“Safe sex” discourse attempts to protect women from dangers assumed inherent in erotic life, such as domination, submissiveness, and loss of freedom and self-control. However, Beauvoir's and Merleau-Ponty's revision of Sartre's ontology suggests that erotic life involves a kind of generosity that transforms existence; sex neither liberates personal existence nor poses a necessary threat to women's freedom. I also reconsider the conditions under which sex is assumed to involve a violation of being.

After a brief discussion of the terms “monogamy” and “nonmonogamy,” I evaluate explanations offered by different theorists for the pain that nonmonogamy can cause to the partner (especially a female partner) of a nonmonogamous person (of either sex). My suggestion is that the self, especially the female self, is convention’ ally defined in terms of sexual partners. I present and reply to a possible objection to this explanation, and then discuss my theory's normative implications.

The feminist conception of discourse offered below differs from classical discourse ethics. Arguing that inequalities of power are even more conspicuous in global than in local contexts, I note that a global discourse community seems to be emerging among feminists, and I explore the role played by small communities in feminism's attempts to reconcile a commitment to open discussion, on the one hand, with a recognition of the realities of power inequalities, on the other.

This paper argues that feminists have yet to develop a satisfactory account of power. Existing feminist accounts of power tend to have a one-sided emphasis either on power as domination or on power as empowerment. This conceptual one-sided’ ness must be overcome if feminists are to develop an account complex enough to illuminate women's diverse experiences with power. Such an account is sketched here.

While communities engaged in liberatory struggles have valued group loyalty and condemned betrayal, loyalty itself may be problematic, because remaining loyal to a community may require that one refrain from deconstructing the group identity on which the community is based. This essay investigates what loyalty is and whether loyalty is a virtue, and considers why, if loyalty is indeed a virtue, it may be one that is difficult to maintain in a context of oppression.

This paper reconsiders the use of the term “victim” in feminist theory to attempt to find common ground for the intersection and interconnection of Western and indigenous feminisms. The role of the victim in the discourse of victimology, a branch of criminology, is assessed and applied to the work of Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and Lata Mani who both examine the construction of women's subjectivity in the practice of “sati” in India.

In this paper I explore white attempts to move toward a proactive position against racism that will amount to more than self-Criticism in the following three ways: by assessing the debate within feminism over white women's relation to whiteness; by exploring “white awareness training” methods developed by Judith Katz and the “race traitor” politics developed by Ignatiev and Garvey, and; a case study of white revisionism being currently attempted at the University of Mississippi.

The recent global movement for women's human rights has achieved considerable re-thinking of human rights as previously understood. Since many of women's rights violations occur in the private sphere of family life, and are justified by appeals to cultural or religious norms, both families and cultures (including their religious aspects) have come under critical scrutiny.

This paper demonstrates how Mary Astell's version of Cartesian dualism supports her disavowal of female subordination and traditional gender roles, her rejection of Locke's notion of “thinking matter” as a major premise for rejecting his political philosophy of “social contracts” between men and women, and, finally, her claim that there is no intrinsic difference between genders in terms of ratiocination, the primary assertion that grants her the title of the first female English feminist.

I address the problem of how to locate “traitorous” subjects, or those who belong to dominant groups yet resist the usual assumptions and practices of those groups. I argue that Sandra Harding's description of traitors as insiders, who “become marginal” is misleading. Crafting a distinction between “privilege-cognizant” and “privilege-evasive” white scripts, I offer an alternative account of race traitors as privilege-cognizant whites who refuse to animate expected whitely scripts, and who are unfaithful to worldviews whites are expected to hold.

Two distinct doctrines of the will operate in Nietzsche. On one, each person has a will that grows out of their engagement with life. This view can be the basis for a feminist epistemology. On the other, the will must be stimulated through the creation of unattainable goals and games of seduction. This view of the will is misogynist, as it posits a self that must constitute for itself a dominated and silenced other.

Do women conceptualize—understand, know about, and react to—shame differently from the way men do? Does the experience and knowledge of shame have a gender-specificity, and along what lines could it be analyzed? By introducing a distinction between life or enduring experiences, “Erfahrung,” and episodic or occurrent experiences, “Erlebnis,” andby juxtaposing this distinction with the Rylean notion that knowledge is dispositional this paper argues for the plausibility of a gender-specificivy.

How to communicate with “the other” who is culturally different from oneself is one of the greatest challenges facing North-South relations. This paper builds on existential-phenomenological and poststructuralist concepts of alterity and difference to strengthen the position of Latina and other subaltern speakers in North-South dialogue. It defends a postcolonial approach to feminist theory as a basis for negotiating culturally differentiated feminist positions in this age of accelerated globalization, migration, and displacement.

While feminist epistemologists have made important contributions to the deconstruction of the traditional representationalist model, some elements of the Cartesian legacy remain. For example, relativism continues to play a role in the underdetermination thesis used by Longino and Keller. Both argue that because scientific theories are underdetermined by evidence, theory choice must be relative to interpretive frameworks. Utilizing Davidson's philosophy of language, I offer a nonrepresentationalist alternative to suggest how relativism can be more fully avoided.

Wollstonecraft's early works express a coherent view of moral psychology, moral education and moral philosophy which guides the construction of her early fiction and educational works. It includes a valuable account of the relation between reason and feeling in moral development. Failure to recognize the complexity and coherence of the view and unhistorical readings have led to mistaken criticisms of Wollstonecraft's position. Part I answers these criticisms; Part II describes and textually supports her view.

I argue that science will be better, by its own criteria, if it pursues multiculturalism, by which I mean an ethnic- and gender-diverse set of scientists. I argue that minority and women scientists will be more likely to recognize false, prejudiced assumptions about race and gender that infect theories. And the kinds of changes that society will undergo in pursuing multiculturalism will help reveal these faulty assumptions to scientists of all races and genders.

Here I discuss some epistemological questions posed by projects of attempting to think globally, in light of the impossibility of affirming universal sameness. I illustrate one strategy for embarking on such a project, ecologically, in a reading of an essay by Chandra Talpade Mohanty. And I conclude by suggesting that the North/South border between Canada and the U.S.A. generates underacknowledged issues of cultural alterity.