Project MUSE®: Hypatia - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Hypatia.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 14 (1999) - vol. 23 (2008)Latest Articles: HypatiaTWOProject MUSE®Hypatia1527-20010887-5367Latest articles in Hypatia. Feed provided by Project MUSE®When Equality Justifies Women’s Subjection: Luce Irigaray’s Critique of Equality and the Fathers’ Rights Movement
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252694
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Much of the contemporary “fathers’ rights” movement (FRM) is devoted to promoting the view that policies that undermine women’s reproductive autonomy actually promote gender equality. I argue here that this strategy takes advantage of certain general weaknesses of equality claims that Luce Irigaray has identified. In the first section, I claim that Irigaray criticizes equality without categorically rejecting it, especially two particular tendencies of equality claims: the tendency to assume the possibility and appropriateness of a gender-neutral universal subject and the tendency not to challenge the limits of our extant symbolic repertoire.
In the second section, I show that the rhetoric of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallWhen Equality Justifies Women’s Subjection: Luce Irigaray’s Critique of Equality and the Fathers’ Rights Movement2008-11-06text/htmlen-USWhen Equality Justifies Women’s Subjection: Luce Irigaray’s Critique of Equality and the Fathers’ Rights Movement2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®1130352026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06Asking Different Questions: Feminist Practices for the Natural Sciences
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252695
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Sometimes a pipette is just a pipette. As a feminist scientist, I have been party to more than several skirmishes over my intentions of bringing feminism and science together and have found myself retreating at times into conciliatory bottom lines just to keep the conversations alive. Yes—in a science influenced by feminism, pipettes will still be pipettes, one plus one will still equal two, and as Ruth Hubbard has said of gravity, “apples will indeed continue to fall unless someone throws them up in the air” (1995, 206). I have come to realize however that for many individuals, the mere idea of mixing feminism and science together sets well-established modes of reasoning (perhaps even gravity) into
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallAsking Different Questions: Feminist Practices for the Natural Sciences2008-11-06text/htmlen-USAsking Different Questions: Feminist Practices for the Natural Sciences2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®1003572026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06Book Notes
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252696
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Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Edited by SUSAN GILLMAN and ALYS EVE WEINBAUM. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Though W. E. B. Du Bois seldom made explicit connections between the “Negro question” and the “woman question,” the editors of this collection argue that it is necessary “to explore how Du Bois bequeathed to readers important, if often inchoate, traces of and speculations about the possibilities and difficulties of thinking gender, sexuality, and race side by side, as juxtaposed, if not fully interwoven or articulated” (2). Indeed, the goal of this collection is to reveal and examine this “politics of juxtaposition” in Du Bois’s work
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallBook Notes2008-11-06text/htmlen-USBook Notes2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®59662026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06Notes on Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252697
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Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and was Director of its Program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from 2002 to 2008. She is author of Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (1986); Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (1992; winner of the National Educational Association’s best book of the year award); together with Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism as Critique (1994); The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996; reissued in 2002); The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, (2002); and The Rights of Others:
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallNotes on Contributors2008-11-06text/htmlen-USNotes on Contributors2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®126672026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06Global Feminism and Transformative Identity Politics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252699
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Identity is about binding, and it means, on the one hand, that you can be bound—parochialist, narrow, xenophobic. But it also means that you can be held together.
Identity . . . can be constituted only through acts of identification.
The coalition requires that we conceive identification anew.
Feminist theorists have learned a lot, in the past couple of decades, about the dangers of binding identities. We have learned about parochialism, narrowness, xenophobia; about essentialism and ahistoricism; and about how careless and solipsistic conceptions of who we are can produce exclusion, and suffering, and blindness. We have learned, and continue to learn, crucial lessons about the dangers
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallGlobal Feminism and Transformative Identity Politics2008-11-06text/htmlen-USGlobal Feminism and Transformative Identity Politics2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®1062512026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06Folk Feminist Theory: An Experimental Approach
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252700
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In their attempts to get a handle on folk concepts and folk theories, naturalistic philosophers have proceeded by looking at people’s intuitions about particular cases. The basic technique is simple. The philosopher constructs a hypothetical scenario and then asks people whether, for instance, the agent in the scenario is morally responsible. By varying the details of the case and checking to see how people’s intuitions are affected, one can gradually get a sense for the contours of the folk theory.
I must admit that I was slow on the uptake, but I am now a complete convert. With experimental philosophy gaining so much attention, I have finally jumped wholeheartedly on the intuition-pumping wagon. Prior
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallFolk Feminist Theory: An Experimental Approach2008-11-06text/htmlen-USFolk Feminist Theory: An Experimental Approach2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®137382026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06Surviving Personal Identity Theory: Recovering Interpretability
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252701
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This paper critically analyzes a recent account of the narrative constitution of personal identity in order to highlight the ways in which contemporary philosophical accounts of persons can remain hostile to difference and reinforce norms of rational intelligibility that exclude many from person status. A particular and pressing concern, which I illustrate through the work of Marya Schechtman, is that personal identity theorists invested in narrative approaches have relied on an unreflective account of reality as self-evident. This accounts for the view that the “insane” cannot track reality and that they are hopelessly out of touch. This is of concern to those who fit the paradigm of insanity and ought to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallSurviving Personal Identity Theory: Recovering Interpretability2008-11-06text/htmlen-USSurviving Personal Identity Theory: Recovering Interpretability2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®713802026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06Thinking with a Good Heart
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252702
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“In order to weave and live a good life, a woman must ‘think with a good heart,’ ” say Wixárika (Huichol) women in western Mexico (Schaefer 2002, 39). The relevant Wixárika word iyari translates roughly as heart, soul, heart memory (2002, 306), or I suggest, as heart-mind. Guided by a good iyari, a woman who follows the “path of becoming a master weaver or artisan,” may “gain expertise in the many levels of Wixárika cosmology. She may then integrate these teachings into . . . curing patients, communicating with gods, . . . creating textiles,” and living an upright life (2002, 85). Sixteenth-century Aztec philosophy likewise claims that in order to think correctly about the cosmos, human affairs, and humans’
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallThinking with a Good Heart2008-11-06text/htmlen-USThinking with a Good Heart2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®460862026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06Pictures, Pluralism, and Feminist Epistemology: Lessons from “Coming to Understand”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252703
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Feminists have long argued that there is no generic epistemic subject, and while it has been suggested that the existence of a generic bearer of epistemic content is similarly mythic, far less has been written on this topic. This is not to malign what has been said; feminists have offered important insights into knowing how (Alcoff and Dalmiya 1993), narrative (Babbitt 1996), and emotional engagement and expression (Jaggar 1992; Campbell 1997) as instantiating modes of epistemic content that resist reduction to the propositional analyses that characterize mainstream epistemology. There are, however, still many other modes of content yet to be carefully examined and explored. What follows is an attempt to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallPictures, Pluralism, and Feminist Epistemology: Lessons from “Coming to Understand”2008-11-06text/htmlen-USPictures, Pluralism, and Feminist Epistemology: Lessons from “Coming to Understand”2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®1229752026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252704
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Few people get excited about a new book on the science wars, given that the academic battle has persisted for at least thirty years and become quite tired. I am an exception because I work on feminist philosophy of science and face the battle on a daily basis, but I’m also quite exhausted by it all, and almost cynical. So I was encouraged to see Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human. A rhetorical analysis by such a distinguished scholar (Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Duke, and Distinguished Professor of English at Brown) promised fresh insight by taking a step back and considering the debates in a larger historical context.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallScandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human (review)2008-11-06text/htmlen-USScandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human (review)2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®129842026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06How Many Epistemologies Should Guide the Production of Scientific Knowledge?: A Response to Maffie, Mendieta, and Wylie
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252705
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I thank James Maffie, Eduardo Mendieta, and Alison Wylie for their thoughtful comments on Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues (SSI). I appreciate their care in thinking through the ways that I engage with what I take to be some of the most difficult issues confronting philosophies of science at this moment in history. I am deeply honored by their generous assessments of my attempts usefully to engage with such challenges.
To set this book in the context of my earlier work, since the early 1990s, I have tried to stage encounters about the sciences and their philosophies between, on the one hand, progressive social and intellectual movements in the West, such as feminisms
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallHow Many Epistemologies Should Guide the Production of Scientific Knowledge?: A Response to Maffie, Mendieta, and Wylie2008-11-06text/htmlen-USHow Many Epistemologies Should Guide the Production of Scientific Knowledge?: A Response to Maffie, Mendieta, and Wylie2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®381832026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252706
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Lisa Guenther’s The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction is a book I have been waiting for a long time. It is one of the first studies to undertake the ambitious project of articulating the philosophical and the ethical significations of maternity in the context of feminist politics of reproduction and abortion rights. The Gift of the Other shifts philosophical discussions of finitude from mortality to natality and proposes to approach the event of birth not as a fact of biology but as a primary ethical gift that orients human existence toward being with others prior to becoming oneself. Yet, as Guenther argues, given the history of the political exploitation of maternal responsibility
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallThe Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (review)2008-11-06text/htmlen-USThe Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (review)2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®125642026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Freedom and Absolute Evil
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252707
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Simone de Beauvoir held that there are no values extrinsic to human choice and experience. If a certain thing or action is to be preferred over some other, the determination cannot be made with reference to a divine decree or “an inhuman objectivity” (1948/1964, 14); rather, such designations can only make sense with regard to the concrete needs, desires, and projects of human beings. Moreover, she held that the ontological status of humans is ambiguous. As Beauvoir explained in The Ethics of Ambiguity, humans find themselves to be both free to choose their own destinies and unceasingly fettered by their bodily, socially, and historically embedded facticity. The human has no choice but to exist within and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallSimone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Freedom and Absolute Evil2008-11-06text/htmlen-USSimone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Freedom and Absolute Evil2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®539822026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252708
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The repertoire of the damages humans are capable of inflicting upon each other is huge, varied, and ever expanding, from the horrors of genocide to the petty insults of a vengeful book reviewer, from slavery to importuning a junior colleague to pick up your dry cleaning, from war between nations to lies between friends. We are accomplished smashers and destroyers of the bodies and souls of others and of carefully wrought relationships between individuals and among communities. Though Margaret Walker does not treat the moral dimension of our lives as something that can be tidily filleted and lifted out of the social fabric into which it is so closely woven, she nonetheless thinks that moral damage is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallMoral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing (review)2008-11-06text/htmlen-USMoral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing (review)2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®196252026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism, and Women and Citizenship (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252709
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Ségolène Royale, the controversial presidential candidate of the French Socialist Party, who lost her bid in May 2007, makes an appearance in Joan Scott’s riveting account of the history of the parité movement. “As a result of a law passed in 2003 that required strict alternation of men and women on electoral lists for regional elections” (134), the proportion of women doubled, from 27.5 percent in 1998 to 47.6 percent in 2004, but the presidencies of these councils remained in the hands of men—with one exception, the socialist, Ségolène Royale, who triumphed over the party of the sitting prime minister of the time, thus leading to speculations about her possible candidacy for the presidency (135).
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallParité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism, and Women and Citizenship (review)2008-11-06text/htmlen-USParité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism, and Women and Citizenship (review)2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®196032026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06Referral in the Wake of Conscientious Objection to Abortion
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252710
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One of the major battles currently being waged over abortion has to do with conscientious objection among physicians. The conflict has two main sides. On one side are pro-choice people who think that physicians should offer women all needed abortion services. On the other side are pro-life people who hold that physicians who conscientiously object to these services should not have to provide them. In the spirit of compromise, pro-choice people have agreed to allow conscientious objectors to opt out of performing abortions so long as these objectors make referrals for abortions. This arrangement is common; but even so, many pro-life people are dissatisfied with it. For them, it amounts to a false compromise
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallReferral in the Wake of Conscientious Objection to Abortion2008-11-06text/htmlen-USReferral in the Wake of Conscientious Objection to Abortion2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®727142026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06Dialogue among Friends: Toward a Discourse Ethic of Interpersonal Relationships
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252711
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Given the clear parallels between Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics and recent scholarship in feminist ethics, one would expect to find a rich and vibrant secondary literature cultivating fruitful connections between them. After all, Habermas has probably done more than any other contemporary philosopher outside the field of feminist ethics to develop a robust conception of intersubjective moral agency. His discourse ethics rejects the quest to identify transcendental foundations to morality (1990a, esp. 94–98) and acknowledges the contextual nature of much of ethical thought, while still providing grounds to justify at least some universal moral norms. For feminists, who are often contextualist moral
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallDialogue among Friends: Toward a Discourse Ethic of Interpersonal Relationships2008-11-06text/htmlen-USDialogue among Friends: Toward a Discourse Ethic of Interpersonal Relationships2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®1025662026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06The Disunities of Science(s) and Technoscientific Fortuity
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252712
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Sandra Harding’s name is not unfamiliar to philosophers, sociologists, feminists, historians, scientists, postmoderns, post-Marxists, and postcolonial critics. Her name is now woven into the thick narratives of late twentieth-century advances in and transformative critiques of philosophy, science studies, philosophies of science, philosophies of technology, technoscience, sociology of technology and science, and feminist standpoint epistemologies. Undoubtedly, many of these disciplines and subdisciplines have been given a lease on life because of Harding’s pioneering work. Unquestionably, she is among a handful of woman philosophers who has secured a permanent place on the first page of histories of North
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallThe Disunities of Science(s) and Technoscientific Fortuity2008-11-06text/htmlen-USThe Disunities of Science(s) and Technoscientific Fortuity2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®334582026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06Social Constructionist Arguments in Harding’s Science and Social Inequality
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/252713
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The time has come, Sandra Harding argues, to compare, strategically integrate, and draw out the implications of critiques that destabilize confidence in the inherently progressive nature of scientific inquiry. I agree; we are at a critical watershed where challenges to conventional views about the nature and authority of science are concerned. It is no longer plausible to assume, as settled convention or as a working hypothesis, that the sciences are unified by a singular set of goals and regulative ideals; that when inquiry embodies these ideals it will converge on a coherent, true picture of the natural and social world; that inquiry is scientific just in case it transcends local contexts of practice, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/80/image/coversmallSocial Constructionist Arguments in Harding’s Science and Social Inequality2008-11-06text/htmlen-USSocial Constructionist Arguments in Harding’s Science and Social Inequality2008-11-062008TWOProject MUSE®463082026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002008-11-06