Harassment is often understood to be, in its paradigm form, overtly aggressive or hostile. But harassment can also occur in a more deceptive format, and can be presented as soft, neutral, innocent, or even friendly and caring. There is something fundamentally deceptive and dishonest about this kind of harassment. The overt friendliness makes these particular forms of harassment harder to spot, and therefore potentially more likely to succeed. I focus on one such instance of friendly-presenting harassment: sealioning. I argue that, despite its ostensive friendliness, sealioning is a form of harassment that has a twofold goal: there is the political goal of forestalling action, and the epistemic goal of undermining the victim's authority. I draw on Jose Medina's understanding of culpable ignorance and the existentialist notion of bad faith to flesh out the distinction between ill-willed and good-willed sealioning, and argue that the latter, despite the good will, is also harassment. I conclude by addressing the different responsibilities of the sea lion, the victim, and the onlooker. Narrowing in on these deceptive forms of harassment, I aim to contribute to the hermeneutic justice of being able to spot and name harassment as it happens.

What are the matters of philosophy? How do they shape how philosophy is practiced, what kinds of knowledge it produces, and who counts as a philosopher? The dominant matters of Western philosophy, or its epistemic companions, are books and journal articles even when dialogic and oral traditions are acknowledged or referenced. In this paper, we argue that alternatives would be necessary if philosophy were to be a more capacious and welcoming discipline. We introduce Feminist Philosophical Toys as one such alternative that challenges what counts as serious philosophy by being seriously playful. The toys foreground the oral and the dialogic while reflecting on and committing to engaging materiality, record-keeping, and record-making. In doing so, the toys challenge the dominant form of philosophy and its mechanics of knowledge-making as they offer an alternative way of doing philosophy that can be transformative for the next generation of feminist scholarship. The dialogic, embodied, and communal interaction with paper, with theory, and with others is meant as a practice of live theorization, opening philosophy to a new groundedness and accessibility, centered in the ethos of feminist epistemology, while at the same time pushing against fetishization of matter.

Motivated ignorance is an incentivized absence of knowledge that arises in circumstances of unequal power relations, a self-protective non-knowing which frees individuals from having to reflect on the privileges they have in virtue of membership in a dominant social group. In philosophical discussions, the term “motivated ignorance” gets used interchangeably with “willful ignorance.” In the first half of this paper, using Charles Mills’ (2007) white ignorance as the defining case, I argue that this is a mistake. A significant swath of cases of motivated ignorance are non-willful, or deep, following Rik Peels (2010). But in all cases, benefits accrued to some in virtue of their social position are gained and maintained at the expense of harms to others. In the second half of this paper, I argue that these harms are what ground attributions of culpability in cases of motivated ignorance and drive the normative requirement that the subject know better, so long as the facts in question are ordinarily and easily knowable (in a sense to be specified). Willfulness is not a necessary condition for culpability, even if it is a sufficient one.

Epistemic exhaustion is cognitive fatigue generated by efforts to determine, retain, or communicate what one believes under conditions that make doing so especially taxing. I argue that the creation and maintenance of epistemic exhaustion is a tool that the socially and politically powerful can and do use in order to retain power. I consider a variety of conversational tactics and three circumstances—partisan polarization, epistemic chaos, and epistemic oppression—that can leave people prone to epistemic exhaustion. I survey several common responses to epistemic exhaustion and offer some suggestions for how we ought to respond to epistemically exhausting circumstances.

Michèle Le Dœuff has devoted several decades to the exploration of the relations between women, philosophy and feminism. With this in mind I went to meet the philosopher, who generously accepted to establish a correspondence with me during my doctoral research. My questions all aimed at understanding how a woman, in the 1970s, had come to devote herself to the problematical relations between women and philosophy, and to consider such a question as a legitimate philosophical object that should be explored. It was thus a question of better knowing the feminist line that runs through her whole work, based on a displacement of this problematic from the margins to the center of the philosophical thought.

This paper explores how debates on wages for housework in the 1970s contribute to current discourses on redefining, redistributing, and revaluing care. More specifically, this paper asks: How does a rereading of the international Wages for Housework (WfH) campaign contribute to feminist degrowth debates on commoning care and a care income? In trying to answer this question, I revisit original literature and interpretations of WfH and show that, as a Marxist feminist political perspective, the aim of the campaign ventured beyond the monetization of care. Subsequently, I elaborate on the now divergent ideas of Selma James and Silvia Federici, two of the campaign's main founders, of how to re-actualize the transformative aim of the campaign. Their two proposals, namely, a care income and reproductive commons, are introduced, brought into conversation with each other, and critically discussed against the background of Nancy Fraser's distinction between affirmative and transformative strategies of transformation. Exploring the fertile tension between a care income and commoning care, I draw preliminary conclusions on what feminist degrowth can learn from WfH regarding a social-ecological transformation to a more socially just and ecologically sound economic system.

“What might motherhood and Europe have to do with one another?” is a question posed by Lisa Baraitser in the Foreword to the collection, Motherhood in Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Europe. The question is certainly pertinent at a time when the very concept of Europe as a geopolitical space and an imaginary construct is being interrogated and critiqued from both within and without the carefully policed borders of the European Union project. It is also pertinent given the increased amount of scholarship on the maternal produced by scholars occupying various transnational locations and positionalities, working to deconstruct unitary and essentialist ideas about mothers and motherhood. The possibility of identifying a specifically European maternal theoretical and lived space thus invites us to carefully theorize the diversity of European contexts, a diversity that is often occluded or elided by easy references to Eurocentric bias in feminist research, as well as the dis/continuities between European-based and Anglo-American feminist scholarship on the maternal. And yet, precisely because the work of mothering always unfolds within specific micro and macro geographic, social, cultural, and ideological spaces, the question merits closer attention. In this essay I consider the cluster of three books delineating the contours of an Italian, as well as a more broadly conceptualized European, philosophy of the maternal in light of these evolving academic and experiential realities.

Through a combined ecofeminist, and critical disability philosophical analysis of the commodification of female farmed animal reproduction, the paper conceptualizes ability as a socio-capitalist construct that can carry the potential for harm. Patriarchal farmed animal capitalism relies upon the idea of naturalized ability of farmed females to be hyper-reproductive/hyper-ovulatory/hyper-lactative. This paper frames the introduced condition of hyper-ovulation in “egg” hens, or the amplification of their ability to lay through selective breeding, as reproductive impairment, and an act of violent patriarchal commodification and capitalization of female reproduction. Impairment, then, functions not just as disability, but also as ability. Focusing on our rescued chickens, the paper argues that such intentionally bred hyper-fertility manifests for individual hens in its least harmful form as chronic illness with the likelihood of everyday pain and inflammation, anxiety, and metabolic hunger; and in its most harmful form as a life-threatening condition. It then examines the subversive ecofeminist politics of using contraception for chickens in a fraught attempt to restore a closer pace of avian ovulation cycles that existed prior to their selective breeding. In allowing infertility to be restored to hen bodies, chicken contraception highlights the disappearance of intentionally introduced reproductive impairment to materialize the patriarchal-capitalist ableist construct of hens who naturally ovulate daily. Ideas of normal and natural can also thus operate in the service of ability. Ultimately, the paper positions the infertile hen as central to a fuller feminist resistance to the governance and control of the female reproductive body.

The global pandemic exposed many flaws in the gendered political economy. It also illuminated how essential care is to our economy and to our flourishing. Yet, when care is dependent on a capitalist system that relies on competition, there will always be people who receive care and those that will not. In such a system, care is wrongly perceived to be a “choice” one can opt into or out of. This short essay grapples with the discourse of care as a choice, particularly around reproductive decisions. Choices offered within a neoliberal market logic fail to understand the political relationalities of such choices. Drawing on my personal experience of an abortion and other examples from the first year of COVID-19, this essay demonstrates how little choice there is in matters of care; care connects and disconnects one another regardless of personal choices. If matters of care persist in the realm of the market reliant on rational economic autonomous actors, then the many interrelationalities of care that the pandemic exposed will not have any impact on attaining a more caring society. This is particularly important given the nature of abortion politics in the United States. I argue that abortion is health care, and is often the most caring decision a pregnant person can make for the world they are trying to maintain, continue, and repair (per Tronto 1993). Care is not a choice; it is fundamental to human society.

This paper critically examines Confucian proposals for social welfare espoused by contemporary Confucian moral and political theorists, who promote a familialist, residual welfare state in which welfare provision should be the family's primary responsibility and public assistance be a last resort only available to the poor without family support. By investigating the situation in South Korea, a country whose welfare system bears a striking resemblance to the Confucian ideal, I argue that the Confucian scheme is inherently flawed. It considers poverty to be a personal failure, idealizes the family as a single unity of common interest free from power hierarchies, and lacks knowledge about social reproduction. Their proposal in actuality humiliates and excludes disadvantaged and marginalized people from social protection, abdicates the state's responsibility for the well-being of citizens, and colludes with capitalism in free riding on women's unpaid labor.

Despite the broad agreement that microaggressions cause harm, there is disagreement on how to capture microaggressor's accountability. Friedlaender (2018) argues that, in many cases, survivors of microaggressions are not justified in holding the microaggressor blameworthy or blaming them (Friedlaender 2018, 14). I argue, in contrast, that we are generally justified in holding most microaggressors blameworthy and blaming them. By adopting a broadly blame-inclusive account of microaggressor accountability, we are in a position to satisfy the desiderata an ideal account should meet: (1) account for cumulative harm; (2) consistently allow for standing to forgive; and (3) be risk sensitive to the microaggressed. By possessing these virtues, I believe my view of microaggressor accountability better equips us to take seriously the harm caused by microaggressions and center the well-being of microaggressees. I respond to Friedlaender's concerns regarding epistemic ignorance and what they call the disaggregation problem. In contrast to Friedlaender's broadly blame-exclusive responsibility model, I motivate a broadly blame-inclusive model for holding microaggressors accountable, explaining how it fulfills the desiderata. I respond to the objection that my account is too blame-inclusive by providing examples of (1) justified microaggressions; (2) excused microaggressions; and (3) blameworthiless microaggressions where blame is justified all the same.

Storytelling in solidaristic communities can foster agency and challenge oppression. However, power imbalances among community members can undermine that potential by contributing to the production of loneliness, where a person loses their sense of self and their sense of belonging within the solidaristic community. To prevent loneliness and to protect the liberatory potential of storytelling, we consider how what we call solidaristic listening might be supported. We first consider, but ultimately reject, empathy as a central feature of solidaristic listening. Despite its popularity in feminist philosophy, empathy is often unable to maintain the relational distance needed between conversation partners to appreciate their differences. Instead, we suggest an ongoing embodied, relational approach to foster solidaristic listening. We draw on three philosophical ideas to motivate our account: visiting the perspectives of others (Arendt 1992), visiting as a reciprocal exchange that requires multiple trips (Simpson 2017), and solidarity as traveling together (Medina 2013).