In this paper I theorize a form of epistemic resistance rooted in Audre Lorde’s notion of self-care. I do this by developing an undertheorized concept in Miranda Fricker’s work, hermeneutical rebellion, proposing a model of epistemic self-care that can cultivate the capacities needed to resist oppressive narratives and social imaginaries acting on one’s identity. Considering breast cancer survivor narratives as a case study, I analyze the identity power wielded by the dominant narrative (e.g. white, cis, heteronormative conceptions of femininity), arguing that survivors are subject to hermeneutical injustice that kettles them into an understanding of themselves which perpetuates systems of oppression. Engaging Katharine Jenkins’s account of gender identity, I show how an individual’s efforts to rebel against this dominant narrative will be insufficient to overcome identity harms, as she will be defining herself in relation to the same constructions she is rebelling against. I argue that a different type of rebellion is needed—one capable of loosening the grip of identity power on one’s sense of self. Drawing from Lorde’s experience as well as my own, ultimately I reframe the dominant narrative as absurd and introduce Donna Haraway’s cyborg myth as a model for the kind of alternative conceptual resource that can make this rebellion possible.

Theories of moral responsibility have often assumed that praise does not require justification in the way that blame might. Recent accounts of oppressive praise have challenged this and demonstrated that oppressive praise will track and enforce oppressive norms. Existing solutions to the problem of oppressive praise have sought either to redistribute praise or to reorient praise to serve emancipatory goals. These solutions fail to acknowledge how emancipatory norms evolve over time, and the relationship between developing norms and developing practices of praise. This paper offers a practice-dependent account of progressive praise as a solution to oppressive praise, that (i) respects agent’s socially self-governed agency and (ii) does not reinforce oppressive norms, but (iii) can contribute to improvements to the social moral ecology.

In this paper, we analyze the potential harms of everyday self-help discourse, particularly in contexts of systemic oppression. After analyzing the core principles of self-help, such as the power of positive thinking, eliminating negative thinking, gratitude, self-knowledge for self-improvement, and individual choice and responsibility, we argue that self-help discourse is likely to perpetuate different forms of harm in conditions of oppression. First, we argue that, when used in contexts of systemic oppression, self-help discourse contributes to victim-blaming. Secondly, we highlight that the harms of self-help discourse include epistemic and affective dimensions. On the epistemic front, self-help discourse carries epistemic risks, including testimonial smothering and hermeneutical injustice, by discouraging the expression of certain perspectives and lived experiences. On the affective front, self-help discourse reinforces oppression by adding emotional burdens to the oppressed, dismissing their emotional experiences, and imposing the emotional norms of the dominant group. Finally, we revisit the principles of self-help, and show how they contribute to the highlighted harms, particularly by reinforcing victim-blaming, and epistemic and affective forms of injustice.

This project aims to identify and explain a phenomenon I call pain-related motivational deficit, which occurs when there is proper uptake of the epistemic contributions of a pain utterance, but defective uptake of the motivational contributions of a pain utterance. I argue that the normalization of fibroid pain in Black women, and of menstrual pain more broadly, causes a pain-related motivational deficit to be unfairly assigned to utterances about these pain experiences. I show that current ways of thinking about epistemic injustice cannot adequately explain these cases.

In this paper, we examine and respond to two concerns associated with gender socialization and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). After providing an overview of feminist theorists’ work on gender socialization and women’s autonomy, we consider the concern according to which women’s choice to use ARTs to have children may be non-genuinely autonomous due to the influence of oppressive norms on this choice. We call this the autonomous-choice concern. In response to this concern, we argue that only subscribing to an overly demanding account of autonomy yields this conclusion and issue a caution about the implications of subscribing to such an account. Second, we consider the concern according to which the investment of public resources to make certain ARTs more widely accessible amounts to endorsing oppressive norms and may indirectly harm infertile and other women by making these norms more compelling. We call this the norm-legitimation concern. In response, we argue that when appraising the adverse downstream effects associated with legitimizing oppressive norms, it is necessary to consider both the costs of compliance and the costs of non-compliance with these norms, and that their consideration requires a differentiated approach. In closing, we consider objections to the arguments defended in the paper.

The study of hermeneutical injustice tends to restrict the category of “hermeneutical resources” to discursive resources: words, concepts, and expressive styles. This article foregrounds a diverse set of nondiscursive hermeneutical resources, including embodied skills, habits, comportments, and dispositions, and argues that such resources are vitally important for theorizing self-interpretative dysfunction. I reconstruct four accounts of gendered embodiment from Nancy Tuana, Bat-Ami Bar On, Iris Marion Young, and Simone de Beauvoir, and I argue that each implicitly treats embodied practices, comportments, and dispositions as hermeneutical resources. I also consider several implications of and objections to incorporating nondiscursive hermeneutical resources into the study of hermeneutical injustice, and argue that doing so complicates standard accounts of the relationship between hermeneutical injustice and epistemic injustice.

Addicts, an already vulnerable population, can be made worse off by certain kinds of popular and well-intentioned research programs and beliefs about addiction, agency, and responsibility. Perspectives of backwards-facing responsibility that focus on blameworthiness and liability highlight the injustices that addicts have faced. Likewise, the disease model of addiction, pursued as an alternative to the stigmatization and moralization of the choice model, takes responsibility away from the addict. However, each of these fails to help the addict to recover or to care for herself. If anything, embracing these perspectives and models can rob addicts of agency and lead them to further suffering. Drawing on feminist philosophy, this paper shows there is good evidence for us to reconsider those models and perspectives, and instead ask what kind of understandings about addiction aid in fostering agency and recovery.

In this paper, we propose a performative account of hinge epistemology to make the case for a feminist hinge epistemology. We characterize it as follows: 1) there are hinges that enable and govern our ordinary epistemic practices, functioning as rules; 2) these hinges are enacted and actualized in the specific actions of agents that participate in such practices; 3) this makes room for the transformation and emergence of hinges; 4) against this background, we argue in favor of the possibility of feminist hinges. This novel account opens the way for hinge epistemology to be useful for feminist goals in epistemology, which we believe is the ultimate criterion for hinge epistemology to be legitimately feminist.

Emerging as a critique of the cultural paradigm in philosophy, new materialism has had a significant impact on the contemporary landscape of the humanities and social sciences, particularly since the 2000s. Following Donna Haraway’s 1988 critique of social constructivism, developed through her concept of situated knowledge, which invited feminists to make reality claims rather than merely addressing the extent to which this or that practice is socially constructed, new materialist feminisms proposed solutions for conceiving the agency of matter—as well as the body and the nonhuman—in its various entanglements with meaning and discourse. Most have criticized Judith Butler’s concept of performativity for reducing the body to either a sign or a fantasy, thus ignoring its agency. In this article, after positioning the new materialist critique of the cultural turn as a response to Haraway’s earlier call for faithful claims to reality, I argue that the underlying problem of the new materialists with Butlerian performativity is generally framed in terms of an objection to correlationism, as conceptualized by the French philosopher Meillassaux, which the new materialist feminisms themselves do not manage to evade either.

This article introduces the part-time cyborg as a Black feminist framework for navigating and resisting the demands of visibility, labor, and surveillance in digital and institutional spaces. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory and Black feminist thought, the part-time cyborg reclaims rest and refusal as strategies for survival and defiance. The article argues that mundane authoritarianism operates through small, everyday demands that normalize compliance, particularly for Black women, whose bodies have long been sites of scrutiny and control. By turning off a camera or withdrawing from hypervisibility, the part-time cyborg disrupts these systems, asserting autonomy in the face of extractive logics. In an era of intensifying surveillance and control, these micro-resistances are vital tools for imagining and building more just and equitable futures.

In this essay, I argue that for women, rather than a flaw to be suppressed, embracing anger is a vital act of self-care and resilience. While philosophical traditions often dismiss women’s anger as irrational, I argue that it is a legitimate response to injustice and a necessary tool for reclaiming agency. I begin by examining how traditions from the Stoics to Aristotle have framed anger as an impediment to reason. This framing is often used to position women’s anger as evidence of a weak or shameful state. I then argue that these social constraints are not universal; specifically, Black women must navigate the angry Black woman stereotype, which treats their expressions of anger as threatening or excessive. Drawing on my own history and the cultural evolution of “the angry woman” in the media, I next highlight that women become experts at controlling anger because the alternative is being labeled emotional or facing physical danger. I conclude by arguing that caring for oneself does not mean overcoming anger but rather embracing it as a source of strength. Seen as such, anger, then, becomes a form of self-respect and a liberating act of reclaiming.

Feminist philosopher Lisa Tessman argues that sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering is a burdened virtue: virtuous insofar as it serves as a ground of possibility for other virtues, but also burdensome because, taking into consideration the background condition of extreme suffering in the world, it evokes anguish by always being joined to its opposite, indifference. For Tessman, indifference is horrifying and an irredeemable meta-vice. However, in this essay, I bring Tessman into conversation with critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno to argue for a more nuanced feminist ethical appraisal of indifference. Adorno’s critique of coldness shares several important elements with Tessman’s critique of indifference; for Adorno, coldness made the Holocaust possible, and overcoming it means striving to cultivate identification-based solidarity. But Adorno’s dialectical approach to coldness has important implications for a character-focused liberatory ethical project, and his testimony to his own coldness, as a Holocaust survivor, introduces further complexity to this picture. Drawing on and moving beyond Adorno’s work, I argue that certain kinds of coldness—in particular, critical coldness and self-protective coldness—can have liberatory feminist potential. I introduce the concept of liberatory vices to delineate this new category of dispositions.

It is often claimed that gender data gaps (GDGs) are unjust, but the nature of the injustice has not been interrogated. We argue that injustices arising from such data gaps are not merely socio-political but also epistemic: they arbitrarily skew the epistemic landscape in favour of one group over another. GDGs place a greater epistemic burden on women and gender minorities; they have to do more to avoid error and the pay-off is worse: they have a smaller pool of true beliefs on which to act. We suggest that there are both pragmatic and conceptual reasons to differentiate the injustice arising from GDGs from other more familiar varieties (such as testimonial and hermeneutical injustice), and so we introduce the new concept of epistemic deprivation to capture this injustice.

Some victims of sexual violence fight back, seriously harming their abusers as a way of taking power or exacting retribution. Although violence always raises moral questions, there is nevertheless something impressive about those whose actions succeed in posing a formidable challenge to their oppression. The aim of this paper is to offer two ways of thinking about the ethical value of such non-ideal acts of resistance. First, violent resistance may allow victims to maintain ground projects that are being undermined by their abusers. Second, violent resistance may display what I call the virtue of audacious integrity—a willingness to take moral risks, that is, to act in ways that may arouse severe moral censure, in order to uphold one’s values. Both explanations illustrate that victims of sexual abuse may choose to engage in violent resistance for a variety of ethical reasons, including but not limited to paradigmatic moral considerations.

Care work can be extremely demanding, as this musing illustrates with an extended feminist case study of long and grinding care work. Yet it is essential work that is paradoxically both undervalued and fundamental to the continuation of society. Much ink has been spilled on what society and the state owe to those who render care. Here, I interrogate the limits of the care worker’s duty to provide care under a system that is oppressive to care workers because it does not provide what is owed, and relies on a logic of depletion. Self-care can justify saying “no” to care work as a way of resisting the logic of depletion, but in a non-ideal world, this refusal isn’t open to everyone. And who it is open to distressingly tracks and levies both socio-economic oppression and the very same system that devalues care work in the first place.

This paper critiques self-help literature for promoting personal boundaries while neglecting the value of boundary ambiguity, which is essential to care relations. Acknowledging the sufferings that undergird the term “boundary issues,” it reframes the cause of such experiences through Irigaray’s theory of gendered individuation. It argues that sexism produces structural obstacles against women’s ability to own their desires, and boundary-setting remains an inadequate solution because it is modeled after a masculine image of individuality. It draws on Irigaray’s concept of place-making to offer an alternative solution that does not devalue temporary boundary ambiguities.

This paper explores a dilemma often faced by marginalized groups: how to cope with oppression when doing so necessitates a choice between safeguarding immediate personal well-being and fighting for structural change. While mainstream conceptions of coping take it to be an individual-level phenomenon aimed at maintaining/restoring personal well-being through emotion regulation processes, a recent plea in psychology calls for the “decolonization” of coping, such that collective efforts aimed at liberatory change be construed as genuine instances of coping as well. We provide the first philosophical treatment of “decolonial coping” and assess its merits and drawbacks as compared to mainstream coping. Our focus on coping double binds contributes to the philosophical literature on double binds by broadening the range of scenarios that can plausibly be understood as instances of double binds and the normative analysis of the costs associated with each horn of the dilemma and with the double bind itself. We identify the affective injustice of apt ambivalence, thereby also addressing for the first time the relation between double binds and affective injustice.