Anglophone theoretical reflections on gender often assume the generalizability of their claims without first asking whether “gender” as a term exists, or exists in the same way, in other languages. Some of the resistance to the entry of “gender” as a term into non-Anglophone contexts emerges from a resistance to English or, indeed, from within the syntax of a language in which questions of gender are settled through verb inflections or implied reference. A larger form of resistance, of course, has to do with fears that the category will itself release forms of sexual freedom and challenges to existing hierarchies within the second language. The well-organized political attack on gender and gender studies now occurring throughout the world has many sources, and that is not the focus of this essay. This essay maintains that there can be no theory of gender without translation and that Anglophone monolingualism too often assumes that English forms a sufficient basis for theoretical claims about gender. Further, because the contemporary usage of gender emerges from a coinage introduced by sexologists and reappropriated by feminists, it proves to be a term that is bound up with grammatical innovation and syntactical challenges from the start. Without an understanding of translation—its practice and its limits—there can be no gender studies within a global framework. Finally, the process of becoming gendered, or changing genders, requires translation in order to communicate the new terms for recognizing new modalities of gender. Thus, translation is a constitutive part of any theory of gender that seeks to be multilingual and that accepts the historically dynamic character of languages. This framework can help facilitate a way of recognizing different genders, and different accounts of gender identity (essentialist, constructivist, processual, interactive, intersectional) as requiring both translation and its limits. Without translation and historical coinage, there is no way to understand the dynamic and changing category of gender and the resistances it now encounters.

This article analyzes a crucial aspect of the #MeToo phenomenon overlooked in all the commentary: the sign under which this activism has been taking place. Our premise is that to comprehend the novel politics that #MeToo incites, we need to understand the political grammar of the sign. #MeToo hails individuals to recognize their serial collectivity and assembles them into a fluid yet cohesive group. Straddling the particular and universal, the sign allows for a range of genres of speaking out and joining in, thereby reconfiguring the possibilities of feminist political assemblage. We begin by providing an overview of the arguments summoned in opposition to #MeToo that have dominated public discourse. Next, we examine #MeToo in the context of debates within feminism, demonstrating how #MeToo addresses enduring tensions over the terms of coalitional politics. Finally, we analyze the sign itself, focusing first on the distinctive grammar #MeToo deploys, and then on the politics it facilitates. We argue that #MeToo allows feminists to grapple with the challenges of difference in innovative ways—not only contextually or with respect to the varying positionalities of individuals assembled under the sign, but also in upholding a continuum of sexual violation.

The veil has remained controversial in the US since 9/11, yet it has not been subject to explicit regulation. Beginning with a court case in which a Muslim woman is banned from the courtroom for refusing a judge’s order to remove her niqab, I explore the ways in which the judge’s order resembles a demand for transparency. Transparency as a norm, a mode of discourse, and a kind of comportment betrays the explicit ethos of secular-liberal political norms and practices as being purely procedural. Drawing on early immigration law, the PATRIOT Act, and other laws, I argue that transparency is a demand for “unfamiliar” strangers to present themselves as familiar, or at least, as unthreatening to the dominant, homogenous population—not merely through sincerity and collegiality, but through submission and obedience. The demand for transparency is also often an impossible demand for a gendered racial and cultural recomportment, that is, to transform oneself into someone familiar—a neutral, vaguely feminist, liberal subject. I conclude that transparency remains in excess of liberal political and civic culture’s explicit scope.

This article interprets Teresa Brennan’s (2004) work on the forgetting of affect transmission in conjunction with Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) argument concerning the rise of Western Man through the dehumanization of native and African peoples. While not directly in dialogue, Wynter’s decolonial reading of Foucault’s (1994) epistemic ruptures enriches Brennan’s inquiry into this “forgetting,” given that callous, repeated acts of cruelty characteristic of Western imperialism and slavery required a denial of the capacity to sense suffering in others perceived as differently human. Supplementing Brennan with Wynter, we can better describe the limits of sympathy discourses as resting on identification and perceived sameness. In turn, Brennan (posthumously) comes to Wynter’s defense in her call for a new science of plural cultures to redefine the human, which some have interpreted as a positivist misreading of Frantz Fanon (2008). Brennan and Wynter alike have been criticized for their appeals to science; yet, I defend their respective proposals for social-scientific inquiry with support from Brennan’s response to the 1996 Sokal Hoax: the influence of the social on the biological body is, indeed, difficult to study, but this does not invalidate the inquiry as such.

While the emphasis on embodiment and situatedness is strong in contemporary philosophy and cognitive sciences, its implications for the practice of critical thinking are just beginning to be taken seriously. The challenge is to think with the richness and the intricacy that come along with embodiment of situated knowers and on the basis of the experiential turn (based on phenomenological and pragmatic approaches). Even though the embodied and experiential dimension is operative and continuously present all the time in thought and action, it is hardly acknowledged, cared for, or made transparent in academic philosophical training. In doing philosophy we are actually rather trained to detach ourselves from the experiential basis of our thinking. In this paper we claim that by doing so we cut ourselves off from important sources of what it means to think for oneself. We argue that the more embodied context one dares to include in critical thinking, the more critique becomes personally and politically transformative. This has major methodological implications: one needs to learn “reading” embodied, felt experience as carefully and closely as the texts. The methods of Embodied Critical Thinking (ECT) presented here are based on the micro-phenomenological approach of Claire Petitmengin and the Thinking at the Edge method developed by Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks.

In this brief excerpt from a forthcoming translation of L’Afrique et ses fantômes (2015) and Singe de Kafka (2008), Seloua Luste Boulbina shows how French opposition to the Islamic hijab, as described by Fanon, mirrored British opposition to the Indian practice of sati by claiming to defend women while really defending the interests of European men. This made it difficult, if not impossible, for women to define and assert interests of their own, apart from the perspectives imposed by politically opposed groups of men. Fanon recognized this complex silence. But Fanon also failed to read the perspective motivating the writings of fellow Martinican author, Mayotte Capécia (Lucette Ceranus Combette), which prevented him from seeing any independence in women’s capacity for interracial love and prevented him from giving a more complex psychological and political meaning to mixed ancestry.

This essay conducts a comparative reading of Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of the Hindu epic Mahabharata and Mahasweta Devi’s story “Draupadi.” While scholars have examined Devi’s tribal protagonist Draupadi in conjunction with the high Hindu goddess Draupadi of the epic, I suggest that the former’s viswarupadarshana (revelation of form) should be read in contrast to the role of the Mahabharata’s Hindu God Krishna. This comparison shows the feminist and postcolonial import of Devi’s story, as it demonstrates the continuity of caste-based tribal exploitation from antiquity to globalization. Along with this critique of tribal women’s subalternity in the national imaginary, Devi’s story stages a terrifying singularity that disrupts the sociopolitical logic of gender. Draupadi occupies the position of the subject of knowledge to invert the Indo-Aryan (mythology based) ontograph. By unraveling the “she” that must be perpetually murdered for (this kind of) historicity to take root, Draupadi pours (back) into an encounter between agent and subaltern the affectivity ideologically excised for an illusion to be seen as truth and, hence, as history.

This article uses the circumstances of black intimacies within the nineteenth century to analyze the ways in which the law, by definition, limits human possibility and agency. This limiting of possibility and agency is then visited upon LGBT people in the moment of marriage equality. The article attempts to show how that limiting is, in fact, part of the definition of legal personhood. While expanding forms of agency prescribed by the state, the law has also worked to narrow the forms of social agency produced and enacted by minoritized communities. This article, in sum, takes the marriage right as an example of a legal agency that confers personhood and narrows the intimate universes and social capacities produced by racial and sexual minorities.

This analysis connects the resurgence of affect theory known as “the affective turn” with the locus of attention surrounding abjection and examines the workings of abjection within the logics of disgust and shame, as well as the political potential of shame. The abject not only informs structures of knowledge and power that govern how subjectivities and group formations are founded and regulated, but provides elements of fluidity and ambiguity that allow us to challenge the affective patterns associated with the abject and locate resources in shame that contribute to restructuring the terrain of politics beyond a simple conversion of shame to pride.