Jordan Pascoe

Building on Kant’s idea of the ‘free play of the imagination’, we argue that sexual fantasy reveals both deep insights into our desires and emotional wounds as well as the impact of oppressive conditions on our sexual selves. After clarifying Kant’s distinctions between experience, dreams, and fantasy, insofar as they are important to defining the unique character of sexual fantasy, and incorporating feminist theories of fantasy and pornography into our reading of Kant and sexual fantasy, we examine the intersection of aesthetic expression and moral significance, suggesting that fantasy is not morally neutral but deeply formative; indeed, viewed comprehensively, sexual fantasy can become a site for wise personal resistance and growth. In particular, and contrary to what seems to be Kant’s own worry, a Kantian view of sexual fantasy can provide resources for liberation from a tendency to regard oneself, and others, as mere objects in sexual fantasy, towards a more integrated sense of our multifaceted nature.

One of the most striking features of the Covid-19 pandemic was the surge in reactionary activism, from early anti-lockdown protests to the January 6 insurrection. We situate social movements and protest in the context of disaster, drawing on social epistemology to show why disasters lead to well-documented collective perceptual shifts and an urge towards solidarity that can surge both progressive and reactionary social movements. We explore the epistemic practices that shape reactionary social movements and right-wing radicalization, and argue that disasters are critical sites for studying the rise and attraction of reactionary social and political movements.

This chapter examines Immanuel Kant’s racial theory and its enduring impact on liberal political philosophy, arguing that Kant’s racism is not a peripheral contradiction but central to understanding his system’s continued relevance. Through an intersectional and critical analysis, the author explores how Kant’s mature political philosophy, particularly in The Doctrine of Right, embeds racial hierarchies within frameworks of formal equality and rightful dependency. By tracing Kant’s silence on race and strategic location of slavery “elsewhere,” the chapter uncovers how colonial and racial subordination are rendered invisible within liberal meritocracies. It then presents Kant as a pioneer of colourblind, meritocratic strategies that continue to justify systemic inequality. Rather than dismissing Kant, the author argues for engaging critically with his legacy to expose the racialized architecture of liberalism and to better understand how modern notions of justice obscure, rather than eliminate, enduring patterns of racial domination.

This response addresses critical engagements with The Epistemology of Disaster and Social Change, defending and expanding its core argument: that disasters generate epistemic opportunities capable of reshaping societies, for better or worse. Drawing from feminist and standpoint epistemologies, the authors develop a heuristic of the epistemic watershed to map how positionality, rupture, and solidarity produce or inhibit liberatory change. They confront critiques of epistemic uptake, emphasizing the ethical costs of appropriating marginalized knowledge while asserting its centrality to just disaster response. Case studies from the Altadena wildfires and post-Maria Puerto Rico illustrate how queer and Black feminist practices of survival, refusal, and community-building challenge dominant imaginaries and enable democratic transformation. Acknowledging the real harms of epistemic extraction and backlash, the authors argue for coalitional knowledge practices as essential in moments of crisis. Ultimately, they insist that disaster must be reimagined not as a neutral rupture but as a battleground for justice-oriented futures.

Philosophical approaches to disaster response have tended to foreground classical Western moral theory and social contract frameworks, which have in turn shaped emergency management principles in practice. These frameworks have tended toward an agent-centered view of moral obligations in disasters which map disasters against the mythology of the state of nature and its associated justifications for the exercise of state power. In their focus on individual desert and the restoration of rights and property, established moral frameworks have failed to attend to the inequitable impacts of disaster, particularly in the disparate and disproportionate ways that they impact women and communities of color. In this chapter, we draw on feminist philosophy and Black feminist organizing praxis in order to offer alternate frameworks for theorizing disasters and the duties of response. We develop an account of disaster rooted in the ethics of care, highlighting the ways that disasters are primarily crises of care. These crises of care are organized through privatized local and global care chains which distribute care toward the privileged, producing care drains that exacerbate the inequitable impact of disaster in ways that are rarely captured in established ethical frameworks for disaster. In search of alternate ethical frameworks, we explore resources within Black feminist organizing in order to develop an account of resistant care ethics, capable of reshaping priorities in disaster management and response.

This essay examines how inequalities are structured and rendered rightful in Kant’s political philosophy in order to offer a sketch of Kant’s juridical racism, or the ways in which his political philosophy is well-equipped to contain and maintain racial exclusions. By drawing on Nkiru Nzegwu’s conception of colonial racism, it highlights the forms of institutional racism that are perpetuated through juridical and colonial orders, which exceed Kant’s own theory of race, operating as what Huaping Lu-Adler has called a “racial ideology” embedded in his political philosophy. It first mines Kant’s arguments about the dependency of women in the Doctrine of Right, showing that these arguments offer a conceptual map of how raced inequality might be organized within the rightful state, organized as a form of juridical racism. It then turns to his cosmopolitan arguments, showing that working towards a rightful cosmopolitan condition will involve developing a shared conception of possessive rights, which Kant took to be a priori. In Kant’s inclusion of domestic right in this basic scheme of rightful possessive relations, we see an example of what Maria Lugones called the “modern/colonial gender system”, through which the invention and enforcement of normative gender roles becomes a critical method of coloniality. Thus, instead of treating gender as analogous to race in Kant’s arguments, I propose that we understand the normative structure of gendered dependency as a feature of Kant’s racial ideology.

In “Rethinking Race and Gender in Kant: Toward a Non-Ideal, Intersectional Kant,” Jordan Pascoe argues that Kant’s moral philosophy is productively read through the “non-ideal” lens of the sociopolitical concerns he faced and espoused. This lens in turn offers possibilities for thinking differently about the particular articulation that his formal principles take. She defends a non-ideal, modified methodological approach in which Kant’s problematic conception of race and gender are opportunities for expanding our reflection on Kant’s moral philosophy as a whole.

The article offers a challenge to, and an invocation of, the values of Lasallian mission against rape culture. It addresses the continuum of violence, from outright misogynistic terrorism to an ongoing threat of assault and harassment, to the normalization of emotional and physical coercion of (primarily) women; and it explores historical responses within the Lasallian tradition to this pervasive problem in society and identifies a few rich resources within its underlying charism for tackling this pernicious evil (the virtue of silence / listening & a paradigm of association). The Lasallian obligation to address rape culture and attitudes of patriarchal normalcy is articulated; and a challenge is issued to actively teach students about healthy relationships, gender norms, and sexuality. Women and men on college campuses need to be willing to engage these difficult but necessary conversations and take responsibility for their part in the transformations needed in society and on college campuses.

Community resilience, a system’s ability to maintain its essential functions despite disturbance, is a cornerstone of public health preparedness. However, as currently practiced, community resilience generally focuses on defined neighborhood characteristics to describe factors such as vulnerability or social capital. This ignores the way that residents of some neighborhoods (as ‘essential workers’’) were required during the COVID-19 pandemic to sacrifice their wellbeing for the sake of others staying at home in more affluent neighborhoods. Using the global care chain theory, we analyze the way that the resilience of affluent neighborhoods depends on siphoning off the labor of other, less affluent neighborhoods, creating what we call the parasitic nature of resilience. We argue that understanding this neighborhood interdependence—and accounting for its parasitic nature— should be prioritized by public health authorities to prevent unintentional harm in future pandemics. Otherwise, any public health emergency response that relies on this labor (as did the COVID-19 pandemic response) depends on exploitative practices that produce the very disparities the response is trying to address. We explore the theoretical grounding and practical effects of this idea to provide the preparedness enterprise with an initial set of theoretical tools to move from a model of community resilience to one of community renewal. The community renewal model is based on an underlying ethics of care, in which systems are redesigned to become more prosocial during a public health response. We believe this model can more successfully address the tragic inequities in labor and health outcomes that we see during public health emergencies.

The #MeToo movement generated a feminist insistence that we “believe women.” But the men accused of assault, harassment, and other violations frequently defended themselves with the insistence that they had always “respected women” – sometimes, going so far as to get numerous women to sign letters swearing that these men had always respected them. This common MeToo defense reveals the core inconsistency – and the core entitlement – at the heart of misogyny and sexual injustice: some women deserve respect. But the duty to respect those women relies on an invisible entitlement to disrespect – indeed, to assault, harass, dominate, or exploit – others. This chapter explores consent’s role within the superstructure of misogyny and sexual injustice, arguing what consent is a key apparatus of white supremacy. It argues that consent has been constructed through dynamics of colonial and racist sexual entitlement, mapping some (white) women as deserving of respect and the right to consent, while marking other women as expendable or disposable within the sexual economy. This means not only that consent is historically constructed as white, but also that whiteness, and in particular, white womanhood, is constructed through consent. Thus, white women’s right to consent – or to refuse – is premised upon the inability of other women to do so. In this way, the right to sexual consent does not disrupt the norm of male sexual entitlement. Consent has always been premised on non-consent, from coloniality and slavery to contemporary porn, which offers a vision of the world without proper consent, so that granting consent to actual women is an exceptional practice, an “act of respect.” By including race and class alongside gender in my analysis of consent, I argue that contemporary feminist visions of sexual justice must do more than defend or ameliorate consent, but develop intersectional interrogations of sexual justice that reckon with the complicities of consent.

This paper explores Kant's account of marriage and its relevance to contemporary debates over same-sex marriage. Kant's defense of marriage is read against debates unfolding in Prussia in the 1790s, when the question of whether marriage was a "universal estate" was a central point of debate surrounding the Prussian Legal Code of 1794. By reading Kant's arguments in light of this historical context, and in comparison with those offered by his contemporaries, Fichte and von Hippel, this article shows both that the debates about marriage in the 1790s mirror contemporary tensions, and that Kant took a "middle path" that innovatively defended marriage as a basic feature of the state.

The purity test scandal highlights a pervasive double standard: reputations shape the lives of just about everyone, but to be declared a slut is to be publicly denied the right to even basic kinds of respect. This chapter talks about purity test results where Meg Manning finds out that her score of 48 is plastered across her locker, along with the word “slut.” The locker next to hers, however, is marked with a 32 and the words “You're the best!” Either this locker belongs to a girl being mocked for her low score or it belongs to a guy being praised. Veronica Mars doesn't take the test, but a fake score is posted for her anyway—a shamefully low 14. The purity test reminds us that sluts and studs aren't terribly different. The only difference is that studs are applauded for their reputation, while sluts are shamed for theirs.

This paper formulates a response to standard accounts of Kantian sexual morality, by first clarifying why sex should be understood as a case of using a person as a thing, rather than merely as a means. The author argues that Kant’s remedy to this problem is not sexual consent, but a model of setting and sharing sexual ends. Kant’s account of sexual morality, read in this way, is a critical framework for contemporary moves to think beyond consent, and to grapple with concerns about sexual violation and “bad sex” that have gained uptake in the wake of the MeToo movement. The author defends an account of sex as a process of setting and sharing sexual ends in a Kantian key, which provides us with resources for thinking about the robust ongoing project of making our sexual selves in nonideal conditions, as well as for identifying the wrongs of both “bad” sex and sexual harassment. In doing so, they offer a critical middle ground between contemporary accounts of sexual morality that center questions of individual agency or autonomy, and those that foreground the intersubjective nature of sex.

This Element examines Kant's innovative account of labour in his political philosophy and develops an intersectional analysis of Kant. By demonstrating that Kant's analysis of slavery, citizenship, and sex developed in inter-linked ways over several decades, culminating in his development of a 'trichotomy' of Right, the author shows that Kant's normative account of independence is configured through his theory of labour, and is continuous with his anthropological accounts of race and gender, providing a systemic justification for the dependency of women and non-whites embedded in his philosophy of right. By examining Kant's arguments about slavery as intertwined with his account of domestic labour, the author argues that his ultimate rejection of slavery may owe more to his changing conceptualization of labour than to his theory of race, and that his final arguments against slavery rehearse strategies for embedding intersectional patterns of domestic dependence in his account of the rightful state.

In this essay, I draw on Kant’s legal philosophy in order to defend the right to voluntary motherhood by way of abortion at any stage of pregnancy as an essential feature of women’s basic rights. By developing the distinction between innate and acquired right in Kant’s legal philosophy, I argue that the viability standard in US law (as established in Planned Parenthood v. Casey) misunderstands the nature of embodied right. Our body is the site of innate right; it is the means through which we can set and pursue ends in the world. The law, therefore, cannot adjudicate the relationship between the will and the body: it cannot require us to allow our bodies to be used against our will. By comparing unwanted pregnancy to sexual assault, I problematize the notion that consent to pregnancy, like consent to sex, can ever be conclusive. I examine Kant’s own account of unwanted pregnancy, in which he describes mother and child finding themselves “in a state of nature” in order to rethink the status of the fetus in law, and I argue that we should understand the fetus’s right to life as provisional, rather than as enforceable by law.

ABSTRACT. Public discourse about ethics in the COVID-19 pandemic has tended to focus on scarcity of resources and the protection of civil liberties. We show how these preoccupations reflect an established disaster imaginary that orients the ethics of response. In this paper, we argue that pandemic ethics should instead be oriented through a relational account of persons as vulnerable vectors embedded in existing networks of care. We argue for the creation of a new disaster imaginary to shape our own understandings of the interrelated social, political, and economic hardships under conditions of social distancing. We develop a pandemic ethics framework rooted in uBuntu and care ethics that makes visible the underlying multidimensional structural inequities of the pandemic, attending to the problems of resource scarcity and inequities in mortality while insisting on a response that surges existing and emergent forms of solidarity.

In this article, I compare Kant’s and Marx’s analysis of women and domestic labour in their mature political works, and argue that Kant offers more analytic tools for understanding the social and economic role of domestic labour than does Marx. While domestic labour becomes visible to Marx only as it is outsourced, Kant develops a clear account of the specific rules governing domestic labour in the emerging bourgeois household. Because of his commitment to the domestic realm as a core feature of the just state, however, much of Kant’s account of domestic labour should be challenged by contemporary Kantian feminists.

There is no doubt that Immanuel Kant has a woman problem. His anthropo-logical studies of women are full of cutting remarks, and despite a generation offeminist Kantian scholarship, it is an open question whether he meant to include women as full, equal agents in either his moral or political philosophy. Those who engage this question within Kant’s political philosophy ask whether or not women can “work their way up” to full, active citizenship. If women can achieve equality in this way, the argument goes, then we can solve Kant’s woman problem. But this approach, I argue, asks the wrong question. It focuses on the status of wives rather than on the structure of the domestic sphere as a whole, and therefore obscures the ways in which the valuation of domestic space and reproductive labor shape access to rights and equality in Kant’s political philosophy. I will argue that this approach misses the deeper structural and gendered inequalities built into Kant’s conception of the state. Re-examining Kant’s “woman problem” points us toward a larger problem with labor and inequality in the Kantian state: Kant’s map of the rightful institutional order normatively requires that someone do the dependency work that makes independence possible