Jordan Pascoe

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.

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...

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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...

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.

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.