This paper explores the silencing and subjugation of women within Indian patriarchal society through the lens of feminist criticism, with particular emphasis on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of the subaltern as articulated in her seminal essay Can the Subaltern Speak?. The discussion centres on Banu Mushtaq’s poignant narrative Heart Lamp, which vividly portrays the lived reality of Mehrun, a woman rendered voiceless and invisible within the confines of tradition, marriage, and cultural expectation. Through a close reading of the text, the paper examines how patriarchal structures perpetuate psychological and emotional violence, stripping women of agency and identity. Drawing upon Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist philosophy and integrating literary and cultural references, the paper situates female silence as a powerful metaphor for systemic oppression. At the same time, it highlights the moments of subtle resistance and self-assertion, suggesting that literature becomes a critical space where the subaltern woman, once marginalized, re-emerges as a symbol of endurance, protest, and transformation.

This article explores a group of contemporary magical artists who are inspired by feminist new materialist thought. In the work of these contemporary artists, magic is defined less by the transmission of traditions and initiatory wisdom or revelations about truth, and more by the ways in which artists can initiate change by shifting perspectives and orientations through creating inspiring, affective, embodied experiences. I argue that the philosophical shifts that are emerging from feminist philosophies and feminist fiction are also helping to create a cultural space for wider discussions of magic, particularly among artists, who are reconfiguring ideas about nature and being, erasing the distinctions between the human and non-human worlds, highlighting the deep connections between the material and immaterial.

يهدف هذا البحث إلى التعرف على أحد التيارات أو الحركات الفكرية النسوية التي ظهرت في العالم العربي بمضامين ثقافية واجتماعية، أخذت نمط فلسفي كمحاولة للتوفيق بين الواقع الاجتماعي والانفتاح على العالم الخارجي، متخذة من أهدافها أهم القضايا وهى السعي لتحرير المرأة و القطيعة مع دينها وثقافة مجتمعها، ومساواتها بالرجل في الحقوق السياسية والاقتصادية والاجتماعية، متمحوراً هذا في سؤال الماهية من خلال وضع المرأة في مجتمعها، من جانب، وسؤال وإثبات هويتها وتحريرها ومساواتها بالرجل من جانب آخر.

This article analyses the joint monument to Mary Kendall and Lady Catherine Jones erected in Westminster Abbey after Kendall’s death in 1710 (and before Jones’s death thirty years later). The monument’s inscription refers to the ‘close Union and Friendship’ in which they lived and Kendall’s purported desire ‘That even their Ashes … Might not be divided’, making this a rare and emphatic public consecration of female same-sex love during the period. The monument features a life-size figure of a woman in contemporary dress, presented both in the round and – unusually – facing directly out towards the viewer. Although it appears beneath Kendall’s armorial device and above words that locate Kendall within her family of origin, the figure appears independent of the signs of familial status with which women were conventionally memorialized. Instead, we are offered an image of contemporary womanhood in and of itself, one that appears to have will, agency, and the character and piety ascribed to Kendall by the inscription below. As this article argues, this emphasis on a woman’s capacity for independent thought, action and moral depth is redolent of contemporary writings by the early feminist philosopher Mary Astell, whose circle included both the inscription’s author and Jones, a woman to whom Astell also had an intense amorous attachment. Through a close analysis of its materiality and form as well as the historical moment in which it was made, the monument is described as both an model of female self-realization and an allied validation of female same-sex love during a period in which women and their intimate relationships with each other were the subject of both Astell’s writings and the politicized panic around Queen Anne’s female companions.

Purpose Ethics enables organizations to effectively resolve dilemmas while acting socially responsible. This study aims to examine how current communication practices involving AI technologies align with domain-specific Generative AI (GenAI) guidelines to foster the quality of organizational-public relationships (OPR). Design/methodology/approach The discussion on ethical principles governing AI in computer science, along with the conceptualization of OPR linked to professional codes of ethics, informed by the feminist philosophy known as the ethics of care, contributes to the development of a proposed AI ethics framework to foster OPR. Drawing upon this framework, the use of content analysis to unpack industry discourse reveals the extent to which the industry’s understanding of GenAI ethics aligns with this proposed framework. The implications of implementing this framework to foster OPR are discussed. Findings Communication professionals view social responsibility and authenticity crucial for ensuring ethical AI practice, with truthfulness, respect and equity following closely. However, adherence to ethical AI use in communication depends on the implementation of explainability, accuracy, fairness and machine autonomy in computer science. Embracing the ethics of care to integrate these ethical principles into the current AI ethics framework in communication becomes crucial for easing this tension. Originality/value The proposed AI ethics framework bridges AI ethics between communication and computer science by capturing social responsibility, authenticity, truthfulness, respect and equity. This framework helps shape professional codes of ethics to address challenges in the rapidly evolving AI-driven communication landscape and advocates for the engineering of responsible AI tools to foster quality OPR. The outcomes advance cross-disciplinary research and cross-sectoral practices of AI ethics by leveraging the ethics of care, thereby connecting AI ethics across computer science and other fields.

Purpose This paper introduces Onto-Epistemic Mutual Becoming as a relational, affective and ethical approach to peer review. It critiques dominant epistemic and linguistic gatekeeping practices in traditional reviewing, particularly their marginalising effects on non-Anglophone scholars. Drawing on Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist, Indigenous and affective epistemologies, we reimagine peer review as dialogic, inclusive and co-constructive. Through translingual, intergenerational narratives, we call for publishing practices premised on ethical responsibility, interpretive generosity and epistemic justice. Design/methodology/approach This paper applies a narrative inquiry approach and draws on Deleuzian and Eastern relational ontologies to propose a transversal, ethically attuned peer review approach. Through the experiences of three multilingual scholars – early-career (Xingxing), mid-career (Nashid) and senior (Sender) – we illustrate affective harm, epistemic exclusion and transformative alternatives grounded in translanguaging, mentorship and dialogic reciprocity. Theoretical lenses include Ren, Wu Wei, Pratityasamutpada and collective Indigenous accountability. Findings Traditional peer review often enacts affective and epistemic harm through linguistic regulation and methodological policing. However, relationally grounded, translanguaging-friendly and mentorship-based approaches disrupt dominant norms and foster inclusion. Experiential narratives show how scholars actively resist marginalisation and co-create epistemic spaces of care, reciprocity and plural recognition. Research limitations/implications Based on a small set of narrative accounts, this study prioritises depth and transferability over objectivity and generalisability. Nonetheless, its theoretical innovation opens pathways for empirical inquiry into affective justice and inclusive peer review across contexts. Practical implications We propose education in epistemic justice, dialogic mentorship and translanguaging-affirming review models. Editorial policies should decentralise monolingual norms, diversify reviewer pools and support relational feedback. Social implications This approach promotes equity in knowledge production by challenging epistemic hierarchies and amplifying plural traditions. It empowers marginalised scholars and nurtures scholarly ecosystems of care and ethical co-becoming. Originality/value This is among the first papers to theorise Onto-Epistemic Mutual Becoming in peer review. By weaving Eastern, Indigenous and feminist philosophies with lived narratives, it reimagines peer review as an ethical, transversal and relational practice.

Abstract Fricker’s influential account of epistemic justice has turned feminist epistemology into one of the most vibrant and fertile subfields in feminist philosophy in recent decades. Even scholars critical of its limitations have utilized Fricker’s account as a base from which to launch their own theories of epistemic justice. I refer to theories of epistemic justice developed or inspired by Fricker Frickerian accounts of epistemic justice (FAEJ). Their influence is so wide-ranging that some now claim that these accounts can be conducive to promoting decoloniality. The aim of this paper is to critically assess this claim. To accomplish this aim, this paper starts with a conceptual clarification of “decoloniality” in accordance with Latin American decolonial theory. It then critically assesses three aspects of the claim that FAEJ can be conducive to decoloniality: first, the types of epistemic injustice in these accounts relevant to decoloniality; second, the application of these types of epistemic injustice to different stages of coloniality; and third, whether FAEJ can advance programs of decoloniality. After demonstrating that FAEJ cannot promote decoloniality, this paper concludes with a brief examination of how decoloniality can be promoted.

This study traces the journey of the philosophical evolution of the “self” within the background of feminist theory across its three major waves. The study investigates how feminist thought has critically interrogated and transformed traditional conception of identity. The analysis is structured in three sections: The Autonomous self, From the Private to Political, Fragmented Selves and Fluid Identities. By drawing on key feminist thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, this article shows how feminist discourse has shifted the notion of the self from a fixed, rational subject to a dynamic, socially constructed, and performative subject. The study concludes that feminist philosophy not only challenges essentialist views of gender but also redefines subjectivity itself, contributing to broader debates in contemporary political and philosophical thought.

ABSTRACT While research has examined how game modifications (“modding”) alter content elements, they have largely overlooked the mediality that underpins these modifications. This paper reconceptualizes modding as “formatting resistance”: acts that challenge a game’s intended format to preserve a desired experience or articulate certain visions. Drawing on ethnography of Chinese modding communities, we propose a nested containers framework that extends Sofia’s (Sofia, Z. [(2000). Container technologies. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 15(2), 181–201.], Sofia (Sofoulis), Z. [(2024). Containers, retrospectively. In M. L. Angerer, I. Richardson, H. Schmedes, & Z. Sofoulis (Eds.), Containment: Technologies of holding, filtering, leaking. Philipps-Universität Marburg.]) container theory into a recursive structure for digital media. This system operates across three interdependent layers: (1) official games as apparatus containers that create player experiences; (2) game mods as utensil containers that enact resistance through dependency; and (3) modding forums as utility containers that sustain the entire ecology. This nested structure, through its inherent containment, filtering, and leakage, enables formatting resistance. It also shifts the notion of resistance from content to format operations—revealing modding as storage politics, a layered and ongoing struggle over what digital systems preserve and what they erase.

ABSTRACT The concept of epistemic injustice, as discussed by the feminist philosopher Miranda Fricker, has helped to discern a distinctively epistemic form of harmful and unjust treatment based on identity prejudices such as those of gender, race/ethnicty, and class. In this essay, I focus on epistemic injustice issues specifically in childhoods and as suffered by children. Children are commonly viewed as irrational or cognitively and morally immature, hence as not fully accomplished epistemic agents and humans. In addition to this, it becomes challenging to conceptualize epistemic injustice in childhoods given that the concept was originally developed to address inequalities in adulthoods. Through the lenses of critical childhood studies and by drawing on findings from my research on child welfare and protection and juxtaposing it with child and youth activism, I discuss applications of the concept of epistemic injustice in relation to children. The essay gives particular consideration to children and young people as agents of social justice and how a recognition of their resistance may broaden the concept of epistemic (in)justice in childhoods.

This paper critically examines how resilience, vulnerability, and well-being were mobilised in public health responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on two Australian case studies, we analyse how government and media discourses constructed vulnerability to justify both supportive and securitised interventions. Drawing on feminist philosophy and two Australian case studies, we propose a typology of vulnerability that distinguishes between self-constituting, circumstantial, and pathogenic forms, arguing for a relational autonomy framework that foregrounds care, trust, and interdependence. We suggest that reframing vulnerability in this way offers a more ethically robust foundation for public health policy and democratic participation in a post-pandemic world.

Mobile health (mHealth) technologies are increasingly advertised by companies as means for health and wellbeing empowerment. Although several scholars have analyzed the notion of empowerment at play in mHealth discourses and identified crucial elements for its fulfillment, one theoretical framework that is especially absent in this discussion is that of relational theories of selfhood developed in feminist philosophy. In this article, the author aims to correct this deficit by offering a possible pathway to scrutinize mHealth technologies from a feminist perspective. Specifically, the author starts evaluating one type of mHealth, apps for tracking physical activity, through the lens of a feminist conception of self-respect. Doing this reveals a puzzling tension: whether the use of mHealth undermines self-respect or promotes it is not obvious.

This paper attempts to articulate a feminist philosophy of the city that highlights questions and intersections of subjectivity, corporeality, and spatiality in order to unpack the political and philosophical significance of a feminist city. In doing so, this paper develops feminist philosophical thinking on spatiality which considers the philosophical and political significance of the sexed and gendered dimensions of how we inhabit, or are excluded from, place and space, and makes connections with feminist social reproduction theory and a feminist politics of the commons. Unpacking these connections gestures toward a feminist philosophy of the city that pays attention to the ways in which we can reoccupy public space and public institutions and begin reimagining democracy framed by the question of sexuate difference.

This study examines the profound ideological confrontation between the worldwide campaign for girls' education by Malala Yousafzai and the Taliban's systematic scourge against the intellectual lives of women through the prism of epistemicide, the systematic annihilation of knowledge regimes. I employ a blend of postcolonial theory, feminist philosophy, and human rights scholarship to suggest that the Taliban is not just a set of repressive regulations. Their policies are a calculated assault on a complete mode of knowing and being among women to abolish their critical and independent thinking, their ability to act without dependence, and to preserve their historical memory. Against this backdrop, the continued work of Malala Yousafzai is, to me, an exemplar of epistemic justice in real life. I place her activism as a counter-philosophy that is needed to reclaim education as a liberation tool useful in enabling people to think critically and contribute to creating a more peaceful society. Comparing both pieces of evidence, Afghanistan and Pakistan, I demonstrate that the struggle to educate girls is not about a normal policy discussion. It reveals the conflict as the struggle concerning the most basic human right, the right to know, to speak, and to live as completely autonomous, intellectually capable human beings.

ABSTRACT Storytelling is an established method in feminist research on sharing lived experiences of how the political is configured in everyday spaces in complex ways. Our aim in this article is twofold; first, to present two stories of experiencing violence in dialogue and second, to open up discussion about the relational aspects of storytelling and reading in the process of interpretation. For this purpose, we build on feminist philosophy of storytelling as a relational process that enables validation and narrative hermeneutical understanding of narratives as interpretational practices. We introduce Hanna Meretoja’s concept of narrative agency to explore the dialogic dimensions of storytelling as a practice of making meaning. In the process of creating the stories of Zubaida and Lisa we identify three dimensions in dialogue: the relationality between us and the research materials, the relationality between the two stories as these are placed side by side, and the relationality between this article and the potential readers. Both stories are based on the authors’ respective projects researching non-physical violence as experienced in isolation. We argue that storytelling is a powerful method that enables validation and transformation.

ABSTRACT The dichotomy of Prakṛti (the material principle that creates the phenomenal world) and Puruṣa (the conscious principle that experiences it) forms the basis for metaphysical dualism in the Sāṅkhya system. Viewed through a feminist lens, these metaphysical categories reflect a gendered binary, corresponding to the ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ principles. This paper offers a feminist intervention into Sāṅkhya by re-reading the Prakṛti-Puruṣa dichotomy through concepts in feminist philosophy. First, I examine the gendered metaphors, adjectives, and pronouns that characterise Prakṛti and Puruṣa in Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s Sāṅkhya Kārikā to reveal the underlying gendered lens. Next, I explore how Vācaspatimiśra’s Tattva Kaumudī, a commentary on the Sāṅkhya Kārikā reflects the influence of the Advaita Vedānta tradition, attempting to align Prakṛti-Puruṣa dichotomy with the Brahman-Māyā framework, centralising Puruṣa and diminishing Prakṛti. Lastly, I challenge this Advaita Vedāntin interpretation and propose a feminist philosophical reading of Prakṛti and Puruṣa, drawing on Iris Marion Young’s conception of ‘difference’ from Justice and the Politics of Difference.

Abstract Feminist philosopher Lisa Tessman argues that sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering is a burdened virtue: virtuous insofar as it serves as a ground of possibility for other virtues, but also burdensome because, taking into consideration the background condition of extreme suffering in the world, it evokes anguish by always being joined to its opposite, indifference. For Tessman, indifference is horrifying and an irredeemable meta-vice. However, in this essay, I bring Tessman into conversation with critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno to argue for a more nuanced feminist ethical appraisal of indifference. Adorno’s critique of coldness shares several important elements with Tessman’s critique of indifference; for Adorno, coldness made the Holocaust possible, and overcoming it means striving to cultivate identification-based solidarity. But Adorno’s dialectical approach to coldness has important implications for a character-focused liberatory ethical project, and his testimony to his own coldness, as a Holocaust survivor, introduces further complexity to this picture. Drawing on and moving beyond Adorno’s work, I argue that certain kinds of coldness—in particular, critical coldness and self-protective coldness—can have liberatory feminist potential. I introduce the concept of liberatory vices to delineate this new category of dispositions.

Decades of scholarly reception of Beauvoir in (Anglophone) philosophy and literary studies have positioned her within feminism, yet her Les Bouches inutiles ( Useless Mouths [alt: Who Shall Die? ], written 1943) and Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) provide not only political commentary on the Vichy government and canonical French culture, but also evidence of the author’s calculations about her own options as a public intellectual in postwar France. How she adapted her source materials (a medieval French chronicle and a text from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives ) signals her active renunciation or France’s traditional intellectual culture. Using tactics more familiar from the Theatre of the Absurd and 1970s French feminist philosophy, these texts reveal her claims to an intellectual agency far beyond conventional political feminism, enacted through her inversion of Classicism and the national mythmaking of the postwar era – a part of her intellectual biography she often suppressed but never actively denied.

This paper aims to analyze some recent objections to feminist philosophy and respond to these criticisms. First, we analyze Timothy Crowley’s notes, which argue, above all, for the impossibility of a feminist philosophy committed to truth and honesty. Second, we analyze the arguments of Tuija Pulkkinen, who, although in favor of dialogue between the fields, defends maintaining the distinction between philosophy and feminism and rejects the expression “feminist philosophy”. Finally, we present some arguments in favor of the thesis that the debate on the possibility of feminist philosophy needs to go through a meta-philosophical investigation that considers what has already been produced in this area by authors of feminist philosophy.

Abstract In this paper, I explore and extend Susan Dieleman’s suggestion that Rorty is a “feminist ally”, arguing that the idea of allyship provides a fruitful and revealing way to understand the political substance and implications of his liberalism. I begin with attention to allyship itself, the core tenets of which are, I suggest, implicit in Rorty’s oft-ignored commitment to hope as a normative philosophical and political ideal. To make further sense of Rorty’s understanding of allyship – and the deference to the experiences of marginalised others that it implies – I reconsider his engagement with feminist philosophy. At the end of the paper, I locate my discussion in the context of recent scholarly conversations about the identity and implications of Rorty’s vision of politics in a liberal community.