1. Thanks for the challenge Patrick – a few things have crossed my mind. In terms of my own work, and I think more broadly for feminist bioethics, “Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Automony, Agency, and the Social Self” by Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, published in 2000, has been hugely influential.** The work in this volume provides a coherent and well-argued way to critique traditional, and masculinist, accounts of autonomy and to recognise the ways in which social context shapes and determines the nature and extent of our autonomy. I am among the many many bioethics scholars who continue to draw on the concepts elucidated in this book. (My other ‘most influential’ book is Sue Sherwin’s “No Longer Patient” which alas does not meet the “since 2000” criterion.)
   The other contributions to debates about feminism that I wish to mention are less academic but I have nonetheless found them noteworthy. These are the everyday sexism project (http://usa.everydaysexism.com/) and the recent “#LikeAGirl” video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjJQBjWYDTs). The everdayday sexism project shows us just how far we still have to go. It is hard to read it without feeling rage and sadness that women and girls remain exposed to a constant barrage of words and actions that imply that, just because they are female, it is acceptable to heap them with slurs, put-downs, assaults, innuendos and the rest of it. Sites like this show us that the need for feminist scholarship and activism remains as pressing as ever.
   I read your post on “LikeAGirl” and while I agree that it is a potentially cynical appeal to feminism in order to sell “feminine hygiene products”, I think the power of the video has outstripped its advertising roots. The video demonstrates how the term “like a girl” acts as an insult in a vivid and memorable way. My hope is that for every (male) person who understands the message of the video , we may get one less posting to everydaysexism.
   **Please note that I am a friend and colleague of Catriona Mackenzie and therefore may be considered biased in my nomination of “Relational Autonomy”. I can confirm that the book influenced my writing long before I ever met Catriona and that she knows nothing of this nomination at the time of posting.

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2. What a fascinating and challenging question! I think I’ll need to ponder it for a couple of days and come back to it later. Like Wendy, one of the first contributions that sprang to mind dates from before 2000: Margaret Urban Walker’s “Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics” was published in 1998. Her characterisation of feminist approaches to ethics as following an “expressive-collaborative model” as opposed to the “theoretical-juridical model” of most non-feminist ethics was and is enormously important in turning out attention to morality as an untidy, ongoing, socially embedded task of negotiating claims and responsibilities.

   I’m going to chea a bit with my actual nominee, because although Eva Feder Kittay’s “Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency” was first published in 1999, the paperback version didn’t reach my hands until 2000! Kittay was a pioneer in bringing a rigorous philosophical scrutiny to some taken for granted understandings of dependency, independence, autonomy and related concepts. She did this in the context of disability but her analysis, crucially, explored the ways in which dependency is universal and ubiquitous: it’s just that many manifestations of dependence are tacitly ignored in order to confirm with a dominant image of the ideal moral subject as being entirely self-sufficient. With dependency seen as ubiquitous, society has a moral obligation to support “dependency workers”: those people, usually women, who undertake paid or unpaid care work that for others. Kittay’s work, like Walker’s, proves its importance through the amount of later feminist thinking that picks up on and develops these ideas.

   And finally, I’d like to nominate something that can sometimes seem to attract more criticism than praise from feminists: social media. Despite the problems of abuse and so on they raise, the ability to communicate with other feminists like this has certainly enabled me to develop global bonds of real sisterhood and solidarity in a way that was unimaginable to feminists only a couple of decades ago.

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3. I would like to second Wendy’s suggestion of Mackenzie and Stoljar’s work on relational autonomy. It is a great resource for thinking critically about what some have called the “lynchpin” of medical ethics, but also a concept underlying much of western philosophy and with implications for moral agency, epistemology, and social justice.

   I would also like to nominate Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice, and work on this subject more generally. It is REALLY extremely important to understand what governs why we take the testimony of some more seriously than others. In bioethics, this shows up in how doctors relate to patient self-reports and to patients’ reasoning. In general, it pertains to all manner of power relations.

   To name these is not to disdain others. Hey folks, what have you got?

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