Since Carol Gilligan's analysis of the “Heinz dilemma,” many philosophers working on care have articulated critiques of abstraction and principles in ethics. Their objections to abstraction and principles have not always been systematically set out. In this paper, I try to clarify the debate. I begin by distinguishing several aspects of the care critique. I then consider the strengths of each from a Kantian perspective. I conclude that, although some of these objections point out potential misuses of abstraction and principle, and in doing so, suggest strategies and cautions for their correct and careful use in ethics, they do not present a successful challenge to abstraction or principles as such.

Judith Butler's theory of the constitution of subjectivity conceptualizes the subject as a performative materialization of its social environment. In her theory Butler utilizes Louis Althusser's notion of interpellation, and she critiques the constitutive paradoxes to which its tautological framing leads. Although there is no pre‐existing subject, as it is constituted in the turn to the interpellative hail, Butler nonetheless theorizes a guilt and compulsion acting on an “individual” that compels his or her turn to answer the hail. There is a price to pay for subjectivity in Butler's schema: the reprimand of the interpellative law that punishes at the same time as it constitutes. But a return to Althusser's text finds that he does not rely so much on coercion and guilt in his explanation of the subject's answer to the hail. Althusser can instead be read as suggesting that we are already an instantiation and enactment of power‐ideology and, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, are already the principle of our own “subjection.” This contests the notion that we are in any way compelled to submit to an external, punitive force to become subjects. As subjects, we are always‐already the embodiment of the field of society‐power‐ideology.

Over the last twenty years, wildlife biologists and transportation planners have worked with environmental groups and state and tribal governments to mitigate the effects of human transportation arteries on animal habitats and movements. This paper draws connections between this growing field of road ecology and feminist science studies in order to accomplish two things. First, it aims to highlight the often unacknowledged roots that the interdisciplinary field of animal studies has in feminist theory. Second, it seeks to contribute to conversations in the humanities and social sciences on roadkill and on wildlife biology by steering us into a world of practice that foregrounds mundane details. I approach this topic through interdisciplinary methods, including interviews with tribal and state wildlife biologists and participation in fieldwork on a western painted turtle tagging project. Although engaging in science and formulating policy are often understandably regarded by nonspecialists as practices that distance observers from their topic, in the world of roadkill prevention, I argue that the opposite is the case. What I call “intimate bureaucracies” are formed: arrangements of papers, policies, and people that bring a world of counting, and accountability, into being.

In this article, I argue that Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg needs to be reassessed and extricated from the many misunderstandings that surround it. First, I suggest that we consider her cyborg as an ethical concept. I propose that her cyborg can be productively placed within the ethical framework developed by Luce Irigaray, especially in relationship to her concept of the “interval between.” Second, I consider how Haraway's “cyborg writing” can be understood as embodied ethical writing, that is, as a contemporary écriture feminine. I believe that this cyborgian “writing the body” offers us a way of both creating and understanding texts that think through ethics, bodies, aesthetics, and politics together as part of a vital and relevant contemporary feminist ethics of embodiment. I employ the term “poethics” as a useful way to describe such a practice.

This paper provides an overview of Michel Foucault's continually changing observations on familial power, as well as the feminist‐Foucauldian literature on the family. It suggests that these accounts offer fragments of a genealogy of the family that undermine any all‐encompassing or transhistorical account of the institution. Approaching the family genealogically, rather than seeking a single model of power that can explain it, shows that far from this institution being a quasi‐natural formation or a bedrock of unassailable values, it is in fact a continually contested fiction that masks its own histories of becoming.

Sites of embodied disruption challenge academics to engage with power at its seams. In this article I consider an ethics of embodiment, situating it within questions raised by Judith Butler in her articles, “Doing Justice to Someone” (Butler 2001a) and “Giving an Account of Oneself” (Butler 2001b). In “Giving an Account,” Butler claims that gaps in knowledge and representation are germane to ethical practice, that brave inadequacies and creative approximations are the best we can do for others and ourselves. In “Doing Justice,” Butler enacts this stance, recounting the story of David Reimer, a child who in 1965 was offered up to science after his penis was severed in a botched circumcision. She seizes upon, through narrative fragments, a body whose sexual indeterminacy became the site and occasion for particularly brutal regimes of interpretation. Butler situates this patchwork narrative within the academic industry that reappropriates David's story for its own purposes. Taking Butler's ideas to heart, I carefully trace the nuances of her argument and highlight the (necessary) silences and foreclosures of her account. I propose “seamfulness” as a possible ethical‐aesthetic strategy for embodying Butler's ethical concerns. I close by briefly introducing some implications for arts‐informed representations in academic work.