Sarah Lucia Hoagland

Review (2007) of three books fighting violence against women of color. Organizers and activists all, the theorists of these volumes provide comprehensive analyses as well as strategies exploring the struggle for reproductive justice for women of color, policing the national body and criminalization, and American Indian genocide as related to sexual violence and colonial relationships. The arguments highlight once again the inseparability of theory and practice. The focus hope is to bring mainstream feminism back to its struggle for social justice.

In this paper I will argue that an epistemology of ignorance is a denial of relationality. Knowing is a series of practices. So is ignoring. And as practices, they are strategic. I have argued that knowing is a practice, of engagement or disengagement ("Practices of Knowing"), so is ignoring (Frye, Mills). I have argued that we need to recognize rationalities not countenanced in the dominant logic ("Resisting Rationality). And I have argued for disrupting the conceptual coercion of the dominant logic as well as for uncertainty as a way of emerging from the form of life enacted through the mystification of dominant discourse ("Moving Toward Uncertainty"). In this paper I want to take up the question of relationality. From postions of power and the logic of oppression, an epistemology hides engagement and as a result erases contestation and resistance. From positions of marginalization and the logic of resistance, it resists coercive consensus. In both cases there is a denial of a certain kind of relationality.

Looking at work on advocacy research, this article raises concerns about researchers, exploring and illustrating four aspects of the Coloniality of Anglo-European knowledge practice possible in such research. It suggests that it is not because we are able to be scholars that we are positioned to develop knowledge of marginalized others; it is because of how we are positioned in relation to marginalized others that we are able to be scholars. This article ends with a suggestion for an epistemic shift.

This open-ended anthology is a journey into the very canon that Mary Daly has argued to be patriarchal and demeaning to women. This volume deauthorizes the official canon of Western philosophy and disrupts a related story told by some feminists who claim that Daly’s work is unworthy of re-reading because it contains fatal errors. The editors and contributors attempt to prove that Mary Daly is located in the Western intellectual tradition. Daly may be highly critical of conventional Western epistemological and theological traditions, but she nevertheless appropriates themes “out-of-context” for the building of her own systematic philosophy. The following are just a few of the many themes explored in this volume: • the question of subjectivity understood as an ongoing process of be-coming • the ambiguity of the need for feminists of colonial nations to speak out about violence against women in other parts of the world while that speaking carries with it the stamp of a colonial location • the territoriality of lesbian and women’s space • the theological dimensions of twentieth-century Western philosophy. Contributors are Wanda Warren Berry, Purushottama Bilimoria, Debra Campbell, Molly Dragiewicz, Frances Gray, Amber L. Katherine, AnaLouise Keating, Anne-Marie Korte, María Lugones, Geraldine Moane, Sheilagh A. Mogford, Laurel C. Schneider, Renuka Sharma, and Marja Suhonen.

Lesbian ethics is an ethics of resistance and creation. It is not a set of rules of right behavior or injunctions of duty and obligation or delineations of good character that one may find in utilitarian, deontologic, and virtue treatises. It is a liberatory conceptual journey which emerges from recognized contexts of oppression, and as such challenges some unstated assumptions of traditional Anglo‐European ethics. Lesbian ethics is an envisioning and discussion of possibilities, given lesbian lives, for a transformation of values. As such it is not a matter of moral reform, a matter of preservation of and better adherence to existing values. It is a call for another type of moral change, moral revolution.

The scope of Philosophy in Multiple Voices provides the reader with eight philosophical streams of thought-African-American, Afro-Caribbean, Asian-American, Feminist, Latin-American, Lesbian, Native-American and Queer-that introduce readers to alternative, complex philosophical questions concerning gendered, sexed, racial and ethnic identities, canon formation, and meta-philosophy. The overriding theme of the text is that philosophy is pluralistic in voice, rich in diversity, and ought to valorize democratic intellectual spaces of philosophical engagement