Feminist Philosophy Quarterly

Readers will find four peer-reviewed articles in this issue. First, in “The Limitations of Duality: Reexamining Sexual Difference in Feminist Philosophies of Nature,” Camilla Pitton advances a critique of what she terms “the duality view,” that is, the perspective she finds in some interpretations of Luce Irigaray’s work that nature is dual and sexed. Whether it is an accurate reading of Irigaray or not, Pitton says, the duality view ought to be rejected, in part because such an account is unable to ground a normative rejection of objectification.

Second, Marie-Pier Lemay proposes research-guiding principles as one way to conduct research in philosophy, in her article, “Engaged Solidaristic Research: Developing Methodological and Normative Principles for Political Philosophers.” Lemay’s work emerges from the author's qualitative research fieldwork in Senegal and realization of methodological hazards of the kind of work that political philosophers are doing when they're doing engaged philosophy.

In our third article, Caroline King explores the ways that Paul Preciado’s book Testo yonqui (Testo Junkie) offers a productive lens through which to view transgender theory through heterotopias: worlds within worlds that both mirror and upset the “real” world outside, in “Spaces for Becomings? Heterotopic Fictions in Preciado’s Testo yonqui.”

Our fourth article, by Tyra Lennie, “Self-Improvement in Astellian Friendship,” argues for Mary Astell’s description of friendship as a self-improvement project available to an agent in a strong community. Lennie relies upon a comparison of Astell’s account of friendship to the function and structure of Epicurean friendship in order to clarify and demonstrate shared themes between these two views of friendship as essentially featuring self-improvement.