In “Rescuing Conservatism: A Defense of Existing Value,” G. A. Cohen offers an anticapitalist philosophy of valuing that takes as given the existence itself of particular valuable and valued things, and commitment through time to cherishing relationships to them. In this article, I argue that “being placed,” in precolonial senses, and decolonial “being in” and “seeking place,” are the givens of being valuing, living creatures among valuing, living creatures. Valuing as placed and valuing being placed are intrinsic to decolonial feminist resistance to the gendered, racialized, and denatured ideological warfare on the terms of life. Place is not one among other values; place and placed temporality must be accepted as given. In place, the past is living in the present. Placed decolonial valuing is the only resistance to solipsistic destruction of all that has value, to a coloniality that would fragment the past to destroy the life force of the capacity to value present existing and living. Thus I bring Cohen's rescuing valuable things, and the capacity to value them, to intergenerational, interspecies, temporally located placedness shared across diverse peoples prior to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century conquests and nineteenth-century imperialism, and in perpetual resistance to contemporary settler societies and coloniality.

In this article, I explore some harms that emerge from the call for charity in academic philosophy. A charitability gap, I suggest, exists both between who we tend to read charitably and who we tend to expect charitability from. This gap shores up the disciplinary status quo and (re)produces epistemic oppression, which helps preserve philosophy's status as a discipline that is, to use Charles Mills's language, conceptually and demographically dominated by whiteness and maleness (Mills 1998, 2). I am particularly interested in calls for charity made in response to critiques of racist or sexist authors/texts. I suggest that in these cases, interpretive charity perpetuates epistemic violence by creating conditions for testimonial smothering (Dotson 2011); that it functions as an orientation device (Ahmed 2006) designed to bring “unruly” philosophers back in line with disciplinary practices and traditions; and that it requires resistant philosophers to remain in oppressive worlds (Lugones 2003a; Pohlhaus 2011). Although charitability is risky—and charity is disproportionately demanded from already marginalized philosophers—I am hesitant to abandon charity entirely. The outright rejection of charitable orientations toward texts or others commits philosophers to a purity politics that, following Alexis Shotwell, I suggest we resist (Shotwell 2016).

This article maps out a pedagogical juncture of bell hooks's feminist theory of homeplace (hooks 2007) and Indigenous maternal pedagogies as liberatory praxis through a journey with Indigenous women's literatures. I position this work as a response to the call to transform feminist theorizing through Indigenous philosophies as articulated in a recent Hypatia special issue (Bardwell-Jones and McLaren 2020, 2). The article documents hooks's theory of homeplace as a space of resistance and renewal and shares insights into Indigenous experiences of homeplace within historical and contemporary contexts of genocide, and the ongoing racialized and sexualized violence on Turtle Island. I discuss finding homeplace in Indigenous literatures by sharing a genealogy of Indigenous women's literatures as theorizing tools for engaging social change within academic spaces. To bring this work full circle, I offer Indigenous perspectives of homeplace, and the lessons gleaned from Indigenous women's literatures, as intentional work toward imagining Indigenous futurities. Indeed, connecting this work with liberatory pedagogical praxis imagines a site to establish homeplace in academic settings and empower students to engage in the kind of work that fosters and calls for safer homes, schools, and communities.

Hobbes's justification for original maternal dominion is often evaluated in connection to the ambiguous status of women in his political thought. Many feminist interpreters explain this ambiguity as a contradiction: following Carole Pateman, they see maternal dominion as one term of the “paradox of parental power.” The first aim of this article is to elaborate a second, alternative approach within some critical responses to Pateman's reading. Rather than as one part of a contradiction, in these interpretations maternal dominion emerges as a self-standing form of authority that is very different from patriarchal domination. By offering a new synthesis of some of these interpretations, I aim to show this second view as more comprehensive and compelling than that offered by Pateman. Then, building upon this view, I give a new reading of the concept of preservation that establishes the mother's dominion as an intersubjective practice that reflects an awareness about the interdependent conditions for human well-being and, hence, challenges the standard approach to Hobbesian individualism and sovereign power. Finally, drawing from my interpretation of preservation, I offer a new way to understand Hobbes's argument that “parental authority is derived from the child's consent.”

Various philosophers discuss perlocutionary silencing, but none defend an account of perlocutionary silencing. This gap may exist because perlocutionary success depends on extralinguistic effects, whereas silencing interrupts speech, leaving theorists to rely on extemporary accounts when they discuss perlocutionary silencing. Consequently, scholars assume perlocutionary silencing occurs but neglect to explain how perlocutionary silencing harms speakers as speakers. In relation to that shortcoming, I defend a novel account of perlocutionary silencing. I argue that speakers experience perlocutionary silencing when they are illegitimately deprived of perlocutionary influence on a conversation in which they are active participants, where perlocutionary influence on the conversation relates to speech-related perlocutionary goals meant to influence the conversation or conversational direction. Thus, this account grounds perlocutionary silencing in linguistic phenomena and characterizes perlocutionary silencing in a way that explains why those who experience perlocutionary silencing are harmed as speakers. Moreover, this account explains how perlocutionary silencing harms speakers as conversational participants in a way that cannot be captured by illocutionary or locutionary silencing, for a speaker may be perlocutionarily silenced despite illocutionary success. Consequently, the account explains why “All Lives Matter” silences Black Lives Matter and “Not All Men” silences women sharing experiences of sexual harassment.

I expand on and defend a particular account of silencing that has been identified by Mary Kate McGowan. She suggests that one sort of silencing occurs when men do not think that women have the authority to refuse. I develop this proposal, arguing that it is usefully distinct from other forms of silencing, which attribute a radical misunderstanding to the perpetrator. Authority-silencing, by contrast, concedes that the perpetrator understands that the woman is trying to refuse. I examine the nature of authority and of refusal and argue that a normatively binding refusal requires authority: the normative capacity to make a determination that has a “because I said so” structure. Women's authority in this sense is fragile. Authority to refuse sexual advances can be lost through women's attire, how much they have had to drink, location, or their profession. This account makes sense of the way that perpetrators both do and do not understand sexual refusal, and explains how they are blameworthy despite their misunderstanding.

In recent years, online “involuntary celibate” or “incel” communities have been linked to various deadly attacks targeting women. Why do these men react to romantic rejection with not just disappointment, but murderous rage? Feminists have claimed this is because incels desire women as objects or, alternatively, because they feel entitled to women's attention. I argue that both of these explanatory models are insufficient. They fail to account for incels’ distinctive ambivalence toward women—for their oscillation between obsessive desire and violent hatred. I propose instead that what incels want is a Beauvoirian “Other.” For Beauvoir, when men conceive of women as Others, they represent them as simultaneously human subjects and embodiments of the natural world. Women function then as sui generis entities through which men can experience themselves as praiseworthy heroes, regardless of the quality of their actions. I go on to give an illustrative analysis of Elliot Rodger's autobiographical manifesto, “My Twisted World.” I show how this Beauvoirian model sheds light on Rodger's racist and classist attitudes and gives us a better understanding of his ambivalence toward women. It therefore constitutes a powerful and overlooked theoretical alternative to accounts centered on objectification and entitlement.

This essay offers a philosophical analysis of the misogyny women experience in the alternative right (alt-right) movement. I argue that this misogyny takes on a paradoxical form: the better alt-right women propagandists promote hate, the greater the hostility they experience from their fellow racists and critics; the more submissive women alt-right members become, the harsher the impact of misogyny on them. I develop this argument in four parts. Part I explores the self-conception of racist white women using the concept of social imaginaries. Part II describes three dominant images in racist propaganda—the goddess/victim, wife and mother, and the female activist—which inform the more popular images of the white power Barbie and the tradwife in the alt-right. Part III explores the misogyny paradox and presents how alt-right women could be seen as both misogynists and victims of misogyny. Part IV reflects on the absurdity of the alt-right's dependence on women's economic labor, a feature that could make the movement vulnerable to political intervention.

In recent years, feminist scholarship on emotional labor has proliferated. I identify a related but distinct form of care labor, hermeneutic labor. Hermeneutic labor is the burdensome activity of: understanding and coherently expressing one's own feelings, desires, intentions, and motivations; discerning those of others; and inventing solutions for relational issues arising from interpersonal tensions. I argue that hermeneutic labor disproportionately falls on women's shoulders in heteropatriarchal societies, especially in intimate relationships between women and men. I also suggest that some of the gendered burdens of emotional labor that feminist scholars point out would better be described as hermeneutic labor. Drawing on feminist philosophy as well as findings from social psychology and sociology, I argue that the exploitation of women's hermeneutic labor is a pervasive element of what Sandra Bartky calls the “micropolitics” of intimate relationships. The widespread expectation that women are relationship-maintenance experts, as well as the prevalence of a gendered demand-withdraw pattern of communication, leads an exploitative situation to appear natural or even desirable, even as it leads to women's dissatisfaction. This situation may be considered misogynistic in Kate Manne's sense, where misogyny is a property of social environments rather than a worldview.

Accounts of sexual experience, sexual oppression, and sexual violation, if they are not to lend support to the problems they are invoked to address, require the foundation of a phenomenological description of the character of experience. Relying on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I aim to provide this foundation, arguing that sexual experience is a domain not of detached, individual autonomy but of intrinsic susceptibility and exposure to the world. My description of sexual experience is intended to reveal the immanent norms that sexuality projects and thereby to critique ways of inhabiting experience that disavow what is revealed in that description. The first section discerns three ambiguities that characterize our experience in Merleau-Ponty's notion of “flesh”: that between materiality and meaning, self and others, and self and world. The second section offers a phenomenology of sexual experience based on these ambiguities. The third section, on sexual oppression and suppression, identifies two stereotypical ways in which they are evaded: what I call the stances of “withdrawal from” and “control of” sexuality as flesh. Finally, the fourth section reveals the shortcomings of the legal-juridical domain in navigating our status as flesh, and warns against the proliferation of its terms, specifically the norm of consent.

In this interview with Kathryn Sophia Belle (formerly Kathryn T. Gines), Edward O'Byrn discusses Belle's publications from 2010–2017. His questions focus on Simone de Beauvoir and her use of analogy in The Second Sex, along with broader questions that engage Belle's work on existential philosophy, Beauvoir, Black feminism, and intersectionality.