''Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy'' is a peer-reviewed

academic journal An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and ...

published quarterly by

Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press in the world. It is also the King's Printer. Cambridge University Pr ...

. As of January 2019, the journal is led by co-editors Bonnie J. Mann, Erin McKenna, Camisha Russell, and Rocío Zambrana. Book reviews are published by ''Hypatia Reviews Online (HRO)''. HRO is edited by Erin McKenna and Joan Woolfrey. The journal is owned by a non-profit corporation, Hypatia, Inc. The idea for the journal arose out of meetings of the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) in the 1970s. Philosopher and legal scholar Azizah Y. al-Hibri became the founding editor in 1982, when it was published as a "piggy back" issue of the '' Women's Studies International Forum''. Named after Hypatia of Alexandria, a philosopher who was murdered by a mob in 415 CE, it became an independent journal in 1986. ''Hypatia'' became involved in a damaging dispute in 2017 when its associate editors published an unauthorized apology for the journal's publication of an article on transracialism, after the author and article were criticized on

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. The episode pointed to a significant breakdown of communications within ''Hypatia''s editorial team. The journal responded by setting up a task force to restructure its governance. It was the subject of further controversy in 2018 when it accepted a satirical hoax article for publication, one of several written as part of the

grievance studies affair The grievance studies affair, also referred to as the "Sokal Squared" scandal, was the project of a team of three authors—Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose—to highlight what they saw as poor scholarship and eroding cri ...

. The hoaxes were exposed by the ''Wall Street Journal'' before ''Hypatia'' was able to publish the article.

History

Background

''Hypatia'' has its roots in regional meetings of the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), established in 1972. One of SWIP's earliest ideas was that it would set up a philosophy journal. The thought of " a journal of our own" was very powerful, according to Kathryn Morgan (

Toronto Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the anch ...

), speaking in 2009 on the history of ''Hypatia''. At the time, according to Linda Martín Alcoff ( CUNY), president of the Hypatia Inc. board of directors since February 2018, philosophers who wanted to write about gender-related issues were being silenced in a discipline "riven by unabashed bias and vested interest, inflicting its own form of unapologetic mob violence". Azizah Y

SWIP decided in 1977 to set up an editorial board to plan the journal; the first board was put together by

Ann Garry Ann Garry is a professor of philosophy, emerita, at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA). While at CSULA, Garry was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities, and also served several terms as the chai ...

( Cal State LA) and Jacqueline Thomason ( UMass Amherst). At a meeting in Denver in the spring of 1979, the board agreed that Azizah Y. al-Hibri ( UR) should be the founding editor. Al-Hibri began work on the journal in 1982, after she had completed her PhD in philosophy and just as she was starting her first year of

law school A law school (also known as a law centre or college of law) is an institution specializing in legal education, usually involved as part of a process for becoming a lawyer within a given jurisdiction. Law degrees Argentina In Argentina, ...

. The philosophy and women's studies departments at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest- ...

offered support in the form of an office and research assistance. '' Women's Studies International Forum'' agreed to publish the new journal as an annual "piggy back" issue of its own, which it did for three years, and distributed 10,000 brochures to its mailing list advertising it. The group led by Al-Hibri decided that submissions would be fully reviewed and that substantive comments would be offered, rather than the usual brief rejection, to help authors improve their work and to contribute to the field's development. Donna Serniak ( Penn) was responsible for the first issue. It was first published independently of ''Women's Studies International Forum'' in 1986.

Title, feminist philosophy

The journal is named after Hypatia of Alexandria, a mathematician and philosopher who was murdered by a mob in 415 CE. Al-Hibri said that the SWIP editorial board chose the name to reflect that women have "deep roots in philosophy". According to Linda López McAlister ( USF), the idea for the name came from Sue Larson ( Barnard) during a meeting of Eastern SWIP in 1973.

Sandra Harding Sandra G. Harding (born 1935) is an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology, research methodology, and philosophy of science. She directed the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1996 to 2000, and co-edite ...

(

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California ...

), who was at the meeting, objected, thinking it awful to name a feminist-philosophy journal after a woman who had been "stoned to death for telling the truth". The first suggestion was ''Hypatia: A Journal of Philosophy and Feminism'', rather than ''A Journal of Feminist Philosophy'', because at the time it was unclear what feminist philosophy might be.; . In 2019, Hypatia's editors wrote, in "The Promise of Feminist Philosophy":

Governance

''Hypatia'' is owned by a non-profit corporation, Hypatia Inc., registered in the US state of Washington in April 2008. Its purpose is "to foster feminist scholarship in philosophy and related fields, including through the publication of the academic journal ''Hypatia''". As of 2017, its annual revenue was around $70,000. Besides publishing the journal, Hypatia Inc. also issues "diversity grants" in support of feminist scholarship and philosophy, consisting of travel grants for individuals as well as project grants. As of October 2019, the board of directors consisted of Linda Martín Alcoff, Talia Mae Bettcher,

Helen Longino Helen Elizabeth Longino (born July 13, 1944) is an American philosopher of science who has argued for the significance of values and social interactions to scientific inquiry. She has written about the role of women in science and is a centra ...

, Jacqueline Scott, and

Nancy Tuana Nancy Tuana is an American philosopher who specializes in feminist philosophy. She holds the DuPont/Class of 1949 Professorship in Philosophy and Women's Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. She came to Penn State from the University of ...

. In addition, the journal listed an international advisory board of 15 and an 11-strong board of associate editors. Instead of an editor-in-chief, four co-editors were named, Bonnie J. Mann, Erin McKenna, Camisha Russell, and Rocío Zambrana, and a managing editor, Sarah LaChance Adams. The managing editor of ''Hypatia Reviews Online'' was named as Bjørn Kristensen. Previous editors-in-chief were:

2017 transracialism controversy

Dispute

''Hypatia'' became involved in a dispute in April 2017 that led to the online shaming of one of its authors, Rebecca Tuvel, an untenured assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis. The episode pointed to a breakdown of communications within ''Hypatia''s editorial team, and to a rift within

feminism Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...

and academic

philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. ...

. The journal had published Tuvel's article, "In Defense of Transracialism", in its spring 2017 edition after the standard double-blind

peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...

. Comparing the case of

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to that of Rachel Dolezal, Tuvel argued that " nce we should accept transgender individuals' decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals' decisions to change races." On 28 April the article was criticized on

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and

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, and Tuvel became the target of personal attacks.Sosis, Cliff (5 October 2017)
"Interview with Rebecca Tuvel"
''What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?''. The following day an open letter, listing a member of ''Hypatia''s editorial board as its point of contact, urged that the article be retracted. By 2 May the letter had gathered 830 signatures. The journal distanced itself further from the article on 1 May when an ''Hypatia'' associate editor apologized on the journal's Facebook page for the article's publication, on behalf of "a majority of the Hypatia's Board of Associated Editors".McKenzie, Lindsay (1 May 2017)
"Journal Apologizes for Article Likening Transracialism to Being Transgender"
''Chronicle of Higher Education''. The editor-in-chief, Sally Scholz, stood by the article, and the board of directors, led by

Miriam Solomon Miriam Solomon is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department as well as Affiliated Professor of Women's Studies at Temple University. Solomon's work focuses on the philosophy of science, social epistemology, medical epistem ...

, confirmed that it would not be retracted.

Task force

In July 2017 Scholz resigned as editor-in-chief, along with Shelley Wilcox, editor of ''Hypatia Reviews Online''. The board of directors announced that a task force would restructure the journal's governance, and that anyone in an editorial or non-board position with ''Hypatia'' would be "required to sign a statement of adherence to guidelines issued by COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics". According to a statement from the associate editors, whose role was to choose the next editor, the board of directors asked them, on 17 July, to resign or the journal's governance documents would be suspended, which would remove the associate editors' influence. Eight of the associate editors resigned. In their resignation statement, they wrote that the current controversy was "grounded in long-standing differences and tensions within the field." They argued that feminist philosophy had an ethical commitment to transform philosophy into "a discipline that honors the perspectives and welcomes the scholarly contributions of historically marginalized groups, including people of color, trans* people, disabled people, and queer people." The board appointed interim editors, and in November 2017 Sally Haslanger, Serene Khader, and Yannik Thiem were named as the governance task-force co-chairs. The five-person board of directors, including Solomon, was replaced in February 2018. Linda Martín Alcoff and Kim Hall, two of the associate editors who resigned in July, became president of the board of directors and chair of the search committee for the new editorial team, respectively.

2018 grievance studies affair

''Hypatia'' was the subject of further controversy in 2018 when it accepted a hoax article for publication as part of the "grievance studies affair". The philosopher Peter Boghossian and others submitted 20 bogus papers to several humanities and social-sciences journals to provoke discussion about scholarly standards. Two papers were submitted to ''Hypatia''. The first, "The Progressive Stack: An Intersectional Feminist Approach to Pedagogy", was not accepted; the authors were three times advised to revise and resubmit. The paper suggested that "educators should discriminate by identity and calculate their students' status in terms of privilege, favor the least privileged with more time, attention and positive feedback and penalize the most privileged by declining to hear their contributions, deriding their input, intentionally speaking over them, and making them sit on the floor in chains ..." One reviewer asked how privileged students could be made to "feel genuinely uncomfortable in ways that are humbling and productive", but not "so uncomfortable (shame) that they resist with renewed vigor". The second paper, "When the Joke Is on You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire", was accepted. The paper argued that "satirical or ironic critique of social justice scholarship" is unethical but is acceptable in fields such as economics. The ''Wall Street Journal'' exposed the hoax before ''Hypatia'' had published the article. In October 2018, ''Hypatia'' published a statement denouncing the breakdown of trust in academic publishing, and said it would "revisit our procedures to see whether we can better screen for fraud in ways that will burden neither the very authors we hope to encourage to submit their work nor the reviewers we ask to give their time to their important task". The editors emphasized that the hoaxers had manipulated ''Hypatia'''s publication and review practices, which were intended to “encourage submissions by younger and marginalized scholars” and "to avoid placing unnecessary hurdles in the way of submitting and revising manuscripts". Justin Weinberg, Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina, wrote that "if the citations n the published paperare legitimate and the descriptions of others' views are accurate ... the editors of ''Hypatia'' have nothing to be particularly ashamed of. ... It seems to me that only on the last page of the paper are there certain statements that could be interpreted as outrageous, but they are so vague that a much more charitable alternative interpretation would be reasonable."

Revised governance structure

Following the 2018 transition, the governing bodies of ''Hypatia'' collaborated to produce a new governance document to facilitate open communication and procedural consistency in cases of conflict. The journal also now has two standing committees to consider issues of ethics, dispute resolution, and outreach. In February 2020, ''Hypatia'''s governance boards elected a new Board of Associate Editors.

Abstracting and indexing

''Hypatia'' is

abstracted and indexed An abstracting service is a service that provides abstracts of publications, often on a subject or group of related subjects, usually on a subscription basis. An indexing service is a service that assigns descriptors and other kinds of access poi ...

in the following

bibliographic databases A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to published literature, including journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, ...

: According to the ''

Journal Citation Reports ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core Colle ...

'', the journal has a 2017

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as ...

of 0.712.