A Phenomenology for Women of Color: Merleau-Ponty and Identity-in-Difference (Philosophy of Race) 1666916722, 9781666916720

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A Phenomenology for Women of Color

PHILOSOPHY OF RACE Series Editor: George Yancy, Emory University Editorial Board: Sybol Anderson, Barbara Applebaum, Alison Bailey, Chike Jeffers, Janine Jones, David Kim, Emily S. Lee, Zeus Leonardo, Falguni A. Sheth, Grant Silva The Philosophy of Race book series publishes interdisciplinary projects that center upon the concept of race, a concept that continues to have very profound contemporary implications. Philosophers and other scholars, more generally, are strongly encouraged to submit book projects that seriously address race and the process of racialization as a deeply embodied, existential, political, social, and historical phenomenon. The series is open to examine monographs, edited collections, and revised dissertations that critically engage the concept of race from multiple perspectives: sociopolitical, feminist, existential, phenomenological, theological, and historical. Recent Titles in the Series A Phenomenology for Women of Color: Merleau-Ponty and Identity-in-Difference, Emily S. Lee Afrosofian Knowledge and Cheikh Anta Diop: Geo-Ethical and Political Implications, François Ngoa Kodena Creating a Black Vernacular Philosophy, by Devonya N. Havis The Making of American Whiteness: The Formation of Race in Seventeenth-Century Virginia, by Carmen P. Thompson Racist, Not Racist, Antiracist: Language and the Dynamic Disaster of American Racism, by Leland Harper and Jennifer Kling Ontological Branding: Power, Privilege, and White Supremacy in a Colorblind World, by Bonard Iván Molina García Black Men from Behind the Veil: Ontological Interrogations, by George Yancy White Educators Negotiating Complicity: Roadblocks Paved with Good Intentions, by Barbara Applebaum White Ignorance and Complicit Responsibility: Transforming Collective Harm Beyond the Punishment Paradigm, by Eva Boodman Iranian Identity, American Experience: Philosophical Reflections on Race, Rights, Capabilities, and Oppression, by Roksana Alavi The Weight of Whiteness: A Feminist Engagement with Privilege, Race, and Ignorance, by Alison Bailey The Logic of Racial Practice: Explorations in the Habituation of Racism, edited by Brock Bahler Hip-Hop as Philosophical Text and Testimony: Can I Get a Witness?, by Lissa Skitolsky

A Phenomenology for Women of Color Merleau-Ponty and Identity-in-Difference

Emily S. Lee

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lee, Emily S., 1971– author. Title: A phenomenology for women of color : Merleau-Ponty and identity-in-difference / Emily S. Lee. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2024. | Series: Philosophy of race | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023048518 (print) | LCCN 2023048519 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666916720 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666916737 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Race—Philosophy. | Ethnicity—Philosophy. | Minority women. | Phenomenology. | Identity (Philosophical concept) | Intersectionality (Sociology) | Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908–1961—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC HT1523 .L44 2024  (print) | LCC HT1523  (ebook) | DDC 305.48/8—dc23/eng/20231115 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023048518 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023048519 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: A Phenomenology of Perception: Racisms as Bias and Multiplicitous Subjects

19

Chapter 2: The Phenomenological Structure of Experience: The Ambiguity of Intersectionality for a Group Identity

57

Chapter 3: The Body Movement of Historico-Racial-Sexual Schema

91

Chapter 4: Three Criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology

121

Chapter 5: In the Face of Indifference: The Phenomenological Structure of Identity-in-Difference

155

Conclusion 189 Bibliography 193 Index 205 About the Author

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Acknowledgments

It heartens me to think that my accomplishment really results from group effort. Let me begin by thanking Linda Martín Alcoff, for not only inspiring my philosophical work but modeling the kind of person I would like to be. The sincerity with which you approach your philosophical work and the generosity you exhibit to the people in your life is truly admirable. I’ve learned a lot about professionalism and forgiveness through you. Thank you, Deborah Hurd and Gloria Garcia, for practicing Marxism in Brooklyn. You two not only subsidized my housing during graduate school in your brownstone in Brooklyn, but also always encouraged my endeavors, including listening to my first conference paper. I’ve needed you as surrogate mothers, because you model how to love, how to demand better, and how to nevertheless, still support each other. I’m so grateful that you are present for my daughter even when we live so far away. Since beginning and ending this book, the circumstances of my life have changed so much that people who were a daily part of my life at the beginning are no longer a part of my life, while people who were not a part of my life now participate in my daily life. Old friends: Iona-Man Cheong, Kamling Wong, Aiyoung Choi, Lisa Goodlin, Sarita See, Dev Rana, Yukari Yanagino, Jane Chiang, Keun-Hee Han, Ariana Hemara, and the late David Allison. I am still grateful for your company, mentoring, or friendship. Women of color philosophers: Kyoo Lee, Boram Jeong, Namita Goswami, Mariana Ortega, Alia Al-Saji, Helen Ngo, Falguni Sheth, Camisha Russell, Kris Sealey, and Shireen Roshanravan. Your work inspires me. Philosophers: David Kim, George Yancy, Robert Bernasconi, Mario Saenz, Peter Park, Ann Murphy, Gaile Pohlhaus, Heather Battaly, Alison Bailey, Marjorie Jolles, Helen Fielding, Bonnie Mann, Michael Monahan, Ron Sundstrom, Jerry Miller, vii

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Kim Hall, Megan Burke, Christine Wieseler, Alison Wylie, Ed Emmer, and the late Charles Mills and Maria Lugones. Thank you for your philosophical work and making the field of philosophy inviting. Students: Shaeeda Mensah, Erica Rodriguez, Erika Grimm, Mariana Gomez, Monica Pinon, Camerine Davila, Patrick Henning, Rene Ramirez, Aram Hernandez, Long Hoang, Julia Vazquez, Eric Tafolla, Danielle Batalla, Chavva Olander, and others. Thank you for sharing my love of philosophy. I must thank André Burgstaller for talking me out of economics and persistently insisting I become a philosopher. Let me express my gratitude for my parents, Lee Kap-Cho and You Soon-Ok. Thank you for working so hard to meet all our primary needs, including ensuring we receive an undergraduate education, while surviving as immigrants. Thank you for the lessons about charitable giving, mom, and expecting the best of people, dad. My brother Seung Jin Lee and his impressive wife Hye Youn Kim—boy, have we been through a lot over the years! Your steady presence fortifies me. To my nephews and nieces Andrew, Joanne, James, Kira, and Audrey, it has been such a joy to be in your lives as you grow up. It was easier when you were little; I must learn about how to better engage you as young adults. My cousins, David, Stephen, and Erika Parker—I’m so flattered you wanted to be mentioned in the acknowledgments! I wish our children could grow up closer to each other. My aunt Leigh Parker—you made this immigrant journey possible by bravely living your life. You still managed to remain joyful, calm, and discerning. My cousin Hyun Tae Jung—I admire your gregarious and wise character and everything you do. My friends, including Donna Marcano, Nan Lee, Ceping Chao, and Janine Berg, were pivotal to keep me going—by listening to my complaints, talking me through the disheartening moments, and making sure I celebrated my accomplishments. Michael Mailutha and Chris Rynd have brought just needed periodic moments of laughter and perspective in life. New friends: Kendahl Radcliffe and Kyung Sun Cho, I respect all our efforts at ensuring life is meaningful. My new network of mothers, Pawan Jordan, Cyndi Rivera, Stephanie Ogata, and Tanya Panichpakdee—I am so glad that you and your children are a part of my daughter’s life. Raising children does require a village! I am so afraid I missed people. My sincerest apologies if I did miss you. Surrounded by such incredible people, I must be doing something right! Lilah Toy—words cannot say how important you are in my life. I don’t believe maternal love should be unconditional, but I cannot help it. Thank you for your patience with me. I’m learning a lot about love and relationships from you and your father.



Acknowledgments ix

TEXT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A much shorter version of chapter 5 was originally published as “Identity-inDifference to Avoid Indifference” in The Future of Feminist Phenomenologies, edited by Helen Fielding and Dorothea Olkowski, 313–27 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), copyright Emily S. Lee.

Introduction

WHY A PHENOMENOLOGY OF RACE? The meaning of race changes. Race indicated intellectual ability and the possibility of becoming civilized. Race demonstrated facility to produce culture and knowledge of the sciences. Race justified colonialism and slavery, the ramifications of which are still felt today.1 Even after surpassing assertions of such extreme distinctions among human beings with the end of slavery, race still justified segregation. In the United States, after the passage of the civil rights laws, the language of colorblindness and the value of refraining from judging human beings based on skin color were widely disseminated. Race was understood to function primarily as individual prejudices and biases. Yet, race considerations continue to influence social political institutions in the interpretation of laws and in the organization of society, such as in the delineations of neighborhoods and in the funding of elementary schools. In this form, in a real material sense, segregation continues. Race governs the ineffable cultural practices of society, from idiomatic usages of language, expected normative social interactions across races, and assumptions of class levels. Race dynamically accommodates changes in meaning. Clearly, understandings and functions of race evolve. Race matters. Yet there is no unanimous accord on the influence of race. How race matters varies among different people; race has meaning but not one meaning for everyone, everywhere during any one period of time. Today, while some consider white supremacy and overt signs of racism as only the behavior of a minority of extremists and not woven into the public narrative, some consider racism as still functioning deeply embedded in society in the assumptions of entitlement and desert. These different understandings of race lie at the heart of the controversy over Black Lives Matter and racist police violence, the value of teaching critical race theory and remembering the history of racism, and how to understand the periodically 1

2

Introduction

recurrent waves of hate crimes against immigrant populations, including anti-Asian hate crimes. Such different interpretations of the relevance of race illustrate that race is open to various understandings. Race is ambiguous. Because expressions of race change and understandings of race are ambiguous, race persists as a feature of society. As such, philosophers of race posit not only that race still functions today, but racial meaning will continue as a feature of our social world.2 This position highlights the persistence, the longevity of race and racism. A phenomenology of race aims to understand race as changing, as ambiguous—as dynamic—and as a persistent feature in our social world. The structure of race corresponds to the framework of phenomena.

THE AIMS OF THIS BOOK A phenomenological analysis of race may be unexpected since one of the main criticisms against phenomenology remains that its focus on descriptive analysis forecloses normative/ethical analysis. As Michael Barber explains, the limited scope of phenomenological analysis does not simply reflect an oversight on the part of phenomenologists and the phenomenological method, but demonstrates a choice based on an understanding of the limits of theory. Barber writes, “[t]his hesitancy about . . . theoretical ethics springs from numerous sources, such as the existentialist mistrust of universal moral laws and the difficulty of applying them . . . or a Nietzsche-like suspicion that moral norms express and mask underlying power motivations.”3 The scope of phenomenological method not only reflects the limits of theory, but also, exhibits the conscious decisions of phenomenologists. This book focuses on race—one of the most normative and political of all areas of inquiry—through a phenomenological framework. With blatant disregard for the initial cautious aims of phenomenology, this book’s focus appears as if I do not understand phenomenology. But Maurice Merleau-Ponty was interested in the questions of ethics and politics. The last chapter of The Phenomenology of Perception and his text Humanism and Terror clearly demonstrate his interest in the political questions of his day. MerleauPonty struggles with the limits of normative theory and human situatedness that leave subjects stranded with the inability to judge right and wrong in any absolute sense. Without this certainty and security of knowing one is right and the other is wrong—one must, nevertheless, act, for one cannot refuse to act. Not acting constitutes passively conceding, history marches on, time continues to flow. MerleauPonty writes: What if our actions were neither necessary in the sense of natural necessity nor free in the sense of a decision ex nihilo? . . . What if, in the social order, no one were innocent and no one absolutely guilty? What if it were the very essence of history to impute to us responsibilities, which are never entirely ours? And what if such freedom determined itself in a situation, which it had not chosen, even though it had assumed it? We would



Introduction 3 then be in the difficult situation of never being able to condemn with a good conscience, though it is inevitable that we do condemn.4

Caught within the despair of this dualistic trap of freedom and determinism, always situated, and hence always bereft of normative certainty, I read Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as an investigation of the ambiguities of life to ultimately consider normative and political questions. Clearly Merleau-Ponty was interested in normative theory, but he explores normative theory within the boundaries of a phenomenological analysis, acknowledging the limits of experience, especially limited access to absolute normative certainty. The inspiration for exploring a phenomenology of race arose by accident while reading Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, I happened to be also reading Patricia Williams’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights.5 I was inspired by how much the two texts deeply spoke to each other. Williams conveys her confoundedness of dominant interpretations of social events. Such divergent perspectives place into doubt her conception of reality and ultimately her sanity. But clearly, to the extent that her work speaks to me and others, Williams’s understandings of the various events evoke truth. To reconcile how people living in one society, in a shared world, can diverge and even completely disagree in understanding an experience/event about race launched this project of exploring Merleau-Ponty’s work for its implications in philosophy of race. Because Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, in its attention to context, perspective, and situatedness accounts for how people share an experience and still cull different knowledge from the experience, I was inspired to relate the two branches of philosophy that so far had limited contact with each other. Considering the large body of feminist philosophy that engages Merleau-Ponty’s work because of his focus on embodiment, reading Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and philosophy of race together made sense. At this point in the project, with some perspective on the structure of this work, I recognize some concerns. I position Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology—the work of a dead, white, male—as the philosophical framework to conceptualize a subject matter that so many people of color have discussed, pondered, and already contributed deep insights to. Do I perform what Namita Goswami describes as “the protocols of Eurocentric identity politics recommend enlisting a ‘daddy text’ to be considered philosophical”?6 This could be problematic. I am not sure how much of associating the two areas of philosophy centers around legitimizing my work as philosophy, or simply because I believe that reading the two areas of philosophy together genuinely benefits both areas of philosophy. This positioning does not suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s work is the answer to thinking about all race questions. Rather, my positioning of phenomenology and philosophy of race invites thinking about questions of race within another framework. My positioning of the two areas of philosophy also broadens the scope and relevance of phenomenology itself. The philosophical framework of phenomenology invites rethinking, if not newly thinking,

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Introduction

about our situatedness, our being-in-the-world, our relatedness with others before making any epistemological claims, including in regard to social political knowledge.

RACE AS PHENOMENA Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology can address race because race is a phenomenon. The structure of race corresponds to the framework of phenomena. Merleau-Ponty defines phenomena as a “layer of living experience through which other people and things are first given to us.”7 In Edmund Husserl’s famous injunction to go back to the things themselves, he focuses on what Gail Weiss describes as both the investigations of the “‘how’ as well as the ‘what.’”8 This dual-faceted exploration attends to “what is being observed but also to the intentions of the one doing the observing and to the modes through which the phenomenon is ‘given’ in the first place.”9 Husserl and Merleau-Ponty argue that initial contact with the world occurs phenomenally, rather than already clearly distinguishable as subjective or objective. The lived world steers in between the unnecessary setup of stark contrast between the naturalism of empiricism and the psychologism of intellectualism. Husserl refuses to accept the constraints of these opposing theories, where one reduces the world to either that which exists out in the material world—the fallacy of the natural attitude—or to the projections of the inner self—the reduction to and prioritization of consciousness. Instead, Husserl portrays the phenomenal world as in between these two conceptions. The lived world is an open-ended framework with meaning complexes.10 Ronald Bruzina, describing Husserl’s understanding of phenomena, writes: we would precisely no longer think of consciousness as an “inside” and a perceptual object, for example, a chair, as “outside,” “out there” in the universe. Rather, consciousness is now a pure field of experience-in-the-living (lived experience, Erlebnis), in which various objects are found as appearings-in-the-field . . . a phenomenon (“appearing”) in a field differentiated most fundamentally as a subject-object bipolarity.11

All insistence that the world is already divided into the subjective and the objective misses the phenomenal quality of the world, the space of phenomenology. Phenomena include not only the influence of the world but also that of the subject. Linda Martín Alcoff, in describing Merleau-Ponty’s account, emphasizes the active involvement of the subject as “positional, intentional, inherently and incessantly open to the world and yet constitutive of the meaning of that world and of our experience within it.”12 Phenomenology forwards that experiences of the world are negotiations between the subject and the world, between the intentions of the subject and the givens of the world. Acknowledging the perceptual situatedness of subjectivity, and that the world never presents itself in pure objectivity, renders experience and knowledge of the world as ultimately ambiguous. By beginning with clarifications in claims to knowledge about the world, Husserl ultimately aims for a presuppositionless inquiry to finally achieve clear, certain



Introduction 5

knowledge. But as Weiss points out, “there is a deep tension Husserl never satisfactorily resolves between (1) his drive to secure the scientific rigorousness of phenomenological inquiry through comprehensive descriptive analysis and (2) his recognition that indeterminacy is an indispensable feature of human experience within the life-world and that therefore some phenomena cannot be known rigorously.”13 In defiance of Husserl’s aims at presuppositionlessness, race is an open-ended framework, in other words an indeterminate meaning complex that promises to perennially function within the social horizon. Recognized as not natural, but as a social cultural meaning structure, race’s persistence in its creative transformations testifies to the impossibility of eliminating it as a meaning system from the social horizon. Race’s perseverance contests the possibility of a pure transcendental or eidetic reduction. Race is a phenomenon. Race perfectly illustrates both Martin Heidegger’s and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s refocus of the project of phenomenology—not to eradicate these meaning-structures—but to explore, analyze, and understand these phenomenological indeterminate influences as conditions for being-in-the-world. Here, the aim of phenomenology lies not in describing the physical natural world, nor in the search for nous, truth, or the guiding principles of the universe, but in the more constrained and limited aim of describing human being-in-the-world for honesty and accuracy about what we can claim to know about the world. Because race is not solely a natural difference, because the differences of race are not biologically significant, empiricist and positivist philosophical analysis cannot capture the functioning of race. Because reason, universal principles, and values do not guide human understandings and reactions to race, traditional normative philosophy cannot address the functioning of race. Race is about power, and perhaps it lies in the domain of political philosophy. Poststructuralist theory elaborates on the force of social constructions, such as race, but adheres to a belief that distinguishing the socially constructed from the natural world suffices to resolve the question of race. Clearly this has not come to pass. Additionally, the tendency within some strains of poststructuralist theory to de-emphasize the significance of the natural/material world does not justly admit the role of the embodied differences of race. Phenomenology, as a philosophical framework and a methodology, precisely addresses the conceptual space where race functions. Race occupies the interstice within the natural and the sedimented social meanings—precisely the domain of human being-in-the-world. Race is phenomena.

RACISM AS ESSENTIALISM OR DENYING RACE AS PHENOMENA Michael Omi and Howard Winant define racism as essentialism. They write, “[a] racial project can be defined as racist if and only if it creates or reproduces structures of domination based on essentialist categories of race.”14 In defining essentialism, they clarify, “a key problem with essentialism is its denial, or flattening of differences

6

Introduction

within a particular racially defined group.”15 Racism as a static, repetitive refusal to see or to think otherwise about people precisely denies race’s phenomenological structure. Racism clings to the safety of a particular understanding or conception of the world. Members of society made race meaningful; to treat the meaning of race as static denies the social construction of race and subsequently treats race as natural—with a conception of nature as fully formed and unchanging. Let me illustrate this definition of racism with two examples. First, Charles Mills’s explanation of how race determined those relegated as permanently prepolitical, and unable to form or to enter the state is a description of racism as essentialism. Mills writes, “[i]n the white settler state, [race’s] role is not primarily to demarcate the (temporarily) prepolitical state of ‘all’ men (who are really white men) but rather the permanently prepolitical state or perhaps better, nonpolitical state . . . of nonwhite men.”16 In other words, conceptualizing nonwhite men as permanently nonpolitical, as static, as unable to develop, is essentialist, and as such, racist. Second, focusing on human relations, Helen Ngo writes, “[t]he ontological violence of racism is not a violence against our subjectivity, as traditional accounts of racism would have it, but rather—and more urgently—a violence against our intersubjectivity. It is a violence against our embodied being-with.”17 Ngo develops Frantz Fanon’s description of the black subject as overdetermined by existing meanings— frozen forever by dominant meanings—and posits that the prevailing meanings of race and racialized subjects constrain our relations with each other, within already known scripts constricting our ability to get to know each other, to learn from each other, and to be surprised by the other. To fully appreciate Ngo’s consternation in regard to the violence against intersubjectivity and being-with, consider José Medina, who emphasizes social relations, within the context of epistemology, “epistemic appraisals always contain an element of social systematicity, even when they appear to be quite isolated.”18 Within this inherently social, epistemic context, Medina juxtaposes identity with diversity, “issues of identity have to be understood as issues of diversity: the others are essential to the self, for it is in networks of relations that individuals and groups are formed. . . . In this view, diversity is the human condition.”19 In such emphasis on sociality and hence diversity, regarding epistemology and identity, Medina’s point parallels Ngo’s prioritization on the importance of building sincere relationships. Similarly, Mariana Ortega emphasizes relations with others through coalition building. She writes, “I propose a view of coalitional politics that take into consideration both location and relations with others, being and becoming, the intersectional aspect of the multiplicitous self. . . . Coalition politics can open the possibility for becoming-with, the possibility that my relations with others with whom I fight oppression is an experience that stands to change both who I am and my understanding of the world I inhabit.”20 This emphasis on relationality, sociality, and coalition building all grapple with this inherent condition of being-with-others and of being-in-the-world. Because of this ontological condition of situatedness, our knowledge claims are necessarily



Introduction 7

ambiguous, indeterminate, and phenomenal. Racism denies recognizing such relationality, instead racism essentialistically holds as static the racialized other. In contrast to such essentialistic, atomistic, and static conceptions, Medina foregrounds the following: “fluidity, dynamicity, and interconnectivity that our racial consciousness should aspire to.”21 Racism precisely forecloses the interplay between the immanent and the transcendent, between the givenness of the world, including situatedness, and human existential generations of novel meaning. In other words, racism foregoes acknowledging race as a social construction and as such that the structure of race is open-ended, changing, and relational. Racism rebuffs the phenomenal structure of race.

FOREGROUNDING RELATIONALITY WITH WHOM In acknowledging the importance of our relations with others, I take seriously the question of with whom to have relations. Because I want to develop deeper relations with women of color, I center their works. There are those with whom there is no choice but to have relations. One cannot avoid engaging those comfortably situated within the hegemonic norm because of the power they occupy and influence, intentionally or not. But considering the importance of with whom I am being-with—for my relationships form my subjectivity and my knowledge—I want to think carefully about with whom I develop relations. I want the insights from women of color to influence and to form my philosophical thinking.22 Of course I engage with the work of black male thinkers, white women thinkers, as well as white males, especially Merleau-Ponty. But I take seriously Anna Julia Cooper’s words, “only the black woman can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.’”23 I read her words to say that when foregrounding black women, as the model of humanity and members of society, all black people will be recognized as models of humanity and as central members of society. Underlining this position recognizes that black women who experience the devaluation of both gender and race receive the least appreciation as valuable members of society. Repositioning them as models of humanity overturns society’s priorities. Analogous to Cooper’s point, I want the work of women of color to inform me. To develop relations with the work of women of color, I centrally prioritize their work. I do not compare oppressions; I merely generalize Cooper’s point to women of color. Hence although this book engages a dead white male philosopher, my endeavors are not to develop his work, but only mine his work as a useful springboard to think through the concerns of women of color thinkers more deeply. The term “women of color” is a complicated term. Loretta Ross explains the introduction of the term in 1977 during the National Women’s Conference.24 The black women in attendance initially forwarded the term “The Black Women’s Agenda” to replace the organizer’s designation as “The Minority Women’s Plank.” During

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Introduction

the meeting in Houston, Texas, with the introduction of the “The Black Women’s Agenda,” Ross describes that other women of color in attendance expressed the desire to be included in “The Black Women’s Agenda.” Hence, the term “Women of Color,” was born. Ross writes that with the term, “we named ourselves.” She continues to clarify that “they didn’t see it as a biological designation—you’re born Asian, you’re born Black, you’re born African American, whatever—but it is a solidarity definition, a commitment to work in collaboration with other oppressed women of color who have been ‘minoritized.’”25 From its inception, the term was about naming oneself and about building political solidarity. The term faces some contestation, because of the term’s solid origins in the United States and the West. Stella Nyanzi writes, “I find woman of color very North American and colonizing.”26 And Ranjoo Seodu Herr states, “women of color fails to connote the complex dimensions of women’s oppression across the globe due to the history of European imperialism, colonialism, and globalization in the last five hundred years.”27 But Saba Fatima uses the term “women of color to refer to nonwhite feminists within a US Context.”28 Yet, in contrast even to this reading, “Maylei Blackwell argues that the category women of color ‘emerged out of a transnational imaginary of third world liberation struggles.’”29 Admitting that the term “women of color” arose from within the hegemonic Western context, nevertheless, women within an international context do not necessarily embrace the alternative terms such as Third World women or transnational women. Clearly the term women of color does not unanimously sit well with everyone. Acknowledging that the term faces controversy, let me present the Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective’s understanding of the term “women of color as a political identity-formation and not simply an identity-marker.”30 The Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective repeats Ross’s initial presentation. Recognizing the function of the identity, as “a political identity-formation,” “a solidarity definition, a commitment to work in collaboration with other oppressed women of color who have been ‘minoritized,” centrally figures the fragility of this politically forging identity. It aims to represent numerous different women—African American, Latin American, Asian American, Native American, and so many more, that in my inability to name all their specificities, I fear causing harm. The term “women of color” aims to respect diversity and name them as a unity. In respect of such fragility, I treat the term primarily as a self-ascribed term, a term a person chooses to self-apply. The identity is aspirational for political solidarity, in the future. I utilize the term in this book, admitting that the term faces controversy especially in an international context, but for its initial solidarity sense, in its aspirational context, for its political identity formation. The term “women of color” functions as an indeterminate meaning complex. “Women of color” does not refer to a natural, a biological term; it is a socially produced identity. The identity is fluid; both its unifying core and the borders of the identity are unclear and subject to change depending on the context. As fluid and indeterminate, the identity structure is phenomenal. As such, this book does



Introduction 9

not explore a phenomenology of women of color, precisely because of the absence of a stable unity/essence or boundary. In recognizing the phenomenal structure of the identity, this book analyzes how the phenomenological structure facilitates understanding this fragile solidarity identity. Hence this project does not apply the phenomenologically descriptive method on the subject, women of color. For example, I do not analyze testimonies from women of color about their experiences. Rather, this book explores the concepts circumscribing women of color, such as multiplicitousness and intersectionality, with phenomenological concepts for I believe these concepts meaningfully speak and provide depth to each other. The concepts of multiplicitousness and intersectionality, in its specificity and ambiguity, function phenomenologically. My analysis pushes the boundaries of phenomenological analysis especially the difficulty of coming to normative claims within a phenomenological framework, now called “critical phenomenology” in some circles. The term “critical phenomenology” is even younger than the term “women of color,” and even with the publication of the important text 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, I’m not quite sure what is critical phenomenology. I lean towards believing that critical phenomenology addresses Husserl’s second tension that Weiss articulated earlier, “indeterminacy is an indispensable feature of human experience within the life-world.” Or as the authors Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon write in their introduction, within phenomenology’s general focus on “attunement to lived experience,” critical phenomenology “mobilizes phenomenological description in the service of a reflexive inquiry into how power relations structure experience as well as our ability to analyze that experience.”31 This book project sits within the boundaries of this understanding of critical phenomenology. In keeping in mind that race and the identity “women of color” are phenomenal, relational, and situated in the world, my primary goal is to foster my relations with other women of color’s work. This book engages the work of women of color to think again and to think deeper about how our racial and gendered structural relations with each other influence our subjectivity and our claims to knowledge. After all, our situatedness, our relationship with others set the parameters of normative possibilities, to avoid essentialisms and toward becoming with others.

CHAPTER OUTLINES The chapters in this book explain perception, experience, and embodiment are phenomena, much like race and the identity women of color. As phenomena, perception, experience, and embodiment serve as lenses to a phenomenology of race. Prior to phenomenological analysis, perception, experience, and embodiment have defied the endeavors of philosophers. As Merleau-Ponty refers to them, empiricism and intellectualism neglect, or rather cannot convey these three structures, because these three phenomena are not solely natural/material or entirely the products of consciousness. Perception, experience, and embodiment enable the most intimate and

10

Introduction

immediate opening onto and connection with the world and other human beings. Yet, because they cannot be reduced to thing-like, atomistic structures, they eluded earlier philosophical endeavors to understand them. Rather, perception, experience, and embodiment function within relational, contextual, phenomenal structures. As phenomena, the perception, experience, and embodiment of race and sex mediate one’s situatedness in the world and relations with others. And as phenomena, the perception, experience, and embodiment of race ambiguously facilitate the pull and push between meaning and matter in time’s flow. The two poles of the visible and the invisible, the world and ideas in the horizon never completely exist separate from each other; matter and meaning interact and influence each other, at times challenging and at times corroborating each other. Their relationship is not simply dialectic, but phenomenal in that the two poles and the distance between the two poles condition the relationship. Because of the tension in this structure, the phenomenon of race creatively develops. Much like the undulations and ripples in a pool of water, defying absolute stillness, race, as phenomena, change. The visible, bodily symbols of race and the meanings of race become salient in different ways because of one’s situatedness and relations with other human beings, in time, in the horizon of the world. The identity “women of color” is phenomenal; it does not have an essence, a unifying necessary and sufficient condition, and the boundaries of the identity group flow and become. Embodiment materially defines the identity group, but socially constructed ideas and meanings structure the identity. As such, the identity group remains ambiguous and develops. The criteria for membership, for identification with the identity group fluctuates. The subject, the women of color, influences her phenomenological space and time. The openness in the structure of race admits both the influences of the world and the subjects; both from the immanence of the condition of being-in-the-world and the transcendental possibilities of subjectivity; or both from admitting the limits of situatedness and the possibility of still developing knowledge about the world. For even upon recognizing the constraints of being-in-the-world, nevertheless, each racialized, gendered, embodied woman of color perceives and experiences the world similarly and differently. And importantly, each subject influences and conditions the lived world. The philosophical framework of phenomenology can poignantly depict the social and conceptual space circumscribing women of color. Chapter 1: A Phenomenology of Perception: Racisms as Bias and Multiplicitous Subjects The current emphasis on implicit bias as a framework for understanding race and racism returns to the older, initial framework that racism encircles individual level prejudices or biases. The recent analysis adds emphasis on the social embeddedness of biases to position biases as beyond individual control. This chapter takes a closer look at the social embedded quality of racial meanings.



Introduction 11

Admitting the situated and contextual experience of race and recognizing the openness and volatility at the heart of the structure of race, this chapter focuses on the experiences of women of color who ambiguously embody both race and sex. Focusing on Mariana Ortega’s notion of multiplicitous subjects, subjects who occupy more than one world, challenges notions of universal biases, or biases assumed from a shared social world. Focusing on multiplicitous subjects highlights the complexity and fluidity of the experiences of occupying more than one world. The biases of white people differ from the biases of multiplicitous subjects. This chapter introduces phenomenology’s basic understanding of perception from Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. The phenomenological view denies that perception occurs free from bias. Phenomenology conceives perception as inherently active, in constant negotiation between the subject and the world. Perception plays a pivotal role in perceiving bias; and the phenomenological conception of perception as active challenges the possibility of a bias-free perception of race. Merleau-Ponty gives up the possibility of certainty and acknowledges the ambiguity and temporality at the heart of all claims to knowledge. These epistemic consequences of the phenomenological framework directly speak to the conceptual constraints of understanding racism as bias. Within the phenomenological framework, because the subject perceives and knows the world always in situation, and because the subject actively engages in organizing her perception—bias is unavoidable. Multiplicitous subjects are poised to better recognize biases. More importantly, occupying more than one horizon prepares and perches multiplicitous subjects to envision possibilities beyond the current dominant biases. Although the present work on implicit bias works toward recognizing the social embeddedness of bias, phenomenology provides the ontological framework for holistically conceptualizing the inevitability of bias. Race functions as a meaning system in our social world. Chapter 2: The Phenomenological Structure of Experience: The Ambiguity of Intersectionality for a Group Identity Narrations of experience, especially in the form of autobiography, have made visible the lives of people once relegated to invisibility, and consequently, insignificance. Yet experience’s epistemic value faces contestation. Some poststructuralists challenge Hegelian-based foundational references to experience and insist that experience alone cannot serve as a source of knowledge. Rather, experience requires explanation. Amid these contestations on the epistemic value of experience, Merleau-Ponty demands that philosophy’s central task is to understand experience. This chapter positions this puzzle about the epistemic value of experience among subjects who have intersectional identities. The idea of intersectionality faces challenges. Without better understanding of intersectionality, it can strategically function to oppress. Subjects with intersectional identities rely upon references to experience for knowledge claims particularly because existing knowledge frameworks do not capture the complexity of their identities. Without reductively conceptualizing

12

Introduction

intersectional experience to universal sameness, and without claiming all intersectional identities draw identical epistemic conclusions, Patricia Hill Collins and Anna Carastathis forward the possibility of “heterogeneous commonality,” acknowledging internal heterogeneity and external homogeneity among women of color. Coalition building develops heterogenous commonality and vice versa. To better understand the epistemic value of experience and the possibility of heterogenous commonality, this chapter presents the phenomenological structure of experience as constituted by three features: (1) the world in its materiality and its meaning-structures; (2) the subject; and (3) the temporality of all three features. Without reducing experience to an atomistic essence, the phenomenological structure of experience recognizes three distances inherent within experience: (1) between the subject and the world in time; (2) between undergoing and reflecting upon the experience; and (3) between the experience and the language with which to understand and to convey the experience. Within this understanding of the ontological distance in the structure of experience, occupying more than one horizon renders the distances in the structure of experience for women of color denser. The density in the distances makes possible acknowledging their heterogenous commonality and their epistemic insights. Chapter 3: The Body Movement of Historico-Racial-Sexual Schema Race is embodied. This chapter explores the embodiment of living with racial meanings that saturate the distinguishing features of one’s body. To think through the role of the body as purveyors of racialized meanings, this chapter begins with Merleau-Ponty’s work on embodied subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty challenges the dualist divide between the subject and the body and insists that subjectivity is embodied. Only in accepting that subjectivity is embodied can we understand Frantz Fanon’s analysis of hypervisibility and the development of a historico-racial schema, and Helen Ngo’s articulations about racialized habits. Here I forward the possibility of a historico-racial-sexual schema of women of color. With the subject as embodied, Merleau-Ponty forwards the existence of a body motility or body intentionality. The build-up of the body’s habitual movements develops the body’s own intentionality. Merleau-Ponty’s framework demonstrates that body movements generate meaning and significations. Because body movements so centrally figure in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, this chapter considers how body movements, including habitual movements, change. With an embodied subjectivity, what intends body movements? Neither consciousness nor mechanistic means solely initiates body movement. Instead of a direct causal force, Merleau-Ponty evokes the notion of “motivations” to explain body movement. Motivations are forces and intentionalities in the horizon of the world. Motivations influence less directly, less predictably; but motivations account for the condition of embodied subjectivity in the world and that body movements occur situated in the world, within the weight of materiality and the subjects’ existential will.



Introduction 13

Centering the agency of body intentionality, this chapter concludes by exploring the motivations for women of color’s body movements. Because women of color live in more than one world, more varied and complex motivations influence women of color’s body movements. Motivations from different worlds poise women of color’s body movements to develop ways to challenge dominant meanings about their embodiment and creatively forward new meanings. Chapter 4: Three Criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and phenomenology in general face several criticisms from philosophers of feminism and race. To defend the use of phenomenological frameworks for exploring race and the identity group women of color, this chapter addresses three of the more common and perhaps strongest arguments against phenomenological methods. The three criticisms regard the following: (1) the prioritization of perception; (2) Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the anonymous body; and (3) the ontological status of difference, especially in the chiasmatic reversibility of flesh. Luce Irigaray voices probably the strongest criticism against phenomenology, including Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, as ocularcentric. She worries about the narcissism, the totalization, and the inability to see absolute difference, inherent in the structure of perception. In addition to Irigaray’s concern about perception’s narcissistic tendencies that cannot see difference, I address the possibility of the structure of perception rendering hyper-visible certain features of the body, highlighting specific differences of the body—a concern especially for women of color. The phenomenological structure understands perception as occurring in a horizon in relation between the seen and the seer, within the world. Feminist and race philosophers have found useful the phenomenological structure of perception, for the role of the horizon highlights the felt natural and immediate sense of racialized and sexualized meanings. But Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception may not admit the struggles of power that gave rise to the present racialized and sexualized meanings in the horizon, nor the possibility of the existence of more than one horizon. Although Merleau-Ponty theorizes embodied subjects, his descriptions of embodiment remain general. Judith Butler points out his descriptions of embodied subjectivity as existential and transcendental always correlate with male embodiment. His few descriptions of female embodiment clearly portray an imminent and objectified embodiment. Tracing Butler, Shannon Sullivan, and Silvia Stoller’s considerations of the anonymous body, I argue that for Merleau-Ponty to truly forward a conception of embodied subjectivity, he needs an account of the differences of embodiment, including racialized embodiment. The notion of an anonymous body challenges situated bodies, much like the notion of an abstract body challenges recognizing the differences of embodiment. Anonymous bodies serve theoretical functions but do not exist in practice. This position does not foreclose utilizing phenomenology for normative analysis. Merleau-Ponty’s mistake can be acknowledged and localized.

14

Introduction

Lastly, Irigaray charges that Merleau-Ponty’s framework forecloses the possibility of seeing difference, including the ontologic status of difference. But Irigaray needs to explain her own claim to knowledge about absolute difference. Merleau-Ponty carefully avoids such abstract, solely theoretically based, epistemic claims (except perhaps with anonymous bodies). Irigaray accuses Merleau-Ponty’s framework of precluding the possibility of seeing difference, especially in his notion of reversibility. She lists four relationships that defy reversibility: (1) in the temporality of birth between the mother and the child; (2) between seeing and touching; (3) between the gendered relations to language, in the male’s entrustment with speaking and the female’s relegation to listening; and (4) between the seer and the seen. I find unconvincing the abstract irreversibilities between seeing and touching, and the seer and the seen because of the synaesthesis among the senses. But I find persuasive the concrete, embodied irreversibilities between the mother and the child, and between the male and the female relationship to language. To this modified list of irreversibles— irreversibles centered on embodiment—I consider the differences of racialized embodiment. As much as I respect these irreversible differences of embodiment, contra Irigaray’s position, these embodied differences do not constitute absolute differences. Chapter 5: In the Face of Indifference: The Phenomenological Structure of Identity-in-Difference Philosophy of race presently emphasizes that although the differences of race are social constructions, the differences of race effectively function as natural. As such, the differences of race have ontological consequences. Additionally, Merleau-Ponty scholars appear to finally be winning the long-fought argument against dualism— insisting not only that the mind cannot function separately from the body, but also that the body impacts the mind—embodiment structures consciousness. These two developments lead to the conclusion that differently racialized and sexualized people may live in different horizons, which time may hermeneutically substantiate and increase the differences among the horizons. These two tenets lead to a dangerous conclusion. Recalling the justification of colonialism with claims that the colonized are different—so different as to be less than human—this chapter explores the ontological structure of identity-in-difference. For although colonialism in the form of imperialism no longer persists as a viable threat, I fear that too much emphasis on difference may result in indifference to those dubbed strange, foreign, or other. Many attribute the origin of the idea of an identity-in-difference to Hegel’s The Science of Logic. But clearly, in the long debate between monism and dualism/ pluralism and its many manifestations between essence and accidents, thought and being, or truth and being, the idea is older than Hegel’s philosophy. Merleau-Ponty’s references to the structure of an identity-in-difference does not strictly follow the Hegelian sense. Merleau-Ponty alludes to an identity-in-difference that does not rely upon a dialectical surpassing but realizes itself in immediacy. I develop the structure within this by chapter elaborating on four senses of identity-in-difference within



Introduction 15

phenomenology: (1) the demand to perceive the same object in the world even as we occupy different situations; (2) the experience of embodiment in its phenomenality, materiality, visibility, intentionality, and temporality; (3) admitting the changes a subject undergoes while recognizing an enduring identity through time; and (4) the relation with the other, for one not only has contact with the other, but also the other inspires one’s ethical development and one’s ability to generate meaning. I argue the ontological structure of identity-in-difference not only phenomenologically functions but can normatively inspire social/political considerations especially regarding the differences of race. Glenn Loury defines a racially stigmatized group as a group about whom an appalling social statistic does not signal that something has gone wrong in society as a whole. In this sense, too much emphasis on difference results in a lack of care, and an indifference regarding others. This chapter ends with three examples of recent stigmatization, to make the normative case to heed the structure of identity-in-difference. To prevent such indifference, I advocate recognizing our shared humanity, our identity. For this reason, this final chapter regards the racial and sexual differences of embodiment as not wholly different nor entirely reducible to the same, but as a relation of identity-in-difference. I contend the identity group women of color performs as an identity-in-differences. Through these explorations into perception, experience, embodiment, and finally by forwarding the phenomenological structure of identity-in-difference, I hope I convincingly present the need for understanding race and the identity group, women of color, as phenomena, for a phenomenology of race.

NOTES 1. See The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, by Nicole Hannah-Jones (New York: One World, 2021). 2. Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes, “[p]articular racial myths and stereotypes change, but the underlying presence of a racial meaning system seems to be an anchoring point of American culture,” “Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 23. See also Michael Omi and Howard Winant, who write, “we should think of race as an element of social structure rather than an irregularity within it; we should see race as a dimension of human representation rather than an illusion” (Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s [New York: Routledge, 1994], 55). 3. Michael Barber, Equality and Diversity: Phenomenological Investigations of Prejudice and Discrimination (New York: Humanity Books, 2001), 129. 4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Yogi and the Proletarian,” The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. Nancy Metzel and John Flodstrom (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). 5. I do not continue to systematically address Williams’s book within this project. See “Madness and Judiciousness: A Phenomenological Reading of a Black Woman’s Encounter

16

Introduction

with a Saleschild,” Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, eds. Maria Lupe Davidson, Kathryn Gines, and Donna-Dale Marcano, 237–48. Albany: SUNY Press (2010).  6. Namita Goswami, Subjects that Matter: Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 2019), 4. 7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Great Britain: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1962), 57. 8. Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York: Routledge, 1999), 41. 9. Weiss, Body Images, 41. 10. Ronald Bruzina, Logos and Eidos: The Concept in Phenomenology (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1970), 73. 11. Bruzina, Logos and Eidos, 53. 12.   Linda Martín Alcoff, “Merleau-Ponty and Feminist Theory on Experience,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 257. I discuss this and the notion of intentionality in more detail in chapter 3. 13. Gail Weiss, Refiguring the Ordinary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 27. 14. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 71. 15. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States,  72. Weiss concurs in writing, “racist, sexist, and classist behavior are often directly connected to a refusal to be open to different horizons that would yield different (i.e. non-oppressive) interpretations of one’s encounters with others” (Refiguring, 164). 16. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 13. 17.  Helen Ngo, The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 166. Ngo focuses on relationality with others, “[t]his denial of the fundamental being-with (whether Mitsein in Heidegger, intercorporeality in Merleau-Ponty . . . ) and the motility to actively participate in the world while navigating one’s way through the weight of its historicity, is what I identify as the ontological violence of racism” (167). Specifically in regard to racialization and the relation between whites and blacks, Ngo writes, “the process of racialization speaks to a superior-inferior complex; the imposition of a white epistemic perspective, and the corresponding exercise of power (of naming, of visibility) upon others is borne of the assumption that other ways of knowing and perceiving do not matter. Racialization, then, is almost always a form of racism” (xiii). 18. José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 89. In knowledge claims, but also in regard to the question of agency, Medina emphasizes the value of social knowledge, over self-knowledge; “responsible agency requires more than minimal self-knowledge; it requires minimal social knowledge of others and minimal empirical knowledge of the world” (127). 19. Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 298. 20. Mariana Ortega, In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 146. 21. Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 201. 22. This conclusion was made with the gentle prodding of anonymous reviewers for this book.



Introduction 17

23. Anna Julia Cooper, The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including “A Voice from the South”  and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters, ed. Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 32. I also heed the words of Shireen Roshanravan, “Because Women of Color politics seeks to affirm and build coalition among racially devalued ways of thinking, traditional knowledge-production within academic disciplines cannot contain the methodological and theoretical work of Women of Color” (“Motivating Coalition: Women of Color and Epistemic Disobedience,” Hypatia v. 29, n. 1 [Winter 2014]: 42). I am not sure where my work falls within her paradigm. Although when younger I firmly believed in Audre Lorde’s position that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, today I am not certain about where I stand on this position. But I find intriguing Roshanravan’s point that “[e]ngaging Women of Color scholarship only as critique continues to center Eurocentric knowledge and, in the words of Barbara Christian, impedes Women of Color in the ‘pursuit of ourselves as subjects’” (41); I aim not to engage women of color’s scholarship only as critique. 24. Grace Yiak-Hei Kao, “Does the Term ‘Women of Color’ Bother You?” Feminism and Religion, August 11, 2015. https://feminismandreligion.com/2022/01/16/from-the-archivesdoes-the-term-women-of-color-bother-you-by-grace-yia-hei-kao/. Kao credits this explanation from Loretta Ross to a publication by Andrea Plaid on Racialicious. 25. Hence the term is not a re-ordering of the term “colored people,” nor an extension of Martin Luther’s King’s term “citizens of color,” from his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. 26. Saba Fatima, Kristie Dotson, Ranjoo Seodu Herr, Serene J. Khader, and Stella Nyanzi, “Contested Terrains of Women of Color and Third World Women,” Hypatia v. 32, n. 3 (Summer 2017): 739. Stella Nyanzi in her contribution to this piece, entitled “I ain’t No Third World Woman of Color,” continues to write, “[t]he paradox of the label woman of color is that while nonwhite American women appropriate it to resist homogenization by white feminists, the same label suffocates non-American nonwhite women by erasing and muting our realities” (739). 27. Fatima et al., “Contested Terrains,” 736. 28. Fatima et al., “Contested Terrains,” 731. 29. The Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective, “Building on ‘the Edge of Each Other’s Battles’: A Feminist of Color Multidimensional Lens,” Hyaptia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, v. 29, n. 1 (Winter 2014): 30. 30. Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective, “Building on ‘the Edge of Each Other’s Battles,’”  25. 31.  Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020), xiii–xiv.

1 A Phenomenology of Perception Racisms as Bias and Multiplicitous Subjects

David Theo Goldberg postulates a paradox in present-day Western societies: “[r]ace is irrelevant, but all is race.”1 Linda Martín Alcoff elaborates on this paradox, “[t]he legitimacy and moral relevance of racial concepts is officially denied, even while race continues to determine job prospects, career possibilities, available places to live, potential friends and lovers, reactions from police, credence from jurors, and the amount of credibility one is given by one’s students.”2 This paradox illustrates that although legal statutes prohibit racism and the common social parlance declares intolerance towards racism, race still functions as an axis of meaning. Aiming to address this paradox, without relying on consciously identifiable individual acts of racism, philosophers of race focus on unconsciously practiced, social racial stigmas and biases. I appreciate the language of racial stigma and bias for highlighting the persistence of race and racism even after the social recognition of the unacceptableness of racism. This language of racial stigmas and biases aims to rid biases. Consistent with the previous understanding of racism as prejudice (with its individual emphasis) and with the more recent understanding of racial stigma (with its social group emphasis), the most well-known solution aims at eliminating biases. To eliminate biases, historically the United States promoted colorblindness. Within this recent conception of racism as bias, I center women of color or multiplicitous identities to consider how to understand race in relation with sex (and as women of color insist, discussions of race always tow discussions of class), to consider race not in isolation but in complexity with another socially identifying feature. Centering women of color contextualizes understanding racism as bias, for women of color’s biases do not agree with white subjects’ biases. This chapter introduces the phenomenological structure of perception, for a phenomenological understanding of perception insists on the role of the horizon, or the 19

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Chapter 1

principle of contextual relevancy in perception. The phenomenological structure of perception forwards the ontological inevitability of bias, challenging the solution of ridding biases to address unconscious racism. This chapter makes two arguments. First, this chapter argues for the impossibility of eliminating biases as a solution to racism or racial stigma. Tracing the epistemic consequences of the phenomenological structure of perception, I argue that the individually focused solution of eliminating bias does not challenge socially supported racial stigmas. Second, this chapter argues that women of color as multiplicitous identities, in living in more than one world, occupy a broader horizon that promotes greater awareness and sensitivity of biases. Although the argument that the oppressed have more sensitivity for recognizing bias has been made, most prominently, recently by José Medina, his argument primarily functions within a Hegelian framework which understands society as structurally divided into oppressor/oppressed situations. This chapter explores the relation between the idea of multiplicitous subjects occupying more than one world, along with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis of the pivotal role of horizons and contextual relevancy. The existence of more than one world highlights not only sensitivity to bias and injustice, but also facilitates envisioning other possibilities of seeing and being.

FROM INDIVIDUAL, CONSCIOUS RACISM AS PREJUDICE TOWARD SOCIAL, UNCONSCIOUS RACIAL STIGMA AND BIAS Understandings of race and racism have evolved. A tension exists between emphasizing the individual versus the social and alternating between the conscious versus the unconscious. Up to the 1980s, Gary Peller explains that racism was attributed to a mistake on the level of individual conscious decisions. He writes, racism is “rooted in consciousness, in the cognitive process that attributes social significance to the arbitrary fact of skin color. The mental side of racism is accordingly represented either as ‘prejudice,’ the prejudging of a person according to mythological stereotypes, or as ‘bias,’ the process of being influenced by subjective factors.”3 This older view emphasizes the role of individual consciousness and holds that racism results from an individual’s mistake in reasoning of associating a meaning to body features.4 In the 1980s, in response to understanding racism as individual prejudice or bias, the United States advocated colorblindness among individual interactions and in the formation and application of state policies.5 This solution of colorblindness to race reinforces the old Platonic idea that the body distracts the mind from thought. This solution evokes other debates from the history of philosophy, such as the old Lockean question of exactly how to determine certain features as primary and worthy of recognition and other features as secondary and deserving of dismissal. From such focus on individuals and conscious-based understandings of racism, philosophers of race continued to consider the social structural, institutional laws and policies that promote racial awareness and racism. Historically, many of these



A Phenomenology of Perception 21

laws consciously instituted racist demarcations and divisions about who is worthy of state sanctions and protections. Peller expounds that functions in the “exteriors of social life” rather than solely within consciousness contribute and uphold racism.6 Peller refers literally to the social institutions, such as government agencies and departments, pointing out how most government agencies continued to maintain all the same personnel and procedures after the end of the Jim Crow laws. More pointedly, Charles Mills famously argues that the social contract is really a racial contract—delineating and establishing racial divisions as the grounds for modern societies. Mills writes, “the Racial Contract . . . create[s] not merely racial exploitation, but race itself as a group identity. In a contemporary vocabulary, the Racial Contract ‘constructs’ race.”7 With this understanding that the concept of race is not just an unfortunate development from interactions among societies, but weaved into the very formation of societies by delineating which populations can and cannot potentially evolve to participate in society, Mills advocates, “[w]hat is needed, in other words, is a recognition that racism (or, as I will argue, global white supremacy) is itself a political system, a particular power structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties.”8 More than recognizing that racism persists and thrives in the policies of state institutions, Mills contends racism founds the very structures of society. Race was one of the parameters for defining society. With the recognition of the unacceptableness of racism, either as conscious individual prejudice or as social racist laws, nevertheless, race and racism continue to pervade life with others. To understand how race continues to influence individuals and society, philosophers of race acknowledge that race functions on the unconscious level. First, by highlighting racial stigma, the discussions about race focus on the unconscious level in-group relations. Elizabeth Anderson identifies, [t]he condition of racial stigmatization consists of public, dishonorable, practically engaged representations of a racial group with the following contents: (1) racial stereotypes, (2) racial attributions, or explanations of why members of the racial group tend to fit their stereotypes, that rationalize and motivate (3) derogatory evaluations of and (4) demeaning or antipathetic attitudes . . . toward the target group and its members. Processes of racial stigmatization consist of conduct (including habits, norms, and policies) that tends to produce, reinforce, or express that condition.9

Noting the lack of speculation about the origins of stereotypes, the analysis of racial stigmatization admits the influence of unconscious stereotypes about a social group. Jose Medina writes, “[t]he defining element of the phenomenon of racial stigmatization is what Anderson refers to as an expressive harm or injury: that is, the damage of the reputation or social standing of a group . . . racial stigmatization ‘does not require that the actor be conscious of or endorse the stigmatic representations’; and in the extreme case ‘the actor may be wholly ignorant of them.’”10 The unconscious support of a particular racial stigma especially exhibits itself through practices, that is, “acting in a way that expresses, evokes, or enacts.”11

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Chapter 1

With this understanding of the unconscious influence of racial stigma in practices, recently, philosophy of race focuses on alleviating racial stigmas by identifying their various manifestations as biases in individuals.12 Margaret Crouch defines implicit or unconscious bias as “bias of which we are not aware but which can be detected in certain test situations, and can clash with our professed beliefs about members of social groups.”13 The existence of social group–based racial stigma encourages the development of individual biases. Anderson explains attention and attribution biases, “cultural stereotyping involves attention biases: ‘they make people more receptive to and better able to recall stereotype-confirming than disconfirming evidence’ for out-groups and not for the in-group. And they also involve attribution biases, which leads people ‘to attribute stereotype-confirming behavior to people’s internal dispositions, such as their genes, culture, or voluntary choices, and stereotypedisconfirming behavior to their external circumstances, such as luck or the action of others.’”14 To Anderson’s attention and attribution biases, Medina adds cultural bias. He writes, “culture-blaming. The attention and attribution biases characteristic of stigmatizing cultural stereotyping supports this selective blaming of cultural factors for social problems when they appear in out-groups, but not when they appear in the in-group.”15 With the language of bias, the analysis of race returns to individual involvement. Let us look at biases more specifically. Explaining the origins of bias and keeping alive the dynamic relation between the social and the individual, Jennifer Saul emphasizes the role of the unconscious, consistent with Anderson’s description of stigmas, that biases “arise, broadly speaking, from being immersed in a society where certain biases and associations are widespread.”16 Recall that society and social practices and beliefs did not develop benignly, as clarified by Mills’s work. Contesting Saul’s position, and consistent with Medina’s clarification of cultural bias, Jules Holroyd cites various empirical studies to argue, “the manifestation of bias would appear to be a function of the agent’s attitudes, values, and beliefs, rather than solely the culture they live in.”17 Holroyd explains different individuals within one society experience their culture differently and as such do not necessarily share biases. For Saul, all subjects necessarily have unconscious biases precisely because of the shared historical, social, cultural, situated nature of the human condition. But according to Holroyd, even if subjects live in the same country, same time, and same culture, they do not necessarily develop the same unconscious biases. Even among shared biases, individuals hold them to different degrees; biases are not uniform. Saul explains the difficulty of addressing biases, “a conscious, direct effort to simply not be biased is unlikely to succeed and may even make things worse. We do not have this sort of control over our biases and their functioning.”18 Holroyd agrees, citing studies identifying a “rebound effect” when individuals attempt to suppress their implicit biases. But Holroyd challenges Saul in assuming a link between control and responsibility. Holroyd writes, “[t]he idea that control is necessary for responsibility is a plausible one. . . . But many have rejected this condition.”19 Beginning with the recognition of the difference between direct immediate control and long-term



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indirect control of our activities, Holroyd explains that although one may not be held immediately responsible for long-term activities and goals such as “sustain concentration, play the piano, lose or gain weight, speak a second language,”20 one can be held responsible for these long-range goals as under one’s indirect control. Holroyd carefully traces similar long-range indirect responsibility for cognitive states, to ultimately make the case for moral responsibility for our biases. She forwards indirect means, including selection of evidence and implementation intentions, through which ultimately, in the long term, individuals can control their biases. Her work shows that the boundary between conscious and unconscious can be transgressed, the boundary is not rigid. Upon recognizing variation in the biases individuals hold within one society, Holroyd also admits individual responsibility for one’s biases. Interestingly, because of racial stigma’s embeddedness in the social unconscious, the language of bias conveys the felt naturalness and inevitableness of racism, even while insisting on the unnaturalness, the social constructedness of racism. Consciously locating one’s prejudice is not forthcoming for locating racism; yet the framework of bias and instantiating its unconscious influences does not facilitate eliminating biases or stigmas. It is precisely this immersion in the unconscious that Helen Ngo finds unsatisfactory about the discussion of racism centered around bias. She writes, “while this discourse is effective in illuminating the depth of racist attitudes and perceptions in our psychical being, as well as their near-imperceptibility . . . its framing in terms of the unconscious makes it difficult to give an account of the uptake involved in such racist orientations.”21 In other words, Ngo argues that despite such emphasis on the role of the unconscious in conceptualizing racism as bias, racism propagates because individuals perpetuate these biases. Holroyd and Ngo posit that this broader language of racial stigma with its understanding of the unconscious influences of biases obfuscate and challenge identifying concrete steps to address the biases, to address the attitudes and practices that support the group identity–based, unconsciously publicly supported, racial stigmas. Although I largely agree with Ngo’s concerns, I dwell in this language of stigma and bias not only because this language dominates philosophy of race’s present focus, but this language of stigma and bias illuminates the ways in which even though we have consciously decided that racism is immoral, racism persists in our society unintentionally, unconsciously. I find fascinating the pervasiveness and persistence of racism despite widespread agreement against it. For this reason, rather than attend to overt racism, this focus on bias and stigma—on unconscious racism—philosophically intrigues me.

MARGINAL, LIMINAL, MULTIPLICITOUS SUBJECTS OR WOMEN OF COLOR Within this history of conceptualizing racism, in the dialogic movements and relations between the individual and the social, and between the conscious and the unconscious, let me turn our attention to the subjectivity, the lives of women of color.

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Centering women of color bridges the gap between the individual and the social, because to speak about women of color is to speak about a social, political, solidarity forming identity. This focus also fills in the idea of an individual—to consider differences among individuals, and why certain individuals recognize or do not recognize their indirect responsibilities for social cultural biases. Research on the subjectivity of women of color has grown and continues to grow, but most of the analyses of racism and sexism still have difficulty explaining how race and sex ambiguously influence each other, at times exacerbating, and at other times contradicting each other.22 Perhaps the difficulty lies in systematically conceptualizing how the two social groups’ identifying features impact each other. The experiences of women of color persist as the most difficult set of experiences to portray. Initial endeavors to understand the influence of living with these duo-identifying features have analogized one to the other or have added one onto the other.23 Both analogizing and adding have been found to be wanting perhaps because these early endeavors begin with single-axis identifying features. More recent work begins from and centers the lives of women of color by exploring the experiences, the lives, and the subjectivity of women of color. In other words, more recent works begin with complexity.24 Within Latina Feminist Philosophy, developing from the works of Maria Lugones, Gloria Anzaldua, and others, Mariana Ortega puts forth one of the most comprehensive portrayals of the subjectivity of Latina women. Without essentializing all Latina women, but still recognizing the commonalities among Latina women, I find Ortega’s analysis insightful for better understanding the liminal, marginal, world-traveling experiences for me as an Asian American woman. I do not aim to hastily position Ortega’s work as speaking to the experiences and the contexts for all women of color.25 Nevertheless, I find the analysis from Ortega and other Latina feminist philosophy women to deeply ring true for me. Aiming to avoid essentializing the members of the identity group of women of color, within this discussion about racial stigmas and biases, I outline some of the key features of the lives of marginalized women with the help of Ortega’s work, to consider how the discussion of racial stigmas and biases fare when centering women of color. Let me begin by recognizing Alcoff ’s position, regarding the separation between a public and a private self, “there is . . . a lived subjectivity that is not always perfectly mapped onto our socially perceived self and that can be experienced and conceptualized differently.”26 Within this universal schism between the lived and the public self that is more pronounced for visible identities such as women of color, Maria Lugones clarifies, “One way of putting the point is to think of particular subjects as oppressing (or collaborat-ing) or be-ing oppressed and as resisting.”27 My analysis does not begin by positioning all women of color in distinction from whites, clearly separable as the oppressed or oppressor; specificities in regard to class and other normalizing social distinctions need consideration. Recall Lugones’s articulation of the simultaneous tension in that the oppressed can be oppressors (oppressor ↔ oppressed). Degrees and nuances exist in the situatedness of oppressed or oppressor.



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Along with the ambiguity in the positions of oppressor ↔ oppressed, Ortega locates another central ambiguity for women of color by carefully delineating her position from Lugones: the difference between multiple and multiplicity; Lugones relies on plural selves, but Ortega clarifies, “the term ‘plurality’ suggests multiple selves, while the term ‘multiplicity’ suggests a complexity associated with one self.”28 With this notion of multiplicity, Ortega aims to “neither elevat[e] the sense of multiplicity such that the sense of being one self disappears, nor prioritiz[e] oneness such that multiplicity is sacrificed or erased.”29 Women of color’s subjectivity is complex in its ambiguity of multiplicity and oneness. I find this description very interesting because it keeps in play both the individual and the social features of the identity women of color. The Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective also aims to promote multiplicity with the following clarification: “maintaining multiplicity at the point of reduction—not in maintaining a hybrid ‘product,’ which hides the colonial difference—in the tense workings of more than one logic, not to be synthesized but transcended.”30 I am wary of the undertones of authenticity here in their complete relegation of hybridity as colonial practices, and prefer a transactional understanding, some sense that the multiplicities influence each other. Nevertheless, the Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective’s caution against synthesis or hybridity, I presume is a call to resist the forces of assimilation. Assimilation has not been a desirable strategy because of its history of subsumption into the dominant culture requiring giving up the practices of one’s various cultures. Maintaining the multiplicity, Ortega explains that “the multiplicitous self needs to be understood as decentered. That is, none of this self ’s identities is a priori central or most important—there is not one primary identity that negates, undermines, or makes irrelevant other identities.”31 I am not sure how this position of decenteredness feels.32 But Ortega explains, in this decentered position, without prioritizing any single identity, one inevitably experiences contradiction.33 In multiplicitousness, women of color learn to live with ambiguity and contradiction. Such ambiguous and contradictory experiences are difficult. Ortega writes, world-travelers experience psychic restlessness, the feeling of being a problem, the feelings of thin and thick not being-at-ease, the “intimate terrorism” that accompanies the life of those in the margins as described by Du Bois, Lugones, Anzaldua, and others— they might experience these feelings so much that they are completely undermined. In many cases, as Paulo Freire reminds us, the oppressed internalize the paradigm of the oppressor to such an extent that they are erased as autonomous agents capable of liberating themselves.34

Living on the margins is uncomfortable most of the time, terrifying at times. But ultimately living on the margins can be epistemically harmful in the internalization of dominant narratives and psychically damaging in the loss of a sense of self. Women of color, multiplicitous subjects, face the tragedy of doubting their abilities to such an extent as to lose the ability to act as autonomous agents. In this complexity of marginalization, in living in more than one “world,” or “context,” neither being

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one or multiple, keeping all the multiplicitous selves alive in its decenteredness—the scenario motivates reflection on one’s life and the world, toward developing insights from such experiences. Ortega writes, “the self in the borderlands, or the self that world-travels constantly experiences ruptures in her everyday experiences that lead to a more thematic or reflective orientation toward activities.”35 These ruptures provide the opportunities for self-reflection and reflection on social norms: “The multiplicitous imaging or consciousness that they have, given their constant world-traveling, might serve as perspectives from which to analyze societal norms and practices as well as personal practices.”36 Lugones initially introduced the notion of world-traveling. She offers the idea to both literally and metaphorically refer to the experiences of women of color who live in more than one world, a dominant world and a marginalized world. The concept of world-traveling presents epistemic and ontologic insights, as well as strategic possibilities. With increased exploration of the concept, it has received much criticism. I am not so much concerned here with the criticisms centered in challenges to its ontologic status, to the total separate status of worlds, to the role of playfulness,37 or to the characterization of forced migration as traveling.38 I appreciate the conceptual framework of world-traveling for highlighting that for women of color, for multiplicitous identities their worlds are not limited to the dominant world. Although the dominant world is powerful and hegemonic, it is not absolutely encompassing. Whether the second (perhaps subsidiary) world exists separate from the dominant world, overlaps with the dominant world, or survives only as a bubble within the dominant world, the notion of world-traveling clarifies that women of color do not live within one context, in one world. The occupation of more than one context, one world is the source of both pain and insight.39 With the understanding of occupying more than one world, Ortega explains opportunities arise for reflection. These reflections do not come inevitably or naturally; reflection on the self and society require work: “[t]he standpoint of the new mestiza or nepantlera, then, is not to be seen as one that comes by virtue of her inhabiting the borderlands but one that is arrived through gut-wrenching personal struggle.”40 Reflective of the work, Ortega carefully points out the role of existential choices. Reflection is not simply passive; one exercises choice, “in resolute existence the self learns to choose with the understanding that she creates her own ground through her very choices.”41 Ortega does not conceive of these choices along the traditional sense of individual, isolated choices. Ortega functions with a different understanding of choice that emphasizes the social context, the situatedness of choices.42 The uncomfortable ruptures in one’s experiences while traveling between worlds that are both painful and revealing provide opportunities for choice, a choice shared with other women of color. Ortega clarifies this understanding of sharing; “I appeal to becoming-with—the possibility that my relations with others with whom I fight oppression is an experience that stands to change both who I am and my understanding of worlds.”43 Ortega continues, “[w]hen I meet you, I don’t become you by being assimilated by you, and you don’t become me by being assimilated by me—the



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Hegelian move that is to blame for philosophy’s fear of the power of the other, or rather a dread of otherness. I become-with you, and we remake each other.”44 Clearly women of color live complex lives—both in its difficulties and possibilities. Returning to the discussion about racial stigma and bias, let me separate the racial stigmas held by whites about racialized subjects from the racial stigmas and biases that women of color hold about our own group members both internal to the specific groups within Latina, Asian, or Black, as well as intra-minority groups from Asian to Black or Latina to Asian, etc., as well as the racial stigmas and biases that women of color may hold about whites or dominant subjectivities. In contrast to the overarching discussion about racial stigmas and biases which focuses primarily on biases held by whites about racialized subjects, I want to think through the implications of this language of racial stigma for women of color. As an Asian American, I know that members of this community have stereotypes and biases about each specific group of East Asians, distinguishing between the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. David Kim writes that some members become hyper-aware and hyper-vigilant about the stereotypes that encircle one’s own immediate group and distance themselves from the group identity.45 At times some Asian Americans accept the hegemonic stereotypes about other identity groups, perhaps even more vehemently than some whites. At other times, some Asian Americans recognize the stereotypes as means to oppress. As Ortega says, one exercises existentially reflective choices in accepting or in challenging existing stereotypes and biases. So, in what ways do the biases of women of color differ from the biases of whites? Because women of color live in more than one world, the occupation of a culture or a society does not simply explain their biases. Their inhabitance in more than one world raises questions regarding which world’s social cultural biases to follow. In occupying more than one world, multiplicitous identities cannot solely refer to the unconscious biases mired in a culture following Saul’s analysis. The biases from the two worlds may contradict. Here in considering the biases and racial stigmas not only of whites but also of women of color, I turn to the function of perception and the phenomenological framework.

TURNING TO PERCEPTION So much about race and sex centers on perceiving the distinguishing features of the body that indicate race and sex. Perception functions as the central medium for awareness of race and sex.46 The language of bias still pivots on perception, on perceiving the bodies of others and making immediate presumptions based on the body’s associated identity group and its racialized stigmas. Both of Anderson’s attention and attribution biases occur immediately in perception. Hence it is not surprising that the solution to racism hinges on perception occurring a specific way—without bias. Within this discussion where racism hinges on perception and the solution relies upon addressing bias in perception, recall that feminists have long been suspicious

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of whether perception ever occurs neutrally. If neutral perception corresponds with truth and biased perception corresponds with falsity, then advocating neutral perception facilitates true perception. But history has long demonstrated that neutral perception is not self-evident. Feminists have long contested the possibility of ever achieving neutral perception; rather, these claims of objective perception guard the exercise of power. White heterosexual males have long maintained their positions of power by promoting their perceptions as true. The works of Donna Haraway, Annette Kuhn (on the male gaze in film), Adrienne Rich (on white solipsism), and Luce Irigaray (on male narcissism) explain and contest the sovereignty of the white heterosexual male gaze in Western society.47 These theorists insist that white heterosexual males’ perceptions has been most frequently associated with truth. Often, our society relegates women’s perceptions—particularly women of color’s perceptions—that disagree with men’s perceptions as false.48 Within philosophy of race, Mills agrees with feminist philosophers’ conclusions. In his origin’s theory, he argues that the racial contract positioned white men’s perception as the accurate depiction of the world. Mills writes, “[t]here is an understanding about what counts as a correct, objective interpretation of the world, and for agreeing to this view, one is (‘contractually’) granted full cognitive standing in the polity, the official epistemic community.”49 In addition to casting non-white perceptions as false when they do not agree with white perception, in a solipsistic move, non-white perceptions are recast in white likeness. Rich, Lugones, and Elizabeth Spelman explain and challenge precisely this maneuver: that white women solipsistically remake women of color’s perceptions in white women’s images, affecting another level of disappearance of the perception of women of color.50 Consider the interplay between what is perceived and what is not perceived. Hence as structures of power influence if not determine true and false perception, and at times recast people of color’s perception into white perception, there exists that which is not perceived. In the language of Edward Said, Mills refers to a latent perception; “‘[b]ecause the discrimination is latent, however, it is usually unobservable, even to the person experiencing it. One never knew for sure.’”51 Such disparities in perception plant doubt in women’s and people of color’s perception. Such disparities in perception promote the felt experience of not being recognized, of not being personally seen. Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man alarmingly highlights the disparities of perception, so that no matter what the black subject says or does, he is not seen in the ways he intends. He is only seen within existing racial stigmas, within existing meaning frameworks. Medina describes, “the experience of not being seen can produce the painful experience of cognitive conflict between two ways of seeing—the subject’s own gaze and the social gaze that does not see him.”52 Medina continues to carefully delineate “social invisibility and distorted social visibility . . . are conceptually distinct and can happen separately.”53 Because of such contestation over true vision, Teresa de Lauretis urges the realization of another vision, “displacing the critical emphasis from ‘images of ’ women ‘to



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the axis of vision itself—to the modes of organizing vision.’”54 As racial stigma and bias hinges on perception these feminist and race philosophers aim to change perception, to realize a different perception. Their work illustrates how perception does not simply passively reveal the world, but that perception is open to manipulation, negotiation, and development. Perception does not serve as a self-evident tool to truth about the world.55 Yet this conclusion opens the possibility of reconceptualizing and changing perception and hopefully racial stigma and bias.

THE RELEVANCE OF A PHENOMENOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF PERCEPTION Turning to phenomenology can help with this discussion about unconscious, social practices of racial stigma and bias, while acknowledging the contestations about true perception for the complex identity of women of color. I refer to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. Let me begin by recalling from the introduction that Merleau-Ponty defines phenomena as a “layer of living experience through which other people and things are first given to us.”56 This definition of phenomena operates on both the ontologic and the epistemic level. Merleau-Ponty never separates the ontological and the epistemological aspects of the subject. “‘What do I know?’ is not only ‘what is knowing?’ and not only ‘who am I?’ but finally: ‘what is there?’ and even: ‘what is the there is?’”57 The two questions integrally relate for Merleau-Ponty.58 Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology marries Edmund Husserl’s philosophy with Gestalt theory. Gestalt theory advances that the “most basic unit of experience is that of figure-on-a-background.”59 Anything simpler reflects mere mental constructions. Human experience of the world cannot reduce the smallest unit of experience to the figure, alone. Rather, one always experiences the figure within a background. The Gestalt principle of contextual relevancy holds that “the meaning of a theme is co-determined (a) by the unity formed by the internal coherence of [the theme’s] parts, and (b) by the relation between the theme and the horizon that provides its context.”60 Empiricism and intellectualism recognize only the first condition of unity within the figure and fail to recognize the second condition of balance between the figure and the background. This second condition is Gestalt theory’s unique contribution. Gestalt theory explains that one perceives the figure because of and with the background. One cannot perceive the figure without its background. Isolated from its usual background or within a different background, the figure defies recognition. A familiar context or an optimal relation must exist between the figure and the background for perception of the figure.61 This optimal balance within Gestalt theory does not prevail solely spatially, but also temporally.62 Here, informing Gestalt theory with Martin Heidegger’s work illuminates the temporal dimensions, by broadening the concept of figures to themes and backgrounds to horizons. The notion of the horizon includes temporality and

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invokes the meanings, or the significations from the past already sedimented in the world. With and through the weight of history, the horizon also depicts the sense of possibilities in the future because the world is “an open and indefinite multiplicity of relationships which are of reciprocal implication.”63 The transformation of the Gestaltian theory of background to horizon more explicitly acknowledges Heidegger’s insistence that human beings are always in the world within time’s flow.64 Being is perennially subject to the influences of the world. The horizon encompasses not only the spatial background, but “the nature of the attitudes, experiences, and expectations,” in other words the accumulated practices of society that beckons to a specific future.65 Being is always situated.66 In his working notes, Merleau-Ponty credits the horizon as the source of all concepts, of a certain style of being, and of being itself.67 Françoise Dastur positions this re-assessment of the horizon as a move away from Husserl’s understanding of the horizon and towards Heidegger’s understanding of the horizon. She writes that Merleau-Ponty “is with this conception nearer to Heidegger—who defines horizon as the limit toward which the temporal ecstasies tend, that is, as a structure of a being essentially outside of itself—than to Husserl, for whom the horizon remains the index of a potential infinity at the center of an actual given whose objective status is not called back into question.”68 Dastur notes two differences in the understanding of the horizon. First, Heidegger’s horizon stresses the exteriors of the theme, whereas Husserl’s horizon focuses on the interiors of the theme. Heidegger’s notion of the clearing emphasizes the exterior of the theme’s surroundings as the horizon, whereas Husserl’s clarification of the difference between noesis and noema requires understanding the theme to reach its eidos. Second, Heidegger’s horizon does not intrinsically ascribe to a sense of infinity; it evokes more a sense of historicity. In contrast, Husserl’s horizon remains still mesmerized by infinity in focusing on the possibility of grasping the eidos. Dastur’s position that Merleau-Ponty moves closer to Heidegger’s conception of the horizon implies that Merleau-Ponty’s horizon highlights the exteriority of the theme and foregoes the possibility of infinity.69 But Merleau-Ponty does not completely forego the internal sense of the horizon, the sense in which the theme carries within itself an accumulation of meanings. In this sense, belief in a certain infinity persists. The horizon encompasses socially/culturally constructed meanings. Alcoff writes: “[t]he concept of the horizon helps to capture the background framing assumptions we bring with us to perception and understanding the congealed experiences that become premises by which we strive to make sense of the world, the range of concepts and categories of description that we have at our disposal.”70 But the horizon does not consist of only socially constructed meanings, for the natural material world plays a central part of the horizon.71 Within the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty explains culture as accumulating from the body’s behavior patterns; “behavior patterns settle into . . . nature, being deposited in the form of a cultural world.”72 He remains vague about his use of the word culture here. He simply contrasts culture with nature; culture arising from body movements serving as the



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overlay upon nature.73 Although his definition of culture is rather thin, it accepts the role of others in the horizon. Husserl and Heidegger recognize the role of others in the world.74 By the time of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty demands the dissolution of such distinctions of culture and nature, insisting any experiences of such distinctions are abstract.75 He uses the term abstract in all its Hegelian negative connotations. To speak of social or cultural construction requires distinguishing between culture and nature, a discernment Merleau-Ponty believes impossible in our situatedness in the horizon. Instead, suffice it to note, that culture, in a form not completely distinguishable from nature, functions within Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the horizon. Merleau-Ponty insists that, ontologically and epistemically, human experience of the world always occurs via the horizon. The horizon is saturated with meanings and meanings change. Reductions of the ontologic structure of the world solely to the figure, the theme, the object, or another variant of such atomism Merleau-Ponty relegates to misguided thinking, like the naturalistic attitude as mentioned in the introduction. Because phenomenology ontologically frames experience of the world as always relational, contextual, and in situation, because of the role of the background or horizon, this ontological structure can illuminate the functioning of stigma and bias of race. I argue that conceptualizing race through a phenomenological structure facilitates understanding race as fluid and creatively evolving. At the least, it should be clear by now, that viewing race through a phenomenological structure avoids reductively conceptualizing race into a static stigma or bias. The structure of a horizon also highlights the historical, political solidarity identity forming social conditions that inspired the identity women of color and the significance of multiplicitous subjects occupying more than one world. The structure of a horizon coheres with the concept of worlds and possibly illustrates the relevance of inhabiting more than one world.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERCEPTION With this understanding of the structure of phenomena, two points are clear. First, phenomenology as a framework, as a philosophical method, relies upon perception. Second, Merleau-Ponty contends that perception occurs phenomenally. Phenomenology recognizes the infinite distance between the world and consciousness. Yet the two never exist separately from each other. Perception opens us to this space between the world and consciousness. Merleau-Ponty writes, “[o]ur point of departure shall not be being is, nothingness is not nor even there is only being—which are formulas of a totalizing thought . . . —but: there is being, there is a world, there is something.”76 Perception does not begin with concrete or certain things; perception begins with ephemeral somethings. Perception occurs continuously; one cannot simply turn perception on and off.77 Perception is a lacuna; it never finishes in that

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there is always more to see.78 In an alternative light, perception is partial and full of gaps and holes.79 It occurs through an atmosphere of generality and anonymity.80 This openness of perception hides as well as reveals. In this sense, perception opens us to the world, but also does not completely present the world. As Galen A. Johnson writes, “the eye contains a blind spot. What the eye does not see is what in it prepares and makes possible the vision of everything else, as the retina is blind at the point where the fibers that permit vision spread out into it.”81 Perception hides in two senses of the word. First, perception is never complete; there persists always more than what one sees but perception feels complete. And this incompleteness is ambiguous; perception never reveals exactly what percentage we see and not see. For unlike drinking a glass of milk, when one sees how much milk one has drunk, one never sees exactly how much one sees and does not see. Perhaps the phenomenon of white folks not seeing the differences in Asian facial features also illustrates the incompleteness of perception, that still feels complete. I have experienced the same phenomenon; white people looked alike upon returning to the United States after a year living in Korea. This incompleteness functions as an inherent feature of perceiving. One can never finish perceiving any one feature in the world. Second, perception tends to focus on that which is already familiar.82 Because we focus on that about which we already possess some knowledge, we exacerbate the incompleteness of perception. The phenomenon of white people not seeing mixed people in their midst—of people who are black especially under the one-drop rule—nicely illustrates this phenomenon of perception’s tendency to present the already familiar. Black folks know that blacks come in all shades. But because white folks’ unfamiliarity or undesirability of this knowledge, black people have a history of passing.83 In regard to these two ways in which perception hides, Merleau-Ponty summarizes, “[t]hus there is a paradox of immanence and transcendence in perception. Immanence, because the perceived object cannot be foreign to him who perceives; transcendence, because it always contains something more than what is actually given.”84 In these two ways, perception actually hides the world, without providing a hint as to what it is hiding. Consistent with the intentionality of the active subject, perception is not passive. Veronique Foti writes, vision “is not a limpid openness unto things but is narcissistic and eroticized; it always accomplishes the presentation of a certain absence.”85 To understand Foti’s position consider Merleau-Ponty’s description of the act of “fixing one’s gaze.” He writes, “[f ]rom the point of view of the object, it is separating the region under scrutiny from the rest of the field . . . from the subject’s point of view . . . [it] is, a localized vision which it controls according to its own requirements.”86 By his last work, he generalizes this description of fixing one’s gaze to all of perception. Perception opens us unto the world, but waves of images do not simply flood over us.87 In perception’s ability to actively participate in what one sees, one sees that which one desires to see. Within this phenomenal framework, Merleau-Ponty explicitly articulates what has been functioning unacknowledged within the perceptual horizon—the embodied subject. He admits the role of the perceiver in relation to the theme and horizon,



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“one’s own body is the third term, always tacitly understood, in the figure-background structure.”88 Merleau-Ponty argues that one experiences the body phenomenally.89 In situating the body as the third term within the Gestaltian framework, Merleau-Ponty does not naively place the body within the theme-horizon framework and assume that all embodied subjects see more or less the same thing. Instead, he recognizes that all bodies are not exactly alike. Each body’s positioning in relation to the theme and horizon reflects the embodied subject’s differences. Consequently, each individual’s position within the horizon permits a unique perspective of the theme. Alternatively, Alcoff writes, “[t]he horizon is just the individual or particular substantive perspective that each person has that makes up who that person is, consisting of his or her background assumptions, form of life, and social location or position within the social structure and hierarchy.”90 This does not admit the possibility that one can presume another’s perspective simply by physically occupying the other’s position in the horizon. Rather, as earlier mentioned in terms of the temporality of the world and subjects in the world, the uniqueness of each perspective in its position within the horizon does not derive solely from its spatial position but also through the accumulation of an individual’s personal history. Looking more closely at the positioning of the body, Merleau-Ponty writes: each individual body and “[e]ach perception is mutable and only probable—it is, if one likes, only an opinion; but what is not opinion, what each perception, even if false, verifies, is the belongingness of each experience to the same world, their equal power to manifest it, as possibilities of the same world.”91 These words express two important ideas. For Merleau-Ponty, there are only two common features of each perspective. First, all perspectives belong to this one world. As such, perception demands acknowledgment, if not incorporation, of all the perspectives involved in viewing a theme. No single perspective is irrelevant. If a perception appears to diverge, there is an urgency to resolve this status. Hence, in looking at a figure with another, there is a demand to come to agreement about seeing the same figure. Even if the distance between the theme, the horizon, and the embodied subjects represents differences in physical proximity, age, education levels, or life experiences—at least one other person must concur on the perception to confirm some level of validity of the perception. Each view demands consent as a perspective. Second, and perhaps more importantly, each body is valuable as a different perspective. Because of the precariousness of individual perspectives, sole perspectives can be dismissed as merely opinions. In rescuing each opinion, Merleau-Ponty hails the unique position of each embodied subject within the horizon and its consequent unique possibility to contribute to the perception of the theme. This represents a novel treatment of the subject. Prior to Merleau-Ponty’s work, philosophy conceptualizes subjects in two difficult to reconcile ways. First, prior to Merleau-Ponty, philosophy abstracts away differences among subjects and depicts the subject as fungible, as replaceable. Prior philosophy generally regards all human beings as more or less alike; the only important aspect of human beings is our status as thinking beings.92 For Merleau-Ponty, each person represents a unique and valuable perceptual

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perspective. In coming to agreement about seeing an object, each perspective must somehow cohere with at least one other perspective within the horizon. As such, each perspective offers an opportunity to grasp the theme more completely or accurately. Just as a friend in pointing to a specific feature of a scene introduces a new aspect of a scene, each embodied subject and her perspective holds the potential to grasp the theme with more depth. Second, prior to Merleau-Ponty, philosophy conceives individuals as isolated. Although Merleau-Ponty envisages the uniqueness of each perspective, he also regards each subject as always integrally intertwined, if not entirely infected by other subjects. Weiss explains that for Husserl, “the independence of the transcendental ego seems to give way to a subject whose own intentionality is intertwined through and through with the intentionality of others.”93 Hence the uniqueness of each perspective does not originate from a conception of the subject as isolated from each other. Perhaps as such perception performs a daily miracle; somehow “in the course of perceptual experience, I shall be presented with an indefinite set of concordant views.”94 Not because all views are identical, but because we still conclude, even with the unique status of each perspective, that we see and refer to the same theme. Even without complete knowledge of exactly how the multiple perspectives come to agreement, perception performs the miracle of coming to agreement. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological framework persistently endeavors to understand this relation, and this thickness between the theme, the world, and the subject. As such, he refuses to reduce our perception any further than within a phenomenal framework of the embodied subject in relation to the theme within a horizon. Clearly the phenomenological conception of perception shows potential to account for many of the concerns that feminist and race philosophers expressed earlier about perception’s relation to power and its ability to diverge, and completely disagree. For structurally, the phenomenological conception of perception challenges the possibility of a neutral perception or one true perception. In recognizing the role of the body, the embodied subject as possessing a unique perspective within the theme-horizon structure, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological structure relativizes each subject’s perception, including white male perception and its dominance over true perception. Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception, with its insistence on the value of each subject’s perspective and the negotiation necessary for perception must be shared, can potentially heed feminists’ concerns to weigh women’s perceptions more carefully. For through the concordance of these variously situated perceptions, perception becomes more thorough and closer to truth. This phenomenological structure has the potential to claim the value of the unique perspectives of multiplicitous subjects living between worlds. Structurally, Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception as phenomenal recognizes the negotiation, the fluidity, and the dynamism in perception. But Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception clearly does not grant the possibility of power and contestation within the theme-horizon structure. Rather, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology naively explains that all perspectives demand recognition for an optimum perception



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of the theme and does not admit our history of the diverging treatments of different perspectives.95 Nevertheless, I argue the phenomenological conception of perception structurally can accommodate many of these worries in regard to perceiving race, racial stigma, and bias, and the phenomenological conception of perception heeds de Lauretis’s counsel to attend to the act of perception in-itself.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL OPENNESS Toward returning to thinking through the relationship among racial stigma, bias, multiplicitous subjects, and perception, let me trace Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to a few epistemological implications. High-Altitude Thinkers Merleau-Ponty christens the epistemological quagmires of traditional philosophy as “high-altitude thinking.” He uses this term in a thoroughly negative connotation. Admittedly, Merleau-Ponty is not selective in his application of this title. He accuses not only intellectualists, but also empiricists, and even psychologists of being “high-altitude thinkers.”96 He also quite liberally categorizes various thinkers under these headings including Plato, Kant, Descartes, and Freud as intellectualists, and Locke and Hume as empiricists. But this should not be surprising, for Husserl originally delineated the phenomenological position from the naïve certainty of both empiricism and intellectualism. Under such a criterion, only a phenomenological investigation avoids high-altitude thinking. High-altitude thinking holds the following three positions. First, they commit what Merleau-Ponty calls the “experience error.” To explain the “experience error,” Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor write, “perception ends in objects, and so, once constituted, these objects, and not the body’s creativity or movement of transcendence, appear ‘as the reason for all experience of [them] which we have or could have.’”97 Because perception and our experience of the world focus on objects, we mistakenly believe that our perception and experience of the world must be correct. In perceiving, we lose awareness of the phenomenal quality of our initial experiences of the world, our situatedness in the world, the theme-horizon structure. In perceiving, we forget about our active involvement—our intentionality—in our acts of perception. The experience error posits how we forget the conditions of perception in fixing on the objects, the scenery, or the themes, mesmerized by seeing concrete certainty. High-altitude thinkers assume accurate perception of the theme not realizing that such certainty can only be projected and contrived. Second, concordant with the experience error, high-altitude thinkers uphold the prejudice of determinate being, that “things are, in themselves, completely and unambiguously determined.”98 High-altitude thinkers function in the world confident

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in the stability, the complete formation of the things in the world. They proceed certain that the materiality of the world remains constant, not subject to change. The prejudice of determinate being does not admit that the world and the matter of the world still evolves and changes or perhaps what the world divulges to us may still be developing. Within the space between subjects and objects, high-altitude thinkers cannot theorize either the subject or the object as still becoming and actively interacting with each other. Philosophers are alert to the idea that subjects change, but not aware that objects and the materiality of the world change. Without a philosophical framework that accommodates the world as changing, and with the assumption that the things in the world are static, fully present, and wholly knowable, high-altitude thinkers ultimately—even if inadvertently—claim access to infinity.99 Third and finally, high-altitude thinkers claim the constancy hypothesis. The constancy hypothesis forwards that “a point-by-point correspondence and constant connection between the stimulus and the elementary perception” exists.100 Martin Dillon elaborates on the constancy hypothesis, as “the familiar assertion of a veridical correspondence across the ontological gap separating immanence and transcendence coupled with a reduction of both thing (stimulus) and perception (retinal excitation) to atomic elements.”101 The constancy hypothesis assumes the correspondence between the seeing subject and the seen object. To establish this correspondence, it conceptualizes the ontological structure of the world as atomistic. The constancy hypothesis has a long philosophical history. Because of the atomistic metaphysics of both matter and perception, understandably, one accepts or dismisses the constancy hypothesis only upon metaphysical grounds.102 Merleau-Ponty does not accept these three tenets of high-altitude thinkers because these three tenets transform perception into thought about things. Against such mental acrobatics, he insists, “[t]he real has to be described, not constructed or formed,” and “there is no inner man, man is in the world.”103 Merleau-Ponty argues that we can never eliminate our phenomenal encounter with the world. He explains that certain, complete, infinite, and constantly available contact with the world “exceeds perceptual experience.”104 Dillon elaborates, “[c]larity and distinctness  .  .  . are incompatible with externality. What is external to me must, by that fact alone, transcend me in some degree.  .  .  . But what is transcendent is, by definition, not fully known; it is attended by a modicum of opacity—that opacity being phenomenal evidence for its transcendence.”105 Merleau-Ponty insists that the things of the world must transcend us to some degree. This insistence indicates his respect for the world. Much as in the paradox of perception as both transcendent and immanent, as both revealing and hiding the world, knowledge of the world must transcend us and aspects of ourselves must remain immanent within ourselves. This insistence that the world escapes our perception and knowledge ensures that our knowledge of the world truly derives from the world and is not simply constructions of our minds.106



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Phenomenological Openness Merleau-Ponty disparages high-altitude thinkers, because he advocates the impossibility and undesirability of certainty, totality, infinity, and constant correspondence. We must now question whether phenomenology avoids these dilemmas. Turning first to Merleau-Ponty’s conception of ontology, within the Visible and the Invisible, Françoise Dastur explains Merleau-Ponty’s being as “Urprasentierbar [is] ‘Being’s unique way of manifesting itself without becoming positivity, without ceasing to be ambiguous and transcendent.’”107 Being never fully forms; being remains open. Consistent with this ontologic openness, Merleau-Ponty understands knowledge as open, ambiguous, and contextual. To appreciate Merleau-Ponty’s conclusions about the openness of being and knowledge, we must identify the implications of the phenomenal condition of Martin Heidegger’s phrasing: being-in-the-world. Phenomenology as a method of philosophical inquiry begins with the insistence on the openness and indeterminacy of our experience of the world. Merleau-Ponty writes, “ambiguity is of the essence of human existence, and everything we live or think always has several meanings. . . . Thus, there is in human existence a principle of indeterminacy . . . it is the very process whereby the hitherto meaningless takes on meaning.”108 While there are numerous sources of ambiguity, two sources of ambiguity concern me here. The first focuses on the second feature of the principle of contextual relevance. The delicate balance in the relationship between the theme and the horizon codetermines the Gestaltian framework. Distance permeates between the theme and the horizon.109 This distance plays a formative role in perceiving and experiencing the theme. As earlier explained, if one moves the theme to another horizon, it is difficult to recognize the theme without explanations and encouragements. The Gestaltian framework insists that perception of the theme depends upon its background. This distance between the theme and the horizon comprises a spatial and a temporal sense. The time of looking at the theme matters, much as a child sees very different things in a room than an adult, much as one’s work looks very different in the morning than in the previous evening.110 The second instance of ambiguity within the Gestaltian framework lies in the role of the embodied subject. The distance between the perceived and the perceiver signals the past experiences, the history, or the immanence from which the individual perceives. Each body occupies a unique position within the horizon because immanent to each body ensues a horizon of personal experiences. As Weiss writes, “indeterminacy is corporeally lived.”111 As such, an optimal distance for perception demonstrates each body’s relation with the object of perception.112 Merleau-Ponty writes, the “person who perceives is not spread out before himself as a consciousness must be; he has historical density, he takes up a perceptual tradition and is faced with a present.”113 Each body has a blind spot; the subject cannot have full self-consciousness of the situations of his/her own body at any moment. The body’s situatedness functions in multiple senses: spatiality (including what spaces provide

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comfort or discomfort), temporality (such as what speed to live life), not to mention sexuality, cultural sedimentation, and historicity. These ambiguities in the distance between the theme and the horizon, and in the position of the seer in relation to the theme and the horizon, are only two of the many ambiguities within the theme-horizon framework. Yet these two ambiguities illustrate how phenomenology arrives at situatedness. Merleau-Ponty explains that for human beings, knowledge accrues/develops within our specific situations in the world; he writes, “[a]ll my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some experience of the world.”114 Situatedness is inherent in the principle of contextual relevancy. Our situatedness highlights our finitude. As Jean Greisch makes explicit, Merleau-Ponty’s prioritizing of ambiguity and debunking of certainty means that he accepts the limitations of finitude.115 The relationality of the three aspects of the Gestaltian framework ensures that one never forgets the finite status of all three.116 So why value openness and ambiguity? Why does Merleau-Ponty covet these features, aside from their contrary relationship to certain knowledge? Do situatedness and finitude have value in themselves? Because Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology recognizes the openness and ambiguity of being and knowledge, it permits the possibility of becoming and change. Openness and ambiguity accept that subjects and the world develop and change. Within a Gestaltian framework, knowledge of the world forms a centrifugal and centripetal relation to the world; knowledge develops within the intimate relationship between the subject and the world. And as the subject grows or as the world evolves, the relation between the two develops.117 Openness, ambiguity, and finitude in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology permit change and becoming, but precisely because of this, his position is vulnerable to bias.118 Bias enters because of the incompleteness of perception and because of subjective prejudice—the very two sources of ambiguity in the horizon. Merleau-Ponty understands that because of the immanence of the subject and the transcendence of the object, because perception occurs within a theme/horizon structure, the seer and the seen can never exactly concur.119 Merleau-Ponty does not nonchalantly dismiss the relevance of bias; he recognizes the epistemological dangers of admitting bias in coming to know the world. His only consolation lies, as earlier stated, in his belief in the occurrence of the daily small miracle of perception; although we occupy our unique positions within the horizon in relation to the theme, somehow, we come to agree that we see the same object. Merleau-Ponty resigns to the position that bias is unavoidable. The two sources of bias hinge really upon one simple fact—situatedness—and this is simply inevitable. Merleau-Ponty opposes omniscience and proposes situatedness and finitude as the true grounds for perception and knowledge of the world.



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CONCLUSION With this long foray into the structure of phenomena, its theme/horizon structure, its conception of perception, and its epistemological implications, let me return to the language of racial stigma, bias, and multiplicitous subjects. I contend that although philosophy of race’s focus on the unconscious influences of racism is an advance, philosophy of race persists in presuming an individualistic, an essentialistic, or an atomistic ontology about race and perception. I trace three conclusions from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. First, although the present conceptual framework of racial stigma and bias with its recognition that racist stereotypes function on the level of the group unconscious, embedded in social practices, is an advance from the previous rather thin idea about racism as occurring in individual consciousness, nevertheless, such focus on stigma and bias still misunderstands the dynamic relation between the social and the individual structure of perception. This analysis about racial stigma and bias suggests that better individual awareness and understanding of bias will alleviate, if not eliminate, identity group–based racial stigma. Within this framework, isolated individual effort to dispel bias, although difficult, is the only solution. The phenomenological framework contests the possibility of eliminating bias through individual effort alone and accounts for variations in the development of biases by differently situated members of society. This chapter recenters this discussion on perception because the language of bias pivots on perception, on perceiving the bodies of others and unquestioningly applying meanings onto such embodiment based on existing racialized stigmas. (Bias seeps into other domains, including affect, but nevertheless, perception still plays an important role.) An epistemological framework that presumes and entertains the possibility of eliminating biases fails to truly understand that individual human beings situated in the social world with a particular history and future can never be free of all biases. In other words, in conceiving bias as isolatable, bias is presumed to be eliminable. Within a phenomenological framework, an understanding of the function of a horizon admits the inevitability of the social historical condition of bias. As situated beings, bias functions as an inherent part of being and perceiving in the world because of the three reasons outlined earlier: (1) the incompleteness of perception that feels complete (experience error); (2) perception’s focus on the already familiar; (3) the embodiment and body movement of the perceiving subject. After all, as Alcoff says, “[r]acial identity especially is a patently non-intrinsic and context dependent feature of a person.”120 Let me elaborate on the difference between Saul’s and Holroyd’s solution with the phenomenological understanding of perception. Holroyd’s position is a substantial advance over Saul’s, especially in admitting the role of individuals working toward long-term goals of eliminating biases and not just resigning to the unavoidable influences of culture for one’s personal biases. Still, Holroyd treats bias as individually isolatable, addressable, and resolvable. A phenomenological framework recognizes that bias arises within a dynamic relation between the social and the individual; a

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phenomenological framework positions the two as forming part of a whole. This phenomenological structure appreciates that although one can isolate a single bias, one’s situatedness in a horizon has illuminated this bias at this moment. Holroyd’s focus on biases in the long term initially attends to this contextual condition. I read Holroyd’s strategy of addressing long-term bias in two ways. Holroyd’s attention to long-term bias needs to be tempered with the understanding that even as one detangles one bias, one remains mired in other biases and may even cultivate new biases. One can concentrate on some biases at this moment in time but concede addressing biases is a continual process. Admitting the impossibility of individually eliminating all biases, addressing racial stigma and bias, demands recognizing that the social, cultural shared meanings must be simultaneously addressed. Perhaps we need to foster productive, workable, new biases even while admitting the difficulty of recognizing which biases are productive. Alternatively, I read Holroyd’s attention to long-term bias as an attempt to change one’s horizon. Alcoff writes about horizon not just within a phenomenological framework but within a hermeneutic framework: “[t]he horizon is a substantive perspectival location from which the interpreter looks out at the world, a perspective that is always present but that is open and dynamic, with a temporal as well as physical dimension moving into the future and into new spaces as the subject moves.”121 In other words, or to repeat, horizons are relative to the situated subject, and horizons are dynamic. Holroyd’s elaboration of addressing long-term biases illustrates the possibility of subjects influencing their horizon. In this way, Holroyd’s position nicely coheres with the understanding of horizons as dynamic within the principle of contextual relevancy, and that subjects and the world mature. But Holroyd’s focus on long-term bias does not admit the functioning of horizons. Race, racial stigma, and racism have not been static. Race, racial stigma, and racism cannot be reduced to a static expression that can be eliminated. Expressions of race, racial stigma, and racism have been downright creative in their multiple expressions. Even a cursory look at the history of colonialism, the statements of Enlightenment philosophers, the international policies of the United States, the works of scientists, as well as our daily interactions with those whom we characterize as others, reveal that racism and racial stigma obviously manifest in creative ways. As Mills writes, “[t]he Racial Contract is continually being rewritten to create different forms of the racial polity.”122 A phenomenological framework accounts for these multiple expressions of racism as racial stigma and bias because the openness and ambiguity in the theme/horizon framework ontologically comprehends the inevitability of change. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology acknowledges the prejudice of determinate being that we cannot have certain knowledge and that objects of knowledge are not completely and infinitely determined. Within these epistemological limits, one need not reduce racial stigma and bias into one isolated essential expression; one may admit that expressions of race and racism evolve and transform. Let me expand upon this non-isolatable and dynamic understanding of racism by focusing on the biases of women of color, of multiplicitous subjects. The language



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of racial stigma primarily focuses on the stigmas held by whites about blacks, most likely black males. The most prominent bias held by people of color, including and especially by women of color, centers on internalizing dominant biases against the self. Building from the Hegelian analysis of slave mentality, Medina writes about the oppresseds’ characteristic biases as breeding internalized doubts about oneself: “[i]f there is a form of skepticism that is characteristic of the oppressed, it is ego skepticism: a skepticism about the self, about its capacities and even about its very existence. An internalized lack of appreciation and a constant self-questioning can lead to a poor self-esteem, a lack of self-confidence, and even an inferiority complex.”123 The oppressed subject wrongs herself while simultaneously benefiting oppressors; “I, as a hearer, can wrong myself by attributing a credibility excess to all those who are different from me and credibility deficits to those who are like me. This pattern is grounded in an inferiority complex and contributes to perpetuate it.”124 This problem of internalized bias as held by people of color is not simply an individual problem but a feature of oppressed identity groups, a function of the social. By refusing to isolate this bias of germinating a lack of self-confidence in individuals, we can understand that this bias against the self is not idiosyncratic, not psychological, but is about racial stigma, and the entrenched depth of social injustice.125 I argue a phenomenological framework underscores the condition of being-in-the-world and better frames the experiences of women of color, of multiplicitous subjects. First, one of the biggest difficulties in conceptualizing the experiences of women of color centers on how to treat both the experiences of race and sex without simply adding or analogizing them. Women of color speculate and propose that one experience arose because of racism or racial stigma, while another befell because of sexism or gendered narratives, and that yet another ensued from an indeterminate combination of the two. Understanding that perception occurs within a theme-horizon framework and the principle of contextual relevancy permits all these options without reductively locating a rule for identifying the stigmas along one “ism” for all the experiences of all women of color. Within a phenomenological framework, ambiguity persists because of the horizon and our embodied subjectivity; this framework welcomes conceptualizing the indeterminate experiences of multiplicitous subjects including the experiences of decenteredness, living with contradiction, and the tension of simultaneously occupying the oppressor/oppressed positions.126 Because women of color live in a dominant world that professes equality, justice, and democratic principles that, as Mills points out, whites insist are real, but also experience inequality, injustice, and undemocratic circumstances, multiplicitous subjects subsist aware of indeterminability and ambiguity. Indeterminability overlays in the subtle issues such as the untranslatability of specific phrases in language,127 the elusiveness of table manners,128 and the priorities for how to live life.129 Living with such ambiguities from inhabiting the oppressed position sets the conditions to become more sensitive to bias. So far, my analysis in this chapter highlighted the function of the horizon, against and over isolated, individual, and static expressions of racism as bias. Additionally,

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configuring women of color as multiplicitous subjects emphasizes their occupation of more than one world.130 Without defining these subjects primarily through the lens of oppression within one world, but rather featuring their dwelling in more than one world, their traveling between at least two horizons, positions multiplicitous subjects as more likely to sense biases than those who occupy only one world or horizon. The Hegelian framework emphasizes how the oppressed develop a more wholistic vision of society, but his analysis is confined within one world, one horizon. Beyond the limits of Hegel’s philosophy, the emphasis on occupying more than one horizon opens further questions. Phenomenologically, I cannot locate the idea of more than one horizon in Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, or Merleau-Ponty’s work. They refer to smaller or broader horizons, horizons interior or exterior to the theme, but not to multiple worlds. Unlike Lugones who introduced this notion of traveling between different worlds,131 I am not certain if Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, as white males comfortably occupying worlds that enable and affirm their perceptions, could not and did not imagine the possibility of more than one world. Perhaps the white males might conceive the multiple worlds of women of color as just a broader horizon, a deeper horizon? Nevertheless, the idea of multiple worlds brings into relief not only the oppressor/oppressed conditions but differences in values, contrasting perceptions, and new visions of living in the world. Most importantly, the idea of multiple worlds highlights contradictions that do not simply circumscribe conditions of oppression. Unlike traditional phenomenology’s emphasis on a single horizon (in which perception appears complete, and the experience error and the prejudice of determinate being obfuscates perception), traveling between at least two worlds can disrupt such tendencies of the horizon to cohere and to bias perception. Multiplicitous subjects inhabit at least two different, perhaps not completely separate, but at least divergent worlds; the multiplicitous subject’s horizon is not the same as the dominant horizon. Considering the active quality of perception, because multiplicitous subjects can see the differences, the contradictions, and the developments in both worlds, multiplicitous subjects are attuned to sensing more of the biases. For survival, multiplicitous subjects adapt to the distinct practices of the dominant world. But occupying more than one world, multiplicitous subjects are situated to better recognize contextualism, relativism, and truths that suffice temporarily. Following the works of Hegel, debate persists regarding the epistemic privilege of oppressed subjects, for the condition of surviving as oppressed subjects requires a more holistic view of the workings of society.132 Although I lean towards acknowledging the epistemic advantage of the oppressed, I do not make that argument here. Here I make a restrained point, without claiming epistemic advantage. I follow Medina’s more nuanced position. He writes, “although I will depart from those strong positions that attribute some kind of epistemic superiority to oppressed groups, I will defend the claim that there are distinctive epistemic advantages that can be found among oppressed subjects: there are some critical and demystifying experiences with important consequences for the epistemic character of those who have them, which can only be found in subordinate groups.”133 Medina claims the



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oppressed nurture two specific sensitivities. First, consonant with my earlier appreciation of open-endedness within the phenomenological framework, Medina attributes open-mindedness to the oppressed, in distinction from the oppressor.134 Second, and in a similar vein, Medina writes, “the hermeneutically disadvantaged tend to be better listeners.”135 Let me highlight that Medina makes these claims only within the framework of a single horizon. In considering more than one horizon, multiplicitous subjects are even more likely to foster these sensitivities. More importantly, multiplicitous subjects in occupying more than one world, are privy to alternate visions of life. In contrast, consider subjects who occupy only one world. These subjects perceive within the constraints of a single horizon. The single horizon affords more comfort, ease, and a sense of authenticity, according to Heidegger. But the single horizon is a more limited horizon. Within this single horizon, consider the hermeneutic consequences of the perceptual tendency of focusing on the already familiar. Also consider that under these contexts, perception is not passive, but rather active. These contextual features of perception that inherently sustain bias, hermeneutically sediment, exaggerating the different perceptions between the subjects living in one horizon and the subjects living in more than one horizon.136 In admitting the sociality of biases and that one cannot simply isolate and address biases, because of the theme/horizon structure of perception, multiplicitous subjects who inhabit more than one horizon are better situated to notice these biases. Living in at least two horizons, experiencing not only the contradictions from being positioned as oppressed within a single horizon, but experiencing the ambiguity in the variances of beliefs and practices between at least two worlds, multiplicitous subjects cultivate sensitivity to biases. More importantly, multiplicitous subjects see different futures and learn multiple ways of being. This chapter addresses the complexity of perception, for perception can disagree or diverge. Such variances in perception have important ramifications because perception serves as one of the central means, if not a primary means, to initially see race. Moving away from static, isolated conceptions of race and racism in the language of bias, and toward better understanding the social, relational, ambiguous, and changing expressions of race and racism requires reconceiving the very frameworks through which to theorize race. A phenomenological framework facilitates understanding women of color’s ambiguous experiences. Focusing on the contextual relevance of perception substantiates how multiplicitous subjects, in occupying more than one horizon, cultivate a keener sense of biases and envision new possibilities.

NOTES 1. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Cultures: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), 6.

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2. Linda Martín Alcoff, “Towards a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment,” Journal of Radical Philosophy v. 95 (May/June 1999): 16. 3. Gary Peller, “Race-Consciousness,” Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, eds. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: The New Press, 1995), 129. Alcoff also concurs with this position; “it is commonly believed that for one to be a racist one must be able to access in their consciousness some racist belief, and that if introspection fails to produce such a belief then one is simply not racist” (“Towards,” 21). 4. Attaching meaning to body features is not logically valid or reasonable, because racial differences are not biologically significant. Lisa Gannett writes, “[it] is estimated that humans are identical in 99.9 percent of our DNA. .  .  .  Since the 1970s, estimates have remained fairly constant that 85 percent of human genetic differences occur within, rather than between populations” (“Racism and Human Genome Diversity Research: The Ethical Limits of ‘Population Thinking,’” Philosophy of Science v. 68, n. 3 Supplement: Proceedings of the 2000 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part 1: Contributed Papers [Sept. 2001]: 487). In other words, phenotypic differences do not constitute genetic significances for human beings. Any meanings attributed to body features do not correspond to a natural significance but are instead socially constructed. 5. Numerous critical race theorists challenged the feasibility and the desirability of promoting colorblindness. See the works of Neil Gotanda, “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution is Color-Blind,’” Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, eds. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: The New Press, 1995). Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Patricia J. Williams, Seeing a Colorblind Future: The Paradox of Race (New York: The Noonday Press, 1997). José Medina has an interesting understanding of colorblindness. He writes, colorblindness is a “double blindness: blindness to differences and to social relationality” (The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations [New York: Oxford University Press, 2013], 213). 6. Peller, “Race-Consciousness,” 143. 7. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 63. 8. Mills, The Racial Contract, 3. 9. Medina,  The Epistemology of Resistance,  141. He cites from Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 48. Medina continues, “[t]he literature in social psychology suggests that cultural stereotyping is a very extended (perhaps universal) phenomenon and not inherently derogatory” (165). 10. Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 141–42. 11. Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 145. 12. See preliminarily, Tamar Szabo Gendler, “On the Epistemic Costs of Implicit Bias,” Philosophical Studies v. 156 (2011): 33–63; Sally Haslanger, “Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone),” Hypatia, v. 23 (2008): 210–23; and Jennifer Saul, “Unconscious Influences and Women in Philosophy,” Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change? eds. Katrina Hutchinson and Fiona Jenkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 13. Margaret A. Crouch, “Implicit Bias and Gender (and Other Sorts of ) Diversity in Philosophy and the Academy in the Context of the Corporatized University,” Journal of Social Philosophy, v. 43, n. 3 (Fall 2012): 213. Or in slightly more technical language, Jules Holroyd



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defines implicit bias: “[a]n individual harbors an implicit bias against some stigmatized group (G) when she has automatic cognitive or affective associations (her concept of ) G and no negative property (P) or stereotypic trait (T) which are accessible and can be operative in influencing judgment and behavior without the conscious awareness of the agent” (“Responsibility for Implicit Bias,” Journal of Social Philosophy, v. 43, n. 3 [Fall 2012]: 275). 14. Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 165. Parallel to this analysis of bias as a social function on the unconscious, Helen Ngo explains microaggression, “[a] similar argument pertains to the discourse of ‘microaggression,’ a term coined by psychiatrist Chester Pierce in the 1970s, and subsequently expanded in the psychological literature. . . . This concept, defined by Pierce and others as the ‘subtle, stunning, often automatic, and non-verbal exchanges which are “put downs” of blacks by offenders,’ identifies two important things: first, the micro-level coding of anti-Black racist messages into the fabric of popular culture . . . and second, its psychical impact on Blacks” (The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017], 24). 15. Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 165–66. 16. Jennifer Saul, “Ranking Exercises in Philosophy and Implicit Bias,” Journal of Social Philosophy, v. 43, n. 3 (Fall 2012): 257. 17. Holroyd, “Responsibility for Implicit Bias,” 281. Elaborating on the variations in implicit bias, she continues, “[a] number of studies have shown that there appears to be considerable variation in the degrees of implicit bias that individuals display in experimental tests. . . . Just as individuals vary in the extent to which they are explicitly prejudiced, and in the reasons for and extent to which they care about not being prejudiced, individuals vary quite significantly in the extent to which implicit biases show up” (280). 18. Saul, “Ranking,” 259. 19. Holroyd, “Responsibility for Implicit Bias,” 284. 20. Holroyd, “Responsibility for Implicit Bias,” 284. 21. Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 23. Ngo writes, the “unconscious of implicit bias confirms that these biases exist, but says little about the way they come to be actively embedded in our ways of being” (23). Ngo confirms the important role of practices and emphasizes body habits for recognizing individual culpability, “[m]ore forcefully than the discourse of implicit bias, I will claim, framing racism in terms of phenomenological habit shows that there exist certain modes of being in the world that are not simply nor naively acquired, but rather involve some complicity or complacency on the part of the subject” (25). Concurring with Ngo, I explore embodiment in chapter 3. 22. One difference between the feminism of women of color and that of white middle-class women centers on the inseparability of feminist concerns with an additional concern, for women of color. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes, “[t]he major analytic difference in the writings on the emergence of white, Western, middle-class liberal feminism and the feminist politics of women of color in the U.S. is the contrast between a singular focus on gender as a basis for equal rights, and a focus on gender in relation to race and/or class as part of a broader liberation struggle” (“Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle Third World Women and the Politics of Feminisms,” Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991], 11). Rey Chow makes a similar point. See Rey Chow, “Violence in the Other Country: China as Crisis, Spectacle, and Woman,” Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, eds.

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Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 82–83. See also Bat Ami Bar On, “Marginality and Epistemic Privilege,” Feminist Epistemologies, Linda Martín Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 83–100. Bar On argues against adding each feature of marginalization or considering a marginalization as further from the center as indicators of epistemic privilege. 23. Turning to analogizing the two features, Trina Grillow and Stephanie Wildman deny the two “isms” of sexism and racism as completely accessible to each other through analogies. They contest the presumption that one can begin with one “ism” and claim full understanding of the other “ism.” Additionally, Grillow and Wildman argue that attempts to understand the particular experiences of women of color by simply adding the two “isms” does not sufficiently depict this dual-faceted experience. Exactly what does adding the two features imply? Are women of color doubly oppressed? Can oppression be quantified? Clearly, class, sexuality, able-ness add other dimensions (Trina Grillow and Stephanie Wildman, “Obscuring the Importance of Race: The Implication of Making Comparisons between Racism and Sexism [or Other Isms],” Critical Race Feminism, ed. Adrien Katherine Wing [New York: New York University Press, 1997], 49). Medina acknowledges, “it is debatable whether this sensitivity to insensitivity can be transferred and carried over from issue to issue” (Epistemology of Resistance, 74). 24. Recognizing the dynamic between the individual and the social coheres with Alcoff ’s analysis; she states, “[m]y belief is that a somewhat rewired hermeneutic and phenomenological account of the self, one that builds from a pluritopic rather than the traditional monotopic hermeneutics will help us begin to make sense of the claims of identity politics and of some aspects of the political clashes between culturally defined groups” (Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self [New York: Oxford University Press, 2006], 88). 25. I cannot speak for all the variety of Asian American women. I am only representative of East Asian American, a large and diverse category in-itself. There is also South Asian American or Pacific Islander, and of course African American women, with all the diversity inherent within all these identities. 26. Alcoff, Visible, 93. 27. Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 200. 28. Mariana Ortega, In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 64. 29. Ortega, In-Between, 50. 30. The Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective, “Building on ‘the Edge of Each Other’s Battles’: A Feminist of Color Multidimensional Lens,” Hypatia: Special Issue on Interstices: Inheriting Women of Color Feminist Philosophy, v. 29, n. 1 (Winter 2014): 30. Ortega clarifies in phenomenological language the potential dangers of world-traveling. She explains that survival may include yielding to the force of assimilation. She writes, “When does the experience of world-traveling cease or lose its force as a resistant practice? . . . The relevant question here is whether part of surviving involves eventually giving in, settling in, accepting the norms, practices, and even the definitions of the multiplicitous self assigned by members of dominant groups” (Ortega, In-Between,  127). Ortega continues, “[t]he new mestiza that I have in mind is the one that keeps the multiple histories alive and does not try to reconcile them so as to assimilate” (Ortega,  In-Between, 131). This distinction leaves unanswered the epistemic question of how one can recognize the difference between surviving and assimilating.



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31. Ortega, In-Between, 74. 32. As a phenomenologist, I suspect that this choice of the word “decenteredness” references the framework of horizons that I explain later in this chapter. I consider this word further in the later discussion of horizons. 33. Ortega, In-Between, 83. She continues, “[i]t may also lead to the realization that we can embody contradictory attributes without necessarily having to choose one or the other as being the defining feature of our self.” 34. Ortega, In-Between, 129. Regarding “being a problem,” George Yancy clarifies that this is not a temporary phenomenon. He writes, “[w]hen Black people are asked the same question [How does it feel to be a problem?] by white America, the relationship between being Black and being a problem is non-contingent. It is a necessary relation. Outgrowing this ontological state of being a problem is believed impossible. Hence, when regarding one’s ‘existence as problematic,’ temporality as frozen. One is a problem forever” (Yancy, “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, v. 19, n. 4 [2005]: 237). 35. Ortega, In-Between,  50. In the language of Lugones’s notion of world-traveling, “world-traveling constitutes experiencing an opening, an aperture, from which the multiplicitous self can attain an understanding of herself and the different worlds it travels given its multiple social identities” (Ortega,  In-Between, 101). 36. Drawing from Anzaldua’s work, for Latina women, such experiences of marginal living encourage the development of “La facultad . . . the unconscious sense of what is helpful or hurtful in the environment, of what is behind everyday phenomena” (Ortega, In-Between, 59). For “[r]emembering or seeing oneself as different in another world amounts to seeing otherwise,” (111). Not everyone in the margins automatically develops this ability; “those in the margins are more likely to develop la facultad, but not all of them do” (Ortega, In-Between, 38). The oppressed develop these sensitivities because, as Medina develops from Mills’s work, the oppressed are especially likely to undergo experiences of surprise. Medina writes, “[t]his not-fitting . . . typically has the experiential character of a surprise: it is surprising to the experiential subject who has this experience for the first time, as well as to the rest of society. Mills explains that ‘the shock arises not merely from the simply alien but from the alienated familiar, the presentation of the old from a new angle’” (Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 47). The oppressed undergo these experiences of surprise precisely because dominant society does not recognize their visions of the world. 37. See Ortega’s summary of all these criticisms of world-traveling in pages 89–139. 38. See Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 115–16. 39. Consistent with the understanding that women of color, that multiplicitous identities occupy more than one world, Ngo writes in the framework of double-consciousness, “for all its fragmentary and interruptive effect—and these are many and real—a racialized double-consciousness is still, quite literally, the acquisition of an additional consciousness, a new epistemic standpoint from which to reflect upon one’s place in, and relations with, the world” (Ngo,  The Habits of Racism, 124). Ngo’s position with the language of doubleconsciousness lends to an additive analysis of women of color’s experiences of both race and gender—a position that I earlier indicated has been problematized. The epistemic consequences of occupying more than one world are interesting but not without controversy. I address these epistemic consequences further in chapter 2. 40. Ortega, In-Between, 38.

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41. Ortega, In-Between,  130. Ortega utilizes Heideggerian language to make this point about choice. Ngo questions whether world-traveling and becoming a multiplicitous subject are choices as the term “traveling” suggests. She writes, “[i]n what sense, then, are racialized persons made to travel by their relatively disempowered social, historical, political, and economic positions? Recall . . . the way racialized people bear the burden of adapting their bodily movements, behavior, and comportment to preempt or manage racist projections—this is one example of the differential power relations that call into question the term ‘travel’ in such a context. The question of ‘choice’ is not a meaningful one in the face of racist bodily habits which subject the racialized person to anything from disadvantage, discrimination, to bodily danger” (Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 116). 42. Ortega refers to Lugones’s idea of active subjectivity, “[a]ctive subjectivity thus replaces the traditional conceptions of intentionality and agency that Lugones deems problematic because they trick subjects into believing that they are making individual choices” (In-Between, 107). 43. Ortega,  In-Between, 13. Ortega refers to earlier work’s position that even identifying as a woman of color occurs in an entangled process of becoming and choosing: “Alexander and Mohanty note, one ‘becomes’ a woman of color. The experience of becoming a woman of color is instructive about the active process of identification rather than a passive or a given politics of location. .  .  .  The complex interplay of what is given and what is transformed given discursive consideration as well as relations with others cannot be overlooked” (Ortega,  In-Between, 164). 44. Ortega, In-Between, 168. 45. See David Kim, “Self-Contempt and Color-Blind Liberalism in The Accidental Asian,” The Boundaries of Affect: Ethnicity and Emotion, eds. E. Ann Kaplan and Susan Scheckel (Stony Brook, NY: Stony Brook University and the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook, 2007), 39–70. 46. This is not to say that perception should be the dominant medium to notice race and sex, or that perception is the only venue for racial stigma. Recognizing that perception has been highlighted too much in the discussion of race, Medina writes, “[i]n order to underscore the affective dimension, whenever possible, I have tried to reformulate problems of sight and blindness in social interaction into problems concerning social sensitivity and insensitivity” (Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 315). See also Ortega, In-Between, 168–69. This focus on affect is very interesting and promising, nevertheless, perception continues to function as a medium, if not the most prominent medium, for discussions on racial stigma. 47. See the works of Donna Haraway, “The Persistence of Vision,” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Annette Kuhn, “The Body and Cinema: Some Problems for Feminism,” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Kuhn writes, “the options on offer to spectators in cinema are basically either to take up a masculine subject position as, so the argument goes, is proposed by the huge number of films in which the enunciating instance is male/masculine; or to submit to a masochism of overidentification, as is evoked, for example by the Hollywood ‘women’s picture’; or to adopt the narcissistic position of taking the screen as mirror and becoming one’s own object of desire” (198). Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1979). Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). See Williams on this same point, Alchemy



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149, 152. See also Gail Weiss’s summary of Judith Butler’s analysis of the Rodney King trial. Weiss writes, “no straightforward appeal to visual ‘evidence’ will suffice to counter the jurors’ interpretation of the video” (Refiguring the Ordinary [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008], 105). 48. Elizabeth Spelman utilizes Adrienne Rich’s work on white solipsism to make this point especially clear. Spelman writes, that whites have “‘tunnel-vision which simply does not see nonwhite experience of existence as precious or significant, unless in spasmodic-impotent guilt-reflexes, which have little or no longer-term, continuing momentum or political usefulness’” (Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought [Boston: Beacon Press, 1988], 116). She cites from Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence, 299. 49. Mills, The Racial Contract, 17–18. I think Mills would not object to reading his word “interpretation” as including perception. Debra Dickerson writes that white people cannot see “[h]ow ostensibly benign situations are actually fraught with racism, even danger, for black people” (“Black Like Her,” The New York Times Magazine, July 16, 2000, 55). 50. See Maria C. Lugones and Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice,’” Women and Values: Readings in Recent Feminist Philosophy, ed. Marilyn Pearsall (California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1986). 51. Mills, The Racial Contract, 75–76. In chapter 4 I discuss the relationship between visibility, hypervisibility, and invisibility. 52. Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 192. 53. Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance,  189. 54. Teresa de Lauretis, “Aesthetic and Feminist Theory: Rethinking Women’s Cinema,” New German Critique n. 34 (Winter 1985): 164. She cites Rich, 35. 55. Or as Alcoff summarizes the works of Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Gadamer, and Mead as, “perception not the mere reportage of objects and their features . . . serves as an orientation to the world, a background of experience that constitutes one’s capacities of discernment and observation” (Visible, 27). 56. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Great Britain: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1962), 57. 57. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 129. Author’s italics. 58. As Alcoff explains, Merleau-Ponty acknowledges “the fact that knowledge is always unfinished and incomplete, precisely because of the open-ended nature of experience and of meaning.” “Merleau-Ponty and Feminist Theory on Experience,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 258. 59. M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 60. 60. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, 67–68. See also Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 302. See also Weiss, who writes, “[i]n contrast to this familiar view of the horizon as providing closure to the visual field, Husserl, Gadamer, and Merleau-Ponty emphasize the open-ended nature of the horizon. All three depict the horizon not as the natural limit of vision but as the indispensable background against which the visible appears as such” (Refiguring the Ordinary [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008], 98–99).

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61. The first chapter of Weiss’s book Refiguring the Ordinary, “Context and Perspective,” brings a welcome discussion to the nuances in the relations among context, horizon, situation, and perspective. But the discussion appears preliminary. Some of the claims she makes I do not find wholly persuasive yet, such as that context is broader than horizon (21) or that context is portable (21). Weiss’s discussion informatively teases out some of the differences in the senses and meanings of these terms, but without a more fully developed discussion, the present discussion would not benefit significantly by including some of these distinctions. 62. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 205. The specific citation reads: “[t]he Gestalt is not a spatio-temporal individual, it is ready to integrate itself into a constellation that spans space and time—but it is not free in regard to space and time. .  .  .  It is a double ground of the lived.” Against the theory of qualia, Merleau-Ponty writes, “the visible of the world is not an envelope of quale, but what is between the qualia, a connective tissue of exterior and interior horizons” (Visible, 131). The editor explains that these lines were inserted by Merleau-Ponty. See also 148 and Phenomenology 209, 213. 63. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 71. See also Visible, 100. 64. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, xvii–xviii, 84, 137, 451. 65. Weiss, Refiguring, 18. Weiss continues, “Merleau-Ponty refers to the background for individual perception both as being perceptible and as being constituted out of a whole network of past experiences and future expectations that, on principle, are not a part of the sensory field at any given moment” (Refiguring, 18). 66. Within the Phenomenology, however, Merleau-Ponty over-emphasizes the role of consciousness in the makeup of the horizon. As such, even in his insightful idea of sedimentation, Merleau-Ponty mistakenly prioritizes the influence of thought. Explaining sedimentation, he writes, “there is a ‘world of thought,’ or a sediment left by our mental processes, which enables us to rely on our concepts and acquired judgments as we might on things there in front of us, presented globally, without there being any need for us to resynthesize them.” Although the notion of sedimentation beautifully attempts to depict the ways in which the horizon already possesses meanings, it still prioritizes the mind as the source of meanings (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 130). 67. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 237. 68. Françoise Dastur, “World, Flesh, Vision,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 38. 69. The difference here refers to the discussion in the introduction about Husserl’s endeavors at certainty. 70. Alcoff, Visible Identities, 95 71. There is a large body of work critical of Merleau-Ponty precisely due to his lack of treatment of the role of culture. I address these and other criticisms of Merleau-Ponty in chapter 4. 72. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 347. 73. As a result, Dillon defines sedimentation as “the settling of culture into things” (Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 101). I address body movement in chapter 3. 74. Husserl acknowledges a horizon of empathy: “that of [our] co-subjects, which can be opened up through direct and indirect commerce with the chain of others” (Weiss, Refiguring, 100). Husserl grants others influencing and leaving their impressions upon the horizon through their body movements; in this way, culture develops. 75. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 253. 76. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 88. See also 170. 77. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 99–100.



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78. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 57. 79. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 77. 80. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 215. 81. Galen A. Johnson, “Ontology and Painting: ‘Eye and Mind,’” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. ed. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 54. He quotes from Visible, 248. 82. Jacques Taminiaux appears to concur with this position in writing, “[t]he perceived entity would lose its perceptual density, its incarnated existence, and would cease to be perceived if the aspects that are presented by it did not announce other aspects, which are not yet offered to sight.” See his article, “The Thinker and the Painter,” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. ed. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 281. 83. I’m thinking of Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (New York: Penguin, 2003). 84. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences,” The Primacy of Perception, ed. and trans. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 16. 85. Veronique M. Foti, “Painting and the Re-orientation of Philosophical Thought in Merleau-Ponty,” Philosophy Today v. xxiv, n. 2/4 (Summer 1980): 115. I comment further on the narcissism of perception in chapter 4. Michael B. Smith writes, vision “precedes itself,” is “clairvoyant.” So, in its predictive element it focuses on that which is already familiar. See his article, “Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics,” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. ed. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 208. 86. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 226. Sean Dorrance Kelly explains, “[n]ormally we think of perception as a kind of point for point descriptive representation of the visual features of the world . . . to say something radically different from this, namely, that it is a part of my visual experience that my body is drawn to move, or, at any rate, that the context should change, in a certain way. These are inherently normative, rather than descriptive, features of visual experience. They don’t represent in some objective, determinate fashion the way the world is; they say something about how the world ought to be for me to see it better. In this way, Merleau-Ponty takes very seriously the idea that perception is a way of being involved with the world, not an objective, determinate way of recording it” (“Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty,” The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, eds. Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005]: 87). I do not completely agree with this reading especially because phenomenological versions of perception challenge clearly separating what the world “is.” But at least Kelly’s words distinguish phenomenological perception from correspondence versions of perceptions and the activity of perception. 87. Dastur gives an interesting summary of vision. She writes, “[w]hat the Cartesian analysis of vision does not see is that ‘vision is tele-vision, transcendence, crystallization of the impossible’: tele-vision in the sense that it ‘makes us simultaneously with others and the world in the most private aspects of our life’; transcendence because it discharges consciousness from its immanence; crystallization of the impossible since every visible is the union of incompossible aspects and the concretion of something ungraspable” (“World, Flesh, Vision,” 41. She cites from Visible, 273, and Signs, 16). 88. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 101. 89. I provide a more thorough account of the embodied subject in chapter 3. Here, I focus only on the role of the body in relation to perception.

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90. Alcoff, Visible, 96. See also 100. 91. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 41. 92. See Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 26. 93. Weiss, Refiguring, 101. 94. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 185. On this miracle of seeing the same objects in the world, Merleau-Ponty writes, “how my experience is related to the experience which others have of the same objects. . . . If I consider perception as simple sensations, they are private; they are mine alone. If I treat them as acts of the intellect, if perception is an inspection of the mind, and the perceived object an idea, then you and I are talking about the same world, and we have the right to communicate among ourselves because the world has become an ideal existence and is the same for all of us—just like the Pythagorean theorem. But neither of these two formulas accounts for our experience. . . . There is—and I know it very well if I become impatient with him—a kind of demand that what I see be seen by him also. . . . The thing imposes itself not as true for every intellect, but as real for every subject who is standing where I am” (“Primacy,” 17). 95. I speak more about this in chapter 4. 96. See Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 19, 30, 36, for just a few of the times that he uses this description. 97. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, “Introduction: The Value of Flesh: Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and the Modernism/Postmodernism Debate,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, ed. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 5. They cite from the Phenomenology, 67, 70, and 71. The term “experience error” is from Phenomenology, 5. The experience error mirrors the natural attitude. 98. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 62. 99. Merleau-Ponty argues against this possibility of thought thinking into eternity (see Phenomenology, 38). 100. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 7. 101. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 63. 102. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 64. 103. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, x–xi. 104. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 71. See also Visible, 12. 105. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 18. 106. Renaud Barbaras insists that things in the world are more than what man posits; objects transcend us. See his article “Perception and Movement: The End of the Metaphysical Approach,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 82. See also Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 68, 363; Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 191–92. See also Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 28. 107. Dastur, “World, Flesh, Vision,” 36. She quotes from Visible, 214. Barbaras concurs in writing, “Being as a pure presence, a ‘there is’ that as such is not yet a definite thing” (81). 108. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 169. See also Henri Maldiney, “Flesh and Verb in the Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000). He writes, “[a]mbiguity is as essential to Being as transcendence. This ambiguity is the sign of a divergence” (61). See also Weiss in her description of the indeterminacy in Husserl’s horizon. Weiss writes, “[i]ndeed, this very indeterminacy, an openness that guarantees what Derrida later called the ‘undecidability’ of meaning, while serving as the bane of most analytic philosophers’ existence insofar as it poses an impossible challenge to the Cartesian goal of attaining complete knowledge on truth



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concerning a particular phenomenon, I found to be an accurate and refreshing description of the reality of ordinary human experience” (Refiguring, 163). 109. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 12. 110. I address this temporality in greater detail in chapter 3. 111. Weiss, Refiguring, 27. 112. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 304. Barbaras writes, “[t]hus, strictly speaking, it is not because we are embodied consciousness that the perceived world is distant; it is rather because perceived being implies an essential distance that our experience is partly obscure, that is, embodied” (“Perception and Movement,” 82). I do not quite agree with Barbaras, especially because I do not believe in the need for this hierarchization, and I wish to maintain at least an equal role for the body. 113. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 238. See also Richard Wolin’s wonderful explanation of Merleau-Ponty giving up all suppositions of “epistemological transparency: that is, the idea that somehow our knowledge of things could ever be exhaustive, consummate, and pure. For it is the perennially situated nature of the knowing subject that mocks omniscience and suggests finitude as the true transcendental ground of cognition” (see his article, “Merleau-Ponty and the Birth of Weberian Marxism,” Praxis International, v. 5, n. 2 [July 1985]: 117. Wolin’s italics.) 114. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, viii. See also xi. Obviously, this is a position much discussed, especially in the works of feminists. 115. Jean Greisch, “‘In Praise of Philosophy,’ A Hermeneutical Rereading,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 107. 116. Merleau-Ponty distinguishes the difference between a bad ambiguity and a good ambiguity in an unpublished piece submitted to evaluate his candidacy for the chair of Sorbonne’s philosophy department. He writes, “a ‘bad ambiguity’ [is] a mixture of finitude and universality, of interiority and exteriority. But there is a ‘good ambiguity’ in the phenomenon of expression, a spontaneity which accomplishes what appeared to be impossible when we observed only the separate elements, a spontaneity which gathers together the plurality of monads, the past and the present, nature and culture into a single whole.” All ambiguity is not good; the ambiguity that makes possible openness, becoming, and change in place of certainty, clarity, and totality is not all immediately and entirely good. Good ambiguity does not simply retain disparate elements without any order but in a flux of movement makes meaningful the separate features. I would appreciate an elaboration of this tantalizing difference, but this is the only reference I could find (Merleau-Ponty, “An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His Work,” The Primacy of Perception, ed. and trans. James M. Edie [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964], 11). 117. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 45. See also 87. Perhaps the most famous case of the importance of becoming, at least in philosophy, revolves around the question of gaining knowledge. Merleau-Ponty summons one of philosophy’s seminal texts, the Meno, and contemplates again the famous passage where Meno struggles to understand how he comes to knowledge. Meno’s paradox is the paradox of knowledge formation. See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 371, where he cites the Meno, 80D: “‘How will you set about looking for that thing, the nature of which is totally unknown to you? Which, among the things you do not know, is the one which you propose to look for? And if by chance you should stumble upon it, how will you know that it is indeed that thing, since you are in ignorance of it?’” Merleau-Ponty evokes this example not because he agrees with Plato’s suggestion that knowledge acquisition is recollection,

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but precisely because he disagrees with Plato’s view of knowledge formation. Dillon cites this passage to begin his exploration of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. 118. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 91. 119. Or as Alcoff writes, “[h]orizons yield different conclusions, yet how can we claim that a ‘horizon’ is wrong?” (Visible, 97). 120. Alcoff, Visible, 91. 121. Alcoff, Visible, 95. She continues, “[t]he idea of a closed horizon, Gadamer says, is merely an ‘abstraction’” (Visible, 95). 122. Mills, The Racial Contract, 72. 123. Medina, Epistemology of Resistance,  42. With specific references to Hegel’s work, Medina writes, “the slave’s internalization of the master’s judgments and expectations. A crucial part of this mindset was the underestimation of one’s cognitive powers and abilities to the point of an utter lack of self-confidence and epistemic self-trust” (Medina, 41). 124. Medina,  Epistemology of Resistance,  60–61. But about these biases, Medina writes, “[a]lthough oppressed subjects can indeed fall victim to socially generated illusions, they often have more resources to undo these illusions, they have a richer (or more heterogeneous) experiential life that they can use to dismantle the accepted description of reality that rules the day” (Medina, 46). 125. Women of color’s biased internalization of racial stigma clearly exemplifies Miranda Fricker’s hermeneutical understanding of injustice as conveyed by Medina: “[h]ermeneutical injustices happen because ‘a collective hermeneutical gap prevents members of a group from making sense of an experience that is in their interest to render intelligible’” (Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 71. He cites Fricker 2007, 7). 126. Multiplicitous subjects are especially likely to experience what Medina explains, “the acute (and typically painful) awareness that there is an epistemic lacuna permeating the social context, a lacuna that the subject (and others like her or him) experiences but that others do not” (Epistemology of Resistance, 191). Of course, this leaves open the question of determining an adequate understanding of experience. Not all explanations of experience are acceptable, and ambiguity does not imply that any explanation of an experience suffices. The phenomenological framework provides the beginnings of an explanation, in its insistence on the value of different perspectives because they assist in coming to a better perception of the theme. Different perspectives encourage communication to promote a more accurate perception of the theme. Chapter 2 addresses experience further. 127. There are obvious disparities in that specific words and hence specific concepts do not exist in some languages, such as jouissance. But there are also structural differences such as the possibility of using nouns as verbs, or languages that do not utilize an alphabet. These variances in language stimulate the conceptual development of human beings. 128. Ortega has written about the difference between using a fork or a spoon when eating cake. As an Asian American, I wonder about whether slurping when drinking noodle soup is good manners or bad manners. 129. Speculations exist about cultures that prioritize family values such as Latin Americans and Asian Americans, versus cultures that prioritize work such as the United States. Europeans have accused the United States as giving too much precedence to work; consider the differences in vacation times. 130. This position parallels Alcoff ’s concerns regarding a pluritopic hermeneutic, “[t]he complexity, inevitable cultural hybridity, and multiplicity of the contemporary self requires what Raimundo Panikkar, Enrique Dussel, and Walter Mignolo call a pluritopic, rather than



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monotopic, hermeneutic. As Mignolo and others have pointed out, the Western tradition of hermeneutics is itself monotopic and monologic; it presupposes a single coherent tradition that is dynamic through history but unchallenged by alternative horizons competing in a given space or time frame. This is of course key to colonial ideology as well as patriarchal conceit” (Visible, 124). 131. And Alcoff ’s clarification of a pluritopic hermeneutics. 132. Chapter 2 addresses this question about epistemic advantage of the oppressed specifically by focusing on experiences. 133. Medina, Epistemology of Resistance,  45. Within his framework that insists on the epistemic blind spots of people in privileged positions and epistemic advantages of the marginalized, Medina insists, “[m]y argument here is that the experience of being hermeneutically disadvantaged itself can become an epistemic advantage” (Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 73). He continues, “[e]ven before the conceptual tools to repair the collective insensitivity are developed, hermeneutically marginalized subjects are better positioned to detect the hermeneutical gaps and to offer epistemic resistance” (Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 75). 134. The specific quote reads, “open-mindedness. Oppressed subjects tend to feel the need of being more attentive to the perspectives of others. They have no option but to acknowledge, respect, and (to some extent) inhabit alternative perspectives, in particular the perspective of the dominant other(s). They are often encouraged and typically even forced to see reality not only through their own eyes, but also through the eyes of others whose perspectives and social locations matter more” (Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 44). 135. Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 73. 136. I am aware of the epistemic missteps of essentializing an identity group. Referring to Alison Wylie’s work, Medina writes, “we cannot assume that all those who occupy marginalized locations that render them invisible automatically enjoy these epistemic advantages” (Medina, Epistemology of Resistance,  191). For this is standpoint theory’s caution: “against essentializing standpoints by relying on one-sided definitions of social groups and social locations and thus homogenizing the diverse and heterogeneous experiences that people can have within them” (Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 191, footnote 1).

2 The Phenomenological Structure of Experience The Ambiguity of Intersectionality for a Group Identity

Much of the discussions and contestations about the workings of race reference the different experiences of living as racialized subjects. Understanding the persistence of race and sex as unconscious, unintentional, and socially embedded bias requires understanding the relevance of experience. Yet experience’s epistemic significance has been contested. This chapter’s primary aim is to defend references to experience for knowledge claims. Two of the most well-known arguments in regard to experience occur between the Hegelian dialectic and the poststructural frameworks. The Hegelian dialectic, which characterizes two separable situations between the oppressors and the oppressed, conceptualizes experience as distinguishable among these group members within a society. The distinction is epistemically significant. Alternatively, the poststructural framework—particularly in Joan Scott’s work—questions the epistemological value of experience in-itself. Experience itself only ensues within and through socially constructed, ideological frameworks. Immediate, direct, “actual,” experience, as pure access to the circumstances of the world remains elusive. I lean towards the dialectic framework because references to experience valuably inform philosophy of race and feminist philosophy. But I cannot deny the poststructuralists’ analysis regarding the influences of conceptual frameworks in experience. To interrupt and complicate this debate, I center this question about the epistemic value of experience around women of color, specifically the idea of intersectionality. The concept of intersectionality aims to depict the complex experience of both race and sex. Although the concept itself faces some challenges, I center on this concept because it captures the centrality and the complexity of experience. As subjects with intersectional identities, women of color have noticed that their experiences do not align with dominant meanings, narratives, and ideological frameworks.1 Women of color must both acknowledge intragroup heterogeneity and recognize and develop 57

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intergroup homogeneity or as Patricia Hill Collins advocates, heterogenous commonality. Herein lies this chapter’s second goal—to advocate for the epistemic value of women of color’s experiences. The density of women of color’s identity that encourages, if not demands, recognizing heterogenous commonality sets the conditions for epistemic insights. Seeing heterogenous commonality promotes the ability to detect themes, networks, and connections for epistemic insights. Challenging singleaxis, reductively simplified understandings of experience, and instead broadening to intersectional identities, illuminates why racialized group identities refer to experience for knowledge claims, including epistemic insights. In the hopes of supporting the epistemic value of personal experiences, especially women of color’s experiences, this chapter explores the ontological structure of experience through the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.2 Phenomenology has been summarily likened to the study of experience. Without accepting this reductive characterization, phenomenology’s attention to experience aligns with much of the investigations in philosophy of race. Between the ambivalence in the dialectic and poststructural frameworks regarding the epistemological value of experience, the phenomenological understanding of the ontological structure of experience depicts the ambiguous, open structure of experience—that admits nonidentity. This chapter explores three distances in the structure of experience: (1) between the subject and the world; (2) between undergoing and reflecting upon the experience; and (3) between experience and language. In admitting these three distances, phenomenology denies that certainty or universality characterize the structure of experience. The phenomenological framework understands experience in its complexity, ultimately supporting references to experience especially for intersectional identities. For these distances are thicker/denser for women of color and the density both contributes to recognizing intergroup identities and intragroup differences, or heterogenous commonality. Experience has epistemic value, an epistemic value that includes human beings’ existential powers.

BETWEEN SUPPORTING AND QUESTIONING THE EPISTEMIC VALUE OF EXPERIENCE Let me admit that this section draws very broad strokes for the sake of outlining the parameters of the discussion. It sounds a bit like a literature review; but I aim to set the parameters. It is brief but relevant. Experience Provides Epistemic Value A resounding amount of work in the humanities and social sciences supports the position that experience contributes to knowledge. Autobiographical narratives, including slave narratives or the more recent genre of memoirs, utilize the sharing and confessing of personal experiences. These autobiographical publications relay the life



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experiences of “exceptional” subjects. When these autobiographical accounts center on minority subjects, publishing houses consider these subjects as “exceptional” because they do not represent the norm or the majority. They portray the lives of subjects usually unseen, unknown, and without a previous place in history—who, in a word, depict difference. As such, autobiographical narratives serve as the entryway for racialized and/or gendered voices to disrupt grand narratives that blanket and suffocate difference.3 The confessional form of autobiographical narratives provides evidence on the vastly different circumstances of life within any one society. Clearly, autobiographical narratives play a pivotal role for philosophy of race. Consistent with autobiographical narratives, Hegelian philosophical frameworks advocate the epistemic value of experience. Upon the premise that society has always been historically divided into the oppressed and the oppressors, in an insightful and surprising twist, G. W. F. Hegel argues that the oppressed groups ultimately have epistemological advantage over the oppressors, because the experience of being oppressed necessitates knowing the conditions of both the oppressor and the oppressed. The oppressed envisages the functionings of society as a whole. At minimum, Hegel clearly outlines that within a society, experience can vary so greatly as to be distinguishable and that such division is epistemically relevant.4 Two very well-known instantiations of Hegel’s theoretical framework are Marxist theory and feminist standpoint theory.5 Here I consider the feminist standpoint theory, to highlight a particular feature. Feminist theorists have demonstrated that feminist consciousness forms from recognizing the common features of women’s experiences that are distinguishable from men’s experiences and signify the social structure. Through the concept of standpoint theory, feminist theorist Sandra Harding, and others, insist that experience serves as a source of knowledge that can disrupt the existing ideologies in society. She writes, “[f ]or a position to count as a standpoint . . . for the importance of listening to women tell us about their lives and experiences, we must insist on an objective location—‘women’s lives’—as the place from which feminist research should begin.”6 For Hegel, the distinct positions of master and slave divides society. Within feminist theory, demarcating the boundary conditions for membership within the identity of “woman” proves challenging. Contestations over the defining features or cohesiveness of the identity of “woman” as distinguishable mark the history of feminist theory. Harding elaborates that situated knowledge does not originate from one or even a few experiences, but from a series, a culmination, a history of experiences from the objective standpoint of women’s lives. Finally, Harding carefully explains that the standpoint of women designates not only a location, but also an achievement of political awareness and advocacy.7 The achievement occurs on the individual level, yet this individual achievement ultimately contributes to forming a group. As an achievement all women do not automatically gain feminist standpoint insights—the epistemic advantage that Hegel attributes to the oppressed. This clarification from within feminist standpoint theory seems correct and it challenges Hegel’s suggestion that all the oppressed possess

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epistemic advantage over the oppressors. I find unconvincing that all the oppressed gain insight into the workings of society, holistically, through the self-fulfillment gained in reflection of their worth in their work. Rather, I find more persuasive that some of the oppressed achieve epistemic advantage, but not all, consistent with feminist standpoint theory. Interestingly, although political interest frames the standpoint, the standpoint represents an increase in objectivity, including epistemic objectivity. Lynn Hankinson Nelson explains that for Harding, the specific experiences of politically active women constitute a standpoint in society that necessarily provides more objectivity than the situations of the oppressors, in this case the standpoint of male lives.8 Harding insists political motivation does not obfuscate objectivity. Feminist standpoint theory has faced criticisms and developed. Nevertheless, among the various instantiations of standpoint theory, the central point remains that one’s situation within a society forms one’s experiences and develops into distinct understandings of the world—understandings that can challenge dominant social norms. Autobiographical narratives and the Hegelian framework rely upon experience, trusting that experience reveals, informs, and generally supports epistemic claims. Such a position coheres with many of the insights from racialized subjects about oppression based on the experiences of race. Historically racialized subjects relied precisely on their experiences to reveal injustice. In the present, in our so-called postcolonial period, people reference precisely their personal experiences to illustrate that race continues to be significant. Clearly, citing experience serves as an important methodology for racialized subjects and for philosophy of race. Experience Does Not Provide Epistemic Value Despite experience’s important history in philosophy of race and feminist theory, poststructuralist theory raises one of the most devastating criticisms again referencing experience as a reliable source of knowledge. Joan Scott’s article, “The Evidence of Experience,” best articulates the poststructural argument against the citations of experience. Scott begins by clarifying historians’ (her field of expertise) attitudes toward evidence. Historians work with the inconclusiveness of all claims to evidentiary status for two reasons: (1) following Thomas Kuhn’s logic, a theoretical narrative determines the evidential status of facts, including the evidential status of experience; and (2) evidence only functions as pure evidence if based “on a referential notion of evidence which denies that it is anything but a reflection of the real.”9 In other words, “pure” experience that provides direct evidence about the real world does not exist. Rather, theory defines the parameters to conceptualize experience and what and how experience can serve as evidence. Scott’s description of the historians’ understanding of evidence depicts the problems of correspondence theories of knowledge; Scott inadvertently challenges correspondence theories of knowledge, the notion that knowledge merely represents the world.



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Because of this necessarily selective status of facts and evidence, Scott suspiciously regards narratives that begin and end with experiences as evidence. Scott refers specifically to the use of autobiographical narratives as historical accounts of populations and identities omitted from history, much like Samuel Delany’s book The Motion of Light in Water, which describes gay life in New York City’s East Village in the 1940s. She recognizes the importance of such biographies to correct past histories that rendered minority identities invisible—such as gay men of color. Yet Scott argues that many of these recent autobiographical accounts that aim to rectify the past rely upon treating experience as evidence that simply and directly reveals the world. She emphasizes that these autobiographical accounts unquestioningly employ the subject’s experiences to disrupt the dominant hegemonic narratives of social history without realizing that theory establishes evidential status.10 Scott carefully points out that these autobiographical accounts apply the same mistaken methodology as the original histories, which made necessary the autobiographical histories of oppressed peoples.11 Both histories selectively regulate evidence; both propose or discard the evidence of experience based only on whether it promotes the current narrative. Against such problematic uses of experience as evidence, Scott advocates discourse constructs all experiences; she “refuse[s] a separation between ‘experience’ and language and . . . insist[s] on the productive quality of discourse. Subjects are constituted discursively.”12 Language constrains and structures our experiences. Scott concludes, “[e]xperience is at once always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted. . . . Experience is . . . not the origin of our explanation, but that which we want to explain.”13 Experience has a tenuous relationship to knowledge. Hence although sharing experiences first formed feminist and race consciousness, Scott argues that experience cannot found knowledge. The poststructural framework (as articulated through Scott’s work) contests the epistemic value of pure references to experience. The poststructural framework contends that discourse, theories, and ideologies frame, contextualize, and structure experiences of life, subjects, and society. Recognizing just how thoroughly ideas saturate being-in-the-world, poststructuralist frameworks question any allusions to experience as simply, immediately, and directly accessing the world. Scott’s conclusions challenge autobiographical narratives and epistemic claims that rely on Hegel’s philosophy. Clearly this position contests philosophy of race and feminist theory’s reliance on the methodology of citing personal experiences. This is a long-standing debate between the Hegelians and the poststructuralists. I briefly recount this debate because I believe this debate has not been settled. The Hegelian position on the distinguishable divided experiences of society as epistemically significant is persuasive. But considering the phenomenological understanding of the experience error, the poststructuralist position on the social construction of experience especially through discourse is persuasive as well. The epistemic significance of experience still needs attention and elaboration. For philosophy of race, especially

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for women of color, I consider pivotal, somehow defending the epistemic relevance of experience.

INTERSECTIONAL SUBJECTS Within this discussion about experience’s role in knowledge claims, let me examine the experiences of women of color by addressing the notion of intersectionality. Arguably women of color’s experiences are especially complex and distinct. Chapter 1 centers on women of color through the idea of multiplicitous subjects. To further reflect on the open and ambiguous experiences of both racism and sexism, within this chapter, I focus specifically on the notion of intersectionality, for after all, as Mariana Ortega insists, multiplicitous subjects are intersectional. The relatively recent notion of multiplicitous subjects center around Ortega’s and Maria Lugones’s work. I appreciate the concept because of its emphasis on the subjectivity of women of color as we negotiate the complexity of our multiple but unified/whole identity. The concept of intersectionality has a much longer history and centers on how society focuses on identity features to serve as tools of oppression. As such the two concepts—multiplicitous identities and intersectionality—subtly highlight different aspects of the lives of women of color. The notion of intersectionality has undergone much discussion—a good indicator of the complexity and importance of the idea. The idea attends to the difficulty of conveying the distinct experiences of women of color. Explaining the value of the notion of intersectionality, Vivian May writes that “[d]rawing on knowledge gained from marginalization, its theoretical contours include the notion that social location and the lived body are epistemically significant—particularly when contextualized in relation to institutional practices.”14 Starting from the basis of women’s lives, much like feminist standpoint theory (and Hegelian theories), “[i]t seeks epistemic and political recognition of different ways of knowing and living and envisions changed social relations via coalitional dynamics rather than notions of sameness underlying liberal notions of equality.”15 In this regard, in the distinctness of the experiences of women of color, beginning from their lives directly addresses the question of the epistemic value of experience. All women of color do not undergo uniformly the same experiences, but the experiences may be identifiably distinct in their complexity. Because of such distinct complexity, the notion of intersectionality relies on references to experience, more so than those who experience single-axis oppression of only gender, race, or class.16 The notion of intersectionality is most commonly attributed to the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, but others have proposed the notion.17 Crenshaw’s deployment is memorable because it highlights the very real dangers for women of color of domestic violence and rape. Serious social, economic, and physical harms result from neglecting the intersectionality of racism and sexism. Crenshaw’s work explains that neglecting the



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experiences of women of color has resulted in physical and sexual violence upon them. Regarding instances when attending to only racism harmed women of color, Crenshaw elaborates a history where communities of color’s apprehension about publicizing the existence of domestic violence within their communities outweighed the urgency of assisting women of color experiencing domestic violence. From fear of perpetuating negative stereotypes, communities of color strategically let the concerns of racial stigma supersede the safety of women of color. Crenshaw writes, “[t]his account sharply illustrates how women of color can be erased by the strategic silences of antiracism and feminism.”18 Considering the women of color who actually die from domestic violence, Crenshaw’s mention of the disappearance of women of color must be taken literally. Alternatively, focusing on only feminist concerns harmed women of color. The discourse of domestic violence proclaimed its universality, that all women are subject to violence regardless of income and race. Only this inclusive language for identifying domestic violence victims passed legislation for addressing domestic violence. This implies that legislators have been aware of the existence of domestic violence within communities of color for some time, yet these communities’ pain, alone, did not warrant national attention. Apparently, communities of color are not real or equal citizens of the United States, deserving of state resources. Only by including white women as victims of domestic violence, women of color who experience domestic violence gained state protection, albeit indirectly.19 But reflective of this strategy in the passage of the bill, the enactment of the bill was not sensitive to the specific needs of women of color. The placement of shelters and language ability were not considered in the services. These two examples from Crenshaw feature the dangers of focusing on just one oppression, racism in the first, and sexism in the second, that causes the very real neglect and harm to women of color. The examples underscore the difficulty of epistemically understanding how the two oppressions interact. Better understanding of the interactions of the two can illuminate how too much of a focus on one oppression can reinforce the other. In distinction from Crenshaw’s older and initial examples which illustrate the coincidental repercussions from not foreseeing the intersections between racism and sexism, the following more recent examples demonstrate the strategic positioning of one oppression against the other promoting intergroup competition. Yen Le Espiritu explains the history in which Asian American women’s advancements followed from the discrimination of Asian American men. She writes, “the racialized exploitation of Asian American men has historically been the context for the entry of Asian American women into the labor force.”20 Within the context of the racist de-masculinization of Asian American men, Asian American women gained feminist advances. In this case, proliferating racism served as an entryway for promoting feminist concerns. Sumi K. Cho explains further that, historically, Asian American women have been competitively situated against white women and African American women. She writes, “the objectified gender stereotype also assumes a model minority function

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as Asian Pacific women are deployed to ‘discipline’ white women, just as Asian Pacific Americans in general are used against their ‘nonmodel’ counterparts, African Americans.”21 Cho’s work illustrates the competitive positioning of women of color. Racism ultimately undercuts feminist possibilities by challenging coalition building among women of color and women in general. As Aimé Carillo Rowe’s words summarize, “the ‘race to innocence,’ a politics based in a hierarchy of oppression, compels us to invest in our particular marginality through the erasure of our complicity in oppressing others.”22 Without awareness of the intersectionality of oppressions, those who experience one oppression can be positioned in contrast and in competition against those who experience other oppressions, overlooking Maria Lugones’s analysis of the intermeshedness of oppression ↔ oppressed conditions. Unlike these above examples which attend to one identity feature, the following examples illustrate how the intersecting oppressions reinforce each other. Robin M. James elaborates several instances of obfuscation of the intersectionality of the two oppressions to exploit them more successfully. James quotes Rey Chow who writes, “‘feminization in its avant-garde form becomes racial power’ . . . by displacing gender oppression onto racial oppression.”23 Normalizations and idealizations about gender historically have been evoked to justify a whole range of racist practices. Consider the circulation of defeminized ideas of black women to justify their slavery and in contrast disseminating ideas of white women’s fragility to rationalize their prohibition from participation in public life. Or consider Gayatri Spivak’s work explaining the justification of colonization in the name of protecting Third World women.24 Traci L. West quotes Homa Hoodfar, “‘Muslim feminists have often asked, must racism be used to fight sexism?’”25 Gender normalization hides racial oppression; sexism reinforces racism. Dominant groups do not only activate these strategic intersectional uses of racism and sexism that reinforce each other. Members of marginalized groups—perhaps because of the intermeshedness of the oppressor ↔ oppressed condition—slip into employing such strategies as well. Camisha Russell writes that “Collins briefly traces the history of this problematic of black gender norms, identifying it in the work of both W. E. B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier, who considered deficient gender ideology among African Americans a factor in, but not the primary cause of, African American poverty and political powerlessness.”26 Two prominent black men—coherent with narratives from dominant white communities—evoke the sexist ideas of improper female gender behavior as explanations for the continual economically disadvantageous circumstances within black communities. Aside from these historical examples, in the present day, women of color continue to internalize visions of femininity that ultimately reinforce racial stigmas.27 White versions of normalized femininity, aesthetic sensibilities such as blonde hair or blue eyes, or the promotion of certain behaviors as feminine even though such behaviors do not promote women’s well-being (such as discouraging cultivating physical strength)—even as they oppress white women, oppress women of color with visions of femininity unattainable for women of color. Because after all, normalized femininity is racialized.



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Clearly, we need a better understanding of intersectional identity features to avoid exercising intersectional tools of oppression. Perhaps because of the importance of the idea of intersectionality, it faces many criticisms. I list three of the more prescient criticisms here.28 One well-known criticism does not apply. Ortega explains that “Hames-Garcia and Lugones . . . are critical of the notion of intersectionality. . . . [They argue that the notion of intersectionality] assume[s] the separation of the different axes of oppression. Consequently, they opt for the intermeshedness and blending of social identities to emphasize that the axes of oppression are to be understood as mutually constituted.”29 Michael HamesGarcia and Lugones insist that sexism and racism are inseparable. Similarly, Helen Ngo explains through Alia Al-Saji’s work, a temporal concern: “intersectionality can be problematic insofar as it can operate on the assumption that there already exists relatively stable axes of race and gender (or any other social identities) which converge or ‘intersect’ when a person falls concurrently within both categories.”30 Al-Saji carefully posits not only the melding of sexism and racism, but also the temporality of the periods of welded and separate expressions. Acknowledging these first two criticisms, let me submit that Crenshaw never conceived the notion of race and sex as separate entities. Anna Carastathis quotes Crenshaw from her initial introduction, “‘in mapping the intersections of race and gender, the concept does engage dominant assumptions that race and gender are essentially separate categories. By tracing the categories to their intersections, I hope to suggest a methodology that will ultimately disrupt the tendencies to see race and gender as exclusive or separable.’”31 In other words, Crenshaw predicts Hames-Garcia, Lugones, and Al-Saji’s concern about recognizing the temporal intermeshedness between race and gender. Clearly Crenshaw acknowledges the continuous relation between the two. Collins defends the possibilities of the notion of intersectionality even as she articulates its limitations. Collins conveys two problems with intersectionality. First, the notion of intersectionality promotes thinking about all oppressions as equivalent. She explains, “oppression talk obscures actual unjust power relations. . . . Although this approach is valid as a heuristic device, treating race, class, and gender as if their intersection produces equivalent results for all oppressed groups obscures differences in how race, class, and gender are hierarchically organized, as well as the differential effects of intersecting systems of power on diverse groups of people.”32 Those familiar with Collins’s work regarding the specificity of organizing principles probably know why I do not contest this position; this will become clear. So here, I focus on Collins’s second concern: she writes, “[i]ntersectionality works better as a substantive theory (one aimed at developing principles that can be proved true or false) when applied to individual-level behavior than when documenting group experiences.”33 As Anika Mann describes it, “[t]he problematic stems in part because intersectionality has the potential to imbue individualism within group analyses.”34 Looking more closely at this latter critique from Collins, in its several re-articulations, there are two different ways to read Collins’s second point: (1) a concern for essentialism,

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in that championing an individual’s experiences does not necessarily speak to the experiences of the identity group as a whole. As Diane Perpich writes, “Collins argues, ‘whereas breaking silence within an identity politics grounded in concrete experiences has merit for individuals, as a group politic it contains the seeds of its own limitation.’”35 Collins’s second point may also speak to the difficulties of intersectionality as a theoretical or political strategy. Turning to the first reading of Collins’s second argument, this problem of individualism imbuing group analysis is really a concern about essentialism, or regarding any one person, intersectionally identified, as representative of the group. If my reading is correct, the problem of essentialism does not uniquely circumscribe intersectional identity groups. After all, the difficulty of avoiding essentializing the members of any group identity persists within the identity group of African American men or white women—even within single-axis identifiers. For the concern of eschewing essentialism centers on recognizing differences among the members of a group identity, and admitting the prevalence of individual experiences among the members of the group.36 Hence Collins’s concern that the idea of intersectionality does not well “document” group experience demonstrates the difficulty of theorizing group experiences in general, whether about single-axis identifying groups, as well as this more specific and more complex identity group, women of color, multiplicitous subjects, who experience the complex expressions of at least two means of oppressions. The concern about individualism and essentialism regarding groups centers on locating patterns of oppression without claiming all the members undergo similar experiences and come to similar epistemic conclusions. For this reason, individuals cannot be upheld as representative of the group. As such, Ortega and Cristina Beltran remind us that all marginalized individuals do not develop political awareness. Ortega writes, “[l]iminality is not a sufficient condition for liberation. . . . We are already familiar with the pitfalls of early standpoint theories that in effect essentialize the marginalized and reify their epistemic privilege.”37 In the same regard, members of the group identity of whites are also internally heterogenous. Ortega and Beltran concede that “a point of view from ‘the first world’ does not unquestionably point to privilege.”38 Nevertheless, while acknowledging the dangers of essentialism in this discussion about experience’s relation to knowledge, portraying the distinct experience of intersectionality and some means of referring to group experience is important. Turning to my second possible reading of Collins’s second argument, about the difficulties of references to intersectionality as a theoretical or political strategy, let me initially forward Audre Lorde’s words here. She wrote a while ago about identity groups who have been historically maligned, “advancement is not simply about individual success. It also involves collective uplift and solidarity.”39 Lorde illuminates, so well, that for oppressed groups, individual fate is linked to the group fate. Hence although any single individual is not completely representative of the group, nevertheless, for minority subjects our individual fates are integrally secured to our group identity. Marginalized identity groups cannot escape racial stigmas individually; the individual situation is always tangled with the group. Conceptualizing groups is



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necessary. Ortega’s words help here; she recognizes the shared and different experiences among members of one’s identity groups. She writes, [m]y life and the lives of others are always intertwined . . . identity-in-process and by both positionality and relationality.  .  .  . I hold a contextualist view of identity. .  .  .  I propose that we understand the multiplicitous self as capable of having a coalitional politics that is attuned to multiplicity, difference, and the intersectional or intermeshed aspects between race, class, sexuality, gender, ability, nationality, and other categories. This coalitional politics is about being/belonging or about identifications with others with whom I share identity markers, but it is also about becoming or the possibility of being transformed through my interactions with others.40

I appreciate Ortega’s words for envisioning an understanding of groups as fluid; by comprehending our unavoidable linked fate to our group identity, through participating in forming our group identity. Imagining a fluid understanding of groups, not a rigid understanding, may prove to be helpful with Collins’s concern about the notion of intersectionality serving as a theoretical or a political tool. In emphasizing a contextualist understanding of identity, Ortega features different aspects of any individual identity becoming salient in sundry contexts. Although essentialism and not upholding any one individual as representative of the whole group is a concern, minority subjects must contend with their group identity. Recall Linda Martin Alcoff ’s words here, “[o]ur relational properties can be fundamental to who we are when they have causal determinacy over our epistemic and political orientations to the world—what we notice, what we care about—but also when they profoundly affect how we are seen and interacted with by others.”41 Let me be clear, I want to keep in mind Collins’s caution that all groups do not have the same organizing principles. She writes, “[a]lthough race and gender both mark the body in similar (but not identical) ways, in the United States they are organized in social relations quite differently. Race-class intersections operate primarily through distancing strategies associated with racial and economic segregation. Groups remain separated from one another and do not see themselves as sharing common interests.”42 Collins continues, “[i]n contrast, gender is organized via inclusionary strategies. . . . Women are encouraged to develop a commonality of interest with men.”43 Collins brilliantly highlights the disparity in the functioning of group identities. Hence even while diagnosing the fluidity of groups and the contextualist circumstances for activating some intertwined and intermeshed version of at least two if not more group identities, this does not intimate that all group identities follow similar organizing principles. Even as I follow the position that marginalized subjects have linked fates with their group identities, individual experiences require appreciation. Lupe Davidson writes in a footnote, “[t]his middle ground is staked, for example, by Barbara Christian who writes, ‘For although the idea that there is a shared experience between AfricanAmerican women’s history and the reality of African-American women’s lives is now being challenged, my experience is that we have both a collective life as well as

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individual variations that are ours and ours alone. That both these ideas are true does not mean that either is not true.”44 Clearly, the unique value of individual experience and the linked fate of minority subjects with their group identities is a fragile balance to maintain. Within this fragile balance, women of color need to build coalitions across identity groups. For women of color’s identity groups are intermeshed, intertwined with intersectional identifying features, within the United States. It includes Asian American women, Native American women, Latina women, and African American women. And within these categories, a multitude of interesting combinations proliferate. For example, Asian American women vary distinctively between East Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Pacific Islander women.45 Of course, I can further elaborate distinctions within each of these smaller groups regarding class, sexuality, ability, etc. Within this wide umbrella as women of color, not only is there a fine balance between individual experiences and one’s immediate group identity, but women of color must endeavor towards intragroup cooperation and coalition building. The identity group is inherently fluid as multiplicitous, intermeshed, and intersectional. Internal to the group identity of women of color is the necessity of coalition building across identity groups. Clearly women of color rely upon internal intragroup coalition building, Here in recognizing the internal heterogeneity and the need for coalition building within the identity group, women of color, Collins forwards a notion of “heterogeneous commonality.” Regarding African American women, Collins writes, [s]hared group location is better characterized by viewing Black women’s social location as one of a heterogeneous commonality embedded in social relations of intersectionality. Despite heterogeneity among African American women that accompanies such intersections, differences in Black women’s experiences generated by differences of age, sexual orientation, region of the country, urban or rural residence, color, hair texture, and the like theoretically can all be accommodated within the concept of a shared standpoint.46

Carastathis applies Collins’s work on conceptualizing groups as a heterogeneous commonality onto the coalition building among Latin American lesbian women. Carastathis argues, “conceptualizing identities as coalitions—as internally heterogeneous, complex unities constituted by their internal differences and dissonances and by internal as well as external relations of power—enables us to form effective political alliances that cross existing identity categories and to pursue a liberatory politics of interconnection.”47 Collins, Carastathis, and Ortega forward recognizing the internal heterogeneity as a bridge to think about women of color’s relations. Carastathis more specifically writes, “if identity categories are coalitions—constituted by internal differences as much as by commonalities—then this changes how we think about the political task of coalitional organizing. The emphasis shifts from forming coalitions across group differences to recognizing that groups are already internally heterogeneous.”48 For after all, the process of determining what is common and what is different relies upon our focus, our project at hand. I wrote in an



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earlier article, “membership in a group has been metonymically conditioned; groups may prioritize certain group features, and de-emphasize or not accept other features. .  .  .  [There are] difficulties of determining which identities and which differences matter at any one time—for these decisions guide the projects of the group. Because of the malleability of delineating differences depending on the project at hand and the current circumstances, the question of which differences matter and do not matter remains up for negotiation.”49 Internal heterogeneity or heterogenous commonality can serve as a framework to conceptualize intragroup heterogeneity—the definition of the identity group, women of color. Here, let me pause and point out that recognizing heterogenous commonality in the identity of “women of color” precisely fits with my reasons for positing in the introduction of this book that the identity “women of color” is phenomenal, much like race. As a socially produced meaning complex, with an unclear unifying core and boundary, in its diversity and unity, and in its fluidity, the identity “women of color” is phenomenal. For this reason, in the complexity of intersectional identifying features, acknowledging our heterogenous commonality facilitates coalition building toward a future political solidarity. I want to be careful here. Because experience of one marginality does not guarantee understanding experience of another marginal position, recall Collins’s insight about the different organizing principles between race and class as distinctive from sex. And let me add Jose Medina’s words here, “a heightened sensitivity with respect to one kind of insensitivity does not at all guarantee any special sensitivity with respect to other forms of insensitivity. In other words, what is learned in one context of injustice or because of certain experiences of oppression should not be assumed to be immediately transferable to other contexts of experiences of oppression.”50 How to attend to the idea of internal heterogeneity or heterogenous commonality while conceptualizing group identity, and keep in mind each group’s different organizing strategies? Keeping in mind these cautions, let me at least conclude that the problem of essentialism is not unique to women of color and intersectional identities; the problem of essentialism persists with any group identity. Group identity, structurally, inherently, has commonalities and differences in the fluidity of prioritizing any one individual and group features—what Carastathis, May, and Ortega describe as coalition building. The question of which features to emphasize and which features to de-emphasize depend on the project at hand, whether it is political, to change society, for community building, or for personal survival.51

EXPERIENCE AS PHENOMENA Returning to this discussion about the epistemic value of experience, focusing this discussion on women of color, particularly through the notion of intersectionality, does not readily resolve the debate about the role of experience in epistemic claims. Subjects with intersectional identities draw upon experience for knowledge claims

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especially because the prevailing knowledge frameworks do not wholly or accurately reflect their experiences. But centering on intersectional identities does not settle the debate regarding the role of experience in relation to knowledge. If anything, attention to subjects with intersectional identities further complicates this discussion because clearly experiences do not reveal clear, explicit messages. Intersectional experiences challenge direct or immediate knowledge claims because of the ambiguity circumscribing which identity features or perhaps, what percentage of the identity features, motivated an experience and the meaning of such an experience. In this regard, intersectional experiences affirm Scott’s position that experience needs explanation. But the meaning does not exist within the already present knowledge systems. Let me turn to the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. A phenomenology of experience avoids the impasse between foundational epistemic references to experience and unraveling the epistemic frameworks constructing experience, to better understand intersectional experience. Chapter 1 explains perception as phenomenal; the present chapter analyzes experience as phenomenal.52 Merleau-Ponty defines understanding experience as the philosophical problem par excellence. He writes, “[p]hilosophy’s task is to reinstate [truth] in the private field of experience from which it arises and elucidates its origin.”53 Because Merleau-Ponty expresses such high regard for understanding experience, perhaps his phenomenology may clarify the epistemic value of experience in its complexity while still respecting its individualistic and common features. The extreme positions about the epistemic worth of experience may have arisen because both positions approach experience as thing-like—stable and hence knowable with certitude.54 In contrast, phenomenology theorizes the ambiguity of experience, the ambiguous quality of experience as both unique and shared. Merleau-Ponty writes, “[i]t is just as sure that the relation between a thought and its object, between the cogito and the cogitatum, contains neither the whole nor even the essential of our commerce with the world and that we have to situate that relation back within a more muted relationship with the world, within an initiation into the world upon which it rests.”55 Experience is not reducible to simply the naturalistic world or to purely the ideas of man; experience ambiguously relates these two.56 The Ontology of Experience To discern the epistemic value of experience, a phenomenology of experience aims to depict experience in-itself. I see three constituent parts of experience: (1) the world in its materiality and its meaning-structures, (2) subjects, and (3) the temporality of all three features.57 In turning to the first feature of experience, phenomenology conceptualizes the world by denying the possibility of separating or delineating the materiality of the world and its meaning-structures, its ideologies, or its discursive structure. Phenomenology argues the impossibility of experiencing solely nature or solely culture. As explained in chapter 1, human beings’ actual experiences of the world never



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separate the material and the meaning-structures of the world.58 To separate the world into matter and ideas commits the experience error. The experience error is belief in the certainty of complete perception of the object; only by separating nature and culture and withholding all one’s intentions can one claim complete experience of a material object in the world.59 In place of conceiving experience of the world as reducible separately to either matter or ideas, Merleau-Ponty writes, “[t]he task for us is to conceive, between the linguistic, perceptual and motor contents and the form given to them or the symbolic function which breathes life into them, a relationship which shall be neither the reduction of form to content, nor the subsuming of content under an autonomous form.”60 Human beings ambiguously experience the physical and the cultural world. This ambiguity defines the human condition of being-in-the-world. Subjects constitute the second feature of experience. The subject here ambiguously refers to oneself as the subject and other human beings as subjects. As is well known, subjects within Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology are embodied. Merleau-Ponty conceives subjectivity as irreducible to the physicality of the body or to the abilities of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty writes that “[m]an taken as a concrete being is not a psyche joined to an organism, but the movement to and fro of existence which at one time allows itself to take corporeal form and at others moves towards personal acts.”61 This is not surprising, as Alcoff writes, “Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment provides a nondeterminist, nontransparent account of experience. Experiences matter, but their meaning for us is both ambiguous and dynamic.”62 Subjectivity as embodied is already inherently opaque and ambiguous. Much like perception, the subject participates in experiences both receptively and actively; Spiegelberg writes, “experience is an intertwined network of receptive and spontaneous processes, of undergoing and doing.”63 In other words, the subject does not simply passively receive experiences, but structures her experiences. Experience forms from the intentionalities of the subject as the self, the intentionalities from other subjects, and the intentionalities from the world.64 Within this mélange of intentionalities—intentionalities that at times compete—exactly how and to what extent the subject actively constitutes her experience remains unclear; but nevertheless, she must. Because the subject hermeneutically develops from her experiences, Merleau-Ponty writes that after the subject reflects on herself, the subject understands—no, experiences—her experience differently.65 Let me just briefly note the relation between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, or more specifically, the role of the unconscious within phenomenology.66 In Edmund Husserl’s first articulation of phenomenology, although inspired by the psychological works of Franz Brentano, Husserl distinguishes phenomenology from psychology. This move has garnered both criticism and praise. Merleau-Ponty did not loyally adhere to Husserl’s parameters, for MerleauPonty marries phenomenology with Gestalt psychology. In this way, his framework encompasses the conscious and unconscious aspects of the subject. The extent of Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with the role of the unconscious remains unclear, but

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his understanding of subjectivity benefits from psychoanalytic insights.67 Within his phenomenology, subjectivity can never reach complete self-awareness, and hence the subject always has blind spots and biases. Yet, reflection changes experience. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of subjectivity carefully heeds the complexities of the subject as fluid and becoming. He pointedly criticizes how psychology treats “the invisible of man as a thing.”68 Much like comparisons of the unconscious to a closed black box, such analogies depict the unconscious as unchanging, and like an object with clearly defined boundaries. Contrary to such static conceptions of the unconsciousness, as the intentions and active engagements of the subject impact experience, the unconscious of subjects must also change. Completing the hermeneutic circle, the development of the subject’s emotions, psychological state, and self-understanding impacts the subject’s intentions and engagements with the world. So parallel to the world, the subject changes. But not parallel to the world, the subject’s changes partly arise from self-reflection, and hence are partly self-produced. Such growth further hermeneutically influences the subject’s experiences of the world, illustrating the intricate co-mingled development of the world, the subject, and experiences.69 The third and final feature of the structure of experience, time, further substantiates the coeval development of the world and the subject. Long before the subject enters the world, the world has already erected a sedimented history of material and ideological conditions; and as the subject grows and lives within the world, the subject also builds a history, a situation. Merleau-Ponty writes that “intentional life . . . becomes the thread that binds, for example, my present to my past in its temporal place.”70 At the risk of artificially making a distinction in the flow of time for clarity, in the more immediate sense within individual subjects, time flows: for “[t]here is no such thing as a merely instantaneous experience. Rather, experience has a temporal pattern opening from the very start toward future phases and subsequently also toward past phases. These past phases drop off constantly toward deeper levels of consciousness, where they are submerged by more recent arrivals, and become ‘sedimented.’”71 In a broader context, time flows in terms of the movement and shifting of horizons (recall the theme/horizon structure of phenomena). Ultimately even horizons are subject to time’s flow, facilitating the synthesis of horizons, “if we operate in time, and if we manage to understand time as the measure of being. The synthesis of horizons is essentially a temporal process, which means, not that it is subject to time, nor that it is passive in relation to time, nor that it must prevail over time, but that it merges with the very movement whereby time passes.”72 The flow of time structures personal experiences, including the horizons of the world.73 Krzysztof Ziarek clarifies that the flow of time does not simply ensure a buildup of history, but also a loss, a forgetting of history, without clear indications of what is retained and what is lost. He writes, the flow of time occurs, “as the two fold structure of simultaneous coming into presence and withdrawal in which what is becomes measurable and representable only at the expense of suppressing historicity.”74 Quite



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poetically, he describes the appearance of the present only with some inextricable loss of the past in time’s flow into the future. Because of time’s flow, and the simultaneous presence and absence of the past and future, an incomprehensibility lies at the heart of experience.75 This incomprehensibility describes the inessential ambiguous structure of experience. This inessential structure parallels the structure of perception, phenomenologically understood, that defies atomistic and essentialistic conceptions, as explained in chapter 1. These three ambiguous elements relate, influence, and function embedded together in experience. Merleau-Ponty refuses to reduce experience to any of these three features. He writes that “if I express this experience by saying that the things are in their place and that we fuse with them, I immediately make the experience itself impossible: for in the measure that the thing is approached, I cease to be; in the measure that I am, there is no thing, but only a double of it in my ‘camera obscura.’”76 These three ambiguous irreducible features are all necessary for experience. Yet exactly how these features influence each other is not systematic and remains unclear—hence the ambiguity of experience. Three Distances Although my outline of the three features of the structure of experience emphasizes experience’s ambiguity because of the inter-relatedness and intermeshedness of each feature, the gulf among the three features also contributes to the ambiguity of experience. Three distances constitute an openness at the heart of the structure of experience: (1) the distance between the subject and the world which includes other subjects that the flow of time conditions; (2) the distance between undergoing the experience and reflecting upon the experience; and (3) the distance between the experience and the language within which to understand or to communicate the experience. Grasping the ontological structure of experience demands more fully understanding these distances, rather than eliminating them. These distances uphold the nonessentialistic structure of experience, forming its ambiguity. Turning to the first distance, within the two poles between subjects and the world, and the temporal flow that conditions the relationship between the two poles, “[w]e are interrogating our experience precisely in order to know how it opens us to what is not ourselves.”77 Experience opens us to that which is exterior to the embodied subject. Yet this exposure does not occur to an absolute exterior in the traditional sense. Recall the Gestaltian relation of the figure within a background, or the theme in a horizon, which insists that isolated figures or themes defy human experience. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “[w]hen we come back to phenomena we find, as a basic layer of experience, a whole already pregnant with an irreducible meaning, not sensations with gaps between them.”78 The subject and the world is always in relation in the gestaltian or phenomenal sense; the subject and the world are never separate. Although in relation, an infinite chasm structures this relation. This distance characterizes the difference between dialectic and phenomenological frameworks. This distance is

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not placid and static; continual change and movement mark the relation between the subject and the world. The becoming of each participant/feature conditions the distance. Dialectic and hermeneutic relations concentrate only on the influence one pole has on the other pole, but not how the two poles sway the distance, or the depth of the connection between the two poles. Whereas phenomenological frameworks attend specifically to the density and fluidity of the distance between the two poles. Within the framework of Jean Paul Sartre’s work, Ngo articulates some interesting insights about this distance between the subject and the world. Ngo explains that for Sartre, “to be a subject is to have space organized and oriented around oneself, it is to have distances—or in Sartre’s words, ‘unfold’—from you.”79 But in relations with others, in a horizon/world that includes others, the other’s gaze collapses this distance. Ngo quotes Sartre, “‘[t]his look of the other is given immediately as that by which distance comes to the world at the heart of a presence without distance.’”80 Sartre continues to elaborate the reversibility of these positions, if not concurrently. But in asymmetrical power relations, “the gaze effects an objectification.  .  .  . The seer imposes her distances, her spatial orientation, onto the Other-as-object, or subsumes the Other into them.”81 Ngo emphasizes the importance of such distance in experiencing and organizing the world as well as the influence of power on this distance; the distance between the subject and the world does not lie beyond the purview of power. Second, Husserl posits a temporal lag in the interstice between undergoing the experience and the subject reflecting and coming to understand the experience. This temporal lag captures the phenomenological experience of the subject endeavoring to understand the meaning of the experience. As elaborated earlier regarding the subject’s contribution to experiences, the subject’s ordering of the meaning of her experience ultimately impacts the understanding of the experience and her own subjectivity. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “reflection finds itself therefore in the strange situation of simultaneously requiring and excluding an inverse movement of constitution. It requires it in that, without this centrifugal movement, it should have to acknowledge itself to be a retrospective construction; it excludes it in that, coming in principle after an experience of the world or of the true which it seeks to render explicit.”82 In experiencing, the role of reflection is not immediately felt, although reflection is already sedimented in the structure of experience. When trying to come to understand an experience, reflection further structures experience after its occurrence. An interplay of including and excluding, accepting, and denying the prevailing meaning systems requires time. This distance between experiencing and reflecting upon the experience occurs within a temporal flow. During this time, the subject does not passively reach understanding about the experience. Knowledge about the experience does not simply settle into the subject; the meaning is not given. As earlier described, in part through her intentionalities, the subject actively, existentially creates meaning about the experience. But recall chapter 1’s and earlier in this chapter’s analysis that the subject cannot possess full self-knowledge and hence always has bias. Such bias especially indicates that meaning



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is in part immanent to the subject. Because the subject actively engages in meaning making, the temporal distance between experiencing and reflecting upon the experience is existentially significant. Lewis Gordon describes this existential paradox: “I face my future self, the self who will come about as the choice I will make. But at the moment of that choice, I will face a self that is a feature of my past.”83 The reflecting subject can never catch up with her being or the reflecting subject always exceeds her being. Whichever way one looks at it, this distance of reflecting upon one’s experiences structures the meaning of the subject’s understanding of her past, her present, and her future. Because of this temporal lag, upon coming to completion (at least temporarily) of the reflection on the experience, the world and the self are different than at the beginning of the reflection. The act of reflecting holds a third distance, between the experience and the words to communicate the experience. Because of the encompassing nature of language, in the difficulty if not impossibility of thinking without language, language obfuscates its role in experience. Unlike the poststructural conclusion of Scott that there is only language, phenomenology still insists on the existence of the world and experiences of the world. I do not enter into the details of Merleau-Ponty’s work on language. Let me only mention that Merleau-Ponty’s work appears well-aware of the translation “transition and translocation” which traces the “historical indexing” of linguistic meanings that far exceeds language’s role as simply representation of experience.84 Language exceeds simply portraying the physical, empirical realities of the world. Because of language’s rich and playful relation with meaning, language does not only convey the world and experiences of the world. And much like reflection, language is already sedimented in experience, structuring experience. Yet language does not and cannot thoroughly, completely, in any saturated sense, convey experiences of the world fully. For after all, language is in itself not a finished, static structure.85 Language also represents a history and a historical period. A depth of distance lies between language and experience.

CONCLUSION From this examination of the ontologic structure of experience, let me draw four conclusions. First, as should follow from chapter 1, the phenomenal structure of experience demonstrates the inherent openness in the structure of experience. Because of the distances in the structure of experience, experience is necessarily never total or complete with clear boundaries demarking the beginning and end of our experience. Moreover, because of the subject’s individual history and hence biases, each individual experiences in situatedness from a particular place in the horizon of the world. Respectful of such situatedness, Merleau-Ponty insists, “we have no right to level all experiences down to a single world, all modalities of existence down to a single consciousness.”86

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Second, and perhaps similarly, the openness at the heart of the structure of experience structurally holds nonidentity. The nonidentity is such an inherent part of the structure of experience that Merleau-Ponty writes, “there is no longer identity between the lived experience and the principle of noncontradiction.”87 And again, “[b]etween the manifest content and the latent content, there can be not only differences but also contradiction.”88 The three distances—between the world and the subject, within the subject prior and after reflection, and between experience and language—are inherently nonidentities, in defiance of the possibility of correspondence among these relations. Theoretically, this implies that no one can absolutely participate in the same experience. Even if the subject undergoes the same experience under some sort of ideal condition, because the subject changes, the subject’s biases change, and so the experience will be understood differently. It is the unique situatedness of each experience that contributes to knowledge.89 Without hope for or ultimate collapse or disappearance of these distances, these three distances always condition experience ensuring the ambiguity of experience.90 Although experience structurally encloses nonidentity, parallel to the miracle in perception, Merleau-Ponty does not fear the possibility of the subject’s complete separation from the world, other subjects, and some level of shared experiences. He writes, “I can count on what I see, which is in close correspondence with what the other sees (everything attests to this, in fact: we really do see the same thing and the thing itself )—and yet at the same time I never rejoin the other’s lived experience. It is in the world that we rejoin one another.”91 This sounds strangely like empiricists’s naïve trust in contact and correspondence with the world. But as I further explain in chapter 4, complete isolation from the world, from others or absolute difference defies subjectivity’s condition of being-in-the-world. Because phenomenology begins in situatedness—with being-in-the-world—to speculate on the possibilities of total separation from the world or from others, falls into the abstraction of high-altitude thinkers. Recall also that experience is not a thing; it does not surface solely from the subject or solely from the world in either a clearly defined material or linguistic sense. Rather experience ambiguously unfolds in the depths of the horizon. Hence any suggestion of an absolute separation challenges the ontologic structure of experience. Experience is neither relative nor solipsistic to isolated individuals. Third, in recognition of these distances in the heart of experience, let me return to the concepts of intragroup differences or internal heterogeneity and intergroup similarities or heterogenous commonality. In centering the concept of intersectionality and the experiences of women of color, we arrived at the idea that the identity of women of color requires acknowledging differences within a single-axis identity group while simultaneously building coalitions across identity groups to appreciate the commonalities with at least another, but likely more than one, identity group. The recognition of distances between the subject and the world, between the experience and reflection upon the experience, and between language and experience helps comprehend why even among members within a single-axis identity group there are intragroup different experiences.



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Among duo-axis or intersectional identifying features (keeping in mind that these axes are not completely distinguishable or stable), instead of illuminating greater distance, these three distances can illuminate the commonalities among the intersectional identifying features. To think about this, recall the position from the previous chapter that women of color as multiplicitous identities occupy broader horizons and hence are situated to develop greater sensitivity to biases, with opportunities to see different possibilities. The distances experienced by women of color with intersectional identities is not simply greater or wider. Instead of focusing on wider distances, I posit characterizing women of color’s distances as denser or thicker. Within the distance between the subject and the world, intersectional identities occupy more than one world. As such, the worlds overlap rendering the space between the subject and the worlds as denser. Additionally, regarding the temporal distance between undergoing and reflecting upon an experience, while intersectional identities occupy more than one world, recall each world has its own history. As the postcolonial analysis on historiography and the contestations over writing history demonstrates, histories of different worlds diverge and challenge each other. Hence in occupying more than one world, for intersectional identities, for women of color, thinking about an experience demands culling over a plurality of meanings, requiring extended time and longer periods of remaining unresolved. Without prioritizing resolving one’s thoughts, for intersectional identities are practiced at upholding contrasting ideas, the plethora of ideas from inhabiting multiple worlds contribute to the thickness in the distance between undergoing and reflecting upon an experience. Finally, in the distance between language and experience, many (not all) intersectional identities speak more than one language. Even if one of the two languages spoken is relegated as nontraditional, as bastardized, such as creole or urban dialects, and even if the woman of color cannot claim expertise or comfort in any of the languages, nevertheless, these languages depict and convey different ideas. Considering the centrality of language for thought, the function of language as a framework for culture and development, and the well-known difficulties of translation, that many intersectional identities, women of color, speak more than one language impacts the distance between language and experience. For women of color, the distance between language and experience can only be characterized as more opaque, more complex, denser. I emphasize the density in the distances within the ontological structure of experience for such density invites more possibilities of perceiving commonality in the heterogeneity, to realize intergroup similarities. The density summons more juxtaposing, overlapping, and interweaving of ideas and experiences. Each overlap of worlds and ideas encourage comprehending commonality. The distances in experience can frustratingly demonstrate intra-group differences, but women of color also grasp intergroup commonalities to build coalitions. Here the density in the distances of women of color’s experience promotes epistemic insight. Women of color can recognize their heterogenous commonality, because intersectional identities undergo experiences that are layered, complex, and interwoven. Such experiences promote noticing common threads, patterns, and

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pieces of a puzzle. Chapter 1 argued that because multiplicitous identities occupy more than one world, their broader horizons promote not only confusion, but also opportunities to see new possibilities. Consistent with chapter 1, here in chapter 2, in clarifying the density of the distances in the experiences of intersectional identities, I forward such density sets the conditions for epistemic insight. A focus on intersectional identities and the experiences of women of color require understanding the distances in the structure of experience as not simply empty. Consistent with the understanding of the relation between the theme and horizon, there is an infinity, an openness, interior to the theme (in the Husserlian sense) and exterior to the horizon (in the Heideggerian sense) that mark the distance. But the experiences of women of color, and the notion of intersectionality highlight the qualitative differences in the distances, in the thickness, and in the density of the theme/horizon structure. Fourth and finally, astoundingly, although everything we think and do stems from the constraints of our situatedness, we nevertheless achieve thought transcendent of our immediate being-in-the-world. Thought and knowledge must persist in the world even though it begins in experiences.92 In other words, knowledge must transcend one’s immediate experience in that others must accept the knowledge for it to survive into the future. Robert Burch observes that “for transcendental philosophy to account in principle for its own possibility, it must affirm and demonstrate an original twofold mediation: that experience as such is originally mediated through thought and that thinking, even at its highest level, is mediated through experience.”93 Burch explains that experience and thought mediate each other. If thought intercedes with experience, “[a] transcending dimension must always already be constituted in experience, a transcendence that belongs together essentially with the self ’s own self-constitution.”94 Coherent with Burch’s conclusion that a transcendental element exists in all experience, Merleau-Ponty argues that a situated dimension defines all reflection. He qualifies his position by conceding that human beings can suspend the physical, spatial aspects of the world (with sufficient mental willpower a la Descartes or Plato). Yet Merleau-Ponty insists that human beings cannot halt the temporal effects of the world. Temporality and historicity flood reflection. He writes, “[i]t belongs to the nature of my reflection to gain possession of myself and in consequence to free myself from determination by external conditions. But in reflecting in this way . . . I at once discover a temporality and a historicity that I am. My reflection . . . never lifts itself out of time.”95 Because one can never cease time’s flow, reflection never escapes from situatedness.96 The ontologic structure of experience illustrates the openness and the nonidentity of experience. Perhaps because of the difficulty of conceptualizing the ambiguity of experience, as in contrast to the static, stable knowledge prioritized in traditional epistemology, that experience has so persistently defied understanding. But clearly the nonidentity and openness of experience does not leave us stranded in isolation from each other and the world. We cannot avoid analyzing experience for it clearly



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plays a central role in thought especially regarding discussions on race and women of color or intersectionality. With a better grasp of the ontologic structure of experience, let us finally address the epistemic value of experience. Are the Hegelians correct in foundationally utilizing experience? Or is Scott correct in challenging experience as a source of knowledge and demanding that experience requires explanations? For philosophy of race and women of color, experience plays such a central role for first bringing attention to oppression, colonialism, sexism, androcentrism, racism, and racial stigma that references to experience are pivotal. Phenomenology’s insight into experience insists on this central role of experience and that experience cannot be relegated into such extremes. Phenomenology recognizes experience as the site of our openness and our engagement with the world. Experience is already imbued with thought. Language frames experience, as Scott contends, and references to experience is unavoidable as Hegel and feminist standpoint theorists contend. However, the openness and nonidentity in the distances that structure experience leave space for the existential activity of the subject. So, in what sense can experience provide knowledge? What constitutes the epistemic value of experience? Experience plays a central part in knowledge claims, but experience cannot substantiate one position or the other. Merleau-Ponty probably always remained an existentialist because of the distances in the structure of experience. He does not hold a naive existentialist belief that subjects act completely free of the world, for after all, human beings are beings-in-the-world. In place of either trusting the epistemic value of experience, like the post-Hegelian scholars, or questioning any epistemic value of experience like Scott, and furthermore in light of the complexity of intersectional identities or women of color’s experiences, I read experience phenomenologically. Phenomenology enables reading autobiographical narratives as having epistemic value within a relation to each subject’s horizon and existential choices. Experience cannot be bypassed. For recall, because of each individual’s unique history and biases, each individual undergoes experiences in situatedness. No one escapes one’s experiences and no one can participate in the same experiences of another because of the nonidentity of individual experience. Because the structure of experience inherently sustains the three distances—between the subject and the world, between undergoing and reflecting on the experience, and between the available language and the experience—autobiographical narratives existentially engage the openness in the distances and attempt to make meaning within and from these distances. And the density in the experiences of women of color are epistemically significant for the density promotes recognizing heterogenous commonality and other epistemic insights.97 I have not defended the Hegelian foundational references to experience and situatedness, but still insisted on the value of references to personal experiences in claims to knowledge. Philosophy of race relies upon references to experience for epistemic claims. Although Scott correctly describes discourse as already immediately structuring experience, this understanding of language embedded within experience does not lead to the conclusion that only experience needs explanation. Reflection,

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thought, knowledge also requires explanation, for experience is sedimented into our ideas and knowledge frameworks—because subjectivity is embodied and situated. Hence racialized subjects correctly begin much or some of their claims to knowledge from their experiences. The phenomenological structure of experience illustrates that although experience is mired in or arises from the world with its meaning complexes, and its available linguistic frameworks, racialized subjects, especially women of color with intersectional identities, still existentially understand and order the world to achieve knowledge. For intersectional identities, the density in the distances of the structure of experience serves both as an explanation for encountering intragroup differences as well as for recognizing intergroup heterogenous commonalities. The dense experiences of women of color promote epistemic insights. A phenomenological understanding of the structure of experience as inherently ambiguous because of the distances at its center illustrates the centrality of experience for epistemic claims. And the density of the distances in the experiences of intersectional identities provide the opportune environment for epistemic insights.

NOTES 1. See Linda Martin Alcoff ’s article, “Merleau-Ponty and Feminist Theory on Experience,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 251–72. 2. Herbert Spiegelberg explains that phenomenology rose in critique of empiricism and its heavy reliance on experience. Nevertheless, phenomenology still focuses on experience— just not a naïve understanding of experience. See his article, “Toward a Phenomenology of Experience,” American Philosophical Quarterly, v. 1 n. 4 (October 1964): 325. 3. Consider any autobiographical narratives, from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Classic Slave Narrative (New York: Mentor, 1987) to more recent autobiographical works, including Samuel Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 4. See the much-analyzed sections of G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage,” 111–19. 5. Karl Marx insists that the experiences of the proletariat challenge dominant ideas of freedom, culture, and law because such dominant conceptions represent only bourgeois law, property, and freedom. As he demands from the bourgeoisie, “don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply . . . the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all” (“Manifesto of the Communist Party,” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978], 487). 6. Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 123. See also Nancy C. M. Hartsock, “Experience, Embodiment, and Epistemologies,” Hypatia v. 21, n. 2 (Spring 2006): 178–83.



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7. Harding, Whose Science?,  127. She insists that she does not refer to experience as foundational. 8. Lynn Hankinson Nelson, Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 261. 9. Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry v. 17, n. 4 (Summer 1991): 776. 10. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 776–77. 11. Jeremy Weate notes an interesting twist in the ideological production of the excluded. He writes, “[a]s these counter-interpretations themselves are revealed in the face of the normative view, they therefore tend to reflect the forces of exclusion back to the subject of the experience. In this way, counter-interpretations repeat the pain of marginality” (“Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology,” Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001], 177). 12. Scott,“The Evidence of Experience,”  793. 13. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 797. 14. Vivian M. May, “‘Speaking into the Void’? Intersectionality Critiques and Epistemic Backlash,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, v. 29, n. 1 (Winter 2014): 96. 15. May, “‘Speaking into the Void’?,”  96. May continues to elaborate on the changes to epistemic authority: “intersectionality raises questions of cognitive authority negotiated in the context of structural inequality and intransigent power asymmetries . . . exposes how norms of credibility reinforce hegemony” (98). 16. I recognize that it is arguable whether anyone absolutely experiences a single-axis of oppression. 17. Anika Maaza Mann writes in a footnote, that other feminists of color have articulated the idea. Mann cites the following sources: Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., But Some of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black Women’s Studies (New York: Feminist Press at City University of New York, 1982). Judy Scales-Trent, “Black Women and the Constitution: Finding Our Place, Asserting Our Rights,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review v. 24, n. 1 (1989): 9–43. See Anika Maaza Mann’s article, “Race and Feminist Standpoint Theory,” Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, eds. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 105–19. 18. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, eds. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: The New Press, 1995), 361. See also the work of Helen Zia, who shows that hate crime laws cannot readily be applied to women of color as potential victims of hate crimes. Under the present set of hate crime laws, only men can experience hate crime. See her article, “Violence in Our Communities: ‘Where Are the Asian Women?,’” Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women, eds. Elaine H. Kim, Lilia V. Villanueva, and Asian Women United of California (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 207–14. 19. Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 361. See also Elizabeth Spelman; she elaborates on Simone de Beauvoir’s observation that white women adhere to sexism to maintain their class and race privileges (Inessential Woman [Boston: Beacon Press Books, 1988], 63, 75). Spelman shows that de Beauvoir vacillates between explaining and criticizing such behavior from white women.

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20. Yen Le Espiritu, “Class and Gender in Asian America,” Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women, eds. Elaine H. Kim, Lilia V. Villanueva, and Asian Women United of California (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 139. 21. Sumi K. Cho, “Asian Pacific American Women and Racialized Sexual Harassment,” Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women, eds. Elaine H. Kim, Lilia V. Villanueva, and Asian Women United of California (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 166. 22. Aimee Carrillo Rowe, “L Is for . . . Longing and Becoming in the L-Word’s Racialized Erotic,” Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, eds. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 93. 23. Robin M. James, “From Receptivity to Transformation: On the Intersection of Race, Gender, and the Aesthetic in Contemporary Continental Philosophy,” Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, eds. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010). James reiterates, “Feminization . . . becomes racial power” (143). 24. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Greenberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 25. Traci C. West, “Extending Black Feminist Sisterhood in the Face of Violence: Fanon, White Women, and Veiled Muslim Women,” Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, eds. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 172. 26. Camisha Russell, “Black American Sexuality and the Repressive Hypothesis: Reading Patricia Hill Collins with Michel Foucault,” Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, eds. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 206. Shireen Roshanravan explains that Lugones expressed a similar concern. Lugones’s “impetus to elaborate the ‘coloniality of gender’ is, in her words, connected to a desire to ‘understand the indifference that men . . . men who have been racialized as inferior, exhibit to the systematic violences inflicted upon women of color’” (Shireen Roshanravan, “Motivating Coalition: Women of Color and Epistemic Disobedience,” Hypatia, Special Issue on Interstices: Inheriting Women of Color Feminist Philosophy v. 29, n. 1 [Winter 2014]: 52). 27. I am alarmed to see the number of Asian women dying their hair blonde. 28. See Mariana Ortega, In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self, (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 156, for the earlier critiques from Butler, Brown, Hekman, and Kruks. 29. Ortega, In-Between, 72. Helen Ngo explains Alia Al-Saji’s similar concerns: “Al-Saji’s account . . . advances the idea that gendered schemata are already intrinsic to racialized perception. That is, they are not the intersection of two distinct problems, but rather, ‘continuous,’” (The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017], 34). 30. Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 34. 31. Anna Carastathis, “Identity Categories as Potential Coalitions,” Signs, v. 38, n. 4 Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory (Summer 2013): 946, footnote 6. She refers to Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review v. 43 n. 6: 1244 n. 9. Ortega defends the notion of intersectionality from this criticism as well, “not all those appealing to intersectionality assume that the axes of oppression are separable. As Hill Collins



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states, ‘As a heuristic devise, intersectionality references the ability of social phenomena such as race, class, and gender to mutually construct one another’” (Ortega, 73). 32. Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 211. 33. Collins, Fighting Words, 206. Ortega explains Collins’s position on intersectionality as “not to be understood as being equally efficacious in dealing with individuals as well as groups. The notion is more effective in helping us understand an individual’s experience and to compare the lived experience of different individuals. While an individual can see how categories (race, class, gender, etc.) intersect to produce her experience, it is more difficult to see how these factors intersect to produce group identities and to compare groups” (164). Or as Diane Perpich articulates the problem: “[w]hen the false universalism of a white male perspective reigned without question, the mere presentation of black female experiences contested dominant paradigms, but ‘under a new politics of containment wherein Black women can be highly visible yet rendered powerless, breaking silence may not work’” (“Black Feminism, Poststructuralism, and the Contested Character of Experience,” Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, eds. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano [Albany: SUNY Press, 2010], 26). 34. Mann, “Race and Feminist Standpoint Theory,” 107. Collins writes, “[w]hen discussing intersectionality and group organization, however, assumptions of individualism obscure hierarchical power relations of all sorts, from race—and gender—only perspectives through more complex frameworks such as intersectionality. Can one argue that African American women and White American women as groups are so equivalent that one can take the reality of the social group itself as an assumption that does not need to be examined?” (206–7). Collins summarizes, “[w]hen examining structural power relations, intersectionality functions better as a conceptual framework or heuristic device describing what kinds of things to consider than as one describing any actual patterns of social organization” (208). 35. Perpich, “Black Feminism,” 26. 36. Note, essentialism oppresses both when proposed by those internal or external to the group. Anthony Appiah writes, “identities that ‘come with normative as well as descriptive expectations,’ stipulating ‘proper black modes of behavior’ . . . rais[es] the danger of new forms of ‘tyranny’ that threaten individual freedom and choice” (Charles Mills, Blackness Visible [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998], 14). 37. Ortega, In-Between, 34. 38. Ortega, In-Between, 31. One of the few points of contention with Gloria Anzaldua’s work lies precisely here in depictions of whiteness. Ortega explains, “Beltran . . . claims that for Anzaldua’s theory to work, she must posit a vision of white, Western European as monolithic” (34). Also consider Diana Fuss’s work on essentialism; see “The ‘Risk’ of Essence,” Feminisms, Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 250–58. And Linda Martin Alcoff ’s work on minority identities’ unavoidable representative status; see “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique v. 20 (Winter 1991– 1992): 5–32. Both complicate the idea of essentialism and the relation between individuals and their identity group. 39. Devonya N. Havis, “‘Now, How You Sound’: Considering a Different Philosophical Praxis,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy v. 29, n. 1 (Winter 2014): 248. Lorde continues, “‘community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. It is learning . . . how to make common cause with those

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others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.’” (Havis, 247). Collins concurs, “[t]he fluidity that accompanies intersectionality does not mean that groups themselves disappear, to be replaced by an accumulation of decontextualized, unique individuals whose personal complexity makes group-based identities and politics that emerge from group constructions impossible. . . . African American women’s group history and location can be seen as points of convergence within structural, hierarchical, and changing power relations” (Collins, Fighting Words, 205–6). 40. Ortega, In-Between,  162. See also, “Referring to Alcoff and the Combahee River’s Collective, “[t]hey do not assume that groups are homogenous, and they do not call for a separatist stance. Rather, they wish to underscore the importance of identity in their personal experiences of doing political work” (Ortega 20, see also 71). Or see Collins who questions the easy parallels made between race-based identity theory and standpoint theory, “[d]o group-based identities such as those advocated by standpoint theory ultimately disempower African-American women because they unduly suppress differences and heterogeneity among Black women?” (Collins,  Fighting Words, 202). Collins advocates for conceptualizing groups, for devolving into individualist-based analysis does not promote social political change. “Ironically, within unexamined assumptions of individualism, intersectionality can be reconfigured so that it makes things worse. . . . When extracted from hierarchical power relations, recognizing differences among women can become so watered down that power simply vanishes” (Fighting Words, 223). 41. Linda Martin Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 90. 42. Collins, Fighting Words, 209–10. 43. Collins, Fighting Words, 210. In distinguishing the organizing principles between race, class, and gender, Collins disparages postmodernism as a strategy. Postmodernism, she argues, may be appealing to white women because of the inclusionary strategy that organizes sex, but does not apply to race-class groups with its organizing strategy of distancing. Collins writes, “the increasing attraction of postmodernism for many White American feminists may lie in its deconstructive move. .  .  .  Turning attention away from challenging women’s oppression to deconstructing the modern subject provides conceptual space to sidestep the theoretical failures of Western feminism. .  .  .  Although this theoretical move seems highly plausible when directed toward the fragile solidarity of women, applying similar deconstructive moves to groups organized through segregated spaces of race and economic class remains far less convincing” (Fighting Words, 222). 44. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, “Rethinking Black Feminist Subjectivity: Ann duCille and Gilles Deleuze,” Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, eds. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 132, footnote 29. 45. Specificities exist among African American women, in the contrasts between black people with slave ancestors in the United States, to the more recent immigrants from the West Indies or African countries. Within Latina women, clearly women from Spain diverge from the indigenous populations of the Americas, women from central America or south America, and the Caribbean. 46. Collins, Fighting Words, 224. 47. Carastathis, “Identity Categories,” 942. Carastathis attributes Crenshaw with this insight to conceptualize identity groups as coalitions. Carastathis writes, “the integration of



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all aspects of our individual identities is crucial to achieving the internal balance missing in one-dimensional political movements” (“Identity Categories,”  942). Or as Ortega writes, “[f ]ollowing Collin’s understanding of a group as a ‘heterogeneous commonality,’ Anna Carastathis takes identity categories as potential coalitions that are constitutional by both differences and commonalities, an approach that simultaneously reveals both intragroup and intergroup differences and moves us away from starting from a desire to form coalitions across differences to starting from the recognition that groups are already internally heterogeneous” (In-Between, 165). 48. Carastathis, “Identity Categories,” 945. 49. Emily S. Lee, “The Ambiguous Practices of the Inauthentic Asian American Woman,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy v. 29 n. 1 (Winter 2014): 149. 50. José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 201. His italics. See also Trina Grillow and Stephanie Wildman, “Obscuring the Importance of Race: The Implication of Making Comparisons between Racism and Sexism (or Other Isms),” Critical Race Feminism, ed. Adrien Katherine Wing (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 49. 51. Collins still adheres to the idea of a shared level of oppression. She writes, “[w]hen it comes to oppression, there are essentials” (Collins, Fighting Words, 225). 52. Perhaps perception is a form of experience. 53. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Great Britain: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1962), 40–41. Merleau-Ponty defines the work of phenomenology as addressing experience, “[t]he legitimate function of the fixing of the eidetic invariants would be no longer to confine us within the consideration of the what but to make evident the divergence between the eidetic invariants and the effective functioning and to invite us to bring the experience itself forth from its obstinate silence” (The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968], 47). 54. Much like the problems with high-altitude thinking, the problem lies specifically in committing the prejudice of determinate being and the constancy hypothesis about experience. 55. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 35. See also Phenomenology, 57. 56. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 110. Mariana Ortega’s phrasing of this function of phenomenology is helpful here. She writes, “[t]he aim of the so-called phenomenological theories is to close the gap, or at least to attempt to close the gap, between theory and practice, between how we think of the world and how we live it” (“‘New Mestizas,’ ‘World-Travelers,’ and ‘Dasein’: Phenomenology and the Multi-Voiced, Multi-Cultural Self,” Hypatia, v. 16, n. 3 [Summer 2001]: 3). 57. This structure parallels the structure of phenomena and perception as explained in chapter 1. 58. The fundierung model especially nicely captures this idea; see Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 159. 59. Merleau-Ponty writes, “[o]ur point of departure shall not be being is, nothingness is not, nor even there is only being—which are formulas of a totalizing thought, a high-altitude thought—but: there is being, there is a world, there is something . . . there is cohesion, there is meaning. . . . One starts with an ontological relief where one can never say that the ground be nothing” (Visible, 88). 60. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 126. See also 137. And although some argue that the Phenomenology radically differs from his last text, in the Visible and Invisible, Merleau-Ponty

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adheres to the irreducibility of experience to the material or the meaning-structure of the world. In this last text, he writes, “[i]t is by opposing to the experience of things the specter of another experience that would not involve things that we force experience to say more than it said. . . . This reversal of the pro and con, this empirical realism founded upon transcendental idealism is still a thinking of experience against the ground of nothingness” (Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 162). Spiegelberg lists as features of experience not just the world but “experience of relations, meanings, values, requiredness, other minds, social and cultural phenomena” (“Toward a Phenomenology of Experience,” 327). 61. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 88. Chapter 3 addresses the embodied subjectivity in much greater detail. 62. Alcoff, Visible, 111. 63. Spiegelberg, “Toward a Phenomenology of Experience,” 328. See also Merleau-Ponty’s Visible, 193. The next chapter explains intentionalities in more detail. 64. Spiegelberg, “Toward a Phenomenology of Experience,” 327. 65. Please excuse the awkward phrasing—reflecting “experience’s” ambiguity between the act and the event. 66. Early scholars of Merleau-Ponty suggested that experience occurs pre-judgment. Spiegelberg writes, “[t]he predicative stage of judgment and propositions with its polarization into subject and predicate differs essentially from the unpolarized structure of our immediate experience. But predicative knowledge has its primary foundation in such direct experience” (“Toward a Phenomenology of Experience,”  327). See also Michael Barber’s criticism of Alfred Schutz for not accounting for prephenomenal experience in Equality and Diversity: Phenomenological Investigations of Prejudice and Discrimination (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001), 119. In Merleau-Ponty’s last work, he elaborates on a primordial level of the world, especially with notions like the flesh, chiasm, and the reversibility of the visible and the invisible. But I want to argue that experience could not occur purely pre-judgment. I address this reflective or pre-conscious experience a little later. To the extent that experience is of the world; experience cannot delve beneath being-in-the-world. Rather, experience may feel like it originates pre-judgment, but this may be another form of the experience error. The subject undergoing an experience may feel that it occurs pre-judgment, but judgments, concepts, ideas always condition our experiences because they are of the world. 67. I understand psychology and psychoanalysis comprise two distinguishable areas. I refer to both to the extent that both include references to the unconscious. 68. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 19. 69. See also Ortega, “‘New Mestizas,’” 7, where she suggests similar conclusions about the subject in the world. 70. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 173. See also Phenomenology, 84. 71. Spiegelberg, “Toward a Phenomenology of Experience,” 327. See also Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 69, where he writes of the Husserlian concepts of the retention and the protention of time. 72. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 330. See also 410. See also Anthony Steinbock’s work, “Generativity and Generative Phenomenology,” Husserl Studies v. 12 (1995): 55–79. 73. To depict the flow of time, Martin Heidegger and his followers argue against conceptualizing experience as lived, and propose theorizing experience as event. Krzysztof Ziarek writes that Heidegger conceives the notion of lived experience as only either psychological or empirical. Krzysztof Ziarek writes, “Heidegger is openly critical of the empiricist and psychological understanding of experience, especially of the term Erlebnis, or lived experience. However,



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when Heidegger does use the term Erfahrung [experience], it is precisely to call into question, as Bernasconi suggests, the metaphysical understanding of experience and to reconceptualize it in relation to his most important terms: Ereignis [event], language, technology, danger, and so on” (The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001], 43) [my inserts]. Hopefully and clearly, my reading of experience as lived makes neither of these reductions of experience as psychological or empirical. Nevertheless, against the notion of lived experience and for the notion of “event,” Heidegger highlights the historical conditioning of everyday experience, yet somehow experience remains “always open to the future and transformation” (K. Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience, 4). K. Ziarek writes: The event undoes “the presumption of the mind with respect to time,” figuring experience as openended and excessive in relation to its representation. This temporal excess or incompletion, a certain untimeliness which always accompanies occurrence, unworks the privatization and subjectivation of experience. What is each time “new” is the singularity with which the event exceeds the bounds of representational thinking, and remains in its occurrence, without essence. (K. Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience, 9. See also 104.)

Heidegger’s notion of event, as opposed to experience, aims to accomplish quite a bit of work. I see three aims in the preceding excerpt: (1) the openness in the structure of experience and experience as irreducible to “essence” language; (2) the inability to fully depict experience as representation or signification; and (3) the positioning of experience as not wholly private within the subject. All these aims for introducing the notion of event cohere with my aims for exploring the ontological structure of experience. The only aim that I am not as determined to accomplish with K. Ziarek is his contention against the belief that experience is fully depictable in the mind through representations and significations. Ziarek may be suffering from the strawman position of reductively understanding epistemology as simply correspondence theory. I continue to speak about experience and lived experience because the notion of event does not stay true to time’s flow, especially regarding historicity. To understand time’s flow requires conceiving the indeterminateness of the future in both the sense of the new and the surprising. To emphasize the open-endedness of the flow of time, K. Ziarek explains that “Lyotard demonstrates, between the new as novelty and innovation, and the surprise or the unexpected opened by the event structure of experience” (The Historicity of Experience,  9). Lyotard marks a difference between the new and the surprising. Yet, the notion of event suggests the brokenness of time’s flow, in its evocation of separability and temporariness. Moreover, the notion of event depicts experience as subjectless. K. Ziarek writes, “[w]hat Derrida calls the eventness of the event, signifies the inconspicuous, subjectless, and self-emptying historical structure through which experience unfolds in the signifying texture of the world” (K. Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience, 17. See 18 for a reference to Foucault on the subjectless experience as well). Because poststructuralists contend that discourse and ideology construct subjects, the structure of the event is appealing as subjectless and hence as escaping the overwhelming influence of ideology. But this throws the baby out with the bath water. If the subject is not wholly socially constructed, we must face the difficulty of understanding a situated subject, a subject in the world, an unstable fluid subject, a becoming subject. Rather than face theorizing such a complex notion of a subject, the structure of the event facilely and neatly eliminates the subject. The possibilities and limitations of subjectlessness have been much debated and I do not want to rehash this debate here. Let me just appreciatively note the aims for exploring the notion of event to replace experience. But

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recognizing the openness within experience, resisting the encompassing reach of signification, or alternatively refusing to reduce experience to the private domains of the subject can be achieved through better understanding the ontological structure of experience rather than dismissing experience and replacing it with the notion of an event. 74. K. Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience, 13. See also 14. 75. K. Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience,  20. For Ziarek this incomprehensibility of experience is within understanding experience as event. 76. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 122. Renaud Barbaras explains, “[t]he finitude of experience is founded on the transcendence of the perceived world, or, rather, both of these dimensions are expressions of the same ontological event.” “Perception and Movement: The End of the Metaphysical Approach,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 82. 77. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 159. See also Visible, 100, 122, and Phenomenology, 70. 78. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 21–22. See also Visible, 77. Again, as explained in chapter 1, phenomenology opposes atomistic and essentialistic knowledge. 79. Ngo, 139. 80. Ngo, 139. 81. Ngo, 139. 82. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 45. He continues, “[t]his is what Husserl brought frankly into the open when he said that every transcendental reduction is also an eidetic reduction” (45). See also Phenomenology, 62, “at the point where an individual life begins to reflect on itself. Reflection is truly reflection only if it is not carried outside itself, only if it knows itself as reflection-on-an-unreflective-experience, and consequently as a change in the structure of our existence.” See also 238. Dastur writes, “Husserl brings to light the principal ‘delay’ of every reflection on the already-there of the world and shows that to reflect is not to coincide with the flux of intentional life. On the contrary, to reflect is to free kernels of meaning, intelligible articulations, and then to reconstruct the flux ‘apres coup’” (“World, Flesh, Vision,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000]: 26). Jacques Taminiaux expands on this function of time; he writes, “a double overlapping: that of the successive over the simultaneous. . . . The time to which the activity of thinking is linked is not constituted by the thinker who would rule over it: the thinker is affected by the push, the onrush of time” (“The Thinker and the Painter,” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. ed. Michael B. Smith [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993]: 284–85.) K. Ziarek captures this incommensurability or distance, “the spaces of experience, thought and representation, and through the working of historicity, makes their closure impossible” (The Historicity of Experience, 14). 83. Lewis Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 14. Gordon concludes, “the breakdown of the effort to be entails the self-deception of being as such” (52). 84. See K. Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience, 54–55, where he writes, “language works on the principle of transition and translocation, it cannot be properly regarded as either representation or nonrepresentational. I read these approaches to language in terms of how they render the problem of representation secondary.” He continues, “These markings of alterity—the continuous reopening within language of a distance or an infold without any point of origin—trace the historical indexing of language: They inaugurate history as the in-thinking,



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the memoration (Eingedenken, Andenken) not of a past which once took place but rather of the dehiscence which, spacing the past and the present, (re)opens history as an interval” (66). Ortega writes about translation, “Schutte has termed cross-cultural incommensurability or a ‘minus effect’ in cross-cultural communication. This minus effect has to do with a residue of meaning that cannot be reached, a cultural or linguistic difference that does not come across in cross-cultural communication” (Ortega, In-Between, 167). 85. This is especially evident in Miranda Fricker’s analysis of the term “sexual harassment.” 86. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 290. 87. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 87. 88. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 90. 89. This draws to mind Heraclitus’s famous line, one “cannot enter the same river twice.” 90. This nonidentity interestingly compares to the poststructural concern with difference. Poststructuralism suspects that grand narratives erase or at least conceal difference. Yet poststructuralists have been criticized for their inability to explain their own privy to the existence of this knowledge—especially about absolute difference—even as they insist on its existence. In place of difference, within the phenomenological understanding of experience, nonidentity inherently structures experience. (I elaborate on this later in chapter 4.) 91. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 10–11. He continues, “[t]o be sure, the least recovery of attention persuades me that this other who invades me is made only of my own substance.” See also Phenomenology, 353, and Visible, 110. 92. Françoise Dastur argues that this central paradox of situatedness and yet progressing to knowledge that transcends the immediate situation, and self-determines, is the philosophical problem. She writes, “what hyper-reflection discovers is the problem of the double genesis of the world and reflection, of being and thought—and not solely the problem of the correlation of thought and the existing object. The problem of the double genesis is not ‘a superior or more profound degree of philosophy’ nor is it a residual problem that would be confronted only once the reflective method is put in place; it alone is the philosophical problem par excellence” (“World, Flesh, Vision,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000], 27). She quotes from Visible, 46. Galen A. Johnson points toward this idea as well. He writes, “[t]o reflect in thought cannot mean to coincide with the object precisely because thought is reflection, re-turn, re-conquest, or re-covery. Reflection is retrospective, therefore a temporal beat behind the genesis of its object; reflection is the activity of a self-in-genesis in relation to an object, therefore a temporal beat behind the genesis of itself. . . . Hyper-reflection is the effort to take seriously these spaces of genesis, meaning that ontology is possible only indirectly, in an interrogative mood that remains sensitive to the silence of what cannot be said” (“Ontology and Painting: ‘Eye and Mind,’” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. ed. Michael B. Smith [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993], 46). Barbaras agrees, “[t]he transcendence of perceived being, which Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘invisible,’ cannot be correlated with a conscious being, for this would reduce it to a positive meaning that would abolish the transcendent dimension. For this reason, only a being exceeding itself, existing outside of itself and, as it were, different from itself would be in a position to ground the transcendence of the world. Subjective movement, or Self-movement, meets these requirements” (“Perception and Movement,” 86). 93. Robert Burch, “On the Topic of Art and Truth: Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and the Transcendental Turn,” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed.

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Galen A. Johnson, trans. ed. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 352. 94. Burch, “Art and Truth,”  352. In less direct language, Merleau-Ponty writes, “in our experience we can distinguish the fact that we are living through something from what it is we are living through in this fact. . . . In so far as the essence is to be grasped through a lived experience; it is concrete knowledge. But in so far as I grasp something through this experience which is more than a contingent fact . . . I gain another kind of knowledge” (“Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man,” Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. John Wild [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964], 54). 95. Merleau-Ponty, “Sciences,” 92–93. 96. As Alcoff writes, “[k]nowing is a kind of immanent engagement in which one’s own self is engaged by the world—touched, felt and seen—rather that than standing apart or alone. One not only changes but is always changed as well” (Visible, 111). 97. Shaun Gallagher elaborates on the complexly integrated and hermeneutic consequences of accepting embodiment as consciousness and matter: “[i]n this complex interaction conscious decision-making—the taking up of intentions—the interpretations of what we experience—can shift the system and alter the biases, can create new biases that in the long run add up to ‘character’—which in turn may determine future responses” (How the Body Shapes the Mind [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 243).

3 The Body Movement of HistoricoRacial-Sexual Schema

A phenomenology for women of color must address the role of the body, for the body is the site for racially and sexually informative encounters. Based on the features of the body, one experiences specific interactions and one gauges the appropriate reactions. Chapters 1 and 2 explore a phenomenology of perception and experience to understand how multiplicitous subjects better see biases and possibilities and how intersectional identities’ dense experiences contribute to recognizing heterogenous commonalities for epistemic insights. Here I focus on a phenomenology of embodiment to center body movement as the site for interrupting and changing the existing racialized and sexualized meanings about embodied subjectivity. In place of the impossible divide between the body as object and the mind as subject, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s most radical proposal remains that the subject is embodied. Between the facticity of the material world and the ideas of consciousness, Merleau-Ponty recognizes that the body-subject epitomizes the complex relation between the two spheres without splitting into duality and without positing a monadology. This integration of the materiality of the body and the consciousness of the subject implicates the subject as integrally situated in the world. This intimate relation with the world, especially this world with its history of racism and sexism, has impacted the embodiment of women of color. Embodied subjectivity bounds subjects’ agency and responsibility. To understand the meaning and the implications of such intimacy between subjectivity and the world—particularly for women of color—this chapter begins with carefully analyzing the meaning and impact of the hypervisibility that is perhaps really an invisibility for racialized subjects. The chapter continues to discuss the development of the historico-racial schema—or for women of color, the historico-racial-sexual schema—and racialized habits of embodiment. From these examinations of the impact of racialization on embodiment, this chapter turns to body movement. 91

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Acknowledging the important work of understanding the embodied impact of living in society which socially constructs race with so much meaning, I attend to how our embodied subjectivity responds and existentially participates in changing the meanings of race. This chapter explores two yet undeveloped, under-appreciated ideas in The Phenomenology of Perception: (1) Merleau-Ponty’s work suggests that embodied subjects, through body movement, influence existing significations toward developing new meanings, and (2) understanding body movement requires rethinking the notion of causality. In place of causality, Merleau-Ponty offers motivations. Motivations influence less directly, less predictably; but motivations more accurately reflect the condition of embodiment for subjects and that all body movements ensue situated in the world and with existential choice. In this way, phenomenology holds forth, in addition to its descriptive capacities, normative possibilities. Focusing on the normative and existential possibilities of body movement, this chapter explores the historico-racial-sexual schema of women of color and the motivations for their movements. Because women of color occupy more than one world, women of color experience multiple and complex motivations. As such their body movements develop in ways that may creatively challenge dominant racist and sexist meanings about their embodiment.

THE MEANINGFULNESS OF EMBODIMENT The features of the body function as one of the major reasons, if not the major reason, for the particular experiences human beings encounter. Patricia Williams explains, “[t]he simple matter of the color of one’s skin so profoundly affects the way one is treated, so radically shapes what one is allowed to think and feel about this society, that the decision to generalize from such a division is valid.”1 Deidre E. Davis writes that “[w]e cannot hope to understand the meaning of a person’s experiences, including her experiences of oppression, without first thinking of her as embodied and second thinking about the particular meanings assigned to that embodiment.”2 The truth-value of the body features and their associated meanings is not relevant. The meanings of the body features, as well as the significance of the different body features, change historically but the body features steadfastly remain meaningful.3 Because features of the body convey meaning, one’s body “inspires” distinct reactions from other surrounding bodies. The most egregious and obvious experiences are well known: the assignment of criminality or sexual prowess onto an entire group of people who share a skin color, the association of certain body features with the proclivity to reside in certain classes or possess different levels of intelligence. George Floyd’s death and the work of the Black Lives Matter movement made public the rates of police violence as starkly distinguishable along race. In a five-year study, “[t]here were 5,367 fatal police shootings. . . . In the case of armed victims, Native Americans were killed by police at a rate three times that of white people (77 total



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killed). Black people were killed at 2.6 times the rate of white people (1,265 total killed); and Hispanics were killed at nearly 1.3 times the rate of white people (889 total killed). Among unarmed victims, Black people were killed at three times the rate (218 total killed), and Hispanics at 1.45 times the rate of white people (146 total killed).”4 Although the modern era posits that exterior features of the body do not depict the subject within, such phrenological impulses persist.5 The egregious demonstrations of phrenological impulses may not surprise anyone. What remains elusive is a depiction of the lived experiences accumulated carrying forth every day, with the intimate and mundane interactions that one’s embodiment inspires. Every day, in the banal, minute interactions with members of society, one’s embodiment signals the parameters for reasonable responses and reactions. One’s embodiment communicates trustworthiness to the bus driver who may or may not accept the explanation of boarding the wrong bus and wanting to avoid paying the fare twice.6 One’s embodiment supports the rationale for the person who refuses to enter the same elevator.7 One’s embodiment imparts information about one’s profession when dressed in jeans and a T-shirt; professional clothes have affiliations with specific bodies.8 One’s embodiment informs one’s likelihood for punctuality.9 These experiences accrue to a certain life. The accumulation of these experiences hermeneutically influences if not constructs the subject one becomes. Without entering a futile discussion about the origins of the meanings of body features or the truth-value of the meanings, here I emphasize only that body features meaningfully function. Under such circumstances, Charles Mills writes, “since, in our world, it is precisely the body that has been the sign of inclusion within or exclusion from the moral community (the physical sign of the natural slave that Aristotle had sought in vain), the black body arguably deserves to become a philosophical object.”10

THE BODY AS PHENOMENON It is time to add to the list of the phenomenally experienced—the body. Merleau-Ponty’s most radical proposal locates subjectivity as embodied as previously noted in chapters 1 and 2. On one reading the position that subjectivity is embodied counters much of the work in race theory today, where racialized subjects have insisted on not being defined by our body, that we are more than our body. On another reading, the position that subjectivity is embodied resonates with much in race theory—in the analysis of the emotional and the psychological impact (among others) to one’s subjectivity while growing up and living in a society with specific meanings about particular body parts. The position that subjectivity is embodied, that subjectivity is integrally formed by the materiality of the body, substantiates much in race theory regarding the existential and ontological consequences for racialized subjects. Of course, this latter reading motivates my exploration of Merleau-Ponty’s work on embodied subjectivity. But more than adding descriptions of the ramifications of racialization on embodied subjectivity, I explore Merleau-Ponty’s work to trace the

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consequences of embodied subjectivity for agency and freedom. For I am in search of an account of agency and freedom that takes seriously the weight of racialized embodiment but does not leave racialized subjects floundering without a means to respond to such oppressive circumstances. What are the consequences for agency and freedom on embodied subjectivity? One of the most important and obvious consequences of embodied subjectivity is that embodiment already conditions the subject’s relation with the world. Merleau-Ponty writes, “the alleged facts, the spatio-temporal individuals, are from the first mounted on the axes, the pivots, the dimensions, the generality of my body.” The body “is the measurant of all, Nullpunkt of all the dimensions of the world.”11 Unlike perception and experience, the body defies the law of noncontradiction. The body is matter and is not matter.12 The body is mechanistic and intentional.13 The body is sentient and sensible. Clearly, Merleau-Ponty does not relegate the body to just matter, biology, or nature. The body—rather embodiment and embodied subjectivity—is already meaning laden. As such, Merleau-Ponty writes, the “body is a Gestalt;” the body is “a heavy signification.”14 As phenomenally experienced, embodied subjectivity is ambiguous. These contradictory ambiguities reflect embodiment as reflexive; one can feel oneself touching oneself and one can see oneself looking at oneself.15 As a reflexive subject, the psychic, intellectual, and subjective intertwines with the material, biological, and natural features of embodiment. Obviously, Merleau-Ponty specifically challenges Plato and Descartes’s dualism and even the empiricists’ conception of the body as an object in the world. MerleauPonty explains that in Descartes’s treatments of the body,16 “the body is not the means of vision and touch but their depository.”17 The dualists’ conception of the body reduces the body to simply a container or a vehicle through which the more acclaimed mind or soul manifests itself. Clearly, Merleau-Ponty’s framework denies the dualist separation of the body and the subject. With this complex understanding of embodiment, Merleau-Ponty’s work ultimately contests the notion that existing social meaning systems construct, saturate, manipulate, and literally create the body. Merleau-Ponty appears to have been proven triumphant, as Shaun Gallagher writes, “[o]ne important mark of the contemporary cognitive sciences is the explicit and nearly universal rejection of Cartesian dualism.”18 With embodied subjectivity, new concepts for understanding the body need introduction and definition. Merleau-Ponty offers the following definition of body schema: “[t]he word ‘here’ applied to my body does not refer to a determinate position in relation to other positions or to external co-ordinates, but the laying down of the first co-ordinates, the anchoring of the active body in an object, the situation of the body in face of its tasks.”19 The body schema represents the subject’s spatiality and temporality. Clearly the subject’s embodiment is not as an object among other objects in the world. Because of the confusion surrounding the many usages of body image and body schema across various disciplines, including within Merleau-Ponty’s work, I follow Gallagher’s difference here. He writes: “[a] body image consists of a system of



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perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs pertaining to one’s own body. In contrast, a body schema is a system of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring.”20 The body schema interacts with the environment; but of course, the body schema and body image impact each other. Noting the distinction as important, for Merleau-Ponty, “on an existential level there is a continuous development between the schema and the image . . . but that on the level of the lived experience of the body there is an ‘indistinction’ between these elements.”21

THE RACIALIZED DIMENSIONS OF BODY SCHEMA AND BODY IMAGE Here amidst this discussion of these two notions of embodiment, let me note the work by feminist philosophers and philosophers of race, especially a contribution from Frantz Fanon. People of color, women, and women of color’s lived experience of embodiment develop into distinctive body schema and body image. Fanon and his scholars, including Jeremy Weate and George Yancy, have written about how the hypervisibility of their embodiment leaves racialized subjects very much aware of their body image, impacting their body schema. The analysis parallels much work from feminist philosophers regarding women’s intimate association with embodiment relegating women to object status. The notion of hypervisibility has been much discussed; I do not repeat most of the discussion. Here I want to clarify just two points. Let me begin with noting the concern of hypervisibility within the parameters of Jean-Paul Sartre’s work, which focuses on a specific instance within a dialectic framework, where the subject first sees herself as gazed upon by the other. Sartre reads this moment as the relation between being-in-itself and being-for-others, between the state of transcendence (as a subject who looks upon the other and existentially acts in the world) and the state of immanence (as an object, thing-like and exposed to the gaze of the other). Fanon’s work emphasizes the importance of this moment for black subjectivity because of the black body’s hypervisibility and overdetermination. Lewis Gordon explains that Fanon “urges a sociogenic approach, which he regards as recognizing the convergence of the existential situation of an individual amid social forces that may ‘overdetermine’ his significance. The task, in short, is to address the problems between society and the self, the problem of socially situated existence under the force of institutional sites of power or terror.”22 Because of the hypervisibility of the black body, immanence, object status, overwhelms the black subject prohibiting engagement as an individual being-in-itself, as a transcendent subjectivity who returns the gaze of society. In an antiblack world, the black body is made hypervisible, the look of the other reduces blacks to facticity. As a thing, blacks do not and perhaps cannot exercise the existential possibilities of acting in the world. Clevis R. Headley writes in Sartrean language: “[b]ad faith, in the context of existential phenomenology, then

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indicates that black people, in an antiblack world, are involuntarily situated in a what mode of human existence.”23 With the black body reduced to object status, the white body is free to engage in subjectivity, perhaps even excessive subjectivity. Whereas the black subject so irremediably associates with object status that “blacks expressing freedom are considered threats to the other.”24 Under these circumstances, Fanon famously writes, “[e]very hand was a losing hand for me.”25 This discussion about hypervisibility occurs primarily within dialectic frameworks without a clear understanding of the relevance of phenomenological frameworks, but dialectic and phenomenological ideas both permeate Fanon’s work. The most important distinction between the two frameworks for the present discussion centers on the phenomenological reading of perception and experience as ambiguous. Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on embodied subjectivity and recognition of being-in-the-world emphasizes ambiguity. The dialectic framework presumes the possibility of complete separation between subject and object status. The stark divide into the subjective and the objective cannot explain how the two totally different and separate features of the dialectic can see or experience each other. Merleau-Ponty devotes the first chapter of his last text, The Visible and the Invisible, to this criticism of Sartre; Sartre’s conception of the subject is too abstract in its absoluteness as only ambivalently alternating between being-in-itself or being-for-others. Merleau-Ponty writes, “[f ]rom the moment that I conceive of myself as negativity and the world as positivity, there is no longer any interaction.” He continues, “the opposites are exclusionary to such an extent that the one without the other would be only an abstraction.”26 The phenomenological framework begins in denial of ever beginning or achieving such complete separation. Within phenomenology, being is always in situation and in relation with the world. Merleau-Ponty’s subject never absolutely divides into being-in-itself and being-for-others. With an embodied subjectivity, the subject never completely escapes object status and always ambiguously relates with the world including other embodied subjects. Merleau-Ponty writes, “[w]e cannot pass from ‘All knowledge begins with experience’ to ‘All knowledge derives from experience.’ If the other people who empirically exist are to be, for me, other people, I must have a means of recognizing them, and the structures of the For Another must, therefore, already be the dimensions of the For Oneself.”27 Perception, experience, and embodied subjectivity, as ambiguous, never completely transcend others or remain immanent to oneself. Hence within a phenomenological framework, the entrapment of the hypervisible black subject, as absolutely and only positing immanence, as an object-in-itself, does not cohere phenomenologically, in a lived sense. The phenomenological challenge to Sartre’s dialectic framework explains Fanon’s own agency, and the transcendent—not only surviving—but life affirming, thriving behavior of black people throughout history. Second in this discussion of hypervisibility, consider Gayle Salamon’s discussion on the importance of experiencing anonymity as a positive experience; she posits



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the necessity of retreating into the anonymity of the body for developing the ability to relate with others: “[t]he ability to relate to others, the capacity to have a world, has, then, as its necessary condition its converse, the ability to submerge oneself in the ‘anonymous life’ of the body.”28 But the man of color is denied this zone of anonymity: “This body sense of location, a ‘zone of nonbeing’ as Fanon will term it, is precisely what is denied the man of color through his relations with the white colonizer.”29 What is the importance of such a retreat into anonymity? “Fanon and Merleau-Ponty both insist that anonymity is not just a retreat into the occasion of luxury of unsurveyed privacy; it is the foundation of our lives as social beings, and the condition of relation itself, surprising as that may seem.”30 Within this discussion about the hypervisibility of black bodies, let me consider the threat of invisibility that functions as the flip side of hypervisibility. Ralph Ellison with his novel Invisible Man made famous the phenomenon. As Gordon explains, such hypervisibility consigns individual black subjects to invisibility; “[b]eing ultimately regarded by black and antiblack racists as a body without a perspective, the black body is invited to live in such a way that there is no distinction between a particular black body and black bodies.”31 The invisibility that Ellison, Fanon, and Gordon assert integrally envelops hypervisibility is distinct from anonymity, in that the black subject’s hypervisibility conditions his invisibility. For the preexisting meanings about his body sets the parameters for his hypervisibility. Such preexisting meanings overwhelm the visual register so that the actual, the real subject defies perception. In this sense, the black subject remains invisible. In recognizing the ambiguity of the condition of embodiment within a phenomenal framework, this invisibility cannot be absolute. But this invisibility prominently functions in Western society. In contrast to this invisibility, the anonymity that Salamon celebrates and advocates as rejuvenating appears different. I read this retreat into anonymity as the possibility of escaping from representative existence. Fanon articulates the burden of the black man as representative of “not only my body, but also for my race, and my ancestors.”32 This is the burden of hypervisibility, and I have argued not only black subjects, but minority subjects carry this burden. At times it feels as if every act—foods one enjoys, patterns of speech, emotional proclivities, choices of entertainment—are held as representative of one’s entire identity group. Because the escape into anonymity is denied the black man (and minority subjects), he lives a representative existence. Anonymity and the escape from any representative function affords the luxury of developing idiosyncratic particularities, fostering a sense of style, and considering oneself as unique, perhaps special. Our ability to genuinely socially engage relies upon this ability to retreat into anonymity for it contributes to one’s sense of individual significance.

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BETWEEN BODY SCHEMA AND BODY IMAGE: HISTORICO-RACIAL SCHEMA In denying the absolute positions of transcendence and immanence of hypervisibility, living situated in society with others (with its differential power distributions along race, sex, class, etc.) influence the ambiguous experience of one’s embodied subjectivity. In such situatedness and ambiguity, Fanon offers another concept in addition to body image and body schema through which to understand embodiment: the historico-racial schema. One can read the historico-racial schema as a critique against Merleau-Ponty’s positing of an abstract body schema, or one can read the historico-racial schema as an addition, a specification of the body schema. Whichever way one reads it, Fanon understood that the history of colonialism impacts the present social-historical horizon and as such the history of colonialism impels the embodiment of racialized subjects. Challenging Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s work, Fanon posits a historico-racial schema for the black man, sketched below the corporeal schema. This historico-racial schema develops because the white man “had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories.”33 For the Black man, underneath the corporeal schema lies etched the historico-racial schema turning him into a “triple person. . . . I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics.”34 The black body made hypervisible because of the social-historical horizon encourages the development of a historico-racial schema for black subjects. How to situate the historico-racial schema in relation to the body image and body schema? Philosophers of race emphasize that the historico-racial schema disrupts and creates a distance in the alignment between one’s body image (one’s perception of oneself ) and one’s body schema (one’s sensory-motor capacities and occupation of the world). Helen Ngo describes the experience of embodiment for racialized subjects not only as creating distance between the body image and the body schema, but as forming cracks and spaces within the body schema itself. Ngo writes, “[t]his is a distance that inserts itself not only in the relation of body image and body schema, but in the coming together of the body schema itself.”35 By disrupting the coming together of the body schema, Ngo explains, “[i]t is not that one is simply taken away or separated from a ‘real’ or ‘genuine’ self (even if we are taken away from the self that we recognize), but rather as a racialized body, one stands in multiple relations and perspectives upon the self, in a way that disrupts the spatial cohesion of the body schema.”36 Ngo nicely emphasizes and illustrates how racialized subjects’ body schema builds within a horizon that includes racialized and racist perceptions of one’s body. Ngo considers the body schema as not premade and inevitable, but as coming together and forming from these embodied experiences. Coherently, I consider the body image as well as the body schema as fashioned by cracks and spaces from living in an antiblack world. Ngo understands her work as illuminating the body schema for racialized subjects, I read Ngo’s work as illustrating the historico-racial schema.



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In further ponderance of Ngo’s words, “one stands in multiple relations and perspectives upon the self,” consider that the historico-racial schema does not build only from whites’ perceptions of black subjects, but also from other racialized subjects’ views of black people. The historico-racial schema develops from how other black subjects, and Latin American, American Indian, and Asian American people, view black people. Other racialized subjects—some who may share the prevailing racist perceptions, but some who may not share such existing racist perceptions—contribute to crafting the historico-racial schema. Granted, plenty of racialized subjects merely accept the racist meanings that make up the current social horizon. But because racialized subjects occupy more than one horizon, more than one world as the previous two chapters highlight, racialized subjects have more resources for not simply and naively mirroring the dominant racist meanings. Multiple points of view from occupying at least two horizons contribute to the ambiguous development of black subjects’ historico-racial schema. In this way, black subjects undergo ambiguous experiences while developing their body schema, and body image: perhaps threatening to whites, but perhaps welcoming to blacks and other racialized subjects. In this regard, the perception of not only whites but other racialized subjects contribute ambiguity and context in the development of a historico-racial schema. A phenomenological understanding of the historico-racial schema emphasizes not only the role of the other in developing the body schema for racialized subjects but recognizes the historico-racial schema as not wholly negative, even if formed in sociality. Works contemplating the historico-racial schema of whites are proliferating in whiteness studies. Shannon Sullivan attributes white people’s historico-racial schema with an ontological expansiveness,37 a projective intentionality,38 and a seamless fluidity between their body schema and the white-dominated world.39 Here focusing on the concerns of this book, let me relate the notion of a historico-racial schema with women of color. Women of color clearly experience the hypervisibility, although to different degrees depending on the varying degrees of skin color and diverse body features. In highlighting the hypervisibility of women of color, and working within a phenomenological framework, not a dialectic framework, I want to emphasize the ambiguity of hypervisibility, that hypervisibility does not directly and determinately entrap subjects in object status. The ambiguity of the hypervisibility of the embodiment of women of color leaves open the possibility of diverse and fluid reactions from others. Nevertheless, with hypervisibility, women of color develop a historico-racial—and let me add sexual—schema, a way of living one’s body in this world that is deeply alert to the prevailing racialized and sexualized meanings of women of color’s embodiment. Women of color acquire a historicoracial-sexual schema, “sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness of the necessity of perceptual monitoring,” embodied knowledge of the racialized and sexualized meanings of embodiment. To be clear women of color’s historico-racialsexual-schema do not only mature from the gaze of whites, but also from the gaze of other women of color, from men of color, from inhabiting multiple worlds. Earlier work in feminist philosophy regarding embodiment made a psychological turn and

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emphasized the internalization of the dominance of negative social pressures about embodiment. I do not make a psychological turn to speculate on the development of internalized conditions of self-consciousness and self-hatred inducing physical harms such as the extremes of anorexia and bulimia. Instead, I remain on the phenomenological level and on the development of the historico-racial-sexual schema for women of color. Ambiguity defines embodiment for women of color in the experiences of welcome, respect, and desire felt from some and the experiences of being ignored, dismissed, and repulsed from others. Chapter 1 discusses the contradictory condition of multiplicitous subjects that enables seeing biases and possibilities, and chapter 2 explains the experiences of intersectional identities as dense encouraging recognition of heterogenous commonality and epistemic insights. Here, considering Fanon’s initial presentation of the historico-racial schema which emphasizes the condition of hypervisibility that positions his embodiment as representative of “my body, my race, and my ancestors,” such socially constructed hypervisibility of embodiment situates subjects to experience their embodiment as looked upon by the other, as immanent. These two conditions of representativeness and immanence depend on the heritage mixture and different embodied presentations. As such, hypervisibility alone does not define women of color’s historico-racial-sexual schema. Additionally, gender practices encourage drawing attention to embodiment at times. Women of color do not all submit to these gendered practices; we express ambivalent reactions to gendered expectations of visibility, at times demonstrating a simultaneous desire to defray attention from one’s embodiment. Hence, depending on the embodied presentations of hypervisibility and gendered presentations, the historico-racial-sexual schema for women of color vary. Consider the following description of Asian American women’s embodiment. Asian American embodiment shares with African Americans and not necessarily with Latin Americans the hypervisibility of embodiment. The so-called positive stereotype of “model minority” encircles Asian American women’s embodiment. But this model minority stereotype is complicated. David Kim describes the suppressive social order in the United States that functions as a source for Asian Americans to feel self-shame and self-contempt. Kim lists the following three anti-Asian stigma: “1. the aesthetic devaluation of Asian faces and bodies; 2. the derogation of alleged Asian personality traits, especially in terms of passivity, non-individuality, or social ineptness; and 3. the derogation of alleged Asian foreignness, alienness, or being a FOB (Fresh Off the Boat).”40 The embodiment of Asian Americans clearly grounds the first and the third of Kim’s list of anti-Asian stigma. And although recently some appreciation of Asian body features has surfaced, overall, the first of Kim’s list still holds true, especially in combination with the third. In considering the dimensions of Asian American women’s embodiment, I wrote in an earlier article that “Asian American female embodiment walks the fine line between the invisibility of docility and the characterization of being tiger-like at any sign of aggressivity .  .  .  so that any expressions of authority is perceived as



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aggressive.”41 Asian American women also experience hypersexualized and exoticized body meanings along with the devaluation of Asian features, adding complication to Asian American women’s embodiment. The hypersexualization and exoticization further objectifies Asian American women’s embodiment trapping Asian American women in immanence. The immanence ambivalently vacillates between desire and derogation/disgust. I want to specify one last meaning of Asian American embodiment, from the previous article, “Asian American embodiment is associated with the comic.”42 Reducing to the comic is a classic maneuver of racialization. Here let me admit that with the complexity and variety of embodiment of women of color, positing a historico-racial-sexual schema would essentialize women of color’s embodiment. For although I believe women of color develop a historicoracial-sexual schema, they do not all undergo similar experiences of the historicoracial-sexual schema. There are differences along identity groups and still further differences within identity groups. For instance, for Asian Americans, the model minority stereotype provides distinct experiences from African Americans and Latin Americans. Yet Asian Americans share with Latin Americans the stereotype of valuing family structures. Hence, I do not want to generalize. So, without offering a thorough account of a historico-racial-sexual schema, I forward an initial contemplation. For women of color, there is clearly a disruption of Merleau-Ponty’s description of the corporeal schema as “the body’s spatiality is not that of position, but that of situation,” or the body schema as “the laying down of the first co-ordinates” in relation to space.43 The historico-racial-sexual schema of women of color, much like the reasons for Fanon’s initial forwarding of the historico-racial schema, includes experiences as already, completely, defined, as objects positioned in space and as dislodged from occupying the first co-ordinates in space. For women of color’s embodiment carries the weight of cultural history. For much like black embodiment, each of the racialized identity groups are held representative not only of oneself, but of all the members of the group identity and the group identity’s history. But as consistent with my phenomenological reading of Fanon, embodiment is not completely and thoroughly caught in immanence or completely ambivalent. For even with the experiences of immanence, ambiguity defines the historico-racial-sexual schema of women of color because of the different presentings of embodiment. And importantly, women of color experience ambiguous embodiment because other women of color participate in perceiving women of color. With and from other women of color’s regard, women of color undergo centered and enabling experiences of embodiment. But these experiences ambiguously intermix with experiences of objectification, contributing to disbelief, shock, and confusion about how others perceive and read one’s embodiment and subjectivity. I agree with Alia Al-Saji’s work on hesitation for hesitation clearly overlays women of color’s historico-racial-sexual schema. Because so many contradictory meanings circumscribe women of color’s embodiment, our historico-racial-sexual schema could not but hesitate and wait. Caution alone does

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not motivate such waiting; ambiguity, confusion, and not yet understanding the scenario one finds oneself in also conditions such waiting.

BODY MOTILITY Toward further considering the historico-racial-sexual schema for women of color, let me turn to body motility. Building on body schema’s situatedness in the world, Merleau-Ponty ponders body motility; he proposes that the body retains its own intentionality.44 Let me situate body intentionality between the more traditional act intentionality and phenomenology’s contribution of operative intentionality. Act intentionality refers to the more prevailing understanding of intentionality, the intentionality of conscious judgments culminating in individual actions. Liberal political philosophy refers to act intentionality as agency.45 Operative intentionality, first introduced by Edmund Husserl, connotes an intentionality already functioning within the world. Merleau-Ponty describes operative intentionality: “the life of consciousness—cognitive life, the life of desire or perceptual life—is subtended by an ‘intentional arc’ which projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological and moral situation, or rather which results in our being situated in all these respects.”46 Distinct from the act intentionality of isolated, conscious individuals, operative intentionality names an intentionality always already present in the world because we occupy a specific spatial and historical location. Merleau-Ponty eventually relies less heavily upon the notion of intentionality, both act and operative. Intentionality evokes too much of an affinity with consciousness, and Merleau-Ponty’s work aspires to understand the embodied subject in both its material and cognitive abilities. Galen A. Johnson offers two additional reasons for Merleau-Ponty’s eventual progression away from utilizing the notion of intentionality. Johnson writes, first, intentionality emphasizes the difference between the inside and the outside that retains suggestions of the dualistic divide between the mind and the body. Second, as the two previous chapters explain, Merleau-Ponty aims to theorize the ambiguous.47 Act intentionality is not ambiguous; intentionality’s too heavy reliance on the cognitive abilities foregoes contemplating the more important work of understanding the concurrence with our experience of the world. In other words, intentionality, with its affinity to reflection, too dangerously mimics the mental constructions of high-altitude thinkers who in their fascination with certainty, merely project upon the world. For these reasons, Merleau-Ponty’s work does not heavily rely upon the notion of intentionality, particularly act intentionality. He continues to explore the notion of operative intentionality. For although Merleau-Ponty relies less heavily upon the notion of intentionality, he does recognize the idea of meaning structures already functioning in the world. At the very least, act and operative intentionality suggest that the body’s movements project beyond the immediate. In the relationship between act and operative intentionality lies body motility and the relationship between the significance of an



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individual act and the meanings operating in the world. Merleau-Ponty introduces the concept of body motility to capture this relationship between individual acts and the meanings already in the social/cultural world. He writes, “[a]lready motility, in its pure state, possesses the basic power of giving a meaning.”48 With an elaboration of body motility, Merleau-Ponty’s body schema represents the body in movement as a movement from the individual, immediate, and actual to the social, the world, the future and the ideal. The two moments form a unique relationship.49 The movement from the immediate to the surrounding world is a movement from the space of the concrete now to the space of the abstract future.50 The immediate vicinity that the body in action establishes around itself provides the setting for body movements that extend toward possible and creative space. Learned habitual body movements build the setting for more complicated and coordinated movements that further build into abstract movements.51 Merleau-Ponty describes the movement from the lived to the abstract space as a spiraling centrifugal movement.52 Embodied movements, however, do not project absolutely freely without any limitations or prohibitions. Centripetal influences of the world correlate with the centrifugal movements of the body. Such centripetal influences of the world encircle and motivate the body within specific spaces and for certain lengths of time. After all, the world already inherently limits and constrains the embodied subject. In that the embodied subject is ambiguous and reflexive, centrifugal forces of body movement meet the centripetal influences of the world.53 What causes body motility? Martin Dillon argues that body movements arise from habitual body movements, which build into continual, ritualized movements for an unending impetus. Habitual movements may explain movement from act intentionality to operative intentionality, from the space of the concrete to the space of the abstract—but this does not fully explain body movement. For what initiates habitual movement? The literature presents habits as complex phenomena which do not lend to ready-made explanations for initiating body movement. Because habits do not develop fully volitionally within a single moment in time, Weiss entertains Marcel Proust’s description: “the challenges habit poses to the mind because of the latter’s dependence upon it. For if the mind needs to draw upon habit to construct a familiar life-world, and if habit, that ‘slow-moving arranger,’ performs its function in its own time, this poses a challenge to the modern philosophers’ view of the mind as a self-sufficient entity.”54 Mind does not control habit; but clearly habit influences mind. The discussion from chapter 1 regarding the development of bias and the difficulties of forming and preventing biases, with the conclusion that biases ultimately rest within long-range goals parallel the workings of habits. A lot can be said about habit, but here I focus the discussion of habit about race. Turning to Ngo’s insightful analysis of bodily habits as the site of racialization in its temporality, she posits body habits as not simply a buildup of past bodily movements but as an orientation toward future bodily movements. She writes, “habit is forward looking, and embeds within it possibilities for future acting and modes of

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being.”55 In this way, “both the past and the future are at each moment enveloped in the present.”56 The past and the future temporal dimension of bodily habits shape body movements in the present. Highlighting the present, consider the temporality of “habit also entails an ongoing activity.”57 Habit enables potential; Ngo writes, “[t]his kind of bodily orientation engenders not just a familiarity that is present in habitual (repetitive, routinized) activities, but trades also on the twin notions of power and possibility.”58 Understanding habit as conditioning future possibilities emphasizes that body habit enables future body movements hermeneutically developing specific abilities of the body and as such enclosing the body in its specific skilled movements. Habitual body movements do not only enable the body for open abstract movements as Merleau-Ponty and earlier Merleau-Ponty scholars enigmatically suggest. Habitual body movements cultivate skill, but such conditioning also entraps the body to repeat such body movements. Habits develop within a social milieu, in relation with others and the world; again one cannot completely intentionally develop and draw upon habits as a resource.59 Although Sartre prioritizes transcendence and being-for-oneself, and Merleau-Ponty forwards the idea of body schema and body image without serious consideration of the influences from others, body habits and the notion of a historico-racial-sexual schema responds to a history of colonialism, inherently in reaction and in relation with others. Following the works of Weiss and Iris Young, and through analogizing embodiment with a home (for a home without openings/ pores is really a prison), Ngo explains that “while there are indeed harmful modes or degrees of this porosity or ‘social reference’ (racial and gendered objectification being but two examples), we should not confuse this with the idea that constitution by the ‘other’ or ‘outside’ is always, and in and of itself, harmful.”60 Body habits change and body motility develops socially—and this is not in-itself negative or destructive.61 Race informs bodily habits. Some obvious and well-known examples include the body movement of smiling, more frequently exercised by blacks and women; the use of handshakes for greeting, more frequently practiced among white men, compared to greeting with more body contact, among certain people of color and women; or the notion of colored people time (CP time), referring to the likelihood of lateness by certain people of color. Not only do specific racialized and sexualized subjects more frequently exercise each of these body movements, but also racially and sexually embodied subjects read each of these body comportments differently. Some read the tendency to smile as welcoming and endeavoring to put others at ease, while others consider excessive smiling as obsequious and a sign of a lack of intelligence.62 Some read handshakes as tasteful, while others ascertain handshakes as cold. Some read greetings with more body contact such as kisses and hugs as more intimate and welcoming, while others find these greetings as unnecessarily invasive of personal space. I welcome hugs from women while feeling suspicious of hugs from men, especially men I do not know well. Some read CP time as demonstrating flexibility, patience, with the mantra that one should not take life too seriously, while others define CP time as demonstrating an inability to follow directions and disrespecting other



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people’s time. Because the subject is embodied and, in the world, body movements generate a phenomenal space and time around oneself. Recognizing the temporality and sociality of body habits to ambiguously both enable and foreclose body motility, Ngo highlights white body habits as fulfilling racist habits and black body habits as adapting to and surviving racist circumstances. Ngo nicely explains that because racialized meanings permeate our society, racialized subjects cultivate bodily habits in response, to survive the social context; she writes “the different expressions of racialized or white bodily habits can never be disassociated from the underlying power relations that structure the meaning of such habits or practices.”63 As George Yancy’s now quite famous description of the elevator effect illustrates, white women particularly acquire bodily habits that clearly demonstrate, or as Ngo carefully asserts, “accomplishes” their racism. Yancy describes a number of such predictable body movements when white women stand in the vicinity of black men: in elevators, white women close their body movements; on streets, they lock their car doors, and clutch purses closer to their body.64 Ngo ascribes these bodily movements as habits; “[t]he ease with which such gestures are enacted in response to the racialized ‘other’—that is to say, the extent to which they are not anomalous or exceptional in the history of one’s body schema, but rather coherent and consistent with it—supports the ascription of habit.”65 Ngo insists such body habits fulfill racist meanings. To make this argument, she compares body movements to speech, “‘speech does not translate a ready-made thought; rather, speech accomplishes thought.’ . . . One could argue, then, that racist tropes around Blackness are not only invoked at the woman’s tensing of the body, but rather are accomplished by them.”66 Note the distinction between developing racist body habits that reflect the existing meanings in the world and affirming habits that fulfill and enable racist meanings in the future. For in the conditioning of habit, the past and the future reside in the present. Ngo forwards that black people cultivate their body habits to manage others’ racist perceptions. The recent publicity regarding police violence demonstrates the bodily habits black people must develop to dissuade others from perceiving them as dangerous to survive in present societies.67 Brent Staples, contributor to the New York Times and a black male, developed the habit of whistling classical music or the Beatles when walking at night. In this society, his black body is incongruous with knowledge of classical music or British pop music. So, whistling such music challenges or at least disrupts the ready, hypervisible meanings of black embodiment as dangerous. Ngo characterizes these bodily habits of managing others’ racialized anxieties as survival skills in a racist society; she writes, “if what we are talking about here is ‘coping,’ then this is the human skill par excellence, as thinkers such as Dreyfus . . . have argued.”68 Staples’s habitual skill exemplifies the social circumstances of forming habits. In the present-day social milieu, black bodies foster habits to manage others’ racialized perceptions. With such habits, racialized subjects creatively survive. Ngo points out that such management of others’ racialized perceptions constitute work and causes real physical consequences. Ngo writes, “we must do justice to the very real

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and justified experiences of anxiety, stress, anguish that manifest in racialized bodies in the context of racist societies, while simultaneously giving recognition to the creativity and resilience of those who find themselves in such situations.”69 Clearly, managing other’s anxieties is work. So far, I have argued that because of the function of hypervisibility, women of color cultivate historico-racial-sexual schemas. In considering the body in movement, body intentionality, and body motility, our social milieu and the embodied presentation of race influence the acculturation of body habits. Distinguishable patterns of body habits accrue along embodied differences of race and sex. But all embodied subjects of a particular identity group do not cultivate the same habitual body movements; singularity and style shine through in the development of habits.70 Recognizing singularity, much like chapter  1’s analysis of developing biases and that all members of a society do not incur the same biases, Ngo insists on responsibility for one’s own body habits. She writes, “the acquisition of new habits depends not only on one’s cultural and social milieu, but also on one’s own bodily receptivity and compatibility.”71 Following Merleau-Ponty, Ngo illustrates the role of maintaining habits; habits “require[e] ongoing maintenance and servicing . . . for Merleau-Ponty, habit has a distinctively ‘lived’ dimension: the acquisition of a new habit never fully crosses over the threshold into the acquired, but involves a constant holding or ‘inhabiting.’”72 Centripetal influences of the world and singularity participate in body habits. This long foray into body habits began to understand body motility. A closer examination into the functioning of habit raises further questions about whether habit constrains or enables individual possibilities. Without a clear sense of the beginnings and endings of habit, the role of the mind and the role of the social, it is unclear how habits continue or change. Body movements do change and one’s mind and the social influences the development of habits, but exactly how? Body movements, including that which initiates habitual movements, still require explanation.

BODY MOVEMENT GENERATES SIGNIFICANCE From embodied subjectivity as a projective being, I read Merleau-Ponty’s work as drawing the insightful and remarkable conclusion that body movements generate significance.73 And alternatively, “[m]y body takes possession of time . . . it . . . creates time.”74 This is the inevitable conclusion from Merleau-Ponty’s initial insight on the embodied condition of subjectivity. For the radical position that subjectivity is embodied has ramifications not only for how to conceptualize the body but for how to conceptualize ideas. The body schema depicts the body as establishing the first co-ordinates to anchor oneself in the world. The possibility of generating significance inevitably follows from body movements that move centrifugally into the possible, abstract future, a conclusion that needs and deserves a more thorough investigation to appreciate.



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To elaborate how and exactly in what sense the body generates significance. Let me first clarify that by existentially centering an embodied subjectivity and positing body intentionality, Merleau-Ponty identifies body movement with time. Merleau-Ponty writes, “[i]f . . . the subject is identified with temporality, then selfpositing ceases to be a contradiction, because it exactly expresses the essence of living time,” so that “I cannot see it, just as I cannot see my face.”75 Time’s integral tie to embodied subjectivity explains body movement as self-generating. Because time continuously flows, body movement need not have an impetus to begin, change, or end. Time’s intimacy with embodiment and body movement proffers that body intentionality need not require another force behind it, including habit. So, although habit conditions body movement, understanding time’s integral tie with the body explains the motivations for body movement.76 Merleau-Ponty states, “the body is essentially an expressive space  .  .  . it manifests . . . a core of new significance.”77 Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of embodied subjectivity and body movement explains how the subject and the body can actively resist and transform existing significations. I read Merleau-Ponty’s account of an embodied subjectivity as challenging the idea of the body as passively constructed by prevailing social meanings. Rather, Merleau-Ponty’s account positions body movement as generating significations. In the relationship between the world (including culture or language) and embodied subjects, much of the current analysis on embodiment—including what this chapter covers: hypervisibility, the historico-racial-sexual schema, and even body habits—these ideas ultimately highlight a unidirectional force in its emphasis on the world, discourse, and significations’ influence on embodied subjects. But there is a hermeneutic response from embodied subjects. Embodied subjects’ body movements respond and create new significations. The analysis of hypervisibility, historico-racial-sexual schema, and body habits insightfully lends to holistically understanding the embodied ramifications of living in a world saturated with racial and gendered meanings. But with the phenomenological framework’s denial of the body as purely matter, with the idea of embodied subjectivity and that body movements generate significations—clearly the body is not simply acted upon. What does it mean to challenge unidirectional dualistic conceptions of the body? How can we think about the body as a phenomenon: as mechanistic and intentional, as sentient and sensible, as reflexive? To think the body as a phenomenon invites conceptualizing the body as not simply acted upon, and instead imagines the body as actively participating hermeneutically in relating, responding, and acting upon prevailing social meanings and significations. With the ramifications for race theory and for women of color in mind, I explore more fully body movement.78

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TOWARDS AN ALTERNATE MOTIVATION With subjectivity as embodied, understanding the sources of body movement prove to be challenging. For with embodied subjectivity and its intimate tie to time’s flow, what exactly does it mean that body movement is self-positing? Body movement has been theorized as either driven by physiological motor movements or controlled by pure conscious intentions. Predictably, each of these previous theories about body movement reflects empiricist or intellectualist theories. Martina Reuter summarizes, “Merleau-Ponty shows that body movement cannot be understood either as causal physiological reactions, as empiricist explanations claim, or as directed by conscious intentions, as cognitivist psychology understands it.”79 With an embodied subjectivity we need to rethink unidirectional forces within dualistic frameworks for body movement. With an embodied subjectivity, body movement could not result from either physiological reactions or conscious intentions. Habit exemplifies these constraints in that habit requires body conditioning and habit is not fully subject to the mind. Consistent with the current works on body habits, Merleau-Ponty understands body movement in more complex terms; it is “something between movement as a third person process and thought as a representation of movement—something which is an anticipation of, or arrival at, the objective.”80 This complex portrayal of body movement, as not solely physical and not solely psychical, depicts the reflexivity of the body with the world and the ambiguity of the subject. Merleau-Ponty offers what he names a motivation, to explain body movement, perception, and experience. He theorizes a motivation from Sigmund Freud’s work. Merleau-Ponty writes, “[i]nto the sexual history, conceived as the elaboration of a general form of life, all psychological constituents can enter, because there is no longer an interaction of two causalities and because the genital life is geared to the whole life of the subject.”81 Freud’s work explains how sexuality functions as a motivation that does not immediately, directly lead to one inevitable expression but rather leads toward a possible variety of expressions. Motivation captures open-ended body movement between material and abstract space because human lives defy the limits of the two causalities. Guy Widdershoven writes, “[t]he notion of motivation offers an alternative to the concept of cause, engendered by empiricism, and the notion of reason, which is central to idealism. A motive is not the cause of the resulting action, since its meaning cannot be defined apart from the action; on the other hand, the action is not a totally free response to the motive.”82 In other words, motivational relationships, Mark Wrathall writes, “lack extensionality. Causal relationships, by contrast, are extensional in the sense that the relationship holds up between the relata regardless of the mode by which the relata are presented to us.”83 Motivations can come in the form of objects, events, or “non-thetic or not-explicitly-experienced motive.”84 Motivational relations depend on the context, the conditions of the world, as well as the embodied subjects.



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Accepting that body movement is not under the influence of causal forces, but rather by nondeterminative motivations, helps explain how although people may undergo similar experiences, each subject responds and reacts to her experiences individually. In other words, motivations helpfully explain that embodiment is not predictive. Because even with similar experiences, motivations describe how one can perceive something different and beyond the familiar scope of everyday perceptions; how the body can move in a variety of expressive ways; and how one can create a range of narratives about one’s life. Merleau-Ponty eloquently puts it, “[t]he psychoanalyst’s hermeneutic musing, which multiplies the communications between us and ourselves, which takes sexuality as the symbol of existence and existence as the symbol of sexuality, and which looks in the past for the meaning of the future and in the future for the meaning of the past, is better suited than rigorous induction to the circular movement of our lives.”85 Because motivations are nondeterminative, they cohere with the existential tradition, which places weight and responsibility on the choices and actions of individual human beings.86 Motivations for body movement situate agency and freedom for embodied subjects. From these self-generated and nondeterminative body movements arise the birth of the human subject. Let me summarize the concept of motivations. Motivations function as a force. The force does not derive solely from the material circumstances of the world or the internal wills of subjects, but from some varied combination depending on the situations. The initial impetus and the expressions of the motivations are both open-ended. Motivations do not define a specific ending. Because motivations are open-ended, different “forces” serve as motivations for different subjects in specific scenarios. I mentioned a few of these motivations earlier—the horizon in chapter 1 and intentionalities in this chapter. Motivations do not arise solely from within the subject nor solely from the world. Much like the horizon and operative intentionality, they function as a force in the relation between the subject and the world. So many of the phenomenological frameworks—such as (1) time, (2) fundierung model, (3) pregnancy, (4) autochthonous meaning, (5) the visible and the invisible as flesh and chiasm—all aim to articulate motivations, the relation between the subject and the world. Phenomenological motivations function in the relation of being-in-the-world. These phenomenological motivations, singularly or collectively, directly or indirectly, encourage body movement.

REVOLUTIONARY BODY MOVEMENT TO CHANGE MEANINGS ABOUT RACE By centering the body and embodied subjectivity, we have a better sense of the force of hypervisibility for racialized bodies, such that the social situation, the world, motivate the development of historico-racial schemas for racialized subjects, and historico-racial-sexual schemas for women of color. But women of color are not simply subject to the social influences of the world; through body movement, women of

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color contribute to the meanings about bodies and embodied subjects in the world. Because body movements generate significations, although the current meanings of body features condition the experiences of racialized subjects, through motility, through body movements, racialized subjects will change the existing meanings of such body features. Existing meaning systems cannot infinitely prevail; the meanings of racialized and sexualized body features evolve through body movements. Of course, determining the exact body expressions that encourage different understandings of racialized and sexualized body features is beyond prediction. I do not believe that eventually black bodies will move like white bodies or women’s bodies will comport themselves like male bodies. I look forward to the surprise of unexpected body movements that establish and cement new meanings about body features, habitually, with time, altering what features of the body are racially or sexually meaningful sites. How to enable such disruptive, revolutionary, and creative body movements, even as they remain beyond prediction, considering that such body movements cannot be wholly, intentionally initiated nor materially caused? How to understand and promote such body movements considering that ephemeral motivations initiate body movements? The development and buildup of body movements typically attributed to different racialized identity groups surface from a particular history. Body movements are, if not completely, at least noticeably, racially specific as Ngo argues. Not absolutely, but as the existence of stereotypes testify, one can attribute body movements with a race or sex. This chapter began with insisting on the meaningfulness of body features. This chapter ends with pondering the relevance of body movements distinguishable along race and sex. Body movements develop within a history and exhibit one’s affective resonance in the environment. This chapter discussed group identifiable body movements such as whites’ body habits that fulfill racism and black body habits that defray and manage others’ anxiety about black bodies. I end with attention to locating the motivations for potentially revolutionary body movements. Of course, as an existential phenomenologist, I consider the existentialist will of individuals. How else to explain such creative, idiosyncratic, and strategic body movements such as whistling Vivaldi late at night from Staples? But motivations do not only arise from something internal to the subject, such as consciousness or willpower—these emphasize too much act intentionality. Keeping in mind that motivations derive from a phenomenal structure, from the condition of being-in-the-world, let me forward that women of color—because they occupy more than one world—experience multiple motivations from multiple worlds. In this way, women of color, subject to multiple motivations, have the resources to develop creative and revolutionary body movements. As discussed in chapter 1, because women of color occupy more than one world, they are more likely to perceive biases and see possibilities. As posited in chapter 2, because women of color inhabit more than one world, they are better situated to recognize their heterogenous commonality through making connections and seeing patterns enabling epistemic insights. Here within this chapter 3, let me posit that women of color’s historico-racial-sexual schemas experience not only representativeness and



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immanence but also ambiguity through enabling and possibly positive encounters with differently racialized subjects and not just with whites. Coherently, because motivations surface from the relation between the subject, the horizon, and the theme, and because women of color dwell in more than one world, women of color experience the pull and the push of various motivations that are not simply unidirectional, but complicated, at times countering each other. Women of color experience not just white-dominated worlds, but other worlds, perhaps smaller, but nevertheless, where they are subject to the look of other women of color. Occupying more than one world exposes women of color to more than one holistic set of motivations. Traveling between worlds, dwelling in more than one world presents complex, at times contradictory, motivations. For this reason, women of color opportunely gain familiarity with more—in number and complexity—motivations. As such, I argue that women of color, in traveling between worlds, encounter motivations to possibly develop creative and revolutionary body movements to challenge existing racialized and gendered significations of identity groups.

CONCLUSION The features of our bodies inspire specific reactions from others, in return we gauge the appropriate reactions to others, based on the features of their bodies. To better understand the meaningfulness of body features, Fanon introduces the ideas of hypervisibility, historico-racial schema and more recently Ngo theorizes the racialization of body habits. Such work illuminates the embodied relevance of race. But this understanding does not leave human beings powerless to the dominant, normalizing meanings in our society. Merleau-Ponty’s embodied subjectivity intends and exercises agency with the weight of the body’s materiality and situatedness in the world. Body movements generate significations. Merleau-Ponty’s ascription of the body as “a heavy signification” illustrates the conclusion that body movements stem from our history and a sedimentation of meanings and motivations in our world. For example, the history of colonialism and sexism has left an imprint on embodiment, including racialized and sexualized motivations for body movements. Body comportment and movement are distinguishable along racial and sexual lines, and the intentions and the significances of body movements are read in racially and sexually specific ways. The sedimented scripts in the embodiment of whites, blacks, Asians, Latinos, etc. illustrate the depth of racialized embodiment in the present social situations. Here in this interstice, I forward that body movements do not remain trapped within existing racialized habits. In occupying more than one world, more than one horizon, the various motivations from such multiple worlds, in some relation with the openness of existential will, admits the possibility of body movements that ultimately generate new meanings. Women of color in occupying more than one horizon, in experiencing the motivations from

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more than one world are poised to develop body movements that can change existing significations.

NOTES 1. Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 256. See also Elizabeth Grosz,    Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) and Jayne Chong-Soon Lee, “Navigating the Topology of Race,” Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, eds. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: The New Press, 1995). 2. Deidre E. Davis, “The Harm That Has No Name: Street Harassment, Embodiment, and African American Women,” Critical Race Feminism, ed. Adrien Katherine Wing (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 192. She cites Elizabeth V. Spelman’s Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 129–30. 3. See Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 23. 4. Brita Belli, “Racial Disparity in Police Shootings Remain Unchanged over 5 Years,” Yale News, October 27, 2020. Williams writes that despite persistent associations of blacks with a proclivity to crime, actual crime rates are not consistent with perceptions of which race commits crimes; although “U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics for 1986 show that whites were arrested for 71.7 percent of all crimes; blacks and all others (including American Indian, Alaskan Native, Asian and Pacific Islander) account for the remaining 28 percent” (The Alchemy of Race, 73). 5. See Rebecca Kukla, “The Phrenological Impulse and the Morphology of Character,” Embodiment and Agency, eds. Sue Campbell, Letitia Meynell, and Susan Sherwin (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 76–93. 6. My mother underwent this experience; as an Asian woman, she was believed. My friend also tried this; as a black man, he was not believed. 7. See Taunya Lovell Banks, “Two Life Stories: Reflections of One Black Woman Law Professor,” Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, eds. Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: The New Press, 1995). George Yancy, “White Gazes: What It Feels Like to Be an Essence,” Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, ed. Emily S. Lee (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014). 8. See Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Defining Genealogies: Feminist Reflections on Being South Asian in North America,” Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women, eds. Elaine H. Kim, Lilia V. Villanueva, and Asian Women United of California (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997). See also Adrien Katherine Wing, “Brief Reflections Toward a Multiplicative Theory and Praxis of Being,” Critical Race Feminism, ed. Adrien Katherine Wing (New York: New York University Press, 1997).



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9. See Karen J. Hossfeld, “Hiring Immigrant Women: Silicon Valley’s ‘Simple Formula,’” Women of Color in U.S. Society, eds. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). 10. Charles Mills, Blackness Visible (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 16. 11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 114. Françoise Dastur explains that Husserl came to this conclusion on the central role of the body in Ideas II. She writes that he continued to refer to the body as a “remarkably imperfectly constituted thing” because one could not see one’s head or back. See “World, Flesh, Vision,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of the Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 40. 12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1962), 164, 166, 181. 13. M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 134. 14. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 248, 205. 15. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 136, 249. Elizabeth Grosz ponders entities striding life and nonlife, “it is no longer clear, following Darwinism and its implications that the evolution of life emerges from the most elementary biotic combinations of nonorganic material elements, where the boundary between life and nonlife, between the organic and inorganic can be drawn. What is the ontological status for example of those of RNA which lie halfway between the organic and the inorganic, which we call viruses?” (“Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought,” Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999]: 23). 16. And according to Merleau-Ponty, Descartes’s position exemplifies most dualist philosophers. 17. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. Carleton Dallery (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 178. 18. Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 134. 19. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology 100. Merleau-Ponty writes, the “self . . . that is caught up in things, that has a front and a back, a past and a future. . . . Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself ” (Merleau-Ponty, “Eye,” 163). Gayle Salamon elaborates that to the extent that Merleau-Ponty draws some influence from Paul Schilder’s work, he “describes the body image as ‘in some way always the sum of the body images of the community according to the various relations in the community’ and even insists the body schema ‘belongs’ to the world more than it belongs to the individual whose body it serves. . . . Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the world as a prolongation of the body establishes a relation between self and the world that is not a barrier, but a sensate border” (“‘The Place Where Life Hides Away’: Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, and the Location of Bodily Being,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies v. 17, n. 2 [2006]: 101–2). 20. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 24. He continues, “[t]his conceptual distinction between body image and body schema is related respectively to the difference between having a perception of (or belief about) something and having a capacity to move (or an ability to do something).” I do not follow Gallagher here, mainly because I worry about the possible loss of reflexivity between the mind/consciousness and the materiality of the world. For after

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all, Gallagher continues to attribute to body schema processing new information, coordinating output, and intermodal capacities (45). Gallagher asserts that Merleau-Ponty was consistent in his reference to the body schema “to signify a dynamic functioning of the body in its environment. The schema operates as a system of dynamic motor equivalents that belong to the realm of habit rather than conscious choice  .  .  . however, the term ‘schema corporel’ was rendered ‘body image’ in the English translation of his work The Phenomenology of Perception (1962)” (How the Body Shapes the Mind, 20). 21. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 68. 22. Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 72. 23. Clevis R. Headley, “Existential Phenomenology and the Problem of Race: A Critical Assessment of Lewis Gordon’s Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism,” Philosophy Today v. 41, n. 2 (Summer 1997): 335. Gordon traces the extant of this conclusion in writing, “[t]he conclusion, then, is that reality is threatened by the inclusion of blacks, whereas reality is jeopardized by the exclusion or diminution of white presence” (103). 24. Headley, “Existential Phenomenology,” 335. See also George Yancy, “‘Seeing Blackness’ from within the Manichean Divide,” White on White/Black on Black, ed. George Yancy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 235; Shannon Sullivan, “Ethical Slippages, Shattered Horizon, and the Zebra Striping of the Unconscious: Fanon on Social, Bodily, and Psychical Space,” Philosophy and Geography v. 7, n. 1 (February 2004): 15; Nigel Gibson, “Dialectical Impasses:  Turning the Table on Hegel and the Black,” Parallax v. 8, n. 2 (2002): 35; and Valentine Moulard-Leonard, “Revolutionary Becomings: Negritude’s Anti-Humanist Humanism,” Human Studies 28 (2005): 239. In this discussion, I find David Macey’s critique of Fanon strange. See his article, “Fanon, Phenomenology, Race,” Radical Philosophy v. 95 (May/June 1999); 8–14. Sullivan and others answer more thoroughly Macey’s rather sweeping criticism of Fanon’s work. But I find especially troubling his cryptic remark that Fanon does not address Being-with-others and only focuses on Being-for-others (10). I am not sure why this criticism is dealt at Fanon and not at Sartre. Fanon engages Sartre’s framework, and hence to critique Fanon for not utilizing a Heideggerian framework is simply incongruous. 25. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 132. 26. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 52 and 64. See also 68. Let me be sure to acknowledge Alia Al-Saji’s reading of an important point within Fanon’s work. In this analysis of the hypervisibility of black subjects, Fanon carefully articulates a temporal dimension. Fanon points to how in hypervisibility, the black subject arrives ahead of himself. Al-Saji nicely translates this phenomenon to the case of Muslim womens’ “being determined in advance as ‘oppressed’ women, what she describes is the way in which these women are presumed to be known before they actually are. Not only are they ‘over-determined,’ but they are also pre-determined; determined ahead of themselves, ahead of what any genuine encounter with them may reveal, and ahead of how they may wish to present themselves” (Helen Ngo, The Habit of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017], 67). The flip side of considering this is to understand that “racialized bodies arrive ‘too late’ not only in relation to the identities already carved out for them, but also in relation to the possibilities for action and creativity” (Ngo, The Habit of Racism, 67). See also Boram Jeong’s reading of the idea of people of color



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arriving too late, “A People Yet to Come: ‘People of Color’ Reconsidered,” Race as Phenomena: Between Phenomenology and Philosophy of Race, ed. Emily S. Lee (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 1–15. 27. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 448. Or more directly addressing the ambiguity of the embodied subject “[b]eing supported by the prelogical unity of the bodily schema, the perceptual synthesis no more holds the secret of the object than it does that of one’s own body, and this is why the perceived object always presents itself as transcendent, and why the synthesis seems to effect on the object itself, in the world and not at that metaphysical point which the thinking subject is” (233). And again, “[i]t is simply a question of recognizing that the body, as a chemical structure or an agglomeration of tissues, is formed, by a process of impoverishment, from a primordial phenomenon of the body-for-us, the body of human experience or the perceived body, round which objective thought works, but without being called upon to postulate its completed analysis. As for consciousness, it has to be conceived, no longer as a constituting consciousness and, as it were, a pure being-for-itself, but as a perceptual consciousness, as the subject of a pattern of behavior, as being-in-the-world or existence, for only thus can another appear at the top of his phenomenal body, and be endowed with a sort of ‘locality’” (351). See also Phenomenology, 400 and 404. 28. Salamon, “‘The Place Where Life Hides Away,’” 107. 29. Salamon, “‘The Place Where Life Hides Away,’” 107. 30. Salamon, “‘The Place Where Life Hides Away,’” 110. 31. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, 105. 32. Fanon, Black Skins, 92. 33. Fanon, Black Skins, 111. 34. Fanon, Black Skins, 112. Gail Weiss explains that because the past of colonialism is embedded in our present social horizon, members of minority communities experience their body schema as inferior. Weiss reads Fanon as impacting the subject’s psychology. She writes, “the invisible social processes at work in the construction of a racially-coded corporeal schema . . . [are] always already operative, and for those societally designated as ‘racial minorities,’ the internalization of this racial epidermal schema . . . results in a (psychophysical) inferiority complex” (Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality [New York: Routledge, 1999], 27–28). Considering Gallagher’s clarification of the body schema as sensory-motor capacities, I am not sure what it means to internalize a body schema. We need a better understanding of how the racial epidermal schema impacts racial minorities. 35. Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 65. 36. Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 66. 37. Ngo defines ontological expansiveness, “[t]he idea, according to Sullivan, is that ‘[a]s ontologically expansive, white people tend to act and think as if all spaces—whether geographical, psychical, linguistic, economic, spiritual, bodily, or otherwise—are or should be available for them to move in and out of as they wish’” (Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 80). 38. Sullivan challenges the historical and philosophical prioritization of projective intentionality; Ngo explains Sullivan questions the desirability “that all people live in as ontologically an expansive manner as possible. This suggestion is problematic from an antiracist and feminist perspective because it licenses white people to live their space in racist ways. . . . In this way, the non-transactional, unidirectionality of projective intentionality lends itself toward ethical solipsism” (Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 85).

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See also Lisa Guenther, who writes, “[w]hile the white world disrupts the corporeal schema of those who are racialized as black, it supports the coherence of white corporeal schemas and facilitates their operative intentionality, or their implicit sense of ‘I can’” (“Seeing Like a Cop: A Critical Phenomenology of Whiteness as Property,” Race as Phenomena: Between Phenomenology and Philosophy of Race, ed. Emily S. Lee [London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019], 198). 39. Guenther ponders, “[i]s there a historical-racial schema of whiteness, and if so, how is it (re)produced? . . . we might argue that whiteness is also constructed by white people ‘out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories’ that support the innocence, entitlement, and impunity of white self-investment. The white historico-racial schema disavows both its historicity and its racialization in order to frame its desires, capacities, and interests—its ‘I want,’ ‘I can,’ and ‘I ought to be able to’—as a fluid, natural body schema that dovetails fluidly with the white world” (“Seeing Like a Cop,” 199–200). 40. David Kim, “Shame and Self-Revision in Asian American Assimilation,” Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment and Race, ed. Emily S. Lee (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 119. 41. Emily S. Lee, “Model Minority,” 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, eds. Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 233. 42. Lee, “Model,” 233. 43. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 115. 44. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 387. 45. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, xviii. 46. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 136. 47. See Galen A. Johnson, “Inside and Outside: Ontological Considerations,” Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, eds. Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). 48. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 142. Drawing from recent studies in neural science, Gallagher lends support to this position in writing, “at the time of our birth, our human capacities for perception and behavior have already been shaped by our movement. Prenatal bodily movement has already been organized along the lines of our own human shape. . . . Movement . . . contributes to the self-organizing development of neuronal structures” (1). Or more summarily, “bodily movement, transformed onto the level of action, is the very thing that constitutes the self ” (9). 49. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 110. 50. Lawrence Hass, “Sense and Alterity: Rereading Merleau-Ponty’s Reversibility Thesis,” Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, eds. Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 94. 51. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 147. 52. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 111. See also Dillon,  Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 136–37. Embodiment is not lived in its entirety at one moment; the different parts of the body do not simultaneously move with every act, at all times. The various spheres of the body move in relation to what is necessary for the movement when facing its projects. The body in movement “actively integrates parts of the body ‘only in proportion to their value to the organism’s projects.’” Embodied movements project outwardly to the world and also reverberate inwardly to the different areas of the lived body (Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality [New York: Routledge, 1999], 1). She cites Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology,



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100. Gallagher also writes, “[i]n the act of paying conscious attention to the body one does not have a consciousness of the body as a whole. Even a ‘global awareness’ is only an awareness of the general features or outlines of one’s own body; it is not a consciousness of every part in holistic relation to every other part” (How the Body Shapes the Mind, 29). Or, “[p]roprioceptive awareness does not organize the differential spatial order of the body around an origin. Whereas one can say that this book is closer to me than that book over there, one cannot say that my foot is closer to me than my hand” (How the Body Shapes the Mind, 138). 53. Of course, I do not mean in a one-to-one correspondence sense. 54. Gail Weiss, Refiguring the Ordinary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 76. 55. Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 4. 56. Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 4. 57. Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 39. 58. Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 6. 59. See Weiss, chapter 5, “Can an Old Dog Learn New Tricks? Habitualized Horizons in James, Bourdieu, and Merleau-Ponty,” Refiguring, 75–97. See also Ngo, who writes, “habits allow for a dynamic interchange between body and world” (The Habits of Racism, 8). 60. Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 114. 61. Much like the centripetal influences on body motility, and emblematic of the social development of habits, Ngo writes, “intercorporeality . . . is not a deficiency in need of overcoming via the assertion of bodily autonomy—even when expressed in undesirable practices of bodily objectification (racial or gendered)—since it speaks to the fundamental sociality and situatedness of our lived bodies” (Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 114). 62. See Martha Nussbaum, “‘Don’t Smile So Much’: Philosophy and Women in the 1970s,” Singing in the Fire: Tales of Women in Philosophy, ed. Linda Martin Alcoff (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 81–92. See also Toni Morrison’s description of Clarence Thomas’s laugh in “Introduction: Friday on the Potomac,” Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon, 1992), xii. 63. Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 84. 64. See George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008). See also the movie Crash, dir. Paul Haggis (2004). Sandra Bullock’s character especially poignantly depicts a white woman clutching her purse in the vicinity of a black man. 65. Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 25. 66. Ngo, The Habits of Racism,  17. She continues, “the rigid insistence of a perceptionthen-expression logic obscures the way in which our processes of perception are themselves developed through embodied and lived experiences” (Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 25). Ngo’s position contrasts against Weiss’s position. Weiss insists on the enabling, the open possibilities of habit: “I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the habit body as ‘dilating our being in the world,’ that is, as expanding rather than limiting human possibilities, offers a way of accounting for the creative aspects of habit that cannot be done justice to by either James or Bourdieu” (Body Images, 87). 67. Ngo describes, “the work of managing others’ racialized anxieties and expectations, a burden that is both one-sided and counterproductive” (The Habits of Racism, 58). This admits that not all endeavors to manage others’ racialized perceptions are successful. 68. Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 71. Alison Bailey explains that history sediments into social meanings in the form of body comportments. She writes, “[r]acial scripts are internalized at an

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early age to the point where they are embedded almost to invisibility in our language, bodily reactions, feelings, behaviors, and judgments.” In other words, history has sedimented not only into the social structural situation in terms of laws and institutions or conscious beliefs and unconscious biases about different racialized body features, but into the very way one lives in one’s body, one’s body movements (“On Anger, Silence, and Epistemic Injustice,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement v. 84 [2018]: 290). 69. Ngo, The Habits of Racism,  73. Ngo explains, “not just the management of racial prejudice, but even its anticipation is enough to trigger physiological stress responses in the racialized body” (The Habits of Racism, 60). 70. See Richard Shusterman, “The Silent, Limping Body of Philosophy,” The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, eds. Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 151–80. Shusterman argues that through somatic consciousness, one can adjust and change body movements and being. See also Weiss, who writes, “Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the singularity of each and every body-subject makes it clear that each person will find her own habitual ways of negotiating and thereby extending the parameters of his or her world” (Refiguring, 90). Recall from chapter 1 that not all members of a society incur the same biases. 71. Ngo, The Habits of Racism, 39. 72. Ngo, The Habits of Racism,  40. This is consistent with chapter 1’s discussion of Holroyd’s analysis about perceptual habits regarding the acquisition of implicit bias. 73. Although Merleau-Ponty uses the word “generate,” I do not believe that he uses the word in the sense of Anthony Steinbock’s work. See “Generativity and Generative Phenomenology,” Husserl Studies v. 12 (1995): 55–79. Steinbock uses the term “generating” to refer to becoming over the generations (57), but even Steinbock admits that Husserl never fully developed a generative philosophy (75). 74. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 240. Although later he clarifies that he does not mean create exactly, but generate. Additionally, he writes, “by considering the body in movement, we can see better how it inhabits space (and, moreover, time) because movement is not limited to, submitted passively to space and time, it actively assumes them” (102, see also 142, 148). 75. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 425, 423–24. See Emily S. Lee, “Body Movement and Responsibility for a Situation,” Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, ed. Emily S. Lee (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014), 233–53. 76. The next section addresses motivations. 77. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 146. Michael B. Smith also writes, “it is the human body that provides the generality of signifier” (“Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics,” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. ed. Michael B. Smith [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993], 195). 78. Permit me to reframe the discussion by drawing from Renaud Barbaras’s work and consider perception as a form of movement. Barbaras reads Merleau-Ponty as positing that perception of the world is movement in the world. Hence, simply sitting still and noticing one’s surroundings is moving in one’s environment. This is the inevitable conclusion with the body as reflexive. In Merleau-Ponty’s early writing on child psychology, he explains that the child’s body posture of lying down or sitting up affects her perceptual abilities. He concludes, “[t]his link between motility and perception shows at what point it is true to say that the two functions are only two aspects of a single totality and that the perception of one’s entry into the world and of one’s own body form a system” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. William Cobb



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[Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964], 122). With perception as a form of movement, Barbaras insightfully writes, “[m]ovement cannot be an object of perception because it is the ultimate subject of perception” (Renaud Barbaras, “Perception and Movement: The End of the Metaphysical Approach,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000], 87). Because perception is movement, one cannot perceive movement. With this suggestion, his point offers a possible explanation to Henri Bergson’s frustration of philosophy’s difficulties with understanding body movement. Following Merleau-Ponty’s conclusions, Jacques Taminiaux suggests that this reflexivity between movement and perception must inherently uphold in phenomenology. Taminiaux writes, “[p]henomenology requires that one recognize in the one who sees—qua seeing and not by virtue of some extrinsic accident—‘an intertwining of vision and movement,’ such that to see is, at the outset, to be able to come within proximity of what is seen, to hold it at arm’s length and to come within closer range” (“The Thinker and the Painter,” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. ed. Michael B. Smith [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993], 282). He cites Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye,” 162. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone also writes in regard to dance and thinking in movement, “[t]he World which I am perceiving is inseparable from the world in which I am moving, in the same way that the world I am exploring is inseparable from the world I am creating” (“Thinking in Movement,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, v. 39, n. 4 [Summer, 1981]: 403). All these speculations on perception as a form of body movement lends to thinking that the difficulty with understanding body movement may be because like perception, body movements hide their own blind spots. 79. Martina Reuter, “Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Pre-Reflective Intentionality,” Synthese v. 118 (1999): 73. 80. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 110. 81. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 158. 82. Guy A. M. Widdershoven, “Truth and Meaning in Art: Merleau-Ponty’s Ambiguity,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology v. 30, n. 2 (May 1999): 231. Merleau-Ponty also writes, “Plato and Kant, to mention only them, accepted the contradiction of which Zeno and Hume wanted no part. . . . There is the sterile non-contradiction of formal logic and the justified contradictions of transcendental logic” (“The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences,” The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. William Cobb [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964], 19). 83. Mark Wrathall, “Motives, Reasons, and Causes,” The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, eds. Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 119. 84. Wrathall, “Motives, Reasons, and Causes,” 117. 85. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cezanne’s Doubt,” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. ed. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 75. See also in the Phenomenology, “[o]ne phenomenon releases another, not by means of some objective efficient cause, like those which link together natural events, but by the meaning which it holds out—there is a raison d’étre for a thing which guides the flow of phenomena without being explicitly laid down in any one of them” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 50). See also 120. 86. See Wrathall, “Motives, Reasons, and Causes,” 118.

4 Three Criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological accounts of perception, experience, and embodiment facilitate thinking in more depth some of questions in feminist philosophy and philosophy of race as relevant for women of color. Yet, as with many philosophical frameworks, philosophers of feminism and race have found problematic aspects of his phenomenology. This chapter explores three important criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology—articulated predominantly within feminist philosophy, primarily through the works of Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler. Feminist philosophers’ early engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s work identified critical concerns within Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. These concerns must be addressed to make the case that phenomenology helpfully illuminates the concerns of women of color. This chapter explores the following: (1) the priority phenomenology places on perception, including a quality of “naturalism” or “inevitableness” embedded within the horizon that may not recognize the functioning of power. Irigaray challenges the prioritization of perception because of its tendency to narcissism. The narcissism of perception forecloses possibilities of actually seeing others. I add to this concern with the invisibility of others, the phenomenon of hypervisibility as contributing to the invisibility of others. Recognizing the hypervisibility of racialized subjects and women of color challenges Irigaray’s reduction of perception as simply narcissistic. (2) Butler points out that Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous body normalizes the male gender and consequently devalues gender and women. In parallel fashion, I ponder whether Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous body normalizes the white race and devalues other races. Ultimately the question centers on the possibility of theorizing anonymous bodies and situatedness simultaneously. (3) Irigaray draws attention to the totalizing tendencies of perception and ultimately with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of reversibility. She challenges the idea of reversibility by articulating three irreversibilities. I admit 121

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two of the irreversibilities based on embodiment and add the embodiment of race as an additional irreversibility. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology may not respect the ontological status of difference, especially in the chiasmic reversibility of flesh. These criticisms are relevant to a phenomenology for women of color. To make the case that the phenomenological framework helpfully illuminates the exigencies of race and sex and that the phenomenological framework admits normative analysis, I address each of these criticisms in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. But my aim is not simply to defend phenomenology, for my ultimate aim remains to better understand phenomenology as a philosophical framework and how the phenomenological method can promote understanding of the lives of women of color.

THE PRIMACY OF PERCEPTION REVISITED The Problem of Narcissism Luce Irigaray voices perhaps the most thoroughly devastating criticism of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological system. She questions the prioritization of perception as the primary sensory system which human beings should utilize to engage the world and each other. She challenges the prioritization of perception as the primary sensory system from which to make epistemic claims. Irigaray argues for the primacy of touch over perception. In Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray lists three problems with the primacy of perception. First, Irigaray explains that perception cannot avoid functioning primarily as a mirror of oneself, as a vehicle for narcissistic aims. She writes, “[h]e prefers to be (his) absolute mirror, reflect (himself ) and in(de)finitely. As-if-the-standard for everything that is.”1 Because perception inherently promotes narcissism, according to Irigaray, men especially benefit from this quality of perception. Feminist philosophers have voiced this concern as affecting women of color. Chapter 1 elaborated on the impossibility of neutral perception, that perception is biased and has a history of recasting people of color’s perception in white terms. So, the claim that perception is narcissistic probably will not elicit surprises or disagreements from women of color. Second, perception leaves the impression of completeness, of presenting an entire view of the world. Tina Chanter clarifies Irigaray’s point, “[v]ision is a sense that can totalize, enclose.”2 In gazing at an object, one does not see the absences or blank spaces. One does not sense that one’s perception may be gliding over and not noticing some aspect of the world. Perception leaves the impression of seeing the object as complete and the world in its entirety. Vision totalizes. Irigaray’s third problem with perception circumscribes the ontological status of “difference.” Elizabeth Grosz elaborates, “when it comes to the otherness of the other (whether woman for man, man for woman, or any others) the subject is necessarily unable to see that otherness. We see nothing in the difference because difference itself cannot be grasped, made present; hence I remain blind to—but equally unable to hear or feel—a body that is sexed differently.”3 Irigaray and Grosz hold that



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difference itself is un-perceivable; one cannot perceive absolute difference—difference in a radical sense. This does not specifically characterize perception; but rather, the ontological status of difference itself. Because of difference’s status as absolute otherness, Irigaray elaborates that “[t]hus the sensible must yield and measure up to the specula(riza)tion of the form of sameness in order to enter into knowledge.”4 Perception initially focuses on something familiar, as a handle from which to begin. Perception’s innocent beginnings, combined with its tendency to totalize, ensure that perception does not encounter difference. In this process, Irigaray points out that perception not only does not reveal difference but also translates difference to sameness, hiding absolute difference. Irigaray’s three concerns with perception parallel my description of perception in chapter 1, where I describe the association of perception with power. Beginning with Merleau-Ponty’s recognition that perception is not passive, but active, if perception is narcissistic, the narcissism of perception does not passively occur but is actively maintained. Affirmation of such narcissistic perception as reasonable and true reflects and further substantiates one’s situation of power in society. As Donna Haraway writes, “[s]truggles over what will count as rational accounts of the world are struggles over how to see.”5 To Irigaray’s characterization of perception as narcissistic, let me add that Iris Young attributes narcissism as “‘a principal way of bolstering one’s location.’”6 Ultimately, Irigaray’s concern with the narcissism of perception—especially the narcissism of male perception—points to how men forward their perception as true to guard and to further their positions of power. In recognizing the struggle to claim one’s perception as accurately portraying the world, Irigaray’s third position—that perception erases difference—rings poignantly true to the experiences of women and people of color. As discussed in chapter 1, because perception initially focuses on the familiar, the same, white feminists assumed the sameness of all women’s experiences. Recognizing perception’s tendency to translate difference to sameness explains the experiences of invisibility for women and people of color. Whether perception can occur free from struggles over power and truth, in some form of pure perception, appears quite questionable as chapter 1 discussed in some length. Under such circumstances, philosophical systems such as Merleau-Ponty’s, which rely upon the primacy of perception, seem dubious at best. In his defense, let me begin by stressing that Merleau-Ponty’s system demonstrates awareness of the narcissistic tendencies in perception. He writes, “since the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision.”7 Irigaray’s position would not, by any means, surprise Merleau-Ponty. Additionally, Merleau-Ponty’s work exhibits awareness of the functioning of narcissism within other philosophical systems. Merleau-Ponty specifically criticizes Hegel and Sartre’s work for their lack of awareness of the functioning of narcissism and power. He accuses Hegel and Sartre’s philosophies as “the philosophy of reflection that no result of the reflection can retroactively compromise him who operates the reflection nor change the idea we form of him for ourselves.”8 Specifically in

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regard to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty writes, “he means to speak in the name of all, that in his description he implies the power to speak for all.”9 I cannot say with certainty that Merleau-Ponty fully recognizes the functioning of power in his own work; nevertheless, that he sees the narcissism in other philosophical systems suggests not only his awareness of the workings of power, but also his distaste for such lack of self-awareness that ultimately guards the philosophers’ work and their place in the world. Clearly, concerns with narcissism were circulating in his work while developing his own philosophical system. Merleau-Ponty’s work also exhibits awareness of Irigaray’s second concern with perception—the totalizing effect of perception. As I explained in chapter 1, in forwarding a phenomenological understanding of perception, Merleau-Ponty keenly reveals the experience error of perception—how perception experientially feels complete, while hiding its own gaps and biases. Merleau-Ponty not only exhibits awareness of this totalizing effect of perception, but clearly a phenomenology of perception clarifies this totalizing tendency of perception by at the very least naming it. Hence again, perhaps Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical system already heeds Irigaray’s second caution against perception because of its presentation as complete. Irigaray does not excuse Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as an exception; she directly addresses Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible in her text An Ethics of Sexual Difference.10 In this text she accuses Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological system of the same narcissistic solipsism as all philosophical systems that prioritize perception. As her style within An Ethics of Sexual Difference, she starts each passage by citing from the text she critiques: “‘that to be seen is for them but a degradation of their eminent being.’”11 Elaborating her reading of the meaning of this passage, she writes, “[e]nveloping things with his look, the seer would give birth to them, and/ yet the mystery of his own birth would subsist in them. . . . A passive forever lacking an active. . . . Sight reduces the invisible of things and of the look.”12 Irigaray argues that the narcissistic quality of perception ensures that the seer literally gives birth to the seen. The seer only sees what he projects, and the seer presumes the seen does not transcend the seer.13 Irigaray misconstrues Merleau-Ponty’s statement. I contend that he would heartily agree with Irigaray’s characterization of the relationship between the seer and the seen. In this passage that Irigaray quotes, Merleau-Ponty aims to convey the incredible plurality of possibilities in his notion of the invisible that escapes perception. He argues that the seen, the visible, reflects only a fraction, only just so much of the invisible. At any moment, much more than what is actually seen persists, much more lies embedded in the invisible than in the immediate and present visible. In this sense Merleau-Ponty writes, “to be seen is for them but a degradation of their eminent being.” Far from critiquing Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray only reiterates his position, “sight reduces the invisible of things and of the look.” Merleau-Ponty describes the visible and the event of visibility as much more complex than Irigaray acknowledges. Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of perception recognizes the role of narcissism in all perception, and he carefully and seriously considers



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that which escapes perception. His system allows for the transcendence of the seen. Recall his analysis against the position of the empiricists and the intellectualists; because these two philosophical systems presume the possibility of certainty, their understanding of perception results in the reduction of the world to only the seen, to only what the seer sees. For this reason (and others) he counters their positions and advocates a more complex understanding of perception through phenomenology. Nevertheless, in distinction from Irigaray, he does not leave us with the debilitating position of distrusting and abandoning perception altogether. Merleau-Ponty’s system foresees Irigaray’s concerns about perception and recognizes that the difficulty lies in accounting for the narcissistic feature of perception and admitting that perception somehow still gives us the world. Hence the pertinent issue is not to simply point out the problems inherent in perception and abandon perception—as if this really is a possibility. The pertinent issue lies in how to attend to the act of perception, how to attend to the art of perceiving (perhaps a skill of perceiving?), knowing its dangers—for realistically perception still functions as perhaps our primary access to the world. To highlight this problem, Merleau-Ponty offers a phenomenology of perception. Phenomenology recognizes the subject’s active organization of perception and resists reducing the world to simply the projections of the seer, but also recognizes that perception opens us to the world. Emblematic of her hasty lumping of Merleau-Ponty’s system with other perceptual systems, Irigaray wrongly describes his understanding of perception as sensation. After citing Merleau-Ponty on color and the visible, Irigaray continuously refers to his description of perception as a sensation. She writes, “[s]ensation would have neither an object nor a moment, but it would take place only in the intervals between, through difference, a succession.”14 Irigaray continues and cautions that “[s]ensation is without doubt what we feel as most naively instantaneous. All the more reason to remember this, and that it is not a simple reserve for the appearance of the concept.”15 Merleau-Ponty especially carefully distinguishes the notion of sensation from perception in The Phenomenology of Perception.16 He argues that perception is incorrectly understood because it has historically precisely been reductively conceived as merely a sensation. Sensation evokes too much of the wrong-headed idea that our contact with the world is “undifferentiated, instantaneous, dotlike.”17 Merleau-Ponty forwards the understanding of perception as phenomena to counter precisely its confusion as sensation and atomistic. Finally, in her caution to remember that sensation is “not a simple reserve for the appearance of the concept,” Irigaray incorrectly construes Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the invisible as simply another word for a concept. The invisible designates much more than a concept which this chapter later addresses. Merleau-Ponty shows much familiarity with Irigaray’s first two problems of perception. Indeed, his phenomenology exhibits a desire to address the narcissistic and totalizing tendencies of perception. Irigaray inappropriately directs her contention against prioritizing perception towards Merleau-Ponty. But her third critique of the

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impossibility of perceiving ontological difference remains. Before turning to this final point, let me first introduce hypervisibility into the list of perception’s problems. Hypervisibility and the Negative Associations of Perception Narcissism and hypervisibility form the two most extreme poles of perception. Recall from chapter 3, the problem of hypervisibility as introduced by Fanon. With the term “hypervisibility,” I want to contemplate the contrary position of narcissism. If the narcissistic quality in perception prevents difference from being seen, because one only sees what is the same, then the differences of women of color are difficult to see. Further, if perception translates difference into sameness to provide the semblance of being seen, then the differences that women of color embody truly pose a challenge. The narcissistic quality of perception endangers women of color because it may result in the invisibility of whatever differences women of color may possess or experience. Adding to the complexity of invisibility, instead of complete invisibility, we are left with the illusion of visibility. José Medina writes, “[a]s Du Bois seems to suggest, ‘the veil’ that covers black people from the white gaze does not render them altogether invisible, but worse yet, it confers upon them an illusory visibility in the white world. This is what is most peculiar about the racial blindness in the white gaze that Du Bois describes: the illusion of seeing.”18 Alternatively, to invisibility, hypervisibility endangers women of color because of its possible relegation of women of color as only other, foreign, and different. George Yancy reminds us of this vacillation between invisibility and hypervisibility, “in Fanon’s example, the Black body is seen as hypervisible, while, for Ellison, the Black body is seen as invisible.”19 Helen Ngo’s articulation of hypervisibility circles back towards the phenomenon of the illusion of seeing that Medina references in Du Bois’s work. She writes, “[i]n Al-Saji’s and Yancy’s accounts of the hypervisibility entailed in racialization, the racialized body is that which is seen, and, moreover, seen-as a series of pre-scripted or predetermined possibilities.”20 Instead of only the problem of invisibility regarding difference, through hypervisibility, the differences of women of color have been historically asserted to justify their treatment as less than human. Hence, in addition to Irigaray’s concern with the narcissism of perception, clearly something else occurs within perception in highlighting and accentuating difference. Perhaps, perception even creates difference, for some of the hypervisibility renders that which constitutes a trivial difference into a significant difference. Body features such as skin color which need not indicate more than pigmentation are perceived as indicators of intelligence, civilizability, and humanity. As such, hypervisibility, along with narcissism also presents a formidable concern for women of color. Too much of an acknowledgment of difference is clearly also rife with danger.21 To understand how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological system can be subject to accusations of both the narcissistic erasure of difference and the hypervisibility of differences about women of color, let me focus on the role of the horizon in his portrayal of perception. Linda Martín Alcoff explains that criticisms against



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phenomenology in general focus on its theory of the horizon. She writes that some critics charge that phenomenology “takes subjectivity and subjective experience as cause and foundation when in reality they are mere epiphenomenon and effect. Phenomenology is sometimes portrayed as developing metaphysical accounts of experience outside of culture and history.”22 In a separate article, Alcoff points to the existence of “a fear that phenomenological description will naturalize or fetishize racial experiences.”23 Following Heidegger, critics voice that Merleau-Ponty portrays the horizon as somehow inevitable. As an unavoidable occurrence, the horizon does not depict the members of society as participating in influencing or negotiating the horizon. Our horizon—which includes a history of women’s secondary status, a history of racism and colonialism—simply appears inevitable. Merleau-Ponty’s portrayal of the horizon depicts such a history, sedimented into the present horizon, as teleological, if not necessary, developments of the world. Philosophers of race and feminism contest precisely this implication of the horizon. They highlight the role of history, culture, the negotiations, and the struggles over the social construction of human experiences that have led to our present social environment.24 Jeremy Weate clarifies Fanon’s criticism that racialized subjects may simply not share the same horizon as the majority population. Because racialized subjects lost the struggles over truth, the present horizon of the world simply does not acknowledge their experiences. Weate explains that Merleau-Ponty overlooks Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious. Fanon adapts Jung, relocating the collective unconscious not in the physical matter of the brain, but in the psyches of a specific population, in this case the black community. The collective unconscious among black subjects keeps the memory of a different world, a world distinguishable from that forwarded by white subjects. Whereas white subjects recall a world history of spreading and sharing humanity and Christianity, black subjects recall a world history of chaos and unforeseeable acts of human violence. Whereas white subjects remember a continent uncivilized and barbaric, black subjects remember a continent of community and caring. The two groups of subjects do not live in the same horizon that Merleau-Ponty relies upon for perception and experience of the same world.25 Here, recall that women of color, multiplicitous, intersectional identities occupy more than one horizon and travel between at least two horizons/worlds. Women of color occupy more than one horizon, affirming Weate’s stance of the existence of more than one horizon, but that women of color travel between horizons clarifies that the horizons do not completely diverge. Women of color always occupy at least two horizons, even if one is entirely within the dominant one. The horizons must overlap somewhere, to varying degrees, for women of color to be able to travel between or among worlds. Interestingly, regardless of such difficulties with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the horizon, his notion has been put to the service of the concerns of race and feminist theorists. Gail Weiss evokes the notion of the horizon to elaborate the social situation that converges with felt immediateness—so immediate as to be mistaken for natural—the affiliations of specific bodies with certain negative associations.26 Similarly,

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Alcoff utilizes the givenness of the horizon to explain how racism precedes divisions into social categories, challenging, if not turning on its head, the idea that some sense of natural kinds dictates divisions into social categories. She explains, “the process by which human bodies are differentiated and categorized by type is a process preceded by racism, rather than one that causes and thus ‘explains’ racism as a natural result.”27 The notion of the horizon provides a conceptual framework to understand the felt naturalness in perception of the meanings of body features. Both Weiss and Alcoff find useful the idea of the horizon to illuminate the workings of racism and sexism embedded so deeply into our world as to confuse the natural and the cultural. Let me clarify that the notion of the horizon also depicts how all members of society, including people of color, internalize the association of certain bodies with negative meanings. Annette Kuhn states that women identify with men; and Patricia Williams explains that people of color learn to see themselves through white people’s eyes. Williams writes, “the cultural domination of blacks by whites means that the black self is placed at a distance even from itself. . . . So, blacks in a white society are conditioned from infancy to see in themselves only what others, who despise them, see.”28 The structure of the horizon apparently can be both useful and problematic for philosophers of race and feminism. In examining the horizon’s suggestion of an inevitable development of culture and history, the relevant issue does not center on the origin question of how racial and sexual meanings first became sedimented into the horizon, but whether Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the horizon acknowledges the functioning of racism and sexism. Does the horizon account for the struggles over whose perception most accurately represents the world? Because Merleau-Ponty recognizes that perception relates with power (for occupying situations of power increases the possibility of affirming one’s perception as true and thus hermeneutically supporting one’s situations of power), his notion of the horizon may encompass an understanding that it must have formed within and continues to function through contestation. As earlier noted, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology accounts for individuals’ active involvement in perceiving; he comprehends that perception does not occur solely passively. Moreover, he values the contribution of each individual perception. But sadly, Merleau-Ponty does not appear to admit that some struggle for affirmation of their perception. He does not explicitly mention the history of racism and sexism sedimented into the horizon, that some people do not experience the same horizon, and that some people occupy multiple horizons. Merleau-Ponty demonstrates awareness of the existence of racism and sexism, as evident in his article, “The Child’s Relations with Others.” Yet he does not admit the ramifications of racism in his conceptualization of the horizon. Merleau-Ponty also appreciates struggles over truth. Yet he takes a rather Nietzschean stance of inevitability of such struggles and exhibits a certain bravado regarding the winners and the losers. Merleau-Ponty does not exhibit concern with the implications for the people who lose the contestations over true perception and who experience the negative impact on their embodiment.



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This is a sad conclusion indeed. So, if Merleau-Ponty does not account for such struggles within the horizon, can we modify his system to address this important problem? As chapter 1 explains, the notion of the horizon represents the spatial, temporal, social, cultural, historical circumstances of the world; as such, individual acts of manipulation only insignificantly impact the horizon. Individual acts of manipulation of the horizon belie the notion of the horizon. Rather than considering adjusting the present-day horizon, perhaps conceptualizations of the horizon should include if not emphasize that human negotiations, as well as natural or teleological forces, struggle and develop within the horizon. But as chapter 1 explains, Merleau-Ponty does not value distinctions between culture and nature as important. Perhaps this implies that he already acknowledges the functioning of human negotiations in the horizon. Perhaps because Merleau-Ponty was preoccupied with emphasizing the role of the horizon against atomistic thinking, he never referred to the horizon in a wary tone. But this charitable reading does not seem accurate. He registers the functioning of power; he simply does not seriously ponder the ramifications of human negotiations in the horizon, especially the consequences for those who lose the struggles over perception. Merleau-Ponty’s framework disregards the horizon’s role in constructing the invisibility or the hypervisibility of differences, including the differences in the embodiment of women of color. This conclusion must inevitably influence Merleau-Ponty’s motivations from the previous chapter. As chapter 3 explains, motivations from the world encourage body movement and body movements generate significations, meanings into the world. But if Merleau-Ponty appears nonchalant about the influence of power and human contestations that have settled into the horizon, then his nonchalance probably extends to the motivations for body movement from the world. But recognizing that the motivations for body movement derive from a history of human struggle admits that currently our body movements reflect these struggles, privileging those who won. Under such circumstances, for various, different, and divergent motivations, the multiple worlds of women of color are especially significant. Hyper-visibility not only poses a problem in Merleau-Ponty’s conception of perception, but it also challenges Irigaray’s analysis for she cannot be correct in describing all perception as simply narcissistic. Perception can accentuate difference, denigrating specific bodies with the markers of difference and can be narcissistic. This extreme accentuation of difference may ultimately still be narcissistic in the sense that it may result from a projection from the seer of everything one does not like and fear about oneself. But contrary to Irigaray, it does not project only sameness.29 Perception does not simultaneously project difference and sameness especially not in equal measures. Rather, at times influenced by various motivations, perception focuses on sameness and, at other times, conveys difference. Merleau-Ponty’s framework of perception as phenomenologically occurring better explains that perception transpires in relation, a relation of active engagement among the seen and the seers within the world of a negotiated, a contested horizon, perhaps multiple horizons, or sub-horizons. This understanding of the workings of perception better explains the

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possibility that perception both sees only the same at times, and projects difference at other times. Instead of Irigaray’s reductive understanding of perception as only narcissistic, consistent with my analysis of experience in chapter 2, Merleau-Ponty’s framework accommodates the myriad of ways that subjects perceive because of the distance and the openness at the heart of the phenomenological structure and the situatedness of the subject within the horizon or multiple horizons. Perhaps because of such openness, his framework is subject to criticisms from both extremes.

THE CENTRALITY OF EMBODIMENT AGAIN The second area of contention in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology lies strangely enough in embodiment. Merleau-Ponty centrally figures the role of embodiment; and because of his attention to embodiment, feminist philosophers have combed his theory for potentially illuminating the significance of the differences of embodiment between women and men. Judith Butler, who subsequently deals a devastating critique of Merleau-Ponty’s portrayal of embodied subjectivity, first gives the following compliment about his efforts. She writes, in “‘The Body in its Sexual Being,’ the body is termed a ‘historical idea’ rather than ‘a natural species.’ Significantly, Simone de Beauvoir takes up this claim in The Second Sex, quoting Merleau-Ponty to the effect that woman, like man, is a historical construction bearing no natural telos, a field of possibilities that are taken up and actualized in various distinctive ways.”30 Butler attributes Merleau-Ponty with inspiring de Beauvoir’s insight that many feminists contend marks the birth of feminist theory. Although Butler finds Merleau-Ponty’s later work more fruitful, her criticism of Merleau-Ponty’s early depiction of embodiment is quite devastating. She argues that although Merleau-Ponty acknowledges the influence of history, he does not fully consider or understand the depth, the thoroughness of the historical construction of sexuality. Butler takes Merleau-Ponty to task on the crucial role culture and history play in constructing sexuality. She writes, to say that the subject is historically situated in a loose sense is to say only that the decisions a subject makes are delimited—not exclusively constituted—by a given set of historical possibilities. A stronger version of historical situatedness would locate history as the very condition for the constitution of the subject, not only as a set of external possibilities for choice. If this stronger version were accepted, Merleau-Ponty’s above claim with regard to a natural sexuality would be reversed: individual existence does not bring natural sexuality into the historical world, but history provides the condition for the conceptualization of the individual as such.31

Weiss agrees with Butler’s concern; Weiss points out that Michel Foucault “has placed into question the possibility of a nonmediated relation to one’s body, arguing that we understand our bodies (and are shaped as subjects) through a series of



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disciplinary practices that socially categorize bodies and submit them to hierarchical differentiation.”32 Yet I must challenge Butler’s strong version of the historical construction of embodied subjectivity, including sexuality, and agree with the well-known criticism against Butler—that her analysis jeopardizes the possibilities of human agency. Her analysis adheres to the traditional mind-body divide that relegates the body as under the control of prevailing social ideas and meanings. Recall that chapter 3 explores how neither the intentions of the mind nor empirical forces separately manipulate embodied subjects. Although embodied subjects express habitualized body movements, exposure to various motivations especially from multiple worlds encourage body movements that can change prevailing meanings and significations. As such, Merleau-Ponty’s recognition of the historical situatedness of embodied subjects is sufficient, instead of succumbing entirely to the idea of historical constitution. I forward a phenomenological analysis precisely because phenomenology leaves open the possibility of embodied subjects developing different body movements, exercising agency. For similar reasons, although Weiss agrees with Butler, Weiss carefully abstains from disempowering embodied subjects completely. She resists “presenting [body images] as merely the discursive effects of historical power relationships.”33 Butler’s subsequent criticism is much more substantial and perhaps undeniable. She contends that Merleau-Ponty’s depiction of the body “reproduces certain cultural constructions of sexual normalcy . . . one in which the masculine subject is figured as viewer, and the yet unnamed feminine subject is the body to be seen.”34 She convincingly argues that Merleau-Ponty’s description of the female body exudes an essence in distinction from his existential depictions of the body in general.35 Clearly his general body is really a male body.36 Butler demonstrates that during the moments when Merleau-Ponty specifically refers to the female body, his caricature objectifies the female body by reducing her to the erogenous areas of her body.37 Thankfully, such essentialistic descriptions of racialized embodiment do not appear in Merleau-Ponty’s texts. Although his assumption of a single and shared horizon parallels assumptions taken by many white subjects and may explain his Nietzschean nonchalance about the struggles over perception and the meanings in our horizon. Butler asserts that the generative existential qualities of embodied subjectivity that Merleau-Ponty so enticingly elucidates applies, like so much of philosophy, only to male bodies. It is futile to contest Butler’s astute reading of these passages of The Phenomenology of Perception. Yet, let me say that Merleau-Ponty’s overall project to conceive embodied subjectivity in its existential abilities can survive; his mistake in depicting female embodiment can be localized. The generative qualities of embodied subjectivity can apply to both sexes and all races, even if Merleau-Ponty could not see beyond his own gender. Conceding Butler’s second critique and acknowledging Merleau-Ponty’s mistake, let me focus on her final criticism. Her first two criticisms do not call for discarding Merleau-Ponty’s system as a whole; yet her final criticism demands an answer for his phenomenology to remain relevant to the present analysis of racialized embodiment.

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Butler writes, “Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the ‘subject’ is additionally problematic in virtue of its abstract and anonymous status, as if the subject described were a universal subject or structured existing subjects universally.”38 Shannon Sullivan expounds on this criticism as well, almost ten years later.39 Let me address their treatments of anonymity individually. Butler finds problematic the anonymity and the abstraction of Merleau-Ponty’s description of the body— for it does not consider seriously the role of gender. Butler writes, “[d]evoid of a gender, this subject is presumed to characterize all genders. On the one hand, this presumption devalues gender as a relevant category in the description of lived bodily experience. On the other hand, inasmuch as the subject described resembles a culturally constructed male subject, it consecrates masculine identity as the model for the human subject, thereby devaluing, not gender, but women.”40 Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous body is a male body. In Merleau-Ponty’s attempts to generalize the body image and body schema, he generalizes the male body, for he clearly does not regard the female body in her existential potentiality. He effectively defines normality as masculinity. Butler’s articulation of this problem with Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous body does not motivate a dispute from me. Feminists have fought hard to insist on the importance of the category of gender and to clarify that pictures of normality effect real harm for people who do not fit within the boundaries of that norm. In contrast to Butler, I cannot completely agree with Sullivan’s articulation of the problem with Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous body. She argues that Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous body eliminates all differences among bodies. She writes, “because the body is an anonymous body that has no particularity—such as that provided by gender, sexuality, class, race, age, culture, nationality, individual experiences and upbringing, and more—Merleau-Ponty’s intersubjective dialogue often turns out to be a solipsistic subject’s monologue that includes elimination of others in its very ‘communication’ with them.”41 Sullivan could not mean “elimination” literally; she must mean a narcissistic elimination, following Irigaray. Upon erasing all others, she posits that his anonymous body reifies traditional essentialistic understandings of human bodies. Here, in distinction from Butler, who wonders whether Merleau-Ponty devalues women, Sullivan insists Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous body dominates others. Sullivan contends that Merleau-Ponty’s system ends with a domineering normative body. She writes, “[t]hroughout the history of philosophy, philosophers have claimed that there is an essential ‘core’ in humans that underlies all of their cultural (and other) differences. . . . Merleau-Ponty differs from these philosophers merely by locating this fundamental core in the body.”42 Weiss points out that Young, Grosz, and Irigaray voice similar criticisms.43 Silvia Stoller provides probably the most vehement defense of Merleau-Ponty and virulent attack of Sullivan. First, Stoller clarifies, that contrary to Sullivan’s understanding, Merleau-Ponty’s use of the word anonymous does not mean neutrality, abstraction, or universality.44 Rather, consonant with the existential capabilities of embodiment, with the term anonymous, Merleau-Ponty refers to embodiment in its plurality of possibilities, in its surplus. Stoller writes, “anonymous existence means



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that I and the other are ‘two sides of one and the same phenomenon,’ a ‘dual being,’ or the anonymous collectivity of a ‘sorte d’existence a plusieurs,’ a sort of existence of numerous persons.”45 Stoller claims that Sullivan misunderstands the anonymous body because she neglects the notion of operative intentionality functioning in the pre-thetic level of lived experience. Merleau-Ponty speculates on the anonymous body in the pre-thetic level. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology stresses situatedness, that each embodied subject provides a specific perspective, that embodiment represents the finiteness of human beings in the world. Stoller argues that her reading of anonymity coupled with Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the situated subject sufficiently guards his conception of embodiment from Sullivan’s concern of a domineering body. Stoller defends Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the anonymous body as not normative, essential, or domineering. As much as I would like to defend Merleau-Ponty myself, I cannot agree with Stoller and exonerate the notion of the anonymous body from all of Sullivan’s criticisms. I can only concur with Stoller that Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous body does not necessarily lead to dominance—because he prioritizes situatedness. But his portrayal of the anonymous body in this abstract manner remains problematic. What does it mean to theorize an anonymous body in the pre-thetic level of human lived experience? Descriptions of the body schema and body image most closely appear anonymous, but they are not descriptions of the body itself, but experiences of embodiment. Butler’s and Sullivan’s anonymous body describes Merleau-Ponty’s overall, abstract depiction of the body. Although Merleau-Ponty’s framework represents everything Stoller attributes to him, particularly the situatedness of the body in the world, he never presents or explores visibly different bodies in his expositions of bodies’ existential capabilities. The few instances when he portrays an explicit actual body—it is female (without any ascriptions of race, but I suspect she is white); his descriptions are horrendously misogynistic. Through general descriptions of embodiment, the body becomes anonymous; he abstracts away all the very specific qualities of the body, leaving an anonymous body. I am left bewildered as to the actual appearance of such an abstraction. Relating this discussion to the question of race, Merleau-Ponty’s general and hence anonymous body is devoid of the specificities of racialized embodiment. Absent the specificities of gender and race, clearly women of color do not figure in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis. Does this imply that Merleau-Ponty devalues race? Paralleling Butler’s analysis that Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous body devalues gender suggests that he devalues race and clearly women of color. Following Sullivan’s analysis, that Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous body dominates others, suggests that Merleau-Ponty’s white subject dominates other races. These two parallels do not quite hold up. Alcoff argues that the difference between men and women is in some sense more natural because this difference circumscribes the reproduction of the species, whereas the differences among races are more socially constructed.46 Perhaps because of this distinction, the two parallels do not quite carry over to the question

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of race. Although descriptions of subjectivity devoid of references to race usually presume white subjects, I am not sure that this captures the case here entirely. Unlike the colorblindness initiative, Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous embodiment does not advocate disregarding race. Rather, Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous embodiment aims to describe abstract embodiment before race even enters the analysis. I believe that depicting abstract bodies cannot cohere with situated subjectivity, yet I do not find the theoretical attempts of describing anonymous embodiment in-itself problematic. Do Merleau-Ponty’s depictions of body image and body schema normalize white body comportment and behavior? It is difficult to isolate body comportment and movement that absolutely, distinctively define as either white or black body movement, without further specifications regarding class and nationality. Similarly, isolating body movement that absolutely, distinctively, define Asian or Latinx proves challenging. Merleau-Ponty’s project focuses on embodied subjectivity. As such his project requires at least some generalizations about embodied subjectivity. The question centers on whether such abstract descriptions of embodiment are inherently impossible. Acknowledging feminist and race philosophers’ analysis that the differences of embodiment matter, do attributions of differences of embodiment challenge any generalizations of embodiment? If so, Merleau-Ponty’s project of describing embodied subjectivity appears to be inherently polemic. Merleau-Ponty’s project must admit either that anonymous bodies are not situated or that situated bodies could not be anonymous. If Merleau-Ponty’s greatest contribution to philosophy is theorizing the pivotal role of embodiment, his system would greatly benefit from conceptualizing how to forward abstract descriptions of embodiment while accounting for the differences in embodiment, which plays a central part in situatedness.47 Disagreeing with Stoller and conceding to Sullivan that Merleau-Ponty’s body portrays an anonymous body, I do not, however, accede that his anonymous body essentializes and consequently dominates. Within the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty endeavors to explore a non-essentialistic, non-atomistic ontology and epistemology. He prioritizes phenomena from the recognition that the horizon, the world limits knowledge in distinction from the totalizing certitude of prevailing philosophies. He centrally positions ambiguity and openness, hazarding incompleteness, finitude, and bias. With the notion of reversibility, perhaps Merleau-Ponty loses some of this openness. I address the concept of reversibility in Merleau-Ponty’s last text, The Visible and the Invisible, in the next section of this chapter. Here let me just note that Butler defends Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmatic reversible flesh; she argues that his view of subjectivity “stands in stark contrast both to the Freudian conception of the ‘ego’ understood as the site of a primary narcissism and to the various forms of atomistic individualism derived from Cartesian and liberal philosophical traditions.”48 Butler explains that in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty’s subject—as integrally related to the world, as part of the world in flesh—cannot dominate others. Clearly, Merleau-Ponty still steadfastly holds forth ambiguity and situatedness in this last text. In this sense, sweepingly accusing Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the anonymous



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body as essentializing and domineering does not quite do justice to his project as a whole. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology exhibits all the ingredients to potentially recognize that the abstract, general, and consequently anonymous body cannot represent situated embodied subjects. Perhaps as with dialectic structures, Merleau-Ponty while speaking about embodied subjects could not avoid the dangers of high-altitude philosophers who cannot align theory and practice. Although Gayle Salamon explains the importance of the experience of anonymous embodiment in chapter 3, in theorizing an anonymous body, Merleau-Ponty constructs an abstraction. The material, real bodies one encounters always exhibit an abundance of distinct features, including sex, gender, and for my present concerns, ethnicity, and race. Merleau-Ponty errs in theorizing an anonymous body—a theoretical step that may be unavoidable. Yet one cannot subsequently read his descriptions of embodiment as essentializing and domineering. To the extent that Merleau-Ponty initiates understanding embodiment as phenomenally experienced, his attempts as a whole warrant some generosity.

THE ONTOLOGICAL PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE Exploring the narcissistic erasure and hypervisibility of difference in perception and the abstraction of embodiment does not answer Irigaray’s third criticism—the ontological impossibility of seeing difference. Irigaray focuses on the need for respectful acknowledgment of difference, for her on the differences between men and women, and I add on the differences among various races.49 This last concern has clear relevance for women of color. As such, Irigaray’s last point is quite important for this book. I think Merleau-Ponty realizes this problem of seeing difference; more specifically, he attributes this pattern of disregarding how perception erases difference to high-altitude thinkers and their efforts to reach certainty. In distinction from this position, in the structure of phenomena, Merleau-Ponty offers ambiguity, nonidentity, and openness in phenomena to better depict the epistemic and the ontologic role of difference. For this reason, this book forwards race as phenomena and reads Merleau-Ponty’s work along with the situatedness of women of color. If, contrary to my reading of Merleau-Ponty, his phenomenology does not uphold openness, but rather denies and erases difference, then Irigaray’s criticism implies that his phenomenology does not steer clear of the problems of his predecessors. To answer Irigaray’s criticism, let me comb two of Merleau-Ponty’s texts for signs of perceiving difference or of erasing difference. I first search for signs of respecting difference that avoid reducing everything to sameness. Beginning from the idea that one can see the other, I focus on the question of whether one can see the differences of other embodied subjects. Truly, Merleau-Ponty’s texts exhibit numerous signs of respecting difference. On the most general level, he conceives perception and experience as engaging what is external to us and what transcends us even as we share a world.

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Recall Merleau-Ponty’s careful attention to embodiment, as the third feature in his phenomenological system that ensures openness onto difference. In stressing each embodied subject’s situatedness, Merleau-Ponty writes, “I perceive the grief or the anger of the other in his conduct, in his face or his hands, without recourse to any ‘inner’ experience of suffering or anger, and because grief and anger are variations of belonging to the world. . . . For him these situations are lived through, for me they are displayed.”50 As such, Françoise Dastur concludes that for Merleau-Ponty, “[t]he life of others, just as they live it, remains for me ‘a forbidden experience.’”51 These words exhibit a respect for the other that does not erase the differences between the person experiencing the grief and the person perceiving the other’s grief. With an embodied subjectivity, the other’s vision startles me with alterity. Merleau-Ponty writes, “the intervention of the foreign spectator does not leave my relationship with the things untouched. Insinuating into the world ‘such as it is’ the sub-universe of a behavior or of a private life, his intervention puts my devotion to being to the test; it calls into question the right I arrogated to myself to think it for all.”52 Merleau-Ponty values the other’s perspective because it can disrupt and possibly increase one’s perception and add to the shared perception. But one’s own perception operates as the final determinant of what one accepts and understands about the world. Consequently, one’s view is not and cannot be absolutely the same as everyone else’s view, even after sharing our different views. Clearly such ruminations position a phenomenology of perception and embodiment as adhering to actual experiences of the world—as such Merleau-Ponty exhibits respect for difference. Just as Merleau-Ponty’s texts demonstrate signs of careful attention to difference, his texts also reveal a disrespect of difference. His discussions on intersubjectivity especially carry a tone of carelessness to difference. Merleau-Ponty insists on the accessibility of the other; he argues, “there is, then, no privileged self-knowledge, and other people are no more closed systems than I am myself.”53 Merleau-Ponty grounds his phenomenology on the stance that the other is somehow accessible. He draws a parallel; to the extent that I am closed to myself, the other is closed as well. The other knows me to a limited extent, for I know myself only to a limited extent. Amidst these constraints, in that human beings share a world, in that all human beings are in the world, Merleau-Ponty insists that we reach the other; “[t]his world may remain undivided between my perception and his  .  .  . both are not cogitationes shut up in their own immanence, but beings which are outrun by their world, and which consequently may well be outrun by each other.”54 But here this initial ground of contact with the other does not necessarily imply the banishment of difference. Merleau-Ponty simply asserts some sort of contact with the other; he opposes the position that the other is an abyss or the possibility that we all live in solipsistic isolation.



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Reversibility and Totality The reversibility in flesh holds forth the possibility of the rather oxymoronic relation of complete alterity as complete intimacy. Admittedly, such an idea might irritate or baffle women of color who strive to articulate what difference difference makes. The potential of reversibility prevails in his earlier works as well as this last work. Reversibility pervades Merleau-Ponty’s work in ideas such as the transcendence and the immanence of phenomena, and the reflexivity and synaesthesis of perception and embodiment. Hence, although Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology explicitly theorizes reversibility, his earlier phenomenological endeavors also clearly rely upon reversible relations. Reversibility clearly defines Merleau-Ponty’s idea of synaesthetic experiences of embodiment. In the experience of embodiment, one cannot isolate each bodily sensation—touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight—from each other. Rather, the changes in any of these senses affect and in turn are affected by the other senses. With synaesthesis, Merleau-Ponty denies that perception is experienced as a single sensation. In this sense, Irigaray incorrectly accuses Merleau-Ponty’s system of privileging perception. Uncontestably, his system highlights the role of perception because sighted beings especially rely upon perception as the primary means of contact with the world. Yet as a phenomenologist, his understanding of the senses recognizes the impossibility of fully isolating any single sense from each other. So Merleau-Ponty would not necessarily deny Irigaray’s suggestion that touch should have priority; rather he appreciates the synaesthetic relation among the senses in the subject’s experience of the world. He writes, “[i]t cannot be anything—spatial, sexual, temporal—without being so in its entirety . . . with the result that an analysis of any one of them that is at all searching really touches upon subjectivity itself.”55 Merleau-Ponty posits a synaesthetic account of embodiment. To synaesthetic bodily experience, let me now add, “[r]eflection must in some way present the unreflected, otherwise we should have nothing to set over against it, and it would not become a problem for us. Similarly, my experience must in some way present me with other people, since otherwise I should have no occasion to speak of solitude and could not begin to pronounce other people inaccessible.”56 As chapter 1 explains, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology centers on our ambiguous contact with the world. In this way he addresses Meno’s paradox and the becoming of knowledge. For as much as he challenges the epistemological extreme of knowing with certainty, he denies the opposite extreme of complete unknowability. And recall from chapter 1, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology endeavors to address both the ontological and the epistemological dimensions simultaneously. Complete alterity, in both its epistemological and ontological senses, can only be an abstraction. Only philosophies of reflection construct such complete alterity. Merleau-Ponty begins his philosophical endeavors on the basis that one has access to the other; the other does not and cannot epitomize a completely alien experience. The simple fact remains that in everyday life we have contact with the other.

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Herein lies the clear difference between Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty. Irigaray insists on the existence of complete alterity.57 Irigaray posits an ontological as well as an epistemological alterity insisting that one entails the other. She writes, “[t]his seer is never alone, he dwells unceasingly in his world. Eventually he finds some accomplices there, but he never meets others.”58 Kozel confirms, “when Irigaray is confronted by the way the philosophical tradition closes out women and alterity, she sees the value of positing an irreversible ontological structure between self and other.”59 In insisting on the isolation of the seer, Irigaray mimics very much the philosophies of reflection that she disparages. She cannot explain the epistemological impossibility of her own possession of this knowledge of complete alterity. In positing the existence of such thorough difference, Irigaray steps beyond the realm of her situatedness, disembodies herself, and claims the position of the all-knowing, overarching, thinking subject of philosophies of reflection. As much as claims to complete identity are problematic, if not impossible, claims of complete alterity are also disconcerting. Butler similarly accuses Irigaray in writing, “[o]ddly, in miming the masculinist texts of philosophy, she puts herself in the place of the masculine, and thereby performs a kind of substitution, one she appears to criticize when it is performed by men. Is her substitution different from the one she criticizes?”60 Merleau-Ponty aims to avoid precisely this sort of epistemological quagmire by founding his system on the idea that we have access to alterity. Merleau-Ponty would respond to Irigaray by accusing her of constructing extreme philosophical abstractions. These two positions regarding synaesthetic embodiment and contact with alterity are in The Phenomenology of Perception. In his last text, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty directly addresses the possibility of reversibility. Although his work criticizes dualism, he divides all that exists in the world as the visible and the invisible. The composition of the visible is more or less self-explanatory. The invisible is obviously that which cannot be seen. The invisible is oneself, the self who cannot be seen in the act of looking upon the object.61 James Phillips associates the invisible with the unconscious. Traditionally, the mind and all the ineffable and ephemeral associate with the invisible, whereas the body and all the sensuous and concrete affiliate with the visible. The invisible encompasses much more than this; such a conception aligns much more with Merleau-Ponty’s earlier endeavors. The invisible is as Phillips explains the “nuclei of meaning,”62 the “nuclei of signification.”63 Or, the invisible is, as Henri Maldiney writes, “the depth of the world . . . the unexpected.”64 Invisible meaning saturates and enwraps every visibilia. Merleau-Ponty writes, the “thin pellicle of the quale, the surface of the visible, is doubled up over its whole extension with an invisible reserve.”65 Thought produces and accesses the invisible, but the invisible conditions thought. The invisible makes meaningful all that we see in the world. Because the invisible is, well, invisible, direct access to it is elusive. One gains a sense of the invisible through what Merleau-Ponty describes poetically as “a possibility that is not the shadow of the actual but is its principle.”66 The invisible does not have priority over the visible. The visible functions as our access to the invisible; the invisible depends on the visible. The invisible does not



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detach “from the sensible appearances and . . . [erect] into a second positivity.”67 One glimpses the invisible as “a style, allusive and elliptical like every style, but like every style inimitable, inalienable.”68 The invisible relies upon the visible. Within this ontology of the visible and the invisible, Merleau-Ponty introduces an ontological element, flesh. He defines flesh as an additional element, “in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, a midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea.”69 As an element, flesh precisely depicts the intertwining of the visible and the invisible. Reminiscent of the body schema, flesh establishes spatiality and temporality. Flesh is “the inauguration of the where and the when.”70 Unlike the previous philosophical frameworks or notions that attempt to pierce the workings of the world, this new structure, flesh, describes a texture hanging on or overlaying the world.71 Merleau-Ponty designates flesh as “a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being.”72 Merleau-Ponty’s depiction of flesh does not so much reveal the underlying features or functions of the world, but more captures a qualitative style or fabric of the world. Flesh is chiasmic. Chiasm is reversibility, an all-encompassing reversibility. With this term, Merleau-Ponty depicts the intersubjective reversibility between me and the other. Such a reversibility posits the possibility “that there is not only a me-other rivalry, but a co-functioning. We function as one unique body.”73 Chiasm also characterizes the reversibility between the subject and the world. Merleau-Ponty continues to list reversibilities between all the famous dichotomies: “between the phenomenal body and the ‘objective’ body, between the perceiving and the perceived: what begins as a thing ends as consciousness of the thing, what begins as a ‘state of consciousness’ ends as a thing.”74 In a sense, reversibility begins in relation and then works toward separation without ever reaching complete separation in our perception, experience, and body movement. Merleau-Ponty proposes that flesh, a single element, constitutes both human beings and the world; he writes, It is necessary to rediscover as the reality of the inter-human world and of history a surface of separation between me and the other which is also the place of our union. . . . It is to this surface of separation and of union that the existentials of my personal history proceed . . . it is the invisible hinge upon which my life and the life of the others turn to rock into one another, the inner framework of intersubjectivity.75

Therefore “it is misleading to think of a body-subject in relation to a world-object; it is more accurate to think of an anonymous perceptual unfolding, dehiscence, écart.”76 With the notion of chiasmic flesh, Merleau-Ponty aims to portray both movement and being at once. The reversible relation of subjects with the world is primordial.77 As such the visible and the invisible, as chiasmic flesh, never separates into complete alterity. Chiasmic reversibility is “always imminent and never realized in fact.”78 A hollow exists within reversibility. Merleau-Ponty repeats several times that just as with our

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hands clasped, one never feels oneself touching at the exact moment of being touched, and just as one cannot see oneself seeing, reversibility is never total.79 Merleau-Ponty rejects that “an apparent difference between visible and invisible can be resolved by a real identity.” The chiasmic relation upholds “a fundamental identity-and-difference which he expresses in a series of metaphors: dehiscence, fission, divergence (écart), chiasm, intertwining.”80 Following his position against reducing truth to an essence and for maintaining openness within truth, Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmic relation does not collapse into absolute identity. Because the reversibility never fully realizes, absolute identity is not a possibility. But, because the intertwining constitutes flesh, Merleau-Ponty preserves an identity—an identity in style, in principle, in generality. I ponder this idea of identity-and-difference or rather identity-in-difference in chapter 5.

IRREVERSIBLES To Irigaray’s credit, she recognizes this conclusion, this possibility of an identityin-difference. She precisely distrusts the notion of an identity-in-difference and Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion of reversibility encompassing anything and everything. Chanter explains, “[w]hat Irigaray objects to is the status that Merleau-Ponty wants to accord to reversibility as ‘the ultimate truth.’”81 Irigaray insists on the existence of relationships that defy reversibility. She identifies at least four nonreversible relationships. Kozel explains the first—the irreversibility between mother and child. She writes, “[t]he temporality in question is the generational difference between myself and my mother resulting in the undeniable fact that it is not possible for me to give birth to my mother.”82 Although at initial glance, this irreversibility sounds undeniable, interestingly, Butler finds this irreversibility the least persuasive; she questions the priority Irigaray gives to the maternal: “[w]hy does the maternal figure that origination when the maternal itself must be produced from a larger world of sensuous relations?”83 Second, Irigaray holds firmly to the irreversibility between sight and touch. She opposes distinctly the parallels between perception and touch in writing, “[t]he visible and the tactile do not obey the same laws or rhythms of the flesh. And if I can no doubt unite their powers, I cannot reduce the one to the other. I cannot situate the visible and the tangible in a chiasmus.”84 To instantiate her point, in place of Merleau-Ponty’s image of the one hand lying on the other, Irigaray offers the image of a pair of hands clasped together as in prayer. In this position, touching and being touched, she argues, occur simultaneously. Contrary to Merleau-Ponty’s position regarding synaesthetic bodily experience, Irigaray argues that the tactile sensibility does not resemble perception in this respect: in perception the seer cannot see oneself in the act of seeing (not without the assistance of a mirror). A hollow exists in perception; Merleau-Ponty recognizes a hollow in all reversibility. Irigaray argues that hands



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clasped in prayer do not have a hollow. Reversibility without a hollow results in an immediateness that, in effect, is not a reversibility. Despite Irigaray’s suggestion of the picture of hands clasped in prayer as distinct from Merleau-Ponty’s image of one hand on top of the other, he does entertain the image of hands clasped in prayer as well. Early in the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty precisely ponders the image of hands clasped in prayer. Yet in disagreement with Irigaray, he concludes that even in this position, the actual sensations of touching/ touched can only occur within a temporal hollow; they are not experienced simultaneously. He writes, “[w]hen I press my two hands together, it is not a matter of two sensations felt together as one perceives two objects placed side by side, but of an ambiguous set-up in which both hands can alternate the roles of ‘touching’ and being ‘touched.’”85 Far from a simultaneous experience—at least in temporality— Merleau-Ponty explains that one feels the two sensations separately and ambiguously. Hence regarding Irigaray’s second example of an irreversibility, I do not find convincing her insistence of simultaneously and immediately experiencing both touching and being touched that she claims defies reversibility. Nevertheless, there is something quite persuasive about Irigaray’s insistence on the priority of the tactile and that touch does not parallel perception. Challenging ocularcentrism, she poses the question: “Can I live in the visible independent of touch?”86 Irigaray clarifies that, although one can live without sight, one cannot live without skin. For the third irreversibility, Irigaray writes, “I hear something of the feminine. .  .  .  However, language is said, is ordered in the masculine.”87 This irreversibility lies in the linguistic system that prioritizes the male gender. In the active use of language—in writing or speaking—masculinity orders the signs. Only by carefully listening in between the words, one hears the feminine somewhere in between a passive and an active engagement with language. One hears the feminine in the ephemeral, ineffable qualities, perhaps in the organization or the intonation of the words within the otherwise masculine-dominated words. This gendered relation to language reflects an irreversibility in the lives of men and women. Irigaray, consistent with numerous early feminists, including Mary Daly, insists that in the present social structure of the world, men occupy the position of the speakers ensuring their role as the creators of what prevails as knowledge. Our linguistic system relegates women to listening, although I suspect that women are not even the primary audience or beneficiary of the knowledge. This irreversibility within the system of signs, which reflects the lived situations and relationships among men and women, occurs on the cultural/traditional level of the horizon, an area to which Merleau-Ponty does not attend carefully enough, as I noted earlier. Interestingly, Butler argues against attributing all alterity onto sexual difference. Butler writes, “[o]pen to challenge is the presumption that the question of alterity as it arises for ethics can be fully identified with the question of sexual difference.”88 Butler recognizes that although sexual alterity covers an important source of difference, she does not credit to sexual alterity all forms of difference. For she

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wonders, “[m]ust there be a difference between the sexes in order for there to be true alterity?”89 Alterity exists within sexual difference, but also within the differences of sexuality, political position, class, and as I claim here, race. The fourth and final irreversibility rests between the seer and the seen. To posit a reversibility between the seer and the seen, Merleau-Ponty insists that the seen transcends the seer to some degree. In this way, he writes that in the act of perception, both the seer and the seen actively participate in how much and what is seen or hidden. The seer cannot see completely; the seen controls what it exposes and shares with the subject. Not acknowledging the transcendence of the seen commits the “experience error.”90 A reversibility exists between the seer and the seen. Irigaray contends that despite the written intentions in Merleau-Ponty’s work, an irreversibility exists between the seeing subject and the seen. She argues that he still prioritizes the subject. Irigaray writes, “[a]lthough he dismisses the subject and the object, Merleau-Ponty nevertheless, retains this polarity: seer/visible, which presupposes, here in particular, that the visible, still invisible in its resting place, would have vision and could give it to or take it away from the seer. Later on, he says that the seer and the visible are reversible . . . but after having set up this dissociation from the start: the risk of the disappearance of the one or the other.”91 Irigaray proposes that although Merleau-Ponty aims for reversibility, in beginning with the two separate roles and in insisting on the always coupled existence of the seen with the seer, he effectively prioritizes the seer. In prioritizing the seer Merleau-Ponty affects the disappearance of the reversibility. Irigaray needs to clarify the ontological status of the seen, the seen that is so other, that it does not have a relationship to the seer. Two premises function within Irigaray’s analysis. First, Irigaray argues that Merleau-Ponty spotlights the seer because the seen’s ontological status relies upon the seer. She demands an ontological self-sufficiency for the seen; yet she does not articulate what it means for the seen to exist outside of the relationship to the seer. Second, Irigaray does not explain how she comes to possess this knowledge of such objects existing separately from human beings. She does not elaborate on her own epistemological privilege. Much like my response to Irigaray’s insistence on the ontological existence of complete difference, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological system would propose that the notion of a seen existing independently of the seer simply represents a philosophical construct, a projection of the mind. Rather than a prioritization of the seer or the seen, Merleau-Ponty demands a focus on the act of perception in-itself which determines the status of being the seen or the seer. Merleau-Ponty focuses on the act or the relation in-itself.92 To avoid the narcissistic projections of the mind, that Irigaray accuses of masculinity, epistemic claims must stay within the confines of being in the actual world. Despite Butler’s arguments, I believe that to an important extent, two of Irigaray’s four proposals of irreversible relationships remain. Interestingly, the two surviving irreversibles occurs within the sphere of actual embodiment, between the embodiment of mothers and children, and between the embodiment of men and women. For



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although all alterity is not reducible to sex, sexual difference persists as a significant alterity, an alterity that still escapes complete understanding and requires continual attention. Moreover, although Butler describes maternity as part of a larger structure of sensuate relations, nevertheless, maternity, not in the generational sense, but in the sense of the actual subjects who give birth to life, deserve recognition that birthing and raising a child is not reversible with being the child. To summarize, on the level of the ontologic, Butler’s arguments against Irigaray, in defense of Merleau-Ponty, are persuasive; on the level of embodied subjects in the world (on the ontic level), I still find Irigaray’s position convincing. Irigaray’s more philosophically abstract, philosophically constructed relations of irreversibility are not persuasive. But because of these two irreversibles of embodiment, I reluctantly agree with Irigaray that reversibility may not be encompassing; reversibility does not define all relations in the world. As Weiss elaborates, “Merleau-Ponty’s notion of reversibility, Irigaray asserts, closes off these rich corporeal sites because it weaves them too tightly together, and, in so doing, fails to acknowledge differences that are nonreversible, such as the sexually specific differences between maternal and nonmaternal, female and male bodies.”93

A THIRD IRREVERSIBLE To this list of irreversibles, especially because these irreversibles center on embodiment, I add an irreversibility in the embodied experiences of race.94 This coheres with women of color theorists who have articulated that differences in sex do not alone define their experience but rather a combination of race and sex that inevitably include class. In acknowledging an irreversibility in the embodied subjectivity between men and women, clearly, we should acknowledge an irreversibility in the embodied experiences of race. As earlier mentioned, I agree with Alcoff ’s suggestion that the difference between men and women is in some sense more natural because this difference ensues in the reproduction of the species, whereas the differences among races are more socially constructed. As earlier stated, I do not believe Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of body image, body schema, and anonymous embodiment devalue race or racialized subjects. With these notions, he abstracts to describe embodied subjectivity. But in speaking about actual situated subjects, precisely the embodied experience of race challenges reversibility because a very particular history leaves the embodiment of white people and people of color in specific current situations, horizons, and worlds. The distinctive social situations racialized bodies experience represent the particular history undergone by each group of racialized bodies. Because of the historico-material circumstances, white bodies do not face the possibility of the same events as bodies with color. In the present social situation, white bodies, more likely than not, win the struggle over whose perceptions most readily associate with truth; not every body can facilely occupy the role of the seer. Weate explains, “[t]hrough our bodies, we belong to relatively different worlds, with different forms

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of visibility and invisibility, history and value being thereby disclosed. The merging of these worlds through encounters of difference leads inevitably to contested comprehensions of the phenomenon. Being therefore must, in order to maintain this phenomenological plurality and not repress it, re-situate itself as a spatio-temporal horizon, or rather as the ideal.”95 Weate’s words suggest that reversibility remains the ideal to strive for, not to presume in the present. Careful attention to differences in embodiment better adheres to the phenomenological project of describing being-in-the-world. Merleau-Ponty has not exercised such care to address the situatedness of racialized people and the implications of visibly different embodiment during his time. Under the current circumstances, within the current social horizon, racialized embodiment functions irreversibly. With attention to the different experiences of embodiment among racialized subjects, Weate argues that Fanon more accurately captures a temporal difference in the horizon. Quoting from Fanon, “‘[t]he Negro, however sincere, is the slave of the past.’ . . . This disabling is at the same time an alienation of the subject from the possibility of historical freedom in the present.”96 Weate explains that Fanon carefully depicts the black subject’s experiences of a different history from the white subject. With a separate history, the differently embodied subjects have available and exercise different levels and kinds of freedom. Fanon highlights the impact of a history of colonialism and slavery on the subjectivity of blacks with the notion of the historicoracial schema of black subjects, discussed in chapter 3. Weate explains, “[t]he passage from the corporeal schema to the ‘historical-racial’ schema is intended to reveal that Merleau-Ponty’s claim in favor of free historical agency on the part of able-bodied beings tout court is false.”97 Because of their different embodiment, Weate writes, for Merleau-Ponty “the possibility of active inflection in and of the present is given with the ease of a ‘perpetual contribution[.’] . . . In contrast, Fanon’s freedom from the past involves a great deal more effort and resolve. For Fanon, transformation of the present requires something like a critical resistance to the dominant episteme—an active denial of the mythos that intervenes in the formation of body-images.”98 Because of the history sedimented into the horizon, unlike whites, blacks face a compromised version of freedom. The embodied irreversibility of race poses serious challenges for black subjects’ existential endeavors. Weate’s clarification of the meaning of this irreversibility among racialized subjects—living in different horizons with different histories and their consequences on the subject’s existential possibilities—throws into question Merleau-Ponty’s reliance upon the world for confirmation that we do see the same object, that we do experience the same world. As chapter 1 explains and this chapter mentions earlier, Merleau-Ponty does not believe in complete alterity, and he points to the one world we share as the ultimate source for insisting that we do not live in isolation. To the extent that we can demand agreement in seeing the same objects in the world, we cannot claim absolute difference. Yet, much as I speculate earlier that perhaps Merleau-Ponty exhibits a sort of empiricist trust in his reliance upon the world, Weate argues that Fanon’s work puts into doubt whether the world can serve



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to confirm the perception of the same objects or to validate shared experiences of the same world. Weate insists that Merleau-Ponty cannot presume sharing the same world from the beginning; such concordance must be endeavored toward. Weate writes, “Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the body’s relation to freedom risk being blind to the aporias of difference. Fanon’s critique of phenomenology teaches us that the universal is the end of the struggle, not that which precedes it. . . . Being, operating as a unified given (Merleau-Ponty’s ‘one single world’), is incompatible with an agonistic hermeneutics engendered by bodily difference.”99 Here, let me insert again that although Weate insists that a shared horizon should not be assumed from the beginning but endeavored towards, women of color experience multiple worlds and these horizons overlap. So instead of considering just two separate horizons (or beginning in alterity and endeavoring toward identity) the situatedness of women of color forwards inhabiting at least two horizons and that these already overlie in places. This description of multiple horizons better describes the current social situation, for differently racialized subjects encounter each other and share horizons even if those horizons do not completely overlap. I am compelled to mention Merleau-Ponty’s white embodiment that may have tainted his ability to see the ramifications of racialized embodiment and situatedness. Without falling into an ad hominem attack, but seriously considering his analysis of the intimate relation between the mind and the body, in embodied subjectivity, this luxury to forget his racialized situatedness could only come from an entitlement his white embodied subjectivity affords him. As chapter 3 emphasizes, racialized embodiment plays a pivotal role in the kind of experiences one encounters. One of the burdens of racialized subjectivity is the impossibility of forgetting the distinguishing features of one’s embodiment; while one of the privileges of white embodiment is the ability to overlook one’s body.100 All white subjects do not enjoy this entitlement of disregarding their embodiment and some whites are developing a double consciousness. Some white subjects take great pains not to enjoy such entitlement. One’s embodiment does not determine one’s knowledge, but one’s embodiment significantly motivates one’s perceptions and experiences. Although I acknowledge the possibility and perhaps the necessity of theorizing abstractly embodied experiences through concepts like body schema, body image, or anonymous embodiment, following Fanon’s work (as explained by Weate, Mills, Ngo, Yancy, and others), and the ambiguous embodiment of women of color, even these so-called abstract concepts cannot truly be abstract because the specificities of embodiment impact the body image and the body schema. But I would like to position this as a theoretical problem, in that in the very act of writing and speaking about such abstractions, one cannot avoid breaching the very real material conditions of embodiment. Merleau-Ponty shows awareness of such difficulties in the divergence between theory and practice. But admitting this theoretically, he never seriously considers his own white embodiment possibly obfuscating his thinking about embodiment and the significance of racialized situatedness in the world.

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Acknowledging this theoretical problem, I find persuasive Irigaray’s and Weate’s positions about the irreversible differences among specific bodies, but I am not convinced that these differences lead to the isolation of absolute difference where the two horizons never meet. Much like my position in chapter 3 against absolute transcendence or absolute immanence contra Sartre, each sex and each racialized subject cannot live in a horizon completely isolated from other subjects. The phenomenological structure opposes such likely slippages into absolute, extreme conceptualizations. If being is being-in-the world, the ontological structure of phenomenology is incompatible with such isolation. Irigaray’s and Weate’s analyses persuasively argue that subjects with embodied differences must live in distinguishable horizons, but not that subjects live in absolute isolation. Other subjects occupy any specific horizon, if only to confirm our perceptions and our knowledge claims. Without the extremes of absolute identity and absolute difference, these distinguishable horizons must overlap somewhere. As the previous chapters highlight, subjects with ambiguous identities—subjects who pass, who are mixed, and who are hyphenated—model the overlapping of horizons. Women of color, multiplicitous subjects, and subjects with intersectional identities live in more than one horizon—demonstrating that horizons overlap. The phenomenological structure of being-in-the-world insists that somehow, somewhere distinguishable horizons overlap; we share a world. Granting that we share a world, I agree with Weate and Irigaray in situating embodied differences as, in a sense, irreversible. Although we share a world, the experience of embodiment in itself, I believe remains irreversible. I suspect Merleau-Ponty’s totalizing conceptual use of reversibility occurs because of his neglect of the body in The Visible and the Invisible. In this last text, Merleau-Ponty delves more deeply into ontology, but it does not appear that he positions the notion of the flesh to replace actual/real embodiment. The exact relation between this discussion of flesh and actual embodied subjects is not clear. But this theoretically new element cannot replace discussions about actual/real embodiment. This is regrettable, for the careful attention to the experiences of embodied subjectivity more truly heeds the phenomenological methodology of avoiding the epistemic presumptions of high-altitude thinkers. This ontological discussion risks violating careful phenomenological methodology. Kozel offers a defense, of sorts, of the totalizing tendency in the notion of reversibility. She explains that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological metaphysics deviates from the traditional understanding of metaphysics; she writes, “[p]hilosophical discourse, and phenomenology in particular, however, cannot exist in this [traditional metaphysics] type of closure because they are, to use Derrida’s words, defined as opening onto infinity.”101 Kozel does not elaborate on this alternate, phenomenological metaphysics. I can only surmise that Kozel refers to the openness and ambiguity in phenomena, that I earlier explain as the defining difference of a phenomenological ontology in chapter 1. I agree that phenomenology precisely endeavors to avoid totalizing; the irreducibility of phenomena, of being-in-the-world conditions our open ambiguous relationship with the world. Yet, what remains unclear is



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whether this openness persists in The Visible and the Invisible, particularly with the notion of reversibility. This may define the difference between the two texts, The Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. To the extent that Merleau-Ponty depicts all the world in this reductive relationship between the visible and the invisible, he appears to totalize. Yet in the chiasmic reversibility of flesh, because the reversibility maintains a hollow, one can conclude that some features in the relation between the visible or the invisible remain open—for both still retain the possibility of transcendence. His notion of reversibility is not whole and does not thoroughly encompass; he conceives an asymmetric reversibility. As Dillon writes, “it is clear that the reversibility is not symmetrical: we cannot see ourselves exactly as Others see us.”102 Yet, I must admit that to cling solely to an asymmetrical reversibility in response to the embodied irreversibilities is not quite convincing. To the extent that reversibility defines the relation between the two, reversibility constrains the relation between the two. Recall, one of the dangers of high-altitude thinking is the claim to certain knowledge; to steer clear of this danger and to retain the possibility of the world transcending our knowledge, a modicum of uncertainty must persist. Defining—and hence restricting—the kind of relations that the visible and the invisible can have with each other does not allow for this uncertainty; the reversibility of chiasmic flesh forecloses the surprises the world offers. Contrary to Kozel’s defense, the openness and ambiguity Merleau-Ponty so carefully attends to in the Phenomenology does not survive into The Visible and the Invisible. The totality in reversibility does not represent the conclusion of Merleau-Ponty’s aims within these texts. Although his explorations of perception and embodiment face criticisms, Merleau-Ponty appears to search for the openness of evolving, becoming “somethings.” I turn to this concern in chapter 5 by focusing on the notion of identity-in-difference. At present I concede to Irigaray and Weate the possibility of dangerous totalizing elements in reversibility, in the actual embodied irreversibilities in the world. But contrary to Irigaray and Weate, the acknowledgment of these irreversibilities does not admit absolute alterity or living in completely different horizons.

CONCLUSION This chapter addresses three strong criticisms against Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology from feminist philosophers. These feminist concerns about phenomenology must be answered because of its possible relevance for questions in philosophy of race and for women of color. In regard to the narcissism of perception, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological conception of perception demonstrates awareness of this danger in perception. In emphasizing the horizonal structure of perception, Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception explains how perception promotes narcissism and projects differences resulting in the divergent problems of only seeing oneself or only seeing others as

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completely different. Admittedly, his theory of the horizon does not include struggles over power and knowledge. But the horizonal structure can be conceptualized to include an awareness of the history of struggles over power and knowledge broadening an understanding of perception as possibly diverging among racialized subjects. The horizon can be useful for philosophy of race. Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty does not conceptualize the possibility of different horizons and different worlds. The situatedness of women of color and the existence of multiple horizons persuasively describes horizons as overlapping. Hence perception ranges between narcissism and sameness, hypervisibility, and otherness, and still accesses the world. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty’s attention to embodiment importantly contributes to both philosophy of feminism and philosophy of race. But theorizing abstract embodiment, through concepts like anonymous embodiment, does not cohere with depicting actual material embodied subjects in the world. In speaking of situated subjects in the world, Merleau-Ponty does not pay heed to the ways in which distinguishing body features such as race and sex—so very important for understanding the embodiment of women of color—complicate the subjectivity and the existential possibilities of embodied subjects. But I see this hollow as consistent with dialectic problems in the disjunction between theory and practice. Perhaps, at times, theory cannot cohere with the material circumstances of being-in-the-world. Without careful attention to the plights of embodied subjects in the world, to racialized or sexualized subjects, in his final work, Merleau-Ponty proffers the totalizing idea of the reversibility of flesh. Even with his insistence on a hollow in all reversibility, he does not heed enough to the specific differences of actual embodiment. This devalues the experiences of women of color. The oversights in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology do not debilitate the phenomenological method from speaking to social political concerns, especially regarding the situatedness of women of color. These details in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology summon further thinking about the function of the horizon within perception and the meaning and importance of differences of embodiment. After all, much of Merleau-Ponty’s work further encourages contemplation on perception and pioneers the concept of embodied subjectivity. The experiences of embodied subjectivity, especially women of colors’ embodied subjectivity, invite further analysis.

NOTES 1. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 308. 2. Tina Chanter, “Wild Meaning: Luce Irigaray’s Reading of Merleau-Ponty,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 231. She cites Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Ambiguity, 163. 3. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 106. This third criticism appears not to be specific to perception, but true of all sensations. 4. Irigaray, Speculum, 343.



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5. Donna Haraway, “The Persistence of Vision,” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 289. 6. Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 45. She cites Melissa A. Orlie, “Thoughtless Assertion and Political Deliberation,” American Political Science Review v. 88, n. 3 (September 1994): 684–95. 7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 139. 8. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 70. 9. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 79. 10. Irigaray’s writing style is mimetic. Mimesis is difficult to read, but Irigaray clearly finds this style of writing important methodologically. See Susan Kozel’s article on the strategy of mimesis in “The Diabolical Strategy of Mimesis: Luce Irigaray’s Reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” Hypatia v. 11, n. 3 (Summer 1996). Kozel contends that in reading Irigaray’s works, “[t]here is a choice of focus implied here which affects how one reads Irigaray’s work: Do we read her as providing a ‘direct’ interpretation of a text or as offering an ‘indirect’ strategy of reading, that is, one that exposes what is left out of a text?” (118). For the style of mimesis “involves women consciously stepping into the sexual stereotypes provided for them by men. It thus becomes a process of eroding the stereotypes from within . . . ‘by an effect of playful repetition’” (116. She cites Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985], 76). Kozel continues to argue that actually “[b]ehind the strategy of mimesis, there is obviously substance being withheld or intentionally underdeveloped. . . . She offers as much as she deems necessary, following the principles of the flexible Lacanian session” (120). Kozel concludes, “[m]imesis is an affirmation of the invisible within the visible” (121). But, nevertheless, Irigaray turns her mimetic strategy against Merleau-Ponty. Kozel appears to side with me in that she suggests a problem with the mimetic strategy. Kozel writes Irigaray’s “mimetic strategy applied to Merleau-Ponty risks denying any validity to his individual endeavor. This is what I have called the leveling effect of the strategy of mimesis” (126). 11. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 154. She cites from Visible, 131. 12. Irigaray, Ethics, 154–55. 13. Judith Butler, in an article that defends Merleau-Ponty’s work from Irigaray’s criticisms through an analysis of the structure of language, also defends perception in the relation between the seer and the seen. Upon acknowledging Irigaray’s point that with narcissistic perception the subject is always already implicated in the seen, Butler responds, “[i]f one is ‘implicated’ in the world that one sees, that does not mean that the world that one sees is reducible to oneself ” (“Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics: Alterities of the Flesh in Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty,” Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, eds. Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss [University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006], 118). Working from within Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the relation between the visible and the invisible, Butler contends that perception could not solely be narcissistic when “implicated in the world of flesh of which he is a part is to realize precisely that he cannot disavow such a world without disavowing himself . . . the subject, as flesh, is primarily an intersubjective being, finding itself as Other, finding its primary sociality in a set of relations that are never fully recoverable or traceable” (123).

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14. Irigaray, Ethics, 158. 15. Irigaray, Ethics, 158–59. 16. See chapter 1 in the Phenomenology, “The Sensation as a Unit of Experience.” 17. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Great Britain: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1962), 3. 18. José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 153. 19. George Yancy, “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy v. 19, n. 4 (2005): 226. 20. Helen Ngo, The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 64. 21. Satya Mohanty and Uma Narayan posit similar positions. See Mohanty’s book Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 137–46. Uma Narayan, “Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist Critique of Cultural Essentialism,” Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural Postcolonial and Feminist World, eds. Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). I explore this question in greater detail in chapter 5. 22. Linda Martín Alcoff, “Merleau-Ponty and Feminist Theory on Experience,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 252. See also Medina, who writes, “[i]t is this radical pluralization that the phenomenological tradition failed to accomplish. . . . And this is the core of his critique of Husserl and Heidegger: ‘when one moves, as the last Husserl and the first Heidegger, from the egological, strictly phenomenological point of view . . . to the ‘life-world,’ one has just exchanged the egocentric for an ethno- or sociocentric point of view, solipsism on a larger scale’” (Medina, 271, footnote 15). 23. Linda Martín Alcoff, “Toward a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment,” Journal of Radical Philosophy v. 95 (May/June 1999): 18. 24. Consider Charles Mills, The Racial Contract, and the distinctly separate worlds between the civilized and the uncivilized that black bodies and white bodies occupy because of the racial contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 25. Jeremy Weate, “Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology,” Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 179. For this reason, Medina advocates a genealogical analysis: “A genealogy animated not simply by a melioristic pluralism, but by a guerrilla pluralism, requires more than merely revisiting the past to see how and why things were settled in the way they were; it requires interrogating and contesting any settlement, making the past come undone at the seams, so that it loses its unity, continuity, and naturalness. . . . It is there where genealogical investigations draw their critical force; it is in the friction between forgotten and silenced lives and the lives of the present where the insurrections start to happen” (Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 287–88). 26. Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York: Routledge, 1999), 27–28. 27. Alcoff, “Toward,” 18. 28. Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 62. See Annette Kuhn, “The Body and Cinema: Some Problems for Feminism,” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).



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29. For this reason I do not find persuasive the broad description of phenomenology as flattening out difference. Weate explains that Levinas, Heidegger, and Derrida argue “[o]ne of the most abiding criticisms of phenomenology in both latent and manifest form in recent philosophical discourse is that it must install itself on the basis of the repression of difference. . . . That which appears, the phenomenon, is violated by metaphysical over-generalization, ‘Sameness’ or ‘presence’ in the hands of phenomenologists, according to their critics and this whether the epistemic frame is transcendental or somatic” (169). I agree with Weate’s frustration here. 30. Judith Butler, “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,” The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, eds. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 85–86. 31. Butler, “Ideology,” 90–91. 32. Weiss, Body, 2. 33. Weiss, Body, 2. 34. Butler, “Ideology,” 92. 35. Butler specifically writes, “the sexual physiognomy of the female body ‘elicit[s] the gestures of the masculine body, as if the very existence of these attributes ‘provoked’ or even necessitated certain kinds of sexual gestures on the part of the male. Here it seems that the masculine subject has not only projected his own desire onto the female body, but then has accepted that projection as the very structure of the body that he perceives. Here the solipsistic circle of the masculine voyeur seems complete. . . . In contrast to this normal male subject is Schneider, for whom it is said ‘a woman’s body has no particular essence.’ Nothing about the purely physical construction of the female body arouses Schneider: ‘It is, he says, predominately character which makes a woman attractive, for physically they are all the same.’ For Merleau-Ponty, the female body has an ‘essence’” (“Ideology,” 93–94). She quotes from the Phenomenology, 156. 36. Elizabeth McMillan points to a similar pattern in Merleau-Ponty’s depiction of the female body in his text The Structure of Behavior. See Elizabeth McMillan, “Female Difference in the Texts of Merleau-Ponty,” Philosophy Today v. xxxi, n. 4/4 (Winter 1987): 359–66. 37. Butler, “Ideology,” 93. 38. Butler, “Ideology,” 98. 39. Shannon Sullivan, “Domination and Dialogue in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,” Hypatia v. 12, n. 1 (Winter 1997): 1–19. 40. Butler, “Ideology,” 98. Perhaps Irigaray’s concern with narcissism centers on this same point, because the general body for Merleau-Ponty is a male body and hence only sees other men. 41. Sullivan, “Domination and Dialogue,” 1. 42. Sullivan, “Domination and Dialogue,” 4. 43. Weiss, Body, 66. 44. Silvia Stoller, “Reflections on Feminist Merleau-Ponty Skepticism,” Hypatia v. 15, n. 1 (Winter 2000): 176. 45. Stoller, “Reflections on Feminist Merleau-Ponty Skepticism,”  176. She cites Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, 354, and Merleau-Ponty à la Sorbonne Résumé de Cours 1949–1952 (Grenoble: Cynara), 312, respectively. 46. Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 165.

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47. I address this problem in chapter 5 by exploring the notion of identity-in-difference. 48. Butler, “Difference,” 123. 49. Irigaray’s third criticism refers to much more than this. Her position addresses a larger point about totalizing philosophical systems and the problem of the excluded or the remainder in all dialectical systems. But these concerns circumscribe dialectical frameworks; as such, this present chapter does not address these questions. 50. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 356. 51. Françoise Dastur, “World, Flesh, Vision,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 36. For a similar reading, see Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, “Introduction: The Value of Flesh: Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and the Modernism/Postmodernism Debate,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 11. 52. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 58. In the working notes of The Visible and the Invisible, he explicitly states, “what the other says appears to me to be full of meaning because his lacunae are never where mine are” (187). 53. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 337. See also xii–xiii, 347, 350, and 351. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 9, 143, 209. See also Alphonso Lingis, “The Difficulties of a Phenomenological Investigation of Language,” The Modern Schoolmen v. lvii (November 1979–May 1980): 63. See also Lawrence Hass, “Sense and Alterity: Rereading Merleau-Ponty’s Reversibility Thesis,” Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, eds. Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 95–97. 54. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 353. See also Phenomenology, 360. 55. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 410. 56. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 359. See also 357, where he writes, “[i]n the absence of reciprocity there is no alter Ego, since the world of the one then takes in completely that of the other, so that one feels disinherited in favour of the other.” 57. Many postmodernist theorists also hold this position of the possibility of complete alterity. 58. Irigaray, Ethics, 173. 59. Kozel, “Diabolical Strategy of Mimesis,” 124. 60. Butler, “Difference,” 112. 61. Dorothea Olkowski, “The Continuum of Interiority and Exteriority in the Thought of Merleau-Ponty,” Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, eds. Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 11. 62. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 236. 63. James Phillips, “From the Unseen to the Invisible: Merleau-Ponty’s Sorbonne Lectures as Preparation for His Later Thought,” Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, eds. Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 80. See also Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 236, 239. 64. Henri Maldiney, “Flesh and Verb in the Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 56. See also Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 236. 65. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 216. Merleau-Ponty continues, “the visible is pregnant with the invisible.” 66. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 152.



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67. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 149. Renaud Barbaras explains that Merleau-Ponty “emphasizes that it is qua visible and with a view toward its visibility that the perceived world is invisible as well” (“Perception and Movement: The End of the Metaphysical Approach,” Chiasms: MerleauPonty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000], 83). 68. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 152. Interestingly, Merleau-Ponty first introduced the notion of a style to contrast with the idea of a definition in the Phenomenology. He writes, “[a] style is a certain manner of dealing with situations . . . a definition, correct though it may be, never provides an exact equivalent, and is never of interest to any but those who have already had the actual experience” (327). 69. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 139. 70. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 140. 71. The flesh “(of the world or my own) is not contingency, chaos, but a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself ” (Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 146). 72. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 139. 73. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 215. 74. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 215. 75. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 234. 76. M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 164–65. 77. The notion of the chiasm should not be startling; traces of such an idea prevail in the Phenomenology. A reflexive quality exists in the phenomenological descriptions of perception, experience, and body movement. In this earlier text, Merleau-Ponty writes in regard to touch that, “I am able to touch effectively only if the phenomenon finds an echo within me” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 316). As such, Maldiney writes the rather contradictory words, “this otherness is precisely proper to us only because, as foreign, it is at the same time that which is to us the most intimate and the most originary” (53.) 78. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 147. 79. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 9, 147. 80. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 157. 81. Chanter, “Wild Meaning,” 232. She quotes from Visible, 155. 82. Kozel, “Diabolical Strategy of Mimesis,” footnote 11. 83. Butler, “Difference,” 121. See also 119, where Butler writes, “[i]n what is perhaps the least persuasive of Irigaray’s arguments, she suggests that Merleau-Ponty not only repudiates this ‘connection’ with the maternal in classic masculine fashion, but that he then reappropriates this ‘connection’ for his own solipsistic theory of the flesh.” 84. Irigaray, Ethics, 162. 85. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 93. 86. Irigaray, Ethics, 165. 87. Irigaray, Ethics, 168. 88. Butler, “Difference,” 115. 89. Butler, “Difference,” 116. 90. See chapter 1. 91. Irigaray, Ethics, 153. Frederick Olafson also voices this particular irreversibility of the seer and the visible. Focusing on entities with lifespans so brief that they could not possibly have a relationship to the seer, Olafson writes, “in this case a particle that lasts for a millionth of a second—he asks what such an existence can mean and proceeds to argue that it becomes

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meaningful only through an analogy with macroscopic perception where it is placed within a ‘horizon’ and thus a transcendence, and that in fact it ‘has no meaning in the en soi (but) only the Umwelt of a carnal subject.’” Olafson contests Merleau-Ponty’s position by arguing, “[i]t is a fact that we do form concepts of spatio-temporal objects that altogether abstract from any transcendence or ‘relationship to being that obtains within being.’” With the assertion of this simple fact, Olafson argues for the existence of “spatio-temporal objects” completely ontologically separate from the seer. Olafson contends an irreversibility exists between the seer and the visible because of these spatio-temporal objects that subsist outside a relationship with the seer. For Olafson, Merleau-Ponty’s system still tips the balance, in the relationship between the visible and the seer, to the seer (Frederick Olafson, “Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Ontology of the Visible’: Some Exegetical and Critical Comments,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly v. 61, nos. 1 and 2 [January–April 1980]: 174). Merleau-Ponty would be comfortable with the possibility of a seen that withholds from the seer by remaining immanent unto itself and share only so much, only what it wishes with the seer. 92. Recall Merleau-Ponty’s much referenced and very interesting passage about trees looking at us. 93. Gail Weiss, “Écart: The Space of Corporeal Difference,” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 207. 94. I do wonder about the irreversibility of class or sexuality. 95. Weate, “Fanon, Merleau-Ponty,” 179. See also George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2008). 96. Weate, “Fanon, Merleau-Ponty,” 174. Recall chapter 3 explained Fanon, Alia Al-Saji, and Boram Jeong’s reading of a temporality of the black, Muslim, and women of color’s subject as arriving ahead of him/herself. 97. Weate, “Fanon, Merleau-Ponty,” 173. See also 176. 98. Weate, “Fanon, Merleau-Ponty,”  179. Note that Weate does not position the existential challenges of black subjects as conditioned within the absolute relations between being-in-itself and being-for-itself. He does not position the black subject in the object status through the overdetermined look of whites—following the Sartrean readings of Fanon. Rather, Weate locates the existential trials of the black subject within the temporality that the black subject lives, from the history that the black subject inherits. Of course, there is a long debate about whether the Sartrean framework carefully heeds history. 99. Weate, “Fanon, Merleau-Ponty,” 179. 100. See Mills, The Racial Contract, 51. 101. Kozel, “Diabolical Strategy of Mimesis,” 124. 102. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 167.

5 In the Face of Indifference The Phenomenological Structure of Identity-in-Difference

THE THREAT OF ABSOLUTE DIFFERENCE Sexual and racial differences matter. We have yet to fully understand what difference means and what difference difference makes. Much of this book explores the significance of racial and sexual differences, but we cannot and do not live as beings in complete isolation from each other. Although facile assumptions of sameness, born from the desire to claim universal truths, persist as a dangerous tendency, I find equally troublesome claims of absolute difference because of their slippages into indifference.1 Following the discussion in chapter 1 on racial bias and stigma, this final chapter focuses on Glenn Loury’s concern with one expression of racial stigma. Loury explains a specific instance of indifference in the United States today through the concept of racial stigma, “a racial group is stigmatized when it can experience an alarming disparity in some social indicator and yet that disparity occasions no societal reflection upon the extent to which that circumstance signals something having gone awry in Our structures rather than something having gone awry in Theirs.”2 Such disparate statistics about minority populations that occasion no alarm from the majority members of society indicate how separate the majority members of society think and feel from the minority group. The majority members of society do not consider the minority population as members of a shared community. Loury’s definition draws to mind Maria Lugones’s musings, when she ponders, “[t]he more independent I am, the more independent I am left to be. Their world and their integrity do not require me at all. There is no sense of self-loss in them for my own lack of solidity. But they rob me of my solidity through indifference, an indifference they can afford.”3 Because of these slippages into indifference, I fear the language of absolute difference. 155

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Absolute sameness and absolute difference are not true to phenomenological experience. Indifference challenges if not forecloses developing a community that recognizes our heterogenous commonality for women of color. Hence, although most of this book explores what difference difference makes, in this last chapter, I focus on the phenomenological idea of identity-in-difference. Maurice Merleau-Ponty gestured to this notion—in its epistemic and ontologic sense. I clarify and forward this notion here. I contend that although differences matter, our commonality is just as important. This chapter begins by tracing two recent trends in philosophy of race and feminist philosophy. Philosophy of race has emphasized that the differences of race, as socially constructed, have become ontologically relevant. Additionally, following a development in philosophy of mind that the body influences consciousness, feminist philosophers have speculated on the cognitive relevance of the specificities of embodiment. Both lines of thinking ultimately, hermeneutically lead to the position that differently embodied subjects may experience distinct worlds. To put these trends of analysis in perspective, and trouble these trends of analysis, I posit the phenomenological notion of identity-in-difference. This chapter forwards a description of this ontological framework and an argument for the normative necessity of recognizing this framework. To make this case, this chapter briefly explores the philosophical history of the relation between identity and difference from its metaphysical origins in monism and dualism, to Hegel’s first formulation of a dialectical relation between identity and difference. In distinction from Hegel, Merleau-Ponty briefly references a relation between identity and difference that is much more immediate. To better understand this more immediate relation—an identity-in-difference—I describe four phenomenological relations: (1) in sharing a perception with another; (2) in one’s embodiment; (3) in an enduring identity through time; and (4) in human beings’ accessibility to each other. To argue for this ontological relation of identity-in-difference’s normative recognition in our social relations, I end this chapter by providing three instances of indifference from failure to see our social relations as identities-in-difference. This chapter ends with an elaboration of how both that which serves as identity and that which functions as difference changes; in other words, the features and hence the structure of identity-in-difference becomes. In this way, I advocate for both respecting difference and our common humanity and shared fate to prevent treating each other with indifference. For in the question of race relations, too much of a focus on difference possibly leads to the other extreme problem of simply not caring about the fate of those whom one deems as other. For women of color, for this broad yet specific identity group, already live in relations of identity-in-difference.



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THE ONTOLOGIZING DIFFERENCE OF RACE Philosophy of race widely accepts the social construction of race. Recently, philosophers of race argue that the social/cultural meanings about race have sedimented into the horizon so that human beings not only perceive race to be natural but also to function effectively as natural. The socially constructed meanings of skin color as symbols of race operate so much as a part of the accepted understandings of our social world, that members of society do not recognize the meanings as social constructions. The meanings function as part of the natural order of things. Lewis Gordon writes that this process in which the socially constructed becomes natural has ontological significance: Ontology can be regarded not only as a study of what “is” the case, but also a study of what is treated as being the case and what is realized as the contradiction of being the case. .  .  .  Ontologies often ascribe necessity instead of contingency to being. .  .  .  We lose sight of the contingency of being when we fail to appreciate that what is the case doesn’t always have to be the case.4

Gordon argues for understanding ontology to include this phenomenon of treating as natural the socially constructed meanings of race because of the very real human condition in which we cannot absolutely distinguish the cultural and the natural. The cultural and the natural integrally relate with each other. The phenomenological framework of the fundierung model describes the relationship between the natural and the cultural as not quite distinguishable. Empiricists and poststructuralists characterize nature and culture as separable and the force relations between the two as uni-directional. Empiricists emphasize nature’s force upon culture, whereas poststructuralists feature culture’s influence upon nature. The fundierung relationship does not recognize the two spheres as separable, but highlights a bi-directional, hermeneutic and sedimented relationship between nature and culture. M. C. Dillon provides a concise summary of the Fundierung relationship. He writes, “Merleau-Ponty uses the Husserlian term ‘Fundierung’ to describe the relations between (a) the space of actuality and (b) that of possibility, (a) given contexts and (b) constructed horizons, (a) concrete spatiality and (b) abstract spatiality.” In each case, (a) founds (b). Nevertheless, our contact with (a) occurs via (b); (b) informs us of (a). Merleau-Ponty carefully points out that as a result (a) “is not primary in the empiricist sense” and (b) “is not simply derived from it, since it is through the originated that the originator is made manifest.”5 (A) constitutes all that is primary, primordial, and originary, yet through sedimentation (b) influences (a). Hence, a reciprocity of sorts complicates this relation between (a) and (b). However, “although Fundierung involves reciprocity, it is not a symmetrical relation.”6 This non-symmetric and open-ended relation between the space of the actual and the space of the possible illustrates this force relation as motivational and not causal. Hence, not only do different societies develop this relation uniquely, but each subject utilizes and propagates one’s society’s manifestation of the fundierung’s influence

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uniquely. This parallels the discussion of bias and perception from chapter 1. If we read (a) as the natural world and (b) as the cultural and social world, perception, body movement, and experiences form our relation and negotiation between the space of material/given contexts and the space of possibility, abstract horizons. Or in other words, this reflexive fundierung relation between the actual and the possible motivates our perception, body movements, and experiences. This hermeneutic relationship between nature and culture has ramifications on understandings of ontology. Advocacy of this understanding of ontology has been building within philosophy of race for conceptualizing the ontology of race.7 Elaborating on this confusion between nature and culture, specifically regarding race, Jeremy Weate writes, “[i]nstead of remaining an historical ascription of identity (albeit a false one applied by a white mythos), the schema becomes ‘naturalized’ as a condition of skin. The epidermal marks the stage where historical construction and contingency is effaced and replaced with the facticity of flesh. . . . With the outset of epidermalization, we are at the edge of being-for-others sedimenting into an essence, a ‘fact’ of blackness.”8 Weate and George Yancy explain Frantz Fanon’s work as demonstrating that the meaning of black skin has become so unquestionable that members of society now understand the meanings about black skin as natural. Of course, the entire idea that skin color can actually be black is socially constructed. The skin was described as red, brown, blue, thus not always necessarily black. Clearly focusing on skin as indicators of race and seeing black skin demonstrates another instantiation of the experience error; because perception and experience end in objects—black skin—one mistakenly loses awareness of the phenomenal structure of being-in-the-world.9 Under these circumstances, race philosophers advocate for conceptualizing the ontological relevance of confusing the socially constructed with the natural. Linda Martin Alcoff writes: [t]here is a visual registry operating in social relations which is socially constructed, historically evolving, and culturally variegated but nonetheless powerfully determinant over individual experiences and choices. .  .  .  This visual registry cannot be fully or adequately described except in ontological terms, because the difference that racializing identities has made is an ontologizing difference, that is, a difference at the most basic level concerning knowledge and subjectivity, being and thinking.10

Clearly the naturalizing of the cultural meanings of black skin importantly impacts the social political condition of racist meanings. So, to describe the experience of race in present-day society, philosophers of race argue for understanding race’s socially constructed meanings in ontological terms. To conceptualize race ontologically, let me elaborate on the definition of ontology from the existential phenomenological tradition. Clevis Headley characterizes it as descriptive ontology: “[d]escriptive ontology or existential phenomenology, correctly characterized, is the study of the basic structure of human existence and, unlike traditional ontology, is not primarily concerned with the study of what is or



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what exists; it simply describes the structures of human reality.”11 What Headley refers to as traditional ontology has been more often ascribed as metaphysics. Phenomenological methodology and phenomenology’s understanding of experience conveys the latter meaning of ontology—as a description of the structures of human reality. Accordingly, Gordon describes his work as “descriptive ontology or what is sometimes called existential phenomenology.”12 But more important than merely describing human reality, phenomenology better captures the influence, the interconnection, and the co-development of culture/the socially constructed and nature, between human beings and the world, and the distance that conditions these relations.13 With the position that, although society understands that the differences of races are socially constructed, society, nevertheless, treats these differences as natural to race, philosophers of race argue that the differences of race constitute ontological differences. I understand and empathize with this conclusion. Because the differences of race, although socially constructed, have real, material influence on the lives of racialized subjects, depicting these differences as ontological is persuasive. But I am concerned that this epistemic position promotes the possibility of conceptualizing racially distinct subjects as not sharing a horizon, not living in the same world, and not communicating with each other. Beyond the relation between blacks and whites, positioning the difference of race as ontological has ramifications for Asians and Latinx subjects, in other words, for intra-minority relations. The position that the difference of race has ontological consequences challenges recognizing the heterogenous commonality for women of color. This book emphasizes and explores the significance of the situatedness of women of color as living in more than one horizon. Hence the position that racial differences constitute ontological differences suggests that women of color live under varied circumstances and demonstrate ability and talent in navigating among different worlds. I fear that this position that racial differences constitute ontological differences lends toward positioning racially different individuals as ontologically, radically separate beings—positioning humanity in gradations including the sub-human, “designated as born unfree and unequal,” as Charles Mills explains the positioning of black people.14

THE RELEVANCE OF THE DIFFERENCES OF THE BODY In contrast to philosophy’s long historical denial that thought and cognition depend at all on the material conditions of the body and the world, Merleau-Ponty scholars have been arguing, for the last fifty years or so, that the particularities of human embodiment impact our cognitive development and capabilities. Chapter 3’s emphasis on the significance of embodiment for the experiences one encounters coheres with this current position about the relevance of embodiment for cognition. Perhaps most prominent among these figures is Hubert Dreyfus. He has been arguing that human bodies’ upright postures, human bodily distinctions of front and back, as well as the

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limitations of human body movements, impact human beings’ cognitive connections.15 Dreyfus explains that the form of the input, constrained by the materiality of the body, directly conditions thought. Referring to neural networks designed to simulate cognitive processes, he writes: the body-dependence of shared generalizations puts disembodied neural networks at a serious disadvantage when it comes to learning to cope in the human world. Nothing is more alien to our form of life than a network with no varying degrees of access, no up-down, front-back orientation, no preferred way of moving, such as moving forward more easily than backward, and no emotional response to its failures and successes.16

In other words, research with neural networks shows that embodiment intrinsically conditions cognitive development and thinking. Building on this position, Shaun Gallagher carefully articulates that body movements structure consciousness. He writes, “the question in this case is not about the apparent structure of consciousness, but about the structuring of consciousness, and the role that embodiment plays in the structuring process.”17 In other words, “the body, through its motor abilities, its actual movements, and its posture, informs and shapes cognition.”18 Indeed, recent philosophy of cognitive science explores situated cognition as extended, embodied, embedded, enactive and amalgamated—all of this research insists that bodily material circumstances influence consciousness.19 The mind and the body cannot be separated. The mind does not completely or solely control the body; human embodiment conditions and structures thinking. Elizabeth Grosz’s work effectively further speculates on the implications of embodied subjectivity on cognition. In considering the general features of human embodiment on cognition, what are the implications from particular differences in embodiment, especially the bodily differences of sex and race on cognition? Grosz writes, “instead of seeing subjectivity as the product of a bare, generalizable human form, which has specific details (sex, race, age, historical context, class, etc.) as secondary attributes, the specificities of the subject, these particular ‘variables’ of the universal are integral to the type of ‘bare humanity’ presumed.”20 If embodiment matters in thinking, Grosz invites speculation on distinctions in embodiment, especially upon obversely prioritizing the so-called secondary bodily qualities, such as sex, skin color, and the shape of the eyes, nose, and lips. What conclusions could we draw upon recognizing that these so-called secondary features, which distinguish human beings, actually function as primary features in the influence such “secondary features” have upon the experiences one is likely to encounter? For, after all, these “secondary” features of the body figure as “an entire orientation, a framework” for living subjectivity.21 Parallel to Grosz’s position in feminist philosophy, Gordon’s dispute with Kwame Appiah in race theory centers precisely on making this distinction between primary/ essential features of the human being and the secondary/contingent features. As Gordon writes, “the problem Appiah sees with racism, that it fails to respect the abstract feature of a human being, misses the point about racism that it involves



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hating others in the flesh, which is a failure to respect important, supposedly contingent features of human beings.”22 Gordon challenges Appiah’s prioritization of the abstract features that define humanity over the specific features of the body that serve as the symbols of racial difference. Gordon insists the contingent features are formative for the lived conditions of racialized subjects. This debate has a long history; and the debate is not confined to the topic of embodiment. Donna-Dale Marcano explains that Jean Paul Sartre and W. E. B. Du Bois voiced that when one was rejected for one’s particularities, as Jew or as black, acceptance based only on the abstract features of man—as the universalizing language of equality claims—does not suffice. One must have acceptance and recognition of one’s particularities, as Jew or as black, and not simply as man. Indeed, justice demands universal acceptance of one’s particularities.23 These positions by Grosz and Gordon uniformly align with the conclusions drawn in the previous chapter, chapter 4, about the controversial position of notions like anonymous bodies. Subjects are embodied. The notion of an anonymous body, in its abstractness, does not cohere with situated bodies in the world. Recall chapter 4’s discussion that feminist theorists Judith Butler and Shannon Sullivan argue that to theoretically reduce human embodiment to anonymous subjectivity is too abstract and possibly ultimately devalues not only gender, but also women. I added that anonymous embodiment also devalues race—two features that define women of color. These positions agree with Grosz and Gordon in their foregrounding of these so-called secondary features of sex and race. Although references to anonymous, general bodies serve theoretical expedience, Grosz and Gordon more closely adhere to the reality of embodied subjectivity. Grosz, Gordon, and others forward that the particular or secondary features of the body, which I trace to the embodiment of race and sex, significantly impact social life. The Hegelian insight that history flows through the interchange between what human beings value as necessary or contingent during different periods clarifies the arbitrariness of the attribution of certain body features as primary and other body features as secondary. The attribution of certain body features as universal and others as contingent only reflects our present historical, social/political values and interests. Hence, questioning the identification of certain features of embodiment as primary and other features as secondary raises the further question as to which of the two— the so-called primary/universal or the so-called secondary/particular features of the body—condition thought more. Developments in philosophy of cognitive science suggest that the contingent features of embodiment may structure cognitive processes more than the general features of embodiment. With the obverse prioritization between what we presently consider as the secondary and the primary features of embodiment, Grosz speculates that phenomenology “can position epistemology and ontology as sexually specific, it can suggest in ways that feminists up to now have resisted, that women not only have different bodies from men (a point no one would contest) but therefore, they must also have different minds from them (a controversial and sensitive point, one that

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needs very careful elaboration).”24 Perhaps people with particular body features may not only possess different cognitive structures, but also different cognitive structuring processes. In other words, people with particular secondary features of embodiment may not only contemplate different subject matter but process knowledge in different ways. The embodied differences of race and sex do not lie over the surface of the primary layer of humanity; one lives race and sex through the immediacy of the specificities of the body because the so-called secondary features of the body condition what and how human beings experience and think. This is quite a position to reach considering some of the tenets in the early stages of feminist theory. Feminist theory began with an insistence that women can think as well as men, that women are equal to men. Grosz’s speculation on the possibility that because of women’s embodiment, women may think differently from men demonstrates the advancements in feminist theory in that we risk voicing differences. All feminists do not agree with Grosz’s speculations—as exhibited by the long debate about the existence and need for a biological essence among women to identify women and the relation of this essence to the socially constructed differences of gender. Nevertheless, that Grosz ponders the cognitive implications of embodied differences among men and women illustrates that the social world, the parameters for feminist theory has indeed shifted. Grosz and Gordon’s positions respect the differences of embodiment, but they also magnify the differences, challenging any recognition of sameness. I worry that they risk absolute separation and indifference.

IDENTITY-IN-DIFFERENCE Let me summarize the two conclusions thus far: (1) the socially constructed meanings about race and sex have sedimented to effectively function as natural; as a result, the difference of race and sex constitute an ontological difference; and (2) because embodiment conditions thinking, the specificities of embodiment structure cognition, including cognitive processing. I find these two positions incredibly persuasive. These positions highlight what difference differences make; differences have significant consequences. But I am afraid that these two conclusions lead to the threat that racially and sexually different subjects not only inhabit different worlds, but also that they think differently. The flow of time can only hermeneutically reinforce and exaggerate these differences. This is not the conclusion with which I would like to end this book. Although I aim to dispel overly facile assumptions of similarity in claims to universal truths, I do not endorse the idea that differently racialized and sexualized people, that people with multiplicitous and intersectional identities, that women of color, live in isolation from each other. On the contrary, women of color live in multiple horizons. Uma Narayan warns that too much of an emphasis on difference ignores the degree to which cultural imperialism often proceeds by means of an “insistence on Difference,” by a projection of Imaginary “differences” that constitute



In the Face of Indifference 163 one’s Others as Other, rather than via an “insistence on Sameness.” Failing to see that “cultural imperialism” can involve both sorts of problems, attempts to avoid the Scylla of “Sameness” often result in moves that leaves one foundering on the Charybdis of “Difference.”25

Keep in mind, as much as Frantz Fanon’s work eloquently analyzes the embodied impact of colonization, he makes clear that the colonizers’ strategy of justification was based on asserting alleged differences between whites and blacks. In the last chapter of Black Skins, White Masks, he explains that his project aims to “reach out for the universal.”26 Fanon declares that he is a Frenchman, and that “I am a man, and what I have to recapture is the whole of the past of the world. . . . Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way should I derive my basic purpose from the past of the people of color.”27 Clearly, Fanon celebrates the sameness of black and white people as long as both fight for the humanity of all. Recall also the problem of hypervisibility of differences presented in chapter 4. Upon making hypervisible the different embodiment of women and people of color, colonizers and racist people refer to such hypervisibility of differences to justify the treatment of women and people of color as less than human. Finally, bear in mind from chapter 2, that women of color recognize heterogenous commonality internal to the group while coalition building around different projects as they become necessary and visible. So clearly, differences do not solely define the perceptions and experiences among women of color. In heeding Narayan’s warning, Fanon’s project, and the heterogenous commonality of women of color, let me clarify that racial and sexual differences matter, but the differences do not matter so much that they disconnect forever our relations with members of differently identified groups. A Little History Here amid this conundrum between appreciating differences and yet recognizing our sameness, turning to a phenomenological treatment of the relation of identity-in-difference may be helpful. I argue that underscoring Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is the philosophical relation of identity-in-difference. The relation of identity-in-difference does not originate specifically within phenomenology, but from the broader sphere of philosophy. It is not clear exactly when philosophy birthed the idea of an identity-in-difference. I found enough secondary literature placing this particular locution in Hegel’s work The Science of Logic. But clearly the discussion between identity and difference lies within the old metaphysical debate between monism and dualism, with its slippery slope slide between the one and the many. As Paul Weiss states, “[t]o say nothing more than ‘One’ is not yet as Plato long ago observed, to say anything of significance. Yet to say ‘One is’ is already to have said two things, and in fact to have made a distinction between Unity and Being.”28 Identity had many incarnations: as the one, synthesis, concurrence, sameness, resemblance, consistency,

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or unity; and difference also had numerous incarnations: as self-diremption, dualism, multiplicity, accidents, or the many. I cannot trace the intricacies of the entire discussion here, nor do I feel comfortable attempting such a project. I elaborate only a bit on the history of this relation as is relevant. Perhaps the most well-known instantiation of this idea sits firmly within the discussion between essence and accident in Aristotle’s work.29 By admitting the distinction between essence and accident, Aristotle already reveals himself as a dualist. Aristotle introduces dualism to explain change/finitude and permanence/infinity.30 Essences are permanent and infinite; accidents change and are finite.31 Dualist metaphysics faces the challenge of explaining the relation between the two including whether and how they have contact.32 For this reason, Locke and others resort to monist tendencies, that the essence determines the accidents. But this does not answer the problem of distinguishing between permanence and change. To answer this classic metaphysical problem of the relation between essence (thought) and accident (being), while still distinguishing between permanence and change, Hegel insists that there must be a relation between these two substances.33 Interestingly, rather than forwarding that the essences determine the accidents, Hegel forwards that essences (thought) must reveal themselves in the accidents (being).34 Hegel introduces the idea of an identity-in-difference in the dialectic movement between spirit and the materiality of history. As Frederick Beiser writes, “Hegel’s central and characteristic ideas: spirit, dialectic, and identity-in-difference. . . . They state that the movement of life consists in moments of unity, difference, and unity-in-difference, or of oneness, opposition, and oneness-in-opposition. Such movement reflects the theory that organic growth is a process of differentiation and reintegration.”35 To answer the classical metaphysicians by explaining the noncontingent relationship between essence and accidents and the possibility that thought accurately captures being, Hegel offers a dialectic relationship. With a dialectic relationship, he avoids prioritizing monism or dualism—the one or the many. Hegel insists on a relationship of identity-in-difference. By positing a dialectic relationship—a relationship in movement—Hegel answers the question of how to distinguish permanence and change. Movement explains the immediacy and ephemeralness of a sensuous moment. Erwin Marquit quotes Hegel’s “Science of Logic: ‘[s]omething moves, not because at one moment it is here and another there, but because at one and the same moment it is here and not here, because in this ‘here,’ it at once is and is not. . . . Motion is existent contradiction.’”36 Or referring to two senses of the present as the here and the now, John Russon writes, “[t]he present has two forms: here and now. . . . the now is experienced as passing. But a passage can only be experienced as such if it is experienced in relation to difference: the difference from . . . and to.”37 Hegel insists the essences and the accidents inherently relate in the movement and in the stillness created by the repetitive constancy of dialectic movements.38 In other words, the relation of identity-in-difference is in motion. And because of a constancy in the movement, the dialectic movement maintains an identity. Hegel thus transforms the sense of permanence and change;



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permanence is no longer a static permanence. Change does not challenge permanence, rather change at its center enfolds permanence. Let me clarify: to insist not simply on a relation between essence and accidents, between identity and difference, but on an identity-in-difference, implies an immediacy in their relation. As P. Weiss states, “the defenders of the doctrine of Identity in Difference recognize the fact that despite their diversity the One and the Many are not alien to one another in meaning or in being.”39 The immediacy of this relation frustrates some philosophers, even while motivating others.40 This incredibly short history of philosophy’s wrangling with the metaphysical possibility of the number two hopefully illustrates that philosophy of race does not struggle alone with the relation between identity and difference. Clearly such strife between essence and accidents, permanence and change, resembles philosophy of race’s and feminist philosophy’s difficulty juggling the balance between recognizing the inherent sameness that demands respect and care for all human beings and appreciating the differences of class, culture, and tradition, even if such social history has developed novel practices. Maintaining this balance, this fragile connection between identity and difference obviously impacts the identity group women of color, as multiplicitous subjects, intersectional identities. More importantly, the identity group women of color relies upon recognizing heterogenous commonality, both through acknowledging intergroup commonalities and respecting intragroup differences. For this reason, the phenomenological structure of identity-in-difference, from its Hegelian origins to Merleau-Ponty’s references, and my articulation here might facilitate how to balance this fragile ontological relationship with social, political consequences.

FOUR PHENOMENOLOGICAL RELATIONS OF IDENTITY-IN-DIFFERENCE Merleau-Ponty finds the relation of identity-in-difference enigmatic. Beyond Hegel’s first conceptualization, Merleau-Ponty’s understanding can productively contribute to the present discussion on race and specifically for women of color. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty describes Hegel’s dialectic movement as profound but with limitations. He writes, “the profound idea of self-mediation of a movement through which each term ceases to be itself to realize itself, breaks up, opens up, negates itself, in order to realize itself. It can remain pure only if the mediating term and the mediated term—which are ‘the same’—are yet not the same in the sense of identity.”41 Even with such respect for Hegel’s sense of identity-in-difference, Merleau-Ponty carefully delineates a different, a phenomenological sense of identityin-difference. He writes in the working notes, “that the same be the other than the other, and identity difference of difference—this 1) does not realize a surpassing, or dialectic in the Hegelian sense; 2) is realized on the spot, by encroachment, thickness, spatiality.”42 This particular relation of identity-in-difference centers in the

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chiasmatic relation of the visible and the invisible, the touching touched, in the immediacy and thickness of flesh. Merleau-Ponty explains the intertwining of the visible and the invisible, or the subject’s situatedness in the world, not only dialectically, but also as always conditioned through encroachment in the texture of flesh. In place of the Cartesian subject who claims the ability to transcend, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological understanding of identity-in-difference tautly holds a connection between the extremes of complete transcendence of subjects and total immanence of the world. Merleau-Ponty gestures towards a sense of identity-in-difference in immediate connection between the particular and the general, with simultaneous separation and union, in between the old dualism of being and becoming. This phenomenological sense of identity does not rely upon the old sixteenth-century notion of the constancy hypothesis, an insistence on a one-on-one concordance between the objects of the world and the subject’s perception and experience. This identity does not draw from a list of necessary and sufficient conditions. As should be clear, since chapter 1 of this book, phenomenology does not resort to an identity of some minimal, atomistic, elemental, positive, or core features. What kind of identity does phenomenology utilize? Obviously, the usual suspects do not establish identity. Martin Dillon writes, within a phenomenal relation the “attribution of identity need not entail identity of attributes, and misidentification and uncertainty become conceivable possibilities. . . . It also renders enduring identity intrinsically ambiguous.”43 Contra reductively advocating for an absolute identity, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology considers an identity held together not by intrinsic, essential properties, but an identity fragilely upheld by its surroundings, situation, place, context, time—the horizon of the world. This entails that the identity, or that which serves as the identity, changes. But it also means that difference plays as much a part in establishing identity. Joseph Rouse describes this relation between identity and the phenomenal field as holding “a transcendental field; its structures are immune to empirical revision because they are presupposed by it. Yet there is no principled way . . . to distinguish such ‘structures’ from what they structure.”44 I think this captures the relation of identity-in-difference. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “[i]t can remain pure only if the mediating term and the mediated term—which are ‘the same’—are yet not the same in the sense of identity: for then, in the absence of all difference, there would be no mediation, movement, transformation.”45 Toward illustrating and persuading for this concept, I elaborate four instantiations of such identity-in-difference in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and in Paul Ricoeur’s work. First, Merleau-Ponty insists on the occurrence of a daily small miracle—that human beings can concur about seeing the same object. Recall from chapter 1, for Merleau-Ponty, perception performs a miracle; somehow “in the course of perceptional experience, I shall be presented with an indefinite set of concordant views.”46 Even with the unique embodiment of each subject which develops different biases, with its associated unique position in the horizon of the world, which situates each subject with a unique perspective, ultimately, we can still conclude that we see and refer to the same thing or scenery. In sharing the perception of an item in the



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world or experiencing an event together, and relaying the perception or experience to each other, there is a demand, an insistence that we reach agreement, that we see the same thing, that we experience the same event. On this miracle of seeing the same in the world, Merleau-Ponty writes, “[t]here is—and I know it very well if I become impatient with him—a kind of demand that what I see be seen by him also. . . . The thing imposes itself not as true for every intellect, but as real for every subject who is standing where I am.”47 Without this agreement, one questions whether one actually saw the object, whether one shared the same space and time during an event, whether something is wrong with the other or oneself, or whether one experienced something illusive. In other words, perception performs a miracle and reaches identity, even without complete understanding of exactly how the multiple perspectives come to agreement. Second, the experience of embodiment phenomenologically occurs as an identityin-difference. As chapter 3 explains, neither the mind nor the material conditions of embodiment unilaterally or unidirectionally motivates body movement; the initiation of body movements occurs through an identity-in-difference. Drew Leder elaborates three senses in which one’s experience of embodiment occurs as an identity-in-difference. First, Leder points out a distinction that is not actually a distinction between the experience of the phenomenal and the objective body; “[t]here is a ‘divergence’ (écart), a ‘fission,’ that stops the phenomenal and objective body from quite merging. Yet this is an identity-in-difference. The two sides of the body are not ontologically separate categories as Sartre might have it, the subject’s absolute nothingness, the object’s plenitude of Being.”48 In a very important sense, although one can easily claim one’s own physical body, the experience of one’s physical body transcends us. Leder captures this identity-in-difference in describing the condition of a particular yet common material feature of our body, “[m]y own blood belongs as much to the world as to me: enfolded into my body, it is never quite mine.”49 Relatedly and second, one’s perception of one’s own body and the visceral experience of one’s body never quite coincide: “‘Flesh and blood’ expresses well the chiasmatic identity-in-difference of perceptual and visceral life.”50 Leder’s words depict the common dissonance of the well-known experience of shock when unexpectedly encountering one’s reflection in a mirror. Third, one’s own body image as visible by others and one’s visceral experience of one’s body never quite coincide. Leder writes, “while phenomenologically distinct, the visceral circuit is intertwined, an identity-in-difference, with that of the body-asvisibility.”51 One’s experience of one’s own body and others’ perception of one’s body inevitably diverges. Leder does not address this, but race exacerbates all these dissonances, all these embodied identity-in-differences. As chapter 3 elaborates especially regarding the historico-racial schema for blacks, the historico-racial-sexual schema for women of color, as well as in the recent growth of a historico-racial schema among whites—all these examples illustrate the hermeneutically considerable dissonance between one’s embodied experience and how others perceive one’s body. This third experience of identity-in-difference, between one’s visceral experiences of

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one’s body and how others view one’s body also impacts the second experience of identity-in-difference, between the perception of one’s own body and the visceral experience of one’s body. And again, race and sex exacerbate all these dissonances. Such dissonances impact one’s experience of one’s body, the development of one’s body schema and ultimately one’s body image. Leder’s list of three embodied identities-indifference centers in the disjunction between the experiences of one’s body with the body as objective, as perceived by oneself or by others. Apparently, the experience of embodiment forever lies at the limits of the material and perceptual horizon. One final sense in which the experience of embodiment occurs as an identityin-difference lies in the temporality of embodiment; John Russon explains, “time is a bodily phenomenon, or, again, time is what body essentially is. The body is an orientated determinateness, a potentiality for action, and that means it is a kind of congealed time, a living, present identity that makes futures—specific futures—possible.”52 As chapter 3 explains, body movement integrally associates with time, as such the body’s affiliation with time is an identity-in-difference. For although we live in the present, the past conditions the availability of certain body movements and actions, while simultaneously our movements and our actions beckon a specific future. Body movement and time inter-relate as an identity-in-difference. In these four senses, one experiences embodiment as an identity-in-difference. The third instantiation of identity-in-difference addresses Paul Ricoeur’s concern with an enduring identity. Ricoeur’s problem centers on how to determine the identity of a human being in two different instances of time. This question especially becomes relevant with promise keeping. How does one identify a human being or hold a person responsible to a promise when she has undergone changes in body, in personality, and in mind? Husserl raised this question of an identity through time, an identity in time, about Descartes’s ego. As David Cerbone describes it, “[d]espite his general admiration for Descartes, Husserl criticizes him for failing to make the ‘transcendental turn’ by treating the ego revealed by the cogito as ‘a little tag-end of the world.’”53 In other words, Husserl argues that Descartes treats the ego as outside the flow of time. Rather, Husserl understood, because the ego also flows within time and undergoes changes, the self always differentiates. Mired in these phenomenological historical attempts to understand the subject in time and the subject as time, Ricoeur’s work on narrative identity addresses “the question of how an identity can bespeak both change and permanence.”54 The phenomenological framework suggests that Ricoeur’s dilemma and solution recognize the horizon of personal history as an identity-in-difference. Without entering too much into the details of Ricoeur’s work, I acknowledge Ricoeur’s project as deeply important for understanding one’s ethical responsibilities in the question of promise keeping. Ricoeur begins with simple delineations between the sameness and the difference of one’s identity: “Idem refers to a notion of identity based on Sameness . . . ipse, described as Selfhood, can incorporate change within a recognizable entity. In Time and Narrative, ipse is analogous to narrative identity and involves



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the telling and reading of a life-story, whether factual or fictional, such that the figure of identity that emerges offers a new insight into the self.”55 Ricoeur proceeds cautiously—aware of the dangers of the ego in its tendency to assume complete knowledge, especially of the self.56 Yet, Ricoeur’s work explains a way out of these immediate dangers of the ego through two means. First, he insists that the “self can be the source of its own insight.”57 Second, he forwards that the process of constructing a narrative can provide insight into oneself. Patrick Crowley writes, “based on Freud’s clinical work with individuals whose cure involves making narrative sense of the fragments of memory and stories that disorder their sense of identity . . . Ricoeur notes that the subject comes to self-knowledge through the construction of a ‘coherent and acceptable story’ about himself.”58 With these two positions, Ricoeur insists that the self is not simply and forever trapped within her own narcissistic self-denial, but that she can move toward self-understanding. Hence, one can identify oneself, one retains sameness, and one can practice a method that provides access to self-knowledge even with the changes from the flow of time. Ricoeur’s work outlines all the ingredients to identify the self through changes in time.59 Fourth and finally on my list of identity-in-differences: Merleau-Ponty holds that human beings access each other. Recall from all the previous chapters’ focus on multiplicitous subjects, intersectional identities, and historico-racial-sexual schemas, as beings in the world, no human being lives in total isolation, completely outside the purview of all others’ experiences. When one considers that every child is born from a mother, the condition of birth highlights the impossibility of a life lived in complete isolation. As I hope is clear by now, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology never begins with subjects existing in complete isolation from each other—resulting in the profoundly skeptical problem of even accessing other subjects. Rather, because of the embodiment and the situatedness of subjects, not only does he respect each subject’s unique perspective, but also that each subject always maintains a connection with other subjects. As Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen write, “[i]f the phenomenology of perception brings about a displacement of the cogito from the personal, ‘I’ to the prepersonal ‘one,’ it likewise opens up a space of collective social existence between the first and their third person point of view.”60 Similarly, Leder writes, “[w]orld and self still lack their full depth, however, until reference is made to another chiasmatic relation: that which connects me to other perceivers. My perspective and that of the other intertwine in mutual validation, while never quite coinciding.”61 Merleau-Ponty’s position against absolute alterity denies the extremes of complete separation from others and complete union with others. Let me provide a few examples to illustrate not only that we access the other but also that we rely upon others. The recent work in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and child development not only confirms Merleau-Ponty’s position, but instantiates our profound tie with others, according to Gallagher. Child development, human growth, relies upon the other knitted into oneself. Specifically, regarding Merleau-Ponty’s description of the child’s ability to mimic the facial expressions of the adults around her after at least three months of life, Gallagher argues that

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despite his best intentions, Merleau-Ponty assumes that the child’s experiences of her body, that the child’s proprioceptive movements still follow a framework that commences as expression from inside to the outside, from the internal to the external. In contrast to Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions, recent work in child development suggests proprioceptive awareness of embodiment forms inherently intersubjectively. In other words, mimicry of facial expression does not appear when the child reaches a development stage, but rather the facial expression of the other inspires the child to mimicry. Gallagher writes, “the studies on newborn imitation indicate that the intermodal translation is operative from the very beginning. More precisely, and strictly speaking, no ‘translation’ or transfer is necessary because it is already accomplished in the embodied perception of itself, and is already intersubjective.”62 Regardless of the source of the mimicry, Gallagher’s research further affirms the proprioceptive awareness of one’s embodiment as inherently intersubjective—the fourth identityin-difference. Gallagher’s work carefully illustrates the depth of the integral relations between oneself and others; for even the development of one’s bodily capabilities ensues in relation with others. “Quite literally,” Gallagher writes, “it may be the other’s movement that triggers my own proprioceptive awareness.”63 Second, recent philosophy of cognitive science posits one additional relevant finding. Contrary to the popular theory of mind that thinking occurs via representations (or the “theory theory” theory of mind), Gallagher (consistent with Dreyfus) argues that situational thinking, an inherently intersubjective thinking, dominates thinking—especially during the developmental stages, if not throughout adult life. Situational thinking is inherently intersubjective because more than an isolated relation to objects, others shape the environment, the scenario, the situation. He points out the intimacy of situations to thinking, “the environment, or the situation, is not something that the child, or the adult, objectively confronts as an outside observer.”64 In other words, Gallagher argues that situational thinking conditions our intersubjective relations, as well as the development of other kinds of thinking.65 A third and final example of the fourth sense of identity-in-difference, according to Judith Butler, the other inspires me to know myself, to realize my ethical responsibilities, and to initiate the feeling or sentiment to ultimately act. Butler writes, “if feeling follows from a touch that is not mine, then I am, as it were, grounded in, animated by, a touch that I can know only on the condition that I cover over that primary impression as I give an account of myself.”66 Contact with the other initiates a primary feeling that is caught in the chiasmatic relation of suppressing the origins of such a feeling to invisibility while articulating the feeling and making visible the possibilities of deeper self-knowledge. As she emphasizes, “[t]o undergo this touch means that there must be a certain openness to the outside that postpones the plausibility of any claims to self-identity. . . . Indeed, if there is to be self-representation, if I am to speak the ‘I’ in language, then this autobiographical reference has been enabled from elsewhere, has undergone what is not itself.”67 This chiasmatic relation, this identity-in-difference, highlights that we do not simply access the other,



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or the other is not simply entangled in us, but we rely on the other’s touch for our self-knowledge. We are that intricately reliant upon the other. We depend on others to develop meaning. Merleau-Ponty evokes Hegel again to explain how only intersubjectively, we create meaning. The central fact to which the Hegelian dialectic returns in a hundred and one ways is that we do not have to choose between the pour soi and the pour autrui, between thought according to us and according to others, but that at the moment of expression the other to whom I address myself and I who express myself are linked together without concessions. . . . I submit myself to the judgment of another who is himself worthy of that which I have attempted, that is to say, in the last analysis, to the judgment of a peer whom I myself have chosen.68

For one’s personal and political expressions to survive into the future depends upon others. This coheres within chapter 2’s position of recognizing heterogenous commonality by women of color. Recall from the introduction of this book my assertion that the identity women of color is phenomenal. As a socially produced meaning complex, with an unclear unifying core or boundary, the identity is a relation of identity-in-difference. As such the identity group (perhaps like all identity groups) relies upon the tenet that human beings access each other in our differences. Meaning arises not only within the tension between the givens of the world and one’s existential acts, but with other human beings who scrutinize, judge, or accept the meaning.69 Interestingly, for the meaning to survive, it does not require the judgment of all others, but only a select group of others.70 This concludes my list of four relations of identity-in-difference. (1) In coming to perceptual agreement; (2) in one’s experience of embodiment; (3) in locating identity through time; and (4) in human beings’ reliance upon others for both selfdevelopment and social meaning—all these relations uphold a fragile structure of identity-in-difference. Among these four instances of identity-in-difference, the first and the last more directly speak to the concerns of this chapter, in terms of race and relations with others. The third centers on the role of internal identity, an identity within and for the subject, which remains open to the influences of others. The second addresses both a relationship with others and an internal identity. Clearly Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology relies upon this structure of identity-in-difference. I advocate utilizing this ontological structure to facilitate thinking about the social political questions of race and sex, especially for refiguring the socially constructed difference of race as ontologically relevant, or for considering the cognitive consequences of the differences of embodiment for women of color. In the attempt to make more persuasive the impact of the socially constructed differences of race by insisting on its ontological significance, as much as I believe difference matters, I fear losing sight of that which unites human beings.

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CRITICISMS OF THE FRAMEWORK OF IDENTITY-IN-DIFFERENCE Questions remain regarding the details of the idea of identity-in-difference. But as much as the notion in some ways addresses the debate on the relation between the one and the many, essence and accidents, or change and permanence, what constitutes the identity and what constitutes the difference remain somewhat difficult to pinpoint ontologically, epistemically, or politically. P. Weiss questions whether the notion of identity-in-difference really upholds the possibility of both identity and difference. As P. Weiss flippantly puts it, “[i]t is not clear whether the Identity is supposed to be identical with or different from the Difference.”71 Thinking about this question temporally, P. Weiss questions whether the relation of identity-in-difference begins in identity to breed its difference, or begins in difference to unite into identity. For this reason, P. Weiss argues that the notion of identity-in-difference does not resolve the debate even between monism and dualism.72 I do not understand why identity or difference must change in the direction toward each other. The identity and the difference cannot become away from each other, for the relation may strain and break. But I don’t believe the relation ever really breaks, even if strained. I consider the identity and the difference evolving and influencing each other—circling each other, but never severing from each other or collapsing into each other. The dominant concern coalesces on that the relation between identity and difference cannot escape from the totalizing force of identity. Ultimately, even in the structure of identity-in-difference, is it the case that “the final items are in a sense the same”?73 The question lies in whether the metaphysical difference stands true or just collapses into the accidents, the secondary features of the identity. Critics doubt that the structure of identity-in-difference can withstand the totalizing force of identity. Because narcissistic slippages enwrap all perception and experience, theorists including Gilles Deleuze and Luce Irigaray argue that the relation between identity and difference cannot really see true difference; sameness subsumes all difference.74 One relevant articulation of an insistence on difference comes from race theorists who remember that colonized subjects and their descendants live a different history. Figures, including Patricia Williams, insist on difference in history; for example, for the black community there is no such thing as slave laws. She explains that any state with slave laws could not be a jurisprudent state, but rather a rogue group of terrorists. Gareth Williams points to another community who insists on difference. In this postcolonial period, because of the epistemic drive that only focuses on the seemingly forward-moving development of capitalism, history cannot help but erase— must erase—the narratives of the lives of people who do not fit into upholding these grand developmentalist narratives. He writes, “the knowability and representability of subaltern experience—of its moments of violence, of suffering, and of many of the scars left behind by the histories of domination—is actively suppressed within the time horizon of capital itself.”75 Against these homogenizing forces, against



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these forces that insist on one history, G. Williams and other postcolonial writers endeavor to present the epistemic difficulty of conveying subaltern experiences. As G. Williams writes, “how to think subaltern fragments from within the fragmentary; that is to say, from within a critical site that does not merely reproduce within reflection an underlying desire for the authoritarian and homogenizing notion of a ‘complete’ statement, which would supposedly leave out nothing of importance, but which would ultimately reinscribe an order of knowability grounded in the always already hegemonic.”76 G. Williams, in this specific article, insists on difference, and the article appears wary of any attempts at recognizing sameness because of its absorption into dominant hegemonic narratives.77 I find P. Williams and G. Williams’s questions and analyses extremely persuasive, especially because these concerns of acknowledging real differences in the experiences of the sediments of history in the social world guide so much of this book. I totally respect these differences and recognize these alternate histories. This concern of admitting a history experienced completely differently by the subjugated lies somewhere between the third and fourth of the examples of identity-in-difference listed earlier in this chapter, between an identity in time and that human beings in our diversity still access each other. After all, history is about time, and history unfurls from a social group’s narrative about itself. So, P. Williams and G. Williams’s concern about ensuring an articulation of a different history circles around society’s narrative about itself. As much as I respect their insistence on an alternative history, the identity here lies in the actual period of measurable time. The alternate histories occurred at the same time as the official, dominant, capitalistic time. Hence, I still forward that these narratives of difference still adhere to a structure of identity-indifference. For again, insistence on absolute difference has its own dangers—the most important of which lies in history, a history of justifying colonialism through the denial of the other’s humanity.

THE STRUCTURE OF IDENTITY-INDIFFERENCE CHANGES, BECOMES Let me be clear, I do not defend the dualistic and dialectic relation between identity and difference, but the phenomenological structure of identity-in-difference. Merleau-Ponty’s identity-in-difference builds from dialectic relations but also utilizes a gestaltian framework and a chiasmatic relation between the visible and the invisible. For theorists, including Patricia Williams and Gareth Williams, who insist on the importance of difference, at least of remembering different histories, they may still consider that the ontological structure of identity-in-difference as totalizing, erasing any memory of difference. The concern may derive from a static conception of the structure. If the entire structure of identity-in-difference in-itself develops, this becoming at the heart of the structure should alleviate the fear of totality.

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To carefully make this argument, let me return to one of the original metaphysical problems in the relation between essence and its accidents within Aristotle’s philosophy. Copi explains the most serious criticism against Aristotle and other classical metaphysicians’ concerns distinguishing the metaphysical difference between essence and accidents. Copi writes, “[a]ttributes are really all of the same basic kind, it is said, and the alleged distinction between essence and accident is simply a projection of differences in human interests or a reflection of peculiarities of vocabulary.”78 This criticism reflects monist tendencies, but it also correctly names the epistemic difficulty of distinguishing between the essences and the accidents. Copi does not answer this problem. Baur explains that Hegel builds upon this unanswered criticism; but the way in which Hegel frames this criticism changes the parameters of the discussion. Baur writes, “the old metaphysicians regarded objects as somehow ‘ready-made’ for thought. Accordingly, the old metaphysicians characterized the truth, or essence, of things as somehow already ‘out there.’”79 Hegel posits that the status of essence and accident does not pre-exist the knower. Rather, reconceptualizing the persistent “problem,” Baur does not conceive of this as a problem to be solved, but as a possibility, an opportunity to be explored. He writes, “any distinction between the Essential and the Unessential remains a matter of perspective, and so ‘the same content can therefore be regarded now as Essential and again as Unessential.’”80 The phenomenological structure of identity-in-difference inherently upholds this human possibility of designating the identity and the difference. This coheres with the identity group women of color. For again, for this identity group, that which functions as the identity and that which serves as the difference varies depending on the context, on the project at hand. As I argue throughout this book—for perception, for determining the epistemic meaning of experience, and for generating meaning through our body movements—all these actions determine the essential and the unessential.81 For within the phenomenological field, “every context is nonsaturable,”82 in that every context can yield a variety, if not an infinity, of identities and differences. That which functions as the identity and the difference changes within the structure of identity-in-difference. In other words, when either the identity or the difference changes, the structure as a whole changes. For the difference could not remain the same while identity changes or vice versa; openness lies at the heart of phenomenology. Newness enters the world, or we perceive or experience the world in new ways—the world can still surprise us. Numerous forces influence the movements within the structure, much like the motivations for body movement in chapter 3, so that isolating a dominant force belies the way in which the structure becomes. The strength of each force probably varies depending on the specific struggle. But here let me at least clarify that the natural and the cultural (in the sense of being’s existential endeavors) clearly influence the becoming of the framework. These features function in the four relations of identity-in-difference within Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy.



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CONCLUSION Identity-in-Difference: The Humanity of Women of Color The structure of identity-in-difference becomes with changes in what constitutes the identity and what constitutes the difference by the influences from the material/natural world and social/cultural meaning, including human beings’ existential decisions.83 As a phenomenal framework, the status of identity or difference is ambiguous, never stable, and under constant negotiation. The fluidity of this structure illuminates the structure of the identity group women of color, as phenomenological. For recall the position from the introduction and the discussion from chapter 1, the identity women of color is decentered, indeterminate, and ambiguous. The fluidity of the structure of identity-in-difference depicts the ambiguity of race and sex for women of color, for multiplicitous, intersectional identities, identities who occupy more than one world. The ontological structure of identity-in-difference contributes to theorizing intersectionality. Chapter 2 acknowledges the importance of considering intersectionality and traces the difficulties of the idea of intersectionality when referring to group identities. Patricia Hill Collins and Anna Carastathis voice concerns about the applicability of the concept of intersectionality on group identities and forward the idea of heterogenous commonality. A phenomenological understanding of experience explains how even shared experiences are ambiguous and yet still epistemically relevant—in other words that experience is structurally heterogeneously common. Experience is epistemically relevant without the need to essentialize experience yet references to experience acknowledges the linked fate of the group identity of women of color. The ontological framework of identity-in-difference portrays the idea of heterogenous commonality, of recognizing the internal heterogeneity and the external homogeneity. Clearly, the historico-racial-sexual schema is an identity-in-difference. Leder already explains embodiment as an identity-in-difference. Leder does not include the embodiment of race, but the embodiment of race among all racialized subjects is not identical. And the embodiment of sex among all gendered subjects is not identical. Even as embodiment cannot essentially portray the differences of race and sex, yet racial and sexual features are identified in embodiment for better or for worse. As women of color share an identifiable historico-racial-sexual schema, our body schemas vary. The structure of identity-in-difference provides a framework to consider the emphasis on relationality. Difference makes a difference; I agree with Gordon, Weate, Yancy, Alcoff, and Mills that the differences have become so sedimented as to now function as ontological differences. And yet, I also agree with Helen Ngo, José Medina, and Mariana Ortega (and Alcoff ) for valuing our relations with others. As noted in the introduction to this book, race and racism are about our relationships with others. As Ortega explains Gloria Anzaldua’s endeavors, “‘nos/ostras,’ a play on the Spanish word nosotras, which means ‘us.’ . . . Nos/otras, then, signifies

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an understanding of ourselves as insider/outsider. It appeals to the possibility of our being together while at the same time recognizing differences.”84 Or as Medina writes in the context of epistemology and identity, “from a relational perspective, to understand the identity of something is to understand how that thing is related to many other things, but also how it can become entangled in many other potential relations.”85 Difference matters, and visual differences of embodiment, the markers of race and sex, have sedimented to such an extent that they are regarded as natural. But rather than succumbing to an ontology of difference, considering being-inthe-world, that situatedness necessitates relationships can be more helpful. Clearly human relationships have gone awry—for we organize our society separating, if not isolating, via our differences, especially race, if not via sex as Collins clarifies. But perhaps keeping in mind an ontology of an immediate relation of identity-in-difference can evoke our inherent relatedness and our differences. Earlier I presented four examples of relationships of identity-in-difference to demonstrate that this ontological structure already functions phenomenologically. Here, to make the normative case for recognizing this ontological structure, I end the chapter with three examples of the dangers from failing to see our relations as an identity-in-difference. Not appreciating the relation of identity-in-difference exhibits our severed relations, an inability to care for others, or those whom we identify as others. Whereas Gordon explains how a socially constructed situation becomes ontologically relevant, my position begins with an ontological claim to illustrate its social and political relevance. With the realization that the socially constructed differences of race have ontological relevance and that the specificities of embodiment formatively impact subjectivity—although difference makes a difference—we cannot lose sight of the shared features of humanity. Without an understanding of our common humanity, we risk treating others with indifference. We live during a time when we do not relegate differently embodied human beings as completely inhuman and not deserving of humane treatment. Yet signs of indifference to different identity groups persist. Loury defines stigma as an alarming disparity in some social indicator, about a specific population group that does not indicate that something has gone wrong in our society and only that something has gone wrong in their society. Let me list at least three such current instances. First, Patricia Williams wrote that we have known for the last twenty-five years at least that “there are 650,000 young black men in the United States penal system today, or approximately 23% of all black men between the ages of 20–27 . . . [and] only 450,000 young black men are enrolled in colleges today.”86 Williams’s book was published in 1991. To consider whether this statistic persists today, according to a Pew Research report, in an article surprisingly entitled “The Gap Between the Number of Blacks and Whites in Prison are Shrinking,” based on statistics from 2017, they report that the number of blacks in absolute numbers in prison are 475,900, while the number of whites is 436,500. I find this title and lead into this article misleading because these researchers do not consider these absolute numbers in relation to their population size. For within the same



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report, they continue to write that blacks constitute only 12 percent of the US population, but disproportionately represent the sentenced prison population at 33 percent; while whites comprise 64 percent of the US population, while forming only 30 percent of the sentenced prison population.87 Perhaps we should read statistics about the sentenced prison populations alongside arrest numbers. After the protests over George Floyd’s death, even mainstream news venues such as ABC reported that in 2018, in eight hundred jurisdictions, police arrested five times more black people than whites. The report continued to point out that in 250 jurisdictions, police arrested ten times more black people than whites.88 Blacks disproportionately represent prison populations and arrest rates. Following Williams, to compare the black male population with the numbers who attend college, let’s turn to the number of black males in college. The most recent numbers I found were from an NPR interview in 2013, in which Ivory Toldson insists 1.4 million black men attend college, and 840,000 black men sit in prison.89 This interview occurred after President Barack Obama referred to the same statistic as Crenshaw. Toldson argues that Obama’s numbers originate from mistaken data. And the numbers from the Pew report from 2017, noted earlier, indicate that even Toldson’s numbers came down. Unless the Pew report only covers certain kinds of prisons—federal vs. state or temporary vs. long-term—I am relieved and so glad to hear that the earlier statistics may be exaggerated and that more black men are not in prison than in college. So, although the question about the numbers of black men in prison or in college remains debatable, what remains beyond debate is the overrepresentation of blacks in terms of percentage of the black population in prison. Yet such statistics do not signal that something has gone wrong in our society. Clearly, the Black Lives Matter movement illustrates the concerns of indifference to the black community.90 Second, recall Kimberlé Crenshaw’s example from chapter 1. She explains that in the passing of the first national domestic violence legislation in 1991, the arguments focused on insisting that domestic violence occurs universally. They argued that domestic violence befalls not just communities of color, in urban settings to women of color, but also in middle-class neighborhoods, in suburban communities to white women. Crenshaw astutely indicates that this argument demonstrates our society widely knew about the existence of domestic violence in communities of color, but apparently such knowledge did not motivate a response. The harm to this community was not worth addressing. She writes, “[r]ather than focusing on and illuminating how violence is disregarded when the home is somehow Other, the strategy . . . functions instead to politicize the problem only within the dominant community. This strategy permits white women victims to come into focus, but it does little to disrupt the patterns of neglect that permitted the problem to continue as long as it was imagined to be a minority problem.”91 Our society considers and treats the violence in the homes of the other—the stigmatized—as acceptable. The existence of domestic violence in communities of color does not encourage concern from the larger society.

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Third, let me turn to the statistics on the high numbers of Asian American women suicides. Eliza Noh writes that from “1981–2010, API females had the highest rate of suicide across race from ages 5–9 and 70+ and the second highest rates from 20–69.”92 Such statistics do not signal alarm for the conditions of this community, but rather motivate a search for some cultural practice or racial essence to explain the statistics. Such research exhibits the belief that the statistics indicate something about their community, not our society, even though Asian Americans have participated in the United States for over a hundred years. Each of these disparities in the social circumstances of a racial group do not signal something gone wrong in our society but are regarded as acceptable and in the natural order of things in our society. Clearly these conditions exhibit signs of indifference to the lives of African American males, women of color experiencing domestic violence, and Asian American women. To avoid such indifference, I propose conceptualizing our relations with each other with the phenomenological framework of identity-in-difference. The structure of identity-in-difference is an ontological structure that phenomenologists have been developing. I propose consideration of this ontological structure for sociopolitical concerns regarding the relations of race especially for the complex identity of women of color. I am suggesting the inverse of the position at the beginning of the chapter. I began with Gordon and others’ concern that the difference of race, although socially constructed, so profoundly impacts the lives of racialized subjects that race functions as and effectively constitutes an ontological condition. Further, this chapter acknowledged that the embodied differences of sex impact the development of consciousness, of subjectivity. In recognizing this connection between the sociopolitical and the ontological, I propose this ontological structure of identity-in-difference to guide our sociopolitical concerns. This is not to suggest that ontological structures never change, or ontological structures absolutely condition human lives. But that ontological structures frame our possibilities including the social and political possibilities. The ontological structure of identity-in-difference can help to always keep in mind that difference matters and demands respect, but identity matters as well. Importantly, because the identity and the difference change and become, we can recognize that any identity or difference is not an eternal, inevitable condition. And importantly, nature does not alone determine the identity or the difference; human existential acts participate in the conceptualization or categorization. One last note: the relation of identity-in-difference admits the possibility of misidentifying, mis-positioning both the identity and the difference, especially because both do not solely already exist in the world, but also result from how we choose to see and to act in the world. Rather than endeavor to avoid misidentification, phenomenology answers the possibility of error. Error is a very human experience, as our personal lives and human history demonstrate. Error is inevitable as we over-emphasize either sameness or difference. But the demands of life together with other subjects in a shared world urge preserving becoming at the heart of the fragile balance of identity-in-difference.



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The far reaches of both the possibilities of identity and difference do not lose touch with each other. This chapter clarifies four ways in which the structure of identity-in-difference functions phenomenologically. The first three chapters in this book illustrate the structure of identity-in-difference. For each of the phenomenological frameworks explored throughout this book—in a shared perception that can still yield disagreement, in structurally similar experiences that can nevertheless generate distinguishable knowledge, in being-in-the-world together that can still motivate different body movements—I posit the structure of identity-in-difference as a central phenomenological theme. Depending upon the question, we may dwell upon identity or difference at any one moment, but they always ontologically and epistemically exist as identity-in-difference. Most importantly, the ontological structure of identity-in-difference better depicts the identity group women of color.

NOTES 1. This parallels my position in chapter 4, regarding my challenge of Luce Irigaray’s claim to access absolute difference. 2. Glenn Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 83. Original italics. 3. Maria Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception,” Hypatia, v. 2, n. 2 (Summer 1987): 7. 4. Lewis Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 133. 5. M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 137. 6. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 137. 7. See Charles W. Mills and his insistence that the difference of race is an ontologizing category in his book Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 9–13. Phenomenology recognizes this integral relation between culture and nature more generally beyond solely within philosophy of race. Michael D. Barber explains that Alfred Schutz makes a similar point: “Phenomenology also differs from empiricists in that the life-world agents it considers are not mere observable objects endowed with meaning by social scientists, as if these social scientists performed like natural scientists, who are the only givers of meaning when it comes to the electrons or molecules they investigate. Rather, social scientists grasp the meanings of beings who are themselves giving meaning to their world” (Equality and Diversity: Phenomenological Investigations of Prejudice and Discrimination [Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001], 110). Similarly, Krzysztof Ziarek refers to Luce Irigaray’s work as diagnosing “an inseparable link between metaphysics and the social order it produces, a bond that makes her see this social system as the ‘fulfillment’ of metaphysical conceptuality” (The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001], 145). See also chapter 1 of Falguni A. Sheth’s book, Towards a Political Philosophy of Race (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009). 8. Jeremy Weate, “Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology,” Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001): 174–75. George Yancy also explains this sedimentation of the cultural as the natural, “a process of ontologization, a

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process where the being of the Black body (and the white body) undergoes a process of radical transformation. This involves the process whereby the historically and culturally contingent markings of the Black/White body are transformed into intrinsically natural eternal dispositions” (“‘Seeing Blackness’ from within the Manichean Divide,” White on White/Black on Black, ed. George Yancy [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005], 248). 9. See chapter 1, the first mistake of high-altitude thinkers. See the introduction, phenomenology explains that empiricists naïvely succumb to the naturalistic attitude—assuming they can refer directly to “nature.” 10. Linda Martin Alcoff, “Philosophy and Racial Identity,” Philosophy Today v. 41 (Spring 1997): 68–69. 11. Clevis R. Headley, “Existential Phenomenology and the Problem of Race: A Critical Assessment of Lewis Gordon’s Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism,” Philosophy Today v. 41, n. 2 (Summer 1997): 334. 12. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, 5. 13. Other areas of philosophy have noted this inextricable inter-relatedness between the natural and the cultural. Feminist theorists, evolutionary theorists, and animal studies theorists have speculated on similarly integrated structures. Susan Bordo describes the co-constitution of human imagination and nature: We are creatures of biology and creatures of the imagination. Indeed, our tremendous imaginative capacity is a feature of our distinctive evolution. That’s why the opposition between nature and culture is a red herring. Human diversity—cultural, sexual, and otherwise—far from providing proof that biology has no purchase on us, can be seen as a consequence of our evolutionary development. That is, for good biological reasons, it’s not in our ‘nature’ to have one script, sexual or otherwise, given the tremendous environmental diversity and challenges that human primates, dispersed all over the globe, have had to deal with. Our physiology itself allows for this flexibility. (“Does Size Matter?” Revealing Male Bodies, eds. Nancy Tuana, William Cowling, Maurice Hamington, Greg Johnson, and Terrance MacMullan [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002]: 33)

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone explains that on the evolutionary level, nature and culture share a hermeneutic, reversible relationship. As such, she advocates for a new term—existentialevolutionary: “[t]he methodological significance of the hyphenated adjective, existentialevolutionary, can be capsulized in the simplest way perhaps by quoting from Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous work, The Visible and the Invisible, and saying that there, ‘reversibility . . . is the ultimate truth’” (“Existential Fit and Evolutionary Continuities,” Synthese v. 66 [1986]: 232). Such widespread acceptance of the inseparability of the social and the natural, and their influence upon each other, illustrates that philosophy of race does not uniquely posit the integrated state of the cultural and the natural. 14. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 16. 15. Hubert Dreyfus writes, “[i]n opposition to mainline cognitive science, which assumes that intelligent behavior must be based on representations in the mind or brain, Merleau-Ponty holds that the most basic sort of intelligent behavior, skillful coping, can and must be understood without recourse to any type of representation” (“Merleau-Ponty and Recent Cognitive Science,” The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 129). 16. Dreyfus, “Merleau-Ponty and Recent Cognitive Science,” 135–36. 17. Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. 18. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 8.



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19. See Mark Rowlands, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Robert D. Rupert, Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Henrik Brun and Richard Langlais, “On the Embodied Nature of Action,” Acta Sociologica, v. 46, n. 1 (2003): 31–40. 20. Elizabeth Grosz, “Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the Flesh,” Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, eds. Dorothea Olkowski and James M. Morley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 150. 21. Grosz, “Merleau-Ponty,” 162. See also Mills, Blackness, 13. Gail Weiss makes a similar point in writing, “we cannot refrain from the ‘project of gender’ even if we do not deliberately ‘intend’ gender as our project, insofar as we live and express our genders through our bodies. . . . Gender is a lived bodily project and hence is an integral component of human existence” (Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality [New York: Routledge, 1999], 140–41). 22. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, 69. 23. See Donna-Dale Marcano, “Sartre and the Social Construction of Race,” Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, ed. Robert Bernasconi with Sybol Cook (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 214–26. She quotes W. E. B. Du Bois: “’What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American. If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates black and white America?” (“The Conservation of Races,” The Souls of Black Folk, ed. David Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams [Boston: Bedford Books, 1997], 233). See also Art Massara, “Stain Removal: On Race and Ethics,” Philosophy and Social Criticism v. 33, n. 4 (2007): 498–528. He argues that for Kant the particularities of embodiment, especially skin color, already bears the signs of sin. 24. Grosz, “Merleau-Ponty,” 162. 25. Uma Narayan, “Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist Critique of Cultural Essentialism,” Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World, eds. Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 83. As mentioned earlier, Mills explains the history and reality of positioning black people as subpersons, Untermenschen. See also Melissa A. Orlie’s article, “Beyond Identity and Difference,” where, in criticizing Michael Walzer’s works, she writes that he does not fully appreciate the relevance of difference nor fully recognize identity across groups. Orlie writes, “Sameness amid difference underscores the certainty of the difference, or at least it does in the encounters Walzer describes. To address the aggression that threatens regimes of toleration, we need not satisfy the desire for pure difference but to dispute it” (Political Theory, v. 27, n. 1 [February 1999]: 146). 26. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 226, 197. 27. Fanon, Black Skins, 226. 28. Paul Weiss, “On Being Together,” The Review of Metaphysics  v. 9, n. 3 (March 1956): 391. I situate this distinction in the works of Parmenides, but settling this question does not centrally concern me right now. 29. See Irving M. Copi, “Essence and Accident,” Journal of Philosophy v. 51, n. 23 (Nov. 1954): 706–19; Gunther Poltner, “Unity and Degrees of Being in Saint Thomas Aquinas,” Diotima v. 28 (2000): 123–29. 30. Copi, “Essence and Accident,” 707. 31. Archie T. Bahm elaborates on this need to explain both permanence and change, “[c]hange thus is essentially discontinuous in character. Permanence belongs only to the

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ultimate particles, because they alone do not change.  .  .  . For monists, each difference is contained in a larger identity, and thus each difference is not a real difference, but merely an appearance” (“Organic Unity and Emergence,” The Journal of Philosophy v. 44, n. 9 [April 1947]: 242). 32. See Michael Baur’s article for the significance to Kant’s work, “Sublating Kant and the Old Metaphysics: A Reading of the Transition from Being to Essence in Hegel’s Logic,” The Owl of Minerva: Quarterly Journal of the Hegel Society of America v. 29, n. 2 (1998): 141–42. 33. Hegel relies, according to Baur, on the notion of Schein. For details of Schein see Baur, “Sublating Kant,” 142–58. 34. Baur writes, “’essence must appear.’ . . . Essence is Essence only to the extent that it shows itself in the form of immediate Being” (“Sublating Kant,” 146). 35. Frederick Beiser, “Hegel and Naturphilosophie,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, v. 34 (2003): 144. Beiser continues listing the opposites, “[s]uch development can be understood as a movement between opposites: unity and difference, potentiality and actuality, inner and outer, essence and appearance; yet it is at the same time a single process of development, and so a unity of opposites. All Hegel’s paradoxical talk about the unity of opposites, identity-in-difference, the concrete universal, become perfectly intelligible as soon as we take into account the logic of organic development” (145). 36. Erwin Marquit, “Some Comments on Dialectical and Logical Contradictions,” Nature, Society, and Thought v. 8, n. 2 (1995): 157. Marquit quotes from Hegel’s Science of Logic (1969), 440. 37. John Russon, “Temporality and the Future of Philosophy in Hegel’s Phenomenology,” International Philosophical Quarterly v. 48, n. 1, iss. 189 (March 2008): 60. 38. Marquit writes that modern physics affirms the identity-in-difference of movement, “[m]odern quantum physics partly resolves this problem by denying the possibility of localizing a moving particle to a uniquely defined position at any given instant of time, that is, it rejects the concept of a trajectory as an accurate representation of the motion of a moving particle” (“Some Comments,” 158). 39. Weiss, “On Being Together,” 400. 40. The Hegelian dialectic movement of identity-in-difference supports the epistemic position of coherence. Errol Harris evokes the notion of identity-in-difference to define reason and coherence, “Reason and Rationalism,” Idealistic Studies v. 9 (1979): 95–98. Brand Blanshard, “On Rationalism: A Reply to Professor Harris,” Idealism Studies v. 10 (1980): 104. The implication of coherence within the structure of identity-in-difference addresses a problem within Aristotle’s epistemology. See Ermanno Bencivenga, “Fuzzy Reasoning,” Common Knowledge v. 18, n. 2 (2012): 229. The implications of the relation of identity-in-difference within the epistemology of coherence clearly need more rigorous attention. I do not know exactly what would function as the identity and the difference. Moreover, the transcription from Hegel’s dialectic framework to a coherence theory of knowledge is not thoroughly smooth—especially in that Hegel’s relation of identity-in-difference relies upon motion, movement. Motion does not appear in the coherence framework of Harris and Blanshard. Nevertheless, I want to note this reading of the relation of identity-in-difference not only within metaphysics but within epistemology as well. 41. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 92. 42. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 264. 43. M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 76.



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44. Joseph Rouse, “Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Conception of Science,” The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, eds. Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 287. Rouse continues to describe scientific theories as functioning similarly, that is, following phenomenological logic, not strict analytic logic. Sounding very much like Thomas Kuhn, Rouse writes, “[t]heories thus occupy an ambiguous place between us and the world. They seem to be objects with properties independent of us (we discover rather than invest their implications, for example). Yet we also use them to explore the world and, in doing so, incorporate them into our own capacities, much as a blind man incorporates his cane” (285). In an early twentieth-century article, L. E. Hicks defends an identity relation that comes very close to the identity-in-difference I elaborate on here. Hicks especially eschews facile conceptions of identity. He too focuses on identity, not in the sense of an essence as with classical metaphysics, but as an identity of a whole (with its various internal parts or ingredients). See L. E. Hicks, “Identity as a Principle of Stable Values and as a Principle of Predication,” The Philosophical Review, v. 22, n. 4 (July 1913): 379. Hicks values identity relations with internal diversity for their ability to continue through time—for a dynamic stability. 45. Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 92. 46. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 1996), 185. 47. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Primacy of Perception,” The Primacy of Perception, ed. and trans. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 17. I cited this in a footnote in chapter 1. 48. Drew Leder, “A Proposed Supplement to Merleau-Ponty,” Human Studies v. 13, n. 3 (1990): 210. 49. Leder, “A Proposed Supplement,” 214. 50. Leder, “A Proposed Supplement,” 214. 51. Leder, “A Proposed Supplement,” 213. 52. Russon, “Temporality and the Future,”  63. He continues, “the body enacts the reality that time is the bringing into possibility of futures by virtue of being an established identity” (63). 53. David R. Cerbone, Understanding Phenomenology (Chesham, UK: Acumen Publishing, 2006), 33. 54. Patrick Crowley, “Paul Ricoeur: The Concept of Narrative Identity, the Trace of Autobiography,” Paragraph v. 26, iss. 3 (November 2003): 1. 55. Crowley, “Paul Ricoeur,” 1–2. Author’s emphasis. Crowley distinguishes between autobiography and narrative and argues that despite many authors who reference Ricoeur’s work to support autobiographical analysis, “autobiography offers a challenge to Ricoeur’s work that not only undermines his concept of narrative identity but foregrounds the limitations of his use of texts in the service of a philosophical approach that presupposes the precedence of being over language and privileges the whole over the part” (4). Crowley explains that Ricoeur understands autobiography as too reliant on intuition, and “intuitions needs to be tested by philosophical enquiry. . . . Given these philosophical positions it would seem that autobiographies are too close to blind intuition, too narcissistic, and self-regarding” (5–6). 56. Ricoeur apparently knew about Gabriel Marcel’s and Karl Jaspers’s projects to explain how “the presumed sovereign and self-transparent ego cannot be the source of meaning. Both

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Jaspers and Marcel see the ego, the moi, as something to be transcended in order to attain self-knowledge” (Crowley, “Paul Ricoeur,” 5). 57. Crowley, “Paul Ricoeur,” 3. 58. Crowley, “Paul Ricoeur,”  3. 59. Crowley does not find Ricoeur’s position convincing. Crowley argues that Ricoeur does not take seriously enough the powerful influence of language in socially constructing the self and the distance within the self because of the flow of time—two conditions which only increase the impossibility of the coincidence between the lived subject and understanding oneself. Crowley’s arguments ultimately advocate that Ricoeur over-emphasizes identity over difference. Nevertheless, Ricoeur was facing the challenge of difference—of recognizing the identity of a subject amidst the subject’s changes in time—and to that extent, I understand why Ricoeur emphasizes unity and identity. I do not agree with Crowley’s reading of Ricoeur, but I accept Crowley’s worries here. I do not read Ricoeur as fallen wholeheartedly and completely on the side of unity and identity, rather I read his work as upholding the fragile relationship of identity-in-difference. For after all, Ricoeur addresses the dangers of difference—of the very real possibility of not recognizing our past self or our future self, and not accepting that the choices we made in the past commit us to certain future possibilities. Even Leonard Lawlor, who casts Ricoeur on the side of a closed identity (especially in comparison to Derrida’s work on iteration), nevertheless, still admits that Ricoeur keeps open an “overabundance of meaning which outstrips any attempt to understand it. Every dialogue is incomplete” (“Dialectic and Iterability: The Confrontation between Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida,” Philosophy Today, v. 32, n. 3 [Fall 1988]: 188). Lawlor’s article is fascinating. He ultimately defends Derrida against Ricoeur that iterability disrupts dialectic. I find particularly interesting that although iterability disrupts dialectic, the notion of iterability adheres to the structure of identity-in-difference. I would love to explore this but I am afraid space prohibits me from following this particular path at this moment. Shaun Gallagher offers another solution to the problem of recognizing one’s self-identity through time. He suggests one’s body-in-itself as the unifying theme for the subject, “[i]f . . . we are concerned to define a unity of consciousness across time in a way that will account for the identity of a single, relatively continuous consciousness, we can appeal to a certain coherency produced by the fact that it is one body doing the perceiving” (How the Body Shapes the Mind [New York: Oxford University Press, 2005], 141). Although I find this suggestion tempting, I wonder about the changes of embodiment, in that the visceral feel and perception of one’s body also radically changes over time. With the signs of age on my embodiment, not only do aches in parts of my body surprise me, but also, I find difficult recognizing myself in pictures as a child. Hence, although I appreciate Gallagher’s prominent positioning of the role of the body, I remain unconvinced that the body sufficiently plays the role of identifying a subject through her becomings. 60. Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen, “Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, eds. Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 17. 61. Leder, “A Proposed Supplement,” 211. 62. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 80. There appears to be quite a bit of confusion on the definition of proprioception. Gallagher uses it in the sense, “[o]ne is said to be proprioceptively aware of one’s own body, to consciously know where one’s limbs are at any particular time as one moves through the world” (How the Body Shapes the Mind, 7). He continues, “[b]ody schemas, working systematically



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with proprioceptive awareness, constitute a proprioceptive self that is always already ‘coupled’ with the other” (81). 63. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 81. Interestingly, especially considering my position in chapter 3 in centrally positioning the role of body movement, “[t]he newborn does not attend to the outward appearance of the other, but rather attends to the action and expression of the other” (Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 82–83). See also 140. This fourth sense of an identity-in-difference in the intersubjectivity of the proprioceptive awareness and experience of one’s own embodiment further affirms the second identity-indifference earlier noted in regard to embodiment as seen by others and as viscerally experienced by oneself. 64. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 213. 65. Before the description of the primary role of situational thinking, Lorraine Code argued that knowledge of people should be paradigmatic for epistemology. Clearly, she was visionary. See her article “Taking Subjectivity into Account,” Feminist Epistemologies, eds. Linda Martín Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 15–48. 66. Judith Butler, “Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche,” The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, eds. Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 186–87. Here, she specifically addresses the work of Malebranche, but clearly one can hear Levinas’s influence. 67. Butler, “Merleau-Ponty,”  189. She continues, “[f ]or Merleau-Ponty reading Malebranche, sentience not only preconditions knowing, but gains its certainty of the outside at the very moment that it feels” (190). See also Talia Welsh’s work on child development and the syncretic social conditions within which children develop; they experience others as integrally intermeshed with oneself. See The Child as Natural Phenomenologist: Primal and Primary Experience in Merleau-Ponty’s Psychology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 49. 68. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect,” 110. 69. Merleau-Ponty writes, “[i]t is not enough for a painter like Cézanne, an artist, or a philosopher, to create and express an idea; they must also awaken the experiences which will make their idea take root in the consciousness of others” (“Cézanne’s,” 70). As Lydia Goehr quotes from Merleau-Ponty, “‘[w]hat they expect of the artist or politician is that he draws them toward values in which they will only later recognize as their own values. .  .  .  The public at whom he aims is not given; it is a public to be elicited by his work.’” (“Understanding the Engaged Philosopher: On Politics, Philosophy, and Art,” The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, eds. Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 346). She cites from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 86. 70. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone especially highlights the dependence on the other to acquiesce to meaning even in other species. She writes, “[t]he question of how a displayed-to animal comes to validate a movement or gesture of another as meaningful, how it acquiesces to meaning and thus officially instantiates a particular meaning in the repertoire of the species is a constitutional question fundamental to the origin of semiosis” (The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader [Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2009], 280). See also 356. Sheets-Johnstone insists on the role of embodiment and body movement to attract the attention of others and to motivate others to acquiesce to new meaning. She writes, “[i]ndeed, rather than shedding light on how one individual knows what another intends and in turn

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how it comes to respond in a harmonious way, the examples seem to specify how one individual might go about motivating or encouraging another individual to do something . . . what the examples show is not just that movement is used by an individual as an attractor, a semantically rich social attractor, and that being so, it will generate a response” (Corporeal, 353–54). 71. Weiss,  “On Being Together,” 399. 72. As such, Eddo Evink writes, “[o]n the one hand there is hermeneutical philosophy, represented by, e.g., Gadamer and Ricoeur, who seem to emphasize unity, coherence, and consensus above difference. On the other hand, the so-called philosophers of difference—Levinas, Derrida, and others—focus on the otherness that is reduced, oppressed, and excluded by any unity and totality” (“Horizons and Others: Gadamer, Levinas, Patocka,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, v. 84, iss. 4 [2010]: 727). 73. Weiss, “On Being Together,” 398. 74. Recall from chapter 2, the question of recognizing and preserving difference is precisely Jeremy Weate’s concern in his analysis of Fanon’s work. Two other prominent philosophers prioritize difference over identity. Gilles Deleuze offers a singularity of difference. See Peter Hallward, “Edouard Glissant between the Singular and the Specific,” The Yale Journal of Criticism v. 11, n. 2 (1998): 442. Deleuze’s notion of singular difference proposes to make irrelevant tending to the tediousness of specific differences. Because my project attends precisely to the tediousness of specific differences, especially the particular differences of the embodiment of race, Deleuze’s solution does not address my present project. Alternatively, Luce Irigaray suggests the notion of “proximity,” in place of the duality of identity and difference. With the notion of proximity, Irigaray aims to maintain a constant exchange that “plays” with difference as well as avoids a dialectic relationship between the dualism of identity and difference. See K. Ziarek, Historicity of Experience, 124. More pointedly, Irigaray offers the notion of proximity because she insists on excess, that even the language of difference cannot depict and “the excess and residue cannot be read in terms of difference,” respectfully (Speculum, 122). If by excesses Irigaray claims knowledge of differences that are somehow more different—a difference from difference—I have difficulty understanding this excess. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of identity-in-difference does not only evoke a dialectic movement, but an immediacy as well, with its gestaltian and chiasmatic relationships. As such, Merleau-Ponty sounds very similar to Irigaray in writing about “encroachment, thickness and spatiality.” With his specific sense of identity-in-difference, I do not accept that Irigaray’s concern that the relation of identity and difference applies to Merleau-Ponty. Moreover, as stated in chapter 4, Irigaray cannot explain how she personally comes to know of this excess that remains beyond human epistemic constraints and linguistic frameworks. For these reasons, as much as I appreciate her respect for difference, I do not understand exactly what her suggestion of proximity adds in place of the notion of identity-in-difference. Sara Ahmed follows Irigaray’s suggestion. Referring to the idiom “peas in a pod,” she writes, “[t]his saying suggests for me that likeness is an effect of proximity of shared residence. .  .  .  Rather than thinking about the question of inheritance in terms of nature versus nurture, or biology versus culture, we would be thinking in terms of contingency or contact (touch); things are shaped by their proximity to other things, whereby this proximity itself is inherited in the sense that it is a condition of our arrival into the world” (Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007], 124). Proximity coheres very much with the structures of contexts and horizons. 75. Gareth Williams, “Subalternity and the Neoliberal Habitus: Thinking Insurrection on the El Salvador/South Central Interface,” Neopantla: Views from South, 1:1 (2000): 140.



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76. Williams, “Subalternity,” 142. 77. Williams demonstrates suspicion of any attempts at drawing sameness, referring to notions of hybridity as “death work.” He writes, “[t]he interface passes back and forth subjectivity and innumerable ‘othernesses’ with such rapidity and force that the very notion of ground is eschewed, while identity and difference falter before the radical undecidability of hybrid like-being. Moreover, it appears to be through like-being that we enter the affective, corporeal, and ontological borderlands of collective identity/difference’s other side: namely, opaque resemblance, open exposure, and active contagion. . . . After all, the origin of being-in-common in the transnational order is nothing more than the death work of immanence and of communion” (“Subalternity,” 162). I worry that Williams’s eschewing of hybridity does not admit space for any positive representations of the lives of the numerous hyphenated and mixed subjects today, and upholds a troubling notion of purity. 78. Copi, “Essence and Accident,” 709. Copi attributes the vocabulary point to C. I. Lewis, see 710. 79. Baur, “Sublating Kant,” 141. 80. Baur, “Sublating Kant,” 149. 81. Let me quote Gallagher one more time to substantiate my position here particularly in regard to perception, but I am confident he would agree with me in regard to body movement as well. Gallagher’s explanation of perception illustrates how the act of perception in effect chooses the essence, “[w]here must an object be located within my perceptual field to afford an optima perception? It depends on the sense modality with which I perceive, and on the purpose of my perception” (How the Body Shapes the Mind, 140). See also T. L. S. Sprigge, “Personal and Impersonal Identity: A Reply to Oderberg,” Mind v. 98 (October 1989): 610. 82. Lawlor, “Dialectic and Iterability,” 182. Lawlor specifically refers to the work of Ricoeur and Derrida here, but clearly both philosophers work within phenomenology. 83. So far, this discussion focuses on the forces initiating movement, but the expression of such changes can also surprise. For in addition to the influences that initiate change, there is the question of how change ultimately exhibits itself or how change is received. Bernhard Waldenfels’s article, “The Paradox of Expression,” wonderfully presents some of the questions and contingencies in the expression of an act (Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000], 89–102). 84. Mariana Ortega, In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 21–22. Ortega continues, Anzaldua “struggles to do justice to a lived experience that includes both multiplicity and a sense of oneness” (Ortega, 39). See also 44. And “[t]here is an ‘I’ always connected to a ‘we,’ the ‘we’ being both representative of the multiple identities of the ‘I’ as well as of other selves” (Ortega, 146). 85. José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 298. 86. Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 189–190. 87. John Gramlich, “The Gap between the Number of Blacks and Whites in Prison Is Shrinking,” The Pew Research Center, April 30, 2019, https:​//​www​.pewresearch​.org​/fact​ -tank​/2019​/04​/30​/shrinking​-gap​-between​-number​-of​-blacks​-and​-whites​-in​-prison/, accessed on Aug. 23, 2020. 88. Pierre Thomas, John Kelly, and Tonya Simpson, “ABC News Analysis of Police Arrests Nationwide Reveals Stark Racial Disparity,” ABC News, June 11, 2020, https:​//​abcnews​ .go​.com​/US​/abc​-news​-analysis​-police​-arrests​-nationwide​-reveals​-stark​/story​?id​=71188546,

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accessed on August 23, 2020. The numbers are a summary of a three-year study, ending in 2018, conducted by ABC News and ABC-owned stations. ABC reports that three very large police districts are not included: New York, Florida, and Illinois. The New York Police Department is the largest in the country. 89. Michel Martin, “Are There Really More Black Men in Prison than in College?” interview with Ivory Toldson, NPR, April 23, 2013, https:​//​www​.npr​.org​/2013​/04​/23​/178601467​ /are​-there​-really​-more​-black​-men​-in​-prison​-than​-college, accessed on August 25, 2020. See also the following article which also relies on Toldson: Jenée Desmond-Harris, “The Myth that there are more Black Men in Prison that in College Debunked in One Chart,” Vox, February 12, 2015, https:​//​www​.vox​.com​/2015​/2​/12​/8020959​/black​-men​-prison​-college. 90. I wonder about the number of women of color in prison. Juanita Diaz-Cotto explains that although fewer women in comparison to men go to prison, the number of women in prison is increasing. Among these women, I wonder about the representations of women of color in comparison to white women. See her article “Women and Crime in the United States,” Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 197–211. 91. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, eds. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: The New Press, 1995), 363. 92. Eliza Noh, “Casualties of the Model Minority Myth: The Role of Racial Ideology in Asian American Female Suicidality,” presented for the Connecticut General Assembly Asian Pacific American Affairs Commission, April 12, 2013.

Conclusion

Since beginning and ending this book project, I had the fortune of giving birth to a baby girl. Inevitably, it delayed the completion of this project. But as the truism goes, the birth of my daughter gave me a greater sense of the necessity of this project. Looking back, although I am not sure I would admit this at the beginning, it is a good guess that I was probably motivated to write this book on a phenomenology for women of color as an attempt to understand some of my experiences growing up as a racialized subject of the female sex, as a hyphenated identity, as an immigrant, and from a specific class. But I know that making sense of my life was not my only motivation; exploring a phenomenology for women of color provided an opportunity to consider important philosophically challenging and complex ideas, like the complexity of subjectivity, and the ontology and the epistemology of the situatedness of human life. The birth of my child made me viscerally fear the world that she will face in her lifetime. Although her birth has forced me to focus more closely on the day-to-day routines of the small circle of my immediate family, it has also made me more concerned about the greater world she will ultimately navigate. The first fifteen months of her life were dramatic to say the least. While she was learning to turn over, sit up, grasp food, and crawl, the Ferguson and Baltimore riots occurred, spurred by the deaths of innocent black lives. Student demonstrations to alleviate the racist environments on their campuses unseated a president at one university and a dean at another university. Students brought awareness to the intolerable percentage of sexual assaults occurring on college campuses. Internationally, a historical number of refugees sought safety from wars that left hundreds or thousands of children migrating on their own, only to be treated as criminals in many cases, including by the United States. The world has an ongoing refugee crisis, as well as the continuing 189

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crisis of child soldiers and the kidnapping of girls. If race and sex did not motivate these incidents, race and sex factor in on our reactions to them. I know that I am lucky my child was born in Southern California, in relative peace. But in caring for her, especially when I lay my child down on the changing pad after her nightly bath, and she patiently looks up at me, awaiting my many daily evening routines of applying lotion, putting her diaper on, and clothing her, her completely vulnerable state to my manipulations of her body overwhelms me. With this affective clarity about the helplessness of childhood, hearing about the plights of children starving, living in unsanitary conditions, drowning while seeking safety, and facing violence in the world, moves me even more. Knowing that in their vulnerable state, their only defense is crying and screaming, I cannot help but be concerned, if not afraid, about the state of the world. Clearly, I do not believe that we live in post-racial times even after having a black president in the United States. As such, I am even more motivated to better understand the function of race and sex, and most importantly the relations among humans. In drawing an end to this book, let me return to the introduction where I first defined race as a phenomenon—a structure that mediates one’s situatedness in the world and relations with others, a structure that is open-ended, both externally and internally, and creatively develops. The identity group women of color functions as phenomena as well, in its indeterminacy and fluidity, in lacking an essential feature, and in its openness. Recognizing race and the identity women of color as phenomenal fits well with Omi and Winant’s definition of racism as essentialism. As quoted in the introduction, “[a] racial project can be defined as racist if and only if it creates or reproduces structures of domination based on essentialist categories.”1 With race as phenomenal, racism is essentialism that reproduces the structures of domination. Here, recall Ngo’s articulation of racism as focusing on “a violence against our intersubjectivity. It is a violence against our embodied being-with.”2 Reading Ngo’s understanding of racism along with Omi and Winant’s definition of racism forwards the understanding that essentialistic views of other people forecloses relations with them. This understanding of race as phenomenal, and racism as essentialism and violence to being-with, demands focus on relationality, on sociality, and on community. And in considering relationality, the question and importance of with whom to have relations prominently figures. And so, this book centers the lives and experiences of women of color. Race is phenomenal, race is an open-ended framework with meaning complexes, a “layer of living experience through which other people and things are first given to us.”3 Making the case that race is phenomenal and the constrained aim of describing human being-in-the-world, the chapters in this book address the complexity of such situatedness. Nowhere is the complexity better illustrated than in the experiences and lives of women of color. Exploring the phenomenological understanding of perception, experience, and body movement aims to depict the delicateness of these experiences. Considering multiplicitous subjectivity, intersectional identities, and the centrality of embodiment with its varied motivations for body movement—all



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these features insist on complexity. Such complication saturates the individual lives of women of color. Focusing on group identities multiplies such intricacy in considering the linked fate of women of color without essentializing. The complexity of the identity women of color, the complexity of group identity invites pondering the entwined condition of oppressor ↔ oppressed, the multiple layers of identity, and consequently how the ways in which we relate to others defy uniformity or predictability. And yet, women of color in their complexity find heterogenous commonality especially through the process of coalition building. Although such density is difficult to theorize, such convolution contributes to better see biases, respect the diversity of experiences, and nurture body movements to motivate new meanings that challenge existing historico-racial-sexual schemas. In addition to better understanding our differences and the complexity of such differences, attending to the commonalities of human beings is just as important. Understanding the complexity of differences valuably contributes to understanding our lives with others in community, in society; one cannot dismiss or underplay our differences. But a narrow focus on differences has also justified a history of colonialism and oppression and promoted an economics of scarcity and competition. Presently, a focus on differences promotes indifference to stigmatized identity groups based on race, most impacting women of color. In articulating the phenomenal structure of identity-in-difference, to recognize the immediate relation with other human beings, let me point to the celebrated blog and book Humans of New York.4 The photographer/journalist Brandon Stanton carefully portrayed the differences, the diversity of human lives. These images of embodiment expose one to the look of the sedimented meanings in our society, but the captions Stanton includes disrupt if not startle the ready-made meanings. I was struck by one young brown man, proudly wearing a Columbia University T-shirt, whose caption relays that he could not attend school for the entire first nine years of education—all his elementary and junior high school education—because he was working to help with his family’s finances. He watched every Khan Academy video to get through high school and finally gain entrance to Columbia University.5 The caption with an image of an attractive young white woman reveals that she is getting over a drug addiction.6 An image inside a police officer’s hat shows a sewed-in picture of his children, two brown-skinned toddlers.7 A young Asian woman appears to be simply happy, but her caption reveals that she contemplates stereotypes about Asian American women.8 A caption describing the worry that his son does not freely share the development of his sexual orientation accompanies an image of a very normal-looking white man. A black woman’s caption articulates her loneliness.9 Most of Stanton’s images with their unexpected narratives dislodge any immediate conclusions one might make based on the embodiment of the person. Yet the sheer numbers of these images comfort me with the idea that we share some sense of humanity. So as the violence in the world continues, I find a bit of solace in some signs of the recognition of our vulnerability, our strength, and our humanity. It gives me hope that we will develop a world within which the next generation of human beings can thrive, including Lilah Toy.

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NOTES 1. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), 71. 2. Helen Ngo, The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 166. 3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Great Britain: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1962), 57. 4. Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York: Stories (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015). 5. Stanton, Humans of New York, 356. 6. Stanton, Humans of New York, 387. 7. Stanton, Humans of New York, 318. 8. Stanton, Humans of New York, 266. 9. Stanton, Humans of New York, 410.

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Index

agency, 12, 16n18, 48, 91, 94–96, 102, 109, 111, 131, 144 Ahmed, Sara, 186 Alcoff, Linda Martin, 4, 19, 24, 30, 33, 39–40, 44n3, 49n58, 54n119, 67, 71, 90n96, 126–29, 143, 158 Al-Saji, Alia, 65, 114n26 alterity, 136–47, 169 ambiguity, 9–11, 25, 53n116, 134–35, 146–47; of experience, 41–43, 54n126, 70–73, 96–98, 101, 111, 115n27; of perception, 98–100, 108; sources of, 37–38, 40, 175 Anderson, Elizabeth, 21–22, 28 anonymity, 32, 96–97, 132–33 anonymous body. See Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: anonymous body Anzaldua, Gloria, 24–25, 47n36, 83n38, 175, 187n84 Appiah, Anthony, 83n36, 160 Aristotle, 93, 164, 173, 182n40 assimilation, 25–27, 46n30 associations, 20, 22, 45n13, 92, 96, 101, 112n4, 123, 127–28, 143, 168 autobiographical narratives, 58–61, 79, 170, 183n55 Bahm, Archie T., 181n31

Bailey, Alison, 117n68 Barbaras, Renaud, 52nn106–7, 53n112, 88n76, 89n92, 118n78, 153n67 Bar On, Bat Ami, 46n22 Baur, Michael, 174, 182nn32–34 becoming, 38, 48n43, 53nn116–17, 67, 72, 87n73, 137, 147, 166, 173, 178, 184n59; -with, 6, 9, 27, 36 being, 6, 14, 20, 23, 26, 36–40, 43, 67, 75, 104, 106, 124, 139, 157 163–66; -initself, 95–96; -for-others, 95–96, 158; as a spacio-temporal horizon, 30–31, 72, 144; -with, 6–7, 190; -in-the-world, 3, 5–6, 10, 41, 61, 71, 76, 78–79, 109–10, 146, 158, 176, 179 Beiser, Frederick, 164, 182n35 Beltran, Christina, 66, 83n38 bias, 10–11, 19–24, 27–29, 31, 35, 38–43, 45n21, 54nn124–25, 57, 75–77, 90n97, 91, 100, 103, 106, 117–18nn68–72, 124, 166 Black Lives Matter movement, 1, 92, 177 Black Skins, White Masks (Fanon), 163. See also Fanon, Frantz Blackwell, Maylei, 8 the Black Women’s Agenda, 7 body, 12–14, 33, 37–39, 71, 91–92, 98, 113–14nn19–20, 115n27, 115n34, 205

206

Index

130–35, 138–39, 143–46, 151n35, 156, 167–69, 184n59; features of, 20, 27–28, 44n4, 91–93, 100, 110, 126–28, 148, 160–62; habits of, 45n21, 105–6, 117n59, 117n61, 117n66, 117–18n68; motility/movement of, 31, 102–11, 116–17n52, 118–19nn79, 129, 153n77, 157–60, 174, 179, 185n70, 187n81, 190–91; racialized, 62, 95–101, 126, 179n8; role of, 33–34, 53n112, 93–95. See also MerleauPonty, Maurice: anonymous body; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: general body Bordo, Susan, 180n13 Brentano, Franz, 71 Bruzina, Ronald, 4 Burch, Robert, 78, 90n94 Butler, Judith, 13, 49n47, 121, 130–34, 138–43, 149n13, 161, 170 capitalism, 172–73 Carastathis, Anna, 11, 65, 68–69, 84– 85n47, 175 Carman, Taylor, 51n86, 169 causality, 12, 67, 92, 108–9, 157 certainty, 3–4, 11, 35–38, 53n116, 58, 71, 102, 124–25, 135–37 chiasm, 13, 109, 122, 134, 139–41, 147, 165–70, 173, 186n74 child development, 169–70 Cho, Sumi K., 63–64 Christian, Barbara, 17n23, 67 class, 19, 24, 45n22, 65–69, 80n5, 84n43, 92, 132–34, 142–43, 154n94, 160, 165 coalition, 62, 85n47; building of, 6, 12, 16n23, 64, 68–69, 76–77, 163, 191; politics of, 6, 67 collective unconscious, 127. See also Jung, Carl Collins, Patricia Hill, 11, 58, 64–69, 82n31, 83nn33–34, 84nn39–43, 85n47, 175–76 colonization, 8, 14, 64, 97, 163, 172 colorblindness, 1, 20, 44n5, 134 colored people time (CP time), 104 consciousness, 4, 6, 10–14, 19–24, 26–27, 31, 37–39, 47n39, 50n66, 71–72, 75,

90n97, 91, 102, 110, 115n27, 117– 16n52, 139, 145, 156, 160, 178 constancy hypothesis, 36, 85n54, 166 Cooper, Anna Julia, 7 Copi, Irving M., 173–74 CP time. See colored people time Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 62–65, 177 critical race theory, 1, 44n5 Crouch, Margaret, 22 Crowley, Patrick, 169, 183n55, 184n59 culture, 1, 22, 25–27, 31, 39–40, 53n116, 54nn129–30, 71, 77, 106–7, 127–32, 156–59, 180n13, 186 Daly, Mary, 141 Darwinism, 113n15 Dastur, Françoise, 30, 37, 51n87, 88n82, 89n92, 113n11, 136 Davidson, Lupe, 67 Davis, Deidre E., 92 de Beauvoir, Simone, 81n19, 130 Delaney, Samuel, 61 de Lauretis, Teresa, 29, 35 Deleuze, Gilles, 172, 186n74 de-masculinization, 63 Derrida, Jaques, 52n108, 87n73, 146, 184n59 Descartes, René, 35, 78, 94, 113n16, 168 dialectic, 10, 14, 57–58, 73–74, 95–97, 99, 148, 156, 164–65, 171–73, 182n40, 184n59, 186n74 differences, 5, 13–15, 24–25, 42, 44n4, 60–65, 68–69, 76–80, 83–84nn39–40, 101, 135–36, 142–44, 159, 165, 173–76, 191; absolute, 14, 155–56; bodily, 32–33, 126, 129–30, 132–34, 145–48, 160–63. See also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: on difference Dillon, Martin, 36, 50n73, 103, 147, 157, 166 distance, 10, 12, 33, 37–38, 53n112, 58, 73–80, 98, 128–30, 159, 184n59 diversity, 6, 8, 69, 173, 180n13, 191 Dreyfus, Hubert, 105, 159, 170, 180n15 dualism, 14, 94, 138, 156, 163–66, 172, 186n74 Du Bois, W. E. B., 25, 64, 126, 181n23



Index 207

eidetic reduction, 5, 85n53, 88n82 Ellison, Ralph, 28, 97, 126 embodied subjectivity, 12–13, 41, 91–98, 106–11, 130–36, 143, 145–46, 160–61 embodiment, 3, 9–10, 12–15, 39, 71, 90n97, 91–101, 104–7, 111, 116n52, 121–22, 128–38, 142–48, 156, 159–63, 166–70, 175–76, 184n59, 185n63, 186n74, 190–91 empiricism, 4–5, 76, 94, 157, 179n7, 180n9; and intellectualism, 9, 29, 35, 108, 125 epistemic, 6, 11–12, 14, 20, 26–29, 42, 46n30, 47n39, 54n126, 55n133, 55n136, 57–62, 66–67, 69–70, 122, 135, 142, 146, 156, 159, 172–74; insight, 77–80, 91, 100, 110 epistemology, 6, 134, 161, 175, 182n40, 185n65, 189 Espiritu, Yen Le, 63 essentialism, 5–6, 65–69, 83nn36–38, 190 evidence, 22–23, 36, 48n47, 59–61 experience error, 35–36, 39, 42, 61, 71, 86n66, 124, 142, 158 Fanon, Frantz, 6, 12, 95–101, 111, 114n24, 114n26, 115n34, 126–27, 144–45, 158, 163 Fatima, Saba, 8 feminist philosophy, 3, 24, 28, 57, 95, 99, 121–22, 130, 147, 156, 160, 165 flesh, 86n66, 109, 122, 134, 137–40, 146– 48, 149n13, 158, 161, 166 Floyd, George, 92, 177 Foti, Veronique, 32 Foucault, Michel, 87n73, 130–31 Frazier, E. Franklin, 61 Freud, Sigmund, 35, 108, 134, 169 Fricker, Miranda, 54n125, 89n85 fundierung model, 85n58, 109, 157–58 Gallagher, Shaun, 90n97, 94, 114–15n20, 116n48, 160, 169–70, 184n59, 184– 85nn62–63, 187n81 Gannett, Lisa, 44n4 gaze, 28–29, 32, 74, 95, 99, 126

gender, 7, 9–10, 14, 41, 45n22, 59, 62–67, 82n26, 100, 104, 121, 131–35, 141, 161–62, 175, 181n21 genealogy, 150n25 Gestalt theory, 37–38, 71, 94, 173, 186n74; notion of background in, 29–31, 33, 73 Goldberg, David Theo, 19 Gordon, Lewis, 75, 95, 97, 114n23, 157, 159–62, 175–76, 178 Greisch, Jean, 38 Grillow, Trina, 46n23 Grosz, Elizabeth, 113n15, 122–23, 160–62 group identity, 21, 23, 66–69, 101, 175, 191 Guenther, Lisa, 115–16nn38–39 Hames-Garcia, Michael, 65 Hansen, Mark B. N., 169 Haraway, Donna, 28, 123 Harding, Sandra, 59–60 Headley, Clevis R., 95, 158 Heidegger, Martin, 5, 30–31, 37, 42–43, 78, 86–87n73, 127, 150n22 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 11, 14, 20, 27, 31, 42, 60–63, 79, 123, 161, 174; dialectic, 57–59, 156, 163–65, 170–71, 182n40; slave mentality, 41, 54n123 hegemony, 7–8, 26–27, 61, 81n15, 173 Heraclitus, 89n89 Herr, Ranjoo Seodu, 8 heterogenous commonality, 12, 55n136, 57–58, 69, 76–80, 91, 100, 110, 156, 159, 163, 165, 171, 175, 191 high-altitude thinkers. See Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: high-altitude thinkers historicity, 16n17, 30, 38, 73, 78, 116n39 historico-racial-sexual schema, 12, 91–92, 100–102, 104, 106–10, 167, 169, 175, 191 histories, 46n30, 61, 77, 144, 172–73 Holroyd, Jules, 22–23, 39–40, 44–45n13, 45n17 homogeneity, 12, 17n26, 55n136, 58, 84n40, 172, 175 Hoodfar, Homa, 64

208

Index

horizon, 11–14, 16n15, 19–20, 29–31, 40–43, 59–50nn60–62, 71, 76–79, 109, 111, 131, 134, 141–47, 154n91, 156–59, 162, 166–68; as inevitable, 121; open-ended nature of, 54n121; relation to theme, 33–39, 73; relativity of, 54n119, 172; role of, 126–30, 148; social, 5, 75, 98–99, 115n34; structure of, 50n66, 147–48 humanity, 7, 15, 126–27, 156, 159–60, 162–63, 173, 191 Humans of New York. See Stanton, Brandon Husserl, Edmund, 4–5, 9, 29–31, 34–35, 42, 50n74, 52n108, 71, 74, 88n82, 102, 118n73, 157, 168. See also natural attitude hypervisibility, 12, 91, 95–100, 105–7, 109–11, 114n26, 121, 126, 129, 135, 148, 163 identities, 11, 24–25, 61, 65, 67–68, 83n36, 85n47, 158, 174, 191; fluidity of, 84n40; formation of, 83n33; intersectional, 57–58, 69–70, 77–80, 91, 100, 127, 146, 162, 165, 169, 175, 190; multiplicitous, 19–20, 26–27, 47n35, 47n39, 62, 78, 187n44 identity-in-difference, 14–15, 140, 147, 156, 162–68, 170–79, 182n35, 182n40, 184n50, 185n63, 186n74, 191 immediacy, 14, 23, 27, 57, 61, 68–74, 78–79, 86n66, 102–3, 127, 141, 156, 162, 164–66, 176, 186n74, 191 inclusive, 63, 67, 84n43, 93, 114n23 indeterminate, 5–6, 41, 87n73, 175 indeterminate meaning complex, 5, 8 indifference, 14–15, 82n26, 155–56, 162, 176–78, 191 individualism, 39, 65–66, 70, 83n34, 84n40, 134 influence, 1, 4–5, 7, 9–13, 20, 28, 30, 39– 40, 50n66, 57, 72–74, 87n73, 92–93, 103–4, 109, 117n61, 129–30, 156–60, 171–74, 180n13, 184n59; of race and sex, 1, 21–25, 98, 106–7 intellectualism. See empiricism: and intellectualism

intentionality, 12, 15, 32, 34–35, 48n42, 99; body, 102–3, 106–9; operative, 115–16n38, 133 intergroup similarities, 58, 63, 76–77, 80, 165 intersectionality, 9, 57, 62–64, 68, 76, 78–79, 81n15, 83nn33–34, 84nn39–40, 175; ambiguity of, 65–67; challenges to, 11, 69, 82n31. See also identities: intersectional intersubjectivity, 6, 132, 136, 139, 149n13, 170, 185n63, 190 intragroup heterogeneity, 57, 69, 76, 80, 85n47, 165 invisibility, 11, 29, 91, 97, 100, 121, 123, 126, 129, 144, 170 Invisible Man. See Ellison, Ralph Irigaray, Luce, 13–14, 28, 121–25, 129, 132, 135, 137–43, 146–47, 149n10, 172, 186n74 irreversibilities, 14, 121–22, 140–44, 147, 153–54n91, 154n94 isolation, 19, 29, 34, 39–43, 73, 76, 78, 134, 136–38, 144, 146, 155, 162, 169–70, 174, 176 James, Robin M., 64 Johnson, Galen A., 32, 89n92, 102 Jung, Carl, 127 Kant, Immanuel, 35, 119n82, 181n23 Kelly, Sean Dorrance, 51n86 Kim, David, 27, 100 knowledge, 3–4, 6–7, 9–11, 14, 16n18, 16–17n23, 32, 34, 36–38, 40, 49n58, 52n108, 53n117, 99, 105, 123, 134, 137–38, 141–42, 146–48, 158, 161, 168–70, 177, 179, 186n74; correspondence theories of, 60, 87n73, 182n40; from experience, 57–62, 66, 70, 74–80, 86n66, 90n94, 96, 145; production of, 189n90, 89n92 Kozel, Susan, 138, 140, 146–47, 149n10 Kuhn, Annette, 28, 48n47, 128 Kuhn, Thomas, 60, 183n44



Index 209

language, 1, 12, 14, 19, 22–23, 27–28, 39–43, 47n35, 47n39, 54n127, 58, 61, 63, 73, 75–79, 87n73, 88n84, 107, 117–18n68, 141, 149n14, 161, 170, 183n55, 184n59, 186n74 Lawlor, Leonard, 35, 184n59, 187n82 Leder, Drew, 167–69, 175 life-world, 9, 103, 150n22, 179n7 Locke, John, 20, 35, 164 Lorde, Audre, 17n23, 66, 83n39 Loury, Glen, 15, 155, 176 Lugones, Maria, 24–28, 42, 47n35, 48n42, 62, 64–65, 82n26, 155 Maldiney, Henri, 138, 153n77 Mann, Anika, 65, 81 Marcano, Donna-Dale, 161 marginalization, 24, 26, 46n22, 55n133, 55n136, 62–67 Marquit, Erwin, 164, 182n38 Marx, Karl, 80n5 Marxist theory, 59 May, Vivian, 62 meaning, 7–15, 28–31, 37, 39–40, 44n4, 50n66, 52n108, 57, 73–75, 77, 85n59, 89n92, 91–94, 108–11, 119n85, 128, 138, 165, 174, 179n7, 183n56, 191; of race, 1–2, 5–7, 19–20, 97, 99, 101, 105, 162; social and cultural, 5, 69, 88–89n84, 94, 103, 107, 117n68, 131, 156–58, 171, 185–86n70; structures of, 70–71, 79–80, 86n60, 102, 190 Medina, José, 6, 16n18, 20–22, 28–29, 41–43, 44n5, 44n9, 46n23, 47n36, 48nn46–47, 54nn123–26, 55nn133, 55n136, 69, 126, 150n22, 150n25, 175 Meno, 53n117, 137 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2–3, 7, 9, 43, 78, 109, 117n66, 118nn73–74, 118–19n78, 121–22, 143–44, 147–48, 154n91, 180n15; on ambiguity, 53n116, 115n27; on the anonymous body, 13, 121–23, 132–35, 161; on body schema, 98, 101; on culture, 50n71, 51n86; on difference, 14, 135–36, 153n83, 156–57; on embodiment, 12–14, 31, 71–72, 91–96, 101–8, 111, 130–31, 145, 151n35,

153n77, 159; on experience, 52n94, 58, 70, 73, 75–76, 79, 85n53, 86n66, 90n94; on the general body, 132, 151n40; on high-altitude thinkers, 35–37; on horizons, 20, 30, 49n60, 127–29; on knowledge, 38–40, 49n58, 53n117; on perception, 11, 31–35, 50n62, 89n92, 122–26; on phenomena, 4–5, 29, 73; on reflection, 74, 78; on reversibility, 137–43, 146. See also identity-in-difference mestiza, 26, 46n30. See also Ortega, Mariana metaphysical, 36, 87n73, 115n27, 127, 146, 151n29, 156, 159, 163–65, 172– 74, 179n7 microaggression, 45n14 Mills, Charles, 6, 21–22, 28, 40–41, 47n36, 93, 145, 159, 175, 179n7, 181n25 mimesis, 149n10 The Minority Women’s Plank, 7 minoritize, 8 minority, 27, 59, 61, 66–68, 83n38, 97, 155, 159, 177 model minority stereotype, 63, 100–101 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 15n2, 45n22, 48n43 monism, 14, 156, 163–64, 172, 174, 181n31 Morrison, Toni, 117n62 The Motion of Light in Water. See Delaney, Samuel motivations, 2, 12–13, 92, 107–11, 129, 131, 174, 190 multiplicitous identities, 19–20, 26–27, 47n39, 62, 77–78. See also subjects: multiplicitous multiplicity, 25, 30, 54n130, 67, 163, 187n84 Murphy, Ann V., 9 Narayan, Uma, 162–63 National Women’s Conference, 7 natural, 2, 5–6, 8–9, 13–14, 23, 26, 31, 44n4, 93–94, 127–30, 133, 143, 150n25, 156–59, 162, 174–75, 179n8, 180n13

210 natural attitude, 4, 52n97, 180n9 Nelson, Lynn Hankinson, 60 Ngo, Helen, 6, 12, 16n17, 23, 45n14, 45n21, 47n39, 65, 74, 82n29, 98–99, 103–6, 115nn37–38, 117n61, 117– 18nn66–69, 126, 145, 175, 190 nonidentity, 58, 76, 78–79, 89n90, 135 Nyanzi, Stella, 8, 17n26 Obama, Barack, 177 objectification, 13, 63, 74, 101, 104, 117n61, 131 object status, 95–96, 99, 154n98 Olafson, Frederick, 153–54n91 Omi, Michael, 5, 190 ontological, 6, 11–15, 16n17, 20, 29, 31, 36, 47n34, 58, 73, 77, 85n59, 87–88n73, 88n76, 93, 99, 113n15, 115n37, 122–23, 126, 135–39, 142, 146, 156–59, 162, 165, 171, 173–76, 179, 187n77 ontology, 37, 39, 89n92, 134, 137, 139, 146, 149n13, 154n91, 157–61, 176, 189 oppression, 6–8, 11, 20, 24–27, 41–43, 46n23, 47n36, 54n124, 55nn133–34, 57–66, 69, 79, 83n36, 84n43, 85n51, 92, 94, 114n26, 191 Orlie, Melissa, 181n25 Ortega, Mariana, 6, 11, 24–27, 46n30, 47nn33–36, 48nn42–43, 54n128, 62, 65–69, 82–83n31, 83n33, 83n38, 84n40, 85n47, 85n56, 89n84, 175, 187n84 otherness, 27, 122–23, 148, 153n77, 186n72, 187n77 overdetermination, 6, 95, 154n98 Pellar, Gary, 20 perception, 9–11, 13, 15, 23, 27–29, 30–43, 50n65, 51nn85–86, 76, 94–99, 105, 108–9, 113n20, 118–19n78, 127–31, 135–37, 140–48, 153n77, 153n91, 156–58, 163, 166–67, 172, 178, 184n59, 187n81, 190; phenomenological structure of, 19–20, 70–73, 91–92, 116n50, 121, 169–70;

Index primacy of, 48n46, 49n55, 117n66, 122–26, 149n13, 174 Perpich, Diane, 66, 83n33 perspectives, 3, 26, 33–35, 40, 49n61, 54n126, 55n134, 83nn33–34, 97–99, 115n38, 133, 136, 156, 166–67, 169, 174–75 Pew Research, 176, 177 phenomena, 2, 4–5, 9–10, 15, 29, 31, 39, 72–73, 83, 85n57, 86n60, 103, 119n85, 125, 134–35, 137, 146, 190 phenomenal, 4, 6–10, 31, 33–37, 69–70, 73, 75, 86n66, 97, 105, 110, 115n27, 139, 158, 166–67, 171, 174, 190–91 phenomenological, 3–5, 9–15, 19–20, 27, 31, 34–35, 39–41, 43, 46n30, 51n86, 58, 61, 74, 80, 85n56, 89n90, 96, 99– 101, 107, 109, 121–22, 124, 126–27, 130, 131, 136–37, 142, 144, 146–48, 153n77, 155–58, 163, 165–66, 168, 173–75, 178–79, 190 phenomenology, 2–5, 8–15, 39–43, 58, 75–76, 118–19n78, 121, 158–59, 163, 166, 171, 174, 178, 179n7, 189; of embodiment, 91, 95–96, 133, 169; of perception, 29–31, 35, 124–25, 136, 169; practices and methodology of, 37–38, 70; scope and limitations of, 37, 71–72, 79, 92, 122, 127–28, 130–31, 135–37, 145–48, 161 The Phenomenology of Perception (MerleauPonty), 2, 29, 92, 125, 131, 138. See also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: on perception Phillips, James, 138 philosophy of mind, 156, 169 philosophy of race, 3, 14, 22–24, 28, 39, 57–61, 79, 121, 147–48, 156, 158. 165, 179n7, 180n13 Pierce, Chester, 45n14 Plato, 20, 35, 53n117, 78, 94, 119n82, 163 plurality, 25, 53n116, 77, 124, 132, 144 political, 1–3, 5, 8, 15, 21, 24, 31, 46n24, 48n41, 49n48, 59–60, 62, 64, 66–69, 84n40, 85n47, 102, 142, 148, 158, 161, 165, 171, 176, 178 politics, 2–3, 6, 45n22, 46n24, 48n43, 64, 66–68, 83n33, 84n39

postcolonial, 60, 77, 172 poststructural, 5, 11, 57–58, 60–61, 75, 87n73, 89n90, 157 power, 2, 5, 7, 13, 16n17, 21, 26, 28, 34–35, 95, 98, 103–5, 121, 123–24, 128–29, 140, 147–48; relations of, 9, 27, 33, 48n41, 64–65, 68, 74, 81n15, 83n34, 85nn39–40, 131 prejudice, 1, 10, 19–23, 36, 38, 40, 42, 45n17, 85n54, 118n69 prison, 104, 176–77, 188n90 proprioception, 169–70, 184n62, 185n63 Proust, Marcel, 103 proximity, 33, 118–19n78, 186n74 race, 1–15, 19, 27–28, 41, 43, 48n46, 57–63, 65, 67, 79, 84n40, 107, 133– 35, 142, 165, 167, 179n7, 180n13, 190–91; embodiment of, 12, 97–98, 100, 110–11, 121–22, 131, 143–44, 147–48, 160–62, 175, 186n74; habits about, 103–6; influences of, 24, 39; to innocence, 64; as phenomena, 31, 69, 83n31; as a socio-cultural meaning structure, 10–11, 20–21, 92–93, 156–59, 171, 178; stigma and biases of, 22, 40 racial contract, 21, 28, 40 racialization, 6, 10, 12–14, 27–28, 39, 47n39, 48n41, 57–60, 63–64, 80, 82n26, 91–95, 98–99, 101, 104–6, 109–11, 114n26, 116n39, 117n67, 118nn68–69, 121, 126–27, 131, 133, 143–48, 159–60, 162, 175, 178, 189 racism, 1–2, 28, 39–43, 62–65, 105, 110, 127–28, 160, 175, 190; conceptions of, 5–7, 10–11, 16n17, 23–24, 45n21; institutional, 19–21, 49n49 reflection, 12, 26–27, 58, 60, 72–79, 86nn65–66, 88n82, 89n92, 102, 123–24, 137–38, 167, 172–73. See also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: on reflection reflexivity, 94, 103, 107–8, 113n20, 118n78, 137, 153n77, 158 relations, 13, 15, 16n17, 24, 27, 47n39, 48n41, 62, 65–68, 74, 76, 86n60, 97, 99, 105, 108, 113n19, 137, 143, 147,

Index 211 149n13, 154n98, 157–59, 170–71, 173–78, 190 Reuter, Martina, 108 reversibilities, 13–14, 74, 86n66, 121–22, 134, 137–48, 180n13 Rich, Adrienne, 28 Ricoeur, Paul, 166–69, 184n59, 186n72 Roshanravan, Shireen, 16–17, 82n26 Ross, Loretta, 7–8 Rouse, Joseph, 166, 183n44 Rowe, Aimé Carillo, 64 Russell, Camisha, 64 Russon, John, 164, 168 Said, Edward, 28 Salamon, Gayle, 9, 96–97, 113n19, 135 Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective, 8, 25 Sartre, Jean Paul, 74, 95–96, 98, 104, 114n24, 123–24, 146, 154n98, 161, 167 Saul, Jennifer, 22, 39 The Science of Logic (Hegel), 14, 163. See also Hegel, G. W. F. Scott, Joan, 57, 60–61, 70, 75, 79 The Second Sex (Beauvoir), 130. See also de Beauvoir, Simone sedimentation, 5, 30, 38, 43, 50n66, 50n73, 72, 74–75, 80, 111, 117–18n68, 127–28, 144, 156–58, 162, 173, 175, 179n8, 191 self, 6, 41, 46n24, 47nn34–35, 54n130, 67, 71, 75, 78, 95, 98–99, 113n19, 128, 138, 168–69, 184n59; public and private, 4, 24–26 self-consciousness, 37, 100 self-knowledge, 16n18, 75, 136, 169–70, 183n56 self-reflection, 26, 72 separation, 10, 24, 29, 61, 65, 76, 94, 96, 139, 162, 166, 169 sexism, 24, 41, 46n23, 62–65, 81n19, 91–92, 111, 128 sexual, 15, 63, 128, 131, 137, 141–42, 149n10, 151n35, 155, 163, 180n13, 189

212

Index

sexuality, 38, 46n23, 67–68, 108–9, 130– 32, 142, 154n94 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, 118–19n78, 180n13, 185n70 situatedness, 2–4, 6–7, 9–10, 12–13, 22, 25–26, 30, 34–35, 38–40, 42–43, 59, 63, 75–80, 87, 89n92, 91–92, 95–96, 98, 102, 110–11, 117n61, 121, 130–38, 143–45, 148, 159–61, 165, 169, 176, 189–90 Smith, Michael B., 51n85 social, 1–7, 10–11, 14–15, 19–27, 31, 33, 39–41, 43, 48n41, 48n46, 54n126, 58– 62, 65, 67–68, 83n34, 94–95, 97–100, 103–7, 111, 117n61, 127–31, 143–45, 155–58, 161–62, 165, 169, 171, 173, 176, 178 Speculum of the Other Woman (Irigaray), 122. See also Irigaray, Luce Spelman, Elizabeth, 28, 49n48, 81n19 Spiegelberg, Herbert, 71, 80n2, 86n66 Spivak, Gayatri, 64 spontaneity, 53n116, 71 standpoint, 26, 47n39, 55n136, 59–61, 62, 66, 68, 79, 84n40 Stanton, Brandon, 191 stereotypes, 20–22, 27, 39, 44n9, 63, 100– 101, 110, 149n10, 191 stigma, 15, 19–24, 27–29, 31, 35, 39–41, 45n13, 48n46, 54n125, 63–64, 66, 79, 100, 155, 176–77, 191 Stoller, Silvia, 132–34 subject-body divide, 12, 91, 102, 131 subjectivity, 4, 6–7, 9–13, 24–25, 41, 48, 62, 71–74, 80, 91, 93–96, 98, 101, 106–11, 127, 130–31, 134, 136–37, 143–48, 158, 160–61, 176, 178, 186n77, 189, 190 subjects, 6, 12, 19, 22, 24, 36, 38, 61, 70–73, 76, 87n73, 139, 143, 162, 166, 187n77; as embodied, 13, 33, 92, 96, 104, 106–10, 130–35, 148, 156, 161; marginalized, 54n124, 55nn133–34, 59, 67–68, 172; multiplicitous, 10–11, 20, 26, 31, 34–45, 39–43, 54n126, 62, 66, 91, 100, 146, 165, 169; racialized, 27, 57, 60, 79–80, 91, 93–95, 97–99, 105,

110–11, 114n26, 121, 127, 143–45, 148, 154n98, 159–60, 175, 178 suicide, 177 Sullivan, Shannon, 13, 99, 115nn37–38, 132–34, 161 Taminiaux, Jacques, 51n82, 88n82, 118–19n78 temporality, 11–12, 14–15, 30, 33, 37–40, 65, 70, 72–78, 87n73, 89n92, 94, 103– 7, 114n26, 129, 139–41, 144, 154n96, 154n98, 168, 172 theme, 29–31, 33–43, 54n126, 58, 72–73, 78, 111, 179, 184n59 Time and Narrative. See Ricouer, Paul Toldson, Ivory, 177 totality, 37, 53n116, 118n78, 137, 147, 173, 186n72 totalizing, 13, 32, 85, 121–25, 134, 146– 48, 152n49, 172–73 touch, 14, 90n96, 94, 122, 137, 139–41, 153n77, 166, 170, 179, 186n74 transcendence, 32, 35–36, 38, 51n87, 52n108, 78, 88n76, 89n92, 95, 98, 104, 125, 137, 142, 146–47, 154n91, 166 transcendental, 5, 7, 10, 13, 34, 36–37, 53n113, 78, 86n60, 88n82, 89nn92–93, 95–96, 115n27, 166 violence, 6–7, 16n17, 127, 172, 190–91; domestic, 62–63, 177–78; police, 1, 92, 105 visibility, 15, 16n17, 29, 49n51, 100, 124, 126, 143, 153. See also hypervisibility visible, 10–12, 24, 49n60, 83, 109, 113n19, 124–25, 138–42, 154n91, 163, 165, 167, 170, 173 The Visible and the Invisible (MerleauPonty), 29, 31, 37, 96, 124, 134, 138, 146–47, 165. See also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Weate, Jeremy, 81n11, 95, 127, 143–47, 151n29, 154n98, 158, 175, 186n74 Weiss, Gail, 4, 9, 16n15, 34, 37, 48n47, 49–50nn60–61, 50n65, 52n108, 103–4,

115n34, 117n66, 118n70, 127–29, 130–32, 143, 149n13, 181n21 Weiss, Paul, 163, 165, 172 West, Traci L., 64 western, 8, 19, 28, 45n22, 55n130, 84n43, 97 Widdershoven, Guy, 108 Wildman, Stephanie, 46n23 Williams, Gareth, 172–73, 186–87n77 Williams, Patricia, 3, 48n47, 92, 112n4, 128, 172–73, 176–77 Winant, Howard, 5, 15n2, 190 women of color, 7–15, 19–20, 24–29, 40–43, 45n22, 46n23, 47n39, 54n125, 57–58, 62–64, 68–69, 76–80, 91–92,

Index 213 99–102, 106–11, 121–22, 126–27, 133, 135, 145–48, 156, 159, 161–65, 171, 174–79, 188n90, 189–91 worlds, 13, 26–27, 31, 34, 42–43, 47n35, 77, 99, 110–11, 127, 129, 131, 143–45, 148, 156, 159, 162 world-traveling, 24–26, 46n30, 47n35. See also Lugones, Maria Yancy, George, 47n34, 95, 105, 126, 145, 158, 175, 179n8 Young, Iris, 104, 123, 132 Zia, Helen, 81n18 Ziarek, Krzysztof, 72, 86–87n73

About the Author

Emily S. Lee is professor of philosophy at California State University, Fullerton. Her research interests include feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, and phenomenology, especially the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. She has published articles on phenomenology and epistemology regarding the embodiment and the subjectivity of women of color. She is the editor of Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race (2014) and Race as Phenomena: Between Phenomenology and Philosophy of Race (2019).

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