AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Supporting the development of children’s autonomy is widely recognized as a fundamental good. Despite this, social practices that reflect and reinforce patriarchal gender norms are ubiquitous. These norms, however, curtail the development and exercise of children’s autonomy by constraining their opportunities along gendered lines and promoting falsehoods about ‘natural’ identity expression. In recognition of these limitations, many parents across the political spectrum are pushing back against patriarchal gender norms in their parenting approaches. One particular model that aims to fully embrace a progressive parenting methodology is the “gender-open” model of parenting (GOP). Broadly, the GOP methodology involves withholding disclosure of a child’s biological sex as assigned at birth from public knowledge. With the necessary support, this approach aims to encourage children to choose their own gender in their own time. Advocates of this model claim that adopting the GOP ensures a child’s autonomy in self-expression. However, despite these claims, none of the advocates clearly articulates how the model promotes children’s autonomy. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate how the GOP protects and promotes children’s autonomy in robust ways, making a strong case for its adoption.

Oppressive double binds are those situations where, due to oppressive forces, no matter what choice the oppressed person makes, they contribute to their own oppression. Present and historical patterns of discrimination often give rise to dilemmas around distrust which I argue can best be described as distrust-based oppressive double binds.

On one hand, for members of oppressed groups, it often seems that distrusting others is justified, because unjustified trust can be harmful. On the other hand, however, persistent distrust of others is also burdensome for the person who is distrusting. This means that, whether the distrusting person acts on their distrust or chooses to rely on the distrusted person anyway, they open themselves up to unjust burdens or harms and contribute in some small way to their own oppression.

After establishing this concept, I argue that viewing certain common patterns of distrust among oppressed groups through this lens allows members of oppressed groups to better understand and resist their oppression, illustrates one of the mechanisms through which justified distrust can lead to unjustified distrust, and helps us understand how we can reduce some forms of distrust and when we should focus on others becoming more trustworthy instead.

Bereavement is part of the human condition, and so it is unsurprising to find an array of generic social scripts which operate to scaffold interactions with the bereaved. They are generic in that we will all lose parents and friends, and many of us will lose siblings, partners, or children. Each script supposes a gravity of loss that in turn translates to a ‘space’ for grieving and delimits requirements in caring for the bereaved. But human relationships are complex and exceed these generic formulations. There are more ways to ‘relate’ to others outside a bionormative schema, yet we lack widely disseminated and embedded social scripts to work through the impact of these poorly recognised losses. In this paper, I analyse my own bereavement journey since the sudden death of my ex-step-father in 2013. I explore the impact and implications of grieving without a social script to guide me (and those around me), the meaning-making journey I have embarked upon to process this loss, and the central place that ‘recognition’ has occupied therein. In addition to demonstrating a need for more nuanced social scripts to deal with varied forms of bereavement, I critique the ongoing social centring of bio- and cis-hetero-normative familial relationships in life which is a precursor to misjudging the depth of blended-family (and chosen-family) loss.

Romantic culture has long been a topic in gender studies when it comes to analysis of socialization and social construction of gender. It has been critiqued as leading to normalization of abuse and harassment of women and consequent silencing of women enduring IPV (Intimate Partner Violence) (Radway 1991). In Chinese context, romantic fictions and multi-media adaption of the stories have impacted readership in the last 50 years (or longer) (Liu 2008), among them Chiung Yao contributed 40 years of active writing. Since 1962, Chiung Yao’s stories have been made into more than 100 TV series and films. However, her impact is undertheorized compared to female writers in her era.

Feminist epistemologists theorize the inability to communicate one’s critical social experience as hermeneutical injustice and made further inquiry into the collective hermeneutical resources (Berenstain 2020; Clanchy 2023; Dular 2023; Falbo 2022; Fricker 2007; Mason 2011; Medina 2012, 2013, 2017; Mills 2013; Jenkins 2017, 2021; Simion 2019). I argue that Chiung Yao’s romances, among other stories, constitute an important part of Chinese romantic culture and serve as hermeneutical resources when people draw concepts about love. The endorsement of IPV exhibited in her plots induces hermeneutical injustice of her readers, who fail to express discomfort in a toxic relationship due to normalization of abuse in Chiung Yao’s description of love. This paper contributes to the vivid discussion of hermeneutical injustice, IPV, toxic relationships and intersectional feminism.

Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace proposed that the activities involved in mothering children facilitated a distinct mode of thought that she termed ‘maternal thinking’. In this paper, I examine my experience of becoming a mother and how it influenced my scholarly work. Maternity did not hinder my intellectual life; I experienced an explosion of intellectual energy that I found was facilitated by my maternity in ways like those theorised by Ruddick. However, I experienced a simultaneous feeling of becoming invisible to the academy (beyond a network of feminist colleagues), which was compounded by my status as an early-career and casually employed academic. Rather than my new role as mother limiting my career, the constraints of the university seemed to push my maternal self (and its rhythm of inquiry) out of its walls, and I find myself now remaining a scholar as a mother despite the institution. Here, I frame my own maternal thinking as ‘slow philosophy’, following Michelle Boulous Walker’s Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution, to make sense of this incongruence. I argue that framing maternal thinking as slow philosophy helps further illuminate the marginal position that women occupy in relation to the academy.

In a forthcoming paper I critique Holly Lawford-Smith’s recent book Gender Critical Feminism for both the incoherence of its underlying metaphysics of sex and gender, and the problematic political effects of that metaphysics. In this talk I will first rehearse the crux of that argument, and then use it to motivate a further question: if bad metaphysics leads to bad politics, what kind of metaphysics might help bring about a liberatory politics?

Authentic subjectivity plays a central role in Simone de Beauvoir’s arguments in both The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and The Second Sex (1949). In this paper, I unpack what it means to be an authentic subject. Beauvoir argues that freedom is the ultimate value, which places great responsibility on us to recognise and work towards our own freedom and that of others. Furthermore, to be authentic one must recognise, rather than deny, our ambiguous existence as both transcendent beings who construct and pursue ends freely, and immanent beings whose existence relies on the conditions of life being met consistently.

Patriarchal society relegates women (and others) to the immanent sphere, while simultaneously devaluing that sphere. This is evident in the widespread destruction of our ecosystems and the continued devaluing of reproductive and care labour. Implicit in Beauvoir’s argument, I suggest, is the notion that to be an authentic subject one must challenge the dominant system of values that devalues and exploits the immanent sphere. I extend Beauvoir’s work to argue for the importance of women and other oppressed people working together to create an alternative value system that authentically recognises the ambiguity of existence, and moreover, the value of the immanent.