Ilze Zirbel

In this paper, we aim to establish a right to be cared as part of an interspecies and intersectional concept of justice. This approach recognizes vulnerability as an intrinsic characteristic of all living beings, regardless of gender, class, race, capacity, or species. Therefore, vulnerability is considered general, comprehensive, and fundamental to humans and other-than-humans, differently from modern ethical, political, and ontological theories that usually presuppose a paradigm of ‘invulnerability,’ albeit undeclared. The ideal of invulnerability does not represent the inner condition of living beings but sustains it as a foundation for systems of domination based on hierarchical value dualisms. Acknowledging the vulnerability related to interdependence without rejecting or misrepresenting it, is essential to overcoming these dualisms. Also, it demands recognizing that the distribution of care activities is limited and affects individuals differently depending on their social position, considering race, class, gender, capacity, and species. The right to be cared for due to the vulnerability aims to protect individuals and political minority groups from inequalities and injustices. Beyond negative rights, it requires protective measures imposing care duties on moral agents, social institutions, and the State for which we have proposed an universal interspecies guidelines. To be recognized as someone with moral and political value means having one’s vulnerability taken into account. Consequently, not being cared for in one’s vulnerability at the right time and to the proper extent, taking singularity and the contextual analysis into consideration so the particularities of the situation and specificities of the individual are adequately addressed, is to be the object of injustice. We conclude that a right to be cared for is part of a pluralistic concept of justice that encompasses an interspecies and intersectional perspective opposing the logic of domination and building the path of the logic of care.

The purpose of this text is to problematize care for disabled people who experience complex dependence and to defend care as a matter of justice. To do so, we establish a dialogue between disability studies and a political-feminist ethics of care. In the first section we approach the theme of care from a political-feminist perspective. We then discuss how ableism and familism, in line with neoliberal policies, obstruct access to care, which is accentuated during health emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Finally, based on the understanding that care provided by the state is a matter of justice for people with disabilities, we present some ethical-political principles that help qualify the debate on this subject and foster the construction of emancipatory social policies.

Since the 1990s, feminist economists have directed profound critiques at conventional economics, denouncing the inconsistencies and limits of this model by bringing to the forefront subjects traditionally made invisible. At the same time, ecological economics has made the same move by exposing the environmental limits of this exploitative model. In recent years, these two fields—feminist economics and ecological economics—have made efforts to jointly understand the harms of an exclusionary and predatory economic model, and have sought to propose and build an inclusive, feminist, and ecological economy. In this chapter, we will make an effort to achieve a synthesis of this debate around a conception of ecofeminist economics. To do so, we will present the central critiques of both feminist economics and ecological economics and then, in a second step, weave some connections between these two perspectives and outline some contours of an ecofeminist economy embedded in an ethical-political project guided by plural justice—that is, one that embraces socio-environmental and interspecies dimensions.

The present chapter reflects on some philosophical issues starting from the person and the gestating body. The reflections are organized in two parts. In the first (the longer one), ethical and political questions are at the center of the discussion, aiming to highlight some aspects of gender inequality in contemporary societies, taking into account the issue of vulnerability and the procreative interdependence between men and women. Similarly, gestation and the nutritional dependence of infants will be evoked to address the image of woman as someone destined to care for all the members of her family and society. In the second part of the text, some considerations of a more ontological and phenomenological nature will be made, although in a less extensive manner, with the purpose of pointing to a field of research and reflection still unexplored by Philosophy. It will be argued that certain aspects of human experience are unique and specific to the gestation process and that they may not only help to think about this type of experience but also illuminate or even question definitions and concepts already widely established in Philosophy.

Violence is a socio-cultural phenomenon that violates rights and accentuates social inequalities with noticeable implications in the health and daily life of the population. This article discusses forms of violence produced at the intersection of gender, race and class in a peripheral and highly vulnerable community located in the city of Cubatão, state of São Paulo. The research was guided by the theoretical framework of intersectionality and socio-historical psychology. Data were obtained using three surveys conducted from June, 2017 to November, 2020, partially during COVID-19 pandemic. Interviews and field diaries were conducted, analyzed according to Depth Hermeneutics. The material collected from four community leaders served as the basis for this article. The results point to a structural violence articulated to race, class and gender, expressed in the inaccessibility to decent conditions of housing, food and basic income. The violence against women emphasized as a result appears intermediated by the State or the organized drug trafficking. The data suggest that these forms of violence are aggravated by the inefficiency of the public policy operationalization in promoting care for the mostly black and poor population, indicating that intersectionality can be an essential tool for analysis and confrontation of social inequalities.

In this paper, we seek to argue for the legitimacy of a Feminist Philosophy and to contribute to its solidification in Brazil. For that, we discuss the supposed paradox of a feminist thought -concerned with more concrete issues and contingencies related to women's lives -and Philosophy, which values abstraction and universalisms, while havinga history of erasing women from the canon and an androcentric theoretical production. In a second moment, we will deal with some of the criticisms addressed to Feminist Philosophy, carried out intending to reject it as a real philosophical field of research and reflection. These criticisms are: that Feminist Philosophy acts ideologically and partially, at the same time that it creates a ghetto; that it is too interdisciplinary or sociological; and that it would not be necessary as a field of research since its questions would already be included in any of the sub-areas of Philosophy. In the last two sessions, we will reflect on a Brazilian Feminist Philosophy, its characteristics, and coping strategies to face prejudice against women and feminism in Philosophy, highlighting the possibility of expanding the very idea of what it means to philosophize

Many of the contemporary feminist theories deal with classical problems of modern political theories. Equality is undoubtedly one of these problems. This paper addresses some of the elements present in feminist theoretical discussions on equality in the light ofthe equality-difference dilemma, considered as an unsolvable dilemma for women (and other social categories). Equality as uniformity(linked to descriptive, normative and speculative aspects of political theories) is at the center of this dilemma. It is related to a universalism that excludes and denies differences, contributing to a conception where the identities of the individuals are conceived as substances or essences (something adequate to the private world) rather than processes or relationships (experienced both in the public and in the private). The proposal is therefore the creation of a model of relational equalitythat takes into account the study of the differences and the production of inequalities. In this direction, the gender systemis (1) identified as an effective producer and maintainer of various social inequalities, (2) responsible for the equality-difference dilemma and (3) active in making innocuous or insufficient the affirmative policies seeking to implement equality. The implementation of relational equality requires thus to face this system in their various dimensions (symbolic, identitary, in care activities and social institutions including the family).

The following article presents some of the reflections of the decolonial feminist philosopher Elsa Dorlin on what she called logical-feminism in the voice of four 17th century philosophers: Marie de Gournay, Anna Maria Van Schurman, François Poullain de la Barre and Gabrielle Suchon. In this article, this kind of philosophy is classified as logical-egalitarian and I add a fifth philosopher to the group: Mary Astell. These philosophers defended equality between men and women using logical arguments that sought to demonstrate equality as something true and irrefutable. It is also my intention to present to the Brazilian audience some of the strategies used by these philosophers in the midst of the debate on inequality or equality between the sexes, pointed out by Dorlin. Finally, I’ll focus on the reasons why the arguments used did not reach their objective: a context of corrupt judgments and judges.

This article will address two types of care commonly associated with the “family man”: care as protection and care as provision. It will be argued that these types of care configure a model of masculinity required for both the domestic-family space and the civic-public space. Such a model implies practices of domination by requiring subjection and obedience from the person and the groups to whom such care is intended. The article will discuss some passes (or alibis), pointed out by Joan Tronto, and used by privileged groups to evade more substantive care practices. Finally, public policy issues will be addressed in order to think about a fairer society, aimed at reducing gender inequalities and expanding the social responsibility of its partici-pants. Key-words: ​masculinities; caution; public policy; social responsibility; gender inequality.

This article will argue that reproductive technologies were not developed to address infertility issues as they advertised, but to control the reproductive processes of woman's body and thereby control a variety of population aspects. The article is divided into six parts. The first one will present the Foucaultian notion of biopolitics, pointing to the centrality of human reproduction in it. The second part will present the historical path covered by research in the field of human reproduction and the emphasis given to the body of women as a field of experimentation. The manipulation of women's lives for biopolitical (repro- ductive) purposes will be then illustrated by national birth rate policies of a post-war periods. In the fourth part of the article, the topic of artificial insemination will be presented as a a project that had difficulty implementing it because of its imaginative (and practical) potential for women interested in forming a family without a man. In vitro fertilization will be presented, then, as an elucidative of the objectifying vision and practice of scientists in relation to women and of a project to control female reproduction. Finally, we will question the intentions of the reproductive research done in the name of th

This work seeks to understand some of the statements of Immanuel Kant on the nature of women and the feminine in his writings in anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. In dealing with the character of sex, Kant presents what, in contemporary language, is called "gender differences" (between men and women, male and female) and develops his main argument for the belief in women's "natural weakness": the preservation of the species. To introduce the theme of gender difference, Kant speaks of "production machines" based on different strength levels and nature's desire. Nature is described as responsible for "female weakness". In a similar way, he claims that the allocation of more or less strength, according to the gender of each individual, has the purpose of allowing for physical, rational, and lasting unions between men and women, for the good of mankind. The focus is on theories of the nature and legal incapacity of women in the eighteenth century resulting, to a great extent, from a long debate among different groups within European society in the previous centuries. This article also discusses some of the literary sources that may have influenced the thinking of Kant on this subject and a possible Kantian stance regarding the role of women in Western society.