Abstract This study offers a phenomenological exploration of unchosen pregnancy as a distinct temporal experience. By bracketing the traditionally dominant concept of pregnancy as culminating in birth, this study unveils the unique temporal contours of early pregnancy, particularly when it is not chosen. Through a critical phenomenology analysis, this study demonstrates how unchosen pregnancy is characterized by extreme temporal disorientation, a heightened experience of multiple temporal layers, and a profound loss of temporal grounding. This description of unchosen pregnancy is intended to open new pathways of thought on the ethical issue of abortions and expand the phenomenological understanding of pregnancy.

Abstract This article rethinks the political project of transforming sexual desire and the norms that regulate it, aiming to reduce oppression and marginalization in intimate life. In the wake of recent feminist revivals of this project, such as Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex (2021), I analyze the limitations of two dominant frameworks: ‘disciplinary’ models, which overestimate our capacity to regulate desire, and ‘liberatory’ models, which assume the existence of an authentic, pre-political core of desire that can be freed from power. I argue that both models are flawed, promoting respectively the illusion of total control and prelapsarian fantasies. To move beyond them, I turn to Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of natural history, which challenges the fixity of desire without assuming its infinite malleability. Specifically, drawing on Adorno and his interpreters, I show the natural history provides a framework for conceptualizing agency and transformation that neither negates the constraints shaping desire nor forecloses the possibility of its active reconfiguration. This approach, I suggest, offers a critical foundation for feminist efforts to rethink and reshape desire.

Abstract Thinking about desire has been integral to radical feminism. My goal is to revive a critical politics of desire informed by the history of radical feminist thought: one sensitive to social determinants of romantic and sexual attraction and open to the possibility that our desires can be radically transformed outside of oppressive environments. To do this, I reconstruct radical feminist strategies for navigating politically problematic desires, including demonstrating that recent scepticism toward this project has underestimated its available resources. In particular, I build upon attempts to reconfigure the social contexts in which romantic and sexual desires are formed, including recommending cultural and economic interventions which influence who is seen as desirable. Radical feminists also recognized potential harms of questioning desire, including the problem of intense sexual moralism. In dialogue with this history, I propose that changes in the infrastructure of desire-formation are often better placed to avoid the unproductive shame and defensiveness associated with a critique of desire. So too, I suggest that attempts to remake our public sexual culture ought to incorporate feminist insights about the importance of imagination, experimentation, and open discussion.

Abstract This article examines the relational self-care practices of migrant Chinese women working as massage workers in the United States (hereinafter referred to as Chinese massage workers). Threading both the bodily and the intimate, Chinese massage workers offer care and relaxation for their clients through the modality of touch and quiet comfort. A wealth of scholarly work highlights the complexities of migrant massage workers’ daily lives and their paid labor of care. Thus far, the study of migrant massage workers focuses mainly on their romantic, familial, and work relationships. Little is known about the relational self-care practices that migrant massage workers engage in. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines the practice of Chinese massage workers caring for one another through the intellectual genealogy of self-care in Black feminist scholarship. Through an examination of relational self-care performed by and for Chinese massage workers, this article shifts the focus from analyzing the expected performances of care-giving by migrant women massage workers within the economy of racial capitalism to a reconceptualization of self-care as a relational practice.

Abstract In this article, we explore how to engage with the work of ethicists facing public allegations of professional sexual misconduct. Rather than disengaging or proceeding as usual, we propose citing their work alongside impartial information about credible allegations. We choose to isolate the work of ethicists as the target of this proposal because ethicists are distinct on two fronts: they are distinct among philosophers because they have moral authority, and distinct among others with moral authority, such as religious leaders and civil rights activists, because their power is reproduced in part through citations. Our approach offers a nuanced perspective on the power conferred through citations. We argue that individual scholars have a moral and intellectual responsibility to cite using this practice, especially when institutional enforcement of justice is lacking.

Abstract This paper argues that debates concerning gender terms and context sensitivity should take into account retraction, i.e., the ability to take back a previously true assertion of one’s gender identity. We begin by rejecting the intuition that gender terms should vary in truth value based on the “medical” and “bathroom” scenarios, where a trans woman (or man) should be classed as a woman (or man) in the latter, but not the former because she (or he) lacks certain organs (e.g. cervix or testicles). Assigning authority to self-identification, we hold that if someone identifies as a woman in bathroom scenarios she should also be classed as a woman in medical scenarios. Instead, we draw support for context sensitivity of gender terms from retraction data. We take gender retraction to be supported by the testimonies of trans people. Specifically, we explore the less discussed Later in Life narrative where individuals come to realise their true gender identities later in life. After demonstrating the shortfalls of existing contextualist accounts of retraction, we present a novel version of semantic relativism - Gender Relativism - that is faithful to gender testimonies. Our view accounts for retraction, takes into consideration self-identification and explains why transphobic denials of an individual’s gender testimony are false.

Abstract This paper explores the differences and similarities between Foucault’s genealogical method and feminist standpoint theories. Both approaches rely on the marginalized position of subjugated knowledges to challenge dominant regimes of power. However, standpoint theory and Foucauldian genealogical critique engage with the interrelatedness of power, knowledge, and resistance on a different level. Standpoint theories take a situated, first-person perspective to further knowledge claims which are based on situated knowledge claims. Foucauldian genealogy, on the other hand, delves into subjugated knowledge claims from an outsider or third-person perspective, mobilizing subjugated forms of knowledge to genealogically critique dominant regimes of power-knowledge. Despite this difference, this paper suggests that both approaches are invested in problematizing dominant regimes of power-knowledge by looking at subversive and marginalized knowledge practices that contest dominant regimes of power and knowledge.

Abstract This article redefines the role of abstraction in care ethics, overturning the notion that abstraction is inherently an impersonal and distancing mechanism. By situating abstraction within the context of caring relationships it reveals how abstraction can cultivate human connection when grounded in moral motivation and contextual sensitivity. The article’s primary contribution is the introduction of two concepts: conceptual abstraction, which captures the shift from detailed specificity to broader generalizations, and contextual abstraction, which examines how abstraction either fosters closeness or creates distance in relationships. While the discussion initially focuses on the level of deliberation, the article concludes by exploring if and how abstraction can also be meaningfully employed at the level of justification.

Abstract Green/blue wellbeing is increasingly a focus of mental and physical healthcare in the United Kingdom, with green/blue space “prescribing” touted as providing a range of benefits. Attempts to explore the “how” and “why” of potential mental health improvements through these activities to date are primarily quantitative, and/or utilize medical/individualized models. Such approaches are situated within and can reinscribe a humanist, extractivist, one-way relationship with the natural world. Here, we draw on ecofeminist approaches to care to explore findings from our fieldwork with two wild swimming communities in Scotland, enabling us to consider human–nature interactions as relational. The wild swimming focus groups presented a complex picture in which the mental health benefits of swimming are entangled with relationships between group members, and embodied, sensory experiences of and relationships with blue spaces. By conceptualizing these groups as “ecologies of care,” we seek to embrace that intricacy, considering how wild swimming is a political act engaged with through deviant bodies or in deviant temporal/weather conditions, and how care is engendered through mutuality, space, and cold water. In conjunction with this complexity, the emergent nature of these groups has transformative implications for futurity, justice-to-come, and hyper-local ways of living within and alongside blue spaces.

Abstract This article introduces the part-time cyborg as a Black feminist framework for navigating and resisting the demands of visibility, labor, and surveillance in digital and institutional spaces. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory and Black feminist thought, the part-time cyborg reclaims rest and refusal as strategies for survival and defiance. The article argues that mundane authoritarianism operates through small, everyday demands that normalize compliance, particularly for Black women, whose bodies have long been sites of scrutiny and control. By turning off a camera or withdrawing from hypervisibility, the part-time cyborg disrupts these systems, asserting autonomy in the face of extractive logics. In an era of intensifying surveillance and control, these micro-resistances are vital tools for imagining and building more just and equitable futures.