The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy 9780190628925, 9780190628949, 0190628928

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

F E M I N IST PH I L O SOPH Y

The Oxford Handbook of

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY Edited by

KIM Q. HALL and

ÁSTA

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ásta, editor. | Hall, Kim Q., 1965-, editor. Title: The Oxford handbook of feminist philosophy / edited by Kim Q. Hall and Ásta. Other titles: Handbook of feminist philosophy Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020053830 (print) | LCCN 2020053831 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190628925 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190628949 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Feminist theory. | Women philosophers. | Knowledge, Theory of. Classification: LCC HQ1190 .O974 2021 (print) | LCC HQ1190 (ebook) | DDC 305.4201—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053830 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053831 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Contents

Contributorsix

PA RT I   I N T RODU C T ION 1. What Is Feminist Philosophy? Kim Q. Hall and Ásta

3

PA RT I I   F E M I N I ST E N G AG E M E N T S W I T H P H I L O S OP H IC A L T R A DI T ION S 2. Feminist Engagements with the History of Philosophy Charlotte Witt

15

3. Feminism in Ancient Philosophy Anne-­Marie Schultz

25

4. Feminism and Early Modern Philosophy Deborah Boyle

38

5. Feminist Critical Theory Allison Weir

50

6. Feminist Phenomenology Gail Weiss

63

7. The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir Céline Leboeuf

72

8. Pragmatism Erin McKenna and Maurice Hamington

83

9. Poststructuralism Katerina Kolozova

99

vi   contents

10. Black Feminist Philosophy and the Politics of Refusal Axelle Karera

109

11. Latina/x Feminist Philosophy Andrea J. Pitts

120

12. Asian American Philosophy and Feminism David Haekwon Kim

136

13. Native and Indigenous Feminisms and Philosophies Shay Welch

151

PA RT I I I   F E M I N I ST E N G AG E M E N T S W I T H SU B F I E L D S   OF P H I L O S OP H Y 14. Feminist Philosophy of Mind Jennifer McWeeny

169

15. Feminist Philosophy of Language in the Analytic Tradition Mary Kate McGowan

184

16. Feminist Epistemology Heidi Grasswick

198

17. Metaphysics Mari Mikkola

213

18. Philosophy of Science: Analytic Feminist Approaches Kristina Rolin

226

19. Continental Feminist Approaches to Philosophy of Science Dorothea Olkowski

237

20. Analytical Feminist Ethics Samantha Brennan

248

21. Continental Feminist Ethics Erinn Gilson

261

22. Feminist Bioethics Jackie Leach Scully

272

23. Feminist Moral Psychology Peggy DesAutels

287

contents   vii

24. Feminist Aesthetics A.W. Eaton

295

25. Feminist Social and Political Philosophy Bat-­Ami Bar On

312

26. Feminist Philosophy of Social Science Sharon Crasnow

325

PA RT I V   TOP IC A L E S S AYS 27. Identity Linda Martín Alcoff

339

28. The Body Cressida J. Heyes

350

29. On Feminist Temporalities Joanna Hodge

363

30. Relational Autonomy Catriona Mackenzie

374

31. Feminist New Materialisms Nancy Tuana

385

32. Bias Louise Antony

395

33. Feminism and Epistemic Injustice José Medina

408

34. Epistemic Oppression, Ignorance, and Resistance Gaile Pohlhaus Jr.

418

35. Borders and Migration Shelley Wilcox

429

36. Prisons Perry Zurn

440

37. War and Terrorism Robin May Schott

451

viii   contents

38. Feminist Philosophy of Human Rights  Diana Tietjens Meyers

462

39. The Gender-­Climate-­Injustice Nexus Adrian Parr

474

40. Biomedical Technologies Susan Dodds

484

PA RT V   F E M I N I ST E N G AG E M E N T W I T H I N T E R DI S C I P L I NA RY T H E OR I E S A N D   M OV E M E N T S 41. Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and Feminist Philosophy Natalie Cisneros

497

42. Queer Theory Gayle Salamon

506

43. Feminism and Disability Theory Licia Carlson

517

44. Feminist Philosophical Engagements with Trans Studies Talia Mae Bettcher

531

45. Postcolonial and Decolonial Theories Elena Ruíz

541

46. Animal Studies Lori Gruen

552

Index

561

Contributors

Linda Martín Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a Past President of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. Recent books include Rape and Resistance: Understanding the Complexities of Sexual Violation (Polity, 2018), The Future of Whiteness (Polity, 2015), and Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (Oxford University Press, 2006), which won the Frantz Fanon Award for 2009. For more info go to http://www.alcoff.com. Louise Antony  is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts and at Rutgers University. She has research interests in the philosophy of mind, feminist theory, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion, and is the author of many essays in these areas. Most recently, she has published “Feminism without Metaphysics or a Deflationary Account of Gender” in Erkenntnis. A volume of her essays, Only Natural: Gender, Nature, Knowledge, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She is the editor of Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life (Oxford University Press, 2007), and coeditor with Charlotte Witt of A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (Routledge, 2019). She is committed to public philosophy and frequently writes for and speaks to nonacademic audiences. Her latest piece, “What Is Naturalism?,” is forthcoming in Think: Philosophy for Everyone. Ásta is Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. She works in feminist philosophy, metaphysics, and social philosophy and on related topics in epistemology and philosophy of language. She is the author of Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her website is astaphilosophy.com. Bat-­Ami Bar On (1948–2020) was Professor of Philosophy and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Binghamton University (SUNY). She specialized in social and political theory. Her primary focus was on a subarea that is best described through its normative concerns with violent political conflict and social-­political order. At the time of her death, her research was focused on fascism. The social and political theorist whose work she found especially interesting (after Marx and Foucault) was Hannah Arendt. Sadly, Ami passed away during the final stage of this volume’s production. We (Kim and Ásta) are grateful for her contribution to this volume and her many contributions to feminism and feminist philosophy. Talia Mae Bettcher  is a Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on issues in trans oppression/resistance at the intersection of multiple oppressions. She has published widely, and some of her articles include

x   contributors “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion,” “Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance,” and “What Is Trans Philosophy?” Deborah Boyle is Professor of Philosophy at the College of Charleston. Her primary research interest is in the work of early modern and modern women philosophers. She is the author of papers on Astell, Cavendish, Conway, Descartes, Hume, and Mary Shepherd, as well as The Well-­Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish (Oxford, 2018), Descartes on Innate Ideas (Continuum, 2009), and Lady Mary Shepherd: Selected Writings (Imprint Academic, 2018). Samantha Brennan is Dean of the College of Arts and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Brennan has wide-­ranging interests in normative ethics and political philosophy, including in feminist ethics. In recent years Brennan has published papers on children’s rights and family justice, microinequities and gender justice in the context of postsecondary education, and moderate deontological approaches to ethical theorizing. Licia Carlson is Professor of Philosophy at Providence College. She is the author of The Faces of Intellectual Disability: Philosophical Reflections (Indiana University Press, 2009) and the coeditor of Philosophy and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), Phenomenology and the Arts (Lexington Books, 2016), and Boundaries of Disability: Critical Reflections (Routledge, forthcoming). She has published numerous articles and chapters in the areas of philosophy of disability, bioethics, philosophy of music, and feminist philosophy. Her current research interests include the ethics of genetic testing, and the intersection of philosophy, music, and disability. Natalie Cisneros is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. Her recent work appears in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Carceral Notebooks, and Radical Philosophy Review. She has also coedited (with Andrew Dilts of Loyola Marymount University) a special project for Radical Philosophy Review called “Political Theory and Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration.” Currently, she is completing a book manuscript that draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Gloría Anzaldúa, as well as other feminists and critical race theorists, to suggest a new approach to political and ethical questions surrounding immigration. Sharon Crasnow is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emerita, Norco College, and an Associate Researcher at the Centre for Humanities Engaging Science and Society (CHESS) at Durham University, UK. She coedited The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Science (2021) with Kristen Intemann. She also coedits (with Joanne Waugh) the Lexington book series Feminist Strategies. Peggy DesAutels  is Professor of Philosophy at University of Dayton. Her coedited volumes include Feminists Doing Ethics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), edited with Joanne Waugh; Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), edited with Margaret Urban Walker; and Global Feminist Ethics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), edited with Rebecca Whisnant. Her recently published

contributors   xi articles and book chapters include “Power, Virtue, and Vice,” “Resisting Organizational Power,” “Moral Mindfulness,” and “Sex Differences and Neuroethics.” Susan Dodds is Professor of Philosophy and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research and Industry Engagement, at La Trobe University, Australia. She is a Visiting Professor in the School of Humanities and Languages at UNSW Sydney and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania. Her research addresses issues in applied ethics, feminist ethics, and political philosophy. Her recent research has explored ethical issues associated with emerging biotechnologies, human vulnerability, dependence, and care. With Catriona Mackenzie and Wendy Rogers, she coedited Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2014). She also coedited (with Rachel Ankeny) Big Picture Bioethics: Developing Democratic Policy in Contested Domains (Springer, 2016). She currently leads the Ethics, Policy and Public Engagement theme of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science CE140100012. A. W. Eaton is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Illinois-­Chicago (aka Chicago Circle). She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in both philosophy and art history. She works on the pragmatics of pictures, connections between race and gender and aesthetic value, the epistemological and ontological status of aesthetic value, the relationship between ethical and artistic value, feminist critiques of pornography, representations of rape in the European artistic tradition, and artifact teleology (for more details and publications, see https://sites. google.com/site/eatonaw/). Eaton was a Laurence Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton’s Center for Human Values in 2005–2006; a Senior Research Fellow at Lichtenberg Kolleg, University of Göttingen, in the summer of 2017; and the Brady Distinguished Visiting Associate Professor at Northwestern University in 2019–2020. She is the outgoing editor of the Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art section of Philosophy Compass. Erinn Gilson  is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Merrimack College. Her research focuses on the political and ethical significance of vulnerability, especially the unequal distributions of harmful vulnerability, and on conceptions of vulnerability in popular and academic discourses. Recent publications in journals such as the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Signs, PhiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism International, and the Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics address a range of topics in which various forms of vulnerability are at stake, including sexuality and sexual injustice, food justice, racial injustice, and carceral politics. She is the author of The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice (Routledge, 2014) and coeditor, with Sarah Kenehan, of Food, Environment, and Climate Change: Justice at the Intersections (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). Her current research considers the role of habit, affect, and other aspects of everyday life in ethical and political engagement. Heidi Grasswick is the George Nye and Anne Walker Boardman Professor of Mental and Moral Science at Middlebury College in Vermont, where she teaches in the Philosophy Department and is a regular contributor to the Feminist, Sexuality, and Gender Studies Program. Grasswick’s research interests include feminist understandings

xii   contributors of the social production of knowledge, and the relationship between individuals and communities in responsible inquiry. Her recent work has focused on analyzing the important role of trust relations between knowers, particularly between lay communities and scientific communities. She edited the 2011 volume Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge (Springer) and is co-­editing with Nancy McHugh the volume Making the Case: Feminist and Critical Race Philosophers Engage Case Studies (SUNY Press, 2021). Lori Gruen  is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University, where she also coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies. Her work lies at the intersection of ethical theory and practice, with a particular focus on issues that impact those often overlooked in traditional ethical investigations (e.g., women, incarcerated people, people of color, nonhuman animals). She has published extensively on topics in ecofeminist ethics and epistemology and animal ethics. She is the author and editor of eleven books including Ethics and Animals: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2011; second edition, 2021) and Entangled Empathy (Lantern Books, 2015). She is an editor emerita of Hypatia. Kim Q. Hall is Professor of Philosophy and a faculty member of the Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies Program at Appalachian State University. She is the guest editor of New Conversations in Feminist Disability Studies, a special issue of Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy (2015); editor of Feminist Disability Studies (Indiana University Press, 2011); and coeditor of Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reflections (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). Her research focuses on topics at the intersections of feminist philosophy, disability studies, and queer theory. She is currently working on a book titled Queering Philosophy. Maurice Hamington  is Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Portland State University. He is a care ethicist interested in both the theory and application of care. Hamington’s works on Jane Addams include Feminist Interpretations of Jane Addams (Penn State University Press, 2010), The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams (University of Illinois Press, 2009), and Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-­Ponty and Feminist Ethics (University of Illinois Press, 2004), as well as a variety of peer-­reviewed articles. He is currently coediting The Oxford Handbook of Jane Addams. For more information on his publications see https://pdx. academia.edu/MauriceHamington. Cressida J. Heyes holds an H. M. Tory Chair and is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Alberta, Canada, where she writes and teaches in feminist philosophy and contemporary social and political thought. She is the author of Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge (Duke University Press, 2020), Self-­Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (Oxford University Press, 2007), and Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice (Cornell University Press, 2000). She is currently working on a fourth book, Sleep Is the New Sex,

contributors   xiii which will be the first feminist philosophy of sleep. Many of her publications can be found at http://cressidaheyes.com. Joanna Hodge  is Professor of Philosophy: Aesthetics, Critique, History at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She is author of Heidegger and Ethics (Routledge Taylor and Francis, 1995) and Derrida on Time (Routledge Taylor and Francis, 2007), and is currently completing a monograph for Bloomsbury called “The Singular Politics of Jean-­Luc Nancy.” She is a founder contributor and on the editorial boards of the journals Angelaki: A Journal for Theoretical Humanities (Taylor and Francis) and Derrida Today (Edinburgh University Press). She is also a founder member of the Society for European Philosophy, UK. She currently coedits a monograph series for Bloomsbury on the work of Michel Serres. Axelle Karera is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. Her work is situated at the intersection of twentieth-­century continental philosophy, the critical philosophy of race (particularly Black critical theory), contemporary critical theory, and the environmental humanities. In addition to forthcoming work on blackness and ontology, as well as blackness and hospitality, she is currently completing her first monograph titled The Climate of Race: Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics, in which she examines the question of relationality in new materialist ontology and speculative realism’s purported return to metaphysics. More importantly, the book’s investigations attempt to discern the ethical crux of critical thought in the age of the Anthropocene, with the aim to attend to its powerful—and perhaps even necessary— disavowals on matters pertaining to racial ecocide. David Haekwon Kim  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Francisco. He has published widely in philosophy of race, decolonial thought, and comparative philosophy. His current research focuses on framing concepts for Asian American philosophy. His work also considers the prospects of East-­South decolonial dialogue, especially shared political struggle and conceptual resources for theoretical hybridity in the wider South or non-­West. Katerina Kolozova  is Senior Researcher and Full Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje. She is also a Professor of Philosophy of Law at the doctoral school of the University American College, Skopje. At the Faculty of Media and Communications-­ Belgrade, she teaches contemporary political philosophy. Kolozova was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California-­Berkeley in 2009 (program of Critical Theory), and a Columbia University NY-­SIPA Visiting Scholar at its Paris Global Centre in 2019. She is a member of the board of directors of the New Centre for Research and Practice, Seattle, Washington. Kolozova is the first codirector and founder of the Regional Network for Gender and Women’s Studies in Southeast Europe (2004–). She is the author of Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2014) and Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals: A Non-­Marxist Critique of Capital, Philosophy and  Patriarchy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and a number of articles including

xiv   contributors “Subjectivity without Physicality: Machine, Body and the Signifying Automaton” in the journal Subjectivity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Céline Leboeuf is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Florida International University. Her research on embodiment lies at the intersection of the critical philosophy of race, feminist philosophy, and phenomenology. Catriona Mackenzie  is Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. She  has published widely in moral psychology, ethics, applied ethics, and feminist philosophy. Mackenzie is coeditor of numerous volumes, including Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self (Oxford University Press, 2000), Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2014), and Social Dimensions of Moral Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 2018). Mary Kate McGowan is the Margaret Clapp ‘30 Distinguished Alumna Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. She received her PhD from Princeton University in 1996. She works in metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of law, and feminism. She is the author of Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm (Oxford University Press, 2019) and coeditor, with Ishani Maitra, of Speech and Harm: Controversies Over Free Speech (Oxford University Press, 2009). Erin McKenna is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. She works in American philosophy with a special focus on feminist pragmatism and ecofeminism. She writes and teaches in the areas of animal ethics, ecofeminism, the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Alain Locke, and the social and political thought of John Dewey. Her books include Livestock: Food, Fiber, and Friends (The University of Georgia Press 2018); Pets, People, and Pragmatism (Fordham University Press, 2013); American Philosophy, coauthored with Scott L. Pratt (Bloomsbury, 2015); and the Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). She has edited several books as well. Among her numerous journal articles and book chapters, her contributions to the Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey (Penn State University Press, 2002) and Feminist Interpretations of William James (Penn State University Press, 2015) may be most relevant here. Jennifer McWeeny  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a recipient of the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of phenomenology, philosophy of mind, ontology, feminist philosophy, and decolonial theory. McWeeny is co-­editor with Pedro DiPietro and Shireen Roshanravan of Speaking Face to Face: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones (SUNY Press, 2019) and with Ashby Butnor of Asian and Feminist Philosophies in Dialogue: Liberating Traditions (Columbia University Press, 2014). She has published more than twenty-­five articles and book chapters that have appeared in Hypatia, Continental Philosophy Review, Chiasmi International, and Journal for Critical Animal Studies, among other venues. She has served as Executive Secretary for the Eastern Division of the Society for Women in Philosophy and is currently Editor in Chief of Simone de Beauvoir Studies.

contributors   xv José Medina is the Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He works in critical race theory, gender/queer theory, communication theory, social epistemology, and political philosophy. His books include Speaking from Elsewhere (SUNY Press, 2006) and The Epistemology of Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2013), which received the North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award. He has also coedited multiple volumes, the most recent one being Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2020). His current projects focus on how social perception and the social imagination contribute to the formation of vulnerabilities to different kinds of violence and oppression. These projects also explore the social movements and kinds of activism (including what he terms “epistemic activism”) that can be mobilized to resist racial and sexual violence and oppression. Diana Tietjens Meyers  is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. She has held the Laurie Chair at Rutgers University and the Ellacuría Chair of Social Ethics at Loyola University, Chicago. She has published five monographs: Inalienable Rights: A Defense (Columbia University Press, 1985), Self, Society, and Personal Choice (Columbia University Press, 1989), Subjection and Subjectivity: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Moral Philosophy (Routledge, 1994), Gender in the Mirror: Cultural Imagery and Women’s Agency (Oxford University Press, 2002), and Victims’ Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2016). Being Yourself: Essays on Identity, Action, and Social Life collects some of her articles and chapters (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). She has edited seven collections and two special journal issues and published many journal articles and chapters in books. Her most recent edited collection is Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2014). She currently works in four main areas of philosophy— philosophy of self and action, feminist ethics, feminist aesthetics, and human rights. Her website is https://dianatietjensmeyers.wordpress.com/. Mari Mikkola is the Chair in Metaphysics at the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands). She is the author of two books (The Wrong of Injustice: Dehumanization and Its Role in Feminist Philosophy and Pornography: A Philosophical Introduction, both with Oxford University Press) and of several articles on feminist philosophy, social ontology, and pornography. Her current work is focused on philosophical methodology with a monograph on this topic under contract with Oxford University Press. Dorothea Olkowski is Professor and former Chair of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs; Director of Humanities; Director of the Cognitive Studies Program; and former Director of Women’s Studies. Specializing in contemporary (twentieth-­century) continental philosophy and feminist theory, she has been a Fellow at the University of Western Ontario, Rotman Institute of Philosophy and Science, the Australian National University in Canberra, and UC Berkeley. She is the author/editor of thirteen books and over one hundred articles including Deleuze, Bergson, and Merleau-­Ponty: The Logic and Pragmatics of Creation, Affective Life, and Perception (Indiana University Press, 2021); Postmodern Philosophy and the Scientific Turn (Indiana

xvi   contributors University Press, 2012); and The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible) (Columbia and Edinburgh University Presses, 2007); and with Helen Fielding, Feminist Phenomenology Futures (Indiana University Press, 2017); with Eftechios Pirovolakis, Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of Freedom: Freedom’s Refrains (Routledge, 2019); and with Juilán Ferreyra, Deleuze at the End of the World: A South-­American Perspective on the Sources of His Thought (Rowman, 2020). Adrian Parr is Dean of the College of Design at the University of Oregon. The revised text would read: “Adrian Parr is Dean of the College of Architecture, Planning, and Public Affairs at the University of Oregon.” She has published numerous books, the most recent being a trilogy—Hijacking Sustainability (MIT Press, 2009), The Wrath of Capital (Columbia University Press, 2014), and Birth of a New Earth (Columbia University Press, 2017). She is the producer and codirector (with Sean Hughes) of the multi-­award-­winning documentary, The Intimate Realities of Water, and the curator of the Watershed Urbanism exhibition for the 2021 European Cultural Center Venice Architecture Biennale. Andrea J. Pitts is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Their research interests include Latin American and US Latinx philosophy, women of color feminisms, and critical prison studies, and their scholarly articles can be found in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Radical Philosophy Review, Genealogy, Inter-­American Journal of Philosophy, and IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. Pitts is also the coeditor of Beyond Bergson: Examining Race and Colonialism through the Writings of Henri Bergson with Mark Westmoreland (SUNY Press, 2019) and Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance with Mariana Ortega and José M.  Medina (Oxford University Press, 2020). Gaile Pohlhaus Jr.  is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Miami University of Ohio. Her areas of research include feminist epistemology, feminist theory, and the later Wittgenstein. Her work has been published in various journals including Hypatia, Feminist Philosophical Quarterly, Theoria, Philosophical Papers, and Social Epistemology. She is coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Kristina Rolin is University Lecturer in Research Ethics at Tampere University. Her areas of research are philosophy of science and social science, social epistemology, and feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. Elena Ruíz is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University, where she holds appointments in American Indian and Indigenous studies, Chicanx/Latinx studies, and GenCen. She is also the Principal Researcher on Gender-­Based Violence for the #MeToo movement organization. Gayle Salamon  is Professor of English and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. Her research interests include phenomenology,

contributors   xvii feminist philosophy, queer and transgender theory, contemporary continental philosophy, and disability studies. She is the author of Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (Columbia University Press, 2010), winner of the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies. Her most recent book, The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia (NYU Press, 2018), uses phenomenology to explore the case of Latisha King, a trans girl who was shot and killed in her Oxnard, California, junior high school by a classmate. Her coedited volume with Gail Weiss and Ann Murphy, titled 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2020. Robin May Schott is Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in the research unit Peace and Violence. She is a philosopher who works in the areas of gender studies, genocide studies, ethics, and political theory. She works with a broad range of issues related to gender, violence, and conflict, including topics of trauma and resilience, moral injury, sexual violence, victims and vulnerability, civilian-­military relations, and technologies of warfare. Currently she codirects with Johannes Lang the project “The New Psychology of War.” Among her major publications are the books School Bullying: New Theories in Context, coedited with Dorte Marie Søndergaard (Cambridge, 2014); Birth, Death and Femininity; Philosophical Theories of Embodiment, editor (Indiana University Press, 2010); Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil, editor (Indiana University Press, 2007); and Discovering Feminist Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). Anne-­Marie Schultz is a Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University. She serves as Director of the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core. She recently received the Master Teacher Award, the highest teaching award at Baylor. She is the author of Plato’s Socrates as Narrator: A Philosophical Muse (Lexington Books, 2013) and Plato’s Socrates on Socrates: Socratic Self-­Disclosure and the Public Practice of Philosophy (Lexington Books, 2020). She is currently writing a third book on Plato’s use of narrative, Telling Tales of Socrates: Creating Philosophers of the Future, and comparative work that deals with Plato’s Phaedo, The Bhagavad Gita, and contemporary yoga. She has written numerous articles on Plato, Augustine, feminism, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. She is also a Certified Iyengar Yoga Teacher (Level 3). Jackie Leach Scully is Professor of Bioethics and currently Director of the Disability Innovation Institute at the University of New South Wales, Australia. With a background in biomedicine, she has worked across disciplinary boundaries to follow her research interests in bioethics, especially feminist bioethics and the ethics of disability. She has published widely in disability bioethics and was previously Professor of Social Ethics and Director of the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre at Newcastle University, UK. Nancy Tuana  is the DuPont/Class of 1949 Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, Sexuality Studies at Penn State and the Founding Director of the Penn State Rock Ethics Institute. Her most recent book, coauthored with Charles Scott, Beyond

xviii   contributors Philosophy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and Anzaldúa (Indiana University Press, 2020), occasions practices of attunement to unspeakable dimensions of experience that are a hitherto seldom-­noticed dimension of liberatory thought. Her scholarly work includes books and articles in epistemologies of ignorance and feminist science studies, with particular expertise in intersectional approaches to environmental issues and coupled ethical-­epistemic issues in climate change science. She is series editor for ReReading the Canon with Penn State Press and has guest-­edited several special issues of Critical Philosophy of Race and Hypatia. Allison Weir is a Canadian social and political philosopher who researches and writes about critical theories of freedom, identity and power, feminisms and theories of gender, race, class, and religion, Indigenous philosophies, decolonizing theories, and global care chains. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto. Allison Weir co-­founded the Institute for Social Justice in Sydney, Australia, where she was Research Professor and Director of the Doctoral Program in Social Political Thought, until the Institute closed in late 2018. Before moving to Australia she held a tenured professorship in Philosophy and in Women and Gender Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. She has held visiting positions at Concordia University in Montreal, the New School in New York, the University of Dundee, Scotland, and the University of Frankfurt, Germany. Her book, Decolonizing Freedom, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2021. She is the author of Identities and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Sacrificial Logics (Routledge, 1996), as well as many articles in books and journals including Hypatia: An International Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Philosophical Topics, and Critical Horizons. Gail Weiss is Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University. She serves as Executive Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) and General Secretary of the International Merleau-­Ponty Circle. Her previous monographs include Refiguring the Ordinary (Indiana University Press, 2008) and Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (Routledge, 1999), and she recently coedited 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology (Northwestern University Press, 2020) with Ann V. Murphy and Gayle Salamon. She served as guest coeditor with Debra Bergoffen of a summer 2011 Special Issue of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy on The Ethics of Embodiment (Volume 26, No. 3), and she has edited several other volumes on embodiment and Merleau-­Ponty. Other publications include journal articles and book chapters that draw upon phenomenology, feminist theory, critical race theory, and disability studies to address fundamental features of our lived, intercorporeal experience. Shay Welch is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Spelman College. She is currently the 2020–2021 Carnegie Mellon Corporation and Rockefeller Foundation Distinguished Researcher/Creative Scholar. Her areas of specialization are Native American philosophy, feminist ethics, social/political philosophy, feminist epistemology, philosophy of dance, and embodied cognition theory. She holds a PhD in Philosophy

contributors   xix from Binghamton University and was the Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Philosophy at  Williams College. Additionally, Welch is a performing aerialist and aerial arts choreographer. Her first book is A Theory of Freedom: Feminism and the Social Contract (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She was awarded the Future of Minority Studies Fellowship in Publishing for her book Existential Eroticism: A Feminist Ethics Approach to Women’s Oppression Perpetuating Choices (Lexington Books, 2017). Her most recent book is titled Dancing with Native American Epistemology: The Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Her upcoming book is titled Embodied Critical Inquiry through Choreography. Shelley Wilcox is a Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. She works mainly in political philosophy and feminism, with a special interest in issues of migration, membership, and global justice. She has published articles in Philosophical Studies, Social Theory and Practice, and Journal of Social Philosophy, and presented her work throughout North America and Europe. Her recent article on sanctuary policies (in Public Affairs Quarterly) was one of the first on the topic to appear in a prominent philosophy journal and has been the subject of several symposia and special sessions. She is currently working on a book on the ethics of sanctuary. Charlotte Witt  is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Substance and Essence in Aristotle and Ways of Being in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, both published by Cornell University Press. She is the coeditor of A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (Routlede, 2019) and three other collections including Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays (Cornell University Press, 2004). Her most recent work includes a monograph, The Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford University Press, 2011), and an edited volume, Feminist Metaphysics: Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self (Springer, 2011). Her work on feminist history of philosophy has been widely published, including in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and in Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, coedited with Lilli Alanen. Perry Zurn is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at American University. He researches in political philosophy, gender theory, and applied ethics. Zurn is the author of Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2021) and the coauthor of Curious Minds (MIT Press, under contract). He is also the coeditor of Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), Carceral Notebooks 12 (2017), Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), and Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, 1970–1980 (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).

pa rt I

I N T RODUC T ION

chapter 1

W h at Is Femi n ist Phil osoph y? Kim Q. Hall and Ásta

Introduction As this volume appears in print and digital form, feminist philosophy as a recognized field in academic philosophy in the United States is nearing fifty years old. What began as a desire to find both political and intellectual community with other women in philosophy has become one of the most dynamic and vibrant areas of philosophy. Feminist philosophers have made critical interventions in, and important contributions to, areas that have been deemed canonical in the mainstream of the field. While it is true that feminist philosophy and feminist philosophers continue to be dismissed and marginalized in some quarters of philosophy, it is nonetheless also true that feminist philosophy is no longer a marginal area. As we begin the third decade of the twenty-­first century, feminist philosophy has, so to speak, arrived. But along with the fraught forms of institutional recognition that come with that arrival comes the risk of moving away from the core values and commitments, which, even when imperfectly realized, gave rise to the field in the first place. In this regard, feminist philosophy is like other areas previously excluded from the academy. Institutional inclusion risks a field’s radical edge, especially those fields, like feminist philosophy, that were admitted only as a result of political demands. The challenge is to remain open to transformation even as at least some parts of the field are beginning to be recognized and engaged by the mainstream. Scholars whose work has contributed to feminist philosophy have different histories and relationships to both feminism and feminist philosophy, resulting in varying degrees of inclusion, alienation, and ambivalence (see Mann et al. 2019, 395). In conceiving of this volume, we wanted the chapters to reflect differences, tensions, and even

4   Hall and Ásta ­ isagreements within feminist philosophy in its efforts to think about various sites of d marginalization. We also wanted to do our best to reflect philosophical diversity within the field—that is, the influences of analytic, continental, and pragmatist traditions, as well as work outside Western philosophy, on feminist philosophy. Even though the volume includes contributors based outside the United States, we want to acknowledge that the volume as a whole is situated in the kind of feminist philosophy that is largely written in English and largely written by writers situated in North America and the United Kingdom, Australia, or other global networks with ties to those areas. That is partly a reflection of our (the editors’) situatedness, as both of us are based in the United States, even though one of us was born outside of the United States (Iceland) and has a different language as a native tongue (Icelandic). But it is also partly a reflection of the fact that feminist philosophy in North America and the United Kingdom has had, and continues to have, hegemonic influence on feminist philosophy in other areas of the globe. We wanted the volume to reflect geographical diversity; nonetheless, most of the contributors work in US institutions, and it is important to acknowledge that limitation. Feminist philosophy is an extraordinarily diverse field. Not all feminist philosophers agree with each other, even about what feminist philosophy is or should be. Some define feminist philosophy as philosophy that is informed by and seeks to address women’s experiences, perspectives, relationships, and oppression. Others define feminist philosophy as philosophical critique of power animated by hierarchies of gender, race, class, ability, sexuality, age, nationality, and other categories of socially salient differences that shape what gender is and how it is lived. Some feminist philosophers work with concepts and theories gleaned from canonical philosophical texts, while others strive to develop alternative concepts and theories that build on, and speak to, the histories, experiences, and perspectives of members of marginalized communities. And, of course, some feminist philosophers find important frameworks for feminist thinking across all these diverse conceptions of, and approaches to, work in the field. Whatever their particular approach or philosophical training (e.g., analytic or continental), feminist philosophers continue to make critical, transformative interventions in the philosophical mainstream, as well as develop new fields of inquiry.

Some History Writing about the first meeting of the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), an offshoot of the 1971 formation of the American Philosophical Association’s Women’s Caucus in Chicago in 1971, Sandra Lee Bartky (1935–2016) recounted the sense of shared excitement and wonder at being in a room with a group of rare, beautiful creatures— other women in philosophy: “We came together in joy and solidarity. We talked all day and most of the night. We stared at one another and even touched each other, as if we were fabulous beasts” (1990, 2). For most, if not all, attendees, it was the first time they

What Is Feminist Philosophy?   5 had ever been in a room with other women in philosophy. There was no such thing as a course, let alone an area of specialization or concentration, in feminist philosophy. There was no journal for the publication of the work of feminist philosophers. As an academic field, feminist philosophy didn’t exist. But all shared a desire to know how their involvement in feminist, anti-­racist, anti-­war, and student movements might be more visibly integrated into their teaching and philosophical writing, a desire to use philosophy to think through and to forge a philosophy based on their sense of how “things came together”—things like US imperialism, racism, sexism, militarism, capitalism, ideology in the mainstream and in academic philosophy, internalized oppression, and experience in heteropatriarchal families and relationships (Bartky 2003, 21). At those early meetings, attendees shared syllabi and teaching strategies, experiences in their graduate ­programs and departments, and papers. The founding of SWIP eventually led to the creation of the first journal dedicated to publishing work in feminist philosophy, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. The first full issue of Hypatia was published in 1986, and its mission statement expressed the commitment of its editorial collective to publishing feminist work in all areas of philosophy (Gruen and Wiley 2010, 726). That mission statement positioned feminist philosophy as a field that was not bound by traditional divides (e.g., between analytic and continental philosophy) that characterize the profession in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The aim of feminist philosophy was not only the use of philosophical tools to make sense of feminist issues but also, even more, critique and transformation of the discipline of philosophy itself—from the white, Western European, Anglo, and male figures deemed central to the canon to the questions, methods, and topics deemed the province of “real” philosophy, as well as the demographics of philosophy departments, graduation programs, and undergraduate classrooms. Then, as now, feminist philosophy aims not simply for integration into philosophy but for transformation of philosophy itself. Today, there are several societies dedicated to women in philosophy, including regional divisions of SWIP in the United States (Eastern, Midwest, Pacific, and New York), C-­SWIP in Canada, and SWIP-­U K. Others that either have sporadic meetings or are more recent include SWIP Analytic, NNWP (Nordic Network of Women in  Philosophy), SWIP Ireland, SWIP Germany, SWIP Switzerland, SWIP NL (Netherlands), SWIP Turkey, and SWIP Analytic Mexico. An Australasian SWIP ­operated for some time starting in the 1980s but is not active at the time of writing. No association exists in France. The International Association of Women Philosophers (IAPh), an international organization of women in philosophy, was founded in 1976 and holds meetings biannually. All of these organizations are friendly to feminist philosophy, although most of them are not exclusively focused on supporting work in feminist philosophy. There are, however, several other philosophy organizations and long-­standing workshops that selfidentify as feminist or as allied with feminist work in philosophy, including FEAST (Feminist Ethics and Social Theory), FEMMSS (Feminist Epistemology, Methodology, Metaphysics, and Science Studies), FAB (Feminism and Bioethics), Society for Analytic Feminism, the Roundtable in Latina/x Feminism, the Collegium of Black Women

6   Hall and Ásta Philosophers, the Trans Philosophy Project, WOGAP (Workshop on Gender and Philosophy), and BayFAP (Bay Area Feminism and Philosophy workshop). And other feminist philosophy journals have emerged, including IJFAB (International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics), philoSOPHIA: Journal of Continental Feminism, and Feminist Philosophical Quarterly. This is not an exhaustive list. The differences in how feminist philosophers understand and negotiate their relationship to the institutionalized mainstream of philosophy go beyond subfield specialization (e.g., history of philosophy, ethics, epistemology, etc.) or philosophical training and orientation (continental, analytic, pluralist). There are also important differences in how they understand the specifically feminist contributions of feminist philosophy. In describing these differences, we do not mean to suggest that there is one approach that is more feminist than another. Indeed, each approach plays an important part in historical and contemporary feminist efforts to transform philosophy. What follows is a general, nonexhaustive, brief overview of some of the transformative efforts of feminist philosophy. Whatever their differences in methodology, training, or focus, feminist philosophers strive for some form of field transformation. One feminist philosophical approach to field transformation is through efforts to increase the visibility and recognition of philosophical contributions by people from underrepresented groups (see, e.g., UP Directory, n.d.). Examples of these efforts include recovery of figures who have been ignored and consequently omitted from philosophy’s history and canon (e.g., Project Vox, n.d.; History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, n.d.); critiques of citational erasure in articles and books (e.g., Healy 2015; Ahmed 2017, 14–16); the creation of organizations that provide a forum for the development and presentation of work by philosophers from underrepresented groups regardless of whether or not their philosophical work itself is explicitly feminist; the mentoring of members of groups underrepresented in philosophy (e.g., Philosophy in an Inclusion Key, or PIKSI, Mentoring Workshop for Early-­Career Women in Philosophy); and the generation of data to assess the climate in the field and address its “demographic challenges” (Alcoff 2013). Additional approaches to field transformation within feminist philosophy include challenging mainstream conceptions of philosophy and entrenched assumptions about what counts as philosophy (e.g., Dotson 2012). This latter approach aims to make visible the structures of power that are reinforced through disciplinary practices of boundary maintenance. Feminist interventions into institutionalized philosophy have created a vibrant ground from which to generate new philosophical concepts, methods, and questions. Furthermore, while much work remains to be done, feminist philosophers have played a crucial role in creating greater inclusion at undergraduate and graduate levels, in departments, on editorial boards and in policies, in works cited lists, and in textbooks. The American Philosophical Associations (APA’s) Committee on the Status of Women (CSW) engages in, and supports, many of the aforementioned efforts alongside other APA committees focused on issues of importance to marginalized groups in the profession (e.g., APA committees on the status of Asian and Asian American Philosophy and Philosophers, Hispanics, LGBTQ People in the

What Is Feminist Philosophy?   7 Profession, Black Philosophers, Native American and Indigenous Philosophers, and Disabled People in the Profession).

Inclusion, Exclusion, Power Even though some of its analyses may seem abstract to some, feminist philosophy is, in fact, forged in a context of ongoing gender-­based oppression and its entanglement with racism, ableism, classism, cisnormativity, heteronormativity, Eurocentrism, and Anglocentrism. The creation of feminist philosophy as an academic area of inquiry cannot and should not be separated from feminist movements and other movements for social and economic justice. This fact has led some defenders of mainstream philosophy to deride feminist philosophy as too politicized and therefore not philosophical enough (see, e.g., Alcoff 2012, 35). Such accusations cast philosophy as a rarefied field of abstract reflection that generates universal truths of experience, self, and the world. And yet, it is just this sort of universal pretense and posturing that has been critiqued as gendered by feminist philosophers (see, e.g., Bordo 1987). In making gender relevant for the doing of philosophy, feminist philosophers have transformed the field and demonstrated its relevance for thinking from, with, and about the messiness of reality, lived experience, and relationships. Far from detracting from its philosophical rigor, feminist philosophy’s rootedness in the political—understood here as normalized, often institutionalized, relations of power that structure society, institutions, lives, and relationships—grounds its relevance. The relevance of feminist and other similarly marginalized areas of philosophy such as Latinx, Black, Indigenous, Asian, Asian American, decolonial and postcolonial, non-­Western, disability, queer, and trans philosophies has, as Judith Butler points out, resulted in the embarrassing (for institutionalized mainstream philosophy) fact that most of what scholars in other fields take to be the most relevant work in philosophy is produced by scholars outside philosophy departments or by those whose academic homes are in philosophy departments but whose work is nonetheless delegitimated within the mainstream (Butler 2004, 233). As Butler puts it, “The term ‘philosophy’ has ceased to be in control of those who would define and protect its institutional parameters” (233). It is no accident that Butler first became aware of this phenomenon when lecturing on feminist philosophy early in her career. As she puts it, “It was not a question of whether I was teaching bad philosophy, or not teaching philosophy well, but whether my classes were philosophy at all” (2004, 242). Efforts to discredit feminist philosophy as not “real philosophy” continue to shape the experience of students and faculty who are interested in feminist philosophy. In the face of pressures to continuously prove oneself to be a “real philosopher,” some feel forced to prioritize developing expertise and working in more traditional continental or analytic areas to succeed in graduate school and on the job market, some take the risk and pursue feminist philosophy and fight their way to jobs

8   Hall and Ásta that are often at less prestigious institutions, some leave philosophy for more welcoming academic homes, and some leave academia altogether (see, e.g., Alcoff  2003,  2012; Dotson 2012; Saul 2013; Schutte 2012). To be a feminist philosopher is to be a philosopher who can’t take the institution for granted. As a result, there has been a lot of feminist philosophical work that takes the tools of canonical white male figures and uses them in ways their originators might never have supported, let alone imagined, to create philosophy that reflects and speaks to those whose lives and perspectives are excluded from the mainstream and to create a philosophy in which, as Mariana Ortega puts it, “a love of wisdom [is no longer a love] of exclusion” (2016, 220). For feminist philosophy, the personal is political is philosophical (see, e.g., Kittay 2010). As a result, while not every feminist philosopher specializes in ethics, the doing of feminist philosophy is nonetheless a profoundly ethical endeavor, in the broadest sense of “ethical.” As feminist, feminist philosophy has roots outside academic institutions and is, thus, accountable to those who are marginalized within and outside it. As a broadly ethical practice that is accountable to many constituencies, feminist philosophy seeks to make visible and address a wide range of exclusionary practices. For this reason, feminist philosophers are concerned about how citation has worked in exclusionary ways in the philosophical mainstream and in feminist philosophy itself. For example, feminist philosophers have critiqued the tendency in the mainstream to exclude relevant (even central) scholarship by women philosophers in articles and books (e.g., see Healy 2015); the tendency of work by white, Anglo feminist philosophers to be more seriously engaged than work by feminists of color and non-­Anglo feminists (e.g., see Ortega 2009, 62); the tendency of cisgender theorists, including feminist philosophers, to write about trans people or trans phenomena without citing, collaborating with, or seriously engaging work by trans scholars (e.g., see Stryker 2006; Bettcher 2019); the tendency of disability to be used as thought experiments without seriously engaging and citing work in disability studies or philosophy of disability (e.g., see Carlson 2010, 10); or the tendency to ignore and fail to take seriously non-­European and non-­Euro-­American philosophical histories, traditions, and work (e.g., see Schutte 2012). These are all citational issues, issues that reflect respect, attention, attunement, and regard. In a field that continues to ignore or discount feminist work and to marginalize contributions by theorists from underrepresented groups, citation is an ethical practice. “Citation,” Sara Ahmed writes, “is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow” (2017, 15–16). As feminist ethical practice, citation critically intervenes in the invisibilities created and sustained through mainstream philosophical erasures and other delegitimating practices. In her discussion of the meaning of a decolonial feminism, María Lugones asks, “How do we learn about each other? How do we do it without harming each other but with the courage to take up a weaving of the everyday that may reveal deep betrayals? How do we cross without taking over? With whom do we do this work? The theoretical here is immediately practical” (2010, 755). These questions are also about whom we cite, that is, to whom we

What Is Feminist Philosophy?   9 are responsible and accountable when we write or find that we have been given a place at a ­decision-making table. The ethical dimension of feminist philosophy also concerns the extent to which feminist analyses are intersectional, that is, the extent to which feminist philosophical work attends to the entanglement of gender with other systems of oppression. Just as feminist philosophers critique the gendered, racialized, and classed assumptions embedded in philosophical concepts, thought experiments, and positions, so too have some feminist philosophers critiqued the cisgendered, heteronormative, racialized, and classed assumptions within feminist philosophy itself. Important feminist philosophical work, especially by feminist philosophers of color, has critiqued exclusions and erasures within white/Anglo-­centered feminist philosophy (e.g., Lugones and Spelman  1983). And there have been important feminist critiques of additive and analogical conceptions of difference (e.g., race and gender analogies) that ultimately erase women of color (e.g., see Spelman 1988; Gines 2010). Thinking intersectionally, there is no single, unified voice or experience shared by all members of a social group. Assuming otherwise universalizes the experiences and perspectives of privileged members of the group (e.g., white/Anglo women) while ignoring and rendering invisible those of marginalized members of the group (e.g., women of color). As María Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman powerfully demonstrate in their classic essay “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice’” (1983), the question of who speaks about, with, and to whom within feminism or any other theory is also a matter of language and the privilege of those for whom everything is translated and the marginalization of those who must always translate their experiences, work, and worlds to be taken seriously in dominant contexts. Grappling with the ethical and political significance of ­differences within and between social groups, as well as the inequitable conferral of epistemic authority and credibility, involves the difficult work of dialogue across differences. As a result, much important feminist work has engaged questions of epistemic injustice and the politics of who can speak, with whom, and about what (e.g., see Code  1987; Spivak  1988; Fricker  2007; Alcoff  1991  2018, Medina  2013; Dotson  2011; Pohlhaus 2012).

Our Vision for the Volume In putting together the volume, we were guided by the following commitments: We wanted the volume to showcase the rich diversity of subject matter, approaches, and method among feminist philosophers. Feminist philosophers want good tools, independent of the toolbox in which they are to be found. Not only did we want both analytic and continental approaches represented—and some chapters fit squarely on one side or the other—but we also wanted work that draws on both or engages concepts and theories

10   Hall and Ásta that belong to many different philosophical traditions. It is, however, not only with regard to philosophical traditions that feminist philosophy is boundary bursting. Many feminist philosophers engage empirical and theoretical work in adjacent fields and produce truly interdisciplinary work. We wanted the volume to reflect all that richness. In addition to giving the reader an overview of feminist work in a particular area or on a particular topic, we asked authors to address the relationship between feminist and mainstream work in the area. As there has been considerable uptake of feminist work in some subareas of philosophy while in others feminist work remains decidedly marginal, we wanted authors to give readers their take on that. We also asked authors to look toward the future: what topics and themes are on the horizon? The relationship to the mainstream of philosophy varies considerably by subfield and topic, and in some subfields of feminist philosophy there is a desire for more integration with the mainstream, whereas in others there is not. We wanted the volume to reflect those differences. While this volume does not present a comprehensive account of all work in feminist philosophy or even all feminist perspectives on a particular topic—an impossible feat for a single volume—we believe the volume offers a compelling, informative snapshot of transformative work in feminist philosophy and its ongoing relevance for understanding and addressing connections between theory, lived experience, oppression in the world, and the possibility of resistance—that is, how philosophy and feminism continue to matter. The intended audience of the volume is broad: feminist philosophers and other philosophers interested in learning about feminist philosophy, undergraduate and graduate philosophy students interested in feminist approaches to a certain subject matter or tradition, and scholars and students in adjacent fields wanting an overview of feminist philosophical work on a topic. We hope all these populations will find material of use herein. Our authors do not share a single vision of what feminist philosophy is or should be, nor do they agree on matters of method. But they all share the political commitment to end the oppression of women and work toward that goal through their writing and scholarship. While the tensions within the feminist philosophy community can be especially painful at times, we believe the tensions themselves also have transformative power. We believe that actively listening to each other is key to moving forward on difficult issues facing our community. This requires us to foster environments where active listening can take place and to nurture communities of trust where people can recognize each other across differences. Such engagement is transformative, not only for the individuals involved, but also for the discipline of philosophy and the many communities we are all part of and to whom we are accountable.

Acknowledgments We are grateful to our contributors for their excellent contributions to this volume and the field of feminist philosophy. We also thank our editor, Lucy Randall, and assistant editor, Hannah Doyle, for all their help throughout this long process. Kim: I thank Jill Ehnenn for her support

What Is Feminist Philosophy?   11 and feedback and for being a source of joy in the deeply troubling political context in which this book was completed. And I thank Ásta for all the conversations and for her wisdom during this project. It has been wonderful to work on this book with you. Ásta: I thank Dore Bowen Solomon for her love and support as well as her presence and her vision. And I thank Kim for her thoughtfulness and her humor. I could not imagine a better collaborator.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Alcoff, Linda Martín. 1991. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique 20: 5–32. Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2003. “Introduction.” In Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy, ed. Linda Martín Alcoff, pp. 1–13. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2012. “Alien and Alienated.” In Reframing the Practice of Philosophy: Bodies of Color, Bodies of Knowledge, edited by George Yancy, 23–43. Albany: State University of New York Press. Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2013. “Philosophy’s Civil Wars,” APA Presidential Address. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 87: 16–43. Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2018. Rape and Resistance. Cambridge: Polity. Bartky, Sandra Lee. 1990. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York and London: Routledge. Bartky, Sandra Lee. 2003. “A Life Sentence in Bohemia.” In Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy, edited by Linda Martín Alcoff, 15–22. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2019. “What Is Trans Philosophy?” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 34 (4): 644–667. Bordo, Susan. 1987. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge. Carlson, Licia. 2010. The Faces of Intellectual Disability. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Code, Lorraine. 1987. Epistemic Responsibility. Providence, RI: Brown University Press. Dotson, Kristie. 2011. “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing.” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 26 (2): 236–57. Dotson, Kristie. 2012. “How Is This Paper Philosophy?” Comparative Philosophy 3 (1): 3–29. Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. New York: Oxford University Press. Gines, Kathryn T. (now Kathryn Sophia Belle). 2010. “Sartre, Beauvoir, and the Race/Gender Analogy: A Case for Black Feminist Philosophy.” In Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, edited by Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano, 35–51. Albany: State University of New York Press. Gines, Kathryn  T. (now Kathryn Sophia Belle). 2011. “Black Feminism and Intersectional Analyses: A Defense of Intersectionality.” Philosophy Today 55: 275–84. Gruen, Lori, and Alison Wiley. 2010. “Feminist Legacies/Feminist Futures: 25th Anniversary Special Issue.” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 25 (4): 725–32. Healy, Kieran. 2015. “Gender and Citation in Four General Interest Philosophy Journals.” Blog  post, 25 February, 2015. https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/02/25/genderand-citation-in-four-general-interest-philosophy-journals-1993–2013/

12   Hall and Ásta History of Women Philosophers and Scientists. n.d. https://historyofwomenphilosophers.org Kittay, Eva. 2010. “The Personal is Philosophical is Political: A Philosopher and Mother of a Cognitively Disabled Person Sends Notes from the Battlefield.” In Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, eds. Eva Kittay and Licia Carlson, 393–413. Malden, MA: Wiley. Lugones, María. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 25 (4): 742–59. Lugones, María, and Elizabeth Spelman. 1983. “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice.’” Women’s Studies International Forum 6 (6): 573–81. Mann, Bonnie, Erin McKenna, Camisha Russell, and Rocío Zambrana. 2019. “The Promise of Feminist Philosophy.” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 34 (3): 394–400. Medina, José. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. New York: Oxford University Press. Ortega, Mariana. 2009. “Being Knowingly, Lovingly Ignorant: White Feminists and Women of Color.” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 21 (3): 56–74. Ortega, Mariana. 2016. In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. Albany: State University of New York Press. Pohlhaus, Jr., Gaile. 2012. “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance.” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 27 (4): 715–35. Project Vox. n.d. https://projectvox.library.duke.edu Saul, Jennifer. 2013. “Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, and Women in Philosophy.” In Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?, edited by Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins, 39–60. New York: Oxford University Press. Schutte, Ophelia. 2012. “Attracting Latino/as to Philosophy: Today’s Challenges.” In Reframing the Practice of Philosophy: Bodies of Color, Bodies of Knowledge, edited by George Yancy. Albany: SUNY Press. Spelman, Elizabeth V. 1988. “Gender and Race: The Ampersand Problem in Feminist Thought.” In Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought, 114–32. Boston: Beacon Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Stryker, Susan. 2006. “(De)subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, pp. 1–17. New York: Routledge. UP Directory. n.d. https://updirectory.apaonline.org/Default.cshtml

Pa rt i I

F E M I N IS T E NGAGE M E N T S WITH PH I L O S OPH IC A L T R A DI T IONS

chapter 2

Femi n ist Engagem en ts w ith the History of Phil osoph y Charlotte Witt

Feminist engagement with the Western philosophical canon is not a recent development; indeed, it stretches back at least to the Renaissance in the work of early feminist thinkers like the poet and philosopher Lucrezia Marinella. In The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, Marinella uses an Aristotelian framework of bodily temperatures to argue for the superiority of women—a deeply ironic strategy of appropriation given Aristotle’s explicit and well-­known views on the inferiority of the female animal (Deslauriers 2017). Still, the appropriation of canonical philosophers for use in feminist theorizing is an important strand in feminist engagement with the philosophical canon. And our knowledge of the existence of philosophers like Lucrezia Marinella exemplifies another facet of feminist engagement with the philosophical canon, namely the ongoing transformation of the history of Western philosophy to include the presence and voices of women philosophers. Other feminist historians of philosophy focus on uncovering and criticizing the sexism or misogyny in the thought of canonical philosophers like Aristotle and Kant (and many others). Finally, the proliferation of feminist engagements with the history of philosophy, and the questions that they raise about how contemporary philosophy is related to its past, has inspired reflection by feminist historians on the nature and methods of their discipline. In response to the complexity and multifaceted nature of feminist engagement with the history of philosophy, I divide it into four types (Witt and Shapiro 2017):

1. Criticisms of the canon (or individual canonical philosophers) as misogynist 2. Appropriations of the thought of canonical philosophers

16   Witt

3. Revisions to the history of philosophy (the recovery of women philosophers) 4. Methodological reflections

This taxonomy is useful as a tool to organize a large and growing body of work. But it also raises an important issue. The projects that go under the title of feminist engagement with the history of philosophy are so varied and so diverse that we might wonder whether and how they are united. Moreover, there are apparent tensions between feminist philosophy that appropriates the ideas of a canonical philosopher, like Kant, and puts it to work in feminist theory, and scholarship that is critical of the misogyny of that very same philosopher. And, to consider another example, it is just not clear what the project of retrieving a woman philosopher like Lucrezia Marinella for the historical record has in common with the reflections of feminist scholars on methodological questions. Nonetheless, and despite these evident tensions, I think that these four types of feminist engagement with the history of philosophy all share in the common goal of recognition. In different ways feminist historians of philosophy, who work on, work with, and work against the history of philosophy as traditionally conceived, are challenging the philosophical community to recognize new figures as philosophers, new uses of canonical texts as legitimate, and new critical perspectives on them as significant. Feminist work on the history of philosophy is a recognition project. (Witt 2020)

What Is Recognition? The notion of recognition has its historical roots in Hegel’s philosophy, where it refers to the social character of subjectivity and the attainment of subjective freedom. It is through the mutual recognition by others that individuals can attain both selfconsciousness and, ultimately, freedom. Hence, recognition is both an epistemic ­ moment in the development of self-­consciousness and an ethical or political stage in human progress toward freedom. In contemporary political philosophy the concept of recognition has resurfaced in relation to multiculturalism and the demand that various social identities (e.g., racialized identities, gendered identities) be recognized by others and by social institutions. The contemporary notion of misrecognition captures both the epistemic aspect of recognition and its ethical or political dimension. To misrecognize an individual with regard to race or gender is both to make an epistemic error and to harm that individual due to the epistemic error. Hence, the epistemic and the political are intertwined in the contemporary use of the concept of recognition. The Hegelian and contemporary uses of the notion of recognition have some similarities but also important differences. For example, they are alike in that each describes an intersubjective approach to identity, and each connects identity with political and ethical standing. However, they differ in that Hegel’s view is dialectical and recognition is a moment in an unfolding teleological process, whereas multiculturalism presents a static

Feminist Engagements with the History of Philosophy   17 view of recognition as grounding and legitimating political representation. Still, there is a strong family resemblance between the Hegelian notion of recognition and its contemporary incarnation in the political theory of multiculturalism. Of course, feminist engagement with the history of philosophy is neither a theory of subjective development and freedom as in Hegel nor a theory of representation as in contemporary identity politics. However, the notion of recognition is nonetheless an appropriate and useful concept for understanding feminist engagement with the history of philosophy. Recognition, as I will use the term, is the acknowledgment of something’s existence or its validity (or both). Recognition describes both the epistemic act of acknowledging that something exists and the political act of accurately registering what it is that exists. Hence, it is a term with intertwined epistemic and normative aspects. Moreover, recognition is an intersubjective phenomenon; it is a relationship of acknowledgment between subjects concerning the existence and character of a topic of shared concern—in this case our shared understanding of who is a philosopher, what philosophy is, and how to interpret its history. These three aspects of recognition are clearly relevant to the feminist engagement with the history of philosophy that focuses on the existence and thought of previously unrecognized women philosophers, which inevitably has to address both questions of their existence and the philosophical character or value of their writing and thought. But I also think that feminist work that appropriates canonical philosophical thought to address contemporary issues in feminist theory is a type of recognition project—albeit in a less obvious fashion. It asks the philosophical community to see itself, to recognize itself and its history, in relation to feminist theoretical projects. It asks for the recognition of feminist thought as philosophical and as rooted in the philosophical tradition. In the case of critical accounts of canonical figures, feminist work challenges the philosophical community to recognize the shortcomings and omissions in its history in relation to contemporary feminist issues and practices, and in relation to the question: Who is a philosopher? Finally, the development of feminist perspectives on the history of philosophy has raised important questions about methodology, like how to integrate the newly “discovered” women philosophers into the plotline of the history of philosophy. It also poses questions about genre and the inclusion of forms of expression that do not resemble contemporary philosophical writing. That is, feminist engagements with the history of philosophy generate methodological questions directly relevant to the core questions of recognition: Who is a philosopher? What is philosophy? My conception of feminist engagement with the history of philosophy as a recognition project does not presume to capture the intentions or motives of all its practitioners, which might vary widely. In particular, in claiming that different kinds of feminist engagement with the history of philosophy can be usefully interpreted in relation to the concept of recognition, I am not committed to the view that participants would see their own scholarship in this light. Rather, I am suggesting that using the concept of recognition as the thread that weaves through feminist engagements with the history of philosophy allows us to appreciate this important work as both an epistemic and a political achievement.

18   Witt

The Existence of Women Philosophers According to the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edwards 1967), at the time the authoritative record for Western philosophy, in the entire history of philosophy there were only three women philosophers worthy of a named entry—in contrast to some nine hundred men.1 Fast forward fifty years to 2017 and the contemporary reference work of record for Western philosophy, the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, documents twenty-­five women philosophers worthy of a named entry.2 For the record, they are G. E. M. Anscombe, Hannah Arendt, Mary Astell, Margaret Cavendish, Émilie du Châtelet, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Lady Anne Conway, Simone de Beauvoir, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Fell, Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones, Catharine Macaulay, Lucrezia Marinella, Lady Damaris Masham, Harriet Taylor Mill, Ayn Rand, Madeleine de Scudéry, Mary Shepherd, Susan Stebbing, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Five more entries are under preparation, on Philippa Foot, Susanne Langer, Iris Murdoch, Edith Stein, and Simone Weil.3 More extensive lists of women philosophers are now available online.4 It is reasonable to wonder just what happened between 1967 and 2017 to change the face of philosophy. What happened was a huge and sustained scholarly effort primarily by feminist historians of philosophy to correct the standard, but very misleading, history of philosophy that was virtually devoid of women philosophers. This effort was led by early pioneers like Mary Ellen Waithe, whose four-­volume History of Women Philosophers recorded the existence of women philosophers from the Presocratics to the twentieth century. (Waithe 1987) Basic research on women philosophers in the early modern period has been, and continues to be, particularly fruitful.5 Many important works were edited, translated, and made available for teaching in an ongoing project. Similar efforts are underway concerning women philosophers of the nineteenth and the twentieth century.6 In what way is this a recognition project? How does it differ from mainstream history of philosophy? Recall that recognition has both an epistemic and a political dimension in that it acknowledges both the existence and the nature of a subject. It is in making a case for the validity of women philosophers of the early modern period that we can see 1  Women’s presence in histories of philosophy was not always this meager. For an informative discussion see Eileen O’Neill’s “Women in the History of Philosophy,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed July 14, 2017, http://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-­almanacs-­transcripts-­ and-­maps/women-­history-­philosophy. 2  The 2005 Encyclopedia of Philosophy also records the beginning of a sea change with thirty-­five entries for women philosophers including important figures from the early modern period. 3  Thanks to Uri Nodelman, senior editor at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for collecting and sending along this information. 4  The Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts of Women Philosophers is a compendium of core concepts associated with women philosophers: https://historyofwomenphilosophers.org/ecc/#hwps. 5  See, for example, Project Vox: https://projectvox.library.duke.edu/. 6  History of Women Philosophers and Scientists is an important online resource for the study of women philosophers: https://historyofwomenphilosophers.org/.

Feminist Engagements with the History of Philosophy   19 the political aspect of this scholarship most clearly. The political aspect of recognition, in turn, has at least two components. First, there is the problem of misrecognition. As an example of misrecognition, consider that there is often pushback by scholars to the status of these women as philosophers. For example, consider a debate between Alanen and Garber over whether Elizabeth of Bohemia was a philosopher or a “learned maid.” (Alanen 2004) Those working on women philosophers in the early modern period often face the threat of misrecognition of their subjects and have to address it either directly or indirectly. The second political component is that these philosophers were overlooked in encyclopedias and canon formation not randomly but because they were women.7 And that is unjust. Hence, a project devoted to their recovery is inherently political; it addresses an epistemic injustice. Let us look at another example. Teresa of Avila, one of just three women worthy of a very brief entry in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is another example of a woman philosopher, whose writing raises the issue of genre and the related question of whether or not she counts as a genuine philosopher. In the brief 1967 entry, Teresa is described as an important figure in the history of mysticism as well as an influential figure in the religious reforms of the Counter-­Reformation. Teresa of Avila is an example of a woman philosopher whose existence was recognized although her identity as a philosopher was not acknowledged. Recent work by historian of philosophy Christia Mercer contests the terms of this taxonomy by arguing that Teresa’s book on spiritual meditation, The Inner Castle, was very probably an important influence on Descartes’s Meditations. (Mercer 2017) Of particular note is the use by both philosophers of the demon trope— the idea that we might be systematically deceived by an evil demon and that therefore we should be wary of accepting our beliefs. By drawing out the similarities with Descartes’s Meditations, Mercer invites us to look beyond the genre of Teresa’s writing, which falls into the tradition of religious writing on mysticism, and to recognize its philosophical content. Mercer’s scholarship contributes to righting the lack of recognition of Teresa of Avila’s position in the history of philosophy as an influence on Descartes. It is also an argument for a more inclusive reading of the history of philosophy, one that incorporates many genres of writing. This is an example of the way in which feminist engagement with the history of philosophy raises an important methodological issue—in this case about the range or genre of philosophical writing. The recovery of women philosophers in the history of philosophy is a recognition project. In common with mainstream history of philosophy, it has an epistemic component in that it increases our understanding or knowledge of the history of philosophy, and it does so using recognized criteria for interpretation in the history of philosophy. But it also has an ethical or political component because it regularly faces the challenge of misrecognition, of needing to make the case that a woman philosopher was—indeed—a philosopher or that a particular genre of writing by a woman was philosophical or had philosophical content. 7  For a useful discussion of these issues (though not in the context of the concept of recognition) see Lisa Shapiro’s (2004) “Some Thoughts on Women’s Place in the History of Philosophy.”

20   Witt

Feminist Appropriation and Criticism of Canonical Philosophers Philosophers traditionally draw on the history of philosophy for inspiration; both for ideas that might be useful in a contemporary context and to locate a source of particularly misleading or damaging ideas. Both of these approaches view the history of philosophy as a resource for contemporary philosophical thinking. And we find both kinds of approaches to the history of philosophy in recent work by feminist historians. The thirty­six-­volume Re-­reading the Canon series provides both feminist appropriations and feminist critiques of canonical philosophers from Adorno to Spinoza, including a handful of prominent women philosophers. (Tuana 1994; Witt 2006) In what sense can feminist historians who either appropriate or criticize canonical philosophy in relation to contemporary philosophical concerns be characterized as engaging in a recognition project? Recall that the concept of recognition, as I am using it, has an epistemic and a ­normative/political component as well as an intersubjective dimension. Feminist appropriations of concepts from the history of philosophy display these three features as well. The issue of appropriation of traditional philosophical ideas for use in feminist theory is politically contested, not simply in particular cases, but in general. For example, if the ideas are bound up in a philosophical perspective that is misogynist, there is a problem of extracting the valuable ideas and the question of whether or not they are genuinely useful for feminist purposes. Are these ideas ones that contemporary feminist theory really wants to inherit? As Cynthia Freeland notes, “The inheritance perspective can be seen to perpetuate oppressive relations insofar as it seeks legitimacy for feminists now by taking possession of a tradition that we should perhaps not be so quick to claim.” (Freeland 2000, 389) Hence, in addition to the epistemic task of showing how and in what ways a particular set of ideas from the history of philosophy might be useful for feminist theorizing, the feminist historian faces an additional political challenge to the entire enterprise. The defense of the utility of the history of philosophy for purposes of contemporary feminist theorizing is double; it is both epistemic and political. Moreover, the appropriation of canonical philosophical material for feminist purposes is intersubjective in that it asks for the recognition from the philosophical community that the tradition has resources to address feminist issues, which thereby become recognizable as shared, philosophical issues.8

8  It is worth noting that the task facing feminist appropriation of the tradition differs in type and in scope from an apparently similar challenge facing historians of philosophy with regard to individual philosophers’ unacceptable political views—for example, Frege’s or Heidegger’s anti-­Semitism. The difference in type is that would-­be borrowers of ideas from Frege or Heidegger have available to them a norm of interpretation that permits segregation of a thinker’s mere political opinions or personality from his or her philosophical views. The difference in scope is that feminist appropriators face a long and complex history of exclusion, which makes the strategy of integration into the philosophical canon inherently complex and contested.

Feminist Engagements with the History of Philosophy   21 Feminist work on the canon of the critical type locates the origin of a problematic c­ ontemporary philosophical view in a historical, canonical philosopher. This kind of scholarship can also be seen in light of the concept of recognition. It intertwines epistemological claims about textual interpretation and a political view about a text or author as a source of a contemporary political concept or presupposition. Feminists who engage with the tradition critically suggest that contemporary philosophers read the philosophical canon with an eye to the origins of problematic concepts and frameworks. Consider Emmanuela Bianchi’s (2014) recent book The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos, which invites us to use contemporary notions of sex and gender as lenses through which to read the Aristotelian corpus: “However, holding sex and gender as central guiding questions in an analysis of the texts, as I have done, reveals a structural commitment to gender hierarchy throughout the Aristotelian corpus that cannot, it seems to me, reasonably be evaded” (227). Bianchi views Aristotle’s text as a key source of a perspective of the cosmos (reality) as ordered by a gendered hierarchy, an idea that combines an epistemic claim about what we find in the texts with a hermeneutic perspective that reads Aristotle in relation to a contemporary philosophical problematic. In contrast, Sophia Connell’s (2016) Aristotle on Female Animals: A Study of the Generation of Animals shows how sexist assumptions have played a role in misinterpretations of the female animal in Aristotle’s theory as contributing only entirely passive, inert matter. Some of the best recent work on Aristotle’s theory of animal reproduction has considered the question of his sexism in some detail with interesting results. Sometimes bringing new critical questions to a canonical text provides the impetus for original and interesting interpretations. This type of critical scholarship approaches canonical texts from new perspectives that originate in contemporary philosophical thought.

Methodological Reflections The two previous sections have described different types of feminist engagement with the history of philosophy and made the argument that they could all be seen as facets of a recognition project that combines epistemic and normative factors with an intersubjective dimension. However, the apparent differences among the projects are also significant and raise important methodological questions about the history of philosophy. Is the purpose of the history of philosophy to work on making the history more complete by understanding the place of an increasing number of individual philosophers in their historical contexts? Or is the purpose of the history of philosophy to highlight those philosophers whose ideas resonate most with contemporary philosophical concerns? These two characterizations of the history of philosophy have dominated discussions of the nature, methods, and value of the history of philosophy in the Anglo-­American tradition.9 9  For an interesting and influential analysis that questions the opposition between appropriationists and contextualists in the Anglo-­American tradition, see Margaret Wilson (1992). For the addition of a third methodological approach identified with continental philosophy see Philosophy and Its History: Aims and Methods in the Study of Early Modern Philosophy (Laerke et al. 2013).

22   Witt Using slightly different vocabulary, Cynthia Freeland contrasts the exegetical history of philosophy and the philosophical history of philosophy.10 Recent feminist reflections on historiographical issues focus on the shortcoming of the “presentist” approach to the history of philosophy as inadequate to the project of restoring women philosophers to the history of philosophy. “In the Anglo-­American philosophy of the postanalytic period, the prevailing view of the history of philosophy is that it should concern itself with what philosophers today find relevant and interesting in the philosophy of the past.” (Hutton 2015, 8) Sarah Hutton argues “that in order to reintegrate women philosophers into the history of philosophy, we need a properly historicized history of philosophy that does not dismiss the historical study of philosophy as mere ‘history of ideas,’ and that is not dictated by modern interests and the philosophical assumptions of the present.” (Hutton  2015, 9) Women philosophers will remain invisible in the history of philosophy if its contours are shaped by contemporary concerns. Notice that this is an argument about the appropriate method and purpose of the history of philosophy in which epistemic and political concerns are intermingled. Hence, at a higher, reflective level, it shares common features with other facets of the recognition project. Another methodological issue raised by feminist historians of philosophy concerns the topic of philosophical genre. Neither Elizabeth of Bohemia (letters) nor Teresa of Avila (spiritual meditations) wrote in genres that are easily recognizable as philosophical writing today. Ruling their work out as not philosophical because it was not written in a specific philosophical genre is an example of the presentism mentioned earlier. Presentism concerns not simply the content of philosophical writing but also its form. The issue of what counts as philosophical writing, in turn, is important in part because that question is integral to the lack of recognition and the misrecognition of women philosophers. Hence the question of genre in philosophical writing is both an epistemic and a political issue, and these two facets are deeply interwoven. When feminists engaged with the history of philosophy reflect upon their methods and purposes, we find the mingling of epistemic issues and political considerations. We find them engaged in a recognition project.

Conclusion When I began graduate school in philosophy in 1975, there were no women philosophers on the curriculum. Indeed, one of the prelim examinations then required of doctoral students was titled “The Great Man” in case there were any doubt about either the gender of great thinkers or the existence and the status of women philosophers. Feminist work on the history of philosophy, the recognition project, is changing the face of 10  See also Freeland’s important discussion of feminist work in the history of philosophy in “Feminism and Ideology in Ancient Philosophy.”

Feminist Engagements with the History of Philosophy   23 philosophy because it has begun to erode the Great Man view of the history of philosophy. All three aspects of the recognition project are important to this endeavor. It is important to recognize the many women philosophers unjustly excluded from the history of philosophy. It is important both to record the misogyny in canonical philosophers and to connect feminist theorizing to the philosophical tradition. And, finally, it is important to make feminist engagement with the history of philosophy part of the ongoing methodological reflections about the nature and methods of the history of philosophy.

References Alanen, Lilli. 2004. “Descartes and Elizabeth: A Philosophical Dialogue?” In Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, edited by Lilli Alanen and Charlotte Witt, 193–218. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishing. Bianchi, Emmanuela. 2014. The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos. New York: Fordham University Press. Bourchert, Donald. ed, 2005. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan. Connell, Sophia. 2016. Aristotle on Female Animals: A Study of the Generation of Animals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deslauriers, M. 2017. “Marinella and her interlocutors: hot blood, hot words, hot deeds”. In Philos Stud 174, 2525–2537. Edwards, Paul, ed. 1967. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: Macmillan. Freeland, Cynthia. 2000. “Feminism and Ideology in Ancient Philosophy.” Apeiron 33 (4, December): 365–406. Huseyinzadegan, Dilek. 2018. “For What Can the Kantian Feminist Hope? Constructive Complicity in Appropriations of the Canon.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 4, (1). Article 3. doi:10.5206/fpq/2018.1.3. Hutton, Sarah. 2015. “ ‘Blue-Eyed Philosophers Born on Wednesdays’: An Essay on Women and History of Philosophy.” Monist 98 (1): 1, 7–20. Kourany, Janet. 1998. Philosophy in a Feminist Voice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Laerke, Mogens, Justin E. H. Smith, and Eric Schliesser, eds. 2013. Philosophy and Its History: Aims and Methods in the Study of Early Modern Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mercer, Christia. 2017. “Descartes’ Debt to Teresa of Avila, or Why We Should Work on Women in the History of Philosophy.” Philosophical Studies 174 (10): 2539–55. O’Neill, Eileen. 1998. “Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History.” In Philosophy in a Feminist Voice, edited by Janet Kourany. Shapiro, Lisa. 2004. “Some Thoughts on the Place of Women in Early Modern Philosophy.” In Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, edited by Lilli Alanen and Charlotte Witt, 219–50. Tuana, Nancy ed. 1994. Re-reading the Canon. Penn State University Press. Waithe, Mary Ellen. 1987. A History of Women Philosophers. Vols. 1–4. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Wilson, Margaret. 1992. “History of Philosophy in Philosophy Today; and the Case of the Sensible Qualities.” Philosophical Review 101 (1): 191–243. Witt, Charlotte. 2006. “Feminist Interpretations of the Philosophical Canon.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31 (2).

24   Witt Witt, Charlotte, and Lisa Shapiro. 2016. “Feminist History of Philosophy.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 ed.), ed. Edward  N.  Zalta. http://plato.stanford. edu/archives/spr2016/entries/feminism-femhist/. Witt, Charlotte. 2020. “The Recognition Project: Feminist History of Philosophy” In Methodological Reflections on Women’s Contribution and Influence in the History of Philosophy ed. Sigridur Thorgeisdottir and Ruth Hagengruber, 29–42. Dordrecht: Springer Publishing.

Chapter 3

Fem i n ism i n A ncien t Phil osoph y Anne-Marie Schultz

Feminists face several challenges when interpreting the ancient Greek philosophical tradition. Despite the presence of strong female characters in the literature of the ancient Greek world (Andromache, Penelope, Medea, Antigone), women seldom appear in philosophical texts at all, leaving aside the obvious exception of Diotima in Plato’s Symposium. Although we have the inspiring works of Sappho (ca. 610–570 bce), not to mention other female lyric poets from the fifth and sixth century bce (Cleobulina, Telesilla, Myrtis, and Praxilla), women seem not to be among the notable philosophical writers in the ancient Greek world. The history of ancient Greek philosophy unfolds as a largely masculine enterprise. Female figures do occasionally appear in philosophical texts, but often in a problematic light. Hesiod (ca. 700 bce) accords Gaia an originary place in his fourfold vision of the cosmos (Theogony, line 116). However, he also characterizes Pandora as the source of evils and suffering of humanity (Theogony, lines 560–612). Jean-­ Pierre Vernant describes this train of imagery, remarking that “femininity acts like death” for the Greeks (1991, 101). Parmenides (ca. 510 bce) describes the important role the goddess, maidens, and mares plays in leading him along the path of being. See Fragment A 1–10 (Graham 2010a, 211). Unfortunately, his philosophy, until recently, has been interpreted as upholding a rigid patriarchal logic. Peter Kingsley (1997) offers a promising rereading of the importance of the female goddess that may provide a foundation for future feminist reassessments of Parmenides’s work. Plato’s evocative proposals for the education of women in Republic V appear to offer a promising moment for women in the history of ancient Greek philosophy. However, feminists often regard Socrates’s treatment of Xanthippe as a harsh banishment from his final philosophical conversation (Phaedo, 60b). His subsequent exhortation for his students not to break into tears and act like the very women he has sent away (Phaedo, 117d) further reinforces contemporary assessments of Socrates (469 bce–399 bce) and Plato (428 bce–348 bce) as misogynistic thinkers. For an alternative reading, see Schultz

26   Schultz and McLain (forthcoming). Aristotle’s physical and biological works consistently describe the female as defective matter and relegates the role of women, even in reproduction, as the ground in which the male seed grows. Aristotle (384 bce–322 bce) regards female cognitive capacities as limited and their capacity for moral development limited as well. Similar observations pervade Aristotle’s corpus to such a degree that Charlotte Witt and Lisa Shapiro pose some form of this question: “Are Aristotle’s theories intrinsically gendered and sexist, so that gender cannot be removed without altering the theories themselves?” (2016). During the Hellenistic period (323 bce–31 bce), women “benefitted from great opportunities to receive a literary education” (Plant 2004, 5). The philosophical assessment of women in the Stoic, Epicurean, Skeptic, and Cynic literature improves. The opportunity for direct philosophical study in at least some of the schools also emerges. Nonetheless, there is an abundant amount of patriarchal discourse and misogynistic cultural practices to come to terms with as a contemporary feminist philosopher. Given such a daunting legacy of negative attitudes toward women in particular and toward the feminine as a concept, one might well ask, as Claire Colebrook does, “Why read the Greeks today? Why would, or should, a feminist attend to the ancient Greek legacy?” (2010, 177). If the thinkers of the Greek tradition are “(un)redeemably sexist, masculinist, or phallocentric” (Bar On 1993, xi), it seems unlikely that feminists would find helpful resources for contemporary feminist concerns in the ancient philosophical landscape. Wouldn’t feminists simply be better off leaving the ancient world behind and focusing on pressing social and political concerns facing us today? While such a position is understandable, feminist scholars have, nonetheless, engaged the ancient philosophical landscapes in a variety of productive ways. This chapter surveys the diverse ways in which feminist scholars have developed a rich body of literature that engages the ancient Greek philosophical world. Feminist philosophical engagements with the ancients started in the 1970s. Julie Ward characterizes this early work as “written in the wake of what might be called ‘second wave’ feminist thinking, one that may be characterized by a kind of gynocentric theorizing” (1996, xiv). Groundbreaking articles by Arlene Saxonhouse (1976), Christine Allen (1975), Susan Okin (1977), Julia Annas (1976), and others set the stage for a rich feminist engagement with Plato’s dialogues. Early feminist engagements with Aristotle include Cynthia Freeland (1982), Andrea Nye (1989), and others. Since that time, the scholarship that addresses the intersection between feminist thinking and the ancient world has steadily increased. Several important anthologies in the 1990s provide a range of ways that feminists engage the ancient world. See Bar On (1993), Tuana (1994), Ward (1996), and Freeland (1998). Charlotte Witt and Lisa Shapiro note that “by means of these criticisms, feminist philosophers are enlarging the philosophical canon and re-­evaluating its norms, in order to include women in the philosophical ‘us’” (2016). To place this survey in a broader historical context, I briefly address the importance of feminist engagements with and assessments of the history of philosophy more generally. Genevieve Lloyd’s (1984) The Man of Reason and Susan Bordo’s (1987) The Flight to Objectivity explain how a particular view of reason as masculine in turn shapes the view

Feminism in Ancient Philosophy   27 of women that has pervaded the history of philosophy so deeply that it is often difficult to think of philosophy outside of this context. How scholars engaged in retelling this comprehensive story of philosophy differs depending on interest and emphases. However, the view of philosophy as the exclusive domain of reason, characterized best by the masculine intellectual capacity, has numerous pernicious effects ranging from complete exclusion of feminine voices, to the marginalization of philosophical perspective different from the dominant rational mode, to the ongoing dismissal of the importance of sexual difference and gender identity in philosophical discourse.

Recovering Lost Voices in the Pythagorean Tradition One important aspect of contemporary feminist work in ancient philosophy involves the recovery of underrecognized female writers and voices. Charlotte Witt (2006) outlines the history of the exclusion of women from standard historical surveys of philosophy. While strides have been made to locate feminine writers in other historical epochs, particularly the early modern period, the problem of canon exclusion is still quite manifest in the ancient world. For example, Daniel Graham’s (2010a, 2010b) The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy will revolutionize the study of the Presocratic thinkers. Unfortunately, it contains no writing from a female Presocratic philosopher. This exclusion may result from problems of authorial authenticity and textual transmission. For example, Peter Adamson argues that even when we know about the existence of an ancient female philosopher, it is difficult to establish that she, in fact, wrote the texts attributed to her. He suggests, for instance, that someone simply could be taking on the persona of a Pythagorean woman. He elaborates further, “Unfortunately, it’s impossible to tell for sure the gender of their true authors. The letters were composed centuries after the lifetimes of the women who supposedly wrote them, and form just one part of the more general phenomenon of pseudonymous Pythagorean literature. So the question is not really whether the author of the letters of Theano was Theano, but whether it was a woman or a man who adopted ‘Theano’ as a pseudonym” (2016). Even if that is the case, as Mary Ellen Waithe (1987) notes, there had to be the existence of Pythagorean female philosophers for later authors to use their authority. Prominent Pythagorean female philosophers include Theano (ca. 580 bce), Arignote (ca. 550 bce), Myia (ca. 550 bce), and Themistoclea (ca. 600 bce). The Pythagorean tradition is perhaps the highpoint for the inclusion of women in ancient Greek philosophy. Recognizing their pervasiveness in this tradition validates the recovery project in important ways. If we were to rework this aspect of Pythagoreanism into the history of philosophy, we would see that women had a prominent place in the very beginnings of philosophy. When talking about Aesara’s natural law theory, Waithe remarks, “In the Pythagorean view, women are not peripheral to social justice, they

28   Schultz make it happen” (1987, 25). The relative equality of women in the Pythagorean tradition provides a helpful model of harmonia and reciprocity in philosophical dialogue, perhaps one that Socrates and Plato explicitly emulated. Kris McLain (2016b) studies these writers and others, such as Phintys of Sparta. Originally, Phintys was regarded as a Presocratic philosopher; however, the textual analysis of her word usage indicates that the earliest she could have lived would be ca. 350 bce and no later than 100 bce. She may well be writing in direct response to Aristotle’s discussion of Spartan women in the Politics. Witt and Shapiro note that this recovery project has some difficulties: “The women philosophers restored to the tradition by feminist hands are not all proto-­feminists nor do they speak in a uniform, and different, voice from their male peers” (2016). While one can question the contemporary relevance of this project, it seems helpful in taking the feminist project forward to know the philosophical past, and a more accurate understanding of our philosophical past helpfully informs our philosophical present. Beyond that, some models of human flourishing and philosophical practice in the ancient world might help reorient our own self-­understanding today. This philosophical recovery project intersects with the important work that feminists are doing in other fields. Many feminist scholars in classics and history have done important work uncovering the complex role of women in Greek society and determining how the various ancient societal structures inform the philosophical texts of the Greek world. Although this important work is often done by scholars outside of philosophy, philosophical feminist engagements with the ancients benefit from it. For example, Andrea Nye’s (2013) Socrates and Diotima argues for a direct link between the historical existence of Diotima and the early matriarchal cultures of the Mediterranean. The recovery of the historical roots of Aspasia also depends on engagement with the classical scholarship (Henry  1995). Brooke Holmes (2012) helpfully reconsiders the relationship between sex, gender, and nature in ancient texts and brings that work into conversation with contemporary theories of sex, gender, and materiality and argues that we have not yet exhausted the resources of the ancient world for reflecting on our current situation.

Plato Feminist engagements with Plato often begin on an optimistic note. Most scholars give Plato significant credit for a sustained articulation of the necessity of educating women to be guardians of the city, in Republic V. Similarly, the inspiring presence and philosophy of Diotima in the Symposium receives praise. Other dialogues, even on the face of it, are more challenging to view in feminist terms. For example, the Phaedo presents challenges because of the appearance of Xanthippe and because of its sustained critique of embodiment, which is associated with the feminine in the Greek psyche. The description of the chora in the Timaeus is initially, and perhaps irretrievably, problematic. In addition to these oft-­cited

Feminism in Ancient Philosophy   29 dialogues, the Phaedrus, the Laws, the Theaetetus, the Menexenus, the Apology, and the Crito all offer important evidence for assessing Plato’s views on women and the feminine. Initially, it is tempting to read the Republic and the Symposium in proto-­feminist terms. On the face of it, Socrates seems to be arguing for a kind of gender equality, a world where the social roles people engage in are defined on the merit of their capacity for excellence in that capacity, not on preconceived notions about which role women and men are expected to play in society. Indeed, Socrates claims to have learned much of his knowledge about love from a woman trained in philosophy, which is almost unheard of in his day and age. Beyond that, when Socrates suggests the raising of children in common and the education of women as guardians of the city, he seems to be envisioning the kind of widespread social changes that would need to occur to support such a vision of equality between the genders. However, Plato is a complex writer, and this proposal, along with the others that the enigmatic Socrates makes, is laced with layers of irony. Indeed, feminist scholars have responded to Socrates’s presentation of Diotima’s ideas and his proposals in the Republic in a variety of ways. The range of opinion on this issue gives some indication of the difficulty in unraveling the complexity of Plato’s thought. However, I think it is fair to say that most feminist scholars do not regard Plato in ­sympathetic terms with respect to seeing him as a proto-­contemporary feminist. Elizabeth Spelman remarks that “Plato’s insight was to see that biology is not destiny, and, in this fundamental sense, he is a feminist” (1994, 104). Elsewhere, Spelman also considers how Plato’s presentation of the souls is gendered. Souls are not alike. Male gendered souls are more valued than female gendered souls with respect to the capacity that the soul has to philosophize. Females with male souls are the ones with the ability to engage in philosophical thinking. It is true that Plato’s thought still upholds radical social inequality and hierarchy. Spelman refers to him as “inegalitarian to the core” (1988, 4). However, Plato’s dialogues consistently portray how philosophers come into conflict with political power structures. Viewed in this light, Socrates himself might become a relevant model to emulate when feminists who are committed to various understandings of truth, justice, and liberation come into conflict with the concrete social realities of their day. Socrates fought injustice in his city, both when democrats and when tyrants ruled it. So too feminists work against injustice in their cities regardless of which political regime holds the power. Socrates can be as viable a role model as the suffragettes. I turn now to assess various feminist engagements with Plato’s pervasive use of the feminine as a metaphysically rich and varied metaphor. Some of the images of the feminine are more positive and generative. For example, Plato uses the metaphor of weaving to describe political statesmanship in the Statesman. He uses the metaphor of midwifery to describe Socrates’s philosophical activity in the Theaetetus. He employs metaphors of reproduction throughout Diotima’s speech in the Symposium and metaphors of intercourse and maternal feeding to describe the soul’s relationship with the forms in both the Republic and the Phaedrus. It is important to note, as Page DuBois (1988, 145) does, that positive aspects of these uses of the feminine are often reinscribed in the words and deeds of Plato’s Socrates. Irigaray sees this Platonic appropriation of the feminine largely as an effacement of the

30   Schultz feminine voice. Irigaray notes that Socrates “borrows her wisdom and power, declares her his initiator, his pedagogue, on matters of love, but she is not invited to teach or eat” (1988, 32). It is true that Plato’s Socrates overtakes Diotima’s own voice. Nonetheless, the fact that Plato consistently describes Socrates’s philosophical activity with feminine metaphors of weaving, midwifery, and reproduction in beauty is striking. The pervasive use of these metaphors suggests to me not that Plato is trying to cover over feminine voices, but that he is trying to bring them into philosophical light. Whether he is doing this for what we might call “feminist reasons” remains an open question. As Wendy Brown (1994) puts it, this Socratic appropriation of the feminine is one of the many ways that the dialogues combat pervasive social norms like the hypermasculinity of Athenian culture. Brown writes, “Plato engages in a critique of the socially male modes of thinking, speaking, and acting prevalent in his epoch and milieu” (1994, 158). Other uses of the feminine metaphors like the chora are more challenging to see in productive feminist terms, because it devalues the material dimensions of physical being. Though the feminine, the chora, much like Hesiod’s Gaia, in a fundamental way brings forth creation, the feminine is largely absent or overlooked in the unfolding process. Kristin Sampson explains that the feminine, though responsible for the imperfect copies of creation, is “an ideally empty space, devoid of any properties of its own” (2004, 19). She, along with other scholars, calls attention to the fact that the feminine is associated with a womb, mother earth, and a cave. In these various Platonic accounts of the receptacle of the feminine, “the cave/womb is thus presented both as a necessary condition and as something it is necessary to transcend to achieve full insight into the real world of ideas” (Sampson 2004, 21). Similarly, the pervasive dualism appears to be a difficult challenge to overcome insofar as dualism denigrates the physical and the emotional, which are associated with the feminine. But scholars like Catherine Zoller (2018) are engaged in reassessment of Plato’s physical dualism in the Phaedo. Anne-­Marie Schultz’s (2013) work on narrative and emotions also problematizes a rigid dualistic reading of Plato. Sara Brill’s (2013) understanding of plasticity of soul and Zoller’s (2018) rereading of Plato and the body open new spaces for a reconsideration of how the feminine might be regarded in a more positive, less body-­negative light. In the ongoing reassessment of standard Platonic doctrines like mind-­body dualism, intellectualism, and idealism in light of feminist concerns, we may well come to see that Plato offers us the resources to emerge out of our own caves of privilege and prejudice, helping us see that differences need not divide nor be covered over in the pursuit of collective freedom.

Aristotle Cynthia Freeland describes Aristotle as “paradigmatic of Western Philosophical Sexism” (1994, 145). Indeed, Aristotle’s explicit views on women are abundant and

Feminism in Ancient Philosophy   31 universally derogatory. Feminists frequently note that he regards women as not fully rational. In Aristotle’s view, women lack the capacity for full moral development as well. On the material level, Aristotle consistently articulates the problem of female offspring that they are made of defective matter that should be male. Beyond what is explicitly stated throughout his large corpus, perhaps even more alarming for feminists, his influence on the development of an anti-­female bias on the West is significant, perhaps surpassing both Plato and Christianity. Unlike Plato, it is difficult to claim that Aristotle writes dramatically or ironically, though the metaphors he draws on throughout his biological works are suggestive. Prudence Allen’s (1997) The Concept of Women delineates the extent of his influence. We do not have recourse to the same way of contextualizing some of his negative remarks as we do with Plato. There are no explicitly positive remarks about female philosophical or moral capacity to balance his negative views with, as is the case with Plato. Also, Aristotle’s writing does not employ more metaphorical uses of the feminine, which, in some scholars’ eyes, makes it possible to salvage Plato from the misogynistic camp though keeping him in it in the eyes of others. Not surprisingly, the early engagements with Aristotle were largely negative, having a “polemical, often angry tone” (Freeland 1998, 2). Freeland quips, “feminists have found much to disparage and little to salvage” (Freeland 1998, 2). For example, in Words of Power, Andrea Nye (1997) attacks the Aristotelian logic itself, suggesting that it is too abstract and conceptual to be a helpful tool for feminist considerations. More recently, feminist engagements with Aristotle have turned toward considering what we leave behind when we leave Aristotle out of our philosophical considerations. For example, there is nothing necessarily at odds with feminism and formal logic. Despite what one might call a rocky start in the relationship between Aristotle and contemporary feminism, feminists have engaged Aristotle’s work in substantive ways. They have developed aspects of his metaphysical and ethical thought that have surprising resources for feminist concerns. Aristotle’s writings cover a broad spectrum of topics ranging from biology to metaphysics, rhetoric, logic, and epistemology. Greenhout (1998) offers an assessment of the various applications of Aristotle’s ethical thinking. She remarks that Aristotle “incorporates the emotions as essential to adequate rationality,” that he is “congenial to conceptions of the self as situated, particular, and enmeshed in social relationships,” and that he “recognizes the particularity and situationedness of ethical decision making, and that human nature is inescapably social” (1998, 172). His emphasis on the role of emotion in moral decision making plays an important role in care ethics and Nussbaum’s understanding of a capacity-­based feminism. Despite Aristotle’s own devaluing of the moral and rational capacities of women, he does assert the importance of the emotions in the moral life and, in that sense, offers an important corrective to Socratic intellectualism. Koziak writes, “A well-­founded feminist politics should address how to incorporate and educate the emotional capacities of citizens” (1998, 261). Hirshman writes, “Aristotle writings on virtue ethics are the most ambitious work in the philosophical tradition addressing the critical question facing feminism and contemporary political theory generally today; the purpose and limits of equality” (1998, 202).

32   Schultz Aristotle’s biological and metaphysical works have also received a great deal of attention from feminist scholars, though again, some of the early work in this area was aimed at showing how thorough misogyny pervades his thinking. Deslauriers offers an important corrective to the general understanding of how sex and essence pervade Aristotle’s teleological conception of nature (2009). More recent work, particularly with respect to the concept of hylomorphism, has had surprising value for feminist concerns. For example, Emanuela Bianchi’s (2014) The Feminine Symptom shows the complex ways that concepts of gender permeate Aristotle’s cosmological thinking. According to Bianchi, the feminine upholds Aristotle’s worldview even as he consistently regards the feminine as “a fault, a misstep, and a deviation in the teleological transmission from father to son” (2014, 3). Working in the French psychoanalytic tradition, Bianchi uncovers the use of hylomorphism for political liberation. Sarah Borden Sharkey makes a similar argument in the analytic register. She writes, “Aristotle’s metaphysics of the person can, it seems to me, be used to articulate a particularly subtle and theoretically powerful understanding of gender that may offer an extremely useful tool for making distinctively feminist arguments” (2016, ix). Witt (2006) also focuses on the value of hylomorphism. She uses Aristotle’s view “to suggest an alternative view according to which nature itself contains norms and values” (Witt 2006, 120). Emanuela Bianchi ultimately applies Aristotle’s view in the political realm upholding the same interconnectedness of domains of inquiry that mark Aristotle’s works. She writes, “The ineliminable persistence of aleatory feminism as a mobilizing of the feminine symptom represents a utopian possibility immanent to both patriarchal metaphysics and hierarchical regimes, that of undermining those gendered oppositions that do so much work to structure and uphold them; subject and object, agent and patient, ruler and ruled” (Bianchi 2014, 24).

Later Greek Philosophy In her landmark work, Therapy of Desire, Martha Nussbaum (1994) creates a female character, Nikidion. At various stages in the narrative, Nussbaum asks us to imagine how this philosophically inclined female would have to comport herself to study at the various philosophical schools of antiquity. Nussbaum follows Nikidion’s hypothetical march through the history of pedagogical options available to her. She describes the necessity of cross-­dressing to attend Aristotle’s school, as the real-­life Lasthenia of Mantinea and Axiothea of Philesia did to attend the Academy. Nikidion would find herself welcomed into the Epicurean ranks. It is remarkable that Epicurus opened his school to women of all classes. Although Epicurus did not teach formally, a woman such as Nikidion could join the community if she had the ability to leave behind her life in the city. Diogenes helpfully notes that Epicurus addresses his writing to men and women. Elizabeth Asmis writes, “The early Stoics appear to advocate for the equality of women with respect to the virtues” (1996, 68). It is unclear whether this sense of equality

Feminism in Ancient Philosophy   33 was aimed at equality for women per se or was more an assertion that “any woman is equal to any other woman or man as a sexual partner” (Asmis 1996, 69). However, even if this Stoic view of women aimed to overturn sexual mores, it still reflects the larger Stoic view that we are all part of the same human circle. This view is certainly an improvement on previous Greek conceptions of the intrinsic worth of women. They are included in the circle of humanity: “In the wisest circle, all humans have their humanity in common. In the special community of the good, what is common is virtue. If women are capable of virtue, then both men and women will have each other’s virtue in common” (Asmis 1996, 71). However, the Stoics have what Aikin and McGillRutherford term an “uneven track record” (2014, 1). They note, “Stoics, despite their progressive views in principle, were socially conservative in practice” (Akin and McGill-­Rutherford 2014, 1). This focus on traditional roles is reflected in that the Stoics also wrote a great deal about marriage, which suggests some interest in the status of women. Asmis explores “how the Stoics transformed traditional ideas on marriage” (1996, 76). For example, she notes that Antipater argued for an “equal role in supporting the household” (1996, 79). However, Aiken and McGill-­Rutherford suggest that if one wants to develop a Stoic feminism, “the place to start is with the Stoic notion of natural law and not with their views on marriage” (2014, 24). Hopefully, this line of investigation will continue. Women could also associate with Cynics. Waithe writes, “That Hipparkhia chooses this rugged life is attested to by Diogenes Laertius, Clement of Alexandria, Antipater of Sidon and the Suda” (1987, 207). Antipater even recounts a remnant of her voice: “I have not wanted the jewel on the cloak nor bindings for my feet.” It seems that she, along with the history of ancient Greek male philosophers, regarded nothing as “worthwhile as seeking wisdom” (1987, 208).

Further Ground for Research It remains an open question how best to engage the history of philosophy as a feminist scholar. For example, is it feminist to show how the famous men of the philosophical canon engaged in exclusionary thinking and how their legacy still functions in our world today? Is it feminist to show how, despite their exclusionary practices, there are aspects of their thought that, in fact, support feminist concerns? Is it in the best interest of feminism simply to leave the canon and its entire pernicious legacy behind? Perhaps foreseeing this current state of affairs with respect to feminism, Hirshman writes, “if Aristotle’s philosophy cannot be separated from its objectionable associations, perhaps its similarity to contemporary feminist theory is reason for concern, rather than celebration. Or at least for irony” (1998, 228). While many aspects of ancient philosophy remain an uneasy fit in today’s feminist landscape, its resources are promising as a means of refashioning the conception of feminism itself. Feminism today is in a tough conceptual and political place. Many young women do not self-­identify as feminist,

34   Schultz perhaps because feminism became associated with a militant anti-­male stance and because of a view of feminism as considered primarily with white middle-­class privilege. Yet, at the same time, many social and political goals of second-­wave feminism are now simply part of the fabric of social reality for some women. Adding to this complexity, numerous sustained critiques of feminism itself for being too tethered to systems of patriarchy further undermine an easy identification of being feminist for many women. Feminists can be defensive about those critiques or dismissive of them, or feminists can take up the critiques and carry them into their ongoing work in the world. Indeed, feminists’ critiques of ancient philosophy can provide a mirror for the limitations of contemporary feminism itself. Spelman notes, “There are startling parallels between what feminists find disappointing and insulting in Western Philosophical thought and what many women have found troubling in much of western feminism” (1988, 6). When we recognize these limitations, feminists have a chance to overcome them and work toward a more inclusive approach that acknowledges the profound differences of women’s experiences based on the unique challenges of race, class, and gender. So, where do we go from here with the study of ancient philosophy? Intersectionality will no doubt play a larger role in future studies involving both feminist and ancient philosophy. Intersectional frameworks can be useful for analyzing how our preconceived notions about race, gender, and class permeate the ways we view the past. We need to build upon considerations of the ancient world that address race and class as well (see Holmes 2012; Kamtekar 2002; Kamen 2013; Kennedy 2014). Ancient philosophy will continue to offer fertile grounds for the reexamination of the role of women in philosophy, ongoing gender discrimination inside and outside of the Academy, and the challenges of Title IX violations across college campuses. LGBT rights, trans issues, and nonhumanist concerns will continue to press the boundaries of the liberatory possibilities of feminism. Feminist philosophy should aim at the practice of liberation for all through the pursuit of truth that takes differences among women seriously. As Martin Luther King (1963) proclaims in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “no one is free, until all are free.” With this view of liberation in mind, we would do well to follow Audre Lorde’s exhortation to overcome fear of speaking out against injustice in all its forms. As she notes, “We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and ourselves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid” (2007, 40). We, like Plato’s philosophers, must return to the limited perspectives of our own caves, see beyond our own shadows on the wall, and continue the philosophical work of liberation.

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Feminism in Ancient Philosophy   35 Allen, Christine Garside. 1975. “Plato on Women.” Feminist Studies 2 (2/3): 131–38. https://doi. org/10.2307/3177773. Allen, Prudence. 1997. The Concept of Woman. The Aristotelian Revolution 750 b.c.–a.d. 1250. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s. Annas, Julia. 1976. “Plato’s ‘Republic’ and Feminism.” Philosophy 51 (197): 307–21. Asmis, Elizabeth. 1996. “The Stoics on Women.” In Feminism and Ancient Philosophy, edited by Julie Ward, 68–92. New York: Routledge. Bar On, Bat-Ami. 1993. Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bianchi, Emanuela. 2014. The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos. New York: Fordham University Press. Bordo, Susan. 1987. The Flight of Objectivity. Albany: State University of New York Press. Brill, Sara. 2013. Plato on the Limits of Human Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Brown, Wendy. 1994. “ ‘Supposing Truth Were a Woman.’ Plato’s Subversion of Masculine Discourse.” In Feminist Interpretations of Plato, edited by Nancy Tuana, 157–80. Re-Reading the Canon. University Park: Penn State University Press. Colebrook, Claire. 2010. “Dynamic Potentiality: The Body That Stands Alone.” In Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and the Greeks, edited by Elena Tzelepis and Athena Athanasiou, 177–90. Albany: State University of New York Press. Deslauriers, Marguerite. 2009. “Sexual Difference in Aristotle’s Politics and His Biology.” Classical World 102 (3): 215–31. DuBois, Page. 1988. Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freeland, C. 1982. “Moral Virtues and Human Powers.” Review of Metaphysics 36 (1): 3–22. Freeland, Cynthia. 1994. “Nourishing Speculation: A Feminist Reading of Aristotelian Science.” In Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle, edited by Bat-Ami Bar On, 145–84. Albany: State University of New York. Freeland, Cynthia  A., ed. 1998. Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle: Re-Reading the Canon. University Park: Penn State University Press. Graham, Daniel. 2010a. The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy. Vol. Part I. New York: Cambridge University Press. Graham, Daniel. 2010b. The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy. Vol. Part II. New York: Cambridge University Press. Greenhout, R. 1998. “The Virtue of Care: Aristotelian Ethics and Contemporary Care Ethics.” In Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle, edited by Cynthia A. Freeland, 171–200. Re-Reading the Canon. University Park: Penn State University Press. Henry, Madeline. 1995. Aspasia: Prisoner of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirshman, Linda. 1998. “The Book of A.” In Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle, edited by C. Freeland, 201–47. Re-Reading the Canon. University Park: Penn State University Press. Holmes, Brooke. 2012. Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1988. “Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato’s ‘Symposium,’ Diotima’s Speech.” Translated by Eleanor  H.  Kuykendall. Hypatia 3 (3): 32–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527– 2001.1988.tb00187.x. Kamen, D. 2013. Status in Classical Athens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kamtekar, Rachana. 2002. “Distinction without a Difference: Race and Genos in Plato.” In Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays, edited by Julie Ward and Tommy Lott, 1–13. London: Blackwell.

36   Schultz Kennedy, R.  F. 2014. Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in Classical Athens. New York: Routledge. King Jr., Martin Luther. 1963. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” https://www.africa.upenn.edu/ Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html. Kingsley, Peter. 1997. Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic in the Pythagorean and Empedoclean Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Koziak, Barbara. 1998. “Tragedy, Citizens, and Strangers: The Configuration of Aristotelian Political Emotion.” In Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle, edited by Cynthia Freeland, 260–88. Re-Reading the Canon. University Park: Penn State University Press. Lloyd, Genevieve. 1984. The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lorde, Audre. 2007. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 40–44. Berkeley: Crossing Press. Nussbaum, M. 1986. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 1994. Therapy of Desire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nye, Andrea. 1989. “The Hidden Host: Irigaray and Diotima at Plato’s ‘Symposium.’” Hypatia 3 (3): 45–61. Nye, Andrea. 1997. Words of Power. New York: Routledge. Nye, Andrea. 2013. Socrates and Diotima. New York: Palgrave and McMillan. Okin, Susan Moller. 1977. “Philosopher Queens and Private Wives: Plato on Women and the Family.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 6 (4): 345–69. Plant, I.  M. 2004. Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Sampson, Kristin. 2004. “Identity and Gender in Plato.” In Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, edited by Lilli Alanen and Charlotte Witt, 55:17–32. The New Synthese Historical Library. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic. Saxonhouse, Arlene  W. 1976. “The Philosopher and the Female in the Political Thought of Plato.” Political Theory 4 (2): 195–212. https://doi.org/10.1177/009059177600400206. Schultz, A. M. 2013. Plato’s Socrates as Narrator: A Philosophical Muse. Lanham, MD: Lexington Press. Schultz, Anne-Marie, and Kris McLain. Forthcoming, 2022. “Wailing and Lamenting like Women: Reconsidering the Place of Xanthippe in Plato’s Phaedo.” In Auditory Metaphors in Ancient Greek and Roman Texts, edited by Jill Gordon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sharkey, Sarah Boren. 2016. An Aristotelian Feminism. London: Springer. Spelman, Elizabeth V. 1988. Inessential Woman. Boston: Beacon Press. Spelman, Elizabeth  V. 1994. “Hairy Cobblers and Philosopher-Queens.” In Feminist Interpretations of Plato, edited by Nancy Tuana, 87–108. Re-Reading the Canon. University Park: Penn State University Press. Tuana, Nancy. 1994. Feminist Interpretations of Plato. University Park: Penn State University Press. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. 1991. Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays. Edited by Froma I. Zeitlin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vetter, Lisa Pace. 2005. Women’s Work as Political Art: Weaving and Dialectical Politics in Homer, Aristophanes, and Plato. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. https://rowman.com/

Feminism in Ancient Philosophy   37 ISBN/9780739110638/Women’s-Work-as-Political-Art-Weaving-and-Dialectical-Politics-inHomer-Aristophanes-and-Plato. Waithe, Mary Ellen, ed. 1987. A History of Women Philosophers. Vol. 1: Ancient Women Philosophers, 600 B.C.–500 A.D.  4 vols. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Ward, Julie K., ed. 1996. Feminism and Ancient Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Witt, C. 2006. “Feminist Interpretations of the Philosophical Canon.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31 (2): 537–52. Witt, Charlotte, and Lisa Shapiro. 2016. “Feminist History of Philosophy.” Edited by Edward  N.  Zalta. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/spr2016/entries/feminism-femhist/. Zoller, C. 2018. Plato and the Body. Albany: State University of New York.

chapter 4

Femi n ism a n d E a r ly Moder n Phil osoph y Deborah Boyle

Introduction In a groundbreaking 1998 article, Eileen O’Neill observed that although early modern women philosophers had published numerous books and pamphlets, it was as if they had written them in “disappearing ink.”1 Even when their writings were well received in their day, these women philosophers were subsequently written out of the history of philosophy. O’Neill’s article describes the philosophical work of more than three dozen women from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, yet notes that by the nineteenth century, these women were barely mentioned in popular books on the history of philosophy (O’Neill 1998, 32–33). Mary Ellen Waithe points out that the exclusions continued in the twentieth century; Frederick Copleston’s widely read nine-­volume history of philosophy mentions only three women philosophers (Waithe  2015, 25). Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice, Sandrine Berges argues that since “philosophical writing is a sort of testimony, a passing on of knowledge,” ignoring women’s philosophical work constitutes an injustice (Berges 2015, 385).2 Feminist historians of philosophy have been working in various ways to redress this injustice. 1  As O’Neill makes clear in a later essay, the 1998 article was based on a talk she gave at the 1990 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, so clearly her work on early modern philosophers started much earlier than 1998 (O’Neill 2005, 185). 2  Berges ruefully points out that even today, work by female philosophers still does not command the same attention as the work of male philosophers (Berges 2015, 387; see Healy 2015; Schwitzgebel and Jennings 2017, 94, 95, 97–8). Based on data analyzed by Kieran Healy in 2013, Berges suggests that “works by women are cited proportionally far less than works by men” (Berges 2015, 387). It is not clear that this is true; more recent work by Healy, analyzing citation rates in the Journal of Philosophy, Mind, the Philosophical Review, and Nous over the period 1993–2003, concludes that “on the average, articles by women are not cited less often than articles by men. It’s the low base-­rate of articles by women that’s driving things” (Healy 2015). However, Healy also notes that of the papers that are most frequently

Feminism and Early Modern Philosophy   39 Indeed, this work is sufficiently developed that it now has a history of its own. What we might describe as the “first wave” of feminist scholarship on early modern philosophy involved examining the work of canonical male philosophers from a feminist perspective. As Charlotte Witt describes it, feminist scholars have taken various approaches to canonical texts: “cataloguing . . . the explicit misogyny of most of the canon,” “probing the theories of canonical philosophers in order to uncover the gender bias lurking in their supposedly universal theories,” and mining the texts for ideas that might be useful in feminist scholarship (Witt 2004, 3, 11). This earlier type of work shows up in some of the essays in the volume A Mind of One’s Own, which contains essays on feminism in relation to Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Kant (Antony and Witt 1993). It is also exemplified in the Re-­Reading the Canon series, begun in 1994 and edited by Nancy Tuana. Since the canon is still composed primarily of male philosophers, most of the volumes in the series are about male philosophers; from the early modern period, there are volumes on Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant, while only two early modern women are represented in the series, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Astell. A “second wave” of feminist scholarship of the early modern period, initiated by O’Neill and others in the 1980s but really gaining momentum in the past decade, has focused on the early modern women philosophers themselves, making audible their silenced voices. This is important for correcting the epistemic injustice whereby these voices were omitted from our histories of philosophy, but, as Witt points out, it is also important work for ensuring a fairer present and future: What is really at issue is not philosophy’s past, but its present; its self-­image as male. That self-­image is created and maintained in part by a tacit historical justification. It is a damaging self-­image for women philosophers today, and for women who aspire to be philosophers. The real significance of uncovering the presence of women in our history, and in placing women in our canon is the effect that has on the way we think about the “us” of philosophy. (Witt 2004, 10)

This ongoing scholarship includes multiple projects: trying to figure out why and how these works dropped out of view in the first place; the practical work of finding, editing, translating (when necessary), and publishing these neglected or lost writings, as well as contextualizing, analyzing, and critiquing these works; and theorizing about and experimenting with ways to integrate these works with our existing conceptions of the history of philosophy, especially in teaching. I begin with the first project, examining various explanations that might solve the case of the disappearing ink.

cited—the top 1% of papers—none are by women. Since highly cited papers “become centers of gravity that define what a field is about,” the absence of female-­authored papers at this level means that it is men who are the “agenda-­setters” in philosophy (Healy 2015).

40   Boyle

Explanations for the Disappearing Ink What factors might have caused the erasure of women philosophers? Publication practices in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may have played some role. Some philosophical writings by women were never meant for publication; Princess Elisabeth did not wish her correspondence with Descartes to be published after his death, and it ended up languishing for two centuries in a castle in the Netherlands before being discovered and published (Shapiro 2007, 1–5). Anne Conway wrote her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy “for her own use,” although it was published after her death in a Latin translation (Hutton 2004, 5). When women did choose to publish, they often did so anonymously, which, as O’Neill observes, “clearly did not help to put them on the map of philosophy” (O’Neill 1998, 33). As O’Neill also points out, however, anonymous publication cannot fully explain the wholesale disappearance of women’s philosophical work, since many philosophical books by women were published under their own names and discussed at the time of publication (O’Neill 1998, 33); Cavendish, for example, published multiple volumes of natural philosophy under her own name, yet not until 2001 was even one of those books reprinted (O’Neill 2001). Even when women did publish works under their own name, and even if their books were read and discussed when published, they tended not to be mentioned in male philosophers’ later works, and thus did not become an enduring part of philosophical history (Berges 2015, 387). In a few cases, women philosophers’ ideas did become part of philosophical history, but without receiving credit; for example, George Berkeley included long sections from both parts of Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies in The Ladies Library without identifying her as the author (Broad 2015, 18–19), and Berges mentions work by Michèle Le Doeuff suggesting that Rousseau may have plagiarized from Gabrielle Suchon (Berges 2015, 388). If publication practices do not fully explain why the work of early modern women philosophers fell out of view, perhaps the explanation has to do with later conceptions of what counted as properly philosophical genres and styles. While many of the works by early modern women took the form of treatises or essays, they also wrote in other genres: letters, allegories, novels and stories, pamphlets (Berges  2015, 386). One hypothesis is that normative notions of proper philosophical genre caused these works to be taken less seriously. The historical issues here are complex. On the one hand, as Mary Ellen Waithe puts it, it seems that “at some time during the past few millennia, a silent assumption arose that [philosophical issues] were properly addressed (and their author properly considered to be a philosopher) only when those issues were examined in an essay or dialogue form that had an explicitly argumentative style” (Waithe 2015, 23). On the other hand, as Sarah Hutton has observed, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw “a relaxation of genre boundaries” in philosophy: philosophical writing by men could now take the form of dialogues, essays, encyclopedia entries, and even

Feminism and Early Modern Philosophy   41 novels, all written in vernacular languages rather than Latin (Hutton  2008, 406), in contrast to the more rigid forms of medieval treatises and disputations. Lisa Shapiro too points out that early modern male philosophers did philosophy in a range of genres; she notes Bayle’s Dictionary, Spinoza’s geometrical-­style presentation in the Ethics, and Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees as examples (Shapiro 2016, 379). This broader conception of acceptable genres persisted in continental Europe; consider Nietzsche’s aphorisms and Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous voices. Women would have benefited from this broader conception of philosophical genre, since they often lacked the formal education and training in Latin that previously had been viewed (by men, anyway) as necessary for writing philosophy (Hutton 2008, 406). Unfortunately, Anglophone philosophy seems to have retreated to a narrower conception of appropriate philosophical genre after the eighteenth century, with the dominant styles being the essay and treatise. Only in the past few years has the American Philosophical Association begun to provide space at conferences for poster sessions, a style of presentation long used in the sciences but very slow to be accepted as legitimate for presenting philosophical ideas (Weinberg  2015). Part of the ongoing work by feminist historians of philosophy has been to make the case that philosophy can be— and often has been—done in genres that, since the nineteenth century, have been dismissed as unphilosophical. Correspondence is now recognized as an important genre for understanding a philosopher’s views, although letters are still largely viewed as supplementary sources (Waithe  2015, 23–24; see also Shapiro  2016, 372). Until about twenty years ago, Cavendish was considered a dilettante in philosophy, partly because she presented her philosophical views in dialogues, letters to fictional correspondents, poetry, and fiction. Even her more treatise-­like philosophical books do not conform to usual expectations about the order and style in which arguments should be presented. Now, not just Cavendish’s treatise-­like works but also her poetry and fiction are being mined for their philosophical content. Historian Annie Smart points out that valuable sources for understanding women’s theories of civic identity in prerevolutionary and revolutionary France include not just works that fit the standard model of political treatises and pamphlets but also texts that might previously have been left to literature departments (or ignored altogether), such as Félicité de Genlis’s educational novels and Olympe de Gouges’s play L’Esclavage des noirs (Smart 2011, 13). Sarah Hutton argues that Mary Hays and Elizabeth Hamilton—both typically identified as Enlightenment essayists and novelists—should be read as philosophers. Thus, as the range of genres recognized as legitimately philosophical expands, more seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury women writers are likely to be viewed as philosophically significant. Another cause for the “disappearing ink” identified by O’Neill is that women philosophers frequently wrote on topics that were subsequently deemed not properly philosophical, such as religion and theology. O’Neill recounts how religious and theological works had been viewed as philosophical until the “purification” of philosophy in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when, “by allying philosophy motivated by religious concerns with an unreflective mysticism, eighteenth-­century historians excised whole philosophical schools, and the work of many women, from

42   Boyle philosophy proper” (O’Neill 1998, 34). One effect of this, as Christia Mercer has noted, is that the “richly philosophical spiritual writings” of medieval women were eliminated from the standard story of the history of philosophy (Mercer 2017). Since, as Hutton points out, women’s writings on moral philosophy were often presented in the context of religious concerns (Hutton  2008, 406), even works that engage deeply with moral theory have been seen as theological rather than philosophical. For example, Mary Astell’s account of virtue and Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s account of moral fitness are both presented in the context of discussions of Christian principles (Broad 2015, 10; Hutton 2008, 405), giving the impression, at first glance, that these are more religious writings than philosophical texts. Indeed, Hutton suggests that some early modern women philosophers may have purposely emphasized the religious aspects of their works to show their “godly credentials” and avert criticisms of being insufficiently virtuous and pious, thereby ensuring a wider readership (Hutton 2008, 407); ironically, the “purification” of philosophy from texts with a “taint of religion” (O’Neill 1998, 34) would then have had exactly the opposite effect. Even when women did not frame their writings on moral philosophy in religious terms, those writings did not earn a central place in the history of philosophy, for traditional narratives of the history of early modern philosophy have prized works that focus on metaphysics and epistemology. As Shapiro puts it, the “well-­worn story” of early modern philosophy is structured around “a small set of core philosophical questions”: “the epistemological question of the basis for claims to knowledge and the metaphysical questions of what sorts of things exist and how they causally interact” (Shapiro  2016, 369). This is largely because there has been—at least throughout the twentieth century—a tendency in Anglo-­American analytic philosophy to see the history of philosophy ahistorically, through the lens of issues that the reader sees as interesting and important, filtering out topics and genres that do not fit into current philosophical debates (Hutton 2015, 8–10; Witt 2006, 537). Since many of the topics that earlier women philosophers addressed were not viewed as relevant to twentieth-­century philosophical debates, this meant that such views were simply ignored (Hutton 2015, 8). Thus, writings on topics other than metaphysics and epistemology get barely a mention in the traditional narrative; for example, Locke’s theory of education has attracted far less scholarly attention than his views on epistemology, the possibility of thinking matter, personal identity, or even religious toleration. Works on education by early modern women philosophers, such as Damaris Masham’s Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, have drawn even less scholarly attention. The “woman question” too preoccupied some early modern women philosophers, yet their writings on this issue have been largely ignored. According to O’Neill, “German historians, taking Kantianism as the culmination of early modern philosophy and as providing the project for future philosophical inquiry, viewed treatments of ‘the woman question’ as precritical work, of purely anthropological interest” (O’Neill 1998, 34). One further factor that might explain the disappearance of women’s works from philosophical history is that, even when women writers did address topics that were

Feminism and Early Modern Philosophy   43 deemed properly philosophical, they sometimes defended views or adopted methodologies that were not—from our vantage point of two or three hundred years later—the “winners” (O’Neill  1998, 34). For example, Conway and Cavendish both defended vitalist systems in the mid-­seventeenth century, a period that, according to the usual narrative, was characterized by mechanistic conceptions of nature (Grant 2007, 283). Feminist historians of philosophy (among others) have argued for attending to the so-­called minor figures, for taking a perspective on the history of philosophy that recognizes that there have always been competing voices, and that the figures we now see as the “winners” may not have appeared so to their contemporaries. This increased attention to historical and intellectual context has already led to increased scholarship on previously neglected philosophers such as Henry More and Thomas Reid and will likely, as Hutton puts it, “level[] the playing field for women, because it will benefit all those, men as well as women, who are routinely consigned to ‘minor’ status” (Hutton 2015, 15). Finally, there are almost certainly other social, historical, and economic factors to explain why early modern women philosophers vanished from our narratives in the history of philosophy, and feminist historians of philosophy are working to identify and understand these. For example, Sandrine Berges observes that early modern women philosophers themselves generally did not engage with each other or even acknowledge work by other women philosophers (Berges  2015, 381–82). Drawing on work by Geneviève Fraisse, O’Neill argues that in the wake of the French Revolution, women authors came to be perceived as social and political threats, leading to their wholesale exclusion from intellectual histories written in the nineteenth century (O’Neill 1998, 37–38 and 2005, 187).

Recovering Lost Works Whatever the reasons for the exclusion of women from the history of philosophy, feminist scholars of early modern philosophy agree that the disappearing ink needs to be made visible again. Doing so involves several projects: recovering the lost works, publishing and presenting on aspects of these works, strategizing about how to integrate them into our narratives of the history of philosophy, and encouraging their incorporation into undergraduate and graduate courses. Recovering the works of early modern women philosophers is perhaps the most immediate and pressing need. Some of these writings have long been available on microfilm or, more recently, as PDF files downloadable from the database Early English Books Online (EEBO) or through Google’s digitization project. However, the EEBO texts are available by subscription only, and Google’s digitized scans are not always of good quality—and in all three cases, finding these sources requires a determined researcher who knows what to look for and does not mind the archaic typeface and the lack of editorial apparatus. There is thus a great need for modern editions of works by

44   Boyle early modern women philosophers. The writings of Margaret Cavendish are a prime example. Cavendish published five volumes on natural philosophy and metaphysics in addition to more literary volumes of plays, poetry, orations, stories, and fictional letters. These latter works are relatively easy to find in modern editions; for example, a modern edition of Cavendish’s science-­ fiction book Blazing-­World was first published by Pickering in 1992, and four other edited versions of it have been published since then. Her orations, Sociable Letters, and some of her poetry and plays have also been made available in modern editions. Yet by 2020, modern editions of only two of Cavendish’s books on natural philosophy were available (Observations upon Experimental Philosophy [O’Neill  2001; Marshall  2016] and Grounds of Natural Philosophy [Thell 2020]). And while Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies has been available since 1996 (Springborg 1996), her magnum opus, The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England, only became available in a modern edition in 2013 (Broad 2013). Fortunately, several publishers are supporting the production of modern editions of these works. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe book series has published works by Anna Maria van Schurman, Marie de Gournay, Madeleine de Scudéry, and many other early modern women, as well as the correspondence between Princess Elisabeth and Descartes and between Leibniz and both Sophie, Electress of Hanover, and Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia. Broadview Press has published selected writings by Astell, Trotter Cockburn, and Cavendish. Oxford University Press has begun a “New Histories of Philosophy” series, with editions forthcoming of works by Cavendish, Émilie du Châtelet, Sophie de Grouchy, and others, and Hackett Publishing has also just begun a new series of modern editions of works by early modern and modern women philosophers.

Rethinking the Canon One important problem—both theoretical and practical—is exactly how to incorporate the recovered texts into the history of philosophy, particularly in teaching. For better or worse, there is a canon of figures that students are typically taught and about whom historians of philosophy publish. Should the notion of a canon be abandoned? Should women philosophers be added to the existing canon of early modern philosophy? If so, how? It is not easy to change what texts count as canonical, for, as Jonathan Rée points out, “The main thing that makes a work canonical . . . is the fact that it has traditionally been regarded as canonical; and its canonicity will become more and more entrenched as long as it continues to elicit responses, if only dissident or negative ones, in the subsequent development of the discipline to which it belongs” (Rée 2002, 645). Different strategies for reinterpreting or revising the canon come with different risks. It may be tempting, for example, to present the works of past women philosophers as

Feminism and Early Modern Philosophy   45 specifically “feminist” or “women’s literature,” but, as Waithe points out, many works by early modern women philosophers simply don’t address feminism or the “woman question,” so this would be a misleading characterization (Waithe  2015, 27–28). For example, Anne Conway says nothing at all about gender roles or the education of women; indeed, Hutton notes, Conway’s discussions of animal generation are framed in terms of “male” and “female” principles that are “loaded with traditional sexist connotations of active and passive” (Hutton 2004, 242). This strategy also runs the risk of creating a “ghetto canon” (Waithe 2015, 27–28; Shapiro 2004, 234). Another approach is to present an alternative history of early modern philosophy that focuses only on women philosophers, as Margaret Atherton has done in her short collection of excerpts from seven early modern women philosophers (Atherton 1994). But such histories are as incomplete as the earlier histories that left out the women, and this approach may end up presenting women philosophers as mere curiosities or as inessential extras, with the male philosophers presented as the main characters (Hutton 2015, 16). And when teaching the works of women philosophers, a collection of texts by multiple women philosophers in a single volume may suggest to students that these writers do not each deserve their own editions (Berges 2015, 391). Introducing undergraduate students to early modern women philosophers in courses that focus exclusively on women philosophers runs the same risk (Berges 2015, 390). A third approach capitalizes on the fact that some early modern women philosophers corresponded with or wrote about their male contemporaries; such writings can be included without much disruption in the existing canon. For example, Elisabeth’s correspondence with Descartes can easily be slotted into our standard understanding of the history of philosophy by treating her as yet another “objector.” However, if this is the primary mode in which women philosophers get reincorporated into history, then precious few will be included. Indeed, this strategy doesn’t even do justice to Princess Elisabeth’s philosophical work, for it would justify including only those of her letters that engage directly with Descartes’s writings, omitting her letters on such topics as happiness, good government, mathematics, and medicine. Furthermore, this strategy reinforces the view of women philosophers as merely “handmaidens” to male philosophers, who remain at the center of the story (Witt 2006, 542). Another, related way to add women philosophers to the existing canon would be to group women philosophers with canonical male philosophers who addressed similar topics (Berges 2015, 384). This is the strategy taken in Karen J. Warren’s anthology, An Unconventional History of Western Philosophy: Conversations between Men and Women Philosophers, which pairs Catharine Macauley’s writing on virtue and sympathy with a selection from Hobbes’s Leviathan, for example (Warren 2009). Hutton points out that there was a strategic benefit to this approach when research on women ­philosophers was first gaining steam, for it did help bring attention to women philosophers (Hutton 2015, 19, n7). But, again, this approach risks presenting the women as secondary figures, interesting only insofar as they can be put into conversation with male philosophers.

46   Boyle Given the limits of the approaches mentioned so far, various feminist historians of philosophy have converged on another strategy, that of creating new narratives about the history of early modern philosophy (O’Neill 1998, 43; Shapiro 2004, 220; Berges 2015, 391–94). Citing work by Jonathan Rée on the development of the philosophical canon and by Alberto Vanzo on Kant’s schematization of the history of philosophy that preceded him, Berges points out that early modern philosophy is now typically taught according to a particular formula: Because we have adopted certain Kant-­inspired views as the structuring mantra for teaching early modern philosophy, we do end up focusing only on a history of metaphysics and epistemology, ignoring the work that was done on ethics and politics. What we teach under the heading of early modern is a selection of Kant’s male metaphysical predecessors, carefully chosen to make his own theoretical edifice intelligible. (Berges 2015, 392–93)

Not all women philosophers from the early modern period fit easily into this particular story (Berges 2015, 384). Thus, one way—perhaps the best way, according to Berges and others—to create a more inclusive history of philosophy is to develop a new narrative, or several narratives (Berges 2015, 383–84). Lisa Shapiro argues that changing the questions on which our narratives focus will have broad ramifications for which figures are included in our history: Recognizing that the figures we take to be central are a function of the questions we take to be central can lead us to recognize the contingency not only of the canon, but of the framework in which that canon is constructed. We might well tell a story of philosophy which turns on some other questions, and, in focusing on those questions rather than the ones we are currently gripped by, we might well come to take other figures and texts as instructive and thereby justificatory of our concerns. Indeed, we might find that women thinkers are among those who address these questions in the most innovative and interesting ways. (Shapiro 2004, 233)

Shapiro suggests that one new narrative about early modern philosophy could focus on arguments regarding good education; this is an issue on which male and female philosophers alike have written, and one which brings up closely related questions of “the nature of rationality, of knowledge, and of the mind” (Shapiro 2004, 234; see also Shapiro 2016, 367). As Shapiro points out, early modern discussions of education raise interesting philosophical questions “about the interrelation of consciousness, ownership of thought, rationality, education, and habit” (Shapiro 2016, 367). The “woman question” too raises philosophical issues that can go deeper than they might at first seem: “what it is to be human, what humans should expect from each other qua humans, and how best to promote or encourage the right sort of behaviour, through education and social and political arrangements” (Berges 2015, 382).

Feminism and Early Modern Philosophy   47

Conclusion The blossoming realm of recovery of and research into the philosophical writings by early modern women has been described as “one of the most fertile scholarly areas in the history of philosophy today” (Schliesser 2018). There is still considerable work to do in the areas already described in this chapter, but in an emerging “third wave,” feminist historians of philosophy are creating new opportunities for publishing, presenting at conferences, and teaching about these women philosophers. Monographs (Boyle 2018; Broad  2015; Cunning  2016; Hernandez  2016) and volumes of essays (Broad and Detlefsen 2017; Thomas 2018) on the philosophical issues raised in the texts are being published or are in the works, and journals in the history of philosophy, while rather slow to catch on to this burgeoning field,3 have at last begun publishing articles about early modern women philosophers. Workshops designed to assist instructors interested in teaching texts by early modern women philosophers have aimed to disseminate information about teaching these texts.4 The internet is proving especially useful in this regard. Blog posts, such as Marcy Lascano’s entry on Margaret Cavendish at The Mod Squad group blog (Lascano 2014), are one way to reach a broader audience. Project Vox (n.d.), organized by scholars at Duke University, is an ambitious website devoted to bringing together resources for studying and teaching the works of early modern women philosophers. From 2015 to 2019, the New Narratives in the History of Philosophy project hosted a website with diverse resources, seeking—as its name implies—to develop and promote new interpretations of the history of philosophy, interpretations that will “reconfigure, enrich and reinvigorate the philosophical canon” in all periods of the history of philosophy (New Narratives n.d.); the work of this group is now being continued by the Extending New Narratives Partnership, an international group of more than eighty scholars and librarians (New Narratives n.d.)An open-­access journal dedicated to publishing work on early modern women philosophers may be on the horizon. The disappearing ink is beginning to become legible again.

3  By my count, during the ten-­year period between January 2011 and October 2020, 3.3% of the papers published in the Journal of the History of Philosophy were about the work of a woman philosopher (from any period in the history of philosophy). At the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, during the same period, the rate was 5.1%.These are low, but, encouragingly, the rates are increasing. 4  For example, in January 2018, the American Philosophical Association sponsored a symposium on teaching texts written by women between 1600 and 1900; the New Narratives in the History of Philosophy Project has hosted seminars and conference presentations on teaching noncanonical early modern philosophical texts (New Narratives n.d.); and in June 2018, the Journal of the History of Philosophy sponsored a five-­day master class on the work of Mary Shepherd. The Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists at Paderborn University, established in 2016, hosts conferences, workshops, and colloquium talks about the work of women philosophers from antiquity to the present, including such figures as Elisabeth of Bohemia, Anne Conway, and especially Émilie du Châtelet (History of Women Philosophers and Scientists n.d.).

48   Boyle

References Antony, Louise M., and Charlotte Witt. 1993. A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Atherton, Margaret. 1994. Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Berges, Sandrine. 2015. “On the Outskirts of the Canon: The Myth of the Lone Female Philosopher, and What to Do about It.” Metaphilosophy 46 (3): 380–97. Boyle, Deborah. 2018. The Well-Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish. New York: Oxford University Press. Broad, Jacqueline. 2013. The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England. Toronto: Iter, Inc. and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. Broad, Jacqueline. 2015. The Philosophy of Mary Astell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Broad, Jacqueline, and Karen Detlefsen, eds. 2017. Women and Liberty, 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cavendish, Margaret, and Anne  M.  Thell, ed. 2020. Grounds of Natural Philosophy. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Cunning, David. 2016. Cavendish. New York: Routledge. Grant, Edward. 2007. A History of Natural Philosophy: From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Healy, Kieran. 2015. “Gender and Citation in Four General-Interest Philosophy Journals, 1993–2013.” Accessed 30 October 2020. http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/02/25/ gender-and-citation-in-four-general-interest-philosophy-journals-1993-2013/. Hernandez, Jill Graper. 2016. Early Modern Women and the Problem of Evil: Atrocity and Theodicy. New York: Routledge. History of Women Philosophers and Scientists. n.d. Accessed 25 July 2018. https:// historyofwomenphilosophers.org/. Hutton, Sarah. 2004. Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutton, Sarah. 2008. “The Persona of the Woman Philosopher in Eighteenth-Century England: Catharine Macauley, Mary Hays, and Elizabeth Hamilton.” Intellectual History Review 18 (3): 403–12. Hutton, Sarah. 2015. “ ‘Blue-Eyed Philosophers Born on Wednesdays’: An Essay on Women and History of Philosophy.” The Monist 98: 7–20. Lascano, Marcy. 2014. “An Introduction to Margaret Cavendish.” The Mod Squad: A Group Blog in Modern Philosophy. 16 March 2014. Accessed 1 March 2018. https://philosophymodsquad. wordpress.com/2014/03/16/an-introduction-to-margaret-cavendish-or-why-you-should-includemargaret-cavendish-in-your-early-modern-course-and-buy-the-book/. Marshall, Eugene, ed. 2016. Observations upon Experimental Philosophy: Abridged, with Related Texts. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Mercer, Christia. 2017. “Descartes Is Not Our Father.” New York Times. 25 September 2017. Accessed 28 February 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/opinion/descartes-isnot-our-father.html. New Narratives in the History of Philosophy. n.d. Accessed 30 October 2020. http://www. newnarrativesinphilosophy.net/. O’Neill, Eileen. 1998. “Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History.” In Philosophy in a Feminist Voice Critiques and Reconstructions, edited by Janet Kourany, 17–62. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Feminism and Early Modern Philosophy   49 O’Neill, Eileen, ed. 2001. Margaret Cavendish: Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Neill, Eileen. 2005. “Early Modern Women Philosophers and the History of Philosophy.” Hypatia 20 (3): 185–97. Project Vox. n.d. Accessed 1 March 2018. https://projectvox.org. Rée, Jonathan. 2002. “Women Philosophers and the Canon.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 10 (4): 642–52. Schliesser, Eric. 2018. “Journal History of Philosophy: Scholarship on Early Modern Women Not Welcome! [Corrected].” Digressions & Impressions. 9 January 2018. Accessed 1 March 2018. http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2018/01/journalhistory-of-philosophy-scholarship-on-early-modern-women-not-welcome.html. Schwitzgebel, Eric, and Carolyn Dicey Jennings. 2017. “Women in Philosophy: Quantitative Analyses of Specialization, Prevalence, Visibility, and Generational Change.” Public Affairs Quarterly 31 (2): 83–105. Shapiro, Lisa. 2004. “Some Thoughts on the Place of Women in Early Modern Philosophy.” In Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, edited by L. Alanen and C. Witt, 219–50. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Shapiro, Lisa, ed. and trans. 2007. The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Shapiro, Lisa. 2016. “Revisiting the Early Modern Philosophical Canon.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2: 365–83. Smart, Annie K. 2011. Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Springborg, Patricia, ed. 1996. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Brookfield, VT: Pickering and Chatto. Thomas, Emily, ed. 2018. Early Modern Women on Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waithe, Mary Ellen. 2015. “From Canon Fodder to Canon Formation: How Do We Get There From Here?” The Monist 98: 21–33. Warren, Karen  J. 2009. An Unconventional History of Western Philosophy: Conversations between Men and Women Philosophers. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Weinberg, Justin. 2015. “Poster Sessions at Philosophy Conferences.” The Daily Nous. Accessed 9 February 2018. http://dailynous.com/2015/08/28/poster-sessions-at-philosophyconferences/. Witt, Charlotte. 2004. “Feminist History of Philosophy.” In Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, edited by L.  Alanen and C.  Witt, 1–15. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Witt, Charlotte. 2006. “Feminist Interpretations of the Philosophical Canon.” Signs 31 (2): 537–52.

chapter 5

Femi n ist Cr itica l Theory Allison Weir

There are many kinds of feminist critical theories. Feminist theorists have made ­extensive contributions to critical legal theory, critical race theory, and critical literary theory. I would argue that feminist theory is by definition critical theory. The scope of this entry, however, is considerably narrower. It will focus on feminist critical theories emerging out of and engaging with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, which originated with the work of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and others in the 1930s, and continues today with the work of Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, Rainer Forst, Thomas McCarthy, Amy Allen, and others. Max Horkheimer defined the aim of critical theory as the emancipation of human beings from slavery (Horkheimer 1972, 246). The Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory draws on the philosophical tradition of critique from Kant through Hegel and Marx; the social theories of Weber, Durkheim, and Mead; and the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Klein, and Winnicott, sometimes to consider how human emancipation might be possible, but more often to understand the forces producing our continued enslavement. This has involved critiques of capitalist political economy along with wide-­ranging social and cultural analysis and analyses of the self and subjectivity, to understand the complexity of forms of social power and to ask how and why human beings so often seem to desire their own subjection. The approach of critical theory is, as Horkheimer argued, distinct from both normative and positivist empirical theories. As Amy Allen writes, “Critical theory understands itself to be rooted in and constituted by an existing social reality that is structured by power relations that it therefore also aims to critique by appealing to immanent standards of normativity and rationality. . . . [W]hat is distinctive about critical theory is its conception of the critical subject as self-­consciously rooted in and shaped by the power relations in the society that she nevertheless aims self-­reflexively and rationally to

Feminist Critical Theory   51 critique” (2016, xiii). Iris Young writes, “The method of critical theory, as I understand it, reflects on existing social relations and processes to identify what we experience as valuable in them, but as present only intermittently, partially, or potentially” (2000, 10). Nancy Fraser returns to Marx, to define critical theory as “the self-­clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age” (1987, 31). The theorists of the original Frankfurt School were Jews in Nazi Germany, some of whom escaped to America, some of whom did not. Their studies of anti-­Semitism and the authoritarian personality, and of a strange America apparently dominated by Walt Disney, were acutely attuned to the struggles and wishes of their age. Critical theory, as Wendy Brown writes, “upturned the myth of Enlightenment reason, integrated psychoanalysis into political philosophy, pressed Nietzsche and Weber into Marx, attacked positivism as an ideology of capitalism, theorized the revolutionary potential of high art, plumbed the authoritarian ethos and structure of the nuclear family, mapped cultural and social effects of capital, thought and rethought dialectical materialism, and took philosophies of aesthetics, reason, and history to places they had never gone before” (2006, 2). According to Brown, this involved not only grasping social orders of power but also revisioning thought itself, to develop “new forms of thinking.” Critical theory, then, would seem to be an approach particularly suited to feminist theory. If critical theory is focused on the “the self-­clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age,” it should, as Fraser has pointed out, respond to contemporary feminism—and, I would add, to Black Lives Matter, queer politics, Indigenous resistance to colonization, struggles against Islamophobia and Western imperialism, struggles to address climate change and the Anthropocene, and the displacement of peoples in the context of global capitalism and imperialism. So what’s feminist about critical theory? For many critical theorists, there is nothing feminist whatsoever. The entry for “Critical Theory” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy barely mentions feminism; the entry for “The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy does not mention it at all; and both field overviews include virtually no women (or nonwhite men) in their lists of references. Furthermore, The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory (Thompson 2017) rarely mentions feminism, and includes only two essays by women, out of a total of thirty-­two. One might be forgiven for concluding that only (straight) white men do critical theory, and that feminist critical theory does not exist. But one would be wrong. Feminist critical theory in the Frankfurt School tradition includes substantial bodies of work by Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Iris Young, and Amy Allen, and many other feminist theorists have engaged with critical theory, including Jessica Benjamin, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Mary Caputi, Jean Cohen, Patricia Hill Collins, Drucilla Cornell, Angela Davis, Jodi Dean, Barbara Fultner, Maria Pia Lara, Claudia Leeb, Robin Marasco, Maria Markus, Lois McNay, Johanna Meehan, Patricia Mills, Linda Nicholson, Kelly Oliver, Georgia Warnke, Allison Weir, Cynthia Willett, Linda Zerilli, and others. Feminist critical theorists have contributed incisive critiques of the effects of the androcentrism and inattention to gender in critical theory, and have developed

52   Weir important analyses of the gendered production of the public and private spheres in the capitalist welfare state, as well as theories of individual and collective subjectivity and agency, power and emancipation. Yet many feminist theorists have not engaged deeply with the tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory—in part because in the past few decades this school has been dominated by the work of Habermas, oriented toward the establishment of universal norms at a time when these have been thoroughly deconstructed. Contemporary Frankfurt School theory is, ironically, resistant to many of the prevalent forms of critique and critical theory outside the Frankfurt School, including deconstruction and poststructuralism—and to much of the work of the early Frankfurt School. Few critical theorists have engaged much with critical race theory or with postcolonial or decolonial thought. In this brief chapter, I discuss the historical development of feminist critical theory, beginning with the early interventions in the 1970s and 1980s, noting some of the directions taken since this early work, and then taking up the pivotal debate on agency and the feminist subject in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (Benhabib et al. 1995). Finally, I discuss the engagements of feminist critical theory with issues of race and colonization.

Early Interventions Feminist critical theory in the era of second-­wave feminism can be traced to Angela Davis’s “Women and Capitalism,” an essay written in the Palo Alto Jail in 1971 (1977). Another important early contribution was a lecture by Herbert Marcuse titled “Marxism and Feminism,” published in the journal Women’s Studies in 1974 (1974). Both argued that the feminist movement could be a force of resistance against capitalism and its “performance principle,” which rationalizes domination in the reduction of human life to the performance of productive labor, and glorifies masculine aggression and competition. Women’s liberation would involve the emancipation of eros from “repressive desublimation” and the emancipation of positive qualities that have been designated as feminine. Davis went on to develop analyses of the intersections of racism and patriarchy with capitalism in Women, Race, and Class (1981). Referencing Marcuse, Wendy Brown notes that the commitment to utopian revolution in this early work, and in much of early feminist theory, has since been replaced by more cautious projects. As she writes, feminist theory has abandoned its radicalism: ambitions to overthrow relations of domination have been replaced by “projects of resistance, reform, or resignification, on the one hand, and normative political theory abstracted from conditions for its realization, on the other” (2006, 2). Brown suggests that this abandoned radicalism is commensurate with feminist disengagement with critical theory. However, I would argue that much of feminist critical theory tends to fall into the two camps she describes here. The 1987 collection Feminism as Critique sets out the key interventions and debates in contemporary feminist critical theory in the 1980s and early 1990s (see, e.g., Nicholson

Feminist Critical Theory   53 1986; Fraser 1989; Butler 1990; Young 1990; Cornell 1991; and Benhabib 1992). In what follows, I will take up some of the central themes in this work.

Theorizing the Public and Private Spheres Linda Nicholson and Nancy Fraser analyze the effects of the failure of Marx and Habermas to consider gender as a category of analysis, focusing on their failure to problematize the gendered nature of paid work and work in the capitalist private sphere of the family and their tendency to naturalize the capitalist division of public and private realms. Nicholson notes the importance of the work of feminists who have criticized Marx’s focus on production to the exclusion of reproduction, but also notes Iris Marion Young’s critique of the “dual systems theory” of Marxist feminism: while it is important to include reproductive work in social analysis, the danger is that this can be simply additive, failing to challenge the framework of Marxist theory. Nicholson argues that Marx’s historical analysis is undermined by his designation of the categories of production and of the economy as ahistorical universals. Thus, she writes, “The Marxist tendency to employ categories rooted in capitalist social relations and its failure in comprehending gender are deeply related. In so far as Marxists interpret ‘production’ as necessarily distinct from ‘reproduction,’ then aspects of capitalist society are falsely universalized and gender relations in both precapitalist and capitalist societies are obscured” (1987, 29). Nancy Fraser argues that while Habermas’s analysis of modern capitalist society in terms of four domains—economy, state, public participation, and family— usefully problematizes the public/private binary, his failure to comprehend gender ­systems severely limits his analysis. Habermas assumes, for example, that the nuclear family is primarily a domain of the “lifeworld,” organized through communicative relations, as opposed to spheres governed by functional imperatives of a “system” (the state, the economy). Fraser points out that in capitalist societies “the household, like the paid workplace, is a site of labor” and “families are thoroughly permeated with, in Habermas’s terms, the media of money and power. They are sites of egocentric, strategic and instrumental calculation as well as sites of usually exploitative exchanges of services, labor, cash, and sex, not to mention sites, frequently, of coercion and violence” (1987, 37). As Fraser continues, “By omitting any mention of the childrearer role, and by failing to thematize the gender subtext underlying the roles of worker and consumer, Habermas fails to understand precisely how the capitalist workplace is linked to the modern, restricted, male-­headed, nuclear family” (45). Fraser complicates Habermas’s analysis, developing a differentiated account of multiple spheres that takes gendered relations into account. Elsewhere Fraser develops this analysis in her work on the politics of need ­interpretations, analyzing the socialist feminist politicization of issues considered “private” (located in capitalist property relations and in the private realm of the family and

54   Weir sexuality) and the ways in which these contesting discourses are met with discourses of reprivatization and depoliticization in the “juridical-­administrative-­therapeutic state apparatus” (drawing on Foucault and Habermas) of the American welfare state. In this work, Fraser calls the sphere of contesting discourses “the social,” and differentiates it from the public sphere (Fraser 1989). Fraser continues to problematize the public/private split in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (1997). For example, the chapter “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency’: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State” (coauthored with Linda Gordon) presents an analysis of the raced and gendered histories of the concepts of “independence” and “dependency” in the American welfare state (121–50). Also, in the chapter “After the Family Wage: A Postindustrial Thought Experiment,” Fraser argues that the “ideal typical citizen” should be not just a paid worker but a caregiver (41–68). Central to this work is the question Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell articulated a decade earlier in their introduction to Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender in Late Capitalist Societies: “What kind of a restructuring of the public/private realms is possible and desirable” (1987). In her essay in this volume, “Impartiality and the Civic Public,” Iris Marion Young (1987) argues for a reconception of the public realm, critiquing the ideal of impartiality grounded in ideals of universal reason and the identity of the subject (56–76). Within a few years, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Joan Landes, Young, and others criticize the assumption of a single public sphere focused on determining a shared general interest, noting the gendered nature of the division between the public and the social, and the exclusion of modes of reasoning and modes of expression deemed “feminine.” While they commend Habermas’s theory of communicative action and discourse ethics as a better basis for determining shared norms than either liberal or communitarian theories, all argue that Habermas remains wedded to divisions between public and private, reason and affect, justice and the good life, generalizable interests and private need interpretations, public norms and private values—all of which are called into question by feminist analyses (see, e.g., Meehan 1995). Fraser (2013) and Young (1992) argue for a broadening of our understanding of the public sphere to include multiple contesting discourses in multiple spheres. Benhabib (2002) draws on Hannah Arendt to extend her analysis of public participation, arguing that domains Arendt designated as social spheres, such as eighteenth- to nineteenth­century “salons,” are in fact sites of public political discussion.

The Constitution of the Feminine Subject and the Deconstruction of Gender Identity In their essays in Feminism and Critique (1987), Seyla Benhabib, Maria Markus, and Isaac Balbus argue, as Marcuse did, that we can find resources in socialized femininity to

Feminist Critical Theory   55 challenge the patriarchal capitalist performance principle, the masculine model of the atomistic unencumbered self, and androcentric unitary reason. Benhabib (1987) argues for a conception of the self as situated in relation to concrete, as well as generalized, others. In their contribution to the volume, Drucilla Cornell and Adam Thurschwell (1987) draw on psychoanalytic theory and argue that “the gender categories themselves retain indelible traces of their Other, belying the rigid identification of one’s self as a fully gender-­differentiated subject.” Citing Jacques Derrida and Christie McDonald, they suggest “the immanent potential for a way of relating ‘where the code of sexual marks would no longer be discriminating’ ” (145). Judith Butler argues instead for a deconstruction of sexed and gendered identity, drawing on Wittig’s argument that human social identities are “structured by a gender system predicated upon the alleged naturalness of binary oppositions and, consequently, heterosexuality” (1987, 135). Hence “the category of ‘sex’ is always subsumed under the discourse of heterosexuality” (136). Unlike Wittig, Butler does not call for the emancipation of the lesbian as the harbinger of a sexless society, which will emerge through the dissolution of the binary framework. Drawing on Foucault, and against Marcuse, Butler argues that the eros that is liberated will be already structured by power dynamics. Instead, she follows Foucault in calling not for transcendence but for subversion of binary opposites through a proliferation of multiple differences. While she cautions that this call can repeat the existentialist ideal of radical self-­invention and notes the Lacanian psychoanalytic objection that this proliferation is a preoedipal fantasy, she opens and imagines the possibility of a future proliferation of genders, released from their binary restrictions. Benhabib and Cornell end their editors’ introduction to Feminism as Critique by identifying a tension between the “deconstructive” critiques of identitarian binary logic in the work of Butler, Cornell and Thurschwell, Young, and Fraser, and the “reconstructive” arguments made by Benhabib, Markus, and Balbus, who “see in present forms of gender constitution utopian traces of a future mode of otherness” (1987, 13). But, in fact, Butler’s essay in the volume, despite her own caveats, imagines a utopian future, as does Cornell and Thurschwell’s essay. The difference lies in the imagined utopias, and in their theoretical and political foundations.

The Subject of Feminism: Theorizing Feminist Agency The differences thematized here harden into oppositions with the publication of Feminist Contentions (1995) (including responses to an earlier version published in Praxis International in 1990), which focuses on some of the most important political and philosophical questions in contemporary feminist theory: questions of individual and collective agency, the meaning of gender, and the normative and theoretical

56   Weir foundations of feminism. Central to this debate is Benhabib’s position that feminist critical theory must be grounded in normative critical theory, against Butler’s poststructuralist critique of norms. The debate opens with Benhabib’s critique of the dangers of postmodernist influences in feminist critical theory. Benhabib argues that the postmodernist theses of the death of man, the end of history, and the end of metaphysics (as described by Jane Flax 1990) are useful in moderation, but “the postmodernist position(s) thought through to their conclusions may eliminate not only the specificity of feminist theory but place in question the very emancipatory ideals of the women’s movements altogether” (Benhabib et al. 1995, 20). Benhabib names the feminist versions of these theses as “Demystification of the Male Subject of Reason,” “Engendering of Historical Narrative,” and “Feminist Scepticism Toward the Claims of Transcendent Reason” (18–19, capitalized in the original). Feminism, she argues, would be unthinkable without adherence to normative ideals of autonomy and emancipation. For Benhabib, while the situated and gendered subject is heteronomously determined, she still strives toward autonomy. We necessarily relate to ourselves as the author and character of a narrative that makes sense to us. Hence, any call for the “death of the subject” is incompatible with feminist ideals of emancipation. Similarly, while she agrees with the critique of grand narratives, she argues that we need to hold onto the ideal of historical emancipation. Finally, she argues that feminism as situated criticism requires “philosophy,” which involves an ordering of normative priorities and a clarification of principle, oriented toward a utopian vision of the future. Critical feminist theory requires critique from the perspective of utopian ideals. Many of these criticisms are directed toward Butler, who responds by questioning the assumption that politics requires philosophical foundations and criticizing the authority of a normative political philosophy that positions itself beyond the play of power. For Benhabib, politics, critical theory, and philosophy require normative grounds; for Butler, the role of philosophy, and particularly critical theory, is to question assumptions, and the practice of politics cannot be constrained by unquestionable certainties. We need to ask what our positions authorize and what they exclude or foreclose. Butler agrees with Benhabib that political action includes working collectively toward the achievement of normative ideals, opposing oppressive regimes. But political action also involves many other forms of action: questioning, subversions, parodies, microresistances, resignifying performances. For Butler the “sphere of the political” is where our agency is produced: political action is where we risk transforming who we are, and the answers to our questions of which way to go and who we will be cannot be known in advance. Both are making important points that can open up crucial questions. What is the role of philosophy? To propose ideal norms, or to open our certainties to question? And how do we do politics? Butler is, of course, not just arguing that all positions must be opened to question. She’s also arguing for some strong positions. Her argument shifts between two descriptions of the constitution of subjects and identities. On one hand, “subjects are formed through exclusionary operations” (Benhabib et al.  1995, 48); “identity categories are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such,

Feminist Critical Theory   57 exclusionary” (50). On the other hand, she writes, “If feminism presupposes that ‘women’ designates an undesignatable field of differences, one that cannot be totalized or summarized by a descriptive identity category, then the very term becomes a site of permanent openness and resignifiability” (50). On one hand, language constitutes subjects and identities always and only through an exclusionary identitarian logic; on the other hand, identity categories are fields of differences open to resignification and change. Similarly, she shifts from the claim that all metaphysical claims and normative positions must be questioned to the metaphysical claim that all identities are normative and all norms are predicated on exclusions and are claims to authority. Fraser contends that Benhabib and Butler are embracing “false antitheses” (Benhabib et al. 1995). Both positions are important, and the breadth and complexity of feminist issues require an eclectic, pragmatic feminist critical theory, in which different theories are appropriate to address different questions in different contexts. Both Fraser and Nicholson worry that Benhabib, Butler, and Cornell rely on problematic universals— Benhabib’s universal norms, Butler’s universalized theory of language, and Cornell’s psychoanalytic theory of the symbolic order (also in Benhabib et al. 1995). They question Benhabib’s adherence to a philosophy that defends universal validity claims, to a conception of history characterized by a singular historical narrative, and to a theory of a universal process of individuation. And they argue that Butler’s theory of the subject produced through universal norms of language is ahistorical and deterministic. Both argue for a critical theory that is defined by historically situated social critique. Against the charge of linguistic determinism, leveled by Benhabib, Fraser, and Nicholson, Butler argues, “to be constituted by language is to be produced within a given network of power/discourse which is open to resignification, redeployment, subversive citation from within, and interruption and inadvertent convergences with other such networks. ‘Agency’ is to be found precisely at such junctures where discourse is renewed” (135). Cornell’s argument for what she calls “ethical feminism,” characterized by a reworking of the feminine subject position from a psychoanalytic perspective, receives little attention in this debate, apart from the charge of universalism. The elephant in the room in this discussion is queer theory and politics, which is, weirdly, never mentioned by anyone. The shift from a politics of women’s liberation and gay and lesbian liberation to the queer politics of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-­UP) and Queer Nation was co-­constitutive with the shift in theory from grand theories and normative commitments, theories of autonomous agency and identity politics, to Foucauldian, poststructuralist, and deconstructivist critiques. But while the terms “postmodern,” “poststructuralist,” and “deconstruction” are hotly contested, and Foucault and Derrida and others are named, the term “queer theory” is never used.1 Acknowledging queer politics might have had a transformative effect on this debate. For example, if Butler were to point out that her theory is addressing the heterosexist constitution of complementary gender identities that produces “deviant” subjects and 1  While the term “queer” was just emerging when the first version of this debate was published in 1990, it was well known by the time Feminist Contentions was published in 1995.

58   Weir oppresses all gendered subjects who are forced to police their identities, and to repress or abject qualities that are not gender normative, that might satisfy the demand for a normative position while maintaining the critique of the constitution of norms and normative identities. If Benhabib were to acknowledge the queer politics of subversion, she could shift her focus from the need to defend a collective feminist subject and the emergence of women’s autonomy to acknowledge the historical diversity of forms of political struggle, and even possibly to acknowledge that philosophy and politics can involve not just defending norms but questioning certainties. As Butler points out, this entire debate excludes the questions and arguments posed by postcolonial theorists and feminists of color, who similarly question claims to a collective feminist subject. For Linda Zerilli (2005), the whole debate founders on “the subject question” rather than asking how feminists can do politics (see also McNay 2000; Brown 2005; Allen 2008; Weir 1996 and 2013; Leeb 2017). The debates between Benhabib, Butler, Cornell, and Fraser in Feminist Contentions continue to inform their later work. Benhabib continues to explore subjectivity and agency, drawing on Arendt to develop a narrative conception of the self. Butler refines her conception of language and resignification, and addresses relational psychoanalytic theories of dependency and theories of otherness. And Fraser turns from pragmatic eclecticism to “comprehensive, normative, programmatic thinking” (1997, 4). In their more recent work, these feminist critical theorists engage with transnational and global issues, with feminism as just one dimension of broader arguments. For example, Benhabib has published extensively on cosmopolitanism and international human rights; Fraser has theorized transnational publics and counterpublics and global capitalism; and Butler has addressed nationalisms, war and Zionism, and the politics of assembly.

Race, Colonization, and Western Imperialism Frankfurt School critical theorists tend to forget that the aim of critical theory, according to Horkheimer’s founding text, is emancipation from slavery. There has been little analysis by prominent critical theorists of the African slave trade and the continuing legacies of colonization, racialization, and white supremacy in America and worldwide. Nor have many critical theorists addressed the destruction of Indigenous peoples and cultures and the appropriation of land as property in settler colonization. Hence, there has been little analysis of the ways in which global capitalism and modern regimes of power have historically been enabled through the appropriation and commodification of labor and land, and of how these practices have been linked with and facilitated through heteropatriarchal institutions and disciplinary regimes. To return to a theorist with whom this chapter began, Angela Davis could be said to have invented feminist critical theory with her 1977 essay “Women and Capitalism.” In

Feminist Critical Theory   59 subsequent work Davis engages directly with the aim of emancipating human beings from slavery, analyzing relationships between capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy in the United States. In Women, Race, and Class, Davis addresses the legacies of slavery in the continued exploitation of Black women’s labor in domestic work, but also in the “legacy of tenacity, resistance and insistence on sexual equality” of Black women who worked as equals with Black men and who resisted and fought against slavery (1981, 29). Part of this legacy, Davis argues, was a new standard of women’s equality, which, along with the political experience of white women abolitionists who affirmed solidarity with Black activists, led to the movement for women’s rights. In later work, Davis’s (2003) analyses of the prison industrial complex focus directly on the incarceration of Black people as a continuation of slavery. White feminist critical theorists have not substantially engaged these analyses, and Davis is not included within the pantheon of contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory. There are some Frankfurt School feminist critical theorists who have engaged with race issues. For example, Iris Marion Young includes some discussions of racialized oppression and of race and gender identity politics throughout her work. Nancy Fraser (1997) thematizes the intersecting axes of gender and class in modern capitalism in “A Genealogy of Dependency” and in her work on recognition and redistribution. Both Fraser and Young argue for transformative politics that address the oppression of social groups in relation to normative ideals of justice. Young (1990) argues for a politics of difference that stresses the importance of recognition, identifying five “faces” of oppression (exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence) and distinguishing among four dimensions of justice (distribution, division of labor, decision-­making power, and cultural meanings). Fraser (1997) argues for a distinction between socioeconomic injustice, requiring a politics of redistribution, and cultural injustice, requiring a politics of recognition.2 And she distinguishes between “affirmative” forms of redistribution and recognition (the liberal welfare state, multiculturalism policies, and identity politics) and “transformative” forms (socialism, deconstruction of race and gender identities, and queer politics). Ultimately, she argues that justice requires the transformative forms of both redistribution and recognition: the ideal is to transform the political economic system, and to transform our identities, to “change everyone’s sense of self ” (24). While both Fraser and Young argue for transformative politics, the framing in terms of the politics of recognition and redistribution situates the debates within the politics and theories of the liberal Western state. Similarly, Benhabib affirms a deliberative democratic politics within the liberal state to adjudicate issues of difference and diversity. In their more recent work, both Young and Fraser address transnational colonization and imperialism. Before her death in 2006, Young worked on Indigenous anticolonial politics and responsibility for global injustice and had begun to explore postcolonial and anticolonial theories (Young 2007; Levy and Young 2011). Fraser is currently working on analyses of racialized capitalism, theorizing racialized colonization, accumulation, and 2  Fraser later adds a third dimension: representation.

60   Weir expropriation as “background conditions” of an expanded conception of capitalism. Drucilla Cornell has done extensive work drawing on imaginaries and symbolic and legal systems beyond the Eurocentric frame, focusing particularly on the South African idea of uBuntu, to defend normative ideals of freedom and justice and to “decolonize” critical theory. (Cornell 2008) While race and colonization are thematized within feminist critical theory, there has been little attention to critical race and postcolonial theories in this work. Charles Mills puts it quite bluntly: “Critical theorists” are white, and “critical race theorists” and postcolonial theorists are black and brown (Mills 2017). There has been little engagement in feminist critical theory with postcolonial critiques of Western feminisms and with how ideals of autonomy, rights, and secularism are used to support Western imperialism. In her extensive discussions of the global politics of gender and cultural diversity, Benhabib affirms a deliberative democratic multicultural politics within the liberal democratic state that “does not confine women and children to their communities of origin against their will, but encourages them to develop their autonomous agency vis-­à-­vis their ascribed identities” (2002, 86). As Amy Allen (2013) points out, Benhabib assumes that the modern Western ideal of autonomy, entailing a distanced reflection on one’s attachments and identities, represents a developmental advance over values and identities affirmed in other forms of life. Feminist critical theorists still tend to regard religion as the opiate of the masses, and cultural identities and attachments as primarily oppressive. This stance fails to address postcolonial and Islamic feminist critiques of Western secularism, and of the use of the discourse of the liberation of women from their oppressive cultures and religions to legitimate American imperialism and perpetuate Islamophobia. Genuine engagement with all of these issues would require an expansion and transformation of the narrow definition of “critical theory” to include critical race theory and postcolonial theories, and reflection on the Eurocentrism and whiteness of the tradition of critical theory. This will require a transformation of what critical theory is and who it includes. Feminist critical theorists have struggled to expand Frankfurt School critical theory to include gender issues. They are now faced with the challenge of transforming critical theory.3

References Allen, Amy. 2008. The Politics of Our Selves. Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Allen, Amy. 2016. The End of Progress. New York: Columbia University Press.

3  This work has begun, with the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, founded in 2016 by Judith Butler and Penelope Deutscher. The Consortium aims to globalize critical theory, to connect disparate projects and programs, and to incite new forms of collaborative research. The Consortium has founded a journal, Critical Times, and a book series, Critical South.

Feminist Critical Theory   61 Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. New York: Routledge. Benhabib, Seyla. 2002. The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser. 1995. Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York: Routledge. Benhabib, Seyla, and Drucilla Cornell, eds. 1987. Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender in Late-Capitalist Societies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon. Brown, Wendy. 2005. Edgework. Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brown, Wendy. 2006. “Feminist Theory and the Frankfurt School: Introduction.” Differences 17 (1): 1–5. Butler, Judith. 1987. “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault.” In Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender in Late-Capitalist Societies, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, 128–42. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cornell, Drucilla. 1991. Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Cornell, Drucilla. 2008. Moral Images of Freedom: A Future for Critical Theory. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Cornell, Drucilla, and Adam Thurschwell. 1987. “Feminism, Negativity, Intersubjectivity.” In Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender in Late-Capitalist Societies, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, 143–62. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Davis, Angela. 1977. “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation.” In Marxism, Revolution, and Peace, edited by Howard Parsons and John Sommerville, 139–171. Amsterdam: B.R. Grülner. Davis, Angela. 1981. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Random House. Davis, Angela. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories. Flax, Jane. 1990. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1987. “What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender.” In Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender in Late-Capitalist Societies, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, 31–55. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Unruly Practices: Power Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. New York: Routledge. Fraser, Nancy. 2013. Fortunes of Feminism. London: Verso. Horkheimer, Max. 1972. “Traditional and Critical Theory.” In Critical Theory: Selected Essays, 188–243. Translated by Matthew O’Connell et al. New York: Continuum. Leeb, Claudia. 2017. Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism: Toward a New Theory of the Political Subject. New York: Oxford University Press.

62   Weir Levy, Jacob  T., with Iris Marion Young. 2011. Colonialism and Its Legacies. Lanham MD: Lexington Books. Marcuse, Herbert. 1974. “Marxism and Feminism.” Women’s Studies 2 (3): 279–88. McNay, Lois. 2000. Gender and Agency. Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity. McNay, Lois. 2008. Against Recognition. Cambridge: Polity. Meehan, Johanna. 1995. Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse. New York: Routledge. Mills, Charles. 2017. “Criticizing Critical Theory.” In Critical Theory in Critical Times: Transforming the Global Political and Economic Order, edited by Penelope Deutscher and Cristina Lafont, 233–50. New York: Columbia University Press. Nicholson, Linda. 1986. Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family. New York: Columbia University Press. Nicholson, Linda. 1987. “Feminism and Marx: Integrating Kinship with the Economic.” In Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender in Late-Capitalist Societies, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, 16–30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thompson, Michael J., ed. 2017. The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Weir, Allison. 1996. Sacrificial Logics. Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity. New York: Routledge. Weir, Allison. 2013. Identities and Freedom. New York: Oxford. Young, Iris Marion. 1987. “Impartiality and the Civic Public: Some Implications of Feminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory.” In Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender in Late-Capitalist Societies, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, 56–76. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 2000. Inclusion and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 2007. Global Challenges: War, Self-Determination and Responsibility for Justice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Zerilli, Linda. 2005. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

chapter 6

Femi n isT Phenom enol ogy Gail Weiss

Phenomenology, which seeks to provide comprehensive descriptions of our lived experience without relying on taken-­ for-­ granted presuppositions and/or value ­judgments about that experience, has proven to be a very productive methodology for feminist philosophers, who, in turn, are significantly advancing and transforming the field. Like traditional Husserlian phenomenology, feminist phenomenology takes as its subject matter everyday human experiences, yet feminist phenomenologists also ­critique the phenomenological tradition for falsely assuming that gender-­neutral and race-­neutral descriptions of our lived experiences are possible or even desirable. Feminist phenomenology itself can be said to have burst onto the philosophical scene with the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in 1949. Given Beauvoir’s intensive study of Husserlian phenomenology, it is no coincidence that the second volume of this groundbreaking text bears the phenomenological title “Lived Experience” [L’expérience vécue]. And yet, in contrast to Husserl’s own project, the lived experiences Beauvoir focuses on are not intended to be universal but rather concern the distinctively gendered experiences associated with being a woman or, to use Beauvoir’s words, “the second sex,” in a patriarchal society in which white men’s lived experiences have been presupposed (even within traditional phenomenology) as the universal norm. Accordingly, in this volume Beauvoir offers detailed accounts of significant developmental periods in women’s lives ranging from childhood to old age as well as rich descriptions of the diverse and often denigrated identities women have both voluntarily and involuntarily assumed as lesbians, mothers, prostitutes, narcissists, mystics, women in love, and independent women. Though other twentiethcentury phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-­Ponty challenge Husserl’s idealistic portrayal of phenomenology as a “presuppositionless” or unbiased philosophy that provides essential descriptions of “the things themselves,” with Merleau-­ ­ Ponty famously arguing in the Preface to his 1945 Phenomenology of Perception that “The most important lesson of the [phenomenological] reduction is the impossibility of a

64   Weiss complete reduction,” feminist phenomenologists have challenged even more than the possibility of providing a complete description of a given phenomenon from a “reduced” or unbiased perspective (Merleau-­Ponty 1945: lxxvii). Indeed, following Beauvoir’s lead, one of our central missions has been to expand radically the types of phenomena that are deemed worthy of serious philosophical attention. Beauvoir’s mid-­twentieth-­century descriptions of the pervasive effects of a sexist society on women’s lived experiences provide a crucial foundation for the major contributions feminist phenomenologists Iris Marion Young, Judith Butler, and Sandra Bartky made to the field in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. All three express their indebtedness to Beauvoir in their work even as they critique aspects of her account of women’s “immanence” under patriarchy in The Second Sex. Young’s 1980 essay, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality”; Butler’s 1989 essay, “Gendering the Body: Beauvoir’s Philosophical Contribution”; her 1990 monograph Gender Trouble: Gender and the Subversion of Identity; and Bartky’s 1990 volume, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression, have in turn become classics in the field, establishing a canon that continues to inspire new generations of feminist phenomenologists. Early twenty-­first-­century feminist phenomenology has also been marked by an insistence, contra Husserl, that phenomenological investigations should not aim to be nonprescriptive and value-­free. Indeed, contemporary feminist phenomenologists are utilizing the tools of phenomenological description to reveal the urgent social, political, and ethical consequences of assuming that the experiences of privileged white, ablebodied, heterosexual, cis-­gendered males constitute the (ideal) norm. Drawing upon key insights from critical race theory, carceral studies, disability studies, and queer theory, feminist phenomenologists continue to chart new ground through their contributions to the emerging field of “critical phenomenology.” Like traditional phenomenology, Guenther observes, critical phenomenology is “a method that is rooted in first-­person accounts of experience”; however, it is “also critical of classical phenomenology’s claim that the first-­person singular is absolutely prior to intersubjectivity and the complex textures of social life” (Guenther 2013: xiii). To insist that subjectivity is intersubjectively constituted is to affirm that our first-­person perspectives are not generated in a vacuum; rather, they are developed in and through our everyday relations with others, relations that are situated within and structured by a broader social, cultural, political, economic, and historical context. Given that one individual’s subjective perspective always already incorporates the perspectives of others, it is impossible to describe a single individual’s experience as if it is totally separate from the experiences of other members of her community or as if it is immune to the influence of the habitus, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s expression, that reflects the established norms of that community.1 1  In a chapter entitled “Structures, habitus, Practices” in The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu observes: “The practical world that is constituted in the relationship with the habitus, acting as a system of cognitive and motivating structures, is a world of already realized ends—procedures to follow, paths to

Feminist Phenomenology   65 Taking seriously Husserl’s emphasis upon the background horizons that contextualize each and every human experience as well as the perspectives we form based on that experience, critical feminist phenomenologists call attention to the sexist, racist, and ableist contexts in which our experiences (and our understanding of our experiences) so often unfold, contexts that tend to remain invisible and unexamined unless the habitual expectations that they give rise to are challenged in some way. Feminist phenomenology, moreover, is not content merely to describe the habitual expectations that reflect and reinforce what is so often an unjust and oppressive status quo but seeks to problematize and ultimately alter them.

Early Interventions in Feminist Phenomenology: Beauvoir, Young, Bartky, and Butler It is impossible to overestimate the crucial contributions these four authors have made to the development of feminist phenomenology as a legitimate research specialization in its own right. Building upon Beauvoir’s detailed descriptions of how women are socialized to accept the daily devaluation of their minds and bodies under patriarchy, Young, Bartky, and Butler each expose the deleterious consequences of buying into what Beauvoir calls “the myth of Woman,” namely, a false, fixed, and ultimately contradictory set of stereotypes about women that legitimizes their second-­class status in society as man’s inferior by presenting this latter as their natural destiny. In Beauvoir’s words: This idea escapes all contention because it is situated beyond the given; it is endowed with an absolute truth. Thus, to the dispersed, contingent, and multiple existence of women, mythic thinking opposes the Eternal Feminine, unique and fixed; if the definition given is contradicted by the behavior of real flesh-­and-­blood women, it is women who are wrong. . . . Experiential denials cannot do anything against the myth. (Beauvoir 2012: 266)

Instead of acknowledging and embracing the actual diversity of women’s experiences and aspirations, the myth of woman conflates women with femininity and offers a very restricted view of the type of behavior that counts as “appropriate” feminine conduct. Those of us who fail to meet these accepted standards (as we all do, from time to time, even if we are trying our best to live up to them) tend to be judged harshly by other members of society, especially by our female peers who might lament, or perhaps note take—and of objects endowed with a ‘permanent teleological character’ in Husserl’s phrase, tools or institutions” (Bourdieu 1990: 53).

66   Weiss with glee, that we have “let ourselves go.” This social condemnation, moreover, is often reinforced by a woman’s overly critical self-­assessments of her appearance.2 At the beginning of her essay, “Women Recovering Our Clothes,” Young offers a poign­ant description of the complex yet mundane experience of a woman trying on clothes who does not simply see herself in the mirror but also sees herself being seen, whether by a real or imagined male observer. “I am seeing myself in wool seeing him see me,” she observes, and then quickly asks: “Is it that I cannot see myself without seeing myself being seen? So I need him there to unite me and my image of myself? Who does he think I am?” (Young 2005: 63). This experience of being a “split subject,” a woman whose view of herself is mediated by the way she imagines she is being viewed by another who judges her and may find her wanting, Young suggests, is quite familiar to women in a patriarchal society. Despite its tongue-­in-­cheek title, this essay demands that we give women’s relationship to their clothes and to the men who judge how they look in them our serious phenomenological attention. As Butler emphasizes, the penalties for “doing one’s gender wrong,” that is, for violating the formal and informal standards that sharply distinguish “proper” masculine from “proper” feminine conduct, have historically included not only verbal and physical abuse and/or social ostracization but also death. “One does not become a gender through a free and unconstrained act of choice,” she observes, for gender identity is governed by a set of stringent taboos, conventions, and laws. There are punishments for not doing gender right: a man in Maine walks down the street in a dress, walking the way that women are supposed to walk; next day his body is found dead in a ravine. And though we may not have experienced his punishment directly (although much of childrearing is involved in inculcating the rules of gender through the fear of punishment), we nevertheless know something of the terror and shame of being told that we are somehow doing our gender wrong, that we have failed in some way to measure up to the cultural norm and expectation. (Butler 1989: 256)

Young and Bartky provide additional examples of the harmful gender policing that women are subjected to from their earliest youth, including powerful autobiographical accounts of the negative psychic and physical effects that result from sexist socialization practices that discourage girls (but not boys) from maximizing their bodily potentialities. In “Throwing Like a Girl,” Young points out that, unlike boys, who are encouraged to develop their physical capacities to the utmost, young girls have traditionally been

2  Sixty years after the publication of The Second Sex, women in study after study report being less satisfied with their bodies then men. Given the West’s increasing valorization of thinness as a crucial component of femininity over the last century, it should be no surprise that women who are underweight as well as average weight frequently view themselves as overweight—a misjudgment that is often encouraged by their male peers. For instance, a 2012 article in ScientificNordic by Cecilie Cronwald summarizes the results of a major survey undertaken by Danish research institution AKF as follows: “Men underestimate their own weight, while women are regarded as fatter than they are—by themselves and their male partners alike.”

Feminist Phenomenology   67 dissuaded from engaging in physically challenging tasks for fear that they will get hurt and/or appear unladylike.3 As a result, she notes, women have more of a tendency than men do to greatly underestimate our bodily capacity. We decide beforehand—usually mistakenly—that the task is beyond us and thus give it less than our full effort. At such a halfhearted level, of course, we cannot perform the tasks, become frustrated, and fulfill our own prophecy. (Young 2005: 34)

Building upon Young’s account, Bartky draws upon Marx’s concept of alienation to address the long-­lasting impact of these self-­constraining experiences on women’s relationships with their own bodies. More specifically, Bartky asserts that, “just as workers can be alienated from their labor, so can women be estranged from their own sexuality” (Bartky 1990: 35). Like Young, she exposes a paradoxical dimension to this process, arguing that even as a woman encounters spatial and sexual barriers that can result in a sense of bodily alienation, she also can “suffer a different form of estrangement by being too closely identified with [her body]” through the lived experience of sexual objectification (Bartky 1990: 35). To be sexually objectified, Bartky maintains, “is to have one’s entire being identified with the body, a thing which in many religious and metaphysical systems, as well as in the popular mind, has been regarded as less intrinsically valuable, indeed as less inherently human, than the mind or personality.” (Bartky 1990: 35) In her chapter “On Psychological Oppression,” Bartky offers a personal anecdote that perfectly captures this experience of sexual objectification that so often catches one unawares, undermining one’s sense of embodied agency in the process: It is a fine spring day, and with an utter lack of self-­consciousness, I am bouncing down the street. Suddenly I hear men’s voices. Catcalls and whistles fill the air. These noises are clearly sexual in intent and they are meant for me; they come from across the street. I freeze. As Sartre would say, I have been petrified by the gaze of the Other. My face flushes and my motions become stiff and self-­conscious. The body which only a moment before I inhabited with such ease now floods my consciousness. While it is true that for these men I am nothing but, let us say, a “nice piece of ass,” there is more involved in this encounter than their mere fragmented perception of me. They could, after all, have enjoyed me in silence. Blissfully unaware, breasts bouncing, eyes on the birds in the trees, I could have passed by without having been turned to stone. But I must be made to know that I am a “nice piece of ass”: I must be made to see myself as they see me. There is an element of compulsion in this encounter, in this being-­ made-­to-­be-­aware of one’s own flesh; like being made to apologize, it is humiliating. (Bartky 1990: 27)

While Bartky emphasizes the “element of compulsion” that is part and parcel of the experience of being treated merely as a “nice piece of ass,” she also recognizes, like 3  It should be noted that Young is describing the typical experience of bourgeois girls in Western societies, not the experiences of working-­class girls and women who have been treated as “beasts of burden” for centuries insofar as no task is seen as too taxing or too demeaning for them to perform.

68   Weiss Beauvoir, Young, and Butler, that sexual harassment is not the only way in which ­women’s bodies are objectified. Given that, as Adrienne Rich observes, every human being, whether male or female, is “of woman born,” it is no surprise that the ability to bear children has long been regarded as one of the most important sources of women’s value in a patriarchal society (Rich 1995). While pregnant women commonly experience unwanted stares, inappropriate questions, and even intrusive patting of their abdomens by total strangers, this form of bodily objectification tends not to be regarded as a form of sexual objectification because, as Young notes, “our own culture harshly separates pregnancy from sexuality” (Young 2005: 52). Women who cannot or choose not to have children do not escape notice, but are also objectified for failing to use their bodies to fulfill the maternal role that has been regarded for centuries as a woman’s highest calling. Indeed, they are often regarded as more selfish (and more tragic!) than other women, not only by men but also by other women, especially mothers. Women who are not mothers, moreover, are not exempt from the caregiving expectations that accompany our idealized conceptions of motherhood since, as Bartky astutely observes, the task of providing daily emotional support to others, especially to the men they live and/or work with, has traditionally fallen upon women. In her aptly titled chapter “Feeding Egos and Tending Wounds,” Bartky describes this often invisible but very time-­consuming and energy-­depleting form of affective labor as follows: “To support someone emotionally is to keep up his spirits, to keep him from sinking under the weight of burdens that are his to bear.” And, she adds: To give such support, then, is to tend to a person’s state of mind in such a way as to make his sinking less likely; it is to offer him comfort, typically by the bandaging up of his emotional wounds or to offer him sustenance, typically by the feeding of his self-­esteem. The aim of this supporting and sustaining is to produce or to maintain in the one supported and sustained a conviction of the value and importance of his own chosen projects, hence of the value and importance of his own person. (Bartky 1990: 102)

Propping up other people’s self-­esteem so that they can continue to feel good about themselves even in the face of personal or professional failures can be seen as a unique form of “consciousness raising” that, in marked contrast to early feminist consciousnessraising that seeks to leave no woman behind, far too often raises a man’s consciousness at the expense of the woman who supports him. As Bartky’s previous description makes clear, this traditionally feminine labor goes far beyond emotional support since it is not merely real and symbolic “wounds” that are tended to but male egos that are fed. By calling our attention to the sexist as well as racist, classist, and ableist socialization practices that have consigned both men and women to mutually exclusive, oppositional roles that permit very little deviation or variation without the risk of severe social penalty, feminist phenomenologists have challenged the universality of human experience

Feminist Phenomenology   69 that is presupposed by the male philosophers whose works are most closely associated with the phenomenological canon. The grand titles of these latter texts including Husserl’s Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Heidegger’s Being and Time, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and MerleauPonty’s Phenomenology of Perception testify to their authors’ confident, shared presumption that consciousness, being, time, nothingness, and perception are experienced similarly by all of us, and hence that essential descriptions can be provided of these lived realities that hold equally true for every human being. Yet this is precisely the presupposition that is contested by feminist phenomenologists who describe the ways in which a person’s gender, race, social class, and bodily abilities affect her relations with others and, therefore, the meaning of her lived experiences. Indeed, the very titles of Beauvoir’s, Butler’s, Bartky’s and Young’s books, The Second Sex; Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression; and On Female Embodiment: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays signal their rejection of decontextualized discourses about what are assumed to be essential features of human existence. Rather than viewing their respective critiques of the phenomenological tradition as a rejection of its commitment to provide a comprehensive, rigorous, clear-­sighted, and accurate description of lived experience, however, I would argue that feminist phenomenologists are actually taking this commitment even more seriously, perhaps, than their male predecessors. Indeed, as these feminist philosophers so eloquently and forcefully remind us, the phenomenological descriptions we provide must express the actual realities of our lives. Accomplishing this latter goal, moreover, requires a critical phenomenology that is attuned to the sexist, racist, and ableist presuppositions about human consciousness, perception, temporality, and intersubjectivity that oppress so many and have historically benefited so few. In particular, as Sara Ahmed observes, a feminist approach “is necessary because of what has not ended: sexism, sexual exploitation, and sexual oppression” (Ahmed 2017: 5). As feminist phenomenologists well recognize, these unjust facts of life cannot be swept to the side or deemed irrelevant as we seek to describe the essential features of our lived experience: they must be included in our accounts even as we aim, by identifying them, to open up new possibilities for women and minorities that histories of sexism, racism, ableism, and classism have all too often foreclosed. As Dorothea Olkowski concludes in her 1999 essay on “Feminism and Phenomenology”: If there is an ongoing task attributable to feminist phenomenology, it is this: to transform the culture in the direction of greater openness toward the diversity of life and body, such that the embodied subject is recognized as gendered and historically conditioned, open to all the tensions and contradictions of the culture in which she lives, thus also open to personal and political transformation. (Olkowski 1999: 330)

70   Weiss

Transforming the Natural Attitude: The Task of Feminist Phenomenology There is a synthetic and organic quality to feminist phenomenology that differentiates it from the phenomenological tradition out of which it arose. Whereas the well-­known authors whose work has historically defined the phenomenological canon (e.g., Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-­Ponty) each claim to be providing us with a description of the most essential features of human existence, and frequently begin with an agonistic critique of previous accounts as inadequate to the current task, the work of feminist phenomenologists is marked by a creative engagement with other feminist philosophers’ insights, producing a more collaborative canon in the process, albeit one that remains open to critique and contestation. In contrast to the dispassionate descriptions of allegedly universal nongendered and nonracialized experiences that have long defined the phenomenological tradition, feminist phenomenology, as noted earlier, has a clear social, political, and ethical agenda. By eschewing uncritical claims to universality, our more nuanced and thick descriptions seek not only to address but also to redress long histories of discrimination and oppression that have led to the devaluation of the lived experiences of women and minorities. Contemporary feminist phenomenologists are well aware of the debt we owe to our feminist “foremothers” as well as to the phenomenological tradition itself, which has provided a vocabulary and a method that continues to yield rich insights, especially when one focuses on describing experiences of difference rather than sameness. As Ahmed notes, “Citation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow” (Ahmed 2017: 15–16). By actively citing the work of other feminist phenomenologists, we have been able to establish our own feminist canon that preserves and highlights the different perspectives out of which it has emerged. While the early work of feminist phenomenologists such as Beauvoir, Bartky, Young, and Butler tended to focus on gender and sexual difference, contemporary feminist phenomenology is marked by a more intersectional approach that increasingly incorporates key insights from critical race theory, queer theory, decolonial theory, and disability studies. A powerful example of how a classic phenomenological description can be revisited and presented in a wholly new light through an intersectional feminist lens is provided by Ahmed in her 2006 monograph, Queer Phenomenology. A central leitmotif in the book is Husserl’s example from Ideas volume one of sitting at the table in his study writing, and then stopping for a moment to survey the room, look outside the window, and listen to the voices of the children playing in the garden outside. Husserl uses this example to discuss the figure/ground structure of perception and the way in which our focus on a particular noema (intentional object) pushes everything else into the background. While one is absorbed in a concrete task, he suggests, one can remain blithely unaware of one’s immediate environs as well as the activities that are presently going on within

Feminist Phenomenology   71 one’s perceptual field. When one changes one’s perspective, however, and attends to one’s surroundings, the table one is writing on, the window above the desk that offers a view of the garden, and the children playing outside are transformed from the ground to the figure, becoming the new focus of one’s awareness. This perceptual inversion of figure to ground and ground to figure in turn reveals the complex, multiple horizons that play an ongoing yet often invisible role in establishing the sphere of our daily concern. Ahmed is both fascinated and troubled by this account of perceptual orientation. Dwelling at length on this mundane example, she asks decidedly non-­Husserlian questions about the motivations that lead us to adopt one orientation rather than another, opening up new phenomenological terrain in the process. While Husserl’s example is intended to be a neutral account of how we can alter our focus from what we are writing to the actual paper on which it is being written, or the table on which the paper lies, or the garden outside the window, Ahmed invites us “to consider the domestic work that must have taken place for Husserl to turn to the writing table, and to be writing on the table, and to keep that table as the object of his attention.” Invoking Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she adds: We can draw here on the long history of feminist scholarship about the politics of housework: about the ways in which women, as wives and servants, do the work required to keep such spaces available for men and the work they do. To sustain an orientation toward the writing table might depend on such work, while it erases the signs of that work, as signs of dependence. (Ahmed 2006: 30–31)

Suddenly, through Ahmed’s own writing, a new orientation, and hence a new figure, appears. Husserl’s seemingly innocuous example intended to showcase the essential ­figure/ground structure of all perceptual experience recedes into the background, revealing in turn what has not hitherto been visible but was there all along, namely, his gender and class privilege. Indeed, as Ahmed convincingly demonstrates, the writing table and the room were never neutral objects to begin with, but a gendered space that Husserl can be productive in only if other people (i.e., women) are taking care of the house and the children so that he is free to write and reflect on his experience. Ahmed’s provocative and illuminating discussion reveals an abiding theme in feminist phenomenology more generally: its insistence upon not accepting traditional descriptions at face value but probing further to uncover the hidden gendered, racial, sexual, and class presuppositions that operate beneath the surface, and that must remain hidden for these examples to function as universal experiences available to all. Contemporary phenomenologists such as Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega, and Gayle Salamon continue to break new ground by offering descriptions of experiences that are quite common, but which have not hitherto been deemed worthy of phenomenological attention. Their phenomenologies of mixed-­race, multiplicitous, and trans identities are only three examples of the exciting work that is currently being done in our field, work that is inspiring new generations of feminist phenomenologists to boldly go where no man has gone before.

chapter 7

The Legacy of Si mon e de Beau voir Céline Leboeuf

In her Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism, Nancy Bauer quips that failing to cite Simone de Beauvoir’s iconic line “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” is “tantamount to forgetting to genuflect on your way into the family pew” (Bauer 2001, 172). Bauer is right to point out that we feminist philosophers are quick to pay homage to Beauvoir. Yet she also notes that we do not necessarily grasp the real significance of this line. Is Beauvoir simply claiming that gender is a social construct? Indeed, the sex/gender distinction, one of the core concepts of feminist philosophy (albeit a disputed one), has been traced to The Second Sex by philosophers of such diverse outlooks as Sally Haslanger (2012) and Judith Butler (1986). However, certain Beauvoir scholars, including Toril Moi (1995) and Sara Heinämaa (1997), caution us against merely assimilating Beauvoir’s statement to the claim that gender is socially constructed from sex. Who is right? What is the legacy of this sentence and of Beauvoir’s feminist philosophy as a whole? This chapter aims to grapple with Beauvoir’s legacy for feminist philosophy. While the bulk of my argument will deal with Beauvoir’s magnum opus, The Second Sex, first published in 1949, the publication of her Feminist Writings in 2015, which collects later essays, will allow us to fill in the picture and reveal her feminist philosophy more completely. I will focus on four central themes: (1) Beauvoir’s methodological contributions in The Second Sex; (2) her claim that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”; (3) her account of girls’ and women’s bodily experiences; and (4)  her vision of women’s liberation, as it is articulated in The Second Sex and developed in her later writings. While revisiting these topics will shed light on the legacy of Beauvoir’s feminism, an exposition of her philosophy would be lacking if it did not broach feminist criticisms of her failure to discuss the experiences of marginalized women, such as women of color. Thus, I will conclude by exploring the significance of these erasures for Beauvoir’s legacy.

The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir   73 The Second Sex begins with a provocation: “What is a woman?” (Beauvoir 2011, 3). I say a “provocation” because the question appears innocuous, but it proves to be deeply philosophical. What could be simpler than defining what it is to be a woman? After all, the majority of us are likely to encounter women in our daily lives, and many of us count ourselves in the group. Why would defining “woman” be difficult? Yet, as Beauvoir reveals, the question does not admit a ready answer. Some would locate the being of woman in female embodiment, while others in the quality of femininity (Beauvoir 2011, 3). Beauvoir rejects each of these proposals summarily. On the one hand, Beauvoir notes that some women, perhaps due to their behavior or roles that they occupy, are declared not to be women “even though they have a uterus like the others” (Beauvoir 2011, 3). So, there must be more than female embodiment to count as a woman. On the other hand, reducing the being of women to femininity runs afoul of the growing consensus that there are “no immutably determined entities that define given characteristics like those of the woman, the Jew, or the black” (Beauvoir 2011, 4). Should we resort to the nominalist thesis that “women are, among human beings, those arbitrarily designated by the term ‘woman’” (Beauvoir 2011, 4)? Beauvoir disposes of this solution, since “it is easy for antifeminists to show that women are not men” (Beauvoir 2011, 4). In other words, given current social circumstances, no woman could claim “without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex” (Beauvoir  2011, 4). Clearly, then, answering the question is not so simple. Amidst the disorienting failure of these answers, Beauvoir sets us on the right track when she declares, “I am a woman” (Beauvoir 2011, 5). This brings us to the central methodological point I would like to make about Beauvoir’s legacy: her appeal to her experience as a woman allows her to move the question of woman onto philosophical terrain. Let us have a look at this move more closely. Beauvoir claims that her statement “I am a woman” provides the “basic truth” for her investigation. This is a crucial statement. The Second Sex is not a third-­personal account of the being of woman, of the sort one might find in the empirical sciences, such as sociology. But nor is it an autobiographical work. To be sure, Beauvoir refers to personal experience both in this introduction, when she raises the question of the being of woman, and in subsequent pages. Yet anyone who has read the work will know that The Second Sex is filled with the testimony of many women besides Beauvoir. Therefore, if the investigation is neither an empirical one nor an autobiographical one, what is going on in The Second Sex? Here is a clue: after declaring that “I am a woman” is the basic truth in her inquiry, Beauvoir informs us that men would never think of raising the question “What is a man?” (Beauvoir 2011, 5). Being a man is nothing singular. But being a woman is. To illustrate this point, Beauvoir relates the experience of being told that she believes such and such thing because she is a woman and that the rejoinder “you believe this because you are a man” would never occur to anyone (Beauvoir 2011, 5). In this light, it appears that being a woman is something singular, although it appears, at first blush, that the two sexes are “symmetrical” (Beauvoir 2011, 5). Thus, Beauvoir invites us to critically examine our traditional references to “humanity” or to “humankind,” which conceal that our paradigm for humanity is the male human being. All in all, a paradoxical situation is uncovered in the staging of

74   Leboeuf her inquiry: whereas male and female appear to be counterpart sexes, the male sex is, in fact, taken to represent humankind. What does this paradox spell for philosophy? As I read Beauvoir, it strains the age-­ old philosophical question “What is man?” While philosophers have offered a range of answers to this question, locating our essence in rationality or in consciousness or in freedom, no one until Beauvoir truly challenged the presupposition that the particularity of one’s embodiment needed to be considered to understand human being. In other words, if references to humankind covertly refer to male human beings, we cannot answer the question “What is man?” without accounting for sexual difference. In challenging the perennial philosophical question “What is man?” through her rejoinder “What is a woman?” Beauvoir introduces a new problem in philosophy, one that has occupied feminist philosophers and other theorists for well over half a century.1 In summary, The Second Sex places the question “What is a woman?” on the philosophical map. If anything, this is Beauvoir’s most important contribution to feminist philosophy. Whatever qualms one might have about the specifics of her account of woman, The Second Sex inaugurates the question of woman as a philosophical one. Needless to say, before Beauvoir, philosophers discussed the sexes, and there were philosophical defenses of women. One need only think of François Poulain de la Barre’s The Woman as Good as the Man: Or, The Equality of Both Sexes (first published in French 1673) or Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). But no one before Beauvoir, I would argue, manages to make the being of woman into a philosophical problem. She accomplishes this by introducing her perspective as a woman into what seems to be a mundane topic, a move that challenges philosophy’s traditional aspiration to impartiality. Beauvoir scholars have drawn attention to other interesting methodological aspects of The Second Sex: for example, its anti-­systematic character (Heinämaa 2003) and its appropriation of the works of a dizzying array of philosophers whose views appear to be at odds with one another (Deutscher 2008). Yet Beauvoir is not the first anti-­systematic philosopher, nor is she the first to have tried to make cohere the views of predecessors whose philosophies seem antithetical. In my eyes, then, the most original methodological contribution of The Second Sex consists in the turning of the question of woman into a philosophical problem. Let us now turn to the substantive contributions of The Second Sex and begin with Beauvoir’s oft-­cited “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Let us dwell on this sentence, since it is one of Beauvoir’s signature legacies for feminist philosophy. But to accomplish this, we need to take in the context in which Beauvoir makes this declaration: One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilization 1  For other examples of the claim that Beauvoir introduces the question “What is a woman?” into philosophy, see Nancy Bauer (2001) and Stella Sandford (2017).

The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir   75 as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine. Only the mediation of another can constitute an individual as an Other. Inasmuch as he exists for himself, the child would not grasp himself as sexually differentiated. For girls and boys, the body is first the radiation of a subjectivity, the instrument that brings about the comprehension of the world: they apprehend the universe through eyes and hands, and not through their sexual parts. (Beauvoir 2011, 283)

At first glance, this passage might suggest that Beauvoir endorses a form of social ­determinism, whereby the sexed individual becomes a gendered one in virtue of the action of social forces. Indeed, the second sentence would give the impression that civilization produces a thing: the “intermediary product between the male and the eunuch.” However, as several scholars (Heinämaa 1997; Leboeuf 2015) observe, Beauvoir’s philosophy as a whole belies this interpretation. In The Second Sex and in other writings, Beauvoir makes it clear that we are the types of beings who constitute and interpret ourselves. Thus, in the chapter of The Second Sex entitled “Biological Data,” she states that humans are “historical” beings (Beauvoir 2011, 45). This means that who we are is a function of the narratives we construct about our past and our futures; we are not merely the product of historical forces. And in The Ethics of Ambiguity, an earlier work, Beauvoir describes us as escaping “our natural condition,” and in this regard, as being different from “the animal and the plant” (Beauvoir 1976, 7). Nevertheless, she asserts that we never “[free] ourselves from [our natural condition]” (Beauvoir 1976, 7). In short, we straddle the divide between freedom and objecthood, or, in Beauvoir’s words, there is an “ambiguity” inherent in human existence. Because humans for Beauvoir are not mere objects, they cannot be completely understood according to the terms of those sciences that study us as mere objects (e.g., biology). Thus, these statements from The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity preclude reading Beauvoir as endorsing a form of social determinism whereby an object, the sexed newborn, is turned into another object, the gendered adult. Nevertheless, the reader may wonder whether the passage that follows “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” sanctions interpreting her ideas in terms of the sex/gender distinction. I think not. The reason lies in Beauvoir’s refusal to neatly demarcate biological proper and social ones. In her philosophy, there is no nature/culture divide of the sort implied by the usual sex/gender distinction. In “Biological Data,” Beauvoir asserts that “the body is a situation” (Beauvoir 2011, 46). A situation, in the language of Beauvoir and the phenomenological authors in whose “perspective” she places herself (Sartre, Merleau-­Ponty, and Heidegger), refers to a synthetic structure comprising freedom and facticity. Therefore, to claim that the body itself is a situation is to say that the body straddles the apparent division between the two realms. Put simply, the body does not lie on the side of brute facticity, as one might surmise. Accordingly, to say that the body is a situation is to claim that the body emerges from the ways in which we exercise our freedom in light of our circumstances.2 In saying that the 2  For an extended account of Beauvoir’s claim that the body is a situation, the reader should consult Toril Moi’s What Is a Woman? (1999).

76   Leboeuf body is a situation, Beauvoir indicates that we live our bodies in ways that are shaped by our bodily characteristics and their social significance. This implies that the passage following “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” is meant to refer to the fact that social conditions lead infants, who first apprehend the world “through eyes and hands,” to become persons who understand themselves primarily through the social meaning of “their sexual parts.” As a result, the sentence “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” should not be read as marking a division between a natural state, that of the newborn, and a cultural state, that of the adult woman. Rather, this sentence is meant to set the stage for a narrative about how human beings come to understand themselves, their bodies, as sexually differentiated. Beauvoir unfurls this narrative in “Lived Experience,” the second volume of The Second Sex, which gathers the experiences of girls and women at different stages of life and in different situations, such as motherhood and old age. This interpretation of Beauvoir’s iconic line is not new. As I have suggested, it has been formulated by other Beauvoir scholars. Even so, this interpretation is worth revisiting, since feminist philosophers of different stripes have interpreted Beauvoir’s line as a forerunner of the 1950s and 1960s sex/gender distinction. However, if we are to get Beauvoir’s legacy right, we need to truly understand her iconic line and not intone it unthinkingly. Let us now consider the second main substantive contribution of Beauvoir’s feminist philosophy: her descriptions of girls’ and women’s bodily experiences. This is another key Beauvoirian contribution to the field of feminist philosophy, and I say this because of the influence her descriptions have had on the works of subsequent feminist philosophers. Before I get to this lineage, however, I propose that we have a look at Beauvoir’s account of female bodily experience and home in on what she says about pubescent girls. In The Second Sex, especially in the chapters entitled “Childhood” and the “The Girl,” Beauvoir describes how over the course of puberty, girls begin to garner the attention of men and how the experience of being looked at alienates them. For example, speaking of a girl’s experience of a man commenting on her calves, Beauvoir writes that the girl loses a “transparent” relationship to her body and experiences her body as “foreign” (Beauvoir 2011, 321). The idea of bodily alienation, adumbrated in this passage, is one of the core ideas in Beauvoir’s account of female bodily experiences. The example I just cited might suggest that objectification alone provokes the experience of bodily alienation at puberty. The picture, however, is more complicated. In “Biological Data,” Beauvoir explains that the experience of certain female biological functions can be alienating. She has in mind such functions as menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause. Nonetheless, she does not believe that they are in themselves alienating. Instead, she argues that the way in which some society views women and treats them affects their experience of these biological functions. She writes, “It is not as a body but as a body subjected to taboos and laws that the subject gains consciousness and accomplishes himself ” (Beauvoir 2011, 47). As a result, Beauvoir’s analysis suggests that pubescent girls are simultaneously alienated from their bodies because they experience their

The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir   77 bodily changes as the sign of their inferiority and because their changing bodies are seized by others in their comments and gazes. In brief, the sense of alienation due to objectification overlays a sense of alienation stemming from the girl’s experience of her bodily functions. Furthermore, as Kristin Zeiler indicates, we should note that “the woman, for Beauvoir, comes to identify herself with her body as an object because of how she has learned to see herself, through and in interactions with others” (Zeiler 2013, 80). In other words, women (and girls) eventually come to identify with their objectified bodies. Indeed, Beauvoir devotes an entire chapter to “feminine narcissism.” Over the course of this chapter, she expands on her earlier descriptions of girls’ and women’s relation to their bodies and covers a range of autobiographical pieces by women with a focus on their repeated references to the effects of seeing themselves in a mirror. Despite the prevalence of feminine narcissism, Beauvoir’s position on the origins of narcissism is clear: narcissism is not an essential trait of women’s psychology, as some psychoanalysts would have it. Instead, social norms lead them down this path. Responding to the claim that “narcissism is the fundamental attitude of all women,” she writes, “what is true is that circumstances invite woman more than man to turn toward self and to dedicate her love to herself ” (Beauvoir 2011, 667). Beauvoir’s account of bodily alienation has been highly influential. For example, Iris Marion Young’s On Female Body Experience, which was published in 2005 but collects a range of essays across her career, takes its cues from Beauvoir’s phenomenology in its effort to investigate the various forms of alienation women experience with respect to their bodies. Thus, in her essay “Menstrual Meditations,” Young makes explicit reference to Beauvoir as she unpacks the effects that taboos about menstruation have on girls’ and women’s experience of their bodies. Similarly, women’s bodily alienation is a prominent theme in Sandra Bartky’s work, in particular, in her essay “Narcissism, Femininity, and Alienation” (1990), which explicitly refers to Beauvoir’s twin accounts of narcissism and alienation. There Bartky argues that women, in their efforts to conform to punitive standards of beauty, become alienated from their bodies. Let us now look back on the territory we have covered so far. The Second Sex begins with the question “What is a woman?” and fails to give us any definition other than the oblique statement that one is not born a woman. The two volumes of the work can be read as a two-­part critical engagement with this question. On the one hand, the first volume probes the failures of scientific accounts of women, such as those given by the biology, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism, to adequately answer the question. This is because they fail to account for the social values that undergird the factors they invoke to account for women’s subordination. As Beauvoir explains, “The value of muscular strength, the phallus, and the tool can only be defined in a world of values” (Beauvoir 2011, 68). In plain terms, neither biology, nor psychology, nor economy dictates women’s destiny, but rather, the social values placed on biological, psychological, or economic factors shape this destiny. On the other hand, the second volume presents “the world from woman’s point of view” (Beauvoir 2011, 17). Specifically, it treats women’s experience of the values accorded to them across different stages of life and different situations. Given that human history as a whole is ever unfolding and that, as a result,

78   Leboeuf women’s history is never written once and for all, we should now consider Beauvoir’s vision for women’s future. This is the third substantive contribution of her feminism worth pausing over. The following paragraphs will take us through Beauvoir’s vision of women’s emancipation as it is articulated in The Second Sex and in her later feminist writings. The final chapter of The Second Sex, “The Independent Woman,” begins with the recognition that political rights, such as the vote, are insufficient to guarantee women’s equality with men. Beauvoir emphasizes that work is an important stepping stone toward equality: “these civic liberties [the vote] remain abstract if there is no corresponding economic autonomy” (Beauvoir 2011, 721). She then goes on to enumerate several obstacles to equality at the time of her writing. To begin, although work is necessary for women’s equality, the conditions under which women work are exploitative; thus, Beauvoir warns us that “only in a socialist world would the woman who has [a job] be sure of [freedom]” (Beauvoir 2011, 721). Other obstacles that lie in women’s path include (1) double standards about women, which lead them to feel divided between their independence and the demands of femininity (Beauvoir 2011, 723–25); (2) their lack of sexual autonomy given the current mores (Beauvoir 2011, 725–34); (3) the threat of sexual violence (Beauvoir 2011, 730–31); (4) the threat of unwanted pregnancies and the heavy burdens of motherhood (Beauvoir 2011, 735–36); (5) domestic demands and the difficulties of reconciling independence with conjugal expectations and duties (Beauvoir 2011, 733–34); and (6) past expectations about women, which weigh on them in such areas as professional life and education (Beauvoir 2011, 736–42). For women to be truly liberated, each of these issues would need to be addressed. Beauvoir stresses that we should not judge women’s prospects by the past, and she exemplifies this point through a lengthy discussion of the claim that there are no women geniuses in the arts. She argues that this is the case because women have not enjoyed the independence that would give them the confidence to call the world into question and to intervene boldly in it (Beauvoir 2011, 742–51). However, in a world in which the obstacles that women face would be overcome, they could produce works equal to those of men. Thus, “The Independent Woman” enjoins us to remember that “the future is wide open” for women (Beauvoir 2011, 750). Beauvoir returns to these themes in her later feminist writings. Let me mention a few of her interventions. For instance, in essays written in the late 1950s and in the 1960s, including her preface to the book Family Planning by Lagroua Weill-­Hallé, her preface to The Great Fear of Loving by Marie-­Andrée Lagroua Weill-­Hallé, and her essay “The Condition of Women” published in the La NEF, Beauvoir reminds us of the importance of women’s control of their bodies for their independence. These interventions would culminate in her defense of abortion rights in the early 1970s.3 Beauvoir signs the Manifesto of the 343 (1971), a document in defense of abortion; she gives a deposition at the Bobigny Trial, concerning the case of a minor who had an abortion (1972); she writes several essays, such as her preface to Abortion: A Law on Trial (1972) and her article 3  Abortion would be legalized in France in 1975.

The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir   79 “Abortion and the Poor” in Le nouvel observateur (1972). She also revisits her defenses of freedom and equality in sexual relationships in “It’s About Time for Women Put a New Face on Love” (1950), her preface to The Sexually Responsive Woman (1964), and her 1972 interview with Alice Schwartzer entitled “The Rebellious Woman.” Last but not least, Beauvoir continues to elaborate on the difficulties women face because of double standards about them, the legacy of household demands, and sexual objectification in essays including “The Condition of Women” (1961), “The Situation of Women Today,” a transcript of a lecture delivered in Tokyo in 1966, and “Women, Ads, and Hate” (1983). These later writings are worth mentioning for several reasons. First, they are of interest because of the continuity between the themes evoked in the “Independent Woman” chapter of The Second Sex and those broached later on. In fact, in these later writings, Beauvoir sometimes seems more pessimistic about women’s condition than she did when The Second Sex was published. Second, it is worth highlighting that Beauvoir claims the label “feminist” more vocally than she had at the time of penning The Second Sex. For instance, in an interview given in 1949, Beauvoir declares her support of feminism (Simons 2015, 6). Yet she does not clearly insist on this label as a description of her work until the 1960s and 1970s: in the interview with Alice Schwartzer mentioned earlier, Beauvoir says that “Today, I have changed. . . . I have truly become a feminist” and acknowledges that The Second Sex ended by “expressing a vague confidence in the future, the revolution, and socialism” (Beauvoir  2015, 201). Third, Beauvoir’s recommendations to improve women’s condition are explored at greater length and more concretely than they were in The Second Sex, both because Beauvoir is responding to specific debates as they arise and because she seems to have asserted her feminist stance more decidedly. Fourth, Beauvoir’s later writings should be of interest because many of the themes she treats (e.g., abortion rights, double standards about women, and sexual objectification) remain all too relevant. Having sketched some of the legacies of The Second Sex and Beauvoir’s later feminist writings, I would like to engage more critically with her philosophy. In particular, I will zero in on one of the more vexing issues that contemporary feminist philosophers have identified: her nearly exclusive focus on the experiences of middle-­class white women in The Second Sex. One of the earliest critics of Beauvoir on this point is Elizabeth Spelman in Inessential Woman (1988). However, more recently, Kathryn Gines (2010, 2017) has argued that relying on a gender/race analogy, as Beauvoir does in The Second Sex, tends to erase the experiences of women of color: in the case of Blacks, for example, Gines claims that the analogy codes race as Black male and gender as white female, thereby covertly comparing the experiences of Black men and those of white women while disregarding those of Black women. In another vein, Patricia Hill Collins (2017) draws our attention to a contradiction in Beauvoir’s writings concerning women and race. Beauvoir developed a strong interest in questions concerning race and slavery following her extensive visit of the United States in 1947 and her reading of Gunner Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). Yet her scant references to women of color in her writings romanticizes a vision of them as content with their oppression. For example, in America Day by Day, Beauvoir describes “the

80   Leboeuf dark-­skinned woman in the white apron,” who appears from time to time from the kitchen of the nightclub where she is listening to jazz, as forgetful of her “cares and troubles,” of “her dishcloths, her children, her ailments”; all in all, according to Beauvoir, she is “completely happy” (Beauvoir 1999, 265, quoted in Collins 2017, 337). Collins is right to note that during her visit Beauvoir had little access to African American women intellectuals, their writings, or critiques of Myrdal’s work (Collins 2017, 336). Still, Beauvoir should not have taken the apparent happiness of the women of color she encountered as a sign that they were as a whole content with their condition, nor should she have glossed over their oppression. After all, The Second Sex cautions us against the idea that we should take women’s happiness as a sign that they are not oppressed (Beauvoir 2011, 16–17). Collins concludes that “[a] more self-­reflexive, politically savvy, and less celebratory Beauvoir might have noticed the contradictions that frame her work on women’s oppression and existential freedom” (Collins 2017, 337). How do these criticisms affect Beauvoir’s legacy for feminist philosophy? To me, these criticisms deserve serious reflection and should spur feminist philosophers to embrace intersectionality in their work. Nevertheless, Beauvoir’s philosophical framework in The Second Sex can make room for intersectional analyses. For example, Shannon Sullivan (2017) contends that Beauvoir’s framework allows us to analyze how biology and the social co-­constitute experience: although Beauvoir’s descriptions seem to overwhelmingly concern the constitution of white female subjectivity, her methodology could be expanded so that the experiences of other women (or of anyone really!) could be studied in terms of the biological and the social. I agree with Sullivan on this point. I do not think that we should “commit” Beauvoir’s work “to the flames,” as David Hume exhorted us to do with works that failed to reason either mathematically or empirically. Instead, to pursue the early modern analogy, I would encourage us to adopt Beauvoir’s methodology but with a critical eye toward expanding feminist philosophy beyond the experiences of white middle-­class women. * * * I have argued that Beauvoir places the question “What is a woman?” on the philosophical map and that this is one of the central legacies of The Second Sex. Besides this, Beauvoir’s idea of woman as a becoming, her account of girls’ and women’s experiences of their bodies, and her vision for women’s liberation have been highly influential for the field of feminist philosophy. By introducing this new question and these ideas, Beauvoir should be viewed as one of the founders of feminist philosophy. More specifically, I would add that in her appeal to women’s lived experience, Beauvoir could be said to inaugurate a particular subfield within feminist philosophy: feminist phenomenology. This subfield has been explored at great length since The Second Sex, notably in the works of Young and Bartky, and the tradition of bringing lived experience to bear on philosophical questions is still a vibrant one. Beauvoir’s legacy for feminist philosophy continues to be plumbed, as the 2017 publication of the voluminous A Companion to

The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir   81 Beauvoir underscores. As I close, let me invoke Elisabeth Badinter’s saying about Beauvoir: “Women, you owe her everything!”4 Likewise, feminist philosophers, we owe Beauvoir so much—if not everything!

References Bartky, Sandra. 1990. Femininity and Domination. New York and London: Routledge. Bauer, Nancy. 2001. Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1976. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2011. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage Books. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2015. Feminist Writings. Edited by Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press. Butler, Judith. 1986. “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex.” Yale French Studies 72: 35–49. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2017. “Simone de Beauvoir, Women’s Oppression and Existential Freedom.” In A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Laura Hengehold and Nancy Bauer, 325–38. Wiley-Blackwell: Hoboken, NJ. Deutscher, Penelope. 2008. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Ambiguity, Conversion, Resistance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gines, Kathryn. 2010. “Sartre, Beauvoir, and the Race/Gender Analogy: A Case for Black Feminist Philosophy.” In Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, edited by Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn Gines, and Donna-Dale  L.  Marcano, 35–51. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Gines, Kathryn. 2017. “Simone de Beauvoir and the Race/Gender Analogy in The Second Sex Revisited.” In A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Laura Hengehold and Nancy Bauer, 47–58. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Haslanger, Sally. 2012. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heinämaa, Sara. 1997. “What Is a Woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the Foundations of the Sexual Difference.” Hypatia 12 (1): 20–39. Heinämaa, Sara. 2003. Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Leboeuf, Céline. 2015. “‘One Is Not Born, but Rather Becomes, a Woman’: The Sex-Gender Distinction and Simone de Beauvoir’s Account of Woman.” In Feminist Moments, edited by Susan Bruce and Kathy Smits, 139–46. London: Bloomsbury. Moi, Toril. 1999. What Is a Woman? Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4  Catherine Rodgers (1995) notes that Badinter wanted her 1986 article on Beauvoir to have been entitled “Femmes, vous lui devez tant!” (“Women, you owe her so much!”) instead of “Femmes, vous lui devez tout!” (“Women, you owe her everything!”).

82   Leboeuf Rodgers, Catherine. 1995. “Elisabeth Badinter and ‘The Second Sex’: An Interview.” Signs 21 (1): 147–62. Sandford, Stella. 2017. “Beauvoir’s Transdisciplinarity: From Philosophy to Gender Theory.” In A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Lauren Hengehold and Nancy Bauer, 15–27. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Simons, Margaret. 2015. “Introduction.” In Simone de Beauvoir: Feminist Writings, edited by Margaret Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, 1–16. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press. Spelman, Elizabeth. 1988. Inessential Woman. Boston: Beacon Press. Sullivan, Shannon. 2017. “Race after Beauvoir.” In A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Lauren Hengehold and Nancy Bauer, 451–62. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Young, Iris M. 2005. On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zeiler, Kristin. 2013. “A Phenomenology of Excorporation, Bodily Alienation, and Resistance: Rethinking Sexed and Racialized Embodiment.” Hypatia 28 (1): 69–84.

chapter 8

Pr agm atism Erin M c Kenna and Maurice Hamington

Feminism has a long history in the United States. Women pioneers were essential to the survival of the colonies and active in the “revolution.” Abigail Adams appealed to her husband for equal rights for women to be included in the Constitution. Influenced by the equality of the sexes among the Iroquois, the women who gathered at Seneca Falls in 1848 (organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton) called for women’s right to vote (among other withheld privileges). Transcendentalism, a movement that included figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, is often considered the first philosophy developed in colonized North America. Although educated on classical texts of Western philosophy, these thinkers were also inspired by the natural, social, and political environments of the “new world” and their interactions with Native Americans. Margaret Fuller was part of the Transcendentalist movement and argued that humans have masculine and feminine traits, and full humanity requires development of both (1845, 155–56). Her challenges to notions of gender, along with her arguments for equal education and opportunities, were ahead of her time. Fuller was influenced by Jane Schoolcraft, an Ojibwa woman, who argued that Native women had more power and equality than European women. This combination of “old world” ideas with new ideas and experiences resulted in novel thinking that prompted American philosophy. These same thinkers grounded what would later be called American pragmatism. American philosophy, understood as philosophy rooted in the natural, social, and political environment developing in the United States, is a large and diverse field. More commonly, when people refer to “American philosophy,” they have in mind “American pragmatism.” The often-­told story of pragmatism is that Charles S. Peirce coined the term in the 1870s, William James popularized the idea in Pragmatism: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking (1907), and John Dewey developed it over many years of writing on education, ethics, experience, esthetics, and democracy. However, this is a limited

84   McKenna and Hamington and misleading story. Peirce’s first wife, Melusina Fay Peirce, was active in the cooperative housekeeping movement and other feminist concerns. She was in regular contact with the women in the household of William James. Although few would be tempted to call either Peirce or James feminists, their work was influenced by women’s experiences, and their emphasis on continuity, fluidity, emotion, and change is amenable to feminist interpretation and use. For example, in the pioneering text Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric (1996), Charlene Haddock Seigfried argues that James’s thinking and writing is commensurate with “feminine” forms of thinking and writing rather than the linear, analytic “masculine” thinking. James and his colleague at Harvard, Josiah Royce, provided classes for women who were denied entry to Harvard. Similarly, Dewey had many accomplished women students who took up and pushed his thinking. For example, the work of his wife, Alice Chipman, at the University of Chicago Laboratory School influenced Dewey. He also often notes his indebtedness to Jane Addams (1860–1935)—both her writing and her social engagement at Hull House. American pragmatism is a valuable resource for those concerned with issues such as gender and racial equality. The history of American pragmatism coincided with the US suffrage movement, the emancipation of slaves, the increasing education of women and people of color, and rising immigration and class mobility. Pragmatism grapples with the complex ways these different backgrounds and interests intersect to form both experience and philosophy, and the field continues to be rethought and expanded by feminist philosophers, Black philosophers, Native philosophers, and Latinx philosophers. American philosophy shares several key insights with feminist theory: (1) experience and emotion are important elements of knowledge; (2) individuals are social selves (not the classical liberal self), (3) pluralism (difference) is a source of strength, (4) theory and practice must constantly inform each other, (5) change and improvement (amelioration) are real possibilities, (6) knowledge is always situated or contextual, and (7) humans are fallible (prone to error) and so should be open and humble. Put another way, pragmatism and feminism share a view of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political theory. They both generally embrace a metaphysics of continuity and change rather than a static metaphysics with sharp breaks. They share a socially situated view of knowledge (epistemology) and ethics. The socially situated self that underlies these views is always socially informed and socially responsible to others. This results in a political theory that is rooted in a social and cooperative intelligence. For many pragmatist feminists, this includes the perspectives of other species and parts of nature, as well as the spectrum of human diversity. Although pragmatism offers a resource for feminism, feminism is also an important resource for pragmatism. Classical American pragmatists developed philosophical positions that were “feminist friendly,” but their work was often limited by norms of gender. For example, Seigfried (2003) addresses limitations on emotion and passion found in American philosophy that is corrected through the pluralism of feminist philosophy. In other words, there is much that feminist theorists can gain from pragmatist philosophy, but pragmatism only reaches its fullest expression through feminist philosophy.

Pragmatism   85 Explicit exploration of the intersection between feminism and pragmatism can be found regarding particular pragmatist thinkers in Seigfried’s edited volume Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey (2001), Feminist Interpretations of Jane Addams (2010a) edited by Maurice Hamington, and Feminist Interpretation of William James (2015) edited by Erin Tarver and Shannon Sullivan. In what follows, we highlight a few of these connections in a more general way by turning to a crucial figure in feminist pragmatism, Jane Addams.

Jane Addams and Hull House One important function of contemporary feminist scholarship is revisiting the origin stories offered in mainstream intellectual genealogies that often overlook the role and presence of women (Scott  1999). Peirce and later Louis Menand tie the origin of American pragmatist philosophy to the so-­called Metaphysical Club, an informal series of discussions that took place between Peirce, James, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and others in the 1870s and again in the 1880s. As alluded to earlier, pragmatist ideas can be traced to far before the nineteenth century (Pratt 2002). Although the term “feminist pragmatism” was not employed until the 1990s, one can argue that the idea of feminist pragmatism manifested itself in the work and writing of Addams. Provocatively, one can also contend that Hull House is an alternative origin for modern American pragmatism as well as for feminist pragmatism. In the pragmatist maxim offered by Peirce, the “practical consequences” of any object of consideration help to define that object. Pragmatism has thus been associated with giving experience a central role and understanding truth in terms of practical good. Pragmatists are concerned with social progress rather than abstract and metaphysical theory. Such a characterization allows Hull House to be understood as a founding institution of American philosophy. As Seigfried describes, “the integrative, holistic instantiation of theory and practice at Hull House was a unique accomplishment and unacknowledged contribution of women to pragmatist philosophy” (1996, 59). An outgrowth of Progressive Era thinking, the social settlement movement spawned four hundred communities in the late 1800s and early 1900s across the United States dedicated to local activism and support (Davis 1985). Cofounded in 1889 by Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, Hull House became a flagship of the social settlement movement. Ostensibly, the role of Hull House was to act as a “good neighbor” and respond to the needs of its immigrant neighborhood. As Addams describes, “It has been the aim of the [Hull House] residents to respond to all sides of the neighborhood life: not to the poor people alone, nor to the well-­to-­do, nor to the young in contradistinction to the old, but to the neighborhood as a whole” (Addams [1893] 2002, 32). It grew into a social improvement dynamo that originated social services eventually replicated elsewhere. It attracted a cadre of accomplished women (and some men) who left their mark on a number of important social efforts including child labor, adult education, social work,

86   McKenna and Hamington and labor organizing (Stebner 1997). Leading this unique organization was Addams, who authored a dozen books and hundreds of articles advancing both pragmatism and feminist pragmatism. However, in a pattern replicated elsewhere with women in the history of philosophy, Addams was not recognized for her contributions in the manner that Dewey and James were. As Marilyn Fischer claims, “If philosophy is defined as thinking deeply about questions that matter very much, then Addams is a philosopher of the first rank” (2004, i). However, Addams, like most women pragmatist philosophers of the time, was not part of a professional philosophy department. She was subsequently lost to the canon of classical American pragmatists (Seigfried 1996, 61) until the 1990s. As did feminist scholar Mary Jo Deegan accomplished in Sociology (1988), The work of feminist philosophers, particularly Seigfried, and then later Fischer (2004, 2019) and Judy Whipps, rediscovered Addams as a significant American philosopher. Addams was a social and political philosopher whose primary lens of analysis was a relational and ethical approach to democracy. She viewed democracy not as merely a political structure but a moral way of being that included civic commitments to social knowledge, and she had a cosmopolitan view of democracy that necessitated active citizen engagement to foster better sympathetic understanding ([1902] 2002, 7). For Addams, political structure and rights are not sufficient to “guarantee” democracy, but rather, relational knowledge ultimately maintains the democratic spirit. “Sympathetic knowledge” is a theme that runs throughout her publications as she argues for solutions to social problems that engage the experiences of the people involved. Addams, who wrote extensively about education, peace, and marginalized members of society, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Rather than a charitable operation or a social service, Addams continually frames Hull House as an important educational institution and center for intellectual exchange among people differently situated. In addition to formal educational opportunities such as the first US college extension courses, Hull House included many informal educational opportunities such as the Plato Club, where community members debated philosophy, and the Labor Museum, where visitors could appreciate the history of American workers and in particular women’s work in textiles. Even social events were characterized as opportunities for meaningful interaction of diverse people in service of greater understanding. Special guests such as Dewey, W. E. B. DuBois, George Herbert Mead, and Peter Kropotkin lectured at Hull House and participated in evening discussions over dinner. Many of the Hull House settlement staff obtained advanced degrees and distinguished careers in their fields. In one major Hull House intellectual project, demographic and ethnic data were compiled for the surrounding neighborhoods to create one of the nation’s first urban social studies (Residence of Hull-­House [1895] 2007). The Hull House community continually grappled with intersectional concerns as Chicago was witnessing one of the largest influxes of world migration the United States had ever experienced. Hull House has been criticized by some as being racially exclusionary, but Addams’s strong relationship with Ida B. Wells and DuBois provides some counterevidence (Deegan 2002). In the spirit of pragmatist fallibility, Addams was often self-­critical regarding failed intercultural understanding.

Pragmatism   87 Hull House was a learning community dedicated to social amelioration unfettered by academic or governmental bureaucracy. The result was a novel intellectual and action­oriented environment. Although it was the first coeducational settlement, Hull House was nevertheless a woman-­identified space, unabashedly populated and led by women (Muncy 1991). It can be argued that pragmatism reached its early “classical” embodiment at Hull House.

Influence of Addams Addams influenced classical American philosophers James and Dewey; however, turn­of-­the-­century scholars were not meticulous about attribution. Nevertheless, there are times when Dewey and his daughter (who was named after Addams), Jane, credit Addams with influence. For example, Dewey chronicled a disagreement with Addams over the intellectual value of antagonism. She argued that contentiousness was a social error and never beneficial. Dewey disagreed but later wrote to his wife that Addams’s argument was “the most magnificent exhibition of intellectual and moral faith I ever saw. She converted me internally. . . . Miss Addams does not think this as a philosophy, but believes it in all her senses & muscles—Great God” (Dewey quoted in Menand 2001, 313). The next day he wrote a letter to Addams retracting what he said about antagonism. Dewey considered Addams his intellectual peer and an inspiration. Scott Pratt documents how Dewey’s definition of philosophy’s purpose evolves to match that of Addams’s active engagement with the world (2002, 284), and Seigfried finds Addams’s influence on Dewey straightforward (1999, 213). Addams continues to inspire contemporary American philosophers. For example, Patricia Shields and Joseph Soeters (2015) argue that Addams’s notion of positive peace or “peaceweaving,” the idea that peace is more than the absence of war, is important for the modern context. They point to Addams’s ability to view all of her social and political activism as interwoven in the service of progress and peace. Judith Green (2010) makes this interconnection explicit in arguing that contemporary society can still manifest Addams’s interlinked ideals of social democracy, cosmopolitan hospitality, and intercivilizational peace.

Beyond Addams Although Addams was the catalyst for contemporary feminist pragmatist thinking, she was hardly the only woman from the classical period of American pragmatism rediscovered for philosophical significance. Ida  B.  Wells (1862–1931) was another important early feminist pragmatist who is remembered more for her anti-­lynching

88   McKenna and Hamington activism rather than as a philosopher per se. In 1892, when Wells was the owner of the only Black-­owned newspaper in Memphis, a mob destroyed her operation after she called for justice on behalf of three lynched shopkeepers. From then on, Wells became committed to fighting lynching using empirical evidence to counter false premises that Black men routinely harassed and raped white women. This was such a powerful social narrative in the late 1800s that Wells herself had believed the claim. However, after reviewing police records, Wells produced data to demonstrate that Black men were seldom officially accused of anything prior to being lynched. Wells demonstrated that lynching was a horrific act of oppression without a semblance of justification (see, e.g., Wells 2015). Wells and Addams partnered in a number of projects in the Chicago area culminating in the formation of the NAACP. Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933), to whom management theorist Peter Drucker referred as “the prophet of management,” is another feminist pragmatist figure. Follett offers an integrative relational ontology that claims a holistic understanding of being to include both individual and community. Judy Whipps (2014) finds Follett’s approach useful for addressing difficult problems where hierarchical dominance or compromise leave participants with unresolved animosity. Amrita Banerjee (2008) utilizes Follett’s integrative ontology as a means to address issues of intimate partner violence because healing is not merely removal from an abusive relationship but also entails a change in community and society. Like Addams, Follett’s connection to feminism was not always explicit, but she saw a larger role for women than was the norm for her time. Follett was a student of Royce and James at Harvard, as were Ella Lyman Cabot (1866–1934) and Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930). Author of seven books on education and ethics, Cabot wrote Everyday Ethics, which provides important insight on how to cultivate moral imagination (Kaag  2011). Calkins became more prominent in ­psychology than philosophy and was the first woman president of the American Philosophical Association and the American Psychological Association. Elsie Ripley Clapp (1879–1965), Lucy Sprague Mitchell (1878–1967), and Ella Flagg Young (1845–1918) were students of Dewey. These three became prominent education theorists who authored influential works and implemented their ideas at various levels of American education. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) knew Addams and visited Hull House. Best known for The Yellow Wallpaper ([1892] 1987), a loosely autobiographical story about a young woman who became depressed after marrying and having children, Gilman was a well-­known writer and speaker. Her desire to be a writer was frustrated by the norms of the time. When she became depressed, she, like Addams, was treated by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), whose “rest cure” drove the character in The Yellow Wallpaper to a complete mental breakdown. Gilman divorced, left her daughter to be raised by her father and his new wife, and created an independent professional life. She argued that women should be free from the sole responsibility of domestic work so they could contribute to society and become full persons. Women’s dependence caused men to take jobs that paid well, whether or not these jobs fit their talents or societal needs. Gilman argued that domestic work should be seen as a collective responsibility and proposed community kitchens, common dining, and shared childcare. This would free women to

Pragmatism   89 be wage earners, transforming the relationships between men and women. Furthermore, Gilman’s ideas challenge dominant notions of individual autonomy through social interdependence outside of the home. Early American philosophy existed at a time of more malleable disciplinary boundaries, and the intellectual commitments of pragmatism created an openness to various forms of inquiry. Many of the early pragmatist feminists became better recognized in fields other than philosophy. Accordingly, traditional historical accounts of American philosophy often left out figures like Wells, Addams, Follet, Calkins and Gilman, however contemporary narratives have been influenced by feminist analysis and are more inclusive (McKenna and Pratt 2015). In addition to challenging the traditional origin stories of American pragmatism and naming a new canon of philosophically significant figures, feminist pragmatism has provided the lens for explorations into a variety of philosophical topics both theoretical and applied including but not limited to race, epistemology, care ethics, utopian thinking, animal welfare, and environmentalism.

Race and Identity A considerable amount of attention in the feminist pragmatist literature has centered on issues of race and identity. V. Denise James notes the racial exclusions in traditional philosophy (2014a), American pragmatism (2009), and feminist pragmatism (2014b). Accordingly, James has contributed a variety of works invigorating racial analysis within feminist pragmatism. For example, James recovers the work of Anna Julia Cooper to challenge philosophy’s assumptions regarding intellectual justification and certainty. James (2009) argues that Cooper’s work predates and extends William James famous essay, “The Will to Believe.” (James 2013). Shannon Sullivan (2001) integrates feminism, pragmatism, and phenomenology to suggest that bodily transactions reveal how habits of whiteness have contributed to hierarchies of privilege. Building upon Dewey’s notion of “transaction,” Sullivan focuses on what the body does vis-­à-­vis its context and other bodies rather than an essentialist notion of the body. She develops a “stew” rather than a “melting pot” metaphor for contemporary cosmopolitan existence with the ingredients impacting one another as opposed to melting into one common substance. For Sullivan, races co-­constitute one another within the stew of society (2001). And in Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (2007), she explores the subtle practices of those identified as white leading to a call for greater awareness of race-­based privilege. Acknowledging the complexity of intersectional experience, Celia T. Bardwell-­Jones (2008) brings feminist work on border communities, specifically Latina feminism, into conversation with Royce’s theory of role interpretation as a method for more inclusive understanding. In particular, Bardwell-­Jones eschews dyadic knowledge structures, instead favoring interpretation, mediation, and translation, resulting in a more holistic contextual understanding. Also applying Royce, but integrating Follett, Amrita Banerjee

90   McKenna and Hamington addresses the vagaries of border identities by emphasizing disparate positions of power. Banerjee offers an “interactive logical-­ontological model” to challenge the binary model of multiculturalism and transnationalism. Interrogating the separation of national race discussions from international migration discussions, Banerjee suggests, “A successful transnationalism would be one that learns to acknowledge and uphold a creative tension between unifying and discriminating without sacrificing one at the altar of the other” (2012, 87).

Epistemology Both feminist philosophy and American pragmatism offer theories of epistemology that challenge the analytic framework of “x knows p.” Accordingly, much of the work to develop feminist pragmatist epistemology centers on issues of inclusion. Alexandra Shuford (2010), for example, integrates Deweyan pragmatism with feminist empiricism to offer a feminist pragmatist approach to knowledge that takes into account the role of the body. Dewey’s emphasis on context and transactions provides the ground for a more robust understanding of the knowing subject. Although she praises the work of Louise Antony’s analytic feminist epistemology and Lynn Harkinson Nelson’s holistic feminist epistemology, Shuford contends that both assume a “fixed nature of a generic, passive body” (141). For Shuford, “embodiment matters” and “influences our knowledge projects” (7). In this manner, a feminist pragmatist account of epistemology can better address the experience of women and other nonprivileged bodies. Susan Dieleman (2012) also addresses the issue of epistemic inclusion and applies Richard Rorty’s discursive approach to existing feminist epistemic analysis found in the work of Miranda Fricker and Iris Marion Young to offer a pragmatist feminist view. Dieleman finds Rorty’s notions of “ironic redescription” and “argumentation” particularly efficacious in breaking down the “hegemonic epistemic imaginary” in favor of greater inclusion. In connecting pragmatist and feminist epistemology, Barbara Thayer-­ Bacon ­develops the notion of “qualified relativism” as a term that captures an understanding of knowledge that transcends the absolutist/relativism dichotomous approach to truth claims. She finds Peirce, James, and Dewey engaging in qualified relativism of different sorts where epistemological assumptions are made that recognize culture and context. However, it is Dewey that comes closest to the pluralistic approach advocated in feminist philosophy. Combining pragmatism and feminism, Thayer-­ Bacon concludes, “Qualified relativists describe knowers as socially embedded and embodied inquirers who are limited in their knowing by their environment, which includes their experiences with the world around them and each other, and their human capacities” (2003, 435). Thayer-Bacon returns to these themes in applying feminist pragmatism to education (2008). This is an inclusive and expansive definition true to the understanding of knowledge creation in both traditions.

Pragmatism   91

Care Ethics A number of feminist pragmatists have addressed resonances between pragmatism and feminist care ethics. Early feminist pragmatist work on care offered correctives to care ethics. Only a decade after the notion of “care ethics” was first developed by Carol Gilligan (1982) and Nel Noddings (1984), M. Regina Leffers argued that the work of Addams and Dewey provided a needed framework to support caring for nonfamiliar others or “a universalized caring response” (1993, 65). Leffers’s argument was appropriate because the early work in care ethics focused on care as a personal morality but theorists have since developed a robust politics of care. Similarly, Seigfried critiques the way initial theories of care seemed to advocate a form of gender essentialism and describes care as offering two major challenges: (1) that men and women are empirically different in their approach to moral problems and (2) that traditional systems of justice should be adjusted to account for care. Although Seigfried agrees that caring is a missing element of traditional ethical systems, she takes Gilligan and Noddings to task for developing an essentialist argument for care, claiming that pragmatism favors a social constructionist view. However, a biological essentialist argument was not intended and their positions were clarified in subsequent work. Cathryn Bailey finds the radical nature of care ethics held back by the philosophical tradition of understanding morality as adjudication. She contends, “A feminist ethics of care, informed by Buddhism and Jamesian pragmatism might, in turn, refuse to be an ethics at all, as this has been rendered by philosophers, and become, instead, a poem, a catalogue of practices, something else entirely” (2012, 197). A number of contemporary theorists argue that the existence of care ethics provides an intellectual framework to understand the philosophies of some of the classical American feminist pragmatists including Anna Julia Cooper (Bailey  2009), Jane Addams (Hamington 2004), and John Dewey (Leffers 1993). Maurice Hamington has argued that the insights of various pragmatist philosophers can contribute to a more robust theory of care, including Royce’s notion of loyalty (2014), Dewey’s theories of habit and dramatic rehearsal (2011), James’s ideas about will and action (2010b; 2015), and Addams’s concept of sympathetic knowledge (2004; 2009). Similarly, Heather Keith (1999) has found Mead’s ethics that centers on context and social relationships in the trajectory of contemporary care ethics. Keith suggests that a Meadian pragmatist feminist ethic of care places more attention on self-­development. Seeking a relational feminist pragmatist approach to the environment, Keith integrates Noddings’s notion of reciprocity and contends that relationships with nonhuman subjects themselves can entail reciprocity. For Keith, a feminist pragmatist relational framework offers a means for care and concern between a variety of stakeholders in seeking sustainable solutions to contemporary crises of the environment (Keith 2012). This desire to improve future possibilities, for both humans and the more-­than-­human, direct us to the last two areas of contemporary interest that we will examine.

92   McKenna and Hamington

Utopian Thinking Feminist thinkers have long engaged utopian and dystopian fiction as a vehicle for highlighting both problems in the present and possibilities for the future. This approach shares much in common with Dewey’s idea of dramatic rehearsals—thinking through an idea or action in terms of its possible consequences. Generally, pragmatism and feminism bring to utopian thinking a focus on possibility and improvement, rather than a view of static perfection. A pragmatist feminist tradition in utopian thought can be found in the work of thinkers like Gilman whose utopian works include Herland ([1915] 1979), With Her in Ourland (1915–1916), and Moving the Mountain (1911). Herland presents a society of all women and is focused on how women could be different without the need to make themselves attractive to men. These women are strong, athletic, dressed comfortably, and engaged in meaningful work. Though controversial for reliance on a program of eugenics (much in discussion by scientists and politicians during her lifetime) and lack of diversity, these novels point to the role of social choice in forming people’s bodies and habits. Rooted in a kind of cultural materialism, Gilman’s vision also includes environmental concerns. The women follow a vegetarian diet because they realize that livestock require too much land. They have no pets due to concerns about animal waste and predation. When the main character of Herland, Ellador, visits the United States in With Her in Ourland, she is overwhelmed by the pollution and animal slaughter as well as the ridiculous attire and dependence of the women. In addition to the visions of critique and aspiration found in fiction, there are also those who sought to implement utopian visions in the present. In “Two Leaders, Two Utopias: Jane Addams and Dorothy Day” (2007), Hamington argues that Addams represents a feminist pragmatist utopianism in her work at Hull House. Some books that take up possible links between a pragmatist feminism and utopian thought include Erin McKenna’s The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective (2001) and Ellen Peel’s Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction (2002). Mary Doak’s “Feminism, Pragmatism, and Utopia: A Catholic Theological Response” (2003) takes up the work of Seigfried and McKenna to examine contemporary issues in Catholic theology. In all of these there is an attempt to wrestle with the liberating possibilities of uncertainty, ambiguity, openness, and pluralism.

Environmentalism and Animal Welfare Concerns about the environment and animal welfare have long been part of the pragmatist feminist tradition. Environmental pragmatism and pragmatist approaches to animal issues, while not always explicitly feminist, nonetheless embody the pragmatist feminist tenants mentioned at the start of this chapter. Gilman was a forerunner of

Pragmatism   93 contemporary ecofeminism. In “The Ecofeminist Pragmatism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman” (2001), Mary Jo Deegan and C.  W.  Podeschi present a case for early links between the traditions of pragmatism and ecofeminism. More generally, applied philosophy and ethics owe much to both the pragmatist and feminist traditions of philosophy as they use philosophy to address world problems. Both traditions have concerns about separating theory and practice. Examples can be found in collections such as Environmental Pragmatism (1996) edited by Andrew Light and Eric Katz and Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking HumanNonhuman Relations (2004) edited by Erin McKenna and Andrew Light. In their introduction to Environmental Pragmatism, Light and Katz characterize environmental pragmatism as the “open-­ended inquiry into the specific real-­life problems of humanity’s relationship with the environment” (1996, 2). In Animal Pragmatism, McKenna and Light present pragmatism as an approach to inquiry that starts with where we are and with how we understand things. That is, we should use our experiences as we examine any particular ethical issue, but “like feminist theory, pragmatism rejects ‘either-­or’ dichotomies and instead takes a ‘both-­and’ approach. For instance, both feminism and pragmatism see reason and emotion as integrated, not opposed” (2004, 10). Some key texts to consider in this volume are Albrecht (2004), Fesmire (2004), McReynolds (2004) and Thompson (2004). Hugh McDonald’s edited volume Pragmatism and Environmentalism (2012) includes at least two chapters that take up specifically ecofeminist concerns. Some essential essays in this collection include McKenna et al (2012), Parker (2012), Stephens (2012), Weston (2012) and, Weston and Katz (2012). Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism (2012), edited by Maurice Hamington and Celia Bardwell-­Jones, includes several essays that use a pragmatist feminist perspective to examine issues related to the environment and/or animals. Erin McKenna’s Pet’s People, and Pragmatism (2013) takes up issues of animal ethics employing pragmatism and feminism to examine the ethics of domestication and possibilities for improving the relationships between human beings and those beings commonly seen as “pets.” In addition, McKenna’s Livestock: Food, Fiber, and Friends (2018) uses a Deweyan account of ethics and an ecofeminist understanding of human embeddedness in nature to argue for a rethinking of the relationships among human and livestock animals. Like the other contemporary applications of pragmatist feminism discussed here, this work on animals and the environment is situated, connects theory and practice, recognizes human fallibility, and seeks to make things better.

Conclusion This chapter demonstrates how feminist pragmatists have challenged masculine biases in the genealogy of American philosophy as well as the canon of key figures. Furthermore, contemporary American feminist pragmatists are drawing upon epistemic, ethical, and ontological insights of both intellectual traditions to address today’s theoretical challenges as well as confront contemporary social and political issues. The moniker Feminist pragmatist philosophy raises interesting ongoing

94   McKenna and Hamington questions for the field. While contextually necessary to call attention to the persistence of masculine bias, one might nonetheless ask at what point should all American pragmatism be understood as feminist American pragmatism, especially if the analysis is compelling and viable? Ultimately, feminist pragmatism offers an alternative set of commitments and values to that of analytic and continental approaches. Because of its strong grounding in experience and connections to social and political concerns, feminist pragmatism is a vital resource for feminist theorists seeking frameworks tied to activism and social change. Furthermore, feminist pragmatism demonstrates an ability to dialogue favorably with other philosophical approaches such as with postmodern and phenomenological thinking. Perhaps most importantly, feminist pragmatism is committed to making more than clever academic arguments. Addams, for example, always viewed philosophical and intellectual efforts to be in service of progress: “We know, at last, that we can only discover truth by a rational and democratic interest in life, and to give truth complete social expression is the endeavor upon which we are entering” (1902/2002, 9).

References Addams, Jane. (1893) 2002. “The Objective Value of a Social Settlement.” In The Jane Addams Reader, edited by Jean Bethke Elshtain, 29–45. New York: Basic Books. Addams, Jane. (1902) 2002. Democracy and Social Ethics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Albrecht, James M. 2004. “‘What Does Rome Know of Rat and Lizard?’: Pragmatic Mandates of Considering Animals in Emerson, James, and Dewey.” In Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking Human-Nonhuman Relationships, edited by Erin McKenna and Andrew Light, 19–42. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bailey, Cathryn. 2009. “The Virtue and Care Ethics of Anna Julia Cooper.” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 12 (1): 5–19. Bailey, Cathryn. 2012. “The Revolutionary Fact of Compassion: William James, Buddhism and the Feminist Ethics of Care.” In Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism, edited by Maurice Hamington and Celia Bardwell-Jones, 184–99. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy Series. New York: Routledge. Banerjee, Amrita. 2008. “Follett’s Pragmatist Ontology of Relations: Potentials for a Feminist Perspective on Violence.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 22 (1): 3–11. Banerjee, Amrita. 2012. “Dynamic Borders, Dynamic Identities: A Pragmatist Ontology of ‘Groups’ for Critical Multicultural Transnational Feminisms.” In Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism, edited by Maurice Hamington and Celia Bardwell-Jones, 71–89. New York: Routledge. Bardwell-Jones, Celia T. 2008. “Border Communities and Royce: The Problem of Translation and Reinterpreting Feminist Empiricism.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 22 (1): 12–23. Davis, Allen. 1985. Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements & the Progressive Movement, 1890 to 1914. New York: Rutgers University Press. Deegan, Mary Jo. 1988. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School 1892–1918. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.

Pragmatism   95 Deegan, Mary Jo. 2002. Race, Hull-House, and the University of Chicago: A New Conscience Against Ancient Evils. Westport, CT: Praeger. Deegan, Mary Jo, and C.  W.  Podeschi. 2001. “The Ecofeminist Pragmatism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” Environmental Ethics 23 (1): 19–36. Dieleman, Susan. 2012. “Solving the Problem of Epistemic Exclusion: A Pragmatist Feminist Approach.” In Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism, edited by Maurice Hamington and Celia Bardwell-Jones, 90–112. New York: Routledge. Doak, Mary. 2003. “Feminism, Pragmatism, and Utopia: A Catholic Theological Response.” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 24 (1): 22–39. Fesmire, Steven. 2004. “Dewey and Animal Ethics.” In Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking Human-Nonhuman Relationships, edited by Erin McKenna and Andrew Light, 43–62. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fischer, Marilyn. 2004. On Addams. Toronto: Wadsworth. Fischer, Marilyn. 2019. Jane Addams’s Evolutionary Theorizing: Constructing “Democracy and Social Ethics.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fuller, Margaret. 1845. Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Greeley and McElrath. https://archive.org/details/womaninnineteent1845full. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Green. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1911. Moving the Mountain. New York: Charlton. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1915–1916. With Her in Ourland. Forerunner. Vol. 7. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. (1915) 1979. Herland. New York: Pantheon Books. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. (1892) 1987. The Yellow Wallpaper. New York: Virago. Green, Judith M. 1999. Deep Democracy: Community, Diversity, and Transformation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Green, Judith M. 2010. “Social Democracy, Cosmopolitan Hospitality, and Inter-civilizational Peace: Lessons from Jane Addams.” In Feminist Interpretations of Jane Addams, edited by Maurice Hamington, 223–54. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Hamington, Maurice. 2004. Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Feminist Ethics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hamington, Maurice. 2007. “Two Leaders, Two Utopias: Jane Addams and Dorothy Day.” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 19 (2): 159–86. Hamington, Maurice. 2009. The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hamington, Maurice, ed. 2010a. Feminist Interpretations of Jane Addams. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Hamington, Maurice. 2010b. “The Will to Care: Performance, Expectation, and Imagination.” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 25 (3): 675–95. Hamington, Maurice. 2011. “Care Ethics, John Dewey’s ‘Dramatic Rehearsal’ and Moral Education.” Philosophy of Education Yearbook 2010: 121–28. Hamington, Maurice. 2014. “Loyalty to Care: Royce and a Political Approach to Feminist Care Ethics.” Pragmatism Today 5 (1): 8–17. Hamington, Maurice. 2015. “William James and the Will to Care for Unfamiliar Others.” In Feminist Interpretations of William James, edited by Erin Tarver and Shannon Sullivan, 141–64. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

96   McKenna and Hamington Hamington, Maurice, and Celia Bardwell-Jones, eds. 2012. Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism. New York: Routledge. James, V. Denise. 2009. “Theorizing Black Feminist Pragmatism: Forethoughts on the Practice and Purpose of Philosophy as Envisioned by Black Feminists and John Dewey.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 23 (2): 92–99. James, V.  Denise. 2013. “Reading Anna  J.  Cooper with William James: Black Feminist Visionary Pragmatism, Philosophy’s Culture of Justification, and Belief.” The Pluralist 8 (3): 32–45. James, V. Denise. 2014a. “Musing: A Black Feminist Philosopher: Is That Possible?” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 29 (1): 179–86. James, V.  Denise. 2014b. “Comments on Marilyn Fischer’s ‘Addams on Cultural Pluralism, European Immigrants, and African Americans.” The Pluralist 9 (3): 66–71. James, William. 1907. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co. https://archive.org/details/157unkngoog. Kaag, John J. 2011. Idealism, Pragmatism, and Feminism: The Philosophy of Ella Lyman Cabot. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Keith, Heather. 1999. “Feminism and Pragmatism: George Herbert Mead’s Ethic of Care.” Transactions of the Charles S Pierce Society 35 (2): 328–44. Keith, Heather. 2012. “Natural Caring: A Pragmatist Feminist Approach to Ethics in the MoreThan-Human World.” In Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism, edited by Maurice Hamington and Celia Bardwell-Jones, 255–68. New York: Routledge. Leffers, M.  Reginia. 1993. “Pragmatists Jane Addams and John Dewey Inform the Ethic of Care.” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 8 (2): 64–77. Light, Andrew, and Eric Katz, eds. 1996. Environmental Pragmatism. New York: Routledge. McDonald, Hugh, ed. 2012. Pragmatism and Environmentalism. Amsterdam: Rodopi. McKenna, Erin. 2002. The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. McKenna, Erin. 2004. “Pragmatism and the Production of Livestock.” In Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking Human-Nonhuman Relationships, edited by Erin McKenna and Andrew Light, 160–75. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McKenna, Erin. 2013. Pets, People, and Pragmatism. New York: Fordham University Press. McKenna, Erin. 2018. Livestock: Food, Fiber, and Friends. Athens: University of Georgia Press. McKenna, Erin, Sarah Curtis, and Jon Stout. 2012. “Philosophical Farming.” In Pragmatism and Environmentalism, edited by Hugh McDonald, 151–84. Amsterdam: Rodopi. McKenna, Erin, and Andrew Light, eds. 2004. Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking HumanNonhuman Relationships. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McKenna, Erin, and Scott  L.  Pratt. 2015. American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present. London: Bloomsbury Academic. McReynolds, Phillip. 2004. “Overlapping Horizons of Meaning: A Deweyan Approach to the Moral Standing of Nonhuman Animals.” In Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking HumanNonhuman Relationships, edited by Erin McKenna and Andrew Light, 63–85. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Menand, Louis. 2001. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Pragmatism   97 Muncy, Robyn. 1991. Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform 1890–1935. New York: Oxford University Press. Noddings, Nel. 1984. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press. Parker, Kelly A. 2012. “Pragmatism and Environmental Thought.” In Pragmatism and Environmentalism, edited by Hugh McDonald, 139–60. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Peel, Ellen. 2002. Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Pratt, Scott L. 2002. Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy. Indiana University Press. Residence of Hull-House. (1895) 2007. Hull-House Maps and Papers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Scott, Joan Wallach. 1999. Gender and the Politics of History Revised Edition. New York: Columbia University Press. Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. 1996. Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. 1999. “Socializing Democracy: Jane Addams and John Dewey.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 29 (2): 207–23. Seigfried, Charlene Haddock, ed. 2001. Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. 2003. “Has Passion a Place in Philosophy.” In Philosophy in America at the Turn of the Century, APA Centennial Supplement, 35–54. Charlottesville: Philosophy Document Center. Shields, Patricia, and Joseph Soeters. 2015. “Peaceweaving: Jane Addams, Positive Peace, and Public Administration.” American Review of Public Administration,(47(3): 323–339. Shuford, Alexandra. 2010. Feminist Epistemology and American Pragmatism: Dewey and Quine. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Stebner, Eleanor  J. 1997. The Women of Hull House: A Study in Spirituality, Vocation, and Friendship. New York: SUNY. Stephens, Piers H. G. 2012. “The Turn of the Skew: Environmental Philosophy and the Ghost of William James.” In Pragmatism and Environmentalism, edited by Hugh McDonald, 25–52. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Sullivan, Shannon. 2001. Living across and through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sullivan, Shannon. 2007. Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tarver, Erin C., and Shannon Sullivan, eds. 2015. Feminist Interpretations of William James. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Thayer-Bacon, Barbara. 2003. “Pragmatism and Feminism as Qualified Relativism.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 22: 417–38. Thayer-Bacon, Barbara. 2008. Beyond Liberal Democracy in Schools: The Power of Pluralism. New York: Teachers College Press. Wells, Ida B. 2015. The Red Record. New York: Open Road Media. Weston, Anthony. 2012. “Before Environmental Ethics.” In Pragmatism and Environmentalism, edited by Hugh McDonald, 139–60. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

98   McKenna and Hamington Weston, Anthony, and Eric Katz. 2012. “Unfair to Swamps: A Reply to Katz Unfair to Foundations: A Response to Weston.” In Pragmatism and Environmentalism, edited by Hugh McDonald, 319–24. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Whipps, Judy. 2014. “A Pragmatist Reading of Mary Parker Follett’s Integrative Process.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy 50 (3): 405–24.

Chapter 9

Poststructu r a lism KatErina Kolozova

Poststructuralism in its intellectually most potent forms has been heralded ­primarily by feminist philosophers. Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Drucilla Cornell are just a few of the most influential feminist theorists whose work has often been associated with French feminist and poststructuralist philosophers, such as Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. Nonetheless, this association should be taken with caution, because in spite of the fact that Kristeva’s, Irigaray’s, and Cixous’ work have become important (if not foundational) elements of feminist poststructuralism, they themselves have been persistent in expressing reservations toward poststructuralism (as a distinct method from structuralism) and/or feminism. The writings of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida; the feminist receptions of Jacques Lacan present in the works of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous; and the unique critique of speculative reason proffered by Luce Irigaray constitute the corpus of indispensable texts grounding the school of thought called “poststructuralism.” Feminist poststructuralist critiques of the subject, identity, and culture have made significant contributions to both poststructuralism and feminism. While the founding figures that will be referred to in this chapter are mostly male, it is important to stress that poststructuralism has to a great extent consolidated its epistemic project thanks to the contributions of feminist philosophers. Indeed, the academic prestige that poststructuralism enjoys today can be attributed to the force of feminist philosophical work in the field. By first focusing on some of the founding figures to present a brief genealogy of ideas taken to be poststructuralist, the connections with the main features of some central feminist poststructuralist contributions will become more readily apparent. The feminist poststructuralist concept of gender as a discursive construct rejects the notion of sexual difference as a given, as a fixed meaning or “essence” and, as will be discussed later, has led to the development of a more general critique of “essentialism.” To presume that there is an immutable essence of gender (or sex) outside the world of language implies the possibility of an independent idea “living a life of its own” in a world of ideas or immutable truths—something not unlike Plato’s world of ideas. By way of Derridean deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucauldian theorization of the

100   Kolozova subject, and other means of radicalization in philosophy’s linguistic turn, poststructuralism demonstrates the radical constructedness of identities and the discursive or linguistic determination of the political. In short, the corollary of poststructuralism is that power is discourse (and vice versa), and therefore epistemes (i.e., scientific paradigms) are discourse and political power too. The absence of essence implies the absence of unity for the subject, insofar as it has been declared multiple, transformative, and productively unstable. The instability, nomadism, and mobility celebrated by poststructuralism are constitutive of subjectivity, whether collective or individual, and are contingent upon culture as the discursive conditioning par excellence. Poststructuralists have abandoned universalizing metanarratives of history, class, and other central categories of classical political theories and Marxism in the same way that grand or master narratives have been replaced by small and personal ones, as Jean-­François Lyotard (1984) recommends. One could say that the feminist maxim “The personal is political” is also a central principle of poststructuralist moral and political philosophy. Thus, the epistemic shift poststructuralism brought forth has also been a political shift, and the entanglement of the two categories, that is, of epistemology and the political (enmeshed in the moral), seems to be constitutive of poststructuralism. The central themes of consideration for feminist poststructuralism have become the subject, identity, and culture. Culture has replaced the classical categories of society, politics, and history by way of fusing them into a single concept (i.e., culture). Always already individually subjectivized, culture has become the central political category in feminist poststructuralism as the result of the endorsement of Lyotard’s axiom that the grand narratives are replaced by the small and personal ones. Gender is contingent on—or rather conditioned by—culture and its inevitable subjectivization (Butler 1990, 273–80; 1993).

Structuralism, Postmodernism, and Poststructuralism Poststructuralist emphasis on the fragmentation of the self and its critique of all essentialisms led to the emergence of posthumanism and Donna Haraway’s figure of the cyborg (1991, 149–82; 1985). Either as a construct of power, an external reality to be subjected to analysis, or an epistemological-­methodological instrument, structure has been abandoned in the name of fluxes, rhizomes, and networks as forms of politicaleconomic organization as well as explanatory models. It should be noted that in spite of the epistemic break from structures and static categories in favor of rhizomes and fluidity, and in spite of the abandonment of universalism in favor of particularisms, most of the explanatory potential of poststructuralism, as well as its concepts and methods, has remained indebted to the legacy of structuralism. When looked at with rigor that focuses on epistemological matters rather than thematic preoccupations, it is not an easy task to establish a difference between poststructuralism

Poststructuralism   101 and structuralism. The fact that the term originated in the academic institutions of the United States and was never really accepted in France, where all of its major authorities were active at the time of its growing intellectual influence, is indicative. Historically speaking, it is perhaps most accurate to characterize the school of thought called “poststructuralism” as the product of transatlantic reception of French structuralism designed for the postmodern politico-­economic era. I am referring here not only to the theory of postmodernism and its academic influence but also to a certain philosophy that pervaded and justified the processes of neoliberal globalization and resonated with the arguments and the vocabulary of the postmodern debate. It is, in fact, the proliferation of academic commentaries on the works of French structuralists during the postmodern era that marked the beginning of the field of poststructuralism. It is not easy to determine an exact date of a beginning of an intellectual era, but if we are to choose a particular moment of origin I would say postmodernism begins with the publication of Jean-­François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition in 1979. Postmodernism has coincided with the rise and the reign of neoliberal globalization. Consequently, we can claim that in 2020 we are still living in the “postmodern condition.” In short, we call postmodern an era that consists of a particular political economy, civilizational and technological transformations defining of it, whereas the epistemic paradigm that supports the era in question is what we call here poststructuralism. The notion of poststructuralism is, nonetheless, neither self-­explanatory nor univocal. Michel Foucault famously remarked, “As far as I can tell the problem underpinning what is called structuralism has, to the greatest extent, been that of the subject and its reproduction [remonte]. I fail to see what the common problem of those called postmodernists and poststructuralists is” (1994, 1266, my translation). Postmodernity describes an era of accelerated globalization of capital, the loosening of the structures and authority of nation-­states, the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and the substitution of the concepts of class and history with that of “culture.” These processes began at some point in the 1980s. Through global media, cultural eclecticism has spread on a planetary level dominated by Western outlets and Western popular culture. The intellectual foundation for it was paved in the 1970s and 1980s mainly by the French structuralists who nowadays hold the status as the founding authorities of poststructuralism. Lyotard came up with the name of postmodernism and declared the death of master narratives (1984), but the contributions of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan were, I suggest, far more important.

Rhizomes, Fluidity, and the Fragmentation of Self Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s Anti-­Oedipus ([1972] 1983) and A Thousand Plateaus ([1980] 1987) are perhaps the works most exemplary of the philosophical-­political turn that occurred in the 1980s and spanned through the 1990s and the turn of the twenty-­first

102   Kolozova century. The structures of the psyche—for example, the Oedipal triad as per Lacan (Mother, Father, and Child)—were transformed into traces of “affirmed difference.” Difference and its multiplication through fluxes build rhizomes that are endlessly transformable proto-­structures or, in fact, nonstructures (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 21). Deleuzian ontology is, perhaps, best suited for an ideological justification of the global digital age and the accompanying form of capitalism. Combined with other forms of radicalization of structuralism that have served as the foundation of poststructuralism, the Deleuzian critique of philosophy has furnished an intellectual basis for post-­1990s global capitalism. “Rhizomaticity,” a procedure of deconstruction or radicalization of the structuralist premise in French philosophy as conceived by Deleuze and Guattari, corresponded with the globally promulgated modes of organization, such as networks, platforms, and horizontality; the multinational expansion of capital transcending the boundaries of nation-­states or enacting “deterritorialisation”; and the liberation of the finance industry from the constraints of the “arborescent” real economy. Since the 1990s, abstraction has ruled independently from the territorial or the physical, in spite of the fact that, according to Deleuze and Guattari, it originates in concrete acts of signification. Abstraction as conceived by Deleuze and Guattari constitutes a “machine,” that is, an automaton of signification abstracted from the material that is purportedly independent from physicality and is self-­sufficient, even though it is engendered by material acts (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 148). The ontology of the rhizome acts and presents itself as a politics of emancipation (15, 21 ff.). After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in Europe, rhizomatic expansion of neoliberal capitalism and global “democratization” has been marked by an exuberance of optimism concerning its liberating potential. Following Deleuze and Guattari, the transformation of structures into rhizomes results in networks of traces of power understood in a Nietzschean and Spinozian vitalist sense. There remains some materiality, but its laws of abstraction become reified into “differences,” “unilateral affirmations,” and structures dissolving into fluxes where matter practically disappears through attenuation, transformed into a translucent web whose connecting dots of signification are the only reality that matters. I am referring here to the Marxian concept of reification in which abstraction (of a social relation) is substituted with a material reality that is supposed to embody it, similar to the notion of fetishism in the creation of money and commodity—“turning an abstraction into a thing” (Marx [1887] 1956, chap. 1 sect. 4). Once the structure is canceled, what remains is the potentiality of matter and sign. This is essentially a nihilist position: the emptied space of the vanishing concept (and of matter too) is glaring. The rhizome seems to be endowed with the inherent possibility for the auto-­accelerating work of the “abstract machines” of capital, communication, and pleasure. Rosi Braidotti’s feminist appropriation of Deleuzo-­Guattarian ontology is a dramatic intervention into the original project of the two French philosophers: she upends the tendency of unbridled abstraction by reintroducing materiality as the substance of immanence and, hence, of rhizomaticity, fluidity, and transformativity. In her book

Poststructuralism   103 Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002), the body remains the plane of immanence, including the immanence of sexual difference: the female sex and sexuality are determined by bodily morphology, fluxes, and physicality. In The Posthuman, Braidotti insists on materiality or physicality, including the machine and the animal in the purported continuum of matter as immanence (2013, 136–38). Similarly to Braidotti, and, in fact, preceding her work on the topic of posthumanism, in “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway advocates a posthumanist world, one that has left behind the ruins of the Oedipal triad and that also relies on the strong affinity between the machine and the animal (1991, 150–52). An anthropomorphic expectation at the center of the account of the self and its context, of subject and discourse, can initiate a phantasm of origin, birth, authorship, and demiurgic creation. However, the origin is nameless; there is no father, no mother, no Oedipal triad; and the human is but a cyborg, a hybrid of biology and signification, that is, of technology as signification, pure artificiality enmeshed in physicality that does not produce a binary but rather endless multiplicity (153). Haraway’s metaphor of the cyborg marked the birth of posthumanism. If we look at the epistemic origins of posthumanist and cyber-­feminist argumentation, it becomes clear that they are neither anti-­physicalist nor anti-­humanist but rather nonanthropomorphic and nonanthropocentric in their explanation of how self and society interact. These ideas are indebted to poststructuralism. By insisting on the relevance of physicality and sexual difference, Braidotti retains a certain continuity with second-­wave feminism. By recourse to the Marxist and socialist commitment to materiality and by putting forward the argument about women’s impossibility of attaining the image of the human, Haraway simultaneously remains conservative by sticking to the materialist legacy of second-­wave feminism while propelling the concept of the subject into the unknown of radical posthumanism or inhumanism (Haraway 1992). The feminist poststructuralist subject is nonunitary: it is fundamentally fragmented due to having no essence, no stability, and no fixity. In her pursuit of that “glue that holds the subject together,” incited precisely by her materialism, Braidotti repeatedly states her adherence to the idea of the “non-­unitary subject.” Unity or oneness are disavowed, as granting them relevance would sound like a betrayal of the central belief of poststructuralist feminist philosophy—the subject is multiple, transformative, and in its essence unstable. Thus, she proposes nonunity on the conscious level of subjectivization, whereas the unconscious proffers “identifications [that] play the role of magnets, building blocks or glue” (Braidotti 2002, 40).

The Subject and Power Another founding poststructuralist theorist is Michel Foucault, who himself, as  noted earlier, never endorsed the term or, for that matter, the concerns of the ­poststructuralists. Nonetheless, his concepts of the subject and discourse (i.e.,

104   Kolozova discourse-­as-­power and episteme-­as-­political-­power) have been foundational for feminist poststructuralism. Foucault’s analysis of the subject as an instantiation and effect of discourse qua political power is the result of taking the structuralist method to the level of the pure abstraction or full formalization of the argument: the subject is determined and effected by society as signifying structure. Society is but a signifying chain, a language in its own right—it is discourse, and the subject is simply the effect of the discursive process of subjectivization. Both Foucault and those feminist theorists who have appropriated his concept of the subject (e.g., Judith Butler) have been accused of determinism precisely because of the argument that discourse (or language) determines the subject. In other words, some feminists contend that reducing the subject to an effect of discourse deprives the subject of agency (see Seyla Benhabib’s “Feminism and Postmodernism” in Benhabib et al. 1995, 17–35). Nonetheless, the argument that the subject is a discursive construct should not be understood as a position in favor of fiction at the expense of the real. The conditioning constrictions of the ruling discourse and the formative delimitations of the signifying universe we inhabit constitute the real in a Lacanian sense (Kolozova 2014, 79–98). The limit itself is the productive real that is outside signification but nonetheless engenders it (Cornell 1992). In “Speech and Phenomena” (1973) and Of Grammatology (1976), Jacques Derrida takes the linguistic argument to its extreme by explaining that the voice of the philosopher and his text are indistinguishable from one another in terms of their “authenticity” or realness—all is trace, artifice of signification; all transcendence is language; and language is in fact text, the craft of signification. Nonetheless, this reality is no less real and, moreover, no less material. We must not forget that Foucault subscribed to the structuralist method according to which there is no primacy between the structure and its elements and there is no “doer behind the deed” (Butler [1990] 2006, 195), just as there is no hierarchy between individual phonemes and the structure of signification in linguistics: each element creates the structure just as much as the structure determines the element. The materially determined possibilities of the interaction of individual elements create a finite system of signification, which in turn delineates the possibilities of individual action or the margin of agency. As an effect of discursive power, the subject is a dynamic rather than static, a temporal (becoming) rather than spatial category. Structuralism has served poststructuralism in its critical investigations of subjectivization within a culture, within capitalist society, and, especially for feminist poststructuralism, within the patriarchal signifying automaton of gendering.

Gendering the Subject Within feminist poststructuralism, the theory of the subject as proposed by Foucault is transformed into a project of “anti-­essentialism.” Judith Butler has been one of its most influential proponents and founding authorities. Butler transforms the rather dry and

Poststructuralism   105 abstract Foucauldian subject into an embodied reality, one inhabited by an endless number of identities. In Gender Trouble ([1990] 2006) and Bodies That Matter (1993), Butler further elaborates Foucault’s philosophical proposal, but she also seems to prompt a couple of other consequences that are critical for the aforementioned processes of culturalization of the political. As Butler argues, the subject is an effect of discourse infused with heteronormative power. Discourse as norm is underpinned by the norm and normality of heterosexuality. Norm or normality is inherent to culture, argues Butler, and, therefore, heteronormativity too. Moreover, culture is what conditions gender and heteronormativity ([1990] 2006). Foucault, however, writes of structural and institutional biopolitical violence that is always already subjectivized but never referred to as “cultural”—it is sociopolitical, military, economic, and embedded in robust structures of governance (1997, 73–79). In Foucault, these structures are neither reduced nor reducible to culture. Butler, however, resorts to the notion of culture as one that would either encompass or replace that of biopolitical governance. Butler’s critical strike against the axis of normativity introduced fractal fissures into the feminist theorizing of the early 1990s. In spite of the stated difference concerning the question of culture, Butler built on and expanded Foucauldian concepts of power, resistance, and subjectivity to critique the subject of feminism as theory and political movement. Anti-­essentialism is not only a theory but also a political stance against the discursive hegemony of gendered essences, including that of woman. In Gender Trouble and in a number of her other works, Butler argues in favor of the subject as an effect of sliding along the structure of signification, incessantly mobile and transformable. There are no traits of character and innate rules of behavior that determine gender. While the understanding of agency as a matter of individual volition tends to be taken as constitutive of identity in general and gender identity in particular, gender has no essence (Butler [1990] 2006, 22–46, 89–96, 270–82). To perform or choose to subvert society’s dominant rules about gender or sexuality, Butler argues, is to materialize gender, to bring it into being. This claim does not intimate some hidden truth about gender that has been obfuscated by performance but rather points to the fact that gender is the effect of an act or a series of acts, a performance. Butler’s claim also underscores the contingent nature of gender and gender identity. It is contingent on culture and its norms. Considering that culture is subject to historical transformations, as Butler argues to be the case,1 the “repertoire of performances” is subject to continuous change. We can, therefore, infer that one subverts the norm not only by defying it but also by reinventing the norm itself instead of merely reversing it (because, in the latter case, one remains within the same structure, albeit inverted). Feminist poststructuralist critiques of essentialism rightly argue that there is no historical subjectivization that is permanent and more perfect than another. Consequently, they rightfully argue that particular and historically determined subject configurations (i.e., identities) are not fixed and stable. It is right to argue against the naïve philosophical 1  Elaborated in the Preface to the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble (Butler 1999, 4–5).

106   Kolozova implication that a transcendental category of essence can transpire in historically determined configurations of discourse and subjectivities. It is for these reasons precisely that the centrality of the theme of identity in contemporary feminist poststructuralist philosophy—and, hence, its application in the form of “identity politics”—represents a contradiction in terms. Any consequentiality to poststructuralism’s premises concerning subjectivization requires a radical detachment from representational reductivism of genders. The reductivism at issue implies the fallacy of reification (Petrovic 1983) and the latter means: taking an abstraction, such as the subject, to be a material and visual form or a representation reduced to the real that not only acts as its substitute but also collapses with it (viz. with the real).

Critiques of Feminist Poststructuralism Some feminists, such as the new materialists (Iris van Tuin), the Marxists (Nina Power), and those habitually associated with speculative realism (the Laboria Cubonics Collective), are concerned that the emphasis on anti-­ essentialism ignores the determining role of material and historical conditions. The new wave of Marxist feminists contends that a change in available gender positions is possible only via a profound change in the material political-­ economic conditions of our capitalist societies. Another concern is that, as a result of anti-­essentialist militancy, the possibility of a universalist discourse has been dramatically limited. Consequently, international battles and goals cannot be—or are extremely difficult to be—fought and defended in the language of feminist or nonfeminist poststructuralism. In a strange, subterfuge fashion, poststructuralism introduced culture as the lasting essence of gender, whereas gender expelled sexual difference from feminist theory of authority. Culture conditions gender in such ways that gender is merely its effect, but not the other way around. This is a fundamental difference in relation to the second-­wave feminism in which patriarchy had the status of a universal category intersecting different cultures and historical configurations. Subversion is a powerful instrument of resistance if we look at power in its aspects of fluidity, dialectics, and mutation. As for the structures of political order, subversion may not be sufficient for overhaul. The double-­bind of rejected grand narratives—and thus of the abandonment of any ambition for confrontation with the grand systemic structures—has produced a situation in which acts of subversion by means of identity roles have become the main, if not the only, avenue of resistance. The only mode available now is resistance, not struggle, revolution, or any other form of systemic change. For the advocates of resistance (through Foucauldian-­ Butlerian subversion), the political-­ economic system is seemingly immutable. Thus, culture is that which must be resisted. Surreptitiously, culture has usurped the position of the political, a territory where the individualistic concept of identity and its expression can fill the entire political space, subsuming the economic and the environmental under the notion of subjectivization.

Poststructuralism   107 In conclusion, poststructuralism has brought forth an effective and irreversible overhaul of the traditional philosophical metaphysics insidiously present in the treatment of femininity and masculinity as givens (i.e., in transcending the problem of essentialization). The premise that gender is a socio-­linguistic (or discursive) construct is something that the emerging strands of feminist philosophy should retain as an epistemic step forward and away from philosophical atavisms. However, poststructuralism has been challenged by the new forms of feminist realism in ways that require adequate responses, such as: how are we to conceive materialism and universalism without regressing to modern and premodern philosophy and its self-­sufficient detachment from political reality? To address the stated questions and reinvigorate its discussions, poststructuralism ought to resort to a constructive dialogue with the aforementioned emerging forms of feminist realism and materialism.

References Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser. 1995. Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. London: Routledge. Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” In Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, edited by Sue-Ellen Case, 270–82. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ London and New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. (1990; 1999) 2006. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Cornell, Drucilla. 1992. Philosophy of the Limit. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1972) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1980) 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. “Speech and Phenomena” and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Translated by David B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1994. Dits et écrits 1954–1988. Tome 4. Paris: Gallimard, 1266. Foucault, Michel. 1997. “The Birth of Biopolitics.” In Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, 73–79. New York: New Press. Haraway, Donna. 1985. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review 15 (2): 65–107. Haraway, Donna. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Chap. 8 in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

108   Kolozova Haraway, Donna. 1992. “Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-Humanist Landscape.” In Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott, 86–100. New York: Routledge. Kolozova, Katerina. 2014. Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marx, Karl. (1887) 1956. Capital. Vol. 1. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Edited by Frederick Engels. Moscow: Progress Publishing. Petrovic, Gajo. 1983. “Reification.” In A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, edited by Tom Bottomore et al., 463–465. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chapter 10

Bl ack Femi n ist Phil osoph y a n d th e Politics of R efusa l Axelle Karera

In significant ways, explicitly naming oneself a Black feminist philosopher remains a  daring and often courageous act of professional self-­identification in academic ­philosophy. In her essay “Musing: A Black Feminist Philosopher: Is That Possible?,” Denise James (2014) reflects on the difficulties surrounding such intellectual commitments. She convincingly shows how intellectual practices in Black women’s theorizing are often considered in philosophy to be running counter to the discipline’s established analytics, axiological arrangements, and discursive codes of conduct. Black women, indeed, are drastically outnumbered in philosophy. In this still very restricted number, as James rightly points out, those who self-­identify as Black feminist philosophers and whose work is directly invested in assessing, clarifying, and theorizing Black women’s and girls’ life-­worlds are even more outnumbered. It is important to keep in mind that the majority of Black women working in professional philosophy today have all earned degrees in doctoral programs in philosophy, and like all their peers, they underwent the rigorous and conventional training for which philosophy is recognized in academic settings. Thus, all Black women philosophers working in academia today are intimately familiar with the proverbial and often indicting call to do philosophy “proper”—that is, “to do philosophy like a white man” (James 2014, 191). Following James, to do philosophy “right” means to abide by the “‘rule of play’ set by the norms of [a] profession” that is persistently unwelcoming of the vast amount of philosophical literature by Black women (191). Hence, for Black feminist philosophers, the key to successful production of philosophical work worthy of the name does not merely hinge on one’s appeal to white philosophers. Instead, to do philosophy as a Black feminist with the aim of producing Black feminist philosophy entails the often-­strenuous labor of categorically refusing disciplinary philosophy’s unwavering demand for legitimation.

110   Karera In what follows, I attempt to provide an account—albeit short—of Black feminist philosophers’ own legitimating practices. I will try to show how Black feminist ­philosophers have refused to render their own philosophical contributions invisible. I thus attend to their varied strategies to counter what Kristie Dotson names a “process-­based invisibility” (2013, 39). My discussion of the contributions of Black feminist philosophy borrows Audra Simpson’s (2014) formulation of the “politics of refusal” as a conceptual framework to account for the various ways in which Black feminist philosophy is more than mere corrective and subversion of philosophy’s truncated and yet supposedly neutral and universalist claims. As a framework, Black  feminist philosophical “politics of refusal” depicts how Black feminist ­philosophers doing philosophy for Black women and girls refuse to sell themselves short, refuse institutionally imposed intellectual trajectories, and refuse to respond to philosophy’s call to order in their attempts to lay down uncompromisingly Black feminist research agendas in philosophy. The list of scholars included in this account is deliberately short, for an accurate account of the trials Black feminism continues to face in the discipline ought not only render visible disciplinary efforts implicitly or explicitly invested in the marginalization of dissenting voices. It must also allow readers to recognize how Black feminist philosophers’ ongoing challenges to ­philosophy’s cherished commitment to authenticity render the training of Black feminist philosophers in conventional philosophy departments a task increasingly difficult to pursue. It is undeniable that Black feminist philosophy continues to elevate questions of disciplinarity to new institutional and scholarly heights. Still, it is crucial to ask what it would mean to train a Black feminist philosopher in a philosophy department. As James eloquently implies, is it even a possible endeavor? What daily personal and intellectual compromises are Black feminist scholars working in professional philosophy forced to make to meet the strict requirements of professional and institutional promotions? If, as we shall see, Black feminist philosophers are forcing the recalcitrant borders of disciplinary philosophy open, what follows for the field’s ongoing and historical aspirations for purity? The small number of Black feminist scholars trained in philosophy is of course unsurprising. To be sure, the matter here does not concern an inverted appeal to the seductive lures of narratives of authenticity, which I have already attributed to philosophy earlier—that is, what counts as “proper” Black feminist philosophy. In raising these questions, I attempt to account for why only a brave few in professional philosophy are dedicating their work to Black feminism and, thus, are Black feminist philosophers. Some might dismiss the matter of numbers as trivial in comparison to the exactitudes of depth and rigorous work. Nonetheless, caring to notice the small number of theoretically identified Black feminist philosophers stresses the need to continue the genealogical work feminist philosophy has historically used to assess, disrupt, and debunk myths that continue to make the space of professional philosophy hostile to culturally, socially, and politically situated modes of inquiry. Although what follows does not provide an exhaustive list of Black feminist philosophical works, the Black feminist philosophical interventions I discuss offer a focused portrayal of a Black

Black Feminist Philosophy and the Politics of Refusal   111 feminist philosophical politics of refusal emanating from scholars who, though trained in philosophy, have dedicated a significant majority of their work to a specifically Black feminist scholarly agenda.

Refusal: Strategic Opacity and Counterarchives In “Missing in Action: Violence, Power, and Discerning Agency,” Alisa Bierria (2014) interrogates conceptions of agency unequipped to capture Black women’s intentional agency deployed in precarious conditions of violence and oppression. Though she concedes that we validate one another’s actions and intentions “via a mutually constructed background of meaning,” Bierria aims to uncover the “living archives of scripts, representations, and logics” that obfuscate Black women’s agential authority and render their various choices, decisions, and plights socially and politically illegible (2014, 135 and 133, respectively). This archive, she argues, is a constellation of preestablished and racially packaged conventions that not only teaches how one ought to apprehend Black women’s choices but also proves the alleged legitimacy of the meaning it forcefully imposes on Black women’s actions (133). As Bierria eloquently explains: Racist authoring of black agentic action evacuates black agents’ self-­generated explanation from their actions, replacing it with intentions and explanations constructed through the living archive and sanctioned by institutional racism. In other words, within social dialectics of agency informed and empowered by logics designed to sustain racial domination and anti-­black racism, black agents essentially become missing in action, supplanted by fictive agencies that stand in for explanatory narrative about black action. (134)

This archive’s main engine of signification, thus, is generated and reinforced by a ­systematic (and systemic) process of erasure and hermeneutical contortion—so to speak—intended to create an image of Black female comportment that corresponds to its fictive foundations. Bierria’s invocation of the phantasmagoric is useful here. Discussing the 2010 case of Janice Wells, a Black schoolteacher who called the police to report a home intrusion and was instead repeatedly tasered by the responding law enforcement officers on the premises, Bierria rightly points out that Wells’s dehumanization at the hands of the police not only objectified Wells’s person but also “projected phantom intentions affirming culpability within their constructed narrative of her ‘criminal’ and ‘uncontrollable’ behavior, and constructed the kind of agent that accords with their conclusions” (2014, 134). Phantom intentions, Bierria continues, “also help sustain the officers’ fantasy that they were reacting rationally” (134). Bierria, however, goes further than demonstrating the historically and politically contingent nature of agency. The social dimensions of agency

112   Karera notwithstanding, she shows that agency cannot rigidly be understood as an ontological condition that purchases or acquires meaning through “social uptake.” Rather, Bierria insists that social recognition merely sanctions social legibility and does not posit necessary and strict standards of validation according to which agential authority ought to be discerned or not. There is no such thing, therefore, as a “failure of agency” (136). Indeed, she argues, agency is neither tethered to nor a strict function of recognition—especially when systems of social recognition and validation operate under racialized modes of apprehension. Instead, Bierria offers what she calls “a heterogenous framework of agency-­agencies,” which, by “foreground[ing] the experience of ‘struggle,” would displace binary and scaled conceptions of agency so as to provide the necessary framework to understand Black women’s agency, particularly when exercised under gendered and racialized constraints (137). The most provocative dimension of Bierria’s argument is not solely found in her call to explore alternative formulations of agential authority equipped to accommodate Black women’s intentional actions. What articulates Bierria’s Black feminist refusal is her valuation of opacity as a subversive tool for survival and contestation. In this regard, she argues that the lack of social uptake by the conventional system of recognition and dialectical ontologies of validation can be of a “strategic benefit” for Black women. Indeed, as Bierria asserts, “illegibility can be leveraged as an advantage”; the power of opacity can open up discourses of resistance to forms of intentional action reducible neither to simple insurgencies nor to mere transgressions (2014, 139). Beyond transformative agency, which, in the end, is still enacted in the interest of dismantling conditions of power, Bierria posits a conception of agency that is of a different modality. What she calls “alien agency” is deployed in the interests neither of retroactive clarifications (i.e., to challenge distorted actions) nor of restitution (i.e., demands for justice or due process); rather, alien agency, she explains, “facilitates action that intentionally creates meaning apart from dominant structures of oppression and the people who endorse them” (139). It does not, as Bierria further elaborates, “seek to transform systemic conditions of oppression, but is resistant in that it facilitates action that is preoccupied with cultivating its own universe of meaning and practice that affirms that which is unvalued . . . and . . . encourages its illegibility within the dominant public sphere” (139–40). In “Work the Root: Black Feminism, Hoodoo Love Rituals, and Practices of Freedom,” the Black feminist philosopher Lindsey Stewart (2017) turns to practices of freedom that unfold outside the normative parameters of conventional conceptions of freedom. More specifically, she returns to Angela Y. Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1999) to supplement Davis’s important insights about sexual love and emancipatory practices for newly freed Black slaves, by attending to the mechanisms of freedom themselves. In this powerful essay, Stewart contends that one cannot fully capture Davis’s claim about freedom without paying heed to the cosmological relationship between the blues, as a Black aesthetic form, and “spirit work practices” (2017, 104), understood as “both the healing and the harming ritual practice of African-­derived religious practices that

Black Feminist Philosophy and the Politics of Refusal   113 evolved in the world.”1 Like Davis, Stewart displaces pious understanding of freedom and opts for a conception of emancipatory practices, which do not perceive freedom to be ontologically given or an intrinsic condition of human existence. Rather, according to both Davis and Stewart, freedom is fought for; it is a dynamic process that disrupts the binary between thought and action, a driving analytic in Western conceptions of freedom. What is striking in Stewart’s work—like in the works of several Black feminist ­philosophers—is her unapologetic creation of a critical archival trajectory to ground a philosophical account of Black life-­worlds that cannot easily be captured by dominant conventions. In a move reminiscent of Joy James’s (2000) call, in her essay “‘Discredited Knowledge’ in the Nonfiction of Toni Morrison,” to consider Morrison as a thinker whose ideas filter through established “white” knowledge to account for Black communal modes and forms of self-­fashioning, Stewart lays out the grounds of a philosophical literacy that extends communities of knowledge beyond the living. More than displacing facile dichotomies between thought and practice, Stewart’s work establishes a philosophical archive that blurs conventional boundaries between the living and the dead—between immediate presence and what one may call a proximate nonpresence. Specifically, as a philosophical practice of emancipatory tradition of resistance and world-­making, Stewart considers “hoodoo” to be powerful rituals of inversion whereby the realities of slave property and ownership—both in the figurative and literal sense— are radically disrupted by the (former) slaves’ claims to bodily ownership. Hoodoo, therefore, becomes a practice of radical expropriation whereby the slave’s person and body as objects of property are seized from slavery’s matrix of domination. Indeed, surveying hoodoo practitioners’ historical reports, Stewart points out that we must keep in mind that such reports were usually provided by individuals for whom conditions of enslavement were still a “living memory” (2017, 107). Thus, she writes, it “means that a relationship of ownership toward their bodies, in light of their previous alienation, is a tremendous achievement” (107). In this regard, Stewart also cautions readers to relinquish narrow notions of resistance, for spirit work fails to “fully register on the logic of oppression and resistance” (109). While, as she continues, “resistance ‘reverses’ the role of master and slave,” spirit work begins from a position outside oppressive conditions and thereby generates ways of judging and knowing the world that exceed reactionary impulses that still remain within a binary logic of oppression and resistance (109). This is not to say, however, that Stewart understands spirit work to be a realm of alternative and subversive practices outside of power. In this text, one does not find mere transcendental claims about existence beyond the bounds of power’s grip. Much to the contrary, spirit work grants liberating access to the body. In fact, it is through spirit work that sexual love becomes “a terrain of freedom for the newly freed” (2017, 112). As Stewart argues, spirit work returns the practitioner to the most concrete conditions of her 1  Here Stewart (2017) borrows literary scholar Kameelah Martin’s (2013) conception of “spirit work.” See her second endnote in this essay, p. 113.

114   Karera existence by supplying the preconditions—to use Stewart’s terminology—to face power structures. One might say that spirit work, therefore, is the “hyper-­concrete” or the “para-­concrete,” denoting an adjacent and protective realm of being through which the  practitioner is returned to her “flesh” or—to invoke Hortense Spillers’s iconic intervention—that which suffered slavery’s “highest crimes” (Spillers 1987, 67). Stewart’s politics of refusal is apparent not only in her lucid depictions of freedom and resistance or in the deliberate construction of a philosophical genealogy that exceeds philosophy’s call to disciplinary order. More provocatively, I think we can recognize Stewart’s refusal in how she cosigns hoodoo’s radical and rebellious materialism that disrupts entrenched conceptual binaries between racial slavery’s brute idealism and its primitive forms objectification. Stewart shows that spirit work—as a subversive onto-­epistemic logic of renewal that exceeds resistance itself—allows the captive being to disrupt slavery’s conditions of property by “claiming ownership” over that which slavery arguably harmed the most: her flesh (Stewart 2017, 105). Having discussed refusal as both a privileged mode of Black feminist philosophical theorizing and a conceptual framework that enables thinking uninhibited by the reactionary demands of a politics of resistance, I now turn to how Black feminist philosophy’s refusal establishes forms of conceptual accountability that correspond to its practices of refusal. Indeed, I claim that Black feminist philosophy teaches us the virtues of refusal— refusal to sell ourselves short, refusal to be confined by the conceptual choices offered us, and calls to look elsewhere, beyond philosophy, for scenes and possibilities of refusal. However, refusal also entails accountability, care, and responsibility to conditions of epistemic inheritance that requires a Black woman philosopher to think with Black feminist founding figures’ various interventions. In the next section, therefore, I turn to Black feminist philosophers’ care and commitment to philosophical inheritance and history, which continue to set important standards for critique and the intricate labor of intellectual revision.

Refusal: Inheritance and Radical Historicity In her important essay, “Between Rocks and Hard Places,” Kristie Dotson (2016) dispels prevailing prejudices about Black feminist thought. The essay appears, at first glance, to  be a manifesto—in fact, a plan—for Black feminist theorizing. However, one is immediately led to consider Dotson’s incisive critique of philosophy’s obsession with “originality” and “discovery.” Indeed, she critically interrogates the meaning of holding onto discursive requirements of originality in the twenty-­first century. If disciplinary rigor in professional philosophy is measured by the author’s ability to discover “new ideas,” to produce unique and original interventions, Dotson considers what the judgment

Black Feminist Philosophy and the Politics of Refusal   115 of “newness” structurally implies for philosophical practices. In this regard, Dotson does not pull her punches—so to speak—in her assessment. She writes: What the judgment of “originality,” “newness,” and “discovery” require are colonizing logics that are unabashedly being used as academic gold standards. In a US settler-colonial academy, we colonize and re-­colonize with the adjective “original” and simultaneously lay waste to multiply complicated histories, trajectories of thought, and material conditions that facilitate the appearance of any given idea. And we do this just so we can claim to have provided a “significant contribution” to such some discourse or study. (2016, 47)

Though she points to the pervasiveness of this impulse—including pointing to the fact that Black feminist philosophers are not immune or exempt from such insidious aspirations—Dotson insists that demands for theoretical production reinforce a culture of academic ignorance whereby regressive logics of discovery are unable to grasp their own historicity. Dotson’s argument also reveals that the compulsory nature of such a dubious standard obscures a larger discursive heritage, thereby tacitly foreclosing critical theorists’ ability to dismantle “longstanding set-­ups” that may in turn expose the problematic history of philosophy’s gatekeeping practices (49). As Dotson points out, Black feminists theorists have worked to identify and disrupt enduring systemic (and systematized) structures that relentlessly endeavor to delegitimize the existence of Black women, girls, and gender nonconforming people. Indeed, she contends, it is by disavowing a heritage that may effectively point to a founding racial architectonic that professional philosophy is able to both uphold its claims to universality and, simultaneously, discredit Black feminist philosophers’ genealogical critique as futile, casual, or at best “unphilosophical.” Thus, by relying on a “trick of time” that remains, paradoxically, as coveted as it is disavowed, professional philosophy purchases its so-­called neutrality by surreptitiously covering up its own ­historical track record, thereby obscuring its violent foundations. This “trick of time’s” various operations establish constellations of ­discursive pariahs whose curated invisibility then works to delegitimize Black feminist criticism of disciplinary philosophy and undermine Black feminists’ efforts to establish procedures of conceptual accountability. In other words, philosophy’s “anti-­historicist” disavowal is no innocent commitment to philosophical rigor. Rather, it is used to ward off criticism and potential discursive indictments by both repressing its own racist theoretical foundations and imposing the same historical erasure on Black philosophical genealogies. In “Radical Love: Black Philosophy as Deliberate Acts of Inheritance,” Dotson describes this “process-­based invisibility” as “manufactured forms of invisibility that can be traced by the very processes that affect the disappearances in question” (2013, 39). Often, she continues, “engaging in black philosophy requires identifying and unpacking the many process-­based invisibilities shrouding black theoretical production” (39). As Dotson points out, it is often assumed that Black feminist theory possesses “no significant body of philosophical literature” (40). In this regard, she rightly points out,

116   Karera “process-­ based invisibilities are ignored and the resulting disappearing of black theoretical production is taken as evidence that no such production exists” (40). Hence, this “trick of time,” which is as racially driven as disciplinary philosophy’s gatekeeping practices and obsessive appeals to discovery, manages to discard diverse practitioners while engaging in clandestine processes of self-­absolution intended to preemptively undercut any challenges to its own discursive legitimacy. The trick of time helps to cultivate what Dotson calls a “culture of justification,” a culture significantly responsible for the “relatively few numbers of diverse people in professional philosophy” (2012, 6). Though she provides several symptoms of this culture of justification, her discussion of philosophy’s use of “commonly held, univocally relevant justifying norms” is pertinent here (5). For Dotson, professional philosophy’s culture of justification functions according to a constellation of normative arrangements, which are unspoken yet potently operative. The degree to which a work conforms to these norms determines whether it is classified (or anointed) as properly philosophical. It is this logic of purity—of property and propriety—that Black feminist philosophers have continually resisted and refused. In “Radical Love” (2013), Dotson argues that Black feminist acts of inheritance entail a radical trust in their ancestors as legitimate knowledge practitioners who have extended their knowledge into our current times. Through these acts of inheritance, Black feminist philosophy refuses normative temporality and disrupts the teleological assumptions of philosophy’s “doctrines of discovery” because they require us to consider conceptual heritages as contemporaneous with our immediate interventions. Consider how Dotson describes settler doctrines of discovery in her article, “On the Way to Decolonization in a Settler Colony: Re-­introducing Black Feminist Identity Politics” (2018), where she writes, “Twisting doctrines of discovery . . . operate in epic feats of forgetting and merciless logics of elimination that authorize many registers of genocide that can include anything from unimaginable scales of physical violence to the violence of forced assimilation” (4). Thinking with Dotson, one cannot help but acknowledge the implications for philosophy’s normalizing practices that adjudicate the propriety of intellectual projects according to vague standards of “originality.” What, indeed, is  “originality”? What is “ingenuity” when we concede that discursive inheritance is ineluctable? These are questions Black feminist philosophy forces us to reckon with. As constitutive of a system of accountability and responsibility, acts of inheritance remind us that our philosophical projects are never deployed from timeless perspectives. Black feminist philosophy establishes forms of conceptual accountability that return us to the necessity of critically interrogating the historicity of philosophy itself. It thus teaches us to refuse the abdication of discursive responsibility, which continues to plague philosophy’s insistence on the value of original contribution. The questions Black feminist philosophers ask themselves are, as such, not limited to the confines of their own communities. As Joy James puts it, drawing “the outline of conceptual site or worldview is not an argument for black essentialism” (2000, 26). In addition to its call for conceptual accountability, Black feminist critique of philosophy’s legitimating practices questions institutional demands for diversity and inclusiveness that privilege

Black Feminist Philosophy and the Politics of Refusal   117 mere optics over curricular rearrangement, while nonetheless acknowledging that efforts to democratize education have historically been championed by Black women.2 Black women philosophers’ politics of refusal is also corrective in its various interventions. Consider Kathryn Sophia Belle’s critical commentary of Charles Mill’s analysis of what he and Carole Pateman (2007) call the “racial-­sexual contract.” In “Black Feminist Reflections on Charles Mills’s ‘Intersecting Contracts,’” Belle (2017) reminds us that nonwhite women, according to Mills, possess “greater cognitive clarity” on the intersecting nature of oppression because they inhabit a socio-­political position from which they can adequately assess the ways in which racial and sexual forms of oppression are not distinct and singular operations. In this regard, Black women’s particular epistemic position allows them to decipher the realities of techniques of dominations, which secure power for their various appurtenances precisely in their intersecting modes of operation. Belle’s corrective insistence, however, comes in the form of an epistemic demand for conceptual redress that is a reminder of the necessity to attend to intragroup forms of discrimination—or even subjugation—about which Black women activists and theorists spent the better half of last century articulating, describing, and thinking about. While Mills concedes that Black women are subject to intersecting and competing techniques of oppression, he maintains that in most cases racial discrimination trumps gendered forms of exclusion for Black women. Regarding Mills’s emphasis on Black men’s lack of access to white patriarchal power, Belle writes, “But even if one grants that nonwhite men have not had a public patriarchal role— especially with regard to white women—this leaves unaddressed nonwhite men’s patriarchal relationship to nonwhite women” (2017, 25). Belle’s call for precision is not invested in erecting a hierarchy of competing forms of oppression; this is not a disguised iteration of the “Oppression Olympics.” Rather, Belle turns our attention to the implications of Mills’s observation when what is insidiously at stake is the compulsory identification of Black women’s options to resist racism with the standards of the bourgeois nuclear family.3 What are, Belle asks, “the implications of the observation that nonwhite women are expected to find refuge from white supremacy in a nonwhite family in which patriarchal relations obtain” (2017, 25)? What is lost amidst the urge of such coercion is what Black women sacrifice by prioritizing race over gender. 2  For instance, James argues, “Expanding the intellectual canon to include . . . people of color . . . for more inclusive and representative curricula does not subvert racialized hierarchies. Additive curricula do not inherently democratize education. . . . Where analyses of whiteness as metaparadigm are absent critiques of racialized oppression are insufficient to create a learning environment in which teaching critical work maintains rather than dismantles communal ties and subversive insights” (2000, 27). 3  This should remind the reader of Hortense Spillers’s scathing critique of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report. She writes, the “Negro Family has no Father to speak of . . . and it is surprisingly the fault of the . . . the female line. This stunning reversal of the castration thematic, displacing the Name and the Law of the Father to the territory of the Mother and Daughter, becomes an aspect of the African-­American female’s misnaming. . . . Fathers are here made to manifest the very same rhetorical symptoms of absence and denial, to embody the double and contrastive agencies of a prescribed internecine degradation. ‘Sapphire’ enacts her ‘Old man’ in drag, just as her ‘Old man’ becomes Sapphire in outrageous caricature” (1987, 66).

118   Karera Thus, Belle concludes that “there is something missing” from Mills’s racial-­sexual ­contract (25). As she puts it, “nonwhite men can be patriarchal too” and the “issue is not only being complicit with the role of white racism in oppressing non-­white women, it is also the . . . issue of patriarchal relations between nonwhite men and women” (26). Like Dotson, who insists on the incontrovertible status of inheritance in our various modes of philosophizing, Belle similarly calls attention to the rich discursive history of intersectionality. A racial-­sexual contract that contends that “race generally trumps gender” cannot speak adequately for Black women. Belle’s refusal calls for conceptual accountability by recentering the long history of Black women’s theorizing.

Conclusion Black women philosophers continue to mobilize Black feminism and philosophical thinking to interrogate dubious and arbitrary standards for doing philosophy. In addition, they have produced a body of work that ought to compel us to attend to complex links between refusal and critique. The ground clearing that Black feminist philosophy has enacted, particularly in the last decade as the discipline of philosophy has had to reckon with the growing institutional visibility of Black feminist philosophy, should lead us to rethink the discipline’s perverse treatment of philosophical thought as property for the purposes of disciplinary gatekeeping in the name of authenticity, propriety, and purity. If the cost of doing “proper” philosophy is to forget the racial and sexual antagonisms that subtend the discipline’s canon, if the price to pay for doing philosophy properly entails capitulation to its “trick of time,” Black feminist philosophers’ refusal as critique and knowledge production reminds us that “there is not a subject that you can speak about in the modern world where you will not have to talk about African women and new world African women” (Spillers et al. 2007, 308).

References Belle, Kathryn Sophia. 2017. “Black Feminist Reflections on Charles Mills’s ‘Intersecting Contracts.’ ” Critical Philosophy of Race 5 (1): 19–28. Bierria, Alisa. 2014. “Missing in Action: Violence, Power, and Discerning Agency.” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 29 (1): 129–45. Davis, Angela Y. 1999. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Vintage. Dotson, Kristie. 2012. “How Is This Paper Philosophy?” Comparative Philosophy 3 (1): 3–29. Dotson, Kristie. 2013. “Radical Love: Black Philosophy as Deliberative Acts of Inheritance.” Black Scholar 43 (3): 38–45. Dotson, Kristie. 2016. “Between Rocks and Hard Places: Introducing Black Feminist Professional Philosophy.” Black Scholar 46 (2): 46–56.

Black Feminist Philosophy and the Politics of Refusal   119 Dotson, Kristie. 2018. “‘On the Way’ to Decolonization in a Settler Colony: Re-introducing Black Feminist Identity Politics.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous People 14 (3): 190–99. James, Denise. 2014. “Musing: A Black Feminist Philosopher: Is that Possible?” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 29 (1): 189–95. James, Joy. 2000. “‘Discredited Knowledge’ in the Nonfiction of Toni Morrison.” In Women of Color and Philosophy, edited by Naomi Zack, 25–43. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Martin, Kameelah. 2013. Conjuring Moments in African American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pateman, Carole, and Charles Mills. 2007. Contract and Domination. Cambridge: Polity. Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Spillers, Hortense. 1987. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17 (2): 65–81. Spillers, Hortense, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, and Jennifer L. Morgan. 2007. “‘Whatcha Gonna Do?’ Revisiting ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,’ A Conversation with Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, and Jennifer L. Morgan.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35 (1/2): 299–309. Stewart, Lindsey. 2017. “Work the Root: Black Feminism, Hoodoo Love Rituals, and Practices of Freedom.” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 32 (1): 103–18.

chapter 11

L ati na /x Femi n ist Phil osoph y Andrea J. Pitts

Our strategy is how we cope—how we measure and weigh what is to be said and when, what is to be done and how, and to whom and to whom and to whom, daily deciding/risking who it is we can call an ally, call a friend (whatever that person’s skin, sex, or sexuality). We are women without a line. We are women who contradict each other. (Moraga [1981] 2015, xl–xli)

These words were offered in a concluding section of Cherríe Moraga’s preface to the 1981 volume titled This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. While Moraga’s writings and that collection of texts have become pivotal resources for many writers, artists, theorists, and activists, spanning a wide range of disciplines and issues, Moraga’s words also provide a useful framing for the study of Latina/x feminist philosophy. Like Moraga’s invocation of the poetry, essays, and deeply personal reflections found in This Bridge Called My Back, much of the work by US Latina/x feminists over the last four decades has pursued philosophy as a “strategy.” For example, many Latina/x feminists have used philosophical forms of inquiry as transdisciplinary strategies to articulate the complex relationships between practical and theoretical modes of engaging worlds of meaning. Moreover, drawing again from Moraga’s words, the critical foci of Latina/x feminist philosophy are often the result of careful decisions taken by scholars who must perpetually situate their work amidst the myriad professional and embodied risks that accompany challenging dominant modes of racism, sexism, cultural assimilation, and historical erasure. In this vein, the perpetual question of “to whom” Latina/x feminist philosophy addresses itself is a continuous process, as much of the work among Latina/x feminist scholars strives to analyze the complicated dynamics among communities of color, including coalitional work among Black, Indigenous, Asian, Arab, and Latin American women. Lastly, with respect to Moraga’s words above, the writings of US Latina/x scholars within the field of feminist philosophy have also

Latina/x Feminist Philosophy   121 contradicted each other, and, at times, substantially disagreed with the methods, claims, and goals of one another. This is an important component of the philosophical endeavors within Latina/x feminism, and as I hope to demonstrate later, there are many developing approaches, topics, and debates within the discipline that offer fruitful avenues for future study and critique. In what follows, I first offer a brief articulation of some clarifications of the aims of this chapter. The second section outlines a variety of approaches and methods within Latina/x feminist philosophy. The final section of the chapter concludes with several remarks about future directions of study within Latina/x feminist philosophy.

Productive Ambivalences The aims of this chapter are to provide a brief overview of the tones and contours of Latina/x feminist philosophy. To do so carefully requires a conversation about the uses of key terms throughout this chapter. First, by using the term “Latina/x,” I situate my analytic focus on writings produced in the context of the United States by or about persons who are of Latin American descent, many of whom identify as women, non-­binary, or trans. This means that the work discussed herein is not, unless otherwise specified, focused on the work of scholars producing philosophical writings from non-­US contexts, universities, presses, and so on. To be clear, the reason for this is not to privilege the United States. Rather, the reason is to parochialize and specify the set of texts, authors, methods, and themes that this chapter discusses. As we will see in the next section, many authors within Latina/x feminist philosophy situate themselves within multiple sites of meaning, political engagement, and problem-­spaces. The reason for this is because, as I discuss in more detail later, many Latina/x feminist philosophers have contested the geopolitical borders, boundaries, delineations, and conflicting hermeneutic gaps that modern/colonial nation-­states tend to reify. In this vein, my use of the phrase “modern/ colonial” is also intentional, and has been adopted by some contemporary Latina/x feminist scholars to mark the patterns of sociohistorical dependency that modernity has with colonial violence and neocolonial political and economic systems of dominance (Cf. Lugones 2007, 2010; Méndez 2015, Ruíz 2017). The need to parochialize the discourses of the United States is also important because, as we will see, the academic and literary discourses within Latin America differ in significant ways from those impacting scholars working within disciplinary matrices of the United States. As some authors have outlined in detail, the problem-­spaces and dynamics of academic philosophy differ according to the varying intellectual traditions, philosophical genealogies, cultural resonances, and socioeconomic conditions that make up the geopolitical sites of nation-­states (Cf. Ortega 2016; Rivera Berruz 2014; Ruíz  2011,  2012; Schutte  1998,  2007). Moreover, my choice of the term “Latinx” throughout this chapter reflects a recent linguistic effort that has sought to create identificatory space beyond gender binary terms like “Latina” and “Latino” with a novel

122   pitts gender-­neutral term. Namely, the term “Latinx” has been in circulation since roughly the mid-­2000s across social media outlets, online popular press articles, academic journals, and various other venues (Salinas and Lozano 2017; de Onís 2017). The term has been used by many people as an inclusive term that reflects transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people of Latin American descent. As such, the term aims to offer a gender-­neutral descriptor that can be used across a variety of gender identities. I also chose to use the term “Latina” as well, as many of the authors described in this chapter do identify with the term, and given the systemic erasure of women and femme-­ identified people, it is important to keep an emphasis on their contributions and forms of collective political identification.1 Along these lines, the phrase “of Latin American descent” also bears intentional ambiguity and serves to mark the distinct socioeconomic, genealogical, and positional matrices of meaning by which peoples and cultures across the landmasses of Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America identify themselves and are identified by others. One specific concern among Latina/x feminist theorists is that such heterogeneous sites of meaning and identification are reduced, commodified, exoticized, or detached from their politically relevant contexts. As such, the ability to specify whether a Surinamese-­descended woman living in Florida is “properly” Latina or whether a Filipina American scholar producing texts on colonial violence is “actually” part of Latina/x feminism is of little concern to me to this framing discussion. Rather, the aim is to situate the methods, themes, goals, and practitioners within the circulation of US academic philosophy that are relevantly engaging questions articulated as feminist and the populations that consider themselves of Latin American descent. This emphasis in the chapter reflects an attentiveness to authorial and political positionings, rather than ontological claims regarding the authenticity or conditions for inclusion within the designation “Latina/x.” In the next section, then, we begin to unpack why the demarcation of Latinidad (“Latinness”) and other related epistemic and political functions of power have been critically assessed as facets of situated selfhood. For now, we leave these definitions as ambivalences, ones that, I hope, following Gloria Anzaldúa, we will be able to turn “into something else” (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 101).

1  There has also been a series of debates regarding the term “Latinx.” Namely, some authors have argued that the letter “x,” when pronounced in Castilian Spanish, is quite difficult to fluidly integrate into the language when spoken. For example, phrases like “Lxs niñxs están muy contentxs” would be very difficult to pronounce. Given that the term has largely circulated within US English-­dominant contexts, the use of “x” to render Castilian Spanish phrases gender neutral could be cumbersome and difficult for monolingual Spanish speakers (de Onís 2017; Martínez-­Prieto 2018). However, responding to these concerns, a number of scholars have left various options open for how to both affirm gender plurality when speaking (i.e., to avoid binary uses of “-a” or “-o” terms when necessary) and to endorse the flexibility of hybrid and contextually sensitive uses of language, which do not insist on conceptions of linguistic tradition or linguistic purity (de Onís 2017). Moreover, instead of the use of “x,” some Spanish-­speaking authors have proposed a gender-­neutral ending such as “-e” (e.g., “Les niñes están muy contentes”) to address the morphological and phonetic concerns in Castilian Spanish (Alvarez Melledo 2017; Diz Pico 2017).

Latina/x Feminist Philosophy   123

Latina/x Feminist Philosophy in the Flesh There is a great deal of scholarly work that may be included under the umbrella of Latina/x feminist philosophy. To survey a portion of this work, I proceed by discussing three philosophical themes and approaches within Latina/x feminist philosophy: identity and theories of self, Latina/x feminist interventions in political philosophy, and bridging Latin American and US Latina/x feminisms.

Identity and Theories of the Self Perhaps the most prominent theme within Latina/x feminist philosophy has been explorations of notions of selfhood, social identity, and the rich and varied experiences of embodied being. Pivotal works throughout the 1980s among Latina-­identified authors began to distinguish a number of specific philosophical approaches to core questions of selfhood and identity within feminist theory. In this vein, the work of Gloria Anzaldúa is a common point of reference for many scholars. Anzaldúa’s 1987 text Borderland/La frontera offers readers in both academic feminist contexts and nonacademic settings a collection of writings that addresses a set of rich philosophical questions. For example, Anzaldúa’s early work addresses the relationship between racial, sexual, gender, and cultural identities; the politicization of language; mind-­body dualism; cultural assimilation; imperialism; and theories of perception and consciousness. While many of these themes have their own discourses within philosophy, Anzaldúa’s work sparked new ways of describing, examining, and developing these topics from the positionality of being a Mexican American queer woman raised among conflicting and multiplicitous sites of meaning and power. Accordingly, significant contributions to philosophical feminism from Anzaldúa’s work include her conceptions of mestizaje and mestiza consciousness (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999). Mestizaje has a long and varied history in the context of Latin American and Chicano/a/x history, politics, and philosophy (Cf. Miller 2004; Pérez-­Torres 2006; Velazco y Trianosky 2013). In dialogue with that history, Anzaldúa’s conception of this term offers a new way for US-­based Latina/x authors to theorize the divergent realities of attempting to survive under the abiding norms of a culturally and politically dominant Anglo-­American space. Moreover, her work also offers forms of resistance to the cultural stigmas and harms impacting Latinxs and Chicanxs within their own communities, including issues such as domestic violence and homophobia among Latina/xs. Given these conflicting sites of meaning, she claims that many Latina/xs find themselves bound not only to Anglo-­American cultural, historical, and political modes of being but also to modes of being that are normatively prescribed for Latin American–descended groups as well. In this latter sense, Anzaldúa describes the denigration of Tex-­Mex, Tejano, Spanglish, and other

124   pitts dialects that are often viewed as “illegitimate” or “bastardized” forms of Castilian Spanish (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 80). As such, Anzaldúa analyzes how the language one uses to encounter the world and others bears a direct relationship to our understandings of ourselves, stating, “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language” (81). Throughout her corpus, Anzaldúa revisits, revises, and yet remains committed to the notion of a fundamentally mixed—or mestiza—subjectivity.2 Another prominent early Latina feminist theorist of identity and selfhood is María Lugones. Lugones’s 1983 coauthored essay, “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘the Woman’s Voice’” offers a strong theoretical handling of conceptions of difference among women within feminism. The article shifts between two narrative voices, one of Lugones speaking in “an Hispana voice” and one of Elizabeth Spelman in “the voice of a white/Anglo woman who has been teaching and writing about feminist theory” (Lugones and Spelman 1983, 573–675). Throughout the piece, Lugones and Spelman offer a series of reflections on the feminist invocation of the need for “the woman’s voice to be heard.” The separate narrative roles in the piece, including Lugones’s “Hispana” voice and the Spanish-­language prologue, demonstrate the nonreciprocal theoretical exchanges between many women of color and white/Anglo women. Lugones states in her prologue, “No quiero hablar por ti sino contigo. Pero si no aprendo tus modos y tu los mios la conversación es sólo aparente . . . El diálogo entre nosotras requiere dos voces y no una” (Lugones and Spelman 1983, 573). Her claim here and in the remaining exchange with Spelman in the article is that feminism demands that women be able to authorize their own speech through an exercise in firstpersonal forms of agential activity. However, as both authors state, there is an undue burden for many women of color to communicate through forms of speech and conceptions of self that are only recognizable to white/Anglo women. Her critique is that white/Anglo women rarely engage women of color on their own terms, and thus many women of color are denied the agential framings that affirm their subjectivity and experience within feminist theory. Three years later, in “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” Lugones further develops the notion of nonreciprocal communicative exchanges between white/ Anglo women and women of color by building a nuanced set of claims bearing ontological, existential, and phenomenological resonances. “World-­travelling” becomes a foundational category for understanding the “risky,” inhibiting, and often alienating practices that many Latina/xs and women of color engage in in their efforts to collaborate with white/Anglo communities. Such communities include, for Lugones, the sets of practices that make up academic spaces of feminist theory. Accordingly, she claims that many women of color inhabit and travel across differing “worlds,” and in those “worlds,” 2  Subsequent authors have built on her work on mestizaje and identity, and have relied on many of the core theoretical tools that she provided in her writings on identity, including diverse philosophical theorists such as Edwina Barvosa (2008), Theresa Delgadillo (2011), AnaLouise Keating (2013), María Lugones (2003), Mariana Ortega (2015, 2016), and Chela Sandoval (2000). Additionally, a number of authors have continued to find ways to develop Anzaldúa’s work on identity, including notable scholarly contributions such as those of Cynthia Paccacerqua (2016) and Natalie Cisneros (2013).

Latina/x Feminist Philosophy   125 we are different persons. She also notes that she is “offering a description of experience, something that is true to experience even if it is ontologically problematic” (Lugones 1987, 11). To explain the continuity of the self across worlds of meaning—that is, how the phenomenal “I” is able to recognize itself across ontologically differing worlds of sense—is that memories of oneself in other worlds remain with the traveling self (Lugones 1987, 11). In a recent book-­length treatment of Latina feminist phenomenology, Mariana Ortega (2016) critically attends to some of these “ontologically problematic” claims made by Lugones. Ortega first situates the claim for a plurality of selves within Lugones’s work as arising from a political project aimed at practices of resistance. Reading Lugones’s Pilgrimages/Peregrinages (2003) as a whole, Ortega situates the role of an ontological pluralism of selves within the resistant practice of imagining possibilities for lived embodiment and conceptions of self that are not solely determined through systems of oppression. Namely, Ortega notes, “the task of remembering one’s many selves becomes a ‘liberatory task’” (Ortega 2016, 96, citing Lugones 2003, 59). Yet, Ortega also points out that Lugones does not explicitly describe how a plurality of selves retains continuity over time and space. If the experience of self from one world to another requires remembering oneself from one context to another, Ortega asks for more from Lugones on the role of memory (Ortega 2016, 97; 2001, 14–15). We might ask which memories are necessary for world-­traveling, and how these memories function through differing embodied worlds of meaning and sense. Without some sense of continuity between selves, Ortega asks in a 2001 essay, how can a self determine that it is different from one context to the next (15)? Namely, what are the measures and phenomenal descriptions that can be offered from one sense of being-­in-­the-­world to another? We could also add here the institutional and juridical role of selves as bearers of rights, responsibilities, and recognitions. How would an ontologically plural sense of self interpret the numerous modes whereby we are recognized by others as continuous selves across space and time? To address these metaphysical, political, and phenomenological concerns, Ortega proposes that the resistant possibilities that Lugones seeks in her work can be provided through an existential pluralism instead of an ontological pluralism. In this sense, rather than proposing that there is a plurality of selves and that such selves also travel through differing worlds of meaning, existential pluralism offers a way to describe the ways in which the self, in its multiplicitous existence, fares in differing worlds (Ortega 2016, 89). By this, Ortega means that in differing contexts or “worlds,” I am more or less at ease (58–63). That is, I am more or less familiar with the norms, perceptual expectations, and hermeneutic possibilities for understanding myself and others in differing contexts. “Being at ease” in the technical sense offered by Ortega means that the self is able to be nonreflective about everyday norms of a given world of sense and meaning. In contrast to this, she outlines two senses of not being-­at-­ease, namely, thick and thin senses of not being-­at-­ease in the world. The distinction here rests on the ability to know oneself in a given setting. Thin senses of not being-­at-­ease in a world entail being unfamiliar with the norms and shared history of a particular world of meaning (82). However, the thick

126   pitts sense in which one can not be-­at-­ease is that, in addition to the dissonance between the norms and shared history of a given world, the self also becomes confused as to what kind of person the self is (82). In this way, although many people have experienced the existential complexity of being unfamiliar with a given set of expectations or meanings in one context or another, a “deeper instance” of this phenomenon is when one confronts a radical ambiguity or contradiction with how one exists in a given world (82–83). Accordingly, Ortega shifts to phenomenological terms for familiarity, existential continuity, and self-­interpretation to elaborate and expand conceptions of selfhood within Latina/x feminist philosophy.3

Latina/x Feminist Interventions in Political Philosophy Another significant vein of Latina/x feminist philosophical work explicitly engages sites of political struggle. While Anzaldúa, Lugones, and Ortega each theoretically attend to political struggle through their framings of selfhood and conceptions of intersubjectivity, other Latina/x feminist theorists have also utilized resources among Latina/x and Latin American communities to address a number of questions regarding global expansionism, citizenship, and colonialism. One prominent text in this vein is Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed (2000). Sandoval’s work develops philosophical discussions of both postmodernism and decolonial theory to craft what the author considers a “deregulating system” of resistance (Sandoval 2000, 9). Such a system seeks to address the heterogeneous aesthetic and political discursive sites that characterize advanced capitalism in the West. Sandoval then develops “differential consciousness” as a method for navigating the transnational corporate and neocolonial technologies of global capitalism, including the hermeneutic mechanisms by which globalization has reiterated sites of subjecthood and dominance to maintain itself (179–83). Also, among the political efforts of Latina/x feminists, a number of scholars are engaging sites of political conflict through a philosophical lens in an effort to address the needs of US Latina/x and Latin American women. For example, in a 2013 article, Natalie Cisneros examines the relationship between conceptions of deviant sexuality and contemporary rhetorics of “illegal aliens” in the United States. Her work carefully dissects notions of birthright citizenship and maternal roles that serve to stabilize and destabilize the function of the nation-­state. Drawing from diverse theoretical resources 3  Other notable approaches to selfhood within Latina/x feminist philosophy include Linda Martín Alcoff ’s conception of identities as embodied horizons (2006), Edwina Barvosa’s development of the notion of selfcraft (2008), Theresa Delgadillo’s work on spiritual mestizaje (2011), Jacqueline M. Martinez’s conception of critical phenomenology of culture (2000, 2014), Paula Moya’s postpositivist realism (2002), and Kelli Zaytoun’s interpretive project focusing on Anzaldúa’s conception of la naguala (2012, 2015, 2016).

Latina/x Feminist Philosophy   127 such as those of Lauren Berlant, Michel Foucault, and Gloria Anzaldúa, Cisneros develops an argument to describe the political foreclosure of civic participation for racialized and sexualized subjects and this foreclosure’s impact on the normalizing construction of citizenship (Cisneros 2013).4

Bridging Latin American and US Latina/x Feminisms A third prominent area of analysis within US Latina/x feminist philosophy has been a body of scholarship that seeks to bridge the global North-­South divide among women of color. Much of this work stems from “third world” feminist projects of the 1980s and 1990s that sought theoretical and praxical methods to dismantle the global forms of power and resistance that impact women of color worldwide (Mohanty  1991, 2; Cf. Alexander and Mohanty  1997; Allen  1986; hooks  1984; Lorde  1984; Smith  1983; Trinh  1989). In this vein, many US women of color feminists, including Latina/xs, examine the tensions produced by Anglo-­American and European iterations of feminist theory for the many people who face cultural erasure, colonial and imperial domination, and structural racism as constitutive aspects of their experiences of gender and sexuality. Notably, within this work by US Latina/xs, many authors have attempted to find coalitional strategies for resistance across the geopolitical contexts of the Americas and the Caribbean. Among these authors, the work of Norma Alarcón is a significant early voice within Chicana feminist theory. In her 1989 essay, “Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism,” Alarcón traces the literary, political, and theoretical tropes used throughout Mexican and Chicano/a history to circumscribe the narrative of Malintzin Tenepal, or La Malinche, the indigenous female slave who was offered as a gift by the Tabascans to Hernán Cortes during the conquest of New Spain. While history and mythology of Malintzin has circulated for almost five centuries, Alarcón’s work situates the production and circulation of the figure of Malintzin within three differing historical projects (Alarcón 1989, 64). The first is the travel writings and chroniclers of the conquest of New Spain. The second is the myth of Malintzin as a traitor or scapegoat to the peoples of Mexico, which began around the nineteenth century. This second set of writings largely casts Malintzin, due to her role as Cortes’s translator during the conquest, as a traitor and as a whore, due to her bearing of a son with the conquistador as well. Alarcón states, in this sense, that “Malintzin may be compared to Eve, especially when she is viewed as the originator of the Mexican people’s fall from grace and the 4  Additionally, other Latina/x feminist theorists have developed sustained arguments on a number of other philosophical issues, including relational autonomy (Barvosa-­Carter 2007), reparations for the genocide of Native peoples and the transatlantic slave trade (Figueroa 2015b), multiculturalism (Lugones 2000; Moya 2002), debates regarding identity politics (Alcoff 2006; Moya and Hames-­ García 2000), public reason (Alcoff 2010), and education (Moya 2002; Reed-­Sandoval and Arruda 2016).

128   pitts ­ rocreator of a ‘fallen’ people” (58). Lastly, Alarcón focuses her analysis on the p ­twentieth-century women and men who have sought to vindicate or revise the ­mythological status of Malintzin, and such authors include twentieth-­century Chicana theorists who seek to revalue her role as a woman of color (Alarcón 1989). Navigating these three ­historiographical layers, Alarcón describes the prefiguration of rape and property inheritance as two defining features that differentiate male writers of Malintzin, like Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes, from Chicana theorists of Malintzin. She writes: “For the men, the so-­called rape is largely figurative, a sign of their ‘emasculating’ loss; for the women, it is literal” (82–83). Here, Alarcón points to the undergirding function of the desire for the subjectivity of Malintzin, either as agent, speaking subject, or traitor. Accordingly, many Chicana/x theorists frame the legend of Malintzin as one that requires mestiza/o/xs, Chicana/o/xs, and Latina/o/xs to emphasize their beginnings in sexual violence, which is not only symbolic “but historically coinciding with European expansionist adventures” (83). Thus, Alarcón’s work encourages Latina/x feminist scholars to examine colonial conquest as sites of racialized, ethnic, and sexual violence, and that the possibilities for resistance and historiographical revaluation require us to attend to these variegated layers of erasure that seek to dismiss the concrete sexual harms enacted against people of color worldwide. A great deal of bridgework between Latin American and US Latina feminism has also been done by María Luisa Femenías and Ofelia Schutte. Both Femenías and Schutte have contributed to a volume edited by Femenías and Amy  A.  Oliver on feminist philosophy in Latin America and Spain (2007) and have offered important contributions to Anglophone philosophy that outline core philosophical questions within Latin American feminist philosophy. For example, in A Companion to Latin American Philosophy published in 2013, Femenías and Schutte thematically address four key issues within Latin American feminist methodologies. They cite “the activist/academic dichotomy,” “the use and abuse of ‘gender’ as a category of analysis,” “theorizing ethnicity/race and cultural diversity as an inherent aspect of feminist methodology,” and “the uses and appropriations of Foucauldian discourse theory and Butlerian deconstruction” (Femenías and Schutte 2013, 401–9). In this chapter, the authors mark both tensions and continuities between those of Anglophone feminist philosophy and those of feminist authors across various geopolitical sites in Latin America. Additionally, Schutte’s writings have examined theoretical discourses of Latin American feminist philosophy for the past several decades, including foundational contributions in Anglophone feminist philosophy beginning in the late 1980s (e.g., Schutte  1988). Schutte’s work, including her book-­length treatment of Latin American thought, engaged with a number of sites relevantly linked to the study of gender and culture (Cf. Schutte 1987, 1991, 1993, 1998).5

5  Other Latin American feminist authors who have published within or been analyzed within Anglophone Latina/x feminist philosophical discourses include Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Cf. Femenías 2005; Gaspar de Alba 2014; Medina 2013; Oliver 2014), Graciela Hierro (Femenías and Oliver 2007; Hierro and Marquez 1994), and Carlos Vaz Ferreira (Oliver 2007, 2012, 2014).

Latina/x Feminist Philosophy   129

New Paths/Nuevos Caminos While there has been a great deal of writing and theoretical development within Latina/x feminist philosophy for more than four decades in Anglophone academic journals and publications, there remain a number of emerging methods, resources, and areas of study that also suggest many potential avenues for future work. Recent work by a number of scholars has been examining dimensions of Afro­Latina/x experience and Afro-­diasporic subjectivities among Latinxs. For example, contemporary writings by Theresa Delgadillo (2006), Yomaira Figueroa (2015a, 2015b, 2020), Gertrude Gonzales de Allen (2012), Juliet Hooker (2009,  2011, 2014,  2017), Xhercis Méndez (2014, 2015), and Mariana Ortega (2013) each offer rich philosophical approaches in this vein of scholarship. In continuity with the stated aims of many US third world feminist authors to bridge the histories and resources among women of color, recent attention to Afro-­Latinidad remains an important area of analysis within US Latina/x feminism that can provide a pivotal site to reconfigure conceptions of Blackness, Latinidad, and studies of gender and sexuality.6 Within philosophical studies of Gloria Anzaldúa, the publication of the author’s middle and later works, including the collections of her writings in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (2009) and Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (2015), has led recent feminist scholars to take up projects that connect a number of themes throughout her corpus. Within this area of analysis, Cynthia Paccacerqua (2016) has offered new methods for taking up Anzaldúa’s writings within feminist philosophy. Paccacerqua develops what she describes as “an affective logic of volverse una (becoming whole)” wherein she connects Anzaldúa’s early poem “La Prieta” ([1981] 2015) to both Borderlands/La frontera ([1987] 1999) and Anzaldúa’s last published work in her lifetime “now let us shift . . .” (2002). An affective logic of volverse una, Paccacerqua contends, is Anzaldúa’s systemic framing of an interconnected schematic for situated subjectivity. Such a logical movement provides a framing for a liberatory movement across differing modes of embodied awareness and relationality (Paccacerqua 2016). With the care and attention that Paccacerqua reads other figures in the history of Western philosophy, such as Immanuel Kant, she offers a new way to read Anzaldúa not only as a systemic voice within academic philosophy but also as one that offers significant philosophical challenges to core problems within traditional Western philosophy, such as the dialectical relation between self and community. Read through this lens, Paccacerqua provides “an offering” to Anzaldúa scholars to continue undertaking a great deal of rich theoretical projects (348). 6  Other fruitful areas of analysis within Latina/x feminist philosophy include studies of Latinidad, disability, and gender (Minich 2014, 2016); queer and transgender intersections with Latinidad (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, 2009, [1981] 2015; Arrizón 2006; Cuevas 2018; DiPietro 2016a; Galarte 2021; Lugones 2003, 2007, 2010; Martínez 2012; Pérez 1999; Ortega 2016; Rodríguez 2003, 2014), and art and aesthetics (Ortega, 2013; Pérez 2007; Roelofs 2016).

130   pitts Another prominent vein of scholarship emerging in Anglophone Latina/x feminism involves the critical analysis of theorists within the history of Latin American philosophy. While Schutte offered pioneering scholarship in this area of study, engaging with notable nonfeminist authors from Latin American philosophy such as José Carlos Mariátegui, Leopoldo Zea, and Enrique Dussel (e.g., Schutte 1993), a growing body of scholarship by Latina/x feminist philosophers has been continuing to challenge, expand, and develop the field of Latin American philosophy through feminist critique. For example, Stephanie Rivera Berruz’s recent work on the concept of “philosophy” and its relevance across the geopolitical and cultural borders of the Americas has offered novel framings for approaching the distinctions between differing traditions of thought and feminist analysis (Rivera Berruz 2012, 2014). Other work among US Latina/x feminist theorists has attempted to examine the relevant linkages between figures within the history of Latin American philosophy and US Latina/x feminism. This scholarship includes critical engagement with the work of decolonial theorists such as Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, and Aníbal Quijano (Lugones  2007,  2010; Alcoff  2007; Méndez 2015; L. Pérez 2010); theoretical connections between Latina/x feminism and twentieth-­century Mexican philosophy (Pitts 2014, 2016); and connecting Indigenous thought from Latin America and Afro-­Caribbean cosmologies to feminist analysis (DiPietro  2016b; Gallegos and Quinn  2017; Lugones  2007,  2010; Méndez  2014; Ruíz 2016). This avenue for further study thus opens up the immensely dense historical trajectories of Latin American and US Latina/x sites of cultural and political participation for continued feminist analysis.

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Latina/x Feminist Philosophy   133 Minich, Julie Avril. 2014. Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Minich, Julie Avril. 2016. “The Decolonizer’s Guide to Disability.” In Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imaginary: Critical Essays, edited by Monica Hanna, Jennifer Hartford Vargas, and José David Saldívar, 49–67. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mohanty, Chandra T. 1991. “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.” In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, 1–47. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Moraga, Cherríe. [1981] 2015. “La jornada.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, xxxv–xlii. Albany: SUNY Press. Moya, Paula M. L. 2002. Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles. Berkeley: University of California Press. Moya, Paula M. L., and Michael R. Hames-García. 2000. Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Oliver, Amy. 2007. “Latin American Feminist Philosophy: Early Twentieth-Century Uruguay.” In Feminist Philosophy in Latin America and Spain, edited by María Luisa Femenías and Amy A. Oliver, 31–42. New York: Rodopi. Oliver, Amy A. 2012. “Varieties of Pragmatism: Carlos Vaz Ferreira, William James, and the “CashValue” of Feminism.” Inter-American Journal of Philosophy 3 (1): 59–68. Oliver, Amy A. 2014. “Seeking Latina Origins: The Philosophical Context of Identity.” InterAmerican Journal of Philosophy 5 (1): 63–79. Ortega, Mariana. 2001. “‘New Mestizas,’ ‘World’-Travelers, and ‘Dasein’: Phenomenology and the Multi-Voiced, Multi-Cultural Self.” Hypatia 16 (3): 1–29. Ortega, Mariana. 2013. “Photographic Representations of Racialized Bodies: Afro-Mexicans, the Visible, and the Invisible.” Critical Philosophy of Race 1 (2): 163–89. Ortega, Mariana. 2015. “Latina Feminism, Experience, and the Self.” Philosophy Compass 10 (4): 244–54. Ortega, Mariana. 2016. In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. Albany: SUNY Press. Paccacerqua, Cynthia. 2016. “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Affective Logic of Volverse Una.” Hypatia 31 (2): 334–51. Pérez, Emma. 1999. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pérez, Laura E. 2007. Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pérez, Laura E. 2010. “Enrique Dussel’s Etica de la liberación, U.S.  Women of Color Decolonizing Practices, and Coalitionary Politics amidst Difference.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 18 (2): 121–46. Pérez-Torres, Rafael. 2006. Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pitts, Andrea. 2014. “Toward an Aesthetics of Race: Bridging the Writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and José Vasconcelos.” Inter-American Journal of Philosophy 5 (1): 80–100. Pitts, Andrea. 2016. “Review of Carlos Alberto Sánchez: Contingency and Commitment: Mexican Existentialism and the Place of Philosophy.” Human Studies 39 (4): 645–52. Reed-Sandoval, Amy, and Caroline  T.  Arruda. 2016. “Engaging Latin American, Hispanic/ Latin@, and Chican@ Students in Philosophy.” APA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy 16 (1): 1–3.

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Latina/x Feminist Philosophy   135 Zaytoun, Kelli D. 2015. “‘Now Let Us Shift’ the Subject: Tracing the Path and Posthumanist Implications of La Naguala/The Shapeshifter in the Works of Gloria Anzaldúa.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 40 (4): 69–88. Zaytoun, Kelli D. 2016. “Resistance as Shapeshifter: A Posthumanist Reading of Subjectivity and Death in the Fiction of Gloria Anzaldúa and Clarice Lispector.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 10 (3): 394–410.

Chapter 12

Asi a n A m er ica n Phil osoph y a n d Femi n ism David Haekwon Kim

This chapter explores the intersection of Asian American philosophy and feminist ­philosophy. It considers feminist issues within Asian American philosophy and examines Asian American feminist philosophy as an important subfield in its own right that contributes to Asian American philosophy, feminist philosophy, and ­philosophy of race. Since work of this kind is relatively new and Asian American ­perspectives do not figure prominently in civic and cultural dialogues in the United States, some extra stage-setting will be useful. So the first section of the chapter briefly discusses reasons for including Asian American feminist philosophy in the profession in the first place. The second section provides some historical portraiture and heuristic perspectives to organize our conception of Asian America, with special attention paid to xenophobic racism and Orientalist hypersexualization. The final section highlights four themes of broad interest in Asian American feminist philosophy. They concern historical reconception, normative revaluation, invisibility, and intrafeminist critique. Before proceeding, some delimiting caveats are in order. Following a convention that emerged in the late 1960s, the category “Asian American” includes, with the possibility of modification, US residents who trace some portion of their ancestry to an ethnic or national group in South, Northeast, or Southeast Asia, including some neighboring island nations, like the Philippines (Espiritu 1992; Spickard 2007). In addition, Asian American philosophy is conceptualized in terms of subject matter rather than authorial identity: philosophical inquiry, out of any tradition, focused on the experiences and perspectives of Asian Americans and relevant Asians, irrespective of whether it is conducted by an Asian or Asian American. Finally, the chapter will prioritize explicitly philosophical work, even as it draws, sometimes heavily, from feminist history and theory broadly construed.

Asian American Philosophy and Feminism   137

Reasons for Inclusion Asian American feminist philosophy lies at the margins of the profession, but various reasons for developing this subfield invite reflection. Following a familiar refrain, Asian American feminist philosophy offers at an ­appropriate level of specificity a distinctive set of perspectives on gender, race, and justice in virtue of Asian American women’s distinctive experience of interlocking forms of oppression and intersectional realities. These perspectives are especially important because Asian American feminists have consistently highlighted the condition of invisibility in Asian American women’s experience. Of course, such work can also reveal important similarities across ­subgroups and the bases for solidarity and concerted action toward social justice aims. In addition, Asian American feminist philosophy can offer epistemic resources for Asian American women’s empowerment and help to rectify correlated forms of epistemic injustice (Fricker  2007), especially during a time when more than half of the Asian American community is constituted through the mechanism of immigration and few if any intersectional anti-­racist feminist interpretive resources are offered when Asians cross the US border. The typical mantras that offer framing effects—like “Work hard to achieve the American Dream,” “Immigrants make America great,” and “Asians are a model minority”—offer little to, and likely obstruct, the critical filters or epistemic resources needed to properly understand the historical context and current situation of Asian Americans, including the relevant kinds of racialized sexism that persist in this country. Furthermore, given its intersectional engagement, the viewpoint of Asian American feminism is important for filling out and enriching the project of feminist philosophy and of philosophy of race. The profession is witnessing the rise of black and Latinx feminist philosophies, which has been long overdue. But even a cursory examination of mainstream feminist philosophical literature, which has been concerned with a wider inclusion of women’s experience, reveals a genuine dearth of Asian American feminist work. And in philosophy of race, there is very little in the literature of any form of Asian American philosophy. Asian American feminist philosophy, then, can both complement and go beyond the common Black-­white forms of race-­gender studies in philosophy (on the Black-­white binary, see Alcoff 2006, chap. 11; Sheth 2009, chap. 6; Sundstrom 2008, chap. 3). The next section introduces various social realities that Asian American feminist philosophy emerges from and in turn addresses.

Orientalism and the US Polity: Historical and Conceptual Framings Our forms of life and our representations of them are integrated in complex ways. Being disadvantaged in the former and lacking authority regarding the latter is a link of special

138   Kim importance. Given the historical depth of gender subordination, feminist philosophy has been critical not only of structures of oppression that permeate our forms of life but also of privileged representations that help constitute the structures of oppression and render them natural, normal, or justified (Alcoff 2006; Haslanger 2012; Medina 2012; Narayan 1997; Spivak 1999; Walker 2008). That is to say, feminist philosophy has been as concerned with epistemology, metaphilosophy, and social ontology as it has with moral and political philosophy proper. A central feminist epistemological project is rethinking common narratives, metaphors, and other framing concepts so that patriarchal phenomena and suppositions are exposed and women’s lives and liberatory concerns are made visible. In this spirit, a philosophically rendered sociohistorical portrait of Asian America is offered to generate framing effects that make visible many problematic conditions faced by Asian Americans and the significance of these conditions for gender, racial, and other formations that shape the US polity. Since at least the late nineteenth century, the United States has been entwined with Asia and the Pacific Islands with increasing intensity—economically, politically, culturally, and in its self-­conception. Their relations have been marked by a variety of hierarchical or dominative processes, including race, gender, and colonial formations. On a broad canvas, many of these processes can be mapped in terms of two broad directional movements: the westward expansion of the United States-­as-­racial-­empire to the Asian side of the Pacific and the eastward migration of Asians to the United States-­as-­racial-­republic. The former rubric, rarely discussed, highlights the imperial or hegemonic dominance of the United States beyond the civic parameters of a fifty-­state republic. It resonates with Latin American and Latinx philosophy’s critiques of US imperialism. The latter rubric enables us to thematize many elements of domestic inequality and problematizes the image of the United States as a democratic republic. It delivers a very rough analogue to African American philosophy’s critique of the subordination of African-­ancestry peoples of the United States. Both directionally based rubrics are needed because US white supremacy as a political system (Mills 1997) has been enormously expansive—ocean traversing, hemispheric, and multicontinental— in a way that, say, Canadian and Australian white supremacy have not (Cumings 2009; D. Kim 2004; Erika Lee 2007). Together, these rubrics offer a heuristic model by which to collate and frame various, but certainly not all, ideas about the political positionality of Asian Americans.1 Under the rubric of racial empire, Asians have experienced a range of harms and vulnerabilities due to US imperial ambitions acquiring a Pacific orientation: catastrophic violence and suffering caused by unjust wars (e.g., the Philippine-­American War and the Vietnam War), massive sexual exploitation in military base prostitution (e.g., in Japan, Okinawa, South Korea, and the Philippines), neo-/colonial economic exploitation (e.g., the Bell Trade Act with the Philippines), and neo-/imperial interference in indigenous democratic process (e.g., colonial rule over Hawai’i and the Philippines, and support of 1  Ultimately, this model should be inserted into a larger transnationalism that accommodates transatlantic phenomena, like Asian Indian migration across the Atlantic.

Asian American Philosophy and Feminism   139 dictators in South Korea and Indonesia) (Cumings 2009; D. Kim 2004). Japan’s defeat in World War II ended one chapter of imperialized Asia and the Cold War began another.2 In the twenty-­first century, hegemonic legacies of earlier US dominance persist, notably military bases stretching across the Pacific and along the East Asian border “containing” China and North Korea. In addition, Orientalist and Eurocentric modes of thinking—the conceptual face of imperialism or colonialism—have become conditioning structures of thought in the West (Mohanty  2003; Narayan  1997; Said  1978). Meaningful discussion of these matters is challenging because much of the education system in the United States, like its civic dialogue generally, is configured by a patriotic hermeneutic. Nationalized narratives of progress make it easier to recognize Jim Crow and the Japanese American internment as racial wrongs than the US war with the Philippines or with Vietnam as racial-­imperial invasions. And civic dialogue rightly condemns the persistence of sexual assault in US military ranks, but is ill-­equipped to challenge the “military-­sexual” complex (Kramer  2011) in the form of trans-­Pacific military base prostitution, which over the last century has affected arguably hundreds of thousands of Asian women (Enloe 2014; Moon 1997 Vine 2015). In virtue of familial links and ethical solidarity, Asian Americans have a special concern with the peoples of these affected regions in regard to reparations, rectification, prevention, human rights, peace, and the “ethics of memory” (Espiritu 2003; N. Kim 2008; Rodriguez 2010). Asian Americans should also be concerned because domestic anti-­Asian racism is often impacted by US foreign policy and because racial-­gender phenomena abroad, like colonial-­military prostitution, can shape domestic perceptions of Asian American women. Under the rubric of racial republic, Asian Americans have been subjected to a range of racialized legally codified forms of disenfranchisement: denials of immigration (e.g., Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882), naturalization and thus citizenship for the foreign born (e.g., Ozawa v. U.S., 1922), land ownership (e.g., Alien Land Law, 1913), and interracial marriage (various state civil codes repealed by Loving v. Virginia, 1967). They have also endured a range of deprivations in the civic and social life of the nation: degrading social norms; segregation; civic exclusion; cruel labor conditions; sexualized racism, including the hypersexualization of Asian American women; and a variety of forms of racial and racial-­sexual violence or servitude, including sex trafficking that caters to Orientalist desires (Espiritu  2007; Erika Lee  2015; Koshy  2004; Okhiro 2001; Ngai  2004). Xenophobic racism and Orientalist hypersexualization of Asian women are two large recurring patterns in anti-­Asian oppression and significant features of the US polity. In the catalogue of anti-­Asian social realities, classic biology-­invoking racism has been profound. But this has typically been combined with or inflected by a deep sense that Asian American women and men are cultural outsiders or otherwise foreign, alien, or un-­American, with related concerns about their being inscrutable, unassimilable, or a sullying threat to the nation’s values (C. J. Kim 1999; D. Kim and Sundstrom 2014; R. Lee 1999). This is xenophobia, and for critical purposes, it can be unmoored from its 2  These considerations help to explain why there have been coalitional efforts between Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. On the complexity of these efforts, see Bardwell-­Jones 2010.

140   Kim etymological link to fear and conceptualized instead as civic ostracism, produced by agents or institutions, on account of the perceived cultural otherness of its target. AntiBlack racism typically does not invoke this configuration of ideas, and nationalized narratives of racism in the United States depict African Americans as Americans who have been wrongly rendered second-­class citizens (Kim and Sundstrom 2014). Kyoo Lee suggests using the term “xenoracism” to focalize critical thought on this distinctive feature of anti-­Asian racism (K. Lee 2014). Falguni Sheth argues in an Arendtian vein that xenophobic racism is tremendously consequential because the basic affordances of human rights is mediated through citizenship status, which is precisely what the sovereign state has historically delimited or neutralized in the case of cultural outsiders it deemed to be “unruly,” a paradigm instance of which was the Japanese American internment (Sheth 2009, 123; see also F. Lee 2018 and Yeng 2014). For Asian American women, there is often a shift from xenophobia to a xenophilia in which they are regarded in terms of a positive alterity, an exotic otherness. The sense of otherness is permeated by many historically specific sexual paradigms in which the idea of Asian women’s different “looks” and bodies is mingled with an imagined psychology of demureness, passivity, and willingness to please. Relevant cultural memes abound: Madame Butterfly, geishas, Suzie Wong, wartime prostitutes, even the phrase “me so horny” (Marchetti 1993). The larger conceptual backdrop seems to be a triadic profile, a femininity and sexuality spectrum in which white women occupy a middle ground, Black women the less feminine pole, and Asian women the opposing ultrafeminine pole (Pyke and Johnson 2003). Asian American women are thus integratively hypersexualized and exoticized, and “Oriental woman” has become a cultural trope. This racial-­sexual imaginary has produced a significant fixation on Asian and Asian American women in mail-­order bride services, prostitution, pornography, massage parlors, sex tourism, specialized dating services, and the dating pattern of “yellow fever” (Espiritu  2007; Shrage 1994). After a century of sedimentation, these structural links have been naturalized or normalized in the US polity. In the late 1960s, the United States underwent a double crisis: domestic upheaval due to a variety of liberatory movements and a catastrophic losing war in Vietnam. Out of this political and epistemic crucible, and alongside other New Left movements, emerged the Asian American movement. It offered people who traced their ancestry to the “East” or “Orient” a new critical consciousness and new possibilities for a social collective (Louie and Omatsu  2006; Zia  2000). The movement repurposed and revalued the racializing categories assigned by the political system of white supremacy: people of Asian descent united as Asian Americans out of an understanding of their racial subordination, rather than the unfolding of an underlying essence or culture, and to collectively resist anti-­Asian oppression at home and abroad (Espiritu 1992; Maeda 2009; Okihiro  2001). This new formation had masculinist-­nationalist tendencies that have been critiqued by Asian American feminists and continues to undergo a process of modification and renegotiation shaped by sustained feminist and subsequently LGBTQ perspectives, resulting in a self-­consciously heterogeneous coalition (Eng and Hom 1998; Lowe 1996; Fujiwara and Roshanravan 2018).

Asian American Philosophy and Feminism   141 Due to the removal of anti-­Asian immigration blockades in 1965, more than half of Asian Americans now are first- or second-­generation Americans, and a significant subset of them in the late twentieth century were part of a middle-­class “brain drain” migration and thus were primed for lateral socioeconomic mobility in the United States (Wu 2015). Relatedly, American common sense about race has been captivated by the model minority myth, according to which Asians have achieved the American Dream in the face of racism and thus offer a model for other communities of color. Arguably an important tool of white supremacy, this ideology has been attacked by  Asian American studies scholars for decades on the grounds that it obscures important national/ethnic subgroups of Asian America (like Southeast Asian Americans) that struggle socioeconomically, ignores structural racism as the cause of nonwhite subordination, and prevents a fuller intracolored solidarity against white supremacy (Chou and Feagin  2008; Wu  2015). Asian American scholarship also maintains that in spite of the gains of the civil rights and liberatory movements of the 1960s, anti-­Asianism persists. Asian Americans continue to face the xenophobic double bind of being a “forever foreigner” or a highly assimilated “honorary white” (Tuan 1999), and Asian American women also face the hypersexualization double bind of being a demure “Suzie Wong” or an aggressive “Dragon Lady” (Espiritu 2007; Lowe 1996). And given the impact of US foreign policy on domestic racism, we find that especially since 9/11, xenophobic racism has become more vicious and entrenched against South Asian, Arab, and Muslim Americans, with Western liberal discomfort with the hijab being a significant expression (Al-­Saji 2010; Sheth 2009). It will be important to observe racial, gender, and other formations as the United States continues its “war on terror,” cold war with China, contention with North Korea, and “sexual-­military complex.”

Contributions and Issues On longstanding philosophical topics, like how to conceptualize and critique injustice, Asian American philosophy offers distinctive perspectives, like the two rubrics and  various meso-­level perspectives therein. On distinctive new themes that deserve critical attention, Asian American philosophy offers topics like xenophobia and Orientalist hypersexualization. There are many explicit and implicit feminist issues and concerns in the foregoing material, indicating that a gender lens is crucial for Asian American philosophy as such and its wider significance. And a more explicit Asian American feminist philosophy has already contributed in numerous ways to the philosophical study of race, gender, and justice. A nonexhaustive list includes using critical history centering Asian American women to rethink intersectionality and the development of the US polity in the late nineteenth century; extending normative implications of the material from the preceding section for important claims in philosophy of race; explaining invisibility and intersectionality; and navigating the

142   Kim critique of patriarchy in a nonassimilated home without invoking a Eurocentric ­feminist lens. Each of these is discussed next.

Critical Historical Reconceptions In a Foucauldian reading of the late nineteenth century, Ladelle McWhorter argues that modern racism is a “racism against the abnormal” in which race functions to dehumanize those whose identities deviate from the human paradigm of the white able-bodied heterosexual male. But she understands modern racism to involve not intersectionality in its current popular form but an identity between racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like (McWhorter 2009, 35). Whether a moderate thesis about intersectional realities or the stronger one presented by McWhorter is endorsed, early US nation-­building had a generative fixation on Asians, and Chinese women in particular, that significantly impacted a range of hierarchies. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act is commonly cited as a benchmark for anti-­Asian discrimination, but an earlier event of arguably deeper import was the 1875 passage of the Page Act, which barred the immigration of Chinese women who were prostitutes and Chinese men who were coolies. In the nineteenth century, the strong identification of Chinese women as prostitutes, the medical depiction of Chinese women as potent carriers of disease, and the reduction of Chinese births in the United States emerged as major social forces (Koshy 2004; Luibhéid 2002; Volpp 2005). In port cities, like Hong Kong and San Francisco, a meticulous bureaucracy of interrogation, photography, profiling, and surveillance emerged to analyze, certify, and manage prospective women immigrants. In a Foucauldian vein, Eithne Luibhéid (2002, 52) contends that this rendering visible of Chinese women was an early formative repressive stage of the modern biometric passport system. As it turned out, the Page Act was employed to prohibit the immigration of Chinese women generally, using moralistic concern about prostitution as an alibi for eugenic immigration control. Relatedly, the Expatriation Act of 1907 in effect punished white women who married noncitizen, and thus Chinese, men by stripping them of their citizenship, helping thereby to prevent another way in which the US polity could be “mongrelized” (Koshy 2004; Volpp 2005). The germ of this overall logic would expand to such an extent that by 1924, immigration was halted from the Asiatic Barred Zone, which with few exceptions eliminated nearly all immigration from Afghanistan to the Pacific Islands. Using immigration blockades in a eugenics fashion was social engineering—largely successful—in the preservation of a heteronormative patriarchal white supremacist republic. The significance of these forces and agendas for constituting borders, peoples, and nationhood itself is difficult to overestimate. Philosophy of race and feminist philosophy have rightly focused attention on anti-­Black racism and miscegenation politics during this era (Davis 1983; McWhorter 2009). Consideration of the centrality of the Page Act clarifies the hegemonic complexity and depth of US nation-­building, underscoring the import of Asian American feminist analysis.

Asian American Philosophy and Feminism   143

Normative Implications Asian American feminist perspectives also facilitate normative reconceptions or enrichments of work in philosophy of race. In an important and influential account of the nature of racism, Lawrence Blum (2002, chap. 1) argues that the concept of racism, personal and institutional, should consist of a core of paradigms in which antipathy (e.g., hatred) and inferiorization (e.g., contempt) are central. Invoking many of the concerns noted earlier about Asian American women’s intersectional conditions, Ronald Sundstrom argues that “sexual racism” must be included alongside the other cores of racism. In this type of racism, the particular racialization of Asian women is highly sexualized and their sexualization is distinctly raced. Asian women have been aesthetically racially exoticized and regarded as sexually available or specially willing to please. This problematic form of sexual-­racial objectification is compatible with but does not reduce to the antipathy or inferiorization highlighted by Blum. Thus, it must be added as another core of racism (Sundstrom 2008, 98–100). Robin Zheng also clarifies the normative import of Asian American women’s experience. She challenges a common idea underlying yellow fever, the notion that attraction to racialized phenotype (e.g., liking Asian eyes), as with attraction to any generic phenotype (e.g., liking bushy eyebrows), is mere aesthetic preference and morally unproblematic. A common strategy to assess and reject this commonplace is to identify racist regard, like a bestializing view of Black women’s sexuality, within the racialized attraction and then condemn the latter on account of being configured by the former (Collins  2005; Halwani  2017; Shrage  1994). Zheng instead advocates an approach that is effects oriented, highlighting the cumulative emotional toll experienced by Asian American women due to being persistently racially fetishized within a more extensive set of racial-­gender subordinating experiences. In conjunction with sexual objectification and being racially “otherized,” she identifies “racial depersonalization” as a disparaging experience in being racially fetishized: being shorn from one’s individual attributes, what would be the rightful focus of attraction, and feeling fungible in virtue of being reduced to an Orientalized social type. A recurring pattern of being objectified, otherized, and racially depersonalized has corrosive effects on important aspects of agency, like self-­esteem and social confidence (Zheng 2016, 407–9; see also K. Lee 2013). These reflections can be enriched by phenomenological work by Helen Ngo, who explains the cumulative emotional toll invoked by Zheng in terms of the labor, existential stress, and fatigue of constantly managing discrimination and the correlated disruptions in one’s most basic kinds of comportment, especially during “nonevent” scenarios, which are the ordinarily utterly mundane moments that lie between those occasions in which politicized encounters might be expected. Using Merleau-­Ponty, Ngo describes how the typically smooth and unhampered coordination of bodily experience by the body schema is disturbed in racist and sexist encounters in such a way that one’s self-­experience becomes bifurcated and alienating, being both “here and there” in virtue of one’s self-­concept being disjointedly combined with the racist

144   Kim perception foisted upon one, a perception seemingly already occupying the social space ahead of oneself (Ngo  2017, 65–72). The cumulative toll of such experiences is a felt existential vulnerability, which for Asian women can involve a body “imbued with a certain availability and docility, irrespective of the manner of [her] comportment or presentation” (Ngo 2017, 67; see also Emily Lee 2003).

Invisibility A further source of contribution lies in the work on invisibility or, in light of the prior discussion of conspicuous sexuality, the invisibility/hypervisibility dynamic experienced by Asian American women. This has been a central concern since the inception of the Asian American movement (Yamada 1983). In a pioneering article for philosophy, Yoko Arisaka maintains that the notion of invisibility offers a summative way of conceptualizing many, even if not all, problems generated by the social positionality of Asian women. She argues that Asian women’s invisibility arises from three conditions. First, Asianness is a fractured identity and thus does not offer a unifying platform for collective action. She explains that there is no unifier in that vast category (e.g., common culture), and many subparts are in conflict with each other (e.g., wars between nations). Second, at least for East Asian women, Confucianism encourages dispositions that invite self-­induced invisibility, like modesty, selflessness, and other “feminine virtues.” Third, Eurocentrism in a range of contexts diminishes the value of non-­Western perspectives, interests, and experiences, and this is exacerbated when Asian people themselves endorse Eurocentric ideas (Arisaka  2000, 210–20). For Asian women philosophers who do Asian philosophy, a fourth condition exists: their expertise is in a type of philosophy that the profession Eurocentrically dismisses as nonphilosophy, which prevents access to a range of mainstream networks and opportunities (Arisaka 2000, 220–24). Arisaka’s remarks pertain to Asian American women as well because their situation involves many of the relevant features highlighted by Arisaka and because many Asian American women are immigrant Asian women. As noted earlier, there is a basis for Asian American women, including recently immigrated Asian women, to join in solidarity and collective action, namely a shared understanding of racist, sexist, and other forms of subjection resulting from their social positionality and a collective will to resist these, the basis of the Asian American movement. However, this basis may not be hermeneutically available to many Asian and Asian American women given the civic and cultural focus on color blindness, the model minority myth, and other notions that distract from the realities of an Orientalist polity. So a variant of Arisaka’s first condition of invisibility remains pertinent in the US context, as do the other conditions she describes. And US Orientalism, including the model minority myth, further conceals the social realities experienced by Asian American women. A subtle dimension of invisibility can be found in gendered and class dynamics of the model minority myth, which public dialogue tends to discuss in terms of Asian American male class mobility and cultural assimilation. Emily Lee explains in an

Asian American Philosophy and Feminism   145 existential-­phenomenological vein that authenticity requires participation in shaping the group identities that configure the self, but Asian American women find they are susceptible to being inauthentic because their identities are overdetermined by the model minority concept. They face a double bind: as women, they are less economically upwardly mobile and encouraged as culture keepers not to culturally assimilate and thus deviate from and are inauthentic with respect to the model minority conception of Asian Americans; yet when they have upward class mobility, they are presumed to be culturally assimilated, as a part of the process of mobility, and thus are inauthentic with respect to their home culture (Emily Lee  2014, 153–54). These snares of ­inauthenticity shape Asian American women’s lives and are obscured by common race discourse. Current work in feminist philosophy and philosophy of race has been deepened by phenomenological studies that excavate lived reality and help to counter the varieties of invisibility (Alcoff 2006; Gordon 2015; Weiss, Salamon, and Murphy 2019; Yancy 2016). The work of Arisaka, Lee, and Ngo arises squarely within this tradition. Sundstrom and Zheng’s discussions are phenomenology friendly in their sensitivity to lived experience. An important subset of Asian American feminist philosophy, therefore, joins and enriches this important stream of scholarship.

Navigating Feminist Critique and the Critique of Eurocentric Feminism Finally, Asian American feminist work illuminates a complexity commonly faced by nonwhite immigrant women, the development of a non-­Eurocentric feminist critique of patriarchy in spite of the centrality of Western thought in the academy and the pressures of cultural retention in the private sphere. Feminist philosophy exposes patriarchy’s deep connection to dominative constructions of women’s heterosexualization, from male sexual access to the production of “good families.” As Asian American women are subjected to patriarchal practices—especially in intimate spheres, as daughters, mothers, wives, and romantic partners—a complex interpretive dialectic regarding ethnic or national affiliations can emerge. Leslie Bow explains that a recurring theme of Asian American women’s lives and literature is “that of feminine sexuality and feminism marking ethnic or national betrayal, particularly as sexuality mediates between progress and tradition, modernity and the ‘Old World,’ the United States and Asia” (Bow 2001, 11). Patriarchy at home or in the “home culture” must be challenged, but as pioneering work by Uma Narayan shows, feminist resources for critique may hide problematic elements. Earlier, this entry discussed the important link between disadvantage in the polity and de-­authorization in its representation. Part of the difficulty here lies in feminist philosophy subtly reproducing this link—for example, the problematic centering of white elite women’s experience or concerns in feminist critique itself.

146   Kim Narayan reveals a number of ways in which a “missionary” attitude or “colonialist stance” is manifested in feminist support of Asian Indian women. She maintains that even when there is no explicit sense of cultural superiority, Eurocentric history still fundamentally mediates mainstream feminist philosophy’s border crossing. Also, in discussing oppressive practices perpetrated against Indian women, Western feminists rarely cite Indian feminist critiques of the same practices. Both aspects of Eurocentric entrenchment can be found in Mary Daly’s classic critique of sati because it draws heavily from colonial history, the work of Katherine Mayo, that has been widely known to be discredited and fails to mention any Indian challenges to the practice (Narayan 1997, 55–59). Moreover, Narayan contends that culture is often invoked in the explanation of Asian women’s oppression (e.g., dowry murder) but rarely given explanatory work in the discussion of sexism in the United States (e.g., the phenomenon of domestic abuse in American homes). In the US context, political and economic factors are given significant explanatory value, but such nuance is ignored, and culture disproportionately emphasized, in the explanation of third world patriarchy (Narayan 1997, 111). Narayan’s account, then, is an early call for the somewhat recent trend toward “decolonizing” philosophy, including feminist philosophy. The ramifications of Eurocentrism affect feminist philosophy in other ways. The philosophical traditions invoked in feminist philosophy draw almost exclusively from analytic and continental philosophies, and the traditions of Asian women philosophers’ own homelands are deemed not to be worthwhile philosophy or to be irredeemably patriarchal in a way that Western philosophies (Aristotle, Hume, Kant) are not (for alternatives, see McWeeny and Butnor 2014). As Arisaka has contended, this exacerbates Asian women philosophers’ invisibility. In characterizing her struggles to form a Confucian feminist philosophy, Lisa Li-­Hsiang Rosenlee notes that for feminists, Confucianism seems to be a “term of reproach,” but she insists that regarding Confucianism and feminism as “incommensurable” is “to impose a racial hierarchy under the guise of feminism, with the West being the sole supplier of ethical theories and the rest of the world a moral problem waiting to be solved” (Rosenlee 2007, 149). Arguably it is a distant future when students can do a dissertation on, say, the exoticization of Asian women from a Buddhist or Confucian perspective without in effect de-­credentializing themselves. Perhaps recent efforts at decolonizing philosophy and feminism will open up new possibilities (Lugones  2010; McLaren  2017; Mohanty 2003). In the meantime, heuristically centering Asian and Asian American women’s conditions helps us to understand the complexities of intrafeminist critique and the call for a wider liberation. The scarcity of Asian American feminist philosophy in the profession is such that future research in this field has an open canvas. For example, regarding the last theme of non-­Eurocentric philosophy, a decolonized future would arguably have comparative philosophy in the widest sense simply be mainstream or “normal” philosophy, and Asian American feminist philosophy could be an important participant in developing this future in light of the heavy presence of Asian philosophies in current comparative philosophy and the ongoing need to integrate Asian philosophies with feminist

Asian American Philosophy and Feminism   147 perspectives. In addition, both the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies and feminist philosophy narrowly conceived have produced a significant body of work on the aspect of intersectionality having to do with LGBTQ concerns and concepts. So Asian American feminist philosophy could draw from and add to this research and the study of still other relevant intersectional identities and realities. Finally, given the overlap between feminist philosophy and feminist theory broadly construed, Asian American feminist philosophy can collaborate with Asian American feminist theory in developing fuller interdisciplinary genealogies of Asian American feminist insights. For example, we know the Asian American movement and Asian American feminism of the 1960s arose and developed over the next decade in the midst of critical and feminist theoretical ferment involving Marxist, Third World, Black, and Chicana feminisms.3

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150   Kim Volpp, Leti. 2005. “Divesting Citizenship: On Asian American History and the Loss of Citizenship through Marriage.” UCLA Law Review 53 (2): 405–83. Walker, Margaret Urban. 2008. Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Weiss, Gayle, Gayle Salamon, and Ann  V.  Murphy, eds. 2019. 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Wu, Ellen D. 2015. The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Yamada, Mitsuye. 1983. “Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (2nd ed.), edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 35–40. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Yancy, George. 2016. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Yeng, Sokthan. 2014. The Biopolitics of Race: State Racism and U.S. Immigration. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Zheng, Robin. 2016. “Why Yellow Fever Isn’t Flattering: A Case against Racial Fetishes.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (3): 400–419. Zia, Helen. 2000. Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.

chapter 13

Nati v e a n d I n digenous Femi n isms a n d Phil osophies Shay Welch

In this chapter, I aim to provide the reader with some basic understandings regarding the intersection of Native American philosophy and feminist philosophy. First, I give an overview of what I take to be core philosophical assumptions of the Native American worldview(s), which serve as the basis for Native American philosophy and about/from which Native and Native-­ally philosophers theorize. An aim of Native American philosophy is to systematize the underlying metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical commitments of Native folks to better understand ways of knowing and living and to articulate the distinct philosophies of sovereign nations. Many foundational principles of Native philosophy are broadly shared, which permits a broad ideology through which to analyze and participate in the world. The second section identifies various camps of woman-­centered Native and Indigenous theorizing: tribalism, womanism, and feminism. The distinctions between these camps rest largely on the political commitments of each and their relation to how they view mainstream feminism. The third section explores the ways in which Native American philosophy intersects with feminist philosophy. I highlight key shared philosophical objectives and political interests between them and articulate how they can be used in tandem with each other in light of concrete Native women’s experiences of oppression. My conclusion intimates what I believe will be the future of Native American philosophy generally and with respect to women’s issues specifically. The existence of Native American philosophy still seems to be dubious to much of the academy. There are three reasons. First, there is often surprise that there are actually Native/Native American/Indigenous/Aboriginal folks even existing in the discipline. This makes sense in some respect since the first PhD in Philosophy ever granted to a

152   Welch Native philosopher was in 1992 to Viola Cordova. Second, the discipline of philosophy has historically been—and still is to some extent—narrowly defined in terms of methodology, literature, and presentation. That there has always been Native American philosophy is a given for Native peoples, but the ways in which Native philosophy was pursued and presented did not and does not fall within the hard boundaries dictated by mainstream academic philosophy. Third, some seem to question how there can be such a thing as Native American philosophy given that tribal nations are discrete and diverse. Africana philosophy experienced many of the same difficulties and resistance with its advent within the field. Like Indigenous philosophy, African philosophy, Indian philosophy, etc., most, if not all, worldviews contain and are grounded in shared underlying facets of the distinct cultural perspectives of the tribes or groups who constitute them; it is often just the case that Euro-­centric philosophy does not reflect back onto itself to see that this is so. Relatedly, I would like to give a brief response to a common question that is posed by non-­Native peoples to folks of Native descent and of Native heritage: why do you call yourself X rather than Y? How and why Native folks deploy general identity markers to identify themselves when they are not referencing their nation citizenship or heritage can be both confusing and politically charged. The use of Native, Native American, Indian, Indigenous, Aboriginal, Native South American, etc., is often a matter of locality, tradition, and/or personal, tribal, or cultural preference. Sometimes it even just depends on who you are talking to; when you are at home with your grandpa, you may be an Indian, but in the academy, you are Native American or Indigenous. Sometimes there is an internal debate; sometimes there’s just colloquial habit; and sometimes you have to use terms that settler-­colonizer “allies” recognize as appropriate because they like to make sure you are calling yourself what they think you should. What can be seen, though, is the vast array in which Native and Indigenous peoples refer to themselves and others within their own texts and often within the same text; but this can only be seen by those who take the time to read Native and Indigenous writers. Authors and activists frequently vacillate with their identity-­terminology, and this variation is much less a mystery than it is just a way of self-­referring when the primary intended audience is not the set of members of the settler-­colonial academy. However, some people are very strict in their use of Native, Native American, Aboriginal, or Indigenous. In my own work, I choose to rely largely on the term “Native” so as to ­capture the notion of peoples who first belonged to a land and place and then specify Native American, Indigenous, Aboriginal First Nations/Inuit/Métis, Native North American, Native South American, Maori, Aboriginal Native Hawai’ian, Pacific Islander, or Tribe names when addressing specific theorists or concrete instances when theorists make specific identity designations. As one can see within the references, some scholars address Indigenous feminism but are in Native American journals, some just use the term “Native” or “Native feminism,” and some use “Native American feminism.” This is an exceptionally complex political and ethical issue related to matters of self-­determination and sovereignty.

Native and Indigenous Feminisms and Philosophies   153

Overview: Native American Philosophy Native metaphysics holds that the universe is constituted by, and constitutes through, creative forces to an extent that is, oftentimes, obscured to us. However, this creating and creative flux and flexibility of nature involves a substantial degree of creativity on behalf of all persons, which is why the natural creative process is participatory. The universe and all of its inhabitants—human and nonhuman—possess, act on, and contribute their own unique energy to the creative, collaborative function of natural organization (Cajete 2000, 21). We make such contributions through processes such as creativity, perception, image, and intuition that are revealed through processes of abstraction, symbolizing, visual/spatial reasoning, sound, kinesthetic expression, and integrative reasoning (30). Without creativity and flux, the world, and all of the relations that compose it, can be nothing other than static—dead. Accordingly, the creative body—mind, body, and spirit—operates as the creative, moving center of Native metaphysics (26). Native philosophy maintains that the metaphysical and epistemological constructs are categorically constituted by the ethical domain. In simplistic terms, from the Native perspective, what ought to be is (Burkhart  2004). Native American epistemology highlights two distinctive goals regarding the relationship between knower and knowledge. Primarily, the purpose of pursuing knowledge is to help guide individuals along the right path. Relatedly, knowledge has at its end the nurturing of relationships between individuals and community members, including nonhuman persons and the environment, to ensure harmony betwixt them and to pass down the stories of the histories of such relationships. It is in this sense, then, that knowledge within the Native American worldview(s) is regarded not only as relational but also as ethical. For this reason, Native American epistemology cannot be demarcated from ethics in the way that Western philosophy insists that it should qua the fact/value distinction. Epistemological inquiry from within the Native American worldview(s) must be constrained by ethical limits. Laurelyn Whitt, like many others, emphasizes the inseparable relationship between knowing and valuing (Whitt  2009, 48). The whole purpose of doing philosophy and seeking knowledge is to learn how to live more harmoniously among and with others and to find one’s right path (Burkhart 2004, 17). As I have explained elsewhere (Welch 2013, 2016, 2017), the ethical concepts and values at the center of Native philosophy include interdependency, respect, pluralism, participation, responsibility, and personhood. Native philosophy holds that our ethical, social, and political lives are a direct result of the nature of the world insofar as the entire cosmos is normative. This holds, in large part, because Native philosophy rejects the binary conception of Western logic. Native logic is a nonhierarchical logic that informs knowledge and living vis-­à-­vis a complementary and/or agonistic worldview(s) that acknowledges and accounts for the multitudinous connections between phenomena and relationships (Cajete  2000,  2004; Fixico 2003;

154   Welch Waters 2004). Given the integration between all facets of philosophical inquiry, the value of relationality is primary. This can be gleaned by virtue of the fact that a framing commitment of Native American worldview(s) is that of respectful coexistence. In Navajo thought, this concept is called hóɀhó. Hóɀ signifies a life path, which should always be directed towards wellness, happiness, and sustainability. Life is composed of energies, both positive and negative, and one must live a life that strives towards equilibrium between them. Balance and harmony, within both the cosmos and social arrangements, are taken as the norm, and it is the responsibility of both individuals and communities to sustain them (Lee 2014, 5, 6). The articulation of and engagement with Native American philosophy serve a number of intellectual and political purposes. The list of theoretical gaps bridged and advantages gained from access to a systemic analysis of Native American philosophy is endless. Here are a few examples. First, it helps clarify studies and arguments made within Native studies. For example, many Native scholars speak of Native and Indigenous epistemologies in their work and, thus, generate a fleshed-­out philosophical analysis of a general epistemological framework that aids others in understanding such claims (Barker and Taiewa 2005; Bomberry 2005; Ermine 2000; Hart 2010; J. Gould 2005; Kovack 2009; Lee 2014; Million 2009; L. T. Smith 1999; Talamantez 2005). Second, it provides a theoretical model that can help Western scholars understand why it is that sources of knowledge that are typically rejected according to Western criteria are, in fact, fully valid and credible sources of knowledge. Native studies scholars pull from stories, dances, rituals, visions, and other performative mediums as key sources of knowledge. Yet the academy often rejects these; Western scholars do not deem even oral accounts or poetry as reliable (Mihesuah 2003, 4, 5). The articulation of Native epistemology, as a form of procedural knowledge, demonstrates how knowledge is created and shared differently. Third, Native philosophy allows liberation scholars, such as feminist philosophers and decolonial theorists, a foundation that leads to the nonoppressive ethical and sociopolitical commitments they strive for without becoming entwined within a minefield of theoretical tensions as the level of basic assumptions (Welch 2014, 2016, 2017). Fourth, Native scientific methodologies are more inclusive as a result of the metaphysical philosophical assumptions. Thus, the research conducted is far more comprehensive, intricate, and advanced than research evolving from Western methodologies. For this reason, an analysis of Native American philosophy of science can accommodate advances in our understanding the universe better and more accurately than that with which the academy currently works. These examples are not meant to belie the great difficulty of incorporating Native and Indigenous philosophy into the mainstream. A challenging obstacle consists in the incommensurability of language syntax and conceptualizations between Western and Native American and other Indigenous languages. Western theorists have, for centuries, attempted to translate Native conceptual framework(s) into its own, resulting in everything from failure in communication to justification for genocide of an “uncivilized” people because the incommensurability rendered the Native American worldview(s) unintelligible.

Native and Indigenous Feminisms and Philosophies   155 The problem of theoretical and practical settler colonialism is a second impediment Western philosophy must confront if Native American philosophy is to take root within the field (Alfred 2009a, 2009b; Coulthard 2014; Fanon 1967; Nichols 2014; Nichols and Singh 2014; Pateman and Mills 2007). Settler colonialism is preserved within the liberal tradition, specifically that of social contract ideology, that imbues the entirety of Western thought in relation to Indigenous peoples. Robert Nichols explains that the settler contract “references a strategic use of fiction of a society as a product of contract between its founding members” to conceal the historical truth that the narrative of the ideal, free nation-­state was possible only by virtue of the incessant genocidal practices aimed at eradicating, either through assimilation or violence, the original inhabitants of the ostensibly land of the free (Nichols 2014, 102). Settler colonialism succeeds in its violent practices, which are direct contradictions to liberalism’s central tenets, by burying narratives and histories of Indigenous peoples—or by legitimizing violence against them with even more fictions of savagery when they cannot be made wholly invisible. The consequence of settler colonialism is that even the most committed efforts at fighting domination and intercepting oppressive institutions and practices cannot address the harms to, and needs of, Native peoples or their worldviews because Western scholars cannot see that they already assume that Native and other Indigenous peoples must assimilate into the Western mindset. This is particularly apparent in legal practices, whether at the nation-­state level or on the international stage, where Indigenous peoples are forced to fight for their rights through, and only with, the tools allowed them by the imperial powers they seek to resist. What many scholars do not see, though, is that these imperialistic tools are used to mine and dismantle the Native American worldview(s) within the academy. Native American and Indigenous scholars have been, and continue to be, forced by the academy to justify and legitimize their methodologies, frameworks, and theories (Cordova  2007; Mihesuah  2003; Simpson and Smith  2014; A.  Smith  2014; Talamantez 2005). Many scholars attest that their presence in the academy is regarded with surprise since the Western academic assumption is that Native Americans are meant to be studied rather than to be scholars themselves. Andrea Smith designates this experience within Native studies as “ethnographic entrapment,” which captures the problem of Western academics’ incapacity to conceive of “the Other” as being capable of shaping their own narratives as knowing subjects (Smith 2014, 208). Native American philosophy is even more rife with explicit delegitimization and outright refusal and rejection from Western philosophers. In comments I received from a National Endowment for the Humanities summer grant I submitted for an article, I was told by more than one reviewer that the Native American mindset is not sophisticated enough to be systemic and thus does not qualify as philosophy, and that while there may be Native American religious studies that resemble something like Native American thought, there is no possibility of a Native American philosophy. This enduring tendency towards cultural elimination via cultural ideology discrediting by Western theorists is often what leads Native and Indigenous peoples, activists, and theorists to refuse association with Western frameworks.

156   Welch

Native and Indigenous Tribalism, Womanism, and Feminism Because of the link between feminism, more specifically the general conception of Western liberal feminism (Hirschmann  2001; Meyers  1989; Nussbaum 2001, 2003; Okin 1989), and settler colonialism, many Native and other Indigenous women have rejected feminism as a suitable political and theoretical framework from which to theorize and act. Feminism is often rejected in large part due to the perceived division it can make within the tribal community. Many Native activists in the Red Power Movement and the American Indian Movement, among others, suggest that feminist ideology is dependent upon settler colonialism and white supremacy. The charges made against feminism by Native women are familiar: feminism, like liberalism, is centered on atomistic individualism and a universality that is foundationally opposed to the values and commitments of Native American and other Indigenous worldviews (Cordova 2007; Jaimes and Halsey 1992; Jaimes*Guerrero 2003; Tsosie 2010). Western feminism is perceived as promoting an assimilationist ideal. Thus, any claim to feminism by Native women only furthers the violent practices of assimilation committed by the settler state. One example often cited is that feminism disrupts traditional gender roles that are egalitarian and equal even if they are separate but complementary in some tribal nations. They maintain that Western white feminism is devoted to sameness with white men and do so at the expense of women of color. Devon Mihesuah explains that traditional Native women should be conceived of as “tribalists” insofar as they are assaulted by colonialist ideologies that disempower them and impose ­dysfunctional tribal gender roles; traditional tribalists eschew mainstream “white” feminist theory because feminist theory has accrued its privileges at the expense of women of color (2003, 7). For this reason, many Native women have adopted alternatives such as womanism to address their socio-­political needs. One such need is the restoration of the valuation of the feminine and the love of woman. M.  A.  Jaimes*Guerrero argues that Native Womanism is more concerned with a historical agency that pursues contemporary Native women’s self-­determination through reimagining a precolonial and prepatriarchal society. Such historical-­centered futurities create possibilities to reclaim matrilineal and matrifocal roles that imbue Native women with the traditional respect and authority of Indigenous democratic operations (2003, 67). The goal of Native Womanism is to challenge the patriarchal settler state that is defined by and through practices of domination over woman and land. This “Native Womanism aims to preserve and restore the sacred kinship traditions,” which promotes the gender-­egalitarian social relations central to most Indigenous cultures and traditions (68). Given that land is central to the Native worldview(s) and woman is intimately tied to land and nature, it is crucial to highlight a frame of reference that does not seek to undermine this connection in the way that Western feminism is believed to do.

Native and Indigenous Feminisms and Philosophies   157 However, feminism is not scorned by all Native women scholars and activists (Anderson 2010; Barker 2006; Mayer 2007; Ramirez 2007; Simpson and Smith 2014; A. Smith 2005a; Suzack et al. 2010). Many Native women hold that nationalist viewpoints within tribal communities obscure the gender-­specific needs of Native women and insulate Native men from critique for excluding women from political visibility or retribution for violence against them. Native men charge Native women as being traitors or anti-­Indian for pursuing equal rights and treatment. But women’s social and political autonomy, they argue, cannot be denied in the name of the fight for tribal sovereignty (Barker 2006). In fact, many Native feminists argue that Native men are in cahoots with white men in the pursuit of subordinating Native women. One such explicit and very public fight between First Nations peoples and Canada included an equally public fight between Aboriginal women and men. The Indian Act of 1857 pummeled Native relations of kinship and redrew the parameters of who could be formal tribe members. One key factor of this act was that Native men who intermarried would remain enrolled and their wives would be added; Aboriginal women who intermarried, on the other hand, would be immediately expelled from membership. This benefited Canada by slowly dissolving bands by eliminating women and their children from membership. But it equally benefited Aboriginal men by instituting patriarchy through patrilineal descent. Complications, such as those arising from the Indian Act, through processes of continued colonialization gave rise to the call for feminist responses among many Native women. Renya Ramirez suggests that feminism is indispensable because the Native conception of All-­My-­Relations establishes and sustains respectful, reciprocal relations between genders. For this reason, she argues that this conception must be incorporated into tribal law and court precedents so that gender injustices, most of which stem from internalized colonial practices, can be addressed. Tribal sovereignty has come to be regarded as a battle strictly for independence, but this fails to uphold the internal traditions that anchored tribal nations prior to colonization; tribal sovereignty must explicitly espouse commitments to respect, interdependence, responsibility, ­dialogue, and engagement with gender equality issues. Grounding sovereignty in All-­My-­Relations is key to upholding the Indigeneity of it (2007, 31). Like many others, she emphasizes that race, tribe, and gender are nonhierarchical and so cannot be lexically ordered; intersectionality is heeded through the incorporation of feminism rather than through its rejection. In response to the idea that feminism is merely a Western notion that forces assimilation, she tracks Taiaiake Alfred’s argument that sovereignty is a Western notion that is itself flexible in nature and thus can be appropriated and utilized by Native folks to resist and demand that their rights be addressed (30). And while there are Native and Indigenous feminisms, there is not merely one kind of Native or Indigenous feminism, and there is not one way to do Native or Indigenous feminism (Hilden and Lee  2010). Some of this pertains to tribal and Indigenous affiliation distinctions, and some of this pertains to the diversity of understanding what being a woman means under colonization. Mihesuah rightly remarks that feminist theory cannot be totalizing with respect to Native women’s thought because Native women are not of a totality themselves—neither in appearance nor in culture nor in

158   Welch thought (2003, 159). This suggests that there would be many ways to conduct in, or engage with, Native feminist philosophy depending on which values were at stake and which relations were being prioritized. And correspondingly, different Native feminisms would intersect different Western feminisms such as Black feminism, socialist feminism, care ethics, etc., as a function of the values and relations stressed.

Intersections between Native and Indigenous Feminisms and Western Feminism Mihesuah asserts that while American Indian women’s studies and feminist studies seem a logical fit, “efforts toward such an initiative [must] be both cautious and deliberate” (Mihesuah  2003, 5). As Cheryl Suzack rightly argues, an Indigenous feminism must represent the subject on whose behalf it speaks (2010, 133). Western feminists must approach Native women and their issues with genuine respect and not reinforce colonial and universalizing assumptions. To accurately and respectfully represent Native women, Native feminism, women’s studies, and feminist philosophy addressing Native women’s issues will need to be cognizant of pivotal gender issues that contain core philosophical values. I provide a few examples here. One issue is the need for a harmonious relationship between tribal and individual autonomy (Napoleon 2005). Rebecca Tsosie (2010), Cordova (2007), and I (2014) argue that individual autonomy is a product of, and contributing factor towards, tribal sovereignty. As discussed earlier, women’s autonomy can be exploited in the name of tribal sovereignty. Second, violence against women is terrifyingly pervasive in Native women’s lives. Native American and First Nations women are sexually assaulted and murdered at a higher rate than any other group of women—most commonly with impunity. This violence occurs both internally and externally of the tribal nation. White men who assault Native women are almost never held accountable for their crimes given the legal complexities between tribal, local, and federal police and courts. Andrea Smith (2005a,  2005b; Deer  2009) explains that such violence against Native women is a function of the patriarchal practices of rape and femicide instituted by the United States in its attempt to eliminate Native peoples and dehumanize them in the eyes of all, including Native men. Third, Native women are lacking reproduction rights (A. Smith 2005b). This is one key area, among many others, where Native feminism and Black feminism intersect in direct opposition to the traditionally assumed feminist conception of reproductive rights. Like Black women, Native women have always been and continue to be forcefully sterilized in the pursuit of genocide. Andrea Smith notes that the Indian Health Services instituted a “fully federally funded sterilization

Native and Indigenous Feminisms and Philosophies   159 campaign in 1970” (81) and provides extensive qualitative data to substantiate this atrocity. For example, just in Oklahoma City alone, roughly 25% of Native women were sterilized without their consent, and all full-­blood Kaw women were sterilized. The Women of All Red Nations organization reports that up to 50% of Indian women were sterilized in the 1970s (82). Sterilization practices span from nonconsensual hysterectomies to forced permanent forms of birth control like Norplant and Depo, which are both notoriously dangerous qua deleterious side effects. Pro-­choice for Native women means something very different from that of white women; they must be able to choose to be able to have children instead of prevent them. And fourth, LGBTQ issues are uniquely prevalent since many Native worldview(s) and their logic does not admit of gender binaries. Consequently, many tribes also do not have merely two genders— some have three or four (Driskill et al. 2011a, 2011b; Leigh 2009; Jacobs 1997; Roscoe [1998] 2000). Native North America is believed to have been the queerest continent on the planet (Roscoe 1998, 4). Darcy Leigh explains that distinctive traits track certain genders, and sexed bodies can move between genders (2009, 75). It was the imposition of Western patriarchal institutions that brought homophobia and transphobia to Native communities, and now the Two-­Spirit community, as it is most commonly known, struggles for bodily integrity and safety. When engaging in feminist philosophy from a Native perspective or when including Native women’s perspectives, one major theoretical issue needs to be addressed. A Native feminist philosophy will be concerned with praxes and values of ethical interaction rather than abstract principles and extraneous hypotheticals. Core Native American action-­ based values include pluralism, intersectionality, interrelatedness, inter­ dependency, affective knowledge, listening, belonging, home, autonomy, reciprocity, respect, harmony, cooperation, narrative, and care. These values pertain to every subdomain of philosophy in that every domain of the Native worldview(s) is normative. Native epistemology is procedural and action-­based in a number of ethically interesting ways (Norton-­Smith 2010; Welch 2019). Reid Goméz provides what I take to be one of the best and most apt descriptions of the intersections between epistemology and ethics in a way that also highlights its intersection with feminist values: She says: At the storytelling event, listeners are invited to call out things they’ve heard ­otherwise, offer their own versions, each holding and telling details and differences that together make up the people in their varied experience. Necessary in this is a developed reverence for the act of listening as an integral part of the moment, as well as a complex understanding and experience of listening. Connections are made and further enhanced in the relationships created and strengthened through the shared event of story making. Storytelling involves a touch and exchange between teller and listener, a sharing of power and experience across the generations and across particular geographic realities. Teller, listener, and story interpenetrate each other and exist forever in and outside of that reality; they compel action, and this action takes you to deeper levels of knowing. (2005, 162)

160   Welch This one explicative story captures listening, narrative, pluralism, interdependency, and interrelatedness. Moreover, it brings into focus the extent to which Native philosophy spans feminist epistemology, feminist ethics, and feminist socio-­political philosophy at the level of praxis. Native and Indigenous political theorists, in line with many feminist political theorists, maintain that for democratic practices to be ethically inclusive, oppressed groups must be able to sit at the sharing circle and help shape the story of society. And this requires a politics of decolonization, which is where, as Simpson and Smith (2014) point out, many feminist philosophers fail to accommodate Native feminism. The path towards decolonization that must and should be paved by the oppressed is a key means of active citizenry that procures the oppressed a seat at the circle instead of waiting for permission—recognition—from others to be citizens. One way specifically in which feminist political philosophers have fallen short in this respect is by advocating for a politics of recognition, which is at odds with decolonization (Benhabib 1996, 2002; Fraser and Honneth  2003; Gould  1988). Since recognition is granted by the one in power, the means of achieving it is either assimilating to or operating under the dominant schema. Practices of recognition are inadequate to assuring Indigenous peoples as active citizens since norms of recognition implicitly serve to legitimate the settlercolonial state. The path towards decolonization that must and should be paved by the oppressed is a key means of active citizenry that procures Native peoples a seat at the circle instead of waiting for permission—recognition—from others to be either sovereign or citizens. In “Imagination and Wonder: Native Cognitive Schemas and Decolonizing Democratic Ethics” (2016), I argue that it is only by allowing Native peoples to draw from their traditional forms of knowing, and having those communications acknowledged as exerting valid claims on the community, that Native peoples can truly be active US and tribal citizens in a way that can generate a form of decolonial democracy (Johansen 1998). Thus, storytelling asserts itself as a foundational mechanism for and within Native feminism. Janice Gould tells us that stories literally create the world. Stories contain the magic of memory and history and metaphor that do not resonate to the supposedly rational, cognitive mind, which is why colonial legal, educational, and scientific institutions have worked tirelessly to eradicate them and invalidate the process itself. But stories, prayers, and songs are fundamental to practices of sovereignty that is itself constituted by “the indigenous imagination that is rooted in place” (Gould 2005, 11). The profound import and salience of storytelling and listening highlights another reason that a politics of decolonization rather than a politics of recognition is necessary for doing or engaging Native feminism—the centrality of place in the Native worldview(s). A true politics of decolonization recognizes that this land belongs to others. Native ways of knowing and being in the world are incomplete without its relationship to land, even in the political sense. Western scholars, especially Western feminists, must be willing to admit they are unjustly occupying this

Native and Indigenous Feminisms and Philosophies   161 land—beyond land acknowledgment statements. Otherwise, feminists and feminist philosophers will continue to exploit Native women’s perspectives as best suits them.

Warning: The Future of Native American Philosophy and Feminism As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) avow: decolonization is not a metaphor; I argue even more so for Indigenization. But this battle cry seems to be lost on most Western feminists within the academy. In an effort to take up Native women’s issues or to address the newly introduced concerns over settler colonialism, there has been an influx of journal special issues, conferences, and workshops that aim to “decolonize” or “indigenize” this, that, or the other. Yet, interestingly, there has been little uptake and inclusion of either Native women activists or scholars outside of the requisite token speaker here and there. Within Native feminism and womanism, then, there is deep consternation with the ways in which academics are co-­opting these terms to feign “fresh” and properly “inclusive” research. In short, it is more than a worry by Native studies scholars and activists that the move towards decolonization and indigenization in the academy is yet another step up the ladder by white feminists off the backs of Native women. Unfortunately, I think that much of the near future of Native American philosophy will be held up by the unnecessary work that Native scholars will have to do to intervene in this new fad of “indigenizing” and “decolonizing.” Yet there is plenty of new work being developed by Native and Indigenous philosophers, especially in the area of epistemology, phenomenology (basket weaving!), and environmental ethics. Scholars are working to flesh out the nonbinary logics, revitalize endangered languages—and thus ways of knowing, theorizing storytelling frameworks, such as the Trickster methodology, and articulating ways in which Native and Indigenous cultural practices, such as dancing, are modes of knowing and Truth. There are numerous community-­centered philosophical projects that look at traditional Native American and other Indigenous practices of relating to and caring for the land to address problems of climate change, sustainability, and food ethics. All of these projects will provide important and crucial mechanisms for mainstream feminist philosophy to navigate the dangers of misusing or exploiting decolonizing and Indigenizing methodologies. But it will be imperative that mainstream feminist philosophers not take from Native and Indigenous philosophy but rather listen to Native and Indigenous philosophers and other disciplines of Native feminism, and work in relation. Because of the exclusion of Native and Indigenous women’s experiences in Western feminist philosophy and the general devaluation of Native philosophy in the academy, the step towards respectful coexistence between mainstream feminist philosophy and Native philosophy will need to be taken and maintained by mainstream Western-­oriented feminists.

162   Welch

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Native and Indigenous Feminisms and Philosophies   163 Goméz, Reid. 2005. “The Storyteller’s Escape: Sovereignty and Worldview.” In Reading Native American Women: Critical/Creative Representation, edited by Inés Hernández-Avila, 145–70. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press. Gould, Carol. 1988. Rethinking Democracy: Freedom and Social Cooperation in Politics, Economy, and Society. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gould, Janice. 2005. “Telling Stories to the Seventh Generation: Resisting the Assimilationist Narrative of Stiya.” In Reading Native American Women: Critical/Creative Representation, edited by Inés Hernández-Avila, 9–20. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press. Hart, Michael Anthony. 2010. “Indigenous Worldviews, Knowledge, and Research: The Development of an Indigenous Research Paradigm.” Journal of Indigenous Voices in Social Work 1 (1): 1–16. Hilden, Patricia Penn, and Leece  M.  Lee. 2010. “Indigenous Feminism: The Project.” In Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, and Culture, edited by Cheryl Suzack, Shari M. Hughndorf, Jeanne Perreault, and Jean Barman, 56–79. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Hirschmann, Nancy. 2001. The Subject of Liberty: Towards a Feminist Theory of Freedom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds. 1997. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Jaimes, M. Annette, and Theresa Halsey. 1992. “American Indian Women: At the Center of Indigenous Resistance in North America.” In The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, Resistance, edited by M. Annette James, 311–41. Boston: South End Press. Jaimes*Guerrero, M.  A. 2003. “‘Patriarchal Colonialism’ and Indigenism: Implications for Native Feminist Spirituality and Native Womanism.” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 18 (2): 58–69. Johansen, Bruce. 1998. Debating Democracy: Native American Legacy of Freedom. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishing. Kovach, Margaret. 2009. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lee, Lloyd L., ed. 2014. Diné Perspectives: Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Leigh, Darcy. 2009. “Colonialism, Gender and the Family in North America: For a Gendered Analysis of Indigenous Studies.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 9 (1): 70–88. Mayer, Lorraine. 2007. “A Return to Reciprocity.” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 22 (3): 22–42. Meyers, Diana  T. 1989. Self, Society, and Personal Choice. New York: Columbia University Press. Mihesuah, Devon Abbot. 2003. Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, and Activism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Million, Dian. 2009. “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History.” Wicazo Sa Review 24 (2): 53–75. Napoleon, Val. 2005. “Aboriginal Self-Determination: Individual Self and Collective Selves.” Atlantis 29 (2): 1–21. Nichols, Robert. 2014. “Contract and Usurpation: Enfranchisement and Racial Governance in Settler Colonial Contexts.” In Theorizing Native Studies, edited by Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, 99–121. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

164   Welch Nichols, Robert, and Jakeet Singh, eds. 2014. Freedom and Democracy in an Imperial Context: Dialogues with James Tully. New York: Routledge Press. Norton-Smith, Thomas. 2010. The Dance of Person & Place: One Interpretation of American Indian Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2001. “Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Options.” Economics and Philosophy 17: 67–88. Nussbaum, Martha. 2003. “Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice.” Feminist Economics 9 (2–3): 33–59. Okin, Susan Moller. 1989. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books. Pateman, Carole, and Charles Mills. 2007. Contract and Domination. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ramirez, Renya. 2007. “Race, Tribal Nation, and Gender: A Native Feminist Approach to Belonging.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 7 (2): 22–40. Roscoe, Will. (1998) 2000. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Simpson, Audra, and Andrea Smith, eds. 2014. Theorizing Native Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, Andrea. 2005a. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Cambridge: South End Press. Smith, Andrea. 2005b. “Native American Feminism, Sovereignty, and Social Change.” Feminist Studies 31 (1): 116–32. Smith, Andrea. 2014. “Native Studies at the Horizons of Death: Theorizing Ethnographic Entrapment and Settler Self-Reflexivity.” In Theorizing Native Studies, edited by Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, 207–34. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York: Zed Books. Suzack, Cheryl. 2010. “Emotion before the Law.” In Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, and Culture, edited by Cheryl Suzack, Shari M. Hughndorf, Jeanne Perreault, and Jean Barman, 126–51. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Suzack, Cheryl, Shari M. Hughndorf, Jeanne Perreault, and Jean Barman, eds. 2010. Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, and Culture. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Talamantez, Inés. 2005. “Seeing Red: American Indian Women Speaking about Their Religious and Political Perspectives.” In Reading Native American Women: Critical/Creative Representation, edited by Inés Hernández-Avila, 219–50. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press. Tsosie, Rebecca. 2010. “Native Women and Leadership: An Ethic of Culture and Relationship.” In Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, and Culture, edited by Cheryl Suzack, Shari  M.  Hughndorf, Jeanne Perreault, and Jean Barman, 29–52. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Tuck, Eve, and K.  Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 1 (1): 1–40. Waters, Anne. 2004. “Language Matters: Nondiscrete Nonbinary Dualism.” In American Indian Thought, edited by Ann Waters, 97–115. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Welch, Shay. 2013. “Radical-cum-Relational: Bridging Feminist Ethics and Native Individual Autonomy.” Philosophical Topics 41 (2): 203–22. Welch, Shay. 2014 (Welch 2014 cited on p.12. Need to add reference or correct the date).

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pa rt I I I

F E M I N IST E NGAGE M E N T S W I T H SU BF I E L DS OF PH I L O S OPH Y

Chapter 14

Femi n ist Phil osoph y of Mi n d Jennifer McWeeny

Until recently, the use of driverless cars in Saudi Arabia seemed more plausible than the removal of the country’s ban that prohibited women from driving (Toumi 2014). That philosophers of mind have long considered what it is like to be a bat or a zombie but have yet to centrally examine how the experiences of women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups come to bear on the field’s fundamental questions displays a similar irony.1 By excluding these categories of experiential phenomena from the realm of proper inquiry, philosophers of mind implicitly and perhaps strategically shield a number of the field’s defining assumptions from criticism, thus frustrating their own aim to reveal truths about the nature of mind. Feminist philosophers, for their part, have been slow to draw upon the discourses of philosophy of mind to advance feminist theorizing. Although they have written extensively on topics germane to the subject such as mind-­body dualism, consciousness, personal identity, materialism, emotion, perception, agency, other minds, memory, and psychopathology, feminist philosophers rarely investigate these themes in ways that ­resonate with the debates that have characterized mainstream philosophy of mind and its current trajectories. This lack of engagement is curious, given that feminist philosophy has for some time included established subfields in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and aesthetics. It is also regrettable insofar as the established vocabularies of philosophy of mind could be a resource for feminist philosophers who wish to better describe the contents, structures, mechanisms, and causal origins of various forms of cognition to illuminate the concrete experiences of women, people of color, and others whose lives are affected by oppression.

1  For feminist critiques of the use of such thought experiments see Brison (2003) and Yergeau (2013).

170   McWeeny Despite the historical separation between feminist philosophy and philosophy of mind, a new field born of their integration is currently taking shape. In general terms, feminist philosophy of mind sees the consideration of the experiences or locations of women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups as crucial to investigations about the nature of mind and, inversely, sees investigations of the nature of mind as crucial to understanding the experiences and identities of women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups. Inherent in a feminist approach to philosophy of mind is a call to investigate the questions of whether and how mental content and mental structure are variable across different socio-­cultural groups of people such as women and men, white people and people of color, heterosexuals and LGBTQ individuals, and people of different economic classes. Despite their shared attention to questions of mental continuity and variation across different social locations, however, feminist philosophers of mind often advocate divergent answers and engage in constructive disagreements. In what follows, three historical contributions that open the door for a feminist philosophy of mind are examined. The first is found in Princess Elisabeth’s correspondence with Descartes and involves the idea that mental capacity is affected by social habits. The second comes from Simone de Beauvoir’s descriptions of woman’s consciousness in The Second Sex. The third is a view developed by Naomi Scheman that maintains that beliefs, desires, and emotions are relational phenomena rather than individuated states. These insights expose three fundamental assumptions that are rarely scrutinized in mainstream philosophy of mind and that will be respectively addressed in the first three sections of this chapter: (1) the assumption that the mind is ahistorical in the sense of noncontextual, disembodied, and asocial; (2) the assumption that mental structure is universal among humans; and (3) the assumption that mental contents are nonrelational phenomena that participate in causal relationships as individuated particulars.2 When considered collectively, Princess Elisabeth’s, Beauvoir’s, and Scheman’s arguments suggest that the perspectival structure of mind may be variable in regard to factors such as gender, race, class, and nationality. They also reveal that gender may be more a matter of mind (and less a matter of the anatomical body) than is commonly believed. The fourth section of this chapter surveys recent feminist work on topics relevant to feminist philosophy of mind to speculate on future directions for this just-­emerging field.

Princess Elisabeth and the Ahistorical Assumption Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia was the first to pose an argument that makes manifest what has since come to be known as “the mind-­body problem” in Descartes’s philosophy (Tollefsen  1999; McWeeny  2011). She begins by observing the contradiction between 2  Thomas Nagel’s critique of “the view from nowhere” (1986) and the recently established fields of embodied cognition theory and 4E cognition studies are obvious exceptions to these trends in that they reject assumption (1).

Feminist Philosophy of Mind   171 Descartes’s dualism and his assertion that the mind and body are so deeply and intimately united that the mind “can act on and be acted upon by [the body]” (Princess Elisabeth and Descartes 2007, 63–65). The Princess then shows how any of the possible ways that the mind could move the body requires either contact or extension, both of which in turn require matter. She also provides two examples of minds that seem to lack the capacity of thinking to suggest, contra Descartes, that mind is in some instances separable from thought: (1) infants in their mother’s womb and (2) “great fainting spells” (62). Notably, these examples are indicated in experiences readily associated with women’s bodies. In another letter, Princess Elisabeth concludes, “And I admit it would be easier for me to concede matter and extension to the soul than to concede the capacity to move a body and to be moved by it to an immaterial thing” (68). For Descartes to avoid these difficulties, he would need to be more precise in his conception of mind; he would need to furnish a definition “of [the soul’s] substance separate from its action, that is, from thought” (62). Descartes’s primary response to Princess Elisabeth’s criticism is odd, to say the least. Rather than give a direct answer to Princess Elisabeth’s query that would account for the mechanism by which the soul moves the body, Descartes instead insists that the question has been improperly posed. Princess Elisabeth is confused at best because she has taken a notion that applies to material things, namely “movement,” and applied it to  the soul—an immaterial thing that can only be conceived by the understanding (Princess Elisabeth and Descartes  2007, 69). Things get really interesting, however, when Descartes takes the further step to explain why Princess Elisabeth has likely made this mistake in the first place. He writes: [T]hose who never philosophize and who use only their senses do not doubt in the least that the soul moves the body and that the body acts on the soul. But they consider the one and the other as one single thing, that is to say, they conceive their union. . . . [I]t is in using only life and ordinary conversations and in abstaining from meditating and studying those things which exercise the imagination that we learn to conceive the union of the soul and body. (69–70)

In short, Descartes asserts that the habits of Princess Elisabeth’s lifestyle (habits that, not coincidentally, are gendered, raced, and classed) cause her to prioritize her sensory perceptions over her understanding.3 According to Descartes, a person can develop the mode of thinking that is understanding (and that “accustoms us” to perceive the separation of mind and body) by meditating in his study, suited in a dressing gown (70). Alternatively, tending to conversation, housekeeping, and social duties (“women’s work”) cultivates the mode of thinking that is sensing (and that accustoms us to perceive the union of mind and body). It seems that the consummate rationalist is saying that the way a mind is used affects what that mind perceives. More than that—Descartes suggests that a person’s social position affects the way a mind is used and that this body-­specific usage in turn affects what that mind perceives. As soon as Descartes makes this appeal to social habits to defend his view, he has walked himself into a curious dilemma. On one hand, if Descartes persists in his 3  See also Wartenberg (1999) and K. Lee (2011).

172   McWeeny dualism, he will be unable to explain mind-­body interaction. On the other hand, any explanation that Descartes gives of mind-­body interaction will likely implicate the historical nature of (his own) thinking, and so he will confront a new problem of substantiating why his particular custom of perceiving (the one that is evidence for dualism) should be preferred over that of another. Responses such as perceiving what is eternal yields more truth than perceiving what is ephemeral merely push the problem off to the next level of an infinite regress because this preference must in turn be validated. Princess Elisabeth’s formulation of the mind-­body problem (or, perhaps, the mere fact of discussing philosophy with a woman rather than a man) has led Descartes to an even bigger difficulty: either the body has nothing to do with the mind (constitutively speaking) or it does, thus necessitating that this fact be taken into account whenever a particular human mind is philosophizing about the mind. Let’s call this “the body problem” tout court. It raises the questions of whether mental content and/or mental structure are body specific and, if so, what this means for theorizing. There are certain strategies that Descartes could have employed to defend his ahistorical conception of mind while also affirming his claim that social habits affect a mind’s faculties. For example, one could argue that it is merely the expression of certain faculties of thinking that are affected by social and bodily habits, and not the possession of those faculties. In this case, habituation merely shifts the mind’s attention; it does not alter its contents (what beliefs it has) or structure (what beliefs, actions, or perspectives it is capable of having). But this fundamental debate was never pursued in the historical development of philosophy of mind as a field. Alas, twentieth-­century philosophy of mind has ignored the body problem—the problem that Descartes can either explain mind-­body interaction or preserve the presumption of universal applicability for his own theories, but not both—and has contented itself with residing only on the first horn of Descartes’s original dilemma, thus missing a whole stratum of its complexity. By contrast, a feminist perspective on philosophy of mind asks if there are philosophical costs to having our cake (a physicalist notion of mind, whether conceived reductively or nonreductively, that avoids the mind-­body problem) and eating it too (theorizing about the mind [including the theorist’s own mind] as if it were ahistorical). Three centuries later, another French philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir, made a crucial intervention in what we are defining as the body problem debate by rejecting two of her countryman’s ideas: (1) the mind is separate from the body and (2) mental structure is universal rather than variable among bodies.

Beauvoir and the Universalist Assumption In her most famous work, The Second Sex, Beauvoir enlists the methods of phenomenology to argue that the structure of a woman’s consciousness will be different from a man’s insofar as the two have lived their lives in a sexist and patriarchal society.

Feminist Philosophy of Mind   173 The conception of consciousness that Beauvoir works with has its roots in John Locke’s theory and has also been taken up by William James, Henri Bergson, and Beauvoir’s closest interlocutors, Jean-­Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, and Richard Wright.4 Beauvoir is concerned with the reach, flow, and duration of “prereflective” consciousness, and with the relationship between the perspectival nature of this consciousness and personal identity or “subjectivity.”5 In The Second Sex, she underscores the body’s role in forming the perspective of prereflective consciousness by appealing to Merleau-­Ponty’s view specifically: “I am my body, at least insofar as I possess experience, and, reciprocally, my body is as it were a natural subject, a provisional sketch of my total being” (Merleau-­Ponty 2012, 205; cf. Beauvoir 2010, n41).6 For Beauvoir, the idea that experience requires the identity of a person’s body and her/ his/their subjectivity to some degree is manifest in the way that children’s bodies found the perspectival character of their consciousnesses. Of this stage of development Beauvoir writes, “For girls and boys, the body is first the radiation of a subjectivity, the instrument that makes possible the comprehension of the world; children apprehend the universe through their eyes and hands, and not through their sexual parts” (2010, 283).7 The child’s body is her point of view; she grasps her body as herself. This self-­body relation in turn establishes a consistent perspective that is present in each otherwise distinct moment in the flow of consciousness, and that is therefore capable of gathering diverse experiences into a single stream because it brands them as “mine” (see W. James 1950, 1:239; Sartre 1956, 163). Everything changes, however, when a girl goes through puberty and becomes an adolescent, and it changes further still when this adolescent becomes a woman. Unlike Sartre and Merleau-­Ponty, Beauvoir argues that the original perspective of prereflective consciousness—what many now refer to as “the first-­person perspective”—can be altered in the context of sexist and oppressive societies that treat some bodies differently than others.8 Challenging Merleau-­Ponty’s view, Beauvoir writes, “Woman, like man, is her body; but her body is something other than herself ” (2010, 41). This experiential paradox results from the prevalence of social practices that teach boys that they have value in virtue of their own activity and inversely teach girls that they have value only insofar as they serve the interests of others. As Beauvoir explains: For the girl, erotic transcendence consists in making herself prey [se faire proie] in order to gain her ends. She becomes an object, and she grasps herself [se saisir] as an object; she is surprised to discover this new aspect of her being: it seems to her that 4  Margaret A. Simons suggests that Beauvoir was familiar with W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness and was inspired by Richard Wright’s attention to the psychological dimensions of oppression. See Simons (1998/1999). 5  Prereflective consciousness is an originary and fundamental practical consciousness that exists beneath representational consciousness and renders it possible (Merleau-­Ponty 2012, lxxxii; Sartre 1960, 49). See also McWeeny (2019). 6  Translation modified. 7  This and all subsequent translations of passages from The Second Sex have been modified. 8  See, for example, Zahavi (2005) and Baker (2013).

174   McWeeny she has doubled herself [se dédoubler]; instead of coinciding exactly with herself, here she is existing outside of herself. (2010, 349)

Because womanhood in sexist societies requires the abdication of one’s body to the interests and desires of another, the situation of a girl in such a society is one of having to choose between “making herself be” (the capacity for freedom and transcendence that Sartre associates with the for-­itself of consciousness and calls “se faire être” [1956, 145–46]) and “making herself a woman” (se faire femme) (Beauvoir 2010, 376, 515).9 By contrast, “[the boy’s] vocation as a human being in no way contradicts his destiny as a male” (723). Oppression carves out this tragic choice where neither option supports the freedom, agency, and self-­expression of the consciousness that makes it.10 This practical situation is one where a girl is continuously encouraged and pressured to make herself be by existing her body as the conduit of another’s desires, by living her body as if it belonged to someone else. This habitual activity eventually disrupts her capacity to experience her body solely as the locus of her own subjectivity, ultimately alters the perspectival character of her consciousness, and “imperiously modifies [the girl’s] consciousness of her self ” (301). The doubling of a girl’s consciousness—the foreignness that grows there as the girl grows into a woman—is not the same as an abdication of subjectivity, nor should it be understood as a clean replacement of the perspectival structure present in the child’s experience. On Beauvoir’s view, alterations in the perspectival structure of consciousness are additive, not subtractive or exclusionary. The child’s original capacity to experience her body as herself is not lost, but that perspective is now not the only one present in her consciousness; the woman also has the ability to grasp her body as a vehicle for someone else’s subjectivity. A woman’s consciousness in sexist society is therefore not animated by a single stream, as Locke’s, James’s, or Sartre’s theories would have it: it is instead a double consciousness that holds at least two experiential perspectives at the same time. Importantly, this conclusion that consciousness is structurally multiple rather than singular is not unique to Beauvoir’s philosophy, but is instead a common refrain of theorists who study the mind in oppressive contexts (Du Bois 1997; Fanon 1967; King 1988; Lugones 2003).11 The idea of a structurally double consciousness provides a much-­ needed counterargument to theories of self-­consciousness like Lynne Rudder Baker’s (2013) or Dan Zahavi’s (2005) that hold that all experience is necessarily first-­personal and given with a sense of “mineness.”12 It also points to the need for notions of embodiment, 9  For more on this distinction, see McWeeny (2017). 10  For a girl, the choice to se faire être can be as problematic as the choice to se faire femme because it often places her outside the accepted gender norms of sexist society, a location that can incur isolation and other consequences that hinder her capacities to realize her humanity and transcend her situation. 11  On the relationship between Beauvoir’s theory and other notions of multiple consciousness, see McWeeny (2016). 12  For another kind of socially based counterargument see Heal (2013).

Feminist Philosophy of Mind   175 embeddedness, and enaction that are more robustly social than those that are usually employed in discussions of 4E cognition.13 Moreover, Beauvoir’s contention that the body constitutes the perspectival structure of consciousness invites the question of whether and how a phenomenological approach to the hard problem of consciousness could be useful. Finally, Beauvoir’s theory begins to address the body problem by affirming rather than denying the possibility of mental variation. The next step is to consider how mental variations that supervene on social variation could affect theorizing about the nature of mind. An early essay by Naomi Scheman makes a foundational contribution to this project.

Scheman and the Individualist Assumption In her 1983 paper, “Individualism and the Objects of Psychology,” Scheman contends that philosophers of mind have generally failed to provide an argument for the idea that psychological states or “objects,” such as emotions, beliefs, intentions, and desires, “can be assigned and theorized about on an individualistic basis” (1983, 225). Someone who is an individualist about the objects of psychology believes that emotions and beliefs, for example, are “particular, identifiable states that [a person is] in, which enter as particulars into causal relationships” (226). Alternatively, Scheman proposes that a phenomenon only becomes individuated as a particular mental state in relation to social meanings or norms surrounding the recognition, classification, and expression of that state (227). Socialization teaches us to differentiate experiences of anger from frustration, sadness from misery, belief A from belief B, beliefs from intentions, intentions from desires, and so on. As Scheman explains, “The question is one of meaning, not just at the level of what to call it, but at the level of there being an ‘it’ at all” (229). Social contexts provide the tools not only to pull but also to craft individuated objects like emotions and beliefs out of the melee of experience. Scheman’s work shows us that constructing a feminist position in philosophy of mind is rarely a simple matter of opposing an existing argument, since often the views being challenged are those that are expressed in unwritten disciplinary practices and traditions but are rarely acknowledged in publications in explicit ways. She therefore supports her thesis with a series of suggestions as to why criticisms of individualist accounts of emotions, beliefs, and desires are so rare in the scholarly literature. Her analysis reveals not only that there are scant philosophical reasons for supporting individualism about the objects of psychology but also that individualism is curiously consistent with a number of prevailing social, political, and professional ideologies.

13  For contemporary discussions of 4E cognition see Newen, de Bruin, and Gallagher (2018).

176   McWeeny Scheman first addresses the popularity of physicalism in contemporary philosophy of mind. For physicalism to be true, psychological objects would need to be conceived as particulars because only then could they (1) be identified in physical terms and (2) possess the kind of causal efficacy consistent with those terms. Because physicalism requires individualism about the objects of psychology, arguing against individualism amounts to arguing against physicalism, a path that Scheman will later pursue in “Against Physicalism” (2000). If contemporary philosophers of mind are predisposed to be physicalists, then they will also be predisposed to treat emotions, beliefs, and desires as individuated causal particulars, and they may be less likely to question their reasons for doing so. However, Scheman claims that regardless of their positions on physicalism, most  people nonetheless have strong intuitions about the reality and discreteness of their own beliefs, emotions, and desires (1983, 228). Thinking of our own minds as containing something more than what can be observed behaviorally or constructed by culture—something that is exclusively our own—is comforting because it can ground senses of individuality and identity. But the tendency to think of our mental states as individuated, no matter how readily it comes to us, does not necessarily make it so. Scheman also explores the role this kind of individualism has in facilitating ­certain social and political ideologies. For example, liberalism is premised on the ideas that each person has a mind of his/her/their own and that the law must treat the emotions, beliefs, and desires that belong to that individual as clear expressions of his/her/their interests (Scheman 1983, 231). Realism about the individuation of mental states fulfills this political desiderata by providing a ready means to distinguish one mental state from another within an individual, and by making each mental state the sole property of that individual. In addition, Scheman notes that political liberalism and capitalism are each consistent with a notion of personhood that prizes masculinity, independence, and separateness. Insofar as men and women are raised in liberal, capitalist societies, they are likely to believe that masculine individualism in regard to egos (and the individualism about the objects of psychology that supports it) is a natural and exemplary expression of humanness, while feminine relationality is a stunted or underdeveloped version of the liberal, capitalist subject (234–40). Whether or not we agree with Scheman’s analyses about why the individualist assumption in regard to the objects of psychology is so widespread, the implications of her overall point that certain foundational ideas in philosophy of mind could be a function of ideology rather than logic is hard to ignore. The correspondence between Princess Elisabeth and Descartes brings into stark relief the need for methods to ­discern whether a prominent view in the philosophy of mind is embraced due to its philosophical superiority or its capacity to accommodate the entrenched ideologies and lifestyles of the field’s practitioners. The more a theorist advances physicalist, embodied, enactive, or contextual views of mind that implicate a relationship between practical habits and mental structure, the more pressing this need becomes.

Feminist Philosophy of Mind   177

Core Questions and Future Directions Considered collectively, Princess Elisabeth’s, Beauvoir’s, and Scheman’s arguments give us good reason to believe that mental structure can be altered in substantive rather than superficial ways by oppression. It was Descartes who, in his response to Princess Elisabeth’s query about the interaction between mind and body, first suggested that social and class-­based habits can affect which kinds of insights and understandings a mind is capable of having. In the twentieth century, Beauvoir took the suggestion one step further by revealing the mechanism by which such changes occur. She argues that practical habits that accommodate sexism have the potential to transform the way that a person’s body figures in the perspective of her/his/their consciousness, which in turn alters the first-­personal, agentic, and temporal structures of that consciousness. Scheman’s reminder that it is social processes that allow us to make the kinds of meanings that would enable us to experience emotions, beliefs, and desires as individuated causal particulars further emphasizes the need to ask whose mind is being described in psychological and philosophical theories and whose mind is doing the describing. All three thinkers problematize prevalent tendencies to treat mental content and mental structure as ahistorical, universal among humans, and individualistic or nonrelational. The shared implications of these arguments point to a constellation of core questions that promise to ground and root the emerging field of feminist philosophy of mind: “Are minds gendered?,” “Are minds raced?,” “Are minds marked by social class?,” “Does mental variation supervene on cultural variation?,” “Are minds sexually oriented in different ways?,” “How are minds gendered and raced?,” and “Are differences in gender, race, and sexuality a matter of mind?,” “Are certain functions such as emotion, perception, and memory gendered and raced?” Feminist publications that take up issues and themes relevant to philosophy of mind have not yet been considered together in a way that establishes feminist philosophy of mind as a field rather than a mere topic of study.14 Luckily, this moment is imminent.15 Nonetheless, certain subjects in philosophy of mind such as the self, consciousness, emotion, and mind-­body dualism have been of special interest to feminists historically, and this existing research will undoubtedly chart the way for future debates and directions as feminist philosophy of mind congeals into a readily identifiable philosophical area. Feminists generally agree that the self is relational and embodied in constitutive rather than contingent ways (S. James 2000; Brison 2003; Kim 2014). However, they 14  Exceptions include Garry and Pearsall (1989) and Fricker and Hornsby (2000), two classic anthologies in feminist philosophy that each include sections on feminist philosophy of mind. 15  The first edited collection in the field, a twenty-­chapter book titled Feminist Philosophy of Mind edited by Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny, is currently forthcoming with Oxford University Press. The relevant entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is also forthcoming.

178   McWeeny disagree about whether the self is unitary or plural, multiple or multiplicitous (Lugones  2003; Ortega  2001,  2016; Barvosa  2008; McWeeny  2016,  2017). Feminist research into the natures of self and mind also involves questioning the normative presuppositions of naturalistic views and standard, third-­ person descriptions of pathologies and embodiment (Bordo  1994; Bluhm and Jacobson  2012; Taylor  2015; Wilson 2015). Feminist investigations of selfhood are frequently linked to studies of consciousness. Evident in the discussion of Beauvoir’s work in this chapter, feminist interest in consciousness has primarily focused on how the material conditions of oppression can alter the contents and structure of consciousness, especially in regard to a person’s sense of self (King 1988; Charlesworth 2000; Maitra 2014; McWeeny 2016, 2017; Leboeuf 2018). They also examine how false consciousness can be overcome to facilitate political projects of liberation (Bartky 1975; MacKinnon 1989). This work has been entwined with considerations of how agency is inhibited by oppression and subsequently fostered through certain kinds of political movement (Young  1980; Meyers  2004; Campbell, Meynell, and Sherwin 2009; E. Lee 2016). Additionally, feminists in recent years have paid special attention to developing theoretical accounts of memory, perception, and emotion, especially when women’s experiences of these phenomena tend to conflict with standard views (Frye  1983; Butler 1989; Rohrbach 1994; Campbell 2003; Brison 2003; Alexander 2005; Alcoff 2011; Siegel 2017). For instance, feminist theories of emotion consider how particular emotions may be differentially conceived, attributed, cultivated, and experienced by different social groups who are variably affected by sexist and racist oppressions (Scheman  1980; Lorde  1984; Narayan  1988; Jaggar  1989; Cahill  2001; Burrow  2005; Kim 2014; Whitney 2015). Cognizant of their capacities to proliferate and legitimate historical associations between men and rationality, whiteness and civilization, women and nature, and people of color and animality, feminists and other critical social theorists have long sought to develop alternatives to mind-­body dualism and reductive physicalism (Daly  1990; Plumwood  1993; Anzaldúa  1999; Quijano  2000; Maldonado-­ Torres  2007).16 It is therefore unsurprising that feminists have been at the forefront of the recent move to articulate “new materialisms,” philosophical descriptions of matter that do not reduce it to a passive and unthinking substance (Matthews  2003; Barad  2007; Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010). Significantly, such explorations in feminist philosophy of mind not only promise to advance theorizing about the nature of mind but also invite new ways of theorizing about gender and sexual difference. For example, Beauvoir believes that a woman is defined by “the [perspectival] manner in which she grasps her body and her relation to the world through other consciousnesses” (2010, 761). Contrary to the pervasive idea that the difference between a woman and a man is primarily a function of different kinds of bodies, Beauvoir’s view suggests that it is at base a difference in kinds of minds—one 16  Cf. Gertler (2002).

Feminist Philosophy of Mind   179 that follows not from an essential nature, but from the bodily, relational, and plastic structure of consciousness. Attending to the ways that certain kinds of mental phenomena are tied to particular bodies has also led to new conceptions of race, sexuality, class, and ability, as well as to fresh theories of sex and gender.17 That strategies for denying the rational capacities and mental faculties of many humans such as people of color, colonized peoples, Jews, the proletariat, women, and the disabled have been central to various programs of oppression throughout history emphasizes the intimate connections between theories of mind and social ontology. Each of these current conversations grows from a common feminist motivation to take seriously the possibilities that mind is socially and culturally situated, relational, and body specific. In the future, as these prototypical considerations evolve into debates between alternative theoretical positions, disagreements will undoubtedly arise over how the mind is thus situated, that is, whether or not the oppressions in question generate mental variation in structural and substantive ways. Disputes about under what conditions socio-­mental variation is positive or negative and about how to account for its role in the production of philosophical theories will likewise ensue. The contours of these arguments will likely trace to a number of already-­established poles in current discussions about gender, race, and mind: equality or difference, realism or nominalism, dualism or physicalism, internalism or externalism, reformism or radicalism. New positions stemming from the integration of what were formerly the separate and respective vocabularies of feminist philosophy and philosophy of mind will also be developed. Finally, continuing to expand the scope of whose experiences are centered in accounts of mind, especially along the lines of gender, race, sexuality, class, and ability, promises to generate exciting philosophical innovations too original to be foretold.

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Chapter 15

Femi n ist Phil osoph y of L a nguage i n th e A na ly tic Tr a dition Mary Kate Mc Gowan

Feminist philosophy of language is a broad field. In fact, it includes many quite distinct literatures. For the purposes of understanding feminist philosophy of language in its broadest terms, it is useful to distinguish between three different “types”: feminist criticisms of language, feminist criticisms of the philosophy of language, and feminist uses of the philosophy of language. This chapter will present sample work in each of these three areas; the fields are simply too large to be comprehensive. Particular emphasis is placed on the third type (feminist uses of the philosophy of language) because there is an upsurge in this kind of work and other overviews emphasize the other two types. Although there are important differences between these broad categories of ­feminist philosophical work on language, all three nevertheless share some pertinent characteristics. In particular, all three emphasize that language reflects its use and that language is a social practice that cannot be properly understood without accounting for its social embeddedness. Consequently, an adequate study of language use must include the concept of gender and the crucial role of social context and power relations in its practice.

Feminist Criticisms of Language Work in this area takes many forms, and I will not explore them all. Some feminist work in this area focuses on alleged gender bias with particular bits of language and its use.

Feminist Philosophy of Language in the Analytic Tradition   185 Consider, for example, the words ‘man’ and ‘men.’ Moulton (1981) argues that uses of these terms that purport to be gender neutral really are not: Man nurses his young. Man has two sexes; about half of them are female. These examples show that some purportedly gender-­neutral uses of ‘man’ fail to be so, but Moulton goes further and argues that all such uses fail to be genuinely gender neutral. She shows this by considering a change in context. Consider, for instance, the sentence ‘All men are mortal.’ If any use of the terms ‘man’ or ‘men’ are gender neutral, then surely this one is. Moulton then asks us to consider that sentence as the first in a syllogism that is completed by ‘Socrates is a man.’ The occurrence of ‘man’ in ‘Socrates is a man’ is clearly not gender neutral, so either this classic example of a valid syllogism rests on an equivocation or ‘men’ in ‘All men are mortal’ was not gender neutral after all. Mercier (1995) does not deny that ‘man’ has a gender-­neutral sense, as Moulton does. Instead, she argues that ‘man’ is ambiguous (between a gender-­neutral and a gender-­specific sense), but she argues that this ambiguity itself is far from neutral. According to Mercier, ‘mann’/’man’ became ambiguous (between gender neutral and gender specific) when the Old English word ‘wer’ (once a general term for male adults) phased out of the language. This ambiguity, argues Mercier, is peculiar linguistically in a variety of telling ways. Ultimately, she argues that the ambiguity of ‘man’ is governed by a double standard that renders women invisible, treats men as the norm, and serves the purposes of sexism. Emphasizing the impact language use has on the social world, Mercier urges that “in the context of sexism, friends of women should go out of their way to make women visible, by deliberately avoiding masculine language” (1995, 243). Another important feminist criticism of gendered pronouns concerns how they force us to know and to make linguistically evident the sex or gender of persons even in contexts where sex or gender is (or ought to be) irrelevant. Because of the gendered nature of personal pronouns, English requires us to mark the sex/gender of all persons and this serves the purposes of sexism by making sex/gender seem relevant even when it is not (or should not be but for sexism) (Frye 1983, 17–40). Another area of language use that has received considerable feminist attention is that of gendered metaphors. Martin (1996), for example, analyzes the metaphorical descriptions of conception according to which the ovum is a passive damsel in distress and the sperm an active superhero. Martin argues that this picture of conception is inaccurate in a variety of ways, thus leading to false information about reproduction, problematic scientific methodology, and the perpetuation of pernicious myths about male and female. Such gendered metaphors are common, especially in science. Perhaps this is no surprise since Nature herself is often presented as a woman in need of being harnessed and controlled (Lloyd 1984).

186   McGowan Not all feminist criticisms of language focus on particular expressions or sorts of uses. Instead, they take, as their target, language as a whole. Consider, for example, Hintikka and Hintikka (1983). They stress that semantic theories leave certain prior questions untouched. Such theories aim to account for how various terms and expressions are interrelated (they call this the structural system) but leave untouched more fundamental questions (concerning what they call the referential system). One such prior question concerns that which fixes reference (how terms get attached to their referent) and prior to that are questions about individuation (which things and collections in the world are eligible to be the referent of various types of terms and expressions). Focusing on trans-­world identity in possible word semantics, Hintikka and Hintikka point out that there are different legitimate ways to determine sameness across worlds; different similarity metrics are available. Citing studies that show gender ­difference in sorting exercises, Hintikka and Hintikka suggest that individuation schemes that privilege intrinsic properties of objects over their functional or relational properties may well constitute a male bias. Here, the maleness is reflected in the ontology presupposed by the language as a whole. Hintikka and Hintikka can be read as here criticizing male bias both in language and in theories about (thus in the philosophy of) language. Another classic example is Spender (1980), who argues that language is created by men; its use is dominated by men; it reflects a male point of view by treating men as the norm and it thus functions to perpetuate patriarchy. She points out, for example, that there are more words for men than for women, and the words for women tend to have negative connotations or sexual overtones. Consider, for example, the difference between ‘bachelor’ and ‘spinster’ or the difference in implied meaning between calling a man a ‘professional’ and calling a woman one. ‘She is a professional’ implies that she is a prostitute. ‘He is a professional,’ by contrast, implies no such thing. Spender also argues that the norms governing language use tend to advantage men. Studies show, for example, that women tend to speak less but are perceived both as speaking considerably more than they actually do and as speaking too much. Other important works on these issues include Tannen (1990) and Cameron (2007). Spender also points out that the shared meaning of terms tends not to reflect the experiences of women even in cases where the terms in question concern women. She cites as an example the social meaning of motherhood, which (arguably) idealizes motherhood in a way that causes real mothers to feel guilty, inadequate, deficient, alienated, and even pathological. More recently, Fricker (2007) has dubbed this phenomenon (of how shared word meaning reflects the experiences and interests of the powerful) “hermeneutical injustice.” Saul (2012) offers a very helpful and more detailed survey of feminist criticisms of language where she distinguishes between seven different feminist criticisms of language, most of which are covered here to at least some degree: false gender neutrality, invisibility of women, maleness as a norm, sex marking, encoding a male worldview, maleness of language, and metaphor.

Feminist Philosophy of Language in the Analytic Tradition   187

Feminist Criticisms of the Philosophy of Language Our second type focuses on the philosophy of language and criticizes it for various kinds of male bias. We have already discussed the Hintikka and Hintikka (1983) view that problematizes the male bias inherent in the ontology presupposed by language use. Another feminist criticism of the philosophy of language is the explanatory focus on the communicative intentions of individual language users. Centering attention on individuals can discourage the recognition of broader social patterns, thereby overlooking the sorts of structural and relational properties that are so crucially important in understanding the social world (Frye 1983). Similar feminist criticisms (of theories being overly individualistic) occur in epistemology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, and political theory. Hornsby (2000) offers a particularly powerful and explicit articulation of this sort of criticism. She argues that the apparent separateness of feminist philosophy of language and mainstream philosophy of language (which she calls “malestream” philosophy of language) is the result of impoverished and male accounts of linguistic meaning. Such accounts, Hornsby argues, overlook the social context of language use, are overly individualistic, and fail to do justice to the reciprocal aspects of communication. She offers an account of saying something to someone as an alternative to more individualistic accounts of linguistic meaning.

Feminist Applications of the Philosophy of Language This area of feminist philosophy of language is itself broad and varied; it includes feminist applications of methods, tools, and insights from analytic philosophy of language, and there are, of course, many ways to do this. There has been a recent increase in philosophical attention to the ways that language use can perpetuate social injustice. One such example of this is the upsurge of work on slurs. Some of this work aims to identify the distinct semantic character of slurs as a lexical type (Jeshion  2013; Hom  2008; Hornsby  2001; Saka  2007; Tirrell  1999; Richard 2008; Camp 2013; Anderson and LePore 2013). Such accounts ought to be able to explain the data on slurs, including how slurs derogate or dehumanize their targets, why some slurs are more potent than others, why they escape scope when they do, how they contribute to the truth conditions of the sentences in which they occur, how they can be reappropriated, and whether and why there are neutral counterparts. This focus

188   McGowan on slurs as a lexical type should be distinguished from understanding acts of slurring. The distinctive characteristics of that lexical type should be differentiated from the act of using a slur on a particular occasion. Another example is the recent attention on generics, sentences with bare plural subjects (e.g., ‘Mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus,’ ‘Birds lay eggs’). The truth conditions of generic sentences are interesting. ‘Birds lay eggs’ is true even though only female birds do so, and, even more intriguing, ‘Mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus’ is true even though the vast majority of mosquitoes do not carry the virus. Since the truth conditions are contested and perplexing, generics are difficult to falsify and there is growing feminist interest in the possibility that they can function as linguistic vehicles for reinforcing negative stereotypes about social groups (Leslie 2008; Haslanger 2011; Saul 2017). Consider, for example, the following generic claims: ‘Muslims are terrorists’ and ‘Women are irrational.’ Given the feminist emphasis on language use and power, it is perhaps no surprise that speech act theory in particular—an account of how saying things can constitute doing social-­world-­altering things—is one area that has seen many such feminist uses.

Speech Acts Austin first introduced what is now called “speech act theory” in his How to Do Things with Words (1962). In it, he took exception to the then-­current tendency in the philosophy of language to focus exclusively on the truth value of sentences or utterances. Austin pointed out that language does more than merely describe the facts. It also has causal effects on hearers and the world; it is evaluable along many other axes other than truth (e.g., relevance, warrant, and ease of interpretation), and sometimes saying something actually counts as doing something. Austin distinguished between three different forces of an utterance. First, the locutionary force of an utterance is the meaning expressed and the referents picked out. For example, when Mike says, “Shea’s bedtime is 9:00 p.m.,” his utterance has the locutionary force of referring to Shea, to his bedtime, and to the nine o’clock hour and of expressing the claim that Shea’s bedtime is 9:00 p.m. Second, the perlocutionary force of an utterance is the effect that that utterance has on the audience in virtue of the audience recognizing the linguistic function of the utterance. (Nonlinguistic causal effects, like a shrill voice causing irritation, are not proper perlocutionary effects.) Perlocutionary effects often vary among hearers. Mike’s claim that Shea’s bedtime is 9:00 p.m. might cause Shea’s younger sister to be jealous, Shea’s mom to be stressed, and Shea to be delighted that he gets to stay up later. Finally, the illocutionary force of an utterance is the action constituted by it. In this case, the circumstances may be such that Mike is not merely stating what Shea’s bedtime already is but enacting a new one. As Shea’s father, Mike is here making it the case that Shea has a new and later bedtime of 9:00 p.m. His saying so makes it so. Other illocutionary acts include ordering (e.g., “I order you to finish the report by Monday”) and promising (e.g., “Yes, dear, I promise to prepare the receipts for our tax returns”).

Feminist Philosophy of Language in the Analytic Tradition   189 Many of the feminist applications of speech act theory concern issues at the intersection of political philosophy and philosophy of law. They focus on the illocutionary force of certain types of pornography or hate speech and how that might affect the free speech status of these categories of speech. The motivating concern is that certain types of pornography and hate speech are harmful in ways that undermine equality. Speech act theory is relevant because if pornography has the illocutionary force of subordinating women, then there may be legitimate grounds for regulating it. Similarly, if hate speech does more than merely express a personal political opinion—if it actually constitutes an act of discrimination, intimidation, or harassment—then there may be grounds for regulation and thus for the law to be involved in protecting members of marginalized groups from further harms. Many feminist speech act applications arose as philosophical analyses of some of MacKinnon’s (1987,  1993;  1997) claims. In particular, MacKinnon contends that pornography is the “graphic sexually explicit subordination of women,” and this claim has met with incredulity and accusations of incoherence. Vadas (1987) offered the first defense of the coherence of this claim, but Langton’s (1993) account has garnered considerably more attention. Appealing to speech act theory, Langton defends the coherence of this claim by showing how speech in general and pornography in particular can subordinate. According to Langton, (some) pornography subordinates women by enacting social norms that unfairly rank women as inferior, legitimate discriminatory conduct towards women, and deny women important powers. This work has stimulated a lot of further work, most of it focusing on the role of authority in subordinating speech acts (Green  1998; Bauer  2015; Langton  1998,  2009; Maitra  2012; McGowan  2003, 2009b, 2018; Wieland 2009). MacKinnon also claims that pornography constructs women’s nature and that this construction is false. McGowan (2005) and Langton (2009) explore this provocative and perplexing claim using similar speech act accounts. McGowan (2003) offers the hypothesis that pornography is like an erroneous umpire’s call: it purports to track an objective and antecedent fact about women’s nature, while it actually and sneakily enacts what women socially count as being. Langton (2009, 103–16) argues that pornography (as a verdictive speech act) can be self-­fulfilling in two ways. It can “make something count as so, in a constitutive, illocutionary way” (109), and it can “make something really become so, in a causal, perlocutionary way” (109).

Silencing Perhaps most famous, though, is MacKinnon’s claim that pornography silences women. Pornography (or some of it) is alleged to interfere with women’s speech acts in a way that actually violates women’s right to free speech. This complex claim involves several distinct issues. One issue concerns the alleged relationship between pornography and silencing. How exactly does pornography (or its consumption) bring such silencing about? There are several hypotheses about this, and not all of them treat pornography as a speech act.

190   McGowan Another issue concerns the claim that silencing (or some particular type of it) violates the free speech right. West (2003) argues that if some form of silencing systematically interferes with communication, then that form of silencing violates the right to free speech (which is just the right to be free from systematic communicative interference). Yet another issue concerns the phenomenon of silencing itself. What exactly is it? I  will focus on the various accounts of silencing. In the most general terms, silencing is a speech-­related harm. It is to have one’s communications or communicative capacities undermined or disabled in a way that is harmful. Maitra (2009) treats all instances of  communicative failure/disablement as silencing but limits her concern to those instances that meet further conditions (and are harmful). Communicative capacities can be disabled in a wide variety of ways. Consequently, there are many different phenomena legitimately called silencing. One way for communicative capacities to be undermined is for one’s attempted communications to fail and to fail for systematic reasons. Language use and communication generally are highly inferential. Successful communication requires accurate interpretation, and so certain background conditions (e.g., having the appropriate background beliefs and dispositions to interpret) in the audience are required. Hornsby (1993) calls this reciprocity; Dotson (2011) calls it testimonial competence.1 One form of silencing involves recognition failure during attempted communication. If there are systematic reasons for the recognition failure in question, then the speaker is silenced and her attempted communication is thwarted. Suppose that an addressee fails to recognize what sort of speech act a speaker is intending to perform. Hornsby (1993, 1995) and Langton (1993) argue that when this happens, the speaker is silenced and her speech act fails. Thus, if a woman says “no,” intending to refuse sex, but her addressee fails to recognition that intention, then, according to Hornsby and Langton, that woman fails to refuse and she is silenced. Much of the silencing literature focuses on this Hornsby-­ Langton account of silencing. Objections to it include its allegedly false assumption that the recognition of this (illocutionary) intention is necessary (Bird 2002; Jacobson 1995), that it undermines the responsibility of rapists (Bird  2002; Finlayson  2014; Jacobson  1995; Mason manuscript; Wieland 2007), and that it overlooks the crucial role of context (Saul 2006). Responses include Bianchi (2008), Hornsby and Langton (1998), Langton (2009), Maitra and McGowan (2010b), McGowan et al. (2011), and Mikkola (2011). There are other important engagements with the Hornsby and Langton account of silencing. Maitra (2009) offers a Gricean account of the same phenomenon; Wyatt (2009) explores the potential role of second-­order meaning conventions; McGowan et al. (2015) explore the systematicity condition; Schwartzman (2002) defends the account against some of Butler’s (1997) criticisms (as does Langton 2009). Davies (2016) argues 1  Dotson is concerned with testimony in particular, but the competence required generalizes to other speech acts. For Dotson, audience competence is relative to content/topic, and whether it is harmful is relative to the context/case. She is also not concerned with communicative failure but with testimonial quieting and testimonial smothering.

Feminist Philosophy of Language in the Analytic Tradition   191 that in some (courtroom) contexts, some opinions are inexpressible and thus silenced; the cross-­examination of a claimant in a rape trial illustrates the phenomenon. Hornsby and Langton focus on the recognition of the illocutionary intention, but there are other sorts of recognition failures that can interfere with communication. Suppose, for example, that a woman says “no,” but although the addressee recognizes her intention to refuse, that addressee nevertheless fails to recognize that she has and is exercising her authority to refuse. McGowan (2009a) argues that this is a case of authority silencing. For engagement with this account, see Caponetto (2017) and Mason (manuscript). Failure to recognize that the speaker is sincere can also constitute another form of silencing. If a woman says “no,” sincerely intending to refuse, but her addressee falsely believes that she is refusing insincerely, then she may be sincerity silenced (McGowan  2014). Since one’s sincerity is an important component of what one intends to communicate when one speaks, systematic interference with the recognition of speaker sincerity may well constitute another form of silencing. Silencing need not involve recognition failure or even communicative interference. Instead, it can involve group-­based credibility deficits. Suppose that speakers are able to get their communicative intentions across but they are (sometimes) given less credibility than they ought to be given and this happens because the speaker is a member of a socially marginalized group. In such a case, it makes sense to say that the speaker is silenced. Dotson (2011) calls this testimonial quieting;2 Fricker (2007) calls it testimonial injustice. This sort of silencing systematically undermines the epistemic impact of the speakers in question. Speech can also be disabled when the shared conceptual resources are impoverished. In extreme cases, a person cannot make sense of her own experience. Before the ­concept of hostile work environment sexual harassment was a socially shared concept, for example, women who experienced such harassment had difficulty recognizing it  as such (Fricker  2007, 153). As feminist philosophers of language have stressed (Spender 1980, 54–58), the meaning of terms and the concepts available in a language tend to reflect the interests and experiences of those in power. This means that language is ill equipped to express the experiences and interests of marginalized persons. Such hermeneutical injustice, as Fricker (2007) calls it, is a matter of degree. In less extreme cases, marginalized persons communicate perfectly well with one another but face challenges in communicating their experiences with members of the privileged group (Fricker 2016; Medina 2013). Kukla (2014) argues for what she calls discursive injustice. A speaker is a victim of discursive injustice when she abides by the conventions appropriate for performing a certain speech act but she is interpreted as performing a different speech act and this misinterpretation further undermines her social standing. Kukla argues that members of marginalized social groups are especially vulnerable to this type of injustice. 2  Dotson coined the expression “testimonial quieting” to draw attention to a long history of Black feminist scholarship on the phenomenon. See, for example, Collins (2000).

192   McGowan Not all forms of silencing actually involve speech. Sometimes a speaker decides against speaking and thus self-­silences. Whether a decision to refrain from speaking counts as silencing depends on the reasons for doing so. If a speaker decides to remain silent because she knows that her audience will get something wrong and harm will result, then this is a case of what Dotson (2011) calls testimonial smothering and it is a form of self-­silencing. McGowan (2018b) explores others sorts of self-­silencing. It is also important to recognize the potential significance of silence itself. It can be a communicative act (Langton 2007; Tanesini 2018). It can also be meaningful in other ways. It can signal approval, but we should be careful when interpreting it that way lest we overlook the power dynamics that might prevent the expression of disagreement (Langton 2007). Moreover, when silence is a failure to object, it too can be harmful (Horisk manuscript; Ayala and Vasilyeva 2016; Langton 2018; Johnson 2018).

Hate Speech In addition to philosophical work on the semantics of slurs, which has obvious applications to racist hate speech, philosophers of language have turned their attention to the harmfulness and free speech status of such speech. This work has its origins in critical race theory (Crenshaw  1993; Delgado  1982; Delgado and Stefancic  1991; Matsuda  1989; Lawrence  1990). Directly engaging with this legal literature, Altman (1993) applies Austin’s theory of speech acts to give an account of the claims of Lawrence and Matsuda; Altman argues that they are best understood as claiming that hate speech is the illocutionary act of “treating someone as a moral subordinate” (1993, 310). More recently, West (2012) argues that racist hate speech silences members of racial minority groups by interfering with a variety of communicative capacities; West also argues that these very communicative capacities are what makes speech valuable and thus deserving of the special protections of a free speech principle. Appealing more broadly to the kinematics of conversation and the normative aspects of practices generally, McGowan (2012,  2019) argues that some racist speech enacts discriminatory norms in public places and thus ought to count as an actionable act of discrimination. McGowan is concerned with racist and sexist speech generally and not hate speech in particular. Maitra (2012) argues that ordinary hate speakers under ordinary circumstances sometimes acquire the authority to subordinate members of racial minority groups. According to Maitra, formal institutional authority is not required to subordinate with speech. Engaging with mechanisms of accommodation in the pragmatics of language use, Langton (2012) suggests that hate speech is governed by rules of accommodation for attitudes as well as beliefs. If this is correct, then hate speech surreptitiously affects our attitudes, desires, and feelings in addition to affecting our beliefs, and this possibility has potential political consequences. Working within the framework of an inferentialist theory of meaning, Tirrell (2012) argues that hate speech was crucially involved in setting the social conditions necessary

Feminist Philosophy of Language in the Analytic Tradition   193 for the Rwandan genocide; Tirrell argues that hate speech changed which behaviors counted as socially acceptable, thereby paving the way for that genocide. Waldron (2012) argues that some hate speech should be regulated to protect the public good of everyone’s basic assurance of inclusion in society. Hate speech and its toleration is a sign that those targeted are unsafe and vulnerable to humiliation and discrimination. Thus, a full commitment to human dignity and equal inclusion requires some regulation. The philosophical work on hate speech and slurs tends to focus on racist hate speech and racial slurs; there is less work done on gendered hate speech or gendered slurs. Ashwell (2016) and Richardson-­Self (2018) are notable exceptions. Notoriously difficult to define, there may well be different kinds of racist hate speech (Langton 2012) and one might be best served by defining it for specific theoretical or legal purposes (Matsuda 1989). Finally, much of the philosophical work on hate speech is not work in the philosophy of language; it is political philosophy or philosophy of law. Of course, these boundaries too are difficult to define, shifting, and contested.

Blurry Lines and Future Directions Presenting the current state of play in the feminist philosophy of language (within the analytic tradition) requires negotiating blurry lines. Where do we draw the line between analytic and continental? Is work on testimony in the philosophy of language or in epistemology? Do speech act accounts become philosophy of law once they enter into debates about the free speech status of the speech in question? There is nothing peculiar about feminist philosophy and this blurring of lines. In fact, whenever one is really doing philosophy, one must be—at least to some extent—engaged with different subareas simultaneously. Can you really do epistemology without also doing (or at least assuming some) metaphysics? The distinction between feminist philosophy of language and mainstream philosophy of language is similarly shiftable. In fact, as feminist work in the philosophy of language gains recognition, as the social context of language use takes its rightful place in our philosophical study of language, and as more and more courses at all levels cover the social aspects of language use, the distinction between “feminist” philosophy of language and enlightened and responsible mainstream philosophy of language ought to dwindle. There are signs that business as usual in the philosophy of language will come to include what was once distinctively feminist, and this is all to the good. I thank Ásta for helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter.

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Feminist Philosophy of Language in the Analytic Tradition   195 Hornsby, Jennifer. 1993. “Speech Acts and Pornography.” Women’s Philosophy Review 10: 38–45. Hornsby, Jennifer. 1995. “Disempowered Speech.” Philosophical Topics 23 (2): 127–47. Hornsby, Jennifer. 2000. “Feminism in Philosophy of Language: Communicative Speech Acts.” In Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, edited by Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby, 87–106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hornsby, Jennifer, 2001. “Meaning and Uselessness: How to Think about Derogatory Words.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy: Figurative Language 25: 128–41. Hornsby, Jennifer, and Rae Langton. 1998. “Free Speech and Illocution.” Legal Theory 4: 21–37. Jacobson, Daniel. 1995. “Freedom of Speech Acts: A Response to Langton.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 24 (1): 64–79. Jeshion, Robin. 2013. “Expressivism and the Offensiveness of Slurs.” Philosophical Perspectives 27: 231–59. Johnson, Casey. 2018. “For the Sake of Argument: The Nature and Extent of Our Obligation to Voice Dissent.” In Voicing Dissent: The Ethics and Epistemology of Making Disagreement Public, edited by Casey Johnson, 97–108. New York: Routledge. Kukla, R. 2012. “Performative Force, Convention, and Discursive Injustice,” Hypatia 29 (2): 440–457. Langton, Rae. 1993. “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (4): 293–330. Langton, Rae. 1998. “Subordination, Silence and Pornography’s Authority.” In Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, edited by R.  Post, 261–83. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. Langton, Rae. 2007. “Disenfranchised Silence.” In Common Minds: Essays in Honour of Philip Pettit, edited by Geoffrey Brennan, Robert Goodin, Frank Jackson, and Michael Smith, 199–213. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Langton, Rae. 2009. Sexual Solipsism: Essays on Pornography and Objectification. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Langton, Rae. 2012. “Beyond Belief: Pragmatics in Hate Speech and Pornography.” In Speech and Harm: Controversies over Free Speech, edited by Ishani Maitra and Mary Kate McGowan, 72–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Langton, Rae. 2018. “On Blocking as Counter Speech.” In New Work on Speech Acts, edited by Daniel Fogal, Daniel W. Harris., and Matt Moss, 144–162. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lawrence, Charles. 1990. “If He Hollers, Let Him Go: Regulating Racist Speech on Campus.” Duke Law Journal 39 (3): 431–83. Reprinted in Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, edited by M. Matsuda, C. Lawrence, R. Delgado, and K. Crenshaw, 53–88. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Leslie, Sarah Jane. 2008. “Generics: Cognition and Acquisition.” Philosophical Review 117 (1): 1–47. Lloyd, Genevieve. 1984. The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. MacKinnon, Catharine. 1987. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacKinnon, Catharine. 1993. Only Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacKinnon, Catharine, and Andrea Dworkin, eds. 1997. In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maitra, Ishani. 2009. “Silencing Speech.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (2): 309–38.

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chapter 16

Femi n ist Epistemol ogy Heidi Grasswick

As is the case for any political project, knowledge is important for feminism. Feminism is in part motivated and sustained by certain epistemic claims about the world, including empirical claims about how social relations are operating (e.g., that gender oppression exists) as well as moral understandings of the wrongs of sexism and oppression. Epistemological questions concerning the status of knowledge, the forms that knowledge comes in, the justification of knowledge claims, and the goals of inquiry arise for feminists when they consider how the knowledge claims needed for feminism are generated and what conditions, including social conditions, are required to develop feminist forms of knowledge and understanding. As feminists have pointed out, how communities answer such questions can make a practical difference to who gets listened to and whose concerns get addressed in society. As a field, feminist epistemology examines a variety of questions concerning knowledge and inquiry while focusing on the specific epistemic interests of feminists. Some of the questions feminists ask are similar to those traditional epistemologists have asked, though their answers may differ. For example, they are interested in what constitutes good evidence and how best to conceptualize key epistemological ideas such as knowledge, understanding, and objectivity. But significantly, many of the questions feminists ask differ from those of traditional epistemology, and these move feminist epistemology in its own distinct directions. For example, rather than attempting to outline ideal conditions for achieving knowledge, feminists are especially interested in understanding and responding to the epistemic challenges inquirers confront from within social conditions of oppression. Generally, feminist epistemologists seek to develop epistemological tools—theories, concepts, and recommended epistemic practices—that will be helpful in satisfying the specific epistemic needs of feminist practitioners and theorists as they seek to achieve their social and political goals of moving through and ending oppression.

Feminist Epistemology   199

Conceptualizing “Feminist” Epistemology Feminist epistemology first developed in the early 1980s in response to the perceived inadequacies (from a feminist point of view) of both the epistemological frameworks in use within philosophy and the positivist methodologies employed within much of the research in the social and natural sciences. At this time, feminists interested in the sciences (as well as philosophy) were seeking an explanation for why a recognition of specific cases of gender bias in research was coinciding with the influx of feministminded women into these disciplines and, more generally, the cultural presence of the feminist movement (Harding  1983; Wylie and Nelson  2007). The idea that feminist researchers noticed these biases at play just because they were better at applying the positivist standards of value neutrality in research seemed implausible. The desire to explain the historical connection between improvements in scientific research that were related to corrections for gender bias and the cultural presence of a feminist movement constituted an important starting point for the development of the field of feminist epistemology.1 As feminist researchers sought to provide such explanations, it quickly became apparent that part of the problem lay in the inadequacies of available epistemological frameworks themselves. Not only did some of the positivist-­inspired methodologies employed within the human and social sciences maintain an epistemological commitment that explicitly denied any substantive role within the knowledge process for social and political values such as feminist values, but also feminists argued that because of this, these methodologies allowed masculinist and androcentric biases to slip through and infect the knowledge system, without being detected. This could happen in several ways: through an influence on the direction of research, a reliance on gendered background assumptions that inform the work, or the use of gendered metaphors and language in descriptions of the data and processes that then frame resultant understandings. In the case of philosophy, feminists targeted several components of prominent framings of epistemology, arguing that they contributed to the masking of a male point of view as a neutral or objective point of view and were ill-­adapted for handling complex situations of knowing. For example, Lorraine Code argued for a need to “remap the epistemic terrain” (Code 1991), citing the limitations and effects of the 1  Many feminists prefer reference to the plural “feminist epistemologies” to acknowledge the wide variety of theories and positions put forth. When I use it in the singular throughout this chapter I am referring to the development of the general field of feminist epistemology, with there being a great deal of variety of the theories and positions within.

200   Grasswick contemporary “S knows that p” paradigm of epistemology that focused on the task of providing the set of necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge that would hold for any epistemic subject (“S”) and for any proposition (“p”). Code rejected the model of the abstract and generic individual knower that underlies this paradigm, arguing that the subjectivity of inquirers needs to be accounted for. She argued that when the differences between knowers and their subject positions are assumed to be irrelevant to epistemological analysis, the makers of the epistemology (i.e., predominantly white economically privileged male philosophers) end up managing to have the specifics of their own subjectivity represented as the proper epistemological “objective view.” In error, their perspective comes to be understood as a “view from nowhere.” Many feminists, including Code, further argued that the legacy of a narrow focus on reason as the way to achieve knowledge worked against women’s attempts to be understood as knowers, since the content of this “reason” was culturally bound and conceptually associated with masculinity (Code  1991; Rooney  1995; Lloyd  1984). Early work in feminist epistemology focused on critiquing current epistemological frameworks and identifying their limitations, particularly with respect to their impact on understanding women as knowers and the extent to which biases were able to remain in place unnoticed when knowledge was governed by such epistemologies. Once such limitations were identified, feminists began to consider alternative framings of epistemology that could do better. As feminists began to develop their own epistemologies, it became common to differentiate these theories according to the tripartite taxonomy of feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory, and feminist postmodernism (Harding 1986). Empiricists had a primary interest in the workings of science and were interested in understanding and reconciling the role of feminist values while sketching out a vision of an empirically adequate and objective practice of science. Standpoint theorists became known for their strong emphasis on the ways in which one’s social location shapes one’s knowing, coupled with a premise that the perspective of the oppressed actually carries an epistemic advantage compared with the perspective of the dominant. Feminist postmodernists shared standpoint theorists’ interest in probing the connection between social location and knowledge but focused on the multiplicity of socially situated perspectives and the role of social power in determining which perspective(s) successfully dominated social discourse. Over time, these three categories proved limiting for understanding the variety of feminist epistemologies, with many later theoretical developments representing a blend of these interests and commitments (Intemann 2010). Throughout its history, feminist epistemology has repeatedly had to counter misperceptions of it and articulate the work that the modifier “feminist” is intended to do when naming feminist epistemology. One problem has been that as feminist epistemologists have at times argued for the value of ways of knowing that have been culturally conceived as feminine, such as the role of emotion in knowing (Jaggar 1996) and the role of embodiment (Young 2005; Tuana 2001b), they have sometimes been interpreted as putting forth an epistemology that valorizes women’s ways of knowing. In

Feminist Epistemology   201 spite of such common misperceptions, feminist epistemology is not equivalent to a “feminine” epistemology that simply posits and focuses on specific “women’s ways of knowing” (Rooney 2012). Instead, it is better described in terms of investigations into how gender is implicated in questions of knowledge (Anderson 2017), with gender being understood as a feature of power-­infused social relations that carry epistemic effects. In this regard, feminist epistemology is best understood as a form of social epistemology (Anderson 2017; Grasswick 2013; Anderson 1995a).2 The modifier “feminist,” then, identifies the fact that feminist epistemology is centrally interested in mapping the connections between such power-­infused gender relations and quests for knowledge. If the epistemic value of such features as emotion or embodiment are in need of more attention, it is because gendered power relations shaped the conceptualization of knowledge production as a practice exclusively concerned with a masculinized reason, with features such as the emotional and the embodied being conceptualized as feminine in contrast to masculine reason (Lloyd 1984). Furthermore, other misperceptions require correction. As many have noted, although historically feminist epistemology began by taking gender as its primary category of analysis, this is much too narrow a description of feminist epistemology today. As feminist epistemology was evolving as a field, the conceptions of gender employed within feminist theory were developing simultaneously, with it becoming clear that gender simply could not be reasonably understood in isolation from other categories of social identity that intersected with gender in various complex ways and themselves represented distinct (though intertwined) axes of oppression, such as race and ethnicity, class, sexuality, and able-­bodiedness. As many feminists of color stressed, a focus on gender in isolation from other aspects of social identity and their relation to privilege and oppression had led to impoverished understandings of the dynamics of gender within feminism and false claims about gendered perspectives on knowledge, all the while privileging the experiences of white straight women and failing to fully recognize the diversity of women’s lives (Crenshaw  1989; Lorde and Clarke  2007; Lugones and Spelman 1983). As feminist epistemologists have broadened the scope of their analyses to consider multiple axes of oppression and understand how they play out intersectionally, affecting women’s experiences of oppression differently, it has become inaccurate to consider feminist epistemology as a field operating with a sole emphasis on either women or gender as its primary analytical category in spite of this accurate description of its historical roots (Alcoff and Potter 1993). More recently, in recognition of its broader scope, some have described feminist epistemology as examining the epistemological dimensions of social justice rather than gender itself (Rooney  2017). Others describe their work as a kind of “liberatory epistemology,” tracing the connections between knowledge production and conditions of oppression, attending to any and all axes of oppression that might be relevant, and envisioning better ways of 2  Arguably, certain versions of feminist epistemology that focus exclusively on individuals as reasoners may constitute the occasional exception to this characterization of feminist epistemology as social epistemology (Grasswick 2013).

202   Grasswick knowing that can contribute to ending various forms of oppression (Tuana  2001a; Scheman 2001; Grasswick 2011). Regardless of the favored characterization, it is clear that feminist epistemology has evolved to a place where oppressions of various forms are of central concern, where the understandings of gendered perspectives that are brought to bear on our knowledge production practices are recognized as complex and intersecting with other perspectives connected to social identities, and where disagreements concerning how best to understand the ways in which forms of oppression intersect and inform people’s epistemic experiences and practices continue to further stimulate theoretical developments in the field.

Three Distinctive Features of Feminist Epistemology There is a great variety of projects and theories that identify as feminist epistemologies. Amongst them, some feminist epistemologies borrow from and at times work with various elements of other existing epistemological frameworks, even as they may push these frameworks in different directions. Given the variety of feminist epistemologies and the confluence of some of their interests with those of other epistemologies, it is reasonable to ask, “what is distinctive about feminist epistemology?” (Rooney 2012). In fact, there are several features commonly found within feminist epistemologies that differentiate feminist approaches from others. Three in particular are noteworthy.

Situated Knowing Perhaps the most well-­articulated distinctive feature of feminist epistemologies is the emphasis placed on the idea that knowing and knowers are socially situated; knowing is both shaped and limited by the social situation of the knower, and knowers are differentiated relative to social position (Haraway 1988; Harding 1991). Unsurprisingly, this idea leads feminists to attend to questions about who the specific knowers are in epistemic situations and whom the knowledge is for (Code 1991). Considerations are given to which features of the identities of knowers are epistemically relevant in particular circumstances and in what ways. Important implications of social situatedness are that any knowledge that results from socially situated activities of inquiry is not “aperspectival” in the sense of being completely divorced from a particular viewpoint. Further, because of our limitations and material embodiment, the knowledge we generate will never represent any full account of the world. The basic idea of social situatedness—that knowing is always done from a particular perspective, and that because one experiences the world from a particular social

Feminist Epistemology   203 location, this location significantly shapes one’s epistemic perspective—constitutes a broadly accepted claim across most varieties of feminist epistemology.3 Yet feminists have developed this idea in significantly different directions. For example, the basic view of the socially situated nature of knowers and knowledge has led many feminists to develop pluralistic accounts of knowing, arguing that what we call knowledge offers us particular ways of representing the world—ways that allow us to interact with the world quite successfully—but are never the only way of successfully representing the world (Longino 2002; Nelson 1990). These theorists have explored the implications of the realization that epistemic choices must be made in the kinds of knowing that we pursue and the kinds of theories we accept. They have connected these issues to the question of social location and the differentiation amongst knowers: are there certain ways of representing the world that serve the epistemic (and other) interests of some members of society better than others? An answer in the affirmative leads feminist epistemologists to take up questions concerning the need for democratic practices of knowing (Anderson  1995b) and new (social) understandings of the requirements of objectivity in which the critical interrogation of multiple perspectives is paramount (Longino 1990, 2002). The idea of situated knowing has also been developed in another prominent direction by feminist standpoint theorists. They have coupled the idea of the socially situated perspectival nature of knowing with a social theory (originally adapted from Marxian theory) that results in a view wherein those who occupy a socially underprivileged position hold a kind of epistemic privilege; that is to say, those who are socially underprivileged are more likely to either have access to or be able to develop a deeper understanding of the world (or parts of it) than are those who occupy a socially privileged position (Hartsock 1983). The idea is that those who are oppressed can access a “bifurcated consciousness” (Smith 1974), or a “double consciousness” (Du Bois 1990), through their occupying an “outsider-­within” (Collins  1991) position. The oppressed have insights to draw on from their histories within the dominant workings of the culture and its institutions (as do the socially privileged), but they also have their distinct experiences of oppression from which they can draw in coming to understand the world. Feminist standpoint theories have been extremely productive in drawing attention to the untapped epistemic resources of underrepresented groups within research fields, challenging the adequacy of many standard methodologies of the human and social sciences that ignore differences in social position and exposing various forms of bias in the process. As the work has developed, feminist standpoint theorists have become more precise in their considerations of exactly how and when social location makes a difference to one’s knowing potential, with many arguing that it is an empirical matter to determine those specific knowing contexts within which such an epistemic privilege will be relevant (Wylie 2003). Many also point out that gaining an epistemically 3  This is not to say that there are no exceptions to the socially situated dimension of feminist epistemologies. Louise Antony’s approach, for example, could be read as offering one such exception (Antony 1993).

204   Grasswick privileged standpoint needs to be struggled for (it does not arise automatically from social position) but yet is more easily reached by those in socially underprivileged positions than those in dominant positions (Hartsock 1983; Harding 1991). Alongside their productivity, standpoint theories have also perhaps been the most controversial forms of feminist epistemology (Harding  2009). Nonfeminists and feminists alike have expressed concern over the very idea of an epistemic privilege, in part because in some versions it seems to threaten epistemic chasms between differently located knowers that cannot be bridged (Walby 2001). For others, the concern is that claiming epistemic privilege is not an effective strategy for those in a nondominant cultural position, since it remains complicit with the problematic idea that some specifically socially positioned group of persons (dominant or marginalized) should have such authority (Bar On 1993). Throughout its now thirty-­year-­plus history, feminist standpoint theory has sought to explain what epistemic privilege amounts to, how a standpoint needs to be understood as a perspective that is attained through political struggle, and, perhaps most importantly, how the reality of multiple oppressions and positionalities implies that almost everyone must negotiate a degree of lack of epistemic privilege due to the almost ubiquitous occupation of relative social privilege with respect to some other persons.

Interactive Knowing In addition to situatedness, feminist epistemologists have also emphasized the many ways in which knowledge production is interactive; we know through each other. We depend on others through everyday interactions of testimony and through extensive cognitive divisions of labor where we essentially let others do the knowing for us (Code 1995; Daukas 2006; Fricker 2007; Grasswick 2011; Scheman 2001). This interactive nature of knowing is central in making it clear that feminist epistemologies are at their heart social epistemologies. The repercussions of recognizing the interactive nature of knowing shift the orientation of these epistemologies, generating work on the specific problems knowers face when they must depend on others for expertise or testimony (in contrast to the more traditional individualistic approaches to knowledge in postEnlightenment Western philosophy). Additionally, feminist epistemologies investigate ways in which apparent individual epistemic skills such as reasoning are actually developed through dialogue and communal practices that help us discern what counts as good knowing and reasoning (Baier 1985; Code 1991). Many feminists have also emphasized a different feature of the interactive nature of knowing: the important role of critical dialogue and engagement with others in identifying shared assumptions as well as opening up to criticism and further developing the assumptions, methods, and inferences relied upon in knowledge production (Longino  1990). For these theorists, how we engage with each other in epistemic practices not only is relevant with respect to how we can come to know things through

Feminist Epistemology   205 others’ testimony but is also crucial in determining how knowledge can be successfully generated in the first place. Feminist empiricists, with their interest in scientific knowledge, have focused on those features of our interdependence that can help or hinder the production of reliable empirical knowledge. Some have explored the role of communities as knowers as opposed to individuals (Nelson 1990), while others have focused on understanding how successful epistemic communities require a diversity of voices, interacting in epistemically healthy ways to achieve some version of objectivity (Longino 1990, 2002). Perhaps the most significant implication of this feminist acknowledgment of the interactive nature of knowing is the epistemic role of power dynamics. If knowing is accomplished through social interactions, then power dynamics, which are an inevitable component of social relations and interactions, need to be investigated for their potential epistemic effects. Social interactions and their associated power dynamics can affect whom we trust for knowledge as well as the level of self-­trust one grants oneself as a knower (Jones 2012). Relatedly, a recognition of the interactive nature of knowing has led many feminist epistemologists to insist on the need to examine the ethical dimension of epistemic practices; as soon as we are dealing with interactive practices, ethical concerns arise with respect to how we treat our fellow inquirers and what epistemic effects those treatments could have. This is an important feature of feminist epistemologies, insofar as they resist the dominant framework in contemporary Western epistemology that draws firm divisions between ethical and epistemic (Code 2006).

Practical and Contextual Approaches Finally, a third distinctive feature of feminist epistemology lies in its practical and contextual approaches. Rather than provide purified, idealized, or isolated epistemological accounts, feminists put forth practical and contextual approaches to epistemology that see our epistemic tasks as thoroughly embedded in our social lives and shaped in part by our nonepistemic goals and concerns (Addelson 1993; Code 2006; Longino 1989).4 This embeddedness in our social lives confers an awareness amongst feminist epistemologists that whenever, as epistemologists, we abstract from our epistemic situations in our analyses, we run the risk of missing important social elements of our practical epistemic activities that play a significant role in shaping the knowledge results. For example, feminist philosophers of science have tended to be less sanguine than many nonfeminist philosophers of science concerning attempts to 4  This practical and contextual approach is different from an “applied” epistemology (an example is Coady 2012) that takes our epistemological theories and applies them to our real-­world epistemic problems. Instead, feminists tend to create their epistemologies with real-­world problems in mind right from the beginning, by asking such questions as “what are the epistemic dimensions of gender oppression and what kind of transformative knowledge is required in order to attain gender justice?”

206   Grasswick understand objectivity as achieved by virtue of adherence to a strict rule or procedurebased methodology. Instead, these feminists have drawn attention to the many ways in which our social practices are inevitably employed in developing scientific knowledge, shaping it in specific ways. They have argued that culturally circulating gender biases (among other biases concerning social identity) shape not only the direction of scientific research but also the background assumptions that play a significant role within scientific theory choice (Longino and Doell 1996; Martin 1996). Furthermore, culturally specific gendered norms concerning how men and women comport themselves affect the quality of men’s and women’s participation in their epistemic communities. If, due to such norms, women are more likely to refrain from being assertive (or are fearful that their assertiveness might be negatively perceived), they may be less likely to provide the critical engagement with the assumptions, evidence, and methodological frameworks that is required for an epistemic community to do its epistemic work well. Furthermore, if due to gendered biases women are not taken as seriously as inquirers, the communal results will not be as trustworthy (Rolin 2002). For many feminist epistemologists, then, knowledge production is best understood not in terms of an abstract methodology but in terms of more or less successful social epistemic practices. Their work becomes framed in terms of how to develop robust social practices of knowing within specific social contexts, rather than developing abstract and idealized theories of what constitutes knowledge, justification, or objectivity. When they do consider such concepts as these, their analyses often include contextual parameters and reference to larger social practices with features and goals other than just the epistemic. Their approaches share affinities with pragmatist epistemologies, and several feminists at times draw on the resources of the pragmatist tradition (Seigfried 2001; McHugh 2015; Sullivan 2001).

The Intersections of the Three Features Importantly, these three social dimensions of knowing that are emphasized in feminist epistemologies to varying degrees—social situatedness, the interactive nature of knowing, and the practical/contextual nature of knowing—combine in ways that elevate certain concerns in feminist epistemological analyses and push its theories in particular directions. For example, the feminist claim that knowing is socially situated—shaped and limited by social location—combines with a recognition of the interactive nature of knowing and adds to the pressing need to engage with others in knowing and grapple with the epistemic challenges of such work. If I cannot access a certain form of knowing myself because of the limits of my social situation, I have to depend on the quality of my epistemic relationships with others for important forms of knowledge. Certain developments amongst standpoint theorists who seek to rescue their theory from the concerns of epistemic chasms between knowers of different social positions demonstrate an attentiveness to the interactive nature of knowing. In Sandra Harding’s version of

Feminist Epistemology   207 standpoint theory, for example, the relevant standpoint is understood as requiring that research and research questions start from the lives of the marginalized. This position allows for those from socially privileged positions to participate as inquirers in such research, but it requires that they apply a critical reflexivity to their own position and attempt to take up the standpoints of those in socially underprivileged positions (Harding  1991). This can only be fully successful through engagement with those in other positions, which in turn requires developing robust relationships of trust across parties, a topic of significant development in feminist epistemology (Frost-­Arnold 2014; Daukas 2006; Scheman 2001; Grasswick 2010, 2017). In another example, the feminist practical and contextual approach when combined with attention to the interactive nature of knowing and a recognition of differently situated knowers leads feminists to develop particular kinds of analyses of testimony that focus on the contextually based social power relations and their influence on testimonial practices. This approach marks feminist analyses of testimony as different from many of the more analytical and abstract analyses found in contemporary epistemology of the nonfeminist variety (such as Goldman 2001; Kitcher 1990; Lackey and Sosa 2006). For example, feminist epistemologists have focused their attention on the ways in which the structure of the “credibility economy” (Fricker 2007) maps onto social power differences, not just differences in epistemic abilities (Jones  2002; Alcoff  2001; Fricker  2007; Daukas  2006; Dotson  2011,  2012). In short, “testimonial injustices” occur when social identity prejudices operate to deny a knower the epistemic credibility she deserves on the basis of her epistemic merits. According to Fricker, a testimonial injustice is a kind of “epistemic injustice” that has both an epistemic and a moral dimension insofar as it is a wrong done to an agent in their capacity as a knower (Fricker 2007).

Recent Trends in Feminist Epistemology The themes of situatedness, interactiveness, and a practical/contextual approach continue to shape current work in feminist epistemology. Now that the groundwork has been laid for the field, much of the recent work in feminist epistemology attempts to develop further a rich repertoire of specific epistemological concepts that help feminists understand the impact of social power on our epistemic practices and explore how this impact can be confronted, all the while recognizing that knowing always occurs in a social context of power relations. Work on “epistemic injustice” and its variety of forms illustrates such a recent development of a powerful concept capturing the connections between the epistemic and the ethical, and helping to explain how our social practices of knowing can be corrupted by problematic power relations (see, e.g., Pohlhaus, this volume; Fricker 2007; Dotson 2012; Pohlhaus 2012; Medina 2013; Townley 2006). A closely connected area of recent development focuses on the concept of ignorance. Alongside critical race theorists, feminists have argued that epistemologists need to

208   Grasswick attend to not only the concepts and practices related to knowledge formation but also those related to the actual construction and maintenance of ignorance that is shaped by social power relations (see Medina, this volume; Mills 2007; Alcoff 2007; Tuana 2006; Code 2007; Townley 2006; Dotson 2012; Pohlhaus 2012). Another recent trend in feminist epistemology concerns a willingness to draw on new developments within what can be characterized as nonfeminist epistemology. Moving beyond their initial criticisms of abstract, individualistic, and generalizable traditional epistemological frameworks that paid little attention to the specific epistemic needs of differently situated and materially embodied inquirers, feminists are finding valuable resources in some—though not all—of the recent directions visible in “mainstream” epistemology. For example, feminist attention to implicit bias and its epistemic effects (Brownstein and Saul 2016) can draw on naturalized epistemologies that are committed to ensuring that our epistemologies be informed by empirical studies of how we actually do go about forming beliefs. The burgeoning field of social epistemology has also been a rich resource for feminists thinking about the multiple ways in which culture, social interactions, and structures of communities are integral to our epistemic practices (Longino 2002). And virtue epistemology has been harnessed by feminists to consider how to frame the virtues needed to inquire well within social contexts of oppression, and how to frame epistemic virtues of both individuals and communities (Daukas 2011; Anderson 2012; Fricker 2007). Phyllis Rooney also notes that feminist epistemologists share with several other contemporary mainstream epistemologists a “value turn in epistemology,” a direction that broadens the scope of epistemological questions and incorporates concerns regarding what kinds of knowledge and understanding matter to us (Rooney 2012). As a result of some of these intersections, it is fair to say that at least some mainstream epistemologists have begun to engage with explicitly feminist work, as they develop epistemological themes that either build upon or are conducive to features found in feminist epistemologies. One example of this engagement can be found in epistemic injustice literature that has captured the attention of many social epistemologists (especially testimony theorists) beyond those whose work is explicitly feminist.5 At the same time, Phyllis Rooney has pointed out that in spite of some of these shared directions, what most clearly marks feminist epistemology as distinctive from mainstream epistemology unfortunately remains its continued marginalized status within the larger field (Rooney 2012). While future intellectual connections between nonfeminist and explicitly feminist epistemologists should be welcomed where they are helpful, feminist epistemology will likely always stand apart from other forms of epistemology in its central focus on the epistemic needs of the oppressed. Feminist epistemology is first and foremost a field devoted to exploring the epistemological questions that are most pressing for feminists as they seek to develop knowledge of and for the oppressed. 5  One example of such engagement can be found in the 2010 Episteme discussion of epistemic injustice that included contributions from David Coady, Sanford Goldberg, and Christopher Hookway.

Feminist Epistemology   209

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Feminist Epistemology   211 Hartsock, Nancy. 1983. “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism.” In Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, edited by Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka, 283–310. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Hookway, Christopher. 2010. “Some Varieties of Epistemic Injustice: Reflections on Fricker.” Episteme 7 (2): 151–63. https://doi.org/10.3366/epi.2010.0005. Intemann, Kristen. 2010. “25 Years of Feminist Empiricism and Standpoint Theory: Where Are We Now?” Hypatia 25 (4): 778–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527–2001.2010.01138.x. Jaggar, Alison. 1996. “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology.” In Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, 2nd ed., edited by Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, 166–90. New York: Routledge. Jones, Karen. 2002. “The Politics of Credibility.” In A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, edited by Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt, 154–76. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Jones, Karen. 2012. “The Politics of Intellectual Self-Trust.” Social Epistemology 26 (2): 237–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2011.652215. Kitcher, Philip. 1990. “The Division of Cognitive Labor.” Journal of Philosophy 87 (1): 5–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/2026796. Lackey, Jennifer, and Ernest Sosa, eds. 2006. The Epistemology of Testimony. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lloyd, Genevieve. 1984. The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Longino, Helen E. 1989. “Can There Be a Feminist Science?” In Feminism and Science, edited by Nancy Tuana, 45–57. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Longino, Helen E. 1990. Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Longino, Helen E. 2002. The Fate of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Longino, Helen E., and Ruth Doell. 1996. “Body, Bias, and Behaviour: A Comparative Analysis of Reasoning in Two Areas of Biological Science.” In Feminism and Science, edited by Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E. Longino, 73–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lorde, Audre, and Cheryl Clarke. 2007. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Reprint ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Lugones, María C., and Elizabeth V. Spelman. 1983. “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice.’” Women’s Studies International Forum 6 (6): 573–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/0277–5395(83)90019–5. Martin, Emily. 1996. “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles.” In Feminism and Science, edited by Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E. Longino, 103–17. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McHugh, Nancy Arden. 2015. The Limits of Knowledge: Generating Pragmatist Feminist Cases for Situated Knowing. Albany: State University of New York Press. Medina, José. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Mills, Charles. 2007. “White Ignorance.” In Race and the Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 13–38. Albany: State University of New York Press. Nelson, Lynn Hankinson. 1990. Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

212   Grasswick Pohlhaus, Gaile. 2012. “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of  Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance.” Hypatia 27 (4): 715–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1527–2001.2011.01222.x. Rolin, Kristina. 2002. “Gender and Trust in Science.” Hypatia 17 (4): 95–120. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1527–2001.2002.tb01075.x. Rooney, Phyllis. 1995. “Rationality and the Politics of Gender Difference.” Metaphilosophy 26 (1/2): 22–45. Rooney, Phyllis. 2012. “What Is Distinctive about Feminist Epistemology at 25?” In Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, edited by Sharon Crasnow and Anita Superson, 339–75. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rooney, Phyllis. 2017. “Rationality and Objectivity in Feminism.” In The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader, and Alison Stone, 243–55. New York and London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Scheman, Naomi. 2001. “Epistemology Resuscitated: Objectivity as Trustworthiness.” In Engendering Rationalities, edited by Nancy Tuana and Sandra Morgen, 23–52. Albany: State University of New York Press. Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. 2001. “Beyond Epistemology: From a Pragmatist Feminist Experiential Standpoint.” In Engendering Rationalities, edited by Nancy Tuana and Sandra Morgen, 99–121. Albany: State University of New York Press. Smith, Dorothy E. 1974. “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology.” Sociological Inquiry 44 (1): 7–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1974.tb00718.x. Sullivan, Shannon. 2001. Living across and through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Townley, Cynthia. 2006. “Toward a Revaluation of Ignorance.” Hypatia 21 (3): 37–55. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1527–2001.2006.tb01112.x. Tuana, Nancy. 2001a. “Introduction.” In Engendering Rationalities, edited by Nancy Tuana and Sandra Morgen, 1–20. Albany: State University of New York Press. Tuana, Nancy. 2001b. “Material Locations: An Interactionist Alternative to Realism/Social Constructivism.” In Engendering Rationalities, edited by Nancy Tuana and Sandra Morgen, 221–43. Albany: State University of New York Press. Tuana, Nancy. 2006. “The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women’s Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance.” Hypatia 21 (3): 1–19. Walby, Sylvia. 2001. “Against Epistemological Chasms: The Science Question in Feminism Revisited.” Signs 26 (2): 485–509. Wylie, Alison. 2003. “Why Standpoint Matters.” In Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophies of Science and Technology, edited by Robert Figueroa and Sandra Harding, 26–48. New York: Routledge. Wylie, Alison, and Lynn Hankinson Nelson. 2007. “Coming to Terms with the Values of Science: Insights from the Feminist Science Studies Scholarship.” In Value-Free Science? Ideals and Illusions, edited by Harold Kincaid, John Dupré, and Alison Wylie, 58–86. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 2005. On Female Body Experience: “Throwing like a Girl” and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 17

M eta ph ysics Mari Mikkola

Introduction Over the past few decades, feminist philosophers have advanced influential arguments in ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and political philosophy. However, until recent years feminist philosophical interactions with metaphysics have been far less prominent— and at times outright antagonistic from both sides (for more, see Battersby 1998; Haslanger and Ásta 2011). Contemporary mainstream metaphysics can be highly abstracted and detached from common-­sense reality. This sort of metaphysics typically investigates the basic structure of reality (what really or fundamentally exists) and its nature (what kinds of entities exist). It examines reality’s putative structure carved in its “joints,” where the task of metaphysics is to elucidate that structure (Sider 2009, 2011). Analytic feminist philosophers, by contrast, aim both to critique patriarchal social structures by utilizing mainstream philosophical tools and to shape mainstream philosophy with the help of feminist political insights. Feminist philosophy is typically distinctive in being framed around specific concepts and background beliefs, which are sensitive to concerns about gender justice. This all appears to be irrelevant to metaphysics: surely politics cannot tell us anything informative about reality’s fundamental structure! Moreover, metaphysics seems to be a paradigm value-­neutral endeavor, which makes it prima facie incompatible with feminism’s explicitly normative stance and emphasis on how gender makes a difference to philosophical inquiry. Feminist philosophy involves advocacy: public support for a cause and speaking on behalf of some group. Metaphysics, however, is politically neutral: objective facts speak for themselves and are independent of politics. Bluntly put: metaphysics aims at the truth, while feminist philosophy is guided by a political ideology that allegedly interferes with the pursuit of truth. The gap between feminism and metaphysics looks deep and irreconcilable.

214   Mikkola Nonetheless, interest in feminist metaphysics has exploded over the past few years.1 The basic ideas behind feminist metaphysics can be summed up as follows: it is about negotiating the natural (Haslanger  2000a) and going beyond the fundamental (Barnes 2014). Feminist metaphysics places prime importance on examining “to what extent the central concepts and categories of metaphysics, in terms of which we make sense of our reality, could be value laden in ways that are particularly gendered” (Haslanger and Ásta  2011, 1). Feminist investigations have expanded the scope of metaphysics in holding that metaphysical tools can help advance debates on topics outside of traditional metaphysical inquiry (e.g., on gender, sex, sexuality). Feminist philosophers have also discussed common metaphysical topics like properties, relations, the self, nature, essence, and identity from a feminist perspective (Alcoff  2006; Antony  1998; Ásta  2011,  2013,  2018; Heinämaa  2011; Meyers  1997; Mikkola  2017a; Warnke  2008; Witt  1993,  1995,  2011c). Furthermore, feminist philosophers typically bring new methodological insights to bear on traditional ways of doing philosophy. Feminist metaphysicians too have recently begun interrogating the methods of metaphysics and they have raised questions about what metaphysics as a discipline is in the business of doing (Barnes 2014; Haslanger 2012; Mikkola 2015, 2018). In light of these developments, one issue has become increasingly prominent: is feminist metaphysics compatible with and part of mainstream metaphysics? Why aren’t feminist metaphysical questions simply part of social philosophy? Other areas of philosophy ask metaphysical questions, but there is no need therefore to include them in metaphysics. Metaethics examines (among other things) the nature of the good and the right. These examinations deal with straightforward metaphysical issues in moral philosophy, but metaethicists do not subsequently wish to be considered metaphysicians. Bluntly put: not all metaphysical questions belong to metaphysics, nor should they. It might then seem that feminist philosophers can continue raising their discipline-­relevant metaphysical questions without these questions needing to count as metaphysics. Elsewhere I have argued that pragmatic reasons to do with the state of academic philosophy suggest that feminist metaphysics should be included in mainstream metaphysics (Mikkola 2016). Here, I will consider the compatibility of feminist and mainstream metaphysics from a different angle. I will examine whether one prominent strand of contemporary analytic metaphysics, Frank Jackson’s (1998) “serious metaphysics,” undermines feminist metaphysics. I will first present in more detail themes central to feminist metaphysics. Next I will outline Jackson’s view. Finally, I will consider the compatibility of feminist and “serious” metaphysics. Perhaps frustratingly, my view is that feminist metaphysics both is and is not compatible with Jackson’s metaphysics, depending on how we understand his project. Nevertheless, 1  The watershed event was the publication of Sally Haslanger’s important collection of papers written over the past twenty years, Resisting Reality (2012). Of course, this collection did not invent feminist metaphysics and some of the first “head-­on” feminist metaphysical papers were published twenty years earlier in Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt’s ground-­breaking and still-­timely collection A Mind of One’s Own (1993). The first ever collection on the topic, Feminist Metaphysics, also edited by Witt, was published in 2011.

Metaphysics   215 I  suggest, this may not be because feminist metaphysicians are ­misguided; rather, issues internal to Jackson’s view generate the gap.

Negotiating the Natural and Going beyond the Fundamental Feminist metaphysics is unapologetically normative: oppressive social relations are sometimes justified in that they mirror “our” human natures and feminist metaphysics (in part) aims to demonstrate how some putatively natural properties and relations are in fact socially constructed (Antony  1998; Ásta  2018; Haslanger  1995,  2000a,  2000b, 2003). To illustrate, consider feminist work on gender. Ordinary speakers typically take the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ to be coextensive: women and men are human females and males, respectively, where the former is just another way to talk about the latter. Feminists typically disagree and many have endorsed a sex/gender distinction. Its standard formulation holds that ‘sex’ denotes a biological classification of human females and males on the basis of chromosomes, sex organs, hormones, or other anatomical features. By contrast, ‘gender’ denotes a social classification of women and men, which depends on factors like societal roles, positions, behavior, and self-ascription. The main motivation for making the distinction was to counter biological determinism: the view that one’s sex determines one’s social roles and cultural traits. Historical examples demonstrate how social, cultural, and psychological differences were taken to be manifestations of some underlying “real” or “natural” differences between women and men, where these differences were used to justify a range of oppressive social conditions. For example: it would be inappropriate to grant women political rights if they are “by nature” unsuited to have those rights; and doing so would also be futile since women (due to their supposed nature) would simply be uninterested in exercising them. In response, feminists have argued that many putatively natural ­differences have social origins. Manifest gender differences are socially constructed, not carved in nature’s joints. One task of feminist metaphysics, then, is to show how apparently given facts about properties, relations, and dualisms in no sense capture the way things really are (Haslanger and Ásta 2011). Feminist metaphysics aims to debunk supposedly natural facts to uncover their social nature (Haslanger 2003) and to show that classifications central to feminist concerns are in fact constitutively constructed (Haslanger 1995): for example, in defining womanhood, we must make reference to social factors, not anatomy. Of course, which social factors fix gender is an ongoing debate within feminist philosophy (see Ásta 2011; Bach  2012; Frye  1996,  2011; Haslanger 2000b; Mikkola  2009,  2011; Stoljar  1995,  2011; Young 1997; Witt 2011b). The metaphysics of gender—what gender is—demonstrates the centrality of the notion of social construction in feminist work. There are, however, many ways in which we can understand this notion, and feminist metaphysicians have done painstaking

216   Mikkola work to elucidate it (Ásta 2013, 2015, 2018; Haslanger 1995; Diaz-­Leon 2013; Mallon 2007). Consider another example to illustrate further how something can be socially constructed. Many people, including many feminists, have taken sex ascriptions to be solely a matter of biology with no social or cultural dimension. It is commonplace to think that there are only two sexes and that biological sex classifications are utterly unproblematic. By contrast, feminist philosophers and biologists have disputed this and argued that sex classification is not a nonevaluative matter. To make sense of this, it is helpful to distinguish object and idea construction (Haslanger 2003): ideological forces and material social conditions can be said to construct certain kinds of objects (e.g., sexed bodies) and certain kinds of ideas (e.g., sex concepts). Take the object construction of sexed bodies. Surgical interventions offer the most explicit demonstration of how sex can be “made” by us. But there are other, subtler ways such construction takes place. Secondary sex characteristics are affected by material social practices. In some societies, females’ lower social status has resulted in them receiving less to eat, and the lack of nutrition (among other factors) has had the effect of making women relatively smaller in size (Jaggar  1983). Uniformity in muscular shape, size, and strength within sex categories is not straightforwardly caused by genes and hormones but depends heavily on nutrition and exercise opportunities. Were such opportunities equalized, it is thought that bodily dimorphism would diminish (Fausto-­Sterling 1993, 2000). These examples suggest that apparently sex-­specific features like body shape and size thought not to be affected by social and cultural factors are, in fact, causally constructed: social beliefs about food and exercise have causal efficacy in shaping the way we are embodied. Causal construction of sex takes place against the backdrop of what is attributed to us by others as exemplars of supposedly dimorphic sex categories. In this sense, certain conceptual schemes and ideas underwrite sex construction. Feminist work further examines the idea construction of sex concepts (Ayala and Vasilyeva  2015; Butler 1990, 1993; Stone 2007). The concept of sex is said to be socially produced in the sense that what counts as sex depends on what we take to be socially meaningful in particular contexts. What properties we take to be definitive of sex results in different systems of classification and there may be no conceptual-­scheme-­independent way to settle the issue. In this case, our sex classificatory scheme is a strong pragmatic construction: social factors wholly determine our use of the scheme and the scheme fails to represent accurately any independent “facts of the matter” (Haslanger 1995). This is reminiscent of Hilary Putnam’s (1981, 1996) “internal realism” and his example of counting objects. A common-­sense realist and “a mereologist” encounter entities x, y, and z. How many objects are there? For the former, there are just three. But for the latter, there are (at least) seven: in addition to those mentioned, there are the mereological sums of x + y, y + z, x + z, and x + y + z. But how many objects are there really, and which conceptual scheme is the true one? For Putnam, these questions cannot be answered. Doing so would require an impossible God’s-­eye perspective on reality from which we look “in” while standing outside. And so, to think that there is some scheme-­independent way of counting objects is an illusion. The situation with sex as a strong pragmatic construction is parallel. The ordinary conception has it that there are only two sex categories (male and

Metaphysics   217 female). This conception, however, fails to accommodate intersex and trans people. “Our” conceptions of sex vary relative to what we think of as significant and salient for the task at hand, and there is no obvious way to settle what sex amounts to that is “carved in nature’s joints.” Interests and prior beliefs make a huge difference to our choice of conceptual schemes. Feminist metaphysics thus aims to make explicit how putatively natural classifications are actually social by unmasking politically and morally suspect interests and biases that ground classificatory systems. Haslanger calls this form of social constructionism “critical social realism,” which aims to reveal real “differences that are socially constituted but not recognized, or fully recognized, to be so . . . [where] calling attention to this will . . . provide critical leverage in challenging how we think and act” (2012, 197). In negotiating the natural, feminist philosophers have extended the scope of ­metaphysics. Nonetheless, their work ill fits what many take to be the central task of metaphysics. On some prevalent conceptions, metaphysics is in the business of elucidating the fundamental structure of reality. For instance, Ted Sider holds that metaphysics is about “figuring out the right categories [carved in reality’s joints] for describing the world” (2011, 1). As he sees it: The joint-­carving notions are fundamental notions; a fact is fundamental when it is stated in joint-­carving terms. A central task of metaphysics has always been to discern the ultimate or fundamental [structure of] reality underlying the appearances. (2011, vii)

Elizabeth Barnes (2014) argues that because feminist metaphysics aims to go “beyond the fundamental,” conceptions of metaphysics like Sider’s rule out feminist metaphysics from the start.2 Serious and “deep” metaphysics involves substantive disputes and questions, instead of superficial and verbal ones. “Is the Pope a bachelor?” is a merely conceptual question; “Is there lithium on Mars?” is a substantive one (Sider  2011). Whether a question is substantive depends on “the extent to which its terms carve at the joints; that is, that the question concerns the world’s fundamental structure” (Sider 2011, 6). A question is nonsubstantive if its answer “depends on which various candidate meanings we adopt, where the candidates are equally joint-­carving and where no other candidate is more joint-­carving” (Sider 2011, 129). The importance of substantive questions allegedly hinges on epistemic value. The goal is to grasp the world “in its own terms” due to which “wielders of non-­joint-­carving concepts are worse inquirers” (Sider 2011, 61). Such inquirers are apparently missing out on some important knowledge. Not all nonsubstantive debates are worthless: they may be metaphysically shallow but conceptually deep in revealing something important about our conceptual schemes (Sider 2011, 70). But metaphysics is ultimately about deep, substantive disputes. This way of demarcating the discipline of metaphysics has prima facie problematic results for feminist investigations. Feminist metaphysics is not about fundamentality 2  For Barnes, the same is true of Schaffer’s (2009) and Dorr’s (2005) metaphysics too.

218   Mikkola and it does not consider the nature of gender to be carved in reality’s joints. Disputes about gender seem to be upfront nonsubstantive and hence outside of metaphysics proper. This is bad news. If Sider is right, feminist metaphysicians are mistaken about the metaphysical status of their work. Elsewhere I have argued that even by Sider’s own lights the situation is not quite as alarming (Mikkola 2017b). Depending on how we frame the substantive/conventional distinction, either feminist metaphysical debates are properly metaphysical or no debates are properly metaphysical. The former vindicates feminist metaphysics, while the latter renders all of metaphysics merely conventional, in which case feminists are no worse off. However, what about other permutations of mainstream metaphysics? In the remainder of this chapter I will consider how feminist metaphysics fares against Jackson’s project of serious metaphysics.

Jackson’s Metaphysics Although metaphysics is concerned with existence, its task is not simply to offer a list of what there is. Instead, Jackson holds that metaphysicians “seek a comprehensive account of some subject-­matter . . . in terms of a limited number of more or less basic notions” (1998, 4). When our account is comprehensive and limited enough is up for debate; and Jackson’s metaphysics investigates where those limits should fall. In being discriminatory about what to include in the list of “basic ingredients” when providing an account of some subject matter, we will inevitably have to either eliminate or locate some apparent features of reality since not everything that putatively exists will be found in the list of reality’s basic ingredients. The question then becomes whether nonfundamental or derivative entities can nevertheless be located in reality or not. If not, we must give up ontological commitments to those entities. For instance, take colors. If colors do not feature in the basic ingredients of reality but are derivative entities, where their existence depends on the existence of some more fundamental entities, we have to “find” them in the world through different means than by analyzing the fundamental structure of reality. If we wish to be ontologically committed to colors but cannot locate them, we must give up our commitment. In short, we must accept that (contra appearances) colors do not figure in our ontology. How do we settle the matter and “When does a putative feature of our world have a place in the account some serious metaphysics tells of what our world is like?” (Jackson 1998, 5). The answer lies in Jackson’s proposed entry by entailment thesis: If the feature is entailed by the account told in the terms favoured by the metaphysics in question, it has a place in the account told in the favoured terms. . . . [T]he one and only way of having a place in an account told in some set of preferred terms is by being entailed by that account. (1998, 5)

Consider the following example to illustrate. Physicalism roughly holds that the world is entirely physical in nature. There is nothing but and nothing over and above the physical

Metaphysics   219 world. The full “inventory” of what there is is equivalent to a full inventory of the instantiated physical properties and relations (Jackson  1998, 9). However, if (this form of) physicalism is true, psychological properties like mental states are prima facie ruled out. The challenge is to locate psychological properties “in the world”; or failing that, we must eliminate them from our ontology altogether. Following Jackson, mental states gain entry by entailment. Roughly, they gain entry if the psychological is entailed by the physical, where “any psychological sentence about our world is entailed by the physical nature of our world” (Jackson 1998, 24). Take Φ to be a “hugely complex, purely physical account of our world,” while Ψ is “any true sentence which is about the psychological nature of our world” (Jackson 1998, 26).3 The referents of Ψ gain entry to our world or are located (rather than being in need of elimination) if Φ entails Ψ. And “entail” here is not to be understood as “conceptually entail” or “a priori entail.” Rather, for Jackson, it means necessary truth preservation: necessary determination or fixing. Even if we cannot actually construct Φ, the general point holds. Jackson considers the (allegedly) true sentence in English “The average size of houses in 1990 is under 1,000 square metres” and writes: We know that this sentence is entailed by a very long conjunction made up of conjuncts of the form “–is a house in 1990 of such and such a size” together with a conjunct that says how many houses there are, in an idealized version of English with distinct names for every distinct house. Despite the fact that we will never go close to writing down this sentence, we understand perfectly well what has just been claimed—as is evidenced by the fact that we know that it is true. (1998, 26)

Existence of Gender Jackson’s central idea is that even if some putative features of reality are not found on the fundamental level, we need not yet ontologically give them up: they can gain entry by entailment in the aforementioned way. For feminist discussions this is significant. Even if common objects of feminist metaphysics (like gender) do not figure in the “basic ingredients” of reality, if they are nevertheless entailed in the aforementioned manner and analogously to (say) mental states, we need not conclude that those objects are in need of elimination. In this case, feminist debates about the nature of gender are not merely conventional and conceptual. Rather, they will figure in “the account some serious metaphysics tells of what our world is like” (Jackson 1998, 5). Can we then locate gender? Does gender gain entry by entailment? Consider the following sentence G.4 G: Ψ [Jill is a woman] in virtue of Φ [Jill being systematically socially subordinated, where observed or imagined evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction “marks” Jill as a target for this kind of treatment]. 3  I am simplifying Jackson’s account considerably, but nothing hangs on these simplifications here. 4  This formulation draws on Haslanger’s (2000b) understanding of gender. For more, see my 2015.

220   Mikkola Prima facie if Φ entails Ψ, gender—being a woman—gains entry by entailment and we need not ontologically eliminate gender. This raises a number of issues though. To begin with, the sense of entailment relevant for Jackson’s metaphysics is not conceptual but necessarily truth preserving: it necessarily fixes “the way the world is.” Feminist philosophers, however, deny this relative to gender. Even if Jill is systematically socially subordinated in the previous sense, this does not determine that Jill is a woman because the existence and nature of the gender system is utterly contingent. There is nothing inevitable or necessary about the world being divided along our extant gender categories or along any gender categories at all. In being socially constructed, the existence of gender is neither inevitable nor necessary. This seems to be a clear way in which gender fails to gain entry by entailment. According to Jackson’s metaphysics, we should abandon our ontological commitment to gender—something that most feminist metaphysicians will probably resist given that gender seemingly plays a causal role in how reality is socially structured. Jackson’s metaphysics appears to entail that most features of reality that are of central importance to feminist metaphysicians should be eliminated from our ontology, which would pull the rug from under feminism. After all, if there is no gender, how and why to strive for gender justice? This might be too fast though. Feminist metaphysicians might challenge Jackson’s distinction between conceptual and necessarily truth-­preserving entailment. There are easy examples that demonstrate how the two come apart. The sentence “x is a vixen” conceptually entails that “x is a female fox,” but the former sentence does not metaphysically fix the truth of the latter sentence. For one thing, these are simply two ways of saying the same thing. But is the same true of sentences like G that pertain to socially constructed features of reality? This is not obviously so. To develop this idea, consider essences in Kit Fine’s (1994) definitional sense. On this view, a real definition of x reveals x’s essential nature. And so, the sentence “What it is to be a woman is to occupy a sex-­marked socially subordinate position” provides the definition for being a woman, which is the essence of womanhood (understood as a gender trait). The determination relation would thus be translated into: Womanhood ontologically depends on occupying a sex-­marked subordinate social position, just in case occupying a sex-­marked subordinate social position is a constituent in a real definition of womanhood.

The essential definitional nature of the relevant part of the first relatum (occupying a particular sex-­marked subordinate social position) determines and necessitates the ­definitional nature of the relevant part of the second relatum (being a woman).5 Why should we think that this is more than “merely” conceptual entailment? In developing a Finean account relative to ontological dependence relations, Kathrin Koslicki writes: 5  This generates a slight problem. The Finean account of real definitions pertains to the objects themselves, not to the linguistic expressions with which we refer to them. It might seem, though, that socially constructed natures provide merely nominal, not real, definitions. This does not, however, undermine my proposal. The nominal definition of social entities just is their real definition.

Metaphysics   221 A real definition, if successful, must at least entail identity: that is, the two noun phrases flanking the relational expression in a statement expressing a real definition must be at least extensionally equivalent. . . . And yet statements expressing a real definition must also accomplish more than simply to offer two different ways of singling out the same entity or entities, since the definiens must also be explanatory of the essential nature of the definiendum. (2012, 198)

This, I take it, sets the case of gender apart from the case of vixens: Jill’s womanhood (Ψ) is explained in terms of her sex-­marked subordinate social position occupancy (Φ). These are not just two ways of saying the same thing; rather, G tells us something illuminating about social reality. A debunking account of womanhood tells us that, contra everyday beliefs, being a woman is not about being female—it is about occupying a particular social position (Haslanger 2000b). G tells us something about “our” world that would otherwise have been left unexplained. It captures a determination relation that is not merely conceptual, albeit being a relation that does not fix the way the world necessarily is. In this case, there is something about gender (and perhaps other socially constructed features) that does not fit the framework of Jackson’s metaphysics given the way that he understands ‘entailment.’ But (one might say) the problem is not with gender eluding existence; rather, the problem lies with Jackson’s metaphysics having a woefully restricted scope from the start, due to which features of reality important for feminist endeavors cannot but fail to gain entry. Is feminist metaphysics then compatible with Jackson’s metaphysics? As I see it, the answer is both yes and no. On his account, putative features of our world that can be located through entry by entailment are real features of our world. So, any features that feminist metaphysics deals with that gain entry by entailment are safe. In principle, “serious metaphysics” therefore is compatible with feminist metaphysics. However, de facto I suspect that most (if not all) features of reality that feminist metaphysics deals with will fail to gain entry because of the way that Jackson understands ‘entailment.’ In this case, his metaphysics cannot be used to do meaningful feminist work, and feminist metaphysical debates come out as “merely” conceptual insofar as the objects of those debates are in need of being eliminated from our ontology.

The Future of Feminist Metaphysics My previous discussion suggests that Jackson’s distinction between conceptual and necessary determination fails to capture some important phenomena “out there.” If most socially constructed objects are neither “merely” conceptual nor necessary, this might demonstrate that Jackson’s conception of determination is in need of revision. If we start with his account of determination, socially constructed aspects of reality probably have to be eliminated following his entry by entailment thesis. But if we start thinking about determination with socially constructed features in mind, we will probably end up with

222   Mikkola quite a different account, one that does not so strictly distinguish merely contingent conceptual determination from truth-­preserving necessary determination. This points to some future directions that feminist meta-­metaphysics might take. Feminist philosophy is traditionally taken to proceed by way of critique (Lloyd 1995). This fits the earlier characterization of feminist metaphysics: that its role is to investigate and critique ways in which metaphysical theories and notions might be questionable from a feminist perspective. However, one might wonder whether feminism has more to contribute to metaphysics than just a critical outlook that identifies deficiencies in current work. Self-­proclaimed feminist metaphysicians seemingly hold that feminist insights can and should have a constructive role: not only to identify masculinist assumptions in metaphysical theories but also to offer transformative metaphysical models informed by feminist concerns. Such transformative models might be developed in two ways (see my 2015, 2018). First, we might ask: are feminist political and moral values necessarily inadmissible when making ontological theory choices? Elizabeth Anderson (1995) argues that value-­neutral models in science falsely presuppose that political and moral considerations compete with evidence and facts. Value-­neutral accounts assume that the goal of scientific inquiry is to tell us truths; however, Anderson notes that theoretical inquiry aims at elucidating an organized body of significant truths (1995, 37). Theory choices must thus be made relative to a broader set of aims: What counts as significant? What renders the organization good and adequate? In answering these questions, we must consider our inquiry’s background interests that are (at least partly) drawn from the social context of inquiry, thus having practical content. The door is thus opened for moral, social, and political values to enter the context of justification, and makes theory choice a function of an interaction between normative and evidential considerations. The same (I argue; 2015) might be true of ontological theory choices, so that contextual values become admissible when making ontological theory choices. Given our practical concerns and interests, we might have good reasons to reject some ontological theories, and we may need to revise what we hold to be ontologically relevant and significant. Second, and relatedly, perhaps feminist metaphysics should be understood as offering a specific kind of metaphysics (see my 2018). Contra mainstream projects that are more detached and engaged in elucidating the fundamental, feminist metaphysicians (at least sometimes) undertake nonideal metaphysics, which is akin to nonideal theorizing found in social and political philosophy. That is, given feminist political commitments, our ontological theory building and choices might meaningfully start from nonideal perspectives, which is likely to generate novel accounts. As things stand, sketching out such a nonideal feminist metaphysics is still in its infancy. Nonetheless, exploring this issue (I expect) would yield new ways to think about the methodology of metaphysics informed by feminist insights.

Acknowledgments I have presented an earlier version of this paper at the Social Metaphysics Conference, University of Nottingham, in July 2018. I am grateful to everyone present for their insightful

Metaphysics   223 comments and queries. Special thanks goes to the editors of this collection for further challenges that have improved the paper.

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chapter 18

Phil osoph y of Science Analytic Feminist Approaches Kristina Rolin

Introduction What does it mean to do philosophy of science as a feminist? For many feminist ­philosophers, it means that one prevents gender from being disappeared in an analysis of scientific knowledge and practice (Longino 1992, 339). It means also that one engages the work of feminist scientists and science studies scholars (Nelson 2002, 317). In the 1980s, feminist philosophy of science gained momentum by exploring the implications of feminist science criticism for philosophy of science (Harding and Hintikka 1983; Harding 1986; Tuana 1989). Feminist historians of science had documented the underrepresentation of women and some other social groups at the ranks of professional scientists as well as their less powerful positions in the social organization of science (Rossiter 1982). Historical studies urged feminist philosophers to ask to what extent the underrepresentation of women (and some other social groups) had influenced what research problems had been pursued and how these problems had been framed. Feminist philosophers investigated also how increased social diversity in science can improve scientific research (Fehr  2011; Intemann  2009; Wylie 2011). Moreover, feminist scientists had examined the influence of gender ideologies on the content of science. Such influence was manifested, for example, in the use of gender metaphors to characterize the object of inquiry or the presence of gender bias in research design (Bleier  1984; Keller  1985; Keller and Longino  1996; Spanier  1995). These studies urged feminist philosophers to ask how gender bias was  to be conceptualized and whether it was aptly characterized as bad science

Philosophy of Science   227 (Harding 1991; Lloyd 2005; Longino 1990; Nelson 1990; Richardson 2013). Feminist philosophers examined also how scientific practice was to be conceptualized so that the potential influence of gender ideologies on the physical sciences could be analyzed (Harrell 2016; Potter 2001; Rolin 1999). For feminist philosophers in the analytic tradition, doing philosophy of science as a feminist involves both a critical and constructive mission. The critical mission is to understand when gender bias is epistemically harmful and what antidotes are needed to counter the harms. The constructive mission is to understand how objectivity is to be conceptualized, when feminist values can improve scientific research, and how epistemic communities should function. Ultimately, the constructive mission is to rethink the criteria of good scientific knowledge and practice so that goodness has a moral-­political dimension in addition to an epistemic one. However, the pursuit of both critical and constructive projects is not without tensions (Richardson  2010). One tension is what Louise Antony (1993) calls the bias paradox: how is it possible to criticize gender bias as epistemically harmful while at the same time hold the view that all scientific knowledge is socially situated and partial in some ways (Intemann 2017; Intemann and de Melo-­Martín 2016; see also Antony in this volume)? In this chapter, I discuss three strategies to respond to the bias paradox: critical contextual empiricism, feminist radical empiricism, and feminist standpoint empiricism. Each one of the three strategies acknowledges the socially situated and partial nature of scientific knowledge. By empiricism feminist empiricists mean the view that empirical adequacy is the most important criterion in the epistemic justification and evaluation of scientific theories and hypotheses even though it is not the only criterion. The empiricism of feminist empiricists is nonfoundationalist in the sense that empirical evidence is not perceived as an independent and infallible foundation of scientific knowledge. The three versions of feminist empiricism also share the view that biases are not inherently epistemically bad, neutral, or good. To distinguish ­epistemically harmful from harmless biases (or beneficial ones), feminist empiricists inquire whether they impede (or promote) the epistemic goals of science, including significant truth (Anderson 1995) and empirical success (Solomon 2001). The three versions of feminist empiricism differ in how they qualify empiricism to distinguish it from what Sandra Harding calls spontaneous feminist empiricism, the view that good science is bias-­free science that can be achieved by following conventional empirical methods more rigorously (1993, 51). Whereas critical contextual empiricism emphasizes the importance of developing norms for scientific communities, feminist radical empiricism stresses the significance of feminist values in guiding scientific research, and feminist standpoint empiricism emphasizes the necessity of developing feminist standpoints. I argue that each type of feminist empiricism provides feminist philosophers of science with valuable resources that enable us to both criticize gender bias and explain how feminist values can improve scientific research.

228   Rolin

Feminist Criticism of the Value-­F ree Ideal Helen Longino (1990) proposes that feminist criticism of gender bias is framed as part of a broader philosophical controversy concerning the proper roles of constitutive and contextual values in science. Whereas constitutive values are values that promote the epistemic goals of science, contextual values originate in the social and cultural environment of science (1990, 4). Like many other feminist philosophers, Longino rejects the value-­free ideal of science, the view that contextual values are not allowed to play any roles in the practices where knowledge claims are justified and evaluated epistemically. Yet, she refrains from drawing a sharp distinction between constitutive and contextual values. One reason for this is that constitutive values are not always purely epistemic. Values that are perceived as constitutive—such as empirical adequacy, novelty, and external consistency—may promote also moral and social goals, and sometimes this is a reason to treat them as theoretical virtues (Longino 1995). Another reason to acknowledge a “borderlands area” between constitutive and contextual values is that sometimes contextual values promote the epistemic goals of science even though they are not intrinsically truth conducive (Rooney 2017). Longino (1995) argues that in many cases the value-­free ideal is not attainable because contextual values can legitimately influence the way constitutive values are interpreted and weighed as long as they do not replace constitutive values. Moreover, contextual values can legitimately have an impact on the choice of background assumptions used in evidential reasoning as long as no one has challenged these assumptions (Longino 1990; see also Anderson  2004). That contextual values give rise to socially situated and ­partial perspectives on the subject matter of inquiry is not a problem as long as ­scientific communities include a diversity of perspectives (Longino  1990; see also Solomon 2001). Most importantly, Longino (1990) argues that even in those cases in which the value­free ideal is feasible in principle, it is not a criterion of good scientific research. Value freedom is not desirable because contextual values can play epistemically beneficial roles in science. Longino and other feminist philosophers have identified three ways in which feminist values can be epistemically fruitful and productive. First, feminist values can engender criticism that helps scientists identify and correct false beliefs or biased accounts of the subject matter of inquiry. This is because scientists are more likely to detect value-­laden assumptions in research when the assumptions in question are at odds with their own moral and social values (Longino 1990). Second, feminist values are a source of scientific creativity. They can lead scientists to pursue new lines of inquiry, search for new types of evidence, propose new hypotheses and theories, and develop new methods of inquiry (Anderson 2004; Fausto-­Sterling 2000). Third, feminist values can improve the ways scientific communities are organized as well as the relations between scientific and lay communities (Grasswick 2010; Scheman 2001).

Philosophy of Science   229 In sum, feminist philosophers of science reject the value-­free ideal as either unfeasible or undesirable. This means also that gender bias in scientific research is not always ­diagnosed as a sign of bad science. Insofar as gender bias gives rise to bad science, it is because it leads to error or unjustified conclusions. While feminist philosophers of science have abandoned the ideal of value-­free science, they have not given up the ideal of objectivity. In the next section, I explain how objectivity is understood in critical contextual empiricism.

Critical Contextual Empiricism According to Longino’s (2002) critical contextual empiricism, the bias paradox is solved by norms applicable to scientific communities. The best way to identify and eliminate epistemically harmful biases is to subject all scientific research to the deliberation of a scientific community that is socially diverse and responsive to criticism. The term “contextual” refers to three notions of context: the context of particular background assumptions, the context of scientific communities, and the social and cultural context of science. The first notion of context is implicit in the thesis that epistemic justification is relative to background assumptions that are needed to establish the relevance of empirical evidence to a hypothesis or a theory (Longino 1990, 43). The second notion of context is implicit in the thesis that the objectivity of scientific knowledge is a function of a community’s practice (74). The third notion of context is implicit in the thesis that values originating in the social and cultural context of science can legitimately play a role in the justification and evaluation of hypotheses and theories via background assumptions (83). The three notions of context come together in the argument that we should adopt a social account of objectivity because values belonging to the social and cultural context of science can legitimately have an impact on the background assumptions scientists rely on in evidential reasoning. A social account of objectivity is the view that scientific knowledge is objective to the degree that a relevant scientific community satisfies the four criteria of publicly recognized venues, uptake of criticism, shared standards, and tempered equality of intellectual authority (129–31). Critical contextual empiricism is a form of empiricism in that the requirement of empirical adequacy is included in the shared standards criterion. Yet, it goes beyond spontaneous feminist empiricism in demanding that scientific communities satisfy the three other criteria. The fourth criterion is especially interesting because it introduces a feminist equity perspective into philosophy of science. The tempered equality criterion requires that a community be inclusive of scientists independently of their race, ethnic identity, nationality, gender, age, and sexual orientation. Equality of intellectual authority is “tempered” only insofar as human beings differ in domain-­specific expertise (Longino  2002, 132–33). As Longino explains, the fourth criterion facilitates transformative criticism in two ways, by disqualifying those communities where certain perspectives dominate because of the political, social, or economic power of their

230   Rolin adherents (1990, 78) and by making room for a diversity of perspectives that is likely to generate criticism, alternative hypotheses, and novel questions (2002, 131). While critical contextual empiricism has been well received among feminist philosophers of science (Anderson  1995; Borgerson  2011; Brister  2017), feminist philosophers have raised two concerns. One concern is that the account of epistemically ideal communities is not helpful for those feminist scientists who find themselves in less-­than-­ideal scientific communities (Bluhm 2016; Goldenberg 2015). For example, Maya Goldenberg argues that feminist philosophers should not assume tacitly that community arbitration is the only way to distinguish epistemically harmful biases from harmless or beneficial ones (2015, 26). Another concern is that even when scientific communities come close to realizing the epistemic ideal, they are not sufficiently effective in eliminating morally and politically problematic values, such as sexist or racist views (Hicks 2011; Intemann 2017; Kourany 2010). While Longino’s intention is to ensure that scientific communities are inclusive of women and other social groups who have historically been excluded from scientific education and professions, her account can be abused by sexists and racists to demand attention and resources for their research programs (Borgerson 2011, 445). Insofar as scientists with sexist or racist beliefs are a minority within a scientific community, they can appeal to their minority status and demand that, for the sake of greater objectivity, their views deserve uptake in the community (Hicks 2011, 337). While some feminist philosophers think that critical contextual empiricism can respond to the two worries (Rolin  2017), some others call for an alternative way of distinguishing acceptable values and biases from unacceptable ones. Besides Goldenberg (2015), Elizabeth Anderson (2004), Robyn Bluhm (2016), and Sharyn Clough (2012) propose a more naturalized approach to values in science, suggesting that values are subjected to empirical testing. Miriam Solomon (2012b) calls this approach “feminist radical empiricism.” As she explains, what is radical is the empiricism, not the feminism. Matthew Brown (2017), Daniel Hicks (2011), Kristen Intemann (2017), and Janet Kourany (2010) propose a more political approach to distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate values and biases. For example, Kourany puts forward the ideal of socially responsible science, the view that “sound social values as well as sound epistemic values must control every aspect of the research process, from the choice of research questions to the communication and application of results” (2010, 106). Brown challenges the epistemic priority thesis, the view that social values may only influence science if, in doing so, they respect basic epistemic standards, or criteria for what counts as adequate science (2017, 63). Both Kourany and Brown emphasize that while epistemic constraints are important in scientific inquiry, scientific knowledge has value only insofar as it serves human flourishing and social justice. There is no epistemic goodness that is independent of moral­political goodness. In the rest of the chapter, I discuss feminist radical empiricism and standpoint empiricism. Whereas feminist radical empiricism is a naturalized approach to values in science, feminist standpoint empiricism is a combination of naturalized and political approaches. Radical and standpoint empiricists share the view that feminist values can increase the empirical adequacy of scientific research. Yet, they have different

Philosophy of Science   231 understandings of how feminist values can and should interact with empirical evidence in scientific inquiry.

Feminist Radical Empiricism The core ideas of feminist radical empiricism can be captured in two theses. One thesis states that empirical evidence, background assumptions, and values are integrated into a web of belief that can be tested empirically (Anderson  2004, 22). To use a term introduced by Solomon, I call this the “web of valief ” thesis. As Solomon explains, “web of valief ” refers to an “all-­encompassing network of beliefs and values that is described by feminist empiricists in the Quinean tradition” (2012b, 435). Another thesis is an empirical hypothesis suggesting that in some cases feminist values increase the empirical adequacy of scientific research (Clough 2012, 408–9). I call this the “empirical success of feminism” thesis. According to Anderson, we should accept the “web of valief ” thesis because value judgments are not “science-­free” (2004, 6). This means that factual judgments can support or undermine value judgments; it does not mean that factual judgments entail value judgments (2004, 5). For example, emotional experiences, that is, “affectively colored experiences of persons, things, events, or states of the world,” are capable of functioning as evidence for value judgments (2004, 10). An implication of this view is that value judgments are not inherently dogmatic (2004, 9). They are open to revision in light of experience (2004, 19). Also, the value-­laden nature of scientific inquiry is not a problem in and by itself; it becomes a problem when it gives rise to dogmatism, thereby rendering scientific inquiry immune to empirical evidence (2004, 3). In Anderson’s view, contextual values play a legitimate role in scientific inquiry when they “do not operate to drive inquiry to a predetermined conclusion” (2004, 11). Anderson defends the “empirical success of feminism” thesis by arguing that feminist values do not necessarily lead to wishful thinking. When feminist scientists value social and political goals such as freedom from sexual violence, they are interested in evidence showing the extent to which such goals are or are not realized; they do not have an interest in thinking wishfully that the social and political goals have already been achieved when they have not (2004, 7–8). In Anderson’s view, feminist values can guide researchers to look for a certain kind of evidence, but they cannot guarantee that such evidence will be found (2004, 14). This means also that feminist values can be assessed on the basis of whether they are epistemically fruitful. As Anderson explains, a value judgment is epistemically more fruitful than another, relative to a controversy, if it guides a research program toward discovering a wider range of evidence that could potentially support or undermine any (or more) sides of a controversy (2004, 20). Clough argues that we should accept the “web of valief ” thesis because values have empirical content that can be evaluated by means of empirical methods (2012, 422). Value judgments are not radically different from factual judgements because both types of judgments get their semantic content from their relationship to the world (2012, 424).

232   Rolin To defend the “empirical success of feminism” thesis, Clough introduces a case study of the hygiene hypothesis that is meant to explain a correlation between increased hygiene and sanitation, on the one hand, and increased incidence of allergies, asthma, and autoimmune disorders, on the other hand. Clough argues that the hypothesis will be strengthened empirically if scientists pay attention to feminist research on the gender role socialization of small children. The upshot is that feminist values can increase the empirical adequacy of scientific research by drawing attention to new sources of evidence and opening up further avenues for study (2012, 417). In sum, feminist radical empiricism attempts to solve the bias paradox by proposing that biases and values are subjected to empirical testing. As a constructive critic of feminist radical empiricism, Solomon reminds us that when biases and values are tested empirically, they are tested for their epistemic fruitfulness and not for their moral correctness (2012b, 443). In her view, feminist radical empiricists should recognize that epistemic and moral-­political goodness do not always go hand in hand. Sometimes morally bad values are causally responsible for producing epistemically good science and morally good values are causally responsible for producing epistemically bad science (2012a, 334). Another constructive critic, Audrey Yap (2016), is concerned that feminist radical empiricists are too optimistic about the ability of scientific research to influence people’s deeply held values. In her view, feminist radical empiricists should pay attention to empirical studies that explain why social identity stereotypes and prejudiced value judgments sometimes persist in the face of contrary evidence.

Feminist Standpoint Empiricism Like radical empiricists, standpoint empiricists believe that feminist values can be ­epistemically productive. The term “feminist standpoint empiricism” is introduced by Intemann (2010) to recognize that recent developments in feminist standpoint theory are in agreement with feminist empiricism. Standpoint empiricism can be summarized in three theses: the situated knowledge thesis, the thesis of epistemic advantage, and the achievement thesis. The situated knowledge thesis is the view that all scientific knowledge is socially situated and partial (Haraway  1991, 187; Harding  2004, 7; Wylie  2003, 31). However, not all social locations are of epistemic interest in all research projects. Feminist standpoint empiricists are interested in those social locations that track systemic relations of power and social inequalities. An “essentialist” understanding of social groups and socially grounded perspectives can be avoided by recognizing that it is a matter of empirical inquiry to find out which social locations are epistemically significant and how these locations shape experiences in particular contexts (Wylie 2003, 32). The thesis of epistemic advantage is the view that those who are unprivileged with respect to their social locations may have an advantage when it comes to gaining knowledge of some aspects of social reality. For example, the “outsiders within” can

Philosophy of Science   233 draw on their social experiences as an epistemic resource not available for those in dominant positions in the society (Collins 2004). As Alison Wylie (2003) explains, the thesis of epistemic advantage should not be construed as an attribution of automatic or comprehensive epistemic privilege to members of subdominant social groups. The achievement thesis is the view that insofar as unprivileged or marginal social locations are a source of epistemic advantage, the advantage is a collective achievement. Sharon Crasnow (2014) argues that developing a standpoint is a political project that involves community building. Standpoint communities can be understood as scientificintellectual movements, that is, collective efforts to pursue research programs or projects for thought in the face of resistance from others in the scientific or intellectual community. Such movements are epistemically productive when they make it possible for scientists to generate evidence under social circumstances where relations of power tend to undermine their attempts to do so, or when they provide scientists with an epistemic community where they can receive fruitful criticism for research that may be ignored in the larger scientific community (Rolin 2016). Like feminist radical empiricism, feminist standpoint empiricism attempts to solve the bias paradox by subjecting biases and values to empirical testing. However, in feminist standpoint empiricism the production of novel evidence is understood to be a matter of feminist activism and not merely a matter of applying empirical methods. The generation of novel evidence proceeds hand in hand with community building and the empowerment of disadvantaged social groups. This is why feminist standpoint empiricism is both a naturalized and a political approach to values in science.

Conclusion As feminist philosophy of science aims to improve the practices and products of scientific inquiry, it is socially relevant philosophy of science (Richardson 2010) and applied philosophy of science (Daukas 2016). Critical contextual empiricists emphasize that feminist values can increase the empirical adequacy of scientific research by identifying epistemically harmful biases and generating novel perspectives. Radical empiricists emphasize that feminist values can improve scientific research by leading scientists to consider new sources of evidence. Standpoint empiricists stress the importance of building scientific­intellectual movements that provide scientists with novel epistemic communities and help them generate evidence despite relations of power.

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236   Rolin Rolin, Kristina. 1999. “Can Gender Ideologies Influence the Practice of the Physical Sciences?” Perspectives on Science 7(4): 510–33. Rolin, Kristina. 2016. “Values, Standpoints, and Scientific/Intellectual Movements.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 56: 11–19. Rolin, Kristina. 2017. “Can Social Diversity Be Best Incorporated into Science by Adopting the Social Value Management Ideal?” In Current Controversies in Values and Science, edited by Kevin C. Elliott and Daniel Steel, 113–29. New York and London: Routledge. Rooney, Phyllis. 2017. “The Borderlands between Epistemic and Non-Epistemic Values.” In Current Controversies in Values and Science, edited by K. Elliott and D. Steel, 31–45. New York and London: Routledge. Rossiter, Margaret  W. 1982. Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Scheman, Naomi. 2001. “Epistemology Resuscitated: Objectivity as Trustworthiness.” In Engendering Rationalities, edited by N. Tuana and S. Morgen, 23–52. Albany: State University of New York Press. Solomon, Miriam. 2001. Social Empiricism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Solomon, Miriam. 2012a. “Socially Responsible Science and the Unity of Values.” Perspectives on Science 20(3): 331–38. Solomon, Miriam. 2012b. “The Web of Valief: An Assessment of Feminist Radical Empiricism.” In Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, edited by S. Crasnow and A. Superson, 435–50. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Spanier, Bonnie B. 1995. Im/partial Science: Gender Ideology in Molecular Biology. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Tuana, Nancy, ed. 1989. Feminism and Science. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Wylie, Alison. 2003. “Why Standpoint Matters.” In Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophies of Science and Technology, edited by R. Figueroa and S. Harding, 26–48. New York: Routledge. Wylie, Alison. 2011. “What Knowers Know Well: Women, Work, and the Academy.” In Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, edited by H. Grasswick, 157–79. Dordrecht: Springer. Yap, Audrey. 2016. “Feminist Radical Empiricism, Values, and Evidence.” Hypatia 31 (1): 58–73.

chapter 19

Con ti n en ta l Femi n ist A pproach e s to Phil osoph y of Science Dorothea Olkowski

There are a number of well-known and well-respected feminist philosophers of science. These include Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding, Helen Longino, and Nancy Tuana. This is not an exhaustive list, but it indicates that each of these feminist philosophers of science have come out of the analytic tradition of philosophy, a tradition founded by the logical positivists and privileging epistemology and logic (Cudd 2006, 20).1 Typically analytic feminists claim that, unlike continental feminists, they uphold the universality of truth, justice, and objectivity. Given that science and philosophy of science appear to have these same values, we may ask if there is a feminist continental philosophy of science. Are there feminist philosophers in the continental tradition who can be called philosophers of science, or do they actually practice science studies? Science studies, according to historian of science Lorraine Daston, is defined as “first and foremost sociology, but also anthropology, political science, philosophy, gender studies, and history. It overlaps with but is not identical to Science, Technology, and Society programs, on the one hand, and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge on the other” (Daston 2009, 800). The point of science studies, she states, has been to either humanize science or to tame it through a critique of the positivist view of science as logic and empiricism validated by a mechanistic and independent methodology (Daston 2009, 803). This opens up an important discussion about the difference between science studies and philosophy of science. Coming from the ostensibly small progressive male sector of philosophers of science (some of whom are also scientists), Sebastian de Hero argues that “the subjects of the natural sciences are also subjects for philosophy. The universe as

1  Cited in Garry (n.d.).

238   Olkowski a whole, possible universes other than our own, elementary particles, and life, are all subjects of concern for both natural science and philosophy” (de Haro 2013, 12). De Haro rejects the old idea that science asks how questions, while philosophy asks why questions. “Any how-question may lead us to a why-question, and any answer to a whyquestion may lead us to answers to multiple how-questions” (de Haro 2013, 12). For de Haro, scientific knowledge is not independent of the rest of human knowledge and crucially, for our purposes, “scientific results constitute knowledge to be integrated into the broader human quest for answers about ourselves and about the universe” (de Haro 2013, 13). Ultimately, because philosophical positions are implicit in scientific paradigms, science needs philosophy of science to analyze those presuppositions and goals. According to historian of science Sarah Richardson, when feminists engage with traditional philosophy of science, they must consider two perspectives. As philosophers of science, they must engage with naturalized descriptions of science, and as feminists, they must engage with constructive reformulations of scientific norms. This double duty, participating in (even if critiquing) standard epistemological investigations along with raising serious questions about the social responsibilities of scientists and the social norms and practices of the scientific community, gives us some indication of the difficulties facing feminist continental philosophers who enter the field of philosophy of science, but it also differentiates their work from those feminists in science studies (Richardson 2010, 349). The related question is why have continental feminists come to philosophy of science in such small numbers and, in general, only very recently? This may not be a question that can be easily answered, but even mainstream analytic feminist philosophers of science such as Helen Longino have faced withering and bias criticism from their male colleagues.2 What can be done is to examine the philosophy of science that continental feminists have carried out in the manner of Richardson’s two prescriptions, with the goal of establishing philosophy of science as a serious and worthy avenue of study and research for continental feminists. The entry of female continental philosophers into the field of philosophy of science is a relatively recent phenomenon. A 1970 English-language publication, Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences, contains work by only one female philosopher, Suzanne Bachelard, who is represented by two chapters on mathematical physics. In the first chapter, Bachelard proposes what she refers to as a subject-oriented investigation of mathematics, the attitude of mind of the mathematician, which could serve as the starting point for the study of the consciousness of rationality because, she argues, merely objective inquiry is insufficient (Bachelard 1970, 419). In the second chapter, Bachelard refutes the idea that mathematics is a language or that it is a set of tools because in recent times mathematical insight has been the source of materialized progress; that is, it aims 2  “Kitcher’s review of Longino’s book, The Fate of Knowledge (2002), is a jaw-dropping example of condescension, derogation, and belittling treatment of a female, and feminist, colleague. In a swaggeringly abusive tone that may predominate in the back rooms but is rarely encountered in published philosophical exchange, Kitcher delivered a screed of scattered philosophical arguments mixed with a rhetorically flamboyant portrayal of Longino as out of her league, emotionally awry, and working in the realm of ideology rather than philosophy” (Richardson 2010, 352).

Continental Feminist Approaches to Philosophy of Science   239 at reality without subjecting itself to empiricism (Bachelard 1970, 439). What distinguishes Bachelard from the analytics is her proposal for a subject-oriented study of rationality in tandem with objective inquiry. While not claiming to be feminist, Bachelard’s approach provides a backdrop against which some of the concerns of a feminist continental philosophy of science may arise. More recent work coming from continental feminists often takes up Richardson’s prescription to incorporate analyses of the way in which science is carried out to the exclusion of women scientists and their ideas. Isabelle Stengers may not have explicitly identified as a feminist philosopher of science, but her support for women in science and her focus on the relation between science and society situate her as an advocate for feminist issues. She emerged internationally along with coauthor and chemist Ilya Prigogine with the publication of their book, Order Out of Chaos, Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (1980).3 The book is their account of the conceptual transformation of science from Newton’s classical model to the present, especially the transformation from the static view of classical dynamics to an evolutionary view arising with nonequilibrium thermodynamics. For Stengers, with Prigogine, classical science cannot give a coherent account of the relationship between nature and society because it isolates physical reality to make it conform to an ideal conceptual scheme and forces nature to respond, thereby limiting the possibility of any concrete dialogue between humans and nature (Stengers and Prigogine 1980, 37–41). This is especially the case because science proceeds by developing and utilizing mathematics, and the scientific perspective is one that excludes observers. In contrast, they propose a structure that takes its orientation from the observer “who measures coordinates and momenta and studies their change in time,” leading to the discovery of unstable dynamic systems, intrinsic randomness, and time irreversibility, and proceeding to dissipative structures (those that transform energy from the environment into an ordered system), and from there back to the time-oriented observer (Stengers and Prigogine 1980, 300). Stengers next takes up the concept of complexity and argues that complexity implies a conceptual genesis that reveals the limited character of previous conceptual tools appropriate only for simple models (Stengers 1997, 12). She argues that because complexity is constitutive of a living object, it requires intelligent experimentation that does not silence the interrogated being (Stengers 1997, 17).4 She then addresses the crucial distinction between phenomenological and fundamental laws, the first tied to irreversible ­evolutions and unstable dynamic systems, and the latter to classical models of timereversibility, for which the distinction between before and after is illusory, and uncertainty regarding the future is due only to ignorance (Stengers 1997, 14). Stengers’s focus on the arrow of time is connected to her interest in change, so she asks if change is immanent, a result of the chance collisions of atoms, or, as the moderns 3  My detailed account of Stengers appears in Olkowski (2010). 4  Insistence on attention to the sensitivities of the interrogated subject is fundamental in Stengers’s thinking overall.

240   Olkowski claimed, externally caused by a force exterior to masses (Stengers 1997, 33). Newton’s laws establish purely exterior relations between masses, yielding an “eternal and monotonous repetition of an unchanging truth” (Stengers 1997, 35, 37, 48). However, the discovery of photons and electrons revealed processes involving irreversible interaction with the world, opening new alliances with nature (Stengers 1997, 48). Given the emergence of this new point of view, Stengers wonders if the transformation of scientific models is due to science and scientists or if, instead, it arises with culture and is only described as scientific after the fact. Ultimately what is at stake is the bigger question of what is science and who gets to be called a scientist. In place of exploiting nature and isolating the objects of scientific investigation, Stengers would like to see the interconnection between science and culture made transparent. Referring especially to the Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock, Stengers argues that the real lesson for those interested in the relation between women and science is that McClintock’s work narrates “what reason is capable of when it is liberated from the disciplinary models that normalize it” (Stengers 1997, 130). Stengers’s The Invention of Modern Science engages directly with the dominant philosophies of science to examine the epistemological and social relations between philosophers and scientists. Addressing Thomas Kuhn’s claim that normal science is when scientists preserve the autonomy of scientific phenomena, she observes that this frees them from accounting for their choices and research priorities, but scientists also need to remain aware of the extent to which they utilize the social, political, technological, and economic resources of society (Stengers  2000, 8).5 Stengers defends against provocations such as identifying male values with scientific rationality and hateful misunderstanding directed to scientists, so she stresses the importance of nonscientists taking an interest in science and technology and engaging with scientists in society (Stengers 2000, 17). What is needed from scientists and nonscientists, she claims, is the realization that science is a contingent process whose statements belong to the order of the possible, as well as the acknowledgement that there is a real difference between opinions and what can be demonstrated in science (Stengers 2000, 80–83). Additionally, she insists that when scientists leave the laboratory, it is part of their scientific, ethical, and political responsibility to affirm the selective character of their knowledge, thereby separating science and power, and recognizing the extent to which they are situated in the social world (Stengers 2000, 134). In 2011, Stengers was appointed to a special chair in philosophy at the Free University of Brussels. Her inaugural lecture was directed to the then-recent firing of the scientist Barbara Van Dyck from her university position for objecting to the testing of genetically modified potatoes, an act of civil disobedience in a country “where potatoes are sacred” (Stengers 2011). Supporting Van Dyck, Stengers argued for “slow science,” the movement 5  Although, as Stengers points out, science does not have the power to make scientists agree with one another, the concept of a paradigm and of normal science provide both a practical and theoretical model for how to proceed.

Continental Feminist Approaches to Philosophy of Science   241 to  resist fast and competitive benchmark research in the markets of education and ­technoscience, and she supported training scientists to concern themselves with the consequences of their research in the nonscientific world (Stengers  2018, 2–6).6 The ­reliability of scientific claims requires diversity, which increases the opportunity for ­scientists to be transformed by alternative perspectives and slows down their so-called progress (Stengers 2018, 12). She also calls for an educated and interested public that does not blindly accept the claims of science, and she strongly objects to those who seek to speed up the evolution of technology for the sake of neo-Marxist emancipation, ­calling them “trash” and “male chauvinist pigs” (Stengers 2018, 98).7 Stengers’s book In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism continues her effort against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) with the aid of the Gaia theory of chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis (Stengers 2015, 69; Lovelock and Margulis, 1974). Gaia theory maintains that air, water, and the earth are living systems and not merely the environmental background of life. Her most extensive work Cosmopolitics argues for an “ecology of practices,” a performative ecology that brings something into existence (Stengers 2010, 12). Performative ecology is associated both with the existing concerns and research practices of science and with the production of values, evaluation, and meaning (Stengers 2010, 32, 33). Ecology must address the known consequences of c­ limate change as much as the appearance of new species and the possibility of new technical practices (Stengers 2010, 33). As such, it is a science of practices where “good intentions risk turning into disasters” through human interventions, and no act is independent of the whole that stabilizes it but can also cause it to change meaning (Stengers 2010, 35).8 Stengers’s self-proclaimed “constructivist” position, influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, requires the affirmation of the historical immanence of our knowledge, convictions, and truths, even as we take account of the manner in which these are stabilized in a bid to transcend history (Stengers 2010, 38). Navigating between normativists and relativists, Stengers proposes a topology that distinguishes outside from inside on the basis of a requirement for stability as well as the obligation to create (Stengers 2010, 54). With these concepts in hand, Stengers calls for “[a] true diagnosis, in the Nietzschean sense, [that] must have the power of a performative. It cannot be commentary, exteriority, but must risk assuming an inventive position that brings into existence, and makes perceptible, the passions and actions associated with the becomings it evokes” (Stengers 2010, 12). Following Stengers, feminist continental philosophers of science depart from the model of strict objectivity and engage with Stengers’s approach, involving stability and creativity as well as a focus on consequences. If philosophy of science is not to be merely distanced commentary, it must take up an inventive position and bring to light the 6  Stengers draws this idea from Alfred North Whitehead. 7  Cited in Conway (2018). 8  This use of the performative is much closer to that of J .L. Austin than that of feminists like Judith Butler. In Austin’s view, language performs when it is spoken in the proper context, a context that supports what is being said and who is saying it.

242   Olkowski consequences of the specific models of scientific knowledge and practice it promotes. Trish Glazebrook began her work in the philosophy of science with an account of Martin Heidegger’s views of science, but insofar as this work serves as the basis of her later work on climate justice and the effects of climate change on women farmers in Ghana, we will address it here. According to Glazebrook, Heidegger argues that there are two possible types of science: positive science, which objectifies, and the science of being, a temporal or transcendental science (Glazebrook 2012, 29, 30). Heidegger then claims, somewhat contrarily, that in the end, there is no scientific philosophy, but that the study of Dasein, metaphysics, or fundamental ontology is in fact “meta,” and so beyond physics and essentially independent with respect to it (Glazebrook 2012, 34). For Heidegger, like Stengers, modern science is mathematical in the manner of Galileo and Newton (Glazebrook 2012, 51). By contrast with Aristotle, who utilized the observation of particulars, “Galileo’s method is . . . to hypothesize a universal law. He makes an assumption, and then seeks its validation” (Glazebrook 2012, 54). Thus, nature consists simply of bodies governed by measurement and the laws science uses to “set up” its objects (Glazebrook 2012, 71, 72, 86). Science then uses this knowledge to force nature to behave in ways it would not if left alone (Glazebrook  2012, 102). Nevertheless, Glazebrook also claims that Heidegger insists that science could provide a valuable evaluation of and direction for knowledge if it were directed to knowledge that is valuable for the polis and for the community beyond that of scientists (Glazebrook 2012, 143). In her later work, Glazebrook develops what are for her the broad implications of Heidegger’s critique of science. These include ecophenomenology, which arises out of the Heideggerian concept of dwelling—the manner in which nature is creative in the highest sense of the word—and the question of the social obligation of the sciences, which requires nontechnical and nonscientific reflection (Glazebrook  2012, 296). Environmental philosophy, Glazebrook maintains, can benefit from Heidegger’s analysis of how the history and philosophy of science contribute to the assault on nature and thus lead to feminist concerns about the logic of domination and the relation between science, technology, and mastery (Glazebrook 2012, 302). The ecofeminist concept of “maldevelopment” addresses the manner in which policymakers conceive of nature as an exploitable resource with little attention to social and environmental costs. Equally problematic is the marginalization and displacement of indigenous women’s traditional epistemologies by science-based approaches that ignore centuries-long sustainability in favor of profit (Glazebrook 2012, 302). For Glazebrook, as for Heidegger, addressing the concerns of feminist critics of science “require[s] an attitude of caring beyond the impartiality traditional to objectivity” (Glazebrook 2012, 309). In spite of admonitions from noted Nobel laureate physicists, recent feminist continental approaches to the philosophy of science continue to address the philosophical and extra-philosophical consequences of scientific theories. Karen Barad is a physicist turned philosopher, known for her theory of agential realism and her commitment to feminist neomaterialism, a relatively recent development in continental philosophy.9 In 9  The account of both Barad and Olkowski, which served as the basis of this segment, is in Olkowski (2008).

Continental Feminist Approaches to Philosophy of Science   243 an interview, Barad defines agential realism in opposition to the humanist conception of agency, defined as the idea that agency is a “property” of persons or things (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 54). Her critique of agency arises in relation to a conception of materiality, which Barad situates in the quantum notion of entanglement and in a quantum mechanical account of naturalized objectivity. Quantum physics describes the behavior of atoms in two fundamentally different modes. When observed, an atom appears as a tiny particle and an observer can describe its position and momentum (called spin) (Herbert 1993, 143–44). When it is not observed, the atom exists as a wave and can only be represented mathematically as being in many places at once, or as the possibility of being in one place rather than another (Herbert 1993, 143–44). If waves are sent through a narrow slit whose width is the same as the wavelength, this results in a diffraction pattern, whereby waves that are in phase increase in amplitude and waves out of phase with one another interfere and decrease in intensity.10 As a significant physical phenomenon in quantum theory, diffraction becomes a key metaphor for Barad’s materialism.11 The idea that a photon or electron can be both a particle and a wave is the model for Barad’s ontology governed by diffraction. Barad equates diffraction with difference or takes it to be an effect of difference, meaning that the quantum system is both particle and wave. She claims that insofar as there are physical systems that are both particles and waves, it is also possible for there to be some phenomena that are simultaneously physical and nonphysical; that is, the material and the discursive are one and the same and so not dualist. Barad arrives at this conclusion after describing an observation performed by a purely physical measuring device. She calls this “intra-action,” the relationship between an object to be measured and the “measuring agencies” or “material reconfigurings” that do the measuring and thereby produce objects and subjects (Barad 2007, 128, 146–51). This conclusion is a function of Barad’s understanding of the mind, which is defined as a material configuration, essentially a brain, and is governed by Barad’s claim that the relation between the mind or brain and the object to be measured is an example of entanglement. In quantum physics, when two quantum systems interact, even at great distances, their waves are entangled; that is, the action in one physical system immediately causes a change in the other physical system, a relation that perplexes and confounds physicists. That a mechanical apparatus that measures quantum waves can be said to entangle the material brain has not been proven scientifically and currently seems unlikely, so Barad utilizes it as a metaphor. Barad extends her argument, claiming that the concept of position or standpoint is only a specific physical arrangement and that therefore, theoretical concepts are also material and discourse is freed from human ideas insofar as every new apparatus produces a new material phenomenon rather than a mental construct (Barad  2007, 58, 360). However, the limitation of this structure is that such 10  A detailed version of this account appears in Olkowski (1996). 11  The concept of diffraction was originally adopted by Donna Haraway as a counter to the metaphor of the mirror reflection.

244   Olkowski intra-active engagements with differential becoming cannot involve any sort of ethical responsibilities because they take place between two physical systems without any human cognitive interference. For Barad, objectivity arises in what she calls the “agential cut” between agent and object, in which the agent’s choice is carried out in setting up an apparatus that organizes concrete intra-actions between subject and object. If there is a choice to be made, then it is made minimally by a self rather than a material brain, and a self is a condition of objectivity (Barad 2007, 295). However, Barad argues that the self disappears into the ap­pa­ ratus that it sets up, yet this calls for a self to set things up, and from that decision something is revealed about the world and something is revealed about that self and its choices (Barad 2007, 337). One assumes that it is a human self that sets up the apparatus and makes the decision that makes the cut possible. Thus, if observers measure position, they forgo measuring momentum, and if they measure momentum, they forgo measuring position. It is widely agreed among physicists that quantum facts are undisputable, as is quantum wave-particle theory. This means that predictions about the outcome of quantum experiments are accurate and correct. What remains highly contested is the nature of quantum reality; that is, there is no theory that brings together quantum facts or predictions and quantum theory to present a coherent picture of the universe (Herbert 1993, 146). Many physicists recognize that there are numerous competing theories about the nature of quantum reality, theories that seek to explain the unobserved atom as well as to speculate on the process of measurement. Barad’s view of quantum is derived from the standard interpretation developed by Niels Bohr, but an alternative perspective on quantum theory can be found in my own work, which engages with the research of cosmological physicists Fotini Markopoulou and Lee Smolin and the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Unlike classical Newtonian physics, which privileges unchanging space, this alternative privileges time and the concept of evolution, modeled on biology. If we distinguish two kinds of time, the geometric and the fundamental, Makopoulou’s theory posits that geometry, the spacetime of the classical model, emerges out of the microscopic fundamental time of quantum gravity (Smolin 2001, 59; Markopoulou, 2002). According to Markopoulou, at the high-energy levels of the early universe there is no geometric locality. Matter and with it geometry emerged only when the universe started to cool. Reversing the commonly accepted formulation, now “geometry is nothing but the collective organization of emergent matter” (Markopoulou 2008). This allows us to conceptualize a philosophical point of view that does not assume the primary existence of an atomistic individual in a formal, statistical, geometrical manifold. Instead, it correlates with the philosophy of Bergson for whom time as duration is “the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances,” and duration is a thread immanent to the entire universe that endures and in so doing creates new forms (Bergson 1983, 4). Duration is carried physically by the structure of light cones. According to general relativity, the speed of light is invariant and nothing (no causal effect and no information) travels faster than the speed of light. Thus, “the causal past of an event consists of

Continental Feminist Approaches to Philosophy of Science   245 all the events that could have influenced it. The influence must travel from some state in the past at the speed of light or less. So the light rays arriving at an event form the outer boundary of the past of an event and make up what we call the past light cone of an event” (Smolin 2001, 58). By drawing a light cone around every event, we may specify all the causal relations affecting it. Doing this with every event would yield the causal structure of the universe. This is significant insofar as “most of the story of our universe is the story of the causal relations among its events . . . [and crucially] the causal structure is not fixed. . . . [I]t evolves, subject to laws” (Smolin 2001, 59). The question is: “How many events are contained in the passage of a signal from you to me. . . . How many events have there been in the whole history of the universe in the past of this particular moment?” (Smolin 2001, 60). Additionally, given that many, many events constitute a point of view, every point of view is not an atomistic individual but a crowd, the effect of the overlapping and temporal connections of causal relations. For my work, this allows for the construction of a point of view of a crowd, a point of view according to which different observers “see” or “live” partly different, partial views of the universe, which nonetheless overlap. Commensurate with this, Markopoulou proposes a causal structure of spacetime that codes the view from inside as what an observer inside the universe can observe (Markopoulou 2008). Markopoulou suggests utilizing causal sets (large collections of causal relations), sets of events in spacetime that are partially ordered by temporal causal relations. Moreover, Markopoulou proposes to work with evolving sets that bring the causal past of each event as well as the causal structure of each event into a causal set. Along with this I have suggested that the logic utilized by Markopoulou, namely intuitionistic logic, provides an alternative for both physical science and human experience. Classical physics adheres to the law of noncontradiction, meaning that every statement must be either true or false, but intuitionism does not allow proof by contradiction and does not assume that a statement must be true or false. A statement may be true tomorrow or false at some time in the future, but without a proof, the option is open and a statement may remain indefinitely indeterminate (Markopoulou 1999). This means that intuitionistic logic is suited to change and evolution in time and so prediction may be impossible. This perspective constitutes a complex causality, within which layers and layers of states form new patterns and resolve in a point of view that is the effect of this crowd of influences even as each point of view contributes to a crowd of influences, moving away from atomistic and individualistic conceptions of humanity, the earth, and the universe. We can see that continental feminist philosophers have moved from a more traditional form of philosophy of science to an immanent engagement with science as philosophers, although primarily with physics and not yet with other natural sciences, something we still hope to see. The first aspect of this positioning seems to be commensurate with the general direction of feminist continental philosophy insofar as it is no longer content to comment on the workings of science from an external point of view. Instead, continental feminist philosophers have resituated their point of view so that they can be said to take up an immanent position that puts scientific concepts to work

246   Olkowski and asks what they produce with respect to the cosmos but also with respect to earthly life and experience.

References Bachelard, Suzanne. 1970. “Phenomenology and Mathematical Physics,” and “The Specificity of Mathematical Physics.” Translated by Joseph  J.  Kockelmans. In Phenomenology and the  Natural Sciences: Essays and Translations, edited by Theodore  J.  Kisiel and Joseph J. Kockelmans, 413–30. Evanston, IL: Northwestern. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bergson, Henri. 1983. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Boston: University Press of America. Conway, Philip. 2018. “Review of ‘Isabelle Stengers.’ ” Another Science Is Possible. Accessed August 6, 2018. http://societyandspace.org/2018/02/20/another-science-is-possible-byisabelle-stengers/. Originally in Turpin, Ed. Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy. London: Open Humanities Press, 2014. Cudd, Ann E. 2006. Analyzing Oppression. New York: Oxford University Press. Daston, Lorraine. 2009. “Science Studies and the History of Science.” Critical Inquiry 35 (4). The Fate of Disciplines. Edited by James Chandler and Arnold I. Davidson (Summer 2009): 798–813. Accessed March 6, 2018. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/599584. de Haro, Sebastian. 2013. “Science and Philosophy: A Love-Hate Relationship.” Institute for Theoretical Physics and Amsterdam University College University of Amsterdam, 1–16. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.1244.pdf. Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. London: Open Humanities Press. Garry, Ann. n.d. “Analytic Feminism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed March 10, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/femapproach-analytic/. Glazebrook, Trish. 2001. “Heidegger and Ecofeminism.” In Re-Reading the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger, edited by Nancy Holland and Patricia Huntington, 221–51. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Glazebrook, Trish. 2012a. “Developments and Implications.” In Heidegger on Science, edited by Trish Glazebrook. Albany: State University of New York Press. Glazebrook, Trish. 2012b. “Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science.” In Heidegger on Science, edited by Trish Glazebrook, 299–315. Albany: State University of New York Press. Herbert, Nick. 1993. Elemental Mind, Human Consciousness and the New Physics. New York: Dutton Books. Lovelock, J. E., and L. Margulis. 1974. “Atmospheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis.” Tellus. Series A. Stockholm: International Meteorological Institute 26 (1–2): 2–10. Markopoulou, Fotini. 1999a. “An Insider’s Guide to Quantum Causal Histories.” 2: 1–4. arXiv:hep-th/9912137. Markopoulou, Fotini. 1999b. “The Internal Description of a Causal Set: What the Universe Looks Like from Inside.” 2: 1–35. arXiv:gr-qc/9811053. Markopoulou, Fotini. 2002. “Planck-Scale Models of the Universe.” 2: 1–19. arXiv:gr-qc/ 0210086. Markopoulou, Fotini. 2008. “Space Does Not Exist, So Time Can.” Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. http://www.fqxi.org/data/essay-contestfiles/Markopoulou_SpaceDNE. pdf.

Continental Feminist Approaches to Philosophy of Science   247 Olkowski, Dorothea. 2008. “Every One, a Crowd, Making Room for the Excluded Middle.” In Deleuze and Queer Theory, edited by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Meryl Storr, 54–71. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Olkowski, Dorothea. 2010. “Rethinking Science as Science Studies: Latour, Stengers, Prigogine.” In History of Continental Philosophy, Vol. 8: Emerging Trends in Continental Philosophy, edited by Todd May (General Editor: Alan D. Schrift). Acumen Press. Olkowski, Dorothea. 2016. “Neo-Materialism and the Future of Feminist Phenomenology.” Rizomes, Special Edition on Karen Barad, edited by Peta Hinton and Karen Silberg, issue 30. http://www.rhizomes.net/issue30/. Richardson, Sarah  S. 2010. “Feminist Philosophy of Science: History, Contributions, and Challenges.” Synthese 337–62. doi:10.1007/s11229-010-9791-6. Smolin, Lee. 2001. Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. New York: Basic Books. Stengers, Isabelle. 1997. Power and Invention Situating Science. Translated by Paul Bains. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Stengers, Isabelle. 2000. The Invention of Modern Science. Translated by Daniel  W.  Smith. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Stengers, Isabelle. 2010. Cosmopolitics I. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Stengers, Isabelle. 2011. “Another Science Is Possible! A Plea for Slow Science.” Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, ULB. 13 December 2011, Inaugural lecture Chair Willy Calewaert 2011–2012 (Vrij Universiteit Brussel). Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Open Humanities Press/Meson Press. Stengers, Isabelle. 2018. Another Science Is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science. Translated by Stephen Muecke. London: Polity. Stengers, Isabelle, and Ilya Prigogine. 1984. Order Out of Chaos, Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam Books.

chapter 20

A na ly tica l Femi n ist Ethics Samantha Brennan

Introduction Feminist ethics is that branch of ethics that is concerned first and foremost with understanding the oppression of women and developing a normative analysis of its wrongness. More broadly, in feminist accounts of ethics, moral problems and accounts of moral theory are seen through a feminist lens and are also analysed on that basis. As well, some branches of feminist ethics develop whole new methods of moral theorizing on the basis of feminist insights (Brennan 1999, 2010). While a very wide range of work falls under the heading of “feminist ethics,” all of that work has in common its focus on women’s oppression, gender equality, and women’s moral experiences. According to Alison Jaggar, a work of ethics is feminist if it shares two assumptions: that the subordination of women, and indeed, of any group of people, is morally wrong, and that the experiences of women are worthy of respect and serious philosophical attention (Jaggar 1991). In addition, I would say that philosophical work in ethics can count as feminist because it uses an explicitly feminist method of moral theorizing, it reaches feminist conclusions in matters of applied ethics and public policy, or it relies on and incorporates women’s experiences of a particular moral phenomenon. All work in feminist ethics is critical of the history of moral philosophy and applied ethics for its exclusion of women’s experiences and the moral problems central to ­women’s lives. Feminist philosophers disagree on the extent to which this exclusion is connected to the theory itself. We might ask and wonder how much the gender of those doing the theorizing affected the theory itself. At a minimum, moral theory in the ­mainstream and historically male tradition looks to men’s moral experiences rather than women’s and applies itself to cases central to the lives of men. Some feminist philosophers argue that because mainstream moral theory was developed in patriarchal contexts, the content of the theory itself is also patriarchal and unable to work for

Analytical Feminist Ethics   249 f­ eminist aims. It is no surprise, on this view, that mainstream moral theory has ignored women’s lives and the moral problems we face. Feminists who advocate for this view often approvingly quote Audre Lorde on the master’s tools’ inability to destroy the ­master’s house. Here is the full quotation from Lorde: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support” (Lorde 2007: 112). Right or wrong, the idea here is that moral theory developed primarily by men who have benefited from the oppressive system of gender norms and distribution of power and privilege cannot help us understand such a system or see what is wrong with it. Other feminists take a more revisionary tack and look at redeveloping moral theory to incorporate feminist insights. The feminists closest to mainstream moral theory, though admittedly in a minority, think the only issue with traditional moral philosophy is with its application. They take mainstream moral theories and apply them directly, without revision, to problems of concern to feminists. The richest and best work in feminist ethics incorporates an intersectional analysis and undertakes to see how gender is connected to other axes of oppression in society, such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, and physical and mental ability. Feminist analytic approaches to ethics use the tools of analytic philosophy to understand and make progress on the problems highlighted by feminist understandings of moral wrongs and social justice. Some feminists who write about ethics do this quite explicitly, naming their work “analytical feminism,” while others simply proceed from the tradition and background in which they were educated and in which they continue to work. Individual feminist philosophers also vary in how much those tools are themselves subject to feminist scrutiny and in how much progress is believed possible using the methods of analytic philosophy alone. The self-­reflective nature of this endeavor does not really stand out from the rest of mainstream analytic philosophy, however. Many philosophers, feminist and not, include criticisms of philosophical methods as part of their process. Meta-­philosophical discussion is often found along with philosophical discussion, including as part of feminist ethics. Feminist meta­philosophical discussion, feminist meta-­ethics especially, differs though in what standards to which feminists ethics is held accountable (Urban Walker  1989). The scope of accountability is broader, extending far beyond philosophical criteria of argument and analysis. Criticism of work in feminist ethics by feminist philosophers includes political accountability, inclusion of the perspectives of the people whom the work is about, and the contribution the work does or does not make to positive social change. When it comes to feminist work on disability, race, class, and sexual or gender orientation, the questions are not just about theoretical consistency and strength of the arguments, though these things matter too. Feminists are concerned with the lived reality of a particular ethical analysis on the ground. How does it work in real life for people whom the theory is about? Does the theorizing take into account the experiences of those whom it is about? This matters too.

250   Brennan The contrast to “analytical feminist ethics” is often with continental approaches to feminist ethics. But feminist ethics, more so than other areas of philosophy, is not neatly divided into continental and analytic traditions. Indeed, many of the feminist philosophers whose work is both groundbreaking and influential resist either of those labels. Many feminists whose work falls within the “analytic” side of the divide also read and discuss work by continental philosophers. The more one identifies as a feminist first and a moral philosopher or ethicist second, the less the divide between continental and analytical approaches to ethics matters. There are also tendencies within analytic philosophy that feminists of all stripes reject. For example, if you think the contrast is between “analytic philosophy” and “empirically connected or grounded philosophy,” you will find that feminists are far more likely to side with the latter. In this way feminist philosophers, of both continental and analytical sorts, stand out from more strictly theoretical philosophers. Very few feminists of analytical or continental backgrounds do purely abstract “high theory.” For most the application of moral theory to real-­world social injustices matters a great deal. I sometimes, when teaching, make the distinction between “high theory” and “engaged philosophy.” There are high theory types of both analytic and continental bents. Feminist work is necessarily engaged with politics and the world around us. There is among feminists of both kinds a tendency to less disciplinary boundary policing of all sorts. For example, the line between feminist ethics and feminist epistemology is also blurry, and often work in feminist metaphysics is informed by ethics and political theorizing. Feminist approaches to ethics touch both real-­world engagement and other branches of philosophy. Feminist ethics is, at its best, informed by feminist practice, and that includes practice in other academic disciplines that aim at understanding social justice. These include, but are not limited to, sociology (Mahon and Robinson 2012), anthropology (Wylie 2017), geography, political science, gender studies, and economics (Anderson 2003). Feminists, whether writing about ethics or not, rarely use the stripped-­down methods of bare conceptual analysis or arguments that do not connect to facts about the social world. What I would like to do is think of analytic themes, trends, and tendencies within feminist ethics rather than just talk about the work that falls squarely under the heading “feminist analytic ethics.” This chapter could just focus on the most canonical ethics texts of the analytic feminist approach, but I think we would miss out on a lot of interesting work that has been informed by feminism and by analytical approaches to ethics.

What Is Analytic Feminist Ethics? First, let me begin with a few words about the label “analytic feminism” itself. The term “analytic” as it is used in discussions about “analytic philosophy” refers very loosely to the techniques of argument and analysis. It is not to meant to rule out normative ethics in the way that the term is sometimes used (Katzav and Vaesen 2017).

Analytical Feminist Ethics   251 The term “analytic feminism” has always made the most sense to me in the context of the United States where the Society for Women in Philosophy became synonymous over time with continental approaches to feminist philosophy. This was so much so that outsiders to feminism and feminist philosophy began to assume that feminist philosophy was associated with continental philosophy. Feminists pursuing non-­continental approaches had difficulty finding venues for their writing. At the same time there were many feminists in philosophy in strongly analytic departments who had been educated in the analytic tradition. The branding of analytic feminism happened alongside the founding of the Society for Analytic Feminism (SAF) twenty-­five years ago (Cudd and Norlock 2018). Ann Garry writes, “The term ‘analytic feminist’ came into use in the early 1990s in North America. Virginia Klenk proposed a Society for Analytical Feminism in 1991 and was its first president; Ann Cudd characterized analytic feminism on the in a special issue of Hypatia on Analytic Feminism (Cudd, 1995; Cudd and Klenk 1995)” (Garry 2017). Notably, the SAF does not have the same kind of strength in Canada or in Europe, where the mingling of languages and intellectual traditions, among other factors, leads to a reluctance on the part of feminists to label themselves as belonging to either side of this disciplinary divide. An important strand in the telling of the story of analytic feminist ethics comes from the history of ethics itself. The discipline of ethics saw a turn to applied ethics from meta-­ethics in the 1960s and 1970s as philosophers became engaged with issues of public importance during and after the Vietnam War. These issues began with questions related to war but moved on to include other topics of social justice such as abortion, sexual ethics, and workplace sexual harassment. At the same time feminist influence in other areas of philosophy was slower moving. Arguably feminist debates about reason and its relation to feminist politics began with the publication of the volume A Mind of One’s Own, edited by Louise Anthony and Charlotte Witt in 1993. Its focus was philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology. Analytic feminism has been focused largely in those subdisciplines of philosophy. There has not been the same attention paid to defining or defending analytic feminist approaches to ethics. Within ethics, recent decades have seen the publication of several feminist analytic ethics–focused texts and anthologies. I edited a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy called Feminist Moral Philosophy in 2003 and the essays were in the analytic tradition. Later, Anita Superson and I edited Feminist Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition as a special issue of Hypatia in 2005 and many of the essays were about ethics. 2006 saw the publication of Ann Cudd’s very influential book Analyzing Oppression. In 2012 Sharon Crasnow and Anita Superson edited Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, which contained a number of important essays in analytic feminist ethics. More recently there was the publication of the edited collection The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism (Garavaso 2018). There are also many feminist philosophers such as Ann Cudd, Jean Hampton, Serene Khader, Anita Superson, Shay Welch, Ruth Sample, Lisa Tessman, Claudia Card, Barbara Herman, Carol Hay, Julia Driver, and Martha Nussbaum, writing in the area of analytic approaches to feminist ethics.

252   Brennan

Feminist Versions of Moral Theories One version of analytic feminist ethics takes mainstream moral theories and applies them to cases of concern to feminists, such as abortion and workplace equity. In this way, feminist ethics expands the range of topics considered worthy of moral concern and moral theorizing. Feminists working in ethics from a variety of backgrounds and approaches have tackled such issues as beauty and gender role socialization (Widdows 2018), food choices and patterns of eating (Kukla  2018a; Isaacs  2018), reproduction (Anderson  1990), abortion (Sherwin  1991), women’s sexuality (LeMoncheck  1998), sexual harassment (Hay 2005), pornography (Langton 2009), disability (Tremain 2013), and many others. These criticisms of mainstream moral theory are the mildest since the complaint is not with the ethical theory itself but rather with its application. Mainstream moral theorists and their works are criticized for only considering the world from a masculine point of view, seeing moral subjects as male, adult, fully rational, fully autonomous, and likely also white and able bodied. When one sees the world from that point of view, certain moral problems emerge (e.g., the keeping of contracts) but not others (e.g., care for the very young). But as feminists set out to apply mainstream moral theories, some feminists began to see problems with the theories themselves. What kinds of problems? Here are some examples. Feminists have criticized traditional approaches to ethics on a variety of grounds: ideal where a nonideal approach is better, overly abstract, insufficiently political, placing too much emphasis on individuality, ignoring relevant intersectionalities, overvaluing rationality, focusing on individuals in conflict rather than on individuals in community, and caring about autonomy and independence out of proportion to their true moral worth. Some feminist critics of traditional or mainstream ethical theories have responded to the criticisms using the resources of the theory itself and of feminism. The hybrid ethical theory that results is a feminist version of the traditional one. In this way, we get feminist consequentialism, feminist virtue theory, feminist deontology, feminist contract theory, and so on. Insofar as those theories are part of analytic philosophy, the feminist versions are too (Driver 2005; Hampton 1993; Schott 1997). What is an example of a way a traditional theory might be changed in light of feminist considerations? Consider the case of feminist consequentialism. Consequentialism has two parts. First, consequentialist moral theory has a theory of how we ought to promote the good as its account of right action. On the standard version we are required to maximize the good, but on other versions of consequentialism we might merely be required to bring about enough good, or a sufficient amount of the good. Second, consequentialist moral theory has a theory about what the good is that we are required to promote. Usually consequentialists think that we are required to promote welfare or well-­being, and then there are different theories about the nature of welfare or well­being. Feminist versions of consequentialism make amendments either to standard consequentialism’s theory of right action or to standard consequentialism’s theory of the

Analytical Feminist Ethics   253 good. That is, there are two ways a consequentialist theory might be amended in light of feminist considerations. Let’s look at the option of amending consequentialism’s account of the good on the basis of feminist arguments. Harriet Baber, for example, argues for preference satisfaction over the desire theory of the good on feminist grounds (Baber 2007, 2017). Baber is responding to feminist worries about adaptive preferences and to worries about “deferential wives” (Hill 1973) who have come to desire what is best for their husbands rather than themselves. The preferentist account, according to Baber, is able to offer a radical critique of some aspects of the desire theory of the good. Julia Driver also tackles consequentialism from the perspective of the good and puts forward her own version of feminist sophisticated consequentialism. But does preference theory go far enough? Feminists are obviously critical of the liberal view that the good consists in desire or preference satisfaction because of worries about adaptive preferences and gender socialization. But how far away from desire satisfaction ought feminist ethics to move? Full information versions of the desire theory claim that what is good for individuals is what they would want if they had access to full information. One can go further and add additional idealizing conditions where what is best for a person is getting what you would want if you had access to full information and were perfectly rational. The worry is the nature of the test we apply when we want to see if the idealized version of the desire or preference theory gets it right. It starts to look as if we have some standard that is entirely independent of the preferences people have for their own lives. The next step is to break from desire altogether and look to objective goods as the source of value in human lives. Kimberly Yuracko (2003) argues for a feminist version of perfectionism as the best basis for feminist arguments for women’s autonomy. With Yuracko, some feminist consequentialists argue for perfectionism and objective theories of the good on feminist grounds (Yuracko 2003; Babbitt 1996.) Finally, some feminist moral theorists think there are reasons to give a special status to certain kinds of bad outcomes, namely those that constitute evils. Claudia Card, for example, argues that evils deserve a special kind of moral priority and the prevention of evils is more urgent than the promotion of mere good (Card 2002). In a similar vein there are feminist versions of deontology developed by feminist moral philosophers who make use of Kant’s work, accepting some parts of his theoretical apparatus and revising others (Varden 2006, 2017, 2018; Hay 2005, 2013, 2018). Carol Hay’s work focuses on the obligation of oppressed people to resist our own oppression using Kantian arguments about respect for oneself. The subject matter is a natural fit for Kantian moral reasoning and Hay reaches conclusions that might initially surprise some feminists. Helga Varden writes improbably about Kant and sex. Like Barbara Herman before her, whose well-­known paper on Kant and marriage is called “Could It Be Worth Thinking about Kant on Sex and Marriage?,” Varden uses Kant’s work to analyze sex in normative terms. (Herman  1993) The overlap between Kantian and feminist themes is remarkable even though one might hardly think of Kant as a friend of feminism. When we look at Kant as a moral philosopher focussed on the notions of respect and self-­respect, the connections between Kant and feminism are clear. Both

254   Brennan Kant and feminist moral philosophers are critical of the use and the objectification of women (Denis 2002) and are critical of unequal treatment of persons when viewed as a failure of equal respect for persons (Denis 2014). But deontology and consequentialism are not the only moral theories that have revised feminist versions. There are also specifically feminist accounts of virtue theory (Dillon 2018). According to Dillon, feminist virtue theory tends to focus on “character” rather than “virtue.” Feminist virtue theory is more political and tends to focus on the development of character and virtues in nonideal contexts (Dillon 2012, 2018; Berges 2015). There is also considerable feminist writing on specific virtues and vices, such as bitterness (Campbell 1994). Feminist contract theory is another feminist mainstream theory hybrid. Jean Hampton is arguably the parent of feminist contractarianism (1993), but she is not alone these days. Ruth Sample (2002), Mary Walsh (2015), Susan Dimock (2008), and Shay Welch (2012) all put the tools of social contract theory to work for feminist ends. Another version of feminist ethics that uses tools from analytic philosophy, arguments, and analysis is feminist game theory (Wendling and Viminitiz 1998). Some feminists viewed traditional moral theories as reformable, while others thought that an entirely new feminist approach to ethics was required both to adequately address women’s oppression and to overcome the male bias in moral philosophy. Some feminists abandon traditional moral theories, even their feminist revised versions, and start building new feminist moral theories from the ground up. When we turn to feminist approaches to ethics that urge a completely new approach to moral philosophy, one that puts women’s experiences in relationships front and center, care ethics comes immediately to mind. Indeed, for a time it looked as if feminist ethics might become synonymous with the ethics of care. After the publication of Carol Gilligan’s research on women’s moral reasoning in 1982 and Nel Noddings’s theoretical articulation of that reasoning in 1984, a decade followed in which the ethics of care predominated as the feminist approach to ethics. In more recent years there has been a broadening of concern. Feminists are now well known for work on trust, autonomy, and responsibility, to give some examples. The focus on relationships, if not care, as the sole source of value in those relationships remains central to feminist work in ethics. Recently feminist ethicists have explored problems associated with the traditional core of moral philosophy, such as moral luck (Card  1996) and moral skepticism (Superson 2009). There is also a growing body of work by women moral theorists that is not explicitly feminist (Calhoun 2004). A lively debate exists as to whether that work has any common themes and whether women, as women, have a distinctive voice in the field of ethics. Another branch of feminist analytic ethics offers up a conceptual analysis of terms central to the political project of feminism. Think about feminist work on developing an account of oppression (Schwartzman 2002), exploitation (Sample 2003), or gender categories. There is also a feminist conceptual analysis of the concepts that are not themselves necessarily feminist. In this case the feminist content comes from the analysis. I am thinking here of things like the categories of apology and forgiveness. Also, feminists have done important work on our understanding of adaptive preferences (Khader 2011; Khader and Vaesen 2016, Superson 2005; Welch 2015). This feminist work

Analytical Feminist Ethics   255 is clearly in dialogue with mainstream work in ethics and political philosophy while remaining feminist in intent and method. Analytically minded feminist ethicists have explored problems associated with the traditional core concepts of moral philosophy, such as moral luck (Card 1996) and moral skepticism (Superson 2009), as well as those concepts associated with feminism as a political movement, such as “misogyny” (Manne 2017).

Feminist Applied Ethics One of the exciting developments in feminists is the extent to which feminist work has entered the mainstream. But it is also the case that feminist work has become more intersectional, broader in terms of connecting areas of philosophy such as epistemology and ethics, and reaching out to new and exciting topics. Feminist approaches to ethics have become more ubiquitous, and while this is largely an excellent trend, it can make feminist approaches harder to identify. This author finds gatekeeping debates in philosophy troubling about what is and is not philosophy, what is ethics versus what is epistemology, and now what is feminist ethics versus mainstream ethics. As a discipline we seem especially keen on boundary policing and I would rather that that were a game avoided by feminist philosophers, even as I sometimes see its practical purpose. In addition to the standard topics one might think of when it comes to feminist themes in applied ethics, such as reproductive ethics, rape, and sexual harassment, there are feminist ethicists working on such themes as responsibility for oppression (Cudd 2006, Superson 2005, Isaacs 2011, Hay 2005, 2018), beauty as an ethical ideal (Widdows 2018), family and marriage (Brake  2012,  2016; Jenkins  2017), fitness (Brennan and Isaacs 2018) and fat and body size, and sexual negotiation, pleasure, and consent (Kukla 2009, 2018b). Feminist ethics has also not shied away from turning its critical gaze to the discipline of philosophy itself. There is a considerable work by feminist philosophers on the topics of philosophy, ethics, implicit bias, and micro-­inequities (Brownstein and Saul 2016; Superson and Cudd 2002; Hutchinson and Jenkins 2013). While early feminist moral thinking seemed to focus on public policy issues in the countries in which the theorists were writing, more recent work in feminist ethics has taken on global issues. Again, the approach taken varies depending on which kind of moral theory one takes up or develops as a feminist. Feminist rights theories, feminist Kantian theories, feminist contract theories, and feminist consequentialism will all look very different from one another. That said, all of these theories rely on claims about well-­being. That might seem to be less obvious in the case of a feminist deontological theory, but even deontologists think that, when no rights claims are at stake, we have some obligation to bring about good for others. Feminist moral theorists may disagree on how well women are faring in a particular set of social arrangements. What is the baseline measure? What is the right theory of welfare? DesAutels and Whisnant put the challenge facing feminist global ethics this

256   Brennan way: “Can Western feminists theorize approaches to global suffering and injustice without falling prey to imperialist and essentialist ways of thinking, and without viewing women in the developing world as passive victims in need of saving?” (DesAutels and Whisnant 2008, ix). According to Martha Nussbaum (2000a), the danger of inaction, from fear of getting things wrong, is far worse than the risks of making judgements about the lives of women in developing countries. We ought to be wary about making judgements about the well-­being of women in the developing world without explicitly including their perspectives, but being too fearful means ignoring women in nonwealthy countries, and I think Nussbaum is right that this would be worse. Notable figures writing in the area of feminist global ethics include, in addition to Nussbaum, Christine Koggell (2006), Uma Narayan (1997), Serene Khader (2018), and Onora O’Neill (2000). Issues of global justice of special concern to feminist moral theorists include immigration and the caring labor of women from the developing world who assist first world families with child care, elder care, and housework; the sexual exploitation of women from developing countries and the sexual trafficking of women and girls; the double exploitation of women in the developing world, exploited by both patriarchal customs at home and the global economic order; and the unequal distribution of food and other goods both between rich and poor nations and between men and women within those nations.

Looking Forward There are at least four ways that feminist ethics strains to fit within the category of analytic philosophy. These are the inclusion of narrative and personal experience; an awareness of power, power relationships, and structural oppression; closer attention to empirical data; and emphasis on intersectionality and oppression. This does not mean that analytic feminist ethics is not possible. Obviously it is. It does mean that feminist ethics pushes the boundaries of analytic philosophy and that seems to me to be a good thing. Feminist ethics, whether analytic in orientation or not, is thoroughly political in ways that analytical philosophy is not. Traditionally analytic ethics uses made up (sometimes otherworldly) counterexamples, whereas feminist ethics wants to focus on injustices in the world as it exists. While in famous thought examples in analytical ethics, women may find themselves hooked up to famous violinists, in the real world women may find themselves pregnant, not of their choice, in a country without access to abortion. Some feminist ethicists are interdisciplinary in a way that traditional analytic philosophy is not. It is true that feminist work in philosophy generally and in ethics in particular tends to be more political than other kinds of philosophy, including most mainstream moral theorizing. That does not mean that feminists cannot also use the tools of traditional analytic philosophy, even if we do not limit ourselves to those tools exclusively. This chapter began with a discussion of what makes a philosophical approach to ethics feminist. There I favoured a broad, disjunctive account. There is enough disciplinary

Analytical Feminist Ethics   257 gatekeeping in academic life without feminist philosophers engaging in our brand of it. When it comes to what makes an account of feminist ethics a contribution to analytical feminist ethics, here too I suggest we tread lightly. Feminist philosophical writing, with its strong ties to empirical work, its interdisciplinary nature, its political emphasis, and its connection to women’s experiences, is unlikely to be analytic philosophy in its purest sense. Feminism is not just bare concepts, analysis, and arguments. Instead, we use the tools of analytical philosophy when those are the tools that make the most sense and help us make progress in the world. Justice and philosophical work that seeks to understand and eliminate women’s oppression has its head in an ideal world of arguments and analysis, but its feet are firmly rooted in facts, experience, and history.

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chapter 21

Con ti n en ta l Femi n ist Ethics Erinn Gilson

Approaches to ethics that can be characterized as coming from a continental feminist perspective are many and varied. Continental European philosophy, generally construed, tends to focus on central philosophical authors and movements with attentiveness to both the historical context and the historical development of philosophical ideas. Continental feminist ethics thus encompasses both the so-­called French feminists— including Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Monique Wittig, among others—and feminist theorists in Anglo-­American and other contexts who are influenced by continental European philosophical methods and ideas. These thinkers draw upon the traditions of phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial thought to develop accounts of ethics, especially in relation to gender, sex, sexuality, and other salient dimensions of social identities and positions (race, ethnicity, nationality, ability/disability). Such approaches to ethics are distinctive and yet also share much with feminist ethics coming from an analytic or more philosophically pluralist perspective. On the whole, feminist ethics broadly construed takes a critical perspective on traditional ethics and engages in the constructive work of reconceptualizing and re-­envisioning central ethical concepts and problems (Held 1998). It has identified gender bias and illusory gender neutrality, both explicit and tacit, as errors underlying traditional ethical theory and explored the role of sex/gender in ethical reflection and decision-­making (Calhoun 1988; Gilligan 1987; Benhabib 1987). Feminist thinkers of all stripes have critically analyzed the way binary oppositions in ethical theory align with binary sex/gender categories, interrogating the devaluation of categories connected to women and femininity such as the body, emotion, dependency, the private sphere, and intimate relations. This analysis was aimed at revaluing these dimensions of ethical life given how they had been ignored or minimized in canonical ethical theories and, simultaneously, at conceptualizing them more adequately. The work of reconceptualization often turned on challenging the assumption of dualism that undergirds binary oppositions and, in contrast, attending to

262   Gilson the complexity of actual ethical life, for example, by theorizing the interweaving of reason and emotion and of public and private spheres.1 Thus, eschewing “a view from nowhere” as a way of masking bias under the veneer of impartiality, feminist ethics also focuses on the particular and concrete—particular individuals, relationships, situations, experiences, and problems—in contrast with traditional ethical theory’s frequent emphasis on the universal and abstract. Given the importance of sex/gender and intersectionality for feminist thinkers, there is special attentiveness to the particular experiences of women and members of other marginalized or oppressed groups. In this way, ethics is regarded as closely tied to social theory and politics, and concerns about oppression and injustice are central to feminist ethics. Politics is defined more broadly on this view as dealing with relationships of power and social connection, dynamics of oppression, and structural injustice rather than more narrowly in terms of political processes and institutions (Young 1990). For instance, feminist ethicists raise questions about the extent to which people who are oppressed are obligated to resist their own oppression (Hay 2013) and the impact that oppression has on the capacity of the oppressed to cultivate ethical virtues (Tessman 2005). Thus, they acknowledge and examine the extent to which socio-­economic, political, and historical circumstances condition people’s ability to act ethically and even circumscribe what is considered “ethical” or not. These concerns have also led feminist thinkers to examine the ethical and political importance, the value-­ladenness, of metaphysical and epistemological issues and claims. Continental feminist ethicists take up these concerns about the relation between ethics and politics in myriad ways. One focal point is the role of norms, both ethical and social-­political. For some, this exploration develops in light of critical conceptualizations of power inspired by Michel Foucault (1990), who identified the norm as a mechanism by which people can be induced to participate in their own subjection. Normalization allows for the continual correction of people’s behavior, entailing that they can govern and be governed in subtle rather than overtly oppressive ways. Judith Butler, initially renowned for her deconstructive approach to the sex/gender dichotomy, has pursued this line of inquiry the furthest in her ethical writings. The point for Butler, among others, is not only that the normative tenets of morality are impacted by political conditions but also, in a more Nietzschean vein, that it is difficult to extricate that which is moral from that which is social; there is no means by which we can purify ethics of power. If power, on the Foucaultian view, is simply a matter of the dynamics of relationships, then ethics itself is a power-­laden endeavor. The intent is not to render all normative prescription null but rather to render it suspect and so subject to critical examination. Consequently, especially for those feminists influenced by Foucault, critique itself is conceived as an ethical activity because it enables the problematization

1  For an analysis of dualism and an assessment of its implications for ethical treatment of others, including nonhumans and the natural world, see Plumwood (1993).

Continental Feminist Ethics   263 of norms—both ethical and social—that are oppressive, exclusionary, or simply unduly limiting such as those concerning gender, sex, sexuality, and bodies.2 Continental feminists also delve more deeply into the nature of subjectivity, subject formation, and how subjects are formed in relation to norms. Feminist ethicists in general have turned their attention to the formation of selves and identity by foregrounding the importance of caring relations in human development. They have done so both to proffer an alternative vision of what human beings are—interdependent, relational, and connected rather than purely or mainly independent, autonomous, and disconnected—and to revalue the role the intimate sphere of personal relations plays in ethics, that is, in the development of identity and moral agency. Continental thinkers take up these concerns in two ways: First, they turn attention to an even more extensive range of conditions and processes that obtain for subject formation to occur in the ways that it does. Second, they make normative development the subject of critique. If the norms of the social world mediate our formative relations with others, then such norms are formative of subjectivity rather than simply being applied to an already formed subject. As a consequence we may be formed at the start by “violent” forces, that is, norms that operate to exclude, foreclose, and marginalize. Indeed, Butler argues in The Psychic Life of Power (1997) that our very capacity to act morally—the superego in psychoanalytic terms and conscience in lay terms—is founded upon the foreclosure of possibilities, in particular, relational possibilities that are foreclosed by norms for gender and sexuality. Thus, the very formation of subjects both raises ethical issues and is the condition of the possibility of ethics in general. The more extensive range of conditions and processes of subject formation can be encapsulated in four related ethical concepts: embodiment, vulnerability, relationality, and alterity. For all continental thinkers, embodiment lies at the heart of subjectivity. From an existential-­phenomenological perspective, to be an intersubjective being, one who always and inevitably shares the world with other subjects, is to be a corporeal being, and to be a corporeal being is to be vulnerable. In other words, corporeality is marked by passivity and exposure: to have a body is to be open to others and the world in ambivalent ways that one cannot necessarily control, to physical injury and aid, to judgment and esteem, to the warmth of unexpected touch and the shame of a withering gaze. For phenomenological thinkers, embodiment is an open structure, an availability to the world and others that makes possible sensation and perception. This vulnerability has ethical significance insofar as it is both what enables ethical response and what can be violated or exploited: care and assistance are needed because we are vulnerable and thus dependent beings, but ethical violations can likewise only be committed because of vulnerability, the capacity to be affected in this way. Moreover, one is only motivated to respond to others ethically because one is affected, moved in some way by their need or suffering; the capacity to be vulnerable, corporeally and emotionally, makes possible 2  Understood in the Kantian sense that is central to nearly all continental thought, critique is an exploration of the (transcendental) conditions of possibility. For elaboration see Foucault (1994b) and Butler (2002).

264   Gilson ethical response to others. For some, attention to embodiment marks a turn to a “corporeal humanism,” that is, a humanism based not on traits traditionally associated with masculinity, such as autonomy and rationality, but rather on a shared corporeal vulnerability (Murphy 2011), whereas for others this turn toward vulnerability holds the potential to decenter the form of “the human,” and a certain normative form of the human, from its pride of place in ethics and politics (Butler 2004, 13). For all, though, vulnerability and corporeality are matters of relationality. Relationality is understood not solely in terms of the capacity for relationships among discrete persons but rather in terms of the formative nature of such relationships and their impact on subjectivity. To be formed by relations with others entails that we are not our own in some sense: it is not merely others’ care during our early years that forms us, but further the habits, beliefs, attitudes, values, and ways of living that they share with us. We come to be who we are through such relationships, through adopting a mother’s way of telling jokes, a father’s pattern of communicating difficult information, or a friend’s verbal tics. One comes to have a sense of one’s self in relation to these others, in terms of both relational roles (being a child or parent, friend, colleague, sibling, lover, and so on) and shared forms of life. Further, the need for recognition—of our desires and needs, attributes and abilities, roles and status—and the capacity of others to recognize or misrecognize us structures the subjectivity of all parties. Such relations of recognition take place within the mediating milieu of the social world and all its accumulated meaning, and so relations with others induct us into the norms that compose that world, norms, again, that may effect a kind of violence on the subject (e.g., racist or homophobic norms) even as they also enable particular patterns of sociality. The constitutive quality of relations with others makes them essential parts of the self. If others are part of who we are, then the self is characterized by being outside itself, ec-­static in Judith Butler’s terms, dispossessed rather than in possession of itself (as conventional ideas of autonomy presuppose) (2004, 20). There are many ethical implications of this notion of constitutive relationality. First, it amounts to a necessary relation to alterity, or otherness, in the form of concrete others. Alterity in continental thought often refers to the dimension of otherness that is inaccessible or irreducible to what one can know or perceive of the other. On some accounts, alterity implies difference that is intangible and ungraspable. More specifically, it is a kind of difference that subverts the dichotomy between sameness/difference or identity/otherness; that is, such difference is not merely the difference of conceptual opposition (x and not-­x). Thus, the ethical response called for is not merely a matter of cognitively recognizing that difference but rather of encountering concrete others who are epistemically and socially unassimilable to the self. The ethical challenge is thus how to engage with and respond to such others without erasing their alterity or absorbing them into the self, for instance, in a mode of ethical relationship that Kelly Oliver has theorized as a form of “witnessing” (2001). For thinkers such as Luce Irigaray (1985) and Hélène Cixous (Cixous and Clement 1986), concern for alterity takes the specific form of making space within Western discourse for sexual difference, that is, the difference of feminine subjectivity. They extend and revitalize de Beauvoir’s critique in the introduction

Continental Feminist Ethics   265 to the Second Sex that women’s difference from men has only ever been theorized oppositionally, male and female as positive and negative poles, men as plenitude and women as lack (2011, 5). Irigaray, for instance, critiques masculine hegemony in language and the social order and, in particular, the way women have been reduced to being conduits for relations among men and their subjectivity to a mirror of men’s. On her view, sexual difference has not yet been realized since women’s subjectivity has not been afforded space in which to develop. Thus, both Irigaray and Cixous emphasize the importance of the repressed feminine—the body, imagination, emotion—and use writing as a vehicle for conveying elements of that feminine. They likewise affirm the potential for an ethics based on sexual difference. Such an ethics might be one based on communicating across different “relational identities” in ways that preserve and communicate that difference rather than dissolving it or merely conveying information (Irigaray 2002, 79). Yet, this relationship to alterity is complicated by a second ethical implication. If the self is formed through relations with others and is dispossessed of itself, then the consequence is that the self is other to itself in certain respects. This view is strongly indebted to psychoanalytic accounts of the formation of subjectivity, which emphasize splits in the subject between unconscious and conscious elements, and finds exemplary expressions in the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler. As Butler charts in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), we cannot grasp our own self-­formation adequately nor fully narrate how we have come to be the selves that we are. Thus, there is an opacity at the heart of subjectivity that entails that we cannot account for our own intentions and desires completely. Accordingly, we cannot be adequate moral agents either by knowing ourselves fully and acting with intention or by accounting for our ethical comportment. In this way, the project of ethics is beset at the outset by the inevitability of failure, but this failure is precisely what motivates attempts at ethical response. It is only because we cannot be perfect agents, cannot know ourselves fully and thus control ourselves properly, that we need to endeavor to act ethically and that ethical action has meaning as an endeavor and a process. Further, the constitutive relationality that makes us other to ourselves is a matter of unwilled dependencies and unchosen connections, but these relationships are concrete, not abstract or hypothetical. We do not choose those who care for us as infants, just as we do not choose to be connected to those many others whose actions sustain us throughout our lives. Although many relations are ostensibly a matter of choice, the notions of relationality, vulnerability, and alterity call our attention to the fact of “unchosen cohabitation” that characterizes coexistence on the earth (Butler 2012, 145). A third ethical implication, a further challenge, is raised by the possibility that how we relate to such others is intimately connected to our otherness to ourselves. If we are, in Kristeva’s turn of phrase, “strangers to ourselves” (1991), we have become so through processes of repression and abjection in which intolerable relations to primary others, such as dependence on the mother, and the intolerable in the self, such as mortality and aggression, are excluded and/or projected onto others. Thus, the issue of how to respond to those who are experienced as the most strange or abject must be raised in relation to the issue of how the subject deals with its internal otherness.

266   Gilson The three aforementioned ethical implications all point to a fourth, which encapsulates them: an alternative notion of responsibility. Responsibility is foremost among the mainstream ethical concepts taken up in continental approaches to ethics, yet the role it plays in these accounts differs from its conventional conceptualization. Whereas responsibility is typically conceived as a matter of desert—being responsible is being worthy of praise or blame for one’s actions—continental approaches instead emphasize the etymological meaning of the term (response-­ability) and formulate notions of responsibility centered on the capacity to respond to the address, appeals, or mere presence of others in their alterity. Thus, they foreground the dialogic and relational nature of responsibility; what is at stake in responsibility is a certain kind of relationship to others as well as to the self rather than the discharging of obligation. If the self is other to itself, then it does not take responsibility solely or primarily through conscious, volitional choice. Rather, in being addressed by an other, one is affected and responds; responsibility is as much a matter of affect as it is will, emotion as it is reason. Therefore, taking response as a paradigm for ethics marks a departure from the tripartite focus of traditional ethical theories on duty, character, and consequences, and action, intention, and virtue, and thus from the relatively clear-­cut nature of ethical prescription. In contrast, akin to feminist care ethics, the focus shifts to the nature of the relationship between beings and, further, the right course of action is contingent upon not only the particular others to whom one is called to respond but also the socio-­historical and political conditions that are the ground for the relationship. Thus, two main concerns tend to occupy such accounts of responsibility. First, feminist thinkers in particular are concerned with what it means to take responsibility in relation to particular others in specific socio-­historical circumstances and thus with responsibility for justice: What does it look like to take responsibility for the racist, colonialist regimes of the past and their enduring legacies in the present? For the violence done through war, for instance, to the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan through the US “war on terror”? For the suffering that humans inflict on nonhuman animals? Such questions have as much to do with what interrogations of and alterations to the self one is called to make as they do with what one is called to do for others. Indeed, although typically responsibility is thought as responsibility for others, here the relevant prepositional phrase might be before or in relation to others, meaning that responsive relation does not necessarily consist of assuming others’ burdens or taking on their tasks but of engaging with them in ways called for by the unique others and unique situations. Second, continental philosophers pay significant attention to how responsibility, the capacity for response, is a capacity that is a precondition of subjectivity itself; that is, they offer quasi-­ontological accounts of the nature of responsibility. Insofar as we are constituted relationally, the ability to respond inheres in our very being: “Response­ability, then, is the founding possibility of subjectivity and its most fundamental obligation” (Oliver 2015, 486). Derridean and Levinasian feminist approaches are illustrative of this view, suggesting that we are “always already in relations of responsibility or ethics. The subject, then, has no choice but to respond” (Taylor 2005, 219). They further contend that responsibility is infinite and impossible to fulfill both because it is never ceasing and

Continental Feminist Ethics   267 because we can never be sure that we have done what is just. Although this kind of ­stipulation can seem hyperbolic, and indeed Derrida (1995) calls it such, it points to the inevitable limits of our abilities to feel, understand, and respond, to the limits within ourselves and the limits that others in their opacity are for us. This perspective on the issue of responsibility leads to some conclusions about the distinctive features of continental feminist approaches to ethics. One such feature is the shift in focus from the terrain of already constituted subjects and their obligations to the very conditions of the possibility of ethics. These conditions, as described earlier, are those of subject formation: what enables us to be the kinds of subjects that we are also enables us to be ethical subjects. Although accounts of this ontological register differ depending on the influence of different traditions and figures, there is a shared structure: embodiment, sensation and perception, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and sociality are all premised on an ambivalent openness that allows for differentiation through relations, and which constitutes our ability to see, touch, understand, respond, and come to be the beings that we are. The ambivalence and ambiguity of this basic structure lies at the heart of its ethical significance: for instance, its receptivity and plasticity condition both the formation of entrenched habits, which enable ready functioning but can be regressive and oppressive, and the possibility of transformation, which can just as well be reactionary as progressive (Diprose 2002). Consequently, if continental feminist ethicists attend to the conditions of the possibility of ethics, then they are also often concerned with what makes ethical response impossible, engaging in critical analysis of what prevents ethical engagement with and response to others. As Sina Kramer notes with respect to ethics and politics oriented around vulnerability, “the ethical problem is posed by the frames that shape in advance our ability to respond to the ethical claim made on us by precariousness or vulnerability” (2015, 33). Thus, critical analysis frequently focuses on the taken-­for-­granted dimensions of our social world that do this work of framing, for instance, the structures of perception and embodiment that underlie epistemic and politico-­ethical vices like bias, objectification, arrogance, and self-­certainty and the way affect emerges in relation to such structures (Ahmed 2006; Alcoff 2006). Building on the insights of Marilyn Frye (1983) and Maria Lugones (1987), phenomenological feminist ethics, for instance, ­analyze “objectifying vision” not merely as a harmful way of seeing others, eliding their difference, but also as a particular dimension of normal modes of perception: “objectifying vision makes the world visible as objects” and erases the process of vision, the unavoidable process of selection and interpretation that makes things appear to us as meaningful (Al-­Saji 2009, 377). It posits objects as discrete entities so “their relation to an embodied seer is severed. The work of vision remains invisible, hidden from the regard of vision itself ” (378). Although it is necessary for the work of vision—rendering some things invisible in order to see others—to recede to the background, this particular kind of seeing, objectifying seeing, is not inevitable. Thus, Alia Al-­Saji argues for a “critical-­ethical vision” that would restore awareness of the constitutive relationality (the relations between subject and world, between visible and invisible, etc.) that underlies and makes possible vision. Ethical vision consists of attentiveness that occurs

268   Gilson through hesitation, which “creates an opening in habits and makes them visible for themselves and within the world” (378); it is both critical and ethical because it attends to the literally overlooked process and work of vision, to the contingency of this process, and so creates space for seeing along with others in their uneliminable alterity. In this instance and many others, critical ethical analysis targets not only social norms but also the way particular patterns of perceiving, relating, thinking, and feeling are regarded as inevitable and necessary rather than understood as the contingent formations that they are. The focus on the conditions of the possibility of ethics is also an occasion for rethinking what is entailed in ethical prescription. Like an ethics of care, an ethics oriented around corporeality, alterity, relationality, and vulnerability finds the basis for ethical prescription in immanent conditions rather than transcendent norms (e.g., Kantian rationality or discursive permutations thereof). It eschews the categorical and absolute, holding ethical prescription to be context sensitive and contingent upon the singularity of the subjects involved, their social positions, and socio-­historical and politico­economic circumstances. Accordingly, as a product of critique, ethical prescription is often inverted; it is a matter of identifying ethical failures and the conditions thereof and then proposing remedies for the ways of seeing and feeling, habits of thought and action, and modes of subjectivity that hinder ethical relation and response. Ethical prescription is inverted in this way because of the methodology, shared by most feminist ethicists, of starting with experience rather than with abstract principle and the belief that it is crucial to attend to subject formation as an ongoing process: if we are beings that are becoming—always in process, that is—then ethics is about transforming ourselves and our responses to others rather than about deducing correct judgments about ethical dilemmas from principles. Consequently, ethics is a matter of ongoing practices rather than discrete actions, and practices are embedded in social contexts and relationships rather than being the purview of isolated individual actors. In this light, the notion that critique is itself a positive ethical activity becomes clearer and finds exemplary instances in the work of feminist Foucaultians concerned with carving out practices of self-­relation that resist the coercive force of dominant norms and their ethically damaging consequences. When ethics is, as Foucault defines it, “the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection,” then critique, and critical self-­relation, are necessarily ethical, the basis for freedom to be reflective rather than haphazard (1994a, 284). Indeed Foucaultian feminists such as Cressida Heyes (2007) and Dianna Taylor (2004) often best capture the implications of the fundamental ambivalence of our ontological and ethical existence. Foucaultian analyses of power and normalization supply the insight that disciplinary practices simultaneously produce “docile bodies” and generate new capacities and modes of agency. This insight is indicative of the ambivalence of the basic structures of embodiment and intersubjectivity and, further, points to the necessity of a more nuanced understanding of ethical life, one in which good and bad, right and wrong, liberatory and oppressive may not always be readily distinguishable.

Continental Feminist Ethics   269 Thus, there is much value in the focus on the conditions of the possibility of ethics, the transcendental level, that is. The work of continental feminists fruitfully extends the efforts of feminist thinkers to explore the development of subjectivity and agency, attend to the relationships constitutive of subjectivity, and bring both the particularities of people’s positions within social structures and their singularity as subjects to the fore in ethical reflection, thus drawing ethics into its necessary relation to politics and social justice. This avenue of research is most worthwhile when it brings the transcendental to bear on the empirical and concrete, when it makes the move to critical analysis of actual specific practices that, on the one hand, facilitate ethical response and, on the other hand, hinder or inhibit it, contributing to violence, oppression, and the continuation of small banal miseries. Analyzing how conditions of possibility are actualized in diverse ways in relation to historical, political, economic, and cultural conditions so as to perpetuate injustice or enable resistance is a way of making such theoretical parsing of the transcendental meaningful. Examples of such work include Lisa Guenther’s Solitary Confinement (2013), a powerful critique of how the practice of punitive isolation exploits and distorts the basic and constitutive bodily capacity of relationality, and the recent collection of essays edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, Vulnerability in Resistance (2016), that highlights how vulnerability is a capacity for resistance, not merely a susceptibility to wounding. These tendencies are less fruitful when an interpretation of the nature of transcendental or ontological conditions is advanced as tantamount to ethical knowledge, motivation, or meaning and an account of such conditions is put forward in lieu of any other ethical evaluation. For instance, such conditions are sometimes read as predisposing subjects to ethical response since the possibility for response is inherent in the very structures of embodiment, perception, and intersubjectivity; the assumption is that the motivation or imperative to respond ethically issues from such ontological conditions.3 Continental feminism may continue on in this direction, parsing these metaethical or ontological structures as if their truth amounts to an ethical intervention and so focus its theoretical work on comparing and contrasting, or worse, pitting against one another, different versions of these basically similar views: Irigaray contra Levinas, phenomenology contra poststructuralism, witnessing versus recognition, agonism versus nonviolence, and so on. Yet, since the core insight ultimately amounts to the same basic point—that embodied existence is ambiguous—more fecund terrain can be found by taking this insight beyond that familiar territory of continental theory. Such a move might call for changes in method, away from the textual exegesis and figure-­centric orientation that dominates contemporary continental thought and toward greater accessibility in terminology and style, more engagement across disciplinary and intradisciplinary 3  This kind of view also amounts to a return to a kind of foundationalism and has problematic implications for the relationship between ethics and politics; rather than maintaining that ethics and politics intertwine, and so that we must always attend to the political dimensions of ethics, to assume that ontological features of the world or of subjects lead to ethical obligation is to assume that there is a prepolitical foundation for ethics. See Kramer (2015) for a discussion of this point with respect to Judith Butler’s ethics.

270   Gilson boundaries, and greater pluralism, especially with respect to the methods and ideas of decolonial and postcolonial, indigenous, non-­Western, and comparative thought. This shift might also take the form of what might be thought of as a new kind of casuistry in ethics: not deduction of moral judgment in particular cases from moral principle but ethical analyses of the concrete problems of social life.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Alcoff, Linda. 2006. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Al-Saji, Alia. 2009. “A Phenomenology of Critical-Ethical Vision: Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the Question of Seeing Differently.” Chiasmi International 11: 375–98. Benhabib, Seyla. 1987. “The Generalized and the Concrete Other.” In Women and Moral Theory, edited by Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers, 154–77. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. 2002. “What Is Critique?: An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue.” In The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy, edited by David Ingram, 212–28. London: Blackwell. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Butler, Judith. 2012. “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26 (2): 134–51. Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, eds. 2016. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Calhoun, Cheshire. 1988. “Justice, Care, Gender Bias.” The Journal of Philosophy, 85 (9): 451–63. Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément. 1986. The Newly Born Woman. Translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Beauvoir, Simone. 2011. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Diprose, Rosalyn. 2002. Corporeal Generosity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel. 1994a. “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, 281–302. New York: New Press. Foucault, Michel. 1994b. “What Is Enlightenment?” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, 303–20. New York: New Press. Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The Politics of Reality. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Gilligan, Carol. 1987. “Moral Orientation and Moral Development.” In Justice and Care, edited by Virginia Held, 31–46. New York: Routledge. Guenther, Lisa. 2013. Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hay, Carol. 2013. Kantianism, Liberalism, and Feminism. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Continental Feminist Ethics   271 Held, Virginia. 1998. “Feminist Reconceptualizations in Ethics.” In Philosophy in a Feminist Voice, edited by Janet A. Kournay, 92–115. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Heyes, Cressida. 2007. Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies. New York: Oxford University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 2002. “Why Cultivate Difference? Toward a Culture of Two Subjects.” Paragraph 25 (3): 79–90. Kramer, Sina. 2015. “Judith Butler’s ‘New Humanism’: A Thing or Not a Thing, and So What?” PhiloSOPHIA 5 (1): 25–40. Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon  S.  Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lugones, María. 1987. “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” Hypatia 2 (2): 3–19. Murphy, Ann  V. 2011. “Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism.” Hypatia 26 (3): 575–90. Oliver, Kelly. 2001. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Oliver, Kelly. 2015. “Witnessing, Recognition, and Response Ethics.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 48 (4): 473–93. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York: Routledge. Taylor, Chloé. 2005. “Levinasian Ethics and Feminist Ethics of Care.” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 9 (2): 219–39. Taylor, Dianna. 2004. “Foucault’s Ethos: Guide(post) for Change.” In Feminism and the Final Foucault, edited by Karen Vintges and Dianna Taylor, 258–74. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Tessman, Lisa. 2005. Burdened Virtues. New York: Oxford University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

chapter 22

Femi n ist Bioethics Jackie Leach Scully

Some Definitions and a Bit of History Definitions of bioethics conventionally start by acknowledging that it is a wide-ranging and unusually multidisciplinary field, a fact that makes it hard to pin down exactly what it is concerned with. Broadly, bioethicists are interested in the ethical implications and consequences of research and practice in the life sciences, especially but not exclusively biomedicine. Something recognizable as bioethics began to emerge during the late 1960s and early 1970s in response to medical developments that raised issues beyond the limits of conventional medical ethics’ focus on intraprofessional conduct and the physician-­patient dyad. Initially dominated by moral philosophy and theology, bioethics now encompasses the expertise of a range of other disciplines including law, social sciences, literature, psychology, policy studies, political theory, and science and technology studies. Its thematic reach has also extended beyond ­traditional biomedical topics to cover issues in research ethics, public health, health and social care, systems of health care provision, and nonhuman and environmental ethics, among many others. Its early dependence on moral philosophy means that mainstream bioethics’ key  intellectual influence is the tradition of Western analytical philosophy. Both Kantian deontology and varieties of utilitarianism were prominent from the outset, while virtue ethics has gained a foothold more recently. However, the development of bioethics has necessarily also reflected the fact that it is a field of applied ethics; one of its main tasks is to provide ethical input to governance, regulation, and policymaking relevant to life sciences and medicine. As much as it was shaped by major ethical theory, then, in its early days bioethics drew heavily on the principlism of Beauchamp and Childress, an approach that was explicitly designed to provide an algorithm for theory-­free practical (clinical) decision making (Beauchamp and Childress 2013).

Feminist Bioethics   273

What Is Distinctive about Feminist Bioethics? Feminist bioethics’ critique of mainstream bioethics emerged from two main directions, activism and theory. While feminist activists drew attention to problematic areas in clinical practice that primarily affected women and/or where women’s perspectives were ignored, the academic critique drew on feminist moral and social scholarship to argue that mainstream bioethics is fundamentally gendered in a way that affects both how life science is researched and implemented and how this research and practice are ethically analysed. Because the perspective from which bioethics identifies morally troubling issues in the health or life sciences, and their ethically salient features, is biased along gendered lines, a mainstream bioethical analysis will be less likely to perceive certain aspects of morally problematic biomedical scenarios (Tong 1997; Sherwin 2008; Scully et al. 2010). Feminism has an explicit ethico-­political goal: achieving equality and justice for women. Feminist ethics therefore is committed to the idea that “the subordination of women is morally wrong and that the moral experience of women is worthy of respect” (Jaggar 1991, 95; Rawlinson 2001). This basic orientation means that feminist bioethics can never claim to be ethically neutral in any straightforward way. If it is the case that certain uses of life science or medical knowledge contribute to practices that are harmful to women, then such practices are morally wrong and need to be rejected and replaced by other, less gender-­oppressive practices. And like other fields of academic inquiry that have developed alongside emancipatory movements, such as disability studies or critical race theory, feminist bioethics must always negotiate the uncomfortable tension between conventions of rigorous academic inquiry (such as particular notions of objectivity) and its ultimate political goal. Feminist bioethics is distinct from mainstream bioethics in terms of the substantive topics that it addresses, the features of morally problematic situations that it highlights and examines, and the methodological approaches it develops. In the following section, I discuss feminist ontology and epistemology and how these theoretical foundations generate the distinguishing features of feminist bioethics.

Feminist Ontology Feminist moral theory has argued that mainstream philosophical models of the moral agent are clearly shaped by the gendered social and political environments of the world in which the concept of the moral agent was first devised (Stanley and Wise  1993; Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000). Traditional moral and political philosophy pictures the moral self as a singular, atomized locus of consciousness, physically disembodied and socially disconnected except for rationally arrived at and reciprocal arrangements with

274   Scully other similar agents. Feminist and other critics of this model argue that it is epistemically flawed because it omits features that are essential to moral selfhood and agency. Moral subjects are in fact embodied and emotional beings, interlinked through dependencies and responsibilities that are often neither reciprocal nor rationally deliberated (Lindemann Nelson 2000).1

Feminist Epistemology Feminist epistemology claims that the moral agent has epistemic resources that differ markedly from those available to the isolated self of traditional moral philosophy. This is not just because those resources of knowledge are collectively generated but also, it is argued, because social asymmetries are paralleled by equivalent epistemic asymmetries. That is, norms and behaviours of particular social identities shape the epistemic viewpoints that are open to the inhabitants of those identities (Harding 1991; Wylie 2003). Feminist epistemologists are mostly concerned with the epistemic effects of gendered social positioning, and by extension of social positioning along other axes of privilege and disadvantage. The stronger claim of feminist standpoint epistemology is that marginalized social groups have a unique insight into those aspects of life that are most profoundly influenced by the power hierarchy of social positions (Hartsock 1983; Hekman 1997; Intemann 2010): being a member of a particular social category affects the knowledge to which a person has access. In addition, social positioning also determines whether or not the knowledge she does have is considered credible by members of other groups. Feminist epistemologies examine the processes through which gendered or otherwise biased social organization generates skewed distributions of epistemic authority. So in a feminist epistemology the focus of attention shifts from the individual’s acquisition and use of information to the social and political structures within which knowledge is created and maintained and epistemic exclusion and injustice occur (Fricker  2007; Dotson 2014; Pohlhaus 2012). Feminist moral ontology therefore leads us to a different take on moral epistemology, because it argues for the salience of epistemological and moral perspectives. Feminist (bio)ethicists have argued that if a person’s social and cultural positioning generally results in epistemic and interpretative bias, then we need an ethical analysis (Lindemann et al.  2008) that is better grounded in the natural, social, political, and institutional worlds. This view also lies behind feminist bioethics’ turn towards empirical methodologies to get a better sense of what actually goes on in various contexts and a more critical understanding of the social, political, and other forces that lead to some practices being ethically troubling. According to Walker (1998), such relations of 1  It is true that contemporary moral philosophy certainly contains more sophisticated models of moral subjectivity. Nevertheless, much of bioethics, where it discusses the nature of the moral self at all, still relies heavily on a less nuanced view.

Feminist Bioethics   275 ­ ominance and authority “allow some people . . . to obscure what is really happening to d whom and why” (219). This idea underpins feminist ethics’ view that empirical ethical inquiry provides a resource of knowledge to inform both general understandings and  the articulation of specific morally troubling cases. Feminist bioethics aims to re-examine what counts as ethically valid and relevant knowledge, how ethical issues are  perceived and described, whose experiences are afforded credibility, how (and by whom) an issue is defined as “moral” in the first place, and how consensus on what constitutes a robust ethical evaluation is shaped by the social organization of epistemic authority.

Substantive Issues It is often assumed that feminist bioethics is distinct only by virtue of the topics that it addresses. This misperception was more understandable in the early days of the discipline, when feminist approaches tended to be dominated by reproductive issues. In part this was due to feminist bioethics’ roots in women’s health activism, but also undoubtedly reflected the high profile of the rapidly advancing fields within reproductive medicine at that time. Over the years, feminist bioethicists have turned their attention to the ethics of pregnancy, miscarriage, contraception, and abortion, and to the growing repertoire of methods of assisted reproduction involved in making “new kinds of families”: in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, egg and sperm donation, embryo donation, and more recently mitochondrial transfer (Wolf  1996; Harwood  2007; Baylis  2013; Baylis and McLeod 2014). The bioethics of prenatal testing and diagnosis, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, preconception testing, (potentially) gene editing, and the use of reproductive tissues in research have all been enriched by feminist analytical approaches (Rapp 2000). Where mainstream bioethics has often sidelined the politics of using gametes and other reproductive tissues, for example, feminist perspectives bring to the fore the potential exploitation of women’s bodies within fertility research and treatment (Dickenson 2013; Ballantyne 2014).

Ethical Analyses Nevertheless, what marks feminist bioethics out is less the substantive topics it addresses (the range of topics with which recent work engages is at least as wide as mainstream bioethics) than how its ethical analyses are performed. Feminist understandings of ontology and epistemology, as outlined earlier, mean that its analytic approaches highlight features that are less prominent, or neglected altogether, in mainstream analyses. These include attention to power dynamics and social context, the use of empirical data to inform theory, taking note of relationality and care, an interest in embodiment and materiality, and openness to minority perspectives.

276   Scully

Power Dynamics and Social Context Feminism holds that relationships between the genders are fundamentally shaped by power differentials, primarily derived from social and political structures that favour men and enable the oppression (covert and overt) of women in all societies. Feminist analyses of life science and biomedical technologies therefore have an eye to the micro-, meso-, and macro-­level power plays that shape how technologies are developed and experienced in different societies and cultures. Hence, feminist bioethics explores how the distribution of power structures, or even creates, the ethical difficulties posed by life sciences and health care. For example, it has expanded the analysis of power beyond a consideration of paternalism in the clinical dyad of doctor and patient to a comprehensive scrutiny of health care systems and institutionalized medical research. A second example: although ethical issues within clinical research have been exhaustively mapped out, it took feminist analyses to highlight that the routine exclusion of women from clinical research, on the grounds that the “anomalies” of female physiology and possible pregnancy generate unreliable data, was ethically problematic (Sherwin 1994; Corrigan 2002). A further example is the way that feminist bioethics anticipated many of public health ethics’ concerns about population health inequities, while adding a focus on how social inequities are generated in the first place, and on the distribution of political and economic power in the practices of public health from data collection to policy design and the delivery of public health programmes. Rogers (2006) provides some compelling examples of public health interventions that are ineffective because they neglect the underlying dynamics of exclusion, not just from decision-­making processes but also from implicit agreements about what should be taken into account in those processes, while Baylis et al. (2008) propose an ethical framework linking public health measures to feminist concepts of relational autonomy and solidarity.

Use of Empirical Information Not all feminist bioethicists use empirical methods, but nevertheless the field has an orientation towards using factual information to inform its normative analysis and reflection. There are two main reasons for this, one deriving from the nature of bioethics itself. A large part of bioethics is about examining the ethical issues raised by life science and biomedical innovation; by definition, this means that much about how these technologies play out in everyday life is novel. Developments in assisted conception have led to new techniques but also to the evolution of new professional and private identities, new ways of having children, new forms of families (such as same-­sex couples with genetically related children), and new and rapidly evolving relationships between public policy, legislation, and private life. Second, feminism’s awareness of the epistemic lacunae created by social stratification leads scholars to be sceptical that we (whoever we are) necessarily have a complete view

Feminist Bioethics   277 of even the most familiar situations. There is therefore a methodological bias towards methods that ground theory in lived experience, in order to be a little more confident that salient aspects of that experience, and especially the experiences of the less powerful, are captured. Feminist bioethics is therefore more likely than mainstream versions to draw on qualitative social science and health research, to ensure that bioethics’ normative work reflects the realities of the natural, social, political, and institutional worlds (Scully 2016). So both the novelty of the practices and the theoretical bias of feminism provide support to the claim that normative bioethical judgements must be based on knowledge of what is actually going on, rather than on an assumption of how things appear to be. To know about the “actual moral and social orders” (Walker  1998, 195) relevant to new technologies and the resulting social practices requires empirical information. Some feminist bioethicists, then, are concerned with developing empirical methodologies that provide useful information for normative reasoning, and still others work on theorising the always problematic relationship between the two.

Relationality and Care As discussed earlier, feminist ontology is broadly speaking a social one, in which the self is embedded in relationships, formed and sustained through interaction with other selves. This theoretical basis underpins feminist bioethics’ stance towards the moral significance of interpersonal relationships. Relationships are not only key to the formation of the moral subject but also, as the model of relational autonomy (see later) argues, provide the basis for self-­determination. Bioethics has a particular interest in relationships in the context of health care settings, whether the questions they raise are longstanding, such as how responsibilities and obligations are ascribed, accepted, or rejected by relatives when family members are ill and how these affect the relationships between the patient and the health care providers, or more novel ones, such as the complexities of relationships between a gamete or embryo donor, and the children that result (Sherwin and Stockdale 2017). Taking the responsibilities of interpersonal relationships seriously has fostered feminist bioethics’ interest in issues of care. Feminist ethics is sometimes taken as being effectively equivalent to the ethics of care (see discussion later). Although this view is mistaken, it does reflect the point that the elaboration of an ethics of care has been one of the key contributions of feminist approaches to ethics. For bioethics, the ethics of care focuses primarily on relationships in the clinical setting and particularly on the micro-level of interactions between individual caregiver or health care professional and care recipient (the patient). The moral structure of relationships involving care (which in some perspectives means the majority of human relationships) is now generating fresh interest as a result of the changes in family formations following new forms of assisted reproduction, and also following demographic changes that have caused most Western nations to experience the aging of

278   Scully their populations with a concomitant increased demand for both medical and social care (Holstein 2013; Verkerk et al. 2015). In many places care responsibilities are, increasingly, shifting away from state provision and back onto families. The result is a reinforcement in some contexts of more traditional family arrangements in which women undertake the bulk of the care of dependent members (Noddings 2002). A significant amount of feminist work examines the empirical and normative organization of familial versus societal responsibilities, especially as globalization encourages the transnational movement of caregivers—often disproportionately affecting socially marginalized groups (Eckenwiler 2013; Lanoix 2013).

Embodiment Mainstream moral philosophy has been accused of being too abstract and decontextualized, lacking connection to real-­life ethical quandaries. One manifestation of this is its failure to take seriously the facts of material embodiment, the specifics of having/being a bodily creature, as relevant to ethical judgement. Feminist theory, on the other hand, has always been informed by the experience that many women undergo, of having/being a body that deviates from an embodied male norm. The categorization of the female body as “anomalous” is particularly obvious throughout medical history, and because of this there is an influential strand within feminist bioethics that reflects quite generally on what it means to have/be various forms of anomalous body, not simply the “wrong” gender. Some of the most interesting work here takes a phenomenological approach to, for example, the experience of pregnancy, of biomedical innovation, or of disability or illness (Shildrick and Mykitiuk 2005). In fact, there is a striking amount of feminist bioethical writing that relates to disability, often challenging conventional analyses, whether that is through a critique of the universally negative treatment of dependency needs in disability, examining how new biomedical technologies inform the construction of cultural expectations of embodied norms, or re-­examining the political choices about prenatal selection and postnatal care for disabled people that may, inadvertently or otherwise, lead to greater marginalization (Scully 2008; Hall 2011). Some feminist disability scholars examine how disability as a form of embodied social exclusion intersects with gender and gender identity, and in the context of bioethics, how these interactions play out in the health care or research setting (Wong 2002). The pathologization of nonstandard embodiments is considered by some feminist writers to be an example of the increasing medicalization of aspects of human life that have historically not fallen within the category of medical or health issues (Bordo  1993; Reiheld 2015; MacKay 2017).

Minority Voices Finally, feminist bioethics is distinctive in recognizing that minority viewpoints are seldom represented within mainstream bioethics, and attempting to take these into

Feminist Bioethics   279 account in its analyses. Given that feminism argues that women are just such a minority or marginalized viewpoint, this is unsurprising. However, as the previous discussion has shown, even in its early days feminist bioethics looked beyond marginalization by sex to other marginalities (gender, race, ethnicity, age, disability, or genetic susceptibility to ­disease) to consider the way that power relations interacting with minority statuses can perpetuate moral harms in clinical care, research, and public health. One example here is the critical examination of the treatment of women in psychiatric medicine that ­identified a range of moral issues to do with the workings of gendered authority within psychiatry: the misuse of clinical power; the stigmatization of women’s, Black, and ­disabled experiences; and the epistemic suppression of perceptions and knowledge that lie outside the norm and that are therefore automatically dismissed as being distorted by mental illness (Bluhm 2011; Thachuk 2011).

Theoretical Contributions to the Field Feminist thought’s most important contribution has been to offer an alternative way of doing bioethics at a time when the field was dominated by a fairly rigid orthodoxy. Different moral theories offer distinct analytical frameworks, but deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, and other variants all operate within the same ontological and epistemological frameworks that feminist bioethics was able to challenge. But in addition, feminist bioethics has also made several unique theoretical contributions. Two of the most important are discussed here: the ethics of care, and theories of relational autonomy.

Ethics of Care The notion of an “ethics of care” grew out of psychologist Carol Gilligan’s 1970s work on gender and ethics and her influential publication In a Different Voice (1982). Gilligan claimed an empirical basis for a gender difference in moral evaluation, with men being more likely to use principled or “justice-­based” approaches, and women favouring a morality that prioritizes values such as love, relational bonds, and responsibility. Later work questioned the reality of such a sharp distinction between masculine and feminine approaches as drawn by Gilligan. It also raised concerns about the implicit gender essentialism of care ethics and whether it has the critical capacity to challenge rather than valorize exploitative or unjust relationships (Groenhout 2004). Nevertheless, the ability of care ethics to throw light on the moral subtleties of ­relational bonds that are frequently overlooked by principle-­oriented frameworks has produced an extraordinarily rich body of work (Held 2006). It has been especially valuable in the health care setting through its challenge to the conventional framing of “dependency” as inevitably anomalous and pathological. Care ethics highlights the fact that unbalanced, dependent relationships are ubiquitous in everyday life, in contrast to

280   Scully the supposedly contractual relationships between equals favoured by many models of social or political life. For example, Eva Kittay’s groundbreaking discussion of so-­called dependency work (1999; Kittay and Feder 2003) brought to the fore the mundane labour that provides essential care to vulnerable people, yet often receives very little bioethical attention in comparison to sophisticated, heroic biomedical innovations that may well be much less significant in everyday life. To some extent, much of this could equally well be described as “ethics of dependency relationships,” and this is reflected in recent efforts to tease out the theoretical connections between the moral concepts of care, dependence, independence, and autonomy, and their implications for normative thinking. An example here is the growing body of recent work on vulnerability as a moral concept in general and specifically within bioethics (Luna 2009; Mackenzie et al. 2014). The terminology of “vulnerable groups” is key to many frameworks of research and health care ethics, notably with respect to informed consent. What tends not to be examined in this literature, however, are the forces that lead to the existence in the first place of vulnerable groups, i.e. people who are collectively more likely to suffer disadvantage, harm, or exploitation in research or other contexts. By contrast, Rogers et al. (2012) and similar authors examine the contingency of vulnerability: the fact that it is often social and political circumstances that generate or exacerbate existing vulnerabilities—for example, the biological vulnerability of the very young or very old can be more or less compensated for depending on whether they live in poverty, are refugees, and so on.

Relational Autonomy In a social model of selfhood, the individual cannot in any meaningful sense be disentangled from an enduring network of familial, community, and wider relationships that creates and sustains their identity (Donchin 2000; Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000). This relational view of the self creates some problems for traditional moral philosophy’s idea of personal autonomy as essentially an individual’s capacity to act as a rational decision-­maker, protecting their own interests and as detached as possible from any influence by or concerns about other agents. Recognizing the inescapability of connection among individuals, their social milieu, their cultural matrix, and so on, feminist scholarship has developed a similarly relational model of autonomy. This view is notably skeptical about the relevance of the standard model of autonomy to marginalized social groups for whom material, social, and political structures may severely constrain their exercise of self-­determination. It is important to note that the critique is not that the exercise of autonomy as conventionally modelled is morally wrong, but that the model itself is a poor one; and it is a poor model not because real-­life social entanglements are a regrettable feature that forces people to fall short of authentic autonomy, but because the activities that constitute ­self-­determination are inherently social. It isn’t that relationality compromises autonomy, but rather that it provides the conditions of possibility for the exercise of self-determination and self-­actualization in the first place (Donchin 2000, 239; Scully 2008, 161–62).

Feminist Bioethics   281 This is particularly important to bioethics, where historically, respect for the a­ utonomy of the individual patient or research subject has been paramount. It is the  principle that underpins the contemporary focus on informed consent and the importance of patient choice (although some bioethicists now argue that this itself has led to an impoverished picture in which autonomy has come to mean little more than offering a patient a set of clinical options). A more adequate conceptualization would make visible the social norms and pressures that influence the options offered to patients, as well as the decisions they then make. It would also emphasize the obligations of health care providers to actively support patient autonomy and decision making in a variety of ways. Feminist bioethics’ interest in the power dynamics of systems and institutions enables it to push beyond the level of interpersonal constraints on patient autonomy (e.g., the authority differential between patient and health care provider) to examine the effects of structures and environments on the capacity for autonomy. Similarly, feminist theory’s attention to the specifics of the body as a morally relevant feature has prompted some scholars to look at the embodied experiences of illness, impairment, or trauma, and relational responses to these embodied states, in terms of their effect on autonomous agency (Ells 2001; Scully 2010; McDonald 2018).

How Feminist Work Has Changed Mainstream Bioethics In some lights, the efforts of feminist bioethics to change how bioethics is done have been a resounding success. Many of its substantive themes and theoretical arguments have been taken up, or at least given more houseroom, by mainstream bioethics (RehmannSutter 2010). For example, there is now greater acknowledgement of the need for empirical knowledge about how biomedical innovations actually work before attempting to generate normative ethical statements; the ubiquity and moral importance of asymmetric relationships of dependency is more often recognized; the dismissal of variant embodiments (such as those of women, or transgendered or disabled people) as necessarily substandard is less common. Ironically, contemporary bioethics sometimes shows a degree of amnesia about where these once radical approaches originally came from. Nevertheless, while elements of feminist bioethics’ theoretical and methodological approaches may have been adopted by the mainstream, its fundamental goals of gender and more general social justice remain peripheral. Acknowledgement of the contributions of feminist bioethics can be grudging or token. So although some feminists have expressed the concern that mainstream recognition of feminist bioethics also renders it powerless as a dissident voice, in practice feminist bioethics is far from wholly assimilated. It still stands as a counter to the predominant frameworks of bioethics.

282   Scully

Future Directions in Feminist Bioethics The trajectory of feminist bioethics’ development has been characterized by thematic and conceptual expansion in response to the ever-­growing repertoire and reach of life science innovation, and to conceptual moves within feminist theory. In this final ­section I point briefly to some recent examples likely to shape the future development of the field.

Thematic Expansion As new bioethical themes come to the fore, feminist bioethics continues to offer its distinctive insights. Among the controversial recent developments in reproductive medicine is the prospect of mitochondrial replacement to prevent the transmission of genetic disease by inheritance of “faulty” mitochondria (the subcellular structures responsible for energy production). Alongside the issues raised by mainstream ethical analysis, feminist scholarship has particularly noted the potential for the exploitation of women as providers of eggs and mitochondria in the global economy of reproductive tissue required for a range of research and treatment (Baylis 2013; Dickenson 2013). Similar concerns about the disproportionate impact on women are raised by research on genome editing technologies. Looking at recent progress in the clinical use of uterus transplants for infertility, feminist bioethics considers not only efficacy and safety but also again the need for women’s bodies to refine the experimental procedures (Catsanos et al. 2013). Some feminist bioethicists have also challenged the assumed universality, or even moral relevance, of parents’ desire for a gestational or genetic link to their children. At the other end of the timescale, a growing number of feminist bioethicists focus on the ethical consequences of environmental damage and climate change for humans and the biosphere overall (Dwyer 2013; Whyte and Cuomo 2016; Zoloth 2017). There is currently a high level of activity in the area of gender identity claims. Feminist theory has long been concerned with the conceptualization of gender, but only since around the turn of this century has that the same level of attention been turned to the theorization of gender assignment and reassignment. Unsurprisingly given the role that the medical profession has played here, this is also a theme that some bioethicists have begun to explore, particularly in controversies around surgical ­intervention in intersex conditions, biomedical and cultural conceptualizations of transgender, and the development of ethical frameworks of rights and equality in the context of gender self-­definition and reassignment (Harbin et al.  2012; Feder  2014; Nelson 2016).

Conceptual Expansion Most theorists would agree that the concept of intersectionality has become enormously influential within feminist theory and politics. Based on the observation that

Feminist Bioethics   283 predominantly white European and North American feminism has tended to ignore the differentiated experiences of Black women, intersectionality offers the straightforward but extremely rich insight that different social or identity categories intersect in complex ways that generate distinctive axes of power and oppression (Crenshaw 1989; Collins and Bilge 2016). So far the favoured categories for intersectional feminist theory work are gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. For theorists interested in justice and equality in health care and research, these intersections provide an attractive and useful expansion of both analysis and methodology. By contrast, while the power of intersectional analysis (both theoretical and political) has been acknowledged by some it has not yet disseminated widely throughout mainstream bioethics. As these examples illustrate, feminist bioethics remains responsive both to the dynamic nature of modern medicine and life science research and to developments in philosophical and social theory. In this respect it is not much different from mainstream bioethics overall. What makes it distinctively feminist is its ongoing, though not always explicitly stated, commitment to the political goal of identifying and removing practices that discriminate against women and, in so doing, creating a more equal and just world for all.

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chapter 23

Femi n ist Mor a l Psychol ogy Peggy DesAutels

Central Issues and Themes Moral psychology is an interdisciplinary and evolving field of study. Some of the questions asked in this field include: What are the respective roles of emotions, reason, intuition, values, and self-­control in moral judgments and behaviors? What are the motives, traits, or patterns of behavior that contribute to living virtuous lives? Are we morally responsible for our thoughts and behaviors? How do and should we attend to moral features of our daily lives? In addition to psychology and philosophy, disciplines of relevance to answering these sorts of descriptive and normative questions include cognitive science, social and political theory, anthropology, sociology, history, and neuroscience. There are also a variety of subdisciplines of relevance. For example, relevant subdisciplines in philosophy include ethical theory, action theory, moral epistemology, and experimental philosophy, and in psychology include developmental psychology, social psychology, personality psychology, and narrative psychology. Feminists working in the field of moral psychology add feminist concerns and theory to the interdisciplinary moral psychology mix. Feminists are especially concerned with ways that patriarchal and other oppressive social structures and institutions shape the moral psychologies and behaviors of both oppressors and those who are oppressed. If social norms for and descriptions of men’s and women’s moral psychologies differ, to what degree is this attributable to patriarchal contexts? Feminists are also especially interested in the role of emotions in our moral motivations, judgments, and behaviors. Historically, male moral theorists (e.g., Aristotle and Kant) have described women as more emotional, less rational, and less capable of moral agency than men. They also, unsurprisingly, tended to denigrate or downplay the role of emotions in moral agency. Most contemporary feminists argue, however, that effective moral agency requires both

288   DesAutels emotional and cognitive capacities. Feminists also emphasize that human emotional capacities and expressions are socially shaped. Margaret Urban Walker writes, “Feminist studies of emotion reveal that patterns of relationship and social requirements for people’s roles and behavior, for example, those created by gender, age, and race privilege, have an impact on what emotions tend to be experienced, recognized, expressed, and identified by different individuals” (Walker  2007, 104). Anita Superson provides an outstanding summary of recent themes and work in feminist moral psychology in her entry, “Feminist Moral Psychology,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) (Superson 2014). She emphasizes recent feminist work on moral motivation, deformed desires, and moral responsibility in the context of patriarchy. To follow I identify additional feminist themes in and approaches to moral psychology.

Sex Differences and Moral Psychology Feminists have long been interested in the assumptions (made by moral philosophers and society more widely) that women are the more caring, nurturing, forgiving, and empathetic sex, and men are the more rational, in-­control, and duty-­oriented sex. Conversely, philosophers and others tend to assume that women are the more manipulative, petty, and contriving sex, and men are the more violent, abusive, and aggressive sex. Norms for women include cultivating such “feminine” virtues as compassion, emotional supportiveness, and kindness, and norms for men include cultivating such “male” virtues as strength of will, leadership, and courage. But feminists take a critical stance on these supposed sex-­ differentiated moral psychologies and accompanying sex­differentiated norms. There have been many recent developments and significant insights in both feminist ethics and feminist moral psychology on ways that patriarchy molds men’s and women’s psychologies. Norms of femininity even today expect women to be first and foremost attractive to men and supportive of men. Conversely, norms of masculinity require that men contain their emotions, refrain from caring sentimentality, and stay in control of themselves and those around them. Theorizing about sex differences in moral psychology grows out of the groundbreaking work of Carol Gilligan, a psychologist, who published In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development in 1982. As a graduate student, Gilligan studied with Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987), who proposed six main stages of moral development (see Kohlberg et al. 1983). Kohlberg’s highest proposed stage was Kantian and involved making moral judgments by applying universal principles to moral situations. In developing his theory, Kohlberg worked with young boys exclusively. When Gilligan included girls in her own research, it appeared that girls were, in general, less morally developed than boys, since they were more likely to focus on caring relationships than abstract justice when reasoning morally, which would put them only at stage three on Kohlberg’s scale of moral reasoning (Gilligan 1982). Gilligan later proposed that there are two incompatible moral perspectives—the justice perspective and the care

Feminist Moral Psychology   289 perspective—neither of which is “higher” than the other on a moral scale, and that both men and women are capable of shifting between these two perspectives (Gilligan 1987). Some feminist philosophers replaced the original hypothesis that women tended to be more caring than men with the hypothesis that members of oppressed groups, including women, are expected to do society’s care work, which might make it more likely that they develop the necessary psychologies needed to do this. However, there is no empirical evidence that women are naturally more caring than men, nor is it indisputable that women acquire traits associated with care even when engaging in the caring work that is expected of them (DesAutels 2015). In 1990, Sandra Lee Bartky analyzed the influence of patriarchy on women’s ­psychologies. In her book, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression, she examines the ways that women internalize oppression. She writes, “I have been interested from the first in the nature of that ‘femininity’ that disempowers us even while it seduces us; I want to understand how the values of a system that oppresses us are able to take up residence inside our minds” (Bartky 1990, 2). She examines women’s psychologies using a wide range of theoretical tools, including linguistics, Marxism, empirical social science, and psychoanalysis. She also provides ways that women can resist the enslaving of their minds through feminist consciousness raising. More recently, feminists have engaged with those working in the emerging fields of neuroscience and neuroethics. Some have been especially interested in purported findings on whether and to what degree sex differences exist in men’s and women’s brains/psychologies. Feminist concerns tied to sex-­difference research include the potential for sex/gender bias, if not all-­out sexism, in this research and a lack of evidence for some neuroscientists’ claims that there are innate sex-­based differences in our psychologies—including our moral psychologies (see Fausto-­Sterling 2000; Fine 2010; Jordan-­Young 2010; and Bluhm et al. 2012). Peggy DesAutels is interested in exploring sex/gender differences in moral judgments, behaviors, and traits. If there are apparent differences, what are the most likely causes? She argues that most differences are attributable not to sex-­based brain differences between men and women, but to distinct and persistent types of psychologies found in members of oppressing and oppressed groups (DesAutels 2015).

Implicit Bias and Stereotype Threat One emerging theme in feminist moral psychology has been feminist uptake on recent findings in cognitive psychology on implicit bias and stereotype threat. Our implicit (nonconscious) attitudes and beliefs affect our perceptions, judgments, and behaviors. Nonconscious bias (including biases and implicitly held stereotypes tied to gender and race) can be linked to biased behaviors toward others. Feminists are especially interested in gender bias. Virginia Valian writes, “Very briefly: the gender schemas that we all share result in our overrating men and underrating women in professional settings, only in

290   DesAutels small, barely visible ways; those small disparities accumulate over time to provide men with more advantages than women” (Valian 2005, 198). Implicit bias affects our hiring choices when, for example, we prefer job applicants with male names on their CVs to equally qualified applicants with female names. And job applicants with white-­sounding names are more likely to be hired than equally qualified applicants with African American–sounding names. Stereotype threat refers to the underperformance on certain stereotype-­relevant tasks of those who are victims of stereotyping. Those experiencing stereotype threat underperform because they worry about confirming stereotypes tied to their group. For example, stereotype threat can affect a woman’s performance on a math exam when a “frivolous woman” stereotype is invoked prior to her taking the exam. Because women are significantly underrepresented in the field of philosophy, some philosophers ask whether and to what degree women’s underrepresentation in philosophy is due to implicit bias and/or stereotype threat. Jennifer Saul is one philosopher who emphasizes the role of implicit bias and stereotype as an explanation for the dearth of women in philosophy (Saul 2013, 39). In addition, feminist philosophers are among those who ask if we are responsible or blameworthy (and if so, to what degree) for our nonconscious biases and resulting behaviors. Saul and Jules Holroyd have each argued in separate pieces that although we cannot be blamed for biases about which we are completely unaware, we can be blamed for failing to address biases that we know we are likely to have. Saul writes that we should “abandon the view that all biases against stigmatized groups are blameworthy” and argues that “a person should not be blamed for an implicit bias of which they are completely unaware that results solely from the fact that they live in a sexist culture” (Saul 2013, 55). Nonetheless, on Saul’s view, biased individuals may be blameworthy if they know that they are likely to be biased and fail to take steps to overcome this bias. Holroyd similarly argues that “we should reject the arguments for the claim that individuals are not responsible for being influenced by implicit biases. Individuals might sometimes meet sufficient conditions for responsibility, when they have long-­range control and so can take responsibility for mitigating implicit biases; or when they are blameworthy given the indirect influence, via reflective level beliefs and attitudes, over whether their actions manifest implicit bias” (Holroyd 2012, 302). Can we align our implicit attitudes with our explicit attitudes and values? If we’re implicitly sexist or racist and behave in sexist or racist ways without intending to, can we change? Anne Jaap Jacobson examines implicit bias and the degree to which it can be changed. She writes, “Biased behavior does not receive the criticism it should. In fact, there is a good reason for holding back on the criticism: It tends not to do much good. People become highly defensive and inquiry tends to shut down. But if we concentrate on how structures in the society encode bigotry and criticize and change them, we may have a more promising route. We refrain from criticizing individuals and instead work on public critiques of more institutional facts” (Jacobson 2015, 1145). Sally Haslanger also emphasizes the need to change social structures to remedy individual biases.

Feminist Moral Psychology   291 She  argues that “an adequate account of how implicit bias functions must situate it within a broader theory of social structures and structural injustice; changing structures is often a precondition for changing patterns of thought and action and is certainly required for durable change” (Haslanger 2015, 1). DesAutels takes a slightly different approach, drawing on recent neuroscience research on perception. She emphasizes that all of our perceptions, including our moral perceptions, are biased. She takes a virtue approach to developing the virtues needed to become more morally responsive perceivers (DesAutels 2012).

Virtue Theory and Moral Emotions Given the reality of the human condition, it is realistically impossible for all, especially those who are oppressed or subjected to abuse of power, to be free of systematic social constraints and to live virtuous flourishing lives. Feminists emphasize that persons’ individual psychologies, virtues, and vices develop within and are facilitated and constrained by nonideal social conditions. When a person is oppressed or subjected to abuse of power, that person’s moral character can be damaged. In addition, the virtues needed to resist oppressive conditions are, as Lisa Tessman describes them, “burdened virtues” (Tessman 2005). The oppressed are burdened because their character development and ability to flourish are constrained by the psychological toll of oppression. Those working in feminist virtue theory theorize how to develop the virtues tied to resisting oppression while flourishing as much as is possible under less-­than-­ideal social conditions (see, e.g., DesAutels 2009, 2016). Two important recent contributions on specific moral emotions are on forgiveness and on anger. Kate Norlock’s central claim is that philosophic accounts of forgiveness are incomplete and oversimplified if they fail to incorporate the role of gender in our practices of and experiences tied to forgiveness. Norlock writes, “I suggest that the fascinating complexity of forgiveness is best appreciated when studied from a feminist perspective that prioritizes the gendered history and meanings of forgiveness, and attends in much more focused ways to the experience of women” (Norlock 2008, 4). She draws on research that shows that women are expected to forgive more often than are men and thus that women are more likely to experience the burdens that accompany forgiveness. In addition, women are more likely than men to be judged harshly when they fail to forgive. Gendered practices of forgiveness can be morally fraught. Lee  A.  McBride III and Myisha Cherry discuss the role of anger in response to oppressive circumstances or social injustices. Lee  A.  McBride II argues that “anger seems an apt and needed response to perceived unjust injury” and that anger “fortifies and emboldens those who suffer injustice” (McBride 2018, 10). Myisha Cherry similarly argues that agape love of the sort recommended by Martin Luther King can be combined with anger and that anger at “hateful racists and complicit others” is both valuable and appropriate (Cherry 2018).

292   DesAutels

Uptake by Mainstream Moral Psychology Mainstream moral psychology as a field is evolving. One recent trend is a more empirical approach informed by and in collaboration with those working in such areas as cognitive psychology, social psychology, personality psychology, and narrative psychology. Unfortunately, recent high-­visibility publications in moral psychology are devoid of feminist content or approaches. For example, John Doris, Stephen Stich, Jonathan Phillips, and Lachlan Wamsley jointly authored the entry in the SEP on moral psychology (Doris et al. 2017), and Doris edits the Moral Psychology Handbook (Doris and the Moral Psychology Research Group  2012). Neither the SEP article nor the handbook mention anything about feminist approaches to moral psychology. This is in spite of there being a completely separate entry on feminist moral psychology in the SEP (Superson  2014) and such edited volumes as Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (DesAutels and Walker 2004). Walter Sinnott-­Armstrong has edited (or coedited) a comprehensive five-­volume series on Moral Psychology (Sinnott-­Armstrong 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2014; Sinnott-­Armstrong and Miller 2017). This series also fails to mention, engage, or include those working on feminist moral psychology. Although most moral psychology anthologies fail to include feminist perspectives, there has been important recent interdisciplinary research on moral psychology that has included feminist work. As an example, “The Self, Motivation and Virtue Project” was a three-­year interdisciplinary research initiative on the moral self funded primarily by the Templeton Religious Trust. Some of the funded projects include feminist approaches. For more detail, see project descriptions by Dawn Moon and Theresa Tobin, and Jack Bauer and Peggy DesAutels at the website http://smvproject.com/initiatives/grants/.

Current and Future Directions in Feminist Moral Psychology I suggest that those who are publishing on moral psychology make issues tied to feminist moral psychology more central to their research programs and that they directly engage with the feminist moral psychology literature. Future efforts could be directed toward (1) critically examining ways that research on moral psychologies is embedded within and contributes to gender-­based social biases and injustices, including oppressive norms tied to “feminine” and “masculine” psychologies; (2) developing theories of moral psychology that are informed both by scientific findings (including findings of sex-­based differences) and by ethical theories (including feminist theories); and (3) advancing research that is socially and culturally attuned and avoids oversimplified explanations for individual moral psychologies.

Feminist Moral Psychology   293

References Bartky, Sandra Lee. 1990. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge. Bluhm, R., A. J. Jacobson, and Heidi Lene Maibom, eds. 2012. Neurofeminism: Issues at the Intersection of Feminist Theory and Cognitive Science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cherry, Myisha. 2018. “Love, Anger, and Racial Injustice.” In The Routledge Handbook on Love in Philosophy, edited by Adrienne Martin. New York: Routledge. DesAutels, Peggy. 2009. “Resisting Organizational Power.” In Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal, edited by Lisa Tessman, 223–36. New York: Springer. DesAutels, Peggy. 2012. “Moral Perception and Responsiveness.” Journal of Social Philosophy 43 (3): 334–46. DesAutels, Peggy. 2015. “Feminist Ethics and Neuroethics.” In Springer Handbook of Neuroethics, edited by Jens Clausen and Neil Levy, 1421–2434. Springer Netherlands. DesAutels, Peggy. 2016. “Power, Virtue, and Vice.” The Monist 99 (2): 128–43. DesAutels, Peggy, and Margaret Urban Walker, eds. 2004. Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Doris, John  M., and the Moral Psychology Research Group. 2012. The Moral Psychology Handbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doris, John, Stephen Stich, Jonathan Phillips, and Lachlan Walmsley. 2017. “Moral Psychology: Empirical Approaches.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2017 ed., edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/moral-psych-emp/. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books. Fine, Cordelia. 2010. Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gilligan, Carol. 1987. “Moral Orientation and Moral Development.” In Women and Moral Theory, edited by Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyes. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Haslanger, Sally. 2015. “Social Structure, Narrative and Explanation.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (1): 1–15. Holroyd, Jules. 2012. “Responsibility for Implicit Bias.” Journal of Social Philosophy 43 (3): 274–306. Jacobson, Anne Jaap. 2015. “A Curious Coincidence: Critical Race Theory and Cognitive Neuroscience.” In Springer Handbook of Neuroethics, edited by Jens Clausen and Neil Levy, 1435–46. Dordrecht, Netherlands. Jordan-Young, Rebecca  M. 2010. Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences. Boston: Harvard University Press. Kohlberg, Lawrence, Charles Levine, and Alexandra Hewer. 1983. Moral Stages: A Current Formulation and a Response to Critics. Basel, NY: Karger. McBride III, Lee A. 2018. “Anger and Approbation.” In The Moral Psychology of Anger (Moral Psychology of the Emotions), edited by Myisha Cherry and Owen Flanagan, 1–13. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield International. Norlock, Kathryn. 2008. Forgiveness from a Feminist Perspective. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

294   DesAutels Norlock, Kathryn J., ed. 2017. The Moral Psychology of Forgiveness (Moral Psychology of the Emotions). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield International. Saul, Jennifer. 2013. “Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat and Women in Philosophy.” In Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?, edited by Fiona Jenkins and Katrina Hutchison, 39–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, ed. 2008a. Moral Psychology, Vol. 1: The Evolution of Morality: Adaptions and Innateness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, ed. 2008b. Moral Psychology, Vol. 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, ed. 2008c. Moral Psychology, Vol. 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, ed. 2014. Moral Psychology, Vol. 4: Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sinnot-Armstrong, Walter, and Christian B. Miller. 2017. Moral Psychology, Vol. 5: Virtue and Character. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Superson, Anita. 2014. “Feminist Moral Psychology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2014 ed., edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2014/entries/feminism-moralpsych/. Tessman, Lisa. 2005. Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles. New York: Oxford. Valian, Virginia. 2005. “Beyond Gender Schemas: Improving the Advancement of Women in Academia.” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 20 (3): 198–213. Walker, Margaret Urban. 2007. “Moral Psychology.” In The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Linda Martin Alcoff and Eva Feder Kittay, 102–15.

chapter 24

Femi n ist A esthetics A.W. Eaton

For decades, feminist aesthetics has been at the forefront of feminist philosophy in the analytic tradition.1 For instance, the Feminist Caucus of the American Society of Aesthetics (ASA) was founded in 1990 and several volumes explicitly dedicated to feminist aesthetics appeared around that time (Ecker 1986; Hein and Korsmeyer 1993; Brand and Korsmeyer 1994).2 This has allowed the field time to nourish a wide array of approaches, views, and topics. At the same time, until recently feminist aesthetics has been operating as a version of what Linda Martín Alcoff calls “imperial feminism”; that is, a feminism that focuses on the struggles of white women while failing to address the distinct and multifarious struggles of women of color (Martín Alcoff 2020). As feminist aesthetics begins the long process of decolonizing, it becomes more pluralist in its interests, its methods, and its conclusions regarding the aesthetic—including aesthetic experience, aesthetic value, aesthetic judgment, aesthetic objects, and aesthetic production.3 Like other subfields in feminist philosophy, feminist aesthetics is deeply interdisciplinary. From its inception, feminist aesthetics has drawn from the arts, art criticism, art history, film studies, literary studies, and psychology, and also from other fields in philosophy such as ethics and epistemology. As feminist aesthetics becomes more intersectional in focus, it also looks for inspiration in queer theory, critical race studies and its subsidiaries (e.g., Latinx studies, Africana studies, Asian and Asian American studies, etc.), disability studies, trans studies, fat studies, and environmental studies. In keeping with this interdisciplinarity, feminists tend to construe “aesthetics” quite broadly. The core of most any aesthetic inquiry is aesthetic experience, which we might

1  This chapter concerns itself for the most part with the field of aesthetics in the analytic tradition, which reflects the limitations of my own training. For an excellent critical summary of feminist and critical race aesthetics from a continental perspective, see James (2013). 2  For the Feminist Caucus of the ASA, see http://aesthetics-­online.org/?page=feminist. 3  The current best current summary of analytic feminist aesthetics is Korsmeyer (2017). For important steps in decolonizing aesthetics, see Peterson and Eaton’s introduction (Peterson and Eaton 2019) and the essays contained in that special issue.

296   Eaton define as affect-­laden experience of some object4 that is constituted by or based on pleasurable or displeasurable responses to (some or all of) that object’s sensible properties.5 Aesthetic experience is typically evaluative, by which one means not that it need involve explicit appraisals of the worth of the object toward which it is directed, but rather that the phenomenology of aesthetic experience presents its objects as valuable in some way and so worthy of experiencing, having, or preserving (or as disvaluable and so to be avoided, discarded, or even destroyed). There are several important things to note about this way of thinking about aesthetic experience. First, whereas traditional philosophical aesthetics restricts the proper objects of aesthetic production and experience to so-­called high art and nature, feminist aesthetics allows that aesthetic experience can be about any object whatsoever, whether artifactual or natural (hereafter the objects of aesthetic experience and judgment will be referred to as “aesthetic objects”). This allows for a more capacious understanding of aesthetic production, which has important consequences when it comes to thinking about gender, as discussed later. In this way, feminist aesthetics shares much with everyday aesthetics, the notable distinction being that feminist aesthetics concerns itself primarily with objects pertaining to gender (and its intersections with other modes of oppression); e.g., bodies, fashion, textiles, home decor, food, video games, popular dance, jokes, etc.6 Second and related, whereas traditional philosophical aesthetics tends to limit “aesthetic experience” to the senses of sight and hearing, feminist aesthetics allows that all bodily senses can deliver aesthetic experience.7 This reclamation of the entire body as an important site of aesthetic experience and production (as well as an object of aesthetic appreciation and value, to be discussed later) also has important consequences when it comes to thinking about gender and its intersection with race, ability, age, and body size, as we shall see. Third and also related, whereas traditional philosophical aesthetics confined itself primarily to the values of beauty and sublimity (and less often to ugliness), feminist aesthetics is interested in a wide range of aesthetic values—for example, shabbiness and chicness, politeness and rudeness, prettiness and plainness, deliciousness and yuckiness, cleanliness and dirtiness, sexiness and unsexiness, etc.—as well as their intersection with other kinds of value (moral, political, epistemic, etc.). There are two more points to make about the field of feminist aesthetics before summarizing important aspects of the field. First, feminist aesthetics initially adhered predominantly to a second-­wave model that tended to treat “women” as a homogeneous group of women who were able-­bodied, middle or upper class, cis-­gender, and racialized 4  The “object” need not be an extended thing or even a physically instantiated thing, as in the case of conceptual art. 5  Since there are debates about how to define “aesthetic experience,” I here define the concept loosely enough to allow for differing views. 6  For an excellent introduction to everyday aesthetics, see Saito (2015, 2020). For gender and race concerns related to video games, see Patridge (2013, 2018, and 2019). 7  See especially two important books by Carolyn Korsmeyer (Korsmeyer 2002, 2011).

Feminist Aesthetics   297 as white. However, feminist aesthetics is progressively moving toward an intersectional approach that thinks deeply about (a) how gender intersects with other modes of social location to affect the production, reception, and appreciation of aesthetic objects and (b) how the production, reception, and appreciation of aesthetics objects affects the social meanings of gender, race, ability, age, body size, and so on.8 The second point is that feminist aesthetics has traditionally employed, or at least implicitly adhered to, a conventional sex/gender distinction according to which “gender” refers to social roles, norms, and meanings assigned to each sex, where “sex” is assumed to be binary and refers to anatomical (and genetic) characteristics pertaining primarily to biological reproduction.9 A “woman,” on this view, is a person who is assigned certain (often subordinating) social roles based on her anatomy (and perhaps also genetics) or on assumptions about her anatomy (and genetics). There is a growing consensus in feminist philosophy that we ought to reject this conventional understanding of “woman” and “gender” (as a social feature distinct from “sex”) as untenable for a host of related reasons. First, the traditional construal assumes that bodies are classifiable into two distinct types independently of the social meanings that we assign to bodies, and this is something that few feminists still accept.10 Second, the traditional understandings assume that bodies readily sort into two distinct sexes, something that research on intersex and intersex activism have taught us is false.11 Third, the traditional understanding construes “woman” and “female anatomy” in a way that excludes trans women and thereby refuses their gender identifications.12 Fourth, the assumed binary (with only two mutually exclusive options) excludes those who resist the traditional female/male dichotomy. While it is not the case that, as I write this chapter in the winter of 2018, alternative, more inclusive construals of “gender” and “woman” have become standard in feminist aesthetics, I am firmly convinced that such construals are in order and, further, will soon become standard. For these reasons, “gender” in this chapter will refer to a cluster of phenomena:13

8  Two seminal papers on intersectional feminism are Crenshaw (1989) and Lugones (1992). For a recent comprehensive overview of intersectionality, see Collins and Bilge (2020), and for a recent discussion of feminism’s defensiveness in relation to intersectionality, see Nash 2019. 9  For instance, my earlier essay on feminist aesthetics (Eaton 2008) employed a traditional sex/ gender distinction. I have learned much since writing that essay and hope to correct its faults here. 10  Judith Butler popularized the idea that biological is not conceptually or practically distinct from gender (Butler 1989, 2011). Helen Longino showed that research on the role of hormones in sexually differentiated behavior is thoroughly shaped by assumptions about gender (Longino 1990). Anne Fausto-­Sterling reveals the significant role that social ideas expectations regarding gender have played over time in understandings about biological sex (Fausto-­Sterling 1992, 2000). For these reasons, I follow Kate Bornstein in referring to what is commonly called “biological sex” as “biological gender” instead (Bornstein 1995). 11  Fausto-­Sterling (2000). 12  Special thanks to Hyacinth Piel from whom I have learned much. I am also indebted to the work of Kate Bornstein and Talia Bettcher (T. M. Bettcher 2009, 2013, 2014; T. Bettcher 2014). 13  This list is influenced primarily by Bornstein (1995) and Jenkins (2015).

298   Eaton 1. Gender classification—a system according to which those classified as “women” are on the whole subordinated, while those classified as “men” are on the whole privileged 2. Gender expression—the ways (perhaps homogeneous, perhaps multifarious, perhaps conflicting) that a person presents gender to others through things like dress, grooming, actions, speech, etc. 3. Gender identity—the way in which a person has an “internal map” of someone classed as a member of some gender14 These distinctions allow for, and indeed welcome, cases where gender classification, gender expression, and gender identity come apart—that is, cases where a person identifies in one way but presents as another or is regularly classed in another. When considering the role of gender in the aesthetic (i.e., in aesthetic production, aesthetic experience, aesthetic value, aesthetic judgment, and aesthetic objects), we must consider all aspects of gender and, to return to the point earlier about decolonizing feminist aesthetics, we must consider this for all women and in light of colonial and racists histories. In short, the field of feminist aesthetics is at the beginning of a long process of rethinking its understanding of gender in ways that are fully intersectional and trans*inclusive. In what follows, I try to weave these thoughts together with some of the important work that has already been done.

Situatedness Feminist aesthetics takes as its point of departure the fact of situatedness. The basic idea is that both the producers and appreciators of aesthetic objects represent, experience, and value the world in ways that are informed by and reflect their social locations.15 Gender is in many contexts a hierarchical mode of social location, one that intersects with other hierarchical modes of social location, according to which the makers and appreciators of aesthetic objects are situated.16 The question is, What do we make of situatedness? What difference, if any, does situatedness make to the production or appreciation of aesthetic objects? What difference, if any, should it make? These questions set the agenda for feminist interventions in philosophical aesthetics, as we see in the following sections.

14  “Internal map” is Jenkins’ term, which I adopt here because it captures the way in which gender identity orients a person in her practical and intellectual activities and life in general. 15  Situatedness is also the starting point for feminist epistemology and philosophy of science; see Anderson (2015, sec. 1 and 2) for an overview. 16  I say “in many contexts” because, as decolonial feminists remind us, gender systems are not oppressive in all contexts. See Lugones (2003, 2012), Oyèwùmi (1997), and Nzegwu (2006).

Feminist Aesthetics   299

Confronting the Artistic Canon Feminist aesthetics began in the late 1960s and early 1970s when artists started to produce explicitly feminist works, and critics and historians of the various arts began to examine a previously unnoticed gender bias in the European artistic canon (where “canon” refers to those works traditionally deemed artistically excellent that form the core of a given discipline). This bias is manifested on two levels. First, feminist critics brought to light the fact that canonical artworks of the European tradition systematically represent women and men according to deeply entrenched stereotypes, a difference evident in the organization and scenarios of the works themselves. As art historian John Berger famously put it in 1972, “men act and women appear.”17 Whereas men are typically portrayed as strong, active, heroic, and playing important historical roles, women are nearly always shown as weak, inert, and vulnerable; in domestic or nurturing roles; as identified with nature; and as sexually available for men’s needs. This is most evident in the visual arts where representations of passive, anonymous, vulnerable female nudes dominate many historical periods.18 Drawing upon semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Marxist theory, feminists sought to expose and analyze the ways that an androcentric perspective has shaped structural features of traditionally admired artworks. One of the most influential concepts developed in this early period is “the male gaze,” a term first applied to film by Laura Mulvey but later adapted by others to the static visual arts (Mulvey 1975). “The male gaze” refers to an image’s androcentric and sexually objectifying perspective toward its female-­gendered subject matter, presenting her as a primarily passive object for heterosexual male erotic gratification. There are several important points to make about “the male gaze.” First, the dominant paradigm of the male gaze is white, although the major theories of this gaze did not originally acknowledge this.19 The result of this oversight is a lack of accounting for experiences of viewers of color as well as too little attention given to the ways in which the female nude, as canonically construed, promotes paradigms of white female beauty at the expense of women of color.20 Second, it is rarely observed but worth noting that “the male gaze” is a heterosexual and cis-­gendered male gaze, never a gay male or trans* male gaze. Third, it is a common mistake to understand this as an empirical description of individuals’ actual viewing practices. A picture need not ever be viewed by heterosexual men to exemplify “the male gaze” because the term refers to the viewpoint or attitude that a picture adopts and the response that it prescribes to its audience— 17  Berger (1990, 47). 18  For an overview, see Nead (1992) and Eaton (2013). 19  The seminal essays on this topic are Diawara (1988) and hooks (1992). For a recent discussion see Taylor (2016, 62ff). 20  Consider Manet’s Olympia (1863, Musée d’Orsay). White feminists had for some time given critical attention to the reclining white female nude gazing directly at the viewer but said very little about her Black maid. As Lorraine O’Grady notes, the Black woman here serves as the “other” to the eroticized white female body (O’Grady 2002).

300   Eaton persons gendered female and male, cis and trans*, heterosexual and homosexual— namely a sexually objectifying attitude toward the woman (or women) depicted.21 This is not to say that the (white cis-­gendered) male gaze cannot be resisted; consider, for instance, bell hooks’s work on the oppositional gaze (hooks 1992).22 The second level at which feminists discern bias pertains to the canon’s gender makeup along two axes. First, although women make up roughly half of the population, they are almost entirely absent from the pantheon of great artists. Second, the kinds of artifacts traditionally produced by women (e.g., quilts, pottery, needlework, and weaving) have not been taken seriously as art but rather have been relegated to the diminished categories of “decorative arts” or “crafts.” (I shall refer to this kind as women’s artifacts for brevity’s sake.) To recap: Feminists draw out attention to three sorts of bias: (1) pervasive gender stereotypes and androcentric perspectives dominating canonical works; (2) an almost complete absence of women, and in particular of women of color, from the pantheon of great artists; and (3) a near-­total exclusion of women’s artifacts from the canon. Taken together, these three things strongly suggest that gender has indeed made a difference to artistic production and its appreciation. One easy explanation is that women are simply incapable of true artistic greatness. All feminists reject this explanation, and not simply on ideological grounds. The fact is that, at least in the Western tradition, the world in which art is created and appreciated has always been one in which women are systematically disadvantaged in most aspects of life. The coincidence of this persistent and pervasive gender inequality with gender bias in the canon suggests that the canon is shaped by more than purely aesthetic concerns. But mere correlation does not prove causation. What, exactly, is the relationship between social and political inequality and the lack of women, and in particular women of color, in the artistic canon? What explains the paucity of great women artists and the prevailing hierarchies that undervalue artifacts customarily produced by women, especially by women of color?

Two Explanations There are two general approaches to the canon formation problem, which, following Iris Marion Young, I call humanism and gynocentrism.23 These two positions, which mirror 21  Devereaux (in Brand and Korsmeyer 1995), Korsmeyer (Korsmeyer 2004, 54), and (Eaton 2013) all understand “the male gaze” to refer to an ideal viewing position prescribed by images, rather than an empirical description of actual viewing practices. See Freeland (1998). 22  See also Mary Devereaux, “Oppressive Texts, Resisting Readers, and the Gendered Spectator,” in Brand and Korsmeyer (1994). 23  See Young (1985). Cornelia Klinger also employs these categories in her essay on feminist aesthetics in Jaggar and Young (2000, 347). In her excellent overview of feminist aesthetics, Anita Silvers uses the terms “gynesis” and “gender theory” to describe similar positions (Kelly 2014).

Feminist Aesthetics   301 the two major approaches to oppression in feminist philosophy and politics generally, differ on the questions of exactly how, if at all, gender matters—and, as we shall see later, how it should matter—to the production, appreciation, and evaluation of art. 1. Humanism in feminist aesthetics holds that although gender—as well as race, ability, and class—have made a difference in the production and reception of art, they do not in principle make any difference. Women of all sorts have the same capacity to produce great art as men, and in the absence of patriarchy (and ableism, classicism, and white supremacy), women artists would not be any different from their male counterparts. What gives the appearance of an intrinsic difference between women and men artists, and in particular what makes women artists appear deficient, is the patriarchal system in which art is produced and appreciated. But how, exactly, has patriarchy had this effect? Humanist feminists offer two sorts of answer. Some explain the exclusion of women artists and the sorts of artifacts typically produced by women from the canon by appeal to biases in the prevailing tastes and standards of artistic excellence.24 Since the makers of taste have predominately been white men, and since until very recently there has been almost no attention to gender and racial inequality in the art world, choices regarding what counts as “great art,” or even as “art” at all, have been distorted by preferences and values for things masculine and white. These biases have taken many forms: for instance, a preference for works that express heterosexual, cis-­gendered, white male experiences and desires, or a prejudice against things made by women simply because they were made by women, or a prejudice against certain materials because of their deep association with domestic affairs or with certain racialized groups. Removing these biases and implementing equitable standards of artistic value should allow for the incorporation of women artists and women’s artifacts into the canon of great art, a topic discussed later in this chapter. This explanation of women’s exclusion from the canon has met with some skepticism, for it seems that no matter how unbiased the standards for artistic greatness, and no matter how many worthy but underappreciated artists or artforms one uncovers, the (re)discovery of “women worthies” will never yield quilts that rival, say, the Sistine ceiling, nor will it uncover women equals of Leonardo or Picasso.25 It is not simply that the (re)discovery project will not work; some worry that any attempt to recover underappreciated art forms and artists may reinforce the point that all feminists reject, namely that women are intrinsically incapable of artistic greatness. For this reason some humanist feminists take a more historical and materialist approach to explaining women’s exclusion from the canon. According to this approach, the problem is the paucity of artists who are women, and in particular women of color and disabled women. There simply have not been many great women artists, a fact explained by the exclusion of women from participation in key artistic spheres.

24  Proponents of this view include Parker and Pollock (1981), Guerilla Girls and Chadwick (1995), and Guerilla Girls (1998). 25  Linda Nochlin first made this point in 1971 (Nochlin 1989a).

302   Eaton Such an argument was famously expounded by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929) and later carried to the context of visual art by Linda Nochlin (Nochlin 1989a). Both Woolf and Nochlin described how social, economic, and institutional barriers have prevented women from making art; for example, in much of nineteenth­century Europe, women were barred from life-­drawing classes and so lacked the training and practice necessary to adequately represent the human form, which was the dominant artistic subject at the time. Humanist feminists point to this kind of inhibition and distortion of women’s artistic potential to explain their exclusion from the artistic canon. Were women to receive the training and resources necessary to produce great art, we should expect to see qualitative parity in artistic production. 2. Gynocentrism in aesthetics holds that gender does make a systematic difference to the production of art. Although there are different views about just what form this difference takes, there is general agreement among gynocentric feminists that the differences one sees between women’s and men’s artistic production are not merely the effects of male-­dominated institutions. Rather, at least some of such differences are the manifestations of particularly gendered forms of bodily experience and aesthetic sensibility.26 It follows, gynocentrists contend, that to appreciate, evaluate, and understand women’s artistic efforts, one cannot appeal to the same standards employed in judging men’s artistic production since there is no common measure that applies to both. Instead, women’s artistic production should be evaluated and appreciated according to its own criteria of excellence.27 It follows from this line of thought that the artistic production of women of color, disabled women, and trans* women, to name only a few, also ought to appeal to their own criteria of excellence. This fundamental shift away from humanism results in a more radical critique of the artistic canon. Neither biased standards nor impediments to art making are responsible for the exclusion of women from the artistic canon: rather, the culprit is the devaluation and repression of the experiences and material production of women—and especially of women of color, disabled women, and trans* women—by a masculinist white-­supremacist ableist cis-­normative culture. The remedy is to celebrate all women’s experiences and material production in a way that foregrounds their heterogeneity and richness. Although it is the more radical of the two approaches to explaining women’s exclusion from the artistic canon, many feminists are skeptical of gynocentrism for various reasons. First, some argue that the claim of the existence of a uniquely female style is simply false. An examination of the scant history of women artists reveals that they have more in common with the other male artists of their time and place than they do with women artists from more distant times and places (Nochlin 1989a; Felski 1989, 2003). Second, some worry that gynocentrism rests on an overly general notion of “women” or “the feminine” that errs the following ways: (1) Gynocentrism overlooks important—and potentially artistically relevant—differences between women such as 26  Frueh (1991), for instance, argues for a female artistic sensibility that emphasizes visceral responses to materials, feelings over intellect, and repetitive imagery. 27  The most developed version of this view is Battersby (1990).

Feminist Aesthetics   303 ethnicity, race, class, sexuality, ability, and age, to name only a few (e.g., Felski 1998; Showalter 1998). (2) In so doing gynocentrists strongly tend to take white able-­bodied cis-­gendered women (including their experiences, tastes, and bodies) as the norm, thereby perpetuating the invisibility of women of color and disabled and trans* women. (3) It is sometimes charged, usually by other feminists, that the focus on the body, and in particular on sexual difference, is essentialist. This criticism usually rests on the assumption that “sexual difference” refers exclusively to reproductive anatomical features understood as a cluster of immutable properties common and peculiar to all women. While it is true that many gynocentrists have understood sexual difference in this way, it need not be so. The gendered body can be understood in a trans*-inclusive way as determined by the gender identification of the subject in her navigation of the norms and meanings that govern gender difference. Understood in this way, as not determined by genitals and other reproductive characteristics, “bodily gender” picks out one significant dimension of social location.28 Given that aesthetic objects are often made with and appreciated through the body, not to mention that the body has been a favorite subject of the visual arts throughout history, it is reasonable to expect bodily gender to make a difference to the appreciation and production of art and other aesthetic objects.29

Confronting the Philosophical Canon Challenges from both the gynocentric and humanist perspectives prompt the need to scrutinize the philosophical canon itself. Much work in feminist aesthetics has been devoted to critically analyzing established theories of art, artistic talent, and aesthetic experience and value. In their critical examination of the Western philosophical tradition, feminists uncover and analyze previously unnoticed gender biases in theories of art from Plato onward. Here are a few key examples. Some contend that central aesthetic concepts such as “genius” and “masterpiece” have been traditionally gendered male and that this makes a difference not only to how women’s artistic efforts are understood but also to how women artists are treated.30 Similarly, several argue that the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime has been construed by Burke, Kant, Schiller, and others in strongly gendered terms that reinforce negative stereotypes about women, especially

28  See note 10 earlier. 29  Some French feminists, for instance, argue that women imagine, express themselves, and experience art somatically (Cixous 1997; I am eliminating Robinson.; Irigaray 1993) or experimentally (Kristeva 1984), and that these distinctive methods require standards, concepts, and definitions of art that differ qualitatively from the traditional ones. See Korsmeyer (2004, chap. 6). With respect to the visual arts, also see San MacColl in Hein and Korsmeyer (1993, 150–68). 30  See Parker and Pollock (1981), Battersby (1989), Freeland (2001, chap. 5), and Korsmeyer (2004, 29ff).

304   Eaton women of color.31 Others argue that influential theories of aesthetic perception implicitly take men’s experience as their model by favoring sight and hearing, which customarily play a prominent role in men’s lives, and by underestimating the aesthetic importance of those senses integral to the social roles assigned to women, namely touch, smell, and taste.32 Finally, many feminist philosophers are critical of a cluster of theories and concepts that assume or attempt to justify the autonomy of art and of aesthetic appreciation and evaluation (see Devereaux 1998 for an overview). Some maintain, for example, that the prevalent insistence upon art’s segregation from practical concerns results in the art/craft distinction and hence in the systematic depreciation of the sorts of artifacts customarily produced by women (Nochlin 1989b; Felski 1989). Others make the case that the related doctrine of aesthetic formalism, which restricts artistic value to a work’s formal features, departs in practice from purely formal concerns by reflecting masculine preferences for particular themes (such as the female nude). In these ways, feminists argue that the presumed disinterestedness and universality of aesthetic judgment in theories following Kant mask standards of evaluation that are partial to men’s experience, preferences, and sensibilities (Brand and Devereaux 2003, ix). The question is, what do we do once these biases have been unmasked?

Overcoming Biases Once the many sources of women’s subordination in the arts and discourses about the arts have been uncovered and analyzed, feminists aim to delineate the means to overcome the biases. In addition to providing all women with equal opportunities in the art world, the prevailing conceptions of art and artistic production (including talent), theories of aesthetic experience and judgment, and standards of taste and of artistic excellence must be revised. 1. Perspectivism. For many feminist aestheticians, the fact of situatedness means that taste is always conditioned—some say distorted (Deepwell 1995, 8; Korsmeyer 2004, 56; Brand 1998)—by the particular social and historical circumstances in which it is formed. Several points are taken to follow from this. First, it is impossible that taste can be disinterested. Second, there are no universal standards of aesthetic excellence that hold for all people across the ages and regardless of social location. Moreover, the ideals of disinterestedness and universal standards are central to what some call the dominant aesthetic ideology which feminism opposes. Dismantling the dominant aesthetic ideology is seen by many to require the outright abandonment of the problematic concepts, methods, and categorizations: this can include not just the ideals of “disinterestedness” and “universality” but also neighboring notions like aesthetic “autonomy,” “formalism,” the art/craft distinction, and even at 31  See Klinger (1997); Gould, in Brand and Korsmeyer (1995); Korsmeyer (2004, chaps. 2 and 6). 32  Korsmeyer (1990; 1999; 2004, chap. 4); James (2013, sec. 3).

Feminist Aesthetics   305 times the very notions of “aesthetic value” and “great art” (Hein and Korsmeyer 1993; Brand and Korsmeyer 1994; Korsmeyer  2004,  2017). In their place, these feminists embrace a perspectivism based on a pluralistic conception of art and artistic value (Korsmeyer 2004, 56). A similar eschewal of all pretension to universal standards of aesthetic excellence leads some art historians and critics to reject the notion of artistic canons altogether and to replace talk of “art” with that of visual or material culture (Pollock 1999). 2. Revisionism. Some feminists warn against the assumption that the entire aesthetics has been tainted by gender bias and point to recent developments in the field, such as the critique of a disinterested aesthetic attitude, that are continuous with feminism’s aims (Silvers  1998; Felski  1989). Others argue that we need to embrace some aspects of discredited ideals such as artistic autonomy because they are actually useful for feminism’s goals (Devereaux  1998; Brand  1998). These developments suggest that feminism might not require a conceptual transformation in the aesthetics and that instead we should work to develop versions of the discredited concepts and norms that acknowledge the fact of situatedness but are nevertheless normative, not relativistic, and purged of androcentric and sexist biases. In practical terms, a revisionist approach would mean two things: (1) integrating women’s artistic efforts into the canon and (2) re-­evaluating those canonical works marked by androcentrism and sexism. Whereas (1), which Cynthia Freeland has called the “Add women and Stir” approach, is well under way, few attempt to undertake (2), that is, to call into question the canonical status of works whose prized status appears to at least partially depend on their sexism and androcentrism.33 This is another place where we feminist philosophers, in conjunction with art historians and critics, need to focus our efforts. 3. Gynocentrism. Gynocentric feminists insist that incorporating women into the canon misses what is distinctive about their art. Likewise, traditional theories of art cannot be adequately modified to capture the uniqueness of women’s experience, preferences, values, sensibilities, and modes of expression. What is needed, then, is not a reformation of the current artistic canon, as the revisionists maintain, since attempting to integrate women’s art into the current canon is bound to do their art a disservice by holding it to inappropriate male standards. Instead, gynocentric feminists call for a separate canon that employs uniquely feminine criteria based on a variety of alternative aesthetic concepts and theories of art (Showalter 1998; Battersby 1990; Frueh 1998; and in Robinson 2001; Barwell, Donovan, French, and Lorraine in Hein and Korsmeyer 1993). As we have seen, some feminists are skeptical of the existence of a uniquely feminine or female artistic style or are worried that gynocentrism’s notion of the feminine is overly general. In addition to these concerns, some worry that separate principles and criteria of artistic excellence and aesthetic experience risk leaving the canon with its 33  For one attempt, see my criticism of Titian’s Rape of Europa, one of the most prized works of the Italian Renaissance (Eaton 2003). Art historian Diane Wolfthal asks similar questions about the entire tradition of what she calls “heroic rape paintings” (Wolfthal 1999).

306   Eaton biases intact while ghettoizing women’s art (e.g., Nochlin 1971; Pollock 1999). A fourth and related point is that a separate canon leaves traditional concepts and standards in place while delineating women as a special case; artists, like most other prestigious roles in our society, are assumed to be male unless otherwise specified. These last two worries seem justified by cases like the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, where works by women are isolated from the considerably more prestigious collections of the National Gallery and the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. When visiting the nation’s capital, one goes to “the” art museums and then, if there is time left over, one might visit the women’s art museum.

The Role of the Aesthetic in Systems of Oppression This final section explores the near future of feminist aesthetics. Although debates about gender bias in artworks, canon formation, and the concepts and methods of traditional theories of art and the aesthetic are lively and ongoing, these concerns no longer dominate feminist aesthetics as they once did. The field is moving in less reactive and more positive directions that are increasingly intersectional. Much of this work concerns the various ways in which aesthetic objects (as defined in the introduction to this chapter), aesthetic experience, and aesthetic standards and taste serve to construct, enforce, and perpetuate often-­intersecting systems of oppression (James 2013, sec. 2). A central example of this changing tide is body aesthetics, an area of study that attends not so much to the representation of bodies as it does to the aesthetic dimensions of actual bodies themselves from both first-­person and third-­person perspectives. Body aesthetics explores ways in which a wide array of aesthetic standards pertaining to bodies can play a central role in systems of oppression and privilege, as well as ways in which the aesthetic dimension of bodies can be sites of resistance to forms of oppression (Brand  2012; Irvin  2016,  2017; Protasi  2017). Either by taking traditional aesthetic concepts and methods, often with modification, or by developing entirely new aesthetic concepts and methods, feminists interpret and explain the aesthetic dimension of bodily phenomena. Examples include the following topics: racialized and gendered standards of beauty (Yancy 2016; Taylor 2004, 2016, chap. 3; Collins 2008, chap. 4; Tate 2009); eating disorders (Lintott 2003) and fat oppression (Eaton 2016; Protasi 2017; Irvin 2017); racialized and gendered aesthetics of the sari and the hijab (Sheth 2009, 2019); the role of bodily beauty in racialized state discourses (Man 2012; Tate 2016); and aesthetics of mothering and birthing (Lintott 2011; Irvin 2011; Brand and Granger 2011). A related set of issues revolve around food, gustatory pleasure, and the sense of taste (of the sort associated with the tongue and olfactory organs) as matters for both feminist and aesthetic concern (Korsmeyer 1999; 2004, chap. 4).

Feminist Aesthetics   307

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CHAPTER 25

Fem i n ist Soci a l a n d Politica l Phil osoph y Bat-­A mi Bar On

My discussion in this chapter is limited to academic feminist social and political philosophy. This is a form of practical philosophy that has its beginnings, though not its antecedents, in the 1970s in English-­speaking and European liberal democracies and whose primary concerns have revolved around social justice. In its earlier days, many of its authors were disciplinarily trained academicians who were also active in feminist groups and organizations that aimed at far-­reaching progressive social and political changes. Their writings, as exemplified by collections such as Carol Gould’s and Mark Wartofsky’s Women and Philosophy (1976), reflected this involvement by offering strong critiques of gender inequality in all spheres of life and by advocating an overhaul of beliefs, relations, practices, norms, and institutions, and the gender regimes that are formed through their assemblages. Even as professionalization led to the making of a rather disciplinarily defined subfield of feminist philosophy, academic feminist social and political theorizing has generally stayed its social justice–seeking, change-­oriented course. At the same time, and especially as globalization increased its reach, feminist social and political philosophers became more reflexive in response to struggles for recognition, and successes and failures of feminist and other movements for social justice. Building on the central role of experience and testimony in the development of feminist insight, feminist social and political theorists aimed to understand gender as a critical lens and social category that interacts with other socio-­structural and cultural categories such as sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, religion, age, ability, nationality, and immigration status. They realized that a focus on gender alone can gloss over perniciously consequential dissimilarities. By and large, feminist social and political philosophy developed alongside the rest of the field of social and political philosophy. Taking gender (and its multifaceted connections) seriously and troubling the boundaries that separate the personal from the social and political and the private from the public spheres, feminist social and political

Feminist Social and Political Philosophy   313 theorists opened the field’s mainstream to extensive and quite different kinds of critiques (both Anglo-American and continental) that they were and still seem to be comfortable with. Whether focusing on texts that have been taken as foundational for the field or many of the field’s central ideas, feminist social and political theorists called attention to sexism and to the fact that in many cases gender neutrality is far from a form of justified impartiality but rather tends to reflect and reproduce patriarchal principles, notions, and models. Yet, these critiques, despite, and perhaps because of, their radicalism, did not necessarily change how nonfeminist social and political philosophers have been doing social and political philosophy. Over time, feminist social and political philosophy came to be somewhat accepted as part of the field of social and political philosophy. Yet, within the field’s mainstream, its questions and analyses have been taken as less central and mainly as applied, and as using rather than contributing to the conceptual apparatus that is at the core of the field (see, e.g., Gould 1994; Ferguson 1994). Even a quick look through entries of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reveals this dual line of development quite clearly. Here is a more detailed example of this situation. Carol Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988) and Susan Okin’s Justice, Gender and the Family (1989) epitomize piercing and innovative feminist critiques of classical and more current canonized texts and ideas. In The Sexual Contract, Pateman points out that classical modern contract theory (e.g., that of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-­ Jacques Rousseau) facilitated the rationalization of patriarchal domination and that John Rawls’s reworking of contract theory fails to solve the problem because his approach abstracts from real people and idealizes the contract. Rawls did not respond to Pateman or other feminists who critiqued his version of contract theory. However, he did respond to Okin and other feminists who were more sympathetic to his reconstruction of liberalism. Yet, as Okin (2005) observes, Rawls’s response was slow to develop and did not involve the kind of theoretical revision of his ideas that Okin believes necessary for Rawlsian liberalism to become truly broad and inclusive. As a result, she contends, Rawls’s liberalism remains entrenched in cultural assumptions about the naturalness of gender roles and families. An upshot of this, according to Okin, is a theoretical inclination to sacrifice women to a liberal tolerance that she thinks goes too far because of its willingness to endure practices adverse to women’s flourishing (Okin 1999). Despite her worry, Okin remains confident that liberalism, especially its Rawlsian version, has the potential for rehabilitation that enables it to better serve the advancement of gender-­sensitive social justice. Rehabilitating any version of liberalism is an arduous revisionist project. As Zilla Eisenstein (1981) argues, Western feminism developed historically against a liberal background and not only borrowed but also adopted liberal concepts (e.g., that of the individual) to launch itself. However, these concepts cannot be merely stretched to cover gender; in fact, they have to be radically transformed for liberalism to become feminist. Feminist social and political theorists have been engaged in such conceptual transformations and have offered new understandings of key liberal concepts (Schwartzman 2006, Baehr 2017). For example, they have argued for a different understanding of the individual

314   Bar On as always already social and relational, vulnerable and dependent (Kittay 1999), rather than atomistic and self-­sufficient. And so, at least for those for whom conditions make it possible, theorized feminist individuals are capable of agential autonomy, a kind of autonomy that recognizes the many ways in which it is unavoidably inflected by heteronomy due to people’s deep social embeddedness (Meyers 2002; Friedman 2003). Feminist social and political rehabilitation projects have engaged traditional Marxism and New Left–inspired philosophies as well (Holmstrom 2002). Like the theorists they criticize, feminist social and political theorists working on these rehabilitative projects take capitalism as a primary object of critique. Nonetheless, unlike their counterparts, they call attention to the naturalization of the reproduction of labor and capital and how it has functioned as a rationalization of a gender-­based division of labor that undergirds gender-­based oppression (Sargent 1981; Hartsock 1985; Ferguson 1989). The different foci of feminist social and political rehabilitation projects led to the ­construction of classificatory schemas of theorists and the rehabilitated theoretical ­conceptions that they developed. Alison Jaggar (1983) offered an initial comprehensive taxonomy of feminist social and political theories that, for the most part, followed feminist activists’ ways of naming themselves and analyzed each theory’s fundamental assumptions about human nature. According to Jaggar, assumptions about human nature determine the contours and explanatory strengths of social and political theories, as well as their ability to open venues for imagining and realizing alternative and better futures. Some, such as Rosemary Tong and Tina Fernandes Botts (2017), have modified Jaggar’s taxonomy to reflect changes in the leanings of feminist social and political theorists. Others, such as Mary Dietz (2003), contend that it is precisely those changes in feminist social and political theorizing that make Jaggar’s initial taxonomy less useful. As Nancy Fraser (2013) suggests, neoliberal developments expose feminism as double-­edged, changing gendered relations yet perhaps ultimately feeding the neoliberal demand for labor and consumption. This, Fraser argues, produces a need to review feminism. I agree with Fraser that changed conditions create a need to reconsider the achievements and possible trajectories of feminist social and political movements, projects, and theories. This is also an opportunity. And so, in what follows, I take a small stab at thinking anew about feminist social and political theory and depart from the established taxonomy of feminist social and political positions, which are typically defined by alignments with various thinkers or schools of thought. This allows me to discuss connections between some feminist social and political ideas and views despite their different points of origin and developmental paths. I pursue my discussion of feminist social and political theorizing under the following headings: (1) social ontology; (2) norms, structures, and power; (3) social justice; and (4) politics.

Social Ontology The feminist denaturalization of gender and families, reconceptualization of the individual, and analysis of the gendered division of labor are all contributions to a

Feminist Social and Political Philosophy   315 feminist social ontology focused on features of lived social reality. As Sally Haslanger (2012) remarks, this ontology tends to be constructivist, insofar as it conceives of the social world as human-­made, and yet it also tends to be realist, insofar as it acknowledges the relative independence of the social world from the individuals and groups who inhabit, make, and remake it. In addition, feminist social ontology is engaged philosophy. Ultimately its aim is to play a part in progressive social change, wary as feminist social and political theorists may be of the very idea of progress (Walby 2009). In addition to its concerns about gender as a social kind, feminist social ontology focuses on the relational, vulnerable, and dependent individual and the institution of the family as an ongoing primary site of social and cultural reproduction (Flober 2010). Examples of major contributions to feminist social ontology include Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight (1993), Iris Marion Young’s On Female Body Experience (2005), and Linda Martín Alcoff ’s Visible Identities (2005). While these works offer different methodologies and orientations to their subject matter, considered together they illuminate the social processes involved in the production and maintenance of gender as a material, embodied, and nonetheless constructed social kind. A distinguishing aspect of Alcoff ’s work is her concern with aspects of identity that are rendered invisible when gender is focused on exclusively. Alcoff ’s work, like earlier work by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991, 1989), Angela Davis (1981), and the Combahee River Collective (1977), foregrounds interlocking oppressions to call attention to important experiential differences that are erased when gender and race are taken as necessarily discrete. Crenshaw introduced the term “intersectionality” to name how social reality is experienced as simultaneously gendered and racialized in societies that are sexist and racist. For Crenshaw, social location subjectifies and so produces a mode of being. As she contends, the intersectional nature of social being and experience cannot be explained through reference to only one harmful, discriminatory, oppressive social practice (e.g., sexism). Instead, intersectional approaches to social ontology focus on the mutually reinforcing, as well as disruptive relationships between multiple oppressive social practices (e.g., sexism, racism, and classism). Intersectionally attuned feminist social ontology analyses social practices in reference to oppressive social norms, structures, and power.

Norms, Structures, and Power Binary gender norms—specifically the expectations that they create and their enforcement—have been a steady target of feminist social and political theorizing. Thus, for example, Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl” (1980) portrays and questions traditional norms of feminine bodily comportment and motility, and Sandra Bartky’s Femininity and Domination (1990) explores and critiques how traditional norms of

316   Bar On femininity discipline and so create bodies, affects, and behaviors deemed feminine. Starting in the 1980s, feminist theorists began to address the entwinement of traditional gender norms and heteronormativity. Both Marilyn Frye (1983) and Sara Hoagland (1988), for example, argue that the nature of social reality is heteropatriarchal. María Lugones (2007) argues for the need to address the relationship between heteronormativity and coloniality to understand the colonial context in which gender norms have been a dehumanizing arm of colonial violence. In addition, there are feminist critiques of binary gender norms that focus on identities, bodies, and experiences that are pathologized by the naturalization of those norms—for example, identities, bodies, and experiences of transgender, nonbinary, or gender fluid people (Bettcher 2012); intersex people (Butler 2004; Feder 2014); and disabled people (Hall 2015). More generally, what traditional gender norms misrepresent, if they represent at all, are people whose social locations are at the periphery of the normed gender core of their societies, of societies that form the economic global core, or of both (Herr 2014). Where at least some degree of agential choice is possible, gender norms, traditional and otherwise, can be somewhat voluntarily conformed to, modified, or rejected. Among the problems that feminist social and political theorizing has faced is how to understand and respond to the choice to conform to harmful gender norms, namely, the phenomenon of adaptive preferences. Beliefs, attitudes, oppression, and repression have been used to depict and explain adaptive preferences (Frye  1983; Young  1990; Nussbaum  2000; Cudd  2006). In Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment (2011), Serene Khader complicates the theoretical descriptions and explanations of and responses to adaptive preferences. Her primary concern is with the implication of claims that all adapters must lack agency because otherwise there would be no explanation for their acting against their own flourishing. She argues that while on the face of it adaptations to harmful gender norms are inconsistent with adapters’ flourishing, many adapters are not necessarily less autonomous nor do they necessarily suffer from low self-­esteem, and that the outcomes of the adapters’ choices have to be understood in relation to different aspects of their flourishing. Flourishing, Khader argues, is not unitary, and so, as people actually do, one can choose to sacrifice some aspects of flourishing for others. It is a matter of trade-­offs. Those typical of adaptive preferences are significantly influenced by social conditions that are bad for the people who choose these preferences. Social conditions are bad when the available array of choices is limited in such a way that even the best trade-­offs lead to results that fall short of basic flourishing and there are, or at least one can realistically imagine, interventions that can modify the available array and improve it. Many, though by no means all, adapters, even if choosing something that is harmful to them, probably make the best choice available to them given their bad circumstances. One can think of the social conditions that influence agential choices at a macro level in terms of structures, which are the enduring and relatively stable patterned arrangements of social relations and so of bundled norms and practices. Structures both constrain and enable individual and group choices and actions by placing them in specific locations

Feminist Social and Political Philosophy   317 within the structures (Young 2006; Haslanger 2016. From a structural perspective, and in abstraction, Khader’s adapters are not different from everyone else. Like everyone else, they too act from a specific social location within a structure. Their difference can be accounted for by how constrained they are relative to how enabled they are by their structural location. It is when their location is compared to that of other choosers that their difference (and so how enabled or constrained they are) can be used to understand their adaptive choices. The relationship between what constrains and what enables can be thought of in terms of power. A person or a group is more powerful the more enabled they are by the social structures that frame their social locations, and vice versa, a person or a group is less powerful the more constrained they are by the social structures that frame their social location. Discrepancies in power matter because an individual’s or group’s relative power determines the extent to which they can act despite others’ opposition, or make others do more of what they want even though they are resisted. Put differently, power inequalities matter because relative power determines the scope and magnitude of an individual’s or a group’s agency. Power, though, can be understood not only as something that gets distributed through structural arrangements or as a function of distributable goods like those that constitute wealth or social position. Power, as Amy Allen (1999, 2007) argues, is dynamic and flows through relations. Being everywhere, power produces subjects. Gendered identities, as multifaceted and varied as they are, and the specific facets that gendered identities have, are, in this sense, products of power. Social norms and social structures are, from the perspective of power, more or less ossified channels of power flows, though, as Allen points out, power is never fully contained within them.

Social Justice Feminist social and political theorization of social ontology, norms, structures, and power is not only descriptive but also evaluative. Though contested, the value of truth is mobilized when aiming at better rather than just different descriptions of social reality (Hekman 1999; Alcoff 2008). Feminist social and political theorists also mobilize the value of justice. Like the value of truth, the value of justice is contested, especially because even its well-­intentioned use in certain contexts can lead and has led to interventions with negative consequences for the people on whose behalf the interventions are taken. The controversies, including among feminists, surrounding Muslim veiling practices and public space reveal a lot about the often tense and conflictual relation between social freedom and social equality in feminist accounts of social justice (Benhabib  2002; Hirschmann  2003). Building on an understanding of individuals as relational, vulnerable, and dependent, feminist social and political theorists recognize the importance of cultural demands, practices, and belonging for individuals. As a result,

318   Bar On they tend to prioritize claims for agential freedom over equality. Still, this prioritization is not unconcerned with the normative demands of equality since some kinds and aspects of freedom can be measured and the freedoms of different individuals and groups can be compared descriptively and evaluatively in ways that take equality seriously. People’s relative social location or relative power can be used as measures of equality and freedom. There are two approaches to social justice that are useful for thinking about tensions between freedom and equality—the capability approach and the vulnerability approach. Both offer nuanced ways to think about measures of equality and freedom. The capability approach centers the freedom to achieve well-­being understood in terms of capabilities, the real opportunities that people have to do and be that which they have their own reasons to value (Robeyns  2017). This approach acknowledges human diversity, and therefore the need to calibrate its indices, whether measuring capabilities or outcomes, and so functioning, to have reliable comparisons across multiple differences. While the capability approach develops and uses a list of basic capabilities (Nussbaum 2006) in its investigation of inequalities, such a list (or at least a list that is understood thickly) may not be necessary for pinpointing and evaluating inequalities. After all, feminist goals and strategies have been identified and developed locally by various feminist movements (Khader 2019). The capability approach is diagnostic and can be used for different sites and at different scales. Another flexible diagnostic approach to social justice is Alison Jaggar’s (2013) vulnerabilities approach. Jaggar develops it by building on Susan Okin’s (1989) claim that women are made vulnerable by the institution of marriage and the ­familial division of labor. Jaggar argues that feminist social justice frameworks like Okin’s expand the domain of justice as well as the objects of justice, exactly because of their attention to vulnerabilities that arise in the context of a many-­sided and ­multidimensional gendered division of labor that operates inside and outside households and is buttressed by interconnected social norms, laws, and institutions. For Jaggar, unpaid housework, domestic work, and sex work are prime examples of gendered assignments produced by the gendered division of labor. When each gendered assignment is examined empirically, one can identify forms of vulnerability that attach to specific gender assignments; however, vulnerabilities produced by exploitation and domination attach to all of them in ways that vary between and within societies. Jaggar does not argue for any particular distributive justice principles. Her framework is intentionally substantive. She points out that political philosophers have tended to focus on the development and justification of principles of justice while assuming answers to the kind of substantive questions that orient feminist social and political theorists’ inquiries. She advocates for a change of priorities and so of focus for social and political philosophy, toward preventable socially caused vulnerabilities. There are two preventable socially caused vulnerabilities that feminist social and political theorists have focused on in particular: vulnerability to poverty that motivates both the capability and vulnerability approaches and vulnerability to gendered violence and harassment, as well as the mutually reinforcing relation between them. Vulnerability

Feminist Social and Political Philosophy   319 to gender-­based violence has other sources as well, as is demonstrated by rape in war and genocidal rape (Card 1996; Schott 2011), and the lack of just responses to victims. In Rape and Resistance (2018), Linda Martín Alcoff addresses a specific set of socialcultural norms that are part of a discursive formation that includes not only the language surrounding gendered violence and harassment but also the rules of intelligibility that govern how the language can be used and how it is to be understood. Understanding these rules requires attention to their plurality, as well as how, whom, and the extent to which they marginalize. This, according to Alcoff, is crucial for any attempt to maximize just responses to gendered violence and harassment, which has been an important feminist demand for social justice.

Politics In response to feminist social justice agendas, feminist and allied social movements have developed a variety of civic organizations that offer support, education, direct aid, and advocacy. They have also advanced the goals of feminist social justice by influencing cultures and formal rules, legislation, and policies. From the movements’ standpoint, which is also the standpoint adopted by many feminist social and political theorists, actions undertaken in pursuit of feminist social justice agendas are political (Zerilli  2016). Perceiving power as percolating through relations sets the ground for perceiving politics, insofar as it is marked by power, as similarly diffused. The feminist slogan “the personal is political” captures the importance of this perception, which on the one hand simply calls attention to politics being everywhere including in personal relations, and on the other hand serves to guide feminist political action, which can take place in various sites (Hanisch 2006). One such site is government and the feminist political act of occupying a government role. The significance of government as a site of feminist political action is illustrated by the work of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state (2009–2013). In this role, Clinton introduced a face-­value simple feminist dictum into United States’ foreign policy. According to what has been called the Hillary Doctrine (Hudson and Leidl  2015), discrimination against and subjugation of women across the globe pose a serious threat to US national security, and as a result, it behooves the United States to shape its foreign policy accordingly. Guided by the Hillary Doctrine, the US State Department emphasized women’s rights as human rights and invested in diplomatic efforts and programs designed to improve women’s and girls’ safety from violence, health, education, access to economic opportunities, and political representation. The Hillary Doctrine implements and goes beyond the US National Action Plan to realize the 2000 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women Peace and Security by interpreting its four pillars—participation, protection, prevention, and relief and recovery—as requiring the United States to advocate for and invest in a global gender-­sensitive social justice agenda (Saiya et al. 2017).

320   Bar On The Hillary Doctrine has been criticized as elitist, imperialist, or neo-­colonial and has paradoxical aspects and effects, as do many policies centered on women’s human rights (Brown  2000; Lloyd  2007). At the same time, it demonstrates the difference that translating and operationalizing feminist social and political ideas into state-­centric policy-­oriented politics can make. Empirical studies show that even just increasing women’s representation in formal political organization makes such a difference since, for example, elected women legislators tend, though not all and never always, to act as proxies or surrogates for women in and beyond the boundaries of their local constituencies (Beckweith 2007; Angevine 2017). Yet, as Jane Mansbridge (1999, 2003, 2006) has argued, while surrogate political representation is important because it can indeed realize feminist social justice goals, it is also imperative to resist the temptation of gender essentialism in which such representational politics can get easily entangled, especially when the number of representatives is small and the pressure on them to ­conform to gender norms is high. Though political representation has pitfalls (Dovi  2007), achieving it is still a challenge and, as of the time of this writing, gender representation in legislatures and governments has yet to reach parity in most of the world (UN Women 2019). Susan Bordo’s (2017) careful analysis of the 2016 presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton presents useful insights into the complexity of not only political representation but also the many barriers that have to be overcome to increase the inclusion of women in politics. This is because, as Iris Marion Young’s (2000) analysis of democratic practices points out, many of these practices function in an exclusionary fashion and undermine the liberal-­democratic promise of political inclusion. One obvious conclusion from studies that expose exclusions from a liberaldemocratic polity is that the polity in question suffers from a liberal-­democratic deficit. Feminist social and political theorists tend to be optimistic about this to the extent that they believe that the liberal-­democratic promise of inclusion is implementable, even if the necessary remedies are quite extensive and require a reconceptualization of liberaldemocratic politics (Benhabib 1996; Gould 2004). Despite this optimism about political participation as a route to gender justice, some feminist social and political theorists remain pessimistic about the transformative potential of liberal-­democratic politics (Butler and Athanasiou 2013; Brown 2015; Arruzza et al. 2018).

A Concluding Observation It is not obvious whether optimism or pessimism about liberal-­democracy is the better feminist attitude, and the choice between them is not merely theoretical. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, feminist social and political theories have tended to track feminist activism. Feminist activism takes place along a continuum that stretches between reform and revolution, and feminist social and political theorizing has been changing with feminist activism. María Lugones’s Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition

Feminist Social and Political Philosophy   321 against Multiple Oppressions (2003), with its direct focus on the complexity of difference, social movements, and the work it takes to make them intelligible, exemplifies how theorizing both tracks and changes with activism. In addition, feminist social and political theorizing has also been changing in response to new collective action problems, such as the ongoing refugee crisis. Feminist theorizing about the refugee crisis takes different forms; some feminist theories center gender and gender precarity in their analyses (Oliver, 2017), while others include gender as one important variable among others in understanding the  refugee crisis (Parekh  2020). Analyses that engage without centering gender mark a different approach within feminist social and political theory, one that can be expected to continue to develop as more feminist theorists engage with issues such as climate change (Cuomo  2011) or the ongoing transformations of work (Anderson 2017). As a discipline, philosophy tends to adjudicate between positions in an effort to identify the best/strongest approach. While feminist social and political philosophy can be evaluated this way, I suggest that the plurality of positions within feminist social and political philosophy is one of the field’s greatest strengths. Each approach sheds light on an important aspect of injustice that needs to be understood and addressed. It is the commitment to social justice that motivates changes in the field, and important changes in feminist social and political positions can result from, perhaps quite awkward, conversations across political boundaries.

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chapter 26

Femi n ist Phil osoph y of Soci a l Science Sharon Crasnow

Introduction Feminist philosophy of social science is not usually identified as a distinct area of feminist philosophy of science. Given the influence of feminist methodology—standpoint methodology, for example—it would seem that it should be. The use of examples from feminist social sciences as a way of illustrating and motivating the need for feminist critique also indicates the importance of feminist social science for feminist philosophers of science. The critical project—revealing how mainstream approaches in the sciences have ignored or “disappeared” gender—has been a crucial piece of feminist social science highlighting a failure that seems particularly egregious for the social sciences given that the social realm is where gender lives. To a large extent philosophy of science—and specifically philosophy of social science—has been slow to recognize the importance of feminist critique for its issues. As Alison Wylie notes when discussing anthologies and collections of work in philosophy of social science, “with one exception, the representation of women authors in these collections is low: closer on average to the 15 percent reported for women in philosophy of science (Solomon and Clarke 2010) than the 20 percent to 30 percent reported for women in Anglophone philosophy generally” (Wylie 2017, 329).1 Additionally, recent anthologies of philosophy of social science rarely discuss feminist work, and when they do the discussion is typically confined to one chapter.2 Arguably this is a result both of the 1  The “one exception” that Wylie is referring to is the anthology edited by Cartwright and Montuschi (2014), in which all the authors are women. 2  See, for example, Ian C. Jarvie and Jesús Zamora-­Bonilla (2011), which has no mention of feminism, and Lee McIntyre and Alex Rosenberg (2017), which devotes a chapter to the topic but feminism makes cameo appearances in only a few other chapters.

326   Crasnow relatively low number of women in philosophy of social science and the marginalization of feminist work, but whatever the causes it seems unfortunate given the close conceptual relationship between feminism and the issues typically explored in philosophy of social science. This chapter offers a preliminary investigation of some ways feminist philosophers might learn from, interact with, and ultimately contribute to discussions about key issues in feminist social science and some ways that this bears on issues in philosophy of social science more generally. I begin with some historical context on the relationship between feminist social science and feminist philosophy of science. I next consider two issues in the social sciences that feminist philosophy of science can shed light on: (1) the relationship between methodology and epistemology and (2) concept critique and development. I focus on how feminist standpoint methodology might be understood as contributing to and further developing feminist epistemology and philosophy of science, noting the relevance of feminist thought to philosophy of social science more generally. Finally, I explore a particular elucidation of issues raised by feminist standpoint theory and its connections to traditional issues in the philosophy of social science.

Historical Background The influx of women into the social sciences during the twentieth century raised awareness of a variety of issues in which gender is implicated. This new awareness gave rise to both critical and constructive feminist projects (Crasnow et al. 2015). The critical project emerged as women entering these fields found that research there often did not reflect their interests or lives. Women economists noted that the domestic work so often done by women was neither studied as part of the economy nor recognized as a feature of the social landscape because it was unpaid labor. In anthropology, women studying primates focused on family groups, whereas men had focused primarily on dominance behavior. The result was a more complex and complete understanding of primate behavior. The discovery that gatherers—usually thought to be female—provided a far larger proportion of nutritional needs than had previously been assumed and that their “gathering” actually included small game and not merely nuts, fruits, and grains (e.g., Slocum 1975) challenged the traditional hunter-­gatherer accounts of early humanity. In sociology, women researchers could sometimes see how women’s lives were shaped by social structures not of their choosing. For example, they noted that the timing of the school day and assumptions about care of children combined to make working outside of the home difficult and often undesirable for mothers (Smith 1987). Sometimes research was explicitly shaped by feminist values and goals, although at other times feminist commitments were not explicit. These approaches revealed “gaps” in previous research. New research areas and alternative ways of investigating challenged assumptions about what was known about the social world, what was important to study, and how the objects of inquiry were to be conceived. These changes produced

Feminist Philosophy of Social Science   327 trenchant feminist critiques of the methods, concepts, and value assumptions that informed the social sciences. These radical changes laid the groundwork for the constructive projects of feminist social science—new theories and new research programs. In part, feminist philosophy of science grew out of the desire to both document and justify knowledge production informed by these feminist commitments—including methodological commitments.

Methodology and Epistemology Sandra Harding describes methodology as “a theory and analysis of how research should proceed” and contrasts it with epistemology, characterized as a “theory of knowledge or justificatory strategy” underlying methodology (Harding 1987, 2). Feminist epistemology can thus be understood as a philosophical account of the epistemic value of feminist methodology—how such methodology produces (better) knowledge. While “methodology” and “method” are often used interchangeably, it is worthwhile to distinguish them as well. Methods are “techniques for gathering evidence” (Harding 1987, 2). Different methods or research techniques can be and have been used in aid of feminist goals. For example, quantitative research methods have been used to provide evidence of both the fact and effects of women’s subordination. Amartya Sen’s (1990) use of demographic data to calculate “missing” women in parts of the world where females do not receive the same health care, food, or attention as males is an example of the former. Quantitative methods have also been used to argue for the value of redressing gender inequality. The extensive evidence of a correlation between the education of girls and economic growth (Klasen 2002) functions in this way. Feminist methodology—the approach to research, the research questions that inform the work, and the aims of research—guides the use of the methods (techniques) for producing evidence. Quantitative observational and experimental methods dominate many of the social sciences and sometimes are claimed to make social science more scientific. Feminist researchers often make more extensive use of qualitative methods—ethnography involving participant observation, interviews, or archival work, for example—although as the previous examples show, this is not always the case. While early feminist researchers raised concerns that adopting quantitative methods reproduced the categories of the dominant ideology and obscured, devalued, or subordinated perspectives (Mies 1983; Smith 1974; Stanley and Wise 1983), current feminist research is generally pluralistic about method. Minimally, a feminist approach to research takes seriously the relevance of gender and seeks knowledge that supports feminist liberatory goals. The question of which methods are appropriate to bring about those ends is an open one. The influential work of sociologist Dorothy Smith provides an illustration of the role of feminist methodological commitments. She advocates starting research from the everyday lives of women (Smith 1987). To do so is not merely a matter of including women as research subjects, although it begins there. To start research from the lives of

328   Crasnow women is to examine the social world from the location of women in it.3 Feminist social scientists following this directive often find the standard approaches and concepts of their disciplines inadequate. The shift in methodological approach may lead to a shift in how the objects of inquiry are conceived and consequently how we know them. Methodology is a view about how research should proceed, but how feminist methodology produces knowledge appropriate to feminist concerns calls for an epistemological answer. Sandra Harding’s (1986) division of feminist epistemologies into feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory, and feminist postmodernism serves as a starting point for discussion. I concentrate on two of these approaches: feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory.4 As Harding characterizes it “feminist empiricism argues that sexism and androcentrism are social biases correctable by stricter adherence to the existing methodological norms of scientific inquiry” (Harding 1986, 24). Her description of feminist standpoint theory identifies it more clearly as an alternative feminist methodology offering an approach that differs from “existing methodological norms.” Standpoint theory stems from the Marxist insight that those in positions of subordination (the working class) are better able to understand the social world than those in positions of dominance—those who control capital. In this sense, they occupy an epistemically privileged social location. Feminist standpoint methodology applies this idea to the subordinate social location that women as a group occupy due to the gendered structure of society. When standpoint methodology directs researchers to start from the lives of women to produce knowledge for, by, and about women, it is because the approach stems from the view that knowledge is socially situated. The basis of knowledge is a cultural/social/political “location” characterized by the power relations endemic to such settings. In other words, there are epistemological commitments underpinning the methodology. Analyzing and explaining such commitments is one role of feminist philosophy of science. As a feminist methodology, standpoint theory directs researchers to be alert to places where their disciplinary frameworks are inadequate to produce knowledge for, by, and about women. As a social science methodology the underlying epistemology is not fully worked out; it does not fully explain how its methodological commitments produce knowledge for, by, and about women. Much of the philosophical work on standpoint over the past fifteen years or so is an attempt to complete that task. Such work begins by elaborating the two key theses: (1) a situated knowledge thesis and (2) a thesis of epistemic advantage (Wylie  2004; Rolin  2009; Intemann  2010; Crasnow  2013,  2014). Minimally, a feminist standpoint epistemology should give an

3  This is not to suggest that there is one location shared by all women or that women are a homogeneous group but rather to clarify that women’s experiences are relevant for understanding the social world in which they live. 4  The literature often refers to feminist epistemology and feminist philosophy of science interchangeably. I follow that practice; however, there is feminist epistemology that may not be feminist philosophy of science, for example, some work in social epistemology.

Feminist Philosophy of Social Science   329 account of these theses and how they justify feminist methodological commitments and support feminist goals. Harding’s characterization of feminist empiricism suggests that its adherents are feminists who adopt a standard empiricist epistemology. Views about what such an epistemology is have altered over the years. Empiricism has grown more sensitive to the various roles social and political values play in science, and this is reflected in contemporary feminist empiricism as well.5 The result is, as Kristen Intemann (2010) argues, that contemporary feminist empiricism and feminist standpoint theory seem to have merged. Intemann claims that they now share three features. They are contextual, normative, and social. Helen Longino’s empiricism, for instance, is contextual and social in that it treats the background assumptions and beliefs in the context of knowledge production as either direct evidence or as indirectly determining what counts as evidence. Her account is also social in that it evaluates knowledge with reference to norms a knowledge community must adhere to for knowledge to be objective. Feminist standpoint appeals to context and the social nature of knowledge as well with its emphasis on social location. The normative aspect of each approach lies in the role of social, cultural, and political values in knowledge production. Intemann suggests that a feminist epistemology that combines elements of feminist empiricism and standpoint theory might be called feminist standpoint empiricism (Intemann 2010, 779). I propose that another way to think of this merger is as the use of empiricist epistemology to explain how feminist standpoint methodology produces knowledge. For example, Wylie (2004,  2011) interprets the traditional notion of “objectivity” as a judgment that knowledge claims conform to a set of epistemic virtues, such as empirical adequacy, explanatory power, internal coherence, simplicity, and consistency with other established bodies of knowledge. Such virtues are widely embraced and consistent with most versions of empiricism. Following Kuhn (1977), Wylie notes that theory acceptance involves trade-­offs among these virtues since they can rarely if ever be maximized in the same theory. She concludes that feminist standpoint provides a way of prioritizing such trade-­offs given that in differing contexts maximizing some epistemic virtues may better serve feminist egalitarian and social justice goals. An example from sociologist Marjorie DeVault’s research illustrates Wylie’s point. DeVault describes how when transcribing interviews her disciplinary training (sociology) had taught her to smooth out the hesitations—the “ums” and “you knows”— present in everyday conversation. However, she came to see such features of speech as evidence of the emotional valence of the topic, evidence of something that was not being said. As a consequence she changed her transcribing practice to preserve “some of the ‘messiness’ of everyday talk” (DeVault 1999, 78). Her feminist methodology led her to

5  In this feminist empiricism follows the evolution of philosophy of science more generally. The values in science literature includes Longino (1990), Lacey (1999), Douglas (2009), and Kourany (2010).

330   Crasnow favor empirical adequacy—the accuracy in an account of how women tell the stories of their lives—over the simplicity favored by traditional disciplinary practice. Using a notion of interest-­based objectivity, I argue that which aspects of the world we pay attention to—our understanding of the objects of inquiry—depends on our interests, values, and goals (Crasnow 2008). As a result, what counts as relevant and hence as evidence is shaped through the commitments of standpoint methodology, although the criteria through which we evaluate the strength of relevant evidence may be consistent with empiricist epistemologies. While approaches that reconcile feminist empiricism with the methodological commitments of feminist standpoint theory offer some insight into how such methodological commitments produce knowledge, none provides a full epistemology, in part, because none adequately discusses the question of who knowledge is for, by, and about. This is one area in which feminist philosophy of social science could do more work, and it is also an area that connects with a traditional issue in philosophy of social science—the nature of the social collective and the relationship of the individual to that collective— one concern of social ontology.

Conceiving and Reconceiving the Objects of Inquiry Another area in which we can see the influence of feminist social science on feminist philosophy of science is concept development. The lack of fit between the experiences of researchers and the disciplines in which researchers work has led to important revisions in the concepts through which the objects of inquiry are understood. Aspects of standpoint methodology shed light on the circumstances under which such ­revisions occur. Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (1986) discusses how she found herself to be an insider/outsider—an outsider in her discipline because she was a woman of color, while at the same time an insider in the community she researched. Additionally, she sometimes saw herself as an outsider in the community because she was a sociologist, although an insider in the discipline. This insider/outsider status gives rise to a kind of double vision that Collins says allows her to see each social world more clearly.6 The tension between the disciplinary framework and the world that she studies provides an epistemic advantage partly though revealing the limits of the standard disciplinary frameworks when they fail to fit lived experience. Seeing just how and where the mismatch occurs requires understanding both the concepts and the experiences. The resulting tension can function constructively to reveal problematic assumptions

6  She is referring to W. E. B. DuBois’s ([1903] 1994) notion of “double vision.”

Feminist Philosophy of Social Science   331 in the dominant framework and to suggest new or revised understandings of the social phenomena under investigation. DeVault’s work again provides an example. In describing her research on “feeding the family” she says: “My topic is activity without a name, activity traditionally assigned to women; often carried out in family groups: activity that I know from experience but cannot easily label” (DeVault 1991, 4). She settles on “feeding the family” in an awkward attempt to identify a related variety of tasks: planning meals, shopping, cooking, serving, cleaning up, and others. It is her own experiences that led to an awareness that these tasks were all part of some whole even though the discipline did not recognize them as proper objects of study. She notes, “This particular insufficiency of language is an example of a more general problem, a more pervasive lack of fit between women’s experiences and the forms of thought available for understanding experiences” (DeVault 1991, 5). Smith expresses a similar idea about the conceptual limits she confronted. Interviews with women in which they discuss their daily routines—their lived reality—reveal their days are both shaped by and sustain the economic structure and institutions in which they live (Smith  1987). What time their children come home from school is not something women choose and yet it structures their lives. The work they do is work that supports the labor of others and yet the disciplinary understanding of “work”— employment or paid work—makes it invisible. The tension between those disciplinary understandings and the lives of women produces a “line of fault”—an indication that the available concepts are not able to support an account of the lives of those studied. Such fault lines indicate a need to reconceive “work” so that it takes into account the unpaid domestic tasks upon which the economy depends. A final example serves as a further illustration. “Sexual harassment” first emerged as a descriptor of the shared, lived experiences of working women in the late 1970s (and earlier). The term appears in Lin Farley’s (1978) research as a way of describing that experience as it emerged during consciousness-­raising groups when women discussed patterns of behavior encountered in their work environments. This example illustrates not only the development of a new concept for academic classification but also the power that such concepts have. The identification of the phenomenon ultimately led to its recognition as a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the 1980s and so provides an example of how feminist methodology can play a role in producing knowledge supporting feminist goals. A hallmark of these examples is the way that methodological commitments—commitments about how to do research—provide a critical platform through which reflection on the value assumptions of the discipline result in reconsidering the nature of the objects of inquiry. Sometimes the result is the recognition of properties previously ignored and a revision of concepts. At other times previously unnoticed phenomena that are in need of identification and explanation are revealed. The role of concepts in knowledge production is one area of focus in some recent philosophy of social science. Eleonora Montuschi’s (2003) treatment of objectivity and Ian Hacking’s (1999) discussion of the looping effects of social science concepts are examples.

332   Crasnow

Further Philosophical Explorations In the previous sections I focused on feminist standpoint methodology primarily because of its role in feminist social science. I identified two key epistemological theses—that knowers are socially situated and that their social locations afford epistemic privilege. I also identified a role that standpoint methodology can play in improving concepts through which the objects of social inquiry are conceived to better support feminist goals. In this section I turn to a third thesis associated with standpoint theory— the achievement thesis. The achievement thesis clarifies some aspects of epistemic privilege, but it also raises the question of who knowers are, raised in the third section of this chapter, and so points to a further development of feminist standpoint epistemology. The thesis of epistemic privilege has sometimes been misunderstood as a claim that such privilege results automatically from membership in a (subordinate) group. The epistemic underpinnings of standpoint methodology do not rest in such a claim, however, and it would indeed be problematic if they did. Social locations are complex intersections of properties that have social meaning—gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, socio-­economic class, and ability, for example. This complexity belies the possibility of treating a group—such as women—as a homogeneous whole. At the same time, it highlights the difficulty of the standpoint metaphor’s suggestion that we occupy a social location, when in fact individuals appear to occupy many at once. Treating women as a homogeneous whole threatens to falsely universalize some of their aspects and ignore or erase important differences among them and thus to replace one epistemological error for another. Traditional epistemology assumed an abstract, universal knower—a universal man. To treat women as a homogeneous group would be to replace this universal man with a universal woman. I have argued elsewhere that there is a way of spelling out the achievement thesis that would help in this regard (Crasnow 2013, 2014). The achievement thesis clarifies that epistemic privilege is not automatic but the result of engaging with others in analysis of social structures and how we are located within them. This idea is either implicitly or explicitly in the work of many of those who have explored standpoint epistemology (e.g., Wylie 2004, 2011, 2012; Intemann 2010; Harding 2015). My take on the achievement thesis begins with Gaile Pohlhaus Jr.’s 2002 discussion of standpoint. Pohlhaus argues for a conception of knowers that takes seriously that they are members of social/political communities. While standpoint is often described as the result of struggling against a dominant group understanding, Pohlhaus argues for more attention to struggling with others as part of knowledge community building. “To struggle-­with would involve building relations with others by which we may come to know the world and understand one another, that is the project of building knowing communities” (Pohlhaus 2002, 292). What I add to Pohlhaus’s analysis is that struggling with is a matter of building political coalitions around specific knowledge projects. To do so is to create the solidarity that

Feminist Philosophy of Social Science   333 standpoint requires for there to be knowers that knowledge is for, by, and about. Such solidarities are negotiated in the midst of intersecting axes of oppression—class, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and ability. Standpoint does not require a universal woman or even a stable knower as knowledge projects may change depending on needs and interests around which such communities are formed. The idea of such dynamic and flexible knowing communities suggests that one area in which feminist philosophy of social science should be more fully developed is through an account of social identity that clarifies how individuals can be in multiple intersecting locations—sometimes sharing important goals with other such individuals with whom they intersect in some ways, at some times, and for some purposes but not for others. Such an account would draw on intersectional analysis; however, intersectionality is not in itself such a theory of identity of knowers.7 Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge make this clear with their account of intersectionality. When it comes to social inequality, people’s lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as being shaped not by a single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by many axes that work together and influence each other. Intersectionality as an analytical tool gives people better access to the complexity of the world and of themselves (Collins and Bilge 2016, 2). As an analytical tool for understanding identity and its relation to the unequal distribution of power in society, intersectionality does not provide an account of knowers for standpoint epistemology, but it does offer a resource for thinking about such knowers and the coalitional solidarity the achievement thesis suggests. Coalitions may be formed along one or more axes of oppression when particular aspects of identity are salient to a particular political issue. Such coalitions would not negate the complexity of intersectional identities since they would be explicitly relevant to the project at hand. Such coalitions could only be formed through acknowledging and working within that complexity. The instability of knowers that this understanding of standpoint theory would involve has metaphysical repercussions. Any account of the identity of the individual that would work with this understanding would have the following characteristics: • It should be flexible—acknowledging that identities are never fixed but rather change depending on context. • It has to allow for individuals occupying multiple identities at the same time. • It should acknowledge both the force of the social identity as a causal factor (how others identify us) and the ability of the agent to act in a way that is not wholly determined by the social. The epistemological focus of feminist philosophy of social science ultimately requires addressing questions of social metaphysics that have been mainstream concerns of 7  The view was first put forward by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989). Patricia Hill Collins (2000) and others have developed it.

334   Crasnow philosophy of social science since its inception. The relationship between the individual agent, social and political institutions, and cultural norms and what this means both for social scientific knowledge and for our understanding of ourselves remains a centerpiece of philosophy of social science, but also plays a crucial role in any further development of a distinctly feminist approach. A key element revolves around reconciling the agency of individuals with the constraints of the social/political/cultural world in which they are situated. Consequently, feminist philosophy of social science both depends on and promises to contribute to philosophy of social science more generally.

References Cartwright, Nancy, and Eleanora Montuschi, eds. 2014. Philosophy of Social Science: A New Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1986. “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought.” Social Problems 33: S14–32. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Crasnow, Sharon. 2008. “Feminist Philosophy of Science: ‘Standpoint’ and Knowledge.” Science and Education 17 (10): 1089–110. Crasnow, Sharon. 2013. “Feminist Philosophy of Science: Values and Objectivity.” Philosophy Compass 8 (4): 413–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12023. Crasnow, Sharon. 2014. “Feminist Standpoint Theory.” In Philosophy of Social Science: A New Introduction, edited by Nancy Cartwright and Eleonora Montuschi, 145–61. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crasnow, Sharon, Alison Wylie, Wenda K. Bauchspies, and Elizabeth Potter. 2015. “Feminist Perspectives on Science.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Last modified 21 March 2015. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/ entries/feminist-science/. Crenshaw, Kimberlee. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989 (1): Article 8, 139–67. http://chicagounbound. uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8. DeVault, Marjorie. 1991. Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DeVault, Marjorie. 1999. Liberating Method: Feminism and Social Research. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Douglas, Heather. 2009. Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press. DuBois, W. E. B. (1903) 1994. The Souls of Black Folk. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Farley, Lin. 1978. Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women on the Job. New York: McGraw-Hill. Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Feminist Philosophy of Social Science   335 Harding, Sandra. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Harding, Sandra. 1987. “Introduction: Is There a Feminist Method?” In Feminism and Methodology, edited by Sandra Harding, 1–14. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Harding, Sandra. 2015. Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Intemann, Kristen. 2010. “Twenty-Five Years of Feminist Empiricism and Standpoint Theory: Where Are We Now?” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 25 (4): 778–96. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1527–2001.2010.01138.x. Jarvie, Ian C. and Jesús Zamora-Bonilla (eds.) 2011. The Sage Handbook of The Philosophy of Social Sciences, London: Sage Publishing. Klasen, Stephan. 2002. “Low Schooling for Girls, Slower Growth for All? Cross-Country Evidence on the Effect of Gender Inequality in Education on Economic Development.” World Bank Economic Review 16 (3): 345–73. Kourany, Janet. 2010. Philosophy of Science After Feminism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1977. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lacey, Hugh. 1999. Is Science Value Free? Values and Scientific Understanding. New York: Routledge. Longino, Helen. 1990. Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Social Inquiry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McIntyre, Lee and Alex Rosenberg (eds.) 2017. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science, New York: Routledge. Mies, Maria. 1983. “Towards a Methodology for Feminist Research.” In Theories of Women’s Studies, edited by Gloria Bowles and Renate Duelli-Klein, 117–39. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Montuschi, Eleonora. 2003. The Objects of Social Science. London: Continuum. Pohlhaus Jr., Gaile. 2002. “Knowing Communities: An Investigation of Harding’s Standpoint Epistemology.” Social Epistemology 16 (3): 283–93. Rolin, Kristina. 2009. “Standpoint Theory as a Methodology for the Study of Power Relations.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 24 (4): 218–26. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527– 2001.2009.01070.x. Sen, Amartya. 1990. “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.” New York Review of Books 37 (20): 61–66. Slocum, Sally. 1975. “Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna  R.  Reiter, 36–50. New York: Monthly Review Press. Smith, Dorothy E. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Smith, Dorothy E. 1974. “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology.” Sociological Inquiry 44(1): 7–13. Solomon, Miriam and Clarke, John. 2010. “Demographics of the Philosophy of Science Association 2010,” Report to the PSA (Philosophy of Science Association) Women’s Caucus. Stanley, Liz, and Sue Wise. 1993. Breaking Out: Feminist Consciousness and Feminist Research. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wylie. Alison. 2004. “Why Standpoint Matters.” In The Feminist Standpoint Reader, edited by Sandra Harding, 339–51. New York: Routledge.

336   Crasnow Wylie, Alison. 2011. “Standpoint (Still) Matters: Research on Women, Work, and the Academy.” In Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, edited by Heidi Grasswick, 157–79. Dordrecht: Springer. Wylie, Alison. 2012. “Feminist Philosophy of Science: Standpoint Matters.” Presidential Address delivered to the Pacific Division APA. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 86 (2): 47–76. Wylie, Alison. 2017. “Feminist Philosophy of Social Science.” In Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Ann Garry, Serene  J.  Khader, and Alison Stone, 328–340. New York: Routledge.

pa rt I V

TOPIC A L E S SAYS

chapter 27

Iden tit y Linda Martín Alcoff

Traditionally, philosophy, and not just in the modern West, has taken the concept of identity to pose a metaphysical problem. All objects, including human beings, are made up of multiple parts and change through time; thus, they are pluralities. How, then, can something that is a plurality also be a unity, and how can something that changes through time retain its identity? (Chisholm 1976). In what sense do I share the identity of the person I was as a child, or as a baby? How can the different parts of myself, such as my mind (or spirit, or consciousness) and my physical or material being, constitute a unified entity? In what sense is there an “I” if our life experiences radically change us? How can the multiple iterations of any object that deteriorates through time constitute a singular entity? The philosophical attention to group identities—such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and so on—has a much more recent genealogy. Debates over these sorts of social identities emerged in social movements, yet the political questions posed by activists are not entirely dissimilar from the traditional metaphysical debates over identity. The problem of plurality, difference, and change besets our attempt to understand social categories of identity as well. For example, does it make sense to group more than half the human race into the singular category “woman”? Are the grounds of its unity natural or only nominal, that is, justified by shared and unchanging natural physical characteristics or only by how societies variably understand and interpret the meaning and significance of these characteristics? Has the unity of the category “woman” been coercive in some way? These questions prompt us to wonder: do we choose our identities, or are they forced upon us? Hence, in the case of our social categories of identity, what might seem to be purely metaphysical questions about how distinct individuals are unified in a single category will quickly embroil us in questions of politics and social systems, ideologies about groups, and questions about individual agency and free will. Grouping individuals into categories, whether these are cats or apples or women, always entails a denial or downplaying of differences. Nonetheless, the use of categories is vital to function in complex

340   Alcoff environments. With the helpful shorthand of group terms and typologies, we can guess that any cat we see may enjoy milk, and that any apple is safe to eat. The fact that such generalizations do not apply perfectly across every individual cat or apple does not make them worthless, and normal category use is usually cognizant that there are exceptions. But if categories are justifiable because of their usefulness, what is the function served by categorizing human beings into identity groups? In particular, what is it that is useful about the category “women”? Nietzsche suggested that the traditional conception of personal identity developed because of the practical necessities of social and political life: without a persistence of my identity through time, I cannot make promises, sign contracts, or be held accountable for past acts (1967, see esp. 2nd Essay, sec. 1–7). The need to hold people accountable to their commitments gave many cultures a reason to overlook the changes over time in a person’s character and commitments and to craft a concept of an identity that persists across time. The fluctuating existential realities of our lives are purposefully bypassed, on this view, to maintain social commerce. If we agree that the capacity to make persons accountable to their promises across time is a legitimate function, so the argument goes, then we should have no problem with bypassing variation. However, the variation within categories such as “woman” or “disabled” or “lesbian” is not simply diachronic but synchronic. There is enormous variation within such groups. So we need to consider whether the function that is served by a group identity category actually justifies overlooking the inevitable variations of its members. A number of social movements in the contemporary era have contested the way in which group identities have been named as well as the significance given to one’s membership in a group over individual variations and differences. Feminism is just such a social movement; in fact, given its own internal differences, it is more accurate to think of feminism as a set of related but sometimes conflictual social movements. In truth, beyond its activism and advocacy, feminism has always also been a research project engaged primarily with the human types we today understand in terms of the categories of gender and sexuality. Feminist scholarship and research has generally found fault with the given definitions of these categories as well as the significance accorded to them as causal explanations of behavior or as predictive of an individual’s abilities and dispositions. The conventional definitions of gender and sexual identities have excused oppression and discrimination. All sorts of group typologies have been used to differentiate and rank human beings and legitimate political, cultural, and economic subordination. Gender has been used to legitimate differential treatment and social segregation, while sexual identities such as gay, lesbian, and trans have been psychologically profiled as pathological. Some feminists argue that the form of identitybased oppression straight women experience is fundamentally different than what ­lesbians experience, or a difference in kind, not merely in degree. While straight women are segregated to lower-­ranked social and economic positions, there is an attempt to displace lesbians entirely from both public and private spheres (Calhoun 2000). Thus, some have argued that lesbians should not be included in the category “woman” at all, since they are essentially treated as “not women” (Wittig 1982).

Identity   341 Feminists of color have similarly argued that a racialized sexism (or sexist racism) is substantially distinct in form, requiring a distinct analysis (Combahee River Collective 1979). To be put on a pedestal and “protected” from the dangerous public spheres of work and politics is quite different than being treated as “the mule of the world,” as Zora Neale Hurston put it. Women of color are not simply more oppressed than white women, but oppressed in a different way. Class, disability, age, religion, transor cis-­identities, and other differences among those classified as women puts further strain on the usefulness of the category. Functions, as we’ve seen, can be nefarious as well as innocuous. All forms of categorization may be related to some function, but we still need to consider what the function is, and for whom it is functional. In fact, some feminists argued that one of the functions of grouping all women into the same category was to make an exploration of these diverse types of oppression all but impossible. The function of feminism would be better served by multiple identity categories, rather than trying to subsume all differences in one broad category, or to work toward the eventual elimination of identity categories (Butler 2004; Haslanger 2012). Thus, it would be a serious misunderstanding to assume that feminism is fundamentally committed to defend existing forms of gender and sexual identities, as if feminism is a form of “advocacy for women,” or the vanguard party representing women in the age-­old battle of the sexes. Rather, as Simone de Beauvoir notes at the very beginning of Le Deuxième Sexe, to raise the idea that there is a “problem” of women, of the way they are treated by society or understood by society, is necessarily to raise the question about the category itself. If, as feminists point out, all females cannot reproduce, nor do all women desire children, nor are they always the best caretakers of children, nor are they more sentimental and less rational than men, then why is the category used? If we dispense with specious descriptive claims about commonalities of intelligence, behavior, or disposition, we might imagine that biological features can provide a grounding for the category, but recent biological research has shown an extensive variety among those who are socially identified as women in their hormonal and morphological features, challenging gender binaries and posing questions about how many gender categories could be sufficient to characterize the real diversity: the biologist Anne Fausto-­Sterling has proposed five (Fausto-­Sterling 1993; see also Angier 1999). Writing in 1947, Beauvoir explains that after more than a century of global struggle around the querelle du feminism, “it is hard to know any longer if women still exist, if they will always exist, if there should be women at all” (Beauvoir 2011, 23). To raise the question of what women are is necessarily to raise the existential question of whether women are, and if so, in what sense? In a related argument the cultural theorist Stuart Hall argued that the “struggle over the relations of representation” has necessarily led to a struggle over the “politics of representation itself . . . [since] how things are represented and the ‘machineries’ and regimes of representation in a culture do play a constitutive, and not merely a reflexive, after-­the-­event role” (Hall  1996, 442–43). Both Hall and Beauvoir argued that the descriptive content of socially recognized identities had a hand in producing those iden-

342   Alcoff tities, in the sense of producing persons with forms of subjecthood that were affected by, and conforming to, the dominant ideas about their groups. This adds a further layer of complexity to the problem of identity when it concerns, not apples and cats, but human beings. In defining identities, we are not merely choosing which group differences to highlight, but, possibly in some cases, we are choosing which group differences to encourage or even mandate (see Ásta 2013, 2018 for a philosophically precise articulation of this claim). Hence, the project of feminism must necessarily grapple with the question of identity, and to address this question we need clarity on the nature of social categories of identity in general, the topic of this chapter. What has been established thus far is that (1) identity concepts aggregate through setting aside inevitable differences, (2) such aggregate concepts are formed because of their functional role for human beings in general or for some subgroup of human beings, and (3) the characteristics used to justify group concepts may have an effect on human behavior or the formation of subjectivity, so we need to consider carefully the actual ontological status of the differences that are purported to justify the use of social categories of identity. More specifically, we need to consider not only the treatment of diverse group identities but also their formation, and who has had a hand in the process of forming the ideas and practices that make up a given identity. These are good general points to keep in mind, and they suggest research questions we will want to ask about all social identities. Yet we may find that all identities are not formed in the same way or have the same nefarious functions. There may well be significant specificities to gender as a category that differentiate its formation from other socially recognized categories, such as race, nationality, and religion, among others. Gender more obviously engages with central features of human embodiment whose importance crosses cultural differences and historical divides. Reproductive capacity and the biological division of labor in human reproduction have a significance for the species with objective importance. In other words, there is a species-­wide function in identifying who has the physiological features that sustain the capacity to gestate and lactate. Not all women have either the ability or the desire to have children, yet more than 80% do worldwide. By contrast, it takes an understanding of colonial history and how geographical lineage was typecast as a predictor of labor capacity to grasp the significance accorded to physical features such as skin color, nose shape, and hair texture (Alcoff 2006). The significance accorded to these kinds of characteristics is not species-­wide or found across history. The category of race in particular can be dated to the modern era, emerging as a convenient way to rank groups just as transnational commerce intensified, including the sale of slaves and the extraction of local resources (and related collective forms of knowledge) for export. In sum, we should be wary of the assumption that all identity formations occur in a similar way or for similar reasons, or that none have a basis in objectively significant features. Each identity category needs a distinct analysis, as well as an analysis of their influence on the formation of, and change in, other conventional identity concepts.

Identity   343 We might think of identities, then, as potentially caused by and expressive of both natural and nominal aspects. As a fully articulated social identity, beyond the bare facts of reproductive potential, gender formations express cultural thinking about the differential roles that males and females can and should play in the drama of parturition. Although this biological division of labor is itself not a cultural fact but a physical fact, the bare physical facts of reproduction cannot possibly explain the incredibly imaginative and widely diverse ideas and practices that human cultures have produced around this basic difference, including practices as well as dress and comportment. Nonetheless, embodiment and reproduction play a distinct role in regard to gender identity formations, their content, and their purported justifications. Race, nationality, religion, and even, perhaps, sexuality do not engage with embodiment in the same way, or, arguably, in as fundamental a way. They are related more to practices, volitional commitments, desires, and the history of organizing and ranking laborers in ways that legitimated coercion and different treatment. So we should not assume that the nature of the differences that are used to demarcate identities all have the same ontological status or the same degree of mix between natural and nominal elements. Despite its distinctiveness, gender is a form of identity like other socially recognized forms of identity. It correlates to differences in everyday practices and to social segregation and is generally assumed to be, or made to be, visible or perceptible in some way on the street, facilitating the differences in forms of social interaction. Social identities often have correlating differences in the way we dress; the way we walk, sit, and move in general; the manner in which we interact with others; and the ways we imagine ourselves as well as others. The cultural variability and historical differences we can observe in all of these correlating features of the way we inhabit our identities prove that they are far from simply natural, even if they contain some natural and objectively significant features. The fact is that all cultures produce concepts and categories that differentiate individuals into groups or types. Further, it is important to recognize that people on the ground make use of identity concepts because they help to explain the social world around them, not simply because they have unthinkingly imbibed ideological claims (Mohanty 1997; Moya 2002). Without the use of identity concepts, we may not be able to grasp the ongoing effects of group oppression, or the distribution of political and economic advantages and disadvantages in a society. Thus, we use identity concepts to understand and navigate our world, but in many cases identity concepts are important for developing social critique, to understand how oppression is organized, legitimated, and concealed. So, what should we think about the fact that social identities exist, and that they have such significance? As Georgia Warnke argues, simply saying that one takes identities to be socially constructed is insufficient as a normative analysis: it cannot tell us how to discriminate “between good and bad identities” (2007, 86). “All identities,” Warnke continues, are “bound up with power” (86), and thus all require critical and normative reflection. So how should we assess them? The remainder of this chapter will address this question. It will involve us in two kinds of philosophical queries: social ontology

344   Alcoff and ethics. We want to understand what should be done about identities from a moral and political point of view, but this question requires further consideration of what identities really are and how they are formed as social kinds. Before we can deliberate over the social and political importance accorded to social identities and how they may need to be altered, we need an understanding of what identities are, how they come into existence, and thus how open they are to being altered. Only then can we meaningfully ask: how much, and in what ways, should they be changed or possibly eradicated? Much of the significance of social identities appears to be negative: identities endanger people’s lives and livelihoods and conscript individuals into categories that do not necessarily reflect their particular capacities, interests, or commitments. Identities seem to be opportunities for oppression, inherently vulnerable to systems of ranking that endanger democracy, cooperation, and peace. Surely, as Warnke (2007), Appiah (2005), and others argue, their social significance should be curtailed. Yet identities are also the manifestation of our connections to history, to communities, to families, and to groups with which we share commonalities. As Bernard Williams puts it, in regard to socially recognized identities, “something is given, even though I must choose to take it up” (1995, 10). Indeed, Williams argues that it is the givenness of identity, the way its meaning exceeds my will, that should help us to see “why the politics of identity should be so essential to our life now” (1995, 10). Our identities are not something we can readily ignore or easily disavow or overcome through individual acts. Thus, to say that social identities are a mix of the natural and the nominal, or the physiological and the historical, is to say that they are a mix of the given and the way in which we take up the given, as Williams put it. Identities may develop from real features we have, but these features are always subject to variable interpretation. This work of interpreting influences the formation of our sense of self. I must engage with what it means to be a Latin American living in the United States; whether I attempt to learn about this history and culture or studiously avoid the topic, I am still engaging in a particular task that not everyone has thrust upon them. But everyone has some given aspects of their life, their history, and their connections to others that condition their options: men as well as women, Anglos as well as Latinxs, and so on. There is a range of individual agency we each have in interpreting the meaning and the significance of our given identities and also in our efforts to transform the communities and practices associated with these identities, but our agency is necessarily a form of engagement and negotiation with existing systems, however fluid these may be. We can now summarize at least four central features of identity: the variable way an identity category may be defined in different contexts, the rootedness of identities in social life, the subsequently limited agency of individuals in regard to their identities, and the multiple ways in which social categories of identity can be defined, altered, or entrenched, not all of which are necessarily controlled by nefarious elites. I will go through each of these points in turn and then conclude by reflecting on the normative question of what is to be done. It is critical to understand that identity concepts are subject to variable definitions and thus best understood locally and contextually. The meanings or descriptive content

Identity   345 accorded to identities, the perceptual practices we learn in order to identify and distinguish between groups, the criteria used to determine membership in a group, and the political effects of having that identity can all vary widely. The attributes associated with women in one domain of the social world (such as daintiness, weakness, economic dependence) are not universal. The dividing line between “Black” and “white” identities varies from place to place. Racial terms have been defined in the United States primarily by one’s family lineage, while in Latin America these are generally determined by skin color, so that siblings may end up being identified as having different racial identities. Similarly, in some parts of the world one’s sexual identity is determined by the gender of one’s sexual partner, but in other places sexual identity refers more to how one has sex, that is, in what position, such that a married man may have sex with men without this affecting his sexual identity if he performs sex in these relationships in a certain way. Religious identity is similarly varied: it sometimes depends on self-­avowal and committed practice, but in other contexts it is treated as a form of inherited ethnicity entirely independent of subjective orientation or doxastic commitments. Also, the way in which one “sees” the identity of those around them is particular rather than universal. Our capacity to perceptually identify and distinguish an individual’s group identity is a finely grained, learned skill, and the perceptual skills that are taught around the world vary, depending on their relevance and utility. Individuals who have been oppressed by identity designations have sometimes been able to move to new cities, neighborhoods, or workspaces where the givenness of their identity has a better set of understood meanings and associated options, in which one can be seen by others in a way that conforms more readily to one’s sense of self. In an essay on Muslim identity, Akeel Bilgrami suggests that taking a Quinean approach to the inevitable variability of identity terms—their interpretation, their effects—will be helpful here, for then, “the absence of strict criteria need no longer be seen as a sign of one’s confusion” (1995, 200). For Quine, concepts like “electron” are best understood as internal to a theory. With this approach, transferring a concept like “electron” from one theory to another is understood to alter its meaning and significance as well as its role in causal attributions and inferences. Hence, if we want to understand a concept, we need to understand it in relation to the theoretical system within which it appears. Similarly, concepts of social identity like “Muslim” are operational within specified contexts: once we understand them as indexical to location, we can see how they are unified and what they are meant to explain. We can then, as Bilgrami says, “embrace their locality . . . without any anxiety about losing our hold over them” (1995, 200). The second aspect we need to understand about our familiar social categories of identity such as gender, race, sexuality, and class are how much they are rooted in social life and political institutions. Contextual variability does not always translate into effective individual control: it simply multiplies the contexts an individual may have to engage with in regard to their identity. We are identified at the moment of birth (or today, with the use of sonograms, before birth), affecting how we are treated and how our actions are interpreted. Our identities as male or female, documented or undocumented, “normate” or disabled are recorded throughout our lives, affecting us in profound ways.

346   Alcoff Beyond the formal records, the meaning and significance of our identities are reflected and reinforced each day in our informal social interactions as well as our media consumption. This is a massive material system. When we look at the social world around us and observe who is rich and who is poor, who does service work, manufacturing, construction, or technology design, we are looking at the material effects of historical events and structural policies. The categories of socially recognized identities continue to yield reliable predictions of income, home ownership, likely imprisonment, and the sector of the labor market in which one works. The increasingly complex intersections of our gender, class, and ethnic and racial identities have not yet rendered identities statistically meaningless for research in economics, sociology, education, medicine, or political science, and thus many governments as well as nongovernmental research groups continue to maintain a watch on the correlations between identity and one’s economic well-­being, political participation, social inclusion, health, and educational achievement. The transformation (as well as maintenance) of this material organization of social groups requires conscious and collective social efforts. Thus, the third aspect of identities we need to understand is the limited control individuals have since our identities are features of collective and social life. To change aspects of my identity, I need to engage with existing systems of meaning that interpret and interpellate me. As an individual, I may be able to engage with the racial and gendered organization of the economy in a way that avoids identity-­based disadvantages, for example, by seeking to enter a higher-­paid profession that is dominated by group identities different than my own. But I cannot simply declare the social world to be irrelevant: to succeed in a sector of the economy in which my group is marginalized, I may need to assimilate to new practices of dress, speech, comportment, even beliefs. This does not mean I cannot challenge and change the current conventions, but to ignore the realm of socially understood meanings is to invite failure, and also to risk becoming unintelligible, which diminishes my effectiveness toward changing existing social systems of meaning around identities. I also risk being unprepared for the treatment I may receive because of an identity others recognize (or believe) me to have. In general, the meanings and boundaries and types of social identities change because of the collective efforts of social movements much more than they do through individual declarations. Many movements have been able to change the negative portrayal of identities. Social movements can also create or bring into larger public awareness entirely new categories of identity such as “Chicano” and “trans.” What we might think of as external aspects of identity—such as the way our identities are designated and viewed by others, sometimes incorrectly—are not actually simply external, or external to who we are. Identities are key features of the self, not peripheral to it. Our identities affect opportunities and challenges and our treatment by others, and all of this will profoundly affect our own self-­development, as confident, hopeful, risk takers or guarded pessimists or arrogant solipsists. It is therefore necessary to understand identities as the product of dialectical interplay in which both internal and external aspects have limited agency in controlling lives and selves and self-­understandings.

Identity   347 The fact that we have limited control is offset by the fact that social systems that try to define us also have limited power over how we see ourselves and over the resistance of our communities and groups. The fourth aspect of identities we need to understand is that they are not necessarily the result of nefarious elites. Given the role of social movements and collectively induced cultural shifts, as well as the profound impact of some large historical events, formations of identity can be the result of bottom-­up as well as top-­down influences (Omi and Winant 1986). Identities are in many cases the product of calculated and concerted efforts by state actors. Constitutions and other forms of legislation can inscribe differential rights, including suffrage, and courts can interpret the law’s applicability to specific individuals to establish the borders between identity groups and the criteria that will be used to determine inclusion. Today, for example, the identity “mother” is subject to legislative and legal interpretation: is a surrogate a “mother”? Are sperm donors “fathers”? What rights do noncitizens have? Notoriously, the Canadian and US governments have operated unilaterally to establish the criteria of Indigenous identity, often contradicting the ideas and practices of Indigenous groups themselves. States interpret identity claims based on values they want to uphold, such as property rights and the inviolability of commercial transactions, so that women who work as surrogates can make no claim against those who hire them, and Indigenous land claims will be minimized if they have no documentation. Yet, as previously discussed, identity-­based movements for social justice have also had an impact on the meaning of identities and their persisting significance. Oppressed groups can be forcibly segregated, but they may also prefer to live in neighborhoods where they are the majority and where, as Tommie Shelby points out, they may then be able to rely on “their established social networks for childcare, transportation, and employment information” as well as a reduced likelihood to experience racism (2016, 70). Community segregation, whether voluntary or enforced, has an effect on family formation and cultural forms of expression, with a resultant impact on identities. Thus, it is important not to overlook the agency of nonelites; Shelby’s analysis of what he calls “ghetto poverty” diagnoses a persistent bias among social analysts who tend to downgrade the agency of the poor, to “see dysfunction where perhaps lies resistance to injustice” (2016, 3). In reality, the conscious collective action of nonelites, as well as the aggregation of individual choices, can shift the meanings and political effects of social categories of identity across time. As Allison Weir puts it, “identities are not simply effects of a single binary logic of subjection through exclusion, but are produced through multiple contesting relations” (2013, 3). She goes on to argue that “no identities are produced only through subjugating regimes of power” and that theorists need to attend to the various “we” relations in which one enacts agency (2013, 8). This is not to downplay the long durée of colonialism and patriarchal cultures, but to remind us of the successes of everyday acts of resistance, struggles to maintain a positive sense of self, and the sometimes unintended consequences of elite projects that can enable new forms of agency, create new solidarities, and motivate a determination to resist.

348   Alcoff Weir has been among the many feminists arguing for relational accounts of the self that may give us some normative guidance on the ethical questions posed by identity. As Weir puts it, identities are “connections to our ideals, to each other, to places, to our bodies, to ourselves” (2013, 10). Our relations with others can be stifling, but they are also the means by which we can achieve self-­understanding, deliberate over goals, resist more effectively conventional meanings and ideas, and, in these ways, maximize our autonomy. Identities thus represent the givenness of our material and historical contexts, but they also enable knowledge and action. I am much more likely to be successful in understanding and resisting gender-­based oppression if I work with and learn from the history of feminist activism and scholarship than if I try to do it all by myself. Put in this way, we might rethink how we understand the complicating intersections of identity terms. My connections to and relations with others are grounded in the material particularities of shared locations and shared experiences as well as the interdependence of families, coworkers, and affective networks of care. This suggests that the central relations that affect my own self-­formation will never simply involve those who share a straightforward form of social identity with me: I may share a location with a neighborhood of diverse people or share experiences with a diverse group of people who have a similar form of disability. My complex connections to these diverse types of people are part of the givenness of my identity. This approach shifts the normative question from whether we should have identities— whether states or other political organizations should recognize and affirm identities— to how we inhabit our connections to others, to places, and to ourselves. What obligations do our identities incur, as unfairly advantaged over others, perhaps? What possibilities can our identities engender in social understanding? Exploring the social ontology of identities reveals their constructed and fluid character, the complexity of their multiplicity and intersectionality. Acknowledging both the natural and nominal elements of identities can remind us of the givenness of our material particularity as well as what is at stake for others in the way in which we interpret our identities and inhabit them. And investigating our complicated connections and relationships will no doubt suggest the critical moral questions of our lives: What, and to whom, are my obligations? What are my possibilities? Future directions in feminist philosophical work on identity will no doubt continue to debate the way in which we should transform the definitions of gender and how progress can be made. New historical and anthropological work around the world has challenged Western feminism by showing great variety in the practices around reproduction as well as ideas about gender differences. Decolonial theorists are contesting the way in which gender and sexuality have been defined on Western terms, with the result of building patriarchal relations and binary sexual identities into the definitions. Indigenous feminisms are raising new questions about the ethics of separate spheres, and trans scholars are exploring in new ways the relationship between gender, sexuality, and embodiment. In general, the social construction of gender and sexual identities has become widely accepted; now the challenge is how to address the wide variability in social practices and ideas.

Identity   349

References Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2006. Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self. New York: Oxford University Press. Angier, Natalie. 1999. Woman: An Intimate Geography. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2005. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ásta. 2013. “The Social Construction of Human Kinds.” Hypatia 28 (4): 716–32. Published under Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir. Ásta. 2018. Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories. New York: Oxford University Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2011. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Shelia Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage Books. Bilgrami, Akeel. 1995. “What Is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural Identity.” In Identities, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., 198–219. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. Calhoun, Cheshire. 2000. Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet: Lesbian and Gay Displacement. New York: Oxford University Press. Chisholm, R. 1976. Person and Object. LaSalle, IL: Open Court. Combahee River Collective. 1979. “A Black Feminist Statement.” In Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, edited by Zillah R. Eisenstein, 362–72. New York: Monthly Review Press. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 1993. “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough.” The Sciences, March/April, 20–24. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “New Ethnicities.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 441–449. New York: Routledge Press. Haslanger, Sally. 2012. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. New York: Oxford University Press. Mohanty, Satya. 1997. Literary Theory and the Claims of History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Moya, Paula M. L. 2002. Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1986. Racial Formations in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge. Quine, W. V. O. 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press. Shelby, Tommie. 2016. Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent and Reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Warnke, Georgia. 2007. After Identity: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weir, Allison. 2013. Identities and Freedom: Feminist Theory between Power and Connection. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, Bernard. 1995. “Identity and Identities.” In Identity, edited by Henry Harris, 1–12. New York: Clarendon Press. Wittig, Monique. 1981. “One Is Not Born a Woman.” Feminist Issues 1 (2, Winter): 47–54.

chapter 28

The Body Cressida J. Heyes

There is scarcely any conceptual relationship more troubled than that awkward ménage à trois formed of Western philosophy, feminism, and “the body.” Even that last singular usage—still so commonplace in the humanities—belies the plurality of bodies in the world as well as their permeability and interrelation. Talk of “the body” risks implying a body that ends at the skin (Haraway 1990; Shildrick 2015). It points to an individual, with all of the historical, ontological, and political weight that word carries. And it hints at something stripped of its historical and social contexts—not only a male body, but also a white European body; an aesthetically normative body; a nondisabled body; a human body; or even an extra-­cognitive, corpse-­like body whose very existence contributes nothing of value to philosophical projects. Nonetheless, feminist philosophy is of necessity concerned with bodies: no matter where one stands on the question of whether the sexed body provides the ground for feminist politics, gendered bodies are the endpoint (and, in a way, the origin) of the forms of social injustice and control that feminist philosophers seek to understand. Philosophy may not be the best discipline for making sense of the historical, institutional, and psychological contexts of embodied life, but in its feminist variants, at least, it has offered rich (and diverse) methods of analysis, many of which are deeply connected to the norms and methods of other disciplines. There is a potted story in the feminist philosophy of the 1980s about how the Western canon has historically disdained “the body”—preferring to think of human bodies as mere extended matter, an entirely different substance than the mind, and often epistemically unreliable or deceptive. Within this story the female body is doubly disparaged: if all human bodies can be sources of falsehood or somehow base, distracting human beings from the higher pursuits of the mind, women’s bodies are even closer to nature, making rational life impossible for us (Lloyd 1984; Bordo 1987). Versions of this position do appear in various places in the Western philosophical canon, and even though they do not assemble as a consistent single view, there is clearly a trend: this tradition is, as Elizabeth Spelman (1988) famously put it, somatophobic, and construes

The Body   351 female persons as more “of the body” than male, conceptually linking disdain for the body to misogyny. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex shows how, intellectually fashionable repudiation of biological determinism notwithstanding, to be feminine is to be immanent, burdened by one’s body, while masculinity represents both the positive and the neutral: Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his subjectivity also includes hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman’s body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularizes it. (Beauvoir [1948] 2010, 5)

In the first chapter of the book Beauvoir undertakes an early, complex attempt to describe “biological data” at the same time as she situates female bodies in their ­historical and cultural contexts ([1948] 2010, 21–48). Her account is famously ambivalent about women’s bodies, especially as reproductive subjects; whether, then, sexual ­difference can ground any particular feminist politic is a question that pushes against a long tradition. In Anglo-­ American feminist social thought from the 1970s, the ­distinction between sex and gender is the conceptual pivot: male and female represent distinctive physiological types of human beings, but the facts of this difference (­whatever those “facts” amount to) need not determine the sense of self of any particular ­individual, nor the social roles men and women adopt. Men’s dominance is contingent, not determined by the innate superiority of maleness (Oakley 1972; Rubin 1975; Kessler and McKenna  1978). In continental psychoanalytic traditions, by contrast, sexual ­difference as simultaneously experienced and imagined through the sexed body plays a key theoretical role in understanding philosophy’s conceptual assumptions. Luce Irigaray’s account of male and female bodies, and of the latter as experiencing not a phallic unity but rather two lips touching, is the best-­known example (Irigaray 1985). Other philosophical interventions stress the experience of pregnancy or (giving) birth as offering transformative ontological resources (Rodemeyer 1998; Young 2005, 46–61; Guenther 2006; Cavarero 1995, 2014). The sustained critique of premising political philosophical conclusions on the facts of sexual difference, then, is that such positions abstract the female body from historical and material contexts and construe it as singular. They thus treat the body as always already sexed—an assumption that begs the question of the historical constitution of what Gayle Rubin (1975) called “sex/gender systems.” For example, María Lugones argues that “colonialism did not impose precolonial, European gender arrangements on the colonized. It imposed a new gender system that created very different arrangements for colonized males and females than for white bourgeois colonizers. Thus, it introduced many genders and gender itself as a colonial concept and mode of organization of relations of production, property relations, of cosmologies and ways of knowing” (2007,

352   Heyes 186). Citing the work of Oyéronké Oyewùmí on the Yoruba and Paula Gunn Allen on the Cherokee, Lugones makes a case that Western heteropatriarchal gender systems cannot be used to interpret either gender roles or sexed bodies (2007, 194–96). Rather, as Roshanravan elaborates Lugones: The primary dichotomy organizing the “modern/colonial gender system” is the racial divide between “human” and “not human.” In this system, sexual dimorphism and the heteropatriarchal gender binary mark the colonizer as superior/human in relation to the colonized, who, in their racial dehumanization, were imagined as sexed (not gendered), hermaphroditic freaks and hypersexed nonhuman animals, fit for breeding, brutal labor exploitation, and/or massacre. Because only humans could be understood to be “men” or “women,” the colonized were denied gendered status, even as the colonizers imposed this system to “civilize the savage.” (Roshanravan 2014, 48)

This kind of argument inclines more recent work on the body in feminist philosophy to be less focused on sexual difference as an exclusive axis of interpretation and hence more contextually specific. We can list a multitude of politically significant ways that bodies are represented and lived, where gender is a structure of power entangled with others: racialized bodies (Sheth  2009; Davidson et al.  2010; Threadcraft  2016); colonized, Indigenous (Smith  2005; Coulthard  2014; Simpson  2016), and migrant (Kittay 2013; Sheth 2014) bodies; reproductive (Park 2006; Brakman and Scholz 2006; Deutscher  2010), medicalized (Shabot  2016), objectified (Cahill  2011), aestheticized (Bordo 1993; Hobson 2003), disabled (Hall 2011; Kafer 2013), queer (Winnubst 2006; Huffer 2013), trans* (Shrage 2009; Bettcher 2012; Baril 2015), and intersex (Holmes 2009) bodies; incarcerated (Guenther  2014; Zurn  2016), posthuman (Barad  2007; Neimanis  2016), and nonhuman animal bodies (Gruen and Weil  2012; Adams and Gruen 2014); and all their intersections. The way the body is taken up and worked into feminist philosophy is also a methodological question: conceptual analysis (Langton 2009; Barnes 2016), psychoanalysis (Grosz 1999; Stone 2012), new materialism (Barad  2007; Alaimo and Hekman  2008), genealogy (McWhorter  1999; Feder  2007; Heyes  2007), poststructuralism (Butler  1993; Mann  2006), and phenomenology (Bartky  1990; Fisher and Embree  2000; Heyes  2020), for example, all offer different modes for philosophizing about bodies that need not be tied to any particular historical or political context—although one might argue that some methods are better suited to some contexts. Rather than attempt to survey these literatures, let me select three key problems that I find particularly illuminating, on the edge of current work in feminist philosophy, to show how work in the field is able to move between the register of lived experience and that of structural analysis. Feminist work on “the body” elsewhere in the humanities tends to read cultural representations of bodies or narrate bodily undergoings often based on fairly generic and intuitive political frameworks. If there is anything distinctive about philosophy, it is that the discipline has a set of particularly deep and careful methods of theory building. Feminist philosophy has taken these methods out of

The Body   353 their abstract and arcane intellectual worlds and applied them to worlds of gender. The guiding theme in my examples is the problematization of human bodies as natural objects, where “natural” has (briefly, in the history of philosophy) signified “outside the domain of philosophical inquiry, of the natural sciences,” and antithetical to feminism.

Sex and Gender First, in the literature on the sex/gender distinction, there is an embedded contrast between the natural and the social, where sex aligns with the natural and gender with the social. These two domains of experience and knowledge are often represented in feminist theory as completely separable with their own internal logics (the former the domain of sexist essentialism, the latter of feminism). If one understands the sexed body as an object of biological inquiry within this logic, then knowledge about that body will necessarily be misogynist—as an important tradition of criticizing (bad) biological claims about sexual difference (and women’s implicit inferiority) makes clear (e.g., Fine 2010; Jordan-­Young 2010; Jordan-­Young and Karkazis 2019). The alternative, then, seems to be to understand the body as a cultural construct, formed by the historical and social contexts in which it finds itself and entirely contingent. This rather implausible dichotomy has contributed to what Elizabeth Wilson calls “antibiologism”—a widespread skepticism about the possibility that biological knowledge might be anything other than epistemically mired in the history of misogyny and hence antithetical to feminist projects (Wilson 2015). Wilson is especially interested in the false distinction between the body and the mind that the enteric nervous system and its relation to psychological states (especially depression) belies. She develops instead a “gut feminism”—an approach to feminist theory that incorporates biological data and refuses the separation of nature and culture. Her work also throws the sex/gender distinction into question (Wilson 2015, esp. 23–27), and thus is part of a larger body of feminist scholarship in philosophy of science, social studies of science, and medical humanities that retrieves the biological body from the bracketed realm of sex. To give another example, human intersex conditions, now controversially referred to in Western medicine as “disorders of sex development” (DSDs), have long been of interest to feminist thinkers who argue that their treatment reveals the investments of a sex/gender system that recursively imposes normative gender onto sex (Kessler 1998; Fausto-­Sterling 2000). (Judith Butler in Gender Trouble states, famously, “If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all,” [1990] 1999, 10–11). More recently, this literature has focused more closely on how sexual difference, within a dominant medical and cultural logic, cannot be allowed to exist as a plurality of developmental pathways within which

354   Heyes atypical outcomes are tolerated if they have no urgent consequence for physical health (e.g., Karkazis 2008). Rather, as Ellen Feder argues, the surgical interventions imposed on intersex infants often treat anatomical anomalies as disgusting and shameful. The business of medicine, she counters, should not be to regulate identity through a preoccupation with normal appearance, but rather to enable human flourishing (Feder 2014, 68–75). The problem with this position is that what will count as a “disorder” that precludes flourishing tends to beg the question; that is, “DSD” is itself an internally diverse category whose nosology reveals untheorized assumptions about what sex is. While the immediate treatment of a few symptoms of some DSDs is important for basic physiological reasons (even to prevent death), the treatment of most is justified through speculation about (future) psychosocial well-­being. In recent work making this case in detail, Catherine Clune-­Taylor (2016,  2019) has argued that endorsing an objectivist account of pathology—as proponents of the DSD nomenclature did—forecloses critical examination of the historical constitution of sex and reifies the binaries of nature/ culture and its key correlate, sex/gender. Examining clinical and bioethical arguments advanced by prominent physicians in the field as well as the actual and projected consequences of treatment models for individuals diagnosed with DSD, Clune-­Taylor argues that in fact these models believe themselves to be securing heterosexual and, especially, cis-­gendered lives. Taken together, her work (which both builds on and critically engages Feder’s) shows that what started life as a purportedly value-­free medical understanding of normal and abnormal sex (development) leads to a treatment model that treats cis-­gendered lives as unquestionably desirable and trans* or genderqueer lives as inimical to human flourishing.

Feminist Phenomenology The philosophical construction of bodies as simultaneously natural and normative (without recognition of the contradiction in binding these terms together) has been unpicked from other directions. The lived experience of the body—including the lived experience of the body as natural—is the central preoccupation of critical (feminist) phenomenology, which incorporates both the structures of first-­person consciousness and the historical and social conditions of that consciousness (e.g., Ahmed  2006; Martinez 2011, 2014; Zeiler and Käll 2014; Lee 2014; Ortega 2016). Thus, second, feminist philosophy of the body emphasizes bodily experience, but not only in the context of theoretically informed memoir (like, e.g., Brison 2002; Freedman 2014; Crosby 2016). Rather, feminist phenomenology starts from the post-­Merleau-­Pontian position that my embodied self is the ground of all possible experience. My body is not a something that a pre-­existing cognitive self “has,” but rather is the condition of possibility of that self. My body schema—the organized totality of my prereflective experience—provides the mobile null point from which the world extends, a world that requires other embodied selves for its ontological and ethical constitution (Weiss 1999; Heyes 2016).

The Body   355 Rather than naively affirm the immediate and unmediated nature of experience, feminist phenomenology can illuminate our embodied experience within social and historical structures, without treating bodies as purely ideological products. It can recognize embodied subjectivity as a grounding locus for understanding “social structures of oppression and the site where complicity, subversion or resistance are enacted” (Al-­Saji 2010a, 32–33; Heyes 2020). The lived experience of racial embodiment in the context of gendered power presents a particular challenge: how to understand the connections between intersubjective experiences of racial identification and large historical and social structures of gendered and racial oppression. Recall Frantz Fanon’s germinal work on the racist overdetermination of Blackness and failures of recognition in Black Skin, White Masks; the interpellation of the Black man, on his account, calls up the history of slavery and every stereotype about African diasporic people (Fanon [1952]  1967). For Fanon his neutral, human body schema is overlaid with a “racial-­epidermal schema” as well as a “historico-­racial schema” through which his individual experience is linked to the larger structures of power that inform it. This theorization of visual interpellation is central to phenomenologies of race. For example, Linda Martín Alcoff suggests that the experience of race originates in perception and thus that “race works through the domain of the visible” (Alcoff 2006, 187). Drawing on the concepts of the habitual body (a default position in which our bodily experience is unified through our everyday micro-practices, which include and result in racialized body images) and the postural model of the body (the nonlinguistic imaginary position of the body in the world and its relation to its environment and to other bodies), Alcoff argues that race operates as a background to perception rather than a deliberate or even conscious act of perception; it is a field of meaning rather than an ectasis. Combine this backgrounding of race with its operation through the visible (a sense thought to peculiarly reveal unmediated reality) and, Alcoff argues, race produces the experience of its own objective reality and immutability. Understanding this production might disclose “the steps that are now attenuated and habitual” and “force a recognition of one’s agency in reconfiguring a postural body image or a habitual perception. Noticing the way in which meanings are located on the body has at least the potential to disrupt the current racializing processes” (194). This process is operationalized by Alia Al-­Saji’s work on Western ways of seeing the Muslim veil (which cites Alcoff, and also reads through Merleau-­Ponty and Fanon, who wrote on veiling [Fanon (1952) 1965] in the context of Algerian colonization and independence). Picking up on Alcoff ’s position that “seeing” is a set of learned habits that must be denied as such, Al-­Saji shows how “gender oppression is naturalized to the Muslim veil” and points to “the perils that attend such representations” (Al-­Saji 2010b, 876). Arguing that the bodies of veiled women provide a focal point for the projection of gender oppression, she suggests that representations of Muslim women in the veil as oppressed provide a foil for Western complacency about gender oppression. Echoing arguments in political theory about the hypocrisy of imperialist projects by heteropatriarchal nation-­states that are justified in using claims about the intolerance of the cultures under attack (e.g., Puar 2007; Morris 2010), Al-­Saji argues that

356   Heyes the naturalization of gender oppression to veiled Muslim women thus permits the norm of western womanhood to be constituted as “free” of such oppression, as the only imaginable mode of female subjectivity. It is my claim, then, that images of veiled Muslim women play a constitutive role in many patriarchal narratives in the West. . . . These representations put Muslim women in positions scripted in advance, where veiling is constituted as the equivalent of de-­subjectification—a lack of subjectivity, a victimhood or voicelessness, that these images in turn work to enforce. (Al-­Saji 2010b, 877)

One key contribution of this feminist phenomenological work is thus to show how ­practices of perception (including perception of others’ bodies and even one’s own body) experienced as natural and immutable are actually produced and political (Al-Saji 2019). This phenomenological insight applies across a range of bodily experiences: Gayle Salamon, for example, rethinks the opposition of materiality and ideality, to challenge “the common assumption that the outside envelope of the body may be subject to the shaping press of the world that is its context, but that there exists beneath this outer surface an inner core of the embodied self that is immune to these pressures” (2006, 97). In everyday thinking about gender and sexuality such notions of the authentic inner core are commonplace: imagine a woman who exhibits extraordinary talent in a field dominated by men who says, “I must have a male brain,” or people so certain of their own homosexuality in the face of others’ opposition that they attribute it to “a gene.” Salamon’s phenomenology explains the felt senses of realness without reducing them to a biological core entirely separate from the social world (Salamon 2006, 2010). This philosophical gesture provides a theoretical structure for more ethnographic work on how gendered and sexual bodies are intersubjectively derived and maintained, such as Joe Latham’s (2016) research on transmen’s narrative practices of their sexed and sexual bodies, or Salamon’s own “critical phenomenology of transphobia” in the case of Latisha King (2018).

Disability Feminist philosophy thus provides both conceptual resources and methods for troubling the separation of the natural body-­as-­object from the political analysis of gender. To give a third and final example, philosophy of disability has relied historically on a distinction between naturally existing (and normatively neutral) impairments and their social construction as “disabilities.” This distinction, however, immediately provokes a critique of a familiar kind. If, as Shelley Tremain has argued, impairment is to sex as disability is to gender, structurally similar critiques apply to each (false) dichotomy (Tremain 2001). Insistence on the extra-­social epistemic status of impairment shores up a medical model of disability, within which disability is “an individual problem that must be treated or cured” (Hall 2015, 2), as against a “social” model that treats disability

The Body   357 as primarily a product of unjust social structures. Against this backdrop, feminist philosophy of disability takes up the first-­ personal experience of nonnormative embodiment simultaneously with the political contexts in which that experience gains meaning. Again, feminist philosophy denaturalizes the most reified aspects of bodily being, turning instead to analysis of processes of becoming. To focus on just one case, bodies exist in time. We are born, we grow up, we age, and we die. Some of us menstruate each month, or observe a chronic illness getting better and worse with the seasons, or experience the interruption of miscarried pregnancies, or have a vasectomy to foreclose a future with more children, or receive a terminal diagnosis and know our lives will end sooner than we expected. As these examples indicate, our temporal bodies are sexed but not only so. Our conceptualizations and experiences of time are not objective or politically neutral, and they often reflect normative understandings of able bodies. As Joshua St. Pierre argues, “the universalization and instrumentalization of time are peddled as natural and simply given, yet they are derived from a masculinized and sterile human ecology. Articulating the contingency of dominant temporalities challenges communicative normalcy and engenders possibilities of enacting new modes of relationality, possibilities for disabled speakers to shape communicative space otherwise” (St. Pierre 2015, 62). His example is the lived stuttering body, which, with its “awkward pauses, gaps in signification, and stuttered syntax” (54–55), fails to match the “choreography” of normative speech. This choreography values and tries to enforce the unhesitating trajectory from past to present; an even, paced speed; and a productive efficiency that aligns with, as St. Pierre argues, conditions of able-­bodied, masculine, and socioeconomic temporalities. The stuttering body, then, on his account, is exemplary for revealing the ways bodies in general are compliant or at odds with often-­subtle political norms of communicative performance. * * * If Western canonical philosophy has often bracketed the body, feminist philosophy can also shy away from talking about any bodily specifics. “If you want academics to write the most abstract thing possible, ask them to write about the body,” I once jokingly said to a colleague; I had in mind feminist philosophers as much as anyone (St. Pierre and Rodier  2016). While “body” appears often enough in the indices of feminist ­philosophy books, it is hard to find such work that dwells on the fine grain of bodily experience or dives deeply into the particular contexts of embodied oppression. The weight of Western philosophy’s history lies heavy. The texts I have focused on here are exemplary because they show how the “natural” body cannot be bracketed out from philosophy, as an object irrelevant or inimical to its projects. More interestingly, they specify contexts in which both small, everyday practices—expressing disgust at intersex genitalia, looking at a Muslim woman’s veil with the assumption that it oppresses her, being frustrated by a stutterer who gets stuck on his words—can be linked through ­feminist philosophy’s methods and conceptual framing to politics. They show us how to move from the register of structures of oppression to the register of bodily experience and back again, a method I develop at length in my own scholarship (Heyes 2020).

358   Heyes All of this also suggests that every philosopher’s body is central to their work. This is a worrying claim for those attuned to the history of women philosophers, when so much effort has been devoted to divesting us of our attachment to our limiting biology and setting us up as rational minds of equal philosophical worth or potential. It is true, however, for the able-­bodied gender-­normative straight white man as much as any other philosopher, even as, of course, his embodiment is denied, accommodated, or concealed by philosophical practice. I hope to have pointed toward a number of methods in feminist philosophy of the body that assume that acknowledgment of the philosopher’s embodied experience is an asset to her scholarship rather than a hindrance, mostly because the body provides the ground of knowledge rather than standing in its way.

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chapter 29

On Femi n ist Tempor a lities Joanna Hodge

Experiences of childbirth and pregnancy and theories of intersectionality and of the postcolonial have provided distinctive ways of recasting philosophical and feminist discussions of time and temporality in the twentieth century. Campaigns for women’s emancipation and feminist analyses of gender have presented distinctive and important approaches to temporality, with competing hypotheses concerning time. There is a Women’s Time, in contrast to a supposedly gender-­neutral time, which, on inspection, turns out to be a hegemonic men’s time, of male and masculine experience; there is a Feminine time of cycles, as opposed to a masculine time of linear order; and there is a Feminist time with a plurality of versions of feminist and female utopian visions. Two relations provide a framework for this discussion: a relation between time and temporality, as the mode in which time is lived and experienced, and a relation between ­temporality and materiality, resulting from the various relations between time and temporality, which constitute distinct domains of entities. These two relations play a major role in setting up how matter variously takes form, remains for a while in that shape, and then resolves back into other shapes and forms, in processes of generation and decay. This has been analyzed continually since the time of Aristotle and, more recently, by, among others, Jane Bennett (2010), Elizabeth Grosz (2004), Vicki Kirby (2011), Georges Canguilhem ([1966] 1989), Michel Serres ([1982] 1995, [2001] 2019, [2003] 2018), and Bruno Latour (2017/2018) to show how new modes of materialisation bring with them new temporalities. The two key pairs of terms, time and temporality, matter and materialization, are to be understood as two sides of a single process, while historical events and revolutionary movements of various kinds are the empirical reality in which these concepts and relations arrive for inspection. Two further pairs of terms are relevant for understanding the philosophical background of feminist analyses of temporality: la durée, the process or duration of time, and der Augenblick, an instant of transformation; and the two Greek terms, chronos and

364   Hodge kairos, terms, respectively, for time as ordinarily understood in contrast with time as a fateful moment of decision or change. The term “process” is closely associated with the analyses of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) in Process and Reality (1929) and The Concept of Nature: The Tanner Lectures on Value 1919 (1920). The conjunction “time and matter” (temps et matiere) arrives in the writings of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), see especially Matter and Memory (1896/1988); and the term “temporality” (Zeitlichkeit) is deployed in Being and Time ([1927] 1962) by Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). The categories of past, present, and future frame time as chronological series, either unified or with several running in parallel. These are to be differentiated from both what is known as “the specious present,” the misleading appearance of what there is, as given in a single unified instant, and from a quasi-­religious moment of revelation, illumination, or conversion. In such a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the Augenblick of Pauline conversion, what is fallen, or given only in pieces, is redeemed and made whole, opening up the religious horizons of revelation and redemption, of messianism and the messianic time of revolutionary Marxist analysis. Underlying this term, there is the contrast between measured and calculated time, in the temporal mode of chronos, as compared to a time of singularities (kairos), held in place by a play of forces, as moments of transformation in which order and identity themselves are determined. The politics of liberal feminist emancipation and feminist epistemology often depend, in their logic and rhetoric, upon the linear orders of chronology and history (chronos), while feminist utopian vision and feminist philosophy of religion frequently turn on concepts of revolutionary moments of transformation and conversion (kairos) (Clack and Clack 1998; Jantzen 1998; Kristeva [1979] 1991). Current innovations in feminist philosophical and critical engagements with time go by way of conjugations of these four pairs of terms (time and temporality; temporality and materiality; la durée and der Augenblick; chronos and kairos). Some feminist innovations emphasize generations, generativity, and generosity (Kristeva [1979] 1991; Diprose 2002; Browne 2014; van der Tuin 2015). Others focus upon vulnerability and aging (Levinas [1947] 1987; Shildrick 1997). Many feminist discussions of time emphasize the body, gender, and the incorporeal (Beauvoir [1949] 2011; Butler 1991; Grosz 1994, 2017). The distinctive status of pregnant bodies, as relational and transitional (Rich 1977; Chodorow 1978; Boulous Walker 1998), is particularly significant here. Pregnant bodies and experiences of pregnancy provide a site for rethinking connections of time, temporality, and embodiment, in contrast with dominant conceptions of a hypothecated, autonomous body, historically conceived as both male and universal. Medieval notions of the King’s two bodies, human and mortal, immortal and divine, along with theories of empirical and transcendental instances of embodiment, give way within feminist philosophy and feminist phenomenology to concepts of plural, singular bodies, of pregnancy, and their status on the threshold of life and death. Hannah Arendt (1958) provides the term “natality” as a focus for the irreversible novelty of each birth in the world (Diprose and Ziarek 2018; Irigaray 2017; O’Byrne 2010).

On Feminist Temporalities   365

Historical Context At least since the time of Aristotle, time and space have provided a focus for metaphysical speculation within Western philosophy, in which the reality or unreality of time is hotly debated. In religious theories, discussions of temporality are almost always linked to discussions of divinity and eternity. In contrast, scientific debates about time focus on the natural world, universe, or cosmos. The distinction and tension between religious and scientific conceptions of time inform two temporal frames: a Western historical frame dating back to the writings of Aristotle versus that of the twentieth century, in which women’s experience and philosophical contributions begin to be recognized as worthy of attention. A notion of successive “ages” provides a timeline into which to fit a series of cumulative results of inquiry, starting with Aristotle and the Greeks, and often deemed to recommence in Europe in the Renaissance and early modern period. In other words, discussions of time are informed by four modes of temporality: new beginnings; a dating of a beginning for philosophy with the Greeks; the notion of a timeline and successive epochs; and the notion of a historical continuity. A privilege thereby attaches to strands of theory that rely on concepts of “ages,” as critiqued in postcolonial and decolonial theories. The grammars of natural languages also reference the nature of time and are themselves modes of temporality, insofar as they enact a relationship between past, present, and future tenses. Verbal forms in natural languages provide contrasts between complete versus incomplete actions and render some views of time and temporality more plausible, at least upon first inspection, than others. There have therefore been repeated attempts in the history of Western philosophy to reduce the ambiguities of natural languages through rigorously construed, quantified formalization. The invention of formalizations of various kinds, and the development of possible world theorizing by Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) in the seventeenth century, continues to this day and reveals important connections between discussions of time and temporality and developments in modal logic, with modalization of states of affairs and orders of entities articulated through concepts of possibility, impossibility, and compossibility, concepts of necessity, contingency, and probability. Conceptions of chronology and of historical development inform the division of historical periods in Western philosophy into the categories such as classical, medieval, modern, postmodern, contemporary, and postcolonial. Far from being neutral and inevitable consequences of the natural progression of time, such naming of epochs is itself a mode of temporalization. It is worth noting that the terms “possibility/ impossibility” and “necessity/contingency” are marked with the residues of Latin grammars, both classical, from the time of the Roman Republic and Empire, and medieval, from translations of biblical text into Latin, with residues of the associated political, theological, and legal discourses. For both papal and Lutheran traditions within Christianity, and for the encounters between Christianity and other world

366   Hodge religions, delimitations of time and temporality, of religion and politics, of the human and the divine became inseparably intertwined with histories of empire and missionary conversion.

Twentieth- and Twenty-­F irst­C entury Context The twentieth century is marked by theories of time following Albert Einstein’s ground­breaking paper on special relativity, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (1905), which determined that the laws of physics are the same for all nonaccelerating observers and gave rise to radically new conceptions of spatial and temporal interdependencies of various kinds, and to a rethinking of temporality. Feminist theorists Karen Barad (2007) and Vicki Kirby (2011) develop analyses of entanglement and quantum indivisibilities and generate a concept of quantum temporality, with a feminist critical twist. Environmental, technological, and biomedical concerns with time and matter in the life sciences come to the fore in Jane Bennett (2010), Georges Canguilhem ([1966] 1989), Jacques Derrida (2019), and Donna Haraway (1997). A second strand of analysis arrives in the work of John M. E. McTaggart (1866–1925), Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Edmund Husserl (1856–1938), and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). For both Bergson and McTaggart, analyzing how lived time is experienced, in a relation between temporality and temporalization, is key to any analysis of a concept of time. For Husserl, a phenomenology of inner time consciousness provides access to an objective, absolute articulation of time ([1904–5] 1991). Husserl questions the distinction between subjects and objects and between subjectivity and objectivity, arguing that only through a radical reduction of individual subjectivity to the collective absolute of intersubjective apodicticity can there be any knowing and knowledge at all (Husserl [1913] 1931). Building on Husserl, Eugen Fink’s distinction between operative and thematic concepts helps clarify how notions of time and temporality are simultaneously to be explicated and implicitly at work (Fink [1957] 1981). Martin Heidegger ([1927] 1962) marks a difference between ordinary conceptions of time and an ecstatic unity of all modes of temporalization. He distinguishes between temporality (Zeitlichkeit), as the manner in which time arrives for attention, and an objective correlate, temporalization (Zeitigung), which is how time itself is articulated into layers and interrelated structures. For Heidegger, there are five main modes of temporality, providing distinct modes of synthesizing the evidences of what there is: everydayness, as the mode in which such distinctions are not remarked; occurrence within time (Innerzeitigkeit); chronology, as measurement of time; historicality (Geschichtlichkeit), or inserting a current conjunction into the past with associated possibilities for future development; and resoluteness, or an ecstatic unit as moment of vision, or turning point (Entschlossenheit), a notion subsequently transposed into the notion of event (Ereignis) (Heidegger [1989] 2012,

On Feminist Temporalities   367 Badiou [1988] 2005, Žižek 2014). Deleuze and Guattari (1972/1977) provide an alternate return to Kant (1787/1929) and to his account of time and synthesis, which has provided stimulus to feminist thinking of time and matter, temporality and materiality. The analyses of time offered by Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger constitute a philosophical background for Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), and Luce Irigaray ([1974] 1985, [1977] 1985, 2017), who are all important for subsequent feminist philosophy. All three take up Heidegger’s notions of Mitsein, being with, as stretched out between birth and death, and given in a shared historical time of inheritance. All three engage critically with Heidegger’s accounts of thinking philosophically in an age of deepening crisis and technological risk. A preoccupation with death, as a mark of human identity, is found from Plato and the Greeks to Hegel and Heidegger in a remarkably consistent thanatophilia, a fascination with death, identified and critiqued by both Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), (see Derrida [1967] 1976). Feminist philosophers critique this preoccupation with death as a masculine distortion and offer an alternative emphasis on pregnant and/or life-­giving bodies, on birth and natality. The title of Alexandre Koyre’s famous monograph From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957) marks a shift in twentieth-­century cosmological thinking. Another important shift occurs in a move from a focus on an infinity of time (related to chronos) to an experience at a site of determinate singularity of time, to be thought with the Aristotelian concept of kairos. Antonio Negri asks whether kairos “is not-­quite simply the power to experience temporality” (Negri [1997, 2000] 2003), and for him a moment of revolution is always to be linked to a conception of change, in the order of time itself. This opens up an alternative vision of futurity, rather than a mere change within existing notions of time’s linear progression, the a-­venir, or arrival of time as futural, the time or surprise of an event that could be neither anticipated nor predicted. The analysis of temporality (Zeitlichkeit) privileges human modes of perceiving time. In contrast, the concept of “temporalization” (Zeitigung) permits a reconfiguration of temporal order, as a nonanthropocentric unfolding, in which the human species evolves alongside all other species. Theorists have used various terms to categorize the current era of climate change: Anthropocene or Capitolocene, and Donna Haraway’s ‘chthulucene,” to highlight how changes in degree become changes in kind, and how the human can no longer be the focus for analysis and understandings of time. Haraway remarks on the effects of bioculturally, biotechnically, biopolitically, and historically situated peoples relative to, and combined with, the effects of other biotic/abiotic forces (2015, 2016). The extension into philosophy of a geological notion of a “deep time” and concern with the planetary limits on growth (Colebrook  2014a,  2014b; Hutton  1788; Lovelock 1979; Wood 2018) shows how what was once treated as external to historical time is to be understood as an element within historical accounts, with “history” now broadly understood. Donna Haraway, following Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, notes that the concept of the human species (das Menschenwesen) itself acquires a temporal index, with notions of historically situated peoples, as opposed to some abstract notion of Universal Man,

368   Hodge purportedly unchanged from the time of Plato and Aristotle to the present day. Current practices of human enhancement and prospects of genetic modification draw attention to how the human species has evolved and will continue to do so (Serres [2001] 2019). The connections and disconnections between historical time and limits to growth are explored from the early 1980s onwards by a geography informed by a Marxist critique of capital accumulation (Harvey 1982, 1990). These critiques focus upon a conception of time and its distinctive temporalities as components in the productive cycles of goods and services, of political orders and human flourishing (Alliez [1991] 1996; Kristeva [1979] 1991; Negri [1991] 1997).

Kristeva on Three Registers: Women’s Time, Feminine Time, Feminist Critique Feminist thinking about time and history signals a significant shift away from the ­categories of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, which identified gaps and resistances in mainstream conceptions of time, in histories and memories, both individual and collective. A distinction between a time of conscious life and a time of traumatic memory provided the basis for Freud’s distinction between a mourning, from which it is possible to recover by putting the lost object in the past, and a melancholy, from which it is not possible to recover since the time of the loss is uncertain. A feminist time of emancipation adopts the former model of time; feminine temporality by contrast is aligned with the latter model of incurable melancholy, in which there is forever a subordination to a masculine priority, time and death. Julia Kristeva hypothesizes that men, as well as women, may be meshed in the mode of incurable melancholy. Her well-­known essay “Women’s Time” ([1979] 1991) rehearses parallels between psychoanalytic accounts of individual formation and historical accounts of collective formation, offered in analyses of the polis. She distinguishes between a notion of a historical time, when women come into their own as citizens alongside men; a feminine time of cycles and organic life, as opposed to a masculine time of publicly constructed identities and career development; and a feminist time of political transformation. Kristeva hypothesizes three generations of feminist struggle to be thought of both sequentially and simultaneously. First, there is a claim for equal rights, followed closely by a second generation, characterized by a demand for respect for difference. The task for a third generation, which for Kristeva is intertwined with the first two, is to overcome stereotypes of gender distinctions, and to disrupt the binarism characteristic of histories of gender oppression, while noting that these conceptual changes are contingent upon an articulation and achievement of certain historical and political claims. The “generations” in question are thus both a series of groups of women and a series of inventions, or inaugurations of new ways of thinking and new ways of temporal ordering. While “Women’s Time” might be supposed to emerge in Europe after two

On Feminist Temporalities   369 millennia of exclusion and exceptionalism, “feminine time” is the always underemphasized complement of a masculine time. A “feminist time” is a time of both political mobilization and historical transformation. While “Women’s Time” and “feminine time” are for the most part in the temporal mode of chronos, with its linear historical narrative, they also presuppose a “feminist time” in the temporal mode of kairos, of political revolution and temporal reordering, inaugurating a new set of epochal distinctions and a series of hybrid temporalities, where it is possible and indeed necessary to live in more than one of these.

Time, Empire, and Differential Inheritance Simone de Beauvoir narrates her passage from existential philosophy and individual autobiography to an affirmation of a sense of collective identity (Beauvoir [1972] 1974). In her six-­volume autobiography, Maya Angelou writes in a concluding volume, Letter to My Daughter: I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish speaking, Native American and Aleut. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered and I am speaking to all of you. (Angelou 2008, xi)

Angelou challenges white and colonial, patriarchal, and heteronormative conceptions of inheritance, which rely on a single, linear segmented conception of time. Instead, she emphasizes hybrid identities and multilayered inheritances. Some inheritances are ­easier to take up; others require a greater break with dominant habits of thinking. As analyzed by Frantz Fanon ([1961] 1967), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1987), and Kimberlé Crenshaw (2017), temporality and legacy are to be contextualized and decolonized within histories of European colonialism and empire, and shown to work at the expense of those made wretched, disempowered, and rendered subaltern. Logics and concepts of historical continuity presuppose recognition of continuous, self-­replicating territorial and political identities (Ricoeur 1983/1984), within which the temporalities of empire and settler colonialism refuse and erase the temporalities of Indigenous peoples. A history of pathos by contrast reveals those who were destroyed in the interests of hegemony and continuity. The history of empire and concepts of a single, unified, neutral temporality are linked, as extensions of a philosophy of time and value, which ignores and erases the temporalities of dispossessed peoples. They continue to inform genocides, sexual violence, and expropriations of all kinds, in the pursuit of global hegemony and the

370   Hodge politics and economics of development (Colebrook 2014a, 2014b; Nancy [1990] 2003, [2002] 2007; Stengers  2015). There is a conflict concerning time and temporality underpinning the struggles of Indigenous peoples, to protect territories threatened with flooding in Pacific and Indian Ocean archipelagos, or with despoliation in the Amazon Basin, for climate change threatens some lives and ways of being more immediately than others. Feminist work on time and temporality thereby arrives in solidarity with postcolonial and decolonizing critiques of dominant conceptions of history and value, of nature and time. Feminist thinking on time from Beauvoir onwards notes linkages between different emancipatory projects, in which oppressed peoples collectively seek to take control of territories and histories, of ways of being in the world, which are otherwise overridden and expropriated in the name of empire, and capital, globalization, and economic development.

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On Feminist Temporalities   373 Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Open Humanities Press. http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/ books/titles/. van der Tuin, Iris. 2014. Generational Feminism: A New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield International. Walker, Michele Boulous. 1998. Philosophy and the Maternal Body. London and New York: Routledge. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1920. The Concept of Nature: Tanner Lectures 1919. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1929. Process and Reality: An Essay on Cosmology. New York: Macmillan. Wood, David. 2018. Deep Time, Dark Times: On Being Geologically Human. New York: Fordham University Press. Žižek. Slavoj. 2014. Event: Philosophy in Transit. London: Penguin Books.

chapter 30

R el ationa l Au tonom y Catriona Mackenzie

Introduction Autonomy is a highly prized value in liberal democratic societies. It is also a contested value. There is a range of competing conceptions of autonomy within public discourse and in philosophy, and these competing conceptions are premised on different metaphysical assumptions about personhood, different normative assumptions about the nature and limits of freedom, and different political assumptions about citizen-­state relations. Feminist theorists have been rightly critical of hyperindividualist conceptions that associate autonomy with character ideals of self-­sufficient, substantive independence and which seem inimical to social relations of care and dependency (e.g., Code 1991). Feminist theorists have also been rightly critical of libertarian political views, which equate autonomy with negative liberty, or freedom from interference, and lend support to anti-­regulatory, minimalist views of state responsibility and of what citizens owe to one another (e.g., Fineman  2008). Suspicion of these hyperindividualist and  libertarian conceptions has led some feminist theorists to reject the value of autonomy altogether. While sensitive to these feminist critiques, relational theorists maintain that personal autonomy is a crucially important value, especially for persons and groups subject to social oppression and domination. Relational theorists therefore reject hyperindividualist conceptions but seek to refigure the concept of autonomy through a feminist lens. “Relational autonomy” refers to this refigured conception. Autonomy is both a capacity and a status concept. To be autonomous is to have the capacity for self-­governing agency, that is, the capacity to make decisions and to act on the basis of one’s own reflective preferences, values, or commitments. To enjoy the status marker of autonomy is to be entitled to exercise self-­determining authority over one’s decisions and one’s life, an entitlement that others are obliged to respect.

Relational Autonomy   375 Relational theories of autonomy are motivated by several connected convictions. First, an adequate conception of autonomy, in contrast to hyperindividualist conceptions, must be responsive to the facts of human vulnerability and dependency, and the need for social relations of care. Second, human persons are embodied, and socially, historically, and culturally embedded, and our identities are constituted in relation to these factors in complex ways. An adequate conception of autonomy must take account of this complex social and historical constitution of identity. Third, personal autonomy is a socially constituted capacity, and its development and exercise need to be scaffolded by the right kinds of interpersonal and social environment. Fourth, gender and other forms of social oppression can impair individuals’ capacities to lead self-­determining, self-­governing lives—to different degrees and in different ways in different contexts. Social oppression, as understood by feminist theorists, is “an institutionally structured, unjust harm perpetrated on groups by other groups through direct and indirect material and psychological forces” (Cudd  2006, 25). Gender oppression refers to an unjust system or pattern of hierarchically structured social relations, institutions, and practices of gender-­based domination and subordination. Finally, because our status as autonomous agents is vulnerable to the character of our social relationships and the broader social environment, some persons with the capacity for autonomy may fail to be recognized and treated by others as having the status of autonomous agents. Some mainstream autonomy theorists now acknowledge the importance of the social dimensions of autonomy, as analyzed by relational theorists. However, relational theorists’ analyses of the potentially autonomy-­impairing effects of social oppression have received less attention in the mainstream literature. The uptake of relational autonomy theory in bioethics follows a similar pattern (see, e.g., Mackenzie 2015a). Relational autonomy is, however, an “umbrella term” (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000). Relational theorists propose a range of different accounts of the conditions for selfgoverning agency, of the sense in which autonomy is relational or social, and of the ways in which social oppression can impede autonomy. One way to map out the different positions in the literature is to distinguish broadly between “internalist” and “externalist” theories (see, e.g., Johnston 2017). Internalist theories identify conditions for autonomy that are wholly internal to individuals’ psychologies. These theories seek to articulate the kind of reflective processes involved in autonomous value formation and decision-­making, and the kinds of competences and self-­ reflexive attitudes characteristic of autonomous agents. Externalist theories hold that in addition to internal conditions, autonomy also requires that certain external, social structural conditions are in place. One of the central issues on which debates between internalist and externalist theories turn is how to negotiate the challenge posed by the “agency dilemma” (Khader 2011; Mackenzie 2015b). This is the challenge of recognizing and explaining the ways in which oppression can impair or constrain the autonomy of members of socially subordinated groups, without impugning and disrespecting their agency or licensing paternalistic interference in their lives.

376   Mackenzie In the following section, I outline some of the central positions in the debate between internalist and externalist theories, explaining how these different theories seek to negotiate the “agency dilemma.” In the final section, I propose a multidimensional analysis of autonomy, which, I suggest, can help to diagnose the issues at stake in debates between internalist and externalist theories and may prove useful in guiding future theorizing about relational autonomy.

Internalist versus Externalist Theories Internalist Theories The etymological derivation of the concept of autonomy is the Greek words autos (self) and nomos (law). Autonomy therefore literally means self-­rule or self-­governance. Internalist relational theories seek to characterize this core notion of self-­governance, explicating the kinds of critical reflection, competences, and self-­reflexive attitudes involved in self-­governing agency, as well as the ways these can be impaired by social oppression. Internalist theories can be divided into two broad categories of theory: procedural and substantive. According to procedural theories, a particular preference, commitment, or value counts as autonomous if that element of the agent’s motivational structure is authentically “one’s own,” or endorsed via an appropriate process of critical reflection. So long as this condition is met, the specific content of the person’s preferences, commitments, or values does not matter. Substantive theories, in contrast, propose additional substantive constraints, either on the content of autonomous preferences, values, or commitments or on the self-­reflexive attitudes required for self-­governing agency. Relational theorists who favor a procedural approach claim that a strong reason for preferring procedural theories is that their commitment to content neutrality is socially and politically inclusive and respectful of individuals’ first-­person perspectives (Friedman 2003). These theorists often invoke the “agency dilemma” against substantive relational theories, charging that substantive theories may license disrespect towards the perspectives of socially oppressed agents and paternalistic forms of interference (see, e.g., Christman 2004; Holroyd 2009). To explain the background to this debate, I begin by outlining in more detail the conditions for autonomy proposed by procedural theorists before explaining why substantive theorists object that these conditions are insufficient to account for the autonomy-­impairing effects of social oppression.1

1  See Mackenzie (2017) for related discussion.

Relational Autonomy   377 Two broad kinds of procedural conditions for autonomy are typically distinguished in the literature (see, e.g., Christman 2009): authenticity and competence. Authenticity conditions specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for authentic critical reflection, and hence for a person’s preferences, commitments, or values to count as “one’s own.” Competence conditions specify the range of competences or skills a person must possess, to some degree at least, in order to be self-­governing. The accounts of authenticity proposed by relational theorists arise from critiques of mainstream hierarchical theories (see, e.g., Dworkin 1988; Frankfurt 1971; Watson 1975). Hierarchical theories distinguish between first-­order elements of an agent’s motivational structure (e.g., desires) and second-­order reflective preferences or values. They hold that an agent is autonomous if her first-­order motivations are in accord with her secondorder reflective preferences or values—that is, if in light of second-­order reflection she endorses her first-­order motivations. Relational theorists charge, however, that hierarchical reflective endorsement procedures are insufficient to distinguish autonomous from nonautonomous reflection. In one of the original discussions in the literature, Marilyn Friedman (1986) uses an example of a conflicted 1950s housewife to make this point. Friedman’s housewife has internalized prevailing social norms that a good wife and mother should stay at home and put her own needs secondary to those of her husband and children. At the secondorder level, she endorses these norms. However, she is frustrated and unhappy and frequently experiences what she regards as wayward first-­ order preferences and emotions in conflict with these norms. Friedman argues, contra hierarchical theories, that these apparently wayward first-­order desires and emotions may be more expressive of the woman’s authentic wants and values than any reflection she engages in at the second-­order level, which may simply reinforce her oppressive social conditioning. In the wake of this critique, relational procedural theorists have proposed a range of alternative accounts of authentic critical reflection. Friedman herself proposes an integration test, according to which authentic, autonomous reflection involves both bottom-­up and top-­down reflective endorsement, or motivational integration between lower-­order preferences and higher-­order normative commitments. John Christman (1991, 2009) proposes a historical, counterfactual, nonalienation test for authentic critical reflection. He argues that hierarchical theories cannot account for the autonomyimpairing effects of social oppression because they focus solely on the structure of the agent’s motivations at the time of deliberation and action, and fail to attend to the historical processes of practical identity formation. His counterfactual test therefore incorporates a historical component, specifying that an element of a person’s motivational set is authentically her own if, were she counterfactually to engage in reflection on the historical processes of its formation, she would not repudiate or feel alienated from that element (2009, 155). Unlike hierarchical theories, Friedman’s and Christman’s theories are explicitly premised on a socio-­historical conception of persons, which takes account of the way individuals’ identities, values, and commitments are shaped by social relationships and personal histories. Like hierarchical theories, these theories are nevertheless internalist,

378   Mackenzie insofar as the integration test and the counterfactual nonalienation test provide criteria for autonomy that focus wholly on the internal structure or ordering of elements within the agent’s psyche, rather than on any conditions external to the agent. An alternative procedural approach to the problem of how to distinguish authentic from inauthentic critical reflection in contexts of social oppression is Diana Meyers’s (1989) theory of “autonomy competence,” which focuses attention on the competences necessary for self-­governing agency. Autonomous self-­governance, in her view, involves a repertoire of complex competences, including self-­reflective skills; rational, emotional, and imaginative skills; and capacities for self-­control. Each of these skills may be developed to greater or lesser degrees. On this picture, then, a person is autonomous, and her choices are authentically her own, to the degree that she has developed the relevant skills and can exercise them to understand herself (self-­discovery), define her values and commitments (self-­definition), and direct her life (self-­direction). Meyers’s skill-­based procedural view foregrounds an important mechanism by which the internalization of oppressive norms and stereotypes can impair autonomy. She emphasizes that the skills involved in autonomy competence are developed through the socialization process and hence are dependent on the character of an individual’s social relationships and environment. Oppressive social relationships, norms, and stereotypes can impair autonomy by truncating the development or stunting the exercise of these skills. She argues, for example, that traditional gender socialization tends to encourage in girls the development of emotional skills that are important for self-­discovery but thwarts the development and exercise of some of the skills required for developing self-defining and self-­directed plans and goals. Consequently, it can hinder women’s global autonomy with respect to their lives overall. Despite Meyers’s emphasis on the role of the social environment in supporting or stunting autonomy competence, her theory is still internalist because it defines autonomy in terms of agential competence. Substantive theorists, while generally accepting the importance of critical reflection and autonomy competence, reject procedural theorists’ commitment to content ­neutrality, arguing that procedural theories are insufficient to explain the autonomyimpairing effects of oppressive socialization. Some theories that have been labeled “substantive,” such as Marina Oshana’s (2006) socio-­relational theory, are in my view better understood as externalist. I will therefore reserve this term for theories that propose additional substantive internal constraints on autonomous agency. A distinction is often drawn in the literature between strong and weak substantive theories (see, e.g., Mackenzie and Stoljar  2000; Benson  2005; Stoljar  2018). Strong substantive theories reject content neutrality because they hold that genuinely autonomous preferences or decisions must satisfy certain normative constraints; specifically, they must be guided by true rather than false norms (see, e.g., Benson 1991; Stoljar 2000). According to this view, the reason that Friedman’s housewife and other agents subject to oppressive social norms and stereotypes lack autonomy is because they have internalized false norms. Natalie Stoljar (2000) discusses the example of women who seek multiple abortions as a result of repeated failure to take contraceptive

Relational Autonomy   379 ­ recautions. Stoljar argues that these women fail to act autonomously with respect to p their own sexual activity because they have internalized oppressive sexual double standards and do not want to think of themselves as the kind of women who have sex outside of marriage. Insofar as they are guided by false social norms, these women are nonautonomous with respect to the specific norms in question and the choices and actions that flow from them. One of the motivations for strong substantive theories is the phenomenon of adaptive preference formation. Adaptive preferences are preferences that are formed in response to severely constrained or unjust social environments, which deny freedoms or block opportunities to members of socially oppressed groups or subject them to prejudicial stereotypes and oppressive social norms. The notion of adaptive preference formation refers to the way that agents in these kinds of social environment tend to adapt to their constrained situations by (often unconsciously) eliminating or failing to form preferences and goals they cannot hope to satisfy (Stoljar 2014) or, more insidiously, being unable to imagine their lives being otherwise (Mackenzie  2000). Strong substantive theorists claim that adaptive desires and beliefs are deformed or distorted (see, e.g., Superson 2005; Cudd 2015) and lack agential authority. While not disputing the reality of adaptive preferences, critics object that strong substantivists fail to recognize the range of reasons people might have for complying with oppressive norms (Khader  2011; Sperry,  2013), or conflate autonomy with substantive independence (Christman 2004), thereby falling foul of the “agency dilemma.” Weak substantive theories agree with strong substantivists that proceduralism does not provide a sufficient explanation for the autonomy-­impairing effects of social oppression, although for different reasons. They claim that autonomous agency is underpinned by certain self-­reflexive attitudes, in particular attitudes of self-­respect, self-­ trust, and self-­ esteem or self-­ worth (see Anderson and Honneth  2005; Benson 1994, 2000; Govier 2003; Mackenzie 2008). One of the insidious effects of social oppression, not captured by procedural theories, is the way that experiences of injustice, discrimination, and prejudicial stereotyping can erode these attitudes. In a related vein, Benson proposes that autonomous agency is characterized by a sense of ownership of one’s choices and actions (2005, 2014). It involves regarding oneself as positioned, and as having the appropriate authority, to speak and answer for oneself. One of the effects of internalized oppression on this account is that it impairs autonomy by impairing a person’s sense of herself as having a legitimate voice, and as competent and authorized to speak or answer for her values and commitments. Critics argue, however, that weak substantive theories are as vulnerable as procedural theories to the problem of oppressive socialization. Jennifer Warriner (2015) discusses the example of women who belong to Christian Evangelical churches, who have thoroughly internalized oppressive gender norms according to which women’s subordination to male authority is normatively required by their religious commitments. She argues that these women are likely to satisfy the weak substantive constraints on autonomy because, despite willingly accepting their subordinated status, within their community they are nevertheless still “expected to regard themselves as having agential

380   Mackenzie authority and are expected to authorize their agency” (2015, 37). However, it seems counterintuitive to say these women are autonomous, because their agential authority can only be exercised within the constraints of a social script of male dominance and female subordination, which they are not permitted to question or challenge.

Externalist Theories Criticisms such as Warriner’s underpin the arguments for externalism. Externalists argue that the problem with internalist theories is that their exclusive focus on agents’ psychologies fails to identify the impact of external constraints on autonomy, including social relations of domination and subordination, structural injustices, restricted freedom and opportunities, discrimination, and stereotyping. Marina Oshana’s (2006, 2015) socio-­relational theory is often characterized as a strong substantive view, perhaps because she presents her theory as an account of self-­governance. However, I suggest this is misleading, and that Oshana’s position is externalist because she thinks a person’s socio-­relational status is the crucial determinant of autonomy. In her view, persons who stand in relations of subordination, subservience, deference, or economic or psychological dependence cannot be autonomous, even if they meet the conditions for autonomy proposed by internalist theories, whether procedural or substantive. This is because such persons, by virtue of their socially subordinated position, lack the authority and power to exercise effective practical control over important aspects of one’s life that is the hallmark of autonomy. Critics of Oshana often invoke the “agency dilemma” against her view, arguing that it disrespects the autonomy of agents who have managed to lead self-­governing lives despite being subject to crushing forms of oppression (Christman  2004). They cite examples, such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parkes, and others like them, who seem to be prime exemplars of autonomous agency in their struggles against the racial oppression and injustice to which they were subject. These objections arise because Oshana’s critics interpret her theory as internalist, and hence as impugning the competence and agency of oppressed persons. If, however, her theory is interpreted as externalist, then it is evident that Oshana’s primary concern is to explain the constraining effects of oppressive social structures on individuals’ abilities to lead self-­determining lives. On her view, it is because of their subordinated status in an unjust social hierarchy that King Jr. and Parkes, despite their heroism, were not able to lead self-­determining lives, and hence were not autonomous. The debates between procedural and substantive theorists, and between Oshana and her critics concerning the “agency dilemma,” point to two central problems with internalist views. First, the internalist focus on agents’ psychologies seems to operate with a “damage” model (cf. Johnston 2017) of the autonomy-­impairing effects of social oppression, which not only risks disrespect towards oppressed persons but also fails to account for the ways that agents’ autonomy may be constrained by external structural

Relational Autonomy   381 factors. Second, autonomy is a complex concept, with conceptual connections to a range of other concepts. The debates outlined previously suggest that the notion of self-governance, on which internalist analyses focus, cannot do justice to this complexity. In the following section, I propose a multidimensional analysis of autonomy. This analysis draws on the important insights emerging from the debate between procedural and substantive, and internalist and externalist, theories, while seeking to diagnose what is at stake in the debate and to reconcile apparently conflicting positions. It might thus provide helpful future directions for the development of relational autonomy theory.

Future Directions: A Multidimensional Analysis of Relational Autonomy To explain the complex effects of social oppression on autonomy, as analyzed in debates among relational theorists, I propose that we should distinguish three distinct but ­causally interconnected dimensions or axes of autonomy: self-­determination, selfgovernance, and self-­authorization (Mackenzie 2014, 2017). Distinguishing these different dimensions helps to clarify what is at stake in the debates discussed in the previous section. Externalist theories focus on self-­determination; internalist procedural and strong substantivist theories focus on self-­governance; weak substantivists focus on selfauthorization. Rather than understanding these theories as competitor explanations, I suggest we should think of them as analyzing a range of different mechanisms of social oppression, some of which function as external constraints on autonomy, while others shape agents’ psychologies in potentially autonomy-­impairing ways. I also propose that each dimension should be understood as a matter of degree and domain: a person can be self-­determining, self-­governing, and self-­authorizing to differing degrees, both at a time and over the course of her life. The self-­determination axis illuminates the conceptual connections between autonomy and freedom that are of concern to externalist theories. To be self-determining is to have the authority and power to exercise both de jure and de facto control over important domains of one’s life (cf. Oshana 2006). This authority and power is a function of the freedoms and opportunities available to a person in her social environment and of her social standing or status. In contexts characterized by social relations of domination and subordination, where a person’s access to relevant freedoms and opportunities is blocked or restricted, and where her status as autonomous agent is constrained by her position within the social hierarchy, it is very difficult to lead a self-­determining life. This remains the case no matter how developed an individual’s capacities for selfgovernance may be, or how strong her sense of herself as a self-­authorizing agent. This is the point, I submit, that Oshana is making about King Jr. and Parkes.

382   Mackenzie The self-­governance axis illuminates the conceptual connections between autonomy, authenticity, and competence that are of concern to internalist procedural theories. To be self-­governing is to be able to make and enact decisions that express or cohere with one’s practical identity, or one’s deeply held values and commitments. This involves introspective and emotional skills for self-­understanding and self-­definition, rational and imaginative skills to envisage and chart a path between a range of alternative courses of action, and self-­control to enact and follow through on one’s decisions. As relational theorists argue, these skills are developed and scaffolded (or not) by an agent’s social relationships and broader social environment. Self-­determination and self-­governance, though conceptually distinct, thus interact causally: the authentic self of self-­governance, and the development and exercise of the competences required for governing the self are to a significant degree enabled and/or constrained by external social conditions. This is why restricted freedoms and opportunities and socially subordinated status can (but need not) be internalized and manifest in adaptive preference formation, restricted imaginative horizons, and constricted psychological freedom. The self-­authorization axis illuminates the connections between autonomy, selfreflexive attitudes, and social recognition that are of concern to weak substantive theorists. To be self-­authorizing is to regard oneself as having the normative authority to take ownership of, or responsibility for, one’s values, one’s decisions, and one’s life overall. It also involves regarding oneself as an equal participant in reciprocal accountability relations—as able to account for oneself to others and also to hold others to account. Thinking of oneself in this way involves holding appropriate attitudes of selfrespect, self-­trust, and self-­esteem. These psychological attitudes are inherently social, because they are developed and sustained through intersubjective social relations and normative structures and practices of social recognition. One of the insidious effects of social subordination is that persistent messages of social inferiority and unworthiness, embedded in everyday social interactions and conveyed through demeaning stereotypes, can be internalized in feelings of shame and humiliation; of diminished self-­respect, self-­trust, and self-­esteem; and of social invisibility. Martin Luther King Jr. eloquently describes the experience of these feelings as “a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’” (King 1964, quoted in Cudd 2006, 177). The benefit of distinguishing these different dimensions of autonomy is that it does justice to the complexity of the concept, while also assisting to diagnose the different ways that social oppression can undermine autonomy. By clarifying that autonomy is a scalar and multidimensional concept, this analysis can also address the agency dilemma, for it makes clear why the claim that social subordination constrains people’s capacities to lead autonomous lives in the self-­determination sense does not manifest disrespect towards socially subordinated persons, nor does it imply that such persons lack capacities for selfgovernance or self-­authorization. At the same time, the multidimensional analysis draws on the important insights of relational autonomy theorists into the ways that the internalization of social oppression can (but need not) impair capacities for self-­governance and a person’s sense of herself as a self-­authorizing agent.

Relational Autonomy   383

References Anderson, Joel, and Axel Honneth. 2005. “Autonomy, Vulnerability, Recognition and Justice.” In Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism, edited by John Christman and Joel Anderson, 127–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benson, Paul. 1991. “Autonomy and Oppressive Socialization.” Social Theory and Practice 17: 385–408. Benson, Paul. 1994. “Free Agency and Self-Worth.” Journal of Philosophy 91: 650–68. Benson, Paul. 2000. “Feeling Crazy: Self-Worth and the Social Character of Responsibility.” In Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self, edited by Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, 72–93. New York: Oxford University Press. Benson, Paul. 2005. “Taking Ownership: Authority and Voice in Autonomous Agency.” In Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism, edited by John Christman and Joel Anderson, 101–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benson, Paul. 2014. “Feminist Commitments and Relational Autonomy.” In Autonomy, Oppression, and Gender, edited by Andrea Veltman and Mark Piper, 87–113. New York: Oxford University Press. Christman, John. 1991. “Autonomy and Personal History.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21: 1–24. Christman, John. 2004. “Relational Autonomy, Liberal Individualism and the Social Constitution of Selves.” Philosophical Studies 117: 143–64. Christman, John. 2009. The Politics of Persons: Individual Autonomy and Socio-Historical Selves. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Code, Lorraine. 1991. “Second Persons.” In What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cudd, Ann. 2006. Analyzing Oppression. New York: Oxford University Press. Cudd, Ann. 2015. “Adaptations to Oppression: Preference, Autonomy and Resistance.” In Personal Autonomy and Social Oppression: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Marina Oshana, 142–60. New York: Routledge. Dworkin, Gerald. 1988. The Theory and Practice of Autonomy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fineman, Martha. 2008. “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20 (1): 1–23. Frankfurt, Harry. 1971. “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.” Journal of Philosophy 68 (1): 5–20. Reprinted in Frankfurt, Harry. 1988. The Importance of What We Care About, 11–25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedman, Marilyn. 1986. “Autonomy and the Split-Level Self.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 24 (1): 19–35. Friedman, Marilyn. 2003. Autonomy, Gender, Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Govier, Trudy. 2003. “Self-Trust, Autonomy, and Self-Esteem.” Hypatia 8: 99–120. Holroyd, J. 2009. “Relational Autonomy and Paternalistic Interventions.” Res Publica 15 (4): 321–36. Johnston, Rebekah. 2017. “Personal Autonomy, Social Identity, and Oppressive Social Contexts.” Hypatia 32 (2): 312–28. Khader, Serene. 2011. Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment. New York: Oxford University Press.

384   Mackenzie King, Martin Luther Jr. 1964. “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. In Why We Can’t Wait. New York: Harper and Row. Mackenzie, Catriona. 2000. “Imagining Oneself Otherwise.” In Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self, edited by Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, 124–50. New York: Oxford University Press. Mackenzie, Catriona. 2008. “Relational Autonomy, Normative Authority and Perfectionism.” Journal of Social Philosophy 39: 512–33. Mackenzie, Catriona. 2014. “Three Dimensions of Autonomy: A Relational Analysis.” In Autonomy, Oppression, and Gender, edited by Andrea Veltman and Mark Piper, 15–41. New York: Oxford University Press. Mackenzie, Catriona. 2015a. “Autonomy.” In Routledge Companion to Bioethics, edited by John Arras, Elizabeth Fenton, and Rebecca Kukla, 277–90. New York and London: Routledge. Mackenzie, Catriona. 2015b. “Responding to the Agency Dilemma: Autonomy, Adaptive Preferences and Internalized Oppression.” In Personal Autonomy and Social Oppression, edited by Marina Oshana, 48–67. New York and London: Routledge. Mackenzie, Catriona. 2017. “Feminist Conceptions of Autonomy.” In Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Ann Garry, Serene Khader, and Alison Stone, 515–27. New York and London: Routledge. Mackenzie, Catriona, and Natalie Stoljar. 2000. “Introduction: Autonomy Refigured.” In Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self, edited by Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, 3–31. New York: Oxford University Press. Meyers, Diana. 1989. Self, Society and Personal Choice. New York: Columbia University Press. Oshana, Marina. 2006. Personal Autonomy in Society. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Oshana, Marina. 2015. “Is Socio-Relational Autonomy a Plausible Ideal?” In Personal Autonomy and Social Oppression: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Marina Oshana, 3–24. New York: Routledge. Sperry, Elizabeth. 2013. “Dupes of Patriarchy: Feminist Strong Substantive Autonomy’s Epistemological Weakness.” Hypatia 28 (4): 887–904. Stoljar, Natalie. 2000. “Autonomy and the Feminist Intuition.” In Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self, edited by Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, 94–111. New York: Oxford University Press. Stoljar, Natalie. 2014. “Autonomy and Adaptive Preference Formation.” In Autonomy, Oppression and Gender, edited by Andrea Veltman and Mark Piper, 227–52. New York: Oxford University Press. Stoljar, Natalie. 2018. “Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-autonomy/. Superson, Anita. 2005. “Deformed Desires and Informed Desire Tests.” Hypatia 20 (4): 109–26. Warriner, Jennifer. 2015. “Gender Oppression and Weak Substantive Theories of Autonomy.” In Personal Autonomy and Social Oppression: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Marina Oshana, 25–47. New York: Routledge. Watson, Gary. 1975. “Free Agency.” Journal of Philosophy 72 (8): 205–20.

chapter 31

Femi n ist N ew M ater i a lisms Nancy Tuana

“Feminist new materialisms” is a recent term that is deployed to refer to a group of diverse and often significantly divergent approaches within feminist theory. To grapple with this complexity, it is helpful to first clarify the meaning of “materialism” as it is employed in these theories and then consider the modifier, “new.” I identify three different sources for the conception of materialism engaged in the feminist new materialisms: (1) attention to materiality in the philosophical traditions of phenomenology and postmodern thought, (2) a turn to the sciences to better understand materiality, and (3) Marxist-­inspired conceptions of materiality. The question of the newness of feminist new materialisms is addressed in the second part of the entry. The entry concludes with a discussion of current critiques of feminist new materialisms.

Three Lineages of Materialism Tracing the lineages of the materialism of the feminist new materialism is no simple matter. Rosi Braidotti in Patterns of Dissonance (1991) provides one such genealogy. A key component for Braidotti is feminist attentiveness, such as that of Simone de Beauvoir’s, to the importance of embodiment and its situatedness. Feminist phenomenological accounts of embodiment are an important element of a widespread feminist suspicion of dichotomies such as mind/body or nature/culture. Phenomenological approaches not based on such dichotomies resulted in a rich attunement to materiality in terms of the embodied nature of the subject. In the hands of feminists, this attunement to materiality was accompanied by attention to the complex exchanges between bodies and power. While recognizing the roots of attention to the emergence of materiality and power in Marxist materialism, Braidotti traces its radical transformation in what she

386   Tuana calls the neo-­materialism of Foucault with his attention to biopower alongside the ­neo-­vitalist materiality proposed by Deleuze. Braidotti argues that feminists encountered in the work of these theorists “a more radical sense of materialism,” that is, “a form of neo-­materialism and a blend of vitalism that is attuned to the technological era” (Braidotti 2000, 161, 160). Braidotti’s vision of matter as lively, emergent, and generative is a theme common in many versions of new materialism. Jane Bennett, for example, in The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (2001), deploys the term “enchanted materialism” to call attention to the agency of organic as well as inorganic phenomena. Identifying resources for her vital materialism in the work of theorists as diverse as Bergson, Deleuze, Foucault, Merleau-­Ponty, Nietzsche, and Spinoza, Bennett aims to “give voice to a vitality intrinsic to materiality” such that we recognize and appreciate that we are all enmeshed in a dense network of material relations (2010, 3). An alternative genealogy for feminist new materialisms concerns the belief by some practitioners that the nature and significance of materiality cannot be fully understood without engagement with the natural sciences. These feminists want to balance what they see as the “cultural turn,” that is, the privileging “of text and context over world and experience” resulting from a shift from materialist to discursive approaches (Hemmings 2011, 86). Such feminist new materialists want to show that a genuine understanding of materiality requires knowledge based on biological and other natural sciences ­perspectives. Their critique is that feminist studies of embodiment based on a humanities perspective remain on the surface of bodies. What is referred to as the cultural or linguistic turn is often viewed as epitomized in the work of Judith Butler. As Karen Barad claims, “Perhaps the most crucial limitation of Butler’s [approach] . . . is that it is limited to an account of materialization of human bodies, or more accurately, to the construction of the surface of the human body (which most certainly is not all there is to human bodies)” (1998, 107). In what has been labeled an ontological turn, Karen Barad develops her version of feminist new materialism through attention to physics. She begins with the physics of Niels Bohr to trace a materialism founded on an ontological shift to an understanding of matter as emerging from dynamic relationality. She argues that “any robust theory of the materialization of bodies would necessarily take account of how the body’s materiality—for example, its anatomy and physiology—and other material forces actively matter to the processes of materialization” (2003, 809). Matter’s dynamism is, for Barad, agential. Deploying an event ontology, she understands the things of the world as grounded not in fixed or stable substances, but rather in events of emergent interaction. She uses the term “intra-­action” to displace even the tendency to posit a dualism. Troubled by the divide between language and matter, Barad develops a theory of agential realism in which discursive practices and materiality coemerge (2007, 44–­45). Matter is on this account a continuous becoming; both matter and meaning materialize together. A third genealogy traces the lineages of the materiality of materialist feminism through a Marxist-­inspired attention to economic and political inequalities. Myra Hird argues that materialist feminism must be “concerned with women’s material living conditions—labor, reproduction, political access, health, education, and intimacy— structured through class, race, ethnicity, age, nation, ableism, heteronormativity, and so

Feminist New Materialisms   387 on” (Hird  2009, 329). Similarly, Elizabeth Wingrove makes a distinction between Marxist-­inspired materialist feminists and the feminist new materialists by explaining that for historical materialist feminisms “to speak of materiality is to speak of structural logics and constitutive contradictions, systematic relationality, and social totalities,” whereas for the feminist new materialisms, “to speak of materiality is to speak of contingencies, web-­like meshes and multidirectional flows that suggest fluctuating connections and a rich ‘messiness’ whose complexity and indeterminacy preclude the notion of a totality” (2016, 456–57). Unlike the more traditional Marxist focus on the capitalist mode of production as the site of oppression, feminist materialists expand the focus to oppressive relations as the point of departure and fundamental reality to be confronted. Such a lens opens the analysis to the oppressions at the heart of complex systems that serve to privilege whiteness, development, heterosexuality, “first world” citizenship, and humanness. Diana Coole offers a version of this approach to feminist new materialism, understanding matter as “the actual, sensuous, corporeal milieu of everyday survival” (2013, 455). On Coole’s account, there are three dimensions to this version of materialism: “the embodied quotidian”; the social, economic, and political structures; and “the planetary eco-/bio- and geo-­systems where ‘nature’ succumbs to or eludes social control” (2013, 464). Perhaps the most promising approach to feminist new materialism is the merging of the previously noted genealogies to open the field up more robustly to the materiality of the complex deployments of differences. Kathy Ferguson, for example, points to the effectiveness of Donna Haraway’s materialism in which her “open-­ended ontologies of becoming are woven into dense histories and careful institutional analyses” where histories of colonialization, capitalism, and power relations within science are key elements of her attunement to material entanglements (2015, 81). While Haraway does not refer to her work by this label, a case could be made for her work being one of its central well-­springs. Influenced by a Whiteheadian process ontology, Haraway’s deeply relational account of materiality offers many of the components found in the previously mentioned three versions of feminist new materialism. One can trace lineages from historical materialism throughout her socialist feminist work as well as in her signature manner of pushing dualisms to their limits through her coupling of traditionally bifurcated concepts (e.g., material-­semiotic, natureculture, tecnoscience), which are designed to offer radical and nonbinary conceptions of difference. For example, in her “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­Feminism in the 1980s” (1985), she states as her aim building “an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism” (1985, 65). Haraway’s cyborg is a trope for “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction” (1985, 66). The boundaries at stake in what she refers to as a “border war” are those at the heart of feminist historical materialism—production, reproduction, and imagination. “In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics—the tradition of racist, male-­dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other—the relation between organism and machine has been a border war” (1985, 292). One of the

388   Tuana central goals of Haraway’s work is to draw attention to the situatedness of the interrelation of production, reproduction, and imagination—historically, culturally, and ecologically. She offers a relational ontological approach, one that acknowledges the agency of nonhuman actors and, in so doing, compels a rethinking of the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman. In When Species Meet she argues, “The partners do not precede the meeting; species of all kind, living and not, are consequent to a subject- and object-­shaping dance of encounters” (Haraway 2008, 4).

What Is New about Feminist New Materialisms? How, then, are we to understand the newness of the feminist new materialisms? While some new materialists frame their work as a response to a postmodern overemphasis on language or discourse (Braidotti 2012; Barad 2003), such a conception miscarries in that it inscribes one of the very dichotomies that new materialism aims to unsettle—mind/ body, language/experience.1 From the material-­semiotic coupling of Donna Haraway to the performative theory of Judith Butler, feminist approaches to topics such as gender, sex, and sexuality provide resources for dissolving this divide. Indeed, while Butler is often cited as the exemplar of a theorist who reduces matter to culture, her attention to how matter materializes or, more specifically, how sex materializes is a helpful resource for understanding processes of materializations. As Sara Ahmed explained, “Bodies That Matter offers a powerful exploration of how histories are sedimented in the very ‘how’ of bodily materialization: it makes sex material” (2008, 33). Another way this difference has been framed is through an occlusion of the body. For example, Elizabeth Grosz argues that feminists “have forgotten the nature, the ontology, of the body, the conditions under which bodies are encultured, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency” (Grosz 2004, 2). The newness of feminist new materialisms might be seen as involving an account of biology that is fully appreciative of its role in producing difference, variability, and change. Noela Davis frames the concern about cultural feminists in the following way: “In presenting an argument against biological determinism by pointing out the importance of the cultural effects that impacted on our lives, they relegate biology to a very minor role and restate the idea that biology is a rigid and passive system that could not possibly account for the variety we see in society” (2009, 7). This definition of the newness of materialism through a return to or recovery of the body has been itself the subject of critique. Ahmed, for 1  This is a highly contested terrain in feminist theorizing and one that seems difficult to disrupt. The insistence on a “linguistic turn” in feminist theory, particularly in the domain referred to as postmodern feminism, has become a frequent refrain of those wishing to highlight the newness of feminist new materialism. Critics such as Sara Ahmed (2008) see this critique as a founding gesture, one that too often requires a superficial interpretation of the theorists charged with it.

Feminist New Materialisms   389 example, argues that one “can only argue for a return to biology by forgetting the feminist work on the biological, including the work of feminists trained in the biological sciences” (2008, 27). Ahmed worries that the call for a return to biology is a speech act that “constructs the figure of the anti-­biological feminist who won’t allow us to engage with biology, and inflates her power” (2008, 31). New materialist’s rejection of a dualistic ontology (mind/matter) combined with feminist attention to difference posits difference as a process of becoming. Difference is a component of our situated, corporeal location. It is, for Braidotti, a negotiable, transversal, affective space, and one not limited to the human (Braidotti 2012, 29). While the overcoming of dualisms has been a consistent signature of feminist theory in general, it is also offered as one of the signatures of the newness of feminist new materialisms. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, for example, frame the “new” of new materialisms as a pushing of dualisms and dichotomies to an extreme and, in so doing, offering a new conceptualization of difference, a difference structured by neither prioritization (humans/ nature) nor predetermined relations (mind/body). As they explain, “A new materialism is constituted by demonstrating how the canonized relations between the mentioned terms are in fact the outcomes of ‘power/knowledge’ according to which Truth is an instantiation of a politics or régime” (2011, 387). They contend that feminist new materialism will catalyze a revolution in dualistic thought not by overcoming sexual difference, but by, in their words, “traversing it” by “allowing for sexual differing” (2011, 389). The traversing of dichotomies and the porosity of boundaries between humans and other lifeways found in concepts such as Stacy Alaimo’s transcorporeality (2010) or my own work on viscous porosity (Tuana  2008) give rise to creative movements within feminist new materialism. They offer insights into the importance of the emergence of new forms of conceptualization (Diprose 2000). Linda Zerilli, for example, advocates the development of new visions of being and doing that serve as catalysts to new perspectives that unsettle our settled significations (2005, 59–60) in ways that acknowledge the emergence of embodied conceptualizations as well as the centrality of poiesis not only for philosophy but also for life. “Beings do not pre-­exist their relatings” (Haraway 2003, 6), nor does the event “precede the concept; the event is itself constituted through the fabrication of the concept, through the ‘condensation’ or gathering together, in a particular way, of the components of the concept” (Diprose 2000, 117–18). This conception of gathering together is found in Butler’s conception of self-­styling as a form of poiesis that engages and re-­engages negotiations with dominant norms that, while not oriented to specific goals, provides in their repetition new negotiations that subtly shift our understandings of sex as well as sexuality.2 We thereby become attuned to the co-­influence of 2  My inclusion of Butler within the lineages of feminist new materialism is contrary to many lineages, such as those offered by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, in which Butler is viewed as keeping in place dualisms such as sex versus gender, mind versus matter, culture versus nature, language versus materiality (2011, 387). The complexity of Butler’s work often gives rise to misunderstandings of her commitments to the mattering of bodies in ways that trouble such dualisms. See, for example, Edenheim’s analysis of the positioning of Butler within the work of feminist new materialism (2016).

390   Tuana social norms and power with the fleshly manifestations of difference—sex, gender, race, class, disability, and age. And in this way, we develop a theory of how sex matters, as well as a powerful lens that provides insights into which bodies matter and which do not, or, at least, not as much. Such attunements return us to Beauvoir’s pronouncement that women are made not born (Beauvoir 1953, 301) and include a rejection of essentialism and an appreciation of the fluidity of the very categories and experiences that they denote. Another component of the newness of feminist new materialisms is the rejection of matter as passive, inert, dead. The overall commitment to understanding materiality as a dynamic, situated, interactive process is a cross-­ cutting theme of feminist new materialisms. To talk of matter some, like Haraway, turn to an account of becoming that is informed by Whitehead. Braidotti turns to Deleuze and the notion of assemblage and rhizome. Barad engages the physics of Bohr in an effort to rethink the agency of matter. The perspective of active, dynamic matter includes an understanding of the human as only one dimension of these complex interactions. In this way both mattering and agency extend beyond the human domain. A conception of matter as agential has led some to advocate a posthumanism. Elizabeth Grosz’s The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (2017) offers a genealogy of what she calls the incorporeal, “a tradition that eschews dualism—any conception of the mind or ideality and body, or materiality, as separate substances—in order to develop a nonreductive monism or a paradoxical dualist monism” (2017, 249). Tracing lineages from the Stoics, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Simondon, and Ruyer, Grosz offers a path for understanding the emergence of new materialist themes in the history of thought.

Critiques of Feminist New Materialism While still a relatively new approach in feminist theorizing, feminist new materialism has been the subject of a number of critiques. Some, like that of Ahmed discussed earlier, raise concerns about the “newness” of the feminist new materialisms. But another line of concern is that, as Bonnie Washick and Elizabeth Wingrove phrase it, “systemically (re) produced relations of inequality and domination by and among (agentially nonsovereign) humans recede in the face of a new materialist metaphysical (and rhetorical) aesthetic” (2015, 71). The critique is that while power clearly matters to the feminist new materialists, the effort to grasp power “in the fullness of its materiality” (Barad, 2007) overlooks, or at least downplays, the relatively durable structures that support hegemonic positions and the ways that they constrain differently positioned individuals and groups. The worry is that the commitment to a radical openness of the ontological imaginary “cannot help but view any purported systematicity as a potential challenge to the

Feminist New Materialisms   391 very nature (the very truth) of Being,” which shifts the focus away from structural constraints toward agentic possibilities (Washick and Wingrove 2015, 70). This worry is compounded by their concern that politics is being subordinated to epistemology in the feminist new materialisms, by “better subjects who practice better knowing” rather than imaginative, affective, or strategic resources for political action (2015, 73, 76). The concerns of Washick and Wingrove are mirrored by others who argue that new materialists’ claims to newness are made at the expense of such traditions as “First Nations and Indigenous peoples; to those humans who have never been quite human enough as explored, for instance, in postcolonial and revolutionary black thought; . . . and to other non-­Western medical and spiritual modalities” (Wazana Tompkins 2016, n.p.). A related concern is that the “science that is privileged and often conflated with matter in new materialist storytelling . . . is the same capital ‘S’ Science, unqualified, critiqued by postcolonial feminist science studies” (Willey 2016, 994). Willey urges the development of a postcolonial feminist materialism as a means to open materialist feminist theorizing beyond the limits of colonialist lenses. The aforementioned type of concern is interrelated with critiques showing that work in feminist new materialisms bypasses the racialization central in the Western tradition; it does not engage the work that has been done on the systems of oppression that have formed in connection with race, colonialism, and slavery. That is, is there a limited focus not only on which bodies of knowledge matter but also on which bodies matter. As Emily Lee argues in Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race (2014), “A focus on race, on the material, the physical features of race may shed more light on racism’s perseverance” (2014, 1). It might be argued, for example, through the work of Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers, that the human/nonhuman divide cannot be effectively troubled without recognizing the racialized nature of Western notions of the human. Alexander Weheliye in Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014) provides a fertile lens for such work. He argues, “Given the histories of slavery, colonialism, segregation, lynching, and so on, humanity has always been a principal question within black life and thought in the west; or, rather, in the moment in which blackness becomes apposite to humanity, Man’s conditions of possibility lose their ontological thrust, because their limitations are rendered abundantly clear. Thus, the functioning of blackness both inside and outside modernity sets the stage for a general theory of the human, and not its particular exception” (2014, 19). Weheliye builds on the insight of Wynter that “sociogenic phenomena, particularly race, become anchored in the ontogenic flesh” to argue that flesh is both a key to understanding the exclusionary operations of the Western conception of the human and a resource for transforming the figure of the human through corporality. The work of Mel  Y.  Chen offers another approach that engages the mattering of bodies. They develop the conception of animacy to theorize how things can “be queered and racialized without human bodies present, quite beyond questions of personification” (2011, 265). Bringing together the many lineages of mattering, Chen argues that “the word animacy has no single definition,” explaining that its multiplicity of meanings, which include “a quality of agency, sentience, or liveness; . . . the grammatical ramifications of

392   Tuana the sentience of a noun . . . [and] a philosophical concept that addresses questions of life and death,” is a better reflection of the phenomena that “circulate biopolitically, running through conditionally sentient and nonsentient, live and dead, agentive and passive bodies” (2011, 280). While Chen does not embrace the label of feminist new materialisms, their conception of animacy in conjunction with their deep attunement to embodiment, racializations, and queering offers resources that would augment the work of those influenced by feminist new materialisms. Finally, there are authors working to link both historical materialism and materialist feminisms to the issue of race. Charles Mills offers an example of the former approach in proposing what he calls a materialist anti-­post-­modernism. Influenced by both Marx and Fanon, Mills argues for a racialization that is “sociogenic” in the sense of the material advantage and disadvantage for privileged and subordinated races. “The materiality of race (apart from the economic dimensions . . .) inheres in the reflexes of, and associations evoked by, particular bodies in a world where the body politic is normed by the white body” (2014, 37). As an example of the latter approach, Michael Hames-­García applies Barad’s conception of feminist new materialism to race, arguing that “a theory of race that does not account for the intra-­action of culture and body is inadequate to explain the data,” and notes that “indeterminacy and mutual constitution are equally as characteristic of social, political, and historical phenomena as they are of quantum phenomena” (2008, 326, 325). Finally, Arun Saldanha engages Grosz’s ­corporeal feminism; his work is wedded to a Marxist materialism and a Deleuzean conception of assemblage and develops what he refers to as a critical materialism that urges a rethinking of race as a culturally embedded phenotype. As he explains, “Phenotype is a crucial element in the assemblage called race, and, because phenotype is already nondiscrete and shaped by culture, race cannot be an essentialist concept” but is rather creative, dynamic, and emergent (2006, 20). Perhaps the most effective approach to understanding feminist new materialisms is to understand them not as a new field of study or a homogenous approach to feminist theorizing, but as a heterogeneous striving to fully understand and engage the complex lineages of the materiality of oppressions. In this spirit, they provide resources to enhance liberatory philosophy.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2008. “Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the ‘New Materialism.’” European Journal of Woman’s Studies 15 (1): 23–39. Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barad, Karen. 1998. “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality.” Differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10 (2): 87–126. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28 (3): 801–31. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Feminist New Materialisms   393 Beauvoir, Simone de. 1953 . The Second Sex. translated and edited by H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf. Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 1991. Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women and Contemporary Philosophy. Translated by Elizabeth Guild. Oxford/Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2000. “Teratologies,” in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, edited by I. Buchanan and C. Colebrook, 156–72. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2012. “Interview with Rosi Braidotti.” In New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, edited by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, 19–37. Ann Arbor, MI: Open University Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London and New York: Routledge. Chen, Mel Y. 2011. “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17 (2–3): 265–86. Coole, Diana. 2013. “Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with New Materialisms in the Political Sciences.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41 (3): 451–69. Davis, Noela. 2009. “New Materialism and Feminism’s Anti-Biologism: A Response to Sara Ahmed.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 16 (1): 67–80. Diprose, Rosalyn. 2000. “What Is (Feminist) Philosophy?” Hypatia 15 (2): 115–32. Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin. 2011. “Pushing Dualism to an Extreme: On the Philosophical Impetus of a New Materialism.” Continental Philosophy Review 44: 383–400. Edenheim, Sara. 2016. “Foreclosed Matter—On the Material Melancholy of Feminist New Materialism.” Australian Feminist Studies 31 (89): 283–304. Ferguson, Kathy  E. 2015. “Engaging New and Old Materialisms.” Contemporary Political Theory 14 (1): 79–82. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2017. The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Hames-García, Michael. 2008. “How Real Is Race?” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 308–49. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1985. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review 15:2 (1985), 65–107. Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hemmings, Claire. 2011. Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Hird, Myra J. 2009. “Feminist Engagements with Matter.” Feminist Studies 35 (2): 329–46. Lee, Emily. 2014. Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race. New York: SUNY Press. Mills, Charles W. 2014. “Materializing Race.” In Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, edited by Emily Lee, 19–42. New York: SUNY Press.

394   Tuana Saldanha, Arun. 2006. “Reontologising Race: The Machinic Geography of Phenotype.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (1): 9–24. Spillers, Hortense. 1987. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, 2: 65–81. Tuana, Nancy. 2008. “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 188–213. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Washick, Bonnie, and Elizabeth Wingrove. 2015. “Politics That Matter: Thinking about Power and Justice with the New Materialists.” Contemporary Political Theory 14(1): 63–79. Wazana Tompkins, Kyla. 2016. “On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy.” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 5 (1). http://csalateral.org/issue/5–1/ forum-alt-humanities-new-materialist-philosophy-tompkins/. Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Willey, Angela. 2016. “A World of Materalisms: Postcolonial Feminist Science Studies and the New Natural.” Science, Technology and Human Values 4 (6): 991–1014. Wingrove, Elizabeth. 2016. “Materialisms.” In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, edited by Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth, 455–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, 3: 257–337. Zerilli, Linda. 2005. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 32

Bi as Louise Antony

One of the primary aims of feminism is the elimination of bias against women. But what, exactly, is “bias”? The term “bias,” as it is generally used, implies a prejudging that is unfair or illegitimate. But fundamentally, “bias” means simply a “bent or tendency; an inclination in temperament or outlook.”1 Notably, there is nothing normative in this definition, nothing to suggest that there is anything inherently wrong with being biased. A coin is biased if it is more likely to land on one face than on the other. There is nothing wrong with a coin that is biased in this way. Stage magicians use biased coins all the time, often to their audience’s delight. But what would be wrong would be using a biased coin in certain circumstances, for example, to bet against people who do not know that it is biased. This example illustrates the general line I want to take about bias in connection with human epistemic and social activity: neither good nor bad in itself, bias is something that can, in context, work for good or for ill. In the human context, there are many ways in which epistemic bias works for good. Indeed, bias turns out to be an enabling condition for human knowledge. When human biases are bad, I contend, it is not because they are biases, but because they run afoul of some particular teleological feature of the context in which they operate—that is, they incline us in the wrong direction, given our epistemic goals. In the case of the biased coin, the problem I imagined stems from the norms of a social practice—betting—which says that parties to the bet must have all the same information. In the cases that concern those of us interested in social justice, there are many contexts in which biases are problematic. I will focus on two important types of circumstance: cases in which a bias is (1) improperly grounded (and so does not lead to truth) or (2) stands in conflict with a subject’s properly avowed (epistemic or moral) norms. First, however, I want to explain why I think bias is both an ineliminable and a salutary feature of human epistemic life.

1  https://www.merriam-­webster.com/dictionary/bias.

396   Antony

Bias, Objectivity, and Impartiality When, in the 1980s, women began to enter the academy in (relatively) large numbers, feminist and other progressive scholars began challenging the claimed objectivity of work that had been done in fields hitherto dominated by privileged white men. Feminist historians, sociologists, economists, and biologists showed over and over how the domination of their fields by men had led to distortions in either doctrine or method or both. For their part, feminist philosophers began to scrutinize the canonical works of Western philosophy (Harding and Hintikka 1983; Lloyd 1984). Evidence of contempt for women in the writings of great philosophers was not hard to find: Aristotle, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, and Kant were all on record as defenders of patriarchy, citing deficiencies in women’s minds or characters (or both) as warrant for male dominance2 (Lange 1983, Spelman  1983 Lloyd  1984). In some cases, these philosophers’ views about women conflicted with their allegedly general views about human nature. One response to such discoveries was simply to dismiss them as isolated failures of rationality or observation on the parts of the philosopher-­authors—failures that would have been unremarked and unremarkable, given the philosophers’ milieux. On this way of thinking, the offensive bits from Aristotle and Kant could simply be excised, preserving for feminist purposes the central tenets of the philosophers’ theories (Antony and Witt [1993] 2001).3 But many feminist theorists believed that the problem went far deeper than a few gratuitous expressions of sexism. Thinkers such as Sandra Harding (Harding  1983, 311–24), Naomi Scheman (Scheman  1983, 225–44), Evelyn Fox Keller (Fox Keller  1983, 207–24), Linda Alcoff (Alcoff and Potter  1992), and Alison Jaggar (Jaggar  1988) argued that many of the concepts and values at the heart of Western philosophy reflected concerns and ways of thinking peculiar to privileged white men. One of the concepts that came under this sort of scrutiny was the concept of objectivity itself (Harding 1986; Fox Keller 1983; Scheman 1983; Bordo 1987). Feminist critics charged that this notion, at least as it had functioned within mainstream epistemology, set up an unachievable ideal of epistemic practice, even as it disguised the actual conditions of human inquiry. All human knowledge, they argued, is partial—that is, limited by the material circumstances of its subjects. But the modernist ideal of objectivity suggests that knowledge can and should be impartial—that it is possible and desirable for human beings to transcend the limitations of their particular epistemic positions and achieve an epistemic standpoint that would somehow constitute a “view from nowhere.”4 That such a standpoint could even be thought possible reflected, 2  See essays by Lange, Spelman, and Pyne Addelson in Harding and Hintikka (1983). 3  For examples of feminist utilizations of work by mainstream men philosophers, see essays by Homiak, Atherton, Baier, Herman, and Hampton in Antony and Witt 1993/2002. 4  Nagel’s term, or, in an odd equivalence, what Susan Bordo called a “view from everywhere” (Bordo 1987).

Bias   397 according to feminist critics, a social position that allowed privileged men to ignore the material messiness of human existence in a way that women, who had to contend with pregnancy, childbirth, care of the sick, care of the home, and so forth, could not. Furthermore, the feminist critics charged, such a standpoint was objectionably ­individualistic—it suggested that human knowers were epistemically self-­sufficient, when in fact we all depend crucially on epistemic interaction with others. Finally, the critics argued, mainstream philosophers erroneously and arrogantly presumed that they themselves had managed to achieve this standpoint of perfect impartiality. They assumed and promoted an unearned authority for their own perspectives, while tacitly rationalizing the erasure of other voices, including women’s (O’Neill 2005).5 Ironically, however, this critique of the notion of objectivity did not comport well with the feminist project of criticizing male bias; the one seemed to undermine the other. If impartiality was an objectionable ideal, what could be the basis for objecting to male partiality? Perhaps men philosophers could coherently be criticized for failing to recognize that their views expressed their own partial points of view, but how could such partiality constitute distortion? If we reject objectivity, how can we explain whats wrong with bias? This problem, which I have dubbed the “Bias Paradox” (Antony 1993), sets a desideratum for any acceptable account of objectivity: it must be compatible with the facts about the essential locatedness of human knowledge, without disabling critiques of pernicious forms of partiality. One early critic of received views of objectivity within epistemology and the philosophy of science who has grappled with this problem is Helen Longino. The bias paradox can be counted among the “essential tensions” that she has identified and strived to resolve in her own work (Longino and Hammonds  1990; Longino  1993). Longino calls attention to the difficulties that arise when feminist theorists try to respond to the “normative aspirations of . . . philosophy of science” while acknowledging the discouraging findings of the more descriptive fields of science studies. She writes: Philosophy of science has taken on the task of articulating an ideal scientific method or explaining how it is that scientific inquiry produces knowledge of the natural world. Social studies of science have taken on the task of showing how social phenomena deflect actual scientific practice from the presumed ideal. . . . A key question raised by [feminist] critiques . . . is whether it is possible to have a theory of inquiry that reveals the ideological dimension of knowledge construction while at the same time offering criteria for the comparative evaluation of scientific theories and research programs. (Longino 1993, 93–94)

Longino proposes a framework, which she calls “feminist empiricism,” for conceptualizing scientific knowledge in a way that she believes resolves the tensions. To put this goal in my terms: this reconception of objectivity would, if successful, dissolve the bias 5  For more recent work in feminist consideration of canonical philosophers, see volumes in the series Re-­Reading the Canon (Penn State University Press), described here: http://www.psupress.org/ books/series/book_SeriesReReading.html.

398   Antony paradox. Longino’s central idea is that knowledge is essentially social, the result of interplay among a host of partial perspectives. Because no individual can ever transcend his or her own material and social location, objectivity must be reconceived as the result of cognitive engagement among subjects from diverse epistemic locations. Objectivity, then, becomes a procedural ideal, characterized in terms of proper interactions within a properly constituted scientific—or, more broadly, epistemic—community. The more closely the community’s constitution and dynamics resemble the ideals, the more objective is the knowledge it produces. Partiality, on this view, cannot be eliminated, but it can be filtered out. I completely agree with Longino and other feminist critics of objectivity-­as-­impartiality in their contention that the locatedness of human life constitutively conditions our ­epistemology. But I do not think the alternative outlined by Longino takes the right approach to solving the bias paradox. Longino’s view treats all partiality as equal; it does not tell us the circumstances under which partiality—bias—is and is not problematic. On her theory, diversity of perspectives is ipso facto an epistemic good. As I hope to show, however, too much diversity or diversity of the wrong sort can impede the development of knowledge. Moreover, to count diversity per se as an epistemic good would be to imply that it would be epistemically harmful if we were to somehow succeed in eliminating sexism, racism, elitism, and other perniciously partial epistemic perspectives, because such elimination would reduce the overall diversity of viewpoints. I argue for a different view about how to reconstruct the virtue of objectivity in the face of the essential partiality of human knowledge. I contend that the epistemic value we are after when we speak of “objectivity” is best served by monitoring and policing the distribution of interests, rather than the distribution of belief.

Underdetermination and the Constructive Role of Bias So what exactly does it mean to say that human knowledge is partial? One thing it means, of course, is that whatever we come to know is only a small part of what there is to know. But it also means something about the relationship between the evidence we have and the judgments we infer to on its basis. Empiricists, as I said earlier, thought that all substantive knowledge derived from sensory experience. But my particular sensory experience can tell me only a certain amount about the world, and about only a small corner of the world at that. Even our everyday beliefs seem to go beyond the sensory stimulations that occasion them; when we think about the arcane hypotheses of contemporary science, the connection to sensory experience seems impossibly slim. And then there is the question of how representative one person’s experience can be. Perhaps my situation in the world is unusual, in which case my judgments would be “partial” in the sense of being biased—they would incline toward idiosyncractic features of my particular epistemic situation, rather than toward general facts about the world.

Bias   399 One response to these concerns is skepticism about the external world. But there is another possible response: one could take it as a datum that we do manage to acquire knowledge of the world, and then treat partiality as posing a puzzle to be solved empirically—how does knowledge develop despite it? This was the course recommended by Willard van Orman Quine (Quine 1969). Quine referred to the problem I been calling “partiality” as the problem of underdetermination: the fact that for any finite amount of data, there are always infinitely many hypotheses logically consistent with that data. To “naturalize” epistemology, he explained, would be to take as its central question not whether we had knowledge, but rather how we managed to get it in the face of underdetermination. Quine’s own solution to the problem of underdetermination, it turns out, marked a decisive break with classical empiricism. Underdetermination showed that knowledge could not possibly be determined solely by sensory evidence. Something had to fill in the gap between evidence and theory, and, Quine argued, what did that for us human beings was—wait for it!—bias. According to Quine and his collaborator, Joseph Ullian, we bring a variety of biases—they called them “extra-­empirical” assumptions—to any epistemic problem (Quine and Ullian 1970). This suite of native biases cuts down to manageable size the set of hypotheses that we must consider seriously. For example, we display a clear preference for simpler hypotheses over more complicated ones. What reason do we have for thinking this preference is reasonable? On the one hand, it seems presumptuous to imagine that nature conforms itself to the limits of our minds; on the other hand, the assumption seems to have stood us in pretty good stead. Moreover, we have no choice; without such assumptions we cannot learn anything at all. Even the austerely empiricist behaviorist psychology to which Quine was committed needed to posit an “innate similarity space” that made animals selectively more sensitive to certain parameters of resemblance rather than others in the stimuli to which they were exposed. Chomsky famously canonized this type of reasoning as a “poverty-­of-­the-­stimulus” argument (Chomsky 1965, 1975). In his work, he focused on an amazing but perfectly mundane human achievement—the acquisition of natural language. Human children, he observed, acquired mastery of a complex symbol system by the age of three or four, without formal instruction, simply on the basis of exposure to other speakers. The information available to children, Chomsky argued, vastly underdetermines the grammatical structure of the language spoken around them. The children, therefore, must be bringing some kind of innate knowledge to the acquisition situation. He called this native structure “universal grammar” (UG); it served to constrain sharply the set of hypotheses a child could consider in response to the linguistic evidence around her, thereby vastly simplifying her learning task. Since then, cognitivists in linguistics and several areas of psychology have posited a wide variety of native mental “instincts,” in humans and in nonhuman animals alike, to fill in the gaps between sensory evidence and cognitive attainment in many domains. In vision science, for example, the leading issue is the “inverse problem” (Palmer 1999). This is the problem of figuring out how the brain infers the character of the three-­ dimensional distal environment from the two-­dimensional retinal array. For each retinal array, there are many distinct distal layouts that could produce it—how does our

400   Antony brain settle on just one? The answer given by vision scientists is that visual processing is constrained by “hidden assumptions”—embodied information about regular but contingent features of our larger environment, like the assumption that illumination comes from above. These constraints on the interpretation of visual data mainly stand us in good stead, but they also make us vulnerable to illusions in cases where the hidden assumptions are false—cases like the Ames room or the rotating mask.6 Developmental psychologists have posited several cognitive “modules” that operate, analogously to Chomsky’s language acquisition device, to enable rapid learning within typical human environments. Elizabeth Spelke (Spelke  2000) holds that we have a module she calls “core cognition” that embodies very general information about the behavior of material objects. Alan Leslie has posited a native module he calls “theory of mind” that encodes basic psychological information, such as correlations between certain facial expressions and certain emotions, and behavioral cues to others’ mental states (A.  M.  Leslie  1987). Some clinical researchers believe that an absence of this theory-­of-­mind module might be at the root of the difficulties autistic individuals have in interpreting the behavior of neurotypical persons (Frith 1991; Baron Cohen 1995). I have been focusing on biases in the course of individual development. What happens when we go social? What happens when we do science? At around the same time Quine was challenging austere empiricism about knowledge acquisition in individuals, philosophers of science like Carl Hempel (1966) and historians of science like Thomas Kuhn (Kuhn 1970) were challenging the empiricist orthodoxy about scientific method and scientific development. Hempel focused on the relation between evidence and hypothesis. It was not true, he argued, that data must precede hypothesis; in fact, hypotheses are rational conjectures that guide the pursuit of data. Without a guiding hypothesis, the search for patterns in the data would be unprincipled and apt to produce many dead ends. As the contemporary statistician Nate Silver puts it, it takes a theoretical model to enable us to distinguish a “signal” (a robust regularity) from mere “noise” (an accidental pattern) (Silver 2012). Thomas Kuhn, looking at the history of science, argued that scientific progress depends upon there being something like a theory writ large—what he called a paradigm— organizing research within a community. A paradigm is a background theory to which all members of the community are committed in a relatively dogmatic way. That is, ­fundamental elements of the paradigm are regarded as settled and not vulnerable to empirical disconfirmation. Sharing a paradigm helps scientists agree about such things as which research questions ought to be pursued and what response to make if recalcitrant data emerge. Scientific education involves a kind of initiation into the dominant paradigm: the inculcation of doctrine, and training in prescribed methods. It is not, Kuhn says, unlike the initiation of a postulant into a religious order. According to Kuhn, scientific efforts during preparadigm times often came to naught. Citing work done before the eighteenth century, he argued that the absence of a paradigm unifying electrical and magnetic phenomena meant that research in one area 6  For examples and explanations, see Bach (2018).

Bias   401 received no uptake by researchers in the other. For my purposes, the lesson is this: too much diversity within science is a bad thing. When scientists’ work is disciplined by a particular kind of bias, science is more productive. This, then, is my main objection to Longino’s procedural account of objectivity: biases are not, in general, reflections of idiosyncrasy7 that must be purged or filtered out. Instead, biases of a certain sort play a salutary and constructive role in the development of human knowledge, both at the level of individual development and at the level of social epistemic endeavors. Without them, we would have no way of solving the underdetermination problem. But this cannot be the full story about human bias. The ones I discussed are all benign; but we know that there are also biases that lead us astray epistemically, ethically, or both.

Good Biases versus Bad Biases According to common usage, whether or not a belief counts as “biased” depends not on its content, but on its relation to evidence. It is tempting, then, to say that a “biased” belief is one that is not justified by the evidence, and thus that a biased belief is always bad. But if the foregoing is correct, none of our empirical beliefs is ever fully justified by evidence. In that case, how can I reconstruct the common-­sensical, pejorative sense of “bias”? How do I draw a distinction between the salutary, epistemically enabling biases and the ones that accompany intolerance, intransigence, and unfairness—the “bad biases”? What I want to say is that “bad biases” are typically the result of unobjectionable cognitive habits being indulged in unpropitious circumstances. I spoke earlier of Quine’s “innate similarity space,” posited to explain how we group things together for the purposes of generalization. Contemporary developmental and cognitive psychologists and psycholinguists have added detail to Quine’s picture (though not in a way he would have liked!). According to these researchers, human beings operate with a native folk metaphysical theory that Susan Gelman has dubbed “essentialism” (Gelman 2003). She writes: Essentialism is the view that certain categories (e.g., women, racial groups, ­dinosaurs, original Picasso artwork) have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly. Furthermore, this underlying reality (or “essence”) is thought to give objects their identity, and to be responsible for similarities that ­category members share. (Gelman 2005)

7  Moreover, these biases are roughly species-­wide. While there are human beings who lack one or more of the native biases I have been discussing, the differences between these individuals and neurotypical individuals are not epistemically significant in this context, because the neurological differences are not systematically related to differences in individuals’ material and social locations.

402   Antony If Gelman and others are right, then even if initial groupings of things are made on the basis of observable similarities, human children (and human adults, it turns out) unconsciously posit unobserved (if not unobservable) essences as the properties that determine membership in the group. Thus, Keil (1989) found that children maintained their judgments about animal-­kind membership despite large changes in an animal’s appearance: a raccoon (depicted to be) painted to outwardly resemble a skunk was still judged by children to be a raccoon. These posited essences can also be, in the mind at least, the ground of kind-­specific dispositions. Hirschfeld and Gelman (1997), for example, found that children judged (incorrectly!) that a child adopted at birth would grow up to speak the language of its birth parents rather its adoptive parents. Physical appearance is a factor that often triggers essentialism, but it is not the only cue human beings rely on to posit essentialist groupings. There are a variety of cues that can trigger categorization, and subsequently, essentialization. Language appears to be very important in this process, signaling grammatically which attributes are stable and consistent across contexts, and thus which attributes indicate groupings that are candidates for essentialization. Gelman and Heyman (1999), for example, found that when children were introduced to a group by means of a noun phrase (“Rosie is a carrot eater”) as opposed to a verb phrase (“Rosie eats carrots whenever she can”), they were much more likely to project the attributed property (of carrot eating) to other members of the group introduced in that context. Generic nominal expressions such as “bare plurals” (plural nouns with no determiners or quantifiers, such as “duck” in “ducks lay eggs”) seem both to trigger and to express the essentialization of groups.8 It is the fact that very young children display evidence of doing this that the tendency to essentialize is thought to be innate. But the tendency does not fade away; adults show the same patterns. Philosopher Sarah-­Jane Leslie has brought together many of the findings about these patterns in her theory of “striking-­property generics” (S. J. Leslie 2017). Contemporary adults reliably judge as true statements like “ticks carry Lyme disease” despite the fact that only a tiny fraction of ticks carry the Lyme bacterium. Leslie’s explanation of this pattern is that, first of all, carrying Lyme disease is a striking property (it is distinctive of ticks, not common to all arachnids) and it is, secondly, a dangerous property (Lyme disease is a serious illness). If the kind “ticks” has been essentialized, then, we will be prone to inferring that members of the kind, even if they do not actually carry Lyme disease, all have the potential or propensity to carry it. While it reasonable to suppose that this habit of essentializing and projecting is often epistemically efficient, and usually benign, the habit can lead to pernicious biases in certain social conditions. Leslie argues that when people’s religions, ethnicities, or cultures are experienced as alien or “other,” shallow cues can trigger or support false essentialist views. If some members of the essentialized group are observed to have a “striking” property—even if it is only a miniscule minority of the whole—it is likely that  some people will come to accept striking-­property generics about the group. 8  Of course, explicit instruction can serve the same function. More on explicit processes and states later.

Bias   403 Significantly, adults do not essentialize groups of which they themselves are members. For their own groups, people recognize the existence of individual differences and do not project a striking property displayed by one member to the other members of the group. All of this is, sadly, borne out by data about Caucasian Americans’ increasingly negative attitudes toward Muslims since the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.9 Though Muslims are increasingly being blamed for political violence (spurred on by the irresponsible rhetoric of Donald Trump), the actual facts about domestic terrorism are that perpetrators of mass shootings, bombings, and other forms of politically motivated violence in the United States have disproportionately been white, male, and non-­Muslim.10 Unconscious and automatic processes of generalization sometimes result in explicit beliefs, that is, in propositions that people will avow as things they believe (Brownstein 2017). But often these processes result in what psychologists call implicit attitudes—thoughts or preferences that are evinced by subtle behavioral differences toward members of different social groups. Such differences often emerge in conditions where one must act quickly or without conscious reflection. For example, in some simulated policing situations, white subjects are quicker to “shoot” a black individual than a white one. (Mekawi and Bresin 2014) Implicit attitudes can also condition everyday interactions: implicit disregard for the opinions of women may result in a subject’s breaking eye contact faster during conversations with a woman than with a man (Valian 1998). Even in conditions where people are reflecting, implicit attitudes can affect deliberations. Many studies have shown that the same resume is evaluated by academics more favorably when the name at the top is male than when it is female (Moss-­Racusin et al.  2012). Implicit attitudes can and do coexist alongside contrary explicit beliefs and preferences. This can make change difficult: it is hard to persuade people that their practices are compromised by biases they sincerely deny they have (Saul 2012). Of course, not all biases are implicit. Unfortunately, there are still plenty of people who will forthrightly espouse racist, sexist, homophobic, or other pernicious attitudes. Frequently, such attitudes represent an externalization of the essentializing processes described previously—that is, an explicit avowal of a belief that members of some social group differ essentially from those belonging to other groups. Philosophers of race agree that the pejorative term “racism” is most apt in application to a false belief in the existence of racial “essences” (Appiah 1990; Hardimon 2017). Such beliefs are typically colored by negative emotional dispositions, such as antipathy, toward members of the essentialized group.

9  https://www.vox.com/science-­and-­health/2017/3/7/14456154/dehumanization-­psychology-­explained 10  For data on mass shootings (which does not include the recent tragedy at a Pittsburgh synagogue), see the Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/ mass-­shootings-­in-­america/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.5fd001f8e886. For data on acts of domestic terrorism (which does not include the recent spate of mailed bombs), see CNN Library: https://www. cnn.com/2013/04/18/us/u-­s-­terrorist-­attacks-­fast-­facts/index.html.

404   Antony But beliefs of this sort are not the only kind of belief people have in mind when they think of social biases. Consider claims like the following: “women want to be mothers” and “Blacks have lower IQs than whites.” Many people who are committed to social justice are flummoxed when confronted with examples like this. There seems to be something sexist or racist about them, but what? Neither of these claims is false or even unjustified; both can be supported by evidence. Someone might have formed either of these beliefs in epistemically respectable ways, say, by inductive generalization or by consulting expert testimony. Even if this is the case, however, I still want to say there is something unpropitious about the formation of beliefs of this sort: they are the result of unobjectionable processes applied to a reality that has been shaped by social injustice. In these cases, the expression of such beliefs can serve, pragmatically, to perpetuate the structures of injustice that made them true in the first place. In other words, it is not the believing of such claims that is problematic; it is rather the assertion of such claims in certain contexts. The context in which such claims are made is very often one in which one is seeking an explanation. Why are there so few women scientists at Harvard? Because women want to be mothers. Why are Blacks so badly underrepresented in the professions? Because blacks have lower IQs than whites. When proffered as explanations, claims like this carry a strong implicature (Grice 1976) that the attributes mentioned have a necessary (and hence immutable) connection to the groups involved. In this way, a certain amount of essentializing is encouraged pragmatically by the mere expression of claims that, taken as mere empirical generalizations, are true. In the case of many groups, especially women, this pragmatic process can create feedback loops of self-­confirmation. Thus, the expression of a general claim about women can promote false ideas about women’s natures, all the while deflecting attention from the extrinsic factors that structure women’s lives: for example, the social structures that make women choose between motherhood and careers (Haslanger 2016) and the social norms that penalize women who appear not to value motherhood above all else (Ásta 2018). The claim “most women value family over career,” while true, can, if offered in answer to the question “why are there so few women scientists in elite universities?,” serve pragmatically to obscure the social conditions that force women but not men to choose between the two, and to implicate that women’s unconditioned preferences are different from men’s.11

Whence Objectivity? But what, then, becomes of the virtue of objectivity? Were we simply wrong to think that there is any such virtue? 11  This explanation was in fact explicitly offered at a conference on diversifying science faculties at Harvard by then-­president Lawrence Summers: https://www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/ summers_2005/nber.php.

Bias   405 I think that objectivity is still an ideal to be pursued. But I think we should understand it not in terms of epistemic biases, but rather in terms of disinterestedness. Objectivity, all will agree, has something to do with a connection to things as they are in themselves. Viewed one way, seeing things “as they are in themselves” is an unachievable ideal, because we cannot transcend our own cognitive perspectives. Viewed in another way, however, it has to do with our policies about how our inquiry is to be governed. Inquiry is more or less objective, I submit, according to how neutral we are with respect to inquiry’s outcome. Bearing in mind the essential role played by native and (some) acquired epistemic biases we possess, we may still bind ourselves to respect the methods and assumptions to which we have committed ourselves, by remaining conatively neutral about the results of our efforts. To the extent that we have something nonepistemic at stake in research, objectivity is compromised. Research into the health effects of smoking should not be financed by tobacco companies; public organs of communication should not be controlled by companies who sell personal data. For my money, interestedness, rather than epistemic bias, is currently the greatest threat to the objectivity of inquiry. A bias toward conclusions that one wants to be true obviously lacks the kinds of justification enjoyed by the enabling biases I described earlier. And indeed, we can say more: unlike epistemic biases that pay their way, eventually, by facilitating empirical success, biases of interest are in no way disciplined by the objective state of the world. If what we want to be true turns out to be true, that can be nothing but an accident. At last, I can endorse Longino’s model of objectivity as diversity. The best way to guarantee disinterestedness in inquiry is to ensure that there is asystematicity in the interests inquirers bring to the table. This means democracy. It means making sure that no one racial or ethnic group, no one age group, no one gender—no group defined by any common interest—controls inquiry. We must have diversity among the people who do science, but also among the people who report the news, and among the people who make the news.

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Bias   407 Longino, Helen. 1993. “Essential Tensions—Part Two.” Antony, Louise, and Charlotte Witt, eds. (1993) 2001. A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. Denver, CO: Westview Press. 93–109. Longino, Helen E. and Evelyn A. Hammonds. 1990. “Conflicts and Tensions in the Feminist Study of Gender and Science,” in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), 164–83. Mekawi, Yara and Konrad Bresin. 2015. ”Is the evidence from racial bias shooting task studies a smoking gun? Results from a meta-analysis.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 61: 120–130. Moss-Racusin, Corinne A., et al. 2012. “Science Faculty’s Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (41): 16474–79. https://doi. org/10.1073/pnas.1211286109 O’Neill, Eileen. 2005. “Early Modern Women and the History of Philosophy.” Hypatia 20 (3): 185–97. Palmer, Stephen E. 1999. Vision Science: From Photons to Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press. Quine, Willard van Orman. 1969. “Epistemology Naturalized.” In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 69–90. New York: Columbia University Press. Quine, W. V., and J. S. Ullian. 1970. The Web of Belief. New York: Random House. Saul, Jennifer. 2012. “Skepticism and Implicit Bias.” Disputatio Lecture 5 (37): 243–63. Scheman, Naomi. 1983. “Individualism and the Objects of Psychology.” In Harding, Sandra, and Merrill Hintikka, eds. 1983. Discovering Reality. Dordrecht: Springer. Silver, Nate. 2012. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, but Some Don’t. London and New York: Penguin Press. Spelke, E. S. 2000. “Core Knowledge.” American Psychology 55: 1233–43. Spelman, Elizabeth. 1983. “Aristotle and the Politicization of the Soul.” In Harding and Hintikka, 1983, 17–30. Valian, Virginia. 1998. Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

chapter 33

Femi n ism a n d Epistemic I n j ustice José Medina

The expression “epistemic injustice” was coined by Miranda Fricker in her pioneering monograph by the same name (2007). Fricker defines epistemic injustice as the phenomenon that occurs when one is mistreated as a subject of knowledge and understanding, distinguishing two main kinds of epistemic injustice: the mistreatment that occurs when one is unfairly denied the credibility one deserves (testimonial injustice) and the mistreatment that occurs when one’s intelligibility is unfairly constrained because of a lack of language or a scarcity of resources for making sense of one’s experience (hermeneutical injustice). In the last decade there have been vibrant discussions on a wide range of issues under the rubric of epistemic injustice concerning the access to and participation in meaning-­making and knowledge-­producing practices in a variety of areas (see Kidd et al. 2017). Feminist theory has figured prominently in these discussions. I will devote the second half of this chapter to the contributions to those recent discussions by contemporary feminist, queer, and trans* scholars, but I will start in the first half with the ground-­breaking insights of classic feminists on issues of ep­i­ ste­mic exclusion and marginalization. I will highlight the contributions that classic feminist theorists have made to the conceptualization of issues of epistemic injustice long before such name was available, focusing especially on the writings of feminists of color from the seventeenth century onward who gave voice and philosophical articulation to the epistemic injustices they suffered as a result of sexism and racism. Indeed, it would contribute to the epistemic injustice suffered by feminists of color not to acknowledge that their scholarship and activism have focused precisely on the host of issues we now call epistemic injustice (silencing, lack of credibility, cooptation of voices, hermeneutical distortions, etc.).

Feminism and Epistemic Injustice   409

Feminist Discussions of Epistemic Injustice before Such a Problem Had a Name Classic feminists have addressed the exclusion and marginalization from meaning­making and knowledge-­producing practices that women have suffered, offering powerful articulations of the set of issues we now call testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. With respect to testimonial injustice, classic feminists have denounced that women are not being heard properly when they are heard at all, and that their voices lack credibility and authority due to gender stereotypes. With respect to hermeneutical injustice, classic feminists have denounced that women face insurmountable obstacles to develop their own expressive and interpretative resources and their own distinctive voices, and that their attempts to do so are systematically distorted or co-­opted. For many centuries, feminist authors have denounced that women’s testimonies and women’s interpretations of their own experiences have been excluded or marginalized given their differential access to education, public discourse, and the dissemination and canonization of written works. In The Second Sex ([1949] 2012), Beauvoir argued that men had turned women into the “Other” and had stigmatized them with a false aura of “mystery,” thus providing an intellectual excuse or epistemic alibi for what we would call today epistemic injustice, that is, for not listening to women (properly or at all) and for not making genuine efforts to understand them. Beauvoir also recognized that similar stigmatizations and injustices occur when human groups are negatively stereotyped according to other identity categories such as race, class, and religion. But the tight nexus between gender oppression and other kinds of oppression, especially racial and class oppression, had been already explicitly explored by feminists of color. In the next section I will highlight the powerful conceptualizations of epistemic injustice that can be found in classic feminists of color, whose ideas have not received adequate attention and have been marginalized within feminism, suffering an additional epistemic injustice within the already epistemically victimized community of women scholars (see Hill Collins [1990] 2000).

Classic Feminists of Color In her pioneer address at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851, Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883) broke a testimonial barrier by denouncing the exclusion of Black women within the women’s movement and by giving testimony of the Black female experience

410   Medina in a forceful and provocative way. Truth denounced that women of color had not been allowed to have a voice and to give testimony of their experiences, problems, and aspirations, and that the exclusion of women of color also affected their meaning-­making capacities since their perspectives were not included within feminist claims and within the very meaning of the term “women” as used by white feminists. Truth’s rhetoric powerfully expressed this exclusion: “Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-­puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I could have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?” As recent discussions have emphasized, hermeneutical injustices sometimes occur when words to express one’s experiences have not been made available, but they also occur when words and concepts are available but they are not allowed to be used to express certain things. This is what Sojourner Truth powerfully called attention to in her 1851 address when she denounced the fact that crucial aspects of Black femininity were blocked from entering the meaning of “woman.” When Sojourner Truth poignantly asked “And ain’t I a woman?,” she was unmasking and denouncing a hermeneutical injustice produced by the racial biases underlying mainstream conceptions of femininity in the nineteenth-­century United States. Other early US feminists of color continue to inspire contemporary discussions of epistemic injustice. In particular, Maria Stewart (1803–1879) focused on educational and epistemic issues in her reflections on gender and racial oppression. Against the backdrop of her notion of “full personhood,” Stewart developed an understanding of epistemic oppression as a form of “deadening” of mental capacities that can “kill” oneself as a subject of knowledge and understanding. She wrote: “There are no chains so galling as the chains of ignorance—no fetters so binding as those that bind the soul, and exclude it from the vast field of useful and scientific knowledge” ([1832] 1987, 45). In this way Stewart described the epistemic oppression suffered by African Americans as a result of being excluded from access to and participation in knowledge practices (education, research, public deliberation, etc.), and from being confined to manual labor under extreme conditions of exploitation. Stewart developed an understanding of epistemic oppression as a form of “deadening” of mental capacities that foreshadows what I have called epistemic death, that is, the phenomenon of having one’s epistemic capacities and one’s status in knowledge practices denied or radically undermined. She writes: “I have learnt, by bitter experience, that continual hard labor deadens the energies of the soul, and benumbs the faculties of the mind; the ideas become confined, the mind barren, and, like the scorching sands of Arabia, produces nothing” (47). Women of color feminists have done more than denounce epistemic injustices; they have provided powerful ways of resisting epistemic oppression, foreshadowing also what I have called epistemic resistance (Medina  2013) and epistemic activism (Medina and Whitt 2021. After Truth and Stewart, African American feminists in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century included Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) and Ida  B.  Wells (1862–1931), educators and public speakers who dedicated their lives to mobilize publics and equip them to participate in the fight to resist epistemic oppression. Cooper’s and Wells’s social advocacy and political activism focused on breaking

Feminism and Epistemic Injustice   411 silences, epistemic self-­empowerment, and making epistemic practices and dynamics more inclusive; therefore, Cooper’s and Wells’s advocacy and activism perfectly exemplify the practices of epistemic resistance that create beneficial epistemic friction (i.e., the kind of friction that interrogates perspectives and can lead to the correction of blind spots and the development of new forms of epistemic sensibility; see Medina  2013). The vibrant tradition inaugurated by classic feminists of color and their fruitful ideas about epistemic injustice and epistemic resistance were further developed in the late twentieth century, especially within the paradigms of intersectionality and standpoint epistemology, which I will briefly discuss in the next section.

Intersectionality and Standpoint Epistemology Although it was not until 1989 that critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality,” the study of intersecting identity categories (such as gender and race) and the interlocking systems of oppression associated with them (such as sexism and racism) had already been the focus of attention of classic feminists of color, as we saw in the previous section; it was also the focus of the feminisms of color developed in the 1970s and 1980s, especially by lesbian Latina feminists such as Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) and by queer Black feminists such as Audre Lorde (1976, 1984). In what follows I will briefly elucidate some ideas by Anzaldúa and Lorde to highlight how the women of color feminisms of the 1970s and 1980s foreshadowed the paradigms of intersectionality and standpoint epistemology later in the twentieth century and the discussions of epistemic injustice in the twenty-­first century. If Stewart foreshadowed the general concept of epistemic death, Gloria Anzaldúa anticipated the more specific concept of hermeneutical death, that is, the phenomenon of becoming radically constrained in one’s expressive and interpretative agency by losing one’s voice and/or one’s status as a participant in meaning-­making and meaning­sharing practices. Gloria Anzaldúa describes the predicament of hermeneutical death in a forceful way when she writes about Anglo white privilege as killing her voice and her capacity to be heard and understood in her own terms, as using “linguistic terrorism” to annihilate her self: “El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arranco la lengua. Wild tongues cannot be tamed, they can only be cut out” (1987, 76). “Repeated attacks on our native tongue diminish our sense of self ” (80). In equally forceful and provocative ways, Audre Lorde’s writings in the 1970s and 1980s explored the epistemic oppression suffered by minority women. Her powerful discussions of being silenced and breaking silences put on the agenda the testimonial and hermeneutical issues involved in being multiply oppressed, and she forcefully called upon women to find their own means of expression, their own defiant language, arguing that innovative and poetic uses of language can provide the tools for resisting epistemic oppression and for building communities of resistance across differences. Lorde’s signature concept Sister Outsider in the collection of essays by the same name (1984) is itself a critical tool for identifying and resisting epistemic injustice, denouncing the isolation that African American women experience and the resulting distrust for

412   Medina multiple publics (including white feminists), while at the same time calling for epistemic solidarity among women of color and for communities of resistance that can meliorate epistemic dynamics and facilitate epistemic liberation. Queer feminists of color such as Anzaldúa and Lorde anticipated the intersectionality paradigm by underscoring that there was something distinctive about their experiences and perspectives as multiply oppressed subjects that could not be captured in a one­dimensional and atomistic analysis of sexual oppression or of racial oppression. As the intersectionality paradigm would later articulate the point, multiple identities intersect to create a totality different from the component identities, and multiply oppressed subjectivities have to be understood holistically: a matrix of intersecting forms of oppression cannot simply be analyzed into discrete components, one form of oppression at a time, because such reduction would betray the distinctiveness of the oppression in which different forms of domination converge and become inextricably interwoven. The radical Black feminism of Angela Davis (1981) deserves credit for adding class to the intersectional analysis. Marxist and neo-­Marxist brands of feminism that connected gender and racial oppression with class oppression played a crucial role in the development of the second paradigm of the late twentieth century that I want to highlight: standpoint epistemology. A core insight of standpoint epistemology is that experiences of oppression give rise to distinctive perspectives with the potential to yield critical insights that could not be obtained otherwise. Standpoint theorists such as Lorraine Code (1987,  1995), Sandra Harding (1991), and Patricia Hill Collins ([1990] 2000) developed insights that have proven to be tremendously fruitful for discussions of epistemic injustice. I will briefly call attention to two such insights. First, standpoint theorists demand attentiveness to embodied and situated experience: we have to start and end with the experiences of actual people in actual contexts. Rejecting the conceptualization of a knower as a detached and disengaged observer with nothing at stake who inspects things from a third-­person perspective, standpoint theorists depict knowers as experiencing and experimenting subjects who find meanings and truths in the first person (i.e., in themselves) or in the second person (i.e., in fellow subjects with whom they share predicaments, problems, and experiences). In this way standpoint epistemology underscores the plurality and heterogeneity of perspectives and raises normative questions about the positionality and relationality of these perspectives within epistemic practices and communities. In the second place, standpoint theorists have identified a deep connection between our cognitive life and our affective life, calling attention to the crucial importance of having the right affective attitudes for listening properly and for engaging in epistemic cooperation fairly. In this sense, they have called attention to the importance of empathy in cognitive activities, the importance of speaking and listening “with the heart,” as Hill Collins ([1990] 2000, 262–64) puts it. These insights about affectivity are the backdrop of recent discussions of insensitivity in the literature on epistemic injustice, and they continue to inspire discussions of how to improve our epistemic sensibility in working toward epistemic justice. Both intersectionality and standpoint epistemology have called into question homogeneous and monolithic conceptions of “understanding,” “knowledge,” and “ignorance,”

Feminism and Epistemic Injustice   413 and they have helped us see that issues of epistemic injustice concern not simply whether or not an experience is understood or known but also, and more importantly, by whom and in what ways. We need to ask: What are the perspectives and standpoints available in the social fabric? How are they interacting so that certain gendered and racialized experiences, for example, can be better or worse understood and known in certain locations and in certain communicative dynamics?

Recent Feminist Discussions of Epistemic Injustice It would be impossible to summarize all the contributions that feminist epistemologists have made since the 1990s to the formation of the epistemic-­injustice paradigm or to its application (see Tuana 2017). Given that being exhaustive is not possible, I will selectively focus on the work of two feminist epistemologists—Lorraine Code and Kristie Dotson— whose contributions are particularly impactful and can be featured as points of ­convergence for the work of many other feminist epistemologists. In Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations (1995), Lorraine Code anticipated the notion of epistemic injustice by calling attention to oppressive communicative contexts and climates that silence women and handicap their equal and fair participation in epistemic practices. Code’s notion of “rhetorical spaces” calls attention to the issue of epistemic agency as facilitated or impaired by communicative contexts and structures. In the recent literature on epistemic injustice a lot of attention has been given to issues of agency and responsibility, and it is here that Code’s feminist epistemology has been (and continues to be) foundational and inspirational. Code is among the pioneer standpoint theorists who underscored the normative dimension of our cognitive life, arguing for a robust notion of epistemic responsibility in her ground-­breaking book by the same name (1987). As Code points out in a recent essay, addressing questions about epistemic responsibility requires engaging with epistemic subjectivities and epistemic communities: “It is about the ethics and politics of knowledge, and indeed about epistemic subjectivity in its multiple instantiations” (Code 2017, 90). As Code observes, her 1987 book on ep­i­ ste­mic responsibility did not receive much uptake at the time because the conceptual resources and frameworks to fully engage with “the ethics and politics of knowledge” were not readily available in mainstream epistemology. This is precisely what the paradigm of epistemic injustice has changed and the reason that in the last ten years the philosophical agenda concerning epistemic agency and responsibility that Code inaugurated in the 1980s has finally received proper uptake. Epistemic responsibility concerns the accountability and responsivity of individual knowers, but also of groups and institutions. One interesting trend in recent discussions of epistemic injustice has been a shift from the ethics of knowing to the politics of knowing. Fricker herself in replies to her critics and in subsequent papers has moved in

414   Medina this direction, writing on the structural and institutional aspects of epistemic justice and on the epistemic virtues of institutions (see Fricker 2010, 2012, 2016). Lorraine Code is one of the key feminist epistemologists who have provided conceptual resources to explore both the ethical and the political aspects of epistemic injustice. In her discussions of “the politics of epistemic location” (2006 and 2014), Code has argued that advocacy is required to unmask our complicity with ongoing injustices and to mobilize publics to fight against them. Code’s concept of advocacy is a key component of what I have called epistemic activism, namely, the kind of activism that can mobilize differently situated subjects and publics to resist epistemic injustices (Medina and Whitt 2021). Kristie Dotson’s analyses of epistemic violence and epistemic oppression have made tremendous contributions to recent and ongoing discussions of epistemic injustice and the politics of knowing. Building on Gayatri Spivak’s (1998) notion of “epistemic violence” as a way of marking the silencing of marginalized groups, Dotson (2011) has developed an account of epistemic violence by analyzing different ways in which the “on-­the-­ground practices of silencing” operate. Dotson identifies two different kinds of silencing that ep­i­ ste­mic violence can produce in testimonial exchanges: testimonial quieting and testimonial smothering. As Dotson explains, “testimonial quieting occurs when an audience fails to identify a speaker as a knower” (2011, 242) because of negative stereotyping. On the other hand, testimonial smothering is a form of self-­silencing that occurs when the speaker perceives her audience as unwilling or unable to provide appropriate uptake. Although Dotson articulates her distinction between quieting and smothering to deal specifically with testimonial cases, this distinction could also be extended to identify different cases of hermeneutical injustice: cases of hermeneutical quieting, which would occur whenever an audience fails to identify a speaker as capable of generating meaning in a particular area, and cases of hermeneutical smothering, which would involve ways of stopping oneself from generating meaning when one perceives the hermeneutical climate as unwilling or unable to provide appropriate uptake. But besides providing fine-­grained distinctions that can be used to develop a sharper and more nuanced understanding of the original categories of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, Dotson has also developed discussions of epistemic injustice that go beyond (and in fact, complicate) Fricker’s framework, providing different axes and criteria of classification. Dotson distinguishes three different kinds of epistemic exclusion that require different kinds of change in the epistemic system in question in order to be corrected. As Dotson puts it, a first-­order epistemic exclusion “results from the incompetent functioning of some aspect of shared resources with respect to some goal or value” (Dotson 2014, 123). First-­order exclusions include testimonial injustices rooted in unfair credibility deficits. These exclusions do not signal a normative problem with the epistemic system in question, but only with the way in which the system is used. Correcting a first-­order epistemic exclusion requires ensuring equitable participation in the epistemic system, but not necessarily a transformation of the system as such. Second-­order epistemic exclusions are those in which there is something wrong with the epistemic system itself: the system is insufficient to deal with certain areas of human experience. Examples of the second-­ order epistemic exclusions include cases of

Feminism and Epistemic Injustice   415 hermeneutical injustice that result from scarcity of resources. In second-­ order exclusions the epistemic system may be functioning properly, but it is insufficiently developed and needs expansion or refinement. Finally, and most importantly, third­order epistemic exclusions occur in an epistemic system that is altogether unfit to a particular epistemic task (2014, 129–31). In this case there is no point in trying to make the system work better or in expanding or refining the system, since the very structure or constitution of the system creates the exclusion. Third-­order epistemic exclusions call for abandoning the epistemic system in question and transitioning to a new one. Dotson argues that third-­order exclusion amounts to a “contributory injustice” and requires third-­order change (2012, 31–32). As described by Dotson, contributory injustices are both structurally and agentially produced: structurally because they are rooted in structural features of epistemic systems, and agentially because they are produced when subjects indulge in what Pohlhaus (2012) calls “willful hermeneutical ignorance” by refusing to employ more apt epistemic frameworks. Although Fricker’s distinction between testimonial and hermeneutical injustice still has currency and utility, there are now new and fruitful alternative classifications—such as Dotson’s—which have enriched the literature of epistemic injustice (for other possible classifications, see Pohlhaus 2017). In her recent work Fricker (2017) also recognizes other categories of epistemic injustice, grouping testimonial and hermeneutical injustice under the heading of discriminatory epistemic injustice (being wronged as an epistemic subject due to identity prejudice) and drawing a contrast with distributive epistemic injustice—the kind of epistemic injustice that occurs when people receive “less than their fair share of an epistemic good, such as education, or access to expert advice or information” (Fricker 2017, 53). Fricker underscores the issues of powerlessness that are involved in discriminatory epistemic injustice, and she calls attention to the new research needed on epistemic discrimination in certain areas of social experience, such as in the domain of physical and mental health care (see Carel and Kidd  2017; Scrutton 2017), or—we could add—in digital environments and new media (Origgi and Ciranna 2017).

References Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. New York: Aunt Lute Books. Beauvoir, Simone de. (1949) 2012. The Second Sex. London: Random House. Carel, Havi, and Ian James Kidd. 2017. “Epistemic Injustice in Medicine and Healthcare.” In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, edited by Ian J. Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., pp. 336–46. New York: Routledge. Code, Lorraine. 1987. Epistemic Responsibility. Providence, RI: Brown University Press. Code, Lorraine. 1995. Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations. New York: Routledge. Code, Lorraine. 2006. Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location. London and New York: Oxford University Press. Code, Lorraine. 2014. “Culpable Ignorance?” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 29 (3), 670–676.

416   Medina Code, Lorraine. 2017. “Epistemic Responsibility.” In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, edited by Ian J. Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., pp. 89–99. New York: Routledge. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Theory, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Theory Forum 140: 139–67. Davis, Angela. 1981. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Random House. Dotson, Kristie. 2011. “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 26 (2): 236–57. Dotson, Kristie. 2012. “A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 33 (1): 24–47. Dotson, Kristie. 2014. “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression.” Social Epistemology 28 (2): 115–38. Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Fricker, Miranda. 2010. “Can There Be Institutional Virtues?” In Oxford Studies in Epistemology 3, edited by T. Szabo Gendler and J. Hawthorne, 235–252. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fricker, Miranda. 2012. “Group Testimony? The Making of a Collective Informant.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (2): 249–76. Fricker, Miranda. 2016. “Epistemic Injustice and the Preservation of Ignorance.” In The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance, edited by Rik Peels and Martijn Blaauw, 160–77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fricker, Miranda. 2017. “Evolving Concepts of Epistemic Injustice.” In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, edited by Ian J. Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., 53–60. New York: Routledge. Harding, S. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hill Collins, Patricia. (1990) 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Kidd, Ian, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., eds. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. New York: Routledge. Lorde, Audre. 1976. Between Our Selves. Point Reyes, CA: Eidolon Editions. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press. Medina, José. 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. New York: Oxford University Press. Medina, José, and Matt Whitt. 2021. “Epistemic Activism and the Politics of Credibility: Testimonial Injustice Inside/Outside a North Carolina Jail.” In Making the Case, edited by Heidi Grasswick and Nancy McHugh, 293–324. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Origgi, Gloria, and Serena Ciranna. 2017. “Epistemic Injustice: The Case of Digital Environments.” In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, edited by Ian J. Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., 303–312. New York: Routledge. Pohlhaus Jr., Gaile. 2012. “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 27 (4): 715–35. Pohlhaus Jr., Gaile. 2017. “Varieties of Epistemic Injustice.” In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, edited by Ian J. Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., 13–26. New York: Routledge.

Feminism and Epistemic Injustice   417 Scrutton, Anastasia  P. 2017. “Epistemic Injustice and Mental Illness.” In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, edited by Ian J. Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., 347–355. New York: Routledge. Spivak, G. 1998. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Stewart, Maria W. (1832) 1987. “Why Sit Ye Here and Die?” In Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer, edited by Marilyn Richardson, 45–49. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tuana, N. 2017. “Feminist Epistemology: The Subject of Knowledge.” In The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, edited by Ian J. Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., 125–138. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 34

Epistemic Oppr ession, Ignor a nce , a n d R esista nce Gaile Pohlhaus Jr.

Feminist philosophers and theorists have long called attention to the social aspects of knowing (e.g., Collins  2001; Harding  1991; Nelson  1990; Alcoff and Potter  1993; Grasswick and Webb 2002). In doing so, they have called attention to the larger struc­ tures and networks within which our epistemic activities take place and knowing is made possible. It is within this context that I understand the ideas of epistemic agency and epistemic autonomy. By epistemic agency, I mean one’s ability to pursue epistemic projects, such as investigate, acquire, and share knowledge. By epistemic autonomy, I mean one’s ability to choose the epistemic projects in which one engages, that is, one’s ability to direct one’s epistemic pursuits freely and in ways that promote one’s interests. These issues are obscured by an individualist model of knowing, insofar as focusing solely on the individual knower downplays the degree to which we depend upon others in our epistemic pursuits. Consequently, just as feminist attention to interdependency in political philosophy has led to more nuanced understandings of political agency and autonomy, so too does feminist attention to epistemic interdependency lead to more nuanced understandings of epistemic agency and autonomy. By attending to epistemic interdependence, I illustrate some of the important ways in which feminist philosophers have understood the function of ignorance, in terms of epistemic oppression and ep­i­ste­ mic resistance. Epistemic agency and autonomy are critically related to political agency insofar as particular actions may require knowing they are possibilities for action before they can be enacted (Simpson 2017). Moreover, gathering democratic support for one’s political interests often requires gathering and circulating knowledge relevant to those interests to others. Consequently, one aspect of systematic oppression is systematic epistemic oppression. Kristie Dotson (2012,  2014) provides an understanding of epistemic

Epistemic Oppression, Ignorance, and Resistance   419 oppression in terms of exclusions that unjustly infringe on epistemic agency by preventing epistemic agents from utilizing and affecting epistemic systems. In this chapter I use this understanding and extend it to include ways in which knowers can be epistemically exploited, or unjustly coerced into contributing to epistemic practices against their political and epistemic interests (Pohlhaus  2014; Berenstain  2016; Davis  2016; McKinney  2016). While exclusions limit epistemic agency, exploitation ­limits epistemic autonomy. This chapter will explore modes of, and resistance to, ­epistemic oppression in terms of ignorance. Before doing so, however, I want to issue a word of caution. First, insofar as the term “ignorance” links cognitive lack with moral turpitude and/or a life less worth living, it may perpetuate systems of oppression. For example, nineteenth-­century European feminists sometimes advocated for women’s education in ways that reinforced Eurocentrism, colonialism, and classism, by arguing that to render women ignorant was tantamount to making them morally base and inferior “savages” (Deutscher 2006). In addition, as Stacy Clifford Simplican notes, “the language of ignorance seems ill-­advised for an emancipatory project around intellectual disability, namely because of the ways in which the familiar Enlightenment category of ignorant/cognizant maps onto morally wrong/right” (2015, 88). Therefore, accounts of oppression and resistance that deploy the concept of ignorance run the risk of reinforcing axes of dominance and oppression (Tremain 2017a, 2017b). Second, insofar as ignorance is typically conceived as an indi­ vidual mental state, utilizing ignorance as a frame for understanding epistemic oppres­ sion and resistance runs the risk of obscuring structural features of these phenomena. Charles Mills’ (1997) intervention commonly referred to by the term “epistemology of ignorance” is designed specifically to attend to this risk. Nonetheless, the literature that has resulted in its wake and sometimes Mills himself have not always been careful in this regard, focusing, for example, on individual vices (e.g., Medina 2013) and individual cognitive dysfunctions (e.g., Mills 2007).1 Finally, while ignorance is typically conceived as negative, this need not be so. Some forms of ignorance may be deployed to resist epistemic oppression. In what follows I consider three ways in which ignorance has been conceived in relation to epistemic oppression and resistance. The first is ignorance as absence, resulting from an unfair distribution of epistemic goods that stymies the epistemic agency and autonomy of particular agents. This way of conceiving of ignorance is consonant with how the term is typically understood, but feminist attention to epistemic interdependence broadens this understanding in significant ways. The second is ignorance as an active ignoring of the experiences and interests of particular agents.

1  Both Medina and Mills argue that these individual vices and cognitive dysfunctions are caused and encouraged by structural features. Nonetheless, given the degree to which individualism is prevalent in epistemology (and in US culture), I worry that the lessons they convey can be too easily excised from structural considerations and so not only lost but also made to serve systems of oppression.

420   Pohlhaus Thinking about ignorance as ignoring (i.e., ignore-ance)2 is associated with the term “epistemologies of ignorance.” The third is ignorance as resistance, or the deployment of ignorance in specific instances as a mode of resistance to epistemic oppression. Finally, I will end by considering whether ignorance as a frame for thinking about epistemic oppression and resistance continues to be helpful for resisting epistemic oppression.

Ignorance as Absence One way to think about ignorance in relation to epistemic oppression is to conceive of ignorance as an absence of knowledge, resulting from an unfair distribution of epistemic goods such that certain epistemic agents are less able or unable to know what they would otherwise know were epistemic goods more fairly distributed. For example, disparities in education systems, with regard to material resources available for learning (Kozol 1992) and how teachers differentially interact with students (Hookway 2010), can impact one’s ability to develop as an epistemic agent. In both cases, an epistemic good, educa­ tion, is unfairly distributed, which can produce ignorance as absence in epistemic agents, leaving them less able to pursue epistemic projects they might have pursued were education to be more equitably distributed. Feminists have long focused on the withholding of education from women, arguing that it is unjust and advocating for women’s access to education (e.g., Pizan [1405] 1999; Cruz [1691] 2007; Astell [1694] 2002). Nonetheless, some of these arguments have relied upon pernicious assumptions concerning the superiority of Europeans over ­non-­Europeans (e.g., Taylor Mill [1851] 1970; Mill [1869] 2002) and an association between cognitive inability and moral turpitude (e.g., Wollstonecraft [1792] 1996). In addition, many of these accounts did not question the shape of epistemic institutions themselves, but rather argued in favor of individual access to them. Ignorance as absence, however, can be thought of in terms of not only an unfair distribution of epistemic goods to particular individuals but also an absence within epistemic institutions and systems themselves. As feminist epistemologists have pointed out, values shape and direct knowledge inquiry (Longino 1990, 2002). Likewise, values shape epistemic institutions and practices, impacting the development of collective epistemic resources available for knowing and making sense of the world. This, in turn, can differentially affect epistemic agency and autonomy. For example, social institutions within which knowledge is collectively pursued have historically been directed toward the interests of dominantly situated persons and against the interests of nondominantly situated persons. This can lead to certain information being unavailable—for example, knowledge concerning women’s health and well-­being (Tuana 2004, 2006). It can lead to an absence of concepts that are apt for knowing what it is in one’s interest to know, 2  I owe thanks to Jeanine Weekes Schroer for reminding me that the emphasis in “epistemology of ignorance” is on an active ignoring (not on a state of being).

Epistemic Oppression, Ignorance, and Resistance   421 such as the concept of sexual harassment (Fricker  2007). It can also lead to methodologies that are ill-­suited to the experiences of certain populations, as when legal and political approaches to oppression are understood through a single axis or an additive approach (Crenshaw 1989, 1991). In each case, epistemic institutions and practices serve the epistemic agency of some over others, reflecting the social valuing of particular groups of people over others. Resisting these sorts of absences requires more than pro­ viding access to epistemic institutions as they are. In resistance to structural features that hamper their epistemic agency and autonomy, marginalized groups have developed strategies for broadening epistemic agency and autonomy, both internal and external to dominant epistemic institutions. For example, within social movements to resist oppression, new models for understanding particular phenomena have been developed, such as the social model of disability (Siebers 2008). Terms have been given to identify and highlight longstanding approaches to the world practiced by nondominantly situated knowers, such as intersectionality (Collins 2017). Counter institutions have been formed to produce and circulate knowledge of interest to marginalized groups, such as the Boston Women’s Health Collective (Tuana 2006). In addition, as groups have successfully contested their exclusion from dominant epistemic institutions, some have negotiated changing those institutions from the inside while remaining responsible to the constituencies for whose interests those institutions were not designed (Collins 2001; Minnich 1990). As marginalized communities resist infringements on their epistemic agency and autonomy, however, dominant epistemic institutions push back. The existence of epistemic pushback against epistemic resistance to oppression reveals that “not know­ ing” can be an active production as opposed to a simple absence. If the problem in such cases were simply a lack of knowledge or epistemic resources, producing the absent knowledge or resources would resolve it. That it does not resolve some problems reveals a need for a more nuanced analysis such as that provided within the literature on episte­ mology of ignorance.

Ignorance as Active Ignoring Charles Mills (1997) first coined the term “epistemology of ignorance” within the context of critiquing structural racism in terms of social contract theory, or what Mills called the “racial contract,” following Carole Pateman’s (1988) use of the term “sexual contract” to analyze patriarchy. Mills noted that in addition to binding agents morally and politically, social contracts must bind agents epistemically so as to recognize and maintain the terms of their contractual relations (Mills  1997, 17–18). Within a racially stratified society, one that is structurally unjust and based in an unjust racial contract: things are necessarily more complicated. The requirements of “objective” cognition, factual and moral, in a racial polity are in a sense more demanding in that officially

422   Pohlhaus sanctioned reality is divergent from actual reality. So here, it could be said, one has an agreement to misinterpret the world. One has to learn to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority, whether religious or secular. (Mills 1997, 18)

In other words, to maintain systematic injustice, those privileged and empowered within relations of dominance and oppression bind themselves to epistemic institutions and practices that insist that what is unjust is just(ified). Utilizing this framework, Mills called attention to at least two things. First, Mills highlighted how epistemic institutions and practices can systematically and actively divert attention away from pervasive ­injustices. Second, he drew attention to the epistemic states that may result from ­systematically and actively diverting attention away from particular pervasive truths.3 In contrast to analyses of ignorance as absence, analyses of ignorance within the ­literature on epistemologies of ignorance focus primarily on the “not knowing” of those who are dominantly situated.4 The notion of an epistemology of ignorance is therefore a corollary of standpoint epistemologists’ contention that those who are marginalized in relations of dominance and oppression are uniquely positioned to know the world more accurately. Understanding how systemic ignorance can benefit some while harming others can therefore help to untangle an apparent puzzle within standpoint ­epistemology insofar as standpoint epistemology locates epistemic privilege in social positions that are not privileged. When dominantly sanctioned epistemic institutions and practices are directed toward ignoring the experienced world of those who are oppressed, they specifically hamper the epistemic agency and autonomy of those uniquely positioned to make that world known. Analyses of epistemologies of ignorance demonstrate how the epistemic agency and autonomy of dominantly situated persons can be supported even while (and through) maintaining their “not knowing,”5 while hampering the agency and autonomy of nondominantly situated persons, even while (and because) they are uniquely situated to know the world better. The systematic active ignoring of pervasive social injustices may manifest in a variety of ways. In each case, ignoring is an active production; knowers do something to maintain their not knowing about the world. And in each case, ignoring is supported by epistemic institutions and collective epistemic practices, so that social injustice is systematically ignored. One way to ignore social injustice is to systematically regard as unreliable those in whose interest it is to make social injustice known. In other words, 3  It is with regard to the second of these two points that the idea of an epistemology of ignorance runs dangerously close to equating cognitive capacity with moral goodness/badness. 4  Mills (2007) notes in a later essay that this ignoring need not be exclusively practiced by dominantly situated individuals, since nondominantly situated individuals may be swayed by conditions that support the ignoring of their own oppression. Nonetheless, the beneficiaries of such ignoring are dominantly situated individuals within unjust social contracts. 5  Working within a different context, Eve Sedgwick observes that ignorance can be utilized just as surely as knowledge to mobilize agential power: “it is the interlocutor who has or pretends to have the less broadly knowledgeable understanding of interpretive practice who will define the terms of the exchange” (1990, 4).

Epistemic Oppression, Ignorance, and Resistance   423 those for whom social injustice is most pressing (i.e., those who suffer injustices) will be moved, epistemically speaking, to know about and call attention it. To prevent those knowers from moving other knowers who are not directly pressed upon and harmed by  social injustice, collective epistemic practices and institutions must press back, ­discrediting these sources of information concerning social injustice. Feminist philoso­ phers and theorists have long identified ways in which those who suffer from injustice are actively discredited, including through the use of officially sanctioned institutions such as the law (Williams 1991), pernicious stereotyping (Collins 2001; Dalmiya and Alcoff 1993; Bettcher 2007), and pervasive social practices (Code 1991, 1995; Jones 2001; Fricker 2007; Dotson 2011). Active discrediting of those who suffer from injustice not only prevents testimony to injustice from being widely relayed but also prevents the subjects of injustice from impacting collective epistemic resources through which the world is known. Epistemic resources help to organize one’s experience, but they can also expand knowers’ attention to the world beyond their own individual experiences. For example, when an aspect of the world is particularly pressing upon, noticeable to, or discovered by one set of epistemic agents, they can develop methods and models for coordinating attention so as to track and analyze what is pressing upon, noticeable to, or discovered by them. These methods and models can in turn become collectively shared resources broadening others’ attention to the world. In this way, knowers can shape, expand, and strengthen epistemic attention, allowing other knowers to attend to the world informed by varying experiences of it. However, when whole groups of knowers are prevented from impacting collective epistemic resources, this facilitates ignoring aspects of the experi­ enced world that uniquely press upon those knowers who have been excluded. In this fashion, discrediting those who suffer from injustice prevents not only the transfer of testimony about injustice but also the development of collective epistemic resources that attend specifically to their unique experiencing of the world, including their experi­ encing of injustice. In conjunction with regarding those who suffer from injustice as unreliable know­ ers and preventing them from impacting collective epistemic resources, those who are subject to injustice may nonetheless be persistently regarded as objects of knowledge in ways that ignore their experienced world.6 In such cases, active systematic ignoring of injustice may be aided through the presence and use of particular epistemic resources. For example, Chandra Mohanty has analyzed and critiqued the manner in which the experiences of women who are nondominantly situated within a global context are known through the use of analytic categories “that take as their referent feminist interests as they have been articulated in the United States and Western Europe” (2004, 17). Mohanty’s analysis reveals that utilizing such categories rein­ scribes relations of oppression by ignoring the complexity and agency within non­ dominantly situated women’s experiences. Uma Narayan (1997) has analyzed how 6  Both Virginia Woolf ([1929] 2005) and Simone de Beauvoir ([1949] 2010), for example, noted the enormous amount of work historically written by men focusing on women as objects of knowledge.

424   Pohlhaus information that crosses national borders can both be highly visible and yet misdirect epistemic attention when received by those without appropriate contextual under­ standing of that information. In both cases, epistemic resources calibrated to the interests and concerns of one group are used to understand the interests and concerns of another in a manner that reinscribes relations of dominance and oppression. This can be a way of ignoring specific concerns and interests under the guise of attempting to know and understand them. Finally, when nondominantly situated knowers epistemically resist this treatment, forming their own communities within which epistemic resources are developed that are better suited to understanding their experiences, including their experiences of injustice, dominantly situated knowers may similarly regard those epistemic resources as unreliable and so refuse to become proficient in them (Mason 2011; Pohlhaus 2012). Even further, they can misappropriate epistemic resources calibrated to understand the experienced world of those who are nondominantly situated, utilizing those resources in ways that redirect attention away from the interests and experiences for which they were designed to bring careful attention. As Mariana Ortega points out, one way in which white feminists have used and continue to use the work of feminists of color renders women of color “forgotten at the very same time that they are viewed and repeatedly brought to light” (2006, 58). While Ortega is concerned about the ways in which work by women of color is cited without being engaged or understood, she also analyzes and critiques how some engagements with epistemic resources developed by women of color contribute to epistemic oppression. In her analysis, Ortega identifies what she calls “loving knowing ignorance”: an engagement with and use of knowledge produced by women of color with the expressed intention to work in solidarity with women of color that nonetheless contributes to epistemic oppression through ignoring, and so directing epistemic attention away from, the complexities in relation for which that knowledge was developed (2006, 63–65). Similarly, Vivian May (2014), Jennifer Nash (2014), and Patricia Hill Collins (2017) analyze how the term “intersectionality” has been engaged and put to use in ways that direct attention away from the very concerns and experiences for which the term was developed. May points out that such uses demonstrate that “recognition can entail avoidance, even suppression of black women’s knowledge” (2014, 94). Failures to use well and misuses of epistemic resources informed by the experiences of nondominantly situated knowers can lead to what Kristie Dotson (2011) has termed “epistemic smothering,” a form of self-­censoring that can occur when, in a high-­risk epistemic exchange, one has reasonably surmised that one’s interlocutor is not sufficiently proficient in the epistemic resources necessary for understanding one’s concerns. It can also lead to particular forms of epistemic exploitation, for example, when nondominantly situated knowers are repeatedly called upon to provide evidence for their dominantly ignored oppression (Berenstain 2016) and/or dominantly ignored humanity (Schroer 2015). This sort of epistemic exploitation illustrates that pernicious epistemic ignoring can not only shut down epistemic activity but also generate it in the service of epistemic oppression.

Epistemic Oppression, Ignorance, and Resistance   425

Strategic Ignorance as Resistance As should be evident, resistance to structurally supported active ignoring is enormously difficult. Forming epistemically resistant communities with similarly situated knowers, one can develop epistemic resources for knowing the world better. But this does not guar­ antee the wider acceptance of such resources (Pohlhaus 2012) or prevent their misappro­ priation (Davis 2016). In light of these difficulties, ignorance itself, both recognizing it in others and strategically deploying it, may become a mode of epistemic resistance. As Alison Bailey (2007) has pointed out, awareness of dominantly situated persons’ ignoring of one’s experiences and humanity can be skillfully utilized by nondominantly situated persons to ascertain knowledge and safely communicate knowledge to other nondomi­ nantly situated persons. Patricia Hill Collins (2001) has noted that dominantly situated persons sometimes reveal information they would otherwise keep concealed when in the presence of those who are subordinate to them owing to the fact that dominantly situated persons are accustomed to ignoring subordinates. In these sorts of cases, one’s status can be utilized to obtain knowledge one would otherwise not be privy to. In addition to utilizing dominant knowers’ active ignoring, however, epistemic ­resistance may come in the form of disengaging from and refusing to participate in dominant epistemic practices and institutions, particularly when those practices and institutions are structured in ways that curtail one’s epistemic agency and autonomy. In such cases not offering testimony of one’s experiences (Henning 2015) and not under­ standing (or refusing to understand) others (Pohlhaus 2011) can be modes of resistance to epistemic oppression and exploitation. Moreover, ignoring those dominantly situated can be a way of shifting and opening epistemic attention toward the interests and experi­ ences of those who are nondominantly situated. For example, María Lugones has advo­ cated for women of color to resist “the injunction for the oppressed to have our gazes fixed on the oppressor and the concomitant injunction not to look to and connect with each other” (2003, 80). Shifting attention away from (and so ignoring) the world as organized around dominant interests can be a way of reaching toward and sustaining epistemic attention with other nondominantly situated knowers in resistance to oppression. Ignorance as resistance, particularly in light of the manner in which the production of knowledge can serve epistemic oppression, raises concerns about the usefulness of understanding epistemic oppression in terms of systematic ignorances, to which I now return. Cynthia Townley has called attention to how discussions of ignorance reinscribe what she calls “epistomophilia,” or “an excessive and exclusive valuation of knowledge” (2011, xii). As Townley points out, “increasing knowledge is not always good, and not the only epistemic good” (2011, xii).7 Moreover, she argues that an excessive valuation of 7  For example, we routinely limit knowledge to make good epistemic judgments within the practice of anonymous review. In scientific experiments on human subjects it is critical that subjects do not know whether they have been placed in a control group or not.

426   Pohlhaus knowledge can lead one to focus on and overemphasize values associated with epistemic mastery as opposed to those associated with epistemic dependence (2011, xii–xiii). As such, an exclusive or excessive focus on ignorance as a tool of oppression (and so something that ought always to be “remedied”) may in fact serve to reinscribe epistemic oppression by not valuing and attending to epistemic interdependence. For example, an excessive or exclusive focus on ignorance might direct attention away from epistemic oppression in the form of institutions and practices that support epistemic overex­ pansiveness in dominantly situated persons and a practiced entitlement to unlimited epistemic access (and so epistemic exploitation) of nondominantly situated persons. It could also direct attention away from the manner in which regimes of knowledge, and compulsions to know, have functioned in the service of domination (Sedgwick 1990). In such cases it is not the generation of ignorance but the generation of knowledge that works hand in hand with epistemic oppression. In light of these dangers as well as those raised at the outset of this chapter, it might be best at this juncture to shift to the more encompassing term “epistemic domination” recommended by Shelley Tremain (2017a, 43–44). Framing the political and ethical aspects of epistemic life in terms of domination and oppression, as opposed to knowledge and ignorance, has the benefit of broadening epistemic attention to a wider range of epistemic activities besides the acquisition of knowledge. Moreover, it does not value knowledge over ignorance in advance of analyses of what knowing in particular instances does. In this way it remains open to identifying and analyzing a wider variety of ways in which epistemic oppression may manifest.

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chapter 35

Bor ders a n d Migr ation Shelley Wilcox

During the past twenty-­five years, mainstream philosophers have written a number of influential articles on the ethics of immigration. This burgeoning literature has focused new attention on the moral status of national borders, identifying the pressing normative questions raised by global migration and developing sophisticated responses to them. Despite the significance of these questions, however, little attention has been paid to the gendered dimensions of migration, despite the fact that women account for nearly half of all international migrants (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division 2016, 7–8). Feminist philosophers have sought to remedy this theoretical lacuna. They argue that intersecting social identities, such as gender, race, nationality, and class, influence migration in at least two related respects. First, social inequalities and related structural injustices shape migration processes and policies. Second, even formally neutral migration policies often disadvantage marginalized groups of migrants in practice, thereby exacerbating social inequalities and related structural injustices. For instance, the persistent expectation that mothers are primarily responsible for childcare plays an important role in generating the high demand for migrant care work and in determining its demographic composition. Immigration policies that limit “unskilled” employment visas also place a disproportionate burden on migrant women, since care work is regarded as unskilled labor. Given the complex relationship between social location and migration, feminist philosophical approaches to migration justice typically attempt to satisfy a twofold aim: (1) to identify the ways in which social inequalities and related structural injustices shape existing migration processes and policies and (2) to develop normative resources capable of guiding the design of just immigration policies in light of these unjust background conditions. This chapter will discuss three such feminist approaches. The first investigates the intersections between structural injustice and migration policy, focusing on immigrant admissions and refugee determination. The second explores the feminization of labor

430   Wilcox migration, with an emphasis on global care chains. Finally, the third feminist approach employs intersectional methodologies to argue that specific US immigration policies work to the detriment of migrant women, particularly women of color.

Migration and Structural Injustice Feminist philosophers tend to be critical of the mainstream philosophical literature on migration. This literature is dominated by the so-­called open borders debate, which centers on the question of whether liberal democratic states have a moral right to restrict immigration. Prominent arguments in this debate typically rely on relatively abstract methodologies, deriving broad policy prescriptions from general liberal ideals. Feminists contend that these arguments are too detached from the empirical facts about migration to provide adequate normative guidance. In particular, standard arguments in the open borders debate ignore or obscure the ways in which background structural injustices, such as gender injustices, racism, global economic inequality, and legacies of colonialism, bear on questions of migration justice. The central task, according to these feminists, is to develop normative approaches to migration that are sensitive to these background injustices. To this end, Peter Higgins develops a new moral principle, which he calls the Priority of Disadvantage Principle (PDP) (Higgins 2013). He begins with the claim that migration policy “affects people not as individuals per se, but as members of social groups” (Higgins 2013, 1). More specifically, the way a migration policy affects an individual “is a function of that person’s gender, race, economic class, sexuality, ability, age, and citizenship status, among other things” (1). It follows, he suggests, that our normative frameworks for assessing migration policies should treat these social categories as salient. The PDP maintains that an immigration policy is unjust if it avoidably harms a social group that is already unjustly disadvantaged. Higgins is particularly concerned with the ways in which so-­called brain drain—immigration by educated and skilled people in the Global South to wealthy countries in the Global North—harms members of vulnerable groups in the Global South, including women. However, the PDP also prohibits affluent states from excluding poor prospective immigrants, who, he argues, constitute an unjustly disadvantaged social group. I have also argued that immigrant admissions policies should be responsive to background injustices. I have advanced two arguments toward this end. Each draws upon a different model of political responsibility to reach a similar conclusion: transnational injustices generate strong moral claims to admission for certain groups of prospective immigrants. The first argument develops a collective version of the standard causal model of responsibility, which holds that democratic states are obligated to remedy harms they have caused (Wilcox 2007). Based on this model, I argue that states must grant admissions priority to those prospective immigrants who have been seriously

Borders and Migration   431 harmed by their foreign policies, including economic policies that disproportionately harm women. The second argument draws upon relational egalitarian theories of justice, which maintain that participants in oppressive structural relations are obligated to mitigate this oppression (Wilcox 2012). I argue that this model rules out immigration restrictions that contribute to oppressive transnational structural relations. For instance, in an economy in which corporations are free to relocate production facilities to neighboring countries with more permissive labor standards, migration restrictions increase workers’ vulnerability to exploitation by prohibiting them from crossing state borders in search of better work. Serena Parekh is interested in the relationship between structural injustice and refugee determination (Parekh 2012). Despite feminist gains in expanding international refugee conventions to recognize gender-­related persecution, many states still do not consider some forms of gender-­related persecution to be sufficient to warrant asylum. This problem, she argues, stems from an inadequate conceptualization of gender-­related persecution, which understands many gender-­related injustices as too apolitical or insignificant to qualify as legitimate persecution. A better conceptual framework would account for the three ways in which structural injustice intersects with gender-­related injustices. First, structural injustice often multiplies the harms associated with gender­related injustices by rendering women more vulnerable to additional social, economic, and moral harms, including stigmatization, economic deprivation, social exclusion, and normative abandonment. Second, structural injustice provides a ground for explaining why many of the harms women routinely experience, such as forced abortion and sterilization, have a distinctly political dimension. Finally, structural injustice can help to foreground the political nature of women’s seemingly apolitical activities. Diana Tiejens Meyers also addresses the relationship between structural injustice and refugee determination (Meyers 2014b). She argues that an adequate understanding of the relationship between severe poverty and economic migration supports the broadening of the conventional definition of refugeehood to include economic migrants. It is generally assumed that economic migration is uncoerced, if not fully voluntary. This is because theories of economic migration tend to adopt the “one-­on-­one, brute force” model of coercion, which maintains that coercion occurs when “a single agent threatens a target with physical harm if she does not comply with a demand,” leaving the target “with no acceptable choice but to acquiesce” (Meyers 2014b, 80). Given this understanding of coercion, it is difficult to see how structural injustices, such as poverty, could function coercively. However, Meyers argues that two bodies of legal doctrine—international refugee law and US hostile environment discrimination law—include more expansive models of coercion. These models suggest that in national economies with a large deficit of decent work (LDDW), extreme poverty presents individuals with a no-­win choice: “either endure lifelong immiseration, or defy destination countries’ immigration laws and risk trafficking, arrest and deportation” (Meyers 2014a, 9). It follows, she argues, that migrants fleeing extreme poverty in LDDW economies should be regarded as economic refugees.

432   Wilcox

Global Care Chains The concept of global care chains was introduced by Arlie Hochschild to describe the growing trend of women migrating from comparably poor nations to perform care and other socially reproductive work in wealthier countries (Hochschild  2001). Migrant care workers often must leave their own children behind in their home countries to be cared for by family members or other care workers. Many factors have contributed to the development of global care chains. In affluent countries, the entry of women into the workforce, without corresponding increases in public provision for childcare, has created a high demand for care workers. In poorer countries, care migration is often generated by a scarcity of well-­paying jobs and, in many cases, a growing reliance on remittances. Structural adjustment and other neoliberal economic policies have exacerbated economic insecurity, thereby encouraging more women to consider labor migration as a means for supporting their families. Increased global economic inequality has also contributed to care migration. Middle-­class women from the Global South can often earn higher incomes as care workers in the Global North than as teachers, nurses, or administrative workers in their home countries. Feminists widely agree that global care chains raise difficult ethical issues, over and above those raised by the background injustices that generate them.1 They also tend to argue that traditional normative resources have difficulty articulating the precise nature of the harms involved in care chains (Kittay 2008, 2009; Parekh and Wilcox 2014). Most theories of global justice focus on distributions of benefits and burdens among countries; however, it is not clear that care should be regarded as a distributive good. Other features of care chains also resist traditional ethical evaluation. Care workers appear to migrate voluntarily, and each party in a global care chain benefits from her participation. Women living in households that employ care workers are able to pursue workforce opportunities that they would otherwise have had to forgo. Migrant care workers are able to earn better incomes than they could in their home countries and may see migration as a route to new opportunities or an increased sense of agency. Migrant care workers often send money home, and their children and sending nations benefit from these remittances. Of course, migrant care workers are vulnerable to exploitation and other workplace abuses, and they and their children suffer from their long absences. However, it could be argued that each of these harms is counterbalanced by significant gains. Given these difficulties, feminist philosophers contend that feminist normative resources are better suited to theorizing care chains. Drawing from feminist justice and care traditions, they raise several serious challenges to the central assumptions in the 1  However, some feminists have defended care work on the grounds that it reduces inequality and improves well-­being (Crozier 2010). Others raise objections to feminist critiques of care chains (Dumitru 2014).

Borders and Migration   433 optimistic analysis of care migration. First, some feminists reject the notion that care migration is voluntary. Meyers’s argument on coercion (discussed earlier) implies that insofar as care workers migrate to escape extreme poverty and structural unemployment, their migration decisions are not voluntary, but rather structurally coerced. Similarly, Anca Gheaus argues that care work migration is rarely fully voluntary, even if not coerced. She defines a voluntary action as an action that “is not performed because there are no acceptable alternatives to it” (Gheaus  2013a, 74). Thus, she argues, care work migration could properly be understood as voluntary if it were motivated by migrants’ desires for adventure or upward mobility. However, since much care work migration is undertaken to avoid unacceptable alternatives, such as structural unemployment and poverty, it should not be regarded as fully voluntary. A second feminist criticism claims that the optimistic analysis of global care chains minimizes the exploitation inherent in migrant care work. Thus, proponents conclude, global care chains would be unjust even if care migration were fully voluntary. For instance, I have argued that structural features of care work intersect with gender, race, class, and migration status to increase care workers’ vulnerability to disrespect, mistreatment, and exploitation (Wilcox 2008).2 Three features of migrant care work are particularly salient: Western cultural understandings of care as an informal, unskilled activity; the distinctive hierarchical power relations involved in care work; and the unjust structural conditions that generate global care chains. Given these features, I argue that migrant care work is conducive to two forms of exploitation.3 First, individual migrant care workers are often exploited in much the same way as housewives within the patriarchal family. Their work is indispensable, but because caring labor is socially devalued and largely invisible, even to those who benefit the most from it, care workers rarely receive the compensation or recognition they deserve. Structural features of care work also tend to reify asymmetrical power relations between employers and workers, enacting racialized forms of domination and inequality. Second, care chains contribute to a global division of labor in which women from the Global South are increasingly called upon to reproduce families in the Global North. This division of labor is exploitative insofar as it enables citizens of wealthy, northern countries to benefit from the labor of migrant care workers while externalizing its social costs.4 In a third criticism of global care chains, some feminists contend that migrant care work involves a unique moral harm: damage to core dependency relationships between migrant care workers and their children (Weir  2005,  2008; Kittay  2008,  2009; Gheaus 2013b). The sociological literature on migrant mothers shows that prolonged separation often involves significant emotional costs. Migrant mothers typically make 2  See also Tronto (2002). 3  Christine Straehle argues that similar structural features generate vulnerabilities that restrict and disable care workers’ capacity for autonomy (Straehle 2013). 4  Hoschschild and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas refer to this phenomenon as the “care drain” (Hochschild 2004; Parreñas 2000).

434   Wilcox every effort to maintain close contact with their own children, calling home regularly and visiting whenever possible. However, they often report feelings of remorse for missing out on important events in their children’s lives or for falling short of their ideals of motherhood. The situation of migrant childcare workers is often particularly painful. Caregiving generates an intimate bond between a caregiver and the children for whom she cares. Over time, this emotional connection may begin to “overwrite the emotional relationship with their own children” (Gheaus 2013b, 8). Thus, in addition of the pain of separation from their own children, many migrant care workers also suffer from feelings of shame and guilt for “transplanting” their love to the country in which they work (Gheaus 2013b, 8; Kittay 2008, 2009). The children of migrant caregivers also suffer. Migrant care workers provide valuable forms of long-­distance care to their children, including much-­needed financial support, and the caregivers who replace them often carry out day-­to-­day caring activities effectively and with affection. However, prolonged periods of parental absence erode the everyday basis of affective care, often leaving important emotional and development needs unmet. Children of migrant care workers are more likely to feel depressed, unloved, and emotionally neglected than children of resident parents. Although feminist critiques of global care chains focus on different aspects of care migration, they tend to agree that a number of changes are necessary to make migrant care work more just: 1. Working conditions for migrant care workers must be improved (Weir 2005, 2008; Kittay  2008,  2009; Wilcox  2008; Gheaus  2013a,  2013b). Care work should be regarded as skilled, professional work: care workers should be fairly paid, protected by strong labor laws, and allowed to unionize. Care workers should be allowed to bring their children with them, and care work should be restructured to recognize accordingly: workdays should be shorter, hours more flexible, and care leaves better supported. Citizenship should be extended to migrant care workers after a short period of residency. 2. Care must be revalued (Weir  2005,  2008; Kittay  2008,  2009; Wilcox  2008; Gheaus 2013a, 2013b). In addition to these ameliorative steps, most feminist commentators agree that making care work more just will require recognizing care as both socially necessary labor and meaningful, rewarding work. Given the importance of caregiving in the lives of all individuals, care work should be publicly funded. Caregiving provides an important source of meaning and identity for many care workers, particularly those who are mothers. Thus, some feminists further argue that the right to give and receive care ought to be recognized as a basic human right (Weir 2005, 2008; Kittay 2008, 2009). 3. Caregiving responsibilities must be more fairly distributed (Weir  2005,  2008; Kittay 2008, 2009; Wilcox 2008). Care work will not be just until the sexual division of labor is eliminated. Of course, men must do their fair share of caregiving. Policies to help equalize the care burden along gender lines, such as more parental leave allowances, may also play an important role. However, a fair distribution of

Borders and Migration   435 care will also require a rethinking of our understanding of citizenship: all citizens, not just women or care workers, must be assumed and expected to have caregiving responsibilities (Weir 2005, 2008; Kittay 2008, 2009).5 4. “Push factors” of migration ought to be eliminated (Weir  2005,  2008; Kittay 2008, 2009; Wilcox 2008; Gheaus 2013a, 2013b). A comprehensive remedy to the injustices involved in care chains must also address the so-­called push factors that generate the need for migration, such as poverty and economic restructuring. The decision to migrate for work should reflect a voluntary choice, not a second-­best response to extreme poverty. Thus, global economic policies should be re-­evaluated from the standpoint of the global poor and reformed to meet their needs.

Intersectional Analyses of US Immigration Policies In addition to raising broad critiques, many feminist philosophers are interested in specific immigration policies and discourses. Using intersectional methodologies, they argue that in structurally unjust societies, such as the United States, national discourses about migration tend to construct racialized and gendered migrant subjects. Consequently, formally neutral immigration policies often work to the detriment of migrant women, particularly women of color, in practice. For instance, Uma Narayan argues that US immigration legislation, such as the Immigration Marriage Fraud Amendment (IMFA), heightens migrant women’s vulnerability to domestic violence (Narayan 1995). Before the IMFA was adopted, when a citizen or legal permanent resident married a foreigner and petitioned for permanent residency status for his or her spouse, legal residency was granted fairly quickly. However, in response to public concern about so-­called marriage fraud, Congress passed new legislation, the IMFA, which added a two-­year period of “conditional residency,” during which the couple must remain married, and required both spouses to petition for adjustment to permanent residency status at the end of this waiting period. Narayan argues that the IMFA increased the already significant barriers to escaping abusive marriages for migrant women because it ties immigration status to marriage. This is especially problematic because migrant women are generally “economically, psychologically, and linguistically dependent on their spouses” (Narayan 1995, 106). I have argued that US immigration admissions policies disproportionately disadvantage female migrants (Wilcox 2005). In the 1980s, the United States entered a period of virulent nativist public sentiment, which blamed so-­called unskilled and undeserving 5  Weir argues that our understanding of freedom also needs to be transformed. Understood from the perspective of migrant care workers, real freedom would mean “precisely the capacity to be in relationships that one desires: to love whom and what you choose to love” (Weir 2008, 168).

436   Wilcox immigrants for stealing American jobs and social welfare benefits. These nativist arguments engendered a series of exclusionary legislation designed to reduce the number of unskilled migrant workers admitted to the United States by shifting the balance from family-­based to employment-­based immigration preferences, and by restructuring the latter to favor highly skilled and well-­educated immigrants. Legislation was also enacted to prohibit nearly all noncitizens, including legal permanent residents and children, from accessing publicly funded social services, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Medicaid. This legislation is formally gender neutral in the sense that it does not explicitly make distinctions on the basis of sex or gender. However, it disproportionately disadvantages migrant women in practice because women make up the majority of immigrants who enter on family reunification visas. Moreover, in the context of a society that devalues work traditionally performed by women, laws aiming to exclude unskilled workers also disproportionately disadvantage migrant women in practice, since feminized lines of work, such as care work, are typically considered to be unskilled. Legislation barring noncitizens from receiving social services also disproportionately harms women, since women and children are typically most in need of these services. Natalie Cisneros focuses on recent US political discourses on migration, particularly national debates surrounding undocumented migration, gender, and reproduction (Cisneros 2013). In national debates about undocumented migration, the “illegal alien” is typically constituted as a young, criminally dangerous, Latino man. However, Cisneros argues that recent debates about so-­called anchor babies construct a sexually threatening female “illegal alien” subject. Discourses about citizenship and the nation have always understood women in terms of their capacity to reproduce future citizens. Recent debates draw upon these gendered understandings together with a racialized understanding of the undocumented alien to construct what Cisneros calls “the problematic of alien sexuality.” This problematic produces a normative dichotomy: on the one hand, citizen women are constituted as sexually pure reproducers of the (white) future nation; on the other, migrant women, particularly undocumented women, are constructed as sexually deviant reproducers of (nonwhite) “anti-­citizens.” This problematic, which is consistent with historical constructions of women’s sexuality, has been mobilized to justify coercive policies designed to exclude migrant women of color and prevent even US-­born children of undocumented migrants from gaining access to citizenship.

Conclusion I opened this chapter by suggesting that feminist philosophical approaches to migration justice typically attempt to satisfy a twofold aim: (1) to identify the ways in which social inequalities and related structural injustices shape existing migration processes and policies and (2) to develop normative resources capable of guiding the design of just

Borders and Migration   437 immigration policies in light of these unjust background conditions. The feminist approaches I have considered make considerable progress toward meeting these goals. In doing so, they offer important insights into the complex relationships between intersecting social identities and migration, which are too often overlooked in the mainstream philosophical literature on immigration. In closing, I would like to acknowledge that feminist approaches to migration also make two additional contributions to these debates. First, they emphasize relational normative frameworks. Mainstream philosophical approaches tend to treat migration either as an abstract question of what rights states and individuals possess (as evident in the debate about whether states have a moral right to restrict immigration) or as a matter of global distributive justice (as evident in the question of whether admitting migrants is an appropriate means for discharging duties of global economic justice). However, feminists tend to understand migration as a matter of structural and, in most cases, relational justice. This approach not only enables us to ascertain how background injustices ought to bear upon our normative assessments of migration policies, as I have suggested, but also allows for more nuanced and contextual policy prescriptions. Mainstream philosophical approaches tend to yield all-­or-­nothing outcomes: either states have broad discretion to restrict immigration or states must admit nearly all migrants who seek to enter. However, by emphasizing relational normative frameworks, feminist approaches enable us to identify which prospective migrants have particularly strong claims to admission in a given economic and historical context. Second, feminists are committed to nonideal theoretical approaches. Most mainstream arguments on borders and migration attempt to derive accounts of ideally just immigration arrangements from abstract liberal ideals. Given this commitment to ideal theoretical methodologies, such arguments typically set aside undesirable features of the actual social world, such as relations of domination and oppression, and presuppose idealized notions of migrants and their agency, the circumstances in which migration occurs, and the social and political institutions associated with it. Because real-­world migration is actually quite different from the ways in which it is represented in these arguments, they have difficulty theorizing actual, existing migration-­related injustices. Feminist approaches, in contrast, take real-­world migration as their starting point and aim to identify ways in which actual migration arrangements could be more just. Consequently, these arguments are able to address issues typically ignored in the mainstream literature, such as covertly gender-­biased admissions policies and refugee exclusions. These are considerable strengths, particularly in light of the deep injustices associated with current migration practices and the trend toward ever more draconian policies. Thus, I hope that feminist philosophers of migration will continue to explore the vitally important questions discussed earlier, while also turning their attention to other equally pressing but undertheorized issues, such as the sharp rise in immigrant detention and deportations in the United States and the continued militarization of national borders. In light of these injustices, feminist philosophical approaches to migration justice are more indispensable than ever.

438   Wilcox

References Cisneros, Natalie. 2013. “ ‘Alien’ Sexuality: Race, Maternity, and Citizenship.” Hypatia 28 (2): 290–306. Crozier, G.  K.  D. 2010. “Care Workers in the Global Market Appraising Applications of Feminist Care Ethics.” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 3 (1): 113–37. Dumitru, Speranta. 2014. “From ‘Brain Drain’ to ‘Care Drain’: Women’s Labor Migration and Methodological Sexism.” Women’s Studies International Forum 47 (November): 203–12. Gheaus, Anca. 2013a. “Care Drain as an Issue of Global Gender Justice.” Ethical Perspectives 20 (1). Gheaus, Anca. 2013b. “Care Drain: Who Should Provide for the Children Left Behind?” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 16 (1): 1–23. Higgins, Peter. 2013. Immigration Justice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hochschild, Arlie. 2001. “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value.” In On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, edited by Anthony Giddens and Will Hutton, 130–46. London: Vintage Press. Hochschild, Arlie. 2004. “Love and Gold.” In Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, 15–30. New York: Holt Paperbacks. Kittay, Eva Feder. 2008. “The Global Heart Transplant and Caring across National Boundaries.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 46 (S1): 138–65. Kittay, Eva Feder. 2009. “The Moral Harm of Migrant Carework: Realizing a Global Right to Care.” Philosophical Topics 37 (2): 53. Meyers, Diana Tietjens. 2014a. “Introduction.” In Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights, edited by Diana Tietjens Meyers, 3–17. New York: Oxford University Press. Meyers, Diana Tietjens. 2014b. “Rethinking Coercion for a World of Poverty and Transnational Migration.” In Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights, edited by Diana Tietjens Meyers, 68–91. New York: Oxford University Press. Narayan, Uma. 1995. “ ‘Male-Order’ Brides: Immigrant Women, Domestic Violence and Immigration Law.” Hypatia 10 (1): 104–19. Parekh, Serena. 2012. “Does Ordinary Injustice Make Extraordinary Injustice Possible? Gender, Structural Injustice, and the Ethics of Refugee Determination.” Journal of Global Ethics 8 (2–3): 269–81. Parekh, Serena, and Shelley Wilcox. 2014. “Feminist Perspectives on Globalization.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2014. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/ feminism-globalization/. Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. 2000. “Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor.” Gender & Society 14 (4): 560–80. doi:10.1177/ 089124300014004005. Straehle, Christine. 2013. “Conditions of Care: Migration, Vulnerability, and Individual Autonomy.” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 6 (2): 122–40. Tronto, Joan C. 2002. “The ‘Nanny’ Question in Feminism.” Hypatia 17 (2): 34–51. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. 2016. “International Migration Report 2015.” United Nations. Weir, Allison. 2005. “The Global Universal Caregiver: Imagining Women’s Liberation in the New Millennium.” Constellations 12 (3): 308–30.

Borders and Migration   439 Weir, Allison. 2008. “Global Care Chains: Freedom, Responsibility, and Solidarity.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 46 (S1): 166–75. Wilcox, Shelley. 2005. “American Neo-Nativism and Gendered Immigrant Exclusions.” In Feminist Interventions in Ethics and Politics: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory, edited by Barbara  S.  Andrew, Jean Clare Keller, and Lisa  H.  Schwartzman. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Wilcox, Shelley. 2007. “Immigrant Admissions and Global Relations of Harm.” Journal of Social Philosophy 38 (2): 274–91. Wilcox, Shelley. 2008. “Who Pays for Gender De-Institutionalization.” In Gender Identities in a Globalized World, edited by Ana Marta González, 53–74. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Wilcox, Shelley. 2012. “Do Duties to Outsiders Entail Open Borders? A Reply to Wellman.” Philosophical Studies (1): 1–10.

CHAPTER 36

Pr isons Perry Zurn

Prison is a feminist issue. This is not only the case because women are imprisoned, because women’s prisons are treated as secondary—materially and theoretically—to men’s (Rafter 1992, xix–xxxii), or because women are the fastest-­growing segment of the prison population (Sentencing Project 2015). Prison is a feminist issue because it assumes, supports, and reinscribes the defining target of feminism: a series of oppressive hierarchies built on white settler ableist heteropatriarchy. While prison certainly enhances male domination explicitly (Pemberton 2016), it also enhances domination along axes of gender, race, class, ability, age, and the like, further disempowering already marginalized communities. Insofar as feminist philosophy seeks to diagnose and address the structural inequalities that support systemic oppression, prison is a necessary focal point of that critical project. Prison theory is also a feminist issue. By turns aligned with the mind over the body, the masculine over the feminine, language over experience, reason over passion, and the active over the passive, theory has long capitalized on divisions complicit in structural inequality. Moreover, the battle for theory’s purity has consistently entrenched racism and settler colonialism within university walls (Christian 1987). To do feminist theory, then, is already a work of undoing. It is a work of rebalancing values, diversifying methodologies, and reimagining aims. To do feminist theory about prisons is a particularly complex task. Insofar as the prison population is heavily racialized, denied full subjectivity, conscripted to silence, and often produced by a failed education system, prison theory runs the risk of replicating the very hierarchies upon which carcerality depends (James 1996, 4). It is only with great care that such theorizing can be done in a way that facilitates a shift in political voice and conceptual leadership, as a feminist, ­anti-­carceral project. This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in feminist philosophical work on prisons, examples of important contributions, and future directions for feminist work in the field. It does so, however, in a way that consciously deploys a feminist methodology that resists the replication of hierarchical norms and structural violence in the very doing of theory and history. In this spirit, it emphasizes the record of

Prisons   441 struggle across the prison’s history, the resistance efforts that live behind individual academic theories, and the conceptual frameworks generated by groups bearing the brunt of carcerality, and it investigates alternative strategies of harm reduction developed across those communities. The chapter closes with an explicit exploration of prison abolitionism, which works not only to radically rethink punishment but also to shift the locus of voice and leadership. In so doing, the chapter aims to review, as much as to create anew, a feminist theoretical analysis of prisons.

Prison Theory and Histories of Struggle It is an underappreciated fact that modern prisons and prison theory are both the ­product of activism and resistance efforts. Prisons in general—and women’s prisons in particular—grew out of social justice reforms. Prison theory, in turn, developed in dialogue with prison riots, revolts, and resistance efforts. From a feminist philosophical perspective, it is critical to mark, across this history, the deep imbrication of the material and the theoretical, the voiceless and those given voice, inside and outside the prison.

Rusche, Foucault, and Prison Revolts For centuries, prisons held the accused awaiting trial and sentencing. It was not until the 1800s that imprisonment became a sentence itself. In step with this late development, prison theory is a relatively new enterprise, first launched in 1933 with Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer’s Punishment and Social Structure (1939). The book stems from Rusche’s 1930 essay, “Prison Revolts or Social Policy” (1980), which attempts to explain the demise of American prisons, once paradigms of social reform and suddenly a hotbed of dehumanization and riddled with riots. By tracing the shifts from fines to corporal punishment in the Middle Ages, and then to prison sentences in the modern period, Rusche argues that penal formations always reflect the labor market (Rusche 1978, 1939). What explains the dramatic unrest in American prisons, he asserts, is the failure of the welfare system and the consequent overcrowding of prisons. Four decades later, Michel Foucault provided a critical revision of Rusche’s work. With May ’68 leaders being steadily incarcerated, Foucault was prompted to formalize and lead the Prisons Information Group (GIP). From 1970 to 1973, the GIP gathered and disseminated prisoners’ assessments not only of prison conditions but also of the prison as a penal institution (Zurn and Dilts 2016). Within this milieu, Foucault conducted the research for Discipline and Punish (1976), which, he admits, owes its “two or three good ideas” to the GIP (1980, 915). Against Rusche, Foucault argues that the prison reflects a change in the structure of power more than economics. Prison signals the rise of

442   Zurn disciplinary power, which, through a system of constraint, surveillance, and policing, produces delinquency as a moral and economic stimulus to productive citizenry.

Women’s Prisons and Reform Movements While the birth of the modern prison gained increasing scholarly attention, it took decades for researchers to reconstruct the story of women’s prisons. Their development owes much to Victorian England, for providing both the ideals of femininity that would define reform work and models of reformist leadership in the person of Elizabeth Fry and others. The Victorian woman was to manifest “empathy and generosity within the safe confines of the domestic environment” (Zedner 1991, 15), while her counterpart, the “fallen woman,” was inattentive to the home, brazen and self-­seeking, often inebriated and sexually profligate (41). The ravine between these characterizations was so severe as to construct the fallen woman as really no woman at all, of lower standing than a “savage” (43). Consequently, early US penitentiaries housed incarcerated women in large rooms, rarely overseen, with little to no access to exercise, health care, work, or education. Certain free women began to organize against this unjust situation. These agitators were typically members of middle- to upper-­class, slave abolitionist families, affiliates of  liberal sects, increasingly involved in charities, public service, and other reform movements (e.g., temperance, pacifism, social hygiene, women’s rights, etc.) (Freedman 1981, 26–27). They argued that fallen women are produced by an environment of inequality, that they remain capable of rehabilitation through segregation and domestic training, and that they are best overseen by other women. It was this mobilization of ­sisterhood that established women’s prisons. In practice, such prisons were divided into progressive reformatories and custodial prisons, with the former primarily reserved for white women, who were conceptually infantilized, and the latter preferred for women of color, whose innocence was difficult to conceive (Rafter 1992). Moreover, while the reformatories vanished by the 1930s, racialized penal practice remains alive and well today.

Anti-­Prison Scholar-­Activism The role of race relations not only in the reformation of women’s incarceration but also in the broader penitentiary apparatus and indeed its inception was perhaps most effectively centered in the person and work of philosopher and activist Angela Davis. Within an era galvanized by the Black Panthers and the Communist Party, Davis was incarcerated as a political prisoner from 1970 to 1972. Her acquittal and release were the product of a dynamic campaign, millions strong (Aptheker 1971). In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Davis explains how structural racism and sexism are not only replicated by but also distilled within US prisons. Insofar as the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime,” she remarks, it enabled the involuntary

Prisons   443 servitude of a racialized population to survive in the form of incarceration (Davis 2003, 23) and advancing felon disenfranchisement (Davis 2005, 38). Davis further critiques the reformist movement for either neglecting Black women entirely or training them for domestic service (2003, 64, 70). Finally, she describes the sexual violence sustained by incarcerated women (e.g., strip search, cavity search, harassment, and rape), with the highest rates among incarcerated women of color (63, 63, 68). As a response to this legacy, Davis cofounded, in 1997, the Critical Resistance organization, which extends the abolition project from slavery to the prison. It is in this tradition of scholar-­activism and activist-­scholarship that some of the most insightful analyses of the prison continue to be generated. In The Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007), cofounder of Critical Resistance, illuminates the failures of economic policy that undergird the prison industrial complex, as a capitalist distillation of structural sexism and racism. Beth Richie (2012), on the other hand, highlights the social policies that contribute to the prison by jeopardizing impoverished neighborhoods, communities of color, and queer lives in particular. Richie and others founded INCITE! (2016) in 2000, an organization aiming to critically engage in ­anti-­violence and anti-­prison work that centers women of color, as well as the communities most affected by violence and incarceration.

Incarcerated Theorists and Resistance Critical analyses of the prison and anti-­prison activism, however, are not the exclusive purview of theorists on the outside. Prison is and always has been a place of resistance, rebellion, and revolt initiated by prisoners and founded on prisoners’ analyses of justice and human dignity. The Attica revolt in 1971, following the death of Black Panther icon George Jackson, is simply the best-­known instance. Perhaps its most recent counterpart, the 2013 Pelican Bay Short Corridor Collective hunger strike protested the use of solitary confinement. This tradition of prisoner refusal remains relatively occluded in the scholarship, especially that concerned with women’s prisons. Among the unsung highlights of women’s prison resistance efforts, Victoria Law (2009) names the “­disturbances” at Milledgeville, Georgia (1969–1973); the August Rebellion in New York’s Bedford Hills (1974); the riot at the North Carolina Correctional Center (1975); the “Christmas riot” in California (1975); the resistance at Kentucky’s Federal Medical Center Lexington (1992); and the resistance at California’s Federal Correctional Institution Dublin (1995). To this, one might add the 1971 Attica-­related revolt in Alderson, West Virginia (Off Our Backs 1971), and the 2015 hunger strike at San Antonio’s Karnes County immigration detention center (Marcin  2015). Whether in a men’s or women’s prison, these revolts provide insights into and challenges to the carceral system. In their demands, prisoners redefine justice, human rights, and human dignity, providing a new vision of how to live together, even in an institution of punishment (Rosenberg 2011). Prison revolts go hand in hand with prisoners’ day-­to-­day assertions of agency. As Mary Bosworth demonstrates, this includes the formation of friendships or sexual

444   Zurn relationships, dietary choices and religious observance, ethnic or cultural practices, choice of dress and study courses, passing the GED or submitting legal briefs (Bosworth 1999). It might even be as banal as nicking staff toilet paper. For Bosworth, incarcerated women’s resistance manifests a capacity to “vary the repeated performance of their identity as ‘women in prison’ ” (151). Resistance is not merely a mundane fact of incarcerated life; it is an act of conceptual creativity and political imagination. This history of ordinary and extraordinary resistance is of a piece with politicized prisoner speech, whether that of Angela Davis or Assata Shakur, of Steve Champion or Mumia Abu Jamal, of the Journal of Prisoners on Prison or Prison Radio. Prisoners engage in theorizing with language, yes, but also theorizing with the body, with collective bodies. Together they resist, illuminate, and undermine the very logic of the penal system: to silence and immobilize. Reconstructing prison history and penal theory with a feminist commitment to refuse inside/outside and theory/practice divides, as well as to attend to structural inequality along lines of gender and race, produces a story I have only sketched here. It  is  a story of prison revolts informing foundational texts in prison theory, of ­scholar-­activists and activism-­scholarship suffusing prison history as much as prison theory, and of incarcerated people—and incarcerated women in a unique way—existing and resisting in a space bent on erasing them. It is the task of feminist prison theory to continue to build and tell this story.

Carcerality and Axes of Oppression Prison is essentially an eliminative space, through which social refuse—whoever is constructed as dangerous and disposable—is quarantined and often eradicated ­ (Zurn  2019). As such, the violence of incarceration, which capitalizes on structural inequalities, cuts across axes of oppression, including class, race, gender, ability, and age. Insofar as feminist theory aims to understand these axes and disrupt this oppression, it must address the prison. Moreover, while some continue to debate which axis is most important, and therefore most worthy of activist and scholarly attention, I find it crucial to appreciate the growth of axes that have garnered attention and commit to the axes to which we have yet to hold ourselves accountable.

Socioeconomic Status Jeffrey Reiman (2012) provided an early assessment of prison as an institution that capitalizes upon and enhances economic inequality. According to his analysis, the criminal justice system fails either to protect people by reducing crime or to enact justice by correcting violations of self-­sovereignty. Instead, it constructs a criminal class as the underclass, definitively aligning criminality with poverty. The system is, then, not a

Prisons   445 criminal justice system, but a criminal justice system (188). Two decades later, Loïc Wacquant (2001) argued that, while indeed the prison targets poor and violent neighborhoods in the inner cities for its clientele, it does so as only the most recent institutionalized means to “define, confine, and control” African Americans. Following in the wake of slavery, Jim Crow, and the ghetto, the prison capitalizes upon the failure of the deregulated low-­wage economy to socially immobilize African Americans and newly racialize criminality as Black, especially as Black masculinity. This “is not just a symptom of poverty or poor choices,” Michelle Alexander (2010, 16) insists, but rather “evidence of a new racial caste system at work.”

Race and Ethnicity While most prison theory focuses on Black men’s experience, many populations are overincarcerated and disproportionally criminalized, albeit by different logics but toward similar ends. The US history of racialized criminalization involves Black, Latinx, and Indigenous populations and a real battle over American citizenship. Like the prison system, the burgeoning immigration detention system is marked by “heightened criminal penalties, decreased alternatives to detention, and managerialism” (Miller  2002, 218). Unlike prisoners, however, detained immigrants have fewer rights to due process, no right to court-­appointed counsel, and limited federal protection policies. The immigrant body itself is the subject of intense racialized criminalization. As “immigrant, criminal, asylum seeker, and terrorist” are conflated, the immigrant becomes one giant threat to law and order (Bosworth 2007, 135, 145). Mexican migrants, the US immigrants par excellence, experience this criminalization keenly, being “racialized as ‘illegal aliens’—invasive violators of the law, incorrigible ‘foreigners’ ” (Genova 2004, 161). This ensures that US Latinx people, perceived as inherently immigrant, face a continuum of discriminatory violence in the workplace, streets, and detention facilities. Indigenous people face perhaps the oldest form of racialized criminalization in the United States, again justified through the characterization of a population as a threat to national sovereignty. Settler colonialism involved the genocide of a people, a dramatic assault on Indigenous culture, and the replacement of Indigenous law with ­Euro-­American courts. “These courts,” Laura Ross (1998) states, “were used to suppress Native worlds, which were made criminal” (18–19). The construction of the Indigenous person as essentially deviant fueled Indigenous people’s long history of confinement, in boarding schools and orphanages, in jails and prisons, and on reservations. The prison functions as a colonizing force, according to Robert Nichols (2014), “by providing a solution to that which exceeds and destabilizes sovereignty via a spatial reorganization of populations and a depoliticization of that process” (454). Indigenous people thus share with Black and Latinx people an experience of racialized criminalization and disenfranchisement. It is a project constantly renewed through police violence, ­ ­detention, and incarceration, as well as structurally induced cycles of violence and ­community instability.

446   Zurn

Gender and Sexuality Just as prison is a tool for policing citizenship, it is also a tool for policing gender. Prison is not merely a place where freedom is revoked, but where gender is by turns corrected, punished, or erased. In the broader social world (Critical Resistance and INCITE! 2016), women are routinely punished for not being “real” women, but they are also punished into being women. Their subjecthood is denied, their feminine submission enforced, and their womanhood supposedly reborn. This sexism, which once marked the reformatories, also marks contemporary prisons. Today women face sustained violence in prison, including rape, sexual assault and abuse, degrading language, abusive ­pat-­frisks, invasive strip searches, and inappropriate visual surveillance (All Too Familiar 1996). Guards admit to combatting the perceived masculinization of convicted women with corrective subjection. Inside and out, women of color sustain additive criminalization through the denial of full womanhood. This is highlighted by the New Jane Crow analyses and the #SayHerName campaign, which center police violence against and incarceration of Black women. LGBTQI people are especially vulnerable to perceptions of gender failure (Mogul et al. 2011). Due to rampant homophobia and transphobia, they are a consistent object of  physical and sexual violence, in homes and schools, workplaces and city streets (National Center for Transgender Equality [NCTE] 2011). As such, it is no surprise that this population has high rates of substance abuse, homelessness, school dropout, unemployment, and street work, as well as other misdemeanor crimes of survival. LGBTQI people have more run-­ins with the police, face biased courts, receive more severe sentences, and, once incarcerated, experience increased rates of sexual abuse and harassment, solitary confinement, denial of medical care, and limitation of parole (Mogul et al.  2011, esp. chaps. 3–5). Due to the hetero-­gendered character of their criminalization, LGBTQI prisoners, especially if they are gender nonconforming, are singled out for corrective punishments, including haircuts, uniforms, physical or sexual violence, and isolation (Girshick 2011; Ware 2011, 83). It is from the incredible urgency of alleviating the suffering of incarcerated and detained trans people that trans abolitionist politics, centered on gender liberation and self-­determination, has been born.

Disability and Age While prison analyses along axes of class, race, and gender are longstanding, recent attention has turned to the axes of ability and age. People with disabilities have long been confined or “institutionalized” in asylums, almshouses, poorhouses, back wards, hospitals, nursing homes, group homes, segregated schools, and, of course, both custodial and reformatory prisons (Ben-­ Moshe et al.  2014). Not only are they disproportionately incarcerated, but also the prison itself produces mental and physical illness, among prisoners as well as staff. In the crosshairs of criminalization, people with disabilities are targeted as homegrown threats to the health of the nation-­state and as

Prisons   447 gender failures, lacking true manhood or womanhood. The logics of their confinement and mistreatment, moreover, share the variable of “diminished capacity” with incarcerated juveniles and elders. The elderly prison population has grown immensely in recent years due to tough-­on-­crime measures, long or life sentences, and tightening of parole standards. Incarcerated elders consistently lack necessary health care and programs and are distinctly vulnerable to abuse from guards and younger prisoners (Human Rights Watch 2012). Juveniles, on the other hand, are targeted for detention with the same ableist, racialized, and hetero-­gendered criminalization patterns seen in adults. They are also subjected to similar abusive denials of subjecthood, even while the category of child is used to expand and entrench mass incarceration (Meiners 2016, chap. 1). Prison is a feminist issue because the penal system is a tool used to sustain systems of social inequality, such that marginalized people experience additive abuse—and fewer ­protections—inside. More work is called for to unravel the braid of class, race, gender, ­sexuality, ability, and age in that system today. And, when we understand that eliminative spaces must, by definition, capitalize on social rejection, the dossier of axes will never be completed, nor the record of grievances sealed. Rather, it is necessary to be vigilant, to attend to the many ways people have been, are, or will be marked as deviant and expendable.

Prison Abolition and Feminist Futures As the prison continues to grow, branching into new spaces and assuming new forms, trenchant analyses of its changing functions are increasingly necessary. Chief among such recent studies include Lisa Guenther’s work on solitary confinement (2013), Marie Gottschalk’s analysis of the role of neoliberalism and liberal resistance in the expansion of mass incarceration (2015), and Brady Heiner and Sarah Tyson’s critique of gender-­ responsive prisons (2017). Targeting the roots, however, is just as important as targeting new growth. For a feminist analysis, this demands a real grappling with the tradition of prison abolition. Although movements for prison reform and abolition are as old as the prison itself, contemporary efforts draw their inspiration from W. E. B. Dubois. Dubois ([1934] 1972) argued not simply for the abolition of slavery, but for abolition-­democracy, which would rebuild the nation on the full participation of its Black citizens (184). In this spirit, Davis characterizes prison abolition as “a project that involves re-­imagining institutions, ideas, and strategies, and creating new institutions, ideas, and strategies that will render prison obsolete” (2005, 75). Such a task demands a commitment to a world without violence (Critical Resistance and INCITE!  2016, 223), to “gender liberation and ­self-­determination” (Gossett 2011, 331), and to dismantling settler colonialism, “white citizenship” (Olson  2004, 138), and the “forced dependence and infantilization” of

448   Zurn people with disabilities (Ben-­Moshe 2014, 264). Thus, it involves resisting the systems of inequality upon which the prison capitalizes and without which it cannot function. It also involves the implementation of community accountability tactics. GenerationFIVE (2007) and CARA (2016) are exemplary in the care with which they resist the expansion of the carceral archipelago by building the sorts of support networks, resource centers, and community infrastructure necessary to achieve transformative justice. Insofar as the modern prison is an ableist, hetero-­gendered, and racialized project of policing citizenship, through the construction of certain people groups as criminal and disposable, it must be radically critiqued. Modern prison theory has the power to aid in that critical project, but only if it first addresses the longstanding complicity of theory in the very systems of inequality at issue here—settler colonial, white heteropatriarchy. To embrace the transformative potential of theory to disrupt institutions, frameworks, and our very selves, while undercutting its historical restriction to the aristocracy, theory must be done, as Michael Hames-­García (2004) argues, “praxical[ly]” (xliv), replacing abstraction and counterfactuals with theorizing on the ground. Prison theory, fueled by feminist commitments, cannot be done within the privileged enclaves of elite institutions, set apart from the reflective communities targeted by the penal system. Instead, doing feminist prison theory involves shifting the locus of voice and conceptual leadership. Fueled by an abolitionist spirit, it works to tear down and recreate new practices of theorizing. This is the promise of feminist futures.

References Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press. “All Too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in U.S. State Prisons.” 1996. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. https://www.hrw.org/reports/1996/Us1.htm. Ben-Moshe, Liat. 2014. “Alternatives to (Disability) Incarceration.” In Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, edited by Liat Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison Carey, 255–72. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ben-Moshe, Liat, Chris Chapman, and Allison Carey, eds. 2014. Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bosworth, Mary. 1999. Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women’s Prisons. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing. Bosworth, Mary. 2007. “Identity, Citizenship, and Punishment.” In Race, Gender, and Punishment, edited by Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin, 134–48. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. CARA. 2016. “Taking Risks: Implementing Grassroots Community Accountability Strategies.” In Color of Violence, edited by INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, 250–66. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Christian, Barbara. 1987. “A Race for Theory.” Cultural Critique 6: 51–63. Critical Resistance and INCITE! Women of Color against Violence. 2016. “Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex.” In Color of Violence, edited by INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, 223–26. 2006. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Prisons   449 Davis, Angela. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press. Davis, Angela. 2005. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture. New York: Seven Stories Press. Davis, Angela Y., et al. 1971. “Statements and Appeals.” In If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, 264–88. New York: New American Library. Dubois, W. E. B. (1934) 1972. Black Reconstruction in American. New York: Atheneum. Foucault, Michel. 1980. “Toujours les prisons.” In Dits et Ecrits, vol. 2, edited by Daniel Defert and Francois Ewald, no. 282, 915–18. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Foucault, Michel. 1976. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Press. Freedman, Estelle B. 1981. Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in American, 1­ 830–1930. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. GenerationFIVE. 2007. “Toward Transformative Justice.” http://www.generationfive.org/ wp-content/uploads/2013/07/G5_Toward_Transformative_Justice-Document.pdf. Genova, Nicolas de. 2004. “The Legal Production of the Mexican/Migrant ‘Illegality.’ ” Latino Studies 2: 160–85. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2007. The Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Girshick, Lori. 2011. “Out of Compliance: Masculine-Identified People in Women’s Prisons.” In Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric Stanley and Nat Smith, 189–208. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Gossett, Che. 2011. “Abolitionist Imaginings: A Conversation with Bo Brown, Reina Gossett, and Dylan Rodríguez.” In Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric Stanley and Nat Smith, 323–342. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Gottschalk, Marie. 2015. Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Guenther, Lisa. 2013. Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hames-García, Michael. 2004. Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Heiner, Brady, and Sarah Tyson. 2017. “Feminism and the Carceral State: Gender-Responsive Justice, Community Accountability, and the Epistemology of Antiviolence.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 3 (1). doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3. Human Rights Watch. 2012. Old behind Bars: The Aging Prison Population in the United States. New York: Human Rights Watch. INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, ed. 2016. Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology. Boston: South End Press. James, Joy. 1996. Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in US Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Law, Victoria. 2009. Resistance behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Marcin, Tim. 2015. “Immigration Reform 2015: Women Reportedly on Hunger Strike in Texas Immigration Detention Center.” International Business Times. April 1. Meiners, Erica R. 2016. For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Miller, Teresa. 2002. “The Impact of Mass Incarceration on Immigration Policy.” In Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Incarceration, edited by Meda ChesneyLind and Marc Mauer, 214–38. New York: New Press.

450   Zurn Mogul, Joey, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock. 2011. Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. Boston: Beacon Press. National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE). 2011. Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality. Nichols, Robert. 2014. “The Colonialism of Incarceration.” Radical Philosophy Review 17 (2): 435–55. Off Our Backs: A Women’s News Journal 2 (1) (1971). Olson, Joel. 2004. The Abolition of White Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pemberton, Sarah X. 2016. “Prison.” In Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, edited by Lisa Disch and Maryy Hawkesworth, 721–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rafter, Nicole Hahn. 1992. Partial Justice: Women, Prisons, and Social Control. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Reiman, Jeffrey. 2012. The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class, and Criminal Justice. New York: Routledge. Richie, Beth E. 2012. Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation. New York: New York University Press. Rosenberg, Susan. 2011. An American Radical. New York: Citadel Press. Ross, Laura. 1998. Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality. Austin: University of Texas Press. Rusche, Georg. 1978. “Labor Market and Penal Sanction: Thoughts on the Sociology of Criminal Justice.” Crime and Social Justice 10: 2–8. Rusche, Georg. 1980. “Prison Revolts or Social Policy Lessons from America.” Crime and Social Justice 13: 41–44. Translated by Barbara Yaley from “Zuchthausrevolten oder Sozialpolitik,” Frankfurter Zeitung 403 (June 1, 1930). Rusche, Georg, and Otto Kirchheimer. 1939. Punishment and Social Structure. New York: Columbia University Press. Sentencing Project. 2015. “Fact Sheet: Incarcerated Women and Girls, 1980–2016.” http://www. sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Incarcerated-Women-and-Girls.pdf. Wacquant, Loïc. 2001. “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh.” Punishment & Society 3 (1): 95–133. Ware, Wesley. 2011. “Rounding Up the Homosexuals: The Impact of Juvenile Court on Queer and Trans/Gender-Non-Conforming Youth.” In Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric Stanley and Nat Smith, 77–84. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Zedner, Lucia. 1991. Women, Crime, and Custody in Victorian England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Zurn, Perry. 2019. “Waste Culture and Isolation: Prisons, Toilets, and Gender Segregation.” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 34 (4): 668–89. Zurn, Perry, and Andrew Dilts, eds. 2016. Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition. New York: Palgrave.

chapter 37

Wa r a n d Ter ror ism Robin May Schott

Introduction Issues of violence and conflict have always haunted human existence. From Heraclitus’s fragment, “War is the father of all and king of all,” through a long line of thinkers including Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Schmitt, many philosophers have viewed strife and conflict as fundamental to the nature of being (Crone 2013, 229). Another strand of philosophical theory has focused instead on the ontological or ethical priority of peace, from the Stoic philosophers through Immanuel Kant’s sketch of the project of perpetual peace. These competing conceptions of the ontological status of conflict have generated different narratives about the nature of history, civilization, and modernity. Some argue that the very structures of modernity have contributed to genocidal violence (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972; Bauman 1989), while others claim that historical progress has resulted in the decline of violence (Pinker 2011). Feminist philosophers too address issues of violence and conflict as central concerns. The emergence of second-­wave feminism was deeply indebted to critiques of violence. In the United States, the Vietnam War, racism and resistance to desegregation in the South, the increase in urban crime, and capitalism with its endemic problems of unemployment and poverty all indicated that it was not so much a question of whether violence would occur, but how it would occur and impact the body or subjectivity (Haag 2001, 25). The political crises of war have provided the frame for key thinkers in the feminist philosophical tradition. Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex ([1954] 1972) after wrestling with experience of the Occupation and the French Resistance during World War II, as well as witnessing racism and racial consciousness in the United States (Simons 1999, 167ff.). Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who experienced

452   Schott first-­hand the meaning of statelessness, did not reflect on gender and its implications for philosophy—for which she has been criticized by many feminists (Dietz  1991, 240). Instead for Arendt, the historical facts of being a Jew, a refugee, and a stateless person provided the frame for her theoretical reflections on racism, totalitarianism, and genocide. Her work has opened the door for many feminist philosophers to reflect on the nature of the political in their engagement with war and terrorism. Not only from a historical perspective but also from a substantive one, violence and oppression are core feminist issues. Second-­wave feminism from the 1960s to 1980s was galvanized around issues of pornography, rape, and domestic violence. Feminist reflections on violence have cleared two distinctive but parallel paths for reflections on violence. One path, focusing on embodiment and norms, analyzes violence in terms of gender and sexuality. A second path engages with questions of the political frames of violence. Who is visible, who receives recognition, who is treated with dignity, and who is not? How are exclusions from the frames of recognition a condition for the ongoing existence of such political and moral frames? These two directions inform discussions of war and terrorism as well. In doing so, a feminist lens also brings to the fore issues such as genocide that feminists themselves risk overlooking if they focus primarily on gender and sexuality (Card 2007, 71).

War and Terrorism While focusing on war and terrorism together is a pragmatic constraint of this volume, there are also historical and conceptual reasons to do so. The demarcation between war and terrorism is not always clear. Scholars debate whether the difficulty in distinguishing these phenomena marks a historical shift or a shift in frameworks for understanding the character of violence. Carl Schmitt dated the emergence of partisan or guerilla warfare to the Spanish guerilla war of 1808, which challenges the classical laws of war that recognized clear distinctions between war/peace, combatant/noncombatant, and enemy/criminal. The laws of war refer to a framework in which war is fought between states and regular armies, warring parties respect each other as enemies and not as criminals, and a peace treaty constitutes the end of war. The partisan stands outside these laws of war, moving into an intensified enmity of terror and counterterror aimed at the extermination of the enemy. Both civil war and colonial war are forms of armed insurrection that bear traces of partisan warfare. Schmitt noted that what characterizes partisan war is the irregularity of the fighters, increased mobility, and an intensity of political engagement (Schmitt 2007, 11, 22). With the emergence of the partisan in the theater of war, wartime combat changes character. As Napoleon noted, when fighting the partisan, you must fight like a partisan (Schmitt 2007, 13). Scholars have used various terms to describe this changing character of war—hybrid, privatized, postmodern, and “new wars” (Kaldor 2013, 1). “New wars” of the twenty-­first century are characterized by identity politics, violence used against civilians to displace populations, an interest in state dismantling rather than state building, abandonment of

War and Terrorism   453 the idea of winning the war and ending violence, and the use of communication technologies, which means that local conflicts also have global connections (Kaldor 2013, 4). Globalization and military technologies—which make symmetrical wars increasingly difficulty to win—contribute to the persistence and spread of violence. Whereas civilians were 5% of casualties of war at the turn of the twentieth century, they were 65% by the end of World War II, and more than 90% of casualties in the wars of the 1990s (UNICEF 1996). The contraction of the distinction between war and terrorism marks “new wars,” which also include the “war on terror,” launched by the U.S. after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Scholars debate whether “new wars” are new. But Kaldor stresses that the conceptualizations of old wars and new wars are ideal types that illuminate different political logics, rather than empirical descriptions. These different research paradigms should guide our understanding of and response to conflicts. Interrogating the relation between war and terrorism also raises questions about political legitimation. One frequently notes that yesterday’s terrorists or freedom fighters may be today’s heads of state, and hence the question of whose violence is viewed as legitimate is crucial. Walter Benjamin asked, what does the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence disclose about the nature of violence? In his view, violence is both law making and law preserving (Benjamin 1986, 287), and hence is central for power. Feminist philosophers take forward this notion that violence legitimates power both internationally and domestically. Norms that are forged through war and the legacies of colonialism become mobilized both in relation to the enemy that we fight, imprison, or torture abroad—as in the Orientalized other (Butler  2009; Owens 2010)—and in the restrictions on whom we welcome at home and how we treat them. Legal and political policies on asylum, immigration, and integration—though perhaps far from the theater of war—reflect the conditions that mark political and military engagements in war. Feminist analyses of war and terrorism also sharpen critical inquiries into violence that is so close to home that it typically remains invisible. The use of surprise violence to create grave uncertainty, to target individuals or groups who are unable to shield themselves against threat, characterizes not only the horrifying and spectacular terrorist attacks in public but also the intimate terrorist attacks against partners and families. Hence, stopping terrorism includes stopping rape terrorism at home (Card 2010, 172).

Gender and Sexuality There are significant feminist contributions to the study of war and terrorism from many disciplines, including Holocaust and genocide studies, international relations, peace and conflict studies, philosophy, queer theory, and security studies. Looking through the lens of gender and sexuality reveals the imperative to understand war and terrorism in terms of the embodied, gendered, and affective dimensions of human existence. Gender operates in the training of bodily comportments, values, habits of thinking, and imaginaries, including how one thinks about one’s nation, the foreigner, the enemy,

454   Schott and the nature of security. There are gendered meanings, for example, in the discourses and symbolic systems used in security institutions. Blurting out that one could imagine the suffering of the killed and wounded is out of bounds for defense intellectuals. They are trained by war games to calculate who to nuke, and if a team chooses to defend its populations instead of its territory, they are chastised as “wimping out” (Cohn 1993, 234). The training in and modeling of defense strategies make claims to what are rational, realistic defense policies, even though these claims about what is rational are based on an aggressive form of masculinity that associates emotions and vulnerability as feminine, and therefore out of bounds for security concerns. Gendered comportments litter the public images of war—including the caricatured masculinity of former president George  W.  Bush, who landed on a military aircraft carrier on May 1, 2003, fully decked out in combat gear with “a pronounced genital bulge, and a victorious swagger” to announce U.S.  victory in Iraq (Mann  2014, 7). Bonnie Mann views this as one of many examples displaying the power of gender to justify the operation of power (Mann 2014). In The Second Sex, Beauvoir analyzed how typical forms of masculine existence are based on an abdication of human plurality and vulnerability by projecting risk and vulnerabilities onto an Other, woman. Such maneuvers become not only a form of justifying a feeling of superiority and entitlement over women but also a form of self-­justification more generally. In Mann’s analysis, this form of sovereign masculinity characterizes the gender lessons of the war on terror. With these practices of self-­justification, certain forms of violence—those committed by our warriors—are justified as necessary and legitimate, while other forms of violence are viewed as barbaric and illegitimate. Feminists also ask about the kinds of militarized masculinity that are given weight in the training of fighters. In the modern history of militaries in the West, homosocial bonding has valorized homophobic forms of masculinity, which emphasize the effeminate, weak, and socially deviant nature of the enemy. As Sara Ruddick wrote, the soldier “who goes off to war singing of the ‘Persian pukes’ he is ready to ‘nape,’ the faggot assholes he is ready to sodomize, the dead and diseased whore he is ready to rape, expresses even as he caricatures this common military attitude” (Ruddick  1993, 110). Bonding through homophobia may involve humiliating and raping the enemy (the women in the enemy group, but also the male combatants), which are criminal violations of international conventions. In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia made a landmark decision in convicting three Bosnian Serb soldiers of committing rape as a crime against humanity (Bergoffen 2007, 121). When men are raped, homophobic prejudices further humiliate the enemy by feminizing him, as it is women who cross-­culturally are positioned as rapeable. Patricia Owens notes that the depiction of enemy combatants as sexually deviant has been a common theme post-­9/11. After the attack against the World Trade Center, posters appeared in Manhattan with an image of Osama bin Laden being anally penetrated by the Empire State Building and with the words “The Empire Strikes Back. . . . So you like skyscrapers, huh, bitch?” (Owens 2010, 1042). The horror among defense intellectuals of “wimping out,” the swaggering of a president in combat gear, and the posters that queer the sexuality of Bin Laden are all examples of

War and Terrorism   455 hypermasculinity in response to war and terrorism. Hypermasculinity, a term that has been widely used in the social sciences since the 1980s, refers to the adoption of an extreme machismo in males. It is an exaggerated form of masculinity cultivating features of virility, physicality, a view of violence as manly and danger as exciting, and a tendency to disrespect women (Craig 2009). Hypermasculinity is also a factor in the forms of sexual torture that have taken place in Abu Ghraib. Judith Butler argues that there is a civilizational war at work through sexual torture of the Oriental other, where the US Army casts itself as sexually progressive. She writes, “The point is not simply to break down the codes, but to construct a subject that would break down when coercively forced to break such codes” (Butler 2009, 128). And yet while the US Army portrays itself as on a civilizing mission and constructs and targets a population for its own shame about homosexuality, the US military is itself deeply homophobic and misogynist (Butler 2009, 129). Sexual assault, though invisible, is pervasive within the US military, with 20% of women in the US military having been raped. Men too are raped in the military. Although the percentage of men who are raped is lower than that of women, because of the greater numbers of men in the military the absolute figures are much higher, with an estimated twenty thousand sexual assaults against men per year (Schott 2015, 139). While oppositional movements in support of queer politics and queer sexuality are crucial in taking down homophobic institutional practices, Jasbir Puar warns against taking queerness as always critical of militarism, empire, incarceration, and torture. She argues that the opportunities for LGBTQI inclusion relies upon “specific performances of American sexual exceptionalism vis-­à-­vis perverse, improperly hetero- and homoMuslim sexualities” (Puar 2007, xxiv). Puar proposes the term homonationalism, to analyze the sometimes favorable associations between gay and nationalist politics that are racist, sexist, anti-­immigration, and neocolonialist. Reflecting on the role of gender in war and terrorism raises questions not just about military masculinities, but about femininities that are produced by militarism. Women became a permanent part of military service in the United States in 1948 and were allowed into US military academies in 1976 (Schott 2015, 139). Not only as members of the military but also as military mothers, wives, and daughters, women’s relation to the military has been crucial for societies fighting wars. Virginia Woolf lamented during World War II, “No, I don’t see what’s [to] be done about war. Its manliness; and manliness breeds womanliness—both so hateful” (cited in Ruddick  1993, 112). Women have supported war efforts through taking on the traditional feminine tasks of nursing the wounded, stepping in temporarily to work in factories until men return from war, and bearing the grief of the nation. Militaristic femininity eroticizes “our” heroes and overlooks the sexual assaults of “our troops,” ascribing assaultive masculinity to the enemy men. Militaristic femininity played a crucial role in Nazi Germany. The Cross of Honor of the German Mother was awarded to women who had given birth to the largest number of children, and the Lebensborn program encouraged “racially pure” breeding. Women can also be genocidaires. The former Rwandan Minister of Family Affairs and Women’s Development, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, was convicted in 2011 of crimes during

456   Schott the Rwandan genocide, including conspiracy to commit genocide, crimes against humanity, extermination, rape, and outrages about personal dignity. These examples challenge stereotypical understandings of gender that are present in the United Nations’ Women, Peace and Security Agenda that focuses on women as peacemakers and leaves the dominant political and epistemological frameworks about gender and security untouched (Schott 2013, 17). Anti-­militaristic feminists seek to destabilize these forms of military femininity and to challenge the logic of masculine protection, which protects the good woman, the subordinate citizen, but not those who refuse to be obedient to the rules of masculine protection (Young 2003, 4). Feminists analyze not only the many femininities made available by war and terror but also the position of the feminine in the cultural representations and imaginaries of violence. As Kelly Oliver notes, traditionally bombs and airplane bombers have been given the names of women. The plane that dropped the first atomic bomb in World War II was named Enola Gay, for the pilot’s mother. And the first atomic bomb was named Gilda, to pay “tribute” to the bombshell Rita Hayworth who played the title role in the film of the same name (Oliver 2007, 44). While such naming marks the association of the feminine with the heroism of the nation, the recruitment of women suicide bombers relies in part on the ambivalence towards the female body. It is the association of women with blood and death that feeds the imagination that her body can conceal a weapon while passing herself off as pregnant (Oliver 2007, 44). These contradictory images of woman as bearers of both death and birth express a fundamental ambivalence towards women in Western culture, located in a bipolar conceptual system in which women represent the opposites of both evil and good, hate and love (Beauvoir [1952] 1974, 162; Schott 2003, 241). These representations are unstable, so that evil becomes necessary to the good and the good risks turning into its opposite. The feminine represents both the virtuous values of the nation to be protected and the horrors of the threat of death posed by the Other. The double representation of the feminine as both womb and tomb is one psychological and cultural explanation for the proliferation of sexual violence in war as a strategy in the displacement of populations, mass atrocities, and genocide. Inquiries into the psychological dynamics of violence also include the recognition that there may be pleasure, a joy, jouissance (Butler 2009, 129), in committing torture and killing. This freedom from the law, combined with coercion, is vividly depicted in Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary, The Act of Killing, in which perpetrators of mass murders in Indonesia in the 1960s re-­enact their acts as if for a Hollywood musical. Pleasure in perpetrating violence, and in viewing the spectacles of violence, may be one reason public sentiment is loath to acknowledge the suffering and pain of others.

Political Frames of Violence Posing questions about gender and sexuality reveals the imperative to understand war and terrorism as experienced by, represented to, and remembered by embodied,

War and Terrorism   457 gendered, and affective human beings—whether they are combatants or civilians (Sylvester  2013, 65). These questions also show the need to analyze power and its legitimations. Gender operates through relations, institutions, and values, by which existing forms of power become viewed as natural and necessary, and challenges to them appear as unthinkable. There are other categories and distinctions, often intersecting with gender and sexuality, which legitimate abusive power relations. Analyses of racism, neocolonialism, global capitalism, and the battles over religion are also central for feminist analyses of war and terrorism. In the post–Cold War period, the great powers put aside at least temporarily the paradigm of “mutually assured destruction.” The United Nations 1994 Human Development Report launched the concept of human security, where individual rights to economic, food, health, political, environmental, personal, community, and political security became articulated. Feminist theorists have contributed to this shift away from state-­centered to human security by asking: Who is secured in their homes and on the streets? Who is represented as a threat to security and what political interests are at play in these representations? This construction of threat is sadly actual with Trump’s travel ban, initiated in 2017, which indefinitely bars most citizens from eight nations, six of them predominantly Muslim countries—Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Chad, and North Korea, as well as some groups of people from Venezuela—from entering the United States. Furthermore, feminist theorists ask, who is excluded from the rights of belonging? Arendt’s work on the relationship between citizenship rights and human rights has been crucial in showing that human rights do not provide the grounds of citizenship rights. Instead, human rights can only be protected if they themselves are grounded in citizenship rights (Arendt [1951] 1973, 293). Following Arendt, many feminist theorists also show how certain kinds of exclusions endanger the rights of those who are citizens in a nation-­state. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the current racial and ethnic profiling of Latinas/os/xs and Muslims in the United States are two examples of the link between the perceived enemy without and the perceived enemy within. Questions about recognition are closely related to the politics of exclusion/inclusion and the protection of rights. Who is granted recognition, dignity, worth, and respect, and what kinds of individuals and groups are excluded from moral and social recognition? Nancy Fraser argues for an alternative politics of recognition based on a “status model” instead of a group identity model. Such a model aims to overcome institutionalized relations of social subordination by establishing the misrecognized party as a full member of society (Fraser  2000, 3). Butler argues instead that recognizability precedes recognition, and that we need to reflect on the frames that delimit who and what is framed as a life that matters, a grievable life (Butler 2009, 14). These ethical discussions flow into discussions of ontology, as in Butler’s reflections on precarious life and vulnerability, which are also central for the politics of violence. Recent research in terrorism studies, or “terrorology,” has shown that feelings of ­marginalization and experiences of discrimination are risk factors for supporting a  radical interpretation of Islam, including support for combative jihad, and that

458   Schott v­ iolent extremists “are attracted by the spiritual, emotional, or material benefits of belonging” (Stern 2016, 104–5).

Feminist Contributions to Contemporary Challenges Amidst the plurality of feminist theories, it would be misguided to delineate one feminist framework for reflecting on issues of war and terrorism. Some have called for a feminist use of just war theory. Jean Bethke Elshtain argues that just politics must integrate the fundamental importance of families, friendships, and community. She proposed that the standpoint of the child—as representing what is most vital and fragile in human relationships—be the standpoint of just war (Elshtain 1992, 55). Other feminist scholars have distanced themselves from the view that just war theory can justify violence (Schott 2008, 130) or militaristic practices (Mann 2014, 18). Feminist anti-­militarism remains one prominent response to issues of war and terrorism. Sara Ruddick has called attention to the systematic character of violence, by which the violence that permeates social institutions and ideologies in peace time are inseparably connected with military worlds (Ruddick 1989, 586). However, not all forms of feminism are anti-­militarist. In some countries, feminists organize to procure arms to defend themselves and their people; others support military recruitment as part of the demands for equality in democratic societies, or as a means of improving women’s economic, educational, and life opportunities. And during one phase of feminism, women were militaristic in defining men as other and enemy. And not all forms of anti-­militarism are feminist. During the Vietnam War protests, women were often relegated to second-­class status, meanwhile gaining experience in organizing and rhetoric that contributed to the development of second-­wave feminism. Feminist anti-­militarism is distinctively feminist in being dedicated to the transformation of domestic, social, and political arrangements that penalize women and other subordinated groups. Feminist anti-­militarism is distinctively anti-­militarist in seeking to destabilize the masculinities and femininities that sustain the ethos and practice of war, and in challenging attitudes, policies, and scholarship that legitimate war as moral. New and rapid technological developments and globalization shape the contemporary horizon of thinking about war and terror. (Despite technological innovations, one should not forget that genocide and terrorism are often committed with low-­tech weapons like machetes, trucks, and knives.) Debates flourish on “killer robots” and whether human beings will be able to maintain meaningful control in the midst of big data, speed in processing information, and a reliance on semiautonomous and autonomous technologies, and as social media gives a new twist to Kant’s claim that “a transgression of rights in one place in the world is felt everywhere” (Kant 1983, 118). How can feminist reflection contribute to thinking about the future of this violence?

War and Terrorism   459 Human beings do not transcend gender in their relations with nature or with technology. Gendered imaginaries and norms are carried over to the building and designing of robots and the recruitment of drone operators, and in the calculations made to ensure or defend against planetary destruction. Feminist work in philosophy of nature and science and technology studies, including Donna Haraway’s groundbreaking essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” contributes to a posthumanism that looks for connections across the porous borders between humans, animals, and machines (Haraway  1991, 177ff.). Feminist work on autonomy is crucial for understanding claims to meaningful autonomy with respect to roboticized weapons, and feminist work on ethics and proximity speaks to the issues faced by drone operators who confront the face on the screen of the victim under drone surveillance. Feminist discussions of big data, surveillance, and security challenge the epistemological frameworks used by big data, which produce the normal and the anomalous that function as a “hieroglyph of terrorist behavior” (Aradau 2015, 28). This critical scholarship is crucial for holding governing institutions to account, which is necessary for maintaining their democratic legitimacy. In these myriad ways, feminist philosophy contributes to understanding the urgent issues of war and terrorism, and to the hermeneutical task of rethinking essential questions of conflict, peace, ethics, and politics.

References Aradau, Claudia. 2015. “The Signature of Security; Big Data, Anticipation, Surveillance.” Radical Philosophy 191 (May/June): 21–28. Arendt, Hannah. (1951) 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust. Oxford and Cambridge: Polity. Beauvoir, Simone de. (1952) 1974. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage Books. Benjamin, Walter. 1986. “Critique of Violence.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited by Peter Demetz, 277–300. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken. Bergoffen, Debra. 2007. “February 22, 2001: Toward a Politics of the Vulnerable Body.” In Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil, edited by Robin May Schott, 121–39. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso. Card, Claudia. 2007. “Genocide and Social Death.” In Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil, edited by Robin May Schott, 71–86. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Card, Claudia. 2010. Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohn, Carol. 1993. “War, Wimps and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War.” In Gendering War Talk, edited by Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott, 227–46. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Craig, Ronald  O. 2009. “Hypermasculinity.” In Encyclopedia of Race and Crime, edited by Helen Taylor Greene and Shaun L. Gabbidon. London: Sage. Accessed July 4, 2017. http:// sk.sagepub.com/reference/raceandcrime/n157.xml.

460   Schott Crone, Manni, 2013. “War and Violence.” In Introduction to Political Sociology, edited by Benedikte Brincker, 229–44. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Dietz, Mary  G. 1991. “Hannah Arendt and Feminist Politics.” In Feminist Interpretations of Political Theory, edited by Carole Pateman and Mary Lyndon Shanley, 232–52. Oxford: Polity Press. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1992. “Just War as Politics: What the Gulf War Told Us About Contemporary American Life.” In But Was It Just? Reflections on the Morality of the Persian Gulf War, Fraser, Nancy. 2000. “Rethinking Recognition.” New Left Review 3 (June): 1–7. Accessed July 5, 2017. https://newleftreview.org/II/3/nancy-fraser-rethinking-recognition. Haag, Pamela. 2001. “ ‘Putting Your Body on the Line’: The Question of Violence, Victims, and the Legacies of Second-Wave Feminism.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 8 (2): 23–67. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1972. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Seabury Press. Jean Bethke, Stanley Hauerwas, Sari Nusseibeh, Michael Walzer, and George Weigel. Edited by David E. Decosse. New York: Doubleday. Kaldor, Mary. 2013. “In Defense of New Wars.” Stability 2 (1): 1–16. Kant, Immanuel. 1983. Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Translated by Ted Humphrey. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Mann, Bonnie. 2014. Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Oliver, Kelly. 2007. Women as Weapons of War. New York: Columbia University Press. Owens, Patricia. 2010. “Torture, Sex and Military Orientalism.” Third World Quarterly 31 (7): 1041–56. Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University. Ruddick, Sara. 1989. Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press. Ruddick, Sara. 1993. “Notes Toward a Feminist Peace Politics.” In Gendering War Talk, edited by Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott, 109–27. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schmitt, Carl. 2007. Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political. Translated by G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press. Schott, Robin May. 2003. “Beauvoir and the Ambiguity of Evil.” In The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Claudia Card, 228–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schott, Robin May. 2008. “Just War and the Problem of Evil.” Hypatia; Special Issue Just War edited by Bat-Ami Bar On, 23 (23 (2): 122–40. Schott, Robin May. 2013. “ ‘Making Friends with the Beast?’ Reflections on the Women, Peace and Security Agenda.” Kvinder, Køn og Forskning 2: 16–28. Schott, Robin May. 2015. “The Reflexivity of Tears: Documentaries of Sexual Military Assault.” In Documenting World Politics: A Critical Companion to IR and Non-Fiction Film, edited by Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest, 133–49. London and New York: Routledge.

War and Terrorism   461 Simons, Margaret  A. 1999. Beauvoir and The Second Sex. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Stern, Jessica. 2016. “Radicalization to Extremism and Mobilization to Violence: What Have We Learned and What Can We Do About it?” ANNALS, American Academy of Political and Social Science 668 (November): 102–17. Sylvester, Christine. 2013. War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis. New York: Routledge. UNICEF. 1996. Impact of Armed Conflict on Children. Accessed June 26, 2017. https://www. unicef.org/graca/patterns.htm. Young, Iris Marion. 2003. “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State.” Signs 29 (1): 1–25.

Chapter 38

Femi n ist Phil osoph y of Hum a n R ights Diana Tietjens Meyers

Shocked by revelations of the atrocities committed at the behest of Adolf Hitler’s Nazism, the nations of the world came together after World War II to establish a ­system of internationally recognized human rights. In the name of human dignity and for the purpose of keeping peace, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. There followed a series of covenants and conventions that transformed the ideals promulgated in the UDHR into legally binding treaties. Although the UDHR and its successor documents are couched in the language of universality, it quickly became apparent that they failed to address pervasive forms of  abuse that mainly afflict women (e.g., domestic violence and sexual assault and exploitation). Because these types of abuse were deemed private matters, states abjured responsibility for them. Neither do the early human rights covenants address women’s needs for reproductive control, pregnancy health care, and employment opportunity. Because these needs were deemed peculiar to women, the international community  extruded them from the ambit of human rights. Although the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/text/econvention.htm) in 1979, it took a transnational feminist organizing effort to compel the international community to confront the gravity of violations of women’s human rights, and to this day realizing women’s human rights requires the ongoing vigilance and activism of  feminists worldwide (Bunch and Reilly  1994; Keck and Sikkink  1998, chap. 5; Reilly 1994; Rogers 1994). This chapter examines major trends in contemporary feminist philosophical thinking about human rights. The first section considers broad issues in human rights theory, and the second section takes up controversies regarding genocidal rape, migrant care work, and the feminization of poverty.

Feminist Philosophy of Human Rights   463

Feminists Theorizing Human Rights Analyzing the distinction between human rights and other sorts of rights and providing an account of the grounding of human rights are standard philosophical projects. However, relatively few feminist philosophers have contributed to debates on these topics, and some feminists have questioned the wisdom of adopting a rights framework at all. There is no doubt that feminist valorization of the ethics of care and feminist objections to ideal moral and political theory contribute to the dearth of feminist work on these topics. Still, there are noteworthy exceptions to feminist neglect of basic theoretical issues concerning human rights. Moreover, recent feminist critiques of human rights are more nuanced than earlier wholesale rejections of rights as masculinist rationales for women’s oppression or as Western ideological imperialism. In some respects, Martha Nussbaum’s approach to theorizing human rights is quite traditional. She begins by itemizing the human needs and capabilities that define “the human life form” (1995a, 76–80). However, in a notable departure from theories of human rights based on essentialist claims about humanity, Nussbaum characterizes the array of needs and capabilities she presents as a “working list” that is subject to revision in light of empirical investigation (1995, 80). Nevertheless, she proceeds to generate a set of capabilities without access to which a human life is not good and which, therefore, governments have a duty to secure (1995, 83–84). But again she departs from tradition in insisting that these capabilities can be realized in multiple ways that mesh with diverse cultures (1995, 85, 94). Still, her adamant denunciation of female genital cutting exposes the limits of her multiple realizability thesis (1999, 120–28). Nussbaum is no cultural relativist. In keeping with her critique of female genital cutting, she contends that her capabilities theory undergirds human rights and that it has far-­reaching implications for women’s rights (1995, 88). Maybe so, but her paper on female genital cutting sparked outrage among some prominent African feminists (see Nnaemeka 2005, 30), and I would urge that there is a better stance for Western feminists to take. Instead of claiming to know what’s best for women in diverse cultures, Western feminists should support community programs that promote and protect women’s autonomous ability to decide for themselves (Meyers 2000, 2016b). In contrast to Nussbaum, Charlotte Bunch and Brooke Ackerly offer explicitly woman-­centered views of human rights. Focusing on gender-­based violence against women, Bunch challenges the international community and national governments to stop regarding the vulnerabilities and aspirations of men as the basis for human rights protections, to acknowledge the varieties and the extent of violence against women, and to take measures to secure women’s civil and political rights, their social and economic rights, and their rights to nondiscrimination (1990, 493–96). Envisioning a feminist practice of transforming human rights to address women’s needs, as women themselves

464   Meyers understand them, Bunch celebrates the activism of the women of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and their success in establishing state-­orchestrated disappearances as gross human rights violations (1990, 497). Ackerly takes up Bunch’s calls to bring “female life experiences” to bear on explicating human rights (Bunch 1995, 11) and to bring awareness of intersecting forms of gendered oppression to bear on formulating human rights norms (Bunch 1990, 497). To develop a feminist account of human rights, Ackerly engages in a process of “deliberative inquiry”—a relational, egalitarian, democratic methodology (2008, 150). She obtains data for her theorizing by observing activists’ discussions at international feminist conferences and on feminist networking websites, as well as by conducting open-­ended interviews with activists about their work and their values (2008, 144). From these data, she extracts a list of the norms that guide feminist praxis around the world. Taking into account the norms enumerated in international human rights covenants together with the norms her informants disclose, Ackerly identifies a set of universal values that must be specified and implemented locally. The result, she urges, is an immanent human rights theory that is universal in its applicability (2008, 151). In her data collection and in her analysis of the data, Ackerly relies on “feminist curb cutting” epistemology. Her metaphor refers to the unanticipated benefits gained by seeking out the voices of marginalized people and appropriately responding to their concerns. Pressured by persons with disabilities, cities and towns that cut ramps into curbs at corners discovered that they facilitated the mobility not only of people using wheelchairs and other mobility equipment but also of people pushing strollers or hefting unwieldy loads (2008, 134). Feminist curb cutting is an epistemology of moral and political inclusiveness, both with respect to whose voices are heard and with respect to practical arrangements and policies that do not harm, and preferably benefit, many disparately situated people. As an advocate of feminist curb cutting, Ackerly is alert for signs of marginalization and attuned to the effects of power relations in communicative exchanges. Because her method commits her to attending to more and more individuals who have been silenced, her theory of human rights is dynamic. Despite worldwide appropriation of human rights as a discourse for pursuing gender justice, some feminist philosophers express reservations about human rights. Concerned about mobilizing support for human rights, Virginia Held suggests that care ethics might be more effective at promoting the goods codified in social and economic human rights (2015, 627–28). Carol Gould agrees with Held that care is a powerful motivator of moral conduct, but unlike Held, she doesn’t regard care and human rights as competing moral positions (2004, 145–46; 2014, 135). Like Bunch and Ackerly, Moira Gatens emphasizes that human rights are amenable to ongoing negotiation and culturally appropriate realization, but she warns that unless communities recognize women’s standing as agents of cultural change, human rights won’t secure women’s rights (2004). Although Theresa Tobin grants the value of human rights as political tools that can be adapted to particular social contexts, she worries that human rights covenants promote a top-­down approach to moral analysis that leads to historically decontextualized, absolutist moral condemnation of cultural practices like female genital cutting (2009). Serene Khader’s account of the values that transnational ­feminists

Feminist Philosophy of Human Rights   465 must endorse appropriates the goods that realized human rights secure as indicators of advantage and disadvantage, but it eschews human rights as such (2019, 40). I agree that human rights discourse, like any normative discourse, can be misused and that women’s local empowerment is necessary if human rights discourse is to advance their interests. But I would urge that a feminist politics of human rights often succeeds in promoting the cause of gender justice. Anita Silvers and Leslie Francis are less guarded in their critique of human rights than Held, Gatens, Tobin, and Khader. For Silvers and Francis, human rights are those rights that people, and no other creatures, possess in virtue of some distinctive cognitive, material, or interpersonal feature of human beings (2016, 186–90). Yet, as they point out, properties that exclude other animals from the class of rights bearers also exclude some human beings, and the implications for persons with disabilities are morally unacceptable. Setting aside metaphysical accounts of human rights and opting for a pragmatic account of civil rights, Silvers and Francis defend civil rights on the grounds that they are norms that communities develop, test, and strengthen and that the evolution of these norms is guided by the dual aims of increasing social inclusion and eliminating barriers to human flourishing (2016, 190–91). While I am fully in sympathy with Silvers and Francis’s metaphysical skepticism as well as their commitment to anchoring rights in processes of social reflection and refinement, it is clear, as Ackerly’s work shows, that theories of human rights need not be essentialist about human nature and that human rights need not be construed as fixed, atemporal norms. Thus, I suspect that Silvers and Francis’s critique of human rights is less damaging than it seems. Ackerly’s interactive methodology makes noticing silences and overcoming silencing central to her view (2008, 160–61), and Silvers and Francis’s call for expanding social inclusion makes vocal social movements central to theirs (2016, 186). Correlatively, empowering women to speak and ensuring that they are heard are key themes in the work of other feminist human rights theorists. In her work on the right to truth and reparations, Margaret Walker maintains that the right to truth entails the right to “speak one’s truth” and the right to “standing to speak as  well as know” (2003, 171; also see 2006, 18–19). Moreover, she argues that when requirements of interactivity, usefulness, fittingness, and effectiveness are met, acknowledgment of the veracity of victims’ testimony constitutes one form of respect for victims’ right to reparations (2010, 2015). Whereas Walker situates the question of voice in the context of transitional justice, Serene Khader situates the question of voice in the context of development work and the social and economic rights it aims to realize. Offering an account of the task of listening to individuals whose life experience is vastly different from your own, Khader invokes virtues associated with care ethics—including concrete thinking, loving attention, transparent selves, and narrative understanding— to counteract listeners’ tendencies to substitute their own values and techniques for those of the people they intend to benefit (2011, 753–58). From a different angle, I examine issues about the reception of victims’ stories of human rights abuse. To ensure that legitimate claims of human rights abuse are not  disbelieved, I defend a conception of victims that incorporates victims’ agency

466   Meyers (Meyers 2016a; also see 2011 and 2014). I then provide accounts of the diverse forms that victims’ stories take, the process of emotionally understanding those stories, and the activity of empathizing with the storyteller’s experiences (2016a; also see 2009). Finally, I propose ethical guidelines for various users of victims’ stories—individual consumers, professional scholars, journalists, judicial officials, human rights practitioners, and civil society activists (2016a). Whereas Walker and Khader explicate the contribution that attending to victims’ stories can make to rectifying particular breakdowns in respect for human rights, I explicate the contribution that attending to victims’ stories can make to building a transnational culture of human rights.

Feminist Human Rights Issues In this section, I shift my focus from broad theoretical questions about human rights to several types of human rights violation and nonfulfillment: (1) rape in war, especially genocidal rape, and women’s right to bodily integrity; (2) the care drain from the Global South to the Global North and the human right to care; and (3) the feminization of poverty and lax realization of social and economic human rights. While ­feminist philosophers have taken the lead in theorizing these harms, I hasten to note that they have also made major contributions to any number of other human rights issues—domestic violence, sex trafficking, reproductive rights, female genital cutting, LGBTQ rights, the rights of refugees, etc. I do not have space to cover all of these ­topics, and I admit that my selection of human rights issues for extended treatment is  somewhat arbitrary. Still, the issues I will discuss have attracted a good deal of ­feminist  engagement and represent a variety of feminist concerns—violence, care, and economic justice.

Genocidal Rape That genocide violates human rights is undeniable yet fails to capture its moral magnitude. Thus, Claudia Card classifies genocide as an evil and proceeds to explain what the term “genocide” adds to predecessor categories of human rights abuse and how genocide differs from other types of mass killing. Card highlights genocide’s impact on victims’ identity and emotional life (2003, 64). What makes genocide such an unspeakable horror is not only that it kills enormous numbers of innocent people but also that it inflicts social death (2003, 68). Appropriating Orlando Patterson’s conception of social death, Card claims that genocide attacks survivor/victims’ “social vitality” by severing them from their cultural heritage, thereby stripping their lives of the ­meaning that full immersion in a cultural community imparts (2003, 73). Although Card insists that no victim of genocide altogether escapes social death, she claims, somewhat paradoxically, that the degree of social death varies from victim to victim

Feminist Philosophy of Human Rights   467 (2003, 76). This explains why, in Card’s view, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who persisted in upholding Jewish traditions nevertheless suffered a loss of social vitality and thus a degree of social death. Certainly, the meanings of continued adherence to those traditions changed after the Holocaust. Extending her earlier work on rape in war as torture and terrorism (2002, 118–38), Card applies her views about genocide and social death to the case of genocidal rape leading to pregnancy and childbirth. In this connection, she maintains that the abuse the women endured dehumanized them and depleted their social vitality (2008, 185). Insofar as neither the mothers nor their communities welcome the children born of this abuse, the children too suffer social death (2008, 187). Robin Schott takes up Card’s line of thought and gives it a political interpretation by borrowing Hannah Arendt’s theory of natality. For Arendt, political life depends on human diversity, the condition of the possibility that novel ideas and agendas will gain traction in public discourse. Natality is women’s capacity to give birth to children whose fresh points of view sustain a vibrant politics over the course of generations. But, as Schott argues, the traumatic relationships between mothers whose pregnancies result from genocidal rape and the children they are forced to bear are inimical to the “capacity of beginning something anew” (2011, 13–14; see also Schott 2015, 405–6). Complementing Card’s work and Schott’s, Debra Bergoffen explores the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’s (ICTY’s) handling of genocidal rape. In recognizing the human right to sexual self-­determination, she contends, the judges upended the conception of human rights bearers as inviolate autonomous bodies and replaced it with a conception of rights bearers as vulnerable bodies (2012, 2). Rejecting views of wartime rape as a woman’s shame and a feminine liability, the ICTY reframed the issue as a criminal affront to human dignity and thus affirmed the dignity of the vulnerable human body (2012, 27, 69, 101).

The Right to Care Eva Kittay and Anca Gheaus tackle issues raised by the “care drain”—the migration of caregivers from the Global South to the Global North. They agree that children and other persons in need of care are entitled to be cared for, and neither advocates forcing women to care for their biological children or other kin. However, their agreement stops there. Whereas Kittay accents prospective caregivers’ right to care for their own family members, Gheaus accents prospective caregivers’ right to migrate and work as paid caregivers abroad. Kittay’s view is premised on a naturalized conception of the family. In accounting for the harm of the transnational market in care, she cites damage to the relational self and the familial bonds that are pivotal to identity, and she disparages care provided by grandmothers, aunts, or fathers as a second-­rate substitute for maternal care (2009, 63). Reinforcing this view, she calls the relationships between paid caregivers and their charges “ersatz relationships—formed only to be broken” (2009, 64).

468   Meyers With this understanding of the self and care in place, Kittay urges that there are human rights to give care and to receive care. The right to give care entitles caregivers to care for persons who are dependent on them, whom the caregiver genuinely cares about, and for whom the caregiver must care to sustain her own well-­being (2009, 68–69). In addition, the right to give care entitles caregivers to resources adequate to meet their own needs and those of their dependents (2009, 69). The corresponding right to receive care entitles dependents to be cared for by someone who genuinely cares about them (2009, 69). Writing as a Romanian migrant old enough to remember life under Ceausescu’s totalitarianism, Anca Gheaus questions the assumptions about gender and families that Kittay posits. Why, she asks, is care still regarded as a women’s issue (2011, 7)? Why aren’t the rights to travel, to work and seek economic betterment, and to migrate more central to this debate (2011, 2, 4, 14)? Underscoring the wrong of prohibiting migration as well as children’s human rights, Gheaus considers policies designed to reduce the need to migrate and to secure the welfare of the children of migrant caregivers. A more egalitarian distribution of wealth and provision of subsidized childcare would de-­incentivize caregiver migration. But given the improbability of poverty reduction, Gheaus asks which of the following backup options best serves the interests of migrants’ children: (1) encouraging fathers to do care work, (2) permitting migrant caregivers to bring their children with them, or (3) mandating support services for the children of migrant caregivers (2011, 16–17). Gheaus considers the third proposal the most attractive—the least disruptive to children, achievable in a short period of time, and adequate to children’s needs. These support services should include counseling to help children understand their parents’ decisions and to help them cope with feelings of loss or symptoms of depression (2014, 313–14). The costs of instituting these necessary childcare programs, Gheaus argues, must be borne by both the states where migrant caregivers work and the states from which they come (2011, 18–20; see also 2014, 315–16). Carol Gould and Ann Ferguson interpret the human right to care in a less individualistic spirit. For Gould, the right to give care is equivalent to the joint responsibility of individuals to realize the human rights to the means of subsistence, health care, and education, and the human right to be cared for is equivalent to the benefits guaranteed by these rights (2004, 146–47). In a similar vein, Ferguson understands the human right to care as a collective right to extend care to society as a whole by establishing generous social welfare programs (2007, 105). Moreover, Ferguson advocates social policies that encourage individuals to expand their caring relationships beyond their families and that eliminate the sexual division of labor in care work (2007, 105). The goals that Gould and Ferguson articulate are clearly laudable and compatible with care ethics. Still, Kittay might reply that it’s necessary to recognize an independent right to receive care from a particular, committed caregiver, and Gheaus might reply that Gould’s view and Ferguson’s fail to appreciate the special emotional needs of the children of migrants. In other words, care theorists might object that broadening the concept of care to include social and economic rights eclipses the moral insights that give care ethics its distinctive appeal.

Feminist Philosophy of Human Rights   469

Poverty and Global Justice By and large, feminist work bearing on social and economic human rights appears under the rubric “global justice.” Although Alison Jaggar maintains that some gendered inequities are best understood as forms of exploitation, she endorses human rights discourse to frame others (2014, 171–74). Moreover, she favors an open-­ended political account of human rights that accords with the consensus she attributes to Global South feminists whose lingua franca is human rights (2002, 230–33). Following her lead, I will take many feminist contributions to the topic of global justice to be implicit accounts of the obstacles to realizing social and economic human rights. Likewise, I will assume that many feminist proposals aimed at vanquishing global gender injustice implicitly serve to realize women’s social and economic rights. Taking up a theme first enunciated by Uma Narayan (1997), Jaggar is a staunch opponent of feminist analyses that treat culturally embedded patriarchal traditions as the prime cause of gender injustice. In her view, the global political economy is key to understanding the constraints and deprivations that women face (2002, 2005, 2009). Explicating “transnational cycles of gendered vulnerability,” she picks out two entrenched forms of feminized labor—domestic work and sex work—that exist on a global scale and systematically disempower women (2009, 41–45, 47). Supplementing her diagnosis of the forces that impoverish women, Jaggar calls on Western feminists to be self-­critical: to ask themselves how their own practices and the policies of their governments and the transnational institutions their governments control buttress those malign systems (2002, 247; 2005, 75; 2014, 175–76, 184–91; see also Khader 2019). The feminization of poverty, in Jaggar’s view, is a structural problem and must be attacked as such. However, shoddy poverty metrics obscure the prevalence of women’s poverty and thwart remedies. Jaggar advocates a metric that is sensitive to cultural values and expectations, but she stipulates that it must be cross-­culturally credible (2013, 247). Moreover, to ensure that women’s true circumstances are revealed, she holds that individuals, not households, should be the unit of measurement (2013, 248). To the extent that poverty functions as a placeholder for unrealized social and economic rights in Jaggar’s thought, her claim that poverty is a normative concept that is subject to collective critique and refinement is crucial (2013, 251). Conceptualizing poverty this way brings her treatment of poverty into alignment with the demands for dynamism and egalitarian dialogue that other feminists set forth in their accounts of human rights. Gillian Brock takes up Jaggar’s challenge to figure out how transnational economic structures perpetuate women’s immiseration and how they should be changed. Although Brock grounds her account of global justice in a theory of needs, she regards her proposals for bringing about global justice as concordant with demands that social and economic human rights be realized. According to Brock, the terrible toll that poverty takes in the Global South is especially onerous for women (2009, 142). Because of their unpaid care work, their employment in low-­wage sectors of the economy, and their work in the informal economy, women are especially vulnerable to economic upheaval (2009, 148, 152). It is imperative, therefore, that tax policy stop reinforcing these employment patterns (2009,

470   Meyers 150). As well, it is imperative that tax revenues be found to fund public services, for women’s precarious economic position disproportionately obliges them to rely on these services. Where should the requisite revenue come from? Brock strongly endorses the Tobin tax, a tax on currency transactions (2009, 152). She is more circumspect about but open to well-­designed tariffs, carbon taxes, and other taxation options (2009, 153). However, no tax reform will do much good unless an “international tax organization” is created to administer the revenues and ensure that the monies go to furnishing needed social insurance and social protection programs (2009, 155). Likewise, shutting down tax havens and outlawing accounting schemes that facilitate corporate tax dodging are indispensable to ending widespread abrogation of women’s social and economic human rights (2009, 156). I do not have space to discuss all of the valuable contributions that feminist philosophers have made to discussions of social and economic human rights. However, I would be remiss if I did not direct readers to several additional resources on this topic—Christine Koggel (2009), Serena Parekh (2011), and Ann Cudd (2014).

Conclusion I will conclude by indicating a couple directions in which productive feminist human rights philosophy might move. First, Serene Khader observes that development programs that secure women’s welfare agency (their capacity to access goods and services guaranteed by social and economic rights) do not necessarily promote their feminist agency (their capacity to contravene sexist norms and practices) (2014, 223–25). Khader does not reject programs that deliver subsistence goods and necessary services to women. However, because increased compliance with sexist norms can accompany improved fulfillment of women’s social and economic rights, Khader warns feminists not to be sanguine that women’s material betterment concomitantly augments their empowerment (2014, 243). Second, Ann Cudd offers a new approach to humanitarian intervention for the sake of women’s human rights. Critical of positing peace as the overarching purpose of international humanitarian law, Cudd urges that promoting autonomy justifies humanitarian intervention (2013, 366–67). However, because she recognizes that the humanitarian benefits of military intervention seldom outweigh its costs, she delineates a spectrum of intervention strategies ranging from the mildest (diplomatic persuasion) to the most coercive (regime change by force of arms) (2013, 368–69). Against opponents of international intervention to promote women’s human rights, Cudd argues for moderate interventionism. In her view, both liberal democratic states and transnational nonstate actors should actively support nonviolent feminist resistance movements that are working to realize women’s human rights elsewhere in the world (2013, 369–71).

Feminist Philosophy of Human Rights   471 Taking these papers as a pair suggests some promising projects for feminist philosophy. Khader’s line of thought invites reflection on the doctrine of the indivisibility of human rights—the view that no class of human rights can be fully realized unless all classes of human rights are fully realized. As valuable as anti-­poverty programs plainly are, it is doubtful that the core value of dignity that underwrites human rights is well served by programs that secure rights to goods and services at the expense of autonomy rights. Cudd’s line of thought clarifies the centrality of the value of autonomy to international human rights law. Yet, her work raises questions about the advisability of ­state-­sponsored intervention, as opposed to civil society intervention, in support of women’s human rights. Writing, as I am, at a moment when virulent right-­wing extremism is on the rise throughout the Global North, I have no confidence in the beneficence of national governments. For this reason, it seems prudent for feminists to distrust state-­sponsored intervention, for ostensibly humanitarian interventions are most likely fueled by ulterior, anti-­feminist reasons of state. In my judgment, it is far less risky for feminists to closely monitor transnational nongovernmental organizations and to support those that survive rigorous feminist scrutiny.

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chapter 39

The Gen der- Cli m ateI n j ustice N exus Adrian Parr

It is now general consensus amongst scientists that human activities associated with the burning of fossil fuels (gas, coal, oil), changes in land use, deforestation, use of aerosols, and black carbon pollution (soot) are changing the composition of the earth’s atmosphere. In turn, this is altering the global climate system. Independent analysis of global temperatures by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) states that since 2010, the earth has experienced the six warmest years on record (NASA 2017b; NOAA 2018). Changes to the global climate are affecting precipitation patterns and are increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events (heavy rainfall, severe storms, heat waves, droughts). Thermal expansion of the oceans and land-­based ice melting is causing sea levels to rise (NASA 2017a). The biological effects of climate change include loss of plant diversity and increasing rates of species extinction, with many more species currently on the brink of extinction as they struggle to adapt to changes in their habitats (Thomas et al. 2004). As the oceans absorb more and more carbon dioxide, pH levels in seawater are dropping, causing ocean acidification, resulting in the massive die-­off of coral reefs and the disruption of marine ecosystems (Hoegh-­Guldberg et al. 2007). The impact climate change has on people varies. There have been numerous reports in the media of forest fires destroying property and taking lives. Years of prolonged drought have caused extensive crop failure. Heat waves have killed the elderly and physically weak. Widespread permafrost melt threatens the traditional livelihoods of indigenous populations. Given that diseases such as malaria or cholera are sensitive to climatic changes, some infectious diseases will become more common as temperatures rise. Some coastal communities, such as those at Shishmaref or Kivalina off the coast of Alaska, are fast disappearing into the sea (Sheppard 2015). Temperature rise has also been linked to a significant increase in conflict (Burke et al. 2009). In short, climate change will lead to a hungrier, thirstier, sicker, more conflict-­ridden world.

The Gender-Climate-Injustice Nexus   475 Changes to the climate exacerbate current social, economic, cultural, and political inequities the world over, and not everyone will be equally affected. Indigenous communities or those who depend on natural resources will experience greater stress as seasonal patterns shift and weather events become more severe. Low-­income countries and communities are more vulnerable than high-­income ones. Coastal communities are most susceptible to flooding and land erosion as sea levels rise. Overall, climate change will intensify existing forms of human impoverishment and oppression. Within this matrix of climate injustice, women, and in particular women living in poverty, experience a greater degree of precariousness than men (United Nations Women  2008; United Nations Development Program and GGCA 2009). In short, climate change negatively impacts the gender gap in poverty, education, life expectancy, and health (World Health Organization 2014; Lambrou and Piana 2006). As Chris Cuomo and Nancy Tuana noted in their introduction to Hypatia’s special issue on climate change, a “gender-­justice perspective remains marginalized in mainstream climate justice theory and policy” (Tuana and Cuomo 2014, 534). They also point out that feminist theory problematizes the nature/culture, female/male dualism prevalent in patriarchal thinking and practice. A feminist perspective on climate change casts a spotlight on the institutionalized system of gender-­climate-­injustice operating across the social, cultural, economic, political, and environmental spheres. I, like Cuomo and Tuana, insist on the importance of challenging the gendered construction of climate change politics and ethics. Feminist climate change politics, I maintain, must interrogate the manner in which climate change does not proceed as a monolithic force; its gendered impacts are variegated and uneven. The ethical challenge of the gender-­climate-­injustice nexus is how to narrow, if not completely eliminate, the gender gap climate change intensifies. In this way, the gender-­climate-­injustice nexus has three salient concerns: violence, injustice, and inequity.

Violence Climate change increases the amount of physical, emotional, and sexual violence women encounter. In times of drought, females living in rural parts of the developing world are less protected the farther they venture away from the safety of home and their community to collect water. Some social conventions restrict the movement of women, making them less mobile than their male counterparts to migrate if needed. Often women have fewer savings than men to fall back on when natural disasters hit. Women are also more likely to experience increased burdens when caring for dependents if natural resources are depleted (Bartlett  2008). Displacement from extreme weather events has large numbers of people housed in emergency shelters. The living quarters of these accommodations are tight and lack privacy. Under these conditions women are placed in a compromised position as reports of sexual harassment and abuse show (Van Baaren 2016; Narang 2017).

476   Parr Climate change intensifies conditions of precarity because it damages the life-­giving systems of the earth, impeding their ability to function. Yet these organic realities are not merely natural; negative environmental impacts are compounded by economic structures, political systems, modes of social organization, and forms of cultural value. As such, some people, such as women and girls, are exposed to greater forms of precarity. “Precarity,” Judith Butler stresses, “designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (Butler 2009, ii). For this reason, she contends, these “populations are at heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and of exposure to violence without protection” (ii). Thus, the violence climate change inflicts is more than a natural phenomenon directly attributable to the breakdown or disruption of the earth’s life-­giving systems; it can also be attributed to socially constructed gender norms that disadvantage women. To connect climate change to women’s disadvantage is therefore to contend that (1) treating specific social groups differently produces dominant social and cultural norms; (2) dominant norms create tiered systems of cultural value and hierarchically organize society; (3) cultural value and social hierarchies form a structure of oppression, producing privileged and unprivileged social groups; (4) the more axes of disadvantage a minority group experiences, the more their capacity to absorb environmental stresses diminishes; and (5) women living in poverty experience several axes of disadvantage and therefore bear the substantial weight of climate change burdens. But how, then, do these axes of disadvantage work? Female gender norms, such as childrearing, homemaker, caregiver, and so on, form a distinctive set of conventions that are culturally associated with women (Narang 2017; Neumayer and Plumper 2007). One claim central to feminist thinking is that gender norms are not biologically determined; they are produced through a complex matrix of power relations that are discursive and material. Butler maintains that being a woman is neither natural nor innate. Gender norms are performatively produced; they are realized as they are enacted (Butler 2011). She explains, “To say that gender is performative is to say that it is a certain kind of enactment; the ‘appearance’ of gender is often mistaken as a sign of its internal or inherent truth; gender is prompted by obligatory norms to be one gender or the other (usually within a strictly binary frame), and the reproduction of gender is thus always a negotiation with power; and finally, there is no gender without this reproduction of norms” (Butler 2009, i). A norm is instituted through a process of repetition that relies upon defining itself against the nonnormative, hereby assuming the nonnormative within its construction. The production of gender norms is not merely abstract or symbolic for it has very real bodily effects that are incorporated into everyday lived realities. According to this view, when a girl is taken out of school in rural Tanzania to help collect water for her family, a gender norm is reinforced. The act of being removed from school or of collecting water, however, does not take place in a vacuum; it is part of a larger series of relations producing gender-­based disadvantage. A quick analysis of the cultural construction of this gender norm situates the norm—water collection is a

The Gender-Climate-Injustice Nexus   477 female duty—within a broader system of cultural value and power relations. For instance, it might include an analysis of the presupposition that a girl’s education is socially considered less important than a boy’s. That claim assumes a girl does not need an education because she will not use it. Why won’t she use it? Well, if society expects her to marry and become a homemaker, her everyday life will revolve around the private sphere, a space in which her academic education is believed to be of little use to her. These assumptions and beliefs structure the spaces in which men and women operate, supporting certain behaviors and excluding others. This process of reiteration and exclusion is what Butler describes as the performative production of feminine subjectivity, and when connected to climate change it disproportionately exposes women to greater violence, precarity, and injury. Social meaning is inscribed onto the environment; this inscription is part of a larger milieu of “power that orchestrates, delimits, and sustains that which qualifies” as woman (Butler 2011, xvii). Hence, the very notion that we are self-­willing agents in the world is the effect of discursive practices reliant upon a hegemonic gender.

Injustice Focusing on how the violent effects of climate change are linked to social and cultural institutions that do not support women in becoming equal subjects of recognition can displace other important considerations for how the gender-­climate-­injustice nexus works. If subordination and the frameworks policing or instituting normative gender behaviors, roles, and attitudes are all constructions, then there is no universal standard of justice that can be appealed to, for the standard only exists performatively. Surely, though, if we approached the goal of a just society, not from the perspective of what it means but rather how it functions politically, then we posit a utopian time and space through which our current political projects might articulate themselves. “Justice” as a utopian benchmark carries an immanent function. It operates as an aspirational goal that pushes politics forward and gets us to a new place. It infuses a transformative impulse into the present, to test the present with another space and time, making the present different from what it currently is. This is no longer a political struggle based on a claim to recognize difference; instead, it is a political project that invokes a common claim to justice, and in making the claim a common political frame is outlined. The appeal to justice disorganizes current social, cultural, and economic conditions with a view to reorganizing them. Justice in this sense is not absolute because it carries the present within it. In other words, the concept of justice does not precede history; it constitutes it and is constituted by it, for the appeal to justice depends upon a common investment. In other words, justice invokes both an ideal and real, bringing them into relationship with each other so as to produce a politics of critical realism that engages with how bodies, matter, economic forces, power relations, cultural values, and hegemonic systems coagulate and find investment in emancipatory or oppressive social relations.

478   Parr This moves the problem of gender and climate change beyond the frame of recognition to include social justice claims for redistribution and representation, to borrow from Nancy Fraser (Fraser and Honneth  2003). Fraser navigates the problem of gender injustice by developing a tripartite conceptual framework. Interlocking recognition, redistribution, and representation, she explains that when the struggle for recognition displaces class interests, political issues such as exploitation and inequity are replaced with cultural claims of identity. Each of these political projects adopts a different logic. The politics of recognition promotes group differentiation and specificity. The politics of redistribution aspires to dismantle socioeconomic divisions. With a view to minimizing the conflict between cultural and socioeconomic injustices, Fraser argues for pursuing both struggles in tandem (Fraser 1997, 31). Here is a quick snippet of how a social convention, such as it is a woman’s duty to collect water, connects with material changes in the climate, which in turn reinforce material inequities such as poverty, poor health, and reduced access to education. In a society where water collection is considered a woman’s duty, women spend more time collecting water, time that could otherwise be spent on generating income, which makes her more economically dependent than her male counterparts. Here gender norms preclude a woman’s earning capacity, where time poverty works to create a reinforcing dynamic of gender disadvantage. When we add climate change to the equation, it exacerbates restrictions arising from culturally constructed gender norms. For instance, as precipitation patterns change, some areas become drier, resulting in some women having to walk more hours each day to find water. Girls are taken out of school to help their mothers locate and transport the family’s water supplies. In turn, this has a detrimental impact on female educational outcomes. Then there are health issues associated with reduced water supplies, such as the spread of infectious diseases, not to mention the health effects that come from walking longer distances to collect water. Back problems arise when females physically transport heavy containers of water, and this is compounded when females carry water for longer periods of time. The United Nations underscores the connection between poverty and the number of hours a woman in the Global South spends collecting water. Indeed, the United Nations Development Program has calculated that women in Uganda spend anywhere between fifteen and seventeen hours a week collecting water. In Sub-­Saharan Africa approximately forty billion hours are spent each year collecting water. This equals a full year of labor for the French labor force (Watkins 2006, 47). The World Health Organization has estimated that the global economic return on investing USD$1 on water spending is a return of USD$2, with “combined water and sanitation interventions” having a “benefit­cost ratio of 4.3 at the global level” (Hutton 2012, 4). Arguments like these are used to justify economic development schemes that provide women with new economic opportunities, such as water pump managers or sanitation block cleaners. This is not inherently bad; both women and men need a source of income. That said, it is important to be mindful of the fact that the move from subsistence to independent living is not politically neutral. It turns a woman into a wage laborer. Changing a woman’s relationship to her environment also changes how she creates her

The Gender-Climate-Injustice Nexus   479 material life. We are now prompted to direct our analytic attention to the skewed power relations underlying the geopolitical landscape, for the differential power relations marking off the Global North from the Global South can also compromise the emancipatory promise of feminism.

Inequity Women across the world experience inequity differently. There is no “third world woman” who can be identified as a unified group, who suffers a particular kind of burden simply by virtue of her geographical location. Indeed, to characterize all women living in the Global South as oppressed is to both naturalize gender and, as transnational feminists have vigorously argued, inflict a form of first world feminist violence upon a diverse body of women. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak examines the violent impact Western views of gender equality have on subaltern groups. In her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” she illustrates that in saving brown women from brown men, the West does not liberate the subaltern. Instead, the Westerner acts from a deep-­seated “desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject,” rendering the subaltern transparent. This representation allows the West to assume it is a sovereign subject with “no geopolitical determinations” (Spivak 1994, 66). Intervening on the subaltern’s behalf to liberate her from the “uncivilized” practices associated with an undeveloped world, the Westerner speaks on her behalf. Hereby a twofold act of silencing takes place: imperialist and patriarchal. This action not only marginalizes a woman’s specificity but also renders her a nonsubject, subordinating her agency and leaving her with “no space from which the sexed subaltern subject can speak” (Spivak 1994, 66). Chandra Mohanty points out that the abstract category of “third world woman” erases the multifaceted histories and experiences of women living in the Global South. Consequently, the term naturalizes the subjectivity of women living in the developing world (Mohanty 1988). In much the same way as white Western women have struggled to liberate themselves from the hegemony of patriarchal power relations, the authoritative declaration of a “third world woman” is also an act of political domination. It assumes a unified and undifferentiated group that uses gender to eclipse other social and cultural specificities. Adding to Mohanty, totalizing women’s oppression within a Western feminist construct of third world woman not only colonizes the differentiated realities of women’s lives but also masks the geopolitical landscape of influence, power, indebtedness, and militarism through which women of the Global South appear as the world’s poor. Transnational feminism insists that the Western impulse to save Black/brown women from Black/brown men is not neutral; it must be understood in terms of a larger colonial project and the formation of a colonial subject through subjugation and negation. The gesture exerts power and authority over another culture and society, reinforcing the

480   Parr colonial dichotomy formed between civilized and uncivilized, whereby the West is associated with the positive power of being civilized and the “developing world” is the negative, or uncivilized other requiring economic development, cultural recovery, and social protection, all of which are articulated within a moralizing frame of salvation and redemption. If we return to the example of a woman walking hours to collect water for her family, to describe her disadvantage in economic terms, such as water collection diminishes her earning capacity, is to invoke a Western assumption that values paid labor over and above unpaid household labor. How productivity is gauged, assessed, and socially evaluated is not fixed. It may be true that a woman living in a rural village in Tanzania has a reduced earning capacity because of the many household chores she engages in. That said, she is far from unproductive. Rising early in the morning, she feeds her family, prepares her children for school, collects water, cleans, cooks, engages in subsistence agriculture, and perhaps sells some of her produce at the local market. Prosperity in her context may be calculated according to the number of children she has, how healthy she is, if she is a talented basket weaver or cook, whether her children attend school, good relations she shares with her extended family and community, and so on. Evaluating a woman’s extensive travel to collect water in terms of how much it impedes her capacity to generate an economic surplus is a neoliberal view that privatizes the very notion of prosperity in what might otherwise be a more expansive and collectivist understanding and experience of how prosperity works. Consequently, how we assess the impact climate change has on the gender gap must be mindful of sociocultural blind spots and the larger issue of capital accumulation—capital is not a thing; it is a process that depends upon appropriating the limits it encounters, placing these in the service of capital accumulation. It is the neoliberal drive to deregulate, privatize public goods, and create consumer citizens, all in the service of capital accumulation that creates the conditions of inequity, exploitation, and many forms of environmental injustice the world over. Extreme care must therefore be taken to avoid reproducing and legitimating the very structural conditions and ideological frameworks that produce inequitable social relations.

Feminist Futures It is a vicious circle, for the lower a woman’s socioeconomic status is, the more difficult it is to rectify inequitable gender differences from becoming further skewed by changes to the world’s climate system. It is therefore crucial that climate change agreements, policies, and adaptation efforts situate gender difference front and center in all facets of climate change policy, mitigation, adaptation, remuneration, resource management, and disaster preparations. Yet, this is a difficult task, especially when women continue to remain underrepresented in national and international climate and environmental policymaking circles. Furthermore, the development of gender-­appropriate technologies used for

The Gender-Climate-Injustice Nexus   481 more sustainable resource management and energy production is challenging in a professional environment that has more men than women in science and engineering. Not only do we need to implement a legally binding international climate agreement that puts a stop to the wrongdoing currently being inflicted upon future generations, other species, ecosystems, nonsentient organisms, and poorer communities and nations, but also we need a meaningful agreement, one that redistributes the burden of harm in ways that are attentive to how social marginalization and inequity work. Here harm is understood as multifaceted—economic, infrastructural, social, and environmental. Efforts to date at achieving an internationally binding and meaningful climate agreement have been disappointingly sluggish, and the agreements that have passed have consistently fallen short of what is realistically required if we are going to return global greenhouse gas emissions to 350ppm. The world is currently at 410ppm and rising. Whilst the slow pace of international politics might be frustrating for some, namely critics who highlight the urgent need to produce a binding agreement, the legitimacy of any international climate agreement hinges upon a variety of state and nonstate actors acquiring meaningful representation throughout the negotiation process. But is this enough to ensure the process of arriving at an equitable and inclusive international climate agreement? It is a tough call to make, especially when the public sphere of climate change policy and legislation is handicapped by the underrepresentation of minorities and is bedeviled by the overrepresentation of neoliberal views of economic development and social change. The politics of climate change urgently needs to accommodate intersectional political struggles. What kinds of spaces can sustain intersectional political struggles? Fraser draws our attention to the public sphere and the question of parity of participation. She distinguishes her view of the public sphere from Jürgen Habermas in four respects. First, she demands social equality be embraced as a “necessary condition for participatory parity in public spheres” (Fraser 1997, 80). Second, she pluralizes the singular view of the public sphere by including “multiple and unequal publics” (Fraser 1997, 85). Third, she maintains that the public sphere does not depend upon a hard and fast distinction between public and private issues. And lastly, it does not rely upon firmly separating the state, or what she terms strong publics, from civil society, or weak publics, those “whose deliberative practice consists exclusively in opinion formation and does not also encompass decision making” (Fraser 1997, 90). She clearly states that her notion of the public sphere is not a tool of legitimization; it does not set out to maintain “a different attitude towards ideal concepts” (Palacio 2009). Her diagnostic idea of the public sphere could be enormously helpful in diversifying the political stage on which climate change politics occurs as it exposes “injustices, disparities, limitations, the closure of publicity, the blocks on certain subjects” (Palacio 2009). Adding to Fraser’s notion of public spheres, I would argue that now more than ever, inclusive and emancipatory social movements, such as the climate justice and women’s movements, need to form tight alliances. They need to work across the horizontal plane of grassroots politics and the vertical line of institutionalized political processes, using the mechanism of the law and policy. This means working from the outside as a radical revolutionary force and from the inside as an evolutionary force of reform. The political

482   Parr charge of bastard solidarities of this kind come from producing multipoints of political identification. In addition to recognizing the numerous constraints women live with, feminist climate change politics works to instigate solidarities with other emancipatory and inclusive social movements. It does this by acknowledging and learning from the myriad ways in which minorities across the world negotiate environmental adversity. It works across the horizontal political stage of grassroots activism and the vertical axes of institutionalized politics in policy circles, lobbying, and party politics. Both strategies are important to effectively respond to the universal problem of climate injustice and the specificities of how climate change weakens autonomy. In short, the remedy to the gender-­climate-­injustice nexus is bastard solidarities.

References Bartlett, Sheridan. 2008. “Climate Change and Urban Children: Impacts and Implications for Adaptation in Low- and Middle-Income Countries.” IIED Human Settlements Discussion Paper—Climate Change and Cities 2 (August): 4. Accessed May 25, 2017.http://pubs.iied. org/pdfs/10556IIED.pdf. Burke, Marshall, Edward Miguel, Shanker Satyanath, John A. Dykema, and David B. Lobell. 2009. “Warming Increases the Risk of Civil War in Africa.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (49): 10670–20674. Butler, Judith. 2009. “Performativity, Precarity, and Sexual Politics.” Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 4 (3, September–December): I–XIII. Butler, Judith. 2011. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge. Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. London: Routledge. Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso. Hoegh-Guldberg, O., P.  J.  Mumby, A.  J.  Hooten, R.  S.  Steneck, P.  Greenfield, E.  Gomez, C. D. Harvell, et al. 2007. “Coral Reefs under Rapid Climate Change and Ocean Acidification.” Science 318 (5857, December 14): 1737–42. Hutton, Gary. 2012. Global Costs and Benefits of Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Interventions to Reach the MDG Target and Universal Coverage. Geneva: World Health Organization. Accessed May 20, 2017. http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/ publications/2012/globalcosts.pdf. Lambrou, Yianna and Grazia Piana. 2006. Gender: The Missing Component of the Response to Climate Change. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Mohanty, Chandra. 1988. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminist Review 30 (1, Fall): 61–88. Narang, Sonia. 2017. “Climate Change Drives Domestic Violence in Fiji.” News Deeply Women and Girls. May 25, 2017. Accessed May 26, 2017. https://www.newsdeeply.com/ womenandgirls/articles/2017/05/25/climate-change-drives-domestic-violence-in-fiji. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). 2017a. “NASA, NOAA Data Show 2016 Warmest Year on Record Globally.” January 18, 2017. Accessed April 22, 2017. https:// www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-noaa-data-show-2016-warmest-year-on-record-globally.

The Gender-Climate-Injustice Nexus   483 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). 2017b. “Sea Ice Extent Sinks to Record Lows at Both Poles.” March 22, 2017. Accessed April 22, 2017. https://www.nasa.gov/ feature/goddard/2017/sea-ice-extent-sinks-to-record-lows-at-both-poles. National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. 2018. “2017 Was the Third Warmest Year on Record for the Globe.” January 18, 2018. Accessed November 22, 2018. https://www.noaa. gov/news/noaa-2017-was-3rd-warmest-year-on-record-for-globe. Neumayer, Eric, and Thomas Plumper. 2007. “The Gendered Nature of Natural Disasters: The Impact of Catastrophic Events on the Gender Gap in Life Expectancy 1981–2002.” Annals of the Association of the American Geographers 97 (3): 551–66. Palacio Avendano, Martha. 2009. “Interview with Nancy Fraser: Justice as Redistribution, Recognition, and Representation.” Monthly Review. May 16, 2009. Accessed May 25, 2017. https://mronline.org/2009/05/16/interview-with-nancy-fraser-justice-as-redistributionrecognition-and-representation/. Sheppard, Kate. 2015. “Climate Change Takes a Village as the Planet Warms, a Remote Alaskan Town Shows Just How Unprepared We Are.” Huffington Post. January 6, 2015. Accessed May 17, 2017. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/14/shishmaref-alaska-climate-changerelocation_n_6296516.html. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1994. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press. Thomas, Chris, Alison Cameron, Rhys Green, and Michel Backkenes. 2004. “Extinction Risk from Climate Change.” Nature 27 (6970, January 8): 145–48. Tuana, Nancy, and Chris Cuomo. 2014. “Climate Change – Editor’s Introduction.” Special Issue. Hypatia 29 (3, Summer): 532–40. United Nations Development Program. 2009. Resource Guide on Gender and Climate Change. Geneva: United Nations Development Program and Global Center on Climate Alliance. Accessed April 22, 2017. http://www.un.org/womenwatch/downloads/Resource_Guide_ English_FINAL.pdf. United Nations Women. 2008. “Fifty-Second Session on the Status of Women.” United Nations. February 25–March 2, 2008. Accessed April 22, 2017. http://www.un.org/ womenwatch/daw/csw/52sess.htm. Van Baaren, Ellie. 2016. “After a Devastating Cyclone, Fiji’s Women Struggle to Rebuild Livelihoods.” UN Women. February 29, 2016. Accessed May 26, 2017. http://asiapacific. unwomen.org/en/news-and-events/stories/2016/02/women-of-fiji-look-for-support-torebuild-their-livelihoods. Watkins, Kevin. 2006. UNDP Human Development Report 2006. Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Accessed May 20, 2017. http://www.undp.org/content/dam/undp/library/corporate/HDR/2006%20Global%20 HDR/HDR-2006-Beyond%20scarcity-Power-poverty-and-the-global-water-crisis.pdf. World Health Organization. 2014. Gender, Climate Change, and Health. Geneva: World Health Organization.

chapter 40

Biom edica l Tech nol ogies Susan Dodds

The Rise of Biomedical Technologies, Bioethics, and Feminist Responses The history of biomedical technology is nearly as long as the history of medicine. However, the pace of advance in research and clinical applications of biomedical technology has increased exponentially since the start of the twentieth century. Until the middle of the 1950s, philosophical engagement with biomedical technologies was largely restricted to work in the philosophy of science and medicine. However, following revelations of wartime atrocities and the role of doctors and medical researchers in perpetrating these atrocities, the ethical responsibilities associated with medicine and research began to gain attention. Rapid development of medical technologies that were seen to significantly alter the ways that humans could control or alter cycles of birth, life, and death gave rise to a range of ethical, social, and political debates that have been given specific philosophical consideration (Callahan 1973). The contribution of philosophers to public debate about the use of biomedical technologies is one major element of the rise of bioethics as a significant subdiscipline of philosophy during the last half of the twentieth century. In parallel with the development of bioethics and its engagement with issues of ­biomedical technologies, second-­wave feminism gained significant momentum during the 1960s, and this intersected with concerns surrounding birth control, abortion, and reproductive choice. Central to feminist bioethics is attention to gendered power relations and oppressive social forces shaping health care decisions, reproduction, medical

Biomedical Technologies   485 research, and access to biomedical technologies. The rise of feminist engagement in bioethics, moral psychology, and epistemology has paralleled the development of medical technologies. Over time, feminist philosophical interventions in bioethical debates have shifted the nature of bioethical debate and have generated distinctive contributions to broader philosophical discussions and to feminist philosophy (Tong  1997; Sherwin 1992; Wolf, 1996; Marway and Widdows 2015). The feminist philosophical engagement with biomedical technologies overlaps considerably with wider feminist and philosophical engagement with these technologies as well as with debates and approaches within feminist environmental ethics, sociology and politics, critical legal studies, social studies of science and technology, and social theory. Characteristic of feminist engagement with bioethics is a focus on how medical technologies and the policies and practices surrounding them differentially affect women, and on the ways in which medical technologies and the policies and practices surrounding them serve to reinforce or dismantle systems of oppression. This chapter does not attempt to provide a definitive account of what makes a particular response to biomedical technologies a feminist philosophical account; rather, it describes a range of themes and approaches that are undertaken by those who describe their approaches as such, or that share family resemblances and engage to varying degrees with arguments and concepts that arise in philosophical, feminist, and bioethical approaches as applied to features of biomedical technology. This chapter focuses on feminist philosophical engagement with biomedical technologies, such as the development of in vitro fertilisation (IVF), genetic engineering, bionic implants, neural interventions, and synthetic biology. It also outlines some of the key feminist philosophical approaches to issues in biomedicine.

Choice, Control, Care, and Embodiment: Themes and Approaches to Bioethics and Biomedical Technology Bioethics as a multidisciplinary area of applied ethics arose at around the same time that second-­wave feminism emerged as a social movement and generated a women’s health movement. Bioethics tended to focus on medical technologies and health care, specifically on the dyadic relationship between physician and patient. It also acknowledged that many of the arguments around key ethical topics—such as abortion, euthanasia, research, access to health care, and compulsory treatment—hinged on debates in law and political philosophy, and sometimes ontology, as in the case of abortion rights and access to reproductive technologies. Feminists were concerned

486   Dodds since the late 1960s with many of the same technologies and practices as bioethics, such as access to the contraceptive pill, abortion, and medical paternalism. However, as Hilde Lindemann (2000) has commented, for nearly two decades bioethicists did not use gender as a category of analysis and feminists did not engage directly with the growing bioethical literature until the early 1990s. Feminist philosophical engagement with medicine and medical technologies was informed by the rise of bioethics as well as the women’s health movement, which sought to empower women’s control over their own bodies and to reinstate women as subjects of knowledge about their bodies as well as objects of knowledge. At the same time, feminists drew on the emerging environmental ethics literature to express concern about the ways in which medical technologies signalled the domination of nature and the social, economic, and political forces shaping technology choices. Early explicitly feminist and philosophical contributions to bioethics reflect this range of influences in approach (Holmes and Purdy, 1992; Sherwin, 1992).

Claims of Scientific Neutrality Feminist approaches to bioethics have been critical of the claim that science is neutral or value-­free and have drawn attention to the ways that scientific concerns have reflected the perspectives and concerns of scientists who, predominantly, have been (white, wealthy, able-­bodied) men, until recently. While scientists may strive for objectivity, their actual practices are shaped by their own experiences and perspectives, which go unchallenged so long as the experience of a largely homogenous group dominates science. For example, science has tended to view women’s bodies primarily in terms of their differences from an implicitly normalised male body, and therefore has understood and explained these differences as deriving from women’s reproductive functions. Feminists have criticised the way that bioethics has also tended to reduce feminist concerns in health and medicine to concerns about reproduction and fertility control. Despite that concern and some clear examples of works that go beyond this focus (Wolf 1996), a large proportion of feminist bioethics writing has been devoted to issues relating to reproduction, birth control, and reproductive technology.

Choice During the 1980s there was a significant bioethics literature on ethical issues relating to fertility control, reproductive technology and abortion, and the role of medicine, religion, and societal values in decisions surrounding these issues. Some feminist bioethicists drew on the language of liberalism in response to the religious or authoritarian moralism and paternalism underlying traditional medical practices. These feminists challenged medical paternalism and advocated patient autonomy and women’s choices in relation to their bodies (Tong 1997). Liberal feminists frequently

Biomedical Technologies   487 extended the language of civil rights movements to highlight the importance of women’s authority to make decisions about their own bodies and health care, even where such choices affected the interests of men or the wider society—for example, women’s choices concerning fertility control or abortion (Purdy 1996). These feminists rejected the view that the direct physical dependence of the developing foetus on the pregnant woman justified privileging the interests of the future child (or of the future child’s father) over the interests of the woman in her bodily autonomy.

Control The development of IVF and associated techniques to provide medical alternatives for otherwise infertile couples to achieve a pregnancy is arguably the first topic that generated significant feminist philosophical response to a biomedical technology. Feminist philosophers argued that while the ultimate decision of whether or not to undergo IVF should be the prerogative of the woman who would carry the pregnancy, they also critically assessed the ways in which patriarchal influences may shape those women’s choices (Lorber 1989) and the ways in which presenting the option of IVF to women reinforces oppressive social norms that associate women’s worth with their capacity to bear and raise men’s children (Warren 1988). By contrast to liberal feminist responses to bioethical debate about fertility control and abortion, radical feminists attacked the dominant knowledge and power structures shaping reproductive technology choices (Overall 1987) and the ways that these serve to sever relationships between human and nature or to treat biological capacities as tools for economic or social dominance (Meyerding  1982). By “medicalising” human ­biological processes, such as menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, breastfeeding, and menopause, the bodily processes that are typical of women’s bodies become problems that require a medical solution (Rogers 1999). Such solutions reinforce the expertise of medical practitioners over the women whose bodies are the subject of their research and provide a new avenue for economic interests to invest in technologies to address the purported medical problems. Regulation of access to reproductive technologies tended to reinforce gendered power dynamics and hetero-­normativity as well as class, for example, restricting access to IVF to medically determined sterile heterosexual couples with the financial resources required to pay for treatment.

Relationality and Care Feminists have also been critical of the way that dominant approaches to bioethics tend to individualise patients’ concerns, focussing on patient choice, informed consent, and autonomy. The emphasis on informed patient choice as an expression of personal autonomy has been criticised within feminist philosophy for failing to recognise that autonomy is developmental and arises through interpersonal and social relations of

488   Dodds dependence and interdependence (Nedelsky 1989; Code 1991). Feminist philosophers have approached the limitations of bioethics’ understanding of autonomy as informed choice broadly in two ways. Some have sought to subject the concept of autonomy to careful ethical and moral psychological critique, with the aim of developing a more plausible conception of relational autonomy that can be used to critically evaluate the social, cultural, and institutional contexts that shape personal autonomy (Meyers  1989; Mackenzie and Stoljar  2000). This approach has led to a shift from a focus on the provision of information (such as live birth rates, effects of super-­ovulatory drugs, complications of multiple births) to allow women to make informed decisions to a focus on the social and financial impacts of assisted reproduction. These include discussion about justice in access to reproductive technologies given the costs of egg recovery, embryo transfer, and embryo freezing and whether such costs should be covered by a universal health insurance system in light of the value of parenting genetic children (Downie  2011; McLeod 2017). Similarly, this broader focus on the context of reproductive technology choices shifted attention from the medical intervention to the legal and regulatory context, such as discussions about who should have control over frozen embryos in the event of a relationship breakdown, and whether or on what grounds IVF clinics could legitimately refuse to provide IVF treatment to unmarried women, same-­sex couples, postmenopausal women, or those who sought to use IVF as part of a contracted or surrogate parenting agreement (Bailey 2011). The second approach, influenced by Carol Gilligan’s (1982) work on the ethics of care, emphasised approaches to moral reasoning that are thought to arise from women’s involvement in relations of care (e.g., parenting, caring for those unable to care for themselves, taking responsibility for others) in analysing how new reproductive technologies raise ethical issues. An ethics of care approach rejects the impersonal moral calculations of the rational, atomised chooser in favour of an attitude of care and attention to maintenance of relationships (Tronto 1993). Amongst feminist philosophers, many care theorists are thought to emphasise what Tong refers to as a feminine ethic of care (e.g., Noddings,  1984), while others (e.g., Tronto  1993; Held  1993; Kittay 1999) use a care ethic to demonstrate the paucity of liberal accounts of the citizen for dealing with matters of justice in access to health care, including those involving biomedical technologies such as medical tourism and transnational commercial surrogacy (Parks 2010).

Narrative, Embodiment, and Phenomenology Feminist bioethics, more so than mainstream bioethics, is interested in the practical implications of normative claims for the lived experience of the people affected by the technology, policy, or practice. This arises in part from the feminist observation that experience is gendered and that the experience of those who are marginalised cannot be assumed from the claims of those in dominant positions (Donchin and Scully 2015). Feminist bioethics also draws on feminist epistemology and its commitment to

Biomedical Technologies   489 epistemic justice and humility (Ho 2011; McLeod 2002). The embodied experience of the person whose condition or impairment is the subject of biomedical technology or intervention is of particular interest to feminist philosophers working on these issues and is, as a default, recognised as having privileged access to knowledge about what it is like to live a life shaped by that condition or impairment. Feminist philosophers have drawn on narrative accounts of identity and agency to understand how neurotechnologies, for example, shape an individual’s sense of selfhood, or of being the author of one’s own actions (Baylis  2013; Mackenzie and Walker 2014). These philosophers start from the experience of patients who have been treated with a neural technical intervention and who state that they no longer feel themselves, that they are in some sense alienated from their true self, in order to assess whether our normative concepts of identity, agency, or authenticity are up to the task of explaining what is happening to the subjective experience of patients, and therefore how we should ethically respond to those experiences. Feminist philosophers working in the poststructural tradition have drawn attention to the ways that the sexed identity of the woman who is the subject of biomedical interventions is constituted through social discourses such that her embodiment is both the ground of her lived experience and the effect of those discourses. There is no knowable “nature” of that body outside discourse (Diprose  1994). Margrit Shildrick (1997), similarly, offers a feminist postmodern response to reproductive technologies that acknowledges the fluidity of identities and the embodied investment of women in reproduction to ground their status as agents in using new reproductive technologies (Mills 2016). On these approaches the embodiment of women is subject to legal and medical discourses that contribute to their oppression; equally these discourses can be challenged and subverted within an ethics of embodiment.

Current and Future Directions Some of the many strands of feminist philosophical engagement with biomedical technologies discussed previously are becoming less distinct in current discussions as insights from different positions serve to modify or nuance some of the claims of others. Similarly, some positions first identified by feminist theorists—such as the moral importance and inevitability of human dependence, and the inadequacy of informed choice making as the paradigm for autonomous personhood—have become accepted within “mainstream” bioethics (Beauchamp and Childress 2001). At the same time, feminist philosophical engagement with biomedical technologies has become more expansive.

Neurotechnologies and Regenerative Medicine As mentioned previously, the rise of neurotechnologies to identify and intervene in atypical neural activity, through deep brain stimulation or neural implants, for example,

490   Dodds has generated philosophical discussion about how the concepts of agency, identity, and authenticity are to be understood (Mackenzie and Walker 2014; Baylis 2013). What is striking about the feminist philosophical engagement with these debates is that, unlike much of the traditional approach to these questions in analytical philosophy, they proceed from the case histories and narratives of actual patients, rather than through counterfactual thought experiments (e.g., Parfit 1984). These feminists are concerned with the practical identity of patients who have received neural interventions and understanding how these medical technologies serve to challenge theoretical assumptions. Given the rapid developments in neuroscience in gene technologies and in regenerative medicine, it is likely that the development and use of these technologies will converge and in doing so they will raise new philosophical questions about how these developments disrupt assumptions about our moral agency, identity over time, and subjective selfhood, as well as our understanding of what it is to be human, conscious, or a member of the moral community. Recent work on the development of brain organoids or “mini brains,” for example, promises a better model of the brain for testing drugs and brain development (Shepherd 2018). The value of these organoids as models for impaired brains or for reflecting the physical process of brain development will be questioned by those who understand mental capacities as shaped by both our embodiment and our physical and social engagement with the world. Feminist philosophers will also question how these organoids will be used in developing treatments, who will have access to those treatments, and whether an organoid may be transplanted into a living person’s brain. Already they have been transferred into mouse brains to allow for further development (Mansour et al. 2018).

Disability, Therapy, and Enhancement Disability bioethicists like Jackie Scully (2008) and Anita Ho (2011) have drawn on the experience of people with disabilities to challenge understandings about how we ought to respond to disability. Scully, for example, describes disability bioethics as “the particular moral understandings that are generated through the experience of impairment” (2008, 9). This approach to disability serves to reshape how we understand the ethical landscape of disability from a focus on impairment to a recognition of moral understandings and a source of knowledge that is not available without the experience of impairment. Once the practice of disability bioethics is understood in this way, concerns about technologies aimed at addressing disability become problematised. At the same time the stated aims or goals of some of these technologies seem to be based on a misapprehension of the problem. Instead of asking how well a cochlear implant or the bionic eye will approximate “normal vision,” the question should be what a person with a hearing impairment or a vision impairment wants or needs to know about the way that the world around them is organised such that they can identify what would be useful to them, for example, to make them less disadvantaged in access to the various benefits that others can readily

Biomedical Technologies   491 enjoy. If this approach were to be followed by technology designers, then there may be a more successful uptake of technologies, and less philosophical ink would be spilled in assessing whether a particular technology should be viewed as a “therapy” or as an “enhancement” beyond species’ typical function (Karpin and Mykitiuk 2008).

Vulnerability and Capabilities For more than a decade there has been growing attention given to the moral and political significance of human vulnerability, understood as both an inescapable part of being human and a characteristic of some individuals who are particularly susceptible to a range of harms (Butler  2004; Luna  2009; Fineman  2010; Mackenzie et al.  2014). Vulnerability is associated with a range of bodily conditions (being very young, being very old, being a person with a disability, being pregnant, being a person of colour, having a cognitive impairment, etc.) and with a state of dependence. Given the ethical concern to protect those who are thought to be more vulnerable than others, it is likely that a range of biomedical technologies will be developed to address these vulnerabilities. In a world where work and employment is threatened with disruption by automation, ubiquitous digital surveillance, and social robots, it is likely that a future area of focus for feminist philosophers concerned with assessing the ethical significance of biomedical technologies will be in evaluating which technologies and under what circumstances these technologies support the development capabilities (Nussbaum 2006) and which may serve to generate pathogenic vulnerabilities and dependence (Dodds 2014). It is likely that those technologies developed by or to address the concerns articulated by those thought to be vulnerable will be more able to support vulnerable people and enhance capabilities than those designed to address the social problem of vulnerability. Nonetheless, the complex interplay of vulnerabilities will require careful and ongoing ethical evaluation in the range of contexts in which these as-­ yet-­ unimagined technologies will be deployed.

Acknowledgments This paper was supported, in part, by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science CE140100012, UNSW Sydney and La Trobe University.

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492   Dodds Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Callahan, Daniel. 1973. “Bioethics as a Discipline.” Hastings Center Studies 1 (1): 66–73. Code, Lorraine. 1991. What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Diprose, Rosalyn. 1994. The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference. London: Routledge. Dodds, Susan. 2014. “Dependence, Care and Vulnerability.” In Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, edited by Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds, 181–203. New York: Oxford University Press. Donchin, Anne, and Jackie Scully. 2015. “Feminist Bioethics.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward  N.  Zalta, Winter 2015 edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/win2015/entries/feminist-bioethics/. Downie, Jocelyn. 2011. “Resistance Is Essential: Relational Responses to Recent Law and Policy Initiatives Involving Reproduction.” In Being Relational: Reflections on Relational Theory and Health Law, edited by Jocelyn Downie and Jennifer J. Llewellyn, 209-29. Vancouver: UBC Press. Fineman, Martha  A. 2010. “The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State.” Emory Law Journal 60 (2): 251–75. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Held, Virginia. 1993. Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ho, Anita. 2011. “Trusting Experts and Epistemic Humility in Disability.” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 4 (2): 102–23. Holmes, Helen Bequaert, and Laura  M.  Purdy, eds. 1992. Feminist Perspectives in Medical Ethics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Karpin, Isabel, and Roxanne Mykitiuk. 2008. “Going Out on a Limb: Prosthetics, Normalcy and Disputing the Therapy/Enhancement Distinction.” Medical Law Review 16 (3): 413–36. doi:10.1093/medlaw/fwn018 Kittay, Eva Feder. 1999. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York: Routledge. Lindemann, Hilde. 2000. “Feminist Bioethics: Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going.” Metaphilosophy 31 (5): 492–508. Lorber, Judith. 1989. “Choice, Gift, or Patriarchal Bargain? Women's Consent to In Vitro Fertilization in Male Infertility” Hypatia 4 (3): 23–36. Luna, Florencia. 2009. “Elucidating the Concept of Vulnerability: Layers Not Labels.” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 2 (1): 121–39. Mackenzie, Catriona, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds, eds. 2014. Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Mackenzie, Catriona, and Natalie Stoljar, eds. 2000. Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self. New York: Oxford University Press. Mackenzie, Catriona, and Mary Walker. 2014. “Neurotechnologies, Personal Identity and the Ethics of Authenticity.” In Handbook of Neuroethics, edited by Jens Clausen and Neil Levy, 373–92. Dordrecht: Spring Publishing. Mansour, Abed AlFatah, J. Tiago Gonçalves, Cooper W. Bloyd, et al. 2018. “An In Vivo Model of Functional and Vascularized Human Brain Organoids.” Nature Biotechnology 36: 432–41. Marway, Herjeet and Heather Widdows. 2015. “Philosophical Feminist Bioethics Past, Present and Future.” Cambridge Quaterly of Healthcare Ethics 24: 165–174.

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pa rt V

F E M I N IS T E NGAGE M E N T W I T H I N T E R DIS C I PL I NA RY T H E OR I E S A N D MOV E M E N T S

chapter 41

Cr itica l R ace Theory, I n tersectiona lit y, a n d Femi n ist Phil osoph y Natalie Cisneros

Critical race theory emerged out of the lived experiences of people of color inside and outside of the academy. The term was coined in the early 1980s to name an emerging field within law scholarship focused on race, law, and power. This movement was made possible by a rich, centuries-long Black intellectual tradition exploring these themes and was informed by decades of social movement activism (Cho and Westley 1999). The Black scholars and other scholars of color who founded critical race theory as a field of study “shared not only a common background in student and community activism, but also an orientation toward racial power and inequality shaped by ethnic studies programs that the generation before them struggled to establish” (Crenshaw 2011, 1306). The movement arose from scholars’ commitment to grappling with the realities of white supremacy after the civil rights movement and their own experiences as people of color in mostly elite, white institutions (Crenshaw 2011, 1263). As a field of study, then, critical race theory was formed in response to the persistent hierarchies and exclusions that structure both the academy and the larger world, and it exists because of the theoretical and political organizing work of scholars of color.1 As the evolving conversation of critical race theory continues to inform and be informed by organizing and activist work outside of the academy, its contributions have 1  Describing the group of scholars who attended the first workshop explicitly devoted to critical race theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw also notes that “fully a third had been directly involved in the protracted and very public protest over race, curriculum, and faculty hiring at Harvard Law School six years earlier” (Crenshaw 2011, 1263–64).

498   Cisneros also crossed disciplinary boundaries within the academy. Over the decades since its emergence, work in critical race theory has been taken up by scholars in education, psychology, cultural studies, ethnic studies, political science, and philosophy, among other fields (Crenshaw 2011, 1256). And though this influence has been as diverse as critical race theory itself, the term “intersectionality,” which was coined by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, has been especially prominent across academic disciplines. Crenshaw first discussed intersectionality in a 1989 article to critique the “marginalization of Black women in feminist theory and in antiracist politics” through centering the lived experiences of Black women (Crenshaw 1989, 140). In the decades since, the term has been increasingly used in a variety of disciplines to describe the multiplicity of human identity, especially as identities are often constructed by oppressive structures of power surrounding categories such as gender, race, class, sexuality, and disability. Within feminist philosophy in particular, “intersectionality has taken pride of place in feminist theories that focus on power and social inequality, as it points to the ways that the relative invisibility of social location or speaking position can produce real world harms” for women of color and other historically marginalized people (McCall 2005, 1771). In this chapter, I focus on feminist philosophy’s engagement with intersectionality, which I argue is its most productive site of conversation with critical race theory. But this claim must be qualified in at least two ways. First, though intersectionality has emerged as “the way to theorize the synthesis, co-constitution, or interactivity of “race” and “gender” “ within feminist philosophy,” the term itself has been deployed in a variety of ways to mean different things, many of them inconsistent with Crenshaw’s theorization of the term (Carastathis 2016, 1). The depth and breadth of Crenshaw’s work on the topic is often omitted even as she is explicitly cited as the originator of the term and concept. This brings us to the second important qualification: though the term “intersectionality” was coined by Crenshaw in the 1980s, the concept comes out of a much older Black feminist intellectual and activist tradition. Black feminist thought, which has been visible in written work since the nineteenth century, has engaged critically with both the multiplicity of identity and the convergence of structures of oppression for women of color and other marginalized people for well over a century. This fact has often been elided by feminist philosophers who deploy the language of intersectionality solely in reference to Crenshaw’s work. A rich understanding of the rise of intersectionality in feminist philosophy requires that we understand this concept not only in terms of critical race theory but also as a philosophical contribution of the Black feminist intellectual tradition. To this end, in what follows, I situate the emergence of the term “intersectionality” within the larger field of critical race theory as well as relative to the Black feminist writings on power and identity that theoretically and politically prefigure it. In particular, I trace how intersectionality as a critical conversation emerged not only out of these two intellectual traditions but also out of activist and organizing work that has crosspollinated both movements since the beginning (Cho and Westley 1999, 1377). Next, I turn to Crenshaw’s work in particular, drawing on Elena Ruíz’s conception of “operational intersectionality” to name the difference between Crenshaw’s critique (along with

Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality   499 the Black feminist tradition more broadly) and the body of academic work that has simplified intersectionality to appropriate it in ways that are detached from its original political aims (Ruíz 2017, 335–36). Indeed, the ascendency of intersectionality in feminist philosophy has too often erased Black feminism while perpetuating “racist feminism,” which reifies the very harms that critical intersectional work is meant to uncover (Lorde 2007, 112). Finally, I explore the ways that Black feminist philosophers and other feminist philosophers of color have resisted the move towards operational intersectionality and point to how these thinkers have opened up productive, liberatory ways forward for intersectional work within feminist philosophy as a critical practice rooted in the lived experiences of women of color.

Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality Critical race theory was established in the space between two fields that had already gained some measure of recognition and institutionalization in US law schools by the 1970s and 1980s: liberal racial reform and critical legal studies. The formation of critical race theory was informed by scholars’ own experiences of the political exclusions and theoretical inadequacies of these two fields (along with legal scholarship in general) in accounting for the lived realities of people of color. That is, the movement was characterized by a desire to “move beyond the non-critical liberalism that often cabined civil rights discourses” on the one hand and “a non-racial radicalism that was a line of debate within [critical legal studies]” on the other (Crenshaw 2011, 1262). Critical race theory was thus established as an intellectual and institutional space in which to engage critically with the foundations of liberalism, including conceptions of equality, rationality, and subjectivity, in a way that acknowledges—and, indeed, centers—racism as a significant and quotidian reality in contemporary life that cannot be reduced “to matters of individual prejudice or a by-product of class” (Crenshaw 2011, 1260–61). Though now, as when it first emerged, the field coalesces around key perspectives and themes, it is far from static or monolithic. Crenshaw explains that critical race theory “is not so much an intellectual unit filled with natural stuff—theories, themes, practices, and the like—but one that is dynamically constituted by a series of contestations and convergences pertaining to the ways that racial power is understood and articulated in the post-civil rights era” (Crenshaw 2011, 1261). Critical race theory is not an ideology and is instead best understood as an evolving set of conversations. Leading scholars in the field, including Crenshaw, Angela P. Harris, Charles  R.  Lawrence, Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, Patricia  J.  Williams, Neil Gotanda, Ian Haney López, Robert A. Williams, and Cheryl Harris, work in a wide variety of areas, especially civil rights law, constitutional law, immigration and asylum law, language rights, discrimination, LGBTQ law, criminal law, Indigenous peoples’ rights,

500   Cisneros sovereignty, and labor law (Delgado and Stefancic 1993; Delgado et al. 2012, 3–4). Though critical race theorists work on a diversity of topics and from different perspectives, often drawing from different archives, the field is set apart by its critical engagement with racial power. Critical race theory is informed by the lived experiences of marginalized communities and is committed to the transformation of oppressive structures of power: “Unlike some academic disciplines, Critical Race Theory has an activist dimension. It tries not only to understand our social situation but to change it; it sets out not only to ascertain how society organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies but to transform it for the better” (Delgado et al. 2012, 7). These twin commitments—to critique and to political transformation—animate Crenshaw’s conception of intersectionality. Her theorization of the concept is explicitly rooted in her own personal experiences and political organizing work as well as her engagement with critical legal studies (Crenshaw  1989, 160–61;  1991, 1245). In “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” the first (and less often cited) of the two principal articles in which she introduces the term “intersectionality,” Crenshaw describes her critical intervention as a move to “center Black women . . . in order to contrast the multidimensionality of Black women’s experience with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences” (Crenshaw 1989, 139). For Crenshaw, this distortion and erasure of the multidimensionality of Black women’s experiences occurs across overlapping and reinforcing spheres, and in this 1989 article she focuses on three: antidiscrimination frameworks, feminist theory and activism, and Black liberation politics (Crenshaw 1989, 139). Crenshaw examines three antidiscrimination cases in which courts fail to redress discrimination because they refuse to recognize the multidimensional nature of Black women’s experiences. In one of these cases, Moore v. Hughes Helicopter, the plaintiff, a Black woman, alleged that her employer had practiced both race and sex discrimination. The court “rejected Moore’s bid to represent all females apparently because her attempt to specify her race was seen as being at odds with the standard allegation that the employer simply discriminated ‘against females’ ” (Crenshaw 1989, 144). The court ruled that she could not use statistics on sex disparity or race disparity to prove that she was discriminated against as a Black woman. By refusing to acknowledge that discrimination experienced by Black women is sex discrimination, the court limited Moore’s statistical sample to Black women of her rank, making it impossible for her to prove discrimination under the law. For Crenshaw, this case and the other two she discusses are paradigmatic of larger trends in anti-discrimination cases. Together, they point to the failures of the legal system to account for the experiences of Black women and to redress the persistent and concrete harms of racism and gender-based oppression. Crenshaw discusses how feminist and anti-racist activists also reify the marginalization of Black women. In her widely cited 1991 article “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” she describes this particular set of failures as a function of what she calls political intersectionality. Political intersectionality captures “the failure of feminism to interrogate race” and “the failure of antiracism

Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality   501 to interrogate patriarchy” and thus results in reinscribing the structures of power that marginalize and do violence to Black women and other women of color (Crenshaw 1991, 1252). For Crenshaw, relying on either a feminist or anti-racist analysis “constitutes a denial of a fundamental dimension of our subordination and precludes the development of a political discourse that more fully empowers women of color” (Crenshaw 1991, 1252). Indeed, feminist coalitions led by and organized around white women and antiracist movements led by and organized around men tend to reify the oppressive structures of power that do harm to women of color. Along with political intersectionality, Crenshaw develops two more concepts in the 1991 article: representational intersectionality, or “the cultural construction of women of color,” and structural intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991, 1245). The term “structural intersectionality” names the ways that the lived experiences of women of color are formed by race- and gender-based oppression and violence, ways that aren’t reducible to the experiences of white women or Black men. The cases she interrogates in the 1989 article point to the realities of structural intersectionality, as does her discussion of women of color’s experiences of domestic violence, rape, and the institutions that are supposedly intended to remediate the harms of racism and sexism. Crenshaw’s analysis shows, for instance, how structural intersectionality functions to make it difficult (if not impossible) for immigrant women experiencing domestic violence to seek assistance while avoiding deportation (Crenshaw 1991, 149–50). Even as she coins the term “intersectionality” and constructs a taxonomy of intersectionalities, Crenshaw’s project is not to establish a unified or timeless theory. In the introduction to her 1991 article she makes this explicit: “I should say here at the outset that intersectionality is not being offered here as some new, totalizing theory of identity. Nor do I mean to suggest that violence against women of color can be explained only through the specific frameworks of race and gender considered here” (Crenshaw 1991, 1249–50). Crenshaw conceives of intersectionality not as a universal theoretical framework but instead as a “provisional concept,” which she deploys to critically intervene in a particular social and political context and to resist its systematic erasures and violences by centering the experiences of Black women and other women of color.

Black Feminist Thought and Intersectionality When describing her work, Crenshaw repeatedly notes that her critical intervention comes not only out of a tradition of critical race theory (though she is a founding thinker of this field) but also out of the Black feminist intellectual tradition. She locates her conception of intersectionality within a genealogy beginning with “Anna Julia Cooper and Maria Stewart in the 19th century in the US, all the way through Angela Davis and Deborah King” (“Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality” n.d.). In the 1989 article in

502   Cisneros which she introduces the term “intersectionality,” Crenshaw draws on Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” to critique white feminism’s failure to grapple with racism and points to Anna Julia Cooper’s work to argue for the importance of centering the experiences of Black women in anti-racist projects. But despite Crenshaw’s own rooting of her work in this tradition, the history of Black feminist thought on this topic “is unacknowledged or altogether ignored by philosophers” (Gines 2011, 275). In response to this erasure, Kathryn Sophia Belle argues that key Black feminist projects of the nineteenth century, including those of Cooper, Stewart, Truth, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, as well as the contributions of twentiethcentury figures such as Elise Johnson McDougald, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, Frances M. Beal, and the Combahee River Collective, should be understood as “protointersectional” (Gines 2011, 275; 2016, 13–14). In the beginning part of the nineteenth century, for instance, Truth’s work linked abolition and women’s suffrage efforts, underscoring how the category “woman” explicitly and implicitly excluded Black women both conceptually and practically. In the twentieth century, the Combahee River Collective statement too made clear its commitment to the lived realities of marginalized people rendered vulnerable due to the confluence of structures of oppression: “The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World, and working people. We are of course particularly committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex, and class are simultaneous factors of oppression” (Combahee River Collective 1979, 279). These texts and many others within the Black feminist intellectual tradition share with Crenshaw’s account of intersectionality a focus on lived experience that is multidimensional, a critical interrogation of the ways that the experiences of marginalized people are formed by interlocking systems of oppressive power that often render them invisible and/or vulnerable to violence, and a commitment to political transformation. Indeed, like Crenshaw’s conception of intersectionality, this work begins from the lived experiences of women of color and other marginalized people in particular temporal and geopolitical locations and examines how systematic oppressions including racism, sexism, and classism result in symbolic and literal harm. Like Crenshaw, these “proto-intersectional” thinkers also critique and work to transform the feminist and anti-racist movements in which these lived realities are rendered invisible.

Intersectionality and Feminist Philosophy The elision of Black feminist thought has made possible the widespread appropriation and commodification of the language of intersectionality in the academy and within feminist philosophy in particular. At best, invocations of intersectionality that fail to understand and attend to its roots in Black feminism simplify it and vacate it of its critical

Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality   503 force. At worst, by misunderstanding intersectional thought and refusing to center Black women’s lived experiences, invocations of intersectionality often reify the very harms that this intellectual tradition has worked to acknowledge and dismantle. Ruíz calls this appropriation of the language of intersectionality “operative intersectionality,” a model of intersectionality that “operates under the banner of intersectional feminisms, having unframed the concept from proto-intersectional framings of lived concerns” (Ruíz 2017, 343). She describes how operative intersectionality, which is used as a theory of identity to describe any individual’s social location, “slowly supplanted black feminist’s account of intersectionality” (Ruíz 2017, 343). In this context, the insights of Black feminists and other feminists of color are often instrumentalized for the benefit of white feminism, not only in the work of centering white (and middle-class, cisgendered, ablebodied, heteronormative) experiences, but also to exonerate white feminists and shut down anti-racist critique (Carastathis 2016, 22–23). The rise of operative intersectionality has coincided with the emergence of a set of critiques of intersectional theorizing, ranging from concerns that the concept essentializes identity categories to criticisms that intersectionality holds back liberatory work by dismantling the category “woman” as a coalitional identity (Gines 2011, 275; Ruíz 2017, 343). Though these critiques are often leveled at intersectionality in general, it seems clear that their object is not the tradition of Black feminist thought out of which intersectionality comes, or even Crenshaw’s own contribution to that conversation. Instead, the object of these critiques is a totalizing theory of identity that is neither provisional nor situated within a political context. Like the traditions of critical race theory and the Black feminism out of which it comes, intersectionality is best understood in terms of contentious convergence, coalition, and conversation. By simplifying and miscasting intersectionality as an abstract theoretical framework, operative intersectionality uproots it from its grounding in both Black women’s lived experiences and the organizing and activist projects that gave rise to this form of critical intervention. The effect of this uprooting is particularly severe in the discipline of philosophy, which, as DonnaDale Marcano notes, has not opened up “the necessary space in which theoretical frameworks for Black feminist thought can develop” (Marcano  2010, 54). Indeed, in many ways academic philosophy—including feminist philosophy—has been deeply inhospitable to Black feminist thought and Black feminist thinkers (Dotson 2011). Black feminist philosophers and other philosophers of color including Marcano, Belle, and Ruíz have nevertheless resisted this move to instrumentalize intersectionality by divorcing it from its political and conceptual roots. Despite the ways that feminist philosophy has appropriated the term, Belle argues that “intersectionality remains an important framework for theorizing identity and oppression within and beyond the discipline of philosophy” (Gines 2011, 275). By emphasizing the dynamic evolution of intersectionality within Black feminist thought, Belle’s work resists operational intersectionality’s tendency to essentialize and depoliticize the term as a stable and universalizable theory of identity. Kristie Dotson’s work also shows how “intersectionality, by virtue of its demand for open-ended consolidation, is a valuable mechanism for the constitution of social facts concerning oppression, where oppression is understood as a multistable

504   Cisneros social phenomenon” (Dotson 2016, 43). Dotson locates her analysis within Black feminist thought to examine how an intersectional framework might attend to lived experiences that have been covered over by dominant ways of knowing. These projects make clear that, as Anna Carastathis argues, “if intersectionality has been uprooted and transplanted in various sites, domains, and contexts, its roots in social-justice movements and critical intellectual projects—specifically, Black feminism— must be recovered, retraced, and embraced” (Carastathis 2016, 5). Indeed, in spite of the overwhelming prevalence of operational intersectionality within the academy in general and feminist philosophy in particular, Black feminist philosophers continue to do this very work. In reframing intersectionality not only within the intellectual traditions of critical race theory and Black feminist theory but also relative to its roots in organizing and activism, these thinkers have recentered the experiences of Black women as the starting point for liberatory philosophical and political practice. Feminist philosophy’s relationship with critical race theory and with the Black feminist intellectual tradition has thus been a complex and in many ways incomplete engagement. The concept of intersectionality has been the most significant site of convergence for these theoretical traditions. But even as the term has become increasingly prominent in academic feminism, and in feminist philosophy in particular, its roots in these traditions and in the social movements that cross-pollinated them have been ignored and, at times, even actively denied (Carastathis 2016, 23). Indeed, the concept of intersectionality, which comes out of a tradition in which Black feminists have described and resisted the oppressive structures of power that constitute their own lived experiences for well over a century, has been decontextualized to refer to all experiences and operationalized to mean a universal theory of identity. Feminist philosophy’s failures to fully engage with intersectionality as a rich, dynamic, and contentious conversation has been—and continues to be—resisted by Black feminist philosophers. These thinkers have worked to reframe intersectional critique relative to its intellectual and activist roots and have recentered the lived realities of Black women and other women of color.

References Carastathis, Anna. 2016. Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cho, Sumi, and Robert Westley. 1999. “Critical Race Coalitions: Key Movements That Performed the Theory LatCrit IV Symposium - Rotating Centers, Expanding Frontiers: Theory and Marginal Intersections-Performing LatCrit.” U.C.  Davis Law Review 33: 1377–428. Combahee River Collective. 1979. “A Black Feminist Statement.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 42 (3–4): 271–80. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–67. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99.

Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality   505 Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 2011. “Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back to Move Forward.” Connecticut Law Review 43 (5): 1253–352. Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. 1993. “Critical Race Theory: An Annotated Bibliography.” Virginia Law Review 79 (2). Delgado, Richard, Jean Stefancic, and Ernesto Liendo. 2012. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. New York: New York University Press. Dotson, Kristie. 2011. “Concrete Flowers: Contemplating the Profession of Philosophy.” Hypatia 26 (2): 403–9. Dotson, Kristie. 2016. “Making Sense: The Multistability of Oppression and the Importance of Intersectionality.” In Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach, edited by Maeve M. O’Donovan, Namita Goswami, and Lisa Yount. New York: Routledge. Gines, Kathryn T. 2011. “Black Feminism and Intersectional Analyses.” Philosophy Today 55 (Supplement): 275–84. Gines, Kathryn  T. 2016. “Race Women, Race Men and Early Expressions of ProtoIntersectionality.” In Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach, edited by Maeve M. O’Donovan, Namita Goswami, and Lisa Yount. New York: Routledge. “Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality: ‘I Wanted to Come Up with an Everyday Metaphor That Anyone Could Use.’ ” n.d. Accessed August 18, 2018. https://www.newstatesman.com/ lifestyle/2014/04/kimberl-crenshaw-intersectionality-i-wanted-come-everyday-metaphoranyone-could. Lorde, Audre. 2007. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Reprint ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Marcano, Donna-Dale L. 2010. “The Difference That Difference Makes: Black Feminism and Philosophy.” In Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, edited by Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn  T.  Gines, and Donna-Dale  L.  Marcano, 53–65. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. McCall, Leslie. 2005. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” Signs 30 (3): 1771–800. O’Donovan, Maeve  M., Namita Goswami, and Lisa Yount, eds. 2016. “Race Women, Race Men and Early Expressions of Proto-Intersectionality.” In Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach, edited by Maeve M. O’Donovan, Namita Goswami, and Lisa Yount. New York: Routledge. Ruíz, Elena. 2017. “Framing Intersectionality.” In The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race, by Paul C. Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff, and Luvell Anderson. New York: Routledge.

Chapter 42

Qu eer Theory Gayle Salamon

Queer theory is a creature notoriously resistant to ontological capture. Michael Warner and Laurent Berlant described the difficulty in their “anti-­encyclopedia entry” titled “What Can Queer Theory Teach Us about X,” in which they suggest that “queer theory is not the theory of anything in particular, and has no precise bibliographic shape” (Berlant and Warner 1995). Queer theory does not possess a singular methodology and cannot be said to have common or even similar objects of study. Its intellectual lineages are diverse, its disciplinary locations far-­flung, and its political aspirations and effects unpredictable. Nevertheless, there are some shared characteristics that unite this body of work. Queer theory emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s to challenge two different formations in the American academy: the essentialist tendencies of much of the feminist thinking of decades prior, and the identitarian commitments of lesbian and gay studies, which was developing simultaneously and of which queer theory is sometimes considered a subset. Lesbian and gay studies emerged in the 1980s as a reclamation project whose goal was the “uncovering” of the hidden and suppressed lives and loves of lesbian and gay people. This search for gay and lesbian subjects was simultaneously historical in its belief that gay and lesbian subjects might be found and reclaimed through careful minings of the margins of history, and ahistorical in its premise that gay identity existed as a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon (Duberman et al. 1989). Within lesbian and gay studies, the term “gay” had been adopted as a way of shifting language about sexuality away from the more clinical and pathologized “homosexual” as well as to distinguish from earlier homophile groups. The term “queer,” in its embrace and reclamation of an epithet of abuse, aimed to transform weaponized language into a politically powerful form of identification. David Halperin relates that queer theory as a moniker came into being as something of a joke at a conference organized by Teresa de Lauretis. It was precisely the nonreferentiality of “queer” that could either cut toward radicality or provide cover for its opposite. Halperin suggests that although its initial use

Queer Theory   507 was deliberately and “scandalously offensive,” it became co-­opted by the mainstream: “Queer theory appeared on the shelves of bookstores and in advertisements for academic jobs, where it provided a merciful exemption from the irreducibly sexual descriptors ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ ” (Halperin 2003, 340). Later commentators lamented that “queer” had become merely the latest synonym for gay identity, precisely the consolidation that its earlier uses had tried to disrupt or frustrate. In musing about the identificatory possibilities of “queer,” Sedgwick suggested that perhaps all that was required for it to be true was the impulse to use it in the first person. Another foremother of queer theory, Gloria Anzaldua, adopted the term in a first-­person mode that brought her racial identifications into relief in her foundational book Borderlands/La Frontera: “As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.)” (Anzaldúa 1987, 102). Yet as ubiquitous as queer theory was in the American academy, few queer theorists adopted that as their demonym. If the project of lesbian and gay studies is to assemble and fortify a singular if not universal gay subject, queer theory intends to contest and challenge the subject. If the goals of gay and lesbian studies are liberationist, the aims of queer theory are to lay bare the regulatory forces and norms that inevitably underlie gender and sexuality. Rather than focusing on individuals and their orientation, queer theory brings into relief the structures—psychic, cultural, linguistic, political—through which sexuality becomes possible and legible. Siobhan Somerville describes the difference between lesbian and gay studies and queer theory thusly: “If much of the early work in lesbian and gay studies tended to be organized around an opposition between homosexuality and heterosexuality, the primary axis of queer studies shifted toward the distinction between normative and nonnormative sexualities” (Somerville 2014, 205). The concept of heteronormativity is one that queer theorists from a broad range of academic disciplines—philosophy, literature, history, sociology, anthropology—tend to hold in common. Heteronormativity situates queerness in a perpetually slant relation to the norm. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner define heteronormativity as “the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality—but also privileged” (Berlant and Warner 1998, 548). The concept of heteronormativity reoriented the questions that queer scholars would pursue: Not where are the queer subjects?, but rather how do we become subjects in the first place? Into what regimes of gender and sexuality are we conscripted, and through what means? In posing these questions, queer theorists share certain presuppositions: that sexuality is constructed rather than natural, that queer as a descriptor offers significant resistance to referentiality, that attention to the workings of power and its relation to recognition and legibility is of crucial importance in understanding sexuality. As Berlant and Warner put it: “without forgetting the importance of the hetero-­homo distinction of object choice in modern culture, queer work wants to address the full range of power-­ridden normativities of sex” (Berlant and Warner 1995, 345). Analysis of those power-­ridden normativities was aided by the work of Michel

508   Salamon Foucault. The advent of Foucault’s (1990) work, and in particular his History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, first published in France in 1976 and translated into English the following year, offered a challenge to this way of thinking about sexuality, and thus about gay and lesbian identity.1 His radical claim that the homosexual was invented, as a personage and species, and his analysis of the discursive production of sexuality would have a significant role in shaping the field. Foucault was a significant influence on two of the most central figures in queer theory: Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Both Butler and Sedgwick claimed that our identities are always circumscribed by forces beyond our choice or control while simultaneously arguing for the lived possibility, and political necessity, of enacting our identities in other than normative ways. The critiques of identity advanced by queer theory have been thorough, with three aspects emphasized here: First, whereas identity is a thing, identification is a process, a doing rather than a being. Second, if identity is a relation between similars, identification is about lines of affiliation strung between differences (identifying as or identifying with a group, for example). In eschewing identity in favor of identification, queer theorists have sought to emphasize the ways in which we are always constituted by forces outside ourselves. And third, understanding processes of identification requires attention to larger structures and flows of power. For this reason, queerness itself can only be understood in terms of the larger social structures in which it is situated. The philosophical foundations of queer theory are most apparent in the work of Judith Butler. Butler’s theorization of gender and sexuality emerged from a legacy of feminist thought that insisted on sex as a category of philosophical significance, but where the category of “woman” often went uninterrogated, either because its referent was unproblematically assumed or because it was supposed that political solidarity required a unitary subject.2 Butler was influenced by Simone de Beauvoir’s contention that it is woman’s situation and not her body that creates her condition, and Butler took up Beauvoir’s pronouncement that “One is not born, but becomes, woman.”3 Butler’s most enduring contribution to queer theory was her theory of gender performativity. Butler first articulated her theory of performativity in her 1990 book Gender Trouble, clarified it in response to critics in Bodies That Matter (1994), expanded it to consider intersex and transgender in Undoing Gender (2004), and reimagined as an intersubjective mode of social protest and resistance in Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015). Performativity challenges the conceptualization of gender expression as individual, self-­contained, and hermetically sealed, something that wells up from the deep spring of individual consciousness, offering a sense of certainty about the subject and her place in 1  On Foucault’s legacy for feminism, see Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures, and Penny Deutscher, Foucault’s Futures. For an alternative genealogy of Foucault and queer thought, see Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault. 2 See Feminists Theorize the Political for several accounts challenging this presumption. 3  On Butler’s relation to Simone de Beauvoir, Monique Wittig, and Gayle Rubin, see Salamon “Rethinking Gender.” On “the most famous feminist sentence ever written,” see the edited collection “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient”: The Life of a Sentence.

Queer Theory   509 the world. In Butler’s view, gender becomes consolidated as a result of the gendered acts that we repeatedly perform. She insists that there is not self that exists prior to its gendering, but rather that the gendered self comes about as a result of these repetitions. Gender is thus a doing rather than a being, though it is a doing that paradoxically comes to be read and understood as a being. The subject does not emerge prior to gender but with and through gender, and gender does not exist apart from its regulation but is that regulation. Through iteration, or repetition with a difference, Butler claims that those norms can be transformed, if not quite dispensed with. Gender, in this view, is a constant labor, never fully or finally realized, and lived through the body. But our habits of understanding cause us to interpret those acts of gender as evidence that gender is an aspect of personhood caused by a material and bodily something called “sex.” Butler inverted this ontology, suggesting that rather than a material thing called sex giving rise to an immaterial thing called gender, our bodily performances of gender lead us to surmise material sex as its probable cause. She thus calls into question “compulsory heterosexual identities, those ontologically consolidated phantasms of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are theatrically produced effects that posture as grounds, origins, the normative measure of the real” (Butler [1989]1993, 313). In Butler’s view, even the least hyperbolic expressions of gender are performed rather than natural. But normative genders and sexualities conceal their nature as performances through their repetition and their ubiquity. They become, in effect, naturalized, and retroactively assert their foundationality. At the end of Gender Trouble, Butler offers drag as an example of gender performativity, suggesting that theatrical or parodic aspects of gender such as drag can function as a model for the acquisition of normative gender as well as for queer gender or sexuality. Parody functions as such to the extent that its repetitions of the norm result in an unraveling of that norm, exposing it to be illusory. “Gender,” as Butler writes in “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” “is a kind of imitation for which there is no original” (Butler [1989]1993, 314). Queer theory, in all its forms, is an attempt to turn away from an understanding of sexuality understood as a facet of individual identity, in favor of viewing it as a product of social forces, what Butler calls in Gender Trouble the “heterosexual matrix.” Butler asserts that “identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes” (Butler 1993, 308) through the creation of a constitutive outside, in which identity sets outside and beyond itself a region of impossibility whose exclusion allows for the coherence of the category. But, as Butler explained, all identity categories are melancholically haunted by what they are required to repudiate. Thus, Butler emphasized the disavowed homosexuality at the heart of heterosexuality, bringing the resources of psychoanalysis to bear in order to outline the psychic processes by which such losses of gendered possibility are simultaneously lost as lived possibilities yet still maintained by the normatively gendered subject, buried but still reverberant. The radical potential in Butler’s argument is the room it makes for enacting norms of gender and sexuality otherwise, even when those norms are powerful and saturating. Indeed, as she has written repeatedly, her aim is to expand the conditions of livability for precarious lives, queer and trans among them.

510   Salamon Another of queer theory’s primary foundational figures was Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In her first book, Between Men (1985), Sedgwick disarticulates desire and affiliation between men from homosexual identity, reading works of Western literature for their “homosocial” bonds. Those bonds structure not only gay male culture, Sedgwick argued, but also all culture. In Epistemology of the Closet (1990), published the same year as Gender Trouble, Sedgwick claims, contra Foucault, not that a modern regime of the homosexual as personage had supplanted an earlier age of sodomitical acts, but rather that these different regimes existed in “unrationalized coexistence” (Sedgwick 1990, 47). Elsewhere in that text, however, Sedgwick leans into Foucault’s theorizations of discipline, panopticism, and surveillance, particularly in her theorization of “the closet” and its paradoxes. Like Butler, Sedgwick is interested in the homosexuality that lay at the heart of heterosexuality, and like Butler she is deeply critical of consolidated identity positions. Both thinkers theorized queerness as a radical critique of orthodox habits of mind, body, culture, and language. Sedgwick’s language is literary rather than overtly philosophical, and her fine-­grained queer readings of canonical literature are deeply inflected by a sense of play, even as she adopts and transforms the axiom as a favorite form of writing. Sedgwick imagines a queerness that was multiple, distributed, and heteroglossic. In Tendencies (1993), Sedgwick defines queerness as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.” She asked: “What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing?” (Sedgwick 1993, 6). In Touching Feeling, Sedgwick turned to affect studies, a branch of cultural studies that would be further explored by subsequent queer theorists.4 Much of queer theory emerges from feminist theory, yet not all its points of origin are anchored there. Gayle Rubin, whose essay “The Traffic in Women” (1975) did much to organize feminist discourse on sex and gender in the decades after its publication, was also a significant figure for queer theory. Rubin is a feminist anthropologist whose essay “Thinking Sex” (1984/2002) called for a new kind of theorizing about sexuality. The conceptual tools offered by feminism, she argued, had reached the limit of their usefulness for understanding the oppressions of queers and other sexual minorities. With this, Rubin upended Adrienne Rich’s earlier suggestion that lesbianism was best understood as an intensification of the experience of being a woman, leaving lesbian sexuality almost incidental to the continuum of womanly identification that found its furthest endpoint in bonds of affection, political commonality, or other filiation between women. Rubin also positioned herself against feminists like Catherine MacKinnon for whom relations of power were entirely derivable from relations of gender.5 If a feminist 4  On queer affect, see Jose Munoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down”; Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings; Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Heather Love, Feeling Backward; Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness; Tavia Nyong’o, “Trapped in the Closet with Eve”; and Halperin and Traub, Gay Shame. 5  See MacKinnon, “Sexuality, Pornography and Method.”

Queer Theory   511 framework took gender difference—restrictively understood as the difference between men and women—as the sole determinant of the relation between power and sexuality, then such a framework would have little descriptive purchase on the lives of not only gays and lesbians, but also sadomasochists, perverts, sex workers, those engaged in cross-­generational sex, and an always-­incomplete list of others. The persecution and prosecution of these groups meant that their members shared a commonality that transcended their identities and were bound together by their transgression of norms, even when those transgressions looked nothing alike. Though her concerns were less linguistic than Butler’s or Sedgwick’s, Rubin’s central target was normativity, and her goal was the expansion of lives that deviated from the “charmed circle” of procreative heterosexuality. Rubin called for a queer studies centered around practices rather than identities, a theory of bodies and pleasures, to cite the Foucauldian rallying cry. David Halperin, a classicist and cofounder of the journal GLQ, was another early queer theorist deeply influenced by Foucault. His book One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990) considers sexuality in the ancient world, enumerating two aspects of modern sexuality that were entirely foreign to the ancients: the idea that sexuality is an autonomous sphere, and sexuality as a force of individuation. The latter was a legacy of sexuality’s creation and capture by psychological discourse. As Michael Warner observed in Fear of a Queer Planet, prior theories of sexuality had tended toward either history or psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis remained a favored analytic within queer theory because it had offered to date “the most rigorous and sophisticated language about sexuality” (Warner  1993, 55). Psychoanalysis had always had queerness at its center, and its insights about sexuality were sustained throughout queer theory, thinking it not as a biological imperative but rather as what results once culture is done organizing our hungers and our aversions, our life drives and our death drives. To the proposal that “sexual orientation is a fairly clear and simple political matter, that discrimination should be eliminated but that gay people have no further political interest as a group,” Warner responds that sexual orientation, and society’s treatment of people based on sexual orientation, can only be understood in terms of the larger social structures that shape not only the reaction to queer identity but also queer identity itself. In 2012, Warner wrote an afterword speculation about the “time” of queer theory, a time which is always presumed to have already happened, as queer theory has often been characterized—from its very inception—as existing elsewhere or in the past.6 In “Queer and Then,” a piece whose title echoed Sedgwick’s “Queer and Now,” Warner delineated “the basic impulses from which queer theory took its point of departure: a broadening of minority politics to question the framework of the sayable; attention to the hierarchies of respectability that saturate the world; movement across overlapping but widely disparate structures of violence and power in order to conjure a series of margins that have no identity core; an oddly melancholy utopianism; a speculative and prophetic stance outside politics—not to mention an ability to do much of that— through the play of its own style” (Warner 2012). The essay is saturated with questions of 6  See Muñoz (1999) and Ferguson (2004).

512   Salamon temporality, which could also be said of queer theory itself, in which the notion of “queer time” has been a persistent and fruitful area of inquiry. Carla Freccero describes the struggles between anachronism and historicism in queer theory and advances a “fantasmatic historiography” in her book Queer/Early/Modern (2005), and temporality and perversion in contemporary queer life have been surveyed in Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds (2010) and Jack Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place (2005).7 One of the most generative and controversial moments in recent queer theory was the publication of Lee Edelman’s book No Future (2004), in which he mounts a critique of what he titles “reproductive futurism,” the cultural subsumption of all things good and hopeful under the sign of the child. Edelman’s work joined Leo Bersani’s influential essay “Is the Rectum a Grave” (1987) to advance what would come to be known as the “antisocial thesis.” This work was psychoanalytic in focus, strongly emphasized negativity and the death drive, and was for the most part unengaged with theories of gender or feminism, presuming a gay male subject that was radically self-­divided, if not shattered. In Homos, Bersani describes queer desire as “desire for the same from the perspective of a self already identified as different from itself ” (Bersani 1995, 59). In her reading of Bersani, feminist philosopher Lynne Huffer has suggested that for all its emphasis on difference, queer theory has too often presupposed a seamless and unified “we” able to speak and be heard, institutionally and beyond, claiming that “there is a consistently universalist logic at work in the deployment of the seemingly ­anti-­universalist category of ‘queer’ ” (Huffer 2013, 64). Indeed, the charge of false universalism has been leveled against queer theory from nearly its founding, finding one of its important articulations in Cathy Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens,” which called out the racial and class exclusions of a theory meant to represent marginality itself (Cohen 1997). Within sociology, Roderick Ferguson’s articulation of a “queer of color critique” in Aberrations in Black (2014) and José Muñoz in Disidentifications (1999) have taken up questions of race and marginalization within theories of the queer subject, and Muñoz wrote specifically against the antisocial thesis in his final book, Cruising Utopia (2009). Some of queer theory’s most prolific branches have been auto-­critical, enacting a rethinking of some of its foundational assumptions.8 Lisa Duggan’s diagnosis of homonormativity in queer thought (Duggan 2003) and Jasbir Puar’s articulation of homonationalism in Terrorist Assemblages (2007) critique of the ways in which a queer discourse can be conscripted in the service of neoliberal and conservative aims. David Eng’s theorization of “queer diasporas” in the face of queer liberalism considers the function of “the racialization of intimacy” in legal discourse, adoption, and racial reparation. At the time of this writing, 7  On queer time in queer space, see Samuel Delany’s seminal Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, as well as Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology. For works in queer theory that offer a corrective to the equation of the queer with the urban, see Scott Herring’s Another Country and Karen Tongsen’s Relocations. 8  See Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy, in particular his powerful reading of the racial politics neglected in queer celebrations of Lawrence v. Texas. See also his earlier Racial Castration for a consideration of psychoanalysis, racialization, and queerness.

Queer Theory   513 the liveliest debate in queer theory might be on the question of normativity and deviance in queer studies, evidenced by Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth Wilson’s special issue of differences, “Queer Theory without Antinormativity” (2015).9 In that volume, Heather Love offers a critical reassessment of queer theory’s self-­understanding as radical, marginal, and necessarily anti-­normative, and asks after the possibility of a ­re-­engagement with the “queer normal” that had for decades been an object of the study of sexuality in the social sciences (Love 2015). The newer field of transgender theory has both engaged with and opposed itself to queer theory, with which it has a significantly shared history. Its foundational works were deeply inflected by queer theory, even as its concerns were distinct.10 Susan Stryker has defined transgender as “the movement across a socially imposed boundary from an unchosen starting place” (Stryker  2008a) and has suggested trans theory as “queer theory’s evil twin” (Stryker 2004), while Mel Chen has written that their opposition suggests a “false dichotomy,” even as trans theory has asked how “one might excavate the trans in what has been taken and subsumed under the rubric of queer” (Chen 2012, ­135–36). The term “homonormativity” itself offers one significant example, as its use in trans studies as early as 1998 named the exclusion of trans people by queer activists, a trans genealogy that Stryker has deftly traced (Stryker 2008b). Some of the most significant work in recent queer theory takes up the issue of anti-­queer and anti-­trans violence, particularly against queer and trans people of color. To close by returning to ontological capture: Eric Stanley in “Near Life, Queer Death: Overkill and Ontological Capture” discusses what the ubiquity of anti-­queer violence means for the nature of queer being, particularly for queers of color. He describes attempts to extinguish queer life by “overkill,” which he describes as “such excessive violence that it pushes a body beyond death. . . . [O]verkill names the technologies necessary to do away with that which is already gone” (Stanley  2011, 9). Leaning into Fanon, Achille Mbembe, and Giorgio Agamben, Stanley describes queer and trans life as caught between the impossibility of finding an “outside to violence” and the necessity of keeping hope for a life lived otherwise.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands: la frontera. Vol. 3. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2012. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

9  See Wiegman and Wilson, “Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions,” and Annamarie Jagose, “The Trouble with Antinormativity.” 10  See Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” and Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back.”

514   Salamon Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Guest column: What does queer theory teach us about X?.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (1995): 343–349. Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. 1998. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (2, Winter): 547–66. Bersani, Leo. 1987. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43: 197–222. Bersani, Leo. 1995. Homos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, Judith. (1989) 1993. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Halperin, Jagose and Abelove. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, Judith, and Joan W. Scott, eds. 1992. Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge. Chen, Mel Y. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cohen, Cathy  J. 1997. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (4): 437–65. Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Delany, Samuel R. 1999. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York: NYU Press. Deutscher, Penelope. 2017. Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason. New York: Columbia University Press. Duberman, Martin Baumi, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. 1989. Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. New York: New American Library Books. Duggan, Lisa. 2003. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Beacon Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Eng, David L. 2001. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Eng, David L. 2010. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ferguson, Roderick A. 2004. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. Freccero, Carla. 2005. Queer/Early/Modern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: NYU Press. Halperin, David M. 1990. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York and London: Routledge. Halperin, David  M. 2003. “The Normalization of Queer Theory.” Journal of Homosexuality 45 (2–4): 339–43. Halperin, David M., and Valerie Traub, eds. 2009. Gay Shame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Queer Theory   515 Herring, Scott. 2010. Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism. New York: NYU Press. Huffer, Lynne. 2010. Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Huffer, Lynne. 2013. Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex. New York: Columbia University Press. Love, Heather. 2015. “Doing Being Deviant: Deviance Studies, Description, and the Queer Ordinary.” Differences 26 (1): 74–95. Love, Heather. 2009. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Gay History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacKinnon, Catherine  A. 1989. “ ‘Sexuality, Pornography, and Method’: Pleasure under Patriarchy.” Ethics 99 (2): 314–46. Mann, Bonnie, and Martina Ferrari, eds. “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient”: The Life of a Sentence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. McWhorter, Ladelle. 1999. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press. Nyong’o, Tavia. 2010. “Trapped in the Closet with Eve.” Criticism 52 (2): 243–51. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rich, Adrienne. 1980. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5 (4): 631–60. Rubin, Gayle. 1975. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press. Rubin, Gayle. 1984/2002. “Thinking Sex.” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Halberin, Jagose, and Abelove. New York and London: Routledge. Salamon, Gayle. 2008. “Rethinking Gender: Judith Butler and Feminist Philosophy.” In The History of Continental Philosophy, Vol. 8, edited by Alan D. Schrift. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Performativity, Pedagogy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Somerville, Siobhan B. 2014. “Queer.” In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, 187–91. New York: NYU Press. Stanley, Eric. 2011. “Near Life, Queer Death: Overkill and Ontological Capture.” Social Text 29 (2 (107)): 1–19. Stone, Sandy. 1989. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” In Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by Julia J. Epstein and Kristina Staub. New York: Routledge. Stryker, Susan. 1994. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (3): 237–54. Stryker, Susan. 2004. “Transgender studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10 (2): 212–15.

516   Salamon Stryker, Susan. 2008a. Transgender History. New York: Seal Press. Stryker, Susan. 2008b. “Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity.” Radical History Review 100: 145–57. Tongson, Karen. 2011. Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries. New York: NYU Press. Warner, Michael, ed. 1993. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. University of Minnesota Press. Warner, Michael. 2012. “Queer and Then?” Chronicle of Higher Education. January 1, 2012. Wiegman, Robyn, and Elizabeth Wilson. 2015. “Queer Theory without Antinormativity.” Differences 26 (1, May).

chapter 43

Femi n ism a n d Disa bilit y Theory Licia Carlson

The past century has witnessed the disability rights movement, the birth of the ­interdisciplinary field of disability studies, and the emergence of a robust, pluralistic body of disability theories that have radically transformed the lives of people with disabilities (through activism, praxis, and legal and social reform) and established the presence of disability in academic scholarship. Feminist disability scholars and activists have played a central role in these developments and have had a profound impact on the emergence of feminist philosophical work on disability. Though philosophy, as a discipline, has been somewhat slower than others to enter the field of critical disability theory, this does not mean that disability has been absent from philosophy altogether. Examples of disability have figured into both historical and contemporary philosophical discussions, often as marginal cases in moral philosophy and as outliers or thought experiments in theories of justice. Not surprisingly, disability has appeared as a topic in its own right in bioethics, given that a medicalized conception of disability has traditionally dominated this field. As these examples suggest, the mere presence of disability in philosophical discourse does not imply a critical engagement with its meaning and significance, nor does it guarantee the inclusion of the perspectives and voices of people with disabilities; an acknowledgment of the forms of oppression, discrimination, and injustice to which people with disabilities have been subjected; or a commitment to exposing and challenging these social structures and dynamics. In recent decades, however, these latter approaches, consonant with critical disability theories, have taken hold in philosophy as well. Feminist philosophers have been instrumental in this regard, engaging with scholars and activists in the areas of disability studies, critical race theory, queer theory, and with feminists in other disciplines. In what follows, I map out connections between feminist and disability theories to bring into relief the multiple ways that feminist philosophers are partaking in these conversations. The divisions of this chapter are somewhat artificial and, as there are

518   Carlson overlaps between them, it is best to think of these reflections as three variations on a theme. I begin by exploring what is distinctive about feminist approaches to disability. I then turn to examples of feminist work on disability in a number of areas of philosophy: metaphysics/ontology, the history of philosophy, epistemology, social/political philosophy, ethics, and bioethics. The final section highlights and revisits certain central themes and identifies future directions for feminist philosophies of disability.

Feminist Approaches to Disability There are many ways in which feminism informs work on disability, and vice versa. In “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues that “integrating disability as a category of analysis and a system of representation deepens, expands, and challenges feminist theory” (2004, 75). The dynamic interplay between feminist and disability theories has proven to be mutually beneficial in yielding critical challenges for each. It has laid the foundation for generative, transformative collaborations between them, and has enabled the emergence of distinctly feminist disability theories and philosophies. Much of the work in this area owes its genesis to critiques leveled against feminist theory and the feminist movement by women with disabilities. Disability scholars/ activists exposed the ableism inherent in feminism, pointing to the exclusion of women with disabilities from feminist thought; the exploitation of ableist metaphors and assumptions in making the case for gender justice, reproductive rights, and equality; and the misrepresentations and distortions of disability in discussions of a broad range of issues, including motherhood, sexuality, and gender identity (Fine and Asch 1988; Finger  1985; Morris  1996, 1998; Smith and Hutchison  2004; Garland-Thomson 1997, 2004; Browne and Connors 1985; Linton 1998). In challenging the exclusion of disabled women’s voices from both the feminist and disability rights movements, these early scholar-­activists revealed the dissonances between feminist critiques and the lived realities and experiences of women with disabilities and established new, more inclusive theoretical and political spaces. What, then, characterizes feminist approaches to disability? While there is not a single, univocal feminist theory of disability, it is possible to identify certain common themes and methods. Feminist disability theorists have taken up a broad array of topics that have been central to feminist thought, including conceptions of the body and embodiment, autonomy and agency, dependence and independence, theories of identity, and the politics of self-­definition. They have also targeted many of the dualisms challenged in other feminist contexts, including mind/body, reason/emotion, and sex/ gender. In re-­ examining these dualisms from the perspective of disability and introducing and problematizing new dichotomies (e.g., impairment/disability, able/ disabled), they both deepen and complicate these critiques. There is also a shared desire to expose, theorize, and redress social, political, and conceptual forms of oppression,

Feminism and Disability Theory   519 discrimination, and injustice. The acknowledgment that these complex systems perpetuate distinct and overlapping forms of sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, and ableism points to another feature of many feminist approaches to disability: a commitment to intersectionality. Theorizing gender, race, sexuality, class, and disability together has produced a broad array of interdisciplinary work that engages with feminist, queer, and critical race theories. The focus on intersectional and interdisciplinary research is just one example of how work in feminist disability theory employs certain feminist methodologies. The notion of the personal as political has been a cornerstone of the feminist and disability rights movements, and feminist disability scholars embrace praxis by taking the complex, lived experience of disability as a starting point for theoretical inquiry, including ­marginalized voices, and intertwining feminist scholarship with political activism. There is also a commitment to addressing epistemic privilege and problematizing certain conceptions of authority and objectivity in the production of knowledge. Questions regarding the politics of self-­definition raised by Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought (2000) and the challenges that Linda Martín Alcoff addresses in “The Problem of Speaking for Others” (1992) take on new significance when taken up in the context of disability. Disability scholars have examined the varied and complex politics of claiming disability as an identity (Linton 1998), the benefits and hazards of passing (Brune and Wilson 2013), and both the oppressive and liberatory dimensions of performing disability. The plethora of works that give voice to the experience of disability challenge what Susan Wendell has called the “cognitive and social authority of medicine” and shift epistemic authority away from the traditional “expert” (Mairs 1996; Kleege 1999; Wendell 1996; A. Wong 2020). While valorizing narratives has been central to feminist scholarship, distinct issues arise in cases of individuals (e.g., those who bear the label “profoundly intellectually disabled”) who are unable to speak for themselves in traditional linguistic ways. Here, some feminist philosophers have raised questions regarding the appropriate roles for parents, advocates, and surrogates, and the ethical issues that attend this research (Carlson  2010,  2013b,  2016; Simplican  2015b; Kittay 2005,  2008,  2019; Silvers and Francis 2010). Insofar as disabilities are claimed as both objects of knowledge and as lived, subjective identities in so many diverse fields and contexts, it is crucial that feminist disability scholars take seriously the methodological challenges of engaging in inclusive, dialogical, and collaborative research.

Philosophical Areas of Inquiry Feminist philosophers have addressed disability from a number of philosophical perspectives (Wendell 1996; Silvers et al. 1998; Silvers 1999; Kittay 1999; Kittay et al. 2001; Kittay et al. 2002; Tremain 2013b, 2015b; Nussbaum 2006; Hall 2015b).1 In this section I 1  For overviews of work in this area, see Carlson (2016); K. Hall (2015a); Tremain (2013b).

520   Carlson will outline some of the ontological/metaphysical, historical, epistemological, political/ ethical, and bioethical questions that have shaped philosophies of disability. One of the dominant questions for feminist disability theorists and philosophers of disability has been: what is disability? “Disability” is both a complex and a contested term that has been defined in multiple contexts, including in medicine, psychology, education, health policy, human rights, and the law. As with challenges to the ontological status of categories like “gender” and “race,” critical disability theorists have interrogated the meaning and status of disability itself. As disability theorist Simi Linton writes, “A project of disability studies scholars and the disability rights movement has been to bring into sharp relief the processes by which disability has been imbued with the meaning(s) it has and to reassign a meaning that is consistent with a sociopolitical analysis of disability” (Linton 1998, 10). To refute assumptions that disability is a form of defect, a personal tragedy, or an objectively harmed state is to view the phenomenon of disability as the result of social and structural systems of oppression and exclusion. Thus, a critical approach to disability aims to fully capture the lived, material reality of disability as a political and social identity and to simultaneously combat forms of ableism and work toward disability justice. One of the dominant models of disability has been the “medical model,” wherein disability is understood as a pathology rooted in the individual (usually accompanied by the normative assumption that it is also an objectively undesirable state). In response, disability theorists and activists have articulated various versions of the social model of disability, whereby a distinction is drawn between an impairment (a form of biological or functional difference) and a disability (i.e., the disadvantage that accompanies having this particular impairment in a specific social setting). In this model, it is the interaction between an individual and her environment that is the cause of the disadvantage, rather than the underlying impairment. Feminist philosophers have engaged with these models in a variety of ways, including drawing parallels between the impairment/disability and sex/gender distinctions, and evaluating and defending various incarnations of the social model. Others have challenged the presumptions embedded in social models of disability, arguing that the emphasis on external constructions of disablement discounts the materiality of the body, thus defending a materialist model of disability (Scully 2008; Erevelles 2011). In defining the concept of misfit as the basis for a “feminist materialist disability theory,” for example, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson considers how “the particularities of embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects” (Garland-Thomson 2011, 591). Still others maintain that these materialist models fail to fully acknowledge the ways that bodies and “impairments” themselves are constructed (Tremain 2002, 2006).2 Another conceptual challenge is to determine in what sense the very category of disability is a cohesive one. This raises numerous questions: How is the line between illness and disability drawn, and what reasons can be given for maintaining and/or blurring this line? What unifies the experience of disability in view of so many different 2  Tremain, for example, defends a historicist and relativist feminist philosophy of disability (2015a).

Feminism and Disability Theory   521 kinds of disabilities? What meaning should be accorded to the differences between “physical” and “mental” disabilities? Between “visible” and “invisible” disabilities? Between congenital or acquired disabilities? These questions have been articulated in theoretical terms yet also continue to be central to the disability rights movement and to claiming disability as a political and social identity. Against the backdrop of these broader ontological questions, some feminist disability scholars and philosophers have focused on particular disabilities and cases. Teresa Blankmeyer-­Burke’s work, for example, explores the intersections between philosophy and deaf studies. In a coauthored piece written with her American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter, Blankmeyer-­Burke and Brenda Nicodemus explore the nature of their professional relationship and its ethical implications regarding autonomy, professional identity, and vulnerability (2013). At the same time, feminist theorists have challenged the extent to which certain conditions (like deafness and autism) are, in fact, disabilities. “Deafness” (as opposed to being “deaf ”) has been defined as a cultural identity rather than a disability, and similar claims have been made regarding autism, or “Autism Spectrum Disorder,” by those who consider it a form of neurodiversity rather than an impairment or disability (Yergeau 2013,  2018). Feminist disability scholars have also focused on specific illnesses like AIDS (McRuer  2006; Bell  2011), breast cancer (Lorde 1980; Pickens 2011), and chronic illness (Wendell 2001; Goering 2015). The 2002 case of Ashley X, a young girl with multiple disabilities who was given “growth attenuation therapy” (that included removal of breast buds, hormone therapy, and a hysterectomy) has been the focus of medical and bioethical debates and has garnered significant attention from feminist philosophers. Her case highlights the intersection of gender with both physical and cognitive disabilities and raises difficult questions about quality-­of-­life determinations, parental and medical authority, and the meaning of care (K. Hall 2011; Kittay 2011). In Kittay’s words, Ashley’s story “reveals views of human embodiment that have important ethical consequences, ones that are lived in the body of a girl who is to remain forever small” (Kittay 2011, 611). Feminist philosophers have also turned their attention explicitly to categories of mental and cognitive disabilities, including intellectual and developmental disabilities, learning disabilities, traumatic brain injury, dementia, and mental illness (Carlson 2009, 2016; Kittay and Carlson  2010; Kittay  1999,  2005; Simplican  2015a; A.  Taylor  2015; K.  Lindemann  2001; Silvers  2015; H.  Lindemann  2010, Erevelles  2013; Francis and Silvers 2007). While there is a long history of defining women’s inferiority in terms of disability, and intellectual defects in particular, it is important that feminist disability theorists and philosophers of disability do not perpetuate the marginalization of people with mental and intellectual disabilities in an attempt to distance themselves from such erroneous attributions. In an effort to revisit the history of philosophy through the lens of disability, some feminist philosophers are critically engaging various figures and texts. For example, in her book The Capacity Contract, Stacy Simplican examines the ways that Locke’s philosophy “gives us two sides of the capacity contract—it expands political membership by staking it on equal cognitive faculties, at the same time that it uses cognitive capacity

522   Carlson as a way to enforce exclusion” (Simplican 2015a, 22). Other philosophical figures whose work has figured into critical feminist approaches to disability include Hegel (Dryden 2013); Adorno (Fritsch 2013); phenomenological analyses of embodiment that engage with Deleuze, Derrida, and Merleau-­Ponty (Shildrick 2015; Scully 2008, chap. 5); and Michel Foucault’s genealogies and analyses of disciplinary practices, biopower, and subjectivity (Carlson 2009; Tremain 2015a, 2015b; M. Hall 2013, 2017). Many of the questions posed in feminist epistemology have also been rearticulated in philosophical explorations of disability. In The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability, one of the first monographs devoted to a feminist philosophy of disability, Susan Wendell considers what it means to articulate a standpoint theory for people with disabilities (Wendell  1996). What distinct forms of knowledge emerge? Whose accounts are valorized and included? And how do discourses about disability perpetuate forms of what Miranda Fricker (2007) has called epistemic injustice? In her critique of the philosophical treatment of “the severe cognitively disabled,” Eva Kittay urges philosophers to embody the virtues of epistemic modesty, responsibility, and humility (2005, 2008, 2010, 2019). In my own work I explore the connections between epistemic and moral authority and consider how certain forms of ignorance attend philosophizing about intellectual disability (Carlson 2009, 2010). These few examples illustrate how engaging with disability can recast and amplify traditional problems in feminist epistemology. The turn to disability has generated significant interest in the areas of social and political philosophy, ethics, and applied ethics. In moving disability from the margins to the center, feminist philosophers have critiqued, expanded upon, revised and modified, and rejected various moral frameworks and theories of justice, and have also weighed in on specific legal and political questions, including human rights, the Americans with Disabilities Act, political representation and agency, and justice for people with disabilities (Nussbaum 2006, 2010; S. Wong 2010; Silvers 1995, 1998; Kittay 2010; Simplican 2015a; Kittay and Carlson 2010; Francis and Silvers 2000, 2010; Barnes 2016; Carey 2010). Within feminist care ethics, disability has proven a fruitful lens through which to interrogate the meaning of care and caregiving, dependency and autonomy, and agency. Women with disabilities have been critical of the ways in which dominant conceptions of caregiving have both excluded their perspectives and lived experiences and perpetuated erroneous and deleterious assumptions about diminished agency and vulnerability (Morris 2001). In her foundational book, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency (1999) and in her subsequent work on disability, Kittay explores the meaning of dependency and care work in the context of her daughter Sesha’s significant physical and intellectual disabilities (Kittay  2019). A great deal of attention continues to be devoted to theorizing care and disability together. As mentioned earlier, disability has been central to many bioethical debates. This is not surprising, as these discourses often rely upon the medical and personal tragedy models of disability and define disability as a pathology in need of rehabilitation, normalization, and cure. In response to what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has called a “eugenic logic” (Thomson 2012), people with disabilities have raised concerns regarding

Feminism and Disability Theory   523 the ways in which the possibilities of reproductive autonomy, motherhood and parenthood, and sexuality have been discounted and distorted both within the medical establishment and in bioethical discourse specifically. As critical disability perspectives have gained traction in shaping bioethical debates, we are witnessing the move away from these medicalized accounts, to what Jackie Leah Scully has called a “disability bioethics,” which focuses upon “the particular moral understandings that are generated through the experience of impairment” (Scully 2008, 9). Disability theorists are weighing in on a broad range of bioethical debates, including prenatal testing and selective abortion, reproductive technologies, cosmetic surgery, genetic counseling, genetic research, euthanasia, research ethics, and enhancement technologies (Parens and Asch  2000; Mahowald 1998; Carlson 2002, 2013b; Tremain 2006; Mills 2015; Scully 2008; Goering 2003; Patterson and Satz  2002; Thomson  2012; Ho  2008,  2011; M.  Hall  2017, Shildrick  2015). In doing so, they are also engaging with fundamental philosophical questions: Whose lives are worth living? What should our relationship to medical, genetic, and enhancement technologies be? And how do assumptions about disability shape conceptions of a “good life” and a “good death”?

Themes and Future Directions As the previous section indicates, feminist disability theorists and philosophers have made inroads into many areas of philosophy. I will conclude by highlighting particular themes that have shaped feminist disability studies as a field of inquiry and point to work that is taking the philosophy of disability in new directions. Bodies are inscribed with meanings, and the question of how certain bodies are marked, defined, interpreted, governed, and lived as disabled is a central focus of feminist disability theory. This work identifies the ways that particular bodies (perceived as deviant, unruly, abnormal, leaky, atypical) are picked out as such against societal norms, conceptions of the “species typical,” or the normate (Garland-Thomson 1997). Yet as feminist theorists, critical race theorists, and queer theorists have underscored, these bodies and identities are also gendered, racialized, sexualized in various ways. As Robert McRuer writes, “Compulsory heterosexuality is intertwined with compulsory able-­ bodiedness; both systems work to (re)produce the able body and heterosexuality. But precisely because these systems depend on a queer/disabled existence that can never quite be contained, able-­bodied heterosexuality’s hegemony is always in danger of collapse” (McRuer 2006, 31). Judith Butler’s theory of gender identity and performativity has, in many cases, served as a basis for disability theorists to engage with these questions of embodiment, identity, and sexuality. And at the intersection of disability and race, interest in the ways that systems of structural racism and compulsory heterosexuality shape the experience of disability has generated rich interdisciplinary dialogues between disability theories and queer, transgender, and critical race theories (McRuer  2006; K. Hall 2015b; Kafer 2013; Bell 2011; Samuels 2014; Thomsen 2015; Braswell 2015).

524   Carlson In theorizing embodiment and identity, feminist disability theorists have also challenged traditional mind/body dualisms. Though one often finds that authors will distinguish between “physical disabilities” and “cognitive or mental disabilities” for the purpose of clarifying their focus, there is good reason to remain wary of reinscribing facile or false dichotomies. Just as physical/mental disabilities do not always fall neatly along the visible/invisible line, there are also many instances where such a line cannot clearly be drawn, where individuals experience forms of both physical and cognitive or mental disabilities. Moreover, the lived experience of disability cannot be abstracted from the experience of ourselves as embodied, cognitive, emotional beings. Margaret Price adopts the term “bodymind” to acknowledge that “mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other” (2011, 269, 271). In rejecting an additive analysis, be it in relation to mental disability or to adding “disability” to accounts of identity more generally, scholars like Price resist what feminist philosopher Elizabeth Spelman has called a kind of “pop-­bead metaphysics” (Spelman 1990). In addition to critiquing interlocking systems of oppression and theorizing identities, disability scholars continue to explore the generative and productive dimensions of disability and disabled experience. This affirmation of disability identity takes multiple forms, including assertions of “disability pride,” the chronicling of disability history, multiple forms of political activism and advocacy, and the identification, cultivation, and celebration of disability culture and disability arts (Sandahl and Auslander 2005; Siebers  2010). There are also examples of what Michel Foucault has called “reverse­discourse,” whereby terms like “crip” have been reclaimed and represent a form of linguistic and political disruption (McRuer 2006; Sandahl 2003; Price 2011; Lewis 2015). To view disability as an epistemic, ethical, and narrative resource, in Garland-Thomson’s words, is to assert a countereugenic logic wherein disability is an identity and experience to be conserved and celebrated rather than eliminated (Garland-Thomson 2012). As the rich field of feminist disability theory continues to grow, both within and beyond the confines of professional philosophy, new paths will undoubtedly be cleared. By way of conclusion, I would like to briefly note three areas of research that are taking feminist philosophies of disability in new directions. First, while there is ample theoretical, cultural, and artistic work in disability aesthetics and disability arts, fewer philosophers have ventured into these topics (Carlson 2013a, 2015, 2016; Silvers 2000). To take up questions of (feminist) aesthetics in connection with disability can dislodge constructions of disability as a deficit or a problem to be solved, affirm experiences of disability as aesthetically and culturally significant, and expand the moral imagination. There are also connections being drawn between disability theory and feminist science studies that explore how disability intersects with, complicates, and enriches our understanding of technology and the human/nonhuman divide (Kafer  2013). In her review essay “Cripping Feminist Technoscience,” Aimi Hamarie argues that the emerging area of “crip feminist technoscience studies . . . dwells with the insights of feminist materialism and [feminist technoscience studies] while also remaining attentive to what types of difference and embodiment are valued, omitted or normalized when we talk about disability, objectivity and technology” (Hamarie 2015, 308). Disability theorists

Feminism and Disability Theory   525 and philosophers are also engaging with themes in ecofeminism. Some have challenged the human/nonhuman divide by theorizing animal oppression and disability oppression together in an effort to achieve both animal liberation and disability justice (Taylor 2017; Crary 2016); others are bringing queer feminist approaches to the politics of food, sustainability, and environmental justice (K. Hall 2014a, 2014b, 2017). Finally, as the field of feminist philosophy of disability expands, it is crucial to address the problem of ableism and exclusion within academia (Price  2011; Titchosky  2011; O’Donnovan 2010; Tremain 2013, 2020). Just as feminist philosophers have addressed the marginalization and underrepresentation of women in philosophy, attention must also be paid to how the tools and practices of philosophical inquiry and the institutional structures of philosophy itself shape forms of disability discrimination. Ensuring that the academic world is a “habitable world” (Mairs 1996) for all people with disabilities must be an essential task for feminist scholars and philosophers of disability.

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Feminism and Disability Theory   529 Silvers, Anita. 2015. “Becoming Mrs. Mayberry: Dependency and Recovering Freedom.” Hypatia 30 (1): 292–99. Silvers, Anita, David Wasserman, and Mary Mahowald, eds. 1998. Disability, Difference, Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public Policy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Silvers, Anita and Leslie Francis. 2010. “Thinking About the Good: reconfiguring metaphysics (or not) for people with cognitive disabilities.” In Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, edited by Eva Kittay and Licia Carlson, 237–59. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Simplican, Stacy Clifford. 2015a. The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Simplican, Stacy Clifford. 2015b. “Care, Disability and Violence: Theorizing Complex Dependency in Eva Kittay and Judith Butler.” Hypatia 30 (1): 217–33. Smith, Bonnie and Beth Hutchison. Gendering Disability. 2004. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Spelman, Elizabeth. 1990. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon Press. Taylor, Ashley. 2015. Taylor, Sunaura. 2017. Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. New York: New Press. Thomsen, Carly. 2015. “The Post-Raciality and Post-Spatiality of Calls for LGBTQ and Disability Visability.” Hypatia 30 (1): 149–66. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. 2004. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” In Gendering Disability, edited by Bonnie Smith and Beth Hutchinson, 78–103. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. 2011. “Misfit: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.” Hypatia 26 (3): 591–609. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. 2012. “The Case for Conserving Disability.” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 9: 339–55. Titchkosky, Tanya. 2011. The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Tremain, Shelley. 2002. “On the Subject of Impairment.” In Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory, edited by Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare, 32–47. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Tremain, Shelley. 2006. “Reproductive Freedom, Self-Regulation, and the Government of Impairment In Utero.” Hypatia 21 (1): 35–53. Tremain, Shelley. 2013a. “Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability.” Special Issue: Improving Feminist Philosophy and Theory by Taking Account of Disability. Disability Studies Quarterly 33 (4). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v33i4.3877 Tremain, Shelley, ed. 2013b. Special Issue: Improving Feminist Philosophy and Theory by Taking Account of Disability. Disability Studies Quarterly 33 (4). Tremain, Shelley. 2015a. “This Is What a Historicist and Relativist Feminist Philosophy of Disability Looks Like.” Foucault Studies, no. 19: 7–42. Tremain, Shelley, ed. 2015b. Foucault and the Government of Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

530   Carlson Tremain, Shelley. “Dialogues on Disability.” Biopolitical Philosophy. Accessed Nov. 2020. https://biopoliticalphilosophy.com/dialogues-on-disability/ Wendell, Susan. 1996. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York: Routledge. Wendell, Susan. 2001. “Unhealthy Disabled: Treating Chronic Illnesses as Disabilities. Hypatia 16(4): 17–33. Wong, Alice, ed. 2020. The Disability Visibility Project: First-Person Stories from the Twentyfirst Century. New York: Vintage Books. Wong, Sophia. 2010. “Duties of Justice to Citizens with Cognitive Disabilities.” In Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, edited by Eva Kittay and Licia Carlson, 127–46. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Yergeau, Melanie. “Clinically Significant Disturbance: On Theorists Who Theorize Theory of Mind.” Disability Studies Quarterly, 33(4). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v33i4.3876. Yergeau, Melanie. 2018. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Durham: Duke University Press.

Chapter 44

Femi n ist Phil osophica l Engagem en ts w ith Tr a ns Stu dies Talia Mae Bettcher

The inter- and multidisciplinary field of trans studies was born in the early nineties in response to medicalized accounts of transsexuality, such as Harry Benjamin’s Transsexual Phenomenon (1966) that pathologized trans experience, as well as to hostile feminist accounts of trans people, such as Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire (1979). Susan Stryker’s distinction between trans studies and the mere study of trans phenomena is a useful framing: while trans phenomena had been theorized since the late 1800s, trans studies is distinguished by the coming to voice of trans people (Stryker 2006). Rather than being mere objects of investigation, trans people have come to theorize not only our own experiences but also gender more broadly from a roughly trans perspective. Sandy Stone’s pioneering essay “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto” (1991), along with the popular works of Leslie Feinberg (1998) and Kate Borstein (1994), opened up the possibilities for recognizing forms of gender-­based oppression not reducible to sexism. Since then, trans studies has slowly moved towards recognizable “academic legitimacy.” In 2006, the first Transgender Studies Reader was published, followed by The Transgender Studies Reader 2 in 2013. The first ever nonmedical trans-­focused journal, Transgender Studies Quarterly, published its first issue in 2014. The first wave of trans scholarship developed in close relation to the emerging queer theory of the nineties, pioneered by Judith Butler (1990), among others. This helped funnel trans scholarship in a decidedly queer direction. Yet trans studies also maintained its distinctness from queer theory largely through the oppositional work of Viviane

532   Bettcher Namaste (2000), Jay Prosser (1998), and Henry Rubin (1998), which protested this framing of trans experience, while raising concerns about the heavily social-­ ­ constructionist approach. Furthermore, as queer theory has become increasingly ­institutionalized, Stryker argues, trans studies has become the main site of “gender ­trouble,” while queer theory has given high priority to sexual identity—either disregarding trans altogether or else viewing it as another variant of the former (2004). In considering philosophical engagements with trans studies as an interdisciplinary field, it is, first, crucial to ask the question to what extent trans philosophy itself has emerged within the discipline. To what extent have trans philosophers come to voice? There have certainly been some out trans philosophers working on trans-­related issues since at least the mid-­nineties. C.  Jacob Hale’s pioneering work in the nineties, for example, provided the starting point for my own work. However, as the special issue of Hypatia on trans studies and feminism that Ann Garry and I edited and Laurie Shrage’s collection You’ve Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity (2009) exemplify, trans philosophers have been very few and far between. It was not until recently that trans philosophy has begun to take any kind of distinctive form, due largely to a generational shift and an influx of trans scholars who have begun to publish or are getting ready to publish in the area. This turning point was marked by the first ever trans philosophy conference, Trans* Experience in Philosophy, which took place at the University of Oregon in 2016, sponsored by Hypatia.1 Since then, there has been a second trans philosophy conference at American University in 2018 as part of the trans philosophy project (again, sponsored by Hypatia), which, in addition to funding the second conference, includes a resource initiative for compiling a bibliography of trans philosophy as well as pedagogical materials for teaching it, and for developing a set of best practices for philosophy organizations that want to support trans philosophers and trans philosophy. This shift invites several questions. From the beginning, most of the theoretical work in trans studies has developed outside the bounds of disciplinary philosophy in what has been called “theory,” or, as Butler calls it, “Philosophy’s Other” (2004). As Butler notes, there has been considerable work that is philosophical in quality and that draws from philosophical traditions that does not fall within the purview of professional philosophy, occurring instead in interdisciplinary conversations both within the humanities (primarily) and also without. This “Other,” Butler argues, is partially the result of professional philosophy policing its disciplinary boundaries so rigidly. For Butler, this work being done outside the profession may more properly characterize the spirit of philosophy, raising the possibility that philosophy has lost itself to the very thing it has excluded. To the extent that a disciplinary trans philosophy has begun to come into its own, then, by what right does it call itself “philosophy,” and what does it mean when it does? How is it positioned with regard to philosophy’s Other? Is it to be primarily understood as a contribution to disciplinary 1  See Perry Zurn (2016) for a discussion of the difficulties that trans scholars face in the profession of philosophy.

Feminist Philosophical Engagements with Trans Studies   533 philosophy or the interdisciplinary field of trans studies or both? If the latter, what exactly would that look like? What is trans philosophy? The existence of trans philosophy necessarily complicates the question of feminist philosophical engagements with the field of trans studies, of course. What is the relation between feminist philosophy and disciplinary trans philosophy? Certainly as queer theory has provided the basis for development of trans studies as a whole, disciplinary feminist philosophy has provided the basis for trans philosophy’s development: most of the trans philosophical writing has been situated within the broad context of professional feminist philosophy. With the coming to be of a more visible trans philosophy, however, the question to what extent feminist philosophy has actually engaged with trans as a distinctive locus of politics and theory, rather than a set of curious phenomena, has also become more evident and pressing. The question echoes the concerns of Vivian Namaste. “Anglo American Feminism,” she says, has for the past twenty years asked “The Transgender Question” (2009). That is, it has asked questions about trans people’s lives to answer its own epistemological questions, rather than investigate questions posed in collaboration with actual trans people to produce knowledge that improves the life of trans people. While she has in mind theorists such as Butler (1990,  2004), the question to what extent disciplinary feminist philosophy has replicated this move is pertinent. Certainly the emergence of trans philosophy within the discipline has not been uncontroversial in pressing precisely these types of concerns (Bettcher 2017, 2018). There are several ways of considering the feminist philosophical engagements with trans issues and with trans politics/studies more broadly. One way is to simply understand trans as an omitted “other” analogous to race and to strive to include trans people (and, in particular, trans women) within the purview of feminist philosophizing. And certainly there are strands in feminist philosophy, particularly of analytic orientation, that have found the question “What is a woman?” important to answer to delimit the purview of feminist inquiry and intervention: given that feminism is concerned with the oppression of women, runs the thought, it had better be able to determine whose oppression is at stake. The question has been framed as a problem of inclusion. On the one hand, defining “woman” strictly in terms of biological sex appears to go against the feminist insight that womanhood is not a fact of biology, but rather a fact of culture: “woman” is a gender term, not a sex term. It names a social position rather than a natural kind. On the other hand, it is clear that there is no one cultural feature that all women have in common. For example, womanhood cannot be defined in terms of a specific social role, since there are multiple such roles often inflected by considerations of race, ethnicity, and class. In some of these attempts, the existence of trans people has largely been ignored, leading to both the exclusion of trans women from the concept and the inclusion of trans men within the purview concept. For example, Sally Haslanger’s account leads to such exclusion/inclusion. Very roughly, she says one functions as a woman in some context just in case one is subordinated on the basis of presumed female sex (i.e., female biological role in reproduction) in that context (2012, 235), and that one is a woman just

534   Bettcher in case one typically (“regularly, and for the most part”) functions as woman (234). As Katharine Jenkins has argued, this account leads to the exclusion of some trans women—trans women who are presumed biologically male or who are regarded as women on the basis of gender identity rather than presumed biological sex (2016). In other attempts at setting the purview concept, trans women are expressly acknowledged and characterized as “hard cases.” Here, there is less of a concern with ensuring the inclusion of trans women within the purview concept and more of a concern figuring out just where to put us or the use of us as examples to make a point about analysis. According to Natalie Stoljar’s resemblance account, for example, the character Dil in The Crying Game—a trans woman—is a hard case who, according to her account of “woman” and “man” as resemblance classes, could be a member of both. “Resemblance classes do not have precise boundaries,” she writes, “and cases like Dil suggest that the boundaries of the types ‘man’ and ‘woman’ overlap” (1995, 285).2 Recently, however, trans women have started to be considered part of “the problem of inclusion,” which had for the most part been understood only in terms of racial and class difference: efforts have been made to develop analyses of the purview concept, which includes trans women. Jenkins, for example, has modified Haslanger’s account. Rather than focusing solely on gender-­as-­class, Jenkins argues that gender-­as-­identity must be given equal weight. And Jennifer Saul (2012) and Esa Diaz-­Leon (2016) have proposed “semantic contextualism,” according to which features that determine membership vary depending upon the context as a way to analyze the ordinary concept of “woman.” Meanwhile, Stephanie Kapusta (2016) has recently argued from a decidedly trans philosophical perspective that the misgendering of trans people inflicts psychological, moral, and political harms on us and that discursive practices that misgender us are subject to contestation. In light of this, she goes on to argue that any philosophical analyses of the concepts of woman and man that would lead to the misgendering of some group of trans women, if such analyses were broadly implemented in society, are unacceptable from a trans political perspective. Rather than explore the details of these accounts, I raise some general concerns about the overly abstract nature of this approach—concerns that derive from broadly intersectional considerations. In case feminist philosophy is deeply committed to the inclusion of all women, it needs to include other forms of oppression besides sexism. This is no more than to take seriously the insights of Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) and other feminists of color, that to focus on sexist oppression alone is to proceed from a privileged location with respect to other forms of oppression—such as racial and transphobic oppression—and to become incapable of theorizing instances in which multiple oppressions are so thoroughly intermeshed so as to be indistinguishable (consider, for example, racialized sexual violence and racialized pornography). Such considerations have a decided impact on the methodology by which this project of analysis is undertaken—a project that by now can be characterized by two different approaches. The first, more traditional, approach proceeds from an analysis of the 2  See also Mikkola (2009).

Feminist Philosophical Engagements with Trans Studies   535 ordinary concept as it is given in everyday discursive practices. The second, pioneered by Haslanger, is expressly revisionary: it asks what concept feminists should aim to get people to use in light of their goals of ending sexist oppression (2012). Consider the starting intuition that “woman” names something social like a role or a position and is therefore not reducible to biological sex. Presumably, the social position or role is thought to be oppressive. Once this is allowed, however, it becomes plausible that this oppressive concept is actually the site of multiple oppressions. To the extent that the dominant concept of woman has heterosexuality as an ideal built right into it, for example, it can function to marginalize or even exclude lesbians. To the extent that the dominant concept of woman has white femininity (e.g., fragility) built right into it, it can function as a vehicle for racist marginalization. We might characterize this by saying the following: Not only does “woman” oppress “vertically” in specifically targeting a group of individuals named by that category, but it also oppresses “horizontally” in marginalizing or excluding individuals from the category. This is precisely the case, I have argued, with respect to trans women who are not only marginalized or excluded from the dominant category “woman” but also often included within the category “man” (Bettcher 2013). However, in both approaches—traditional and ameliorative—horizontal oppressions are elided. An analysis of the (dominant) ordinary concept of woman, in which it happily turns out that all women are included, is at grave risk of a distorted analysis that fails to make explicit the horizontal forces that press some towards the edges or out of the category altogether. In a way, it is at risk of becoming revisionary. An ameliorative analysis, by contrast, departs from the ordinary concept altogether and therefore does not possess, by itself, the resources to lay bare these horizontal forces. Moreover, as the category of woman is the site of multiple oppression, so there have been multiple resistant responses in various subcultural practices. Consider, for example, the resistant resignifications inherent in the lesbian separatist term “womyn” and the open-­ended and coalitional “women of color.” Similarly, I have argued, there are resistant discursive practices in trans subcultures that allow trans women to count as women paradigmatically—that is, that resist the horizontal oppression of the dominant concept (Bettcher 2014). With both of the main analytic approaches, however, resistant discursive practices are elided. The traditional approach presumptively takes the dominant discursive practices as its starting point in analyzing the “ordinary concept.” This raises methodological questions, however, about which discursive practices and intuitions count in theorizing the concept of woman and why. The ameliorative approach proposes a revisionary account in abstraction from the already existent revisionary practices that occur on the ground. Once these practices are recognized, however, the question arises whether the philosophical revisionist expects to make some sort of difference in actual discursive practices, and if so, how. The question is particularly fraught given the multiplicity of resistant practices: resistant deployments are closely wedded to specific histories of oppression. Consequently, they may also perpetuate other forms of oppression. For example, in some lesbian separatist contexts, “womon” is used in such a way so as to

536   Bettcher ­ recisely exclude trans women. This then invites the question of how and why the p ­proposed philosophical revisions are positioned with regard to this tense, often conflicting, multiplicity, if at all. Perhaps the deepest fear about the project of determining the feminist purview is simply this: if the point of the project is to delimit feminist inquiry, then one should expect the actual inclusion of trans women in investigations into sexism well beyond this specific conceptual project. This, of course, would require engagement with trans philosophy and trans studies more broadly. If not, it would appear that the project has less to do with the real business of feminist engagement with trans and more to do with an isolated conceptual puzzle: Namaste’s concern would apply. What appears necessary to avoid this trap is a “trans feminist” approach, epitomized by the work of Emi Koyama, which proceeds by taking seriously both transphobic and sexist forms of oppression and asks how they relate to each other—how trans people, and trans women in particular, can be subject to both forms of oppression (Koyama 2003). Koyama’s position is notable in deploying an expressly intersectional approach. It positions trans women analogously to women of color—subject to multiple, intersecting forms of oppression. It invites nontrans feminist women to see how they are privileged in relation to trans-­specific oppression and how trans women and men can be vulnerable to both transphobic and sexist oppressions in both distinct and intermeshed ways. Koyama notably situates her account within a broader context of multiple oppressions, paying particular attention to the intersections of transphobia and sexism with race (Koyama 2006). Unfortunately, this type of intersectional approach is woefully underdeveloped in feminist philosophy. It has been explored from a trans (feminist) philosophical perspective. C. Jacob Hale (1998), for example, has examined the complexities trans and genderqueer folks assigned female at birth may face in negotiating (nontrans) feminist space. Rachel McKinnon (2014) has pointed to stereotype threat as a site at which transphobia and sexism may converge. I have shown the complex ways in which the invalidation of trans people’s identities can be manifest in the interblending of sexist, racist, and transphobic oppressions (Bettcher 2014). C. Riley Snorton (2009) has exposed presumptions of trans studies founding texts (by Stone 1991 and Prosser 1998) by drawing on experience as a Black, nonhormone, nonoperative transsexual man. And,   more recently, Snorton has examined the historical intermeshing of trans and Blackness in his recent Black on Both Sides (2017)—easily the most groundbreaking exploration to date. However, one of the difficulties confronting an approach that views sexist and transphobic oppression in particular as intersectional is that trans studies/politics arose in response to anti-­trans feminist positions. Questions therefore arise about the possible trans-­exclusionary underpinnings of feminist frameworks, as well as the possible nonfeminist underpinnings of trans studies/politics. As a consequence, it appears necessary to consider feminist studies/politics and trans studies/politics as frameworks that are distinct and yet interactional. While arguing that Raymond (1979) is caught in a framework that deploys monolithic accounts of trans people and hence forecloses trans subjectivities as active, lived, and

Feminist Philosophical Engagements with Trans Studies   537 multiple, Cressida Heyes raises concerns about an overreliance on individualistic accounts of gender expression as concerning an isolated self in trans politics and theory (2003). Focusing on Feinberg’s Trans Liberation (1998), Heyes worries about a conception of gender expression that cannot be subject to criticism. Gender is relational, Heyes observes, and is situated within complex situations of oppression. When conceived this way, worries can arise about masculine expressions of gender, for instance, that include sexually violent or homo- and transphobic aspects. Surely such forms of gender expression ought to be subject to feminist scrutiny and concern. And what is needed, Heyes argues, is an ethics of self-­transformation. Such concerns, I have argued, can also be applied to Julia Serano’s influential Whipping Girl (2007) (Bettcher 2016). In addition to this problem, I have argued, a model that merely pits individuals against social regulation simply fails as an account of trans oppression (Bettcher 2016). The model is too broad to capture the specificity of transphobia and violence against trans people. Worse, it is not actually an account of oppression at all: as Marilyn Frye (1983) argued many years ago, the subjection of men to the regulation of their gender, for example, does not constitute oppression. Oppression, rather, involves social regulation that constrains movement on all fronts. Echoing Heyes’s concerns, Gayle Salamon (2010) raises concerns about the inclusion of trans subjects within the field of women’s studies and, by extension, any form of feminist inquiry that takes the category “woman” as its defining purview. She suggests the reason trans studies has not been embraced is not merely due to a lag. As women’s studies as a field defines itself in terms of the category “woman,” it necessarily requires an additive model that allows for the inclusion of identities excluded by a partial perspective that had hitherto passed itself off as universal. For example, racially privileged assumptions are challenged once (white) feminists recognize that they have only been considering sexism from a perspective abstracted from considerations of race. According to Salamon, however, it is not the case that trans is yet one more adjective-­identity to be brought under the category “woman.” On the contrary, she suggests, trans subjects pose a deep challenge to the category “woman” itself as well as the taken-­for-­granted understanding of sex and gender. To remain stable, Salamon argues, women’s studies has kept trans at a distance by using the trans subject as “the constitutive outside” of binary gender with the consequence of erasing actual trans lives beyond the binary that are neither “fictive nor futural” (2010, 95). While Salamon surely has a point, one may also wonder whether the failure to include trans within the purview of women’s studies is not partially due to the very framing of trans oppression/resistance in terms of opposition to the gender binary. Many trans people self-­identify within the binary as men or women. This “anti-­binary” framing not only runs against the self-­identities of binary-­identified trans people but also suggests that such identifications are against the interests of trans politics. Crucial for our purposes, it also makes it impossible to include trans women under the category “woman” (Bettcher 2016). As trans people are positioned in opposition to the binary, it makes no sense to include some trans people (e.g., trans women) as a particular kind of woman and “trans” as yet another adjective to be added to the list.

538   Bettcher My own project, in part, has involved disconnecting the idea of trans as locus oppression/resistance from the specific framing of it in terms of a tension between trans people and gender binaries (Bettcher 2014). Turning away from the notion of an oppressive binary towards the related notions of appearance, reality, deception, and pretense, I have focused on the phenomenon of “reality enforcement” that is salient in the lives of many trans people (2014). This kind of misgendering constitutes trans women as “really men disguised as women” and trans men as “really women disguised as men,” subjecting them to double-­bind: either attempt to “pass” and be exposed as a “deceiver” or be openly trans and hence a “pretender.” One benefit of this shift away from “anti-­binary” accounts is that the resistance of trans people who self-­identify within the binary can be illuminated. Even the much-­maligned “Wrong Body Account” can be given its due as an attempt to resist reality enforcement by reversing it: instead of being a man disguised as a woman, one is a woman trapped inside the misleading appearance of a man. Crucially, this pivot provides an account of trans oppression/resistance that does not reduce to “individual versus social constraint.” Rather, it posits a site at which trans people specifically are subject to immobilization on all fronts. That said, applying the concept of intersectionality to the idea of trans feminism involves problems besides the model deployed in making sense of trans oppression. It may be somewhat more difficult to think of the intersections of two forms of gender-­ based oppression (i.e., sexism and transphobia) than it is to think of the intersection of race and sexism (or transphobia), say. In addition to pointing to the intermeshing of multiple oppressions, the concept of intersectionality concerns itself with the oppressive social practices of separating oppressions into discrete categories such as sexism and racism. It is precisely this separation that renders those at the intersections, women of color, entirely invisible. This is important, as the concept of intersectionality, as it has originated in Black feminism, comes as a response to racial marginalization in treatments of sexism and gender marginalization in treatments of racism. It is, in part, how “women of color” or “Black feminism” comes to take on resistant significance. However, while it is certainly true that trans studies and mainstream trans politics have been largely white and, moreover, that trans has not necessarily been centralized in Black studies and politics (Bey  2016), the intersection of sexism and transphobia does not appear to operate analogously. Although trans women are typically marginalized among nontrans women, it is difficult to say that we are typically within trans communities. There is not, to my mind, an analogous “double marginalization” here. Indeed, even the intermeshing of oppression operates differently. Trans men just as well as trans women can be subject to intermeshing forms of transphobia and sexism. By contrast, (nontrans) Black men cannot be subject to sexism in quite such an obvious way. Thus, in recommending further work in this area, I am also proposing that there is important work to be done thinking through just how the concept of intersectionality applies (or does not apply) and how it might need to be rethought in the case of trans feminism. In other words, investigations into the intersections of transphobic and sexist forms of oppression/resistance may provide a site for a deeper, more challenging understanding of multiple forms of gender-­based oppression and their intermeshing with other forms of oppressions.

Feminist Philosophical Engagements with Trans Studies   539

References Benjamin, Harry. 1966. The Transsexual Phenomenon. New York: Julian Press. Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2016. “Intersexuality, Transsexuality, Transgender.” In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, edited by Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth, 407–27. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2013. “Trans Women and the Meaning of ‘Woman.’ ” In Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings, 6th ed., edited by Alan Soble, Nicholas Power, and Raja Halwani, 233–50. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2014. “Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 39 (2): 43–65. Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2017. “Some Thoughts about the Hypatia Controversy.” In Bully Bloggers (Lisa Duggan) “Hypatia and the Politics of Critique.” May 6, 2017. https://bullybloggers. wordpress.com/2017/05/06/another-day/. Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2018. “When Tables Speak: On the Existence of Trans Philosophy.” Daily Nous (Justin Weinberg). May 30, 2018. http://dailynous.com/2018/05/30/tables-speakexistence-trans-philosophy-guest-talia-mae-bettcher/. Bettcher, Talia Mae, and Ann Garry, eds. 2009. “Transgender Studies and Feminism: Theory, Politics, and Gender Realities.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 24 (3). Bey, Marquis. 2016. “The Shape of Angels’ Teeth: Toward a Blacktransfeminist Thought through the Mattering of Black(Trans)Lives.” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 5 (3): 33–54. Bornstein, Kate. 1994. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-Discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–67. Diaz-Leon, Esa. 2016. “ ‘Woman’ as a Politically Significant Term: A Solution to the Puzzle.” Hypatia 31 (2): 245–56. Feinberg, Leslie. 1998. Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue. Boston: Beacon Press. Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Hale, C. Jacob. 1998. “Tracing a Ghostly Memory in My Throat: Reflections on Ftm Feminist Voice and Agency.” In Men Doing Feminism, edited by Tom Digby, 99–129. New York: Routledge. Haslanger, Sally. 2012. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heyes, Cressida. 2003. “Feminist Solidarity after Queer Theory: The Case of Transgender.” Signs 28 (4): 1093–120. Jenkins, Katharine. 2016. “Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman.” Ethics 126 (2): 394–421. Kapusta, Stephanie. 2016. “Misgendering and Its Moral Contestability.” Hypatia 31 (3): 502–19. Koyama, Emi. 2003. “The Transfeminist Manifesto.” In Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century, edited by Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier, 244–59. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

540   Bettcher Koyama, Emi. 2006. “Whose Feminism Is It Anyway? The Unspoken Racism of the Trans Inclusion Debate.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 698–705. New York: Routledge. McKinnon, Rachel. 2014. “Stereotype Threat and Attributional Ambiguity for Trans Women.” Hypatia 29 (4): 857–72. Mikkola, Mari. 2009. “Gender Concepts and Intuitions.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (4): 559–83. Namaste, Viviane  K. 2000. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Namaste, Viviane K. 2009. “Undoing Theory: The ‘Transgender Question’ and the Epistemic Violence of Anglo-American Feminist Theory.” Hypatia 24 (3): 11–32. Prosser, Jay. 1998. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press. Raymond, Janice. 1979. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Boston: Beacon Press. Rubin, Henry. 1998. “Phenomenology as Method in Trans Studies.” GLQ 4 (2): 145–58. Salamon, Gayle. 2010. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. New York: Columbia University Press. Saul, Jennifer. 2012. “Politically Significant Terms and the Philosophy of Language: Methodological Issues.” In Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, edited by in Sharon L. Crasnow and Anita M. Superson, 195–216. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Serano, Julia. 2007. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press. Shrage, Laurie, ed. 2009. You’ve Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Snorton, C. Riley. 2009. “A New Hope: The Psychic Life of Passing. Bettcher.” Hypatia 24 (3) 77–92. Snorton, C. Riley. 2017. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Stoljar, Natalie. 1995. “Essence, Identity, and the Concept of Woman.” Philosophical Topics 23 (2): 262–93. Stone, Sandy. 1991. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto.” In Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, ­280–304. New York: Routledge. Stryker, Susan. 2004. “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory's Evil Twin.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10 (2): 212–15. Stryker, Susan. 2006. “(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies.” in The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 1–17. New York: Routledge. Stryker, Susan, and Aren Auzura. 2013. The Transgender Studies Reader 2. New York: Routledge. Zurn, Perry. 2016. “Trans Experience in Philosophy.” Blog of the American Philosophical Association. August 11, 2016. https://blog.apaonline.org/2016/08/11/trans-experience-inphilosophy/.

chapter 45

Postcol on i a l a n d Decol on i a l Theor ies Elena Ruíz

In recent years postcolonial and decolonial feminisms have become increasingly salient in philosophy, yet they are often deployed as conceptual stand-­ins for generalized feminist critiques of eurocentrism (without reference to the material contexts anti-­colonial feminisms emanate from) or as a platform to recenter internal debates between dominant European theories/ists under the guise of being conceptually “decolonized.” By contrast, this chapter focuses on the specific contexts, issues, and lifeworld concerns that ground anti-­colonial feminisms and provides a brief survey of the literature. Because the terms implicated in the analysis (third world, transnational, women of color, postcolonial, decolonial, and Indigenous feminisms) are highly contested on their own, I only provide provisional and nonfoundational histories and definitions for the purposes of resisting philosophical appropriations of anti-­colonial feminist theory.

Historical Perspectives and Terminology In Western feminist philosophy, the struggles and concerns of non-­western and Indigenous women are often historicized along a continuum of western feminist theoretical development. They are typically read, cited, and valued for their role in pluralizing a dominant canon or contributing to the globalized application of a european theory. As Audre Lorde noted, being valued for one’s ability to “stretch across the gap” of male ignorance and racist feminisms illuminates a deeper, “tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought,” since “it is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns” ([1984] 2007, 114). Thus, the concern

542   Ruíz here is not a fundamental inapplicability of, for instance, mainstream care ethics in transnational contexts. Instead, it is with the tacit operations of a deeper interpretive power in feminist theory, one that recenters itself by producing the effect of difference without the methodological and hermeneutic transformations necessary to bring about what postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak calls a “functional change in a sign system,” one that decenters the very perspective negotiating the centering (1988b, 4). Thus, rather than a development or pluralizing extension of western feminism, a less imperial way to understand postcolonial and decolonial feminisms is through a longer tradition of women’s theoretical and collective resistance to colonial rule in the Global South. To this end, it is helpful to first unpack some of the basic contours of postcolonial, decolonial, and anti-­colonial terminology as they prevail in philosophical circles. To begin, the “colonial” in the terms “postcolonial” and “decolonial” refers to european colonization that began in the fifteenth century and coincides with the imperial projects of early modern european nation-­states, including the rise of settler colonial empires like the United States.1 Backed by the so-­called papal bulls of donation (1493) and the preceding dum diversas (1452) (which granted Iberian rulers the right to enslave non­Christians in “perpetual servitude” long before the whitewashed narrative of voyage and discovery dominated colonial historiography), western european powers began a systematic project of cultural domination and geopolitical expansion that included large-­scale physical, psychological, epistemic, and cultural violence.2 From the intergenerational violence and mass slaughter of African peoples in the transatlantic slave trade to the widespread genocides of Native Amerindian and Aboriginal peoples, european colonialism created a set of social, political, and cultural conditions that begat specific sites of theoretical reflection and resistance across the colonized world. Thus, the first sites of anti-­colonial reflection that form the basis for postcolonial and decolonial theory can be traced back to Indigenous, Native, and Aboriginal resistance to european domination. This includes armed, cultural, and epistemic rebellion, such as Indigenous Inca redistribution of Andean deities in the Catholic pantheon of saints and Nahua women’s resistance to Native informancy in the Spanish cronicas (see Kaplan  1994). However, because of the size and scope of the colonial project, it is impossible to create an umbrella term for anti-­colonialism that does justice to the manifold projects of re­sist­ ance in the Global South. This is partly a result of colonial domination itself, as the material culture and knowledge systems privileged by european powers have made it difficult 1  “Colonial” is sometimes used critically to refer to cases that fall outside the historical centering of western europe in intercultural domination, considering instead cases of East-­East or North-­North relations. The two main examples are Taiwanese colonial histories (especially of Paiwan Aboriginal peoples) under Japanese occupation and Nordic Saami sovereignty struggles in europe. More recently, literature has emerged that strongly highlights Dutch colonial intervention in Taiwan, as well as Dutch and British intervention in China through the opium wars and the British colony of Hong Kong. (See also Kuokkaken 2006.) 2 While dum diversas authorized Iberians “to invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ, to put them into perpetual slavery, and to take away all their possessions and property” (Newcomb 2008, 84), the cultural orthodoxies behind imperial colonialism predate the rise of Christianity in Europe.

Postcolonial and Decolonial Theories   543 to identify, preserve, or gain access to sources in subaltern history (de Certeau 1988; Boone 2011; Spivak 1988a). In light of this, a prevailing strategy in the study of colonialism has been to thematize the systems, practices, policies, and ideologies constitutive of the european colonizing mission (such as the dehumanization of non-­western p ­ eoples through fabricated racialized taxonomies, hierarchical caste systems based on church-­legitimated patrilineal bloodlines, etc.). These broad, far-­ranging practices and conceptual orthodoxies became a thematic focus in early postcolonial and decolonial theories, to which we now turn. The term “postcolonial” came to prominence in academic circles following the 1978 [2003] publication of Edward Said’s landmark critique of western representations of non-­western cultures in Orientalism. It marked a shift in the analysis of colonialism from a historical event to a discourse, or sets of discourses, that predated and outlasted the traditional timeline associated with colonial invasions, settlements, and the official end of colonial rule in national independence movements. Prior to this, the term was mostly used by historians, political scientists, and cartographers as a geopolitical signifier following India’s 1947 independence from British rule.3 Following the publication of Orientalism, South Asian scholars trained or working in former colonies (mainly the United States and United Kingdom) further developed the field of postcolonial studies through what became known as the subaltern studies collective. Active between 1982 and 1987 through the publication of five important volumes on South Asian historiography by Oxford University Press, the group was led by historiographer Ranajit Guha in close collaboration with Gayatri Spivak and literary theorist Homi Bhabha. Arguing that “hitherto Indian history has been written from a colonialist and elitist point of view,” the goal of the collective was not purely academic but to “offer a theory of change” consistent with anti-­colonial liberation struggles (Said 1988, v). This was done by providing a “prose of counter-­insurgency” or resistant epistemic framework that would allow postcolonial peoples to meaningfully resituate histories that have been buried, destroyed, or displaced as part of colonial domination. Due to the emphasis on discourses, strategies, and analyses based on the recovery of buried meanings, postcolonial studies flourished in literature, critical history departments, and comparative studies. However, elsewhere in the humanities and in activist circles different theoretical tracks emerged that led to various articulations of decolonization processes for postcolonial peoples and women in particular (see Schutte 2007; Bhambra 2014). Importantly, some shed light on the gendered and elitist politics of knowledge involved in the new genealogies emerging out of dominant intellectual circles, as many thinkers (such as Frantz Fanon, Jose Carlos Mariátegui, Aime Cesaire, and Safeya Zaghloul) predated Said’s 3  During this period it appears written as a hyphenated term to accent the “post” as the time after colonialism. This temporal definition still exists today; it is favored by historians, international relation scholars, and political scientists that want to emphasize the shifting geopolitical formations resulting from anti-­colonial rebellions, particularly in South Asia and Africa. However, it increasingly goes by the term “decolonial” now. This is an example of both terms being utilized in the historically limited, traditional sense to mark a time, place, or phenomenon that is empirically verifiable by western evidentiary standards. Cf. Shepard (2015).

544   Ruíz work, also focused on questions of cultural and epistemic liberation from coloniality at large, but were not trained at Princeton, Oxford, or Yale. Native theorists and historians had been framing colonialism as an ongoing event long before Said’s work appeared. Despite these criticisms, the academic success of the South Asian school of postcolonial studies over Indigenous, African, East Asian, and Pacific articulations of subalternity had a significant influence in the academic development of “postcolonial theory.” It led, for instance, to the formation of the influential Latin American wing of subaltern studies (including Ileana Rodríguez, Mabel Moraña, Maria Milagros Lopez, John Beverly, and Fernando Coronil), which sought to “revise established and previously functional epistemologies in the social sciences and humanities” as part of a deeper, anti-­colonial strategy of resistance (Latin American Subaltern Studies Group 1993). The region is important for its role in the academic rise of the term “decolonial.” The term “decolonial” came to prominence in academic circles following the 2000 publication of Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano’s article “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America” (2000). In it, Quijano argues that the conventional historical association between enlightenment, development, and modernity is part of a larger cultural strategy of power and domination by western europe that is managed by imported/invented categories of racial hierarchies based on white supremacy. Through these tropes, racialized bodies can be made morally, legally, and culturally subject to logics compatible with the need for europe to exploit a worldwide labor force. Domination went epistemic. That’s how such a relatively small part of the world gained and maintained global dominance long after the decline of its naval and military supremacy; the role of history is not to reveal this but to produce notions of objectivity that correspond to the objects and methods belonging to european conceptions of truth (which only reflect the epistemic orthodoxies of one cultural tradition). Thus, “the modern capitalist system of power” that lurks behind the appearance of natural development, voyage, discovery, and emancipated reason becomes the central axis for thinking from the place of those excluded and oppressed by colonialism. Most importantly, by linking knowledge (as in Cartesian self-­reflexive reason) with a post­Wallersteinian world-­systems theory of colonialism, Quijano thinks postcolonial peoples can and ought to “delink” from the arbitrary linkages made between culture, power, and eurocentric knowledge systems. This epistemological decolonization became a central organizing principle in the academic literature associated with “the decolonial turn” (Mignolo 1999, 2001, 2007; Maldonado-­Torres 2007; Grosfoguel 2007; Lugones 2007; Sousa Santos 2007). The “de” in this sense of “decolonial” is thus an “un”—undoing, unmaking, untying colonialism from its active life source, but not in a romantic way that tries to reverse or go back to an imagined precolonial past unmarred by colonialism. While other important literatures on delinking, rupturing, and desettling colonialism flourished in the humanities and community activism, the US-­based Latin American wing of decolonial scholarship gained the most citational force in mainstream philosophical circles, as did the feminisms associated with this tradition. As points of congruence, postcolonial and decolonial literatures both are anti-­colonial and generally share the view that colonialism did not end with national independence

Postcolonial and Decolonial Theories   545 movements or the withdrawal of occupying powers (especially in settler societies). With few exceptions, they also embrace the stronger thesis that beyond the lingering effects of historical colonialism, active forms of colonial domination continue to operate in society at various levels of transparency, from institutionalized sexist racism and anti­Indigenous cultural bias to casteist apartheid, discriminatory public policy, and ­neoliberal carceral economics. The terms are not mutually exclusive (see Johnson 1982; Nasta 1992; Nkenkana 2015a). Yet one basic difference between the academic construction of postcolonial and decolonial is methodology: whereas the former historically focused on the task of identifying cultural biases and lacunas in history, recovering subaltern histories and writing histories “from below,” the latter sought to displace the mechanisms that, on their view, created and maintained subalternity in the first place. One important tool for the decolonial camp was thus the adoption of a standpoint epistemology that excluded narratives, identities, theories, and citational references based explicitly on european texts and influence. As an example, two years prior to Quijano’s article, an important meeting occurred at Duke University between the South Asian and Latin American subaltern studies groups that led to the dissolution of the Latin American group along this very subject. As Ramón Grosfoguel recounts in “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn,” during this meeting the concern was raised over the heavy theoretical influence of “‘the four horses of the apocalypse,’ that is, Foucault, Derrida, Gramsci and Guha,” all of whom were considered eurocentric thinkers or produced (on his view) eurocentric theory about subjects in the South while located physically and epistemically in the North (2007, 221). “By privileging Western thinkers as their central theoretical apparatus, they betrayed their goal to produce subaltern studies” (2007, 221).4 However, there was no parallel break along the widespread scholarly and citational exclusion (with the possible exception of Maria Lugones) of women in the “decolonial turn,” the usurping of Indigenous theory, or the lack of engagement with African, Black, Asian, and Pacific epistemologies of decolonization. 4  It bears repeating that the “rise” of decolonial scholarship coincided with the academically curated articulation of longstanding themes, issues, and perspectives held in common by Indigenous, First Nations, Aboriginal, and people of color throughout the Global South. Far from being a mere metaphilosophical point, recognizing that the recent uptake of decolonial thought coincided with the rearticulation of anti-­colonialism via the weighty, privileged topics of privileged fields (i.e., epistemology) by academic elites in elite institutions (Duke, Rutgers, Berkeley) through settler languages (English, Spanish), grapholects (Romanized alphabetic literacy), and mediums (peer-­reviewed theoretical reflection) is critically important. First, it enabled the conceptual decoupling of the epistemic and anti-­colonial project as distinct parts of decoloniality, sufficient to allow some philosophers to title (and publishers to market) their books as “decolonial” to mean a general “rethinking of ” anything. Second, it significantly obscured the expropriation of Indigenous knowledges into academic careers, such as the concept of “pluriversality.” Third, it neglected to note how both terms (“post-” and “decolonial”) were in wide circulation in anti-­colonial literatures and activism before their coinage in academic circles, whether in adjectival or adverbial form to describe anti-­colonial strategies and tactics at every level of culture. Black Elk’s (Oglala Lakota) speeches and Leanne Simpson’s (Nishnaabeg) Islands of Decolonial Love (2013), for instance, are both examples of postcolonial and decolonial literatures without academic entanglement in the subalternity or epistemic decolonization literatures, yet they enact similar moves that are very often philosophically devalued.

546   Ruíz

Postcolonial and Decolonial Feminisms Women’s situation under colonialism has been characterized as a “double colonization” that, in addition to facing multiple levels of social and behavioral violence, redoubles the theoretical burdens women face in thinking through systems of liberation from colonial oppression (Peterson and Rutherford 1986; Schutte 1993; Schutte 1998). This is not from lack of efforts or strong cultures of resistance: Indigenous, Native, Aboriginal, and women of color’s resistance to european domination have consistently been subsumed in anti-­colonial and western feminist struggles—from Maori women’s resistance to missionary education to First Nations and women of color’s struggles under classical white feminisms in the United States and Canada. As histories of feminist intersectionality show, women theorized racial and gendered oppression long before the academic discourses of postcolonialism and decolonialism rose to prominence (Ruíz 2017). Yet historically, many of the grand anti-­colonial liberatory narratives and theories of re­sist­ ance failed to center women’s lives as key concerns in fighting coloniality. Thus, many of the feminist theories in anti-­colonial scholarship are correctives to both european colonialism and colonialist tendencies in liberation theories. For example, Elina Vuola points out that while Enrique Dussel’s philosophy of liberation has been central to anti-­colonial discourses of liberation theology, “it seems that in issues of sexual ethics he comes close to official church teaching, even though his argumentation may be different from that of the Vatican” (2000, 160). But not all anti-­colonial feminists disentangle themselves from colonial tendencies in anti-­colonial scholarship. Some resist it by refocusing its insights in relation to women’s lives without directly critiquing the theories or theorists behind them. For example, Maria Lugones’s influential “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” refocuses explanatory priority on gender in Quijano’s analysis of colonial racism (2007). She argues that, just like the idea of race, colonialism introduced a system of heterosexual gender binaries that were paramount in the fusion of race and gender used to exploit colonized peoples. Racialized women’s labor, after all, is a locus of primary exploitation in the birth of global capitalism. However, unlike dominant strains of western feminism that prioritize the universal category of “women” and patriarchal domination as the focal point of oppression, Lugones insists that “we cannot understand this gender system without understanding what Anibal Quijano calls ‘the coloniality of power’ ” (2007, 186). On this view, gender cannot be thought of without a particular articulation of race. Thus, Lugones maintains theoretical ties with the epistemologies of the decolonial turn while focusing decolonial feminist scholarship on practical, engaged, tactical theories that speak to women’s lives and (importantly) communities: “in my understanding of decolonial feminism, the community is central, with communal intentionality and complex communiality constructing the human” (2017, 47). But this is only one articulation of decolonial feminisms. Njoki Wane, Jennifer Jagire, and Zahra

Postcolonial and Decolonial Theories   547 Murad’s landmark volume, Ruptures: Anti-­Colonial & Anti-­Racist Feminist Theorizing, shows how global feminist traditions can deploy decolonizing theories without referencing dominant decolonial scholarship in the Anglo American academy. For the purposes of defining anti-­colonial feminist theories, I suggest that while all anti-­colonial feminisms theorize colonial systems of power and their intersections with gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and other dominant structures of social power, their frameworks are (1) context dependent, (2) based on individual and collective experiences of oppression, (3) related to theories of change (as in plural visions of social transformation), and (4) fundamentally fluid/internally heterogeneous. The articulation of the subjects, methods, and mediums (from academic production to artistic activism) for carrying out resistance therefore depends on the specific circumstances of coloniality and its situated effects on women’s lives. On this view, María Lugones’s influential definitions of decolonial feminisms (2007, 2010, 2017) are as post/de/anti-­colonial as the collective communiqués and oral traditions of Indigenous Chiapanec women, but potentially in different ways that are not scalar but historically multidimensional. That is to say, while the imperial project was vast and played on many of the same racialized tropes and mechanisms (such as decriminalized rape under slavery and Christian marriage laws) responsible for much of the gender-­based violence and subordination of women in geographically and culturally distinct communities, there is no single unifying approach for decoding and unbraiding the traumas of colonialism in women’s lives and communities. For instance, in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, racialized lower-­class women have been especially vulnerable to the impact of the melding of neoliberal economics and humanitarian colonialism (as in microloan economies), structural adjustment programs tied to national trade debts, nongovernmental organization–led millennium development goals, sexual trafficking, and environmental degradation of Native lands. The feminisms that arose in response to these systems have been particularly good at identifying the nature of the global economic, industrial, and political systems that perpetuate gendered harms via the evolution of those structures regionally. They share a great deal with the precarities and violences First Nations peoples, Native Americans, and women of color in the United States face, from widespread sexual violence to normalized cultural invisibility and public health crises in maternal deaths and heart disease. Yet the forms of resistance (the “anti” in anti-­colonial) in settler societies governed by asymmetrical land treaties and institutionalized gendered racisms are not simply interchangeable (while being compatible) with the autonomous feminisms that arose to protest economic liberalization, import substitution industrialization, and state-­sponsored disappearances of women. They are compatible, and certainly not disassociated from each other, as the systematicity of structural violence and sexual trafficking would not be possible if they were. But to understand what is postcolonial or decolonial about feminisms requires a focus on women’s material and historical contexts rather than a primary focus on academic genealogies of concepts. How did colonialism impact women in this region? How are water systems and environmental and traditional models of governance impacted? What violence has it done to kinship structures and

548   Ruíz configurations of human relations? What metaphysical orthodoxies were used to supplant native ones in relation to women’s lives? How are women’s situations framed in relation to colonial caste systems and their reiteration in modern social and racial hierarchies? How are maternal health systems faring under colonial knowledge systems? How are colonial legal systems responsible for the exclusion and subordination of women in each region? This is not an “area studies” approach but a methodological point to ensure anti-­colonial feminisms are not reducible to umbrella terms feminists can deploy against a nonspecific sexist eurocentrism. Universalizing tendencies in feminist philosophy, after all, very often operate as colonial mechanisms of power, especially in hegemonic representations of non-­western women and through culturally essentialist tropes (Mohanty 1984; Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Mohanty 2003; Narayan 1997; Narayan 1998). What is unifying is that the impact of colonial education systems, heteronormative gender binaries, divisions of public and private spheres, legal subordination, and structural poverty on women’s lives has been widespread and intergenerational in the Global South. In their various ways, anti-­colonial feminisms attempt to come to grips with these layered consequences from their specific locations and to produce systems of power that articulate women’s resistance to coloniality at all levels of lived experience. In this vein, some thinkers that have heavily influenced postcolonial and decolonial feminist scholarship in philosophy are Chandra Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, María Lugones, Trinh Minha, Ofelia Schutte, bell hooks, and Uma Narayan. Landmark publications include “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak 1988a); This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Moraga and Anzaldúa  1981); Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Minha 1989); “The Coloniality of Gender” (Lugones 2007); Borderlands/La Frontera (Anzaldúa 1987); and Decentering the Center (Narayan 2008), among others. Key concepts include cultural essentialism, epistemic violence, strategic essentialism, Mestiza consciousness, borderlands, the modern colonial gender system, world traveling, cultural alterity, and the master’s tools, to name only a few. While the list of influences far outnumbers these selections, in the limited scope of this entry, I focus on thinkers who specifically take up issues focused on colonialism’s impact on women’s lives, especially racialized women in the Global South. A more accurate representation would enumerate a longer list of works and thinkers now central to Latina, Black, Indigenous, and autonomous feminisms.

Future Directions At this juncture, tectonic shifts are happening in anti-­colonial feminisms. The hold of traditional philosophical boundaries on delimiting authoritative sources is loosening, bringing with it a watershed of interdisciplinary literatures and metaphilosophical reflection on the mechanisms of power responsible for policing the boundaries of feminist theory (see Dotson 2012). One of the most important shifts is the turn towards

Postcolonial and Decolonial Theories   549 women of color and Indigenous feminisms as stand-­alone work, untethered to the “pluralizing the core/canon” requirements of mainstream feminist theory (see Million 2009; Million 2014; Harjo and Bird 1997; Wynter 2012). The politics of refusal is finally being centered in discussions of anti-­colonial feminisms (A.  Simpson  2007,  2014). Discourses of “unsettling” settler colonial discourses and patriarchal philosophies are emerging, as are philosophies of cultural revitalization (see Meissner and Whyte 2017). A new generation of feminist thinkers are grappling with the academic mainstreaming of decolonial literatures, making their own diagnoses of the times, epistemic shifts, and methodological openings in feminist anti-­colonial work. The citational centering of male senior academics is weakening in a field that historically perpetuates the invisibility of racialized women and Indigenous peoples. In this context, postcolonial and decolonial feminists are a moving polygon of shared concerns while being irreducible to an umbrella term. There is no single “postcolonial,” “decolonial,” or “anti-­colonial” feminist philosophy but diverse genealogies of feminist practices. Lastly, it bears repeating—until that day when “a functional change in a sign system” actually arrives— that there are longstanding anti-­colonial intellectual histories by Indigenous theorists and women of color that do not use the terms “decolonial,” “postcolonial,” or even “anti­colonial” yet have contributed significantly to the intellectual imaginations of the theorists cited in this limited, colonialist medium of historiography.

References Alexander, M. J., and C. T. Mohanty. 1997. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York: Routledge. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Bhambra, Gurminer. 2014. “Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues.” Postcolonial Studies 17 (2): 115–21. Boone, E. H., and G. Urton. 2011. Their Way of Writing: Scripts, Signs, and Pictographies in Pre-Columbian America. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks. De Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Writing of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Dotson, Kristie. 2012. “How Is This Paper Philosophy?” Comparative Philosophy 3 (1): 3–29. Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2007. “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms.” Cultural Studies 21: 211–23. Harjo, J., and G. Bird. 1997. Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writing of North America. New York: Norton & Co. Johnson, Cheryl. 1982. “Grass Roots Organizing: Women in Anticolonial Activity in Southwestern Nigeria.” African Studies Review 25 (2/3): 137–47. Kaplan, Steven. 1994. Indigenous Responses to Western Christianity. New York: New York University Press. Kuokkanen, Rauna. 2006. “Indigenous Peoples on Two Continents: Self-Determination Processes in Saami and First Nation Societies.” European Review of Native American Studies 20 (2): 1–5. Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. 1993. “Founding Statement.” boundary 2, 20 (3): 110–21. Lorde, Audre. (1984) 2007. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 110–14. New York: Crossing Press.

550   Ruíz Lugones, María. 1997. “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” In Feminist Social Thought, edited by Diana Tietjens, 148–69. New York: Routledge. Lugones, María. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22 (1): 186–209. Lugones, María. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25 (4): 742–59. Lugones, María. 2017. “Decolonial.” In Keywords for Latina/o Studies, edited by Deborah Vargas, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, and Nancy Mirabal, 43–47. New York: New York University Press. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2007. “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept.” Cultural Studies 21: 240–70. Meissner, S. N., and K. Whyte. 2017. “Theorizing Indigeneity, Gender and Settler Colonialism.” In The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race, edited by Paul Taylor, Lina Alcoff, and Luvell Anderson, 152–67. New York: Routledge. Mignolo, Walter. 1999. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2001. “Coloniality of Power and Subalternity.” In The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, edited by Ileana Rodríguez, 424–44. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2007. “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality.” Cultural Studies 21 (2): 449–514. Million, Dian. 2009. “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History.” Wicazo Sa Review 24 (2): 53–76. Million, Dian. 2014. Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Minha, Trinh  T. 1989. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mohanty, Chandra. 1984. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” boundary 2, 12 (3): 333–58. Mohanty, Chandra. 2003. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Moraga, C., and G. Anzaldua. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. London: Persephone Press. Narayan, Uma. 1997. Contesting Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminisms. New York: Routledge. Narayan, Uma. 1998. “Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist Critique of Cultural Essentialism.” Hypatia 13 (2): 86–106. Narayan, Uma. 2008. Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nasta, Susheila. 1992. Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Newcomb, Steven. 2008. Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. New York: Fulcrum Press. Nkenkana, Akohona. 2015. “No African Futures without the Liberation of Women: A Decolonial Feminist Perspective.” Africa Development/Afrique et Développement 40 (3): 41–57. Peterson, K. H., and A. Rutherford. 1986. A Double Colonization: Colonial and Post-Colonial Women’s Writing. London: Dangaroo Press.

Postcolonial and Decolonial Theories   551 Quijano, Anibal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepentla: Views from the South 1 (3): 533–80. Ruíz, Elena. 2017. “Framing Intersectionality.” In The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race, edited by Paul Taylor, Lina Alcoff, and Luvell Anderson, 335–48. New York: Routledge. Said, Edward W. 2003. Orientalism: Edward W. Said. New York: Vintage Books. Said, Edward. 1988. “Foreword.” In Selected Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, v–xii. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. Schutte, Ofelia. 1993. “Cultural Identity, Liberation and Feminist Theory.” In Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought. New York: SUNY. Schutte, Ofelia. 1998. “Cultural Alterity: Cross-Cultural Communication in North-South Contexts.” Hypatia 13 (2): 53–72. Schutte, Ofelia. 2007. “Postcolonial Feminisms Genealogies and Recent Directions.” In The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Linda Martin Alcoff and Eva Feder Kittay, 165–77. Oxford: Blackwell. Shepard, Todd. 2015. Voices of Decolonization: A Brief History with Documents. London: St. Martin’s Press. Simpson, Audra. 2007. “Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9: 67–80. Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Simpson, Leanne. 2013. Islands of Decolonial Love. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Publishing. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de. 2007. Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies. New York and London: Verso. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988a. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Bloomington: University of Illinois Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988b. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” In Selected Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, 3–34. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. Vuola, Elina. 2000. “Thinking Otherwise: Dussel, Liberation Theology and Feminism.” In Thinking from the Underside of History, edited by Lina Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta, 149–80. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Wane, N., J.  Jagire, and Z.  Murad. 2013. Ruptures: Anti-Colonial & Anti-Racist Feminist Theorizing. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Ward, Thomas. 2017. Decolonizing Indigeneity: New Approaches to Latin American Literature. New York: Lexington. Wynter, Sylvia. 2012. We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about a Little Culture: Decolonizing Essays, 1967–1984. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press.

chapter 46

A n i m a l Stu dies Lori Gruen

Animal ethics, most commonly associated with Peter Singer and, to a lesser extent, the late philosopher Tom Regan, argues that we should extend the boundaries of ethical concern to include other animals lest we be thought to be prejudicial. Other animals are like us in morally relevant ways. Social animals build lasting relationships in which they express a variety of emotions and behaviors—some animals grieve the death of their companions; they teach their young skills and norms and indulge the bad behavior of youngsters that they don’t tolerate from adults; and many other animals laugh, play, reassure, deceive, betray, and care for others. They have distinct personalities and unique desires. And this may be just scratching the surface, as we are still learning more about their lives and experiences. Failing to recognize the ethical claims they make on us, it is widely thought, is akin to a type of racism or sexism, what Richard Ryder (1989) dubbed “speciesism.” Arguments that we should attend to other animals from an ethical point of view are increasingly familiar, they are often taught in introductory philosophy courses, and they have been taken up in the movement to end animal suffering and combat human tyranny. The horrible treatment of animals in intensive animal agricultural practices; in entertainment industries, including places like Sea World; in zoos; and in laboratories has come to be viewed as objectionable from an ethical point of view. Decades of work in animal ethics and the success of the animal protection movement have generated increased attention to the variety and complexity of human-­animal relationships, relationships that are now at the heart of the growing field of animal studies. Animal studies provides insights into the ideologies and frameworks according to which some beings are enabled to thrive while others are oppressed and destroyed. Recognizing that human-­centered scholarship has relegated animals to the background, scholars working in animal studies seek to bring our relationships with other animals to the fore. As questions about our practices toward, attitudes about, and treatment of other animals have gained attention in disciplines outside of philosophy, feminist philosophical insights have been taken up, although often in unacknowledged ways. Here I will explore three areas in which feminist philosophy informs animal studies and should inform animal ethics: first is the focus in animal studies on relation-

Animal Studies   553 ships; second, animal studies scholarship recognizes, values, and problematizes ­difference; and third, animal studies, perhaps more than any other field, confronts the complexities of speaking for others, an issue that continues to arise in feminist scholarship and activism.

Relationships According to utilitarian frameworks (see Singer 1975), neo-­Kantian frameworks (see Korsgaard  2018), and neo-­Aristotelian frameworks (see Nussbaum  2011) of animal ethics, other animals are included within the sphere of moral concern by virtue of the fact that they share a set of valuable capacities with us that ground our ethical attention and concern. Other animals suffer, both physically and psychologically; their interests are expressions of their natural constitutions; and they have species-­specific capabilities that make them the kinds of beings they are and thus should be respected. Their lives go better for them when they are free from pain and are able to pursue their natural instincts and species-­typical behaviors, and go worse otherwise. That an individual being’s life can go better or worse from their point of view is undeniable, but much of the literature in animal ethics, whether it is a utilitarian ­perspective, a rights-­based perspective, or another approach, is focused on the individual suffering or interest setbacks in abstraction. As many feminists have pointed out, ethical reasoning focused on individuals, or even individual concerns like suffering or interest violations, tends to flatten or erase the complexity of our interactions with others. Traditional ethical approaches do not adequately recognize the particular concerns, interests, worries, attitudes, sympathies, or sensitivities of people figuring out what to do when confronting animal suffering and tend to generalize over the complex experiences of those who suffer. Feminist animal studies scholars early on argued that the mainstream animal ethics tends to ignore the genesis, quality, and significance of particular concerns, interests, or sympathies in social contexts. By focusing on specific individual experiences, it is easier to overlook other aspects of a being’s life that may involve pleasures in community with others. As Marti Kheel (2008) noted, detached reasoning creates a “truncated narrative” that fails to capture the details of moral problems, actions, agents, and relations. The tendency toward abstraction flattens diverse situations and relegates to the background important situational and structural concerns. Viewing animals in isolation from larger political and social structures, and in particular, from those structures of power that underlie current practices in which animals are used and destroyed, weakens analyses. According to some feminists, there is a crucial conceptual link between the “logic of domination” that builds on these structures of power that generate and reinforce sexism, racism, heterosexism, ableism, and other forms of oppression and support the oppression of nonhuman animals and the more than human world more generally (See Warren 2000).

554   Gruen While focusing on these political and social structures reveals parallels between the marginalization of various beings in virtue of being identified with particular groups (Black people, women of color, immigrants, prisoners, the disabled, nonhuman animals), attention to particular relationships helps to bring into focus ethical and epistemic issues that arise in our connections with others. The division between us and them, between men and women, between Black and white, between human and animal, between reason and emotion has been challenged in animal studies as it has in much feminist theorizing. Instead of focusing on discreet individuals in abstraction and reasoning about general capacities they may or may not have in order to develop a view about our moral obligations, I have developed an approach I call entangled empathy that is an ethical praxis premised on care. It includes cognition and affect in ways that cannot be disentangled and leads to richer, more motivating approaches to understanding and improving our relationships with others (Gruen 2015). Being in ethical relation involves, in part, being able to adequately respond to another’s needs, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, perspectives, etc., as they see them as well as being attentive to the ways that we are co-­constructing each other’s needs, interests, desires, even identities. Empathy is a way of connecting to specific others in their particular circumstances and thus is a central skill for being in ethical relations. Rather than generating distance and the vilification that often accompanies efforts to distinguish us from them, entangled empathy challenges the legitimacy of binaries and has us focus on the relationships we are in, whether they are intimate or economic, near or far, direct or indirect.

Difference Holding on to binaries is part of what contributes to the process of othering, which grounds the oppression of those picked out as different. The practice of othering enables a “moral distance and detachment that also lead to the creation and perpetuation of oppressive practices and institutions”(Cuomo and Gruen 1998: 12). Gender binaries are one of the central categories of othering, as is the human/nonhuman binary (See Adams 1990; Plumwood 1993). As Syl and Aph Ko have recently highlighted, building on anti-­colonial theory, this latter binary is also always racialized: “in both the narrative of speciesism and the narrative of racism, the members of the losing side both fall short of real human status and, as a result, their suffering and their deaths are mundane, normal, and expected” (2017: 93). Breaking down the binaries is thought to be necessary for making the suffering and death of others visible. Often, in response to “othering” and exclusion, scholars and activists have argued that “we too” should be included, “we too” are human, “we too” are valuable, but this type of “saming” is not an adequate response to “othering” (Gruen and Weil 2012). The process of saming involves moving the bar of difference so that some others are allowed to be included in moral and political categories that already matter and they are then judged

Animal Studies   555 in terms of their likeness to those at the center. The recent attempts by lawyers at the Nonhuman Rights Project seeking recognition in the courts for chimpanzees and elephants is based on the process of saming. But in this process of focusing on likeness, some of those who are too different will be left out. Importantly, those within the valued category themselves, who may also be different, will have their differences ignored or overlooked by “saming” forms of inclusion. The problem with saming became particularly obvious in work designed to determine whether animals can understand the mental states of others. In a series of experiments with chimpanzees, it was thought that chimpanzees did not understand what their conspecifics thought or saw, but when researchers started to pay attention to chimpanzee difference and redesigned tests that attended to difference, particularly differences that emerge evolutionarily, they noted that indeed, chimpanzees did understand the visual capacities of others and adjusted their own behaviors accordingly (see Gruen 2011). When what we are focused on is similarities—how general types of intelligence or cognitive skills are shared, or some sensitivities and vulnerabilities are shared, or the same emotional responses are shared—distinctively valuable aspects of the lives of others become obscured. As disability theorists have pointed out so powerfully, these assimilationist moves force difference into able-­bodied-­and neurotypical-­oriented frameworks, or in the case of animals, human-­oriented frameworks. In doing this, we ignore valuable aspects of different lives and end up perpetuating problematic binaries. There may be occasions when pointing out similarities has a strategic function, perhaps to call attention to those who have been denied recognition. But in doing that, the obfuscating role of saming needs to be kept fully in mind. Animal studies illuminates ways to re-­examine the construction of difference and the processes of othering, offering new insights on the ideologies that determine the political and ethical frameworks according to which some forms of life are enabled to thrive while others are oppressed and destroyed. The dominating forces of racial patriarchy have contributed to a construction of otherness and a naturalization of that construction to justify destructive practices that impact those who are othered. Exploring how animals are “animalized” sheds light on the ways that human others are “animalized”—deemed not quite human—and can help us reveal the conditions that subjugate, erase, deny, violate, and kill so many others. Rather than focusing on the valuable things we all share, and there are indeed many important qualities that transcend categories of difference, attending to the ways particular differences are deployed in value hierarchies to maintain destructive systems of exclusion is an important contribution of animal studies.

Speaking for Others In the early days of feminist philosophy, when “women’s” lives and experiences were still being either ignored or narrated by men, Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman, in their

556   Gruen crucially important paper “Have We Got a Theory for You!,” challenged the legitimacy of being spoken for/about. Spelman wrote: It matters to us what is said about us, who says it, and to whom it is said: having the opportunity to talk about one’s life, to give an account of it, to interpret it, is integral to leading that life rather than being led through it. . . . [P]art of human life, human living, is talking about it, and we can be sure that being silenced in one’s own account of one’s life is a kind of amputation that signals oppression. . . . Sometimes feminists have made even stronger claims about the importance of speaking about our own lives and the destructiveness of others presuming to speak about us or for us. Lugones and Spelman 1983: 573–74.

But who is this “us”? Spelman and Lugones go on to argue that there is no universal woman subject and develop a set of suggestions for theorizing across differences, theorizing rooted in friendship. In Lugones’s “problematically voiced” suggestions about how “to do theory that is not imperialistic, ethnocentric, disrespectful,” she raises a series of questions: What are the things we need to know about others, and about ourselves, in order to speak intelligently, intelligibly, sensitively, and helpfully about their lives? We can show respect, or lack of it, in writing theoretically about others no less than in ­talking directly with them. . . . When we speak, write, and publish our theories, to whom do we think we are accountable? . . . Why and how do we think theorizing about others provides understanding of them? Is there any sense in which theorizing about others is a short-­cut to understanding them? (1983: 579–­80)

Theorizing about others respectfully and being accountable to one’s relationships requires “openness (including openness to severe criticism of the white/Anglo world), sensitivity, concentration, self-­questioning, circumspection,” and all this and more is necessary to avoid reducing “each one of us to instances of the abstraction called ‘woman’ ” (1983: 579–80). Questions about who is a “woman” and how best to theorize about the lives of others continue to be raised by women of color, trans people, and gender nonconforming people who are often met with resistance, or worse, ignored. But in the case of nonhuman animals, there is no obvious voice to be silenced. One of the central areas of scholarly concern in animal studies involves representing animals, not only as symbols or metaphors for human interests and projects, but also as subjects themselves. Animal studies has been at the forefront of efforts to foster new epistemological paradigms for recognizing and articulating the agency of other animals, but “speaking for” them creates serious difficulties. Within feminist philosophy classrooms, for example, where important interventions about the exclusion of the experiences of Black women, women of color, queer women, trans women, and gender non conforming people continue to occur, the excluded subjects’ perspective can be

Animal Studies   557 articulated, usually by the subject themselves. This is not so easy in animal studies classes, where animals necessarily must be talked about and spoken for in a language that they do not share. And like the category “woman,” the very category “animal” is so vast and includes such diverse beings as orangutans and coral, butterflies and cows, parrots and sharks that it is hard to identify a commonality other than that they are “not human.” Yet they are being spoken about by humans. Unlike women and other regularly silenced humans who struggle to be heard but who can write, speak, and represent themselves, it is not obvious how animals, who have been invisible or located in the background, locked in representations created by humans who are often justifying their instrumental use of animals, can emerge as subjects. Linda Alcoff has suggested a set of conditions for permissibly speaking for others in particular discursive contexts, one of which includes explicit accountability for what one says. “To whom one is accountable is a political/epistemological choice contestable, contingent, and . . . constructed through the process of discursive action. What this entails in practice is a serious and sincere commitment to remain open to criticism and to attempt actively, attentively, and sensitively to ‘hear’ (understand) the criticism” (Alcoff 1992:26). She goes on to suggest that part of the discursive context involves looking not just at the credentials or expertise of the speaker, or the content of what is said, but also at what the speech does. “The content of the claim, or its meaning, emerges in interaction between words and hearers within a very specific historical situation”(1992: 26) Some scholars, myself included, have suggested that we can allow animals to speak for themselves by engaging in a type of animal ethnography that moves beyond behavioral description (although that too involves ethnographic insights) as well as looking to the work of those who have devoted good portions of their lives living with and observing other animals. Josephine Donovan, for example, has argued that we must listen “to other life-­forms regardless of how alien they may seem to us and incorporat[e] their communications into our moral reaction to them” (Donovan 2006: 315) to develop a dialogical ethical approach to other animals. Responding to Wittgenstein’s comment that we would not be able to understand a lion, even if he could speak, Donovan suggests that lions do in fact speak “and it is not impossible to understand much of what they are saying” (2006: 320). Val Plumwood argued for a kind of dialogical interspecies ethic “reconstructing human identity in ways that acknowledge our animality, decentre rationality,” and develop an “openness to the non-­human other as potentially an intentional and communicative being” (Plumwood 2002: 194). But understanding what animals are communicating requires more than just listening; perhaps it also demands what Traci Warkentin has called “interspecies etiquette,” which involves “much more than mere politeness or mildly observing. Indeed, such acts are often precisely what we should not do, particularly when approaching individuals of another species.” She argues that inviting bodily comportments of openness and responsivity are central to the possibility of hearing what other animals have to say (Warkentin 2010). But even here there are disagreements about how to interpret behaviors and cultures and what, ultimately, a particular animal may be saying. Alcoff ’s suggestion is pertinent to thinking about speaking for other animals. The human who is speaking must be

558   Gruen accountable to the well-­being of the animal, must be open to criticism, and must see what the speech does. I would add that the speaker must be able to articulate their own interests and distinguish them from the interests they are representing in the other. Are the things being said serving the speaker’s interests more than the interests of those spoken for? To be accountable to those one is speaking for, the speaker has to understand behavior that is typical for their species and her individual personality, and this requires getting to know the individual over a period of time. Generalizing about all members of a species, or speaking for others for political gains, even if those gains are meant to apply at some future time to the animals themselves, may not be a justifiable or respectful way of speaking and acting. Many current discussions of what we owe animals fail to attend to the particularity of individual animal lives and the very different sorts of relationships we are in with them. Philosophical reflection on our relationships with other animals will be enhanced when we not only attend to how other animals are different from us and how we might navigate these differences in interpreting their interests and desires but also recognize the ways that the categories we think with, for example, human/nonhuman, white/ Black, men/women, and others, work to create distorted and distorting differences. Animal studies can augment feminist philosophical thinking and feminist philosophical insights have contributed to thinking and acting more respectfully within animal studies.

References Adams, Carol  J. 1990. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum Press. Alcoff, Linda. 1992. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique (20): 5–32. Cuomo, Chris. 2002. “On Ecofeminist Philosophy.” Ethics and the Environment 7 (2): 1–11. Cuomo, Chris, and Lori Gruen. 1998. “On Puppies and Pussies: Animals, Intimacy, and Moral Distance.” In Daring to Be Good: Essays in Feminist Ethico-Politics, edited by A. Bar-On and A. Ferguson: 129–142. New York: Routledge. Donovan, Josephine. 2006. “Feminism and the Treatment of Animals.” Signs 31 (2): 305–329. Gruen, Lori. 2011. Ethics and Animals: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gruen, Lori. 2015. Entangled Empathy: A New Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals. New York: Lantern Books. Gruen, Lori, and Kari Weil. 2012. “Editor’s Introduction to ‘Animal Others.’ ” Hypatia 27 (3): 477–487. Kheel, Marti. 2008. Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Ko, Aph, and Syl Ko. 2017. APHRO-ISM Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters. New York: Lantern Boks. Korsgaard, Christine. 2018. Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to Other Animals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Animal Studies   559 Lugones, Maria, and Elizabeth Spelman. 1983. “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice,’ ” Women’s Studies International Forum 6 (6): 573–581. Nussbaum, Martha  C. 2011. “The Capabilities Approach and Animal Entitlements.” In The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, edited by Tom L. Beauchamp and Raymond G. Frey, 237. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge. Plumwood, Val. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge. Ryder, Richard D. 1989. Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes Toward Speciesism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Singer, Peter. 1975. Animal Liberation. New York: Avon Books. Warkentin, Traci. 2010. “Interspecies Etiquette: An Ethics of Paying Attention to Animals.” Ethics and the Environment 15 (1): 99–122. Warren, Karen. 2000. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters.Latham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. ableism  7, 65, 301, 523, 525 abolition  440–3, 446–8, 502 abortion  251, 256, 275, 431, 484–7 Beauvoir on  78–9, 78n.3 bioethics on  486–7 Stoljar on  378–9 absence 419–21 Ackerly, Brooke  463–5 ACT-UP. See AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power Adams, Abigail  83 adaptive preferences  316–17 on gender  253–5, 316, 379 social justice lack and  253–5, 316, 379 substantive theories and  379–80 women deference and  253–5, 316, 379 Addams, Jane  83–8 agency Black women on  111–12 as feminist  55–8 feminist philosophy of social science on  334 identity and  344, 347 neurotechnologies on  489–90 Oshana on dilemma and  375–6, 379–82 phantom intentions on  111–12 political agency and  418–19 prisoners asserting  443–4 recognition and  111–12 substantive theorists on  376, 378–82 agency dilemma  375–6, 379–82 ahistorical assumption  170–2, 176–7 Ahmed, Sara  6–7, 388–91 on citation  70 feminist new materialism and  388, 388n.1

feminist phenomenology and  69–71 on Husserl and privilege  70–1 Queer Phenomenology by  70–1 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP)  57–8 Alaimo, Stacy  389–90 Alarcón, Norma  123–4, 127–8 Alcoff, Linda Martín  71, 126n.3, 355 on disability  519 on identity  315 on imperial feminism  295 on privileged White men  396 on race  355 Rape and Resistance by  319 on social justice  317, 319 on speaking for others  557 Alexander, Sadie Tanner Mossell  502 alienation bodily alienation and  72, 76–7, 80–1 Christman on non-  377–8 feminist philosophy and  3–4 women’s bodies and  67, 76–7, 113 Allen, Amy  50–2, 60 on power  317 Allen, Paula Gunn  351–2 de Allen, Gertrude Gonzales  129 alterity  263–5, 268 ambivalence  3–4, 121–2, 267–8, 456 American philosophy  8–9, 84, 89 American pragmatism  83–5, 87, 92 analytical feminist approaches. See also methodology continental or  3–10, 94, 146, 193, 237, 250 criticism on  238, 238n.2 definition of  250–1

562   index analytical feminist approaches. (Continued ) feminist aesthetics in  295, 295n.1 feminist consequentialism in  252–5, 279 feminist ethics in  256–7 history of  251 morals and  249, 252 in SAF  251 on truth  237 analytical feminist ethics  249, 252 Anderson, Elizabeth  222, 230–1 Angelou, Maya  369 animal ethics entangled empathy for  554 feminist animal studies and  553 feminist philosophy on  552–3 interspecies etiquette in  557 Nonhuman Rights Project and  554–5 on “other,”  555 power on  553 pragmatism on  92–3 “saming,” 554–5 speaking for others and  555–8 speciesism and  552 on suffering  553 anti-colonial feminism  59–60 approaches on  547–8 definitions and history of  541–5, 542nn.1–2, 543n.3, 545n.4, 547 future directions of  548–9 resistance by  547–8 anti-essentialism 104–5 anti-female bias  30–1 anti-Semitism 50–1 Antony, Louise  90, 203n.3, 227, 251 Anzaldúa, Gloría  122, 178, 411, 547–8 Borderland/La frontera by  123–4 on hermeneutical death  411 on intersectionality  412 politics and  126–7 on queer theory  506–7 work by  129 Arendt, Hannah  18, 54, 58, 139–40, 367 on human rights  457 natality and  364, 467 on natality and women  467 war and  451–2, 457 Arignote 27–8

Arisaka, Yoko  144–6 Aristotle 32 anti-female bias in  30–1 feminists on  31 gender and  21 metaphysics and  31–2, 365 misogyny and  15, 32 for patriarchy  396 sexism and  21, 30–1 on women  25–6, 28 art bias in  301 canon as  299–300, 299n.20 gynocentrism in  302 invisibility in  302–3 patriarchal ableism in  301 white, heterosexual, cisgendmale gaze in 299–300 Ashley X  521 Ashwell, Lauren  193 Asian American feminist philosophy Arisaka on  144–6 Blum on  143 definition of  137 on injustice and Asian Americans  137 on invisibility and intersectionality  141–2 nonwhite immigration and  145 on normative implications  143–4 scarcity of  146–7 Sundstrom and  143, 145, 147n.3 vulnerability and  143–4 Zheng on  143–5 Asian American movement  140–1, 144–5 Asian American philosophy  139–42 Asiatic Barred Zone (1924)  142 Asmis, Elizabeth  32–3 Astell, Mary The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England by  43–4 Serious Proposal to the Ladies by  18, 39–44, 420 Austin, J. L.  188, 192, 241n.8 authenticity hierarchical theories and  377–9 neurotechnologies on  489–90 procedural theorists on  376–82

index   563 autonomy 56. See also relational autonomy agency dilemma and  375–6, 379–82 authenticity and competence in  377 bioethics and  487–8 as capacity and status  374 Cudd for  470–1 feminists on  374 King, M., and  34, 291, 380–2 Meyers on competence and  378 oppression systems on  382 Oshana on  378, 380–1 Parkes and  380–1 to political agency  418–19 politics of  374 as self-governing  374–8 as self-governing future  381–2 social oppression and  376, 381–2 Stoljar on  378–9, 534 substantive theorists on  376, 378–82 Axiothea of Philesia  32 Baber, Harriet  253 Bachelard, Suzanne  238–9 Bailey, Alison  425 Bailey, Cathryn  91 Baker, Lynne Rudder  174–5 Banerjee, Amrita  88–90 Barad, Karen  242–4, 366, 386, 390, 392 Bardwell-Jones, Celia T.  89–90, 93 Barnes, Elizabeth  217, 217n.2 Barthes, Roland  99 Bartky, Sandra Lee on bodily alienation  77 Femininity and Domination by  64, 68–9, 289, 315–16 as feminist phenomenologist  64–70 on patriarchy and women  289 on SWIP  4–5 Barvosa, Edwina  124n.2, 126n.3 Battersby, Christine  302n.27 Bauer, Nancy  72 Beal, Frances M.  502 Beauchamp, Tom L.  272 Beauvoir, Simone de  18, 176–8 on abortion  78–9, 78n.3 on alterity  264–5 Bauer on  72

“becomes, a woman” by  72, 74–6 on bodily experiences  72, 76–7, 80–1 on body problem  172, 174–5 on collective identity  369–70 Collins on  79–80 A Companion to Beauvoir and  80–1 on double consciousness  173n.4, 174–5 on embodiment  385–6, 389–90 The Ethics of Ambiguity by  75–6 feminism and  72, 79 feminist phenomenology and  65, 67–70 Feminist Writings by  72, 77–80 on Heidegger  367 on Husserlian phenomenology  63–4 on identity  341–2 intersectionality and  80 legacy of  72 on men  423n.6 Merleau-Ponty and  75–6, 172–3, 173n.5 middle-class and  79–80 on myth of woman  65–6 on prereflective consciousness  172–3, 173n.5 The Second Sex by  63–4, 170, 172–5, 264–5, 341–2, 350–1, 409, 451–2, 454 on sex freedom  78–9 Simons on  173n.4 Spelman on  79–80 on women and body  72, 78–9, 350–1 on women as “other,”  74–5, 454 women definition by  73 on women of color  72, 79–80 on women’s liberation  72, 78, 80–1 Belle, Kathryn Sophia  117–18, 502–4 Benhabib, Seyla  50–2, 54–5, 59–60 on autonomy and emancipation  56 Feminism as Critique by  52–5 Feminist Contentions by  52, 55–8 Benjamin, Harry  531 Benjamin, Walter  50, 453 Bennett, Jane  363, 366, 385–6 Berger, John  299 Berges, Sandrine  38, 38n.2, 40, 43, 46 Bergoffen, Debra  467 Bergson, Henri  172–3, 244, 363–4, 366–7, 385–6 Berkeley, George  40 Berlant, Laurent  126–7, 506–8

564   index Bersani, Leo  512 Bettcher, Talia Mae  297n.12, 531 “Between Rocks and Hard Places” (Dotson) 114–15 Bhabha, Homi  543–4 Bianchi, Emmanuela  21, 32, 190 bias 289–91. See also gender bias on art  301 assertion influencing  404, 404n.11 canon with masculine  93–4 Chomsky on grammar and  399–400 constructive role of  401, 401n.7 definition of  395 epistemology resources for  208 feminist bioethics on  274–5 on gender  227 Goldenberg on  230 good vs. bad on  401–4, 402n.8 implicit attitudes in  403 interests influencing  398 Kuhn on science history and  240, 329, 400–1 as male  186–7 overcoming of  304–6 Quine and  399–401 science without  227 underdetermination and  398–401 bias paradox  396–7 critical contextual empiricism on  227, 229–31 feminist empiricism on  227 Longino on  228–30, 397–8, 401, 405 science and  227, 229, 232–3 Bierria, Alisa  111–12 Bilge, Sirma  333, 333n.7 Bilgrami, Akeel  345 Bin Laden, Osama  454–5 bioethics on abortion  486–7 appearance of  485–6 on Ashley X  521 autonomy and  487–8 biomedical technology and  484 care and  277–8, 487–8 on consent and choice  281 definition and history of  272 on disability  490–1, 522–3

disability theory on  517 feminist bioethics and  273, 281, 283 feminists on  485–6 on fertility control  486–8 as gendered  273, 281–2 life science or medical knowledge in  273 mitochondrial replacement and  275, 282 moral philosophy and  272–4, 274n.1 power relations and  484–5 relational autonomy in  375 biomedical innovation  240–2, 276, 490–1 biomedical technology  367, 484–6, 489 Blankmeyer-Burke, Teresa  521 Bluhm, Robyn  230 Blum, Lawrence  143 bodies. See also “the body”; women’s bodies Beauvoir on experiences and  72, 76–7, 80–1 Beauvoir on problem of  172, 174–5 Western canon on  350–1 bodily alienation  72, 76–7, 80–1. See also alienation “the body,”  350. See also bodies Beauvoir on women and  65, 67–8, 72, 78–9, 351 as natural  352–7 body problem  172. See also mindbody dualism Bohr, Niels  244, 386, 390 Bordo, Susan  26–7, 315, 320 Bornstein, Kate  297n.10, 531, 297nn.12–13 Bosworth, Mary  443–4 Botts, Tina Fernandes  314 Bourdieu, Pierre  64, 64n.1 Braidotti, Rosi  99, 102–3, 385–6, 389–90 Brock, Gillian  469–70 Brown, Matthew  230 Brown, Wendy  29–30, 50–2 Bunch, Charlotte  463–5 Burke, Carolyn  303–4 Butler, Judith  51–2, 72, 241n.8 on anti-essentialism  104–5 assumptions questioned by  56–7 Bodies That Matter by  104–5, 388, 508 deconstruction and  128 on ec-static  264 feminist phenomenology and  64–70

index   565 on Foucault  55 on gender  66 on gender as performative  476–7, 508–9, 523 Gender Trouble by  64, 68–9, 104–5, 315, 508–9 Giving an Account of Oneself by  265 on identity  508–9, 523 on materialization  388–90, 389n.2 on morality and society  262–3 Namaste and  533 on normative political philosophy  55–8, 66, 104–5, 128, 262–3, 297n.10, 386 performative theory and  388, 476–7, 508–9, 523 on philosophy’s “other,”  532–3 on politics  56 on power  7–8 on precarity  476 The Psychic Life of Power by  263 queer theory and  57–8, 507–10, 531–3 on recognition  457–8 Schwartzman on  190–1 self-styling and  389–90, 389n.2 for sexed differences  55 on sexual harassment  67–8 universalized language theory of  57 Cabot, Ella Lyman  88 Calkins, Mary Whiton  88 Canguilhem, Georges  363, 366 canon abandonment or change of  44–5 alternative history in  45 appropriation of  15–17 as artistic  299–300, 299n.20 Berges on Kant-inspired  46 confrontation of Western philosophical 303–4 criticism on  15–16, 20 on early modern women philosophers  27 on female bodies  350–1 feminist phenomenology and  64, 68–70 feminist philosophers on  174–5, 301–2, 396 formation problem  300–1, 300n.23 gynocentrism on  305–6 Kant as  15–16, 129, 146

masculine biases in  93–4 as metaphysics and epistemology  42 misogyny and  22–3 newness standard for  115–17 recognition and appropriation of  17 revisionism and  305 Witt on text and  39 women artists in  300 capability approach  318–19 capitalism  53, 59–60 Deleuzian ontology and  102 feminism resisting  52 feminist philosophy on  4–5 feminist social and political ­philosophy on  314 patriarchy and  54–5 power from colonial  544 racial women under  546–7 Carastathis, Anna  504 Card, Claudia  251, 253, 466–7 care ethics  268. See also global care chains Bailey, C., on  91 bioethics and  277–8, 487–8 disability and  522 gender in  91, 279 Gheaus on immigration and  468 Gilligan developing  91, 254, 279, 288–9, 488 Gould, C., on human rights and  464–5, 468 human rights and  468 migrants and  429, 432, 432n.1 morality and perspective of  288–9 oppression for  288–9 power and  433, 433n.3 pragmatism for  91 relationality and  277–80 right to care in  467–8 Weir on migrant workers and  435n.5 women and  476 Cartwright, Nancy  325n.1 Cavendish, Margaret  18, 40–4, 47 Chadwick, Whitney  301 Châtelet, Emilie du  44 Chen, Mel Y.  391–2, 513 Cherry, Myisha  291 childbearing 67–8

566   index Childress, James T.  272 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)  142 Chomsky, Noam  399–400 chora 28–30 Christman, John  377–8 chronos (time)  363–4 cisgender  201–2, 353–4 Cisneros, Natalie  124n.2, 126–7, 436 cisnormativity  7–9, 64 citation  8–9, 38, 38n.2, 40, 70, 424 Cixous, Hélène  99, 261, 264–5 classism American pragmatism and  84 Beauvoir and middle-  79–80 Davis, A., on  412 feminist philosophy of mind on  169–70, 178–9 feminist philosophy on  7, 9 Fraser on  59 mind and  177 climate change  474–81. See also genderclimate-injustice nexus climate and  92–3 Clinton, Hillary  319–20 Clough, Sharyn  230–2 Clune-Taylor, Catherine  353–4 Code, Lorraine  199–200, 412–14 Cohen, Cathy  512–13 Colebrook, Claire  26 Collegium of Black Women Philosophers  5–6 Collins, Patricia Hill  51–2, 79–80, 519 on insider/outsider status  330–1, 330n.6 on intersectionality  333, 333n.7, 424 on power and resistance  425 on standpoint theory  412 colonization Alarcón on  127–8 of Asia and Pacific Islands  138–9 by Europe-based nations  542–3, 542nn.1–2 feminist critical theory and  52, 60 Indigenous peoples on  51, 58–60, 155 Latina/x feminist philosophy on  121 Lugones on gender and  315–16, 351–2, 546–7 newness standards and  114–17 Nichols on settler  155, 445 philosophy of mind  178–9

Puar on homonationalism and  455, 512–13 resistance to  51 time and value in  369–70 as transnational  59–60 on Western secularism  60 women with double  546 Combahee River Collective  315, 502 Connell, Sophia  21 constitutive relationality  264–5, 267–9, 328 constitutive values on classifications  215, 297–8 contextual values on  228 as outside  509, 537 on representation  341–2 Conway, Anne  18, 40, 42–5, 47n.4 Coole, Diana  386–7 Cooper, Anna Julia  89, 91, 410–11, 501–2 Cordova, Viola  151–2, 158–9 Cornell, Drucilla  51–2 on decolonizing critical theory  59–60 Feminism as Critique by  52–5 on gender  54–5 later work of  58 poststructuralism and  99 corporeal being  263–4, 268 Crasnow, Sharon  233, 251 credibility economy  207 Crenshaw, Kimberlé critical race theory and  411, 497–9, 497n.1 on intersectionality of race and gender  315, 497–502, 534 social identity and  333, 333n.7 critical contextual empiricism  227, 229–31 critical race theory Black feminist philosophers and  501–4 Crenshaw and  411, 497–9, 497n.1 Eurocentric feminism and  145–7 free speech and  192 intersectionality and  497–501 on marginalized social groups  499–500 from people of color  497, 497n.1, 499 postcolonial theory and  60 critical theory Brown, W., on  50–2 Cornell on decolonizing  59–60 critical race theory and  60 definition of  50–1

index   567 feminist theory and  50–1 normative and positive empirical theories on  50–1 de la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés  128n.5 Cudd, Ann  251, 470–1 Cuomo, Chris  475 Daly, Mary  145–6 Davies, Alex  190–1 Davis, Angela Y.  112–13, 315, 412, 442–4, 501–2 as critical theorist  51–2, 58–9 on prisons  442–4, 447–8 Women, Race, and Class by  52, 58–9 Davis, Noela  388–9 decolonial feminism  298n.16 feminist aesthetics and  295 future directions of  548–9 Lugones on  8–9, 126, 315–16, 351–2, 425, 544–7 decolonial theory  7, 52, 70, 126, 130, 269–70 Cornell on  59–60 feminism and  541–9 on gender and sexuality  348 history and  365 on Indigenous, Native peoples, people of color  154, 160–1, 545n.4 deconstruction  52, 57–8 as Butlerian  128 as Derridean  99–100 of gender identity  54–5, 59 rhizomaticity and  102 dehumanization 111–12 Deleuze, Gilles disability and  521–2 Kant and  366–7 materialism of  385–6 neo-vitalist materiality and  385–6, 390, 392 poststructuralism and  99, 101–2 rhizomaticity and  100, 102–3, 390 Stengers and  241 Delgadillo, Theresa  124n.2, 126n.3, 129 Delgado, Richard  499–500 deontology  252–4, 272, 279 Derrida, Jacques  54–5, 57–8, 266–7, 521–2, 544–5 on death  367 deconstruction and  99–100

poststructuralism and  99, 101, 104 time and  366 DesAutels, Peggy  255–6, 287, 289–92 Descartes 39 Elisabeth of Bohemia and  40, 44–5, 170–2, 176–7 Teresa of Avila influencing  19, 22 Deutscher, Penelope  60n.3 DeVault, Marjorie  329–31 Devereaux, Mary  299–300, 300n.21 Dewey, John  558 on pragmatism  83–93 Dieleman, Susan  90 Dietz, Mary  314 Dillon, Robin S.  254 Dimock, Susan  254 Diotima  25–6, 28–30 disability  8–9, 521–2, 524 ableism discrimination on  525 analytical feminist approaches on  252 art criteria for  302–3 bioethics on  490–1, 522–3 caregiving and  522 in embodiment  278 feminist bioethics on  278 feminist philosophy on  356–7 feminists on  518–19 Francis on  465 Garland Thomson on celebrating  518, 520, 522–4 institutionalization of  446–7 invisibility and  302–3 Kittay on  522 Latinx on  129n.6 philosophy of mind on  178–9 Scully and Ho on bioethics and  490, 522–3 standpoint theory and  522 Tremain on  356–7, 520n.2, 522–3 disability bioethics  490, 522–3 disability theory  517–18, 520, 522–4 discrimination  192, 525 diversity  226–7, 395 Doeuff, Michèle Le  40 Dolphijn, Rick  389 dominance. See power Donovan, Josephine  557 Doris, John  292

568   index Dorr, C.  217n.2 Dotson, Kristie  110, 114–18 on epistemic injustice and silencing  413–15, 418–19, 424 on feminist epistemology  413–15 on inheritance acts  116–17 on intersectionality  503–4 on testimony and quieting  190–2, 190n.1, 191n.2 double consciousness  174–5, 330n.6. See also situated knowing Du Bois on  173n.4, 203–4 Driver, Julia  251, 253 Drucker, Peter  88 dual systems theory  53 DuBois, Page  29–30 Du Bois, W. E. B.  86, 173n.4, 203–4, 330n.6, 447–8 Duggan, Lisa  512–13 dum diversas  542–3, 542n.2 la durée (process or duration of time)  363–4 Dussel, Enrique  130, 546 Early English Books Online (EEBO)  43–4 early modern philosophy  40–3, 45–6 early modern women philosophers  38–47 canon exclusion of  27 historical context of  365, 542–3 research in  18–19, 18n.2 eating patterns  252 ecofeminists 242 economic justice  7, 470, 477 economy  444–5, 469–70 ecophenomenology 242 Edelman, Lee  512 education absence of  420 American pragmatism and women  84 Hull House for  85–7 new narrative on  46 Plato on women’s  25–6, 28–9 Stewart, M., on  410–11, 501–2 Einstein, Albert  366 Eisenstein, Zilla  313–14

Elisabeth of Bohemia (Princess)  18–19, 22, 47n.4, 172 ahistorical assumption and  170–2, 176–7 Descartes and  40, 44–5, 170–2, 176–7 Elshtain, Jean Bethke  458 emancipation  50–1, 55–9 American pragmatism and  84 as recovery  368 Stewart, L., on  112–14, 113n.1 embodiment  278, 364 attentiveness on  385–6, 412 Beauvoir on  385–6, 389–90 feminist bioethics and  488–9 in subjectivity  263–5, 268 Eng, David  512–13 entailment 218–22 entangled empathy  554 environment 92–3 epistemes (scientific paradigms)  99–100 epistemic advantage thesis  200, 232–3, 328–31 epistemic agency  418–19 epistemic autonomy  418 epistemic domination  426 epistemic injustice Cooper on  89, 91, 410–11, 501–2 Dotson on silencing and  413–15, 418–19, 424 Fricker on  408, 413–15, 522 standpoint epistemology and  410–13 Stewart, M., on  410–11, 501–2 as testimonial and hermeneutical injustice 408–9 Truth on  409–11, 501–2 Wells, I., on  86–8, 410–11, 502 on WOC  409–11 epistemic mapping  199–200 epistemic oppression  418–19 epistemic privilege  203–4, 232–3, 332, 422, 519 epistemic smothering  424 epistemology 21–2 bias resources in  208 in feminist philosophy of social science  326–30, 328n.3, 328n.4, 329n.5 Fricker and  38, 90, 177n.14, 186, 191, 207, 522 Goméz on  159 history utility as  20n.8

index   569 of ignorance  419, 420n.2, 421–2, 422n.3 of Native American philosophy  151, 153–4, 159–61 pragmatism and  90 recognition as  18–19 resources for feminist ­epistemology  208, 208n.5 situatedness in  332 Townley on excessive  425–6, 425n.7 essentialism  104–6, 401–3 ethics alterity and  268 attentiveness and  267–8 citation as  8–9 continental feminist ethics on politics and 262–3 corporeal being and  268 disciplinary engagement in  269–70 Everyday Ethics and  88 feminist bioethics and  274–5 feminist philosophy with  8–9 Foucault on  268 on gender equality  248 of global care chains  432, 432n.1 Goméz on  159 hermeneutic interpretation of  459 of immigration  429 Khader on global  251, 255–6 metaethics in  214–15 on moral experiences  248 Native American philosophy and  151–4, 157–61 norms of  262–3 as ongoing practice  268 on oppression of women  248 politics and  269n.3 Al-Saji and  267–8, 328 transcendent and  269–70 vulnerability and  268 Eurocentric feminism critical race theory and  145–7 Narayan on  145–6, 255–6, 435, 469, 547–8 Eurocentrism colonization by  542–3, 542n.1 colonization on secularism and  60 Continental European philosophy and  261 epistemology of  42

Foucault and  544–5 on genre  41 ignorance assumptions in  420 on Native American philosophy  154–5 on non-Western perspectives  144 postcolonial and decolonial theory on  541 Spivak on women and  479 Expatriation Act (1907)  142 exploitation  433, 462 Fanon, Frantz  355, 369, 392, 513, 543–4 Farley, Lin  331 fateful decision (kairos) 363–4 Feder, Ellen  353–4 Feinberg, Leslie  531, 536–7 female bodily experience  72, 76–7, 80–1 Femenías, María Luisa  128 feminine  462, 466, 469, 475–6 feminism American pragmatism and  84–5, 92 as anti-militarist  458 Beauvoir and  72, 79 Fraser on neoliberalism and  314 on gender and power  276 on identity  340, 342 intersectionality and  157, 249, 252, 255–6, 282–3, 296–7, 546 on IVF  485 Native women on  156–9 as politics  3, 7, 273 of postcolonial and decolonial theory 541–9 on prison  440, 447 on revisionism  305 Wilson on gut feminism  353–4, 512–13 on women category  341 feminist aesthetics in analytic tradition  295, 295n.1 on bodily sense  296 decolonizing by  295 definition and scope of  295–7, 296nn.4–5 future of  306 on gender  296–8, 297n.9 on gender bias  299–300 gynocentrism in  300n.23, 302–3, 305–6 humanism in  300–2, 300n.23 intersectionality and  296–8, 306

570   index feminist aesthetics (Continued ) male gaze in  299–300, 299n.20 objects in  296 perspectivism in  304–5 range of  296 revisionism in  305 on sex  297, 297n.9 situatedness and  298 on stereotypes  299–300 on White feminism  295–7 on women  297 women’s artifacts in  300 feminist agency  55–8 feminist animal studies  553 feminist applied ethics  255–6 feminist bioethics  275 on bias and ethics  274–5 on bioethics  273, 281, 283 on biomedical innovation  276 conceptual expansion of  282–3 on disability  278 embodiment, phenomenology and  488–9 ethics and  274–5 on factual information  276–7 gender identity and  282 on genome editing technologies  278–9, 282 on marginalized social groups  278–9 on neurotechnologies  489–90 phenomenology and  488–9 on power  281 on social justice  281 thematic expansion of  282 feminist consequentialism  252–5, 279 feminist critical theory critical theory and  50–1 Davis, A., inventing  58–9 early interventions in  52–3 on philosophy of language  184–5, 187 on race  59 race and colonization in  52, 60 feminist criticism  184–7, 228–9, 290, 534 feminist disability theory  518–25 feminist empiricism  329n.5 on bias paradox  227 DeVault on  329–31 in feminist epistemology  200 Harding on  227, 328–9

knowledge and  397–8 Longino and  228–30, 329, 397–8 Quine on  231, 399–401 feminist epistemology credibility economy in  207 definition of  198, 200–1 diversity and  395 epistemology resources for  208, 208n.5 feminist empiricism in  200 feminist philosophy of science as  328n.4 feminist postmodernism in  200 on gender  274 on gender bias  199, 199n.1, 201–2 on ignorance  207–8 interactive knowing in  204–5, 207 moral philosophy and  248–9, 272–4, 274n.1, 278 positivist methodologies and  199–200 practical and contextual approaches in  205–7, 205n.4 situated knowing in  202–4, 203n.3, 207 as social epistemology  200–1, 201n.2, 204–7 feminist ethics in analytical feminist approaches  256–7 continental feminist ethics and  261 on gender  248–9 on gender bias  261–2 on objectification  267–8 social justice and  250 on women subordinated  273 feminist global ethics  255–6 feminist metaphysics future for  221–2 on gender  215–22 metaphysics and  4, 222 “serious metaphysics” and  214–15, 217–22, 219n.3 feminist moral psychology  287–90, 292 feminist new materialism critiques of  390–2 definition of  385 difference in  389 lineage of  385–8 new in  388, 388n.1, 390 feminist ontology  273–4, 277. See also  feminist metaphysics

index   571 feminist phenomenology on gender-neutral and race-neutral descriptions 63 on hidden presuppositions  71 intersectionality and  70–1 on male norms  63–4, 186, 354–5 on male phenomenological canon  64, 68–9 on patriarchy  65 on sexist, racist, and ableist contexts  65 feminist philosophy. See also specific subjects definitions of  4 future for  348 feminist philosophy of language  184–5, 187, 193 feminist philosophy of mind on classism, LGBTQ, POC  169–70, 178–9 as field of study  177, 177nn.14–15 mental structure and  170–2, 176–7 feminist philosophy of science  328n.4 feminist philosophy of social science feminist standpoint theory in  326 on individual agency  334 philosophy of science and  325–6 on research lack  326–7 on social identity  333, 333n.7 feminist postmodernism  200 feminist poststructuralism  99–100, 103–7 feminist pragmatism  92–4. See also pragmatism feminist radical empiricism  227, 230–2 feminist social and political philosophy on capitalism  314 Marx and New Left in  314 on politics  319–20 on refugees and gender  321 social and political philosophy with  312–13 on social justice  261, 317–19 taxonomy of  314 feminist social ontology  314–15. See also  feminist metaphysics feminist standpoint empiricism on bias paradox  227 definition of  230–3 epistemic advantage and  232–3 in feminist epistemology  200 Intemann introducing  232, 329

feminist standpoint epistemology  274 feminist standpoint methodology  328–9 feminist standpoint theory  330 feminist theory American philosophy and  84 on canonical philosophers  39 gender and  106 on prisons  440 radicalism abandoned by  52 feminist virtue theory  291 Ferguson, Ann  468 Ferguson, Kathy  387–8 Ferguson, Roderick  512–13 fertility control  486–8 field transformation  6–7 Figueroa, Yomaira  129 Fink, Eugen  366–7 Fischer, Marilyn  85–6 Follett, Mary Parker  88–90 forgiveness  254–5, 291 Foucault, Michel  126–7 Butler and  55 on critique  262–3, 268 disability and  521–2, 524 on ethics  268 as Eurocentric  544–5 feminist poststructuralism and  57–8, 99, 101, 103–5 Fraser and  53–4 neo-materialism of  385–6 on power  262–3 on prisons  441–2 queer theory and  507–8, 510–11 on sexuality  507–8 Francis, Leslie  465 Frankfurt School  50–2, 59 Fraser, Nancy  52–5 on critical theory  50–1 on gender, climate, social justice  478, 481–2 on gender as category  53 Habermas and  53, 481 Justice Interruptus by  53–4 later work of  58 on neoliberalism and feminism  314 on politics  59, 457–8 on pragmatic feminist critical theory  57

572   index Freccero, Carla  511–12 Freeland, Cynthia  20–2, 26, 30–1, 305 free speech  189–90, 192–3. See also hate speech French feminists  261, 264–5, 303n.29 Freud, Sigmund  50, 367–8 Fricker, Miranda on epistemic injustice  408, 413–15, 522 on epistemology  38, 90, 177n.14, 186, 191, 207, 522 Friedman, Marilyn  377–9 Frueh, Joanna  302n.26 Fry, Elizabeth  442 Frye, Marilyn  267–8, 315–16, 536–7 Fuentes, Carlos  127–8 Fuller, Margaret  83 Gaia theory  241 Gambetti, Zeynep  269 Garland Thomson, Rosemarie  518, 520, 522–4 Garry, Ann  177n.14, 251, 532 Gatens, Moira  464–5 Gelman, Susan  401–2 gender adaptive preferences on  253–5, 316, 379 American pragmatism on  84 anti-binary on  537–8 anti-essentialism on  104–5 bioethics and  273, 281–2 care ethics and  91, 279 classification of  215, 297–8 decolonial theory on  348 deconstruction of  54–5, 59 definition of  213–22, 453–4 earnings and norms on  478 entailment and reality on  219–22 expression of  297–8 false neutrality of  186 feminist aesthetic on  296–8, 297n.9 feminist bioethics on  281–2 Feminist Contentions on  52, 55–8 feminist epistemology on  199, 199n.1, 201–2, 274 feminist ethics on  248–9 feminist metaphysics on  215–22 feminist phenomenology on  63 feminist philosophers on violence and  452

feminist philosophy on  352–3 feminist standpoint methodology on 328–9 feminist theory and  106 government on intersectionality of race and  500 gynocentrism on  300–3, 300n.23 heteronormativity on  315–16 humanism on  300–2, 300n.23 hylomorphism and  32 identity and  201–2, 342–3 immigrants and  429, 435–6 intersectionality on  9, 499–500 in intersubjective approach  356 in knowledge  200–1 language marking  185 Latinx on  121–2, 122n.1, 129n.6 mental structure and  177 of mind  177 moral theory on  273–4 norms of  476–7 performative theory and  388, 476–7, 508–9, 523 philosophy of science and  226–7 politics of  356–7 poststructuralism on  106–7 power and  276 prisons policing  446 refugees and  321 on science research  205–6 segregation on  340 structural injustice and  431 trans philosophy and trouble on  531–2 vulnerability and violence in  318–19 war and  453–4 gender-based oppression  7, 9 gender bias  227. See also bias; stereotypes feminist aesthetics on  299–300 feminist epistemology on  199, 199n.1, 201–2 feminist ethics on  261–2 feminist moral psychology on  289–90 women and  300 gender binary  315–16, 537, 554 gender-climate-injustice nexus  475–7, 480–1. See also climate change gender/race analogy  79–80

index   573 gene technologies  241, 275, 278–9, 282, 490 genetically modified organisms (GMOs)  240–1, 485 Genlis, Félicité de  41 genocidal rape  466–7. See also rape genocide  158–9, 192–3, 455–6 Gheaus, Anca  432–3, 468 Gilligan, Carol  91, 254, 279, 288–9, 488 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins  71, 88–9, 92–3 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson  443 Gines, Kathryn  79–80, 503–4 Glazebrook, Trish  241–2 global care chains exploitation in  433 feminists on  432–4, 432n.1 Global North on  433, 433n.4, 466 migrant women in  429, 432, 432n.1 requirements for  434–5, 435n.5 global digital age  100, 102–3, 390 global justice  469–70 Global North colonization and  59–60 Global South educated immigrants to  430 Global South middle-class to  432 Kittay on care drain and  467–8 on migrant care workers  433, 433n.4, 466 power on Global South  478–9 on third world woman  127, 129, 479 Global South  478–9 educated to Global North  430 Global North on women of  127, 129, 479 middle-class to Global North  432 resistance in  542–3 water search in  475–8, 480 Goldenberg, Maya  230 Goméz, Reid  159 Gotanda, Neil  499–500 Gouges, Olympe de  41 Gould, Carol  312, 464–5, 468 Gould, Janice  160–1 Gournay, Marie de  44 government Hillary Doctrine in  319–20 Hull House on  87 on identity  347 immigrant admissions by  430–1

intersectionality of gender and race in  500 on sexual harassment  331 Greek philosophy  25–6, 28, 30, 32 Grosz, Elizabeth  363, 388–90, 392 Grouchy, Sophie de  44 Guattari, Félix  100–3, 241, 366–7, 390 Guerilla Girls  301 Guha, Ranajit  543–4 gut feminism  353–4, 512–13 gynocentrism  300n.23, 302–3, 305–6 Habermas, Jürgen  50, 52–4, 481 Hacking, Ian  331 Hale, C. Jacob  532, 536 Hall, Stuart  341–2 Halperin, David  506–7, 511 Hames-García, Michael  392 Hamilton, Elizabeth  41 Hampton, Jean  254 Hamraie, Aimi  524–5 Haraway, Donna  99 on biotechnology  367 “A Cyborg Manifesto” by  100, 103, 387–8, 459 on human species  367–8 materialism and  387–8, 390 on quantum theory and diffraction  243n.11 time and  366 Harding, Sandra on bias-free science  227 on feminist empiricism  227, 328–9 on methodology  327 in philosophy of science  237 de Haro, Sebastian  237–8 Harris, Angela P.  499–500 Harris, Cheryl  499–500 Haslanger, Sally  533–5 on bias  290–1 feminist metaphysics and  214n.1, 216–17, 219n.4 on feminist social ontology  314–15 hate speech. See also racism free speech in  189–90, 192–3 in philosophy of language  192–3 slurs and  187–8, 192–3 Hay, Carol  251, 253–4 Hays, Mary  41

574   index Healy, Kieran  38, 38n.2 Hegel  16–17, 50, 367, 521–2 Heidegger, Martin  20n.8, 68–70, 363–4, 366–7 Heinämaa, Sara  72 Held, Virginia  464–5 Hempel, Carl  400 Herman, Barbara  251, 253–4 hermeneutical injustice  34, 408–11, 501–2, 541–2, 547–8 hermeneutic interpretation of Black women  111 dominance and  126 on ethics and politics  459 of feminist philosophy  541–2 injustice and  186, 191, 408–12, 414–15 Latina/x feminist philosophers on  121 on model minority myth  144 selfhood and  125–6 heteronormativity definition of  507–8 gender norms and  315–16 of heterosexuality  7, 9, 105 immigration controls for  142 heteropatriarchal families  4–5 heteropatriarchal relationships  4–5 “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (Lugones)  546–7 heterosexuality  7, 9, 105 Heyes, Cressida  268, 536–7 Hicks, Daniel  230 hierarchical theories  377–9. See also authenticity; autonomy Hierro, Graciela  128n.5 Higgins, Peter  430 Hillary Doctrine  319–20 Hintikka, Merrill  186–7 Hipparkhia 33 Hird, Myra  386–7 Hirschfeld, Lawrence  402 Hirshman, Linda  31, 33–4 history of philosophy  15, 33–4 canon criticism on  15–16, 20 genre in  19, 22 losing viewpoints in  42–3 methodology and  15–16, 21–2 recognition project on  16–23

women philosophers recognition in  15, 17 women recovered in  15–16, 18n.6, 18nn.1–4 Ho, Anita  490, 522–3 Hoagland, Sara  315–16 Hochschild, Arlie  432 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr.  85 Holroyd, Jules  290 homonationalism  455, 512–13 homonormativity 513 homophobia 454–5 Hooker, Juliet  129 Horkheimer, Max  50–1, 58 Hornsby, Jennifer  177n.14, 187, 190–1 hóɀhó (life path)  153–4 Huffer, Lynne  512 Hull House  85–7 humanism  300–2, 300n.23 human rights  111–12, 319, 462–71 Hume, David  39, 80, 146, 396 Hurston, Zora Neale  341 Husserl, Edmund  63–5, 68–71, 366–7 Hutton, Sarah  22, 40–5 hylomorphism 32 hypermasculinity 454–5 identity 127n.4 agency on  344, 347 category creating  339–44 control over  346 feminism on  340, 342 feminist philosophy of social science on  333, 333n.7 fluidity of  348 gender and  201–2, 342–3 government on  347 as group  339–40 Indigenous people and  152, 347 intersectionality and  333, 348 Latina/x feminist philosophy on  123–6, 124n.2 lesbians and  340, 506–8, 510–11 location and  344–5, 348 as metaphysical problem  339–40 as Muslim  345, 402–3, 457 Native American philosophy on  152 neurotechnologies on  489–90 pathology on sexual  340

index   575 queer theory critiquing  508 selfhood and  346–7 as social  345–7, 377–8 war and politics of  452–3 women and  342 ignorance as absence  419–21 epistemic oppression resisted with  419 epistemology of  419, 420n.2, 421–2, 422n.3 Eurocentrism assumptions on  420 feminist epistemology on  207–8 as ignoring  419–24, 420n.2, 422n.4 Mills and epistemology of  419, 419n.1, 421–2, 422n.4 onto morally wrong/right  419, 422n.3 oppression perpetuated by  418–19 resistance as strategic  425–6 ignoring with categories  423–4 by discrediting  422–3 ignorance as  419–24, 420n.2, 422n.4 intersectionality for  424 by oppression systems  422, 422n.5, 424–5 by power  422, 422n.5, 424–5 resistance as  425 immigrants “anchor babies” of women  436 Asian American feminist philosophy and 145 gender and  429, 435–6 global care chains and women in  429, 432, 432n.1 Global North with South skilled  430 government admissions on  430–1 Hull House and  85–6 injustices and policies on  430–1 intersectionality of US policies and  429–30, 435–6 prisons and  443, 445 US Acts on  142 US policies on women as  429–30, 435–6 immigration heteronormativity on  142 from inequalities and injustices  429 marginalized social groups and  429, 435–6 open borders debate in  430

poverty and  431–3, 435 US policies on  435–6 imperialism feminist critical theory on  60 feminist philosophy on  4–5, 59–60 on Indigenous people  138–9, 369–70 US westward  138–9 Indigenous feminism  157–8, 348, 548–9 individualist assumption  175–7, 396 inequity 479–80 inheritance  116–17, 369 injustice by discrediting  422–3 gender and structural  431 global climate change exacerbating  475 hermeneutic interpretation and  186, 191, 408–12, 414–15 immigrant policies on  430–1 immigration from  429 knowledge objects in  423–4, 423n.6 language and hermeneutical  186 oppression and  422 slurs and social  187–8, 192–3 insider/outsider status  330–1, 330n.6 Intemann, Kristen  230, 232, 329 interactive knowing  204–5, 207 internal realism  216–17 intersectionality ancient philosophy and  34 Asian American women and  137, 141–3, 146–7 Black feminist philosophy and  498–9, 501–2 critical race theory and  497–501 feminism and  157, 249, 252, 255–6, 282–3, 296–7, 546 feminist aesthetics and  296–8, 306 feminist disability theory and  519 feminist phenomenology and  70–1 feminist philosophy and  502–4 government on gender and race in  500 Hull House and  86 identity and  333, 348 Native feminist philosophy and  159 oppression interrelatedness and  9, 201–2, 262, 282–3, 421, 424, 429–30, 518–19, 534, 536 of politics  481, 500–1

576   index intersectionality (Continued ) queer feminists on  412 on race and gender  499 race theory and  497–504 standpoint epistemology and  333, 410–13 temporality and  363 trans feminism and  536, 538 of transgender  538 trans philosophy and  536 US immigration policies and  429–30, 435–6 intersex 353–4 interspecies etiquette  557 intersubjective approach as corporeal being  263–4 gendered and sexual bodies in  356 racism and  355 recognition and  16–17, 20–2 as social protest and resistance  508 as social relations  382 subjectivity and  64, 366–7 intuitionistic logic  245 invisibility Asian American feminist philosophy on  141–2 Asian American women in hypervisibility and 144 as process-based  110 race, gender, disability in art and  302–3 of women  186 women of color and  9, 302–3 of women philosophers  40–3, 45 in vitro fertilisation (IVF)  485, 487 Irigaray, Luce  264–5, 351 poststructuralism and  29–30, 99, 261, 269–70, 367 IVF. See in vitro fertilisation Jackson, Frank  214–15, 217–22, 219n.3 Jackson, George  443 Jacobson, Anne Jaap  290–1 Jaggar, Alison  248, 300n.23, 314, 318, 396, 469 Jagire, Jennifer  546–7 James, Joy  116–17, 117n.2 James, V. Denise  89, 109–10 James, William consciousness and  172–4 Pragmatism by  83–91, 172–4 Jenkins, Katharine  298n.14, 533–4

kairos (fateful decision)  363–4, 367, 396 Kaldor, Mary  452–3 Kant, Immanuel  39, 263n.2, 458 as canonical  15–16, 129, 146 metaphysics of  46 on respect and self-respect  253–4 stereotypes by  303–4 on time and synthesis  366–7 Kapusta, Stephanie  534 Keating, AnaLouise  124n.2, 126n.3, 129 Keil, Frank C.  402 Keith, Heather  91 Keller, Evelyn Fox  237, 396 Khader, Serene on adaptive preferences  316–17 on global ethics  251, 255–6 on human rights  464–6, 470–1 Kheel, Marti  553 King, Latisha  356 King, Martin Luther, Jr.  34, 291, 380–2 Kirby, Vicki  363, 366 Kitcher, Philip  238n.2 Kittay, Eva  279–80, 521–2 on care drain  467–8 Klenk, Virginia  251 Klinger, Cornelia  300n.23 Ko, Aph  554 Ko, Syl  554 Koggell, Christine  255–6, 470 Kohlberg, Lawrence  288–9 Korsmeyer, Carolyn  299–300, 300n.21 Koslicki, Kathrin  220–1 Kourany, Janet  230, 329n.5 Koyama, Emi  536 Koyre, Alexandre  367 Kramer, Sina  267–8 Kristeva, Julia  99, 261, 265, 368–9 Kuhn, Thomas  240, 329, 400–1 Kukla, Rebecca  191 Laboria Cubonics Collective  106 Lacan, Jacques  55, 99–102, 104, 368 Lacey, Hugh  329n.5 Landes, Joan  54 Langton, Rae  189–92 language essentialism on  402 feminist criticism on  184–6, 290, 534

index   577 gender marked by  185 generic plural subjects in  188 hermeneutical injustice in  186 Indigenous people and  154 maleness of  186 “man” and gender neutrality in  184–5 slurs and social injustice in  187–8, 192–3 society and  184 speech act theory in  188 Lasthenia of Mantinea  32 Latham, Joe  356 Latin American philosophy  130 Latina/x feminist philosophy Afro-Latina/x perspectives in  129 on disability  129n.6 Femenías and  128 on gender  121–2, 122n.1, 129n.6 identity and selfhood in  123–6, 124n.2 on Latin American descent  122 mestizaje and mestiza consciousness in 123–4 on modern/colonial  121 ontological pluralism of selves and  124–6 resistance and  123–8 on strategy  120–1 on US-centric discourses  121–2 Latour, Bruno  363 de Lauretis, Teresa  506–7 Law, Victoria  443 Lawrence, Charles R.  499–500 Lee, Emily  144–5, 147n.3, 391 Lee, Kyoo  139–40 Leibniz, Gottfried  44, 365 lesbians emancipation of  55, 57–8 identity and  340, 506–8, 510–11 lesbian separatism and  535–6 queer theory on  506–7 women and  63–4, 340, 510–11, 535–6 Leslie, Alan  400 Leslie, Sarah-Jane  402 liberalism  26–7, 313–14, 318, 320–1 life path (hóɀhó) 153–4 location 40 identity and  344–5, 348 situated knowing and social  202–3, 203n.3 Locke, John  42, 172–4, 313, 396 Longino, Helen  238

on bias paradox  228–30, 397–8, 401, 405 critical contextual empiricism of  227, 229–31 feminist empiricism and  228–30, 329, 397–8 on gender and hormones  297n.10 in philosophy of science  237 science literature and  329n.5 on value-free ideal  228–9 López, Ian Haney  499–500 Lorde, Audre  34, 411 on intersectionality  411–12 on moral philosophy  248–9 on racist patriarchal thought  541–2, 547–8 Love, Heather  512–13 Lovelock, James  241 Lugones, María  124–6, 267–8 on colonialism and gender  315–16, 351–2, 546–7 on decolonial feminism  8–9, 126, 315–16, 351–2, 425, 544–7 “Have We Got a Theory for You!” by  555–6 “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/ Modern Gender System” by  546–7 on intersectional feminism  297n.8 on nonreciprocal communications  124–5, 124n.2 ontological pluralism of selves and  124–6 Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes by  320–1 on politics  126 on women of color resisting  425 Luibhéid, Eithne  142 Lyotard, Jean-François  100–1 MacKinnon, Catherine A.  189, 510–11 Maitra, Ishani  190–2 Maitra, Keya  177n.15 maldevelopment 242 male gaze  299–300, 299nn.20–21 Malintzin 127–8 Mann, Bonnie  454 Marcano, Donna-Dale  503–4 Marcuse, Herbert  50, 52, 54–5 marginalized social groups absence resistance by  420–1 achievement thesis on  232–3 critical race theory on  499–500

578   index marginalized social groups (Continued ) epistemic privilege by  203–4, 232–3, 332, 422, 519 feminist bioethics on  278–9 as feminist philosophers  6–7 feminist philosophers on  4, 8–9, 86 feminist philosophy and  3–4, 8–9 feminist standpoint epistemology on  274 gender bias and  262 Global North and women of  127, 129, 479 hate speech on  189 migration policies on  429, 435–6 oppression and  262 research and lives of  206–7 silencing of  191 terrorism and  457–8 underrepresented groups and  6–7 Margulis, Lynn  241 Marinella, Lucrezia  15–16, 18 Markopoulou, Fotini  244–5 Martin, Emily  185 Martín Alcoff, Linda. See Alcoff, Linda Martín Marx, Karl  53, 314 materialism  385–90, 389n.2 materiality  106, 363, 385–6, 389–90, 392 Matsuda, Mari  192 May, Vivian  424 Mayo, Katherine  145–6 McBride, Lee A., III  291 McDougald, Elise Johnson  502 McGowan, Mary Kate  189–92 McKinnon, Rachel  536 McLain, Kris  25–6, 28 McRuer, Robert  523 McTaggart, John M. E.  366–7 McWhorter, Ladelle  142 Medina, José  419n.1 Méndez, Xhercis  129 mental structure feminist philosophers on  178–9 feminist philosophy of mind and  170–2, 176–7 as gendered, raced, classed, sexed  177 philosophy of mind on  170, 170n.2 as socially and culturally situated  179 Mercer, Christia  19, 41–2

Mercier, Adele  185 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  63–4, 68–70, 354–5, 385–6, 521–2 Beauvoir and  75–6, 172–3, 173n.5 on veiling  355 mestizaje and mestiza consciousness 123–4 Metamorphoses (Braidotti)  102–3 Metaphysical Club  85 metaphysics of change  84 early modern philosophy and  42 entailment and reality in  220–2 feminist metaphysics and  4, 222 feminist philosophers and  213–14, 214n.1 identity and problem in  339–40 of Native American philosophy  151, 153–4 normativity and  56–7 as patriarchal  32 physicalism and  218–19 postmodernism and  56 pragmatism and  84–5 on reality structure  217 on sexual objectification  67 methodology of Ackerly  464–5 of anti-colonial resistance  547–8 Beauvoir contributing  72 constitutive relationality in  264–5, 267–8 counter analytics in  109–10 critical contextual empiricism and  230 disciplinary engagement in  269–70 feminist epistemology and positivist 199–200 feminist epistemology approaches in  205–7, 205n.4 feminist philosophers with new  214 in feminist philosophy of social science  326–30, 328n.3, 328n.4, 329n.5 of feminist researchers  327 feminist standpoint as  328–9 Harding on  327 history of philosophy and  15–16, 21–2 intuitionistic logic in  245 isolated individuals and  553–4 lost works blog posts in  47 method and  327 Native American philosophy on  151–2

index   579 objectivity and disinterestedness in  405 phenomenology in  63 on philosophy of language  187–93 presentist approach in  22 question turned as  74 sexual harassment in  331 Smith, D., on  327, 331 standpoint methodology and  330, 332 trans feminist approach in  536 on trans philosophy and oppression  534–7 Meyers, Diana T.  378, 431–3 migration justice  429–30, 436–7 military 4–5 Mills, Charles  60, 117–18, 392 epistemology of ignorance from  419, 419n.1, 421–2, 422n.4 on injustice  421–2, 422n.4 mind-body dualism  169, 172, 177–8 misogyny Aristotle and  15, 32 in canonical philosophers  22–3 extraction from  20 Plato and  25–6 Socrates and  25–6 US military and  455 model minority myth  140–1, 144–5 Mohanty, Chandra  423–4, 479, 547–8 Moi, Toril  72 Montuschi, Eleonora  325n.1, 331 Moraga, Cherríe  120–1 morality analytical feminist ethics on  249 feminist ethics on  248 ignorance and rightness or  419, 422n.3 justice and care perspective in  288–9 national borders and  429 oppression influencing  291 selfhood and  273–4, 280 vulnerability and  279–80 of women subordination  273 moral philosophy  248–9 bioethics and  272–4, 274n.1 embodiment and  278 moral psychology  287–9, 292 moral theory  41–2 deontology in  252–4, 272, 279

feminist versions of  252–5 on gender  273–4 More, Henry  42–3 Morrison, Toni  113 Moulton, Janice  184–5 Mulvey, Laura  299 Muñoz, José  512–13 Murad, Jagire  546–7 Myia 27–8 Myrdal, Gunnar  79–80 Namaste, Vivian  531–3, 536 Narayan, Uma  145–6, 255–6, 423–4, 435, 469, 547–8 narcissism 75–6 Nash, Jennifer  424 natality  364, 367, 467 Native American philosophy on ethics  151–4, 157–61 Eurocentrism on  154–5 feminist philosophy and  151 on identity  152 metaphysics of  151, 153–4 on methodology  151–2 politics and  151–4, 156, 160–1 self-justification by  155 settler colonialism and  155 Native feminism  151, 158–9, 431 Native feminist philosophy  158–61 natural philosophy  18, 40–4, 47 Negri, Antonio  367 Nelson, Lynn Harkinson  90 neo-materialism 385–6 neurotechnologies 489–90 New Left  140, 314 Ngo, Helen  143–4 Nichols, Robert  155, 445 Nicholson, Linda  51–3, 57 Nicodemus, Brenda  521 Nietzsche  40–1, 50–1, 102, 241, 262–3 materiality and  385–6, 390 on personal identity  340 on strife and conflict  451 Nobel Peace Prize  86 Nochlin, Linda  301n.25, 302 Noddings, Nel  91, 254 nonbinary gender  121–2, 122n.1, 537–8

580   index non-Euro-American philosophical histories 8–9 Nonhuman Rights Project  554–5 nonreciprocal communications  124–5, 124n.2 Norlock, Kate  291 normative empirical theory  50–1 normativity 21–2 Asian American feminist philosophy on 143–4 of ethics and social-political  262–3 Feminist Contentions on feminism and  52, 55–8 feminist metaphysics with social  215 feminist phenomenology and male  63–4, 186, 354–5 feminist philosophy on  137–8 gender binary as  315–16 gender in  476–7 metaphysics and  56–7 power structures and  315–17 queer theory on  507 recognition as  17 Nussbaum, Martha  31, 156, 251, 255–6, 463–4 Therapy of Desire by  32 Nye, Andrea  26, 28, 31 objectification bodily alienation and  76–7 feminist ethics on  267–8 as sexual  67 objectivity disinterestedness for  405 feminist scholars challenging  396–7 standpoint methodology and  330 Okin, Susan  26, 313, 318 Oliver, Kelly  51–2, 264–5, 456 Olkowski, Dorothea  69 O’Neill, Eileen  38–43, 38n.1 O’Neill, Onora  255–6 ontological pluralism of selves  124–6 ontological theory  222 opacity  111–12, 265–7 open borders debate  430 operative intersectionality  498–9, 502–4 oppression systems. See also politics aesthetic in  306 on autonomy  382

autonomy and social  376, 381–2 bioethics and  484–5 care work for  288–9 on consciousness  178 critical race theory on  499–500 epistemic domination as  426 feminist epistemology on  198 feminist ethics on  248 feminist ethics on gender and  249 feminist new materialism on  391 feminist philosophy on multiple  534–5 feminists on  452 feminist virtue theory on  291 gender and  7, 9 gynocentrism on  300–3, 300n.23 humanism on  300–2, 300n.23 identity grouping for  341 ignorance and  418–19, 422–5 internalization of  296 intersectionality and  9, 201–2, 262, 282–3, 421, 424, 429–30, 518–19, 534, 536 marginalized social groups and  262 methodology on trans philosophy and 534–7 moral character influenced by  291 politics and  10, 59 prisons and  440, 444 procedural theory and  378 relational autonomy countering  374–5 resistance as ignoring  425 substantive theorists on  376, 378–82 Ortega, Mariana  7–8, 71, 124n.2, 125–6, 129, 424 Oshana, Marina agency dilemma on  375–6, 379–82 externalist and substantive theories and  378, 380–1 “other” alterity and  264–5 animal ethics on  555 Beauvoir on women and  74–5, 454 binaries for  554 Black women as  299–300 essentialism and  402–3 gender binary and  554 philosophy and theory as  532–3 “saming” response to  554–5 women as  74–5

index   581 Owens, Patricia  454 Oyewùmí, Oyéronké  351–2 Paccacerqua, Cynthia  124n.2, 129 Page Act (1875)  142 Parekh, Serena  431, 470 Parker, Rozsika  301 Parkes, Rosa  380–1 Parmenides 25–6 Pateman, Carol  117, 313, 421 patriarchy canonical philosophers defending  396 capitalist performance principle and  54–5 childbearing and  67–8 feminist phenomenology on  65 “home culture” and  145–6 immigration controls for White  142 IVF and  487 metaphysics and  32 Patterson, Orlando  466–7 Paz, Octavio  127–8 Peirce, Charles S.  83–5, 90 performative ecology  241, 241n.8 performative theory  388, 476–7, 508–9, 523 perspectivism 304–5 phenomenology. See also feminist phenomenology on embodiment  263–4 feminist bioethics and  488–9 as Husserlian  63–4, 68–71 mind-body dualism and  30, 123–4, 169–72, 177–8 patriarchy and sexism on  172–3 philosophy  10, 26–7 American pragmatism in  83 body problem and  172 feminist philosophy and  4–8 feminist theorizing in  22–3 Hull House and American  85 individualistic studies in  187, 204, 208, 396–7, 536–7 justification culture in  116 marginalized fields of  7 masculine biases in American  93–4, 187 “other” in  532–3 race exclusion in  89 on religion and theology  41–2

transformation of  6–7 trans philosophy and  532 on violence  451 women defined by  73–4 philosophy of language  184 feminist applications on  187–93 feminist critical theory on  184–5, 187 feminist philosophy of language and  193 free speech in  189–90, 192–3 hate speech in  192–3 male bias in  93–4, 187 silencing in  189–92 speech acts in  188–9 philosophy of mind  169 mind-body dualism and  169, 177–8 on nonrelational mental contents  170, 170n.2 physicalism in  176, 178–9 philosophy of science  226–7, 230 bias paradox in  227, 229, 232–3 continental feminist approaches to  237–9, 242–3 feminist philosophy of social science and 325–6 philosophy of social science  325–6, 325n.2 Phintys of Sparta  28 physicalism  176, 178–9, 215 physics  245–6, 366 Plato 99–100 chora and  28–30 feminists on  26, 29 mind-body dualism and  30 Republic V by  25–6, 28–9 on sexual intercourse  29 on women’s education  25–6, 28–9 Plumwood, Val  557 Pohlhaus, Gaile, Jr.  332–3, 414–15 political agency  418–19. See also agency politics  8–9, 122, 332–3, 356. See also  oppression systems; power of autonomy  374 Black feminist refusal as  110–18, 113n.1, 117n.2, 117n.3 care ethics and  91 continental feminist ethics on ethics and 262–3 of decolonization  160

582   index politics (Continued ) disability and  524 epistemic oppression and  418–19 ethics and  269n.3 feminism and  3, 7, 273 feminist appropriation as  20 feminist philosophers on violence and  452 feminist social and political philosophy on 319–20 of gender  356–7 hermeneutic interpretation of  459 Hillary Doctrine in  319–20 immigrant policies on injustice and  430–1 of intersectionality  481, 500–1 of knowing  413–14 Latina/x feminist philosophy and  126 as misrecognition  18–19 Native American philosophy and  151–4, 156, 160–1 Native womanism as  156 oppression and  10, 59 poststructuralism and  100 power and  7, 262 recognition as  18–19 of refusal  110–12, 160 speech act theory on  189 of US white supremacy  138 violence and  456–8 war and identity  452–3 of women and wages  478–9 Pollock, Griselda  301 pornography  50–1, 140, 189–90, 252, 452, 534 postcolonial theory  52, 261, 269–70, 363, 365–6, 369–70 after British rule  542–3, 543n.3 as anti-colonial  544–5 critical race theory and  60 decolonial feminisms and  541–9 definitions and history of  541–5, 543n.3, 545n.4, 542nn.1–2 on Eurocentrism  541 feminist critical theory and  60 Latin American subaltern studies and 543–5 subaltern studies collective and  543–5 postmodernism  56, 100–1 poststructuralism  52, 352–3. See also gender

anti-essentialism in  104–6 feminist philosophy and  99 on gender  106–7 politics and  100 structuralism and  100–1 poverty criminality and  444–5 feminization of  462, 466, 469, 475–6 global justice and  469–70 migration and  431–3, 435 resistance and  347 violence and  451 vulnerability and  279–80, 318–19 power  112–14, 317. See also politics animals and  553 attentiveness to  122 bioethics and  484–5 care work and  433, 433n.3 dehumanization and police  111–12 from development, modernity  544 as discourse and epistemes 99–100 feminist bioethics on  281 feminist epistemology on  207 feminist new materialism on  390–1 feminist standpoint epistemology on  274 gender and  276 on gender norms  476–7 hermeneutic interpretation and  126 ignorance and  207–8, 422, 424–5 in interactive knowing  205 normativity and structures of  315–17 queer theory on  507–8 race and  355 Power, Nina  106 pragmatism. See also feminist pragmatism as American  83–5, 87, 92 on animal welfare and environment  92–3 care ethics and  91 Dewey and  83–93 epistemology and  90 feminism and American  84–5, 92 Hull House and  85, 87 precarity  321, 476–7 prereflective consciousness  172–3, 173n.5, 354–5 Price, Margaret  524

index   583 Prigogine, Ilya  239 prisons abolition and  447–8 agency asserted in  443–4 elderly in  446–7 as feminist issue  440, 447 gender policed in  446 immigrants and  443, 445 Indigenous people and  445 LGBTQ people and  446 in oppression systems  440, 444 racism and  442–3 resistance in  443–4 slavery and  442–5 women in US  442 prison theory  440–1, 444–5, 448 privilege  70–1, 89, 201–2, 396 procedural theorists  376–82 Prosser, Jay  531–2 psychoanalytic symbolic order theory  57 Puar, Jasbir  455, 512–13 public/private realms  53–4 publishing  43–4, 47 Putnam, Hilary  216–17 Pythagorean tradition  27–8 Queer Nation  57–8 queer theory false universalism in  512–13 history and definition of  506–7 identity critiqued by  508 on lesbian and gay  506–7 on normativity  507 on power  507–8 on queer and trans POC  513 on reproductive futurism  512 on sexuality  509 time and  511–12 transgender and  531–3, 536 use of  57–8, 57n.1 Quijano, Aníbal  130, 544–7 Quine, Willard van Orman  231, 345, 399–401 race American pragmatism on  84 Asia and Pacific Islands and  138–9

category of  342 feminist critical theory and  52, 60 feminist phenomenology on  63 Frankfurt School feminist critical theorists on  59 government on intersectionality of gender and  500 intersectionality on  499 materialism and  392 mental structure and  177 philosophy on  89 Revealing Whiteness on  89 Women, Race, and Class on  52, 58–9 race theory  497–504 racism 65 as anti-Asian  139–40 as anti-Black  117–18, 500 feminist new materialism on  391 feminist philosophy on  4–5, 7, 9 as gendered  117, 355 intersubjective approach and  355 prisons and  442–3 as sexual  143 rape 255 genocidal rape and  466–7 silencing and  190–1 as terrorism  453 Rawls, John  313 Raymond, Janice  531, 536–7 recognition  3, 6–7 agency and  111–12 canon appropriation and  17 definition of  16–17 early modern women philosophers and 18–19 as epistemic  18–19 feminist philosophy project of  16–23 intersubjective approach and  16–17, 20–2 refugees  321, 431–3, 470 refusal politics. See also politics Black feminist philosophers and politics of  110–18, 113n.1, 117n.2, 117n.3 Simpson on politics of  110, 160 Regan, Tom  552 Reid, Thomas  42–3 Reiman, Jeffrey  444–5

584   index relational autonomy. See also autonomy on autonomy  375 future for  381–2 on hierarchical theories  377 internalist theories in  375–6 for oppressed groups  374–5 self-authorization in  382 self-determination in  381–2 self-governance in  382 social oppression and  376, 381–2 in subjectivity  263–5, 268 relationality  264–5, 273–4, 277–80 religion and theology  41–2 Renaissance  15, 305n.33, 365 reparations  127n.4, 274–5, 287–8, 465–6 reproductive rights  158–9 resistance 10 on absence  420–1 anti-colonial feminism and  547–8 Black feminist philosophers and  116–18 by Black women  58–9, 113–14, 117–18 to colonization  51 of epistemic oppression  419 in Global South  542–3 ignorance as  419–20 Latina/x feminist philosophy and  123–8 Methodology of the Oppressed and  126 opacity and  112 poverty and  347 in prisons  443–4 strategic ignorance as  425–6 subversion and  106 as trans against gender binary  537 vulnerability as  269 respect 368–9 reverse-discourse 524 revisionism 305 rhizomaticity  100, 102–3, 390 Rich, Adrienne  67–8, 510–11 Richardson, Sarah  238–9 Richardson-Self, Louise  193 Richie, Beth  443 Rogers, Wendy  276, 279–80 Rooney, Phyllis  208 Rorty, Richard  90 Roshanravan, Shireen  351–2 Ross, Laura  445

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  39–40, 396 Royce, Josiah  83–4, 88–91 Rubin, Gayle  351–2, 510–11 Rubin, Henry  531–2 Ruddick, Sara  454, 458 Ruíz, Elena  498–9, 502–4 Rusche, Georg  441–2 Rwanda  192–3, 455–6 Ryder, Richard  552 Sabsay, Leticia  269 Said, Edward  542–3 Al-Saji, Alia  267–8, 328 Salamon, Gayle  71, 356, 537 Saldanha, Arun  392 Sample, Ruth  251, 254 Sandoval, Chela  124n.2, 126 Sartre 68–70 Saul, Jennifer  186, 290, 534 Schaffer, J.  217n.2 Scheman, Naomi  170, 175–7, 179, 396 Schiller 303–4 Schmitt, Carl  451–2 Schoolcraft, Jane  83 Schott, Robin  467 van Schurman, Anna Maria  44 Schutte, Ofelia  128, 130, 547–8 Schwartzman, Lisa  190–1 science history  238–40, 329, 400–1 science literature Douglas on  329n.5 Kourany and  329n.5 Lacey and  329n.5 Longino and  329n.5 science research Anderson on truth and  222, 230–1 bioethics on neutral  486 Collins on insider/outsider status  330–1 concept development in  330 feminist philosophy of social science on 326–7 feminist values for  227 gender and  205–6 Indigenous people and  242 literature and  329n.5 on marginalized social groups  206–7

index   585 philosophy of science and science studies 237–8 sexual harassment for  331 Smith, D., on women and  327, 331 social diversity for  226–7 standpoint methodology and  330 Stengers on women and  239–42, 240n.5, 241n.6 on women  327–8, 328n.3 women excluded in  239 sciences  245–6, 273, 366, 386 bias paradox and  227, 229, 232–3 scientific paradigms (epistemes) 99–100 Scudéry, Madeleine de  44 Scully, Jackie  490, 522–3 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky  507–8, 510 Seigfried, Charlene Haddock  83–7, 91–2 self-authorization 382 self-consciousness  16, 67, 174–5, 192 self-governing 78–9 autonomy as  374–8 externalist theories and  380–1 internalist theories and  376–8 Oshana and  378, 380–1 relational autonomy and  381–2 selfhood Butler on  389–90, 389n.2 hermeneutic interpretation and  125–6 identity and  346–7 Latina/x feminist philosophy on  123–6, 124n.2 morality and  273–4, 280 social model of  280 as unitary, plural, or multiple  177–8 self respect  253–4 Sen, Amartya  327 Seneca Falls  83 Serano, Julia  536–7 “serious metaphysics,”  214–15, 217–22, 219n.3 Serres, Michel  363 sex Beauvoir on freedom and  78–9 Eurocentrism on  351 Herman on Kant and  251, 253–4 moral psychology on differences and 288–9 social construction of  215–17

sex-difference research  288–9 sex/gender distinction  72, 76, 351–4 sexism  4–5, 143–4 Aristotle and  21, 30–1 Bartky on  67 Black women on  117–18, 500 feminist phenomenology on  65 homonationalism and  455, 512–13 phenomenology and  172–3 prisons and  443 women’s bodies and  174 sexual contract  117, 313, 421 sexual harassment  67–8, 255, 331 sexuality analytical feminist approaches on  252 on Black women  143 Butler for differences and  55 decolonial theory on  348 feminist aesthetic on  297, 297n.9 feminist philosophers on violence and  452 hypersexualization of Asian women and 139–40 in intersubjective approach  356 mental structure and  177 pathology on  340 queer theory and  506, 509 racial-sexual contract and  117, 421 racism and  143 sexual violence  127–8 gender-climate-injustice nexus and  475–7 Nussbaum’s critique of genital ­cutting and  463 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) failure to address 462 Shapiro, Lisa  25–6, 40–2, 46 Shelby, Tommie  347 Shildrick, Margrit  489 Shrage, Laurie  532 Shuford, Alexandra  90 Sider, Ted  217–18 silencing 465 Dotson on epistemic injustice and  190–2, 413–15, 418–19, 424 free speech and  189–90 Maitra, I., on  190–1 of marginalized social groups  191

586   index silencing (Continued ) McGowan on  190–2 in philosophy of language  189–92 pornography and  189–90 rape and  190–1 recognition failure as  190 testimonial quieting  191 testimonial smothering  192 Silver, Nate  400 Silvers, Anita  300n.23, 465, 519 Simons, Margaret A.  173n.4 Simplican, Stacy Clifford  418–19, 521–2 Simpson, Audra  110, 160 Singer, Peter  552 Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter  292 situated knowing  332 dominant knowers and  422 double consciousness and  173n.4, 174–5, 203–4, 330n.6 epistemic advantage and  203–4 in feminist epistemology  202–4, 203n.3, 207 situatedness 4 feminist aesthetic and  298 as social  202–3, 206–7 slavery  127–8, 442–5, 502 slurs  187–8, 192–3. See also hate speech Smith, Andrea  155, 158–60 Smith, Dorothy E.  327, 331 Smolin, Lee  244–5 Snorton, C. Riley  536 social and political philosophy  261, 312–13, 317–19 social contract theory  251, 254 social epistemology  200–1, 201n.2, 204–8 social justice adaptive preferences and lack of  253–5, 316, 379 analytical feminist ethics on  249, 252 capability approach on  318–19 feminist bioethics on  281 feminist ethics and  250 feminist philosophy on  6–7 feminist social and political philosophy on  261, 317–19 freedom tensions and equality in  318 morality and perspective of  288–9 political actions for  319

slurs and lack of  187–8, 192–3 veiling practices in  317–18, 355–7 social protest and resistance  508 social settlement movement  85–6 society construction of sex and  215–17 feminist ontology and  273–4, 277 feminist philosophy of social science and  333, 333n.7 feminist standpoint methodology on 328–9 gender as classification in  215, 297–8 identity and  345–7, 377–8 injustice in  477 intersubjective approach and  382 language and  184 norms of  262–3 selfhood and model of  280 sex/gender distinction and  75–6, 353 sexism and the lived body in  174 and situatedness  202–3, 206–7 slurs and injustice in  187–8, 192–3 subjectivization and  104 Socrates  25–6, 29–30 Solomon, Miriam  230–2 Somerville, Siobhan  507 Sophie (Electress of Hanover)  44 Sophie Charlotte of Prussia (Queen)  44 South Asian school of postcolonial studies 543–5 speaking for others  555–8 speciesism 552 speech act theory  188–92, 241n.8, 510–11 Spelke, Elizabeth  400 Spelman, Elizabeth  29, 34, 350–1, 524 “Have We Got a Theory for You!” by  9, 124, 555–6 Inessential Woman by  79–80 Spender, Dale  186 Spillers, Hortense  113–14, 117n.3, 391 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty  414, 479, 541–4, 547–8 standpoint epistemology  333, 410–14 standpoint methodology  330, 332 standpoint theory  332–3, 522 achievement thesis in  232–3, 332–3 dominant knowers and  422 epistemic advantage and  203–4

index   587 Harding on  206–7, 328, 412 metaphysical repercussions of  333–4 Stanley, Eric  513 Starr, Ellen Gates  85–6 Stengers, Isabelle on GMOs  240–1 on performative ecology  241, 241n.8 on women and science  239–42, 240n.5, 241n.6 stereotypes. See also gender bias feminist aesthetics on  299–300 feminist moral psychology on  289–90 generic plural subjects as  188 internalization of  382 underperformance resulting from  290 of women of color  303–4 sterilization  158–9, 431 Stewart, Lindsey  112–14, 113n.1 Stewart, Maria  410–11, 501–2 Stoics 32–3 Stoljar, Natalie  378–9, 534 Stone, Sandy  531 storytelling communications  159–61 St. Pierre, Joshua  357 Straehle, Christine  433n.3 structuralism  100–1, 104 Stryker, Susan  513, 531–2 stuttering 357 subjectivity alterity and  263–5, 268 continental feminists on  263, 269 embodiment, vulnerability, relationality in  263–5, 268 epistemic mapping and  199–200 intersubjective approach and  64, 366–7 opacity and  265–7 subversion  106, 111–12 Suchon, Gabrielle  40 suffrage 84 Sullivan, Shannon  80, 85, 89 Sundstrom, Ronald  143, 145, 147n.3 Taylor, Dianna  268 teaching  43, 47, 47nn.3–4 temporality  363–4, 367–8 Teresa of Avila  18–19, 22 terrorism  402–3, 453–5, 457–8 Tessman, Lisa  251, 291

testimonial injustice  408–9 testimony 207 Dotson on competence and  190–2 Walker on  274–5, 287–8, 465–6 Thayer-Bacon, Barbara  90 Theano 27–8 Themistoclea 27–8 Thurschwell, Adam  54–5 time 366–7 chronos as  363–4 la durée as process of  363–4 feminist philosophy and  364 imperialism and  369–70 queer theory and  511–12 temporality and  363 Tirrell, Lynne  192–3 Tobin, Theresa  292, 464–5, 470 Tobin tax  470 Tong, Rosemarie  314 Townley, Cynthia  425–6, 425n.7 transcendence embodiment and  364 ethics and  269–70 of gender  459, 510–11 of positions  396–8, 405 theory of  83, 241–2 Transcendentalism 83 trans feminism  536, 538 trans feminist approach  536 transformation (der Augenblick) 363–4 transgender  356, 513, 531, 536–7 abolition and  446 Blackness and  536 category of “woman” and  537, 556 disorders of sex development (DSD) and 353–4 exclusion of  533–4, 536 feminist bioethics and  282 gynocentrism in art and  302–3 Hintikka on  186–7 homonormativity and  513 intersectionality and  538 Jenkins on  533–4 Latinx inclusion of  121–2 Namaste on  531–3, 536 queer theory and  531–3, 536 resistance of gender binary and  537 transgender theory  513

588   index translation 9 transnationalism 88–90 trans philosophy  531–2, 534 cisnormativity excluding  8–9 feminist philosophy and  533 intersectionality and  536 methodology of  534–7 queer theory and  513, 531–3, 536 Trans* Experience in Philosophy conference and  532 trans studies and  533 Tremain, Shelley  356–7, 426, 520n.2, 522–3 Trotter Cockburn, Catharine  18, 41–2, 44 Trump, Donald  402–3, 457 Truth, Sojourner  409–11, 501–2 Tuana, Nancy  26, 39, 237, 475 Tuck, Eve  161 van der Tuin, Iris  106, 389 UDHR. See Universal Declaration of Human Rights Ullian, Joseph  399 underdetermination 398–401 underrepresented groups  6–7 United States (US) Adams on women and  83 Asiatic Barred Zone in  142 Chinese Exclusion Act of  142 Expatriation Act of  142 Hull House and pragmatism in  85, 87 immigration policies of  435–6 intersectionality and immigration policies of  429–30, 435–6 migrant women and  429–30, 435–6 militarism, homophobia, and misogyny in 454–5 Narayan on immigration legislation and  145–6, 255–6, 435, 469, 547–8 Page Act of  142 patriotic hermeneutic in  139 politics of white supremacy in  138 on sexual harassment  331 violence in  451 westward imperialism of  138–9 women prisons in  442 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 462 US. See United States

Vadas, Melinda  189 Valian, Virginia  289–90 value-free ideal  228–9 Van Dyck, Barbara  240–1 Varden, Helga  253–4 veiling practices  317–18, 355–7 violence 451. See also pornography; sexual violence; war as anti-Asian  138–9 as anti-black  111 as anti-immigrant  445, 501 as anti-LGBTQI  123–4, 446 anti-militarist feminism on  458 as anti-queer  513 as anti-trans  513, 536–7 assimilation as  116, 155 as colonial  121–2, 315–16, 351–2, 542–3, 546–7 as colonial and heteronormative  315–16 as cultural  547–8 as domestic  435, 452, 501 as epistemic  414, 547–8 as gendered  318–19, 547 as generational  542–3, 547–8 as genocide  116, 466–7 incarceration as  443–4 against Native women  157–9 by police  445–6 politics and  456–8 poverty and  451 as racist and sexist against women of color 500–1 rape and  127–8, 190–1, 255, 319, 453, 466–7, 501 settler colonialism and  159, 542–3, 547–8 as sex trafficking  466, 547–8 as systemic  458 UDHR and  462 war and  452–3 women and  442–3, 446, 463–5 virtue epistemology  208 virtue theory  251, 254, 291 vulnerability  267–8, 318 biomedical innovation and  491 ethics and  268 to gendered violence and harassment 318–19 Orientalism and  143–4 poverty and  279–80, 318–19

index   589 relationality and  264 subjectivity and  263–5, 268 Vuola, Elina  546 Wacquant, Loïc  444–5 Waithe, Mary Ellen  18, 27–8, 33, 38, 40–1, 44–5 Waldron, Jeremy  193 Walker, Margaret Urban  274–5, 287–8, 465–6 Walsh, Mary  254 Wane, Njoki  546–7 war  451–2, 457–8. See also violence Butler on  455, 457–8, 476–7 feminists on  453–4 gender and  453–4 and homophobia  454–5 hypermasculinity in  454–5 identity politics, violence in  452–3 military and  4–5 robots and drones in  458–9 terrorism and  452 women and  455–6 Ward, Julie  26 Warkentin, Traci  557 Warner, Michael  506–8, 511–12 Warnke, Georgia  51–2, 343–4 Warren, Karen J. An Unconventional History of Western Philosophy 45 Warriner, Jennifer  379–80 Wartofsky, Mark  312 Washick, Bonnie  390–1 web of valief thesis  231–2 websites 47 Weheliye, Alexander  391 Weir, Allison  347–8, 435n.5 Welch, Shay  151 Wells, Ida B.  86–8, 410–11, 502 Wells, Janice  111–12 Wendell, Susan  522 West canon of  303–4 colonization and  60 and gender  479 US imperialism and  138–9 West, Caroline  192 Whipps, Judy  85–6, 88

Whisnant, Rebecca  255–6 white feminism  9, 156, 161, 299–300, 424, 502–3, 537, 546 Whitehead, Alfred North  241n.6, 363–4, 387–8, 390 white supremacy  156, 301–2, 497, 544 Wiegman, Robyn  512–13 Williams, Bernard  344 Williams, Patricia J.  499–500 Williams, Robert A.  499–500 Wilson, Elizabeth  353–4, 512–13 Wingrove, Elizabeth  386–7, 390–1 witnessing  51–2, 264–5, 456 Witt, Charlotte  25–8, 32, 39, 251 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  557 Wittig, Monique  55, 261 Wolfthal, Diane  305, 305n.33 Wollstonecraft, Mary  18, 39, 74 women as knowers  199–200 women’s bodies. See also bodies alienation and  67, 76–7, 113 sexual objectification and  67 Simone de Beauvoir on  65, 67–8, 72, 78–81, 351 women’s liberation  72, 78, 80–1 Women’s Time  363, 368–9 Woolf, Virginia  302, 423n.6, 455–6 Wylie, Alison  232–3, 325–6, 325n.1, 329–30 Wynter, Sylvia  391 Yang, K. Wayne  161 Yap, Audrey  232 Young, Iris Marion on anticolonial politics  59–60 on clothes  66 on dual systems theory  53 On Female Body Experience by  77 on feminine bodily comportment  66–7 feminist phenomenology and  64–70 on oppression  59 on public/private realms  54 Yuracko, Kimberly  253 Zahavi, Dan  174–5 Zerilli, Linda  51–2, 57–8, 389–90 Zheng, Robin  143–5 Zoller, Catherine  30