Failure and Futurity:Reading the Hypatia Archives for Transformative Feminist Praxis

This panel uses the opening of the Hypatia archive to consider how the journal has shaped the development of the field of feminist philosophy, particularly on questions of race, ethnicity, and gender. Each essays considers the complexity of this history and the work of shaping what is possible through the histories we tell. The essays show how exploring the failures of the journal are crucial for understanding what Hypatia has done and can do. The first paper, “Trans in the Hypatia Archives: Records of Failure, Records of Promise,” argues that Hypatia has a history of trans exclusion but also trans accountability, a history best used to conscientiously grow affects, practices, and communities in the present. The second paper, “Exploring Early Latina and Latin American Feminist Contributions to Hypatia, 1983-1999,” argues that the long-term contributions by Latina and Latin American feminist philosophers to U.S. feminist philosophy belies hegemonic narratives of erasure about the newness of such critical work. The third paper, “Unsettling Archives, Reckoning with Home,” reads Hale’s 1996 Hypatia article “Are Lesbians Women?” as a model of analyzing gender practices through attention to emplaced practices that countervail tendencies within feminist theorizing to stabilize gender.