Skip to main content

Jordan Pascoe

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Philosophy, George A. Miller Visiting Scholar

Followers

83

Following

20

Co-authors

2

Public Views

Jordan Pascoe is a political and feminist philosopher based in New York City. Her work explores intersections of feminist philosophy, critical race theory, philosophy of sex, critical disaster studies, and moral and political philosophy. She George A. Miller Visiting Scholar atthe University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before that, she was Professor of Philosophy at Manhattan College in Riverdale, NY.
Address: Brooklyn, New York, United States

less

InterestsView All (8)

Uploads

Papers by Jordan Pascoe

Reactionary Movements and the Epistemology of Political Radicalization: Situating Social Movements in Disasters

Social Theory and Practice, 2025

One of the most striking features of the Covid-19 pandemic was the surge in reactionary activism,... more 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 th 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.

Response to Critics: Kant’s Theory of Labour

Kantian review, Apr 4, 2024

A Universal Estate: On Kant and Marriage Equality

Kant's Doctrine of Right in the 21st Century, 2019

This chapter explores parallels between Kant's defense of marriage as a universal estate with 21s... more This chapter explores parallels between Kant's defense of marriage as a universal estate with 21st century debates about same sex marriage. By examining how debates about marriage in the 1790s shaped Kant's arguments, and comparing his account of marriage to those provided by his contemporaries, Fichte and Von Hippel, I show that Kant develops an innovative account of marriage as a dignity-conferring institution, a basic right of citizens, and a necessary feature of the just state. While his arguments offer a useful philosophical grounding for the contemporary marriage equality movement, feminists and queer theorists should attend to the ways in which the structure of domestic right and the enclosed juridical realm it produces entrench patriarchal privilege and further the privatization of self-care by producing enclosed domestic sphere resistant to juridical interference.

On Being at Home in Ourselves and the World

Estudos Kantianos [EK]

IntroductionHelga Varden’s Sex, Love, & Gender: A Kantian Theory (2020) is a rigorous, beautiful,... more IntroductionHelga Varden’s Sex, Love, & Gender: A Kantian Theory (2020) is a rigorous, beautiful, and transformative book, which does vital work not only in fully developing how Kant’s complex understandings of desire, reflection, and relationality should inform our understanding of his arguments about sex and love but also in positioning these Kantian arguments as absolutely critical resources to contemporary debates about gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual (in)justice. Rarely is a book so comprehensive, so coherent, and so grounded in a vulnerability we rarely find in philosophy; rarely does it so radically expand the resources we have for dealing with what seems like a familiar problem in such a well-read figure. The literature on Kant and sex is extensive, and yet this book absolutely revolutionizes the kinds of questions we can ask about Kant on sex, love, and gender.Beyond its attendance to essential questions about love, sex, gender, and the phenomenology of huma...

Kant and Feminist Political Thought, Redux: Complicity, Accountability and Refusal

Palgrave handbooks in German idealism, 2022

Enlightenment is the human being&#39;s emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is... more Enlightenment is the human being&#39;s emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is the inability to make use of one&#39;s own understanding without direction from another,&quot; wrote Kant (WE, Ak8: 35, 17). This short 1784 essay &quot;What is Enlightenment?&quot; starts out by deeming the motto of the age of Enlightenment to be &quot;Sapere Aude&quot; or &quot;Have courage to make use of your own understanding,&quot; and proposes civil and political progress to be the destiny of humankind. Drawing on this motto, Kant defines enlightenment here as an &quot;emergence from self-incurred minority [Unmündigkeit]&quot;. Pointing out that the lazy and cowardly masses (&quot;including the entire fair sex,&quot; he writes parenthetically) are often too happy to remain minor or immature by relying on an authority in all important matters pertaining to their lives, Kant contends that it may be difficult for individuals to exit from this selfimposed tutelage or to dare to think for themselves on their own, but that it is more likely that a public may enlighten itself as a whole. Enlightenment then refers to a collective progress toward maturity [Mündigkeit], i.e. independence. Kantian feminists have reacted to the parenthetical remark about the &quot;fair sex&quot; in a number of ways. Some claim that Kant encourages everyone, including women, to use their reason to be mature and participate in the project of enlightenment; 1 while others argue that Kant excludes women from this project because of their natural immaturity and lack of courage that &quot;runs counter to a precondition for a human &#39;ideal&#39;, namely, that of Mündigkeit&quot; or because of their peculiar civil and legal immaturity that precludes them from taking part in civil and political progress.

Kant and Feminist Political Thought, Redux: Complicity, Accountability and Refusal

The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy

In this essay, we do not presuppose that Kantian philosophy is useful for feminist theorizing, bu... more In this essay, we do not presuppose that Kantian philosophy is useful for feminist theorizing, but suggest that feminist political theorists treat Kant, as a theorist of the Enlightenment, as instructive in naming the Enlightenment problem in liberalism in both theory and praxis. Accordingly, here we have refused to assume that Kantianism is a useful tool for correcting the intersectional injustices of our contemporary world, injustices with which it remains complicit. When we focus only on gender and reproduce non-intersectional methodologies in our contemporary engagements with Kant, it becomes impossible to hold Kant accountable for the ways that his non-ideal thinking organizes his ideal theory, or to ask what we reproduce when we reproduce Kantian ideas in feminist political theory.

Kant and Feminist Political Thought, Redux: Complicity, Accountability and Refusal

by Jordan Pascoe and Dilek Huseyinzadegan

Palgrave Handbook Feminism and German Idealism, 2023

Enlightenment is the human being's emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is the ina... more Enlightenment is the human being's emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is the inability to make use of one's own understanding without direction from another," wrote Kant (WE, Ak8: 35, 17). This short 1784 essay "What is Enlightenment?" starts out by deeming the motto of the age of Enlightenment to be "Sapere Aude" or "Have courage to make use of your own understanding," and proposes civil and political progress to be the destiny of humankind. Drawing on this motto, Kant defines enlightenment here as an "emergence from self-incurred minority [Unmündigkeit]". Pointing out that the lazy and cowardly masses ("including the entire fair sex," he writes parenthetically) are often too happy to remain minor or immature by relying on an authority in all important matters pertaining to their lives, Kant contends that it may be difficult for individuals to exit from this selfimposed tutelage or to dare to think for themselves on their own, but that it is more likely that a public may enlighten itself as a whole. Enlightenment then refers to a collective progress toward maturity [Mündigkeit], i.e. independence. Kantian feminists have reacted to the parenthetical remark about the "fair sex" in a number of ways. Some claim that Kant encourages everyone, including women, to use their reason to be mature and participate in the project of enlightenment; 1 while others argue that Kant excludes women from this project because of their natural immaturity and lack of courage that "runs counter to a precondition for a human 'ideal', namely, that of Mündigkeit" or because of their peculiar civil and legal immaturity that precludes them from taking part in civil and political progress.

Beyond Consent: On Setting and Sharing Sexual Ends

Philosophies

This paper formulates a response to standard accounts of Kantian sexual morality, by first clarif... more 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 cente...

Kant's Theory of Labour

This Element examines Kant's innovative account of labour in his political philosophy and dev... more 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 dependen...

Rethinking Race and Gender in Kant: Towards a Non-Ideal, Intersectional Kant

SGIR Review, 2019

A Lasallian Response to Rape Culture

Axis: A Lasallian Journal of Higher Education, 2020

This article3 offers a challenge to, and an invocation of, the values of Lasallian mission in the... more This article3 offers a challenge to, and an invocation of, the values of Lasallian mission in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the international movement, on college campuses, against campus rape. It emerges out of an extended conversation between students and faculty about how our shared Lasallian mission might offer spaces of resistance to these forms of violence, as well as how this mission might need to be considered in a new light as our students – particularly our women students – thought about their experiences as women on Lasallian campuses.

“Respect Women”: Thinking Beyond Consent After #MeToo

The Palgrave Handbook of Sexual Ethics, 2022

For the past two years I have been interviewing high school and college-age men for a book on the... more For the past two years I have been interviewing high school and college-age men for a book on their experience of physical and emotional intimacy," wrote Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times the weekend after Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. 1 "At some point in our conversation, these young men usually referred to themselves as 'good guys,' and mostly, I would say, they were. They had also all been duly admonished by some adult in their lives-a parent, a coach-to 'respect women.' But that, along with 'don't get anyone pregnant,' was pretty much the totality of their sex education. As one college sophomore said to me, 'That's kind of like telling someone who's learning to drive not to run over any little old ladies and then handing him the car keys. Well, of course, you think you're not going to run over an old lady. But you still don't know how to drive.'" This chapter asks: what does it mean to "respect women" in a sexual context? I ask this question in an era in which claims to "respect women" have often been deployed by men accused of sexual misconduct in their own defense: "I have great respect for women," Donald Trump told Anderson Cooper after the video leaked in which he bragged about grabbing women "by the pussy." 2 "I have always treated women with dignity and respect," Brett Kavanaugh said on Fox News the week before Christine Blasey Ford testified about the night he allegedly sexually assaulted her in high school. 3 In these locutions, "I respect women" is offered by men as a reason not to "believe women"-it is offered, in fact, as an assertion of the man's entitlement to our respect and our belief. 4

Patriarchy and Enlightenment in Immanuel Kant (1784)

Patriarchal Moments, 2016

Kant and Colonialism

To Love, Honor, and Contract: Engagement and Domesticity in Kant’s Rechtslehre

WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, 2013

Surging Solidarity: Reorienting Ethics for Pandemics

Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 2020

Public discourse about ethics in the COVID-19 pandemic has tended to focus on scarcity of resourc... more 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.

On Finding Yourself in a State of Nature: A Kantian Account of Abortion and Voluntary Motherhood

In this essay, I draw on Kant’s legal philosophy in order to defend the right to voluntary mother... more 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...

Working Women and Monstrous Mothers: Kant, Marx, and the Valuation of Domestic Labour

Kantian Review, 2017

In this article, I compare Kant’s and Marx’s analysis of women and domestic labour in their matur... more 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.

Vicki A. Spencer, Herder’s Political Thought: A Study of Language, Culture, and Community Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012 Pp. 354 ISBN 9781442643024 (hbk) $65.00

Kantian Review, 2015

On Not Being a Slut (Even When Everyone Thinks You Are)

Investigating the Mysteries of Life (Which Is a Bitch Until You Die), 2014

Reactionary Movements and the Epistemology of Political Radicalization: Situating Social Movements in Disasters

Social Theory and Practice, 2025

One of the most striking features of the Covid-19 pandemic was the surge in reactionary activism,... more 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 th 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.

Response to Critics: Kant’s Theory of Labour

Kantian review, Apr 4, 2024

A Universal Estate: On Kant and Marriage Equality

Kant's Doctrine of Right in the 21st Century, 2019

This chapter explores parallels between Kant's defense of marriage as a universal estate with 21s... more This chapter explores parallels between Kant's defense of marriage as a universal estate with 21st century debates about same sex marriage. By examining how debates about marriage in the 1790s shaped Kant's arguments, and comparing his account of marriage to those provided by his contemporaries, Fichte and Von Hippel, I show that Kant develops an innovative account of marriage as a dignity-conferring institution, a basic right of citizens, and a necessary feature of the just state. While his arguments offer a useful philosophical grounding for the contemporary marriage equality movement, feminists and queer theorists should attend to the ways in which the structure of domestic right and the enclosed juridical realm it produces entrench patriarchal privilege and further the privatization of self-care by producing enclosed domestic sphere resistant to juridical interference.

On Being at Home in Ourselves and the World

Estudos Kantianos [EK]

IntroductionHelga Varden’s Sex, Love, & Gender: A Kantian Theory (2020) is a rigorous, beautiful,... more IntroductionHelga Varden’s Sex, Love, & Gender: A Kantian Theory (2020) is a rigorous, beautiful, and transformative book, which does vital work not only in fully developing how Kant’s complex understandings of desire, reflection, and relationality should inform our understanding of his arguments about sex and love but also in positioning these Kantian arguments as absolutely critical resources to contemporary debates about gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual (in)justice. Rarely is a book so comprehensive, so coherent, and so grounded in a vulnerability we rarely find in philosophy; rarely does it so radically expand the resources we have for dealing with what seems like a familiar problem in such a well-read figure. The literature on Kant and sex is extensive, and yet this book absolutely revolutionizes the kinds of questions we can ask about Kant on sex, love, and gender.Beyond its attendance to essential questions about love, sex, gender, and the phenomenology of huma...

Kant and Feminist Political Thought, Redux: Complicity, Accountability and Refusal

Palgrave handbooks in German idealism, 2022

Enlightenment is the human being&#39;s emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is... more Enlightenment is the human being&#39;s emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is the inability to make use of one&#39;s own understanding without direction from another,&quot; wrote Kant (WE, Ak8: 35, 17). This short 1784 essay &quot;What is Enlightenment?&quot; starts out by deeming the motto of the age of Enlightenment to be &quot;Sapere Aude&quot; or &quot;Have courage to make use of your own understanding,&quot; and proposes civil and political progress to be the destiny of humankind. Drawing on this motto, Kant defines enlightenment here as an &quot;emergence from self-incurred minority [Unmündigkeit]&quot;. Pointing out that the lazy and cowardly masses (&quot;including the entire fair sex,&quot; he writes parenthetically) are often too happy to remain minor or immature by relying on an authority in all important matters pertaining to their lives, Kant contends that it may be difficult for individuals to exit from this selfimposed tutelage or to dare to think for themselves on their own, but that it is more likely that a public may enlighten itself as a whole. Enlightenment then refers to a collective progress toward maturity [Mündigkeit], i.e. independence. Kantian feminists have reacted to the parenthetical remark about the &quot;fair sex&quot; in a number of ways. Some claim that Kant encourages everyone, including women, to use their reason to be mature and participate in the project of enlightenment; 1 while others argue that Kant excludes women from this project because of their natural immaturity and lack of courage that &quot;runs counter to a precondition for a human &#39;ideal&#39;, namely, that of Mündigkeit&quot; or because of their peculiar civil and legal immaturity that precludes them from taking part in civil and political progress.

Kant and Feminist Political Thought, Redux: Complicity, Accountability and Refusal

The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy

In this essay, we do not presuppose that Kantian philosophy is useful for feminist theorizing, bu... more In this essay, we do not presuppose that Kantian philosophy is useful for feminist theorizing, but suggest that feminist political theorists treat Kant, as a theorist of the Enlightenment, as instructive in naming the Enlightenment problem in liberalism in both theory and praxis. Accordingly, here we have refused to assume that Kantianism is a useful tool for correcting the intersectional injustices of our contemporary world, injustices with which it remains complicit. When we focus only on gender and reproduce non-intersectional methodologies in our contemporary engagements with Kant, it becomes impossible to hold Kant accountable for the ways that his non-ideal thinking organizes his ideal theory, or to ask what we reproduce when we reproduce Kantian ideas in feminist political theory.

Kant and Feminist Political Thought, Redux: Complicity, Accountability and Refusal

by Jordan Pascoe and Dilek Huseyinzadegan

Palgrave Handbook Feminism and German Idealism, 2023

Enlightenment is the human being's emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is the ina... more Enlightenment is the human being's emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is the inability to make use of one's own understanding without direction from another," wrote Kant (WE, Ak8: 35, 17). This short 1784 essay "What is Enlightenment?" starts out by deeming the motto of the age of Enlightenment to be "Sapere Aude" or "Have courage to make use of your own understanding," and proposes civil and political progress to be the destiny of humankind. Drawing on this motto, Kant defines enlightenment here as an "emergence from self-incurred minority [Unmündigkeit]". Pointing out that the lazy and cowardly masses ("including the entire fair sex," he writes parenthetically) are often too happy to remain minor or immature by relying on an authority in all important matters pertaining to their lives, Kant contends that it may be difficult for individuals to exit from this selfimposed tutelage or to dare to think for themselves on their own, but that it is more likely that a public may enlighten itself as a whole. Enlightenment then refers to a collective progress toward maturity [Mündigkeit], i.e. independence. Kantian feminists have reacted to the parenthetical remark about the "fair sex" in a number of ways. Some claim that Kant encourages everyone, including women, to use their reason to be mature and participate in the project of enlightenment; 1 while others argue that Kant excludes women from this project because of their natural immaturity and lack of courage that "runs counter to a precondition for a human 'ideal', namely, that of Mündigkeit" or because of their peculiar civil and legal immaturity that precludes them from taking part in civil and political progress.

Beyond Consent: On Setting and Sharing Sexual Ends

Philosophies

This paper formulates a response to standard accounts of Kantian sexual morality, by first clarif... more 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 cente...

Kant's Theory of Labour

This Element examines Kant's innovative account of labour in his political philosophy and dev... more 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 dependen...

Rethinking Race and Gender in Kant: Towards a Non-Ideal, Intersectional Kant

SGIR Review, 2019

A Lasallian Response to Rape Culture

Axis: A Lasallian Journal of Higher Education, 2020

This article3 offers a challenge to, and an invocation of, the values of Lasallian mission in the... more This article3 offers a challenge to, and an invocation of, the values of Lasallian mission in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the international movement, on college campuses, against campus rape. It emerges out of an extended conversation between students and faculty about how our shared Lasallian mission might offer spaces of resistance to these forms of violence, as well as how this mission might need to be considered in a new light as our students – particularly our women students – thought about their experiences as women on Lasallian campuses.

“Respect Women”: Thinking Beyond Consent After #MeToo

The Palgrave Handbook of Sexual Ethics, 2022

For the past two years I have been interviewing high school and college-age men for a book on the... more For the past two years I have been interviewing high school and college-age men for a book on their experience of physical and emotional intimacy," wrote Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times the weekend after Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. 1 "At some point in our conversation, these young men usually referred to themselves as 'good guys,' and mostly, I would say, they were. They had also all been duly admonished by some adult in their lives-a parent, a coach-to 'respect women.' But that, along with 'don't get anyone pregnant,' was pretty much the totality of their sex education. As one college sophomore said to me, 'That's kind of like telling someone who's learning to drive not to run over any little old ladies and then handing him the car keys. Well, of course, you think you're not going to run over an old lady. But you still don't know how to drive.'" This chapter asks: what does it mean to "respect women" in a sexual context? I ask this question in an era in which claims to "respect women" have often been deployed by men accused of sexual misconduct in their own defense: "I have great respect for women," Donald Trump told Anderson Cooper after the video leaked in which he bragged about grabbing women "by the pussy." 2 "I have always treated women with dignity and respect," Brett Kavanaugh said on Fox News the week before Christine Blasey Ford testified about the night he allegedly sexually assaulted her in high school. 3 In these locutions, "I respect women" is offered by men as a reason not to "believe women"-it is offered, in fact, as an assertion of the man's entitlement to our respect and our belief. 4

Patriarchy and Enlightenment in Immanuel Kant (1784)

Patriarchal Moments, 2016

Kant and Colonialism

To Love, Honor, and Contract: Engagement and Domesticity in Kant’s Rechtslehre

WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, 2013

Surging Solidarity: Reorienting Ethics for Pandemics

Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 2020

Public discourse about ethics in the COVID-19 pandemic has tended to focus on scarcity of resourc... more 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.

On Finding Yourself in a State of Nature: A Kantian Account of Abortion and Voluntary Motherhood

In this essay, I draw on Kant’s legal philosophy in order to defend the right to voluntary mother... more 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...

Working Women and Monstrous Mothers: Kant, Marx, and the Valuation of Domestic Labour

Kantian Review, 2017

In this article, I compare Kant’s and Marx’s analysis of women and domestic labour in their matur... more 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.

Vicki A. Spencer, Herder’s Political Thought: A Study of Language, Culture, and Community Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012 Pp. 354 ISBN 9781442643024 (hbk) $65.00

Kantian Review, 2015

On Not Being a Slut (Even When Everyone Thinks You Are)

Investigating the Mysteries of Life (Which Is a Bitch Until You Die), 2014

Personhood, Protection, and Promiscuity: Some Thoughts on Kant, Mothers, and Infanticide

APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, Apr 2011

Kant and Kinky Sex

What Philosophy Can Tell You About Your Lover (ed. Sharon Kaye), Apr 2012

To Love, Honor, and Contract: Engagement and Domesticity in Kant's Rechtslehre

Women's Studies Quarterly, Sep 2013

Domestic Labor, Citizenship, and Exceptionalism: Rethinking Kant's “Woman Problem”

Journal of Social Philosophy, 2015

There is no doubt that Immanuel Kant has a woman problem. His anthropological studies of women ar... more There is no doubt that Immanuel Kant has a woman problem. His anthropological studies of women are full of cutting remarks, and despite a generation of feminist 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

Surging Solidarity: Reorienting Ethics for Pandemics

Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 2020

Public discourse about ethics in the COVID-19 pandemic has tended to focus on scarcity of resourc... more 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.

A Lasallian Response to Rape Culture

by Jordan Pascoe and Sarah Scott

AXIS: A Lasallian Journal of Higher Education, 2020

This article3 offers a challenge to, and an invocation of, the values of Lasallian mission in the... more This article3 offers a challenge to, and an invocation of, the values of Lasallian mission in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the international movement, on college campuses, against campus rape. It emerges out of an extended conversation between students and faculty about how our shared Lasallian mission might offer spaces of resistance to these forms of violence, as well as how this mission might need to be considered in a new light as our students – particularly our women students – thought about their experiences as women on Lasallian campuses.

Kant and Feminist Political Thought, Redux: Complicity, Accountability, and Refusal

by Dilek Huseyinzadegan and Jordan Pascoe

German Idealism and Feminism Handbook, 2023

In this essay, we do not presuppose that Kantian philosophy is useful for feminist theorizing, bu... more In this essay, we do not presuppose that Kantian philosophy is useful for feminist theorizing, but suggest that feminist political theorists treat Kant, as a theorist of the Enlightenment, as instructive in naming the Enlightenment problem in liberalism in both theory and praxis. Accordingly, here we have refused to assume that Kantianism is a useful tool for correcting the intersectional injustices of our contemporary world, injustices with which it remains complicit. When we focus only on gender and reproduce non-intersectional methodologies in our contemporary engagements with Kant, it becomes impossible to hold Kant accountable for the ways that his non-ideal thinking organizes his ideal theory, or to ask what we reproduce when we reproduce Kantian ideas in feminist political theory.

Kant's Theory of Labour

This book examines Kant's innovative account of labour in his political philosophy and develops a... more This book 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.

The Epistemology of Disasters and Social Change

The Epistemology of Disasters and Social Change, 2024

An earthquake in Mexico City spurs the rise of democracy. A plague in South Africa lays the foun... more An earthquake in Mexico City spurs the rise of democracy. A plague in South Africa lays the foundations for apartheid. A terrorist attack on New York City triggers massive shifts in global security. A global pandemic sets the stage for the largest civil rights protests in generations.

Beyond their physical impact, disasters assault our certainty and shape a narrow space to alter the structure of what we believe. That change can lead us toward disinformation and authoritarianism, or it can lead us toward greater solidarity and human rights. It all depends on the choices we make as we live through crisis; on how, in fact, we choose to know each other.

The Epistemology of Disasters and Social Change draws on social epistemology, disaster sociology, psychology and feminist philosophy to investigate how disasters function as cauldrons of social transformation, for good and ill. We wrestle with how disasters change us, moment by moment, and provide new strategies to help these tragic events produce positive social transformation, leading to a brighter future during this century of crisis.