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The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals is the first fully comprehensive reference volume to examine the intersections of gender studies and critical animal studies, and is an essential reference for students in Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Geography and Environmental Studies.

This paper provides an overview of Michel Foucault's continually changing observations on familial power, as well as the feminist‐Foucauldian literature on the family. It suggests that these accounts offer fragments of a genealogy of the family that undermine any all‐encompassing or transhistorical account of the institution. Approaching the family genealogically, rather than seeking a single model of power that can explain it, shows that far from this institution being a quasi‐natural formation or a bedrock of unassailable values, it is in fact a continually contested fiction that masks its own histories of becoming.

Drawing on Michel Foucault's writings as well as the writings of feminist scholars bell hooks and Jane Gallop, this paper examines faculty–student sexual relations and the discourses and policies that surround them. It argues that the dominant discourses on professor–student sex and the policies that follow from them misunderstand the form of power that is at work within pedagogical institutions, and it examines some of the consequences that result from this misunderstanding. In Foucault's terms, we tend to theorize faculty–student relations using a model of sovereign power in which people have or lack power and in which power operates in a static, stable, and exclusively top-down manner. We should, however, recognize the ways in which individuals in pedagogical institutions are situated within disciplinary and thus dynamic, reciprocal, and complex networks of power, as well as the ways in which the pedagogical relation may be a technique of the self and not only of domination. If we reconsider these relations in terms of Foucault's accounts of discipline and technologies of the self, we can recognize that prohibitions on faculty—student sexual relations within institutions such as the university are productive rather than repressive of desire, and that such relations can be opportunities for development and not only for abuse. Moreover, this paper suggests that the dominant discourses on professor—student relations today contribute to a construction of professors as dangerous and students as vulnerable, which denies the agency of (mostly female) students and obscures the multiplicity of forms of sexual abuse that occur within the university context.

In 1977 Michel Foucault contemplated the idea of punishing rape only as a crime of violence, while in 1978 he argued that non-coercive sex between adults and minors should be decriminalized entirely. Feminists have consistently criticized these suggestions by Foucault. This paper argues that these feminist responses have failed to sufficiently understand the theoretical motivations behind Foucault's statements on sex-crime legislation reform, and will offer a new feminist appraisal of Foucault's suggestions.

"Much of the history of western ethical thought has been composed of debates about the bases of "the good life." It has typically been taken for granted that "the good life" is achievable only by (certain) human beings. Feminists and Continental philosophers have long challenged both the descriptive accuracy and the prescriptive hold of the idea of the human life whose goodness is under discussion. Beyond the normative demands implicit in the idea of the good life, or the properly human life, more and more philosophers are now interrogating the question of life from within a broader frame. Feminist Philosophies of Life signals the importance of distinctively feminist reflections upon matters of shared concern among living beings. For many of the contributors to this volume, it is not enough to expose the tendency of discourses to normalize and exclude differently-abled, racialized, feminized, and gender nonconforming people, although this task remains central. It is also necessary to ask what life is or how life is constituted. What are the conditions under which life on earth is possible? To what extent do we share the struggles and needs of other living beings? And what is it about living bodies that enables them to develop in so-called "social" or "spiritual" ways? How, as feminist philosophers, do we respond to the precarious existences of people experiencing disability, prisoners, fetuses and pregnant women, murdered and missing indigenous women, and of life itself on a planet that is rapidly being impacted by climate change?"--