THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy is an outstanding guide and reference

source to the key topics, subjects, thinkers, and debates in feminist philosophy. Fifty-
six chapters, written by an international team of contributors specifically for the
Companion, are organized into five sections: (1) Engaging the Past; (2) Mind, Body, and
World; (3) Knowledge, Language, and Science; (4) Intersections; (5) Ethics, Politics,
and Aesthetics. The volume provides a mutually enriching representation of the sev-
eral philosophical traditions that contribute to feminist philosophy. It also foregrounds
issues of global concern and scope; shows how feminist theory meshes with rich theo-
retical approaches that start from transgender identities, race and ethnicity, sexuality,
disabilities, and other axes of identity and oppression; and highlights the interdiscipli-
narity of feminist philosophy and the ways that it both critiques and contributes to the
whole range of subfields within philosophy.

Ann Garry is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at California State University, Los

Angeles. Her work in feminist philosophy ranges from applied ethics to intersectionality
and feminist philosophical methods.

Serene J. Khader is Jay Newman Chair in Philosophy of Culture at Brooklyn College

and Associate Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research in feminist
philosophy focuses on global gender justice.

Alison Stone is Professor of European Philosophy at Lancaster University, UK. She

specializes in feminist philosophy and post-Kantian European philosophy in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Routledge Philosophy Companions
Routledge Philosophy Companions offer thorough, high quality surveys and assessments
of the major topics and periods in philosophy. Covering key problems, themes and
thinkers, all entries are specially commissioned for each volume and written by lead-
ing scholars in the field. Clear, accessible and carefully edited and organized, Routledge
Philosophy Companions are indispensable for anyone coming to a major topic or period
in philosophy, as well as for the more advanced reader.

The Routledge Companion to Free Will

Edited by Kevin Timpe, Meghan Griffith, and Neil Levy
The Routledge Companion to Sixteenth Century Philosophy
Edited by Benjamin Hill and Henrik Lagerlund
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science
Edited by Lee McIntyre and Alex Rosenberg
The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy
Edited by Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader, and Alison Stone
—
For a full list of published Routledge Philosophy Companions, please visit www.routledge.
com/series/PHILCOMP.
Forthcoming
The Routledge Companion to Seventeenth Century Philosophy
Edited by Dan Kaufman
The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments
Edited by James Robert Brown, Yiftach Fehige, and Michael T. Stuart
The Routledge Companion to Medieval Philosophy
Edited by Richard Cross and JT Paasch
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race
Edited by Paul C. Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff, and Luvell Anderson
The Routledge Companion to Environmental Ethics
Edited by Benjamin Hale and Andrew Light
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Technology
Edited by Joseph Pitt and Ashley Shew Helfin
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, Second Edition
Edited by Sarah Robins, John Symons, and Paco Calvo
The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Philosophy
Edited by Craig Bourne and Emily Caddick Bourne
The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School
Edited by Axel Honneth, Espen Hammer, and Peter Gordon
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics
Edited by Eleanor Knox and Alastair Wilson
THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION
TO FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Edited by
Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader,
and Alison Stone
 First published 2017
by Routledge
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Title: The Routledge companion to feminist philosophy / edited by
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Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Routledge, 2017. |
Series: Routledge philosophy companions | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016046368 | ISBN 9781138795921 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminist theory.
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LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046368

ISBN: 978-1-138-79592-1 (hbk)

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by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
 CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors x

Introduction 1
ANN GARRY, SERENE J. KHADER, AND
ALISON STONE

PART I
Engaging the Past 11

  1 Feminist Methods in the History of Philosophy, or,

Escape from Coventry 13
MOIRA GATENS

  2 Feminism and Ancient Greek Philosophy 23

ADRIANA CAVARERO

  3 Dao Becomes Female: A Gendered Reality, Knowledge,

and Strategy for Living 35
ROBIN R.WANG

  4 Feminism, Philosophy, and Culture in Africa 49

TANELLA BONI

  5 Feminist Engagement with Judeo-Christian Religious Traditions 60

BEVERLEY CLACK

  6 Early Modern Feminism and Cartesian Philosophy 71

JACQUELINE BROAD

  7 Feminist Engagements with Social Contract Theory 82

JANICE RICHARDSON

  8 Feminism and the Enlightenment 94

SUSANNE LETTOW
 CONTENTS

  9 Feminist Engagements with Nineteenth-Century

German Philosophy 107
ELAINE P. MILLER

10 Introducing Black Feminist Philosophy 120

KRISTIE DOTSON

11 Feminist Pragmatism 132

V. DENISE JAMES

12 Feminist Phenomenology 143

ALIA AL-SAJI

PART II
Body, Mind, and World 155

13 The Sex/Gender Distinction and the Social Construction

of Reality 157
SALLY HASLANGER

14 Gender Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism 168

MARI MIKKOLA

15 Embodiment and Feminist Philosophy 180

SARA HEINÄMAA

16 Materiality: Sex, Gender, and What Lies Beneath 194

CLAIRE COLEBROOK

17 Feminism and Borderlands Identities 207

EDWINA BARVOSA

18 Personal Identity and Relational Selves 218

SUSAN J. BRISON

19 Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Feminism 231

KELLY OLIVER

PART III
Knowledge, Language, and Science 241

20 Rationality and Objectivity in Feminist Philosophy 243

PHYLLIS ROONEY

vi
 CONTENTS

21 Trust and Testimony in Feminist Epistemology 256

HEIDI GRASSWICK

22 Epistemic Injustice, Ignorance, and Trans Experience 268

MIRANDA FRICKER AND KATHARINE JENKINS

23 Speech and Silencing 279

ISHANI MAITRA

24 Language, Writing, and Gender Differences 292

GERTRUDE POSTL

25 Philosophy of Science and the Feminist Legacy 303

JANET A. KOURANY

26 Values, Practices, and Metaphysical Assumptions in the

Biological Sciences 314
SARA WEAVER AND CARLA FEHR

27 Feminist Philosophy of Social Science 328

ALISON WYLIE

PART IV
Intersections 341

28 The Genealogy and Viability of the Concept of Intersectionality 343

TINA FERNANDES BOTTS

29 Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and Feminist Philosophy 358

FALGUNI A. SHETH

30 Native American Chaos Theory and the Politics of Difference 370

SHAY WELCH

31 Feminist Theory, Lesbian Theory, and Queer Theory 382

MIMI MARINUCCI

32 Through the Looking Glass: Trans Theory Meets

Feminist Philosophy 393
TALIA MAE BETTCHER

33 Feminist and Queer Intersections with Disability Studies 405

KIM Q. HALL

vii
 CONTENTS

34 Women, Gender, and Philosophies of Global Development 419

SANDRA HARDING AND ANNA MALAVISI

35 Feminist Intersections with Environmentalism and

Ecological Thought 432
TRISH GLAZEBROOK

36 Encountering Religious Diversity: Perspectives from Feminist

Philosophy of Religion 446
PATRICE HAYNES

PART V
Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics 459
Aesthetics 461

37 Historicizing Feminist Aesthetics 463

TINA CHANTER

38 Aesthetics and the Politics of Gender: On Arendt’s Theory of

Narrative and Action 474
EWA PLONOWSKA ZIAREK

39 Feminist Aesthetics and the Categories of the Beautiful and

the Sublime 485
CHRISTINE BATTERSBY

Ethics 499

40 Moral Justification in an Unjust World 501

ALISON M. JAGGAR AND THERESA W. TOBIN

41 Feminist Conceptions of Autonomy 515

CATRIONA MACKENZIE

42 Feminist Metaethics 528

ANITA SUPERSON

43 Feminist Ethics of Care 540

JEAN KELLER AND EVA FEDER KITTAY

44 Confucianism and Care Ethics 556

SIN YEE CHAN

viii
 CONTENTS

45 Feminist Virtue Ethics 568

ROBIN S. DILLON

46 Feminist Bioethics 579

WENDY A. ROGERS

Social and Political Philosophy 593

47 Multicultural and Postcolonial Feminisms 595

MONICA MOOKHERJEE

48 Neoliberalism, Global Justice, and Transnational Feminisms 607

SERENE J. KHADER

49 Feminism, Structural Injustice, and Responsibility 620

SERENA PAREKH

50 Latin American Feminist Ethics and Politics 631

AMY A. OLIVER

51 Feminist Engagements with Democratic Theory 642

NOËLLE MCAFEE

52 Feminism and Liberalism 652

CLARE CHAMBERS

53 Feminism and Freedom 665

ALLISON WEIR

54 Feminism and Power 678

JOHANNA OKSALA

55 Feminist Approaches to Violence and Vulnerability 689

ELIZABETH FRAZER AND KIMBERLY HUTCHINGS

56 Feminist Philosophy of Law, Legal Positivism, and

Non-Ideal Theory 701
LESLIE P. FRANCIS

Index 713

ix
 NOTES ON
CONTRIBUTORS

Alia Al-Saji is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. She works

on phenomenology, French philosophy, feminist theory, and critical philoso-
phy of race. She has published in Continental Philosophy Review, Philosophy and
Social Criticism, and Research in Phenomenology, and co-directs the Society for
Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.

Edwina Barvosa is an Associate Professor of Social and Political Theory in the

department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her interdisciplinary work
focuses on the multiplicity of the self and implicit bias as they impact democratic
governance. She is the author of Wealth of Selves: Mestiza Consciousness, Multiple
Identities and the Subject of Politics (2008).

Christine Battersby is Reader Emerita in Philosophy and Associate Fellow of the

Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts at the University of
Warwick, UK. Her publications include The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference
(2007), The Phenomenal Woman (1998), and Gender and Genius (1989).

Talia Mae Bettcher is Professor of Philosophy and Department Chair at California State
University, Los Angeles. Some of her articles include “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers:
Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion” (Hypatia 2007) and “Trapped in the
Wrong Theory: Re-thinking Trans Oppression and Resistance” (Signs 2014).

Tanella Boni is Full Professor at the University of Cocody, Ivory Coast. What started
as work on the idea of life in Aristotle at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne culmi-
nated in Que vivent les femmes d’Afrique? (2008). She is also a novelist and poet, who
has won numerous literary prizes.

Tina Fernandes Botts is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University,

Fresno. With doctoral degrees in both law and philosophy, she specializes in philoso-
phy of law, philosophy of race, and feminism. She is the editor of Philosophy and the
Mixed Race Experience (2016).

Susan J. Brison, Eunice and Julian Cohen Professor for the Study of Ethics and Human
Values at Dartmouth, has written Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (2002),
co-written Debating the Ethics of Pornography: Sex, Violence, and Harm (forthcoming),
and published numerous articles on free speech theory and on gender-based violence.
 Notes on Contributors

Jacqueline Broad is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Philosophy

department at Monash University, Melbourne. Her main area of expertise is
early modern philosophy, with a particular focus on women philosophers of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Adriana Cavarero is an Italian philosopher and feminist thinker. She teaches at the
University of Verona and focuses on philosophy, politics, and literature. Her books
in English include Horrorism (2009), For More Than One Voice (2005), Stately Bodies
(2002), Relating Narratives (2000), and In Spite of Plato (1995).

Clare Chambers is University Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of

Cambridge. She is the author of Sex, Culture, and Justice (2008) and, with Phil
Parvin, Teach Yourself Political Philosophy (2012), as well as numerous articles. Her
next book, Against Marriage, is forthcoming.

Sin Yee Chan is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont.

Her research interests include Confucianism, comparative philosophy, feminism
and moral psychology. Her recent papers discuss the concept of desires in Mencius
and why homosexuality is compatible with Confucianism.

Tina Chanter is Professor of Philosophy and Gender, and Head of the School of Humanities
at Kingston University. Her books include Rancière, Art, and Politics: Broken Perceptions
(2016) and Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery (2011).

Beverley Clack is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Oxford Brookes University, UK.

Her publications include Freud on the Couch (2013), Philosophy of Religion: A Critical
Introduction, co-authored with Brian R. Clack (second edition 2008), and Sex and
Death (2002). She co-edited Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings (2004).

Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University.
She has written books and articles on literary theory, literary history, contemporary
European philosophy, feminist theory, queer theory, and Gilles Deleuze. She has just
completed a book on Fragility (2017, forthcoming).

Robin S. Dillon is William Wilson Selfridge Professor of Philosophy at Lehigh

University, and a founder and long-time director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies. She works in normative ethics, moral psychology, feminist ethics, and
Kantian ethics, and has written on self-respect, respect, arrogance, humility, and
critical character theory.

Kristie Dotson, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University,

researches in epistemology and Black feminism. Dotson has edited a special issue
of Hypatia, published numerous articles, and is writing a monograph on epistemic
oppression for Oxford University Press.

Carla Fehr holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the
Philosophy Department at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She works
in philosophy of biology, feminist epistemology, and socially relevant philosophy
of Science.

xi
 Notes on Contributors

Leslie P. Francis, PhD, JD, is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Law at

the University of Utah. She served as President of the American Philosophical
Association, Pacific Division and is former Vice President of the International
Association of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. She writes on justice, dis-
ability, and bioethics.

Elizabeth Frazer is Head of Department, Politics and International Relations, University

of Oxford, and Fellow in Politics, New College, Oxford. She is the author of books
and articles on the themes of normative ideals of politics, political education, and the
relationship between politics and violence in political thought and theory.

Miranda Fricker is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York. Her
research is in moral philosophy and social epistemology. Her publications include
Epistemic Injustice (2007) and several co-edited works, including The Cambridge
Companion to Feminism in Philosophy (2000). She is an Associate Editor of the Journal
of the American Philosophical Association.

Ann Garry is Professor of Philosophy Emerita at California State University, Los

Angeles. Her writing ranges from feminist issues in bioethics, pornography, and phi-
losophy of law to intersectionality, analytic feminist epistemology, and philosophical
method. She co-edits the Feminist Philosophy section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.

Moira Gatens is Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. She

teaches early modern philosophy (especially Spinoza), political philosophy, and phi-
losophy and literature. Two lectures about her recent work on Spinoza and George
Eliot were published as Spinoza’s Hard Path to Freedom (2011).

Trish Glazebrook is Professor of Philosophy at Washington State University. She

publishes on science and technology, Heidegger, ecofeminism, international devel-
opment, gender, and climate change. She currently researches women subsistence
farmers’ climate change adaptations in Ghana, and oil development in Africa.

Heidi Grasswick is the George Nye and Anne Walker Boardman Professor of Mental
and Moral Science in the Department of Philosophy at Middlebury College and is
affiliated with the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Program. Her research
spans questions of feminist epistemology, social epistemology, and the connections
between the epistemic and the ethical.

Kim Q. Hall is Director of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and Professor of
Philosophy at Appalachian State University. Recent publications include her guest
edited New Conversations in Feminist Disability Studies, a 2015 special issue of Hypatia:
A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.

Sandra Harding is a Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA. She is the author or

editor of seventeen books, including Objectivity and Diversity (2015), The Postcolonial
Science and Technology Studies Reader (2011), and Sciences From Below (2008). She
co-edited Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2000–2005).

xii
 Notes on Contributors

Sally Haslanger is Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies
at MIT. She specializes in metaphysics, epistemology, feminist theory, and critical
race theory. Her book Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (2012)
collects seventeen of her papers.

Patrice Haynes is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Liverpool Hope University. She

publishes in continental philosophy of religion and feminist philosophy. Her first
book is Immanent Transcendence: Reconfiguring Materialism in Continental Philosophy
(2012).

Sara Heinämaa is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä and Director of

the “Subjectivity, Historicity, Communality” research group, University of Helsinki.
Her publications include “Phenomenologies of Mortality and Generativity” in Birth,
Death, and Femininity, ed. Robin May Schott (2010) and Toward A Phenomenology of
Sexual Difference (2003).

Kimberly Hutchings is Professor of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary

University of London. Among her works are Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (2003)
and Beyond Antigone (2010). She is currently collaborating with Elizabeth Frazer on a
series of papers on the relationship between violence and politics within the history
of political thought.

V. Denise James is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dayton. She

researches and writes about the politics of geography, identity, and social justice. She
has published essays on the intersections of classical American pragmatism and black
feminism.

Alison M. Jaggar is College Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado,

Boulder. She holds a joint appointment with Philosophy and with Women and
Gender Studies and is affiliated with the Department of Ethnic Studies. Jaggar is also
a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Katharine Jenkins is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham.

Her main interests are social ontology, feminist philosophy, and the critical philoso-
phy of race. Her publications include “Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity
and the Concept of Woman” in Ethics (2016).

Jean Keller is Professor of Philosophy at the College of St. Benedict/St. John’s

University. She co-edited Feminist Interventions in Ethics and Politics (2005) and
Envisioning Plurality: Feminist Perspectives on Pluralism in Ethics, Politics, and Social
Theory (2013). Her writing has focused on feminist ethics, relational autonomy,
mothering, and adoption.

Serene J. Khader is Jay Newman Chair at Brooklyn College and Associate Professor
at the CUNY Graduate Center. She works in moral psychology, ethics, and politi-
cal philosophy. She is the author of Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment
(2011) and is currently writing a book on transnational feminist solidarity.

xiii
 Notes on Contributors

Eva Feder Kittay is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University/

SUNY. Her publications include Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and
Dependency (1999); Cognitive Disability and the Challenge to Moral Philosophy (2010);
Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy (2006); The Subject of Care: Theoretical
Perspectives on Dependency (2002); and Women and Moral Theory (1987).

Janet A. Kourany, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Gender Studies at the

University of Notre Dame, does research in philosophy of science, science and social
values, philosophy of feminism, and ignorance studies. She is working on a book,
Forbidden Knowledge: The Social Construction and Management of Ignorance.

Susanne Lettow does research at the Institute for Philosophy, Free University Berlin.
She specializes in feminist theory and continental philosophy, critical theory, phi-
losophy of the life sciences, and biopolitics. She edited Reproduction, Race and Gender
in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences (2014) and a special issue of Hypatia on
Emancipation.

Noëlle McAfee is a Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. Her books include

Democracy and the Political Unconscious (2008); Julia Kristeva (2004); and Habermas,
Kristeva, and Citizenship (2000). Her current book project is titled Democracy
Otherwise: Politics, Psychoanalysis, and the Work of Mourning.

Catriona Mackenzie is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean (Research) in the

Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University, Sydney. She has published widely on rela-
tional autonomy and other topics in moral psychology, ethics, applied ethics, and
feminist philosophy.

Ishani Maitra is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan at

Ann Arbor. Her main areas of research interest are philosophy of language, feminist
philosophy, and philosophy of law. She has published articles on silencing, the right
to free speech, assertion, contextualism, and testimony.

Anna Malavisi was a development worker and program manager in NGOs in Bolivia
before completing a Philosophy PhD. She has published on development ethics in
The Development Bulletin (2001) and the Journal of Global Ethics (2014) and is cur-
rently writing a book, Global Development and Its Discontents.

Mimi Marinucci serves as Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies
at Eastern Washington University. Marinucci is the author of Feminism Is Queer
(2nd ed. 2016), which explores the social and political aspects of the production of
knowledge regarding sex, sexuality, and gender.

Mari Mikkola is Professor of Practical Philosophy at the Humboldt-Universität in

Berlin. She works mainly in feminist philosophy, especially feminist metaphysics
and pornography. Additionally, she has research interests in social ontology and is
an editor of the Journal of Social Ontology.

xiv
 Notes on Contributors

Elaine P. Miller is Professor of Philosophy at Miami University of Ohio. She is the

author of Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times (2014)
and The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine
(2002), and co-edited Returning to Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy, Politics, and the
Question of Unity (2007).

Monica Mookherjee is Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy at Keele University, UK.

She authored Women’s Rights as Multicultural Claims (2009) and edited Democracy,
Religious Pluralism and the Liberal Dilemma of Accommodation (2010). Her research
interests span feminism, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and the
politics of recognition.

Johanna Oksala is Academy of Finland Research Fellow in the Department of

Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies at the University of Helsinki. She is
the author of five monographs, including Feminist Experiences (2016) and Foucault on
Freedom (2005), and more than fifty journal articles and book chapters in political
philosophy and feminist theory.

Amy A. Oliver is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Philosophy and
Religion and Associate Professor in Spanish and Latin American Studies, American
University. Her areas of specialization are Spanish and Latin American philosophy,
women’s studies, and philosophy of literature.

Kelly Oliver is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

She is the author of thirteen books, including most recently Hunting Girls: Sexual
Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape (2016) and Earth and World:
Philosophy After the Apollo Missions (2015). Her best known work is Witnessing:
Beyond Recognition (2001).

Serena Parekh is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University in

Boston, where she is the Director of the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Program.
She is editor of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and
Philosophy.

Gertrude Postl is Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at Suffolk
County Community College in Selden, New York. Her work focuses on feminist
theories of language and the body, aesthetics, and philosophy and literature. Her
most recent publication is a co-edited volume in German on Hélène Cixous.

Janice Richardson is Associate Professor of Law at Monash University, Australia.

Her publications include Law and the Philosophy of Privacy (2015), The Classic Social
Contractarians: Critical Perspectives from Feminist Philosophy and Law (2009), and Selves,
Persons, Individuals: Philosophical Perspectives on Women and Legal Obligations (2004).

Wendy A. Rogers is Professor of Clinical Ethics at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her

research interests include feminist bioethics, the ethics of evidence-based medicine,
research ethics, vulnerability, and overdiagnosis. She is a founding member of the
Editorial Board of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics.

xv
 Notes on Contributors

Phyllis Rooney, Professor of Philosophy at Oakland University, has interests in

feminist philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of science, and logic and argu-
mentation theory. She publishes on rationality, gender, and cognition, feminism
and argumentation, values in science, and the connections among feminist,
pragmatist, and naturalized epistemology.

Falguni A. Sheth is Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and

Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Her research is in the areas of continental
and political philosophy, legal and critical race theory and philosophy of race, post-
colonial theory, and sub-altern and gender studies.

Alison Stone is Professor of European Philosophy at Lancaster University, UK. She

has published books on Hegel, Irigaray, motherhood, and the aesthetics of popular
music, as well as An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy (2007) and many articles on
nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy.

Anita Superson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky. Her research

is in ethics and feminism, particularly practical moral skepticism, feminist moral psy-
chology, and sexism in the academy. She is working on a book defending the right to
bodily autonomy.

Theresa W. Tobin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University. She

researches and teaches in theoretical and practical ethics with particular interests in
moral justification, philosophical methodology, and practical ethical issues related to
violence, spirituality, and gender.

Robin R. Wang is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Asian Pacific Studies at

Loyola Marymount University, LA, and President of the Society for Asian and
Comparative Philosophy (2016–2018). Her publications include Yinyang: The Way
of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture (2012).

Sara Weaver is a philosophy doctoral student at the University of Waterloo. She works
mainly in feminist and non-feminist philosophy of science. Her doctoral work is sup-
ported by the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada Joseph Armand-
Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship.

Allison Weir is Research Professor in Social and Political Philosophy and Gender
Studies in the Institute for Social Justice at the Australian Catholic University
in Sydney. She is the author of Identities and Freedom (2013) and Sacrificial Logics:
Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity (1996).

Shay Welch is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Spelman College. She specializes

in feminist political philosophy, feminist ethics, and Native American philosophy.
Her recent publications include Existential Eroticism: A Feminist Ethics Approach to
Women’s Oppression-Perpetuating Choices (2015).

xvi
 Notes on Contributors

Alison Wylie teaches philosophy at the University of Washington and Durham

University. As a philosopher of social science her primary interest is in understanding
how we know what we think we know, especially in archaeology and feminist social
science. Recent work includes Material Evidence (2015) and Evidential Reasoning in
Archaeology (2016).

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature, University of

Buffalo. Her books include Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism (2012) and
An Ethics of Dissensus (2001). Her research interests include feminist political theory,
modernism, feminist philosophy, ethics, and critical race theory.

xvii
 INTRODUCTION
Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader,
and Alison Stone

Aims of this Companion

Feminist philosophy is a substantial and vibrant area of contemporary philosophy.
Feminist philosophers critique and also contribute to traditional areas of philosophy
such as philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, phi-
losophy of science, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. One notable feature of
feminist philosophy is its interdisciplinarity. Dialogues between feminist philosophy
and other disciplines concern not only gender but also the various forms of oppres-
sion and identity that surround race and ethnicity, sexuality, disability, class and
economic inequities, and the relations between humanity and non-human animals
and the natural environment.
Insofar as it originated in feminist politics, feminist philosophy included from the
start discussion of feminist political issues and positions—such as the influential tax-
onomy and evaluation of liberal, Marxist, radical, and socialist feminism in Alison
Jaggar’s Feminist Politics and Human Nature (1983). Feminist philosophers began to
expose sexist biases running through the various branches of philosophy, including
its historical canon, as we discuss in more detail below. Feminists then began work to
construct new positions and approaches to combat the sexist assumptions they had
identified. Initially moral and political philosophy drew much of the critical and recon-
structive attention, but kindred feminist projects have unfolded in almost every area of
philosophy: epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, metaphysics,
philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and history of philosophy. However, non-feminist phi-
losophers were often slow to recognize the philosophical character of what feminists
were doing. For instance, there have long been feminists including women of color
working on identity, such as María Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa, but it has not always
been recognized that in doing this work they were making important contributions to
philosophy of mind (see Chapter 17).
A multi-faceted dilemma arises, though, when we seek as in this volume to trace
how feminist philosophical debates have evolved into their current forms. The voices
of white, Western feminists, often those working in “analytic” or Anglo-American phi-
losophy, have prevailed within these debates. Often debates have taken shape around
these women’s contributions rather than those of women of color, from outside the
West, or working in more marginalized traditions. For example, there has been extensive
 Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader, and Alison Stone

discussion over the years of Catharine MacKinnon’s theory of gendered power

relations, according to which women are subordinated to men through their social
construction as sexual objects against men as sexual agents. But the focus of this theory
is the subordination of women in general, a focus that directs our attention away from
power differences among women, and the different ways in which women experience
their gender in concert with their race, class, or other social divisions. That said, there
have long been feminists who have argued that gender cannot rightly be considered
in isolation from other social divisions, such as the Combahee River Collective in the
1970s and their nineteenth-century foremothers such as Anna Julia Cooper, Maria
Stewart, and Sojourner Truth (see Chapters 10, 28, and 29). Yet these arguments have
far too rarely been fully integrated into feminist philosophy.
The dilemma, then, is that in tracing the development of feminist debates one may
remain focused on those more privileged or powerful voices that have particularly
influenced these debates. Although there is no single solution to this dilemma, dif-
ferent contributors to this volume address it in a range of ways: re-inserting relatively
neglected voices into these debates; introducing new debates and challenging the terms
of existing debates; critiquing the power relations to which feminist thought has been
subject despite itself; and reflecting on the concept of intersectionality itself, that is, the
idea that gender is always intersected by other social power relations and that women
are never simply women but always, inextricably, white women or women of color,
middle- or working-class women, and so on. We have also endeavored as editors to
design this volume in a way that responds to these dilemmas, as we will now explain.
We have divided this volume into five sections: (1) Engaging the Past; (2) Mind,
Body, and World; (3) Knowledge, Language, and Science; (4) Intersections; (5) Ethics,
Politics, and Aesthetics. This organization is designed to facilitate several different
kinds of diversity. First, we wish to ensure a mutually enriching representation of both
the Anglo-American (or analytic) and continental European philosophical traditions.
We have therefore designed each section to include chapters on both “continental” and
“analytic” themes and to put distinct approaches into dialogue (for example, by pairing
chapters on analytic and continental feminist approaches to philosophy of language).
This said, some chapters have a more analytic and others a more continental orienta-
tion while others fall in between or take different stances altogether, ones that are
more interdisciplinary or are guided by non-Western traditions. To facilitate discussion
between continental and analytic traditions we have organized all chapters themati-
cally. An effect of this topic-based organization is that some figures, such as Simone
de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Iris Marion Young come up across
many sections—which evidences the breadth and impact of their thought.
Our second aim is to foreground issues of global concern and scope. Particularly in
“Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics,” we have centralized global issues and asked authors
to address general themes in a global setting. For instance, in discussing care ethics
(Chapter 43) Jean Keller and Eva Kittay address global concerns such as the trans-
national migration of care workers and the global “chains of care” whereby care flows
overall from the global south to the north and from the disempowered to the more
powerful. Nonetheless, the focus of this companion remains feminist philosophy as it
exists today in the Western world, in critical interaction with Western philosophical
and related intellectual traditions. By and large, then, Western approaches provide
the framework through which global issues will be addressed. This returns us to one

2
 Introduction

of the dilemmas noted earlier: that tracing how feminist debates in ethics and politics
have developed entails focusing largely on the West, even though the predominance
of Western voices is a product of the unequal global power relations of which many
feminists are critical.
While we focus largely on the West, we have included chapters on non-Western
philosophical approaches—Daoism, African feminism, and Confucianism—and
approaches that might be classed as “Western” in purely geographical terms—namely
Native American and Latin American traditions—although these are not “Western”
taking “the West” to be a political rather than narrowly geographical entity. While very
far from comprising an exhaustive treatment of non-Western traditions, these chapters
are designed to enable readers to identify points of connection and contrast with other
essays in the volume. This helps to counter narrower views that non-Western traditions
such as Daoism or Confucianism are not properly philosophical at all (e.g., for those who
believe that philosophy began in ancient Greece). Such views are problematic, partly
in presuming that we all know what is and isn’t philosophy. We do not want to follow
mainstream Western philosophy in restricting philosophy to the West. Nonetheless, due
to space constraints we have had to cover a small selection of non-Western approaches,
which are intended to be indicative rather than representative.
Third, the “Intersections” section includes several kinds of diversity. We focus on
the ways in which feminist theory meshes with rich theoretical approaches that start
from transgender identities, race and ethnicity, sexuality, and disabilities. In addition,
chapters cover some of feminist philosophy’s disciplinary intersections with develop-
ment studies, religious diversity, and ecological and environmental studies. We have
deliberately avoided treating intersectional work as an afterthought or as something
separate from the rest of feminist philosophy. Instead we have designed this volume so
that, throughout, there is space for our authors to attend to intersecting nodes among
power relations—for example, in the ways that the aesthetic tradition has tended to
be exclusive not only of white women’s artistic and cultural contributions but equally
those of people of color.
Finally, reflecting the variety of approaches to feminist philosophy, there is diversity
in the styles of writing adopted by different chapter authors, and in the extent to which
they provide original interpretations or arguments regarding their topic or, alterna-
tively, explain the positions already taken by others on this topic. Having explained
how we conceive the overall purpose and organization of this volume, we now want to
introduce the aims and structure of each of its five sections.

Engaging the Past

Early work in feminist history of philosophy concentrated on criticizing the
philosophical canon, not only targeting the explicit sexism of many of the figures in
this canon but also arguing that more pervasive sexist biases often shape entire philo-
sophical frameworks. For example, Genevieve Lloyd (1984) argued that Descartes’s
mind/body dualism implicitly ranks the “female” body below the “male” mind even
though Descartes himself does not associate women with the body, because in
Western thought the body has ingrained historical associations with the female. In
this context, dividing mind from body works to the detriment of “the female” and
by extension actual women. One conclusion drawn by some feminist historians of

3
 Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader, and Alison Stone

philosophy was that a whole series of hierarchical or “binary” oppositions runs

through the history of philosophy and Western culture more broadly: mind/body,
reason/emotion, culture/nature, action/passion, self/other, and so on—generally with
these contrasts lined up with male/female. But must such concepts as mind and reason
be necessarily linked to maleness, or are these associations merely contingent, so that
these concepts in themselves pose no problems for feminists? Among the range of
feminist answers to this question, one possible answer is this: the links are not exactly
necessary, but the associations have been made so deeply and pervasively across his-
tory that we cannot just set them aside, but instead need to rethink the concepts
mind, reason, etc. Thus, critiques of the canon helped to motivate the positive femi-
nist projects of re-thinking ethics, epistemology, and other fields in a feminist light.
Since those critiques of the canon were articulated, though, there have been
considerable shifts in orientation within feminist history of philosophy—shifts to
move beyond the established canon and rediscover previously forgotten or neglected
women philosophers and philosophers of color, or to recognize them as contributing
to philosophy and not only, e.g., to politics. For instance, there has been a redis-
covery of historical philosophers who used Descartes’s ideas in a feminist or proto-
feminist way (see Chapter 6). So, as Moira Gatens puts it (in Chapter 1), building
on Eileen O’Neill’s work, it is not so much that there were no women in philosophy
in the past but rather that we have insufficient memory of the women who were in
it. The problem may be not so much philosophy’s actual history but our selective
narratives of that history. Another development is to remain with canonical figures
but re-read their work positively or as containing positive elements despite their
authors’ overt wishes (for example, in Chapter 2 Adriana Cavarero takes this kind
of approach to Plato).
We hope that this volume shows some ways in which feminist discussions of the his-
tory of philosophy intersect with work that has a more contemporary focus. For example,
feminist re-thinkings of fields such as aesthetics and embodiment are often informed by
critical appreciation of the work of past figures such as Descartes and Kant (as with
Chapters 15 and 37, among others). And such historical traditions as phenomenology,
pragmatism and Black feminist thought all run forward from nineteenth-century roots
into the present day, again indicating that there is no sharp divide between past and
present (see Chapters 10–12).

Mind, Body, and World

From its outset feminist philosophy has addressed issues in philosophy of mind and
metaphysics, particularly concerning the relations between body and mind, between
selves and others, and the nature of identity. Thinking about the sex/gender distinction
has been central to the first of those issues. Early on in English-speaking second-wave
feminist thought, the distinction was drawn between the biological body and social
gender in order to make the point that the ways men and women are understood and
expected to behave, and the ways they come to experience and identify themselves in
light of these expectations, are matters of social norms and pressures rather than direct
causal effects of biology. However, this early discussion did not take into account bio-
logical variations of sexual development such as intersex or the full spectrum of genders,
including trans.

4
 Introduction

There are other problems with the sex/gender distinction too. First, what about our
bodies as we experience and live them, in light of cultural meanings? This seems to
belong neither with sex nor gender. This aspect of the body—as lived and not merely
biological—has been explored by phenomenologists and psychoanalytic theorists (see
Chapters 12 and 15). Second, perhaps gender norms and the expectation that everyone
should be either masculine or feminine shape our categorization of bodies into two
sexes all along, where alternative ways of categorizing human bodies are equally pos-
sible and might be preferable. Further questions arise about what it means for gender
to be socially constructed (see Chapter 13), and in what way, if any, all women count
as women, especially if there are no common properties or experiences that all women
share (the question of “essentialism,” discussed in Chapter 14). In turn, feminist think-
ing about the body has led to broader reflection on matter and materiality (Chapter 16).
There has also been much feminist attention to identity and the self, especially in
light of debates about identity politics. But these discussions have not always been rec-
ognized as contributing to philosophy of mind, partly because feminists tend to eschew
the highly abstract and de-contextualized approach to personal identity and the mind
which is common in contemporary Anglophone philosophy. Attention among feminist
philosophers has been more to identities in the plural, in different contexts, and with
more attention to actual experiences (for instance, of undergoing sexual assault), in con-
trast to traditional philosophy’s preoccupation with the unity of the self and to the focus
on thought experiments in much Anglophone philosophy of mind (see Chapter 18).
Feminists have considered how relations with individual others, and social situations,
figure into our identities such that selves are not self-contained—as with hybrid, includ-
ing mestiza, identities, in which different social locations and related senses of self
co-exist, perhaps antagonistically, within a single person (see Chapter 17). Some femi-
nist philosophers have also turned to psychoanalysis to analyse how external social
relations become internalized into our mental processes and how these processes, in
turn, shape the social realm (see Chapter 19).

Knowledge, Language, and Science

Both the practices of science and our everyday lives lead us to converging insights
about the value of feminist philosophy concerning topics of objectivity, reason, trust,
knowledge, meaning and their connections to values, power, and gender. Most feminist
philosophers have little desire to reject key concepts in theory of knowledge and phi-
losophy of science such as reason, knowledge, truth, and objectivity. Instead they want
to reconstruct them in ways that are more reflective of our actual epistemic situations,
which are more richly conducive to social justice, and that better enable us to avoid past
errors such as power-laden, gender-linked dichotomies (the hierarchical, binary oppo-
sitions discussed above: male = rational versus female = emotional) (see Chapter 20).
Feminist philosophers attest that knowledge is “situated”; they try to provide complex
analyses of the patterns and systems that structure the way we come to know what we
do. This means that purely abstract analyses of knowledge or allegedly value-free analy-
ses are not adequate to the tasks at hand. Instead, most feminists use forms of “social
epistemology” that incorporate concrete facts about knowers and institutional (power-
filled) structures. This means that we can discuss whose word (“testimony”) is likely to
be under- or overvalued on the basis of prejudice or implicit bias, or what groups may

5
 Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader, and Alison Stone

not even have adequate concepts to describe their own experience authoritatively; we
can also look into what it means to have the virtue of being epistemically trustworthy
both as a speaker and as a listener (see Chapters 21 and 22). Traditional philosophers,
including those working in non-feminist social epistemology or virtue epistemology,
have come very late to discovering the importance of discussing epistemic injustice,
ignorance, and their relation to trust.
Feminist philosophers of science have found many opportunities for analysis both
of the practices of science and in the philosophy of science. Over the decades feminist
philosophers, along with feminists in other disciplines, have exposed sexism and andro-
centric biases in the conduct of scientific research, the topics chosen for study, misun-
derstandings of the roles of values in science, and ways that power is unjustly manifested
in science—to name a few. One of the most important insights to emerge from femi-
nist philosophers of science—whether they focus on the physical, biological or social
sciences—is that standards of scientific rationality and objectivity in fact become more
stringent when feminist or egalitarian values are at their base (see Chapters 25, 26,
and 27). Related to the high standard for objectivity is “standpoint epistemology,” the
view that favors starting research from the lives/positions of those who are marginal-
ized rather than dominant. Although this approach was originally adapted from Marx’s
views, it has been broadened in the past few decades so that one of its core insights—
that the position of the knower/investigator matters to the reliability of the knowledge
produced—has been incorporated by feminist philosophers from many methodological
backgrounds (see Intemann 2010; Wylie, Chapter 27).
Both continental and analytic feminist philosophers have critically analyzed language
for several decades. The two strands have developed in different directions although
they share concerns—initially about sexism in language, which leads to women’s invis-
ibility and reinforces unjust imbalances of power (consider “Man bears his young”), and
more recently in their use of “speech act theory” (for example, Judith Butler’s (1990)
performative analysis of gender and analytic feminists’ discussion of unjust silencing
of women). From continental, specifically “French feminist,” perspectives, language is
seen as a symbolic system embodying various kinds of gender biases that can be built
into grammar as well as concrete forms of language use. Gertrude Postl explores this in
Chapter 24: continental feminists’ concern with feminine writing (écriture féminine)
and their analyses at a psychoanalytic level. Ishani Maitra, in Chapter 23, illustrates
analytic feminists’ use of speech act theory as she analyzes various kinds of linguistic
injustices in terms of the ways women are silenced, even as they are speaking.

Intersections
As noted earlier, one of our aims is to foreground the importance of intersectional
analysis for feminist philosophy. By “intersectional analyses” we mean approaches
to issues that reflect the complex interactions among multiple structures and axes
of oppression and privilege that are salient in our social identities, for example,
race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, and ability differences. Although
many authors throughout the entire volume utilize intersectional thinking, this
section begins by providing historical and critical analysis of the concept of inter-
sectionality itself, especially as it has developed out of critical race theory, since
the intersections between gender and race have been a particular focus of thinking
about intersectionality (see Chapters 28 and 29).

6
 Introduction

Understanding intersecting axes of oppression in social reality requires both

attending to the details of people’s lives and drawing upon distinct bodies of theory
that have arisen around each of the axes. Several chapters in this section focus upon
the interactions among these bodies of theory (Chapters 29, 30, 31, 32, and 33). For
instance, in critical response to the oppression of people such as lesbians and gay men
on the basis of their sexuality, queer theory and critical sexuality studies have formed.
Thinking about the close relations between gender and sexuality-based oppression
has often involved cooperation between feminist philosophy and these areas of
thought (and has contributed to the development of both). The chapters in this sec-
tion highlight some salient cases where these theoretical intersections—for example,
with critical race theory, queer theory, trans theory, disability studies, and Native
American metaphysics—shed light on the multiple intersecting social structures that
manifest themselves in our everyday lives. Also included here are chapters on global
development, ecological thought and environmentalism, and feminist engagement
with religious diversity, which pertain to further problematic sets of power relations—
those of the global economic system, human exploitation and degradation of the
natural world, and intolerance of religious diversity (Chapters 34, 35, and 36).

Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics

As we have seen, feminists both argue that oppressive values have shaped the content
and methods of academic philosophy and advocate for philosophy informed by feminist
values. Engagement with values is thus not limited to the subfields of philosophy tradi-
tionally described as “value theory,” i.e., moral and political philosophy and aesthetics.
Part of the feminist contribution to philosophy has been to reveal the importance of
value inquiry across philosophical domains. For instance, some feminist philosophers
of science argue that prevalent ideals of objectivity arbitrarily value intellectual virtues
that are culturally coded as masculine. They claim that value-laden approaches that
recover a broader range of intellectual virtues may produce better science. Feminist
epistemologists also emphasize that just political contexts, and partly political virtues,
such as epistemic justice, are important to knowledge acquisition and legitimation.
Within ethics and aesthetics—two traditional philosophical subfields explicitly
focused on values—feminist philosophers argue for shifts in what we valorize and
in methods of evaluative justification. Early feminist interventions in value theory
revealed how notions of the good, the just, and the beautiful served the interests of
men and other dominant groups. One way traditional conceptions of value served
the dominant, according to feminist philosophers, was by arbitrarily assigning posi-
tive value to masculine traits. For example, autonomy has historically been assigned a
high value in Western moral and political thought. Kant argues that moral action is
defined by autonomy of the will, and many contemporary liberal thinkers claim that
respect-worthy conceptions of the good must be autonomously chosen. Early feminist
moral philosophers claimed that Western philosophy downgraded culturally feminine
traits, such as interdependence and empathy. The ultimate aim of these early feminist
arguments was normative; they did not merely claim that women had been socialized
to value differently from men, but also that androcentric bias had produced a distorted
view of which ends in human life were worth pursuing.
In addition to claiming that traditional philosophical approaches had wrongly
preferred “masculine” to “feminine” traits, goals, and values, early feminist ethics and

7
 Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader, and Alison Stone

aesthetics argued that androcentrism had problematically narrowed the scope of

worthy evaluative questions. In both aesthetics and ethics, questions that seemed
salient from the perspectives of people in dominant groups had eclipsed other impor-
tant questions. To give some examples: Aesthetic theories focused on analyzing
beauty in “fine art” rather than craft practices such as weaving, quilting, and cook-
ing that have been pursued in the domestic sphere. Despite the fact that all human
beings are born dependent and the result that human societies are inevitably faced
with allocating caring labor, most moral and political philosophies were silent on
topics such as dependency work, interpersonal trust, and relations of vulnerability.
Although liberal political philosophy had devoted significant attention to analyzing
economic inequality, it had fewer tools for diagnosing other forms of marginalization,
such as sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism—and intersections among these forms.
Feminism has always integrated such critical projects with positive ones, but positive
projects in moral and political philosophy and aesthetics have flourished in the last
fifteen years. Care ethics, initially discussed primarily in terms of its contrast to more
mainstream approaches, has now developed into a distinct family of moral approaches.
In the 1990s, care ethics was described primarily in contrast to ethics of justice and
rights, and a debate emerged as to whether feminists should eschew justice altogether
(see Chapter 43). Today, some care ethicists hold that care is a comprehensive moral
perspective from within which the value of concepts like rights can be explained. Others
attempt to subsume care into a virtue ethics, and still others argue that care ethics and
Confucianism can be incorporated into a single perspective (see Chapter 44). Similarly,
the body of feminist scholarship criticizing the philosophical tendency to treat the self
as atomistic and downplay the effects of social construction has now produced a rich
feminist literature on autonomy. Relational accounts, discussed at length by Wendy
Rogers (Chapter 46) and Catriona Mackenzie (Chapter 41), define autonomy in ways
that highlight the autonomy-enhancing qualities of the right types of relationships and
social conditions. They also emphasize the role social structures play in both limiting
and enabling autonomy. For instance, some accounts define autonomy so that oppres-
sive socialization is a paradigmatic case of autonomy restriction. Other accounts, espe-
cially within bioethics, are constitutively relational—suggesting that an agent cannot
be fully autonomous if she lacks certain opportunities. As Mackenzie notes, the ques-
tion of whether oppressive socialization is incompatible with autonomy has provoked
decades of debate about whether feminist ethicists should take the content of agents’
beliefs and values as central to determining the autonomy of their choices.
More broadly, many positive ethical and aesthetic projects develop tools for evalu-
ating the impacts of social structures on our individual and collective lives. Liberalism
has been the dominant tradition in Western political philosophy for decades, and
liberals have tended to focus on injustices perpetrated by identifiable agents, such as
individuals and governments. Even as issues about sexism and racism have become
more mainstream within philosophy, a number of feminists have noted the dispro-
portionate tendency to focus on the implicit biases of individual actors, rather than
the networks of material forces that reward and implant these biases. A significant
contribution of feminist philosophy in the last two decades has been to develop theo-
retical tools for identifying and responding to injustices that occur because of habits
and patterns of action that cannot be easily said to originate in an actor. A number
of feminists have criticized the current philosophical preoccupation with attributing

8
 Introduction

sexism and racism to implicit bias. As Serena Parekh notes here, such structural injus-
tices raise particularly vexing questions about responsibility, both because their con-
sequences are often invisible to those involved in them, and because it is difficult to
attribute causation to any individual agent. Feminist philosophers, such as Iris Marion
Young, have developed forward-looking models of political responsibility that address
difficulties attributing responsibility for structural injustice. Similarly, as the chapters
by Sandra Harding and Anna Malavisi (Chapter 34), Serene Khader (Chapter 48),
and Serena Parekh (Chapter 49) all note, feminists are renewing attention to the con-
cept of exploitation, especially to analyse the use of women’s unpaid and undervalued
labor to subsidize “development.”
Feminist philosophy, as we have noted earlier, has always been shaped by an engage-
ment with political movements. Non-ideal theory has gained much attention in main-
stream moral and political philosophy in recent years, but feminists have emphasized
non-ideal approaches for at least the last thirty years. Non-ideal approaches suggest
that, rather than imagining just social institutions, political thought should focus on
identifying existing injustices and developing normative principles and concepts that
help us to move beyond them. Nearly all of the essays in ethics and political philosophy
take this as a methodological starting point; for example, Wendy Rogers’s essay on bio-
ethics begins from attention to existing healthcare disparities (Chapter 46), and Clare
Chambers assumes that responsiveness to sexist oppression is a desideratum of liberal-
ism (Chapter 52). Drawing on Onora O’Neill’s work, Charles Mills (2005) argues that
non-ideal approaches are attentive to the dangers of idealizing the agents who make
normative judgments and the contexts in which they are made. An insistence that
agents charged with making evaluative judgments are shaped by, and operate within,
unjust social contexts cuts across the majority of essays on ethics, politics, and aesthetics
in this volume. As Margaret Urban Walker famously put this point, “philosophers are
in the plane of morality, not hovering above or perched outside it” (2007: 28). Alison
Jaggar and Theresa Tobin argue in Chapter 40 that the pervasiveness of epistemic injus-
tice, that is, conditions of knowledge production that harm marginalized people, offers
a reason to reject the ideal of a single, universalizable method of moral justification.
Allison Weir (Chapter 53) states that conceptions of freedom from colonized peoples
reach beyond some key impasses in Western political thought, which connects with
Shay Welch’s chapter on indigenous metaphysics (Chapter 30). Although the ideal/
non-ideal distinction is not a topic in aesthetics, Tina Chanter’s essay in this volume
(Chapter 37) shows how racial aperspectivalism infects not only moral judgments but
also judgments about beauty.
Engagement with political movements has also caused the subject matter of fem-
inist philosophy to shift along with changes in real-world political landscapes. It is
unsurprising, then, that this volume is more transnational in scope than earlier com-
pilations on feminist philosophy. Monica Mookherjee’s essay on postcolonialism and
multiculturalism (Chapter 47) raises concerns about ethnic and religious minority com-
munities within Western liberal states. Amy Oliver’s essay on Latin American feminist
ethics (Chapter 50) highlights the role of women’s philosophical inquiry in respond-
ing to political violence in Latin America. Tanella Boni’s essay (Chapter 4) discusses
political challenges particular to the sub-Saharan African context, such as navigating
worldviews that attach women’s worth to their capacity to biologically procreate and
acknowledging the intersectional effects of gender and age in determining social status.

9
 Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader, and Alison Stone

The essays on transnational feminisms, care ethics, and bioethics all emphasize the
increasing importance of developing theoretical responses to gender and racial impacts
of neoliberalism. Trish Glazebrook’s essay on ecofeminism (Chapter 35) addresses issues
such as climate change and the privatization of the global food supply.
In conclusion, we hope that this volume showcases the breadth and depth of
feminist thinking across a wide range of philosophical traditions and topics, while
featuring feminist perspectives that challenge and reconsider the history and con-
tours of feminist thinking on these topics up to the present day. In this way we hope
both to introduce the reader to the shape of feminist philosophy so far and also to
provide a new set of original interventions with which current and future scholars
and students will want to engage.

Some Thanks and a Note about Usage

A number of people deserve our deepest thanks. Routledge Philosophy Editor, Andrew
Beck, who commissioned the volume; Routledge Production Editor Sarah Adams and
Editorial Assistant Vera Jane Lochtefeld as well as Swales & Willis Production Editor
Laura Christopher and Copy Editor Kelly Derrick; anonymous reviewers who improved
its structure; and Alyssa Colby who contributed careful editing as well as general advice
and support, funded by the Jay Newman Fund at Brooklyn College. Lancaster University
provided Alison Stone with a term of sabbatical leave to expedite her editorial work.
Finally, sixty-two authors made time in their densely packed and sometimes trauma-
filled lives to write and revise the wonderful chapters you read here. We have enjoyed
working with them and with each other.
Note: We left it to the discretion of individual authors whether or not to capitalize
“Black” when referring to people with African ancestry.

References
Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble, New York: Routledge.
Intemann, Kristen (2010) “25 Years of Feminist Empiricism and Standpoint Theory: Where Are We Now?”
Hypatia 25(4): 778–796.
Jaggar, Alison (1983) Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Lloyd, Genevieve (1984) The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy, London: Routledge.
Mills, Charles (2005) “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Hypatia 20(3): 165–184.
Walker, Margaret Urban (2007) Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics, New York: Oxford
University Press.

10
 Part I

ENGAGING THE PAST

 1
FEMINIST METHODS
IN THE HISTORY OF
PHILOSOPHY, OR, ESCAPE
FROM COVENTRY
Moira Gatens

This chapter addresses the various forms taken by feminist enquiry into the relationship
between women and the history of philosophy. It will focus mostly on philosophy from the
early modern and modern period, and on feminist work produced in Europe, Australia, and
North America (for Ancient and non-Anglophone approaches see the other chapters in
this section). The chapter subtitle intentionally evokes the idea that the historical exclu-
sion of women from philosophy has involved a kind of interdiction or exile from which
women have only relatively recently, and even then only partially, escaped. This chapter
closes with a brief consideration of the work of the writer, George Eliot (1819–1880), who
may be seen as someone who metaphorically as well as literally escaped from Coventry,
and who provides a fine example of a woman who was excluded from institutional con-
texts of knowledge but nevertheless produced outstanding philosophical thought although
in a non-traditional format.
Second-wave feminism—roughly from the 1960s to the 1980s—raised the question:
Why are there no female philosophers in the history of philosophy? Why do Christine
de Pisan, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Simone de Beauvoir stand out as the apparently iso-
lated exceptions who serve to prove the rule? What follows is a sketch of four influential
methodologies developed by feminist thinkers in their attempt to answer the puzzle of
women’s absence from philosophy. As will be shown, feminist responses to the question
of women’s relation to philosophy have developed into a series of exciting and creative
developments in philosophical thought. Critical readings of key works in the history of
philosophy have often resulted in the generation of entirely new ways of conceptual-
izing traditional philosophical problems. This feminist philosophical scholarship, begun
in earnest in the last quarter of the twentieth century, opened up many unexpected
and productive lines of inquiry, including care ethics (Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984),
standpoint epistemology (Harding 1991), ontologies of embodied difference (Bordo
1993; Crenshaw 1989), sexual and racial contract theory (Mills 1997; Pateman 1988),
and numerous other approaches.
 ENGAGING THE PAST

My exegesis of the path breaking thought that served to prepare the ground in which
these innovative philosophies took root will favor work that responded critically to then
prevalent dogmatic philosophical assumptions about women, such as the claim that the
family and relations between men and women do not change across time or place. The
idea that women and the family are ahistorical, simply part of nature rather than created
in and through cultural practices, is common in the history of philosophical thought.
For example, in Emile (1979 [1762]) Jean-Jacques Rousseau referred to the family and to
men’s relation to women as aspects of invariant nature. This erroneous view was echoed
in Beauvoir’s otherwise challenging study, The Second Sex (1953), when she asserted
that women have no history. One of the most important challenges for feminist philoso-
phers is to understand and change these kinds of powerful, destructive, and entrenched
dogmas of thought that associate women with nature, the body, and emotion.

The Philosophical Imaginary and the Héloïse Complex

Michèle Le Dœuff made an early and influential contribution to the task of dismantling
destructive philosophical conceptions of women. Her pioneering interpretation of the
relationship between women and philosophy centered on the proposition that philo-
sophical thought deploys an extensive repertoire of metaphors and images, including
images of irrational, emotional, and objectified women. In The Philosophical Imaginary
(1989), Le Dœuff shows that contrary to philosophy’s self-conception as a master dis-
cipline based in truth and reason, one finds that the canonical texts are replete with
images of trees, clocks, islands, storms, horses, donkeys, and so on. Certain aspects of the
philosophical imaginary—for example, the Baconian image of nature as a woman that
science must conquer and penetrate if her secrets are to be known—conspire against
associating women with reason, culture, and knowledge. Sexed associations between
dichotomous values (e.g. reason–emotion, subjective–objective) are endemic to philo-
sophical thought and philosophy has played a major role in defining what it means to
be male (e.g., rational, objective) or female (e.g., emotional, subjective). It is partly for
this reason that Le Dœuff argues that what turns women away from the practice of phi-
losophy is intrinsic to philosophy, at least as it is presently conceived and practiced. How
could I, a woman, join the Baconian quest for knowledge if that venture is imagined in
terms of the sexual subjection of women? Of course, an alternative kind of philosophical
practice may not need to project negative values onto women or exclude them from the
privilege of being recognized as subjects capable of reason. This type of non-totalizing
philosophy, Le Dœuff muses, would be capable of accepting the necessarily incomplete
and provisional nature of all thought. Le Dœuff writes about this approach to philosophi-
cal thought as “operative,” open-ended, and as “thinking on the move.” Her engagement
with philosophy and its history is not only critical but also constructive and productive of
new, more inclusive ways of engaging in philosophical thinking. An inclusive approach
to philosophy would acknowledge its imaginary component and accept responsibility
for re-engaging that imaginary in order to shift it onto new, more equitable, ground. An
inclusive approach would also need to lift the ban on the participation of certain kinds
of persons in the philosophical conversation, including women.
In “Women and Philosophy” (1977) Le Dœuff introduced the idea of the “Héloïse
complex” in order to explain why even those few privileged women in the past who
managed to gain access to philosophical thought were nevertheless prevented from
becoming philosophers. The historical person from whom the complex takes its

14
 Feminist Methods in History of Philosophy

name is Héloïse d’Argenteuil, who was the lover-student of the famous medieval
philosopher Peter Abelard. The Héloïse complex describes an “erotico-theoretical
transference” that takes place between a female pupil and a male philosopher, who are
often, but not always, lovers. The female pupil looks up to the philosopher as “the one
who knows.” The male philosopher finds such adoration satisfying because it protects
him against self-doubt and the lack in knowledge that drives philosophical enquiry. In
a subtle argument, Le Dœuff develops the idea that the transference on the female side,
when coupled with women’s exclusion from institutions of learning, results in women’s
access to philosophy amounting to mere appearance. In actual fact, this type of relation
between pupil and master amounts to a ban, a “cunning prohibition” on women’s ability
to philosophize, and condemns them to the role of acolyte. This is because insofar as
women’s access to philosophy is mediated through a male lover-philosopher it amounts
to access to only a particular kind of philosophy—his philosophy. This prevents women
from developing their own independent relation to thought and so blocks their capaci-
ties to create philosophies that would represent their own perspectives and ways of
knowing. Hence, she argues, this situation amounts to a surreptitious prohibition on
women becoming philosophers. Although Le Dœuff does not deny the existence of
an erotico-theoretical transference between male pupils and masters, she insists that
there was not an in principle reason that prevented male pupils from becoming masters
in turn because, unlike women, they enjoyed a formal status in institutions of learning.
For males, the institution is able to function as a third term that mediates the intense
dyadic relation between teacher and pupil and so can deflect the transferential relation
onto other teachers or, indeed, onto the institution itself.
In addition to Héloïse and Abelard, Le Dœuff offers examples of other couples caught
in the complex, including Hipparchia (c.350 bc) and Crates, Princess Elisabeth of
Bohemia and René Descartes, and Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Le Dœuff refined and
sometimes revised elements of this argument in her later work, including in Hipparchia’s
Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc. (1991) and The Sex of Knowing
(2003). As feminist research into the work of past female philosophers increased in
scope, and their writings became more widely available, it became clear that women
in the history of philosophy had a great deal more autonomy than had appeared at
first sight. For example, Héloïse enjoyed high standing as a Classics scholar before she
became Abelard’s student, and after their sexual relation ended she continued to study
and compose works. Le Dœuff revised her view of women’s relation to philosophy in
stages, and her more mature view is that women did produce philosophy, did engage
in autonomous philosophical thought, but that often they did so in clandestine ways
and through genres atypical for philosophical work such as letters, novels, poetry, and
plays. In other words, she suggests, they wrote philosophy “on the sly.” Le Dœuff was
one of the first second-wave feminists to put the names of neglected historical female
philosophers in print and thereby helped to stimulate curiosity in works such as the
letters of Héloïse and Abelard and the correspondence between Princess Elisabeth and
Descartes, and Le Dœuff’s sustained engagement with the life and writings of Beauvoir
reinvigorated study of Beauvoir’s contributions to feminism and philosophy.

The Man of Reason

Like Le Dœuff, Genevieve Lloyd stressed the importance of the fact that one of the
oldest set of values in Western thought, the Pythagorean table of opposites, associates

15
 ENGAGING THE PAST

women with the table’s negative values—e.g. left, dark, bad, formless—and men with
the table’s positive values—e.g., right, light, good, form. In her landmark text first pub-
lished in 1984, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (1993),
Lloyd’s aim was not to study the values of actual historical male philosophers but rather
to attend to the symbolic and metaphorical aspects of canonical texts in the history
of philosophy. She sought to demonstrate that the maleness of the “man of reason”
cannot be reduced to a mere linguistic bias. Rather, reason has historically been defined
in opposition to femininity and those qualities with which femininity is especially
associated—emotion, the body.
Of course there is a link between philosophy’s power to describe and define “male”
and “female” and the experience of actual empirical men and women. Hence, women in
the past (and perhaps in the present too) experienced not only exclusion from institu-
tions of learning, illiteracy, domestic confinement, and so on, but they also experienced
a discursive or symbolic dissonance between the practice of philosophy and their lived
womanhood. In agreement with Le Dœuff, then, Lloyd’s analysis of philosophy from
the Greeks to the twentieth century shows that even when women have had access to
philosophy such access is constrained by the mismatch between philosophy’s highest
values and the values associated with being a woman. In Lloyd’s view, philosophy is,
in part, grounded in the conceptual exclusion of “woman,” and femininity as lived by
women has been partially constituted by philosophical discourses. Reason defines itself
against femininity and emotion and then burdens woman with the excluded terms. The
difficult task of critical feminist philosophy, then, is to break this self-confirming circle
of women’s supposed incapacity to reason.
Lloyd’s analysis is subtle and open to misinterpretation. Indeed, in the second edi-
tion of The Man of Reason (1993), Lloyd refined her stance in response to some of the
ways in which her thesis had been misconstrued. She insists that her claim is not that
women cannot, or do not, reason. Nor is it that they have their own feminine type of
reason. Rather, the so-called maleness of reason should, Lloyd says, be understood in
metaphorical terms. However, the power of metaphor should not be underestimated
and the dissonance felt by women who study and practice philosophy, even today, may
help to explain women’s massive underrepresentation in professional philosophy (see
Haslanger 2008). Furthermore, the existence of an ideal sex-neutral reason to which
we should all aspire is doubtful. Traditional philosophical ideals of reason were devel-
oped in contexts of gross inequalities—between men and women, colonizers and colo-
nized, enslavers and enslaved—that distort human capacities and potentials. As Lloyd
remarks “if there is a Reason genuinely common to all, it is something to be achieved in
the future, not celebrated in the present” (1993: 107).
Both Le Dœuff and Lloyd made early contributions to the attempt to understand the
complex historical relationship between women and philosophy, and part of that contri-
bution has involved the development of new ways of practicing philosophy. Consistent
with Le Dœuff’s view of philosophy as “operative” and open-ended, Lloyd too recom-
mends feminist work that engages with traditional philosophy not only in order to
expose its exclusions but also as an appropriable resource for enriching our understand-
ing of the present (Lloyd 2000). This constructive approach to joining the conversa-
tion of philosophy, including “conversations” with historical figures, is bolstered by the
steadily increasing amount of feminist scholarship on women philosophers of the past
(for example by Shapiro, Green, Broad, O’Neill; see also the Penn State Press series

16
 Feminist Methods in History of Philosophy

“Re-Reading the Canon”). Not only are women philosophers, in the present, creating
new philosophical approaches, but it also turns out that there is much more extant work
by women philosophers of the past than was first thought.

Written in Invisible Ink

Eileen O’Neill’s influential paper “Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women
Philosophers and their Fate in History” asks why “almost all trace of women’s pub-
lished contributions to early modern theoretical knowledge” (1998: 19) has disap-
peared, as if it were written in invisible ink. In a significant departure from the starting
points of Le Dœuff and Lloyd, O’Neill describes women’s past philosophical work as
“extant but lost to sight” (1998: 19). Hence, the feminist puzzle to be addressed has
shifted from women’s exclusion from philosophy to their invisibility in or erasure from
philosophy. This difference is important because in the former case the idea is that
women were prevented from producing philosophy, whereas in the later case they
produced work but that work was excised from our historical record. How might this
be explained? O’Neill’s argument is that between the seventeenth century, on the
one hand, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on the other, certain events
transpired that resulted in the expurgation of many women philosophers from the
standard history of philosophy anthologies. This had the catastrophic effect of sever-
ing nineteenth-century women thinkers from their intellectual legacy.
O’Neill’s explanation for this excision is multifaceted, and all that can be offered
here is a brief summary of her extensive scholarship under four points (but see O’Neill
1998; 2005; 2007). First, she reiterates the standard feminist claim that “anon” was a
woman. Eighteenth-century ideals of feminine modesty and diffidence did not encour-
age women writers to claim their works and so they often published their work anony-
mously (anon.). Writing anonymously, or under a male pseudonym, may also have given
the work a better chance of receiving a fair or unbiased reception. Second, O’Neill
notes that at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries
philosophy underwent a process of “purification” that involved the separation of works
deemed properly philosophical from works considered theological or religious, such as
sermons, tracts of faith, or spiritual meditations. The removal of the latter types of work,
ipso facto, included the writings of many women philosophers.
Third, the underlying episteme favored by some early modern women philosophers—
notably, Scholasticism and Neo-Platonism—did not emerge victorious from the struggle
of ideas. O’Neill finds puzzling the way in which these superseded epistemic worldviews
then came to be associated with femininity. The reason for this association does not
seem to be that some women favored the discarded views but rather because such views
were contrasted with the emerging empirical, scientific approach to philosophy that was
associated with masculinity. The old episteme was associated with femininity insofar
as it was viewed as “weak,” “degenerate,” or “passive.” What O’Neill calls the “slip-
page” between the work that came to be coded as “feminine” and the work produced
by women likely served to add to the erasure of female philosophers from the canon.
A locus classicus of the way in which these feminine and masculine associations came
to be inscribed in philosophy is the Kantian idea that philosophy itself is “masculine,”
whereas he associates the receptive arts, such as poetry and literature, with women and
femininity. The tendency of philosophy to sex its values has important consequences

17
 ENGAGING THE PAST

for how we understand the gendering of genres. As Catherine Gardner has shown in
Women Philosophers: Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy (2003), if one wishes to find
women philosophers in the history of philosophy one must sometimes look to genres
of writing other than those found in traditional philosophy. Consider, for example,
Catharine Macaulay, who wrote several volumes on the history of England as well as
letters, Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote novels and travelogues as well as philosophical
treatises, and George Eliot, who wrote novels, essays, and poetry. How and why in the
twentieth century the dominant genre for professional Anglo-American philosophy has
developed into the twenty-page journal article needs to be considered alongside the
disappearance of women’s writings from the philosophical canon.
The fourth and final explanation for the disappearance of women from our historical
record in the eighteenth century is what O’Neill calls the “oxymoron problem.” This
is the idea that a woman philosopher is a kind of an unnatural hybrid: like a hyena
in petticoats (as the Whig politician, Horace Walpole, said of Mary Wollstonecraft)?
Or, like a bearded woman? (Kant commented that a woman who would learn Greek
or debate mechanics might as well grow a beard.) According to O’Neill, it is during
the late eighteenth century and especially the nineteenth century that the image of
the female author comes to represent a huge threat to social and political life, and the
woman author who dared to pick up her pen in order to write philosophy became a target
of especially virulent attacks. O’Neill asserts that the “dramatic disappearance of women
from the histories of philosophy in the nineteenth century can be fully understood only
against the political backdrop of the aftermath of the French Revolution” (1998: 37).
This assertion about women’s erasure from philosophy leans heavily on Geneviève
Fraisse’s account of the crisis precipitated in French culture by the threat to masculine
hegemony that was presented by the spectre of a genuinely universal democratic polity.

Women, Reason, and Democracy

Fraisse’s Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy (1994) makes a dis-
tinctive contribution to the question of women’s relation to philosophy by considering
the issue of the “slippage” between the concepts “feminine” and “woman” in a particular
historical and political context, namely, late eighteenth-century Europe. Fraisse argues
that the construction of woman during this era as being incapable of reason, and so
incapable of philosophy, constituted a powerful mechanism to justify their exclusion
from the public sphere and from politics. On her account, the feminization of the French
salons served to create a barrier between women and the public sphere. The question
that drives her monograph is disturbing. She asks: is there “a necessary link between
founding a democracy and excluding women?” (Fraisse 1994: 2) If the traditional reli-
gious story about women’s divinely ordained obligation to obey loses traction, then those
who would retain political and domestic power must find another narrative to justify
women’s subordination to men. The notion that women have a natural incapacity for
theoretical reason is suited to the task. The convenient corollary to the proposition
that women lack reason is that women who engage in theoretical reason are therefore
“unnatural”; they are not real women. (Of course, the possession of practical reason, nec-
essary in order to raise a family and function as man’s helpmeet, was granted to women.)
Fraisse’s analysis points to the acute anxiety of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
philosophers concerning the instability of sexual difference and the “fear of confusing the

18
 Feminist Methods in History of Philosophy

sexes” (1994: 193). Her monograph offers a close and scholarly reading of key texts by
Rousseau, Charles Fourier, and J. S. Mill, which together provide an outline of the shape
of the debates that raged around the question of woman’s proper place in the emerging
democracies of Europe. This debate came to be known as “the Woman Question.” One
part of the complexity of that debate is captured in the view of marriage of the naturalist
Julien-Joseph Virey (1823): “Violence only produces a slave whereas consent produces
a helpmeet” (quoted in Fraisse 1994: 93). J. S. Mill’s vocal and strident objection to the
suite of rights that English law conferred upon husbands shows that some male philoso-
phers saw the situation differently. Both Mill and Harriet Taylor—the woman who, after
a long friendship, became his wife—argued for women’s education and emancipation
and Mill felt compelled to renounce, in writing, all the rights over Taylor’s person and
property legally conferred by her “consent” to marry him.
Fraisse’s argument raises many important issues for feminist scholarship. Her funda-
mental thesis is that access to reading, and especially to writing, were jealously guarded
in the eighteenth century because they were taken to be the paradigmatic activities
of rational beings. If the newly crafted claim of the “right of man” to self-governance
is based in reason, then it is not surprising that the desire to restrict the scope of that
right involved denying that certain kinds of beings—women, the colonized, people
of color—possess the capacity to reason. The denial of reason to women, and others,
justifies the retention of men’s traditional powers over women in a context where tra-
ditional norms and extant laws were undergoing radical change. In the late eighteenth
and nineteenth century, Fraisse maintains, the “woman question” becomes a question
about woman’s social, economic, and political emancipation. In this sense, she is con-
cerned with a very specific historical moment in which the debate over women’s nature
and potential centered on challenges to, and justifications for, traditional norms and
laws. It is only in the nineteenth century that the question of woman’s relation to
reason, and so woman’s relation to philosophy, becomes an overtly political issue and
begins to take the shape of a “democratic debate” (Fraisse 1994: 181). This is an impor-
tant claim to consider because it illustrates that “woman,” “femininity,” “reason,” and
“nature” are not static or fixed concepts that render women’s exclusion or erasure from
the history of philosophy an unchanging feature of philosophical discourse. On the
contrary, Fraisse’s analysis allows us to see clearly that these concepts are dynamic and
responsive to historical conditions.
The four methodologies treated here converge in a significant way. Le Dœuff,
Lloyd, O’Neill, and Fraisse all respond to the puzzle of women’s absence or erasure
from philosophy by attending to the connections between women’s treatment in
the history of philosophy and the specific historical contexts in which such treat-
ments emerged. Although much second-wave feminist research began as a critique
of the misogyny of philosophy, it has developed into a much more complex set of
questions and concerns. As the chapters in this volume amply demonstrate, feminist
philosophers have appropriated and transformed traditional philosophical prob-
lems and issues. Some feminist philosophers are engaged in what might be called
a retrieval project where the erased work of women philosophers is being put into
conversation with past and present philosophical thought. This ongoing process
of retrieval continues to generate immensely interesting and innovative research
questions about the contribution of past thought to the formation of contemporary
social and political values—e.g., freedom and equality—and institutions—e.g., law

19
 ENGAGING THE PAST

and Parliament. It is in the continuing generation of these kinds of questions that

the future of a more inclusive philosophy is to be found.
So, have contemporary women philosophers escaped from Coventry? I indicated in
the first paragraph of this chapter that my subtitle is meant to convey something of the
sense of exile experienced by many women in philosophy, a sense captured by the play-
ground punishment of being “sent to Coventry.” Although women’s representation in
professional philosophy has improved over the last few decades, it still hovers around 25
percent in many Western universities. Philosophy remains a discipline with one of the
lowest participation rates of women in all the humanities (e.g., see APA 2016 online
data: women in philosophy). Recent research on the exceptionally low rates of citation
of work by female philosophers offers more hard evidence of women’s continuing exclu-
sion from the philosophical conversation (see Healy 2015).
My opening paragraph also promised to close my contribution with a sketch of a
woman philosopher who instantiates many aspects of the exclusions and erasures of
women from philosophy, namely, George Eliot. Even a brief consideration of a histori-
cal woman who had to deal with the exclusions and erasures that have been catalogued
by feminist scholarship can serve to remind us that the history of philosophy is not only
about abstract concepts and ideas but had—and continues to have—palpable effects on
living persons.
Eliot’s birth name was Mary Ann Evans and she was raised in Nuneaton, a small
town near Coventry in England. She was well schooled for a woman of her class and
time, in part because her family and teachers recognized her genius for languages,
science, and philosophy. Her formal schooling ceased when she was sixteen and she
became her father’s housekeeper (her mother had died). Even for someone extraordi-
narily gifted, there were very few paths in life open to women. Accepting a position as
a governess, living with a male member of her family in a housekeeping role, or mar-
riage, would have more or less exhausted Eliot’s options. But the woman who was to
become George Eliot had other ideas. She had already acquired a taste for philosophy
through her wide reading and her translation of David Strauss’s Life of Jesus (later she
translated Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity and Spinoza’s Ethics). After the death
of her father, when she was thirty years old, she travelled in Europe and then moved
to London where she became the clandestine editor of the Westminster Review, a jour-
nal founded by Jeremy Bentham and other so-called Philosophical Radicals. She was
romantically involved with the naturalist Herbert Spencer and the philosopher, George
Henry Lewes, both of whom influenced but did not dominate her philosophical views.
In some ways she was caught in the Héloïse complex but, like Héloïse, she also enjoyed
independence of thought.
Although clearly a philosophical thinker, Eliot never claimed the title of
“philosopher” or wrote in the genres typical of philosophy. Much of her non-fiction
writing appeared as “anon” in the various journals in which she published. She
wrote her novels under a male pseudonym in order that they would be read as seri-
ous literature rather than as “ladies’ novels.” Although she certainly was socially
ostracized for a time because of the unorthodox nature of her relationship with her
partner in life, George Henry Lewes, (they were unmarried) she was not accused
of lacking femininity or of growing a beard. Almost all commentators on her life,
however, feel obliged to mention her physical unattractiveness. Through her novels
and poetry Eliot offered exceptionally astute and deeply philosophically informed

20
 Feminist Methods in History of Philosophy

analyses of religion, the vicissitudes of male–female sexual relations, nature versus

nurture, the difficulty of gaining self-knowledge, evolution (The Mill on Floss), and
anti-Semitism (Daniel Deronda). She treated complex moral problems, including
infanticide (Adam Bede), alcoholism, and domestic violence (Janet’s Redemption);
and she dissected arguments for and against the education of women (Middlemarch),
the franchise for the working man (Felix Holt), and the proper roles of church and
state (Romola). In other words, although she wrote across the entire gamut of philo-
sophical topics she never composed a single philosophical treatise, as such. This is
not say, however, that she allowed herself to be excluded from the conversation of
philosophy. (One of the earliest issues of the philosophy journal, Mind, contains an
extended appreciation by James Sully of Eliot’s art and her astute grasp of human
psychology.) Her escape from Coventry lay in her power to initiate a new conversa-
tion. Indeed, her writings did much to keep aspects of the thought of philosophers
such as Feuerbach and Spinoza alive in nineteenth-century Europe (and not simply
through her translations of their works). George Eliot was a woman who suffered
from many of the sexual discriminations and exclusions that have been the subject
of this chapter. However, she also may be taken as an exemplar of the ingenuity of
thought, and resilience of spirit, which characterize women’s historical relation to
philosophical thought and practice.

Further Reading
Broad, Jacqueline (2014) “Women on Liberty in Early Modern England,” Philosophy Compass 9(2): 112–122.
Gatens, Moira (Ed.) (2009) Re-Coupling Gender and Genre, Special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical
Humanities 13(2): 1–139.
Green, Karen (2015) “A Moral Philosophy of Their Own? The Moral and Political Thought of Eighteenth-
Century British Women,” The Monist 98(1): 89–101.
O’Neill, Eileen (2005) “Early Modern Women Philosophers and the History of Philosophy,” Hypatia 20(3):
185–197.
—— (2007) “Justifying the Inclusion of Women in Our Histories of Philosophy: The Case of Marie de
Gournay,” in Linda Alcoff and Eva Feder Kittay (Eds.) The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy,
Oxford: Blackwell, 17–42.
Shapiro, Lisa (1999) “Princess Elizabeth and Descartes: The Union of Soul and Body and the Practice of
Philosophy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7(3): 503–520.
Waithe, Mary Ellen (1987) A History of Women Philosophers, Volumes I–IV. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Related Topics
Feminist engagement with Judeo-Christian religious traditions (Chapter 5); early modern
feminism and Cartesian philosophy (Chapter 6); feminism and the enlightenment
(Chapter 8); feminist engagements with nineteenth-century philosophy (Chapter 9).

References
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Bordo, Susan (1993) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press.

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 ENGAGING THE PAST

Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1989) “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” The University of Chicago
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Fraisse, Geneviève (1994) Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy, Chicago, IL:
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 2
FEMINISM AND ANCIENT
GREEK PHILOSOPHY
Adriana Cavarero
Translated by Robert Bucci

Binary Logic
Describing the birth of the universe, Plato stated in the Timaeus (Plato 1997: 1245, 42b)
that, as human nature was of two kinds, the superior race would hereafter be called man
and the inferior race woman. More precisely, according to him, woman was created when
the prototype of man, having lived an unrighteous life, passed into another, lesser life and
returned as a woman. After having defined man as zoon logon echon—a rational animal—
Aristotle affirmed in the Politics (Aristotle 1988: 19, 1260a) that, while the slave is wholly
lacking the deliberative element of logos, the female has it but that it lacks authority: that
is, women lack rationality. These are two significant examples of the various sexist and
misogynistic aspects that characterize ancient philosophy and expose it as an expression
of a patriarchal society in which the human being, broadly understood, is modeled on the
male sex only. Consequently the female sex is characterized as a kind of being that is not
fully human and that is deficient, inferior, and for this reason subordinate.
Scholars in feminist and gender studies have long drawn attention to the patriarchal
stain of ancient culture by insisting above all, with regard to the field of philosophy, on
the positions of its two greatest representatives, Plato and Aristotle. Having intensi-
fied during the 1990s in important edited collections on Plato and Aristotle (Bar On
1994; Tuana 1994; Ward 1996; Freeland 1998), numerous feminist essays have had
the merit of showing how, in the works of the two greatest philosophers of antiquity,
the conception of sexual difference—far from being the simple and naïve reception
of a sexist stereotype—intersects with Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought in profound and
complex ways, often influencing their theoretical frameworks. As much as it is inter-
esting and curious, the mere exercise of unmasking the misogynist prejudices that span
the ancient philosophers’ work risks, in fact, being an exercise that sets out to discover
the obvious. With rare and rather problematic exceptions, philosophy—like other
forms of knowledge—cannot but reflect and reproduce the overtly patriarchal culture
of the time. Feminist criticism has therefore taken on the particular task of delving
into the texts of the ancient philosophers in order to demonstrate how the treatment
of sexual difference and of gender stereotypes falls back on the overall construction of
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their philosophical systems and often places them in crisis. Above all, these systems are
characterized by a binary logic—by an oppositional, dual, and hierarchical structure—
which, starting from the man–woman dichotomy, constructs a series of oppositions:
mind/body, spirit/matter, public/private, active/passive, etc. In these the first terms,
considered positive and dominant, coincide with the masculine pole, while the second
terms, considered instead negative and subordinate, coincide with the feminine pole.
It is not at all surprising that the patriarchal stain, easily observable in the entire
history of philosophy as in the history of culture in general, already characterizes the
thought of ancient Greece, in which philosophy had its origin. In recent decades
feminist studies of ancient philosophy have, first and foremost, been inserted into the
wider horizon of studies, which—from diverse disciplinary perspectives—have revisited
almost the whole production of classical antiquity in light of the concepts of sexual dif-
ference, sex and gender, sexuality and sexual desire, or sexual orientation. From epic to
tragedy, from mythology to poetry, from art to politics, from medicine to cosmogony,
reflections on these themes now constitute a vast and fertile field of research. Exemplary
in this respect is feminist scholars’ particular and constant attention to Antigone, the
character from Greek tragedy who has never ceased to interest philosophy, from Hegel
onward (see, e.g., Söderbäck 2010). Also notable, though, is the attention given to
feminine figures from myth—Demeter, Athena, Medea, and many others—to whom,
in the 1980s, the French historian Nicole Loraux dedicated seminal books that marked
a radical innovation in classical studies by opening the way to a different reading of the
relationship between politics and sexual identity (Loraux 1991; 1998).
The intermingling of the various disciplinary perspectives and multiple styles of
thought that re-examine classical culture through recent categories of sexual difference
and gender is a distinctive feature of feminist interpretation of ancient philosophy,
which contributes to the originality of this field. The fact that it deals with recent
categories that are bound to the historical origins and current developments of femi-
nist theory constrains interpretative work to engage with at least two methodological
questions. On one level the work is to examine the problematic nature of applying the
concept of sexual difference to ancient texts, and, even more so, of applying the cur-
rent although controversial distinction between sex and gender. On another level the
work recognizes that the fundamental starting point for a genealogical reconstruction
of the same ideas of sex and gender, if not of sexual difference, is in classical antiquity
(Sandford 2010; Holmes 2012). The first question concerns the terminological and
conceptual layout of feminist theory, while the second evokes the theme of the origin
of philosophy that always presents itself when we speak of the Greeks.

Terminology and the Question of Origin

Feminist interpretations of ancient philosophy are affected by the various vicissitudes
that, in the feminism of the last decades, have seen the term gender placed side by side,
sometimes polemically and at other times in a conciliatory fashion, with that of sexual
difference. Prevalent in the English-speaking world, the category of gender alludes to a
culturally and socially constructed representation of female and of male, a representa-
tion that is distinct from the biological category of sex. Having spread throughout inter-
national feminism together especially with the texts of the French philosopher Luce
Irigaray, sexual difference is instead employed as a critical concept that calls on the

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intersecting web of symbolic and material structures in order to re-think the feminine
radically and free it from the logic of the patriarchal order. In general, with the term
“patriarchal,” the language of feminist theory refers to a cultural system, a discur-
sive register, a regime of truth—more simply, a vision of the world—structured by a
binary logic. That logic defines the human being by modeling it on a single mascu-
line subject, reserving a subordinate role for women, who, not being men, are thus
imperfect or inferior humans. Along with the term “patriarchal,” which alludes to the
power of fathers, feminist criticism in recent decades has elaborated other terms that
express the same concept or approach it in greater depth. These include “androcentric”
(centered on man), “phallologocentric” (centered on the phallus and on the logos), and
“phallogocentric” (a simplification of the preceding term that underlines the identity,
almost the inseparable fusion, between the phallus and the logos). Because philosophy,
at least since the pre-Socratic thinkers Parmenides and Heraclitus, has been a reflec-
tion on logos—whose fundamentally untranslatable meaning ranges from “speech” to
“language,” from “thought” to “reason”—many feminist interpreters tend to privilege
the term “phallogocentric” in order to denounce the masculine stain of the philosophi-
cal tradition. This allows us to pass to the second question mentioned above, that of the
historical origin of philosophy.
As the Western tradition understands it, philosophy was born in the Greek world
during the seventh century bc, and was established, as a form of knowledge with its
own precise disciplinary charter, under Plato and Aristotle. In particular, it is Plato
who used the term philosophia (love of wisdom) in a technical sense and who under-
lined the superiority of this new method for reaching knowledge of truth compared to
other discursive or performative registers such as epic, poetry, rhetoric, and tragedy.
Proudly declaring its innovative character, philosophy is constructed polemically and
antagonistically ever since its historical origin with Plato. All the terminological bag-
gage that comes from Plato’s writings and that passes to the philosophical tradition—
primarily idea, theory, epistemology, and so forth—is inserted into a system of discourse
that proclaims itself to be different, more powerful, and more valid—as well as the
only exact, true, and correct system—in comparison to the other discursive regimes
that dominate the culture of the time. It is a battle of logos in the name of a superior
logos, a philosophical logos that reflects upon itself in order to discover its universal
truth and, more precisely, the method by which to reach that truth. It is worth not-
ing that the term “method” is a Greek word that means the way, the path (odos),
through (metà) which discourse must proceed in order to know truth. The famous
myth of the cave, at the beginning of Book VII of Plato’s Republic, describes this path.
It recounts how the philosopher must turn his back on the Athens of his time—which
is depicted as a dark cave where rhetoricians, Sophists, poets, and artists manipu-
late public attention with their deceptive discourses. The philosopher must turn his
back on this in order to adopt the method that leads to the incontrovertible clarity
of the philosophical discourse on ideas, and—no less important, as the second part
of the myth narrates—to assume the order of ideas as the model for designing the
optimal city, kallipolis, to be governed by the philosophers who are its “guardians.”
From a feminist perspective, the theme of the guardians of the kallipolis is particularly
interesting because, in a well-known passage in the Republic (Plato 1997: 1078–1079,
450c–451e), it results in stirring up a sort of enigma. In this passage, Plato makes a
proposal that seems to retract the thesis of the inferiority of women that he sustains

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in the entirety of his work: surprisingly, through the mouth of Socrates, he declares in
fact that there is no reason not to admit women into the role of the city’s guardians.
A question can therefore be posed: Was Plato a feminist?

Was Plato a Feminist?

In the field of ancient philosophy, just as in every other field of knowledge, feminist
studies are a very rich constellation, articulated in many theoretical perspectives and
multiple styles of thought, which cannot be traced to a simple framework. The afore-
mentioned important lexical variation between gender and sexual difference signals
the development of two conceptual currents, from whose mixing further trends arise.
To the latter one can add, at a minimum, the position of liberal and socialist feminism,
which is based on the history of the emancipation of women and therefore insists on
the principle of equality. In fact, even if the denunciation of the misogynistic version
of the differences between the sexes in the Western tradition is shared by almost all
feminists, a vast and articulated area of contemporary critical feminist theory holds
that sexual difference is to be retrieved and re-signified in a new context that values
the otherness of the female by removing it from patriarchal binary logic. The area of
liberal and socialist feminism, on the other hand, holds that the modern principle of
equality between men and women must prevail over their difference. Even though the
criticism of androcentric binarism is shared, in the first case the outcome is the radical
rethinking of difference, while in the second case the outcome is instead the resolution
of difference in equality. One should therefore not be at all surprised that, from the lat-
ter perspective, Plato’s proposal in the Republic on the equality between the sexes proves
to be particularly interesting.
Plato’s proposal does not pertain to all citizens but rather only to the two superior
classes of the guardians into which the kallipolis is organized: the warriors who defend
the city and the philosophers who govern it. Overlooking his frequent declarations of
the natural inferiority of women, Socrates argues that the difference between the sexes
in regard to the reproductive act—“the female bears and the male mounts” (Plato 1997:
1081, 454e)—is inconsequential with respect to the political and military work of the
guardians. Tellingly, so convinced is Socrates of an egalitarianism between the sexes
that was completely unacceptable and scandalous at the time that he expects a “great
wave” to beat down on him and crush him in reaction to his proposal.
Despite highlighting some aspects of Plato’s egalitarian proposition and its
disruptiveness in respect to the prejudices of the time, the greater part of feminist
philosophers have stressed that Plato cannot be considered a proto-feminist and that
his thesis does not anticipate the entirely modern question of the rights of women
(Annas 1976). In particular, it has been observed that Plato’s thesis of equality
between the sexes is symptomatically inscribed in a political and social project that,
for the guardian classes, abolishes the family and thus the domestic role of care and
service, a role traditionally taken on by women, which is instead relegated to the
class of the other citizens, who are the most numerous (Moller Okin 1979: 15–50). In
order to render women equal to men in the government of the polis, Plato therefore
turns women into de-sexed and unnatural females (Saxonhouse 1996: 147–157).
In the Republic, the admission of women to the class of the guardians is realized in
the context of a “communism” before its time, which was based on the customs of

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ancient Sparta and has unsettling eugenic aspects. This “communism” replaces the
family with the political program of sexual unions for a reproductive purpose whose
results—that is, children—are raised collectively and who call all the women and
men who carry out the role of guardians their mothers and fathers.
Although interesting in terms of an archaeology of the emancipationist idea in the
West, the Platonic proposal on the equality of the sexes is very complex and involves
themes that concern the institutional engineering of the philosopher and his so-called
utopia. The extensive critical literature that feminist scholars have dedicated to the
argument reflects this complexity (Kochin 2002; McKeen 2006; Brill 2013). The fact
remains that the sexist prejudices that Plato expresses in other passages of the Republic
and in all his work also, inevitably, appear during the speech in which he states his
egalitarian thesis. At the same point that Socrates holds that men and women have the
same nature for education and employment, he says that the guardians share women
and children in common, thus leaving it to be understood that men remain the true
subjects of this revolutionary social order.

Plato’s Cave and the Chora

There is another passage in the Republic on which feminist philosophers have focused
their attention: the myth of the cave. Constructed by Plato in a polystratified manner,
and marked by an overabundant symbolic density, the myth has generated an infinite
series of interpretations throughout the centuries. We owe one of these interpreta-
tions to Luce Irigaray. In her book Speculum of The Other Woman, published in French
in 1974 and translated into English in 1985, Irigaray breaks away from the canons of
the interpretative traditions, rereads the myth in the light of sexual difference, and
furnishes an interpretation that has become an obligatory reference for all successive
feminist considerations of Plato’s cave (Irigaray 1985: 243–364). It is important to note
the dates of publication and of translation of Irigaray’s book because Julia Kristeva’s
book, translated into English in 1984 as Revolution in Poetic Language, was also pub-
lished in French in 1974, a work that has also had considerable influence on feminist
studies dedicated to Plato. Interdisciplinary thinkers who work between philosophy,
psychoanalysis, and linguistics, Irigaray and Kristeva, although in different ways, are
two central figures of the current of thought that bears the name “French Feminism,”
which has been very popular with contemporary feminist studies in general and, in par-
ticular, with those studies relating to Plato. Both scholars treat an enigmatic category
in the Timaeus, the chora, which—together with the myth of the cave—constitutes one
of the principal points on which feminist interpreters of Plato focus their attention.
Imagine a subterranean cave, says Socrates in the Republic (Plato 1997: 1132, 514a),
where men sit who, “since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs
fettered, able to see only in front them,” observe a sequence of shadows on the wall
before them. So begins the myth of the cave. The story proceeds to narrate how one of
the prisoners frees himself from the chains, gets on his feet, turns around, and walks in
ascent through the narrow tunnel that leads toward the entrance to the cave. Outside
there are fields, trees, lakes; a landscape illuminated by the midday sun. Drawn by the
light—and after having discovered that the shadows on the cave’s wall were produced
by strange mechanisms of projection and formed but a deception of poetic and sophistic
discourses—the prisoner, now free and in the open, can turn his eyes to the sun and

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contemplate it (theorein) as the bright and fertile source of all that is and is knowable.
Socrates sketches an analogy between the sun and the Idea of the Good, and he calls
them respectively “son” and “father.” Full of political and ethical significance, the myth
is an allegory that illustrates the educational and formative itinerary—the paideia—of
whoever practices philosophy. The methodos allows the prisoner to rise from the dark-
ness into the light, from false and misleading discourses to the true discourse, or rather
to the knowledge of what truly is: the realm of ideas, eternal and unchanging forms, the
originals of which the shadows in the cave are copies of copies. Exiting the cave, the
philosopher is born and is constructed by Plato as solitary and immobile, a “vertically
erect” contemplator of the phallogocentric order of ideas (Cavarero 2013). High up
and very bright, the truth without shadows, Plato states, recalls the figure of the father.
Luce Irigaray notes in Speculum that the cave is a uterus and that the labor under-
gone in order to come out of the cave, through a narrow cervix, mimics childbirth. This
is not, however, a naïve, naturalistic imitation. Although the term “mother” does not
appear in the text, the account has a precise structure and is, first and foremost, con-
structed around the polarity between a father/sun, guarantor of truth and knowledge,
and a mother/cave, the seat of sensory deception and ignorance. At first glance, here as
in all of Western tradition, the design is part of what Irigaray herself calls a binary econ-
omy. This is a system of dual oppositions in which the basic element of coming into the
world sexed male or female, or rather the fact of sexual difference, is translated into a
symbolic order in which man occupies an essential, founding, and dominant position,
whereas woman holds a subordinate role often characterized by negativity and spite.
Upon closer inspection, as clarified by Irigaray and others, Plato’s allegory has very
interesting manifestations of instability with regard to sexual difference. Beyond oper-
ating as the female pole of the binary economy, the cave/uterus also functions as a
screen—material that is given and not representable—on which the philosopher pro-
jects and represents his gnosiological and educational journey toward the bright truth
of the father. This means that philosophy or, if one wants, Platonic metaphysics, as
the outcome of a process of the disincarnation, abstraction, and verticalization of the
rational subject, is built on the mother/matrix that, precisely because it serves as the
material for representation—as a screen for the system’s projection—cannot be repre-
sented and therefore exceeds the system itself. Elsewhere in the Timaeus, Plato calls this
material chora, an untranslatable term that is essentially characterized by not having
any form, indeed by being shapeless, the amorphous matter on which the forms and
ideas of the father are imprinted.
It is interesting to connect the myth of the cave and the passage on the chora in
the Timaeus. On the one hand, the recourse to the metaphor of sexual difference in
the Timaeus is much more explicit, and on the other hand that explicitness is part of
a “family romance”—mother, father, and son are named—that involves a clear allu-
sion to the sexual act. The theme of the Timaeus is cosmogony, the generation of the
perceivable world: the cosmos. Indicated by Plato as the son, the cosmos is at once
the copy and the product of the intelligible model, corresponding to the father, which
generates it; the father imprints his forms, namely his ideas, in the shapeless, inert, and
passive chora, which carries out the role of mother. It is worth insisting on the amor-
phous character of the chora and on the difficulties of conceptualizing it, something that
Plato himself exposes. Resorting to a metaphorical, varying, and imprecise language, he
calls it “mother,” “receptacle,” “wet nurse,” thus taking advantage, for the most part, of

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the polyvalence of the term chora, which in Greek oscillates between the meanings of
“space,” “abundance,” and “place.”
As the third element necessary for the “family romance” of the generation of the
cosmos, and placed to the side of the son that corresponds to the cosmos itself, and the
begetting father that is its intelligible model, the chora is variously defined by Plato in
the Timaeus. He calls it “an invisible and formless being which receives all things” (50a),
or “a receptacle, in the manner of a nurse, of all generation” (49a), or “like the mother
and receptacle of generated things which are visible and fully perceivable” (50a), or yet
again as “the natural recipient of all impressions” (50c) (Plato 1997: 1251–1253). Far
from showing the richness of Plato’s imagination, this variety of expressions exposes the
philosopher’s confusion with respect to something that eludes conceptual grasp, some-
thing that escapes the sphere of intelligible forms, which, not by chance, is reserved for
the father. In other words, there is an element that is necessary for generation and for
knowledge, the chora, which remains outside the hold of discourse, of logos as a concep-
tual system and rational model, but that discourse itself, wanting nevertheless to name
it, calls mother and other names that allude to the female. Logos, in its desire to say eve-
rything, to understand everything, and to place everything in the rigid, vertical order of
ideas, is forced to recognize the existence of something irreducible—unconceptualizable,
uncontrollable, unintelligible—that is described as maternal, as feminine.
In the final analysis, in the Platonic philosophy that emerges from the Republic’s
myth of the cave and from the passage on the generation of the cosmos in the Timaeus,
the female therefore assumes a double face and ambiguously occupies two different posi-
tions. On the one hand, the less problematic of the two, we find the female inside
the binary logic of the system. Opposed to man and subordinate to him, woman per-
forms a precise role in the domestic setting and within social organization as wife and
mother. On the other hand, much more problematically, having been crucially named
as mother/matter, woman is outside of the system and elusive to it, but she is nonethe-
less necessary so that the system can be built and can function. The cave is necessary for
the games of projection that lead to the philosophical journey to the light of the father;
the chora is indispensable in order that the father’s logos can create the cosmos.
One can maintain that, at least beginning with Luce Irigaray’s Speculum, the prob-
lem of the relationship between these two types of representation of the female—the
domestic and domesticated woman inside the system’s binary economy, and the undo-
mesticated woman, irreducible to the system—becomes a decisive theme for a large
part of feminist critical philosophy. Rather than focus on searching for and unmasking
stereotypes of the female inside of the patriarchal binary, many feminist philosophers
work to make the most of and to give new meaning to that irreducible female—the
feminine other—which the patriarchal order itself, starting with Plato, recognizes as
unsettling, unclassifiable, and therefore potentially subversive. The strategy is not only
that of a thinking of sexual difference, but also to give rise to a different thinking in
which the feminine other defines a camp of radical alterity that can extend to welcome
all who are excluded from the system, that is, those subjects that the binary system
casts into its constitutive outside: gays, lesbians, queers, or what has been called “the
abject” (Butler 1995). The binary economy that characterizes ancient metaphysics and
is inherited by Western tradition is in fact also a normative device that establishes,
inside itself, what is normal as it rejects that which, not fitting into these norms, is
abnormal, monstrous. Indeed, Plato’s discourse in the Timaeus illustrates the tension

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between these two types of movement: one that is normative and assuaging, that places
the chora within the binary opposition form/matter, and another that is expulsive and
worrisome, that recognizes the strange and horrific, the inexpressible and unconceptu-
alizable character of the chora.
The experimental richness of Irigaray’s engagement with ancient philosophy and
Greek intellectual tradition cannot be stressed enough (Tzlepis and Athanasiou 2010).
Her exemplary manner of tracing that feminine other, which eludes the binary econ-
omy in ancient philosophy, and of transforming it into the fulcrum of a different think-
ing, is fruitfully harnessed by various feminist strategies that insist on revisiting Plato’s
chora. They highlight the chora’s anarchic and disruptive but also fluid, dynamic, and
vital character, the source of a universe that is becoming and in perpetual change,
which contrasts to the rigid and lethal fixity of the realm of ideas.
As I have already stated, the interest of feminist philosophers in the chora has
also been influenced by the analysis of Julia Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language.
Kristeva identifies the chora in what she calls the “semiotic,” the bodily element of
language, associated with rhythms, movement, and tones, which opposes but permeates
the symbolic, understood as the realm of the denotative meaning of words. By engaging
with Lacan’s vocabulary, Kristeva primarily calls on the chora as the feminine locus of
subversion of the paternal law. However, the chora’s subversive effect, on which most
contemporary feminist philosophers insist, unveils the problematic core of Plato’s phi-
losophy even more directly and deeply. On the one hand, if we assume that the chora is
the bodily and rhythmical realm of the vocal, made up of plural voices communicating
their incarnate uniqueness, then this very chora/voice becomes the perfect contrast to
the abstract universality of logos, that logos that Plato in the Sophist (1997: 287, 263e)
describes as the soundless thought of which the spoken discourse is a simple sonoriza-
tion (Cavarero 2005). On the other hand, in as much as the chora alludes to the bond
between the material and the maternal, between matter and mother, crucial questions
arise about Plato’s notoriously ambiguous relationship to the issue of maternity.
In this regard feminists have spoken of “symbolic matricide.” In Plato, there is an
explicit mimesis of maternal power when philosophy—and, above all, the Socratic
method, which is compared to that of a midwife—is described as a work of logos for
ensuring that the souls of young men may give birth to the ideas with which they are
pregnant. Together with the topic of love (eros), the issue is developed in “Diotima’s
speech” (Irigaray 1993: 20–34). We read in Plato’s Symposium (1997: 491–493,
209b–210d) that, pregnant in soul, men bring to birth many beautiful, even magnifi-
cent, words and thoughts in a love of wisdom, while women, pregnant only in body,
give birth to human and mortal children. It is a woman, Diotima, who says these words.
Plato decides to place in the mouth of a woman the definition of philosophy as the
method that, on the one hand, mimetically takes on childbirth as a feminine charac-
teristic, and that, on the other, debases childbirth as the production of mere mortal
children, a product incomparable to the immortal thoughts born of philosophers. The
rhetorical device of having a woman offer a speech that claims maternal power but at
the same time degrades it functions, therefore, as a symbolic matricide.
Diotima is an ambiguous character who underscores the typical difficulty of the
Platonic system with respect to a female who enters into the binary economy and,
at the same time, exceeds it. From one point of view, breaking every stereotype of
the domestic woman, Diotima is presented by Plato as the wise priestess and teacher

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of Socrates. From the other, she formulates a definition of philosophy that imitates
and dispossesses maternity. Symptomatically, a mimesis of childbirth that raises crucial
questions is also present in the allegory of the cave/uterus and in the figure of the chora.
In the writings of Plato, maternity functions as a sign of a metaphysics that is not yet
perfectly structured, as a theme that supports but concurrently puts into question the
hierarchical verticality of the system.

Aristotle
With Aristotle the organization of philosophical writing becomes more systematic and
takes the form of the treatise, which will later become customary. Feminist scholars
who reread Aristotle have often noted that his misogynistic canon is more explicit
and less problematic than Plato’s. “The male is by nature superior, and the female
inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled,” Aristotle states in the Politics
(1988: 7, 1254b13–15). One of the essential aspects of Platonism’s binary logic, the
dichotomy between mind and body—respectively identified within the limits of the
masculine and of the feminine—is not only confirmed by Aristotle but also revis-
ited in terms of a separation between the public and the private. Systematizing the
customs of his society and at the same time furnishing a model of gender roles that
would endure up until modernity, Aristotle maintains that free men—that is to say,
those who are not slaves—belong to the sphere of politics while women belong to the
domestic sphere: two separate and distinct settings, one public and the other private,
where each of the two sexes best fulfills its nature (Cavarero 1992; Elshtain 1993).
When Aristotle formulates the famous definition of man as an animal equipped with
logos, a rational animal (zoon logon echon), and therefore also a political animal (zoon
politikon), he models the paradigm of the human on a single male subject, giving that
subject a universal valence at the same time. It is worth recalling that this universaliza-
tion of the masculine, definitively put in place by Aristotle, is a typical expression of
the androcentric foundation of the whole of Western tradition and is also reflected at
the level of language. Still today, in modern languages just as in Greek, the term “man”
denotes, at the same time, the human being universally understood and those humans
of the male sex, something that does not occur with the word “woman.” With all coher-
ence, Aristotle argues in Politics that, since they do not fully possess logos, women are
not political animals but, rather, domestic animals, inferior and imperfect humans des-
tined, along with slaves, to tend to caretaking—which is necessary for corporeal life—
in the setting of the home. Exemplary in each of its details, the Aristotelian model
also foresees that, within the domestic setting, it is again the man who is master of the
house—indicated in Greek with the revealing name of despotes, despot, who commands
women and slaves. Binary logic here finds a quintessential expression.
Feminist studies dedicated to Aristotle have shown how sexist binary logic, which
emerges from his political writings and characterizes all of his work, finds an additional
foundation in his biological writings. These are very complex texts in which he under-
takes a detailed examination of sexual reproduction within the teleological process of
nature (Lange 1983; Nielsen 2008). In the Generation of Animals (1942: 109–111, 729a)
Aristotle claims that in the production of embryos the male semen supplies the form
of the potential child, while woman supplies the matter, consisting of menstrual blood.
Moreover, the embryo, according to Aristotle, is always of the male sex, turned into the

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female sex when the maternal matter fails to function properly. Thus the uterus works
as a little oven that, depending on its good or bad performance, produces the perfect
male child that the father deposited in it in the form of a male embryo, or the imperfect
female child as the unfortunate outcome of the functioning of a defective womb. Yet,
although the female offspring is the result of a material mishap—although, as Aristotle
argues in the Generation of Animals, a deviation from nature takes place “when a female
is formed instead of a male”—nonetheless, “this indeed is a necessity required by nature,
since the races of creatures” can only be perpetuated through the copulation of the two
sexes (1942: 401, 767b7–9). Thus a deviation from nature that produces the female as
a deformed male—but also produces some further peculiar monstrosities, depending on
the matter/mother’s unpredictable and aleatory, errant status—ends up endorsing the
final purpose (telos) of nature. There is a speculative turbulence in Aristotle’s biology,
a “feminine symptom,” which destabilizes the structural coherence of the text. Obscure
site of unaccountable movements, deviations, deformations, and even potential crea-
tive revolutions, the Aristotelian matter (hyle) perhaps has much more in common with
Plato’s chora than is generally acknowledged (Bianchi 2014).
Although there are feminist scholars who appreciate the Aristotelian texts and
develop a positive reading of them (Homiak 1996; Witt 2011), Aristotle is certainly
the ancient philosopher who, more than others, succeeds in providing a solid, specula-
tive foundation for the gender stereotypes present in his society and inherited by tradi-
tion. One need only think of the success of the oppositional couples public/private and
active/passive in subsequent literature on the natural subordination of women to men.
Nevertheless, just like the works of Plato especially when they thematize and strain to
rationalize the issue of matter/mother, Aristotle’s texts also reveal some symptoms of
instability and deep anxiety. In the final analysis, feminist criticism finds it more inter-
esting to reflect on these symptoms and to take advantage of their disruptiveness rather
than to denounce the obvious phallogocentrism of the Aristotelian system.

In Conclusion
Although the innovative contribution of feminism to studies on Aristotle is notewor-
thy, it is not a coincidence that feminist scholars have focused their attention largely
on Plato, producing experimentally dense and original interpretations. Organized in the
form of a dialogue, and able to blend the definitional attitude of philosophy with nar-
rative digressions, allegorical accounts, and inventions of myths, Plato’s philosophy—
unlike Aristotle’s—is not constructed as a treatise, a potentially closed system. Instead
Plato develops an experimental, discontinuous, incomplete, and substantially open com-
position. There are unsutured knots in the fabric of Plato’s writing that can be retrieved,
decoded, and resituated within a feminist horizon that changes their meaning. There
are female figures who can be extracted, “stolen” from context and re-thought in light
of sexual difference (Cavarero 1995). A large part of the feminist consideration dedi-
cated to Plato excavates his texts, along its fissures, interstices, caesuras, and fault lines,
in order both to deconstruct patriarchal metaphysics and to think the feminine other
differently. In tune with Plato’s experimental practice of thought, the result is not so
much an academic revisiting of ancient philosophy as it is a way of philosophizing that,
free and unprejudiced once again, confronts the conceptual and lexical structures of the
entire philosophical tradition with the texts in which they have their origin.

32
 Feminism and ancient greek philosophy

Further Reading
Blundell, Sue (1995) Woman in Ancient Greece, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Duvergès, Blair Elena (2012) Plato’s Dialectic on Woman: Equal, Therefore Inferior, New York: Routledge.
Lovibond, Sabina (2000) “Feminism in Ancient Philosophy: The Feminist Stake in Greek Rationalism,”
in Fricker, Miranda, and Jennifer Homsby (Eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 10–28.
Rabinowitz, Nancy and Richlin, Amy, Eds. (1993) Feminist Theory and the Classics, New York: Routledge.
Zajko, Vanda and Leonad, Miriam, Eds. (2008) Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Related Topics
Feminist methods in the history of philosophy (Chapter 1); Dao becomes female: a
gendered reality, knowledge, and strategy for living (Chapter 3); embodiment and
feminist philosophy (Chapter 15); materiality: sex, gender and what lies beneath
(Chapter 16); psychoanalysis, subjectivity and feminism (Chapter 19); rationality
and objectivity in feminist philosophy (Chapter 20); language, writing and gender
differences (Chapter 24).

References
Annas, Julia (1976) “Plato’s Republic and Feminism,” Philosophy 51(197): 307–321.
Aristotle (1942) Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck, London: Heinemann.
—— (1988) The Politics, Ed. Stephen Everson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bar On, Bat-Ami, Ed. (1994) Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle, Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press.
Bianchi, Emanuela (2014) The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in The Aristotelian Cosmos, New York:
Fordham University Press.
Brill, Sara (2013) “Plato’s Critical Theory,” Epoché 17(2): 233–248.
Butler, Judith (1995) Bodies That Matter, New York: Routledge.
Cavarero, Adriana (1992) “Equality and Sexual Difference: Amnesia in Political Thought,” in Gisela
Bock and Susan James (Eds.) Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics, and Female
Subjectivity, London: Routledge, 32–47.
—— (1995) In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, trans. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio
and Aine O’Healy, Cambridge: Polity.
—— (2005) For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
—— (2013) “Rectitude: Reflexions on Postural Ontology,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 27(3): 220–235.
Elshtain, Jean Bethke (1993) Public Man, Private Woman, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Freeland, Cynthia, Ed. (1998) Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press.
Homiak, Marcia (1996) “Feminism and Aristotle’s Rational Ideal,” in Julie K. Ward (Ed.) Feminism and
Ancient Philosophy, New York: Routledge, 118–139.
Holmes, Brooke (2012) Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Irigaray, Luce (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
—— (1993) An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Kochin, Michael S. (2002) Gender and Rhetoric in Plato’s Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

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 ENGAGING THE PAST

Lange, Lydia (1983) “Woman Is Not a Rational Animal: On Aristotle’s Biology of Reproduction,” in
Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (Eds.) Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology,
Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1–16.
Loraux, Nicole (1991) Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, trans. Anthony Forster, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
—— (1998) Mothers in Mourning, trans. Corinne Pache, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
McKeen, Catherine (2006) “Why Women Must Guard and Rule in Plato’s Kallipolis,” Pacific Philosophical
Quarterly 87: 527–548.
Moller Okin, Susan (1979) Women in Western Political Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Nielsen, Karen M. (2008) “The Private Parts of Animals: Aristotle on the Teleology of Sexual Difference,”
Phronesis 53(4–5): 373–405.
Plato (1997) Complete Works, John M. Cooper (Ed.) Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Saxonhouse, Arleen W. (1996) Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought,
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Söderbäck, Fanny, Ed. (2010) Feminist Readings of Antigone, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Sandford, Stella (2010) Plato and Sex, Cambridge: Polity.
Tuana, Nancy, Ed. (1994) Feminist Interpretations of Plato, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press.
Tzelepis, Elena and Athanasiou, Athena, Eds. (2010) Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and “the Greeks,”
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Ward, Julie K., Ed. (1996) Feminism and Ancient Philosophy, New York: Routledge.
Witt, Charlotte (2011) The Metaphysics of Gender, New York: Oxford University Press.

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 3
DAO BECOMES FEMALE
A Gendered Reality, Knowledge,
and Strategy for Living
Robin R. Wang

Introduction
Laozi’s Daodejing or Classics of Way and Its Power is traditionally assigned to the sixth
century bce, but possibly dates from as recently as the third century bce. It has only
about 5,250 Chinese characters in eighty-one brief sections or paragraphs, yet is known
as the foundation of Daoism (or Taoism). The term Dao 道 appears seventy-three times
in the text and has a complicated and multilayered meaning. Throughout Chinese his-
tory, Dao has been cherished by all schools of thought and has generally been taken to
be the ultimate origin, source, and principle of the universe and of the myriad things.
There is no existence, or literally no-thing, beyond Dao.
Daoism, a Dao based and inspired teaching and practice, has been considered to be
the philosophy of yielding in Chinese intellectual history. One important aspect of
yielding is being rou 柔—soft, gentle, supple—which the Daodejing couples with the
feminine. Not surprisingly, then, the female and femininity have enormous significance
for Laozi and Daoism. To highlight this unique philosophical aspect of Daoism, this
chapter will place femininity/the feminine/the female center stage to investigate Daoist
thought and its possible contribution to feminist thought in a contemporary global
setting. In this chapter I promote a somewhat female consciousness of Dao, or a Daoist
female consciousness, which may expand, support, or alter feminist assumptions about
femininity/the feminine/the female. The overarching focal point of this understanding
lies in a depiction of the female and femininity as a cosmic force, a way of knowing, and
a strategy for leading a flourishing life. The main points are that Dao does not govern
actually existing gender relations—or, at least, that the social and political reality of
gender relations is not modeled on Dao, because the patriarchy is not Dao. Highlighting
the female or feminine aspect of Dao, or Dao as becoming female, is a feminist inter-
vention, using resources from within classical Daoist thought in order to re-imagine or
reconfigure gender for our time.
 ENGAGING THE PAST

Dao as Cosmic Mother and Female Body

All phenomena in nature or, in classical Chinese terminology, “all things under heaven”
(tian xia 天下) can be distinguished according to their characteristics as either yin or
yang, and man/male/masculinity and woman/female/femininity are naturally identified
with this yinyang matrix (Wang 2012). Unlike other interpretations of the yin/yang
complementarity in Chinese thought, the Daodejing suggests the primordiality, indeed
the superior power, of yin in general and the female and femininity in particular. From
the perspective of the Daodejing the female/femininity is not excluded, shunned, frozen
out, disadvantaged, rejected, unwanted, abandoned, dislocated, or otherwise marginal-
ized. Its basic identity as a cosmic potentiality and a necessary part of any and every
generative process is highly valued and celebrated. Actually, the spontaneous potency
of Dao is female, or is becoming female. Dao is associated with the female body, which
is a common metaphor for Dao in the Daodejing. This metaphor reveals not just the
importance of yin and its generative capacity, but also designates a yin origin that is
hidden, implicit, or empty.
This is how the Daodejing begins:

As to a Dao—
if it can be specified as a Dao,
it is not a permanent Dao.
As to a name—
if it can be specified as a name,
it is not a permanent name.
Having no name
is the beginning of the ten thousand things.
Having a name,
is the mother of the ten thousand things.
(Moeller 2007: 3)

Here the mother is designated as the beginning of all things or the name of all things.
In chapter 52 we encounter this mother again:

The world has a beginning:

it is considered the Mother of the world. 天下有始、以爲天下母
(Moeller 2007: 123)

In chapter 25, the Daodejing defines Dao:

There is a thing—
it came to be in the undifferentiated,
it came alive before heaven and earth.

36
 Dao becomes female

What stillness! What emptiness!

Alone it stands fast and does not change.
It can be mother to heaven and earth.
(Moeller 2007: 123)

The Daodejing explains that the first way to describe the Dao is mu母, “mother.” The
word mu has a broader range of meanings than merely “biological mother.” It is expanded
to mean the source of heaven and earth and the myriad things in them. Dao/mother is
responsible for the origin of all things, is with all things, and provides the patterns that
one should follow. This basic philosophical commitment reflects a view that the cosmos
and world are generated, not created, through a multiplicative process. The terms used
in classical Chinese texts for the origin of the myriad things incorporate a sense of “life”
and “birth,” both of which are encompassed in the Chinese term sheng 生 (generation).
This link between generation and the mother naturally leads to the priority of female
energy. It is generation or transformation, not a substance or Being, which builds up the
Chinese philosophical landscape or horizon.
In chapter 42, the Daodejing gives a specific account of the origination of the world:

Dao generates oneness,

oneness generates twoness,
twoness generates threeness,
and threeness generates the ten thousand things.
(Moeller 2007: 107)

The concrete world originates from a unitary but indistinct source, Dao. The movement
from that source toward the tangible world is again a process of specification and differ-
entiation, from one to two to three and to the myriad things, literally the “ten thousand
things” (wanwu 萬物). Thus, Dao disseminates a gendered lens through which to per-
ceive the world and reality. As a result this lens is one of change, uncertainty, body, and
sexuality. The source of the variable and changing lies in the intrinsic femininity of Dao.
Interestingly, there are no “male” images of Dao, such as father or son; nor are tradition-
ally male traits, like force, strength, or aggression, linked to Dao. This gendered world is
different from Aristotle’s male–female cosmos in which the masculine telos takes prec-
edence, and is a prime mover upon the feminine, passive matter (Bianchi 2014: 2). The
Daoist feminine is also different from the ancient Greek and Roman goddesses who are
powerful when they possess male power rather than through their own powers of fertility:

The goddesses Diana and Minerva become the symbol of these women [philos-
ophers]. These Roman goddesses, borrowed from the Ancient Greeks, as Diana
or Artemis symbolises the tradition of virginity and independence of males, the
other . . . Athene/Minerva [is] the goddess of wisdom and war.
(Hagengruber 2010: 11)

In addition to the word mu (mother), the Daodejing incorporates two other sets of terms
in relation to femininity, pin 牝 appearing three times and ci 雌 appearing twice. It is

37
 ENGAGING THE PAST

important to highlight the fact that these terms are different from nu 女 (woman in con-
temporary Chinese) or fu 婦 (woman in classical Chinese). The notion of nu or fu refers
to woman in a social relationship. This social construction of woman does not appear
in the Daodejing at all. Both pin and ci have been translated as “female”; in fact pin refers
to female animals in general and ci refers specifically to hens, as opposed to xiong, which
refers to roosters (for more discussion of these two pairs, see Ryden 1997: 29–36). Pin and
ci are ways to demonstrate a natural supremacy and potency of the feminine.
We read in Daodejing chapter 6:

The spirit of the valley does not die—

This is called mysterious femininity [pin].
The gate of mysterious femininity [pin]—
This is called the root of heaven and earth.
(Moeller 2007: 17)

Here the pin is mysterious, the root of heaven and earth, an unlimited resource. This
gendered source without beginning or end, persisting in perpetuity, is the realm of
becoming. The character for spirit, gu 谷, originally meant generation, and is equated
with sheng (part of the character for gender and nature or tendencies), and its shape is
often taken to represent the female genitals.
With respect to “mysterious femininity,” one can notice two interesting directions. On
the one hand, there is what we might call the horizontal level in which femininity/yin
and masculinity/yang are counterparts, both of which are embedded in the myriad things.
On the other hand, there is a vertical level in which masculinity/yang refers to the things
before us, while femininity/yin refers to the origin that is hidden, implicit, or empty.
In this context, let us consider the pairing of you 有 and wu 無. You literally means
“to have,” whereas wu means “to lack.” To say that something exists in classical Chinese
is literally to say that it “is had,” whereas to say it does not exist is to say it is not had or
possessed. By extension, these terms come to denote something like “being” and “non-
being” or “presence” and “absence.” You corresponds with yang/masculinity, and wu
with yin/femininity.
There are inherent connections between the pairings having (you)/not having (wu)
or fullness (shi)/void (xu). Excavated versions of the Daodejing support this unity. In
the received version, chapter 40 says that the myriad things come from being (you) and
being comes from non-being (wu). In other words, the myriad things form simultane-
ously from you and wu, the foreground and background, yin and yang. The contem-
porary Chinese scholar Liu Xuyi (刘绪义) explains the importance of this version of
Daodejing chapter 40:

The myriad things are generated in you (having or to have) and wu (nothing).
Here you (having) and wu (nothing) are not connected in a sequence, one
leading to [the] other but rather they are parallel, Dao generates you and also
generates wu. You and wu exist at the same time. You refers to a general exist-
ence that has a form in the formless. Yet wu is formless, independent and
unchanging. Wu is a part of you.
(Liu 2009: 5)

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 Dao becomes female

Liu illustrates this with the example of a young girl and a mother. A young girl has not
given birth, so she is wu; however, she still has the potential to exercise her reproduc-
tive ability to become you, or a mother (Liu 2009: 287) So this description of Dao fol-
lows the biological ability and development of a female body. A young girl becoming a
mother is the way of Dao; Laozi’s Dao is the mother of all myriad things. This is repre-
sentative of Dao’s unity of you and wu.
Dao’s tendency towards reproduction results in an association between meta-
physical and ontological origins and biological reproduction. This connection, of
course, appears in other cultures as well. For example, Diotima in Plato’s Symposium
says, “All of us are pregnant . . . both in body and in soul” (Plato 1993: xix). One
of her definitions of love is the desire to give birth in beauty. Dao as the source
of generation and reproduction in the world is based on such a biological model,
with concrete things being born through the interplay of you and wu, yin and yang.
More importantly, the Daodejing invites us to share in Dao, that is, to be with Dao,
to be female and to accept femininity as a rhythm of our nature and the way of
our life. The becoming female of Dao and the rhythm of femininity are accessible
by all humans or all beings, irrespective of their sexed bodies or gender roles. Dao
becoming female develops a radically altered consciousness of femininity, and this
consciousness-raising might provide a unique and diverse conceptual resource for
contemporary feminist thought, one that assumes no rigid division or opposition
between femininity and masculinity.

Femininity as a Way to Know Dao

The Daodejing arguably designates one model of thinking about the feminine character of
nature. The female is not just portrayed and acclaimed as the yin, soft (rou) force of the
world, but also resonates with the mystical meanings of Dao. Other traditionally feminine
characteristics such as being “empty,” “returning,” “low,” “soft,” and “yielding” are attrib-
utes of Dao. Thus, there is a robust association between the knowing of a female and the
knowing of Dao. To come to a female consciousness of Dao is to problematize a way of
thinking and knowing. The feminine as a value in the Daodejing conveys a cognitive style
and an epistemological stance.
Daodejing chapter 40 says that:

Reversal [returning, fan] is the movement of the Dao,

Weakness [softening, rou] is the usefulness [function] of Dao. (反者道之動,弱
者道之用)
The things of the world are generated from presence [you].
Presence is generated from nonpresence [wu].
(Moeller 2007: 97)

Returning and reversal as the movement of Dao illustrates a waxing and waning of
change in time, just as the yinyang symbol of two curved, interlocking geometric shapes
depicts a rotating, self-creating cycle. The softening function of Dao elucidates a great
multi-dimensional space in which an unseen potentiality is a necessary part of all exist-
ence. This characteristic of non-presence or emptiness is what permits or creates the

39
 ENGAGING THE PAST

efficacy of Dao. It is noteworthy that the softness of Dao is identified with the empty,
the void or non-presence of Dao.
According to the Hanshu漢書 (The Book of Han, ad 111) “xu”—emptiness—and
wu—no-presence—are the foundation of Daoist method:

The Daoist School is about not doing [wuwei] 無為, but leaving nothing
undone. Its theory is easy to practice but its expression in words is hard to
know. Its method takes emptiness and nonexistence as its root and takes fol-
lowing along as its function [道家無為, 又曰無不為, 其實易行, 其辭難知. 其
術以虛無為本, 以因循為用].
(Ban 1962: 2713)

The Daodejing uses the word wu (no-presence/nothingness) 101 times. In the oracle
bones (turtle shells used for divinations in ancient China) wu is the symbol for danc-
ing. In fact, there are three closely related characters with the same pronunciation:
wu 無, meaning nothingness, wu 舞, meaning to dance, and wu 巫, meaning a female
shaman. The earliest comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters, the Shuowen
Jiezi (說文解字) by the Han scholar Xu Shen 許慎 (58–147 ce), explicates the link:
wu 巫 (shamans) are women who can perform service to wu 無 (the shapeless) and
make the spirits come down by wu 舞 (dancing). Dancing was the way to commu-
nicate with and know shen 神 (spirits) (Xu 1981: 201). However, these spirits are
unseen and formless; only through dancing activities can one communicate with
shen. Wu’s dancing is something present, yet they are working (shi 事) with wu (non-
presence). In its origin, wu (nothingness) is the undifferentiated source of potency
and growth that lets things function, much as the empty spaces between joints and
muscles are what allows Cook Ding to cut with such ease in the famous story from the
Zhuangzi (Ziporyan 2009: 34). More importantly, this non-presence is always a part
of femininity’s presence.
Femininity/yin emphasizes background and hidden structures while masculinity/yang
specifies what is prevailing, exposed, and at front. This mindfulness of the background
is found in the Daodejing statement in chapter 42: “All the myriad things fu yin bao yang
(負陰抱陽) [carry (embody) yin and embrace yang]” (Moeller 2007: 103). Here yin/
femininity and yang/masculinity are woven into the condition of the myriad things.
Bao (抱) means to embrace, and literally refers to putting your arms around something,
often in a sense of holding something valuable, as in “to bao your child.” The myriad
things all embrace or wrap their arms around the yang, which is in front of them, i.e.
apparent or masculine. The idea of bao yang is derived from the sun: one faces south and
embraces direct sunlight. Another extension is confronting what is in front and seeing
what is present (you 有).
The word fu (負), translated above as “embody,” has more than twenty meanings
in the classical Chinese dictionary Shuowen Jiezi. One of the main meanings of fu is
to carry or bear something on your back, that is, not in front of you but behind or in
the background. Thus, this word fu in the Daodejing can be taken as bei背 (on your
back). Fuyin (負陰) then refers to things that are not confronted, or not seen, but
still carried along, something feminine. It is carrying something unseen or non-present.
The fuyin always predicates a set of situations, a unique way of being with the world.
Taken together, fuyin and baoyang reveal awareness of two aspects of reality: a feminine,

40
 Dao becomes female

the hidden underlying structure, and a masculine, the explicit presence in front of us.
Although baoyang and fuyin are inseparable, the Daodejing argues that our natural ten-
dency is to look more at what stands before us, which is yang/masculine, and to ignore
yin/feminine. The Daodejing counteracts this tendency with a focus on yin/feminine.
The feminine should be guarded (shou 守) and protected (bao 保). One should remem-
ber to “stay at the front by keeping to the rear” (Moeller 2007: 158).
As Daodejing chapter 16 explains:

To reach emptiness [虛xu]—

This is the utmost.
To keep stillness [靜jing]—
This is control.
The ten thousand things occur along with each other:
So I watch where they turn.
The things in the world are manifold,
they all return again to their root: stillness.
Stillness—this is what return to the mandate is called.
The return to the mandate—this is permanence.
To know permanence –this is clarity [illumination, 明ming].
(Moeller 2007: 41)

Here the Daodejing necessitates a specific meditation method to attain the stage of xu
and jing. This will stabilize the mind and enable us to attain ming (illumination). This
conceptual formulation has later been developed into a specifically female Daoist prac-
tice of body cultivation. For example, female Daoist Cao Wenyi 曹文逸(1039–1119)
was regarded as the “master of tranquility and human virtue and the perfection of the
Dao.” Another female Daoist Sun Buer 孫不二 (1119–1182) is one of the most promi-
nent female masters in Daoist history, the only female figure among the seven patriarchs
of the Northern School of Daoism in the Song dynasty. Her work is the foundation of
the School of Purity and Stillness 清靜 (Qingjing), which advocates concentrating one’s
heart or mind on the Daodejing’s concepts of emptiness and quietness.
This understanding of xu and jing is rooted in natural phenomena. According to
classical Chinese thought, everything emerges from the dark ground and hidden
places. A plant comes from a seed that has been hidden in the depths of the earth.
The power of growing and nourishment below the surface allows it to spring up and be
displayed. In the same way that the soil provides nourishment for the seed, the mother
provides a nourishing condition that allows the child to grow and flourish, just as the
female body supplies all nutrients for a fetus to survive and develop. When the male’s
sperm meets the female’s egg, the former’s function in the process of creating new life
can be completed. The female, however, works slowly, nourishing the fetus for nine
months. The power and uniqueness of the female’s slower effort should be recognized.
Thus femininity is xu because it can offer a space for a thing to grow. Femininity is jing

41
 ENGAGING THE PAST

(stillness) because it exemplifies the potency of nourishing. This female ability wins
the Daodejing’s philosophical recognition and admiration. It is called “dark efficacy”
(mysterious virtue).

The Dao generates them;

The De [efficacy] nourishes them;
As things they are formed; And as utensils they are completed.
Therefore, the ten thousand things honor the Dao
and cherish the De [efficacy].
Honoring the Dao,
cherishing the De.
The Dao generates them,
Nourishes them,
Lets them grow,
Accompanies them,
Rests them,
Secures them,
Fosters them,
Protects them.
Generating without possessing,
Acting without depending,
Rearing without ordaining:
This is called “dark efficacy.” [玄德xuande]
(Moeller 2007: 121)

The importance of this feminine knowing brings out an epistemic assumption under-
lying thinking: any given point of knowing, like the male/masculine or the female/
feminine, is only a small knot in a giant and coherent gendered web. Any knowing
contains infinite unknowing, because the known discloses only a part of the unknown.
Nonetheless, because we naturally focus on what is present and available, masculinity/
yang, we pay great attention to the foreground and often ignore the background,
femininity/yin. Farmers exemplify the Daodejing’s point: they do not simply see what
will grow out of the soil, but also make an effort to cultivate the soil, that is, they attend
to the background. A seed is embraced in the depths of the earth, where it will grow
and be nourished, which will allow it to spring up and be on display to the world. And
farming is very similar to mothering, as special attention is needed in the cultivation
and growth of a child.
Clearly this Daoist gendered knowing is not structured according to a Pythagorean
dichotomy between a heavenly order of rationality and a terrestrial disorder of irrationality.

42
 Dao becomes female

There are not two qualitatively different realms—one the calculable order of heaven that
appeals to our thought, the other a variety of earthly shapes and events impinging upon
our observation and sensual experience. The world of the senses is pervasive throughout
the interplay of cosmic forces, which rule the stars in the heaven, the seasons on the earth,
and the smallest elements in human beings.
This Daoist view challenges the gender asymmetry that has been pervasive in the his-
tory of Western philosophy, in which the masculine poses as a disembodied universality
while the feminine gets constructed as a disavowed corporeality. But the femininity of
Daoism is not based in an exclusion of the masculine; nor is the masculine taken to be
a rejection of the feminine. There is no feminine outside of the masculine, and there
is no masculine outside of the feminine. This prescribes a developmental and dynamic
process that defines an original fullness of the ultimate reality and of human being.
Basically, this female Daoist thinking is grounded in the value of the body. There is
no dualistic dichotomy that separates reason from emotion and excludes femininity, the
body, and engagement from rationality and knowing. As Daodejing chapter 13 claims:

Thus, if you esteem taking care of your body (sheng 身) more than you do tak-
ing care of the world,
Then you can be entrusted with the world;
if you love your body as if it were the world,
then the world can be handed over to you.
(Moeller 2007: 33)

The Female Mode: The Ultimate Power and Strategy

In a general sense, throughout much of human history and across many cultures, the mas-
culine has been associated with power, control, and dominance, whereas the feminine
has been associated with yielding, flexibility, and submissiveness. The Daodejing inverts
the values of these aspects, pointing out the power of the feminine. Traditionally, how-
ever, that inversion went against mainstream views, particularly those of the Confucians
who dominated social and political institutions. The Daodejing started a full-fledged
campaign to put greater pressure on the sages’ leadership ability, moral character, and
actions. This calling rippled through the fabric of Chinese culture. Sages—who were
traditionally men—must have a capacity for fostering femininity.
Scholars have articulated two gendered animal sets for evaluating human actions in
early China. The cow and bull correlate with categories of things (e.g. Earth and Heaven)
and actions (e.g. receiving and giving). The hen and rooster expound a type of behavior
(e.g. humility and arrogance). Xiongjie 雄節—rooster mode—invariably leads to fighting
and destruction while cijie 雌節—hen mode—inevitably generates peace and prosperity.
As some scholars write, “Interestingly, the parallel structure inferred in the phrasing for
cock mode indicates that hen mode promises to fulfill all the classic goals touted through-
out pre-modern Chinese social orders: wealth, health, and progeny” (Ryden 1997: 40).
The Daodejing exemplifies this emphasis and promotes the “hen mode,” which is the path
to be with Dao and gains the power that defeats the great and hard.
Daodejing 10 asks: “When heaven’s gate opens and closes, can you become female
[ci]?” (Moeller 2007: 25). Chapter 28 suggests: “Know xiong (male) and maintain ci

43
 ENGAGING THE PAST

(female), be the world’s river” (Moeller 2007: 71). The Daodejing accentuates the
greater power of the feminine, as in chapter 61: “A large state is low lying waters,
the female [pin] of the world, the connection of the world. The female [pin] overcomes
the male by constant stillness. Because she is still, she is therefore fittingly underneath”
(Moeller 2007: 141). The Daodejing also uses water as a metaphor for intrinsic feminine
power and resilience in chapter 8:

The best is like water.

The goodness of water consists in
Being beneficial to the ten thousand things,
And in that it, when there is contention, takes on the place that the mass of
the people detest.
(Moeller 2007: 21)

Chapter 78 reads:

Nothing in the world is smoother and softer than water;

but nothing surpasses it in tackling the stiff and the hard,
because it is not to be changed.
That water defeats the solid,
That the soft defeats the hard:
No one in the world who does not know this,
But still no one is able to practice it.
(Moeller 2007: 181)

Daodejing chapter 76 also makes a simple observation to confirm the significance of

softness:

When alive, men are supple and soft.

When dead, they are, stretched out and reaching the end, hard and rigid.
When alive, the ten thousand things and grassed and trees are supple and pliant.
When dead, they are dried out and brittle.
Therefore it is said:
The hard and the rigid are the companions of death.
The supple and the soft the delicate and the fine are the companions of life.
(Moeller 2007: 177)

Another key factor in this feminine power is a strategy of yin 因. In contemporary

Western terminology, this yin is similar to the idea of resourcefulness. In the Lüshi
Chunqiu of 239 bce, the notion of relying on (因 yin) has great importance: “By employing

44
 Dao becomes female

the techniques of ‘relying’ [yin], the poor and lowly can vanquish the rich and noble
and the small and weak can control the strong and big” (Knoblock and Reigel 2000:
358). “Relying” is a technique or strategy for success. On what does one rely?
“The wise invariably rely on the right timing or opportunity. But there is no guaran-
tee that the timing or opportunity will come, so one must also rely on ability, just like
making use of a boat or a cart” (Knoblock and Reigel 2000: 360). What one relies on is
the natural propensity of things, such as water’s power or the tendencies of the human
heart. The Lüshi Chunqiu articulates this ability to be resourceful through examples:

When those who scrutinize the sky recognize the four seasons by examining
the zodiac constellations, this is an instance of relying on the natural state of
things. When those who keep the calendars know when the first and last days
of the month will occur by observing the movements of the moon, this is a case
of relying on the natural state of things [yin 因].
(Knoblock and Reigel 2000: 367)

The uniqueness of a sage is found, at least partly, in this ability. Another passage illu-
minates further:

The true kings of antiquity acted less on their own and more by “relying on.”
The person of relying on has the art/technique of a sovereign; action is the way
of ministers. Acting by oneself entails disturbance; reliance on others will have
quiescence. Relying on winter creates cold; relying on summer creates heat—
what need is there for the sovereign to act in that matter? Thus, it is said, the
Dao of the lord is not knowing and not acting. Yet because it is worthier than
knowing and acting, it attains the truth.
(Knoblock and Reigel 2000: 416)

As a strategy, “relying” shifts the focus away from one’s own actions and powers and
instead emphasizes what is already available in a given situation. In different conditions,
one needs to figure out what kinds of things can be relied on. What are the resources
available? There can be different kinds of relying under different circumstances, but
everything must have something to rely on for its own existence. This belief also makes
clear why guanxi (關係)—social connections—permeates all aspects of Chinese social
life even up today.
Relying, as a form of non-action or wuwei (無為), or appearing soft, indicates the
importance of trusting the rhythm, patterns, timing, and opportunities that have an
inherent tendency to unfold in a given moment. This relying is different from a causal
relationship that articulates a linear sequence between events. Relying is embedded in
complexity; it is relying on the context of associations. What sages rely on are the yin/
feminine factors: yin emphasizes background and hidden structures, whereas yang speci-
fies what is dominant, open, and in front. Thus Liezi says,

If you want to be hard (gang 剛), you must guard it with softness (rou 柔); if you
want to be strong, you must protect it with weakness (ruo 弱). Hardness that is
accumulated in softness will be necessarily hard and strength that is accumu-
lated in weakness will be necessarily strong.
(Graham 1990: 83)

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 ENGAGING THE PAST

The necessity of considering yin factors arises on several different levels, most of which
we have already addressed in more abstract terms. Emptiness (xu 虛) and nothingness
(wu 無) are always intertwined with fullness (shi 實) and being (you 有). Consider,
for example, a vessel or container (qi 器), as discussed in the Daodejing. A vessel only
serves its purpose because of its emptiness. Thus, concrete things themselves always
exist through an element of emptiness. Non-presence is embedded in presence. While
we might say that both are equally important, our tendency to see only the present and
the difficulty of addressing the non-present suggests a deliberate strategy for focusing
on the unseen.

Final Remarks
The Daodejing makes a philosophical imaginary of the feminine into a privileged locus
and relies on the feminine as a way of thinking, knowing, experiencing, and desiring.
This study of the Daodejing can proffer a useful framework for raising female conscious-
ness in Daoist contexts. Neither women nor men should reject their important aspects
of femininity; rather, both should cultivate their femininity to achieve effective results.
However, femininity as the Daodejing conceives it was situated in a particular cultural
and historical context, so that the text was not intended to change women’s social
and political position in China. It does not promote the kind of gender equality that
Western feminists fight for. The Daodejing has not been used politically, socially, and
economically to advance women’s interests and benefits.
The historical relations between Daoism and patriarchy are both conceptually and
practically complex. Daoism values female power and femininity conceptually because
it takes them to be a cosmic potent force. To do this, however, is neither to respect
women as social beings nor to justify the patriarchal system. Daoism (daojia) as a school
of teaching does not fight to better women’s social and political conditions. But Daoism
(daojiao) as a religious practice has offered an alternative way for women to live and to
redefine those restrictive social expectations and roles. In particular, Daoism as religious
practice does not have fixed restrictions on what women can or cannot do in terms of
religious leadership. Many Daoist religious masters in China today are women. Thus,
Daoism does not make a political critique of the mainstream of Confucian patriarchy,
yet it does not fully support that mainstream either.
Nonetheless, a Daoist feminism might use Daoist femininity to challenge sexist
patriarchy and cultivate a different value system. China today greatly needs an injec-
tion of feminist thought to truly assist women’s living conditions. There are at least
two conceptual issues we might take from the ancient Chinese Daoist philosophy of
femininity. First, this philosophy can help us to rethink the very notions of man/male/
masculinity and woman/female/femininity, which are constructed through gendered
terminology. The original concepts of female and male in the Daodejing were articu-
lated to capture the dynamic rhythm of nature, the world, and human life. They have
little to do with contemporary Western constructions of the social gender of women
or men. The Daodejing would agree with many Western feminists when they take the
view that gender is not natural and that there is nothing essentially fixed about gender
roles. The gender identification of women with femininity and men with masculinity
implies a predestined biological and social fate. Women and men have internalized
those gender-biased social expectations and standards to surrender to a social system.
Furthermore, gender as system of social categorization is performative and is culturally

46
 Dao becomes female

taught, cognitively framed, and implemented by individuals. In contrast, the original

concepts of female and male in the Daodejing describe the ebb and flow of everything in
existence as a sustained dance of wu and you, yin and yang.
Second, the Daoist conception of femininity reminds us that feminine and mas-
culine constructions must be situated in the rhythm of interactions and mutual inte-
gration. Daoism values fluidity, not solidity. Like yin and yang classifications of the
human body, the same element can be yin/female in a certain relation but yang/male
in another, and one can talk about yin/female within a yang/male, or yang/male within
a yin/female. Moreover, like the yinyang distinction in the human body the division
between the male and female in social life should be highly dynamic and fluid . . . more
like using chopsticks rather than a fork and knife. The latter require two hands, while
the former constitutes more of a singular harmonious action, with one hand negoti-
ating the utensils. Therefore, using chopsticks is a kind of harmony in action. They
must be used in concert with one another. Similar to classifications of femininity and
masculinity, the chopsticks’ exact position or classification may vary, but only within
a rhythmical and interrelated framework—an ongoing dance of mutually engaged and
nurturing equals. This is the manifestation of the cosmic forces yin and yang. Thus,
instead of fixating on gender roles as a determining aspect of one’s identity, they can
be viewed as aspects of the situation with which one can choose to go along. However,
they are not decisive for one’s identity. A person can “play” or move between different
characteristics, be male or female, depending on the situation. One is not limited to
what society prescribes.
Finally, the Daodejing affirms the remarkable female power contained in Dao. Daoism
becomes the philosophy most amenable to female influence, glorifying the latent force
of the female water element, illuminating the potency of the mother, and prescribing
the Daoist sovereign to cleave to the role of the female. We have much to learn from
this ancient wisdom!

Further Reading
Allan, Sarah (1997) The Way of Water and the Sprouts of Virtue, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Bokenkamp, Stephen (1997) Early Daoist Scriptures, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Despeux, Catherine, and Kohn, Livia (2005) Women in Daoism, Cambridge, MA: Three Pines Press.
Moeller, Hans-Georg (2006) Philosophy of The Daodejing, New York: Columbia University Press.
Wang, Robin R. (2003) Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture: Writings from the Pre-Qin Period to
the Song Dynasty, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

Related Topics
Feminist methods in the history of philosophy (Chapter 1); feminism and ancient Greek
philosophy (Chapter 2); language, writing, and gender differences (Chapter 24); Native
American chaos theory and the politics of difference (Chapter 30); Confucianism and
care ethics (Chapter 44); multicultural and postcolonial feminisms (Chapter 47).

References
Ban Gu 班固 (1962) Hanshu 漢書 [The Book of Han], Beijing: Chinese Press.
Bianchi, Emanuela (2014) The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in The Aristotelian Cosmos, New York:
Fordham University Press.

47
 ENGAGING THE PAST

Graham, Angus C. (trans.) (1990) The Book of Lieh-tzu: A Classic of Tao, New York: Columbia University
Press.
Hagengruber, Ruth (2010) “Von Diana zu Minerva: Philosophierende Aristokratinnen des 17. und 18.
Jahrhunderts und ihre Netzwerke,” in Ruth Hagengruber and Ana Rodriguez (Eds.) Von Diana zu
Minerva, Munich: Oldenbourg Akademie-Verlag, 11–32.
Knoblock, John, and Reigel, Jeffrey (trans.) (2000) The Annals of Lü Buwei: A Complete Translation and
Study, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Liu Xuyi 刘绪义 (2009) The World of Heaven and Human Being: A Study of Origin of Pre-Qin Schools, Beijing:
People’s Press.
Moeller, Hans-Georg (trans.) (2007) Daodejing: A Complete Translation and Commentary, Chicago, IL and
La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Plato (1993) The Symposium, trans. R. E. Allen, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Ryden, Edmund (trans.) (1997) The Yellow Emperor’s Four Canons: A Literary Study and Edition of the Text
from Mawangdui, Taipei: Guangqi Press.
Shen Xu 許慎 (1981) Shouwen Jiezi 說文解字 [Explanation of Patterns], Ed. Duan Yucai 段玉裁, Shanghai:
Shanghai Guji Press.
Wang, Robin R. (2012) Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Ziporyn, Brook (trans.) (2009) Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries,
Indianapolis. IN: Hackett.

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 4
FEMINISM, PHILOSOPHY,
AND CULTURE IN AFRICA
Tanella Boni
Translated from French by Eva Boodman

Introduction: Contextualizing Theories and Practices

African feminisms emerge out of a heterogeneous context. Because Africa’s globalization
has been ongoing for centuries now, African women pay a steep price for it, all while the
patriarchal order remains firmly in place.
But what is Africa? “Africa” as a designation refers to a dynamic geographical,
political, military, economic, social, familial, historical, linguistic, cultural and reli-
gious context. The African context—continental, but also diasporically dispersed
and transatlantic—is marked by complexity and multiplicity. Borders were drawn
onto the African continent on the goodwill of the European leaders rallied around
Bismarck at the Berlin Conference of November 1884 to February 1885. For this
reason, Africa is not one but many broken-up Africas that have undergone slavery,
colonization and racial segregation, as in the case of South African Apartheid. In
spite of the way that these Africas are differentiated by their languages, educational
systems, and cultures, the Venus Hottentot, whose body was instrumentalized and
dehumanized by whites at the beginning of the nineteenth century, continues to be a
strong symbol of the way that African women’s rights have been violated because of
the color of their skin, the shape of their bodies, and their gender.
Today’s difficult postcolonial situations—and the challenges of living in them—are
the result of having been subject to different forms of colonization. The feminisms that
emerge in this kind of context ask real questions that cannot be fully treated by academic
research or “development” activism. And yet, the challenge of a plural Africa must be
faced here, too, and not just by men, around whom revolve constructions of virility and
masculine dominance. Women represent half of the African population. Irrespective
of their age or multiple identities, these women continue to struggle against the real
and imaginary barriers that must be deconstructed in order for them to have the right
to a full and complete existence. There are many African feminist movements: some
based on industry, some transdisciplinary or transnational. These movements work, in
theory and practice, to transform social and political realities. But these feminisms—
which sometimes reject the term “feminism” to adopt another, like “womanism,” for
 ENGAGING THE PAST

example—are plagued by the question of their culturalist or universalist position, the

question of how to enter into dialogue with other feminisms. And on top of all of this,
there is a linguistic gap that these feminisms must find ways to overcome.

Feminism as Engagement
For a long time, like the African writers discussed by Susan Arndt (Arndt 2000),
I refused to be called a “feminist” even if my novels and poems showcased the violence
done to women and the subtleties of the patriarchal order. To reject the word “feminist”
does not mean that one is not concerned with feminism. Today, I ask myself whether
“feminism” is indeed a doctrine, that is to say, a set of determinate concepts that form a
system. I think, rather, that it is a life philosophy in which the subordination of women
and the injustices done to them are explained through concepts, including that of
“gender.” To effect an “epistemological break” of my own, I asked myself whether I, too,
should use the concept of “gender.” But first I needed to test it, and not reject it out of
hand, as other African women have done. All around me, gender was the explanation
for everything: in Africanist discourses, but also in those of development agencies and
even universities. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) talked about “gendered
approaches” in their grant applications. As soon as there were a few women on a team
made up of many men, a project was thought to have used such an “approach” and to
have satisfied the requirements of the granting agency! The instrumentalization of the
word “gender” is so striking, in fact, that one no longer feels the need to ask what the
word means or what the concept refers to.
The many African feminisms, however, cannot be boiled down to “gender” or a
“gendered approach,” since that word does not mean much if it isn’t being applied to
a set of facts. Indeed, it seems to me that “gender” serves to unravel the causes of the
inequalities, injustices and harms that women must face. Once these causes are per-
ceived, one asks how the situation can be improved. In this way, “gender” is both a tool
for thought and a method of social transformation.
I was trying to find the justification for things needing to be done better, with less
injustice, more rights, and responsibilities shared equally between men and women.
I was asking myself loads of questions in a philosophy department where for twenty years
I was the only woman professor. Today, fortunately, there are ten or so women teaching
in that department. I don’t know whether they worry about “gender” or whether they
choose freely the authors they would like to teach.
As far I’m concerned, my salutary break came, in the first instance, out of the disci-
pline from which women were notably absent. I was teaching the history of philosophy,
which had nothing to do with my lived reality. Thinkers from other regions of the
world, and Africa in particular, had no place in a curriculum modeled on the teaching
priorities of French universities. Women philosophers were practically invisible, with
rare exceptions like Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil or Simone de Beauvoir. But in my
own work, I found I had to limit myself to a few ancient philosophers. My research
ended up focusing on negative representations of the female sex as an equivalent to
“matter” in Aristotle’s biology (Aristotle 2002). The male sex was the beautiful sex,
active and superior. I understood that Western philosophy supplied all the elements
needed to justify sexual hierarchy, the inferiority of women and their exclusion from
public debate, with some exceptions. In reproduction, males had a “natural” power over
females. In this way, the philosophy that I was teaching, which was far from “African,”

50
 Feminism, Philosophy, and African Cultures

gave me the material to think about my own situation and that of other women. This
alien philosophy, so far away from my own experience, gave me a theoretical arsenal.
In the social, political, cultural and academic world where I lived, inequality and
injustice were law. I understood that a man and a woman with equal competence did
not have equal chances of being listened to or taken seriously in the realm of knowl-
edge production or scholarly debate. Something broke in me; I would never be able to
see the world in the same way. From that moment onward, I allowed myself to imagine
my environment as a world of walls and obstacles that become visible and audible only
when one develops an awareness of them.
It was not in philosophy, however, that I was first able to express the inequality
and violence that I was experiencing and observing, but in literature, which I
believed to be a space of freedom. (The problems I continue to encounter with pub-
lishing are other barriers in the so-called Francophone world. Age, subject matter,
language of publication (French), and the laws of the free market have to be taken
into account along with an author’s sex to understand what is at work in a publica-
tion, which is not free of constraint, in spite of the invention of the web.) But I
needed to go further, theoretically, to understand this world structured like a net-
work with different orders of interconnected levels. In the twenty-first century,
women have not been the only ones subject to patriarchal programming; so are all
humans whose bodies or sexualities do not conform to the moral, political, cultural
and religious norms of patriarchal society. So to reject the word “feminist,” as I did,
following in the footsteps of many other African women, wasn’t to reject a mere
label, nor was it to surrender in the face of the struggle.
For these reasons, up until 2008, I was reluctant to characterize my own theoretical
research as “feminist.” “Feminism?” I would say; “I’m more interested in discussing ‘the
woman question,’ since, philosophically speaking, it really is a question” (Boni 2008).
Even if it is a philosophical question, there is a vast gulf between the word “woman”
and the word “feminist.” What separates the two is not the quest for a definition of the
category of women; it is, rather, a form of engagement. It is, on the one hand, a cold,
dispassionate question that can be dissected externally and can give rise to all kinds of
interpretations and discussions, just like any philosophical question. But on the other
hand, it is an involved engagement, an approach that comes from our body and soul and
maybe even our gut, where there is anger, revolt and determination. All feminisms seem
to me to be of this order, and feminisms related to Africa to an even greater degree.
African feminism’s unofficial history could be told in this way, before it made any
reference to academic research or treatises on violence against women, their place
in “development” or their rights and duties as citizens. On an individual level, then,
I would say that one doesn’t get into feminism in the way that one does a religion, that
is, by choice. Rather, we become feminists because we have no choice. We struggle and
resist so that we can “find” ourselves, take responsibility, have a place in the world,
and we do this by supporting and caring for ourselves and our loved ones. In this way,
concern for self and others is a step prior to all reasoning and activism we might want
to qualify as “feminist.” When novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Adichie 2012;
2014) writes about running up against the language, facts, and gestures that underscore
the power of patriarchal domination, she doesn’t learn about it in books: it is an experi-
enced reality. What gives her the right to speak it, however, is the authority that comes
from being an internationally renowned author. In this way, creative writing, art, song
and cinema are all materials that show us that before all theorization and all activism,

51
 ENGAGING THE PAST

we have our own experience. Engagement starts, then, with the clear recognition that
what is wrong, and affects us so closely, must change.
We see, then, that when we engage ourselves, we break with what seems natural in
the eyes of most. But does this mean that we must engage ourselves alone? With others?
This depends on our own experiences, the kinds of encounters we have, and the kind of
dialogue we maintain with other feminists from Africa and elsewhere. It also depends
on our understanding, at each stage of our lives, of the fundamental questions that, par-
adoxically, can separate us from other women, all while bringing us closer in many ways.

The State of Affairs: A Brief Overview

The questions of identity, colonization and postcolonialism—and even imperialism
and globalization—are grafted onto African feminism. While there is, among African
women, a desire to throw off the colonial yoke by thinking of ourselves through the
paradigms of a pre-colonial past, it is also worrisome that theoretical reflection is often
too far away from the situations in which most African women find themselves. These
situations are characterized by urgent matters such as war and violence, diseases like
AIDS, the militarization of African societies, and the non-application of international
laws and conventions (most notably CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of
all Forms of Discrimination against Women, UN General Assembly, 1979).
But how are we to name what is happening when the situation of women’s lives is
so complex? What are the locations that give rise to, and are points of transmission for,
feminist research and activism in Africa?
Since the 1970s, big international conferences, like those organized in Mexico
(1975), Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985), and all those that followed, have been
occasions for African women to express their concerns. With these conferences came
an unprecedented activism that developed along many different institutional lines:
through the academy (Imam, Mama, and Sow 1997) and international institutions like
the UN and the World Bank, within religious institutions, or through more independ-
ent initiatives like NGOs and women’s associations fighting for economic, social and
cultural rights. From the point of view of the state, “Ministries of Women’s Affairs” or of
“The Status of Women” made notable appearances in several West African countries.
An example of such state-organized feminism are the activities of every 8th of March,
meant to raise consciousness about women’s issues like excision in the regions where it
is practiced. Theory, especially from a “gender and development” perspective, followed
closely behind political practice and activism, and took several orientations: gender and
politics, gender and economics, gender and reproductive health, HIV-AIDS, sexuality
and violence, etc. (Bennett 2010). Little by little, research centers and institutes in
Gender and Women’s Studies were born. In Dakar, CODESRIA (the Council for the
Development of Social Science Research in Africa) created, in the 1990s, a new series
of publications dedicated to gender, guided by the following statement:

CODESRIA’s series on gender expresses the need to challenge the forms of

masculinity that are the basis for the repression of women. The goal of the
series is to undertake and sustain social science research through discerning
inquiry and debate that challenges the conventional knowledge, structures and
ideologies narrowly informed by the centrality of masculinity.
(CODESRIA, www.codesria.org)

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 Feminism, Philosophy, and African Cultures

Today, the African Gender Institute and Gender and the Department of Women’s
Studies for Africa’s transformation (GWS) at the University of Cape Town have a
journal, Feminist Africa, with an editorial policy that is summarized in this way:

Feminist Africa is a continental gender studies journal produced by the community

of feminist scholars. It provides a platform for intellectual and activist research,
dialogue and strategy. Feminist Africa attends to the complex and diverse dynam-
ics of creativity and resistance that have emerged in postcolonial Africa, and the
manner in which these are shaped by the shifting global geopolitical configurations
of power.
(Feminist Africa, http://agi.ac.za/journals)

Since the beginning of the 2000s, the journal has published around twenty thematic
issues that are available online. In 2013, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary
of the creation of the African Union, the journal published an issue devoted to
“Pan-Africanism and Feminism.” The issue commemorated the not insignificant role
played by women in war, conflict and liberation struggle: in Uganda, Guinea-Bissau,
and Sudan, but also in the continental and transatlantic Pan-African struggle. Another
journal, JENDA: A Journal of Cultural and African Women’s Studies, created in the early
2000s, articulated its goals in this way:

Our conceptualization of JENDA: A Journal of Culture and African Women

Studies was guided by two main objectives: the first is to create a space from
which to theorize our experiences, presently marginalized in today’s global con-
text of unequal economic relations; and the second is to wrest ourselves from
the mould of stereotypical assumptions in which this international economic
order and its attendant culture of hierarchy have cast us.
(www.jendajournal.com/nzegwu1.html)

This journal, which has received much recognition, is published through Binghamton
University.
While in most Francophone countries feminist research seems not to be a priority,
given that it is absent from many research and teaching programs, in the Anglophone
world things are happening. Anglophone feminist thinking has been moving forward
for several decades now, and has a long tradition of debate on women and gender,
masculinity and femininity, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex
(LGBTI) rights.
With this in mind, in November of 2006 a forum of African feminists was organ-
ized in Accra by the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF). The forum
brought together 100 participants, mostly Anglophone, to adopt a “Charter of Feminist
Principles for African Feminists.” The Charter states: “Africa has a long tradition of
resistance to patriarchy. We claim henceforth the right to formalize our actions, to
write for ourselves, to formulate our own strategy, and to do this ourselves as African
feminists” (AWDF 2006: 11). The question of women’s rights is doubly evoked in the
charter: It is a matter of being citizens in the fullest sense, to be free to make this kind of
demand, to have freedom of speech and thought; but it is also a matter of being free to
meet the challenge of taking care of one’s own problems without leaving that task to be
undertaken by others, and especially actors from “the West.” To work together, all that

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is needed is agreement on principles, methods and actions to carry out. The question of
language, however, is yet another difficulty that blocks the flow of ideas.

The Language Gap

A language barrier separates African feminists from one another. We cannot say it
enough: the languages in which we express ourselves do not enable debate, even
when English speakers, French speakers, Portuguese speakers and Arabic speakers are
brought together at big conferences. What can be talked about? Must each of them
wait until their own words are translated from one language to another? In this way,
the language gap is a parameter to take into account in understanding the exclusion of
African women and their lack of visibility on the playing field of serious debate. They
are even less audible when they do not express themselves or write in English, the
dominant language. One might think that official languages bring feminists closer to
one another in serving as unifying vehicles across a multiplicity of local languages. One
only needs to consult a bibliography of feminist research or gender studies in Africa to
be convinced of this: English, the dominant language, is the language of publication for
most single-author essays, co-authored reports, and feminist movement publications.
English is also the language in which a number of concepts were invented, including
womanism, stiwanism, nego-feminism and many others. Where “womanism” is a term
used by Alice Walker (Walker 1984 [1983]), Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi’s thought
is to be differentiated from the Walkerian conception of womanism, and indeed,
from Western feminism on the whole (Ogunyemi 1985). According to Ogunyemi,
“womanists” account for culture, race, politics and economics in such a way that gen-
der no longer occupies a central role in Walker’s theory. Molara Ogundipe-Leslie’s
stiwanism takes STIWA (social transformation including women in Africa) to be the
starting place for understanding the role of women in society. In the case of Obioma
Nnaemeka’s nego-feminism, feminism is taken to be a “negotiation without ego,”
where theory informs practice and vice versa (Nnaemeka 2004). These different con-
cepts articulated by Nigerian activists and theorists, however, have yet to unite all the
African feminisms.
As long as francophonie—the Francophone world as a political and cultural realm—
allows some African countries to become linked to Western countries like France and
Canada, then there will be some spaces (like colloquia, for example) where debates
can take place and experiences can be exchanged. But one has to ask what place
African feminist philosophy has in these Francophone debates, since it seems to be
practically non-existent. For that matter, at meetings that aim to bring together French,
Quebecois, Belgian, Swiss, and African Francophones (Sow 2009), the questions most
important to Anglophone feminists received little attention or were entirely absent. Do
Francophone African feminists, who find themselves preempted or supported by other
feminists, really need to ask themselves the question of Western dominance?

Gender Alone Cannot Explain All Injustice

The majority of theorists and activists, regardless of what languages they speak, do
not disregard gender’s connections with class, age, social and family position, not to
mention a number of other elements that have to be taken into consideration when

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biological sex is discussed. There is, in fact, no undefined “woman” without reference
to a situation. I’m tempted to say that one is born a girl—that one is certainly some-
one’s girl, even when one is “fatherless”—but one becomes woman, which is a long-
term undertaking. One becomes a mother, which society expects us to do in addition
to many other things. Motherhood is, without a doubt, a concept to clarify, and a
point of difference between African women and other feminists who claim Simone de
Beauvoir for her account of motherhood as alienation of the female body (Beauvoir
1949). What many African cultures have in common is a conception of sterility as
a great tragedy for a woman who cannot bear children, as well as a dishonor for the
husband (Kourouma 1970). This is a reference to the idea that the female body is
made to bear children and to preserve the honor of her husband. However, a mother
is not only the one who gives life; her role is also to provide food, care and educa-
tion. There are nourishing mothers, spiritual mothers and protective mothers, and
in this way, they are powerful and have both men and women under their control.
Mothers-in-law can rule entire families. Relationships of brotherhood and sisterhood,
moreover, are not always horizontal, but are hierarchized. Sisterhood is, for African
women, a point of integration and stability in the family. The concept of family, then,
needs to be revisited and adapted to local realities; it does not correspond to ideas of
family that come from elsewhere. The notion of “couple” also needs to be rethought.
To what does “couple” refer? The question is worth asking when, in certain situa-
tions, polygamy is at play in its most insidious forms, and even among educated men
and women aware of their rights. One asks, then, how to account for these complex
situations that seem to be socially acceptable while also being in contradiction with
written laws. What recourse is available to women whose rights are violated if written
laws do not protect them, and oral and traditional laws do not recognize the injustices
they are made to endure? (Boni 2011)
In this way, the individual lives of African women are marked by a long and para-
doxical history of violence. The violence begins in the family. I’m talking here about
life, because it’s where everything begins: there can be no emancipation, no freedom,
no justice if we do not first have the right to life. And this right is threatened when
one is born a girl. Does the role of a boy not have more value than that of a girl? Many
African women who want a son, and not just those in rural areas, undergo multiple
pregnancies, often under difficult conditions, until the desired child with the male sex
is born. The desire for a male child is, in my view, an internalization of patriarchal prin-
ciples by women themselves, who unwittingly participate in its reproduction. If a family
happens to accept the birth of a girl anyway, is it not because, from the moment of her
birth, she has already entered into the framework of a symbolic exchange? The girl will
marry, and this will be of great economic benefit to her parents.
And so, everything does seem to be built around biological sex, motherhood, but also
symbolic relationships—which can also be monetary (and it should be noted that not
all forms of sexual expression are tolerated). We continue to think that female genital
mutilation is part of the “feminization” of the body. And what if this, too, were only
another expression of the dominance of patriarchal power in the regions where it is
practiced? However, it was this view of the practice that offended many African femi-
nists at the Copenhagen Conference in 1980, an occasion when suspicion took hold
between Africans, Europeans, and Americans (Sow 1998). Nonetheless, the urgency
was clear: tools were needed to understand and discuss our own reality.

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 ENGAGING THE PAST

Women’s Silence and the Reproduction of Patriarchal Ideology

If theoretical discourse and radical activist strategy use “gender” in connection with
other concepts to analyze the place of women “in development,” concrete lives must
also benefit from the illumination of the concept. And this is the rub. In private life,
the patriarchal order, the principles of which are anchored into ways of thinking, con-
tinues to reign unabated. In this way, life trajectories—which I call biographies—are
of great importance, and not just the activities one performs. Who African women are
is just as important as what they do. In fact, human activities are never disembodied; it
is precisely bodies and souls who undertake them, human beings who imagine, think,
work and speak. Speech, then, or rather its absence, is a key element on which the
violence driven by the prejudice of patriarchal ideology is exercised. From this point
of view, we see that one of the survival strategies adopted by African women is to act
as though everything is fine, to never speak from the place that hurts the most. Only
writing and other art forms can attempt to break this wall of silence (D’Almeida 1994).
In “Francophone” literature, novelist Mariama Bâ (2001 [1979]) was one of the first to
discuss internal states and intimacy in relation to gender, sexual relationships, social
organization, religion, and polygamy. Silence overtakes the sense of revolt that boils up
in us; and this is why most African women refuse to call themselves “feminist,” as if all
feminisms were a danger to be avoided.
On reflection, the refusal to call oneself “feminist” reveals the existence of a domi-
nant multi-secular system that thinks of itself as holding the standard of truth. Other
forms of discrimination and violence graft themselves onto this system, imposing their
diktats in men’s or women’s voices: through family education, public space, the work-
place, schools and universities, indeed, every public or private space. Women are effi-
cient conduits in their reproducing and transmitting the values of the patriarchal order.
A time comes, however, when women open their eyes and see what is around them.
They finally accept that they can conceive of their own world, their own history, their
own relationships with other worlds, their place and their future on the chessboard
of globalization, by and for themselves. Indeed, thinking for oneself, when one is an
African woman, is in the first place to break with a number of prejudices; it is to want
things to change. It isn’t to think against “man,” or to reject concepts made elsewhere,
but to think with one’s own faculties and to imagine the world with one’s own sensibili-
ties, by trying to find one’s own place among other humans and living things, animals
and plants. This is what the Kenyan political activist and ecologist Wangari Maathai—
who disappeared in 2011—did (Maathai 2006).

Conclusion
The act of being an African feminist is a challenge one gives to oneself. In fact, cul-
tures, traditions, and all sorts of particulars show us that “gender” doesn’t designate
a relationship of domination comprised of only two poles: the woman in the inferior
position, and the man in the superior position. Relationships of domination reproduce
themselves and are interconnected; to know this, one only needs to ask what a family
is. What is a mother? What is a father? Does “the couple” exist? What is sexuality?
Why are fathers so often physically absent when all family, social, spiritual, and intel-
lectual life is organized in their name? Fundamental philosophical questions show
us the degree to which the word “gender” merits being questioned. It could be that

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women themselves are at the center of the development of informal economic life,
though this remains to be proven. Should gender be understood from the standpoint
of exclusive ethnicities in a plural Africa that includes thousands of “ethnic groups,”
languages, religions, and cultures? Though there may be many types of domination,
patriarchal ideology defends the interests of men, irrespective of their situation.
Whether it is a matter of relationships between individuals in a family or in a state
context—and at state summits there are mothers and fathers in attendance, just like
in the family—everything revolves around the organization of masculinities that must
remain infallible, virile and powerful. We understand, too, why LGBTI-identified
people have so few rights in many African countries and are hounded by public and
political opinion, and moral, social and religious law. Is being a feminist not, then,
in the end, to disrupt the order built by patriarchal ideology that reproduces itself at
every level of sociality in the name of normality?
In African philosophical discourse, the word “feminism” is quite rare. Other dis-
ciplines like sociology, anthropology, ethnology, history, geography, economics,
and literary studies tend to recognize feminist concerns well before any African
woman philosopher—a phrase that always makes one smile—could give herself per-
mission to think through the realities of most immediate concern to her. For a long
time now, Western thinkers have analyzed the lives of African men and women,
their cultures, societies, and religions. My impression of the current situation is that
the thought produced by African women does not exist in philosophy, and espe-
cially not in francophone African countries. Women professors and researchers in
philosophy do exist, however, in universities. They must struggle to include topics
related to gender, intersectionality, and women’s lives, knowledge and thought into
research and teaching programs—efforts that do not always succeed. It is an arduous
task, because one must have a voice in the first place, that is, some kind of power to
change the way philosophy sees itself. African philosophy textbooks are rarely used
in francophone countries, since Western philosophy is taken to be primary, and
texts by African authors are virtually absent. This is the legacy of colonialism but
also of the postcolonial situation in which the patriarchal system remains in place.
Research on African philosophers yields only limited results in specialized publica-
tions or on the Internet.
The debate on African philosophy in the 1970s—the result of which was a
diversification of African philosophies—did not include a single feminist dimen-
sion among its concerns. The philosophers who took part in this debate are men,
and those who continue to be cited today are also men. From this point of view,
invisibility is a problem that every African woman philosopher must have on her
mind, before ever calling herself a feminist, since there is a great risk that her words
will remain unheard.
Because public opinion cannot, on its own, imagine philosophers as women (even
if women philosophy professors do exist in universities), the only remaining path is
to publish philosophical essays that take women, men, gender, and sexualities into
account, all while thinking through political, economic, social, and cultural particu-
larities. Feminist philosophers have a duty to make their thinking known. It’s first of
all a matter of thinking alongside the first feminist thinkers in the social and human
sciences, without forgetting that philosophy is one’s specialization. To be able to change
imaginaries programmed by patriarchal ideology that cannot see women in philosophy
(or philosophy in women), is in the first place to write and publish. In francophone

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countries, this resembles the process of “squaring a circle”: one must be able to find
editors interested in the writing of women philosophers, but one must also find a way
for these books to be read by students as well as the general public—the latter being an
entire battle on its own. But to write in French, a language within easy reach, is already
to take the first step.

Further Reading
Bennett, Jane (2010) “Circles and Circles: Notes on African Feminist Debates around Gender and
Violence in the C 2,” Feminist Africa 14: 21–47. (A discussion of contemporary debates in African
feminist movements.)
Nnaemeka, Obioma (Ed.) (1998) Sisterhood, Feminism and Power in Africa: From Africa to the Diaspora,
Trenton: African Word Press. (Relationships between feminism and womanism.)
—— (2005) “African Women, Colonial Discourses and Imperialist Interventions: Female Circumcision as
Impetus,” in Nnaemeka, Obioma (Ed.) Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women
in Imperialist Discourses, Westport: Praeger, 27–45. (Who has the right to pontificate on female circumci-
sion in Africa?)
Oyewumi, Oyeronke (1997) The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses,
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Can we speak of gender in pre-colonial Africa?)
Thiam, Awa (1978) La Parole aux Négresses, Paris: Denoël-Gonthier (African women bear witness to patri-
archal violence.)

Related Topics
Introducing Black feminist philosophy (Chapter 10); the sex/gender distinction and the
social construction of reality (Chapter 13); the genealogy and viability of the concept
of intersectionality (Chapter 28); women, gender, and philosophies of global develop-
ment (Chapter 34); moral justification in an unjust world (Chapter 40); postcolonial
and multicultural feminisms (Chapter 47); feminism and freedom (Chapter 53).

References
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (2012) We Should All Be Feminists [Transcript of Lecture for TEDxEuston,
December 2012], London: Fourth Estate.
—— (2014) We Should All Be Feminists, London: Harper Collins.
African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) (2006) [online]. Available at: http://awdf.org/charter-of-
feminist-principles-for-african-feminists/.
Aristotle (2002) Génération des Animaux [Generation of Animals], Paris: Belles-Lettres.
Arndt, Susan (2000) “Who Is Afraid of Feminism? Critical Perspectives on Feminism in Africa and African
Feminism,” Palabres III: 35–61.
Bâ, Mariama (2001 [1979]) Une Si Longue Lettre [So Long a Letter], Paris: Serpent à plumes.
Bennett, Jane (2010) “‘Circles and Circles’: Notes on African Feminist Debates Around Gender and
Violence in the Twenty-First Century,” Feminist Africa 14: 21–47.
Beauvoir, Simone de (1949) Le Deuxième Sexe [The Second Sex], Paris: Gallimard.
Boni, Tanella (2008) “Femme et Etre Humain: Autonomisation et Réalisation de Soi [Woman and Human
Being: Autonomization and Self-Realization],” Africultures 75: 27–37.
—— (2011) Que Vivent les Femmes d’Afrique? [What Is the Lived Experience of African Women?], Paris:
Karthala.
D’Almeida, Irene (1994) Francophone African Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence, Gainesville, FL:
University Press of Florida.

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Iman, Ayesha, Mama, Amina, and Sow, Fatou (Eds.) (1997) Engendering African Social Sciences, Dakar:
CODESRIA.
Kourouma, Ahmadou (1970) Les Soleils des Indépendances [The Suns of Independence], Paris: Seuil.
Maathai, Wangari (2006) Unbowed: A Memoir, New York: Knopf.
Nnaemeka, Obioma (2004) “Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing and Pruning Africa’s Way,” Signs
29(2): 357–385.
Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo (1985) “Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female
Novel in English,” Signs 11: 63–80.
Sow, Fatou (1998) “Mutilations Génitales Féminines et Droits Humains en Afrique [Female Genital
Mutilation and Human Rights in Africa],” Afrique en Développement XXIII(3): 9–27.
—— (Ed.) (2009) La Recherche Féministe Francophone: Langue, Identités et Enjeux [Francophone Feminist
Research: Language, Identities Issues], Paris: Karthala.
Walker, Alice (1984 [1983]) In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, London: Women’s Press.

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 5
FEMINIST ENGAGEMENT
WITH JUDEO-CHRISTIAN
RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS
Beverley Clack

A Brief History of Feminist Religious and

Theological Critique
When considering the feminist engagement with Judeo-Christian religious and
theological traditions, it is tempting to offer a straightforward “history of ideas.” This
would describe the various ways in which these religious traditions have been critiqued,
deconstructed, and reconstructed by feminist scholars.
Adopting such an approach, we might begin with the critique of God conceived as
Father offered by Mary Daly (1985 [1973]). For Daly, it is this notion that lies at the
heart of patriarchal ideologies, reifying political systems based upon an implicit belief in
the superiority of the male. Daly’s famous remark that “if God is male, then the male is
God” offers a pithy description of the effect that patriarchal religion has on the construc-
tion of social structures (1985 [1973]: 19). Theology is not an esoteric practice, divorced
from the world of social relationships: it both supports and shapes political ideology.
Daly’s The Church and the Second Sex (1968) paved the way for this conclusion, expos-
ing the way in which theological formulations and religious practices shape misogyny.
Rosemary Radford Ruether (1974), among others, built upon Daly’s arguments to fur-
ther expose the use of religious ideas to support sexism. Nearly fifty years on, there is no
room for complacency, Daly’s evocative description of the social effect of masculinist
theological language continuing to resonate in a contemporary context where women’s
representation—both political and religious—remains a contested issue.
From Daly’s groundbreaking work, our intellectual history might go on to detail the
direction taken by feminists like Carol Christ (1979; 1998) who concluded that patriar-
chal religions cannot escape their formation in patriarchal history and are thus incapa-
ble of supporting the well-being of women. As a result, Christ, with others (Goldenberg
1979), preferred to construct new forms of feminist spirituality based on the ancient
religious traditions of the Goddess (Raphael 1999).
Noting this thea-logical shift, we might then consider approaches that resist such
a move. Ruether’s response, for example, is to develop a critical feminist liberation
 Feminism and Judeo-Christian Religion

theology by identifying a “Golden Thread” concerned with liberation, which, she

claims, runs through the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (Ruether 1983; 1998).
Galatians 3: 28 might be held up as a text that exemplifies this radical message of equal-
ity and freedom from oppression: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave
nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
The positive reclamation of religious tradition has been furthered by figures such as
Janet Martin Soskice (1984; 2007) and Sarah Coakley (1996), who argue that there are
good reasons not to discard religious traditions that have emerged from a history defined
by male domination. For Coakley, the self-giving or kenosis of the Christian God offers
a radical way of reformulating ideas of vulnerability. For Soskice, the plethora of images
offered in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is rich enough to challenge the
patriarchal models that have disproportionately shaped Christian theory and practice.
Our history of Western feminist religious thought might then consider more recent
examples of feminists such as Amy Hollywood (2001) and Ellen Armour (1999; 2006)
who apply critical theory to the development of radical new feminist religious positions.
We might, in similar vein, consider Melissa Raphael’s blending of Goddess spirituality
with her Jewish faith (2003). This approach shows that feminist commitments need not
be defined by an acceptance of an implicit dualism in which it is a simple case of decid-
ing for one or other side of a dualistic construction of belief systems.
It would also be vital when detailing the richness of feminist thinking to consider
the critique made of “white feminist” theology by Womanist theologians such as
Dolores Williams (2005). For Womanists, feminist theology has avoided tackling the
issue of race, thereby enabling racial oppression to go unchallenged. A self-critical
feminist theology must engage with this powerful critique if it is not to speak only to
the concerns of a few women rather than the need of all women to be affirmed in their
full humanity. In what follows, the importance of this feminist intellectual history will
be present, if not foregrounded, for its variety bears witness to the creativity of this
area of feminist enquiry.
My intention is not, however, to offer a straightforwardly descriptive account of the
history of feminist attempts to engage with the Judeo-Christian religious past, crea-
tive as such attempts undoubtedly are. What will shape my narrative is a rather differ-
ent concern: Why might radically different feminist scholars with radically different
concerns have felt compelled to shape their ideas through an engagement with that
religious past? For, rather than ditch the whole area of religious enquiry as hopelessly
outmoded, they have sought to develop religious positions that take seriously women’s
lives and experiences, maintaining the value of religious perspectives for the pursuit of
human flourishing.

The Attraction of Religion: Michèle Le Doeuff

on Possibilities and Pitfalls
A comment made by the French philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff can illuminate the
reasons for continuing to engage with religious ideas. Towards the end of her reflections
on the exclusion of women from the history of philosophy (1989), Le Doeuff describes
the pull of the religious perspective for those who, like her, are attempting to shape an
alternative feminist philosophy:

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 ENGAGING THE PAST

Still confused, I now open Pascal—and I suddenly see why, however foreign
the religious concepts of his work are to me, I feel more “at home” in the
Pensées than in any of the other classic texts. It is because the religious perspec-
tive hints at this penumbra of unknowledge (a penumbra which has nothing
to do with the limits of reason), which metaphysics has denied. Here is a form
of writing which does not claim to reconstruct and explain everything, which
slides along the verge of the unthought, develops only by grafting itself on to
another discourse, and consents to be its tributary.
(1989: 127)

Why this turn to religion from someone who is not religious? It is worth tracing Le
Doeuff’s route to this point, for it helps to clarify the continuing attraction of religious
perspectives for feminist thinkers. It also, perhaps, challenges Tina Beattie’s (1999)
claim that all too often feminist theologians have felt like Cinderellas excluded from
the secular feminist ball.
Le Doeuff’s comments arise as she considers the kind of method that is possible if one
rejects masculinist constructions of what it is to do philosophy. She begins by consid-
ering reasons why women might have been excluded from the practice of philosophy,
and cautions against simplistic accounts that claim women have been excluded “from
time immemorial” (1989: 100). As she notes, women have always managed to become
philosophers, but invariably they have felt compelled to position their thoughts in
relation to the thinking of a man. Consider, Le Doeuff says, the relationship of Abelard
and Héloïse. Just as Héloïse came to frame her thoughts in relation to Abelard’s theol-
ogy, so other women have been similarly nervous about developing their own ideas
unshackled from the constricting frame of discipleship. A troubling example of this
tendency is provided by Simone de Beauvoir’s startling acceptance of Sartre’s conclu-
sion that she was not a philosopher, analysed by Le Doeuff in Hipparchia’s Choice (2007
[1990]: Third Notebook). Given Beauvoir’s position as the mother of contemporary
feminism—a status recently reclaimed for her by Susan Hekman (2014)—her unwill-
ingness to claim the title “philosopher” is both perplexing and unsettling for those
women who are attempting to do so.
The temptation to give way before the supposed brilliance of the “male master”
mirrors the theological temptation to align oneself overly closely with the thought of
either a particular man, or, indeed, with a specific patriarchal religious history. While
post-Christians have challenged the status of the “man who is God” for their Christian
sisters, they have not been able to escape entirely from the organizing pull of the
male thinker. Daphne Hampson (2002) uses Schleiermacher to construct her post-
Christian God, while Carol Christ (2003) appropriates Charles Hartshorne for her
process thealogy of the Goddess. In order not to ignore my own duplicity, my attempt
to shape a psychoanalytic account of religion does so by reclaiming aspects of Freud’s
critique (Clack 2013). It is not surprising that so many make this move to anchor their
thoughts in the ideas of a male master. As Daly notes, barring relocating to the moon,
which she does imaginatively in her autobiography, it is almost impossible to escape
a patriarchal past that is, sadly, a universal feature of human society (1993: 337–345).
Le Doeuff’s solution to this problem is to shift the understanding of philosophy away
from discipleship towards practice. As she develops this position, she appropriates a key
feature of the religious perspective that seems to accommodate the openness she seeks
for her framing of philosophy.

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 Feminism and Judeo-Christian Religion

Le Doeuff turns her attention to the implicit gendering of philosophical practice.

With Grace Jantzen (1995: 31–32), Le Doeuff notes the significance of Pythagoras’
(c.570–495 bce) dualistic framing of reality, itself a defining moment in the history
of philosophical method. Pythagoras aligns the female with that which is infinite and
multiple, and the male with limit and unity (Le Doeuff 1989: 113). The implications of
this dualistic construction for an ideal of “the philosopher” cannot be underestimated.
That which is boundless—the female—must be constrained by the force of the limiting
male. Social control and method mesh, philosophical practice coming to reflect the
primacy of establishing limits and creating unity as its practitioners pursue watertight
arguments and final conclusions. Philosophy is constructed as a closed system, where
debate is directed towards the final goal of “true knowledge” (Le Doeuff 1989: 117).
Absolutism in thinking lends itself with some ease to the quest for a master who has
the one, true answer. Le Doeuff resists this construction, arguing that there is never an
end to philosophical practice: it is simply what we do. It is “an unfinished philosophi-
cal discourse, never closed and never concluded,” an incomplete practice that involves
“the abandonment of any totalizing aim” (1989: 126–127). To accept her vision is to
reject the model of the lone philosopher seeking “the truth.” The subject of the enter-
prise that is philosophy is

no longer a person—or, better still, if each person involved in the enterprise

is no longer in the position of being the subject of the enterprise but in that of
being a worker, engaged in and committed to an enterprise which is seen from
the outset as collective—it seems to me that the relationship to knowledge—
and to gaps in knowledge—can be transformed.
(Le Doeuff 1989: 127)

Rejecting the role of the master, Le Doeuff argues for a collective form of philosophical
engagement, where the practice of critical thinking challenges and shapes both indi-
vidual behavior and, crucially, the public sphere. Anne-Marie Mulder, in her recent
attempt to frame an ethical philosophy of religion, makes a similar point when she
argues for a philosophical practice which “develop[s] and maintain[s] horizontal rela-
tions between subjects” (2010: 299). For Le Doeuff, critical thought has the power to
establish this possibility, challenging habitual ways of behaving through the applica-
tion of rigorous philosophical critique. For both Mulder and Le Doeuff, philosophical
practice is not divorced from the public sphere, having the power to enable better ways
of living together.

Framing a Practical Feminist Philosophy of Religion

How to frame this practical philosophy? While cautious of the theological acceptance
of “mystery,” Le Doeuff recognizes the value of a perspective that sees incompleteness
as fundamental to human experience. Religious perspectives allow for the recognition
that not all can be known. Similarly, to adopt a religious perspective is to engage in the
kind of un-knowing that gets us to think about the world differently. Human knowl-
edge is not a closed system; it is not incapable of challenge and change. Enshrining
not-knowing in this way is useful for Le Doeuff’s framing of philosophical practice as it
suggests a way of thinking by which “a relationship to the unknown and the unthought
is at every moment reintroduced” (1989: 128).

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Importantly, such a perspective cultivates openness, although it also does more

than this. Openness is not openness for its own sake: it is important because it
provides the basis for a different kind of life together, in which the complexity
of communal life is not evaded, but celebrated. As Western societies increasingly
seem willing to accept the claim that “There Is No Alternative” to their dominant
economic and social system (the so-called TINA doctrine), the stance that Le
Doeuff advocates allows precisely for such alternatives to emerge. There is always
the possibility of change, always the possibility of finding and enacting ways of
living more conducive to the flourishing of all, not just a few. One is reminded of
Hannah Arendt’s vision of the healthy political space as one in which a plethora
of positions is acknowledged and accepted (Arendt 1998 [1958]). Something even
more fundamental characterizes Le Doeuff’s position, for she returns feminist phi-
losophy to the defining feature of feminism: it is a political movement concerned
with liberation.

Thinking Again About Religion and Feminism

And so we return to religion. There are, of course, many possible pitfalls if one
recognizes the pull of the religious dimension. One might become enmeshed in repeat-
ing the historical formulations of the fathers; one might reject openness in favor of
accepting the dogmatic formulations of a particular tradition. As feminist liberation
theologian Lisa Isherwood notes, we do well to remember that religious doctrine can
all too easily become a bar to creative thinking, acting as “the fossilisation of people’s
original reflections of the nature of the divine in their lives” (2008: 202).
There is danger, but there is also possibility. Religious space, as Le Doeuff identifies
it, provides an open place for creative reflection. At the heart of this space is a willing-
ness to accept the uncertainties that attend to the experience of being mutable beings
in a changing world. Accepting uncertainty is no easy thing, for it demands giving up
on the idea that human beings are in control of every aspect of their lives. The kind of
philosophical practice that Le Doeuff rejects might be seen in this context. The philo-
sophical obsession with pinning things down can be traced back to an anxiety about
the precariousness of life in this world, its methods offering a false sense of security by
eschewing the things that have historically been identified with the female: nature,
desire, physicality, change. Le Doeuff’s approach to this problem is subtle. Resisting the
move to enshrine and validate feminine difference articulated by feminists like Luce
Irigaray (1985 [1977]), Le Doeuff maintains the significance of critical reflection, while
going beyond simply reclaiming rationality for the female. Instead, her method recog-
nizes the ambiguity inherent in human experience, and the need to transform binary
accounts of rationality.
Accepting, rather than rejecting, ambiguity suggests common ground between
Le Doeuff’s reworking of philosophical method and the practices of feminist
theo/alogians. For thealogians, the divinity of the body is enshrined in their formulation
of the Goddess who reflects and shapes experience of the female body (Raphael 1996).
Those remaining in the Christian tradition similarly challenge dualistic constructions
of mind and body. Here, the Christian idea of Incarnation is reworked, Christ revealing
the radical possibilities of proclaiming a God made flesh. Isherwood captures the radical
nature of this formulation as she reflects on the emergence of her theology from her roots
in the Welsh landscape:

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 Feminism and Judeo-Christian Religion

As a Celt my landscape begs me to question the hierarchy of worlds; as the

mists lie low over the mountaintops it is easy to understand the gap between
the human and the divine is ruah, a breath—or one small step into uncertainty.
(2008: 203)

To be religious is not to find certainty but to embrace uncertainty. Isherwood’s image

of mist on mountaintops suggests a way of thinking religiously that is conducive to the
sense of openness that Le Doeuff seeks. Religion need not be framed as providing easily
accessible answers to existential or metaphysical questions, but rather as a space that
makes possible deeper thinking about humanity and our place in the world.
To think of religion in this way may sound strange. After all, the notion of religion as
a means of providing answers to the questions of existence is long-lived and extremely
attractive in a world of chance and change. But in feminist theo/alogical thought, reli-
gion offers a different way of engaging with that reality, providing stories and images
capable of opening up rather than closing down the engagement with such a world.
If Pythagoras makes a connection between Woman, the infinite and that which is
without limit, we might, in the manner of Luce Irigaray (1993 [1984]), embrace rather
than reject this characterization (see Jantzen 1998). In feminist philosophy of religion,
this possibility has been taken seriously, with feminist practitioners challenging the
habitual construction of the discipline as the practice by which the rational grounds
for religious belief can be determined. Twentieth-century philosophy of religion has
been defined as the attempt to establish “the coherence of theism,” to appropriate the
title of Richard Swinburne’s book on the subject (1977). But feminist philosophers of
religion have challenged the implication that we should reject whatever lies outside of
these philosophical constraints on a rational religious perspective.
We might pause, however, before rejecting out of hand the method that Swinburne
advocates. There may be good reasons for directing the cool eye of reason to an area
of life that can all too easily be co-opted to hateful or violent behavior. We have, after
all, already noted the role of religious tradition in promoting misogynistic attitudes and
behaviors (see also Clack 1999a). Kant, famously, was suspicious of religious enthusiasm
because of the potentially destructive emotions it elicits. And he was suitably dismissive
of claims that Abraham was told by God to sacrifice Isaac, for to accept such a conclu-
sion would mean that God could do that which is immoral in human eyes, a claim Kant
stoutly rejects (Kant 1998 [1793]). Yet to approach religion critically need not mean
rejecting the possibility of using it to engage creatively with the world.
Adopting this strategy might take us in surprising directions: Elizabeth Stuart’s (2008)
revisiting of the belief in life after death offers an example. While Stuart notes the ease
with which feminists reject the notion of continued life after death (Plumwood 1993;
Jantzen 1998: 137–141; Clack 1999b), she argues that no theme should be foreclosed
to feminists. Indeed, she makes a strong case for maintaining such a belief in a world
of injustice and pain. We might disagree with her conclusions, but, for Stuart, feminist
thinking must be defined by the willingness to reject the easy closing down of debates,
resisting the temptation to establish new orthodoxies that constrain creative thinking.

Religious Plurality and Feminist Flourishing

A plethora of positions are possible, then, for religious thinking when claims for uncer-
tainty are taken seriously. It is difficult not to be reminded of Nietzsche’s use of the

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open sea as a metaphor for the time after the death of god (2001 [1881]: §343). As he
notes, this openness can be experienced as liberating, but it can also be experienced as
inducing seasickness as we realize the loss of any obvious anchor for thought and action
(2001 [1881]: 119–120).
Nietzsche’s approach emphasizes the loneliness of the Übermensch who alone has
the strength to embrace this open future, boldly embarking on the transvaluation
of all values. Feminists need not tread a similarly lonely path. A different move is
possible for a feminism that takes seriously its roots as a political movement, and,
moreover, as a movement concerned to create a more just and equal society. As a
movement, we do not encounter openness or uncertainty alone but together. The
feminist philosopher is not modelled like Descartes, dependent on the servant girl
“who lit the fire in [his] stove” (Jantzen 1998: 33), thereby enabling his philosophical
isolation. As we saw, for Le Doeuff, philosophical activity has to be re-visioned as a
joint activity of mutual endeavour. Relationship becomes the context for generating
ideas, but also acts as the focus for that philosophizing: how best to create a society
where we are able to live well together?
The focus, then, shifts to the question of what makes for human flourishing. When
Pamela Sue Anderson (1998) and Grace Jantzen (1998) produced the first works dedi-
cated to developing a feminist approach to philosophy of religion, they both understood
flourishing to be at the heart of feminist thinking. Rather different starting points shape
their approaches: Anderson offers an explicitly Kantian approach, while Jantzen applies
psychoanalytic categories to uncover the role of the unconscious. Yet for both what
matters is developing an ethical philosophy of religion.
Jantzen’s work is the most telling for an account that attempts to understand the use-
fulness of religious frameworks for feminist philosophers. She offers critical reflections
on the effects of patriarchal religion on women and marginalized others, but this does
not stop her thinking about the kinds of religious sensibility that might help to create
healthy communities (Jantzen 1998: 204–226). The divine horizon that she appropri-
ates from Irigaray’s work helps Jantzen to develop an alternative to patriarchal religion
that provides the space for creative thinking and—crucially—for better ways of living.
Religion can be viewed, then, as providing space for the kind of playfulness neces-
sary for shaping alternative visions of how we might live. Perhaps it is not surprising
that Jantzen should adopt aspects of psychoanalytic theory in order to do this, her work
prompting thoughts of Donald Winnicott’s (1971) location of religion in the space
opened up between self and other by play. Religion emerges in the place between two
people or positions where relationship is created. As Julia Kristeva notes, relationship
requires this space between self and other (1987 [1985]). Thinking of religion as located
in the spaces between selves is to adopt a model rather different from that which ima-
gines it as a form of pseudo science, attempting to fill in the gaps in human knowledge.
Instead, religion can be seen as providing a space in which we share in the creative
imagining of the world.
What does it mean to commit oneself to creating communities capable of sustaining
the flourishing of individuals and, indeed, the planet? For it is worth noting that Jantzen
takes on board the concerns of ecofeminists as she explores what makes for a flourishing
world (1998: 156–170). Flourishing is difficult to define: what makes me flourish might
be different from—indeed, in tension with—what you require. It is this complexity that
brings into play the quality necessary for flourishing that, at the same time, has rarely
been considered worthy of “serious” philosophical investigation: love.

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 Feminism and Judeo-Christian Religion

Feminist philosophers have understood the importance of attending to love

(see Anderson 2008). Kristeva finds religious stories useful for considering love’s nature.
Love, of all concepts and emotions the most difficult to pin down, reveals the weak-
nesses of the philosopher’s desire for control. As Kristeva notes, when philosophers try
to “settle a score with theology” they forget that “in this respect one had to consider our
loves—that with which theology, for its part, had the cunning to concern itself” (1987
[1985]: 279). For Kristeva, then, religious ideas provide a valuable way of engaging with
the messiness of the experience of love, in all its myriad forms.
The most dramatic example of this appropriation of religious stories is found in
Kristeva’s essay “Stabat Mater,” in which reflection on the grieving Mary at the foot
of her son’s cross is used to explore the sometimes painful experiences of motherhood
(Kristeva 2001 [1977]: 112–138). Love, in all its joyful and sorrowful manifestations,
is made through relationship, without which we are incapable of flourishing as human
beings. We might also note Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Trinity, which has become a
popular way of envisaging the Trinity: three androgynous figures sit at a table eating,
an image that suggests the need for communion with each other, expressed here in a
relational depiction of the divine.
Feminists have used relational depictions of the God-In-Three-Persons to explore
what makes for good relationships. Sallie McFague (1982) explores the nature of friend-
ship as she models God as Friend. Similarly, Beverly Harrison (1985) makes love the
basis for theology and community. For our purposes, pursuing Le Doeuff’s co-option of
religion for philosophical method, the idea of God as conversation makes possible good
philosophical practice. Good conversation grounds friendship. There is no end point to
the conversation between friends, just an ever-open discourse that shapes and reflects
the relationship itself.
It is not necessary to hold to the doctrine of the Trinity in order to recognize rela-
tionship as fundamental to what it means to be human. Aristotle’s definition of the
human being as a “zoon politikon” (“social animal”) suggests a similar recognition of our
need for one another. But there is something about the religious desire to connect with
others and the world—arguably the desire that lies at the root of that much-debated
word “religare”—that enables the anchoring of human flourishing in social relation-
ships. We cannot flourish alone.
This is one of the reasons why feminist theo/alogies are orientated towards the ethi-
cal. What makes for good community demands not just theory but practical steps to live
that theory out. Similarly, Le Doeuff’s work is peppered with examples drawn from her
experience as a feminist activist. Feminist philosophy as she conceives it draws its power
from the practical work of community building. In this way, we come to know whether
our philosophy has a positive or negative effect on the lives of others; whether it helps
or hinders the cultivation of places conducive to the well-being of all, including those
who are marginalized (Le Doeuff 2003: 82–83).
The work of creating societies capable of supporting human flourishing requires both
the work of deconstruction and reconstruction: activities that have marked the history
of feminist religious thought. We need to identify the things that hinder as well as the
things that enable human flourishing. This may take us beyond the usual parameters of
feminist thought. We might, for example, need to embark on far-reaching critiques of
the dominant neoliberal discourse that suggests that “the market” and the desires of indi-
viduals are the only determinants of value. Locating our philosophies in such a context
may well necessitate a return to the question of truth, for it is not without importance

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for establishing the kind of values that support the flourishing of all. As Harriet Harris
(2001) notes, a critical feminist philosophy of religion will do well to remember that the
striving for truth is not without ethical import. Openness does not mean the rejection of
that critical striving, and Harris’ work challenges us to consider the effect of our philoso-
phies and theologies on those with whom we share this world.

Conclusion
We return to the questions posed at the outset. Why is the engagement with religion
important for feminists? What does a religious perspective add to Le Doeuff’s desire for
an open form of philosophical practice?
The variety of feminist religious and theological perspectives suggests something
of the ways in which religious ideas and stories enable new ways of engaging with
the world and with others. Religions emerged as attempts to make sense of the world
in which human beings found themselves. Through providing frameworks for think-
ing, they shaped human community. They have not always done this successfully,
and history is replete with examples of the destructive effects of religious traditions
that have sought to force their view of the world on others. But religions have also
borne witness to the creative impulse of human beings, and the desire to express that
creativity in community.
In feminist philosophy of religion there is the possibility of anchoring philosophy
in life. In the uncertainty to which religions bear witness, there is the possibility of
allowing for a new openness in the way in which we engage with each other, meeting
the other person as someone who is also struggling to find a way through the complex
and often painful experience of life in this world. Feminist philosophy, thus located,
becomes a form of liberating practice. As Patrice Haynes notes: “feminist philosophy
of religion must advance a form of critical thinking that can serve as the basis for social
transformation” (2010: 281). Feminism returns to its roots as a political movement,
which demands that its followers live out its concern with liberation in personal rela-
tionships and political action. To do that we need rich and colorful stories to think
again about the things that really matter in life. In their ability to generate these stories,
religious traditions offer a helpful way forward.

Further Reading
Anderson, Pamela Sue (2010) New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion, London: Springer.
Hampson, Daphne (2002) After Christianity, 2nd ed. London: SCM.
Le Doeuff, Michèle (1989) “Long Hair, Short Ideas,” in Michèle Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary,
London: Athlone, 100–128.
Radford Ruether, Rosemary (2011) Women and Redemption: A Theological History, 2nd ed., Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress Press.

Related Topics
Feminist methods in the history of philosophy (Chapter 1); feminist intersections with
environmentalism and ecological thought (Chapter 35); encountering religious diver-
sity (Chapter 36); aesthetics and the politics of gender: on Arendt’s theory of narrative
and action (Chapter 38); feminism and power (Chapter 54).

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 Feminism and Judeo-Christian Religion

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Oxford: Wiley.
—— (2008) “Liberating Love’s Capabilities: On the Wisdom of Love,” in Norman Wirzba and Bruce Ellis
Benson (Eds.) Transforming Philosophy and Religion, Indianapolis, IN: Indianapolis University Press,
201–226.
Arendt, Hannah (1998 [1958]) The Human Condition, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Armour, Ellen (1999) Deconstruction, Feminist Theology and the Problem of Difference, Chicago, IL: University
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—— (2006) Bodily Citations: Judith Butler and Religion, New York: Columbia University Press.
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—— (2013) Freud on the Couch, Oxford: OneWorld.
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Harrison, Beverly (1985) Making the Connections, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Hekman, Susan (2014) The Feminine Subject, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hollywood, Amy (2001) Sensible Ecstasy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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—— (1993 [1984]) An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, London: Athlone
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Kristeva, Julia (1987 [1985]) In the Beginning Was Love, New York: Columbia University Press.
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Mulder, Anne-Marie (2010) “An Ethics of the In-Between,” in Pamela Sue Anderson, (Ed.) New Topics in
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 6
EARLY MODERN FEMINISM
AND CARTESIAN
PHILOSOPHY
Jacqueline Broad

Introduction
In early modern Europe (c.1500–1700) it was a common perception that men and
women had different bodily qualities: men’s bodies were hot and dry, while women’s
were cold and moist; men were strong and active, while women were weak and passive.
According to French physician Marin Cureau de la Chambre, these different bodily
temperaments gave rise to different dispositions in the minds of men and women. On
account of being hot, a man was naturally inclined to be courageous, magnanimous, sin-
cere, liberal, merciful, just, and grateful. Because he was dry, a man was also capable of
having a strong resolve, and of being constant, patient, modest, faithful, and judicious.
By contrast, on account of being cold, a woman was:

Weak, and consequently Fearfull, Pusillanimous, Jealous, Distrustfull, Crafty, apt

to Dissemble, Flatter, Lie, easily Offended, Revengefull, Cruel in her revenge,
Unjust, Covetous, Ungratefull, Superstitious. And from her being moist, it follows
that she should be Unconstant, Light, Unfaithfull, Impatient, easily Perswaded,
Compassionate, Talkative.
(Cureau 1670: 26, italics in original)

A woman’s mind was especially susceptible to impressions from outside: it was credu-
lous, changeable, and fickle. Though Cureau and others insisted that these inclina-
tions were proper and natural to the female sex—and thus constituted a woman’s
“perfection” (when held in equilibrium)—it was generally thought that women
compared to men were defective by nature, and that women were inherently lacking in
the moral and intellectual competence of the male sex.
While these were popular views of the time, however, they were by no means uncon-
tested or uncontroversial. The seventeenth century bore witness to a number of argu-
ments in favor of the moral and intellectual equality of the sexes (for helpful overviews,
see Clarke 2013; O’Neill 2011). Such arguments can be found in the works of Marie
le Jars de Gournay, François Poullain de la Barre, Anna Maria van Schurman, Bathsua
Makin, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, Judith Drake, Gabrielle Suchon, Mary
Chudleigh, and Damaris Masham, among others.
 ENGAGING THE PAST

In this chapter I examine the influence of Cartesian philosophy on feminist thought

of the seventeenth century. More specifically, I outline the impact of Cartesian epis-
temological, metaphysical, and ethical ideas on the arguments of the French thinker
François Poullain de la Barre (1647–1723) and the English philosopher Mary Astell
(1666–1731). My purpose is to highlight those aspects of Cartesian philosophy that
were central to their feminist thought. In doing so, I propose to elaborate on—and, to
some extent, sharpen and refine—previous statements on the subject of Cartesianism
and feminism.
In the scholarly literature to date, it is an accepted view that Descartes’ method of
doubt provided significant inspiration for early modern feminists. This is the famous
method whereby Descartes doubted every belief that he could possibly doubt in order
to obtain clear and certain knowledge. By analogy, he reasoned, it was better to
demolish an old house built on weak foundations and construct a new building rather
than try to repair the old one piece by piece. His process of “demolition” or universal
doubt famously came to an end with one certain and indubitable truth: that “I am, I
exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind”
(Descartes 1984: 17). This insight, now known as the cogito, provided Descartes with
a criterion of truth and certainty—“clarity and distinctness”—from which to re-build
knowledge on secure foundations.
Though Descartes’ method was never intended to cast doubt on political or reli-
gious authority, its anti-authoritarian implications were obvious to a number of his
near contemporaries (see Israel 2001). Ruth Perry observes that Cartesian method
enabled early modern feminists to call into question the aforementioned prejudices
and preconceptions concerning female moral and intellectual inferiority. By gaining a
familiarity with this radical method, and engaging in a “willful doubting of all previous
knowledge,” Perry says (1985: 479), women became critically minded toward oppres-
sive gender stereotypes of their time. The method of doubt thus provided a “powerful
and revolutionary” mechanism by which women could be liberated (Perry 1985: 475).
Scholars also claim that Descartes’ philosophy of mind provided crucial support for
the idea that “the mind has no sex.” According to Descartes, the mind is essentially a
thinking substance. Simply by looking within myself, I can know that the essence of my
mind is to think. I can also deduce that the essence of my body, a material thing, is to be
extended in length, breadth, and depth. Furthermore, I can clearly and distinctly con-
ceive of my mind, a purely thinking, non-extended thing, existing apart from my body,
a purely extended, non-thinking thing. In Descartes’ view, it follows that the mind and
body are two distinct substances, capable of existing independently of one another.
Perry notes that in this period, “Once mind was separated from body, and elevated,
nothing could be argued from physiology,” and that “women’s reproductive capacity
could no longer be held against them if all minds were created equal and rationality was
the cardinal virtue” (1985: 473). Catharine Gallagher likewise points out that: “Many
seventeenth-century women writers were inspired by Descartes’ dualism to assert their
intellectual equality with men; for if, as Descartes argued, mind has no extension,
then it also has no gender” (1988: 34). In her view, Cartesian philosophy instituted a
“clean break” between mind and body (Gallagher 1988: 34). Erica Harth adds that “the
mind has no sex” is a “rallying cry” for feminists in the period (1992: 81), and Marcelle
Maistre Welch likewise asserts that “the mind has no sex” is “the bedrock of modern
feminist philosophy” in this era, one that owes its origins to Descartes’ “dualism of mind
and body” (Poullain 2002: 82, n. 27).

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 Feminism and cartesian philosophy

These common generalizations about Cartesianism and feminism face certain

difficulties and limitations, however. First, it must be noted that in the context of
Descartes’ wider project the method of doubt is, strictly speaking, a skeptical tool: it is
an instrument to annihilate opinions rather than establish positive truths (Descartes’
doubting comes to an end with the cogito). So while the method of doubt is useful for
the purposes of negative feminist critique, by itself it is unable to establish certain posi-
tive truths about women’s mental competence, or to suggest normative reasons why
women should not be treated differently to men. To form the basis of a full-blooded
feminist theory, this method requires supplementation with a theory of mind and an
ethical or political standpoint.
Second, the supposedly Cartesian idea that “the mind has no sex” is hard to rec-
oncile with Descartes’ explicit claim that the living human being is a mind–body com-
posite (on this point, see O’Neill 1999: 240). In his Meditationes de prima philosophiae
[Meditations on First Philosophy] (first published 1641), following an argument for the
real distinction between mind and body, Descartes states: “I am not merely present
in my body as a sailor is present in a ship” (1984: 56). To some extent, of course, he
concedes that I am like a sailor in a ship: I can steer my body this way and that, and
I can make certain choices and perform certain actions that prevent my vessel from
coming to harm. But in other respects, I am not like a sailor: when a sailor’s boat hits
the rocks, he does not intimately experience the damage. But when my body hits the
rocks, I feel the impact deep within me: I am discomposed by sensations of pain, I
experience the passions of fear and dread, and I am unable not to feel the pounding
of my heart and the shortness of my breath. Such feelings and sensations overwhelm
my ability to think clearly and rationally. As Descartes explains in his final work
Les Passions de l’âme [The Passions of the Soul] (1649), the body influences the mind’s
thought processes in disturbing and confusing ways. Cartesian philosophy does not
therefore institute a “clean break” between mind and body, or posit a “separation”
between the two substances. It holds that for any living human being, a mind will
always be united to, and closely intermingled with, a particular body. For Descartes,
then, the human mind does have a sex: it is tied, fused, joined, united, and closely
connected to either a male or a female physiology.
In light of these points, several puzzles and questions arise about the Cartesian
influence on feminist thought in this period. In particular, it is difficult to see how
the mere assertion of a sexless mind could have mounted an effective challenge to
the prevailing sexism of the times. In Cureau’s view, a woman’s natural temperament
made her a slave to her bodily passions: it rendered her weak, feeble, inconstant,
easily persuaded, and generally mentally incompetent. In her correspondence with
Descartes about the mind–body union, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia expresses a
similar view about the immaterial mind’s inability to overcome her female bodily
temperament. “I have a body imbued with a large part of the weaknesses of my sex,”
she says, “so that it is affected very easily by the afflictions of the soul and has none
of the strength to bring itself back into line” (Elisabeth and Descartes 2007: 88). She
raises a pertinent point: if women’s minds could still be so strongly influenced by their
bodies, it is not clear that with the rise of Cartesianism, “nothing could be argued
from physiology” or that “women’s reproductive capacity could no longer be held
against them” as Perry says (1985: 473).
In the following discussion, I propose to address these difficulties by highlight-
ing other influential aspects of Cartesian philosophy for feminist thought, such as

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Descartes’ views concerning error and judgment, his philosophy of the passions, and
his ethical ideas concerning virtue. I suggest that the writings of Poullain and Astell
are valuable for giving us a strong appreciation of the philosophical sophistication of
Cartesian feminism in this era.

Poullain
François Poullain de la Barre is significant for being one of the first writers to follow
through on the socio-political implications of Descartes’ philosophy. From 1673 to
1675, in three anonymous French works—De L’Égalité des deux sexes [On the Equality
of the Two Sexes] (1673), De L’Éducation des dames [On the Education of Ladies] (1674),
and De L’Excellence des hommes [On the Excellence of Men] (1675)—Poullain argues in
favor of the equality of the sexes. Using Cartesian method, he challenges the prevail-
ing prejudice that women are naturally morally and intellectually inferior and there-
fore ought to be treated as social inferiors to men. Significantly, he does not attempt
a general demolition of opinions or a “willful doubting of all previous knowledge,”
as Descartes does in the Meditations. Rather, in On the Education of Ladies, Poullain
defines a state of general doubt as a “frame of mind, a state of impartiality or of objec-
tivity in which we lean neither to one side nor the other, suspending our judgment
until doubt has been allayed” (2002: 175). In this respect, his method bears a resem-
blance to Descartes’s method of avoiding error, or his way of “rightly conducting one’s
reason,” in his Discours de la méthode [Discourse on the Method] (1637) and the Fourth
Meditation of the Meditations (both cited in Poullain 2002: 237). Poullain also emu-
lates the methodological approach of Descartes’ followers Antoine Arnauld and Pierre
Nicole in their 1662 work La Logique, ou l’art de penser [Logic, or the Art of Thinking]
(cited in Poullain 2002: 237).
In the aforementioned texts, each author recommends following certain useful
rules of thinking in order to find truth. According to Descartes, error is the result
of a dysfunctional relationship between the two mental faculties of the will and the
understanding. The understanding is a passive faculty of perceiving ideas in the mind,
whereas the will is an active faculty of affirming or denying, rejecting or accepting,
whatever is presented to it. Error comes about when the intellect presents me with
certain ideas, and my will leaps in and rashly affirms those ideas as true or false, without
taking time for proper reflection. Error, in other words, is a result of hasty judgments.
It is an outcome of the will “getting the jump on” the understanding, so to speak,
rather than waiting for the understanding to determine its assent. To avoid error, I
must attentively follow the right method of thinking: I must suspend or withhold my
judgments about confused and obscure perceptions, and my will must affirm only those
ideas that are clear and distinct (Descartes 1984: 40–41).
Along the same lines, in On the Equality, Poullain subjects certain sexist assumptions
to “the rule of truth”: he resolves to “accept nothing as true unless it is supported by
clear and distinct ideas” (2002: 50). This method enables him to challenge ill-founded
prejudices—rash judgments, that is, “made without examination” (Poullain 2002: 49,
n. 2). Poullain critically examines the common prejudice that women have a native
feebleness, that they do not have an aptitude for learning and study in the sciences,
and that they are necessarily incapable of virtue due to their inconstancy, timidity, and
credulity. In his view, these judgments fail to pass the test of verity. He allows that in

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early modern society, women are in a state of subjection to men. They are psychologi-
cally, intellectually, and financially dependent on men, and they are barred from access
to all higher education and any public position that requires a sophisticated level of
intelligence and skill. Consequently, as a matter of contingent fact, he says, women
exhibit a certain dependence of mind, a seeming intellectual deficiency, and a timidity
and reserve in their manner. But in his opinion, this is neither a natural nor a necessary
state of affairs.
To demonstrate this point, Poullain highlights the fact that uneducated women
often show more common sense than learned men. In their everyday lives, he says,
ordinary women give countless examples that they are capable of reasoning about com-
plicated things. History, moreover, has shown us that some women have been the
supreme leaders of nations; others have acted as magistrates in various courts of law;
and many have shown remarkable valor, bravery, and resolution in defense of their
religion (Poullain 2002: 77). In short, he argues that popular generalizations about
female incompetence can be readily contradicted by empirical evidence, and that
women are perfectly capable of occupying public positions in society. If we were to
judge that women’s current condition in society is natural or right merely because it
happens to be the case, then this would be a hasty and potentially erroneous judgment.
In keeping with Cartesian method, we must suspend or withhold such judgments.
For Poullain, Cartesian method is not only a negative tool of critique: the method
of right thinking also features strongly in his arguments for the claim that women’s
intellectual deficiencies can be overcome. To deduce the truth, he says, requires only
that the mind have a capacity for judgment; anyone who can exercise this capacity in
one sphere of inquiry can easily apply it in another. In order to think clearly, a woman
has only to apply her mind seriously to the objects before her, “to form clear and dis-
tinct ideas of them, to apprehend all aspects of them and their different relationships,
and to pass judgment only on what is obviously verifiable” (Poullain: 2002: 85). Like
Elisabeth, Poullain shows a keen awareness that a woman’s bodily temperament might
impede her capacity for reflective judgment, and so he is careful to explain the role of
the body in the search for truth. To see this, we need only look to the original context
of Poullain’s famous marginal note, “l’esprit n’a point de sexe” (literally, “the mind has
no sex whatsoever”; see Stuurman 2004: 94). In the passage in question, he aims to
show that women are as capable as men of advanced learning. Toward that end, he says:

It is easy to see that the difference between the two sexes is limited to the body,
since that is the only part used in the reproduction of humankind. Since the
mind merely gives its consent, and does so in exactly the same way in everyone,
we can conclude that it has no sex.
(Poullain 2002: 82)

Shortly thereafter, Poullain affirms that, “A woman’s mind is joined to her body, like a
man’s, by God himself, and according to the same laws” (2002: 82). A woman’s mind is
intermingled with her body—a woman is thus subject to those feelings, sensations, and
imaginings that are a natural consequence of the close association between these two
substances. But in this respect, Poullain emphasizes, a woman is no different to a man.
In fact, apart from their reproductive organs, men and women have almost no relevant
bodily differences: they have the same anatomy, the same brain functions, and the same

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sensory organs (2002: 83). According to his Cartesian physiology, the life, motion,
and sensations of both sexes can be explained by the same mechanical principles (for
details, see Stuurman 2004: 105–109).
Since the differences between men and women do not lie in their minds and bodies,
Poullain says, the differences must be attributed to outside causal factors, such as educa-
tion, religion, and other environmental effects. If a woman is to improve her mind, she
must come to understand the contribution that her body—and the causal influences on
that body—make to her perceptions and volitions. More specifically, Poullain proposes
that the method of avoiding error can help women to overcome the confusing and
disturbing influence of their passions. For Poullain, an understanding of the passions
is the key to attaining self-knowledge and virtue. The passions are those feelings and
emotions—such as wonder, love, hate, sadness, joy, and desire—that occur in the soul
as a result of its intimate ties with the body. In the Fourth Conversation in On the
Education, Poullain’s mouthpiece Stasimachus tells us to pay attention to “what our
interest is in the objects that excite our passions and what is the basis of this interest”
(2002: 217). Once we have recognized those causes that excite our passions, we are in a
better position to evaluate their worth and significance. Following such judgments, we
might either move towards what is good for us, or turn away from what is bad. Likewise,
in On the Equality, Poullain affirms that with experience and training we might learn
“how we can yoke our will to them [i.e., the causes that excite our passions] or dissociate
it from them” (2002: 84).
This last remark problematizes Martina Reuter’s claim that Poullain rejects Descartes’
notion of free will in favor of a concept of the free intellect (Reuter 2013: 66, 80). Here,
like Descartes, Poullain suggests that agents are capable of overcoming the influence
of their bodies through the exercise of free will: they might either “yoke” their will to
the causes of their passions or “dissociate” it from them. The problem for women is that
they are taught to accept everything they are told without question, and so their minds
are “too easily carried away by appearances or custom or some other gushing stream”
(Poullain 2002: 163). To counteract this, Poullain recommends that, for once in their
lives, women stop to examine things seriously, to reflect carefully on their beliefs and
desires, and to use their natural capacity for judgment to accept or reject those beliefs
and desires accordingly:

Examine everything, judge everything, reason about everything—about what

has been done, what is being done, and what you foresee will be done. But in
all cases, don’t let yourself be influenced by mere words nor by hearsay. You
possess the power of reasoning: use it, and don’t sacrifice it blindly to anyone.
(Poullain 2002: 238)

To resist the mental slavery of custom, an agent must recognize that she herself is
responsible for her chains, and that she submits of her “own free will” to her subjugation
(Poullain 2002: 182; my emphases).

Astell
In the late seventeenth century, strikingly similar ideas and arguments can be found in
the writings of Mary Astell. There is no hard evidence that Astell had read Poullain’s

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works, but it’s possible that she was familiar with translated excerpts in a popular English
periodical, The Gentleman’s Journal. In May 1692 and October 1693, this journal fea-
tured select passages from Poullain’s works, titled “The Equality of Both Sexes, asserted
by new Arguments” and “An Essay to Prove, that Women May Apply Themselves to
Liberal Arts and Sciences.” Following in Poullain’s footsteps, Astell’s first work, A Serious
Proposal to the Ladies of 1694, is a call for the education of women so that they might
become useful members of society; and in her 1697 sequel to this work, she puts for-
ward a method whereby women might improve their minds through critical reasoning.
Toward this end, Astell recommends Descartes’ Principia philosophiae [Principles of
Philosophy] (1644) and his Passions of the Soul (Astell 2002: 172, 218; see also 82) as
well as Arnauld and Nicole’s Logic, or the Art of Thinking (Astell 2002: 166, 184, 189).
Several views abound about the precise nature of Astell’s intellectual debt to
Descartes. Ruth Perry and Hilda Smith trace Astell’s critique of male tyranny back to
the Cartesian method of doubt. Perry says that “the key to Astell’s [feminist] radicalism
is radical doubt, not radical politics” (1986: 332), and Smith links Astell’s feminist pro-
gram with “a strong attachment to Cartesian doubt” (2007: 204) and “a philosophical
doubt about all knowledge” (1982: 119). I think that these scholars are right to high-
light Astell’s deep mistrust of prejudices and preconceptions. In the second part of her
Proposal, she advises her readers “not [to] give credit to any thing any longer because
we have once believ’d it, but because it carries clear and uncontested Evidence along
with it” (2002: 133). She suggests that we must “generously . . . disengage our selves
from the deceptions of sense,” reject those ideas that do not stand “the Test of a Severe
Examination and sound Reason,” and remove “those Prejudices and Passions which are
in our way” (2002: 136, 137, 191).
These remarks, however, must be placed in context. In Astell’s wider schema, they
are not part of a skeptical annihilation of opinions or a process of hyperbolic doubt,
but rather a positive program for the moral and intellectual advancement of women.
Like Poullain, Astell claims that women’s intellectual deficiencies might be corrected
through study and training. Unlike Poullain, however, she rarely points to empirical
evidence or to counterexamples that undermine ill-grounded prejudices about women’s
abilities. Appealing to introspection rather than sensory observation, she simply asserts
that “all may Think, may use their own Faculties rightly, and consult the Master who
is within them” (2002: 168). In her longest work of philosophy, The Christian Religion
(1705), Astell says that she is:

A woman who has not the least reason to imagine that her understanding is
any better than the rest of her sex’s. All the difference, if there be any, aris-
ing only from her application, her disinterested, unprejudiced love to truth,
and unwearied pursuit of it, notwithstanding all discouragements, which are in
every woman’s power as well as in hers.
(2013: §401)

To establish that they are likewise capable of attaining truth, Astell urges her fellow
women to look within themselves. She suggests that they familiarize themselves with
their own natural logic. “I call it natural,” she says, “because I shall not send you further
than your Own Minds to learn it” (2002: 166). If they are unable to discern this natural
capacity, then—sadly—they must be ranked among “the Fools and Idiots,” or perhaps

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even among “the Brutes” (2002: 202, 81). But before they give up in despair, women
should reflect again: can they reason about the management of a household, the course
of a romance, or the design of a dress? If so, then this is adequate performative evidence
of their ability to reason. If we look carefully enough, Astell assures her readers, we will
see that truth can be found “in our own Breasts” (2002: 167).
Patricia Springborg has referred to this last remark as Astell’s “restatement” of
Descartes’ cogito (see Astell 2002: 167, n. 5). It is not clear, however, that it plays the
same role as Descartes’s assertion that “I am, I exist” is true whenever it is put forward
by me or entertained in my mind. For Astell, the claim that “we all think, needs no
proof” (2013: §229) is not the endpoint of a systematic doubt, or the hallmark of clar-
ity and distinctness; it is the intuitive, self-evident starting point from which to show
that women are capable of attaining virtue and knowledge. Astell further differs from
Descartes by claiming that “we can’t Know the Nature of our Souls Distinctly” (2002:
173). In this respect, she follows the lead of her unorthodox Cartesian contemporaries
Nicolas Malebranche and John Norris (see Broad 2015: 64–65). Instead of affirming
a clear and distinct idea of the soul, Astell simply points to an internal awareness or
immediate consciousness of a certain power or capacity in the mind—more specifically,
its capacity for judgment.
Like Descartes, Astell also attributes false or erroneous judgments to the “headstrong
and rebellious” will (Astell 2002: 130). Instead of dutifully suspending its assent and
regulating its actions according to the understanding, she says, the will rushes forward
and hastily affirms ideas as true or false, without proper examination. She allows that
her fellow women are particularly prone to making poor judgments. But this failing is
due to custom and a limited education—it is an acquired rather than a natural defect.
Women might correct this defect by following the Cartesian rules for thinking: by rid-
ding themselves of prejudices, by thinking carefully in an orderly manner, from the sim-
plest ideas to the most complex, and by learning to suspend their judgments until clarity
and distinctness win them over (Astell 2002: 135, 137, 159, 164). This is the context in
which mistrust, doubt, and skepticism play an important role in Astell’s work. “[I]f we
would judge to purpose,” she says, “we must free ourselves from prejudice and passion,
must examine and prove all things, and not give our assent till forced to do so by the
evidence of truth” (Astell 2013: §4). Women will benefit from recognizing that they
have this “Natural Liberty” within them—a power of judging for themselves—which
makes them capable of checking ill-grounded opinions, and adhering only to the truth
(Astell 2002: 201).
What role, if any, does the body play in Astell’s search for truth? Cynthia Bryson
asserts that Astell was attracted to Descartes because “he clearly separates the gen-
dered body from the nongendered ‘disembodied mind,’ which Astell identifies as the
true ‘self’” (Bryson 1998: 54). Nevertheless, while it is correct that, for Astell, the
mind is the true self and that the mind and body are distinct substances (see Astell
2013: §274, 229), like Descartes she too emphasizes that the mind and body are inti-
mately joined in the human person. “Human nature is indeed a composition of mind
and body,” she says, “which are two distinct substances having different properties,
and yet make but one person. The certainty of this union is not to be disputed, for
everyone perceives it in himself” (2013: §272). Following Descartes, Astell allows that
in this lifetime the mind can never attain complete separation from the body or the
bodily influences of the sensations, passions, and appetites (see Atherton 1993: 30;
Broad 2015: 85; O’Neill 1999: 242).

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In addition, Astell emphasizes that the body might be of “great service” in the search
for truth, provided that we know how to employ it (2013: §305). One concern, of
course, is that the bodily passions incline women to make poor moral judgments: “we
are hurried on to sin and folly,” she says, “by rash judgments arising from our passions”
(2013: §248). The passions can thus prevent women from arriving at the true and the
good. Even in the grip of strong and violent passions, however, women are never com-
pletely powerless; there is always some course of action they can take. A woman might
permit the passion to continue until it has dissipated, for example, or she might divert
it to another object: “tho we may find it difficult absolutely to quash a Passion that is
once begun,” Astell says, “yet it is no hard matter to transfer it” (2002: 223). Over time,
by cultivating her natural capacity for judgment, and regulating the will according to
the intellect, a woman might obtain dominion over the passions—she might develop
a habitual disposition to direct her passions in accordance with reason. This habitual
disposition constitutes virtue, according to Astell. Virtue consists in the mind governing
the body and directing its passions to worthy objects, in the right “pitch” or intensity,
according to reason (2002: 214).
Astell’s approach to virtue and the passions strongly resembles that of Descartes in
his Passions of the Soul. In this book, Descartes, too, advises that we can gain mastery
over the passions, and meliorate their discomposing effects, by learning to judge what
is truly good and truly evil. For him, the pursuit of virtue consists in a strong resolu-
tion always to do what we judge the best. Once we have learnt habitually to regulate
our wills in accordance with reason, he says, we will come to direct our passions at the
right objects in the right measure; we will attain virtue (for details, see Shapiro 2008).
Poullain echoes these same points. In On the Equality, he says that virtue consists in
a “firm and steadfast resolve to do what one thinks best, depending on the different
situations” (2002: 108). In his view, women’s minds are more than capable of this
steadfast resolve—their bodily differences to men are irrelevant in this respect. “The
body,” he points out, “is merely the organ and instrument of this resolve, like a sword
held ready for attack and defense” (Poullain 2002: 108).
More than this, however, Poullain goes beyond Descartes’ ethical ideas to develop
a nascent theory of women’s rights. He argues that happiness is the natural goal of
all human actions, and so we all have a right to the means of achieving it. But true
happiness cannot be achieved without clear and distinct knowledge about where that
happiness lies: that is, in the pursuit of virtue. It follows that, for the sake of their
virtue and happiness, women have “an equal right to truth” or a “right to the same
knowledge” as men and should therefore be granted access to study and learning
(Poullain 2002: 91, 94). “Since both sexes are capable of the same happiness,” he
says, “they have the same right to all the means of achieving it” (Poullain 2002: 92).
Astell derives similar conclusions from her appropriation of Cartesian ethics. In par-
ticular, she holds that the exercise of freedom is a necessary precondition for the attain-
ment of virtue and happiness. For her, true liberty “consists not in a power to do what
we will, but in making a right use of our reason, in preserving our judgments free, and
our integrity unspotted” (Astell 2013: §249). True liberty is a liberty of judgment—an
act of the will in combination with the understanding—rather than the mere freedom
to do as we will. This kind of liberty is a vital condition for moral responsibility. To be
truly responsible for their choices and actions, women must identify with their choices
and actions as their own, and not those that others have foisted upon them. On behalf
of women, then, Astell defends “that most valuable privilege, and indefeasible right,

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of judging for ourselves” (2013: §256), and the “just and natural” right of women “to
abound in their own sense” (2013: §3).
In sum, these Cartesian feminists mounted a sophisticated and surprisingly modern
challenge to common sexist assumptions of their time. There is clearly some truth to the
claim that Poullain and Astell, like other feminists of their era, used Cartesian method and
the Cartesian concept of the mind to argue against the view that women’s bodies neces-
sarily rendered them morally and intellectually incompetent. It is an over-simplification,
however, to say that their core feminist insights owe their origins to the method of doubt
or to the idea that “the mind has no sex.” Poullain and Astell both appropriate Cartesian
method for feminist purposes, but for them it is Descartes’s method of right thinking, or of
avoiding error, that is most salient. And while these thinkers embrace Descartes’ notion
of the mind as a non-extended thinking substance, they do not overlook the crucial role
of the body in the avoidance of error. Their feminism is built on the insight that although
minds and bodies are intimately conjoined, women nevertheless have the capacity to
gain mastery over the disturbing influence of the bodily passions. For them, the equality
of men and women does not lie in the fact that “the mind has no sex,” but rather in the
claim that men and women equally possess that crucial power or capacity needed to attain
knowledge and virtue—the capacity for judgment.

Further Reading
Broad, Jacqueline (2002) Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Clarke, Stanley (1999) “Descartes’s ‘Gender,’” in Susan Bordo (Ed.) Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes,
University Park, PA: Pensylvania State University Press, 82–102.
O’Neill, Eileen (1998) “Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History,”
in Janet A. Kourany (Ed.), Philosophy in a Feminist Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 17–62.
Reuter, Martina (1999) “Questions of Sexual Difference and Equality in Descartes’ Philosophy,” Acta
Philosophica Fennica 64: 183–208.

Related Topics
Feminist methods in the history of philosophy (Chapter 1); feminism and the enlighten-
ment (Chapter 8); embodiment and feminist philosophy (Chapter 15); rationality and
objectivity in feminist philosophy (Chapter 20); feminism and freedom (Chapter 53).

References
Astell, Mary (2002) A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II, Ed. Patricia Springborg, Peterborough,
ON: Broadview Press.
—— (2013) The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England, Ed. Jacqueline Broad,
Toronto, ON: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and Iter Publishing.
Atherton, Margaret (1993) “Cartesian Reason and Gendered Reason,” in Louise M. Antony and Charlotte
Witt (Eds.) A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 19–34.
Broad, Jacqueline (2015) The Philosophy of Mary Astell: An Early Modern Theory of Virtue, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Bryson, Cynthia (1998) “Mary Astell: Defender of the Disembodied Mind,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist
Philosophy 13(4): 40–62.

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Clarke, Desmond M. (2013) “Introduction,” in Desmond M. Clarke (Ed. and trans.) The Equality of the
Sexes: Three Feminist Texts of the Seventeenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–53.
Cureau de la Chambre, Marin (1670) The Art How to Know Men, trans. John Davies, London: Thomas
Basset.
Descartes, René (1984) “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes,
vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia, and René Descartes (2007) The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of
Bohemia and René Descartes, trans. and Ed. Lisa Shapiro, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Gallagher, Catherine (1988) “Embracing the Absolute: the Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-
Century England,” Genders 1(1): 24–39.
Harth, Erica (1992) Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime, Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Israel, Jonathan I. (2001) Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
O’Neill, Eileen (1999) “Women Cartesians, ‘Feminine Philosophy,’ and Historical Exclusion,” in Susan
Bordo (Ed.) Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 232–257.
—— (2011) “The Equality of Men and Women,” in Desmond M. Clarke and Catherine Wilson (Eds.) The
Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 445–474.
Perry, Ruth (1985) “Radical Doubt and the Liberation of Women,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 18(4): 472–93.
—— (1986) The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Poullain de la Barre, François (2002) Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, introduction and annotations by
Marcelle Maistre Welch, trans. Vivien Bosley, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Reuter, Martina (2013) “Freedom of the Will as the Basis of Equality: Descartes, Princess Elisabeth and
Poullain de la Barre,” in Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen (Eds.) Freedom and the Construction
of Europe, vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 65–83.
Shapiro, Lisa (2008) “Descartes’s Ethics,” in Janet Broughton and John Carriero (Eds.) A Companion to
Descartes, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 445–463.
Smith, Hilda L. (2007) “‘Cry Up Liberty’: The Political Context of Mary Astell’s Feminism,” in William
Kolbrener and Michal Michelson (Eds.) Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate,
193–204.
—— (1982) Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Stuurman, Siep (2004) François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.

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 7
FEMINIST ENGAGEMENTS
WITH SOCIAL CONTRACT
THEORY
Janice Richardson

Introduction
The idea of a social contract is employed in both political and ethical philosophy. In
early modern political philosophy, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the
social contract was part of a conjectural history or political idea, mainly associated with
the work of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. They used it in order to justify obedi-
ence to the law based only upon the consent of the governed. Each author told a story
about the transition from the state of nature to that of civil society, a state with a sover-
eign and laws, which took place as a result of a social contract. All viewed the political
organization of society as something that is constructed by human beings, rejecting the
previous assumptions that there is a natural hierarchy between men and that sovereigns
rule as an expression of God’s will. However, there is an inconsistency in these progres-
sive stories with regard to women, whom the classic theorists—with the possible excep-
tion of Hobbes—continued to view as natural subordinates to men.
Classic social contract theorists actually wrote about women. It was only later that
discussions about the sexes became marginalized as irrelevant to political philosophy
and earlier feminist arguments ignored. Social contract theory went into abeyance
but, when it regained popularity after Rawls published A Theory of Justice in 1971, it
continued this later trend of depoliticizing the position of women. Feminist theory
therefore marks a radical shift by forcing mainstream political theorists to recognize
that women’s subordination is a political problem. In her groundbreaking attack on
social contract theory, Carole Pateman (Brennan and Pateman 1979; Pateman 1988;
1989) analyses the political assumptions that come to light when the position of
women is considered. In the second section below, I will detail Pateman’s arguments,
including her view that it is through contract that subordination is created and man-
aged in modernity (on which, see also Chapter 52 in this volume).
Turning from politics to ethics, in her essay “Feminist Contractarianism,” Jean
Hampton produces an ethical theory of the social contract. Hampton distinguishes
between two types of contract: one derived from Hobbes and the other from Kant. As
a Kantian, Hampton characterizes the Hobbesian position as only mimicking morality
 Feminism and Social Contract Theory

(Hampton 2007: 13). Hobbes claims that it is prudent to appear to treat people with
respect and to maintain contracts (so long as others do the same). This “advice to the
fool” who would betray the trust of others (Hobbes 1994: chap. XV, 90) has been taken
up by game theorists, in particular David Gauthier (1987) and also a few feminists
(Dimock 2008). Hobbesian “morality” is based upon self-interest, in contrast to Kant’s
position in which persons are to be respected as having equal intrinsic worth.
Kant himself was dubious as to whether women could be classed as moral persons
(1960: 79–81 [2: 229–231]). Nevertheless, Hampton (2002; 2007) employs the Kantian
idea of a contract to ask of a heterosexual relationship (with marriage in mind): “would
free and equal persons agree to this relationship?” and she does not accept any false
sense of duty, or emotional ties on behalf of the wife, to justify exploitation. Again, this
involves a major shift in thinking as she highlights a moral problem that arises when
women are taught always to prioritize the interests of others at the expense of their own
needs. In the third section I will detail the implications of Hampton’s use of the social
contract as a test for fairness in heterosexual relationships.
There are areas in which the distinction between the political and ethical divide in
social contract theory blurs. Pateman is critical of the way that social contract theory
in the twentieth century, under the influence of Rawls (1999), diminishes political
philosophy by situating it as moral philosophy:

Political philosophy has been turned into moral philosophy . . . Moreover,

theories of original contracts are not about moral reasoning . . . they are
about the creation and justification of specific forms of political order; they
are about the creation of the modern state and structures of power, including
sexual and racial power.
(Pateman and Mills 2007: 20)

Hampton (2007: 8) points out that philosophy is often influenced by a mental picture,
even if philosophers are loathe to admit it. Liberal social contract theorists envisage
free and equal persons sitting around a table, and ask what they would agree to. While
Hampton employs this question as a test for fairness in heterosexual relationships,
Rawls employs it to attempt to justify liberal principles by asking what persons would
agree to if they were asked what sort of society they would join, without knowing their
position within it—that is, deciding under a “veil of ignorance” (Rawls 1999). The aim
of these thought experiments is to prompt fairness. This is not achieved by relying upon
the hypothetical contract functioning as an actual agreement. It is to focus the mind on
the position of the worst off in a society.
It now seems remarkable that Rawls was initially blind to the position of women.
In his thought experiment in the original A Theory of Justice published in 1971, he
envisaged male “heads of household” who were to decide the principles of a society,
without recognizing that there was (and still is) a conflict of interest within the
traditional heterosexual family. It is important to remember the possibility of this
type of blindness to an area of subordination years after Susan Moller Okin (1989)
pointed out this deficiency in Rawls’ thought experiment. She employs Rawls’
Kantian image of free and equal persons, turning it to feminist ends by prompting
the reader to ask: Would free and equal persons agree to be women in our society?
How would you like it?

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Feminist philosophy often challenges the usual ways in which philosophy is

categorized. The question of what free and equal persons would agree to, as a test of
equal worth, has been employed by feminist theorists from very different traditions.
Continental philosopher and lawyer Drucilla Cornell (1995: ch. 1) adopts this ques-
tion in a manner that shares some similarities with Hampton. Both treat the question
as an evocative test that is to be repeatedly asked in certain circumstances, in contrast
to Rawls’ one-off posing of the question in his thought experiment. For Hampton, the
question functions as a way of consciousness-raising, to focus upon whether a hetero-
sexual relationship is one in which the extent of inequality indicates a lack of respect
for the equal worth of the parties. In contrast, Cornell proposes that the question is
to be employed whenever common law judges or legislators make a legal decision. In
other words, these legal decisions are to be underpinned by the principles of equality
by employing the question of whether free and equal persons could agree to them. If
judges allow their stereotyped images of women to influence their judgement, then this
indicates that they are being unreasonable and thereby failing in their public duty.
Cornell (2000) also develops her position to support rights in terms of race.
Similarly, Charles Mills (1997) has drawn from Pateman, Okin, and Hampton to argue
for the political usefulness of thinking of a racial contract. Like Rawls and Okin, Mills
employs the thought experiment of free and equal persons deciding on the principles
of a society, under the veil of ignorance. Whereas Okin (1989) points out that the
participants should be viewed as not knowing their gender, prompting the question of
whether free and equal persons would agree to be female in our society, Mills asks this
question with regard to race. Mills’ aim is to speak to Rawlsians in their own terms and
to produce a “subversive social contract,” akin to that of Okin on gender, Rousseau on
class, and, Mills argues, Pateman. However, Pateman resists this characterization of
her work, as I will discuss in detail below. In addition to adopting the idea of a social
contract to highlight racism, there have been diverse arguments on the relationship
between the social contract and disability (Becker 2005) and lesbians (Wittig 1989).
I will now consider in more detail, first, the classic social contract theorists; second,
Pateman’s political analysis; and third, Hampton’s ethics. In the fourth and final sec-
tion I will draw out the differences in the main feminist positions on social contract
theory, both in its political and ethical forms.

The Classic Social Contract Theorists

Hobbes’ Leviathan, published in 1651, was radical in starting with an image of human
beings as naturally free and equal in a state of nature and arguing that political
arrangements are socially constructed. In this conjectural history, Hobbes describes
a transition from the state of nature to a civil society with laws. The reason for this
transition is based upon the need to escape the state of nature in which life is “solitary,
poor, nasty brutish and short” (Hobbes 1994: ch. XIII [9], 149). It is a cautionary tale,
influenced by the English civil war, that warns of what would happen without a sov-
ereign. Hobbes’ arguments are based upon his images of humanity: as selfish, acquisi-
tive, competing individuals, who are also rational enough to recognize the benefits of
a social contract and to create a sovereign, whose role is to enforce law—and hence
contractual agreements—by the use of force.
In our natural state, without marriage contracts, there would be no assumption
that the man would be the head of a family. As usual, Hobbes is practical. Given

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that the woman would be the only one who may know the identity of the father
of her child and could choose not to tell him: “the right of dominion over
the child dependeth upon her will, and is consequently hers” (Hobbes 1994:
ch. XX [5], 129). Further, in any dispute between men and women, Hobbes does
not assume that men will win:

And whereas some have attributed the dominion to the man only, as being of
the more excellent sex, they misreckon in it. For there is not always that differ-
ence of strength or prudence between the man and the woman as that the right
can be determined without war.
(Hobbes 1994: ch. XX [4], 128)

Pateman therefore highlights an inconsistency in Hobbes’ otherwise rigorously told

story: why should women, who are not subordinate in a state of nature, join a social
contract as a result of which—in Hobbes’ time—marriage laws would be enacted that
would render them subordinate to men? I will discuss this further below.
In contrast, Locke views as natural a family form in which wives are subordinate to
their husbands (1988a: ch. V §27, 174). Locke’s conjectural history is a story of natural
property owners who are also able to use money. However, in a state of nature, indi-
viduals have the right to enforce justice against anyone who wrongs them and many
are biased in their own cause. Male heads of household are therefore motivated to enter
into a social contract to have a sovereign to guarantee impartial justice and preserve
property rights. Locke’s justification for private property (1988b: ch. V) is the origin
of “property in the person,” which is central to Pateman’s critique of contract, to be
discussed below. Locke’s move of viewing male dominance in the family as natural is
central to Rousseau’s strongly misogynist understanding of women and the sentimental
family, as described in his story of the transition from the state of nature to civil society
(see for example, Okin 2002).
Kant’s social contract theory differs from those of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau in
that Kant does not speculate on life in a state of nature. Instead, Kant describes the
social contract as an idea that we have as a result of our ability to reason,

[The social contract] is in fact merely an idea of reason, which nonetheless has
undoubted practical reality; for it can oblige every legislator to frame his laws
in such a way that they could have been produced by the united will of a whole
nation and regard each subject, in so far as he can claim citizenship, as if he had
consented to the general will.
(Kant 1991: 79 [8: 35–42])

Kant draws a distinction between the faculties of reason and understanding that differs
from previous uses by Plato and Aristotle. As an “idea of reason,” the social contract
can be distinguished from a concept of the understanding. The idea of a social contract
is therefore similar to ideas of God or freedom. It does not relate to objects of experi-
ence (which we can understand), but nevertheless it can be thought and is related
to morality. As the above quotation illustrates, Kant employs the idea of the social
contract as a test for legitimacy of laws. For example, he argues against enactment of
hereditary privilege on the grounds that free and equal persons could not agree to such
laws (Kant 1996: 139 [6: 329]).

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The Political Social Contract: Carole Pateman

Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988) marks a decisive moment in feminist critique
of the social contract. She asks why a progressive political argument against natural
hierarchy, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, did not include women. She
shows the inter-relationship between different areas of subordination and is practical
in her analysis of freedom, providing a theoretical basis in support of greater workplace
democracy and a basic income. Pateman adds a fiction of her own to the social con-
tract stories. She points to a “sexual contract” between men that allows them access to
women’s sexual and other labour and that perpetuates and manages women’s subordi-
nation. In civil society, the sovereign passes laws, including marriage laws that—at the
time that the classic social contract theorists were writing—included the doctrine of
coverture, under which women were effectively civil slaves to their husbands. Without
an assumption that women’s subordination is natural, social contract theorists cannot
explain why women in their stories would enter into a social contract that, through
marriage laws, would render them subordinate to men. In this way, Pateman also draws
a link between the social contract and the marriage contract.
Pateman’s analysis of the meaning of “contract” in modernity brings together the social
contract with marriage contracts and employment contracts in an unusual way. It allows her
to take the imaginative step of examining the position of the weaker party in a “contract” as
envisaged in both political theory and in legal practice. She thereby invites us to compare
the relationships between sovereign and subject alongside those of employer and employee
and traditional husband and wife. In each case the contract creates a weaker party, who
supposedly freely consents to obey the other party. The fact that they do not expect to have
their voices heard undermines the possibility of participative democracy.
Pateman examines and problematizes the idea of the consent of the weaker par-
ties in these contracts. All are viewed as exchanging “property in the person,” which
acts as a political and legal fiction to “justify” subordination. The type of “property
in the person” envisaged cannot be separated from the human body and so involves
a relationship based upon obedience. In the classic social contract theories individ-
uals are envisaged as giving up their right of self-government to different degrees,
depending upon the theorist. Similarly, as Marx points out, in the employment con-
tract employees’ exchange of their labour power for a wage means that they expect
to be told what to do within the workplace (1976: 280). In the traditional marriage
contract—which Pateman situates as having its “heyday” between 1840 and 1970
(1996: 204)—the wife was expected to provide consortium (sex and housework). Unlike
employees, she was not treated as owning her own labour power, and her labour in the
home was unlimited in time and was exchanged for financial support rather than a
wage. Divorce remained blocked by law well after workers gained the right to leave
their employer, leaving aside the financial and other “exit costs” that both suffer. By
attacking the myth of the consent of the governed, in the widest sense of the phrase,
Pateman also undermines the image of liberal individuals whose reasons for acting are
viewed as deriving from their own free will rather than being socially situated.
Hence Pateman draws from, but importantly extends, Macpherson’s (1962) criticism
of social contract theories. Pateman argues that whereas in feudalism there were clear
hierarchies based upon the idea of natural status, in modernity hierarchical relations
are created (and governed) by contracts that involve the exchange of property in the
person. Pateman provides the other neglected side of Macpherson’s analysis, which

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focuses only upon citizens and employees. Even in the twentieth century, the welfare
state assumed the model of a husband/breadwinner and wife, and the courts employed
the fiction of “implied contractual terms” in marriage to women’s detriment. (“Implied
terms” are contractual terms that a court will assume to be part of contracts even though
they are not stated. They are employed to allow courts to regulate contracts.) One
implied term was that women’s consent to marriage was also consent to have sex with
her husband at any time. The effect was to place husbands beyond the reach of the
criminal rape law in the UK and Australia until 1991. The use of this legal fiction also
regulates employment contracts. For example, there is an implied term that workers are
expected to obey reasonable orders.
Today contract law courses still only focus upon one-off transactions rather than
contracts that create and broadly regulate relationships. It still appears to be odd to
link the social contract—a story of individuals’ agreement to create a sovereign to rule
them—with employment contracts and marriage contracts. Yet all of these contracts
are used to explain and, through law, to regulate obedience, and all envisage relation-
ships that endure through the fictional exchange of property in the person.
Pateman traces the history of early modern political theory to highlight differences
between social contract theories in ways that are still relevant today. She argues that:

Hobbes was too revealing about civil society. The political character of the
conjugal right was expertly concealed in Locke’s separation of what he called
“paternal” power from political power and, ever since, most political theorists,
whatever their views about other forms of subordination, have accepted that
powers of husbands derive from nature and hence are not political.
(Pateman 1989: 462)

For Pateman, Locke closes down an argument in support of women’s natural equality
that arose when Hobbes’ political analysis started with individuals rather than the tradi-
tional heterosexual family. Ironically, Locke holds a politically progressive position but
ultimately excludes women. In the first part of the Two Treatises of Government Locke
(1988a) argues against Filmer’s support for the divine right of kings to rule based upon
paternal power. Pateman points out that Locke’s discussion of paternal power—the
power of fathers over their children—occludes his additional assumption that husbands
naturally exercise power over their wives: “When paternal power is seen as paradig-
matic of natural subjection, critical questions about the designation of sexual and con-
jugal rights as natural are all too easily disregarded” (Pateman 1988: 92).
Locke draws an insidious distinction between male power within the traditional fam-
ily and political power. It is this division of power into two types—one to be exercised
within the household and the other in the state—that explains Locke’s inconsistency
regarding women. It allows him to reject the naturalness of male hierarchy while dis-
missing women’s subordination within the household as falling outside of politics. This
idea of women’s natural subordination to men within marriage was subsequently con-
tinued in the form of the claim that women’s “place in the home” was natural and not
properly discussed as part of political philosophy.
Pateman’s use of the “sexual contract” in her analysis has been criticized on the
grounds that it “rests on an unspecified and unwarranted essentialist conception of his-
torical development that makes it impossible to alter institutions and practices without
first rooting out their historical foundations” (Schochet 2007: 241). In response to this

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line of argument, Pateman points out that she did not aim to produce an origin story
herself (Pateman and Mills 2007). The fictional “sexual contract” is employed to illus-
trate a point, as part of an analysis of the origin stories of the classic social contractar-
ians. The classic social contract tales work “as if” there were also a sexual contract.
In addition to questioning Pateman’s dismissal of contract for feminist ends, Okin
(1990: 666) argues that Pateman moves ambiguously between a critique of liberal social
contract theory and of libertarianism in her analysis of contract. However, as Okin
recognizes, one of Pateman’s central concerns is the fiction that we can exchange or
commodify human abilities. This fiction is relied upon in both liberal and neo-liberal
societies, being the basis of the institution of employment as well as traditional marriage.

The Ethical Social Contract: Jean Hampton

Whereas Pateman is critical of the social contract, Hampton applies the Kantian/
Rawlsian idea of asking what individuals would agree to, if given the choice. In her
paper, “Feminist Contractarianism,” she describes the test of fairness in relationships in
the following terms:

Given the fact that we are in this relationship, could both of us reasonably
accept the distribution of costs and benefits (that is, the costs and benefits that
are not themselves side effects of any affective or duty-based tie between us) if
it were the subject of an informed, unforced agreement in which we think of
ourselves as motivated solely by self-interest?
(Hampton 2007: 21)

Hampton bases her test question on Kant’s claim that we all have equal moral worth.
Her work reminds women that this involves treating themselves as equal. When they per-
ceive themselves as owing a “false duty” to look after others to such an extent that they
are exploited, then they fail in their duty to treat themselves as being of equal moral
worth. What I am calling a “false duty” can therefore function just like “emotional
ties,” by prompting women to maintain exploitative heterosexual relationships in which
they are treated as having lower moral worth than their male partner. If these areas of
leverage are not excluded then the husband is effectively saying: you put more into this
relationship because it is your role as a woman or because you love me more.
Similarly, in the Hobbesian version of contractarian morality, the adoption of
“non-tuism” has been argued to be necessary for women to avoid exploitation (Dimock
2008). Non-tuism is the assumption that individuals must be treated as disinterested
in the other parties’ preferences when asking what individuals would agree to in a
hypothetical contract. This is not because human beings are actually disinterested
in each other—as their preferences themselves may prioritize others’ welfare—but
because as Gauthier puts it,

[T]he contractarian sees sociability as enriching human life; for him, it becomes
a source of exploitation if it induces persons to acquiesce in institutions and
practices that but for their fellow-feelings would be costly to them. Feminist
thought has surely made this, perhaps the core form of human exploitation,
clear to us.
(Gauthier 1987: 11)

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While claiming that the basis for her test is that of equal moral worth (and hence moral
realism) rather than that of exploitation per se, Hampton has also explained that she
finds evocative Hobbes’ claim that “we are not under any obligation to make ourselves
prey to others” (Hampton and Pyle 1999: 236; Hobbes 1994: ch. XIV [5] 80). However,
it should be stressed that her test serves simply to demonstrate when a relationship is so
one-sided as to indicate a lack of respect for equal worth (that one is making oneself the
prey of another) and is not the same as the Hobbesian contract position of considering
what would be the best possible deal available. This is what separates Hampton’s Kantian
use of contract (“contractualism”) from the Hobbesian one (“contractarianism”).
The implication of Hampton’s Kantianism is that if there were no marriages that would
allow her to respect herself as of equal worth then she should not marry, because of her
duty to herself. In contrast, for Hobbesians, you make the best deal possible, given that
one’s worth is nothing more than one’s price (Hobbes 1994: ch. X [16] 51).
Like Pateman, Hampton focuses upon subordination. For Hampton, exploitation
(as indicated in the hypothetical contract by the fact that the woman would not
agree to the basis of the marital relationship if not for leverage as a result of falsely
perceived duty and affection) indicates that she is being treated as having unequal
moral worth and hence as a subordinate. In contrast, Pateman traces the history of
different types of subordination, which facilitate exploitation. With regard to this
aspect of their work, Hampton, as a liberal, is reframing Rawls but Pateman, in part,
extends and refocuses Marx.
Hampton also employs her Kantian contractualist analysis to understand the crimi-
nal law and to address the question of when forgiveness is acceptable. This is based
upon the view of crime as occurring when the criminal holds himself (or herself)
above the victim in terms of moral worth. (In terms of Hampton’s test for unfairness
in relationships it would be at the extreme end of failure.) Criminal law judges are
therefore under a duty to make a public statement, by the punishment, that the crimi-
nal was wrong to hold himself (or herself) above the victim. This is not achieved if,
for example, the penalty for rape, or for hate crimes generally, is derisory. From within
her critique of classic social contract theory, Pateman (1979) approaches the same
problem—that of gaining justice for female victims under criminal law—when she
points out that some citizens do not receive the same advantages as others from living
in a state and yet receive more burdens.
Feminists whose work promotes an ethic of care are major critics of any use of social
contract theory, specifically criticising Hampton. Virginia Held (1987), for example,
argues that the paradigmatic image of these contracting individuals is that of economic
man, characterized as selfish and individualistic. Hampton’s response is that she derives
an objective morality from her Kantian position from which to claim justice for women,
and that whether the images of the parties to the contract appear to be male because
of our empirical practices is irrelevant to this normative position. In response, Held
argues that it is individualism, implicit within the use of a hypothetical contract, as a
moral ideal that is the subject of her critique. There have also been criticisms of Kantian
personhood in the feminist continental philosophical tradition. For example, Irigaray
argues that, by “adding in” women to the conception of the Kantian person, the pos-
sibility of sexual difference is closed down, to women’s detriment (Irigaray 1985; see
also Battersby 1998).
Held’s concern that the individual envisaged within the hypothetical contract
is unencumbered, and stereotypically male, is consistent with Pateman’s historically

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situated analysis of the emergence and interaction of different forms of subordination in

relation to women and class (and race in her later analysis of the white settler contract
in Pateman and Mills 2007). Held cites Pateman approvingly when Pateman com-
plains that, “One of the most striking features of the last two decades is the extent to
which the assumptions of liberal individualism have permeated the whole of social life”
(Pateman 1985: 182–183; cited in Held 1987: 111). This raises questions about the
extent to which different feminist responses to social contract theory are compatible
and about the areas of debate between these theorists.

Are Feminist Perspectives on the Social

Contract Compatible?
In his conversation with Pateman, Mills argues that Pateman’s work is compatible with
that of Hampton; that Pateman’s analysis does not undermine the Kantian idea of equal
worth (Pateman and Mills 2007). This repeats a point made by Okin (1989). It leads
Mills to argue that Pateman’s “sexual contract” could be viewed as a non-ideal, subver-
sive contract, within the social contract tradition itself. Pateman resists this positioning
of her work. I will now consider this debate before comparing Cornell’s framework with
that of Hampton and then Pateman (see Richardson 2009).
Pateman claims that Hampton “lets the cat out of the bag” because Hampton does
not require a reference to a hypothetical contract to make her arguments based on
equal moral worth (Pateman and Mills 2007: 22). Mills agrees and—on this basis—
argues that Pateman’s criticism of social contract theory has no bite against Hampton’s
use of it. However, Pateman’s central concern is that subordination is perpetuated
and participatory democracy is undermined by a particular type of contract involving
the fictional exchange of property in the person. Therefore it is unsurprising that she
resists the unnecessary legitimation of the idea of contract as symbolic of fairness in a
thought experiment. While Mills finds the idea of the “subversive contract” a useful
way to respond to Rawlsian liberals in their own language, Pateman simply rejects their
approach to political philosophy.
Similarly, Pateman argues that Okin’s re-reading of Rawls—to ask if free and equal
persons, beneath the veil of ignorance, would agree to be women in our patriarchal
society—is also unnecessary. Okin’s arguments regarding injustice in the traditional
family do not depend upon it (Pateman and Mills 2007: 22). Pateman goes on to explain
why such a contractual procedure is not only unnecessary but distracts from truly politi-
cal questions: “The pertinent question for me is what policies may be feasible and have
a reasonable chance of moving things in a more democratic direction. And that also
requires an analysis of what is wrong at present” (Pateman and Mills 2007: 22).
What of the continental theorist Drucilla Cornell? I will compare her work with
that of Hampton then Pateman. Cornell draws from Kant’s idea of the agreement of
free and equal persons to make a claim against judges and the legislature. However, she
distinguishes her position from that of Hampton (Cornell 1995: 242, fn16). Cornell
refuses to be classified as a “contractarian” to the extent that this means employing
the contract as a “moral or justice proof procedure” (1995: 242, fn16). However, as
discussed above, Hampton’s position only depends upon equal moral worth, not the
hypothetical contract per se. Where Cornell and Hampton really differ, aside from their
uses of the hypothetical contract, is in terms of Cornell’s position on selfhood and

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our use of imagination. She argues that in order to have a democracy, it is necessary
to have people who are able to become citizens, and she holds an anti-humanist posi-
tion in which the process of individuation—of becoming an individual separate from
others—is itself a problem.
Hampton supports her own analysis by showing how boys are brought up to have a
greater sense of entitlement than girls. For Cornell, adopting a Lacanian psychoanalytic
view, self-development does not end with childhood. Instead we continually struggle
to become “persons,” capable of citizenship. As a result, Cornell argues that free and
equal persons would not agree to laws that would undermine their “project of becom-
ing a person” in the first place. This “project” is threatened by sexual harassment, for
example, because it can interfere with someone’s imago, or ideal self-image. As a lawyer,
Cornell extends that move to argue for specific laws and an underpinning of legal deci-
sions by repeating the question of what free and equal persons would agree to, whereas
Hampton’s test is to detect injustice in relationships.
Turning to the contrast between Cornell and Pateman, Pateman also asks what it
takes to produce citizens (1970: 24–25). In contrast to Cornell’s use of Lacan, Pateman
draws from Rousseau (1968). She argues that participative democracy can only occur
if prospective citizens expect to have their voices heard in their everyday lives, rather
than imagining that they exchange or sell parts of themselves in the traditional home
and the workplace. The necessary skills and confidence to participate in citizenship are
learned when we have the opportunity to negotiate and say what we agree to in prac-
tice, as in workplace democracy. Pateman, as a political philosopher, details the history
of subordination through contract to support her contemporary arguments for a basic
income and in favour of a participative democracy. While Cornell may be sympathetic
with these claims, she argues for the basis of law to be formulated in terms of equal
respect for moral worth.
Feminist philosophers’ engagements with social contract theory are rich and diverse.
A major divide lies between critics of social contract theory and those who try to use
it for feminist ends; those who view the tradition as political, and those who view it
as producing techniques for thinking about ethics and for game theory. The extent to
which these positions are compatible depends upon theorists’ wider political analyses
and their conceptions of what it is to be human.

Further Reading
Abbey, Ruth (Ed.) (2013) Feminist Interpretations of John Rawls, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press.
Carver, Terrell and Chambers, Samuel A. (2013) Carole Pateman: Democracy, Feminism, Welfare, Hoboken,
NJ: Taylor & Francis.
Cudd, Ann (2013) “Contractarianism,” in Edward N. Zalta (Ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter
2013 edition. Available from: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/contractarianism/.
Hirschmann, Nancy J. and Wright, Joanne Harriet (Eds.) (2012) Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes,
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
O’Neill, Daniel I., Shanley, Mary Lyndon, and Young, Iris Marion (Eds.) (2008) Illusion of Consent: Engaging
with Carole Pateman, Pennsylvania, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Richardson, Janice (2007) “Contemporary Feminist Perspectives on Social Contract Theory,” Ratio Juris
20(3): 402–423.
Sample, Ruth J. (2002) “Why Feminist Contractarianism?” Journal of Social Philosophy 33(2): 257–281.

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Related Topics
Feminist methods in the history of philosophy (Chapter 1); feminism and the
Enlightenment (Chapter 8); critical race theory, intersectionality, and feminist
philosophy (Chapter 29); feminist metaethics (Chapter 42); feminism, structural
injustice, and responsibility (Chapter 49); feminism and liberalism (Chapter 52);
feminism and freedom (Chapter 53); feminist philosophy of law, legal positivism, and
non-ideal theory (Chapter 56).

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Marx, Karl (1976) Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin.
Mills, Charles W. (1997) The Racial Contract, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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 8
FEMINISM AND THE
ENLIGHTENMENT
Susanne Lettow

The Enlightenment and its legacies are highly controversial among contemporary
feminist philosophers. Since the eighteenth century, the notions of reason, equality,
and human rights have played an important role in denouncing and resisting domi-
nation and exploitation. To a great extent, feminists have articulated critiques of
gender hierarchies in the language of the Enlightenment. At the same time, feminist
philosophers have explored and criticized the structural limitations of Enlightenment
discourse, and have argued that—far from being truly universal—the notions of
equality, reason, progress, tolerance, and human rights foster prejudice, exclusion, and
domination. In many respects, feminist critiques that explore the “dark” side of these
“bright” concepts converge with other critical perspectives, in particular from post-
colonial studies, poststructuralism, critical Marxism, and the early Frankfurt School,
which have all—in one way or the other—exposed the dialectics of Enlightenment.
Accordingly, the Enlightenment claim to scrutinize all forms of authority and power
and to conceive of society based on the principle of equality is understood as being
structurally intertwined with multiple forms of domination in terms of gender,
race, class, and empire.
The question open for discussion is whether feminist critiques of the Enlighten­
ment still need to build on and re-enact the legacy of the Enlightenment, or whether
a new theoretical language that overcomes the discourse of the Enlightenment as it
emerged in eighteenth-century Europe has to be shaped. A close look at the philo-
sophical interventions made by feminists in the historical period of the Enlightenment
itself, i.e. the eighteenth century, is certainly helpful for a better understanding of this
problem, since it makes clear that “the Enlightenment” has always been a contested
discursive space, where a wide variety of arguments and interventions were formulated,
and where feminists sought to challenge established gender hierarchies.

The Plurality of the Enlightenment

Many feminist scholars argue that the monolithic understanding of the Enlightenment
that has long prevailed in the history of ideas needs to be replaced with a more open
and plural understanding that allows one to conceive of the Enlightenment as a col-
lection of “disparate and often contradictory phenomena” (DeLucia 2015: 9). Such a
 Feminism and the enlightenment

view focuses on debates, controversies, and intellectual networks and practices through
which certain ideas came to circulate in the eighteenth century, rather than on fixed
concepts. “Enlightenment,” as Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor argue, “was a living
world where ideas were conveyed not only through ‘high’ philosophical works but also
through novels, poetry, advice literature, popular theology, journalism, pornography,
and that most fluid of eighteenth-century genres, the ‘miscellaneous essay’” (Knott
and Taylor 2005: xvii). Women’s contributions to the discourse of Enlightenment
took many different forms, most prominently letter writing and the management of
“salons.” In order to fully grasp how women’s intellectual contributions helped to shape
Enlightenment discourse, it is important to note that in the eighteenth century no
clear boundaries existed between science, literature, philosophy, letter writing, journal-
ism, etc., and that the invention of new intellectual practices was a major concern for
Enlightenment thinkers. In fact, assessing the philosophical impact of women and femi-
nist thought requires one to challenge a narrow, disciplinary, and anachronistic notion
of philosophy and endorse a broader understanding of philosophical activity.
Not only was the Enlightenment constituted through a wide range of theoretical
practices, but also this intellectual movement took different shapes in the various
European countries and regions. Debates were loosely connected through the transna-
tional circulation of ideas, books, and persons, so that similarities as well as differences
between the multiple Enlightenments exist. In France, the institution of the salon flour-
ished in the second half of the eighteenth century and became the paradigmatic insti-
tution of the Enlightenment. It “upheld both reciprocal exchange and the principle of
governance by substituting a female salonnière for a male king as the governor of its dis-
course” (Goodman 1994: 5). Guided by women such as Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin, Anne-
Catherine de Ligniville Helvétuis, Julie de Lespinasse, and Suzanne Necker, the salon
constituted a “mixed-gender sociability” (Goodman 1994: 5). In this context, the social
meaning of “femininity” and of gender relations became major issues of philosophical
debate. Intellectuals such as Voltaire or Buffon claimed that civilization and politeness
manifest themselves in gender equality, and that women were a “civilizing force on
which depended the ‘gentleness of society’” (Buffon, quoted in Goodman 1994: 7).
Female intellectuals often also endorsed such a positive view of cultivated feminin-
ity, although Jean-Jacques Rousseau converted this ambivalent ideal of femininity into
a hierarchical model of gender complementarity. In particular, in his treatise Emile, or
On Education, Rousseau developed an understanding of femininity according to which
women are “naturally” disposed towards pleasing men, while at the same time regulat-
ing their own and—indirectly—their husband’s desires. The sentimental arrangement
of the sexes of which Rousseau conceives clearly builds on an imbalance of power.
While Sophie, the female figure that Rousseau introduces in chapter 5 of the book
as a companion for Emile, is mainly educated to serve the cultivation of Emile, the
ideal that governs Emile’s education is autonomy. It therefore comes as no surprise
that, as Karen Green notes, the “earliest female responses to Rousseau were funda-
mentally negative” (Green 2014: 167). However, intellectuals such as Germaine de
Staël or Louise Keralio-Robert at least partly endorsed his idea of femininity, accord-
ing to which “any tender bourgeois mother and competent housekeeper could aspire
to govern her husband for the greater social good, through the bonds of sexual desire
and love” (Green 2014: 169). By the end of the century, though, Olympe de Gouges
formulated a powerful plea for gender equality in France as did Mary Wollstonecraft in
England, rejecting any essentialist notion of gender difference.

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 ENGAGING THE PAST

In England and Scotland, the Bluestockings circle had a significant impact on the
development of Enlightenment thought during the 1760s and 1770s. This circle “grew
out of activities of a number of intellectually compatible female friends, who encour-
aged each other’s literary endeavors” (Green 2014: 132). They also helped to shape a
new vision of women’s moral mission in the development of society. Sarah Scott, “the
most articulate political theorist of the group,” envisioned

a utopian community, set up by women where they take in and educate young
girls whose families cannot provide for them, and which provides a sheltered
environment, in which the disabled and disadvantaged poor can work and con-
tribute to their own upkeep.
(Green 2014: 134)

According to Scott, enlightened women should work to transform society “into ‘a state
of mutual confidence, reciprocal services, and correspondent affections’ grounded in
Christian virtue” (Green 2014: 141).
A similar notion of the “civilizing” role of women can be found in the writings
of Elizabeth Montagu who received many of the male protagonists of the Scottish
Enlightenment in her salon. Recently, JoEllen DeLucia has argued that “the conversa-
tions in the Bluestocking’s salons . . . acted as a laboratory for the theories of sociability
and sentiment developed by Scottish literati such as Adam Smith and James [John]
Millar” (DeLucia 2015: 6). In particular the idea that

social progress is a gendered continuum that moves from masculine “undifferentiated

primal energy,” a state of barely controlled individual passions, to a “refined” and
“feminized” modernity in which emotions are tempered by a feminine desire to
reflect on the needs and feelings of others,

echoes the Bluestockings’ understanding of women’s role in society (DeLucia 2015: 8).
It also set the agenda for later modernization theories and their ambivalent,
often colonialist, attitude towards the social organization of gender relations in “non-
Western” societies.
While France, England, and Scotland certainly witnessed the most sophisticated
debates about the role of women in society and about the meaning of gender differ-
ence, as well as critiques of the legal, political, and cultural subordination of women,
debates about women’s education, gender equality, and difference also developed in
other European countries. In Spain the most outspoken feminist position was for-
mulated by Josefa Amar y Borbón who pleaded for women’s “right to happiness”
(Franklin Lewis 2004: 18). In her Discourse in Defense of the Talent of Women, and of
Their Aptitude for Governing and Other Positions in Which Men Are Employed (1786),
Amar developed “a plan to procure that happiness for future generations of women”
(Franklin Lewis 2004: 18). Elizabeth Franklin Lewis compares Amar’s Discourse to
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which appeared three years
later, and stresses that Amar opposed the newly emerging understanding of gender
differences in terms of nature and physiology.
Like many of her contemporaries, Amar repeatedly referred to slavery in order
to decry the restrictions of women’s social and legal situation. However, in contrast

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to the French and English writers, Amar’s opposition to “slavery” did not refer to
transatlantic slavery and the abolitionist movement but to Muslim societies. While
Muslim women are enslaved, the argument goes, “in the Western world . . . women
experience a more subtle kind of slavery, which appears to be veneration” (Franklin
Lewis 2004: 32). As Amar put it: “In one part of the world they are slaves, in the other
women are dependents” (Amar, quoted in Franklin Lewis 2004: 32). This intercul-
tural comparison nevertheless construed Muslim societies as an “abject” or negative
Other to which enlightened societies should not fall back.
In the German speaking territories, a new model of the “learned woman” emerged
in the eighteenth century, with Louise Gottsched (née Kalmus) being the most promi-
nent example. In contrast to the French salonnières, these women who were mostly
trained by their academic fathers “viewed their intellectual labor as a more ‘profes-
sional,’ if supportive activity” (Goodman 1999: 239). Among them were Christiane
Mariana von Ziegler, Hedwig Sidonia Zäunemann, and Dorothea Schlözer, the first
woman to earn a doctorate in Germany. Only the end of the century, however, wit-
nessed the anonymous publication of a political treatise claiming equal rights and the
admission of women to all public institutions. The author was Theodor Gottlieb von
Hippel, the “city president” of Königsberg and a frequent guest at Kant’s lunch table.
The title of Hippel’s essay On the Civil Improvement of Women (1792) referred to On the
Civil Improvement of the Jews (1781), an essay by Christian Wilhelm Dohm, who argued
for the legal and political emancipation of the Jews. Hippel thus constructed parallel
egalitarian claims, made in favor of religious freedom and civil equality, and lamented
the failure of the French Revolution, which did not succeed in extending human and
civil rights to women.

Equality, Difference, and Human Rights:

Olympe de Gouges and Condorcet
This extension had been the project of Olympe de Gouges in her Declaration of the
Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, which is a unique document of feminist politi-
cal philosophy. De Gouges, born Marie Gouze, never received a formal education.
She published several theater plays and political pamphlets, and in October 1789,
right at the beginning of the revolutionary process in France, she submitted “a reform
program to the National Assembly which encompassed legal sexual equality, admis-
sion for women to all occupations, and the suppression of the dowry system through
a state provided alternative” (Landes 1988: 124). In 1791, de Gouges published her
reformulation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen that had first been
issued by the National Assembly in 1789. De Gouges was sent to the Guillotine in
November 1793 for “plastering the walls of Paris with posters urging that a federal-
ist system replace Jacobin centralized rule” (Scott 1992: 114). Associated with the
Girondist faction, de Gouges nonetheless proposed to defend the king in his trial
before the National Convention, and, also in 1791, published a Declaration of the
Rights of Woman, “dedicated to the Queen.” Some scholars therefore depict de Gouges
as a monarchist. But this view neglects the fact that she endorsed the revolutionary
political principles of egalitarianism and human rights as they were articulated in the
Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen and as they correlated with an understanding
of society and the political opposed to that of the ancien régime.

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 ENGAGING THE PAST

De Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen introduces
two areas of concern that today are still central concerns of feminist political phi-
losophy. These are first the dialectics of equality and difference, or universalism and
particularism, and second the extension of the bourgeois notion of the political.
The first is already present in the title of the Declaration, which points out that the
“rights of man” are, in fact, tailored to the male part of humanity only, and do not
encompass those rights that are required if women, too, are to be regarded as equals.
However, de Gouges does not only reclaim equality—claiming that “all female and
male citizens, being equal . . . have to be equally admissible to all dignities, public
offices and employments according to their abilities” (Gouges 1986: 103; translations
follow Hunt 1996). Also, de Gouges makes clear that when abstract human rights
are adapted to the concrete lifeworld of women, those rights acquire a new meaning.
Such is the case with the right to freedom of speech. De Gouges translates it into the
right of a woman to name, under any circumstances, the father of her child, so that
she and the child would receive means of subsistence and public recognition. “Every
female citizen,” she declares, should be able “to speak frankly: I am the mother of a
child which belongs to you, without any barbarian prejudice forcing her to dissimu-
late the truth” (Gouges 1986: 104). This right, if applied, would obviously have had
a huge impact on women’s possibilities to shape sexual and familial relations accord-
ing to their needs and desires. Not least of all, it would have enabled them to escape
the restrictions of marriage—“the tomb of trust and love,” according to de Gouges
(quoted in Scott 1992: 110).
Clearly, de Gouges’ Declaration is an attempt to overcome the exclusions that are
produced or at least continued through the language of human rights and equality.
Her theoretical strategy to include those who have previously been excluded from
the language of universalism thereby reflects the problem of particularism that until
today haunts every critique of universalism. When de Gouges claims that women are
“the superior sex in terms of beauty, like in terms of courage of maternal suffering”
(Gouges 1986: 102), she obviously subscribes to an essentialist understanding of
difference. Joan Scott has termed this “the paradox of an embodied equality,” high-
lighting the fact that “de Gouges never escaped the ambiguity of feminine identity,
the simultaneous appeal to and critique of established norms” (Scott 1992: 106).
However, the “paradoxes” that de Gouges’ text displays are not merely intellectual
shortcomings: they expose constitutive problems of Enlightenment thought and
modern political philosophy. First and foremost, they reveal that there is a problem
of how to recognize difference without falling back on particularism and essential-
ism. In addition, the Declaration, although only implicitly, also suggests a way out
of this impasse, namely the politicization of difference. As Scott states, de Gouges’
“addition of Women” is “disruptive because it implies the need to think differently
about the whole question of rights” (Scott 1992: 110). In contrast to other articula-
tions of the relation between equality and difference, de Gouges’ text works towards
questioning the limits of the political.
A year before de Gouges published the Declaration, Condorcet’s On the Admission
of Women to the Rights of Citizenship (1790) appeared. The Marquis de Condorcet, a
member of the abolitionist Société des Amis des Noirs and a Girondist like de Gouges,
contended that women should receive the full rights of citizenship and be admitted to
all public institutions. The “principle of the equality of rights” (Condorcet 1996: 119),
he argued, does not allow any exception:

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 Feminism and the enlightenment

Either no individual of the human species has any true rights, or all have the
same; and he or she who votes against the rights of another, whatever may be
his or her religion, colour, or sex, has by that fact abjured his own.
(Condorcet 1996: 120)

Condorcet’s famous essay also refers to the opposition of equality and difference but, in
contrast to de Gouges’ essay, he does not treat it as a “disruptive” paradox. Condorcet
instead establishes a notion of equality that includes difference by way of subordina-
tion, treating it as a specification of the general. Condorcet argues that “women are
not governed . . . by the reason (and experience) of men; they are governed by their
own reason (and experience)” (1996: 120). This distinction resonates with his under-
standing of the distinctive “private” duties, for which—Condorcet responds to his
opponents—women “would only be better fitted” if they become equal citizens.
As Joan Landes has remarked, Condorcet, “at this point in his argument, appears
to bow to masculinist prejudices of republican doctrine—specifically to the increas-
ingly popular notion that women’s domesticity can be made to service the wider polity”
(Landes 1988: 114). Moreover, in Condorcet’s essay a certain model of women’s eman-
cipation emerges that has informed much of subsequent politics and political theory,
liberal and socialist alike. According to this model, women are to be treated as equals
in the public sphere and within the market economy while leaving the power relations
of the private sphere intact. De Gouges’ Declaration, in contrast, points in a different
direction as it undermines “the possibility of any meaningful opposition between public
and private” (Scott 1992: 111). In fact, when de Gouges introduces “woman” into the
discourse of human rights, she subverts the underlying notion of the political as a distinc-
tive sphere in which autonomous subjects meet. So even if the rights she refers to are the
same as in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, these rights now constitute the
non-political—relations of kinship, reproduction, and sexual desire—as political.
In addition, de Gouges’ Declaration hints at the fact that the opposition between equal-
ity and difference is not stable. Differences proliferate. What is at stake is not only the
difference between men and women, but also differences among women, for example
women of rich and of poor families for whom the same laws do not have the same effects,
as de Gouges explains in the Postambule to the Declaration. In addition, the question that
looms at the margins of her text concerns the interrelations between gendered and racial-
ized forms of oppression, in particular slavery. De Gouges extends her egalitarian view to
those enslaved and colonized: “Man everywhere is equal” (L’homme partout est égal), she
states in her 1788 Reflections on Black Men (Réflexions sur les hommes nègres; Gouges 1986).
She also deconstructs the “black–white” dichotomy: “Men’s colour is nuanced, like all the
animals that nature has produced, as well as the plants and minerals. . . . All is varied and
this is the beauty of nature” (quoted in Scott 1992: 113). If, one could argue, the exten-
sion of the language of universal human rights and equality to the colonized and enslaved
evokes the dialectics of equality and universalism in a similar way to the feminist perspec-
tive, then the question emerges of how these forms of critique interfere with each other.

Education, Equality, and Independence: Mary

Wollstonecraft in Context
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1798) is certainly the most prominent feminist Enlightenment
thinker. In defense of the early French Revolution she published A Vindication of the Rights

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 ENGAGING THE PAST

of Men, the first reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, in which she
heavily criticized Burke’s aristocratic views. In this book, though, she did not reflect upon
the situation of women as she had already done in her first book Thoughts on the Education
of Daughters (1786) and as she continued to do up to her last novel Maria, or the Wrongs of
Women (1798), published posthumously by William Godwin, her husband and the father
of her daughter Mary Shelley.
The Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), her most important publication, is
a plea for gender equality through equal education. Wollstonecraft’s “central organ-
izing principle, through which she expresses her observations about the oppression
and domination of women” (Coffee 2014: 908), and thus her leading ethical ideal, is
“independence.” In the dedication to Talleyrand, who Wollstonecraft wishes to con-
vince of the necessity of women’s equal education, she stresses: “Independence I have
long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue” (Wollstonecraft
1989: 65). The main precondition for gaining independence—including economic
independence—is, according to Wollstonecraft, for every being “the exercise of
its own reason” (1989: 90). In the present state of society, she diagnoses, women
are systematically hindered in this with fatal consequences for the female habitus.
Education is thus meant to initiate a “revolution in feminine manners” and to change
women’s subaltern forms of behavior, which Wollstonecraft critically exposes again
and again throughout the Vindication (1989: 114). Indeed, education was a major
topic in Enlightenment discourse, as a wide range of authors considered it the central
means for improving the individual and society alike. In line with this, Wollstonecraft
reflects upon the correlation between the transformation of society and the transfor-
mation of subjectivity, or the need of women’s “reforming themselves to reform the
world” (1989: 114). She thereby introduces an understanding of emancipation that
has had an enormous impact on feminist notions of the political as starting from and
indispensably including a politics of subjectivity and self-transformation.
Wollstonecraft, who “seems to have read very few of the earlier women writers
on her sex, radical or conservative” (Ferguson and Todd 1984: 61), and who did not
have any connection to the Bluestockings circle, was deeply impressed by Catherine
Macauley’s Letters on Education. Wollstonecraft reviewed the book enthusiastically
upon its appearance in 1790, and as Moira Ferguson and Janet Todd highlight, “In
all essential ideas on women Wollstonecraft and Macauley agree—politics, religion,
and pedagogy” (1984: 61). Macauley, too, advocated the equal education of boys and
girls and argued that “differences that actually subsist between the sexes” might be
altered through education (1996: 204). She engaged in a kind of deconstruction of
sexual difference and argued heavily against Rousseau’s ideal of complementarity.
For Macauley, Rousseau’s account of girls’ education, which he gives in chapter 5 of
his Emile, or On Education, in which he introduces the figure of Sophie, is “blinded
by his pride and sensuality” (Macauley 1996: 213). His ideal of femininity, which
requires that a woman “cultivate her agreeable talents, in order to please her future
husband,” must, in Macauley’s view, be compared to the ideal Circassian slave, who
“cultivates hers [i.e. her agreeable talents] to fit her for the harem of an eastern
bashaw” (1996: 213). This orientalist theme also runs through Wollstonecraft’s criticism
of women’s oppression and her critique of Rousseau.
Wollstonecraft’s relation to Rousseau is complex. Certainly, she was critical of
Rousseau’s idea of gender complementarity, which many of her contemporaries endorsed.

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 Feminism and the enlightenment

Her “quarrel with the depiction of women in Emile” was, however, by no means a
“wholesale repudiation of his ideas” (Taylor 2002: 115). On the contrary, Wollstonecraft
shared his critique of how inequality distorts society and has led to degeneration. Her
attempt is to “extend” his argument “to women, and confidently assert that they
have been drawn out of their sphere by false refinement” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 90).
As a consequence, Wollstonecraft argues that women “must return to nature and
equality” instead of “degrading themselves” (1989: 90). Wollstonecraft’s statement that
Rousseau’s construction of femininity “appears to me grossly unnatural” (1989: 93)
is thus completely in line with her interpretation of Rousseau. While Wollstonecraft
acknowledges some gender differences—“women, I allow, may have different duties”
(1989: 120)—her overall claim is that different tasks do not constitute differences on
the level of moral principles. “They are human duties,” she contends, “and the princi-
ples that should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same”
(1989: 120). In the last instance, it is the “authority of reason” that should govern all
human behavior (1989: 120).
Among twentieth and twenty-first century feminist philosophers, this rational-
ist commitment, together with Wollstonecraft’s harsh critique of sensuality and her
“astringent attitude to heterosexual love,” (Taylor 2002: 112) have attracted much crit-
icism. Authors such as Cora Kaplan and Mary Poovey have argued that Wollstonecraft
adopted a masculine ideal of reason, which led to a neglect of the body and a “denial
of female sexuality” (Kaplan 2002: 258). In a similar way, Joan Landes has argued that
Wollstonecraft endorsed “the implicitly masculine values of the bourgeois sphere” and
repudiated the “female position” (Landes 1988: 135).
Vivian Jones, however, has challenged these readings by highlighting the “innovative
quality” of Wollstonecraft’s views on sex education (Jones 2005: 145). Wollstonecraft
extensively read the medical literature of her day and engaged in the so-called “botany
controversy” that surrounded the eroticized depictions of plants in the poems of Erasmus
Darwin. Wollstonecraft took sides, Jones argues, with “a language of sexual instruction
based on rational ideals of openness and transparency” (Jones 2005: 146). Accordingly,
Wollstonecraft’s refusal of feminine sensuality should not be misunderstood as a nega-
tion of bodily pleasures but as a critique of imposed subaltern subjectivity.
Another controversial issue is how far Wollstonecraft reflects on the intersection-
ality of domination. Of particular interest here are her relation to abolitionism and
the references that she makes to slavery in order to decry the subordination of women.
Like other radical egalitarians such as de Gouges and Condorcet, Wollstonecraft also
advocated the abolition of slavery. In particular, the abolitionist movement and
the revolution of Black slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue impacted
on Wollstonecraft’s understanding of slavery. “Formerly, in all forms of discourse
throughout the eighteenth century, conservative and radical women alike railed
against marriage, love, and education as forms of slavery perpetrated upon women by
men and by the conventions of society at large” (Ferguson 1996: 126). In the wake of
the French and the Haitian Revolutions, “slavery” was “recontextualized in terms of
colonial slavery” (Ferguson 1996: 126).
Moira Ferguson credits Wollstonecraft with having “been the first writer to raise
issues of colonial and gender relations so tellingly in tandem” (1996: 131). Indeed the
Vindication of the Rights of Women on many occasions decries colonial slavery. However,
the more conventional, metaphorical reference to “slavery” also runs through the text,

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invoking a supposed moral superiority of the European nations. Penelope Deutscher, in

her account of Wollstonecraft’s use of analogies, therefore hints at the problematic, yet
unthought aspects of the complex analogies that her text displays.

For when the claim that women are like animals and slaves (not to mention
children and savages) serves the interests of women’s claim to a better status,
what links the analogy with the analogy of the analogy is the hinge of what may
be named an indirect, aspirational, analogical subordination of those whom it
would . . . be degrading for women to be “like.”
(Deutscher 2014: 204)

An equally unsolved problem that only surfaces in Wollstonecraft’s late writings, the
Letters from Sweden and Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, is the interference of gender
and class domination. In her last novel Wollstonecraft portrays “with sympathy the
peculiar horror suffered by women of the laboring class” (Ferguson and Todd 1984: 85).
But Wollstonecraft does not engage in theoretical reflection about that horror.

Feminist Engagements with the Enlightenment

From the second half of the twentieth century onward, feminist philosophers have
engaged with the Enlightenment in various ways. Methodologically two strategies can
be distinguished: re-readings of Enlightenment authors and debates about the legacy of
the Enlightenment for present feminist theory.
The first strategy worked, on the one hand, against the neglect of the theoretical
contributions of female authors. Prior to the feminist wave of the 1960s and 1970s,
de Gouges, for example, had been more or less “forgotten” while Wollstonecraft was
largely recalled because of her biography and her personal struggle for independence.
In this respect Emma Goldman and Virginia Woolf paid tribute to her, but scholarship
and serious engagement with her theoretical positions only date from the last decades of
the twentieth century. On the other hand, the masculine canon of philosophy was scru-
tinized as feminist philosophers started to systematically assess the gender ideologies of
“classical” male authors. In particular, the “dark” sides of Rousseau and Kant provoked
a wide range of readings and critiques.
As in the eighteenth century, Rousseau’s gender theory has inspired diverse and
controversial readings. Lynda Lange, for example, has argued that despite the “very
unequal prescriptions he makes for women’s and men’s lives,” Rousseau “neverthe-
less . . . accords women not-insignificant power and has, after all, claimed that their
contributions to family life are of crucial importance to a good civil society” (Lange
2002: 5). Critics such as Susan Moller Okin, on the other hand, have highlighted the
fact that equality and freedom, the “two most prevalent values” of Rousseau’s social
and political philosophy, were only “for men” (Okin 1979: 140). Indeed, for Rousseau,
gender difference did not constitute a problem of inequality but on the contrary was
introduced as a necessary component of society. Rousseau’s account of the education of
Sophie that is purely supplementary to that of Emile can thus be understood as paradig-
matic of “the exclusion of women from public life and its complement, their relegation
to private life,” where women are to exercise a moral and cultivating influence on their
husbands (Steinbrügge 1995: 6). Within the structure of bourgeois society, Steinbrügge

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concludes, women “became the moral sex” while “humane qualities survived (only) as a
female principle” (1995: 6).
Despite the fact that this gender arrangement clearly resonates with a wide range of
attempts of the period to naturalize gender hierarchies, other scholars such as Jacques
Derrida, Penny Weiss, and Linda Zerilli have pointed to the ambiguity of Rousseau’s
concept of nature. “Nature,” and in particular “woman’s nature,” is by no means to be
understood in a positivistic sense as a set of given data but, for Rousseau, is something
that needs to be created and conserved. Accordingly,

there is a profound sense in his writings that gender boundaries must be carefully
fabricated and maintained . . . because what announces “man” or “woman” is
not anatomical difference but instead an arbitrary system of signs that stands in
permanent danger of collapsing into a frightening ambiguity of meaning and a
loss of manly constitution.
(Zerilli 2002: 279)

In contrast to the case of Rousseau, the gendered aspects of Kant’s philosophy did not
receive much attention in the eighteenth century although they, too, were controver-
sial, as the example of Theodor Gottlieb Hippel shows. Contemporary feminist philoso-
phers, however, have engaged extensively with Kant. His views on women, citizenship,
and marriage in the Metaphysics of Morals, his distinction between male reason and
female emotion in his essay On the Beautiful and the Sublime, and his theory of gender
complementarity in the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View have been heavily
researched in the last decades. This research has established that Kant—despite his crit-
ical remarks on the tutelage of the “beautiful sex” in his essay What Is Enlightenment?—
was certainly not an advocate of women’s equality.
The controversial question, however, is how far “the basic categories of Kantian
moral philosophy contain elements that, irrespective of their author’s view on gender
differences, admit of a feminist appropriation” (Nagl-Docekal 1997: 102). In particular,
the Kantian notions of reason and autonomy have inspired feminist arguments as well
as generated wide-ranging critiques. As Geneviève Lloyd put it, Kant’s ethical writings
introduce “a view of morality as the antithesis of inclinations and feelings—a transcend-
ing of the subjectivity and particularity of passion to enter, as free consciousness, the
common space of Reason” (Lloyd 1986: 68). The structural omissions that underlie and
constitute the Kantian moral philosophy—affect and emotion, collectivity and social-
ity, the body and non-human nature—have been criticized in different but converging
ways by feminist philosophers inspired by psychoanalysis, Marxism, poststructuralism,
postcolonial studies, and environmental ethics. It is here that the different branches of
feminist critiques of Enlightenment meet.
Indeed, the various feminist critiques of Enlightenment thought have largely
focused on the dichotomies that constitute the notions of reason and autonomy. It
has been argued that the concepts of freedom, equality, and human rights have proved
to be insufficient when it comes to understanding and overcoming gendered forms of
domination—or, worse, have even worked to conceal them. The question that has
generated the most controversy among feminist philosophers is, then, what theoretical
consequences follow from these critiques. Could or should feminist philosophy relate to
the egalitarian and rationalist legacy of the Enlightenment and treat it as an unfinished

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project that has to be further radicalized? Or, on the contrary, could or should feminist
philosophy engage in a radical deconstruction of Enlightenment discourse?
Feminist philosophers such as Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser, working in the tra-
dition of Habermasian Critical Theory, have clearly pursued the first path. In particu-
lar, Benhabib has formulated a “post-Enlightenment defense of universalism,” which
rejects the “metaphysical illusions of the Enlightenment,” first and foremost that of
disembodied reason (Benhabib 1992: 3–4). She therefore replaced the notion of “a
disconnected and disembodied subject” with the idea of a “situated self” that is always
already engaged in embodied and situated communicative action. Fraser, for her part,
has reformulated the notion of the public sphere. In contrast to Habermas’ idealization
of the liberal public sphere as an institutionalized arena of discursive interaction in
which citizens exercise their reason, Fraser has proposed to conceive of public spheres
in the plural. She introduced the notion of “subaltern counter-publics . . . where mem-
bers of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn
permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and
needs” (Fraser 1990: 67). Other feminist philosophers have attempted to rethink the
Dialectics of Enlightenment as formulated by the early Frankfurt School from a femi-
nist perspective. Cornelia Klinger, for example, has explored the “gender dialectics of
enlightenment,” arguing that the double privatization of family and religion in moder-
nity led to a “sacralization” of the private sphere, so that women and the private came to
function as an utopian reservoir that complements the devastations of modern society
(Klinger 2003: 200).
If all these readings in one way or the other try to assess and overcome the struc-
tural shortcomings of Enlightenment thought while recuperating its critical impulse,
an inverse dialectics seems to be at work in the attempts to overcome Enlightenment
discourse while nevertheless engaging in radical problematizations of power and subjec-
tion. This is most explicit in Judith Butler’s writings on “precarious life” and critique,
in which the political-ethical horizon of the Enlightenment is re-established. Her ques-
tion, “Who is normatively human?” critically posed in order to disrupt discursive and
practical “dehumanization” (Butler 2004: xv–xvi) and the unequal mourning of deaths,
obviously evokes and re-instantiates a political notion of humanity and the claim that
everybody should be treated equally. With reference to Kant and Foucault, Butler even
states in the essay “Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity” that “to the degree that we can
still ask the question, what is enlightenment, we continue . . . to show that critique has
not stopped happening, and that in this sense neither has enlightenment stopped hap-
pening” (Butler 2009: 787). In light of contemporary complex and intersecting forms of
domination and ideology, and in light of our knowledge about the troubles of critique,
one might add that the task of scrutinizing and challenging all established authorities
has only become more complicated.

Further Reading
Ferguson, Moira (1992) Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834, New York:
Routledge. (A comprehensive account of women writer’s positions on slavery and abolitionism.)
O’Brien, Karen (2009) Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. (Explores the relation of women writers to the British Enlightenment and women as a
subject of inquiry by male and female authors.)

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Taylor, Barbara (2003) Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. (On Wollstonecraft’s utopianism and her relation to the radical-Protestant Enlightenment.)
Trouille, Mary Seidman (1997) Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau, Albany,
NY: SUNY Press. (A comprehensive account of interpretations of Rousseau by eighteenth-century
women writers.)

Related Topics
Early modern feminism and Cartesian philosophy (Chapter 6); feminist engagements
with social contract theory (Chapter 7); feminist engagements with nineteenth-
century German philosophy (Chapter 9); rationality and objectivity in feminist
philosophy (Chapter 20); the genealogy and viability of the concept of intersectionality
(Chapter 28); feminist conceptions of autonomy (Chapter 41); feminist engagements
with democratic theory (Chapter 51); feminism and liberalism (Chapter 52); feminism
and freedom (Chapter 53); feminism and power (Chapter 54).

References
Benhabib, Seyla (1992) Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics,
New York: Routledge.
Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Politics of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso.
—— (2009) “Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity,” Critical Inquiry 35(4): 773–795.
Coffee, Alan M. S. J. (2014) “Freedom as Independence: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Grand Blessing of
Life,” Hypatia 29(4): 908–924.
Condorcet, Marquis de (1996) “On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship,” in Lynn Hunt
(Ed.) The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief History in Documents, Boston, MA: Bedford,
119–121.
DeLucia, JoEllen (2015) A Feminine Enlightenment: British Women Writers and the Philosophy of Progress,
1759–1820, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Deutscher, Penelope (2014) “Analogy of Analogy: Animals and Slaves in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Defense of
Women’s Rights,” in Susan Lettow (Ed.) Reproduction, Race and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life
Sciences, Albany, NY: SUNY, 187–216.
Ferguson, Moira (1996) “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery,” in Maria J. Falco (Ed.)
Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,
125–149.
Ferguson, Moira and Todd, Janet (1984) Mary Wollstonecraft, Boston, MA: Twayne.
Franklin Lewis, Elizabeth (2004) Women Writers in the Spanish Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness,
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Fraser, Nancy (1990) “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing
Democracy,” Social Text 25/26: 56–80.
Goodman, Dena (1994) The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment, Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Goodman, Katherine R. (1999) Amazons and Apprentices: Women and the German Parnassus in the Early
Enlightenment, Rochester: Camden House.
Gouges, Olympe de (1986a) “Réflexions sur les hommes nègres,” in Benoîte Groult (Ed.) Oeuvres, Paris:
Mercure de France, 83–87.
—— (1986b) “Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne,” in Benoîte Groult (Ed.) Oeuvres, Paris:
Mercure de France, 101–112.
—— (1996) “Declaration of the Rights of Women,” in Lynn Hunt (Ed.) The French Revolution and Human
Rights: A Brief History in Documents, Boston, MA: Bedford, 124–129.

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Green, Karen (2014) A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1700–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hunt, Lynne (Ed.) (1996) The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief History in Documents, Boston,
MA: Bedford.
Jones, Vivian (2005) “Advice and Enlightenment: Mary Wollstonecraft and Sex Education,” in Sarah Knott
and Barbara Taylor (Ed.) Women, Gender and Enlightenment, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 140–155.
Kaplan, Cora (2002) “Mary Wollstonecraft’s reception and legacies,” in Claudia L. Johnson (Ed.) The
Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 246–270.
Klinger, Cornelia (2003) “Die Dialektik der Aufklärung im Geschlechterverhältnis,” in Sonja Asdal
and Johannes Rohbeck (Eds.) Aufklärung und Aufklärungskritik in Frankreich, Berlin: Berliner
Wissenschaftsverlag, 199–229.
Knott, Sarah and Taylor, Barbara (2005) “General Introduction,” in Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (Eds.)
Women, Gender and Enlightenment, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, xv–xxi.
Landes, Joan (1988) Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Lange, Lynda (2002) “Introduction,” in Lynda Lange (Ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1–23.
Lloyd, Geneviève (1986) The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy, New York: Routledge.
Macauley, Catherine (1996) “Letters on Education. Letter XXII: No Characteristic Difference in Sex”
and “Letter XXIII: Coquetry,” in Janet Todd (Ed.) Female Education in the Age of Enlightenment, vol. 3,
London: William Pickering, 203–215.
Nagl-Docekal, Herta (1997) “Feminist Ethics: How It Could Benefit from Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” in
Robin May Schott (Ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 101–124.
Okin, Susan Moller (1979) Women in Western Political Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Scott, Joan (1992) “‘A Woman Who Has Only Paradoxes to Offer’: Olympe de Gouges Claims Rights
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Steinbrügge, Liselotte (1995) The Moral Sex: Woman’s Nature in the French Enlightenment, Oxford: Oxford
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Taylor, Barbara (2002) “The Religious Foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminism,” in Claudia
L. Johnson (Ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Wollstonecraft, Mary (1989) “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” in Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler
(Eds.) The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, vol. 5, London: William Pickering, 79–266.
Zerilli, Linda (2002) “‘Une Maitresse Imperieuse’: Woman in Rousseau’s Semiotic Republic,” in Lynda
Lange (Ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 277–314.

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 9
FEMINIST ENGAGEMENTS
WITH NINETEENTH-
CENTURY GERMAN
PHILOSOPHY
Elaine P. Miller

Introduction
Immanuel Kant’s 1791 Critique of Judgment inspired the best of nineteenth-century
European philosophy, including German Idealism and Romanticism and the philos-
ophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (Hance 1998; Kreines 2008; Zimmerman 2005). Many
feminist scholars have also found the Critique of Judgment productive, despite thorough
critique of some of Kant’s central presuppositions in his other works. Themes of interest
to feminists in this work include the turn away from an emphasis on the isolated ego
or subject, the value of felt connectedness among humans, the significance of embodi-
ment, and the restoration of narrative complexity (Moen 1997: 214). G. W. F. Hegel’s
transformation of Kantian morality into a system that unites universal principles with
an acknowledgment of the concrete circumstances and self-correcting possibilities of
actual historical events and movements is also arguably important for the feminist cri-
tique of traditional metaphysics and of moral values that do not take women’s concerns
into account (Gauthier 1997). A growing recognition of the impossibility of under-
standing the human being apart from her relation to nature and to a broader political
context, and the necessity of attributing a very specific type of purposiveness to natural
as well as human phenomena can be added to this list.
The philosophies of both Hegel and Nietzsche have been the target of sustained and
intensive feminist critique for decades, in what Paul Patton calls “a battlefield of con-
flicting interpretations” (1993: xii). Other nineteenth-century thinkers have received
less attention, although arguably strands of nineteenth-century German thought,
including some readings of Hegel and Nietzsche, opened up new possibilities for think-
ing about sexual difference and gender equality. In addition, a culture of women’s
salons in nineteenth-century Europe opened up a new horizon for intellectual contri-
bution by women. In this chapter I will examine the areas of Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s
philosophy that have garnered the most critical attention from feminist thinkers, as
well as some lines of thought that also have proved productive but that have received
 ENGAGING THE PAST

less critical notice. In addition I will consider the intellectual contributions of three of
the most celebrated women contributors to nineteenth-century intellectual life: Rahel
Varnhagen, Dorothea Veit Schlegel, and Caroline Schelling-Schlegel.

Hegel and German Idealism: Being and Thinking

As early as 1970 the Italian radical feminist manifesto “Let’s Spit on Hegel” (Lonzi
1996) attests to the intensity and contentiousness of reaction to the way that tradi-
tional views on women have converged onto the figure of Hegel. Even if they do not
espouse so passionate a rejection of Hegel’s philosophy, many feminist theorists have
been wary both of the apparent biases in Hegel’s writing and of the explicit content of
his philosophical claims. Hegel is famous for comparing women to plants because in
his view their actions are guided not by reason but by contingent external conditions,
inclinations, and opinions (Hegel 1991: 166Z). Hegel’s dialectic, while always taking
into account specific historical and material conditions, considers abstraction from
every determinacy a necessary condition for spiritual (both legal and symbolic) person-
hood, leading to the conclusion that any consideration of specific natural difference,
including sexual difference, must be left out of a fully articulated account of human
development (Nuzzo 2001: 116–121).
Feminist philosophers have extensively analyzed all of Hegel’s central concepts,
including both their limitations and their further possibilities for development in direc-
tions not anticipated by their author but consonant with his philosophical system.
Although the majority of feminist work on Hegel has addressed themes in his 1807
work Phenomenology of Spirit, in particular the sections “Lordship and Bondage” and
“Man and Woman”—on Greek Ethical Life, which draws on Sophocles’ Antigone—
feminist philosophers have engaged with the full spectrum of Hegel’s texts, including
the Logic and the Philosophy of Nature.
Early Hegel scholarship by feminists was often configured according to the pros
and cons of reading Hegel at all, whereas more recent scholarship uses contemporary
insights into sex, gender, and women’s roles to illuminate aspects of Hegel’s method
and central concepts that might be refashioned to ends other than his own (Hutchings
and Pulkkinen 2010: 2). Perhaps the most fundamental and important insight that
Hegel’s philosophy provides develops out of his reading of Kant. Whereas Kant viewed
the connection between nature and freedom as a necessary yet indemonstrable pos-
tulate of reason, Hegel argued that this connection not only existed but also could be
known. Dichotomies, in Hegel’s view, were not the result of but rather the catalyst for
philosophy. Systems of thought that posit static dualities simultaneously present views
that are one-sided and abstract, but also motivate philosophy to find a way of going
beyond them. Hegel’s dialectical method outlines the movement of a self-positing
and self-correcting historically developing system, in which stances that are initially
one-sided and mutually opposing overcome themselves and shift to more complex and
inclusive positions that preserve the truth of the moments that they supersede even
as they destroy their false presuppositions. This movement mirrors the way in which
human beings progressively make their home in nature, overcoming obstacles that arise
as they proceed in shaping the world to their needs, and making use of their experi-
ence and errors to better adapt it to their purposes. Human beings are practically free,
according to Hegel, not because they completely conquer a hostile and external world

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that they view as an antagonist over and against themselves, but rather because they
have the capacity to make themselves at home and indeed recognize themselves in and
of the world out of which they, like other natural things, have arisen (Hance 1998: 40).
This activity of immanent self-positing and self-overcoming, as well as a con-
tinuous transition between nature and spirit, can only be properly conceptualized
by understanding the activity and mediation of this process as a living one. This is
the legacy Hegel takes from Kant’s third Critique: purposiveness without a (external,
determinate) purpose is the movement of life, which constantly overcomes itself and
becomes more complex and inclusive (Lindberg 2010: 180). Purposiveness here does
not refer to the finite, external teleological movement that Hegel is sometimes incor-
rectly accused of according to historical movement—a version of which he himself
derided by characterizing those who hold it as believing, for example, that nature cre-
ated cork in order to give humans something with which to stopper their wine bottles
(Hegel 1977: 245Z). Rather, Kant calls purposiveness the infinite capacity, common
to all living beings and to nature itself, to attain ends already immanent within a liv-
ing system. Purposiveness entails self-organization and self-regulation, and is present
within living beings and in free action.
Purposiveness without a (determinate, external) purpose is a regulative rather than
a constitutive principle. For Kant, this distinction marks the difference between the
reason and the understanding. The pure concepts of the understanding constitute, or
make possible, any given object of experience, whereas reason has ideas that go beyond
any possible experience but that nonetheless play an important role in, or regulate, our
philosophizing about the unity of experience. For Kant, although it is indeterminate,
purposiveness is the a priori principle upon which reflective aesthetic judgment is based.
Its unique quality of pertaining both to judgments of beauty, which are sensory, and
supersensible judgments of (indeterminate) purposiveness, makes it suitable to mediate
between the realms of nature and freedom. Kant’s critique of teleological judgment, in
particular the attempt to systematically move beyond a thinking that posited dualis-
tic, static, and hierarchically ordered oppositions, influenced the development of much
nineteenth-century philosophy.
This dialectical process of positing and overcoming contradiction has implications
for the role of the feminine in Hegel’s work. Some scholars have argued that it is pre-
cisely the material and the feminine dimension that is lost or that fails to be preserved
in this dialectical process, where the “truth” of positions is distilled and the unnecessary
is overcome (Efrat-Levkovich 2010; Lindberg 2010). Two central dialectical opposi-
tions in Hegel’s work in which the feminine is arguably overcome as a significant cat-
egory of self-positing have been the focus of the majority of feminist critique of Hegel,
as mentioned above. These are the dialectic of master and slave, on the one hand, and
the dialectic between natural/divine law and human law divided along gender lines, on
the other, which form important nodes of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Spirit, here,
refers both to the subject and the object of knowing. Spirit spans individual and col-
lective human experience and achievement, the growing human body of knowledge,
works, and institutions, and the unity of the whole as a “world spirit” actualizing itself
by coming to know itself.
Hegel’s phenomenological description of the progressive development of human con-
sciousness is often figural, depicting constellations of increasingly complex interactions
of natural, historical, and symbolic strands of meaning that present the truth of particular

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moments in history in relation to each other. These nodes are crystallizations, part of a
dynamic process and thus incomplete, constantly subject to change, and self-correcting
(Lindberg 2010: 178). Hegel uses the figures of master and slave at an early stage of his
dialectic in order to illustrate the drama of the most primordial of human intersubjective
encounters, what could be called the very emergence of human self-consciousness out of
natural human existence.
Simone de Beauvoir famously described the relation of woman to man as analogous
to that of slave to master in the Hegelian master–slave dialectic (Beauvoir 1989: 64).
In fact, this section of the Phenomenology of Spirit is not explicitly gendered, although
both antagonists are implicitly male. The scene of master–slave conflict depicts the first
encounter between two human consciousnesses (not as yet individuated) who have
emerged out of a state of nature characterized by the quest for the immediate satisfac-
tion of desire or the perpetuation of pure life, in which sexual desire and reproduction
plays an integral part.
In his description of this initial state of being, Hegel portrays the human being as a
fundamentally animal nature, interacting with the natural world around it as something
to be consumed. In this world another human is nothing more than either a means or
a threat to the preservation and perpetuation of the species, itself an endless cycle of
coming into being and passing away. This cyclical natural activity remains fluid and
unchecked until one consciousness comes up against another in a desire, not for food
or sexual gratification, but rather for recognition from the other. Recognition cannot
be acquired from any other non-human living entity and indeed cannot obtain if one
of the antagonists consumes the other. The mutual desire for recognition leads to a life-
and-death struggle in which each party strives to bend the other’s will to its own. When
one consciousness necessarily concedes defeat and becomes a “slave” or “bondsman” to
the other, it is enjoined to serve the other’s needs, transforming both of their existences
in the process. The “slave’s” existence now comprises nothing more than procuring for
the “master” what the other needs to satisfy its desire, thereby deferring the immediacy
of its own gratification.
This check in desire has the unanticipated consequence that the slave emerges as the
truth of this encounter. The slave becomes a reflective self-consciousness, as opposed to
a consumptive animal, by virtue of having controlled the immediacy of its desire and of
having worked on the world as a consequence of this task. This “working” on the world,
which Hegel characterizes as the creation of a “thing” for the consumption of the mas-
ter, brings into being a second, humanly crafted nature. The master consciousness,
however, by virtue of having neither checked its own desire nor worked on the world,
remains a static version of the original animal human nature and eventually simply
fades away in this encounter. It never becomes self-conscious, since even in its domi-
nation of the other, it cannot be recognized by one who is not of equal stature. True to
the form of the Hegelian dialectic—Aufhebung or “sublation,” denoting both perishing
and preserving—one side of the opposition is incorporated into the other, which, here
as explicit, reflective, self-consciousness, emerges as the truth of the confrontation.
Feminist commentators have disagreed as to whether or not Beauvoir is correct
in aligning woman with the slave in this encounter, and what the implications of
reading the dialectic in this way would be. As Tina Chanter notes, Beauvoir not only
attributes the woman-as-slave’s state of submission to oppression by the dominant
consciousness, but also to what she considers her “bad faith” acquiescence in a role

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closely aligned with nature due to her childbearing (1995: 62). This alignment with
life makes woman more likely to concede defeat in the life-and-death struggle that
arises when two self-consciousnesses meet and demand recognition from each other.
In tension with this view, however, Beauvoir seems to completely disregard the key
transformation of the slave at the conclusion of the encounter (Chanter 1995; Oliver
1996; Miller 2000; Mussett 2006).
Arguably, however, Beauvoir’s reading of the master–slave dialectic may have a dou-
ble thrust. If woman actually serves as the catalyst and mediation for man’s transcend-
ence, avoiding the life-and-death struggle that characterizes the encounter between
the two consciousnesses, she may nonetheless be emancipated through the activity of
labor, or “work” on “the thing.” Beauvoir herself in The Second Sex writes that woman
functions as a respite from the constant risking of life that characterizes man’s existence
(Beauvoir 1989: 141). Mussett argues that we can cull from Beauvoir’s reading another
kind of “absolute negativity,” one that arises not through a life-and-death struggle but
precisely through women’s historical oppression and their historical position as abso-
lute other. Since women did not choose their historical situation, their passage out of
the position of the slave is more precarious than that of men, who demand recognition
through confrontation; however, through working on the world women may follow an
analogous, albeit a slower, path to subjectivity (Mussett 2006: 288).
In The Second Sex Beauvoir also suggests that for women to occupy the transforma-
tional position of the “slave” they would need to assert distinctively feminine values in
opposition to masculine values (Beauvoir 1989: 141; Miller 2000: 122). Only this kind
of creation of values could put women in a position to demand recognition from men
in the manner outlined by the master–slave dialectic. This argument implies that there
might be two distinct subjectivities differentiated along the lines of sexual difference.
In Beauvoir’s view the mere demand to “be recognized as existents by the same right
as men” has not yet placed women in a position to struggle in the way outlined by the
Hegelian master–slave paradigm (Beauvoir 2000: 64–65). This suggests a proximity to
the position of Luce Irigaray, who argues that the universal cannot be one, but must be
at least two, differentiated along the lines of sexual difference and desire.
Irigaray’s famous reading of Hegel, “The Eternal Irony of the Community,” opened
up a plethora of readings of the second most commented upon section from Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit, “The Ethical World: Human and Divine Law: Man and
Woman” (Hegel 1977: 267; Irigaray 1985: 214–226). Hegel chooses to illustrate the
tension that potentially arises between man and woman when human law and divine
law are assigned according to natural difference, by reading that tension through the
central conflict of Sophocles’ Antigone. Here Hegel initially presents the harmonious
first shape of what he calls spirit, the historical stage where human consciousness for
the first time explicitly recognizes its world as a product of itself, and the external
world begins to appear not as something alien over and against consciousness, but
rather as a place in which consciousness is at home. For Hegel, this moment occurs
in ancient Greek ethical life, where maintaining allegiance to the law of the family is
assigned to women, and the order of the state is assigned to men. Such an historical
arrangement presumes that if duties are clearly and distinctly distributed and differen-
tiated, then spheres of human interaction will function seamlessly and harmoniously.
The Sophoclean tragedy Antigone, by contrast, presents the inevitable conflict that
will arise when such prescribed ethical duties clash. Antigone’s act of following the

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dictates of divine law and family allegiance by burying her brother Polynices against
King Creon’s explicit (human) order leads to the inevitable destruction of the harmo-
nious ethical substance.
As a result of this breakdown, subjectivity becomes an aggregate of lifeless “persons”
rather than the unified substance of ethical life. Irigaray’s reading emphasizes the
“undifferentiated opaqueness” of woman in this paradigm, her role as nothing more
than the “store (of) substance for the sublation of self,” the historical development of
the masculine subject. Woman has no specific historical discourse that would allow her
to identify with and return to herself as individuated yet united with a symbolic order;
thus her role becomes one of silently facilitating the emergence of the ostensibly neutral
but actually masculine individual.
Multiple feminist readings of Hegel’s Antigone were inspired by the dissemination of
Irigaray’s essay (Bernstein 2010; Boer 2003; Butler 2010; Chanter 1995 and 2011; Mills
1986; Oliver 1996). In fact, readings of Antigone have overshadowed any other recent
feminist discussion of Hegel, with a few notable exceptions, including Carole Pateman
on the Philosophy of Right, Alison Stone on the Philosophy of Nature (2010; 2013), and
Kimberly Hutchings on the Science of Logic (2005). In addition, Hannah Arendt and
Gillian Rose engage with Hegel’s figure of the “beautiful soul” who shrinks from contact
with the world and fears to act (Hegel 1977: 383) by reading the role of women intel-
lectuals contemporary with Hegel through this figure from the Phenomenology of Spirit
(Arendt 1974; Rose 1992).
The most important themes for feminist philosophy arising out of nineteenth-
century continental philosophy in general, and Hegel in particular, then, include
overcoming the epistemologically and politically isolated subject in favor of an
interconnected system that not only links humans with each other individually and
socially, but also humans with broader nature; understanding the human being as
essentially not only intellectual and moral but also embodied and broadly material;
and the relationship between beauty and morality. The overcoming of one-sided
antitheses such as the distinctions between nature and culture, the individual and the
universal, inclination and duty, body and mind, also constitutes an important part of
Hegel’s legacy for feminist thought.

Nietzsche, the Eternal Feminine, and Truth as a Woman

Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy has generated as concentrated a critique from femi-
nists as Hegel’s, but a number of commentators, particularly from within contempo-
rary continental philosophy, have also recognized the resources for feminist thinking
in Nietzsche’s critique of the history of metaphysics and of certain institutions, which,
in his words, embody “the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries
to come” (1990: 105). Feminist philosophy, in other words, shares common enemies
with Nietzsche. In addition, Nietzsche’s analysis of the ways in which seemingly neu-
tral and universal truths and values develop historically to favor certain groups can
contribute to the feminist critique of power relations in patriarchal culture. I will
focus here on several particularly productive strains of thought for feminist inter-
preters of Nietzsche: (1) the idea of truth as a woman; (2) the eternal feminine as a
Dionysian affirmation of life; (3) the will to power as an overcoming of philosophical
dualisms; and (4) the concept of genealogy. Nietzsche’s critique of the philosophical

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conception of the atomic autonomous subject also provides resources for the feminist
critique of traditional conceptions of subjectivity that privilege qualities historically
judged to be “masculine” (Oliver and Pearsall 1998: 2).
Probably more than any single phrase of Nietzsche’s, the enigmatic beginning of
Beyond Good and Evil, “Supposing truth were a woman: what then?” (1989: 2) has
both intrigued feminist writers and aroused their suspicion. With the publication of
two important works treating the subject in France in the 1970s, feminist attention to
Nietzsche burgeoned. Jacques Derrida’s Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (1979) circles around
the above phrase, and is one of the first works to eschew the previous two major atti-
tudes of commentators on Nietzsche’s remarks on women in favor of an attention to the
polysemic nature of the use of “woman” in his work. One strand of such early commen-
tary rejected Nietzsche’s philosophy altogether as misogynistic, while the other simply
ignored his inflammatory comments on women as peripheral to his project.
The second important seminal work on Nietzsche and truth as a woman, Sarah
Kofman’s “Baubo: Theological Perversion and Fetishism,” also avoids this double
danger by focusing on Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics for its “perverted” perspec-
tive, which Nietzsche likens to a rapacious gaze that wants to strip women naked,
that claims to be able to see the world as it really is and not as it appears (Kofman
1988: 37; Nietzsche 1989: 21). As “woman,” in Kofman’s view, Nietzsche’s concep-
tion of truth makes a claim to be neither appearance nor reality, and thus cannot be
expressed metaphysically.
Nietzsche’s controversial remarks on women cannot be denied. Among the most
infamous, the section “On the Friend” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra describes women as
cats, birds, or cows, and makes the claim that “Woman is not yet capable of friendship”
(1966: 57). The section “On Little Old and Young Women” states that “everything
about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: that is preg-
nancy,” and has an old woman advise Zarathustra “You are going to women? Do not
forget the whip!” (1966: 67). Yet in the same work virtue, truth, and eternity are female
figures and virtue is compared to a mother’s relationship to her child. Also, Zarathustra’s
whip is shown to be an ineffective way of approaching life or the feminine (Armstrong,
cited in Patton 1993, xiii; Nietzsche 1966: 226). And through Zarathustra’s longing to
become pregnant with wisdom Nietzsche compares a relationship to the earth—the
corrective to a tradition preoccupied with transcending corporeal life—to the capacity
to procreate bodily (Nietzsche 1966: 36, 76, 85, 94, 108–109, 124, 224–227, 228–231).
Nietzsche also uses pregnancy as a metaphor for self-overcoming and the eternal recur-
rence of the same in the same work (1966: 16; 115).
Derrida traces the multiple layers of Nietzsche’s descriptions of woman as a figure for
truth and for distance and as a figure of artifice, veils, and skepticism toward the philo-
sophical idols that have heretofore been set up, in particular toward the metaphysical
conception of being as unchanging and transcendent. Truth is a veil that both prom-
ises and hides something that seems to lie underneath appearances, but the feminine
is that which recognizes both the temptation and the deceptiveness of such an appeal.
According to Derrida, the heterogeneity of Nietzsche’s text manifests his lack of illusion
that he could ever know woman, truth, or the ontological effects of absence and pres-
ence (1979: 95). As such, Derrida argues, the figure of woman in Nietzsche performs and
unmasks the contingency of every philosophical claim to transcendence and certainty,
including those that occlude the claim of women to a specific philosophical role.

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Luce Irigaray’s Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche famously responds to Spurs without
citing it, insinuating that both Nietzsche and Derrida have appropriated the feminine
to their own ends. Marine Lover is a conversation with Nietzsche that both responds
to figures of the feminine in Nietzsche with love, as the title suggests, but also criti-
cally intimates that in addressing or discussing woman Nietzsche speaks into a mirror
that ultimately reflects back only himself, or the feminine as it is constituted in the
masculine imaginary. For Irigaray, supposing that truth is a woman and figuring woman
as veiled, deceptive, or as purely appearance remains, as does its antithesis, within the
metaphysical paradigm of truth, where the opposite grounds the economy of sameness
(1991: 77). Irigaray writes, addressing Nietzsche directly, that when he finally allows
woman to speak for themselves, as in the figures of Truth, Life, and Eternity in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, “it is only to bring about—your perspective, your art, your time, your
will.” This appropriative mimicry takes woman “away from her surfaces, her depths,”
and allows her to speak only through the ventriloquism of Zarathustra (1991: 36). On
this argument, Nietzsche’s text remains complicit with the values that it seeks to over-
turn and does not open up a space for an active feminine subject (Oliver 1995: x–xiii).
Debra Bergoffen negotiates this impasse by suggesting that Nietzsche’s task was not
to investigate the desire of woman so much as to undo man’s desire for transcendence
(1989: 82; 1998: 229). Bergoffen relates Nietzsche’s attempt to unravel masculine meta-
physical desire to his articulation of the temporality of the eternal recurrence of the
same, which intertwines masculine and feminine temporalities in a “nonteleological
joyful affirmation of life” (1989: 88).
Likewise, Kofman analyzes Nietzsche’s appellation of truth as “a woman who has
grounds for not showing her grounds,” or “Baubo,” in The Gay Science (Nietzsche
1974: 8), by recounting the story of the witch Baubo who appeared to Demeter dur-
ing the Eleusinian mysteries. Baubo pulls up her skirts and exposes herself—or, in an
alternate version, shows Demeter a picture of Dionysos drawn on her belly—causing
Demeter to laugh in the midst of sorrowing for her lost daughter. As Kofman reads it,
in the Eleusinian mysteries the female sexual organs are celebratory symbols of fertil-
ity and regeneration, and here they represent a return of the fecundity that Hades
had stolen away, becoming assurances of the eternal rebirth or return of spring,
life, and all life-affirming things. Kofman argues that Nietzsche both identifies and
struggles with an ambivalent cultural attitude toward all things feminine, but that,
at the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, his protagonist respects feminine truth, mar-
ries feminine eternity, and becomes pregnant with wisdom, himself taking on an
androgynous character. Thus, both Baubo and Dionysos are masks for androgynous,
protean life (Kofman 1988: 44–46).
Nietzsche’s writings, in their Heraclitean emphasis on transitoriness and becom-
ing, also provide resources for a critique of static philosophical dualisms, including the
essentialist opposition between male and female. Kofman emphasizes that Dionysos,
Nietzsche’s privileged metaphorical figure for the principle of will to power and the
affirmation of life, lies beyond the metaphysical designations of male and female (1988:
45). Lynne Tirrell juxtaposes Nietzsche’s critical remarks on the untenability of hierar-
chical and often metaphysically loaded dualisms between becoming and being, appear-
ance and reality, and conscious and unconscious psychic activity, with the question as
to why he did not direct this same critique toward the opposition between man and
woman (1994: 162). She points out that there is much of value for feminists to study

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in Nietzsche despite this lack, by virtue of his ground-breaking attack on metaphysical

dualisms in Beyond Good and Evil, his analysis of the power of discourse (in the hands
of men) to shape cultural interpretations of what a woman is, and his discussion of the
importance of power in shaping identities (Tirrell 1994: 177).
Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy interpreted through the mediation of Foucault
and Deleuze also informs the feminist philosophy of Judith Butler and Rosi Braidotti.
Genealogy, articulated by Nietzsche most forcefully in On The Genealogy of Morals
(1967), opposes the search for metaphysical origins or essences lying invisibly “behind
the world,” inquiring instead into the contingencies, piecemeal motivations, and above
all values and struggle for mastery that inspire the formation of particular cultural stand-
ards (Nietzsche 1967: 17). Genealogy critiques both the causes of the emergence of
moral values, but also the values to which they in turn give rise once established. Butler
turns the critical gaze of Nietzschean genealogy onto the nature of gender roles, arguing
that dualistic and essentialist conceptions of femininity (and masculinity) arise out of
a series of interpretations, values, practices, and reinterpretations that in turn engender
a compulsion to perform gender norms of behavior and appearance (1990: 5). Such
performances of gender render it denaturalized and subject to oppressive reinforcement,
but also to reinterpretation and change. Braidotti uses genealogy to argue for a material-
ist conception of the intersection of bodies and power, rejecting any dualistic separation
of nature and culture (2011: 145).
It is in this overcoming of metaphysical dualisms and the description of the will to
power as an organic process, a simultaneously creative and destructive force that con-
tinually interprets and reinterprets (Nietzsche 1968: 539, 342), that Nietzsche’s phi-
losophy reflects the legacy of Kant and German Idealism. However, Nietzsche accords a
power to human manipulations of this will to power not found in Kant’s conceptualiza-
tion of the purposiveness of nature, or even in Hegel’s articulation of the movement of
the historical dialectic of being and thought.

Women’s Voices in the Nineteenth Century

Although women’s intellectual contributions were increasingly heard in nineteenth-
century German culture, the venue for women to express them was primarily restricted
to letters, journals, and the conversations of literary salons. Caroline Schlegel-Schelling,
married at one time to the literary critic and scholar August-Wilhelm Schlegel and
later to the philosopher F. W. J. Schelling, and Dorothea Veit Schlegel, married to
A.-W. Schlegel’s brother Friedrich, formed part of the important Jena Romantic Circle,
where they debated with important intellectual men of their time—including Novalis,
Schelling, and Ludwig Tieck—and were acquainted with Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel.
The contributions of these two women to the literary journal Athenäum edited by the
Schlegel brothers cannot be precisely ascertained, since many entries were published
anonymously, but it is commonly accepted that their work contributed greatly to early
German romanticism. Among themes important to feminist philosophy, these frag-
ments advocated a love relationship characterized by mutual support and respect,
envisioned a free society with equal roles for men and women, and critiqued bourgeois
marital norms and the notion of forced marriage.
Rahel Varnhagen was a nineteenth-century German intellectual who hosted one
of the most prominent Berlin literary salons attended by the likes of the Schlegel

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brothers, Schelling, the Tieck brothers, the von Humboldt brothers, and even
Goethe, as well as being the subject of an early book by the philosopher Hannah
Arendt. Arendt reconstructed Varnhagen’s life from a series of letters and diaries,
proposing to correct the view of her presented after her death by her husband, the
bourgeois Prussian civil servant Karl August von Varnhagen, who sought to present
his wife in a manner that minimized her Jewishness and presented her as far as pos-
sible in line with the conventions of the day. In addition to tracing the evolution of
a changing Jewish identity in the Germany of the early twentieth century, Arendt
critiques the German Romantic conception of a certain Innerlichkeit, a self-professed
desire on the part of Varnhagen to “live her life as a work of art,” which resulted in a
kind of claustrophobic worldlessness, a withdrawal from the world that accords with
the appellation that Goethe gave to Varnhagen when he described her as a “beautiful
soul.” This phrase, which is the subject of a short story “Confessions of a Beautiful
Soul” that appears within Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, names one
who is isolated from society, who freely follows her own impulse rather than any law
imposed from without, and could equally be applied to Caroline Schlegel-Schelling
and Dorothea Veit Schlegel.
Dorothea Schlegel was the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, the Enlightenment phi-
losopher. She left her husband, a respectable Jewish merchant, for Friedrich Schlegel,
the philosopher and literary critic. As Arendt describes it, Dorothea Schlegel assimi-
lated completely, but not so much to German society as to Romanticism (2007: 24).
Arendt describes Rahel’s Innerlichkeit in a negative vision of this seemingly posi-
tive appellation, as one who was “exiled . . . all alone to a place where nothing could
reach her, where she was cut off from all human things, from everything that men
have the right to claim” (1974: xvi). Like the beautiful soul who lacks an actual
existence, “entangled in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity
of that self to externalize itself” and dwelling in the immediacy of this antithe-
sis, eventually wasting away in yearning (Hegel 1977: 406–407), Arendt criticizes
Varnhagen for the evocation of an endless longing without fruition, concluding that
a beautiful soul is not enough.
The philosopher Gillian Rose, however, countered Arendt in proposing that
Varnhagen and other nineteenth-century women intellectuals neither accepted exclu-
sion from the universal nor feigned an illusory personal identity outside of the universal,
but instead followed a third path beyond clinging to pure-being-for-self, on the one
hand, and externalization or actualization in the world, on the other. Instead, Rahel
“untangled the contradiction between her pure self and the necessity of that self to
actualize itself by refusing to dwell in the immediacy of this antithesis” (Rose 1992:
192). These women intellectuals neither fixed themselves in isolation outside civil soci-
ety, nor sought solace in an unattainable transcendence, nor reified themselves in one
of many available paths through civil society.
Rose argues that by cultivating the life of the salon and the authorship of journals
and letters that were eventually published, nineteenth-century women were able
to negotiate the limits of civil society and play multiple roles rather than remain-
ing fixed in one of its circumscribed positions (1992: 193). This operation on the
borders of civil society allowed nineteenth-century women intellectuals to take on a
singular position that eventually worked to effect change in women’s education and
philosophical authorship.

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Further Reading
Although I only referred specifically to some of the essays in the edited collections listed below, all the essays
in the collections provide good resources for further reading in these areas.

Bernstein, Richard (2010) “Hegel’s Feminism,” in Fanny Söderbäck (Ed.) Feminist Readings of Antigone,
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A defense of Hegel arguing that ethical life ought not
to depend on natural distinctions, in particular sexual difference.)
Burgard, Peter (Ed.) (1994) Nietzsche and the Feminine, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.
(Addresses common reactions to Nietzsche’s apparently misogynistic comments and suggests new ways
of reading Nietzsche on the feminine.)
Hutchings, Kimberly and Pulkkinen, Tuija (Eds.) (2010) Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought, New York:
Palgrave MacMillan. (A rich collection featuring many European feminists.)
Mills, Patricia Jagentowicz (Ed.) (1996) Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel, University Park, PA:
Penn State Press. (A collection of essays by major commentators addressing the question of the role of
the feminine in Hegel’s writings.)
Oliver, Kelly and Pearsall, Marilyn (Eds.) (1998) Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche, University
Park, PA: Penn State Press. (A collection of essays representing a wide range of feminist responses and
approaches to Nietzsche.)
Patton, Paul (Ed.) (1993) Nietzsche, Feminism, and Political Theory, London: Routledge. (An early collection
on Nietzsche’s views on women in relation to political theory, featuring many well-known philosophers
from England and Australia.)
Schott, Robin (Ed.) (1997) Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, University Park, PA: Penn State Press.
(A collection of important essays addressing feminist critiques of and resources in Kant’s writings.)

Related Topics
Feminist methods in the history of philosophy (Chapter 1); early modern feminism
and Cartesian philosophy (Chapter 6); feminism and the Enlightenment (Chapter 8);
historicizing feminist aesthetics (Chapter 37); aesthetics and the politics of gen-
der (Chapter 38); feminist aesthetics and the categories of the beautiful and the
sublime (Chapter 39).

References
Arendt, Hannah (1974) Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a German Jewish Woman, trans. Richard and Clara
Winston, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
—— (2007) The Jewish Writings, New York: Schocken.
Beauvoir, Simone de (1989) The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley, New York: Vintage.
—— (2000) The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman, New York: Citadel.
Bergoffen, Debra (1989) “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Nietzsche for Women,” in The Question
of the Other: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, Ed. Arleen B. Dallery, Albany: SUNY Press,
77–89.
—— (1998) “Nietzsche Was No Feminist . . . ,” in Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall (Eds.) Feminist
Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche, University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 225–235.
Bernstein, Richard (2010) “Hegel’s Feminism,” in Fanny Söderbäck (Ed.) Feminist Readings of Antigone,
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Boer, Karin de (2003) “Hegel’s Antigone and the Dialectics of Sexual Difference,” Philosophy Today 47(5):
140–146.
Braidotti, Rosi (2011) Nomadic Subjects, second revised ed., New York: Columbia University Press.
Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble, New York: Routledge.

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—— (2010) Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, New York: Columbia University Press.
Chanter, Tina (1995) Ethics of Eros, London: Routledge.
—— (2011) Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery, Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1979) Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Efrat-Levkovitz, Rakefet (2010) “Reading the Same Twice Over: The Place of the Feminine in the Time
of Hegelian Spirit,” in Kimberly Hutchings and Tuija Pulkkinen (Eds.) Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist
Thought: Beyond Antigone? New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 153–176.
Gauthier, Jeffrey (1997) Hegel and Feminist Social Criticism, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Hance, Allen (1998) “The Art of Nature: Hegel and the Critique of Judgment,” International Journal of
Philosophical Studies 6(1): 37–65.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—— (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hutchings, Kimberly (2003) Hegel and Feminist Philosophy, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hutchings, Kimberly, and Pulkkinen, Tuija (2010) Introduction in Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought,
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–18.
Irigaray, Luce (1985) “The Eternal Irony of the Community,” in Speculum: Of the Other Woman, trans.
Gillian C. Gill Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 214–226.
—— (1991) Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill, New York: Columbia University Press.
Kant, Immanuel (1987) [1791] Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Kofman, Sarah (1988) “Baubo: Theological Perversion and Fetishism,” in Michael A. Gillespie and Tracy
B. Strong (Eds.) Nietzsche’s New Seas, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 175–202.
Kreines, Robert (2008) “The Logic of Life: Hegel’s Philosophical Defense of Natural Teleology,” in Frederick
Beiser (Ed.) Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth Century Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 344–377.
Lindberg, Susanna (2010) “Woman-Life or Lifework and Psychotechnique,” in Kimberly Hutchings and
Tuija Pulkkinen (Eds.) Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone? New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 177–194.
Lonzi, Carla (1996) “Let’s Spit on Hegel,” trans. Giovanna Bellesia and Elaine MacLachlan, in Patrica
Jagentowicz Mills (Ed.) Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel, University Park, PA: Penn State Press,
275–298.
Miller, Elaine P. (2000) “The Paradoxical Displacement: Beauvoir and Irigaray on Hegel’s Antigone,”
Journal of Speculative Philosophy 14(2): 121–137.
Mills, Patricia Jagentowicz (1986) “Hegel’s Antigone,” Owl of Minerva 17(2): 131–152.
Moen, Marcia (1997) “Feminist Themes in Unlikely Places: Re-Reading Kant’s Critique of Judgment,” in
Robin Schott (Ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, University Park, PA: Penn State Press,
213–256.
Mussett, Shannon (2006) “Conditions of Servitude: The Peculiar Role of the Master-Slave Dialectic in
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex,” in Margaret A. Simons (Ed.) The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir:
Critical Essays, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 276–294.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1966) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Viking Penguin.
—— (1967) On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage.
—— (1968) The Will to Power, trans. R. J. Hollingdale and Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage.
—— (1974) The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage.
—— (1989) Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage.
—— (1990) Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin.
Nuzzo, Angelica (2001) “Freedom in the Body: The Body as Subject of Rights and Object of Property in
Hegel’s ‘Abstract Right,’” in Robert Williams (Ed.) Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism, Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 111–123.
Oliver, Kelly (1995) Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to the “Feminine,” New York: Routledge.
—— (1996) “Antigone’s Ghost: Undoing Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” Hypatia 11(1): 67–90.

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Oliver, Kelly and Marilyn Pearsall (1998) “Introduction,” in Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche,
University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1–17.
Patton, Paul (1993) “Introduction,” in Nietzsche, Feminism, and Political Theory, London: Routledge, ix–xiii.
Rose, Gillian (1992) The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society, London: Blackwell.
Stone, Alison (2010) “Matter and Form: Hegel, Organicism, and the Difference between Women and
Men,” in Kimberly Hutchings and Tuija Pulkkinen (Eds.) Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought:
Beyond Antigone? New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 211–232.
—— (2013) “Hegel on Law, Women and Contract,” in Maria Drakopoulou (Ed.) Feminist Encounters with
Legal Philosophy, London: Routledge, 104–122.
Tirrell, Lynne (1994) “Sexual Dualism and Women’s Self-Creation: On the Advantages and Disadvantages
of Reading Nietzsche for Feminists,” in Peter J. Burgard (Ed.) Nietzsche and the Feminine, Charlottesville,
VA: The University of Virginia Press, 158–184.
Zimmerman, Robert (2005) The Kantianism of Hegel and Nietzsche: Reinventions in Nineteenth-Century
German Philosophy, New York: Edwin Mellen Press.

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 10
INTRODUCING BLACK
FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY
Kristie Dotson

Introduction
In her article, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” Bernice Johnson Reagon
advocates for leaving a legacy of one’s liberatory praxis when she writes:

The thing that must survive you is not just the record of your practice, but the
principles that are the basis of your practice. If in the future, somebody is gonna
use that song I sang, they’re gonna have to strip it or at least shift it. I’m glad
the principle is there for others to build upon.
(2000 [1983]: 366)

Reagon articulates not only what people laboring for social change need to leave
behind, but also what those who inherit their work should expect to receive. That is
to say, those of us who are concerned with social and political change should aim to
“throw . . . [ourselves] into the next century,” as she suggests, by leaving our practice
and our principles (Reagon 2000 [1983]: 365). And those of us who are on the receiv-
ing end of messages from previous centuries should, at the very least, work to identify
the principles that lay within inherited practices. Accordingly, when exploring Black
feminist philosophy this is often what one must do, that is, uncover philosophical posi-
tions left for us to discover.
In this chapter, I introduce U.S. Black feminist philosophy by tracing two lessons
that can be identified from Black feminist philosophy in that context. They include:
(1) oppression as a multistable, social phenomenon; and (2) part of some Black
women’s experiences of oppression concerns the occupation of negative socio-
epistemic space. These two observations gesture to an understanding that liberation
agendas require grappling with an ongoing politics of spatiality. These two lessons
and their implication can serve as a starting point for the beginner to Black feminist
philosophy as they draw on historical and contemporary inquiries in Black feminist
thought. Not only do these lessons span over a century of Black women’s social theory,
including Anna Julia Cooper (1998 [1891–1892]) and Fannie Barrier Williams (2007
[1900]; 1905), but they also remain salient in many Black feminist theoretical posi-
tions today. In what follows, I will highlight the above two lessons that can be found
in Black feminist philosophy in a US context.
 Introducing black feminist philosophy

The Multistability of Oppression

There have been and there will continue to be attempts to create metaphors for experi-
ences of oppression where singular analytics fail. Very few feminist and gender scholars
are not familiar with critiques from Black feminists on the difficulty of fitting their
experience of oppression into categories demarcated by one vector of vulnerability, e.g.,
gender-based oppression and/or race-based oppression. From Anna Julia Cooper’s train
station (1998 [1891–1892]), to the Combahee River Collective’s idea of interlocking
(1995 [1978]), to Frances Beale’s double jeopardy (1995 [1969]), to Deborah King’s
revision of the jeopardy paradigm with her conception of multiple jeopardy (1995
[1988]), to Hortense Spillers’ interstices (1984), to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersection
(1989), and beyond, there have been attempts to create metaphors capable of capturing
experiences of oppression that seem to twist, turn, twirl, and jump so as to resist being
tracked. That Black feminist thought has, and continues to, attempt to track oppres-
sion experienced according to multiple aspects of social existence cannot be disputed.
However, there seems to be relatively little recognition of what these attempts imply
about an overall understanding of oppression as a social phenomenon. That is to say,
much of Black feminist philosophy can be said to commit to an underlying assump-
tion that social phenomena, like oppression, are multistable. And the understanding
of oppression as multistable puts demands on our theorizing about social phenomena.
The Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement,” first published in
1978, offers a portrait of the rhetorical landscape within which one can recognize ten-
sions in conceptions of oppression, which one might take as a beginning philosophical
problematic about the nature of social phenomenon. The Collective open their famous
“Statement” with the call for an:

Integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of
oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the con-
ditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical
political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that
all women of color face.
(1995 [1978]: 232; emphasis added)

There are two conceptions of oppression conflicting with one another in this passage.
There is oppression defined as multiple, interlocking systems and oppression as a holis-
tic, simultaneous experience. These two conceptions of oppression are not wholly com-
patible. But that the Collective deploy them one after the other indicates a rather
sophisticated overall understanding of oppression that has heretofore gone largely unac-
knowledged. In what follows, I will outline these two clashing conceptions of oppres-
sion and the first lesson from US Black women’s social theory, i.e. that oppression is a
multistable phenomenon.

A System-Based Conception of Oppression

According to the earlier cited passage, oppression can be seen to have several characteris-
tics. It can be seen to be composed of (1) various systems that (2) interlock to create com-
prehensive wholes. These “wholes” are manifold or varied. This range of descriptors—i.e.
systems-based, interlocking, and manifold—can be aligned and realigned in a number

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of ways to gesture to different overall understandings of oppression. The most common

reading is to trace the descriptors—systems-based, interlocking, and manifold—to an
additive approach to understanding oppressions. This interpretation can harken to a rem-
nant of critiques of Francis Beale’s “Double Jeopardy” (1995 [1969]), which attempts to
promote the recognition of the interrelations of race-based and gender-based oppressions,
along with a much-overlooked emphasis on class-based oppressions. The jeopardy para-
digm would give rise to the use of “triple jeopardy,” to indicate race, class, and gender-
based oppression and, as some claim, a fourth jeopardy in sexuality-based oppression.
Because the jeopardy model grew by “adding-on” other systemic forms of oppression, the
jeopardy paradigm is often considered to be an additive approach. This interpretation
largely results from placing emphasis on the descriptor, “systems-based.” If oppression is
composed of diverse systems of jeopardy that interlock and complicate one another, for
example, then oppression, itself, can also be functionalized thus.
Oppression, then, can be seen to function according to diverse systems of jeopardy
that interlock and complicate one another. The descriptors—systems-based, interlock-
ing, and manifold—seem to fix oppression as a conglomerate of diverse, discrete systems
that represent different and complicated sites of jeopardy according to a functionaliza-
tion by description. Certainly this kind of reading can be supported by the passage “[we]
see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based
upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking,” (The Combahee
River Collective 1995 [1978]: 232). First, the use of the plural term, “oppressions,” and,
second, the call for “integrative analysis and practice” imply, for some, that the underly-
ing conception of oppression is one in which discrete systems, which can be analyzed
separately (even if only in theory), are locked together in ways that make sites of jeop-
ardy manifold. Varying remarks throughout the text separating sexual oppression from
race oppression, for example, further evidence this understanding of how oppression is
conceptualized in the Collective’s “Statement.” That these “oppressions” are, at times,
separated from a holistic account of oppression is notable and can be found in the text.
This has made many content with the system-based conception of oppression, which
most identify with The Combahee River Collective and the jeopardy paradigm.
Although the systems-based conception of oppression is likely the most familiar
reading of the Collective’s understanding of “interlocking oppression” and, to a certain
extent, of the jeopardy paradigm, this is but half of the story of how the term “oppres-
sion” is used in the Collective’s “Statement.” It is also the least defensible, insofar as it
lends itself to a disintegrative analysis that is done for the sake of an integrative analysis.
That may be precisely what the Combahee River Collective, Frances Beale, and many
other Black women social theorists in an US context are attempting to compromise
due to problematic oversights that such a functionalized model of oppression promotes,
e.g. not just race, not just gender (Smith 1998). It is fortunate, then, for Black feminists
who inherit this work, that this is not the only way oppression is conceptualized in “A
Black Feminist Statement.”

An Experiential Conception of Oppression

The second conception of oppression that is present in the Collective’s “Statement” can
be seen to follow from, first, the following passage, “The synthesis of these oppressions
creates the conditions of our lives” (1995 [1978]: 232) and, second, the fact that for the
bulk of the essay oppression is invoked not as the plural, “oppressions,” but as a singular

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term “oppression.” This second conception of oppression, I claim, is experience-based,

not systems-based. That is to say, emphasis is put on the simultaneity of one’s experience
of oppression, which is not easily discernable according to a systems approach. As the
Collective write, “we often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression
because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously” (The Combahee
River Collective 1995 [1978]: 234). The term “simultaneity” is used to describe the
experience of oppression. And the synthesis of oppression, which harkening to experi-
ence can promise, involves another dimension of oppression that cannot be captured by
understanding oppression as interlocking systems.
It is the understanding of oppression as a holistic phenomenon, as experience-
based and not given to discrete systems that can be analyzed separately, that informs
the Collective’s call for “identity politics.” Identifying oppression as experience-based
also required harkening to the reality that addressing oppression will need to track
possible ranges of experiences of oppression. As one member of The Combahee River
Collective recalls:

I think we came up with the term “identity politics.” I never really saw it any-
where else . . . But what we meant by identity politics was a politics that grew
out of our objective material experiences as Black women . . . So there were
basically politics that worked for us . . . It gave us a way to move, a way to make
change. It was not the reductive version that theorists now really criticize. It
was not being simplistic in saying I am Black and you are not. That is not what
we were doing.
(Harris 2009: 28)

Understanding oppression as outlined by one’s range of experiences with oppression

changes the formulation of oppression from “discrete systems, which can be analyzed
separately, and yet are locked together in ways that make sites of jeopardy manifold” to a
range of experiences that can condition one’s life according to simultaneous jeopardiza-
tion. Jeopardy, a noun, turns into jeopardize, a verb. This latter conception is compatible
with Beale’s usage of jeopardize, as her primary deployment of the term “jeopardy” is the
verb “jeopardize.” Oppression can be understood, then, according to ranges of jeop-
ardization and the range of one’s jeopardization can often be tracked according to one’s
“read-able” social identities in a given geo-political space. What is important to note is
that oppressions (plural) transforms into oppression (singular), for the Collective.
One of the differences between the “integrative analysis” of a system-based concep-
tion of oppression and the “synthesis” of an experience-based conception of oppres-
sion lies in one’s reasons to deploy either conception. A systems-based conception of
oppression can be used to find bridges across different experiences of oppression, but
it contributes precious little to comprehending ranges of jeopardization. In fact, it does
much to obscure such ranges. An experience-based conception of oppression can aid
in identifying ranges of jeopardization, but often obscures sites of coalition. This is not
a simple difference. Those invested in an experience-based conception of oppression
often think that sites of coalition are merely illusions, whereas those persuaded by a
system-based conception of oppression often find the identification of experiential
difference distracting, at best, and irrelevant, at worst. These positions are not easy
to reconcile. And it is not clear that reconciliation is a necessary goal. Rather, as is
evidenced by the Combahee River Collective’s text, each conception can be allowed

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to exist simultaneously. They can exist side-by-side, clashing horribly at times, but
present in a way that calls for a philosophical reading of an operative assumption con-
cerning the nature of oppression, which underwrites the unproblematic deployment
of two clashing conceptions of oppression.
The Collective’s attempt to examine the “multilayered texture of Black women’s
lives,” takes place among conceptions of oppression that they both utilize and chal-
lenge. They complicate the “system or experience” dichotomy that so often plagues
reconstructions of Black feminist thought, by refusing to choose one conception over
another. They challenge a system-based conception by identifying that their experi-
ences of oppression do not fold nicely into neat analytics, while affirming the necessity
of systems-accounts as socialists interested in the articulation of “the real class situa-
tion of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and
sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives” (The
Combahee River Collective 1995 [1978]: 235).
The systems-based theory can work when we are distinctly referring to systems of
oppression, and they exist. But such an approach fails miserably to track the range of
jeopardization one might face. The Collective affirm an experience-based conception
of oppression when they forward that “we know that there is such a thing as racial-
sexual oppression that is neither solely racial and solely sexual,” even while they pro-
claim the need to consider system-based analyses (The Combahee River Collective
1995 [1978]: 234, 235). What does this intentional conceptual clashing imply about an
overall understanding of oppression? I claim that The Combahee River Collective can
be seen to have operated with an understanding that oppression is a multistable social
phenomenon.

Lesson 1: Oppression is a Multistable Phenomenon

In its simplest formation, an assumption concerning oppression invoked in The
Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement” is: oppression is complicated.
It admits of no privilegeable conceptions that do not also obscure through the privileg-
ing. Multistability, here, refers to “an empirically testable hypothesis about how several
stable patterns of the same object can be perceived from the first person perspective”
(Whyte 2015: 69). Oppression is a multistable social phenomenon. That means that
oppression, as it persists, can give rise to numerous different patterns of persistence
that can be empirically verified. Taking oppression as a multistable phenomenon is
to say that it admits of an open range of “topographic” possibilities (Ihde 1977: 77).
Oppression in a given society, on the ground, will have multiple ways one can under-
stand it, and these multiple ways will have a certain “apodicticity” (Ihde 1977: 71).
That is to say, one’s certitude that oppression simply “is” a certain way or originates
from such and such a place, or can be understood according to such and such an orien-
tation, can be experientially fulfilled time and again. This is not simply to say that we
see what we want to see, although this is certainly part of it. Rather, oppression admits
of a number of interpretations and a number of manifestations and a number of concep-
tions. How a multistable phenomenon is interpreted in space will depend on a variety of
factors, not the least of which will be one’s “perspectival perception,” one’s goals (Ihde
2009: 12), including, but not limited to, cultural inheritances, cognitive commitments,
and embodied location. The way oppression is perceived will also depend on its social
effect and one’s relations to it (Frye 1983).

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 Introducing black feminist philosophy

It is no surprise that a middle-class, able-bodied, heterosexual, Christian, English-

speaking, Black man who is a long-time citizen in the United States might identify
race as “the” primary form of oppression and privilege a systems-based conception of
oppression. Accordingly, it is also hardly surprising that I cannot make sense of what
it would mean to be oppressed as Black or as a Woman without having a “conceptual”
difficulty akin to the difficulty inherent in resolving the mind/body problem. Where
do the “raced” parts end and the “woman” parts begin? And how do they interact?
When attempting to comprehend the range of jeopardization I face as a Black woman
in the United States, I privilege an experiential-based conception, but not in all cases
and not consistently. And it should be noted that there are more ways of conceiving
of oppression than either system- or experience-based in Black feminist thought. This
reality, that oppression holds stable for empirically testable hypotheses across a range
of patterns, gestures to an aspect of oppression that is largely overlooked—although
not, I would claim, by the Combahee River Collective. There is simply oppression;
and it is multistable admitting of a range of conceptualizations, functionalizations, and
manifestations.
I believe that this is what many of the theories of oppression in Black women’s
writings in the US have been aiming to highlight. Anna Julia Cooper’s “Woman
vs. the Indian” (1983 [1891–1892]), Fannie Barrier Williams’ “The Colored Girl”
(1905), Frances Beale’s, “Double Jeopardy” (1995 [1969]), Pauli Murray’s “The
Liberation of Black Women” (1995 [1970]), Audre Lorde’s “There is No Hierarchy
of Oppression” (2009 [1983]), Deborah King’s “Multiple Jeopardy” (1985 [1988]),
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Gender” (1989),
Carole Boyce Davies’s Black Women, Writing and Identity (1994), Carla Peterson’s
“Doers of the Word” (1995), Patricia Hill Collins’ Fighting Words (1998), Valerie
Smith’s Not Just Race Not Just Gender (1998) and Kimberly Springer’s Living for the
Revolution (2005)—all of these Black women (and many more) have attempted to
articulate some metaphor for oppression that can signify the complex ways oppres-
sion jeopardizes the lives of Black women, and yet leave room for the realization that
oppression is a multistable social phenomenon. Unfortunately, the clashing concep-
tions of oppression in these texts are often read as a lack of theoretical sophistication,
instead of resting on an important insight into the nature of oppression itself. Namely,
that oppression holds within its structure the ability to manifest stably differently at
different times to different people.
Identifying an orientation that oppression is multistable within The Combahee
River Collective’s clashing conceptions of oppression is not mere conjecture on my
part. Identity politics is underwritten by a realization of a real danger in not owning
one’s social identity and how it affects one’s understanding of oppression. They write
concerning identity politics:

We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics
come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody
else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant,
dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvi-
ous from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that
anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves . . . to be recognized as
human, levelly human, is enough.
(The Combahee River Collective 1995 [1978]: 234)

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This passage draws attention to the often-cited and still under-appreciated statement
that “all the women are white, all the Blacks are men” (Hull, Scott, and Smith 1982).
This is not a statement of fact. It is a statement of the power to determine dominant
narratives of gender-based or race-based oppression. And those narratives are experien-
tially confirmable for certain portions of those populations, but they lead to rendering
unintelligible ranges of jeopardization faced by Black women, for example. This is not
a surprise: analytics of oppression do work to obscure experiences of oppression com-
plicated by complex social existences. So-called ill-meaning Black men or evil white
women are not the sole cause of such misreadings, although there may have been some.
Rather, the nature of oppression as multistable encourages such overdetermination,
but it also demands more open-ended approaches. This is where I situate the clash-
ing conceptions of oppression in “A Black Feminist Statement.” It is a performance of
open-endedness required to acknowledge the multistable nature of oppression so as to
resist practices of misreading encouraged by the multistability of oppression itself. These
performances of openness are common in Black feminist thought, although they are
often read as theoretical incontinence.
The next lesson from Black feminist philosophy that I will identify can be posited as
a way to understand why the clashing conception of oppression in “The Black Feminist
Statement” was largely ignored and, through reductive critiques of identity politics, erased.

Possessing Negative Socio-Epistemic Status

In her book, Invisibility Blues, Michele Wallace argues that one of the primary values
of Black Women’s literature is its ability to render “the negative” presence of Black
women substantial (1990: 228). Claiming that Black women are the “other of the
other,” Wallace (1990) will, I think, appropriately identify a “fear” of a kind of the-
ory in some Black feminist intellectual traditions that is a response to the ways that
abstract theorizing about oppression has rendered invisible Black women’s experiences
of oppression. Black women, in Wallace’s estimation, exist in varying states of negation
fostered by, in part, the ways Black women’s experiences have been overwritten with
narratives where they no longer recognize themselves. Wallace, here, is picking up on a
common topic in many US Black women’s social and political writings that dates back,
at least, to Maria Stewart (1832).
The epistemic violence that often hinders one’s ability to “make sense” of claims
made by and about Black women has been heavily remarked upon. From Fannie
Barrier Williams’ pronouncement that Black women are “unknowable” (1905) to
Paule Murray’s understanding of Jane Crow dynamics (1995 [1970]), to Deborah
King’s articulation of Black women’s theoretical invisibility (1995 [1988]: 43–45), to
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s description of how Black women can be “theoretically erased”
(1989: 139). To shed light on Wallace’s point and this understanding of Black women’s
“problematic” occupation of socio-epistemic space in an US context, I will articulate
Fannie Barrier Williams’ claim that Black women are “unknowable.” Williams articu-
lates two fronts on which Black women are unknowable and then turns to offer an
account of what is at stake in being unknowable.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Williams explains that Black women were
unknowable “qua woman” and “qua race.” In her article, “The Woman’s Part in the
Man’s Business,” she writes:

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 Introducing black feminist philosophy

The American Negro woman is the most interesting woman in the country . . . She
has no history, no traditions, no race ideals, no inherited resources, no established
race character. She is the only woman in America who is almost unknown.
(Williams 1907: 544)

To say that Black women, in a US context, were almost “unknown” was not to indi-
cate that there were no stereotypical images of Black women in existence. Williams
is well aware of negative portrayals of Black women as she writes numerous arti-
cles defending Black women in the face of transient public opinions. However, what
provoked Black women’s general “unknowability” was a paucity of resources within
“fixed public opinion” that one could draw upon when interpreting Black women
(Williams 2007 [1900]: 54). I take “fixed public opinion” to be something akin to a
“social imaginary.” Lorraine Code explains that a social imaginary is a “conceptual
analytic resource” that refers to

[i]mplicit but . . . effective systems of images, meanings, metaphors, and inter-

locking explanations-expectations within which people, in specific time periods
and geographical-cultural climates, enact their knowledge and subjectivities
and craft their self understandings.
(Code 2006: 29)

The concept of a social imaginary points to the ways that social perceptions are
influenced, and the underlying understandings that fashion them. Black women,
according to Williams, could not be known via available prevailing social narratives.
And though Williams was aware that Black women were subject to social stereo-
types, those stereotypes were only one part of the problems Black women faced. She
explained that another very real problem for Black women also followed from a lack
of available resources within established social imaginaries useful for understanding
the lives and plights of Black women.
According to Williams, Black women were situated in a peculiar place. They were
not wholly subject to prevailing narratives around race, nor were they wholly subject
to prevailing narratives around womanhood. Williams explained, in her article “The
Colored Girl,” “Man’s instinctive homage at the shrine of womankind draws a line of
color, which places . . . [the colored girl] forever outside its mystic circle” (1905: 400).
She believed that Black women had no male defenders and no prose or literature writ-
ten to sing the virtues of Black women. It may seem irrelevant to say that there are no
poems and literature written in homage to Black women. But what Williams appears
to be drawing attention to is a kind of negative socio-epistemic status that is marked by
pervasive absence, and not a masked presence. Where Ralph Ellison will express elo-
quently through the voice of the nameless narrator of The Invisible Man, “I am invisible,
you understand, simply because people refuse to see me . . . it is as though I have been
surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass” (1995 [1947]: 3), Williams expresses a
similar edict by indicating that “she is invisible, you understand, because there is no way
for her to be seen” (1905: 400).
It is not clear that Williams sees her position as being surrounded by mirrors of any
kind. The mirrors are all positioned to reflect other groups, distorting their images, but
leaving her image in darkness. So Williams, when speaking of social uplift, expresses

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the need to address the negative socio-epistemic space Black women exist in within US
social imaginaries. Let me suggest that the liminal, outsider-within status that many
Black feminists have identified around Black women as a social group within the US
parallels Williams’ conception of the “unknowability” of Black women (see, for exam-
ple, Collins 1986; Peterson 1993).
Now there is much about this account that is dated. First, there are and were Black
male defenders of Black women. There have also been great strides in cultural produc-
tion by and about Black women in the US. However, fixating on these clearly dated fea-
tures misses a larger commonality that Williams shares with more contemporary Black
feminist scholars such as Wallace. What survives the cultural production phases of self-
determination is an ongoing identification of erasure. What a paucity in fixed public
imaginaries harkens to is, at base, a struggle for intelligibility that cannot be satisfied
with “controlling images” or “stereotypes,” if they are also transient. The problem that
Williams and Wallace identify in common is being the “other of an other,” which is
obviously not a reduction to the same. It is a relegation to a null, transient space of signifi-
cation. A dynamic space, where one can construct Black women as the welfare queen or
the mammy; the diseased maid or the emasculating matriarch; or with whatever purpose
Black women are introduced into a given narrative.
The effect of being unknowable is hardly limited to an inability to be detected within
“fixed” social imaginaries. For Williams, there was a more profound effect of (what
Wallace calls) Black women’s varying states of negation. Williams writes:

That the term “colored girl” is almost a term of reproach in the social life of
America is all too true; she is not known and hence not believed in, she belongs
to a race that is best designated by the term “problem” and she lives beneath
the shadow of that problem which envelops and obscures her.
(1905: 400; emphasis added)

Again, contrast this quote with a question posed by W. E. B. Du Bois, who opens his
book, The Souls of Black Folks, with the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?”
(1995 [1905]: 43). Williams situates herself, and other Black women, by asking the
question, “How does it feel to exist beneath the shadow of a problem?” Du Bois, a Black
man subject to semi-permanent race ideas and conceptions of race character, can have
the state of embodying “a problem.” Williams, on the other hand, as a Black woman
is denied that possibility. Williams recognized the ability to positively “embody” an
identity, held by both white women and Black men, as a marker of status. What status,
you might ask? I want to suggest that deep-seeded “distortions” actually offer a positive
socio-epistemic status. Positive, here, simply means social presence or broad detectabil-
ity. Williams is not alone in making this observation. Kimberlé Crenshaw will make
much of anti-discrimination cases where Black women are seen as too special a class
to be subject to anti-discrimination correctives either due to the fact that they were
not discriminated against because they were Black or because they were women, but
because they are Black women, for example (Crenshaw 1989). This kind of erasure,
which Deborah King calls “being socialized out of existence,” is precisely what Williams
is attempting to draw attention to in 1905.
Books such as Melissa Harris-Perry’s Sister Citizen highlight the problem of being
“socialized out of existence” or, as Wallace prescribes, existing in varying states of

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negation as an ongoing problem for many Black women in the US (Wallace 1990;
King 1995 [1988]: 45; Harris-Perry 2011). This is not an accident. There are condi-
tions for the possibility of social presence, i.e. the ability to resist Williams’ unknowa-
bility, and they concern occupying positive socio-epistemic space. Lesson two, then,
is simply that erasures can be affected when one exists in varying states of negation,
even if (and, quite possibly, especially if) that negation is theoretically inscribed so as
to affect social imaginaries. It is important to note that social imaginaries are by no
means uniform and universal. As a result, the occupation of negative socio-epistemic
is not itself a uniform or universal state of existence. This is why Wallace identifies
it as “varying states of negation.” Occupation of negative socio-epistemic space is a
dynamic condition that is heightened and lessened depending upon context.

Conclusion: Towards a Politics of Spatiality

If oppression is multistable (given to perspectival perceptions on the ground) and if part
of Black women’s experience of oppression follows from inhabiting a negative socio-
epistemic space, then Black women’s liberation will need to address far more than mate-
rial concerns and far more than our own material concerns. One must also address
the politics of spatiality that the multistability of oppression and the necessity of posi-
tive socio-epistemic space highlight. A politics of spatiality, here, refers to tracking
dominant narratives of oppression (and the understandings and pivots on which those
dominant forms are tracking or obscuring) and the machinations and composition of
negative socio-epistemic space in any given geo-political landscape. Addressing prob-
lems that result from the multistability of oppression and the occupation of negative
socio-epistemic space would require radical reconceptualizations of how we occupy
space as part of a liberation agenda.
The call for this kind of reconceptualization can be seen in Anna Julia Cooper’s
1891 article, “Woman vs. the Indian.” Cooper offers an anecdote aimed at clarify-
ing her position as a Black woman in the US. She talks of frequenting a train rest
stop, with a main foyer area and two clearly labeled rooms. One dingy, lonely room
was labeled “FOR LADIES.” And another equally depressing room was labeled “FOR
COLORED PEOPLE.” Cooper briefly describes her confusion. To which room did
she belong? The Ladies’ room? The “Colored” People’s room? What room should she
occupy and at what costs? Cooper describes her awareness of the puzzle presented her
when she simply stands in place and asks the reader, “What a field for a missionary
woman?” (1983 [1891–1892]: 95). The irony of her question should not be lost. One
of the points of Cooper’s story is that there is no field for a Black woman, missionary
or otherwise. The marked failure to find “space” where one belongs speaks to many of
the concerns raised in Black feminist thought. Let me suggest, then, that the almost
rabid focus on “homes” and “home life” as a strategy for social uplift within US Black
feminist thought (see, e.g., Smith 1983; hooks 1990; Omolade 1994; Peterson 1995;
Tate 2003) is not indicative of an internalization of the “cult of womanhood” ideals,
nor is it an outgrowth of some imagined “bourgeois” self-deception.
What Black feminist social theorists such as Williams and Cooper identified was that
Black women had no clear spatial placement. This observation has been reaffirmed and
extended in the twentieth and, now, twenty-first centuries to also include an absence
of theoretical placement (Crenshaw 1989: 139). The spatial nature of the descriptions

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that Cooper and Williams offer of Black women’s situation with respect to oppression
should not go unnoticed. For Williams, Black women were “beneath,” “beyond,” and
“outside” of US social imaginaries. For Cooper, Black women simply did not have a
“field” or space that lent to interpreting Black women’s place in American social land-
scapes. But, as local as this account has been, this is far from a local problem. Oppression
is multistable wherever it occurs. And there are populations all over the world occupy-
ing negative socio-epistemic space, which is inherently unstable when one allows this
notion to travel. Imagining justice and feminist agendas, then, requires that one harken
to the politics of spatiality in a given geo-political context, and this will require open-
ended, dynamic theorizing.

Further Reading
Collins, Patricia Hill (2000 [1990]) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
Empowerment, 2nd ed., New York: Routledge.
Guy-Sheftall, Beverly (Ed.) (1995) Words of Fire: An Anthology of Black Feminist Thought, New York: New Press.
Hull, Gloria, Scott, Patricia Bell, and Smith, Barbara (Eds.) (1982) All the Women Are Whites, and All the
Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave, New York: Feminist Press.
James, Stanlie, Foster, Frances Smith, and Guy-Sheftall, Beverley (Eds.) (2009) Still Brave: The Evolution of
Black Women’s Studies, New York: The Feminist Press.
Smith, Barbara (Ed.) (1983) Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, New York: Kitchen Table Press.

Related Topics
Feminism and borderlands identities (Chapter 17); epistemic injustice, ignorance, and
trans experience (Chapter 22); the genealogy and viability of the concept of intersec-
tionality (Chapter 28); critical race theory, intersectionality, and feminist philosophy
(Chapter 29); feminism and power (Chapter 54).

References
Beale, Frances M. (1995 [1969]) “Double Jeopardy: To Be Female and Black,” in Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Ed.)
Words of Fire: An Anthology of Black Feminist Thought, New York: New Press, 146–155.
Code, Lorraine (2006) Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location, New York: Oxford University
Press.
The Combahee River Collective (1995 [1978]) “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Beverly Guy-Sheftall
(Ed.) Words of Fire: An Anthology of Black Feminist Thought, New York: New Press, 343–355.
Collins, Patricia Hill (1986) “Learning from the Other Within: The Sociological Significance of Black
Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33(6): 14–32.
—— (1998) Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice, St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota
Press.
Cooper, Anna Julia (1983 [1891–1892]) “Woman Versus the Indian,” in Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan
(Eds.) The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including a Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers,
and Letters, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 88–108.
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 1: 139–167.
Davies, Carole Boyce (1994) Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject, New York: Routledge.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1995 [1905]) The Souls of Black Folk, New York: Signet Classic.
Ellison, Ralph (1995 [1947]) The Invisible Man, New York: Random House.

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 Introducing black feminist philosophy

Frye, Marilyn (1983) The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory, Freedom: Crossing Press.
Harris, Duchess (2009) Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Harris-Perry, Melissa (2011) Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
hooks, bell (1990) Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, Boston, MA: South End Press.
Hull, Gloria, Scott, Patricia Bell, and Smith, Barbara (Eds.) (1982) All the Women Are Whites, and All the
Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave, New York: Feminist Press.
Ihde, Don (1977) Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction, New York: Capricorn Books.
—— (2009) Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
King, Deborah R. (1995 [1988]) “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black
Feminist Ideology,” in Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Ed.) Words of Fire: An Anthology of Black Feminist Thought,
New York: New Press, 294–317.
Lorde, Audre (2009 [1983]) “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppression,” in I Am Your Sister: Collected and
Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde, Ed. Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-
Sheftall, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 219–220.
Murray, Pauli (1995 [1970]) “The Liberation of Black Women,” in Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Ed.) Words of Fire:
An Anthology of Black Feminist Thought, New York: New Press, 186–197.
Omolade, Barbara (1994) The Rising Song of African American Women, New York: Routledge.
Peterson, Carla L. (1993) “Doers of the Word: Theorizing African American Women Writers in the
Antebellum North,” in Joyce Warren (Ed.) The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women
Writers, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 183–202.
—— (1995) “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880),
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Reagon, Bernice Johnson (2000 [1983]) “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” in Barbara Smith (Ed.)
Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, New York: Kitchen Table Press, 343–355.
Smith, Barbara (Ed.) (1983) Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, New York: Kitchen Table Press.
Smith, Valerie (1998) Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings, New York: Routledge.
Spillers, Hortense (1984) “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” in Carol Vance (Ed.) Pleasure and Danger:
Exploring Sexuality, Boston, MA: Routledge, 86–88.
Springer, Kimberley (2005) Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Tate, Gayle T. (2003) Unknown Tongues: Black Women’s Political Activism in the Antebellum Era, 1830–1860,
East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press.
Wallace, Michele (1990) Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory, New York: Verso.
Williams, Fannie Barrier (1905) “The Colored Girl,” The Voice of the Negro 2(6): 400–403.
—— (1907) “The Woman’s Part in a Man’s Business,” The Voice of the Negro 1(7): 543–547.
—— (2007 [1900]) “The Club Movement among Colored Women of America,” in Henry Louis Gates Jr.
and Gene Andrew Jarrett (Eds.) The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American
Culture, 1982–1938, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 54–58.
Whyte, Kyle P. (2015) “What Is Multistability? A Theory of the Keystone Concept of Postphenomenological
Research,” in Jan Kyrre Berg, O. Friis, and Robert P. Crease (Eds.) Technoscience and Postphenomenology:
The Manhattan Papers, New York: Lexington Books, 69–82.

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 11
FEMINIST PRAGMATISM
V. Denise James

Classical Pragmatism and Feminist Recovery Projects

In the late nineteenth century, classical pragmatism found its first explicit exponent
in the philosopher William James, who credited the epistemological and methodo-
logical insights of fellow US philosopher Charles S. Peirce with opening up a new
route in philosophical inquiry that was necessarily linked to experience. Although
Peirce would later decry the connection between his views and James’s interpretation
of his epistemology, James went on to develop a theory of truth that he claimed was
first articulated by Peirce. Following Peirce’s lead, James would call the philosophi-
cal orientation associated with this theory of truth and its consequences pragmatism.
Pragmatism, for James, was a philosophical attitude, “The attitude of turning away
from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards
last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (James 2000: 33). John Dewey took up the
banner of James’ pragmatism, expanding it to include the associated theories of the
social and political world that would be influential not only for academically trained
philosophers but also for the growing progressive movements of his day, especially in
education policy and democratic theory.
For Dewey, pragmatism was primarily about inquiry and knowing, but what
Dewey meant by “to inquire” and “to know” diverged from what he deemed a false
dichotomy of knowing versus practice operative in philosophical discourse at the
time. Dewey gives a genealogy of pragmatism and an explication of his own views in
the essay “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy” (Dewey 1980: 3–48). He follows
James and locates the first use of the term “pragmatism” and the first theoretical
commitments to a form of pragmatism in Peirce, with his insistence on the fallibi-
lism and verifiability of knowledge claims. Dewey defends James’ notion that ideas
must “cash in” to have value, by explaining that verifiability requires existential
proof in our lived experience. Dewey deepens James’ view and resists the allure of a
philosophy that would only deal in concepts. He asserts, “Concepts are so clear; it
takes so little time to develop their implications; experiences are so confused, and it
requires so much time and energy to lay hold of them” (Dewey 1980: 44). It is this
“laying hold” that would characterize Dewey’s theoretical production and his work
in schools and policy. Intelligence was creative and future oriented on Dewey’s view.
Inquiry required the use of imagination and vigilance about experience. Philosophy
would only prove to be useful if it served to help to articulate, clarify, and ameliorate
 Feminist pragmatism

what Dewey called “human difficulties of a deep seated kind” (Dewey 1980: 46).
Attuned to the progressive era in US politics, Deweyan pragmatism was influential
both in academic philosophy and wider society.
Even as some of its themes inspired many analytic philosophers such as W.V.O. Quine
and Hillary Putnam, pragmatism lost influence as analytic philosophy rose in promi-
nence in US universities. Pragmatist theories of truth, language, and mind, which pri-
oritized consequences and situational thinking over tight, systemic argumentation and
linguistic exploration, went out of fashion during what is now sometimes called the
“epistemological turn” (Seigfried 2002: 4). However, more recently there has been a
revival of interest in pragmatisms old and new, due in no small part to the work of con-
temporary feminist pragmatists who have undertaken various recovery projects, as well
as to those who have begun to use pragmatist methodologies in their work.
It is only in the last few decades that important contributions of women as prag-
matists, either as students of the recognized classical male pragmatists or as advocates
of their own pragmatic viewpoints, have started to be appreciated by academic phi-
losophers. The list of classical pragmatists is now often updated to include the noted
social settlement innovator and contemporary of Dewey, Jane Addams. When the list
of early pragmatists is expanded to include other notable figures with Addams, such as
Josiah Royce, George Herbert Mead, and George Santayana, increasingly cases have
been made for the inclusion of other women who were their contemporaries such as
Mary Parker Follett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ella Lyman Cabot, Alice Chippman
Dewey, Mary Whiton Caulkins, and Ella Flagg Young. Contemporary feminist prag-
matists have recovered the work of these women from the classical era of pragmatism
and claimed that there are vital points of connection between feminist philosophical
orientations and pragmatism.

Feminist Pragmatism or Pragmatist Feminism?

Contemporary feminist pragmatists have argued that the methodological practices and
theoretical claims made by pragmatists and feminists are not only complementary but
that a more careful inventory of each would bear fruit for the aims of both. The work
of Charlene Haddock Seigfried has been pioneering and pivotal in the emergence of
feminist pragmatism as a subfield in pragmatism. In 1993, Seigfried edited a special
issue of the feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia, about these connections. Seigfried
set the stage for the special issue two years earlier, in an edition of the Transactions
of the Charles S. Peirce Society, when she called feminist pragmatism “the missing per-
spective” (Seigfried 1991). The Hypatia special issue served both to legitimize and gal-
vanize inquiries into feminist pragmatism, as some preferred, or pragmatist feminism,
as others preferred. The difference in labels, then and now, seems primarily to reflect
priorities in orientation and not deep disagreement. The feminist pragmatist, for the
most part, engages with the methods, claims, and conversations of pragmatism from a
feminist standpoint. While the pragmatist feminist might use the methods and basic
insights of pragmatism, they see their main orientation as feminist, drawing from a
wide range of resources in the history of feminist theory and activism. To understand
this distinction we only need to look at the difference between the works of two his-
torical women who are often counted as both pragmatists and feminists, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman and Jane Addams.

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Novelist, essayist, and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman did not work with
the early pragmatists to develop her ideas about pluralism and progress, but it could
be argued that her understanding of the social formation of the individual and of the
possibilities for the amelioration of social problems by human efforts is in line with the
overlapping set of ideas that we recognize as characteristic of pragmatism. In works
such as her most well-known story, The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman gives a fictionalized
account of the life of a housewife confined to a room to protect her delicate nature,
only to be driven mad by the control of her husband and the titular wallpaper (Gilman
1997 [1892]). Gilman’s attention to the lived experience of white women in her era as
sources for social recommendations reflects her deep commitment to the importance of
perspective and rejection of the subordination of women. Gilman also wrote about the
economic and social repression of women, advocating that women assert new selves to
take on new roles in society. Her analyses of class and gender are identifiable as pre-
decessors to more contemporary considerations (Kimmel and Aronson 1998 [1898]).
Gilman, virtually overlooked by non-feminist academic pragmatists, is rightly regarded
as a key figure in US feminism.
On the other hand, Jane Addams, the renowned writer, peace activist, and social set-
tlement pioneer, worked alongside John Dewey in Chicago, influencing his ideas about
democracy. Her place in the history of pragmatism is most often supported through
appeals to her ties to Dewey. Dewey did not credit her ideas with citations in his long
philosophical works, but he made public and private declarations about the importance
of her thinking in speeches and correspondence. While Addams is seen as seminal
to the field of social work and is more often considered as part of the canon of classi-
cal pragmatists, Addams’ feminism was more apparent than explicit, its full expression
found in the explication of her work by contemporary feminist pragmatists who have
taken up the recovery of her thought with zeal.
The various recovery projects of Addams’s work have seeded other feminist inves-
tigations into the shared claims, methods, and roots of feminism and pragmatism.
Seigfried has argued that despite their similarities, feminists and pragmatists have, for
the most part, ignored the fruits of the others’ labors (Seigfried 1996: 17–40). Early
women pragmatists may have been taken up by feminists, but not explicitly as prag-
matists. Pragmatists who had been socially or politically feminist may have pursued
studies of Dewey or James or Royce, but little had been done to evaluate their work as
good sources for feminism. Seigfried and the contributors to the Hypatia special issue in
1993 were the vanguard of a growing group of scholars interested in the connections of
feminism and pragmatism. The articles included those that sought to recover women’s
voices in early pragmatism, those that analyzed the feminist or anti-feminist leaning of
the classical male pragmatists, and finally articles that suggested that pragmatism and
feminism could be wedded to create better social, epistemological, and political orien-
tations. Yet not all contributors to Seigfried’s special issue agreed that pragmatism had
something special to offer feminists.
Notably, Richard Rorty claimed that, like postmodernism, which had reached the
height of its popularity in the early 1990s, pragmatism was not specially suited for femi-
nist use and could very well be used for cross purposes. He argued,

Pragmatism—considered as a set of philosophical views about truth, knowledge,

objectivity, and language—is neutral between feminism and masculinism . . . 
Neither the pragmatist nor the deconstructionist can do more for feminism

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 Feminist pragmatism

than help rebut attempts to ground these practices on something deeper than
a contingent historical fact—the fact that the people with the slightly larger
muscles have been bullying the people with the slightly smaller muscles for a
very long time.
(Rorty 1993: 101)

Rorty’s claim about pragmatism’s neutrality met with resistance from feminist
pragmatists because it seemed to miss an important set of distinctions that can be
made about pragmatism. On the one hand, we can agree with Rorty from a historical
perspective if we only count the male pragmatists, such as Peirce, James, or Dewey,
as the keepers of the pragmatist tradition. We can follow feminist historian Estelle
B. Freedman’s claim that “movements cannot be feminist unless they explicitly address
justice for women as a primary concern” (Freedman 2002: 8). The most progressive
of the big three pragmatists, Dewey, seemed to suggest that the status of women in
society ought to be improved but did not take anything close to a decidedly feminist
stance in his philosophical writings. There was not, at least if we are only counting
the male pragmatists of the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a
feminist movement in classical pragmatism.
However, Rorty’s claim is not primarily historical or about the history of a femi-
nist wave in pragmatism. We can address his claim without appeal even to the
women that we have already mentioned as frequently associated with early pragma-
tism. His claim is that pragmatism’s methods and beliefs are neutral. There is good
reason to reject neutrality as either the pragmatist’s method or attitude. Much of
what we recognize as pragmatism comes from Dewey. Dewey extends and deepens
the meaning of pragmatism. Whereas Peirce’s early pragmatism was a defense of the
scientific method and verification through empirical study, and James’ pragmatism
prioritized practical aims over metaphysical truths, it could be argued that what
prevails, especially in conversations about feminism and pragmatism, is not the
supposed neutrality of Peirce or James’ view, but the pragmatism of Dewey. Dewey’s
pragmatism, by method, attitude, and in practice required a belief in a democratic
way of life that is not value neutral. Perhaps we would not call Dewey a feminist
after reading his few sparse lines on women’s rights, but he produced a body of work
rich for feminist enlargement.
It could be argued that this is what Seigfried had in mind when she countered Rorty’s
view and argued that

[t]he first-generation pragmatists, like contemporary feminists, refused the

false neutrality of the epistemological turn and argued that theory be joined
to practice and that practice be held accountable to the values that make life
worth living for all members of the varied Communities that make up the
larger social order.
(Seigfried 1993: 13)

This perspective is clearly Deweyan. A Deweyan pragmatism is not neutral in the

sense that Rorty claims, and lends itself especially to feminist interpretation and
uptake. Seigfried’s argument relies on the view that Dewey did not live up to the full
consequences of his pragmatism in regard to women’s issues, but she ably demonstrates
that this oversight was that of the man, Dewey, and not of the values or methods

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of pragmatism. Whereas Rorty claimed that pragmatism was value neutral, Seigfried
argues that it is value rich. She even suggests that pragmatism can be understood as a
feminine rather than masculine endeavor, arguing that

[t]he pragmatist goal of philosophical discourse, which is shared understanding

and communal problem solving rather than rationally forced conclusions, is
more feminine than masculine, as is its valuing of inclusiveness and commu-
nity over exaggerated claims of autonomy and detachment. The same can be
said for its developmental rather than rule-governed ethics.
(Seigfried 1996: 32)

We need not masculinize or feminize pragmatism to take up Seigfried’s rebuttal of

Rorty’s claim. A rightfully pragmatist project would have a difficult time being inten-
tionally masculinist, as the emphasis on shared understanding and pluralism go against
that stance. Even if it could be argued that pragmatism had, prior to contemporary femi-
nist intervention, only advanced masculinist projects in the hands of male pragmatists,
we need not turn away from the overlapping claims and aims of the two theoretical and
practical orientations.
Erin McKenna highlights similar lines of connection in her estimations of pragma-
tism and feminism. She contends that, “Pragmatism and feminism share philosophical
roots in rejecting dualism, taking a perspectival stance, developing values from con-
crete experience, and giving feeling a role in experience and knowledge” (McKenna
2003: 5). She argues that joining pragmatism—with its emphasis on processes, growth,
mutuality, and engaged philosophy—with feminism—which fights against women’s
subordination—results in a form of flexible feminism. Flexible feminism is found even
in the early women pragmatists.

Historical Connections
Jane Addams is the historical woman who is most frequently associated with feminist
pragmatism today. It is easy to connect Addams with views readily associated with
classical pragmatism, especially those attributed to Dewey. Addams and Dewey each
believed that democracy was a way of life that depended on the associational nature
of the individual and her or his relationships with others as the source of both social
intelligence and progress. Sharing with Dewey as she did a commitment to social reform
and melioration, Addams’ writings and speeches—most notably Twenty Years at Hull
House, her book-length reflections about her attempts to support the growing immi-
grant community in Chicago—can be read as field notes to pragmatism in practice
(Addams 1999 [1901]). When contemporary readers have sought to identify Addams’
feminist themes, it requires us to use a label “feminist” that Addams did not use herself,
so we must proceed with care, making sure not to attribute views to her that she did not
hold. Maurice Hammington has argued that Addams’ work resists easy labeling because
there is a “resistance to ideology inherent in her pragmatism” (Hammington 2009: 30).
Yet Hammington, along with others, finds Addams’ work ripe for feminist insight.
In her social work and public writings and speeches, Addams supported women’s
suffrage and worked to garner sympathy as well as social access for prostitutes, immi-
grant, and other poor, disenfranchised women. In her life and writing about these issues,
Hammington identifies several key themes that are easily recognized by contemporary

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feminists. He argues that Addams employed forms of standpoint epistemology in her

writing and care ethics in her practice. As a standpoint epistemologist before the phrase
came into use, Hammington asserts, “Addams links social identification, social expres-
sion, and democracy together” (Hammington 2009: 55). Addams highlighted the impor-
tance of attending to the lived experience of all people in our efforts to address social
problems. Of a piece with the attention to standpoint, Addams practiced an ethics of
care in her relation to the women at the settlement house, and advocated the importance
of deep, reciprocal interactions in her calls for peace at times of war.
Hammington makes a more controversial claim about Addams as a feminist when he
contends that we can find a “proto-lesbian ethics” in her life and works (Hammington
2009: 61). Following the biographical explorations of Hull House women produced by
Mary Jo Deegan (1996), in spite of Addams making no public assertion of herself as
a lesbian, Hammington frames Addams’ personal life, deep friendships with women,
the formation of an all-female learning and living environment at Hull House, and
objections to the prominence of Freudian theories of sexuality, as indicative of an
ethos of same-sex love that is hard to pin down as sexual but should not be overlooked
(Hammington 2009: 61). Citing Sarah Hoagland’s (1988) conceptualization of les-
bian ethics, Hammington argues that the all-woman environment at Hull House and
Addams’ resultant views on social development are in line with Hoagland’s claims that
a lesbian ethics would emphasize “connection, growth and integrity rather than rules or
calculations of straight behavior” (Hammington 2009: 65).
Whether or not one agrees with Hammington’s claims about the relevance of
Addams’ apparent affiliative preferences, his analysis of her work and life along those
lines throws into relief one of the (arguably) most distinctive and fruitful parts of the
feminist pragmatist historical recovery projects made possible by pragmatism’s rejec-
tion of traditionalism. Contemporary feminist pragmatists, such as Marilyn Fischer
(2013), John Kaag (2008), Erin McKenna (2012), and Judy Whipps (2012) have
mined the works of women thinkers from the early twentieth century to offer us not
only a glimpse into the past that is more diverse than we once presumed but also to
point out new sources for our current feminist and pragmatist projects. The historical
consciousness of the feminist pragmatist is most often productive and instructive. The
point of recovery projects is not just getting what the classical woman pragmatist said
“right” and understanding what she intended in her context. Key to the pragmatist
attitude is considering not the eternal veracity of claims but what use they might be
to us. Contemporary feminist pragmatists have exemplified what was once considered
the distinct attitude of classical pragmatism when they have endeavored to expand
and use historical sources for their own purposes.

Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism

The nearly quarter century since the 1993 publication of the special feminist pragma-
tist issue of Hypatia has seen a proliferation of feminist pragmatist academic produc-
tion. Some of these have been recovery projects, for example Marilyn Fischer and Judy
Whipps’ book on Jane Addams’ peace writing (2003) and John Kaag’s exploration of
Ella Lymon Cabot as a pragmatist and feminist (2013), while others attempt to use
the resources of feminism and pragmatism to articulate new paths for philosophical
inquiry. These projects have been wide-ranging and diverse in their methodologies and
recommendations. Most of the published work in feminist pragmatism has been in the

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form of essays and articles. To understand the what and how of feminist pragmatism,
it is illustrative to consider two of the few book-length projects in feminist pragma-
tism (McKenna 2001; Sullivan 2001) and a recent edited collection (Hammington and
Bardwell-Jones 2012).
In her 2001 book, Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism,
and Feminism, growing out of what she calls a “cross fertilization” of the ideas and theo-
ries of pragmatism and feminism, Shannon Sullivan argues that bodies are transactional
(Sullivan 2001: 7). She finds resources for her conception of transactional bodies in
Dewey’s notion of the organism. In Dewey, Sullivan uncovers the seeds of a deeply
phenomenological account of corporeal existence, even as she notes that “the phe-
nomenological side of his pragmatism is not often recognized” (Sullivan 2001: 4). She
describes the mutuality of bodies and environments as co-constituting. What results is
a self-aware perspectivalism that joins pragmatism and feminism in a project that aims
to take the lived experience of gender and race seriously in a standpoint theory of truth
that would give “an account of truth as flourishing contact between organic bodies and
world” (Sullivan 2001: 10).
In The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist Feminist Perspective, Erin McKenna also advo-
cates a feminist pragmatism that relies on the development of a standpoint theory
that would take into account the lived experience of women and others. She sets
out to theorize a “process model of utopia” (McKenna 2001: 2). Against those who
would argue that utopian thinking and social planning are either too idealistic to be
taken seriously or, worse, would only result in a totalitarian society, McKenna asserts
that a Deweyan pragmatic method of positing goals and making attempts to reach
them while constantly re-assessing both the attempts and the goals would not lead to
fascism or escapism. Rather, it would be representative of a dynamic process model
of utopia, of which she sees evidence not only in Dewey’s philosophy but also in the
utopian fiction of feminist writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Sally Miller Gearhart
(McKenna 2001: 3).
Maurice Hammington and Celia Bardwell-Jones’ edited volume, Contemporary
Feminist Pragmatism (2012) is a collection of essays on topics as varied as patriotism,
pets, hip-hop, epistemic exclusion, and care ethics. The organizing question of the
volume is “What does feminist pragmatism have to offer to reflections on contempo-
rary issues and ideas?” (Hammington and Bardwell-Jones 2012: 1). The editors argue
that the framework they present is not a unified answer to the question, rather it
shows how the essays hang together. The framework identifies several methodologi-
cal commitments that the feminist pragmatists all promote in some form throughout
the volume. First, they argue that a commitment to “the importance of context
and experience” is a binding tie between the texts (Hammington and Bardwell-
Jones 2012: 2). Second, joining pragmatism and feminism offers an increased and
more nuanced approach to epistemology and value theory. Being a white woman, a
Latina, or a Chinese American man are, for the feminist pragmatist, not incidental
factors to be bracketed in philosophical explorations. Rather the social and histori-
cal occurrence of the use of these identity markers reveals much about the situated,
temporal nature of what we value and call knowledge and thus what we mean by
objectivity (Hammington and Bardwell-Jones 2012: 3). Third, feminist pragmatism
“emphasizes the need for diversity and thus dialogue among differently situated
social groups” (Hammington and Bardwell-Jones 2012: 4). Pluralism is valued by

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both the pragmatist and feminist traditions not only because diverse viewpoints can
reveal that our knowledge is contextual, but also because social intelligence offers
us different answers to our pressing questions and problems. They contend: “Rather
than appealing to abstract conceptions of humanity and ignoring the situated char-
acter of experience, feminism and pragmatism conceive of the self engaged in social
interactions with others” (Hammington and Bardwell-Jones 2012: 6).
Claudia Gillberg’s contribution to the volume, “A Methodological Interpretation
of Feminist Pragmatism,” serves as a good example both of the methodological
commitments that the editors attribute to feminist pragmatists and of what forms
the practice of feminist pragmatism can take outside of academic discourse. Gillberg
writes, “As an action researcher and educational researcher who embraces feminist
pragmatism, I wish to be particularly aware of the role that research can play for social
or organizational change towards more inclusive, democratic ways to organize our
lives” (Gillberg 2012: 218). Feminist action research, like the practices of pragmatists
such as John Dewey and Jane Addams, uses the end goal of a more democratic every-
day life to direct collaborative models of social change and problem solving.
Gillberg gives examples of how one might work as a feminist pragmatist action
researcher. One of the examples is particularly instructive. She worked with preschool
teachers to, first, figure out whether and how the gendered nature of toys and playground
equipment was affecting the children in their school. Instead of rushing to de-gender
the toys and change the program, the teachers and Gillberg read and discussed research
on gender and children, increased their knowledge of associated background theories,
visited other schools, and pondered possible parent reactions to any changes. The group
considered possible obstacles to their planning and used a collaborative approach to
address potential problems. Gillberg played the role of “critical friend” who facilitated
the teachers’ discussions and actions but did not direct the teachers from on high. From
her practices, Gillberg identifies several feminist pragmatist concepts at work that
include notions of community, reciprocity, and the use of study to act toward reform and
increased democratization (Gillberg 2012: 224–227). While Gillberg makes the con-
nection to pragmatist and feminist academic sources in her practice explicit, the work is
reminiscent of work done by other feminist practitioners, such as black feminists, who
have long used the label pragmatist and similar methods without an indebted connec-
tion to the classical pragmatists or academic feminist philosophy (James 2009).
In the early 1990s, black feminists from a wide range of academic disciplines and areas
of activism met several times for a Black Feminist Seminar. These meetings led to the
publication of an anthology titled Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism
of Black Women (James and Busia 1993a). In the introduction, Stanlie M. James articu-
lates a wide-ranging agenda that unites the black feminist work included in the volume.

Black feminists are simultaneously envisioning incremental changes and radi-

cal transformations not only within Black communities but throughout the
broader society as well. Ultimately, the humanistic visionary pragmatism of
theorizing by Black feminists seeks the establishment of just societies where
human rights are implemented with respect and dignity even as the world’s
resources are equitably distributed in ways that encourage individual autonomy
and development.
(James and Busia 1993b: 3)

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This “humanistic visionary pragmatism” of black feminists is rooted in a long tradition

of black women activists and thinkers, not often included in professional philosophi-
cal discourse, as well as black feminist engagement in movements for civil rights and
social justice. The pragmatism of the black feminists identified by James has obvious,
significant points of overlap with classical and feminist pragmatism in the discipline
of philosophy. Many black feminist pragmatists and Dewey agree that having hope
or a vision of the future plays a vital role in what we do to promote democracy
in writing and in practice today. The emphasis on meliorism, fallibility, and the
related view that society and individual are co-constituting are found in both prag-
matisms, even as the roots and impetuses for the work diverge. Considering black
feminist pragmatism along with contemporary and classical philosophical sources
enlarges the available resources for pragmatist social justice and theory projects
(James 2009: 93).

Feminist Pragmatist Futures

Pragmatism as an academic discourse arose just as the United States was completing
its westward expansion, debating white women’s suffrage, codifying Jim Crow laws,
and asserting its military power in increasingly global conflicts. America was becoming
America. The philosophies of the classical pragmatists came to be and are still often
known as American philosophy. Increasingly, just as people have begun to question
more frequently the use of the term “American” to signify only the people and products
of the United States, there have been calls to rethink the habit of naming only the
efforts of the classical US pragmatists “American philosophy.” Both these critiques of
our naming practices are in line with the methodologies of both pragmatism and femi-
nism. In their myriad expressions, each discourse has sought to question the entrench-
ment of tradition for tradition’s sake and to champion the pluralism of perspectives that
is necessary in epistemology and ethics.

Further Reading
Fischer, Marilyn (2004) On Addams, Stanford, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. (An invaluable resource for an
introduction to the thinking of Jane Addams as a pragmatist.)
McKenna, Erin and Pratt, Scott L. (2015) American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, London:
Bloomsbury. (Offers a distinctively thorough and astute introduction for the student or non-specialist
seeking to contextualize feminist pragmatism in wider conversations about the history of American
philosophy.)
Seigfried, Charlene Haddock (1996) Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric, Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press. (The seminal text of feminist pragmatism.)

Related Topics
Feminist methods in the history of philosophy (Chapter 1); introducing Black femi-
nist philosophy (Chapter 10); rationality and objectivity in feminist philosophy
(Chapter 20); feminist philosophy of social science (Chapter 27).

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 Feminist pragmatism

References
Addams, Jane (1999 [1910]) Twenty Years at Hull House, Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Deegan, Mary Jo (1990) Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918, New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Books.
—— (1996) “‘Dear Love, Dear Love’: Feminist Pragmatism and the Chicago Female World of Love and
Ritual,” Gender and Society 10(5): 590–607.
Dewey, John (1980) “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” in Jo Ann Boydston (Ed.) John Dewey: The
Middle Works, 1899–1924, Volume 10: 1916–1917, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,
3–38.
Fischer, Marilyn (2013) “Reading Addams’s Democracy and Social Ethics as a Social Gospel, Evolutionary
Idealist Text,” The Pluralist 8(3): 17–31.
Fischer, Marilyn and Whipps, Judy (Eds.) (2003) Jane Addams Writings on Peace, Bristol: Thoemmes.
Freedman, Estelle B. (2002) No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. New York:
Ballentine Books.
Gillberg, Claudia (2012) “A Methodological Interpretation of Feminist Pragmatism,” in Maurice
Hammington and Celia Bardwell-Jones (Eds.) Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism, New York: Routledge,
217–237.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1997 [1892]) The Yellow Wallpaper, New York: Dover.
Hammington, Maurice (2009) The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams, Urbana, IL and Chicago, IL: University
of Illinois Press.
Hammington, Maurice and Bardwell-Jones, Celia (Eds.) (2012) Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism, New York:
Routledge.
Hoagland, Sarah (1988) Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Value, Palo Alto, CA: Institute of Lesbian Studies.
James, V. Denise (2009) “Theorizing Black Feminist Pragmatism: Thoughts on The Practice and Purpose of
Philosophy as Envisioned by Black Feminists and John Dewey,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 23(2):
92–99.
James, Stanlie M. and Busia, Abenia P. A. (Eds.) (1993a) Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary
Pragmatism of Black Women, London: Routledge.
—— (1993b) “Introduction,” in Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women,
London: Routledge, 1–12.
James, William (2000) “What Pragmatism Means,” in Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 27–44.
Kaag, John (2008) “Women and Forgotten Movements in American Philosophy: The Work of Ella Lyman
Cabot and Mary Parker Follett,” Transactions Of The Charles S. Peirce Society 44(1): 134–157.
—— (2013) Idealism, Pragmatism, and Feminism: The Philosophy of Ella Lymon Cabot, Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books.
Kimmel, Michael and Aronson, Amy (1998 [1898]) “Introduction,” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women
and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. vii–lxx.
McKenna, Erin (2001) The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective, Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield.
—— (2003) “Pragmatism and Feminism: Engaged Philosophy,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy
24(1): 3–21.
—— (2012) “Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Women and Pets,” in Maurice Hammington and Celia Bardwell-
Jones (Eds.) Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism, New York: Routledge, 238–254.
Rorty, Richard (1993) “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View,” Hypatia 8(2):
96–103.
Seigfried, Charlene Haddock (1991) “The Missing Perspective: Feminist Pragmatism,” Transactions of the
Charles S. Peirce Society 27(4): 405–416.

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—— (Ed.) (1993) “Special Issue: Feminism and Pragmatism,” Hypatia 8(2): 1–242.
—— (1996) Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago
Press.
—— (2002) “Introduction,” in Charlene Haddock Seigfried (Ed.) Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey,
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1–24.
Sullivan, Shannon (2001) Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism,
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Whipps, Judy (2012) “Feminist-Pragmatist Democratic Practice and Contemporary Sustainability
Movements: Mary Parker Follett, Jane Addams, Emily Greene Balch, and Vandana Shiva,” in Maurice
Hammington and Celia Bardwell-Jones (Eds.) Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism, New York: Routledge,
115–127.

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 12
FEMINIST
PHENOMENOLOGY
Alia Al-Saji

To speak of feminist phenomenology, or of how feminist philosophers have appropriated

phenomenological methods and sources, is to speak in the plural. It is therefore impor-
tant to begin by noting that I will not offer a survey of what feminist phenomenology
has been or a definition of what it should be. Rather, my interest is both in how phe-
nomenology, as a variegated movement, has been useful to feminism and how feminist
phenomenologies offer a corrective—or, more precisely, a critical reconfiguration—of
phenomenology. This reconfiguration sheds light on the social-political possibilities
of a movement that might have seemed, on the surface, to be only about description.
There are multiple ways in which one could broach how phenomenology has influ-
enced feminist theory. One could speak of sources, figures, or themes. Feminists have
drawn on the works of Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz
Fanon and extensively on the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-
Ponty (and this is only a partial list). And phenomenologists have, arguably from
the start, been engaged in feminist questions. One has only to think of Edith Stein
(Calcagno 2007) or Simone de Beauvoir (2010 [1949]), to recall that phenomenologi-
cal approaches to feminist concerns—even when not explicitly labelled “feminist”—are
not limited to the current generation of phenomenologists. Moreover, phenomenol-
ogy addresses dimensions of experience—such as embodiment (see Chapter 15 in this
volume), affectivity, perception, temporality, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity—to
name but a few thematic threads that have also been of import to feminists.
What feminist phenomenologies add to this list is a sensitivity to how oppression,
power, and privilege may form the horizon wherein these dimensions are differentially
structured—the social-historical context wherein experience is situated and histori-
cized. Feminist phenomenologies provide, then, not simply an additional theme, but a
different and arguably deeper way of thematizing and contextualizing phenomenology’s
classical foci—shifting and redefining these foci in the process. Feminist phenomenol-
ogy shows how the political already structures experience at the lived, “prereflective”
level of felt embodiment. And this is not only when experience is self-reflectively or
personally ascribed. It points to how the social mediates how I feel and perceive, as well
as what I can do—embodied agency—and who I am—identity.
In my view, this means that the richness of phenomenology is best seen when it is
understood not simply as tradition, but as method. And this phenomenological method
 ENGAGING THE PAST

is one that has itself changed over time—that has been revised and reconfigured
through multiple appropriations and critiques, including critical race, queer, and femi-
nist ones. To give only a few examples of such appropriations and critiques, I point the
reader to: Alcoff (2006); Ahmed (2006); Bartky (1990); Gordon (1995); Heinämaa
(2003); Salamon (2010); Weiss (1999); Yancy (2008); and Young (2005). There
have also been a number of important special issues and volumes on feminist phenom-
enology in the last two decades: Fisher and Embree (2000); Heinämaa and Rodemeyer
(2010); Schües, Olkowski, and Fielding (2011); Simms and Stawarska (2014); and
Zeiler and Käll (2014).
This is to say that phenomenology has the structure of what Husserl and, following
him, Merleau-Ponty call institution (Husserl 1970 [1954]; Merleau-Ponty 1964b [1960]
and 2010 [2003]). It is not a static given, a mere set of texts, or a pre-defined formula.
Phenomenological method is a movement that is also tendency and change, a way of
being oriented in the world, a style of thinking or way of perceiving. This style should
be understood to be dynamic, both weighted by its past and transformed by it, impro-
vising in response to its historical and social situation. Here, I do not mean to divide
textual interpretation from “application,” but to point to the ways in which phenom-
enology is a continual taking up and reinvention.
In what follows, I begin with this question of method, as an avenue to elucidat-
ing phenomenology’s relation to lived experience and to its normative—although not
uncontested—assumptions. Because of the introductory nature of this essay, my appeal
to sources remains selective. I draw on phenomenology’s past, especially on Husserl,
Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and Fanon, and on contemporary feminist phenomenolo-
gists. But there are many phenomenologists (Binswanger, Minkowski, Patočka, Schutz,
Stein, and of course Heidegger) and some entangled intra-phenomenological debates
to which I cannot do justice. Because my interest lies in understanding how phenom-
enology becomes feminist, I focus on bringing to light the critical, ethical and political
possibilities of what I will call “critical phenomenology.”

Phenomenology as Method
It is perhaps commonplace to begin a discussion of phenomenology with an account of
the “phenomenological reduction.” In its simplest form, the reduction is about “putting
into brackets” attitudes to the world, in particular causal-scientistic and naturalistic
ones. To “bracket” is neither to affirm nor to nullify, but to suspend an attitude, in order
to bring into focus its constitutive activity and the web of meaning it has instituted.
However, the attitude that most weighs in experience, and that is the most difficult to
bracket, is the “natural attitude.”
When he introduced the concept of the “natural attitude,” Husserl meant to desig-
nate not simply a way of conceiving the world, but also a way of living and perceiving
the world that takes that world and the objects within it to be “out there,” defined apart
from consciousness. In other words, this is an attitude of naïve realism toward the world
(Husserl 1998 [1976]). This attitude is “natural” both in being the basis upon which
other attitudes—theoretical and practical—build, and also in becoming habitual, its
operations forgotten, so that it is implicitly and unreflectively lived. To say that this
attitude is “natural” is not to endorse it, then, but to indicate that it remains lived-
through and is not grasped as an attitude, that it is invisible to us since we perceive
according to it. This is to say that it has been naturalized.

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More generally, what the phenomenological reduction allows us to see and to

interrogate are the naturalizing tendencies within experience. What it reveals are the
threads of meaning-making that weave together experience. To paraphrase Merleau-
Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, the reduction “loosens” and hence makes visible
these intentional threads, but, it should be added, it does not undo them (Merleau-
Ponty 2012 [1945]: lxxvii). In its classical Husserlian form, to carry out this kind of
“reduction” is to reveal the constituting role of consciousness as the source of sense-
giving—as the condition of possibility of there being meaning. It is because it forms
the condition of possibility for sense to appear that consciousness—or subjectivity—is
revealed to be “transcendental subjectivity.” This does not mean that consciousness
transcends experience but that it grounds experience—that it makes possible an experi-
ence of something, which is to say, the appearance of sense to consciousness (or what
phenomenology calls “intentionality”).
As one reads Husserl more closely, however, transcendental subjectivity is revealed to
be not so much a source-point as a flow that is paradoxically both constituted through,
and constituting of, time (Husserl 1991 [1966]). As one attends to time more concretely,
time-consciousness is shown to be more than a formal, linear schema. Rather it is an
affectively entangled flow, in which later events make a difference for how earlier ones
are retained or fade away (Husserl 2001 [1966]). Moreover, the perceptual field is an
affective relief; it is a field of contextual contrast, where the relative pull of affections
motivates the sensing body to turn toward, and perceive, them (Husserl 2001 [1966]:
216/168). I would add that this affective relief is neither an abstract map that is the
same for all bodies, nor is it given once and for all. It is a tissue with variable contours,
viscosity and texture, a furrowed terrain in which some bodies move with ease and others
get bogged down in ruts. This differentially lived and perceived space—sedimented and
materialized over time—can be described as a lifeworld of habitualities, since it has been
shaped through, and in turn shapes, bodily habits. Such habits stem not only from my
singular interactions with the world but from my social and historical location and my
intersubjective milieu, the others (human or otherwise) with whom I have lived.
Thus the affective map of lived space reflects back to bodies their (differentially
socialized) habitualities, the system of their possible actions in the world. The practi-
cal significances of things (e.g., a pen to be written with) mirror to my lived body its
habitually acquired capacities (in this instance, being-handed, able to write, having
acquired a language and literacy in a particular script, etc.). These capacities are felt
in my body in terms of possible movement and sensing (by means of the sensory,
kinaesthetic and proprioceptive awareness that my body has of itself, a self-awareness
that is not yet conceptual or reflective). Husserl calls this bodily feeling of practical
possibility the “I can” (Husserl 1989 [1952]: 270/258); for example, the feeling that
“I can write” with that pen. Transcendental subjectivity thus appears to be receptive
and embodied, affectively embedded in the world and responsive to it (Husserl 1989
[1952]; Welton 2000). As Merleau-Ponty describes it, perception is a dialogue of the
lived body with the world (2012 [1945]: 134).
Phenomenology listens in on this dialogue, not simply to record what is said, but to
lend an ear to what is not said—the silent relations and differences that structure the
meaning of what is said. More specifically, phenomenology is a way of attending to
experience, to reveal not only its sense, but also the dimensions that generate sense.
Such are the structuring and normative dimensions that make meaning, but that do not
themselves appear as sense. Drawing on the later Merleau-Ponty, this is not to treat

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experience as an object—something to be viewed under a microscope or held between

forceps—but to accompany experience in its temporal becoming and in the workings of
its constitutive dimensions (Merleau-Ponty 1968 [1964]: 101, 128).
In this sense, the phenomenological reduction differs in its scope and depth among
phenomenological authors. It differs in what it puts into brackets, what naturalizing
tendencies it questions, and what it is thus able to reveal. Here the significance of
feminist, critical race, and queer phenomenologies comes to view. At stake is not simply a
shift in what is being described. Rather, these are critical and creative reconfigurations
of phenomenology that deepen and actualize the promise of its method. Before turning
to this point in the next two sections, I want to address more explicitly the limitations
that feminist critics have found in phenomenology.
With few exceptions (Heinämaa 2003 and Weiss 2008), feminists have historically
been wary of the Husserlian line in phenomenology and have more extensively appro-
priated, in critically careful and innovative ways, that of Merleau-Ponty (for an expla-
nation see Oksala 2006: 231; see also Olkowski and Weiss 2006; cf. Butler 1989 for
caution with respect to Merleau-Ponty). I have argued elsewhere that, while feminist
readers are right to be hesitant about some aspects of Husserlian phenomenology, his
fine-grained analyses of embodiment, temporality, affectivity and sensing offer sites for
productive recuperation (Al-Saji 2010). The brief sketch I gave above shows how tran-
scendental subjectivity can be fleshed out temporally, affectively, and in bodily terms.
These dimensions are essential to the constitutive work of transcendental subjectivity,
not secondary afterthoughts.
While my sketch responds to a long-standing feminist concern that the subject of
Husserlian phenomenology is a disembodied pure ego, it does not obviate all worries.
For it is one thing to admit an embodied consciousness, quite another to take historicity,
habitualities, and social positionality—thus gendering and racialization—to structure
intentional activity at the transcendental, and not simply empirical level. For instance,
Husserl may admit that transcendental subjectivity has a lifeworld of habitualities (as
shown above). But the concrete forms that these habits take can still be seen to belong
to the empirical ego; this would allow the transcendental ego to be conceived univer-
sally, with details filled in locally (see Fisher 2000: 30–31). Categories of “identity”
would thus be relegated as characteristics of the “empirical ego.” The phenomenologi-
cal reduction would seem to go both too far—in assuming that we can separate out what
is empirical from what is transcendental in the mixture of experience—and yet  also
not far enough, in ignoring the structuring role of characteristics deemed empirical
and contingent. In this vein, the structures of inner time-consciousness might appear
as generally founding of experience, yet filled in differently for different gendered and
racialized subjects. But what if gendering and racialization make a difference in how
time is experienced—a difference in the very structure of temporal experience and not
simply in its coloration or content (Al-Saji 2013)?
Here we find the knot of the dilemma: this dilemma, I think, is tied up with how
phenomenology conceives the commonality of the field of sense. The problem is
not simply that phenomenology has often assumed a philosophy of the subject, even
when that subject has been an embodied and intercorporeally situated consciousness
(cf. Oksala 2006). Phenomenology can arguably account for the meaning-making pow-
ers of the world: as sedimented, intersubjective meanings to be re-activated (Husserl
1970 [1954]), as affective relief (Husserl 2001 [1966]), as institution (Merleau-Ponty
2010 [2003]), and as flesh (Merleau-Ponty 1968 [1964]).

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But what phenomenology presupposes, even when the subject is decentered, is a

common horizon of intelligibility—a perceptual world within which “something”
appears and can eventually be recognized, that is to say, made sense of. That “there
is sense” appears to be the condition of possibility of phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty
2012 [1945]: 309), its primordial “faith” so to speak (2012 [1945]: 359). As Merleau-
Ponty says, we are “condemned to sense” (2012 [1945]: lxxxvi, 173). This does not mean
that everything makes sense at once: every thematization (i.e., occasion of making deter-
minate sense of something) has as its background an indeterminate horizon that includes
the implicit habituality and opacity of one’s perceiving and feeling body, as well as the
inexhaustible inner and outer horizons of things. While elements of the perceptual field,
of which we are a part, can be made explicit, the field as a whole cannot be exhausted
nor completely given. And it is this indeterminacy and incompleteness that makes us
feel that the perceptual world is real, always already there behind our backs.
Perception thus contains an implicit trust, or hope, that through a teleological pro-
cess of perceptual adjustment and correction, a back-and-forth dialogue with the world,
what was experienced as lack can come to expression (Merleau-Ponty 2012 [1945]:
155). There are at least two ways of understanding this teleology of perception. On the
one hand, it can be understood to rely on optimal bodily attitudes—ways of moving and
sensing that allow the practical and perceptual significances of the world to be better
grasped (a kind of optimal “I can”). Take, for instance, the focusing distance through
which a particular object can be better seen, or the weight of touch that allows the tex-
tures of a certain surface to be felt (2012 [1945]: 316). On the other hand, this teleology
can be understood as an open-ended improvisation or synchronization, through which
both sensing and sensible—body and world—take dynamic form, and in which neither
preexists their relation (Al-Saji 2008). Since this second option discards the prejudice
of an objective in-itself world, multiple “solutions” to the problem of expression may
be possible, and different ways in which sense can appear. Here the commonality of the
field of sense cannot be assumed, though it can become an epistemic and ethical task.
The first option risks re-naturalizing ways of perceiving—judged optimal—that cor-
respond to certain cultivated capacities and habitualities. These often reside in par-
ticular privileged forms of embodiment and are made possible by the colonization of
material, social, and economic resources. Forms of behavior that are adapted to, or
geared into, current social norms will best succeed on this picture. But the second
option is not without its risks. For the improvisation of perception does not take place
apart from the normativity of the social world. Indeed, both sensory world and sens-
ing body are already weighted by differential historical and social ways of being. The
sensory world is already social and the body is a historical being (Merleau-Ponty 2012
[1945]: 174). What risks being re-naturalized, here, is the radical “alterity” of forms of
life. Otherness is de-contextualized and reified into bodies, as if that experience of dif-
ference were not also a function of differential positioning on the social map and its
constitutive, normative exclusions.
Two examples from critical race and feminist phenomenologies can show what is at
stake. In her well-known essay “Throwing Like a Girl,” Iris Marion Young shows how
“feminine” movements are often restrictive: they are lived in terms of a self-inhibited
“I cannot” that is superimposed upon the practical possibilities of a general “human” —
but in fact male— “I can” (2005: 37). To leave the analysis there would be to re-naturalize
feminine embodiment as inhibited intentionality, as “Other.” What needs to be shown,
and what Young shows, are the ways in which one learns to move like a girl in a social

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world pervaded by a Western phallocentric gaze and violence that which structure
habituation (i.e., what habits one acquires or is dissuaded from acquiring), body image,
and affect (Young 2005: 44–45).
A second example can be found in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967
[1952]), and takes us back to the analysis of temporal experience. Differences in rhythm
and sensibility—in bodily, musical and poetic expression—are often taken to belong to
blackness and are made into innate bodily forms. This elides how such expressions of
“Négritude” point to a multiplicity of experiences, situated in a history of slavery, racism
and colonization, and formed both in suffering and in resistance to them (Fanon 1967
[1952]: 122–129).
Once the social and the political—once historicity, domination and oppression—
are taken to structure perceptual and affective experience all the way down, an incom-
mensurability is introduced into experience that challenges the commonality of the
field of sense upon which the recognition of meaning relies. Sociality and historicity
differentially structure the very forms of expression that perceptual sense and practical
possibility take. Sociality and historicity are not merely added onto meaning-making
relations as an extra layer of sense. What does phenomenology need to become in order
to do justice to such knotted and entangled experience?

Lived Experience and Pathologies of the Social

The problem of phenomenology as feminist methodology was clearly exposed in a debate
between Joan Scott and Linda Martín Alcoff on the status of lived experience for femi-
nist theory (Alcoff 2000 and 2014; Scott 1992). While Scott’s critique was levelled at
histories of difference, her claim—that “the project of making experience visible pre-
cludes analysis of the workings of [the ideological] system and of its historicity; instead it
reproduces its terms” (1992: 25)—is an objection often repeated against phenomenology.
The claim is that hitherto marginalized and unheard experience is foregrounded in its
immediacy at the cost of eliding its social conditions. I would agree with Scott that tak-
ing experience as an unproblematized and uncontested foundation for knowledge risks
re-naturalizing the oppressive structures that make that experience possible.
However, as Alcoff rightly notes in response to Scott, posing experience and theory,
phenomenology and critique, as mutually exclusive terms is a false opposition—one that
the practice of feminist phenomenology undercuts (2000: 45–47; 2014: 456). It should be
clear from my account thus far that the experience at stake in phenomenological descrip-
tion is neither naïve, nor unproblematized; it is not a “clear datum,” as Alcoff points out
(2000: 48). Experience is an ambiguous and dense knot of relations, a temporally entan-
gled and non-linear flow that calls for methodological reflection, precisely for phenom-
enology. The “immediacy” of experience is hence not as straightforward as the term
implies. “Immediacy” is a way of describing the “prereflective” self-awareness of experi-
ence, the sense in which every experience is lived-through, from within, prior to reflection
(Zahavi 1999). But “immediacy” also points to the thickness of lived experience—
how I cannot detach from it while also living through it, how it cannot be made into
an object to be surveyed and grasped—and the ways in which there always remains an
excess that has not been made sense of, a core of “non-sense,” implicit and opaque. It
is in this sense that “the most important lesson of the reduction is the impossibility
of a complete reduction,” as Merleau-Ponty says (2012 [1945]: lxxvii). This is not to
abandon the reduction (Heinämaa 2002), but to take it to be an always renewed effort,

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questioning and hesitating, without end. Moreover, phenomenological “sense” is not

a discrete and static content. Rather it is relational, temporal and processual, more
orientation and style than thing (to recall the multiple meanings of the French word
“sens”; see also Ahmed 2006). I have been careful to discuss “meaning” broadly in this
essay, allowing sense to be perceptual, practical and affective—to be kinaesthetically,
visually, haptically, aurally and linguistically worked out in the relation between lived
body and world, avoiding divisions into preconceptual and conceptual contents.
While giving a “phenomenology of x” is sometimes used loosely to mean describing
what it is like to experience or be x, in the first person, this is not all that phenomenol-
ogy as method must do. Phenomenology both makes experience (partially) explicit
and discloses that which is structuring of, which makes a difference in, experience. It
gestures toward that which is only indirectly and laterally given in experience—the
invisible norms according to which meaning appears. Such normativity—of percep-
tion, for instance—is historically instituted and socially situated, but it is forgotten
as norm and its work remains invisible. Examples of perceptual norms include the
dimensionality of depth—which opens up the experience of space as voluminosity and
envelopment—and the spatial level that orients and anchors the visual field (Merleau-
Ponty 2012 [1945]: 259–279). Merleau-Ponty describes these perceptual norms as
invisibles of the visible; they make visible but are not themselves visible (1964a [1964]
and 1968 [1964]). Particularly suggestive is the example of a color, which when it
becomes the color of the lighting, is transformed through its own duration to serve as
a “neutral” level according to which we see (Merleau-Ponty 2012 [1945]: 322–324).
Lighting is invisible, ubiquitous, forgotten in its particularity, but inflects and differ-
entially makes visible the rest of the field (Merleau-Ponty 1968 [1964]: 218, 237). As
Helen Fielding (2006) has argued, this neutrality of lighting should be questioned.
The color and level of lighting cannot be assumed to be perceptual constants. Rather,
they point to a social-historical horizon and the racial logics and technologies that
take white light to be a neutral and “colourless” hue, optimal for distinguishing bodies,
since it optimally distinguishes the features of white bodies (Fielding 2006: 87).
Moreover, I would argue that the voluminosity opened up by depth is not a neutral
space, a structural invariant that can be configured and encoded differently through the
possible actions of different bodies (cf. Fisher 2000: 29–30). Extending a point made by
Young, the voluminosity of space is often experienced in “feminine” embodiment as a
splitting or “double spatiality,” where “here” and “there” are discontinuous (Young 2005:
40–41). “There” does not hold open practical possibilities for my body, even while it
conjures up a virtual body (not mine) capable of living in it and acting upon it. This clo-
sure of the “there” and enclosure in my “here” are felt in my body (hesitantly, as “I can-
not”). Understanding this as a limitation of a generalized, seamless, and freely traversed
space would be an idealization. This is not merely a question of limited or truncated
possibility, but a different sense of possibility that belongs to a differently structured space.
To introduce more complexity into this phenomenological account, gender can-
not be understood to be the only denominator according to which the spatial world
is differentiated, nor is there one single denominator. The spatiality of bodies, racial-
ized as white, is often felt to be “ontologically expansive,” to use Shannon Sullivan’s
term (2006: 10). The space that these bodies project is smooth and open, “available
for them to move in and out of as they wish” (Sullivan 2006: 10)—a space where they
are free to act, with leeway to improvise and play, and where their actions, moreover,
can have traction. In contrast, racialized bodies are policed and hampered in their

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movements and migrations, internalizing these borders to some degree. Their lived
space is permeated by differential viscosities and currents, places where they may get
bogged down in stereotypes, atmospheres saturated with bodily suffering, past and
present, and fissures weighted by violence and historicity.
Hence, if the first step of phenomenology is to bracket naturalizing tendencies within
experience, then the description of what it is like must not only be contextualized, but its
normative assumptions must also be historicized and its exclusions made visible. This
means extending, indeed radicalizing, the scope of the phenomenological reduction
to the naturalization of social oppression in experience; and this is what I have called
“critical phenomenology.” Referring back to the commonality of the field of sense, it
might be objected that some omission or forgetting will always accompany the institu-
tion of the field and is part of its historically contingent development. It is in this sense
that the phenomenological reduction was always incomplete for Merleau-Ponty (2012
[1945]: lxxvii). In the figure-ground structuring of the visual field, that which remains
in the background frames, orients and relationally defines what is figured. That the
background remains tacit, that it is not explicitly made sense of, precludes neither its
affective sway nor its relational power.
But this is not the sense of normative exclusion or elision that I mean. To be precise,
there are two forms of exclusion upon which the normativity of the perceptual field
might be built, but that I would describe as pathologies of the social (to paraphrase Fanon
1967 [1952]: 10). What I mean to point to is not the structure of institution as such, but
the pathological recalcitrance of institutions of oppression—racial and colonial forma-
tions, as well as sexual and gendering oppressions—in how they manage relationality,
in their dependence on, forgetfulness of, and domination of others.
In the first exclusion, what is forgotten is not only one’s dependence on a social-
historical horizon and on a cultural and linguistic milieu, but also on the materiality,
time and bodies of others (e.g., maternal and carer bodies)—on the sociality that has
accompanied and supported the development of one’s perception. It is this invisible
“weight of the past” that institutes a particular way of perceiving as normative (Merleau-
Ponty 2010 [2003]). But at the same time, there is a second exclusion: the exclusion of
the non-familiar and “alien” other (e.g., the racialized other), whose difference may be
represented as exotic or threatening, but whose abjection plays a constitutive role in
how one comes to see. This corresponds to the structural elision of other ways of being
and perceiving that do not “make sense” within the instituted field of sense. As I have
argued elsewhere (Al-Saji 2014), the first exclusion institutes the level according to
which I perceive based on the appropriation of the flesh of others to whom my attach-
ment is rendered invisible (Frye 1983; Lugones 1996). The second means that even
excluded others are obliquely and structurally inscribed within the perceptual field, as
its “constitutive outside” (to use Judith Butler’s term, 1993). The “radical difference”
of the other cannot be understood to mean absolute separation in this case, as if others
were new lands to be discovered. Rather, those defined as “alien” are already relied on
assumed within the workings of perception, even as they are relegated to its intolerable
and unrecognized margins.
Institutions of oppression thus manage relational difference by subsuming it into
homogeneous identity, into the sphere of the ego, on the one hand, and by abjecting it as
inassimilable non-sense, radical alterity, on the other. These two forms of exclusion work
together. This means that institutions of oppression suffer from an “affective ankylosis,”
to use Fanon’s diagnosis (1967 [1952]: 121), a rigidity or lack of receptivity to otherness.

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In the final section, I argue that phenomenology has generally addressed the first form of
exclusion more adequately than the second, and I explore where in phenomenology we
might find the means to remedy this.

Critical Phenomenology and Hesitation

My question is, then, how to prevent phenomenology from becoming another
“epistemology of ignorance” (Mills 2007), from re-naturalizing oppression to the
perceptual and affective realms that it describes. Here the incompleteness of the
phenomenological reduction can be redeployed as recommencement and hesitation.
While it is possible to read Husserl as searching for a foundationalism that provides
certainty, what we learn when we attend to his method is the need to renew, each
time, the bracketing operation. I don’t think this is a failure on Husserl’s part. The
phenomenological reduction is not a formula whose outcome can become a stable
acquisition; we miss the import of the reduction if we take it to define a teleology.
Instead, phenomenology should be understood as an effort of re-orientation, a con-
version of perception, a way of attending differently (Ahmed 2006; Merleau-Ponty
1964a [1964] and 1968 [1964]; Oliver 2001; Ratcliffe 2012).
As Merleau-Ponty saw, the incompleteness of the phenomenological reduction can
also be its virtue. This is not only because the experiences to which phenomenolo-
gists attend are singular and multiple, requiring a unique effort each time; nor simply
because this effort unwinds in its performance, as naturalizing tendencies seep in. It
is also because phenomenology seeks to hold together—and make palpable—both my
belonging to the world and my estrangement from it; to dwell in the experience that it is
seeking to describe; to keep it alive while excavating its structures. It is hence not simply
an epistemological, even ontological, project, but also an affective one. This affect has
often been described, following Eugen Fink, as “wonder” in the face of the world (cited
in Merleau-Ponty 2012 [1945]: lxxvii), but it can also be anxiety (Sartre 1960 [1936]:
103; see also Carr 1999: 127–128), nausea or despair (Fanon 1967 [1952]: 112, 140).
This discomfort or unease—this hesitation—deepens with critical phenomenolo-
gies, where the phenomenological reduction serves not only to reveal one’s ties to the
social world, but also the exclusions that structure one’s positionality and with which
one may be complicit (Beauvoir 2010 [1949]; Fanon 1967 [1952]; Al-Saji 2014). The
two forms of exclusion that I describe above can hence motivate two different critical
orientations. First, a recuperative orientation: a revaluation and disclosure of both the
structures of perception and their material, bodily, and temporal grounds. Both Husserl
and Merleau-Ponty have addressed the structures of perception, not merely through
static but also through genetic phenomenological accounts; that is, they have shown
how sense arises within experience and not merely how sense is possible (Husserl 2001
[1966]; Merleau-Ponty 2012 [1945] and 1968 [1964]). But this is not yet to address the
generativity or relational dependency of perception (Steinbock 1995). The work of
critically uncovering the debt of perception to other bodies, especially maternal and
carer bodies, has been largely carried out by feminist theorists (whether or not they
would call themselves phenomenologists). Luce Irigaray’s critique of Merleau-Ponty’s
elision of the maternal body is a case in point (1993 [1984] and 2004).
The second exclusion can motivate a different critical orientation, however, one
that has not always been easy for phenomenology to negotiate; for the second exclusion
calls for a thick intersectional approach. By this, I do not mean simply adding together

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axes of identity, as attributes in a list, to give an encumbered subject. I mean, rather,

analyzing how gendering and racialization, for instance, are interlocking oppressions
that may sometimes reinforce, sometimes occlude, and sometimes instrumentalize one
another (see Chapters 10, 28, and 29 in this volume). That these cannot be understood
as “pure” axes or attributes, and that they need to be known contextually and locally,
leads me to suggest that feminist phenomenology might not always be primarily a phe-
nomenology of gender (contra Oksala 2006). Or, less controversially, that if feminist
phenomenology comes to experience with a predefined category of “gender,” then it
risks missing the thick nexus of experience where gendering occurs in unrecognizable
and entangled ways—where it cannot be thought without an understanding of its colo-
niality, its reliance on racialization, and its exclusion of other ways of being gendered.
Here we come full circle. For what is required of feminist phenomenology is not only
structural analysis but also richly textured and fine-grained description—which listens,
checks, and questions (Ortega 2006)—description so attentive that it can become trans-
formative. By dwelling in and mining the affective tissue of intersubjective life, bodily
experience can become the source of phenomenological questioning (Fanon 1967 [1952]:
232). Hence the practice of phenomenology as seen in the texts of critical phenomenolo-
gists of oppression, such as Beauvoir and Fanon: creating possibility by articulating experi-
ence anew, interrupting its naturalizing tendencies and making that experience hesitate.
This is not the paralyzing hesitancy of “feminine” habits that Young described, but a
hesitation that makes time for experience to be disclosed and re-oriented (Al-Saji 2014).
I said, above, that phenomenology listens in on the dialogue of body and world. I should
add that it participates in this dialogue, by making it audible and by opening up other ways
for bodies to respond, locally and without predetermining what that response may be.

Further Reading
Alcoff, Linda Martín (2000) “Phenomenology, Post-structuralism, and Feminist Theory on the Concept
of Experience,” in Linda Fisher and Lester Embree (Eds.) Feminist Phenomenology, Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Al-Saji, Alia (2010) “Bodies and Sensings: On the Uses of Husserlian Phenomenology for Feminist Theory,”
Continental Philosophy Review 43(1): 13–37.
Heinämaa, Sara (2003) Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir,
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Weiss, Gail (2008) Refiguring the Ordinary, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Young, Iris Marion (2005) On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Related Topics
Embodiment and feminist philosophy (Chapter 15); materiality: sex, gender, and what
lies beneath (Chapter 16); psychoanalysis, subjectivity and feminism (Chapter 19);
critical race theory, intersectionality, and feminist philosophy (Chapter 29).

References
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39–56.

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 Part II

BODY, MIND, AND

WORLD
 13
THE SEX/GENDER
DISTINCTION AND THE
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION
OF REALITY
Sally Haslanger

Introduction
The claim that gender (or other categories) is socially constructed is broadly accepted,
but what this means is controversial and often unclear. In this chapter, I will sketch
some different meanings of the claim that something is socially constructed and why
these claims matter. For the purposes of this chapter, my focus will be to consider how
the different senses of construction might apply especially in the case of gender.

The Construction of Ideas and Concepts

Ian Hacking urges us to distinguish the construction of ideas and the construction of
objects (Hacking 1999: 9–16; Haslanger 2012: ch 3). Let’s start with “ideas.” What
does it mean to say that the concept of gender, or the idea that females should not
be sexually attracted to other females, is socially constructed? Plausibly, the claim is
simply that they are products of a socio-historical process. However, that would seem
to be utterly obvious. Surely at least most ideas and concepts are only possible within
and due to a social context (allowing that there are also innate cognitive processes and
structures that also play a role). Concepts are taught to us by our parents as we learn
language; different cultures have overlapping but also distinct concepts and ideas; and
concepts as well as ideas evolve over time as a result of historical changes, science,
technological advances, etc. Let’s (albeit contentiously) call this the “ordinary view”
of concepts and ideas.
Even someone who believes that our scientific concepts perfectly map “nature’s
joints” can allow that scientists come to have the ideas and concepts they do through
social-historical processes. After all, social and cultural forces (including, possibly,
the practices and methods of science) may help us develop concepts that are apt or
 BODY, MIND, AND THE WORLD

accurate, and beliefs that are true. We may sometimes forget that social forces affect
what and how we think because our experiences seem to be caused simply and directly
by the world itself. However, it does not take much prompting to recall that our
culture is largely responsible for the interpretive tools we bring to the world in order
to understand it. Once we’ve noted that our experience of the world is already an
interpretation of it, we can begin to raise questions about the adequacy of our concep-
tual framework. Concepts help us organize phenomena; different concepts organize
it in different ways. It is important, then, to ask: what phenomena does a particular
framework highlight and what are eclipsed? What assumptions provide structure for
the framework?
For example, our everyday framework for thinking about human beings is structured
by the assumption that there are two (and only two) sexes, and that every human is
either a male or a female. But in fact a significant percentage of humans have a mix
of male and female anatomical features. Intersexed bodies are eclipsed in our everyday
framework (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Rubin 2012). Thus, we should ask: why two sexes?
Whose interests are served, if anyone’s, by the intersexed being ignored in the dominant
conceptual framework? (It can’t be plausibly argued that sex isn’t important enough to
us to make fine-grained distinctions between bodies.) Assuming for the moment that
sex can be distinguished from gender (more on this later), our everyday framework also
assumes that there are only two genders, but this obscures those who are gender queer
as well as third sexes found in other cultures (Herdt 1993).
Once we recognize that our everyday framework has eclipsed a kind or category,
how should we respond? For example, how should we revise our conceptual framework
once we notice the intersexed and gender queer (Butler 1990: ch. 1; Fausto-Sterling
2000)? Should we group humans into more than two sexes or genders, or are there rea-
sons instead to complicate the definitions to include everyone in just two sex/gender
categories? Or should we stop classifying by sex and gender altogether? More generally,
on what basis should we decide what categories to use? In asking these questions it is
important to remember that an idea or conceptual framework may be inadequate with-
out being false, e.g., a claim might be true and yet incomplete, misleading, unjustified,
biased, etc. (Anderson 1995; Haslanger 2016).
The point of saying that a concept or idea is socially constructed will vary depending
on context. Sometimes it may have little or no point, if everyone is fully aware of the
social history of the idea in question or if the social history isn’t relevant to the issue at
hand. On other occasions, saying that an idea is socially constructed is a reminder of the
ordinary view of concepts and, more importantly, an invitation to notice the motiva-
tions behind and limitations of our current framework. Every framework will have some
limits; the issue is whether the limits eclipse something that, given the legitimate goals
of our inquiry, matters.
Often, the claim that a concept or idea is socially constructed is accompanied by
genealogical inquiry. The genealogy of a concept or idea explores its history, not because
the origin of a concept determines its proper content, but in order to situate the concept
within our social practices (Haslanger 2012: ch. 13). Consider, for example, Daston and
Galison’s recent genealogy of the concept of objectivity. They suggest that in the case
of complex and historically significant concepts, there is often a “smear of meanings,”
that cannot be usefully parsed by a priori inquiry alone (Daston and Galison 2007: 52).
So their approach is to explore how the ideal of objectivity guided scientific practice in
different periods.

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If actions are substituted for concepts and practices for meanings, the focus on
the nebulous notion of objectivity sharpens. Scientific objectivity resolves into
the gestures, techniques, habits, and temperament ingrained by training and
daily repetition. It is manifest in images, jottings in lab notebooks, logical nota-
tions; objectivity in shirtsleeves, not in a marble chiton . . . . It is by performing
certain actions over and over again . . . that objectivity comes into being. To
paraphrase Aristotle on ethics, one becomes objective by performing objective
acts. Instead of a pre-existing ideal being applied to a workaday world, it is the
other way around: the ideal and ethos are gradually built up and bodied out
by thousands of concrete actions as a mosaic takes shape from thousands of
tiny fragments of colored glass. To study objectivity in shirtsleeves is to watch
objectivity in the making.
(Daston and Galison 2007: 52)

They convincingly demonstrate that the notion of objectivity has changed dramati-
cally over time. For example, in Descartes’ work, the objective is what is available as
the object of consciousness, in contrast to the object in the world. In the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, objective inquiry aimed to capture the perfect or ideal
exemplar; but soon after, influenced by the development of photography, the goal was
to capture the world “untouched by human hands” (Daston and Galison 2007: 43) and
to catalogue its detailed specificity and imperfections.
Such genealogies offer two valuable lessons: First, what strikes us as obvious or
unquestionable is the result of a complex social and intellectual history; we might
have taken very different things for granted, employed very different distinctions,
and reasonably so. However, the best genealogies do not leave us with a sense of
arbitrariness, but of richness and opportunity. Our conceptual repertoires are at least
partly a matter of choice. We can create different and improved tools to accomplish
our cognitive ends. Second, our cognitive tools are not just “in the head” but are
enacted and embodied in practices that engage the material world. The products
of our practices—some of them material, such as lab notebooks and cameras, and
others institutional, such as universities and bureaucracies—make a difference to
how and what we think.
These two lessons are importantly related. Our practices are shaped by histori-
cally contingent assumptions, and the practices, in turn, reinforce those assump-
tions by materializing them. But genealogy allows us to see that we have choices
about the assumptions we make, and material changes—including not only new
technologies, but also new institutions and bureaucracies—can render questionable
what seemed obvious. A space opens for critique: our ideas and practices are not
necessitated by the world, but are the products of history, a history in which we are
agents and whose trajectory we can change.
For example, Anne Fausto-Sterling characterizes her book Sexing the Body (2000)
this way:

The central tenet of this book is that truths about human sexuality created
by scholars in general and by biologists in particular are one component
of political, social, and moral struggles about our cultures and economies.
At the same time, components of our political, social, and moral struggles
become, quite literally, embodied, incorporated into our very physiological

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being. My intent is to show how these mutually dependent claims work, in

part by addressing such issues as how—through their daily lives, experiments,
and medical practices—scientists create truths about sexuality; how our bod-
ies incorporate and confirm these truths; and how these truths, sculpted by
the social milieu in which biologists practice their trade, in turn refashion
our cultural environment.
(Fausto-Sterling 2000: 5)

This interdependence between thought and practice is especially evident in

feminist work that has documented how the sex/gender binary has not only been
assumed, but also enforced (Butler 1990; 2004; Fausto-Sterling 2000; Richardson
2012; 2015). For example, intersexed infants have been surgically altered to
conform to binary assumptions about the proper size, shape, and function of
genitalia (e.g., Kessler 1990, 1998; Dreger and Herndon 2009). However, his-
torical and scientific genealogies of the concepts that guide our enforcement of
sex/gender show that our understanding of sex is culturally conditioned; this seems
to give us options.

Our bodies are too complex to provide clear-cut answers about sexual dif-
ference. The more we look for a simple physical basis for “sex,” the more it
becomes clear that “sex” is not a pure physical category. What bodily signals
and functions we define as male or female come already entangled in our ideas
about gender.
(Fausto-Sterling 2000: 4)

Note that Fausto-Sterling’s claim here that “sex” is not a pure physical category is ambigu-
ous. It could mean that the conditions for being male or female include non-physical
properties. This is true according to some definitions of sex (Fausto-Sterling 1997).
However, I take her to be making a different point in this quote, namely, that there are
a variety of options for defining sex that, considering the physical facts alone, are equally
good. We have chosen one definition for socio-cultural reasons, but it may be better
for us to choose another. So there is an important sense in which how we define the
distinction (or whether we do at all) is up to us, but this is consistent with there being
physical differences between sexes.
So to claim that our concept of X (or idea concerning X) is socially constructed can
be more than to claim that we developed it through a socio-historical process. It adds to
this that nature (or whatever foundational source of truth we might be seeking) doesn’t
necessitate that we opt for one particular understanding, but leaves it at least somewhat
open. For example, the fact that nature does not dictate a sex binary—we could iden-
tify more than two sexes, or allow some to be without sex—is crucial to the claim that
our concept of sex is socially constructed. The fact that we have to surgically create a
binary is some evidence that the difference is not “purely natural.” But if our particular
conception of X is “not inevitable” or required, then we should not only question our
thinking, but also the practices that depend on it and enforce it (see also Sveinsdóttir
2011; Haslanger 2016).
Social constructionism is generally offered as an alternative to essentialism; both
come in different forms. Drawing on the link between thought and practice, Alison

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Stone (2004) explicitly takes up a genealogical approach to the social construction

of gender to avoid the pitfalls of an essentialism that assumes there is some feature or
features that all women share, by virtue of which they are women. She claims that

women always become women by reworking pre-established cultural interpre-

tations of femininity, so that they become located—together with all other
women—within a history of overlapping chains of interpretation. Although
women do not share any common understanding or experience of femininity,
they nevertheless belong to a distinctive social group in virtue of being situated
within this complex history.
(Stone 2004: 137)

On her account, the group is unified by virtue of the members situating themselves in
relation to the lineage of meanings associated with women, i.e., “women only become
women, or acquire femininity, by taking up existing interpretations and concepts of
femininity . . . . [i.e.] through active appropriation and personalizing of inherited cul-
tural standards” (Stone 2004: 149). By incorporating the historical variability of prac-
tices of femininity, Stone aims to identify a unity for gender that is weaker than sharing
an essence, but also stronger than family resemblance.
Stone employs the notion of genealogy not only to reconstruct the history of the con-
cept or idea of gender through its practices, but also to identify a source of unity of the
group, women (2004: 150). Women are a social kind, i.e., the group consists of those who
situate themselves within the local practices as women (or as feminine?). Stone (2004)
concludes that this kind has no essence (according to her concept of essence). However,
it is arguable that on her account, women are a kind with an historical essence, i.e., a
kind unified by reference to an historical process of replication and revision (Bach 2012).
An historical conception of gender allows for substantial intrinsic diversity, while also
providing a basis for political unity through a shared lineage of gender practices. Stone’s
account gives us important resources to avoid certain forms of essentialism, but because
it is focused on the agency and activity involved in “appropriating and personalizing” the
norms of femininity, it neglects pre-agentic females and those women whose agency is
compromised. Moreover, the account fails to provide a basis for identifying what counts as
a gender norm or for differentiating gender practices from other social practices: if the line-
age of relevant practices is not identified by reference to the ideology of bodies that guides
them (Alcoff 2005; Haslanger 2012: ch. 6), the content of their identities (Chodorow
1978), or their function (Bach 2012), then by virtue of what are they gender practices?

Social Construction and Illusion

It is also possible to find the claim that something or other is “merely” a social
construction, with the implication that what we are taking to be real is only a fic-
tion, an idea that fails to capture reality (see also Haslanger 2006). Such eliminativist
implications are common in the case of race, i.e., often when someone says that race
is socially constructed, they mean that race is an illusion (Glasgow 2008).
Feminists have argued, for example, that certain mental “disorders” that have been
used to diagnose battered women are merely social constructions. Andrea Westlund
points out how

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[b]attered women’s “abnormalities” have been described and redescribed within

the psychiatric literature of the twentieth century, characterized as everything
from hysteria to masochistic or self-defeating personality disorders (SDPD) to
codependency . . . Moreover, such pathologies measure, classify, and define
battered women’s deviance not just from “normal” female behavior but also
from universalized male norms of independence and self-interest.
(Westlund 1999: 1050–1051)

Such diagnoses invite us to explain domestic violence by reference to the woman’s

psychological state rather than the batterer’s need for power and control; they also
“deflect attention from the social and political aspects of domestic violence to the pri-
vate neuroses to which women as a group are thought to be prone” (Westlund 1999:
1051). These diagnoses, it could be claimed, are merely social constructions in the sense
that they are ideas used to interpret and regulate social phenomena, but do not describe
anything real. To say, then, that “self-defeating personality disorder” is a social construct
is to say that it doesn’t exist.
We can gain insight into this eliminativist use of the term “social construction” if
we link it to the genealogical approach considered above. Suppose we find through
examining the practices in which the concept is used, that the concept we thought was
of a certain kind, is not. For example, suppose we think that “self-defeating personality
disorder,” if it exists at all, must be an individual psychological pathology. If, however,
there is no clear psychological phenomenon where we took there to be, and if we take
it to be part of the content of the concept that it is a psychological disorder, then it is
tempting to conclude that it doesn’t exist and we were wrong all along. If, however,
we allow that we might have been wrong about the kind of thing we were talking
about, then we need not take the eliminativist route. For example, there are family
system pathologies and cultural syndromes that are not individual pathologies. One
might argue, then, that “self-defeating personality disorder” really is a social pathology.
In other words, we would offer a very different construal of the target concept. Is this
shifting the meaning of the term? Or is it discovering the meaning? Often this is exactly
the issue at stake between eliminativist and non-eliminativist social constructionists.

The Social Construction of Objects

Let’s now turn to the construction of objects (understanding “objects” in the broad-
est sense as virtually anything that’s not an idea). What are some examples? Beauvoir
(1989 [1949]: 267) famously claims, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
But when we say that gender is a social construct, could we possibly mean that indi-
vidual women and men are social constructions? What could this mean? Aren’t women
and men human beings, and aren’t human beings a kind of animal?
We saw above that our cognitive tools are enacted and embodied in our practices.
So at least in social contexts, our classifications may do more than just map pre-existing
groups of individuals; rather our attributions have the power to both establish and rein-
force groupings that may eventually come to “fit” the classifications. This works in several
ways. Ian Hacking (1999) describes the “looping effect” of social kinds. In such cases, forms
of description or classification provide for kinds of intention; e.g., given the classification
refugee, I can set about to become a refugee, or avoid being a refugee (Hacking 1999: 32).
And such classifications can function in justifying behavior; e.g., “We cannot send her back

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to Syria because she is a refugee” (note that there are international laws about the treatment
of refugees as opposed to migrants). Such justifications, in turn, can reinforce the distinc-
tion between refugees and non-refugees. Social construction in this sense is ubiquitous.
Each of us is socially constructed in this sense because we are (to a significant extent) the
individuals we are today as a result of what has been attributed (and self-attributed) to us.
To say that an entity is “discursively constructed” in this sense, is not to say that
language or discourse brings a material object into existence de novo (Haslanger 2012:
ch. 2). Rather something in existence comes to have—partly as a result of having been
categorized in a certain way—a set of features that qualify it as a member of a certain
kind or sort. My having been categorized as a female at birth (and consistently since
then) has been a factor in how I’ve been viewed and treated; these views and treatments
have, in turn, played an important causal role in my becoming gendered a woman (see
also Haslanger 2012: ch. 1). But discourse didn’t bring me into existence.
It would appear that gender (in different senses) is both an idea-construction and
an object-construction. Gender is an idea-construction because the classification men/
women is the contingent result of historical events and forces. At the same time these
classifications are crucial to explaining what Hacking calls “interactive kinds”: gender
classifications occur within a complex matrix of institutions and practices, and being
classified as a woman, or a man, or a different sex/gender, or not, has a profound effect
on an individual. Such classification will have a material affect on her social position as
well as affect her experience and self-understanding.
Linda Alcoff’s (2005) account of gender, or gender identity, provides an excellent
example of such looping effects. She suggests, as a start:

Women and men are differentiated by virtue of their different relationship

of possibility to biological reproduction, with biological reproduction refer-
ring to conceiving, giving birth, and breast-feeding, involving one’s own
body . . . . Those classified as women will have a different set of practices,
expectations, and feelings in regard to reproduction, no matter how actual [or
not] their relationship of possibility is to it.
(Alcoff 2005: 172)

The different relationship of possibility is not, in her terms, an “objective” fact, but is a
matter of what socio-cultural resources are available, specifically in constructing hori-
zons of meaning (Alcoff 2005: 125f, 145, 175f):

[E]ach individual’s horizon is significantly incorporative of social dimensions

or shared features. The practices and meanings that are intelligible to me are
ontologically grounded in group interactions, which are themselves structured
by political economies of social structures.
(Alcoff 2005: 121)

The possibility of pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, and in many societies, rape, are
parts of females’ horizons that we carry with us throughout childhood and much or
all of our adult lives. The way these are figured, imagined, experienced, accepted,
and so on, is as variable as culture. But these elements exist in the female horizon,
and they exist there because of the ways in which we are embodied.
(Alcoff 2005: 176)

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Alcoff’s account has an advantage over Stone’s insofar as it gives us a basis for dis-
tinguishing gender practices and meanings from others via the links to reproductive
embodiment. It is somewhat unclear, however, how this account would be developed
to accommodate the tensions between the classifications (gender ascriptions), bodies,
and identities of transwomen (Connell 2012).

The Social Construction of Kinds

We have considered the social construction of ideas and objects. Yet the most common
examples of social construction, it seems, are kinds, e.g., gender, race, disability, family,
the nation, meat/food. It is important to distinguish between the social construction of
ideas and objects because it is easy to confuse the idea of a kind, i.e., a classificatory tool,
from the kind itself. Unless we draw this distinction we won’t be able to recognize the
interaction between the tool and the reality it purports to track. This looping interac-
tion is crucial to the idea of social construction of all sorts.
Above I argued that we claim that an idea or concept is socially constructed to call
attention to the fact that it is a product of a social and intellectual history. I suggested
further that, at least in some cases, to attend to the social construction of a concept is
to note that it is possible to grasp the relevant phenomena, be it in nature or other form
of reality, without employing that exact concept. That is, the framework we have for
understanding this bit of the world is “not inevitable” and is in some sense “up to us.”
This matters because we have a way of making reality conform to our idea of it, and if
we are unhappy with the reality, it is useful to know if it is the way it is because we have
made it so, or because there is no reasonable or realistic alternative.
How does this bear on kinds? The social constructionist is keen to draw our attention
one or another of two mistakes that we are tempted to make about kinds, given how our
understanding of them interacts with reality:

 i) We may think that the commonality that the members of the kind share is caused
by natural facts and forces, but instead, our social arrangements are (in some impor-
tant way) causally responsible for the commonality. For example, it may be worth
pointing out that poverty is socially constructed to make clear that poverty is not a
result of (alleged) laziness or stupidity of the poor, but due to social/political struc-
tures. Or it might be worth pointing out that disability is socially constructed to
make clear that disability is not the result of impairment, but of the social manage-
ment of differently abled bodies.
ii) The dominant understanding of the kind might locate the commonality between
the members’ non-social properties, e.g., natural properties, but what the mem-
bers of the kind share are really social properties (and relations). For example,
it may be worth pointing out that races are not constituted by people with a
certain “blood,” i.e., genetic profile, but by how people with bodily markers
associated with relatively recent ancestry in a particular geographical region are
viewed and treated (Haslanger 2012: ch. 6). Or it might be worth pointing out
that food is not what is digestible by humans, but what cultures deem appropri-
ate to eat. To say that food is socially constructed in this sense is not to say that
humans cause or create food (though of course we do), but that cultural mean-
ings constitute what food is.

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The difference between (i) and (ii) is a difference between what causes commonality
and what constitutes commonality. It is important to note that social kinds cannot
be equated with things that have social causes. Sociobiologists claim that some
social phenomena have biological causes; some feminists claim that some anatomi-
cal phenomena have social causes. What is the cause of the average height differ-
ences between males and females? Some argue that it is due to the broad preference
for males to be the taller in a heterosexual couple. But is that preference a result
of social norms or biological imperatives? More generally, it is an error to treat the
conditions by virtue of which something counts as a social entity as causing the
entity. Something is a house by providing stable shelter to an individual or group
of individuals. A builder putting bricks or boards together in a certain way causes
the house to exist.
In (ii), the point is to distinguish social kinds from physical or other non-social
kinds where what’s at issue is the basis of commonality between the members. It is
significant that not all social kinds are obviously social. Sometimes it is assumed
that the conditions for membership in a kind concern only or primarily biological or
physical facts. Pointing out that this is wrong can have important consequences. In
the case of gender, the idea would be that gender is not a classification scheme based
simply on anatomical or biological differences, but marks social differences between
individuals. Gender, as opposed to sex, is not about testicles and ovaries, the penis
and the uterus, but about identities or about the location of groups within a system of
social relations (MacKinnon 1989; Haslanger 2012: ch. 6). One could allow that the
categories of sex and gender interact (so concerns with distinctions between bodies
will influence social divisions and vice versa); but even to be clear how they interact,
we should differentiate them. Using the terms “male” and “female” to mark the cur-
rent familiar sex distinction, and “man” and “woman” the gender distinction, one
should allow that on this account of gender, it is plausible that some males are women
and some females are men. Because one is a female by virtue of some (contextually
variable) set of anatomical features, and one is a woman by virtue of one’s identity
or position within a social and economic system, the sex/gender distinction gives us
some (at least preliminary) resources for including trans* persons within our concep-
tual framework (cf. Jenkins 2016).
Because gender is at least partly a function of one’s role in a social framework or
identification as one of those who typically (in the local context) occupy that role,
if we allow that social phenomena are highly variable across time, cultures, groups,
then this also allows us to recognize that the specific details of what it is to be a
woman will differ depending on one’s race, ethnicity, class, etc. My being a woman
occurs in a context in which I am also White and privileged; my actual social posi-
tion will therefore be affected by multiple factors simultaneously. I learned the
norms of WASP womanhood, not Black womanhood. And even if I reject many
of those norms, I benefit from the fact that they are broadly accepted. The social
constructionist’s goal is often to challenge the appearance of inevitability of the
category in question. As things are arranged now, there are men and women, and
people of different races. But if social conditions changed substantially, there may
be no men and women, and no people of different races. To make the category vis-
ible as a social as opposed to physical category sometimes requires a rather radical
change in our thinking.

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Conclusion
In the account of social construction I’ve sketched, there are several different senses
in which gender, race, and the like are socially constructed. First, the conceptual
framework that we take as just “common sense” about gender is only one way of
understanding the world. There are, and have been, other ways; there are (I believe)
better ways. Moreover, there are ideas associated with gender that are “merely” con-
structions, e.g., fictions about biological essences and genetic determination are used
to reinforce belief in the rightness and inevitability of the classifications. This is not to
say, however, that gender is not “real.” Although some ideas about gender are fictions,
these fictional ideas have functioned to create and reinforce gender reality. These
categories of people are, I would argue, not just ideas, but social entities. Such enti-
ties are socially constructed in the sense that they are caused by social forces, but also
because the conditions for membership in a gender group are social (as opposed to,
say, merely physical or anatomical) conditions. Finally, individual members of such
groups are, in a rather extended sense socially constructed, insofar as they are affected
by the social processes that constitute the groups. Human beings are social beings in
the sense that we are deeply responsive to our social context and become the physical
and psychological beings we are through interaction with others. One feminist hope
is that we can become, through the construction of new and different practices, gen-
dered differently and potentially new sorts of beings altogether.

Further Reading
Antony, Louise (2000) “Natures and Norms,” Ethics 111(1): 8–36. (This title argues that the appeal to
nature(s) is compatible with feminism, for the fact that something is natural does not assure its norma-
tive status.)
Foucault, Michel (1978) The History of Sexuality, Volume. I: An Introduction, New York: Pantheon. (A clas-
sic that undertakes a genealogy of sex and sexuality.)
Mallon, Ron (2007) “A Field Guide to Social Construction,” Philosophy Compass 2(1): 93–108. (Offers a
helpful overview of social construction on topics beyond sex/gender.)
Shrage, Laurie (2009) You’ve Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity, Oxford: Oxford University
Press. (A collection of eleven philosophical essays on sex reassignment and its implications for thinking
about sex, gender, and identity.)
Witt, Charlotte (2011) The Metaphysics of Gender, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Argues for a social
gender essentialism, challenging the idea that essentialism is incompatible with feminism.)

Related Topics
Feminism, philosophy, and culture in Africa (Chapter 4); feminist essentialism and anti-
essentialism (Chapter 14); materiality: sex, gender, and what lies beneath (Chapter 16);
personal identity and relational selves (Chapter 18); values, practices, and metaphysical
assumptions in the biological sciences (Chapter 26); through the looking glass: trans
theory meets feminist philosophy (Chapter 32).

References
Alcoff, Linda Martin (2005) Visible Identities, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Anderson, Elizabeth (1995) “Knowledge, Human Interests, and Objectivity in Feminist Epistemology,”
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Bach, Theodore (2012) “Gender Is a Natural Kind with an Historical Essence,” Ethics 122(2): 231–272
Beauvoir, Simone de (1989 [1949]) The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley, New York: Vintage.
Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble, New York: Routledge.
______ (2004) Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge.
Chodorow, Nancy (1978) The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Connell, Raewyn (2012) “Transsexual Women and Feminist Thought: Toward New Understanding and
New Politics,” Signs (37)4: 857–881.
Daston, Lorraine and Galison, Peter (2007) Objectivity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dreger, Alice D. and Herndon, April M. (2009) “Progress and Politics in the Intersex Rights Movement:
Feminist Theory in Action,” GLQ 15(2): 199–224.
Fausto-Sterling, Anne (1997) “How to Build a Man,” in Roger N. Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo (Eds.)
The Gender/Sexuality Reader, New York: Routledge, 244–248.
—— (2000) Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, New York: Basic Books.
Glasgow, Joshua (2008) A Theory of Race, New York: Routledge.
Hacking, Ian (1999) The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Haslanger, Sally (2006) “Gender and Social Construction: Who? What? When Where? How?” in Elizabeth
Hackett and Sally Haslanger (Eds.) Theorizing Feminisms, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 16–23.
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Jenkins, Katharine (2016) “Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman,”
Ethics 126(2): 394–421.
Kessler, Suzanne J. (1990) “The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants,”
Signs 16(1): 3–26.
—— (1998) Lessons from the Intersexed, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
MacKinnon, Catharine (1989) Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
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—— (2015) Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome. Chicago, IL: University of
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Rubin, David A. (2012) “An Unnamed Blank That Craved a Name: A Genealogy of Intersex as Gender,”
Signs 37(4): 883–908.
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Philosophy 1:135–153.
Sveinsdóttir, Ásta (2011) “The Metaphysics of Sex and Gender,” in Charlotte Witt (Ed.) Feminist
Metaphysics, Dordrecht: Springer, 47–65.
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Signs 24(4): 1045–1066.

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 14
GENDER ESSENTIALISM
AND ANTI-ESSENTIALISM
Mari Mikkola

Introduction
It is a widely accepted feminist claim that gender injustice is not incidental and
individual, but systematic and structural—it targets women as women. Feminism thus
seemingly lends itself to identity politics: a form of political mobilization based on
membership in women’s social kind, where shared experiences or traits delimit kind
membership (Heyes 2000; 2012). However, the past few decades have allegedly wit-
nessed a feminist “identity crisis” (Alcoff 1988). Feminist politics presumes the existence
of a women’s social kind founded on some category-wide common traits or experiences.
But as many feminist voices from various disciplines have noted, no such transcultural
and transhistorical commonality exists because our axes of identity (for example, gen-
der, race, ability, class) are not discrete and separable. Furthermore, it is misguided to
assume that we can simply describe some putatively common gender identity without
positing a normative ideal of womanhood. These worries have generated the said crisis:
feminist theorists aim to speak and make political demands in the name of women as a
group at the same time questioning the group’s existence.
A dispute about gender essentialism and anti-essentialism theoretically undergirds
the crisis. Bluntly put, feminist identity politics seems committed to essentialism,
but many feminist theorists have influentially argued for anti-essentialism. Actually,
characterizing this as a dispute is misleading. Different feminists understand both
“essentialism” and “anti-essentialism” differently. They disagree about what is at
stake, which side has won (or is winning) and whether the debate is even worth con-
ducting. Cressida Heyes captures the multiplicity of views nicely: “If Wittgenstein is
correct that the meaning of a word lies in its use, then feminists will find it hard to
know what ‘essentialism’ means” (2000: 11). This chapter then aims to do two things.
First, I will clarify the contours of the gender essentialism/anti-essentialism debate.
Second, I will consider the debate’s value (if any) for feminist theorizing.

What Is at Stake?
Essentialism may be characterized as the thesis that some of an entity’s properties
are necessary to it, whereas other properties are merely accidental (Robertson and
Atkins 2013). These essential properties fulfill various functions (see Witt 1995).
 Gender essentialism and anti-essentialism

An entity’s essence causes and explains characteristic manifest properties and

dispositions. Essences ground our classificatory apparatuses in providing the criteria
for classifying entities into kinds. And an entity’s essence ensures its identity and
persistence through time. The thesis of gender essentialism has been variously for-
mulated relative to these claims. However, gender essentialism is a position that few
explicitly endorse. It has become “the prime idiom of intellectual terrorism . . . with
the power to reduce to silence, to excommunicate, to consign to oblivion” (Schor
1989: 40). Showing that some account is gender essentialist has often sufficed to
reject that position and with good reasons. Positions are usually deemed essentialist
by critics and one is hard-pressed to find an unequivocal, positive characterization
of gender essentialism. I will provide a typology of essentialisms next in order to
elucidate what supposedly renders them theoretically untenable. I will also consider
why one might find some anti-essentialist critiques insufficient.
First, biological essentialism holds that women share some kind of defining biologi-
cal feature(s), as do men. This position is also known as biological determinism: the
view that one’s sex determines one’s social and cultural traits and roles. Many histori-
cal examples demonstrate how social and behavioral differences between men and
women were taken to be manifestations of some deeper, underlying physiological
differences, which were used to justify a range of oppressive social conditions. Toril
Moi characterizes this as a pervasive view of sex (1999: 11). Biological sex traits
are thought to pervade every aspect of an individual, down to their social position
and intellectual capacities, as well as to provide general frameworks for social and
political arrangements. A typical example is that of Geddes and Thompson who,
in 1889, argued that social and behavioral traits were caused by metabolic states.
Thus, women are passive and uninterested in politics, but men are eager, passionate,
and invested in political and social matters. These biological “facts” were used not
only to explain behavioral differences, but also to guide socio-political arrangements.
They were used to argue for withholding from women political rights accorded to
men because “what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled
by [an] Act of Parliament” (Geddes and Thompson quoted from Moi 1999: 18). It
would be both inappropriate and futile to grant women political rights since they are
unsuited to hold them and, due to their biology, women are simply uninterested in
exercising those rights.
In response, feminists argued that behavioral and psychological differences have
social, rather than biological, origins. Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that one
is not born, but rather becomes a woman, and that “social discrimination produces in
women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by
nature” (1972: 18). In order to distinguish biological differences from social/psycho-
logical ones and to talk about the latter, feminists in the 1960s and 1970s appropri-
ated the term “gender” and distinguished it from “sex” (Nicholson 1994; 1998). On
standard formulations, “sex” denotes human females and males and depends on bio-
logical features, like chromosomes, sex organs, hormones, or other physical features.
By contrast, “gender” denotes women and men and depends on social factors such as
social roles, positions, behavior, or self-ascription. Genders (women and men) and
gendered traits (being nurturing or ambitious) are socially constructed: they are the
“intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice” (Haslanger 1995: 97). This
enabled feminists to argue that manifest gender differences are mutable (for more,
see Mikkola 2012).

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This form of anti-essentialist critique is uncontentious. However, one major sticking

point with identity politics is that it presupposes some shared gender-defining experi-
ence or trait, which must be socially constructed following the sex/gender distinction.
This brings me to the second type of essentialism.
Classificatory gender essentialism is the view that some shared gender-defining social
feature(s) exists. Take Beauvoir’s claim that one becomes a woman. Gender socializa-
tion provides one way to understand this as a causal claim: females become women
through a process of acquiring feminine traits and behavior—masculinity and femi-
ninity are products of nurture. Similarly, Kate Millett took gender differences to be
culturally based and to result from differential treatment. For her, gender is “the sum
total of the parents’, the peers’, and the culture’s notions of what is appropriate to
each gender by way of temperament, character, interests, status, worth, gesture, and
expression” (Millett 1971: 31). Catharine MacKinnon’s theory of gender as a theory
of sexuality provides a constitutive understanding of this idea. The social meaning of
sex (i.e., gender) is constituted by and created through sexual objectification: women
are viewed and treated as objects for the satisfaction of men’s desires (MacKinnon
1989). Masculinity is defined as sexual dominance, femininity as sexual submissive-
ness. And so, genders are “created through the eroticization of dominance and sub-
mission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define
each other” (MacKinnon 1989: 113). As a result, genders are by definition hierarchi-
cal and fundamentally tied to sexualized power relations. This situation is in no sense
natural though. Pornography rather constructs a vision of sexuality, where both gen-
ders find submissive female sexuality as erotic.
Millett takes gender socialization to be the common experience definitive of
womanhood; MacKinnon takes this to be sexual objectification. This form of gen-
der essentialism has come under sustained attack in that it fails to respect women’s
diversity, and is thus exclusionary. Feminists of color have critiqued the idea that
there is some experience that all women as women share (for example, Lorde 1984;
Lugones 1991). For instance, bell hooks (1997) has argued that feminism only satis-
fies white bourgeois women’s interests and has left black and working-class women
wanting. Take the common feminist view that the family is a major site of gender
injustice. This is not, however, shared by all black feminists: “since the family is the
site of resistance and solidarity against racism for women of colour, it does not hold
the central place in accounting for women’s subordination that it does for white
women” (Walby 1992: 34). Betty Friedan’s (1963) well-known work is another
case in point. Friedan saw domesticity as the main vehicle of gender oppression and
called upon women in general to find jobs outside the home. But she failed to real-
ize that women from less privileged and poor backgrounds, who were often people
of color, already worked outside the home. Friedan’s suggestion, then, was largely
applicable only to white middle-class American housewives, but was mistakenly
taken to apply universally. This mistake results from theorizing gender from the
perspective of “white solipsism”: the tendency to “think, imagine, and speak as if
whiteness describes the world” (Adrienne Rich, quoted in Harris 1993: 356). In so
doing, white middle-class Western feminists failed to understand the importance of
race and class.
Queer feminist critiques further maintain that traditional feminist theory has
endorsed a heteronormative view of gender. This is the tendency to treat hetero-

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sexuality as the normative standard and to naturalize heterosexual practices (Butler

1999; see also Wittig 1992). The “generic” woman was conceived as white, middle
class, heterosexual, Christian and able-bodied, which privileged some women and
marginalized others.
A major point of classificatory anti-essentialism, then, is to highlight women’s
diverse and dissimilar experiences as women. Consequently, Elizabeth Spelman argues
in her classic Inessential Woman that there is no single class of women. Rather, there
are multiple contextually specific classes. Since gender is socially constructed and social
construction differs from one society to the next, womanhood is culturally specific.
Females become particular kinds of women (Spelman 1990: 113): they become white
working-class women, black middle-class women, poor Jewish women, wealthy aristo-
cratic European women and so on.
This highlights a third form of essentialism theoretically underpinning classifica-
tory essentialism: what I here call divisible-identity essentialism. This is the view that
different facets of identity (gender, race, ability, sexuality, ethnicity, class) are sepa-
rable and definable independently of one another. As Spelman points out, those who
fail to appreciate the difference that race and class make to gender, assume that what
makes x a woman is the same as what makes y a woman. By contrast, “gender is
constructed and defined in conjunction with [other] elements of identity” (Spelman
1990: 175). This idea is more commonly understood as intersectionality (Crenshaw
1989). As individuals, we stand in the intersections of many different constitutively
intertwined social categories—structures of privilege and oppression. Not appreciat-
ing this prevents an adequate analysis of (say) the structural situation of black women:
a focus just on their gendered position leaves out their racialized position and vice
versa. An analysis that disregards intersectionality is unsatisfying because it fails to
acknowledge that black women’s situation cannot be analyzed by focusing just on one
identity facet. Rather, critical race theorists have argued that many of the disadvan-
tages black women suffer are due to the intersections of their racialized and gendered
social positions (Grillo 2006).
Classificatory anti-essentialism has been extremely influential in feminist philoso-
phy and the failure to think intersectionally about social identities is considered to
be a grave intellectual error. For instance, Iris Marion Young holds that Spelman has
definitively shown that gender essentialism is untenable (1997: 13; though Haslanger
2000a and Mikkola 2006 disagree). Nevertheless, although these analytical tools
highlight important ways in which extant positions have fallen short, they are not
without problems. Spelman seems to assume that the categories of race, class, religion,
and ethnicity are stable and unified (Young 1997: 20). Independently of Young, Uma
Narayan has argued in a similar vein. To assume a commonality among all Western
women or all Jewish women (for instance) is just as misguided as the assumption
that all women qua women have something in common. After all, particular racial,
cultural, and religious groups are themselves internally diverse. This way of attending
to women’s differences, then, “endorses and replicates problematic and colonialist
assumptions . . . Seemingly universal essentialist generalizations about ‘all women’
are replaced by culture-specific essentialist generalizations” (Narayan 1998: 87; see
also Fuss 1989).
However, if we take this critique seriously, we end up dissolving groups into indi-
viduals. Each individual occupies a unique intersection that constructs their identity

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and undergirds their social position occupancy. Thus, we can legitimately only address
individual women’s experiences. But for a political project like feminism this looks
worrying. In rejecting the existence of a single unified women’s social kind, Spelman’s
view entails that women make up a merely unbound and gerrymandered collection of
individuals. This view is in tension with the central feminist claim noted above: that
gender injustice targets women in a systematic, group-based fashion. Subsequently,
many have found the fragmentation of women’s kind problematic for political reasons
and have come to question classificatory anti-essentialism (e.g., Alcoff 2006; Bordo
1993; Frye 1996; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Martin 1994; Mikkola 2007; Stoljar
1995; Stone 2004; Tanesini 1996; Young 1997; Zack 2005). As Linda Alcoff captures
the worry:

What can we demand in the name of women if “women” do not exist and
demands in their name simply reenforce [sic] the myth that they do? How can
we speak out against sexism as detrimental to the interests of women if the
category is a fiction?
(Alcoff 2006: 143)

In response, one might argue for strategic essentialism: despite there being no
unifying shared gender-core, we act politically as if there were one (Fuss 1989).
Anti-essentialism is descriptively true, but essentialism is politically more helpful.
However, this view is worrisome due to yet another form of essentialism that I will
outline next.
Classificatory anti-essentialism is not alone in challenging the viability of women’s
social kind. A fourth form of anti-essentialism that does so critiques (what I here call)
prescriptive essentialism. In her seminal book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler takes issue
with feminist identity politics (to name but one issue in a rich work). It appears as if
the term “woman” has some unitary cross-cultural and transhistorical meaning and
that the term picks out some determinate group of people with an identity-defining
feature in common. However, this picture is mistaken and “woman” has no stable
meaning. Instead, it is “a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot right-
fully be said to originate or end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to inter-
vention and resignification” (Butler 1999: 43). (For a similar argument that rejects the
position that “woman” has some fixed and invariant meaning, see Cornell 1993.) The
feminist picture of gender (for Butler) in no meaningful sense describes reality; rather,
it is an unwitting product of feminist politics in its effort to represent the interests of
certain political subjects (namely, of women). In aiming to represent women’s inter-
ests, feminism constructs its own political subjects. Hence, any notion of womanhood
that is used to capture the class of women unhelpfully masks women’s diversity. It
“necessarily produce[s] factionalization . . . ‘identity’ as a point of departure can never
hold as the solidifying ground of a feminist political movement. Identity categories
are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary” (Butler
1991: 160). Gender concepts articulated by feminist theorists turn out to articulate a
set of “unspoken normative requirements” (Butler 1999: 9) that those hoping to gain
feminist political representation should satisfy; thus, they prescribe a supposedly cor-
rect picture of womanhood. Butler takes this to be a feature of terms denoting social

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identity categories. The underlying presumption appears to be that such terms can
never be used in a non-ideological way (Moi 1999: 43). They will always prescribe
some conditions that ought to be satisfied since all processes of drawing categorical
distinctions involve normative commitments that involve the exercise of social power
(Witt 1995). Those who do not conform to the normative picture of womanhood risk
being alienated and excluded from feminist politics altogether. Nicholson captures
this thought nicely: “the idea of ‘woman’ as unitary operates as a policing force which
generates and legitimizes certain practices, experiences, etc., and curtails and delegiti-
mizes others” (1998: 293). Along with other anti-essentialists, Butler thinks that white
solipsism and heteronormativity are among the ideological forces that exclude and
marginalize some within the feminist movement.
Butler’s aim is not, however, merely to critique prevalent ways to understand wom-
anhood. Her argument is stronger than this: every definition of “woman” will be insidi-
ously normative and thus politically problematic. The mistake is not that feminists
provided the incorrect understanding of womanhood. Rather, their mistake was to
attempt to define it at all. Following this line of argument, then, any strategically essen-
tialist position will be politically worrisome. This connects to Butler’s view of gender
performativity. Gender is not “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various
acts follow”; rather, gender comes into being through “a stylized repetition of [habitual]
acts” (Butler 1999: 179). Gender is something that one does in wearing gender-coded
clothing, in walking and sitting in gender-coded ways, in styling one’s hair in gender-
coded manner and in desiring sexually the opposite sex/gender. And repeatedly engag-
ing in “feminizing” and “masculinizing” acts congeals gender, thereby making people
falsely think of gender identity as something that they “naturally” possess. This opens
up the possibility to undermine gender dualism by subverting the way one “does” one’s
gender. Subsequently, feminists should actively resist defining womanhood, thereby
opening it up for new, more emancipatory conceptions. Butler is not alone in mak-
ing this anti-essentialist methodological point and it is commonplace in “postmodern”
feminism. For instance, Denise Riley (1988) claims that feminists should fight against
attempts to classify women since this is always going to be misguided and dangerous.
In fact, this is essential to feminism. And Julia Kristeva claims that the notion of wom-
anhood must be deconstructed and cannot be reconstructed: “In [womanhood] I see
something that cannot be represented, something that is not said, something above and
beyond nomenclatures and ideologies” (1980: 137).
Such postmodern views have been very influential in generating a suspicion of uni-
fied gender types. Judith Squires notes that postmodernism “currently sets the tenor
of most debates within gender in political theory” (1999: 19). Not everyone finds the
upshot of views like Butler’s helpful though. For instance, political scientists Nancy
Hirschmann and Christine DiStefano ask:

[I]n making us reluctant to take the risks of offering positive visions, has post-
modernism curtailed the usefulness of feminism as a theoretical method? Have
we become so afraid of the dangers and pitfalls of totalization, universalism,
and absolutism that we shy away from one of the major traditional enterprises
of political theory?
(Hirschmann and Stefano 1996: 3)

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Many analytic feminist philosophers agree and have endeavored to salvage the social
kind of women for feminist purposes (e.g., Haslanger 2000b; Mikkola 2007; Zack
2005). For one thing, the idea that elucidating identity categories is always a normative
enterprise may not be so worrisome. Sally Haslanger outlines different ways in which
we might elucidate the concept woman. A conceptual project aims to articulate our
ordinary woman-conception by consulting the conditions under which native English
speakers think someone satisfies woman. Such an analysis probably reveals that women
are thought to be human females. By contrast, a descriptive analysis of woman would
examine our everyday language use and applications of “woman” in order to identify
the social kind that the term tracks. However, Haslanger rejects both of these projects
as useful for feminist purposes. Instead, she argues for an ameliorative analysis that aims
to “elucidate ‘our’ legitimate purposes and what concept of F-ness (if any) would serve
them best” (2005: 20). Ameliorative analyses aim to elucidate those concepts that we
should appropriate given our political goals. And so, feminists should define woman in
a way that best serves gender justice. Specifically, Haslanger holds that membership
in men’s/women’s types depends on being marked for certain privileged or subordi-
nated treatments (respectively) on the basis of one’s observed or assumed reproductive
functions. For her, gender captures a multiply realizable relation in a social hierarchy,
and there are many ways in which women can be sex-marked for social subordination.
This project is not entirely distinct from a descriptive one. An ameliorative analysis
of woman offers an analysis of the concept that we usually think tracks women’s social
kind; but it does so in a way that “usefully revise[s] what we mean [by woman] for certain
theoretical and political purposes” (Haslanger 2000b: 34).
This affords methodological resources to elucidate women’s social kind in a nor-
mative manner without falling prey to the kinds of worries Butler voices. After all,
on Haslanger’s picture appropriating particular gender terminology hinges on our
political purposes. If they are problematically exclusionary, we have grounds to reject
the articulated conception of woman. Following Haslanger, though, the conditions
definitive of gender are not exclusionary in being multiply realizable. Moreover, we
need not abandon gender concepts altogether just because we are unable to articu-
late some non-normative gender-defining conditions. After all, we can revise gender
notions in a meaningful way, which demonstrates that normativity per se is not the
problem—misguided and exclusionary normativity is. Thus, we can conceptualize
women’s social kind for feminist political purposes and avoid the kind’s fragmenta-
tion, which retains the central claim of feminism and avoids earlier problems that
feminist identity politics faced. Haslanger’s position might hence be termed (clas-
sificatory and prescriptive) “anti-anti-essentialism.” Or, as Haslanger (2012) and I
(Mikkola 2012) prefer to put it, it is gender realist: there is something women by
virtue of being women share, which is not intrinsic, innate or necessary to women
qua individuals. Women have in common a socially constructed, and yet variously
manifested, extrinsic feature. This gender realist view, then, can avoid classificatory
anti-essentialism without falling prey to prescriptive essentialism, contra earlier views
like Millett and MacKinnon’s.
The above hints at a fifth form of essentialism: individual essentialism. This is not
to be confused with divisible-identity essentialism, although the two are related.
Rather, individual essentialism is about individuation: that gender is necessary for
women qua individuals. For instance, if being a member of the kind dog is individu-
ally essential to Lassie, were Lassie to lose this feature he would not only cease to be

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a dog, but also Lassie. So, if some property is individually essential to us, we cannot
qua individuals survive its loss. This sort of essentialism is sometimes treated as
co-dependent with classificatory essentialism (see Stoljar 1995): if some feature is
essential for membership in women’s kind, then this feature is also essential to indi-
vidual women qua individuals. Strictly speaking, this does not follow. Being colored
red is necessary for membership in the type of red entities but being so colored is not
necessarily essential to red entities qua individuals. If a red car were painted blue,
the car would no longer be a member of the class of red entities, but the car would
not cease to be the very same car. Furthermore, if we were to accept that gender is
necessary for individual identity and ensures individuals’ persistence through time,
transitioning would be impossible: transitioning would mean that the “old” indi-
vidual ceases to exist and a new one comes into being. But this looks intuitively
implausible in that trans individuals persist through time as the very same numeri-
cally identical individuals.
Although individual gender essentialism has received much less attention than
other essentialisms, Charlotte Witt has prominently argued for such a view. She starts
by asking: would you be the same individual if you were gendered differently? According
to Witt, most ordinary people take the answer to be easy and obvious: No. She goes
on to elucidate such ordinary gender essentialist intuitions by arguing that gender is
uniessential to us qua social individuals. On this unique Aristotelian-inspired version of
individual essentialism, certain functional essences have a unifying role in ensuring that
material parts constitute a new individual, rather than just a collection of parts. The
essential house-functional property (what the entity is for) unifies different material
parts so that there is a house, and not just a collection of house-constituting particles.
Gender functions in a similar fashion: it provides “the principle of normative unity”
that organizes, unifies, and determines the different roles of social individuals (Witt
2011: 73). This requires distinguishing:

•• personhood: possession of a first-person perspective;

•• being a biologically human organism;
•• being a social individual: occupying social positions synchronically and diachroni-
cally, where certain social roles are ascribed simply by virtue of one’s social position
occupancy.

These ontological categories are not equivalent in having different persistence and
identity conditions. And importantly, Witt’s gender essentialism pertains to social indi-
viduals, not to persons or human organisms.
Social individuals are those who occupy positions in social reality and have social
norms and roles associated with them. Qua social individuals, though, we occupy mul-
tiple social positions at ones and over time. However, since a bundle of social position
occupancies does not make for an individual, what unifies these positions to constitute
a social individual? The unifying role is undertaken by gender (being a woman or a man):
it is “a pervasive and fundamental social position that unifies and determines all other
social positions both synchronically and diachronically. It unifies them not physically,
but by providing a principle of normative unity” (Witt 2011: 19–20). By “normative
unity,” Witt means the following: given our social position occupancies and roles, we are
responsive to various “complex patterns of behavior and practices that constitute what
one ought to do in a situation given one’s social position(s) and one’s social context”

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(Witt 2011: 82). These patterns can conflict: e.g., the norms of motherhood conflict
with the norms of being an academic philosopher. However, in order for this conflict to
exist at all, the norms must be binding on a single social individual. And what explains
the existence and unity of the social individual who is subject to conflicting social pat-
terns is gender (being a woman): a social position that clusters around women’s socially
mediated reproductive functions to conceive and bear (Witt 2011: 40). Thus, gender is
essential to us qua social individuals in unifying our agency.

Worth of the Debate?

Both essentialist and anti-essentialist perspectives have afforded valuable theoretical
insights, but they generate a stalemate. If we fail to appreciate women’s dissimilar expe-
riences and intersectionality, our accounts of gender will fall prey to exclusionary false
universalism. But if we appreciate difference too much and can legitimately only speak
of individual women’s experiences, we cannot make sense of gender injustice being
systematic. How might we overcome this impasse? One might be tempted to find out
which perspective captures the way gender really is in order to settle the matter. I con-
tend, however, that the stalemate is not to be settled by appealing to the truth or falsity
of essentialism, and that nothing much hangs on settling this metaphysical issue. To
illustrate, consider three recent views.
First, Alison Stone holds that women have a genealogy, though no essence.
Specifically, women become women “by taking over and reinterpreting pre-existing
cultural constructions of femininity” (Stone 2004: 153). These interpretations make
up an overlapping, complex and multiply branching chain of history within which
women are situated. And so, women “are defined as a group by their participation in
this history” (Stone 2004: 153). Stone’s position is motivated by anti-anti-essentialist
political concerns: fighting systematic social injustice demands that we understand
women’s kind in a way that avoids false universalism and quietism. It would be a mis-
take, though, to think that her view is essentialist in any of the earlier senses outlined
above. Critiquing anti-essentialism does not make one’s theory troublingly essentialist
and thus, worthy of rejection. Rather, evaluating Stone’s view hinges on pragmatic
considerations: what do we want a theory of gender to do for us? Genealogy aims to
“reject essentialism (and so to deny that women have any necessary or common charac-
teristics), while preserving the idea that women form a distinctive social group” (Stone
2004: 136). So, evaluating Stone’s genealogical proposal does not hinge on the truth
or falsity of essentialism. Instead, it turns on independent pragmatic and normative
considerations: how well does a genealogical theory of gender fulfill these desiderata?
Second, take Theodore Bach’s view that gender is a natural kind with a histori-
cal essence. For him, women share an essential property that is partaking in a lineage
of women: “an individual must be a reproduction of ancestral women, in which case
she must have undergone the ontogenetic processes [i.e., gender socialization] through
which a historical gender system replicates women” (Bach 2012: 271). Again, evaluat-
ing this position does not depend on the truth of essentialism. Rather, we should look
at what his theory aims to do and how successful is it. And this, rather than the truth
of anti-essentialism, gives us reasons to reject it. For Bach, no one is born a man or a
woman; instead, certain ontogenetic processes (most importantly, differential socializa-
tion) reproduce members of these kinds out of sexed individuals. In short, female gender
socialization fixes gender, but one need not manifest any typical gendered traits: one is a

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woman because one has “the right history” (Bach 2012: 261). This historical account is
allegedly inclusive and non-marginalizing. Only those who have not been socialized as
women fail to count as women; but since gender socialization is ubiquitous, Bach takes
his account to be genuinely inclusive. There are some individuals, though, who clearly
fail to satisfy Bach’s criteria for womanhood: trans women. And this is deeply problem-
atic. On Bach’s account, they would not count as women, given that the right ontoge-
netic processes that fix one’s gender status as a woman or a man take place “through
events that occurred primarily before the age of ten” (Bach 2012: 268). In fact, this
suggests that trans women would be gendered men contrary to self-identification, which
raises serious questions about how inclusive the historically essentialist account is—it
looks instead highly exclusive and thus worthy of rejection. But this rejection does not
depend on the truth of anti-essentialism. Rather, it is warranted because Bach’s account
gives us normatively the wrong results.
Finally, consider Witt’s uniessentialism. Witt aims to clarify and understand ordi-
nary gender essentialist claims, while contributing “to ways of thinking [that are]
useful to feminism” (2011: xii). This will be achieved by providing a coherent state-
ment of the claim of gender essentialism, a statement that could be true or false (Witt
2011: 66), and Witt’s uniessentialism allegedly does so. I am, however, less convinced
that gender uniessentialism is important for normative feminist politics. This is not
because I find uniessentialism implausible. Rather, I disagree with Witt’s claim that
“the centrality of the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate within feminist theory
is indisputable, and its significance for a wide range of issues in feminist theory is
beyond doubt” (2011: 68). Let me clarify: feminist theorists have extensively debated
gender essentialism and descriptively speaking it is a central feminist issue. But I am
less convinced that gender essentialism ought to be a central metaphysical concern.
Rather, the position we should endorse (again) hinges on our normative commit-
ments, instead of essentialism’s truth or falsity.
Much more should be said about this. But take one way in which Witt speci-
fies the centrality of gender essentialism. It trades (at least partly) on questions
about agency: individual essentialism, rather than kind essentialism, “intersects
with questions of agency, and the issue of agency is central to feminist theory”
(Witt 2011: 10). Now, elucidating Witt’s feminist account of agency, and its inter-
section with gender uniessentialism, is not entirely unproblematic since it is not so
clear what Witt’s picture of agency is meant to do for feminist politics. But a seem-
ingly central claim is the following:

Gender uniessentialism directs our attention away from individual psychologies,

their conscious and unconscious biases, and “deformed” processes of choice, and
towards the social world, its available social roles, and the ways in which its avail-
able social roles can and cannot be blended into a coherent practical identity.
(Witt 2011: 128)

Since gender uniessentialism demonstrates that our practical, social identities are
essentially gendered, Witt suggests, “political and social change for women will
require changing existing [disadvantaging and oppressive] social roles” (2011: 128).
The politically significant point is that social position occupancies come packaged
with problematic social norms; and this should motivate our rejection of those norms,
rather than embarking on projects than aim to alter women’s individual psychologies.

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 BODY, MIND, AND THE WORLD

I agree wholeheartedly that the goal of critiquing and altering oppressive social norms
is crucial for feminism. But accepting this is independent of the truth of uniessentialism.
I contend that the plausibility of the normative view that “feminist social and political
change must include critique of existing, gendered social roles with an eye to chang-
ing those that disadvantage and oppress women” (Witt 2011: 129) does not hinge on
us accepting the metaphysical thesis of gender uniessentialism—or any metaphysical
formulation of essentialism. Although historically a major point of contention, I am
unconvinced that feminists need to settle the essentialism/anti-essentialism dispute in
order to advance feminist political projects. Much less hangs on finding the metaphysi-
cal facts of the matter, and much more depends on what we want gender to do for us in
feminist politics. After all, if gender is socially constructed and at least partly dependent
on our interests, different metaphysical theories of gender can do different work for us.
The issue of what we want gender to do for us, then, strikes me as prior to settling the
essentialism/anti-essentialism dispute.

Related Topics
The sex/gender distinction and the social construction of reality (Chapter 13); materi-
ality (Chapter 16); feminism and borderlands identities (Chapter 17); personal identity
and relational selves (Chapter 18); values, practices, and metaphysical assumptions in
the biological sciences (Chapter 26).

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 15
EMBODIMENT AND
FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY
Sara Heinämaa

Introduction
Questions of embodiment are central in feminist philosophy for several reasons. The
sexed body is one of the chief themes of feminist politics, but the body is also a historical-
philosophical concept that feminist scholars have problematized and scrutinized, and
ultimately it is a metaphysical issue the relevance of which is a feminist philosophical
controversy. The thematic, historical-critical, and metaphysical interests often con-
verge in concrete debates, but it is important to distinguish them conceptually and
methodologically for the clarity of the goals of our investigations.
First, feminist thinkers have developed philosophical arguments and concepts to
tackle problems that are central in women’s lives, such as pregnancy, childbirth, abor-
tion, rape, pornography, prostitution, sexual orientation, and the division of labor
between the sexes. These classical feminist topics are today expanded by discussions of
transsexuality, disability, technology, and animality. All these themes involve problems
of bodily integrity and self-determination. In addition, they imply questions concerning
physical force and violence, as well as questions concerning sensibility and affectivity
and the nature of corporeal life in general. Thus, for strong topical reasons, the concepts
of body and embodiment are central to feminist philosophy.
Second, feminist historians of philosophy have questioned the traditional opposi-
tions between soul and body, mind and matter, and reason and sensibility, and critically
discussed the adequacy of the concepts of body and embodiment that we inherit from
our philosophical forerunners. Feminists have argued that these traditional concep-
tual oppositions are misleading since they define the two terms in simple contrast, and
privilege or valorize one term over the other either epistemologically or ontologically.
Moreover, they have demonstrated that our philosophical tradition strongly associates
the concept of femininity with the lower terms of these hierarchical oppositions. Thus
femininity is conflated with sensibility, body, and matter, while masculinity is coupled
with soul, spirit, mind, and reason. With a conceptual repertoire such as this it is hard
to argue for the equality of the sexes and for the fruitfulness or productivity of sexual
difference. For these critical reasons, feminist philosophy inquires into the genealogies
of the concepts of body and embodiment.
 Embodiment and feminist philosophy

Third, the concepts of embodiment and materiality are pressing for any thinker who
starts asking political and ethical questions concerning the relations between human
beings and human communities. Insofar as one conceives human beings as bodily beings
with material environments and concrete histories, one cannot avoid taking a stand on
ontological and epistemological questions on embodiment and materiality. Thus there
is also a metaphysical motivation for today’s feminist philosophy of embodiment.

Historical Starting Points

In the early modern period, with the development of the new natural sciences, the task
of rethinking the relation between the body and the soul or mind became acute. The
previously dominant Platonic and Aristotelian theories were challenged and abandoned.
The old Platonic similes and metaphors had suggested that the soul, or its highest
part, governs the body and its lower appetitive and sensible functions, similar to the
manner in which a charioteer or coachman drives his horses and a steersman navigates
his ship (Plato 2005: 26–36, 246a–254e). Against this, the Aristotelian concepts of
form and matter proposed that the function of the soul is formative rather than gov-
ernmental. In the Aristotelian understanding, the soul does not control or regulate the
body but rather organizes it and gives it a proper form. This implies that disputes about
the identity or separateness of soul and body are misguided, since the two phenomena
are mutually dependent (Aristotle 1931: ii, 1, 412b6–9).
These ancient conceptions were challenged in the seventeenth century by
Descartes. He argued that we fail to account adequately for the relation between
mind and matter if we assume that the two relata are both known in a similar manner
and order. For Descartes, the mind is neither governmental nor formative but episte-
mologically fundamental. We know ourselves primarily as ensouled or minded beings,
as “thinking things.” All our knowledge of other things, including material things
and corporeal being as well as ideal entities and the divine being, is grounded on this
primary form of knowledge, for Descartes in the Meditations of 1641.
Descartes’ thesis of the epistemic primacy of the mind implies two different views of
the mind–body relation (on Descartes, see also Chapter 6 in this volume). On the one
hand, body and mind can be conceived in a general manner as two distinct substances
with two different primary attributes: extension and thinking. This implies that they
are independently existing things (as Descartes argues in the Meditations and in the
Principles of Philosophy of 1644). Being distinct and completely different in essence,
the two substances cannot interact. On the other hand, we know our minds as each
being united with one body in particular and as being capable of interacting with
other bodies through this one body. In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes draws atten-
tion to this unitary notion of the mind–body relation and accordingly questions the
adequacy of the ancient similes of navigation and piloting:

[N]ature . . . teaches me, by these feelings of pain, hunger, thirst, and so on,

that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that
I am very closely joined, and as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the
body form a unit.
(Descartes 1996: vol. 3, 159)

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Descartes develops the idea of soul–body union further in his correspondence with
Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia by distinguishing three different objects of knowledge
and three different ways of knowing these objects: mind as pure thinking, body as
extended matter, and mind–body union. He explains to Elisabeth that mind as pure
thinking is known by the intellect alone whereas body as extended matter is known by
intellect aided by imagination. So the faculties of intellect and imagination provide us
with knowledge of the two substances and their essential attributes. But to know the
mind–body union, Descartes argues, we need to interrupt our intellectual studies and
suspend our imaginative activities and pay close attention merely to our sensations:
“[W]hat belongs to the union of soul and body is known only obscurely by the intellect
alone or even by the intellect aided by the imagination, but it is known very clearly by
the senses” (Descartes 1996: vol. 3, 691).
This means that the source of the wisdom that concerns the mind–body union is
the sensations, perceptions, and emotions that are part of our everyday dealings with
the world and with others. Based on this insight Descartes gave Elisabeth the following
guidelines:

Metaphysical thoughts, which exercise the pure intellect, help to familiarize

us with the notion of the soul; and the study of mathematics, which exercises
mainly imagination in the consideration of shapes and motions, accustoms us
to form very distinct notions of body. But it is the ordinary course of life and
conversation, and abstention from meditations and from the study of things
which exercise imagination, that teaches us how to conceive the union of the
soul and the body.
(Descartes 1996: vol. 3, 692)

Elisabeth was intrigued by Descartes’ idea of the soul–body union but not satisfied by
his dual characterization of the relation between soul and body, so she asked for fur-
ther explanations. Recent work in feminist history of philosophy has demonstrated that
Elisabeth’s persistent questions led Descartes to develop his account of the mind–body
duality (Alanen 2003; Bos 2010; Shapiro 2013; Tollefsen 1999). Elisabeth challenged
Descartes by asking him to explain how his definitions of mind and body as separate
substances allow him to form any reasonable notion of mind–body interaction, let alone
a theory of intermingling:

I beseech you tell me how the soul of man (since it is but a thinking substance)
can determine the spirits of the body to produce voluntary actions. For it seems
every determination of movement happens from an impulsion of the thing
moved, according to the manner in which it is pushed by that which moves it,
or else, depends on the qualification and figure of the superficies of this latter.
Contact is required for the first two conditions, and extension for the third.
You entirely exclude extension from your notion of the soul, and contact seems
to me incompatible with an immaterial thing.
(Elisabeth to Descartes May 16, 1643 in Descartes 1996: vol. 3, 661)

Descartes answered Elisabeth, but his explanations did not convince her. She required
more clarifications, and their philosophical discussion developed further. Eventually
the exchange covered metaphysical as well as ethical topics, ranging from mind–body

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interaction to the passions and to the efficacy of Stoic philosophical therapy in treat-
ing emotional distress, sadness, and desperation. Later Descartes dedicated his works,
the Principles of Philosophy and the Passions of the Soul of 1649, to Elisabeth, since
her direct questions and ingenious counterarguments helped him to develop his posi-
tion by theorizing the receptive powers of the human mind: sensation, perception,
and emotion.

Contemporary Alternatives
Descartes devised a partial solution to the problem of the mind–body interaction by
introducing a theory of the “animal spirits,” very small hypothetical movements of
matter, “very fine air or wind.” According to him these caused images on the surface of
the pineal gland, in turn causing experienced sensory perceptions. (The pineal gland
is a tiny organ in the brain; Descartes thought it the bodily part in most direct contact
with the soul.) Thus extended substance and thinking substance could interact thanks
to the mediating operations of the animal spirits.
Since Descartes’ time, the psychological and physiological sciences have taken enor-
mous steps and today can explain much of human behavior. Yet the philosophical prob-
lem of interaction lingers. We have abandoned the Cartesian notion of animal spirits,
but the theoretical task of mediating between the extended and non-extended realms
still remains and is undertaken by new candidates. Neurons are the most recent theo-
retical entities that are supposed to handle the connection between the two realms of
being. They are said to “convert” or “interpret” the quantifiable physiological processes
of our bodies into the qualitative “form” that is familiar to us from experience. However,
philosophically and conceptually the idea of the neuron as converter is no more satisfy-
ing than the idea of animal spirits. Both ideas retain the duality of two distinct realms
of being, the material and the experiential (or the quantifiable and the qualitative), and
only theorize a kind of unit capable of operating in both realms.
Frustrated by such problems, contemporary philosophers have developed meta-
physical alternatives to dualism and suggested strategies that do away with problems
of interaction altogether. These include reductivism, eliminativism, epiphenomenal-
ism, emergentism, supervenience physicalism, token identity theories, and function-
alism. These all build on the modern naturalistic doctrine according to which the
natural sciences—or physics as providing the grounds and the methodological model
for these sciences—ultimately determine what there is. According to this paradigm,
each being is either physical, belonging to the unified totality of physical nature, or
a variable dependent on the physical, and thus at best a secondary “parallel accom-
paniment” (Husserl 1965 [1911]: 169). Most of these approaches allow multiple
explanatory concepts but all demand that the explanatory strategies of psychology
accord with physicalism. In this paradigm, the human person is conceived as a two-
layered reality, in which a material—biological, biochemical, chemical, physical—
basis provides the foundation for the emergence of psychical features. So understood,
mental features are not properties of any immaterial entities—souls or spirits—but of
immensely complex physical systems.
The formation of the higher levels of the psyche is framed as a causal-functional pro-
cess in these naturalistic theories. Usually it is not assumed to be a monocausal, purely
organic process but is understood as involving both internal organic and external
environmental causes (see, e.g., Haslanger 2012: 210; Scheman 2000). Environmental

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factors are seen as influencing the development of psychic features and structures,
together with inborn organic factors.
Some feminist philosophers are committed to naturalism or physicalism because
of their basic philosophical commitments and interests (e.g., Anthony 2005; 2007;
Hankinson Nelson 1990; Hankinson Nelson and Nelson 2003). These philosophers
have to find ways of explaining the macro-level phenomena that are crucial to the
feminist project without compromising the principles of naturalism or physicalism.
This does not demand explanations in terms of physical concepts, but explanations
that are in agreement with physicalism or do not conflict with it. The most central of
these macro-level phenomena is gender, i.e., the difference between women and men.
Sally Haslanger offers a naturalistic analysis of gender, compatible with most physical-
ist approaches (those articulated by the concepts of supervenience). She argues that
the biological categories of female and male are natural kinds, composed of objective
things with a physical undercurrent. In contrast, the categories of woman and man are
positions of subjection and dominance that female and male entities may occupy in
contingent constellations of force and power. If all such constellations were resolved
exhaustively, thoroughly and permanently, then there would no longer be women or
men (Haslanger 2000a: 11–12; 2000b; 2005: 122–124).
Other feminists have challenged the paradigm of modern naturalism and physical-
ism and offered alternative analyses of the concepts of gender. Some have developed
neo-Aristotelian solutions (e.g., Nussbaum 1999; 2000; Witt 1998; 2003). Others have
resorted to Wittgensteinian arguments about the multifunctional character of our men-
tal and experiential concepts (e.g., Scheman 2000).
There is also a growing interest within feminist philosophy in the novel ontolog-
ical approaches that can be loosely classified under the title “new materialism” (on
these approaches, see also Chapter 16 in this volume). These approaches are “new” in
the sense that they reject the idea of substance characteristic of classical materialism
and build their ontologies on dynamic processes, unpredicted events, and conflicting
forces with analogous intensities. They are not naturalistic in the sense discussed above,
since they do not relinquish to the natural sciences the ultimate word on what there
is but rather argue for materialism or monism on independent metaphysical grounds—
Whiteheadian, Bergsonian, Hegelian, or Spinozist (e.g., Braidotti 2002; Dolphijn and
van der Tuin 2012; Grosz 2004; Malabou and Johnston 2013).
Phenomenological philosophy diverges from all these approaches in building on the
Cartesian insight that it is crucial to keep distinct two different ways of studying human
bodies. One proceeds under the guidance of the intellect and imagination and the other
is informed by sensations, perceptions, and emotions—and we are not to explain one
of these in terms of the other. The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty
emphasizes the irreducibility of these epistemic alternatives and argues for a pluralistic
understanding of bodily being:

Thus experience of one’s own body runs counter to the reflective procedure
which detaches subject and object from each other, and which gives us only
the thought about the body, or the body as an idea, and not the experience of
the body . . . Descartes was well aware of this, since a famous letter of his to
Elizabeth draws the distinction between the body as it is conceived through use
in living and the body as it is conceived by the understanding.
(Merleau-Ponty 1995 [1945]: 231)

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 Embodiment and feminist philosophy

In the next sections I will introduce some basic concepts of phenomenology, which
offers a powerful way of understanding the body, not just as an object of natural
scientific knowledge but also as a source of meaning and subject of intending. This
alternative has proven fruitful in the study of the multiple differences between
women and men as well as the differences between sexed and non-sexed ways of
being human.

Phenomenology of Human Embodiment

Phenomenology is a philosophy of experience. It studies human experiences in their
qualitative richness, with the aim of clearly distinguishing between different forms
of experiencing and identifying their subjective and objective components and the
points of correlation between the subjective and the objective. In this context, the
term “subjective” does not refer to any inner realm of private states or processes
or to the mere qualitative aspects of our immanent lives but refers to the ways in
which external (and internal) objects are given to us. (On phenomenology, see also
Chapter 12 in this volume.)
The objects experienced come in different sorts: some are material things but others are
ideal items, such as numbers and functions; yet others are sources or carriers of meaning,
such as novels, theories, and persons. Also, the types of experiences that give us objects
are multiple and various. They may be emotional experiences, such as shame, love, and
resentment, but they may also be cognitive experiences of believing, knowing, arguing,
and criticizing, or practical experiences of projecting goals and determining means. Both
individual and collective experiences need to be investigated as well as familiar experi-
ences and historically or culturally distant forms of experiencing.
The aim is not to survey the details of individual experiences or generalize over
them to construct a theory of experiencing. Rather, the phenomenologist works on
concrete human experiences, and compares and analyzes their features in order to
illuminate their necessary structures and forms of change and development. The most
important of these structures are temporality and intentionality or directedness. All
our experiences flow in time. They pile one upon another and motivate one another,
forming complex temporal wholes that can be described and analyzed by the phenom-
enological concepts of sedimentation and habituation. On the other hand, all experi-
ences are also directed at objects; and the experienced objects characteristic of human
lives come in many types. We attend to and focus on not only things but also values
and goals; and we are interested in not just states of affairs and facts but also persons,
organizations, institutions, and comprehensive histories of such complex objects. All
these different types and kinds of objects must be carefully described and their rela-
tions of dependency clarified.
Among the pivotal objects of our experience is the human body. We can call
the human body a “core object” since it has a central role in our lives both as an
experienced object and as an experiencing subject. Most if not all objects of interest
relate to human bodies in one way or another, and it is through our sensing, perceiv-
ing, and desiring bodies that we relate to things and events in the first place. In The
Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir formulates this idea by writing that our body is “our
grasp upon the world and the outline of our projects” (Beauvoir 1991 [1949]: 66).
But she then argues that traditional philosophical discussions of human bodies are
dominated by an androcentric bias that leads us to interpret phenomena characteristic

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of femininity or femaleness as derivative of masculinity or maleness. In Beauvoir’s

account, this is a fundamental mistake: human embodiment is not a unitary or
homogenous phenomenon but involves two main variations—the feminine-female
and the masculine-male.
To describe and analyze this duality, Beauvoir resorted to the phenomenology of
embodiment developed by Edmund Husserl in the 1920s. While studying the experi-
ential grounds of spatial things and spatiality, Husserl had developed a powerful set of
conceptual tools that account for the different ways in which living bodies are given
to us in experience (see Husserl 1993 [1952]; 1988 [1954]; see also Heinämaa 2011).
Beauvoir and her philosophical colleagues, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-Paul Sartre (1956
[1943]), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1995 [1945]), applied these concepts to a whole
new set of phenomena and complemented Husserl’s studies with analyses of affective,
sexual, and erotic bodily relations.
Thanks to this groundwork, contemporary phenomenology contains a powerful
toolkit for examining human embodiment. In this framework, several different mean-
ings of the human body and embodiment can be distinguished and their relations clearly
defined. The human body is not assimilated to an organism or biomechanical system.
Rather the human body is conceptualized in a number of different ways depending on
the evaluative, practical, and cognitive aspects of the situation in which it is grasped:
thing and machine, to be sure, but also tool, expression, sediment, trace, and dwelling
(general introductions to feminist phenomenology include Fisher and Embree 2000;
Fisher, Stoller, and Vasterling 2005; Heinämaa 2003).
The traditional oppositions of mind/body and culture/nature can be avoided, since
all phenomena—mental and bodily, cultural and natural—are studied under their sub-
jective and objective aspects and under the correlation between the subjective and
the objective. Instead of two separate realms of reality, the mental and the material,
we discover a variety of phenomena with intentional as well as sensible determinants.
The human body is not merely grasped as a material thing, a bio-mechanism, or an
information-processor, but also as our fundamental way of relating to the material world
and worldly objects. The human mind is not a self-enclosed pure spirit or mere epiphe-
nomenon on top of material reality, but a power necessarily expressed in bodily gestures
and corporeally related to other “embodied minds” or “minded bodies.” Nature is not
just an object of the physical sciences but also the common field for all perceiving, mov-
ing, and acting bodies, human and animal.
Unlike the traditional concepts of mind and body, the phenomenological concepts
of consciousness and intentional objectivity imply one another. Intentional conscious-
ness is always consciousness of something, and the intended objectivity is always valid for
someone. Beauvoir captures this mutual dependency of subjectivity and objectivity: “It
is impossible to define an object in cutting it off from the subject through and for which
it is object; and the subject reveals itself only through the objects in which it is engaged”
(Beauvoir 2004: 159–160).
This means that all bodily experiences and phenomena involve both subjective
and objective factors. By differentiating their types and forms, we can disclose several
aspects and layers of human embodiment. Most importantly, distinctions between dif-
ferent ways of being a body, of having a body, and transforming as a body allow us to ana-
lyze problems central to feminist and post-feminist theory and politics. These include
phenomena as diverse as pregnancy, physical work, and artistic expression, cosmetics

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and body transplants, eating disorders, sexual pleasure and violence, and transsexuality.
The next sections discuss more closely some of these phenomena in the framework of
contemporary phenomenology.

Bodies as Instruments and Expressions

When human and animal bodies are studied by the experimental and mathemati-
cal methods of modern natural sciences—in medicine, physiology, and zoology, for
example—they are thematized as complicated mechanisms. They appear as individuals
belonging to biological species, as biochemical structures, or as information systems.
These causal-functional categories are necessary for natural scientific theorization of
bodily relations and behaviors but do not exhaust the senses of human embodiment.
Several other senses are essential to and central in our conscious lives.
In everyday practical contexts, our own bodies and those of other humans and ani-
mals appear to us primarily as means of perception and manipulation of material things.
I roll the ball towards a child who sits on the floor opposite to me, and when the ball
comes into her reach, the child catches it with her fingers. I can do this because I see
the child’s fingers as potential means of controlling environing things and their move-
ments. I do not have to infer or reason that the child’s body involves such manipulative
means. I immediately see her body as orienting and controlling its environment in a
peculiar manner common to all humans (or primates).
The simple example of the child and the ball captures the main idea, but the phe-
nomenon proves more complex in most practical situations involving co-operative,
communicative, and historical factors. When a woman in labor is asked to “hold back”
and “push,” she is asked to use her body as means for the delivery of the child. But her
reaction to such instructions depends on the specific condition of her body, on her
personal history, and on the social-cultural practices in which she participates. When
soldiers are commanded “Left shoulder, ARMS!” they are attended to as functionaries
ready to manipulate their weapons with their bodies. But their promptness in obeying
the command depends on the situation in which they operate, its social and historical
boundaries, and their personal relations to this situation.
The practical framing of the human body involves variations that are crucial to femi-
nist theory and politics. In “Throwing Like a Girl,” the American phenomenologist and
critical theorist Iris Marion Young draws attention to the fact that women’s relations
to their own bodies as means of practical governing are delimited and compromised by
their training and education (Young 1990). And even before entering such institutional
settings, their bodily capacities are shaped and molded by the positive and negative reac-
tions of their elders and their peers (Chisholm 2008). By combining critical-theoretic
and phenomenological insights, Young argues that environmental social-historical con-
ditions of experiencing shape us as motor agents and bodily subjects. Further, she suggests
that this in turn affects our possibilities of governing our spatial environment. Thus a
vicious circle is established in the formation of types of experiences and conditions of
experiencing. The concepts of sedimentation and habitation allow a purely phenomeno-
logical account of such processes (Heinämaa 2014b; Jacobs 2016).
In addition to operating as our means of manipulating things and governing space our
bodies serve other practical purposes. Vitally and symbolically, the most important of
these is the function of housing and sheltering another living being attributed to female

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bodies in pregnancy. The topic of pregnancy is widely discussed in feminist philosophy

and its multi-faceted nature is illuminated by bio-ethical, historical, social-scientific,
and critical-political inquiries (e.g., Labouvie 1998; Martin 1987). Feminist phenom-
enologists have contributed by analyzing the experiential structures of pregnancy and
childbirth. Their inquiries show how social and practical significances intertwine with
deeply emotive, vital, sensory, and subliminal forms of experiencing (Gahlings 2006;
Heinämaa 2014a; LaChance Adams 2014; Stone 2012; Young 1990).
It is important to emphasize that the experiential fact that our bodies are given to us
as our means of manipulating things also involves the possibility of treating the bodies
of all living beings—other bodies as well as our own bodies—as mere material things. In
other words, we can “objectify” living experiencing bodies, and we do this for many dif-
ferent purposes. Some of these purposes are violent, alienating, and exclusionary, while
others are beneficial, empowering, and consolidating (Haslanger 1993; Morris 1999).
Examples range from pornography, torture, and sadism to physical therapy and play.
For political reasons feminist philosophers have mainly discussed the negative
senses of objectification (Nussbaum 1995; Papadaki 2014). By combining phenom-
enological, pragmatic, and critical-theoretical perspectives, Susan Bordo, for exam-
ple, argues that in modern societies women are urged to treat their bodies primarily
as aesthetic and economic objects and to neglect the practical and vital significance
of their corporeality. In Bordo’s analysis, this inflicts distortions on the body-images
of young women and leads to an increase in eating disorders (Bordo 1993). Dorothea
Legrand has questioned this explanatory paradigm using the phenomenological
theory of bodily intersubjectivity or intercorporeality. Legrand argues that eating
disorders should be interpreted not merely in terms of social-historical conditioning
but also as special forms of exchange in which the victim is not a passive recipient
but a communicating agent. She shows that food, eating, and the body operate in
anorexia as means of transmitting emotional desires to others lacking in sensitivity
and responsiveness (Legrand and Briend 2015). On this understanding, anorectic
starvation is not a neglect of one’s own practical-vital body, but rather an attempt at
communication in an extreme social-emotional setting.
Legrand’s analysis demonstrates that the concepts of objectification do not merely
describe situations in which human or animal bodies are subjected to external ends
that harm them. Rather, living beings can treat their own bodies as objects of different
sorts (e.g., expressive or thingly), and they do so in order to pursue their values and to
promote their ends. This means that the concepts of objectification as such are ethically
and politically neutral and allow us to analyze several types of corporeal and intercorpo-
real relations, both harmful and beneficial (Slatman 2014; Weiss 1999; 2009).
A well-known example is provided by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness
(1956 [1943]). Sartre describes a situation in which a young woman avoids the advances
of a male companion by systematically neglecting his words’ sexual significance. When
the man takes her hand, the woman changes her relation to her own body in order to
limit the sexual meanings of this bodily gesture. Instead of identifying with her hand,
she distances herself from it and acts as if it were just another thing lying on the table:
“the hand rests inert between the warm hands of her companion—neither consenting
nor resisting—a thing” (Sartre 1956 [1943]: 97; translation modified).
Sartre studies this example while developing his theory of self-deception (“bad
faith”) as a structure of human existence. Several feminist commentators have argued

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that Sartre’s choice of examples betrays androcentric or heterosexist bias (Barnes 1999;
Hoagland 1999; Le Dœuff 2007 [1989]). Indeed Simone de Beauvoir already argued in
The Second Sex that Sartre’s analysis starts from a simple opposition between attraction
and repulsion. She claimed that such concepts could not account for the complex char-
acter of feminine desire or the varieties of human sexuality (Beauvoir 1991 [1949]: 81;
Heinämaa 2006).
Despite these problems, Sartre’s analysis illuminates the experiential fact that we can
relate to our bodies in several different ways, and can intend our bodies both as mere
things and as our necessary means of having things at the same time. Sartre’s case study
also allows us to highlight the fact that in many communicative contexts, the practical
articulation of human bodies makes way for expressive intentionality, which renders
human bodies into expressive vehicles of meaningful gestures. The caressing hand of
the lover does not merely appear as a tool for the manipulation of things but is given as
an expression of his or her desire.
Erotic situations in general frame human bodies as expressions of desire, passion,
and pleasure. The face, the hands, the genitals, and the whole body of the desiring
person indicate the presence of his or her passion and express or manifest its particular
form. The ecstatic face is not given to us as a goal or a means to a goal, but appears as
a manifestation of delight that grows with each turn in the expressive exchange. If we
characterize emotional expressions as means that serve predetermined ends, then we
subject the phenomenon to inadequate concepts and neglect its specific structure and
dynamism. Moreover, in The Second Sex, Beauvoir argues that the confusion of erotic
intentionality with practical intentionality has lead to a neglect of feminine eroticism
and its specific character. Luce Irigaray builds on this insight in An Ethics of Sexual
Difference, arguing that preoccupation with reproductive goals has blinded us to the true
generativity of corporeal love that happens between the sexes:

[L]ove can be the motor of becoming, allowing both the one and the other to
grow. For such love each must keep their bodies autonomous. The one should
not be the source of the other nor the other of the one. Two lives should
embrace and fertilize each other, without either being a fixed goal for the other.
(Irigaray 1993: 28)

The Limits of Naturalism

In light of the phenomenological analysis of embodiment, the natural scientific con-
cepts of organism and bio-mechanism prove insufficient for feminist philosophy.
They only capture human bodies as components of causal-functional nexuses and
thus overlook broad areas of human experience in which bodies appear as motiva-
tional, purposeful, and expressive. These latter types of relations are not reducible
to causal relations, because their relata—the motivating and the motivated, the
intended and the intending, and the expressed and the expressive—are mutually
dependent and are not separable parts of a fixed whole. Human bodies are not merely
nodes in chains of causal-functional relations but are also expressive units tied to
other expressive units by internal relations of sense, motivation, and communication.
By definition, the natural scientific concepts of organism and bio-mechanism do not
capture such bodily relations.

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 BODY, MIND, AND THE WORLD

It is no use to add psychic or psycho-social systems of significance on top of a body

defined in purely causal-mechanical terms. Such an addition may present the body as
invested with individual and communal significations and meanings, but it does not
help us to capture the sense-forming aspects of embodiment or the body as a source of
meaning. More precisely, the idea of cultural and social construction of meaning does
not contribute to the philosophical understanding of the experiential foundations of
the psycho-physical compound.
Husserl’s phenomenology of embodiment offers a philosophical analysis of the
grounds and the limits of the psycho-physical articulation of human embodiment. In
addition, it includes strong arguments that question the ontological primacy of the bio-
mechanical understanding of the living body and demonstrate its dependency on prac-
tical and expressive bodies. I have explicated these arguments elsewhere (Heinämaa
2003: 2011). For present purposes it suffices to point out that Husserl’s main strategy
is to question the internal consistency of the naturalistic project and to argue that, to
promote her philosophy, the naturalist has to presuppose in practice what her doctrine
denies in theory, i.e. the ideality of sense and reason. That is: to secure the scientific
character of her judgments, the naturalist has to submit them to the critical inspec-
tion of the scientific community. This demands that she address her fellow scientists
as subjects bound by the laws of logic, ethics, and grammar, and not (merely) by the
contingencies or probabilities of nature (Husserl 1965 [1911]: 169; Wittgenstein 1997
[1953]: §109, 47e, §531, 145).
Even if one does not accept this argument about the conditions of human reasoning,
the conceptual innovations that Husserl and his followers made to distinguish different
ways of experiencing living bodies have proven beneficial to feminist philosophy in several
areas of study. An adequate account of the relations between women and men must not
confuse the alternative ways in which we approach living bodies, or slide from one sense
of embodiment to another without an explicit account of their relations. Keeping these
senses distinct allows us to discuss critically the co-existence of human beings, not just as
female and male animals, but as women and men with divergent histories and prehistories.

Further Reading
Grosz, Elisabeth (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press.
Heinämaa, Sara (2011) “Body,” in Sebastian Luft and Søren Overgaard (Eds.) The Routledge Companion to
Phenomenology, London: Routledge, 222–232.
—— (2012) “Sex, Gender, and Embodiment,” in Dan Zahavi (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary
Phenomenology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 216–242.
Welton, Donn (Ed.) (1998) Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.
—— (Ed.) (1999) The Body: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.

Related Topics
Early modern feminism and Cartesian philosophy (Chapter 6); feminist phenomenol-
ogy (Chapter 12); the sex/gender distinction and the social construction of reality
(Chapter 13); materiality: sex, gender and what lies beneath (Chapter 16); personal
identity and relational selves (Chapter 18).

190
 Embodiment and feminist philosophy

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 16
MATERIALITY
Sex, Gender, and What Lies Beneath
Claire Colebrook

Matter, Materialism, Materiality

If materialism is a movement, then materiality must be whatever it is that materialism
advocates. Or perhaps matter rather than materiality is championed by materialism, and
the complicated and more nuanced word “materiality” tries to deconstruct the seeming
simplicity of matter. “Matter” is conventionally opposed to “ideality,” where matter is
real, physical, and grounding, while ideas, culture, or representation are more human,
temporal, and malleable. Then one might think of “materiality” as a process that gener-
ates or opens the distinction between mind and matter, or ideas and matter.
Sometimes being a materialist or signing up to materialism may have meant having
a binary conception of matter. Materialists of this kind range from Marxist historical
materialists who contest the notion that thinking occurs in some space of ideas divorced
from labor and conditions of need, to philosophical eliminative materialists who are
opposed to anything (such as ideas or mental content) that cannot be explained by way
of physical material processes. To write, instead, of “materiality” rather than matter is
to stake a claim or situate oneself outside older matter/mind or matter/ideality binaries.
Yet—like materialism—“materiality” or being a “new materialist” makes no sense with-
out some combative notion of just what materiality is not.
One thing is perhaps certain: new materialism is well and truly against the notion
that it is ideas, language, or texts that construct reality. Here, for example, are four
claims about new materialism that rely upon a textualist, linguistic, postmodern, or
constructivist past in order for materialism in its new mode to have force.

Although postmoderns claim to reject all dichotomies, there is one dichot-

omy that they appear to embrace almost without question: language/real-
ity. . . . [P]ostmodernists argue that the real/material is entirely constituted by
language . . . [T]he discursive realm is nearly always constituted so as to fore-
close attention to lived material bodies, and evolving material practices. An
emerging group of feminist theorists of the body are arguing, however, that we
need . . . to talk about the materiality of the body as itself an active, sometimes
recalcitrant force.
(Alaimo and Hekman 2008: 3–4)
 Materiality, Sex, and Gender

[W]e are summoning a new materialism in response to a sense that the radicalism
of . . . the cultural turn is now more or less exhausted. . . . [T]he dominant con-
structivist orientation to social analysis is inadequate for thinking about matter,
materiality, and politics . . . [A]n allergy to “the real” that is characteristic of its
more linguistic or discursive forms . . . has had the consequence of dissuading criti-
cal inquirers from the more empirical kinds of investigation that material processes
and structures require.
(Coole and Frost 2010: 6)

The emergence of neo-materialism “now” may be understood as the result of

the butterfly effect—a confluence of currents across the disciplines . . . Whilst
humanist thought placed the human subject firmly at the centre of the social
and physical world, discoveries in science, . . . and the emergence of new
human-technological relationships have decentred the subject. These move-
ments, in concert with . . . theories that question the privilege given to humans
in the human/non-human binary, underpin discourses of new materialism. At
the core of the material turn is a concern with agential matter.
(Bolt 2012: 3)

The new materialism is . . . a response to the linguistic turn that . . . , it is

claimed, has neglected the materiality of matter. Concerned with rectifying this
neglect, the new materialism has developed, in part, in debate with poststructur-
alism and with Judith Butler’s theory of the body, which often serve to exemplify
the linguistic turn. Butler’s work is criticized for not allowing an adequate role
for the materiality of the physical body . . . The new material feminisms attempt
to address such an imbalance by returning to the materiality of matter.
(Jagger 2015: 241)

The first three quotations introduce important, definitive essay collections of work
on the declared “new materialism.” They define themselves against the privileging of
mind and subjectivity, and the rendering passive and inert of matter. The fourth is a
recent summation of the new materialism movement in feminism. These declarations
resonate with a whole series of “turns” that overturn the original “linguistic turn.” The
linguistic turn was primarily a critical movement, insisting that one cannot know or
theorize outside the conditions through which the world is given and represented.
However, a series of later “turns” sought to speak for reality, materiality, the inhuman,
affect, embodiment, and life. In addition to an emphasis on materiality, which suggests
a dynamic process rather than the simple “matter,” there have been new vitalisms,
new realisms, and an ongoing rejection of the distance of critique. In its place theo-
rists aim to think about the vibrancy of matter, which has significant consequences
for feminist theory and politics.

New Materialism
If one accepts that there has been a binary association between women and their sup-
posedly determining embodiment, biology, and sexuality, and one accepts that one must
resist “essentialism” in all its forms, then a turn to matter requires significant theoretical

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 BODY, MIND, AND THE WORLD

work. It makes sense, then, that new materialisms do not simply take up the other side
of the binary, but situate themselves against the mind/matter opposition. They define
themselves as distinctly different from supposed older materialisms that regarded matter
as a basis, foundation, or substrate.
I suggest, though, that there is a sense in which all materialisms are “new” material-
isms, because their notion of materiality must have a gestural or oppositional compo-
nent. Any intellectual movement must be uncharitable to its previous generation to
establish a difference, and intellectual movements come in dialectical response to each
other. After years of insisting on social and linguistic construction, then, theorists turn
back to materiality and are critical of too immediate an emphasis on matter.
Nonetheless, there is something about the problem of feminist materiality that is
more insistent than philosophical squabbles between idealism and realism, or histori-
cism and absolutism (or other conflicts and oppositions). Looking over the debates
regarding matter, materialism, and materiality over several decades of feminist schol-
arship, the problem is not one of ontology—of what really is—that is then applied to
feminist politics. Rather, when “matter” is asserted as ontological bedrock, it is already
gendered and sexualized. The first possibility is that the assertion of some neutral sub-
strate of matter that then takes on form repeats a passive-matter-versus-active-mind
dichotomy that has been aligned with the male-female binary: the concept of matter
is gendered, structurally. The second possibility is that resisting the notion of passive
matter, or insisting upon mind or language as determining factors, involves a subjec-
tivist and rationalist prejudice against what simply is: once again reason and activity
are valorized. So one cannot simply assert the side of the binary that was devalued or
dismissed, for the binary itself—and even the project of ontology, of finding what really
exists—is already sexualized.
This problem is evident in the work of Luce Irigaray—often appealed to in new
materialist debates, and also often dismissed as dangerously essentialist. Irigaray argued
that the thought of some ultimate, truly existing substance—what really exists and
remains present through and beyond mere appearances—possessed an (auto-) erotic
structure. If some ultimate substance subtends appearances, and if true knowledge is
the grasp of that underlying presence, then one establishes a paradigm for knowledge
based on a stable subject intuiting the truth of a world that is also stable and available
for representation (Irigaray 1985). What is erased is the coming into being and appear-
ing of the world, and how these supposed subjects of knowledge emerge from relations
with other subjects.
Irigaray therefore stressed the materiality of sexual difference, meaning not the bio-
logical fixity of two sexes but the process and relations through which the complexity
of matter generates (at least) two ways of forming oneself in relation to the world. What
is significant is Irigaray’s attempt to theorize matter as what had been defined as passive
substrate but needed to be redefined as a differential relation. Even more significant is
the horror with which this project was greeted, as though referring back to matter was
essentially essentialist, essentially anti-feminist.
Setting aside whether Irigaray was an essentialist, it is more fruitful to note the
problem of essentialism. For many, it seemed disastrous to say that there might be some-
thing before the discursive and social relation of the sexes. For others, refusing anything
that lay outside or before social relations repeated an anti-materialism that was anti-
feminist (anti-body, pro-mind, pro-subject, pro-human). So there is no way to decide upon

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the merits of matter, materialism, or materiality in some politically neutral terrain. To be

politically neutral and say that there simply is matter is not only metaphysical—positing
some ultimate ground—but also sexual. How does one posit neutral pre-sexual matter
without saying that there is something prior to the differential, relational processes
through which life and being emerge? Of course, matter may exist prior to human
sexuality—prior to male and female, masculine and feminine—but any being (organic
or otherwise) emerges from dynamic relations of existence, in which different forces
enter into relation to generate relatively stable entities.
To see “sex” as something that occurs after matter, as the differentiation of matter,
is to see matter as a blank, pre-relational, formless base that then takes on form. That
notion of formless, pre-relational matter—many feminists have pointed out—has
always been sexed. In the history of philosophy, the forming power of light or reason
gives shape and identity to a formless matter figured as maternal ground. The notion
of blank, formless matter has been dismissed by feminist philosophers because of its
long-standing association with mere matter brought into life and being by reason and
form. But that conception of matter as a neutral and passive building material has
also been rejected by physicists and philosophers. Even so, despite a consensus among
most twentieth-century theorists that life and the world emerge from matter that is
self-forming, materialism is always a tactic or maneuver that displaces another position
deemed insufficiently attentive to what really is.
One of the most-cited volumes on new materialism, Dolphijn and van der Tuin
(2012), makes clear this gestural nature of materialism—as always a new materi-
alism. Their volume consists mostly of interviews with a range of thinkers, one
of whom—Rosi Braidotti—was writing on sexual difference and materialism well
before the appearance of Butler’s Gender Trouble, against which the new material-
ism is often defined (Braidotti 1987a; 1987b). Braidotti’s “new materialism,” then,
existed throughout the “cultural turn” and the postmodernism against which mate-
rialists react. Indeed, Braidotti’s work deploys the very “postmodernists” (Deleuze,
Foucault, Irigaray) against whom new materialism is often defined. Acknowledging
that the “new” of their materialism is a tactic, rather than a description, the editors
of New Materialism write:

It is in the resonances between old and new readings and re-readings that a “new
metaphysics” might announce itself. A new metaphysics . . . announces . . . a
“new tradition,” which simultaneously gives us a past, a present, and a future.
Thus, a new metaphysics . . . traverses and thereby rewrites thinking as a whole,
leaving nothing untouched.
(Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012: 13)

In their interview with another key figure of the declared new materialism, Quentin
Meillassoux gives an account of matter that is defined against the history of Western
philosophy to date, with matter being defined against vitality. This is worth noting,
because the only thing that unites Meillassoux with other materialists is the gesture of
positing matter as something beyond the stable identities of experience. What makes
his position materialist, and the only thing he shares with Braidotti, Karen Barad,
and others, is the reaction against a metaphysics of mind. Meillassoux insists that his
position emerges from reason, or what one is able to think:

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[M]aterialism is not a form of animism, spiritualism, vitalism, et cetera. It asserts

that non-thinking . . . precede[s] thought, and exists outside of it, following the
example of Epicurean atoms, devoid of any subjectivity, and independent of
our relationship to the world. . . . [M]aterialism is rationalism . . . in that it is
always an enterprise that, through skepticism, opposes . . . knowledge and criti-
cism to religious appeal, to mystery, or to the limitation of our knowledge.
(Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012: 79)

Materialism is not merely an oppositional gesture; it is always hyper-foundational.

Whatever you assert to be at the ground of existence—say Epicurean atoms—I
can undermine by saying that there is a matter that precedes even the formation
of atoms, and from which atoms are formed. This is Meillassoux’s objection to
Epicurus, although—in contrast with most proclaimed new materialists—he defends
the Epicurean possibility of something existing without life, relation, or vibrancy.
Meillassoux’s “materialism” is constituted by an objection to others’ views of the bed-
rock of existence. This, indeed, is what materialism is; this is why “matter” is rarely
matter and more often “materiality,” the posited process that accounts for the per-
ceived world of matters (or composed things).
Consider the earliest feminist materialisms, such as Shulamith Firestone’s The
Dialectic of Sex. She contested the Marxist notion that relations among laboring bodies
were the underlying process of history, and substituted the biological division of labor:

I have attempted to take the class analysis one step further to its roots in the
biological division of the sexes . . . , granting it an even deeper basis in objec-
tive conditions . . . [W]e shall expand Engels’s definition of historical mate-
rialism . . . now rephrased to include the biological division of the sexes . . . :
Historical materialism . . . seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving
power of all historic events in the dialectic of sex: the division of society into
two distinct biological classes for procreative reproduction, and the struggles
of these classes with one another; in the changes in the modes of marriage,
reproduction and child care created by these struggles.
(Firestone 1970: 29)

Materialism is always a turning back, always part of a materialist turn, and therefore
always “new” materialism. Karen Barad gets to the heart of this materialist gesture:

Critique is all too often not a deconstructive practice, . . . but a destruc-

tive practice meant to dismiss, to turn aside, to put someone or something
down . . . a practice of negativity that I think is about subtraction, distancing
and othering.
(Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012: 49)

By contrast, materialism does not focus on the limitations of opponents’ claimed knowl-
edge of the world, but adds a dimension that complicates matters. Further, materialism
always bears a contrary relation to life. On the one hand it aims to account for life, with
matter functioning as that from which life emerges. Yet, on the other hand, the gesture
of materialism always aims to think life on its own terms, claiming to make sense of

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how life really works (without appealing to some external principle such as God, the
subject, or logic). Firestone is already directing her feminist materialism against a
Marxism that began with labor: by placing labor as the motor of materialism, Marxism
occludes the sexual relations and matters that generate bodies who enter into labor rela-
tions. Firestone’s materialism is, therefore, distinct from any notion of “matter” as a pas-
sive or determining cause of human relations, and is not a form of biological essentialism.
We might then ask how and why feminists turned back to materialism. Two things
need to be taken into account, and they do not marry well. First, materialist feminism
of the type that Firestone created came in for severe feminist criticism, with radical
feminism (or “difference” feminism that focused on how the sexes could not be con-
sidered simply equal) accused of essentialism (Assiter 1996: 113). Second, the sup-
posed era of feminism that came after Firestone and refused materiality was never as
simply anti-, counter-, or immaterialist as its later caricature implied (Ahmed 2008: 4).
Nevertheless, it became commonplace to think of feminism as having gone through an
essentialist phase, so that feminism narrated itself as having overcome a lapse or fall,
defining its current sophistication against naïve realisms, materialisms, and biologisms.
The classic example is Toril Moi’s 1985 Sexual/Textual Politics, the title indicating
the view that sexual difference is generated through linguistic/textual narrations. Moi
uses “essentialism” as a pejorative, something into which otherwise critical feminists
fall. Here she is writing about Hélène Cixous, and then Luce Irigaray, both of whom
fall into essentialism:

So far, then, Cixous’s position would seem to constitute a forceful feminist

appropriation of Derridean theory. Anti-essentialist and anti-biologistic, her
work [advances] . . . towards an analysis of the articulations of sexuality and
desire within the literary text itself. Unfortunately this is not the whole story.
As we shall see, Cixous’s theory is riddled with contradictions: every time a
Derridean idea is invoked, it is opposed and undercut by a theory of women’s
writing steeped in the . . . metaphysics of presence.
(Moi 2002: 108)

We have seen how Irigaray’s attempt to establish a theory of femininity that

escapes patriarchal specul(ariz)ation necessarily lapses into a form of essentialism.
(Moi 2002: 142)

Moi’s criticism of Cixous and Irigaray in favor of a more properly critical, deconstruc-
tive or textualist account of sexual difference offered itself as the definitive narration of
late 1980s feminism’s refusal of biology (but not of “materiality,” which could be attrib-
uted to language or signification as the material conditions that generate apparent sex-
ual difference). It became common to see naïve essentialism and biologism as properly
displaced by the differential materiality of “signification,” the system of signs through
which reality, matter, biology, and essence are given. “New materialism” then reacted
against this ostensible refusal of a more profound or vital materiality. However, affirm-
ing “materiality” is necessarily a gesture that relies on accusing someone else of uncriti-
cal essentialism: What you take to be a simple thing or given is really the outcome of
a process of complex relations, whether those relations are attributed to language (the
materiality of the signifier) or vibrant matter, the life from which language emerges.

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The very theorists who were charged with unthinking essentialism—especially

Irigaray—were not only retrieved by new materialists, they were also crucial to the
formation of the supposed movement that new materialism displaced. Elizabeth
Grosz and Rosi Braidotti offered readings of Irigaray’s work that focused on how
“materiality” needs to be seen not as the biological substance from which sexuality
is parsed, but rather as a complex differential process that generates an embodied
difference that is always relational and can never be grasped as two stable entities
(male and female) that then enter into relation. This is Grosz reading Luce Irigaray
(one year prior to the publication of Butler’s Gender Trouble, the text that supposedly
preceded and prompts new materialism, yet here is Grosz asserting the complexities
of matter outside language or subjectivity).

In utilising the language of ancient alchemy, she reverts to a proto-historical

world-view, . . . She uses a logic of interactive forces or combinatory “particles,”
the “atoms” of all matter in the universe. Taken together, they indicate a logic,
not of being, but of perpetual becoming, a world in continuous flux and change.
Earth, air, fire and water are the primal ingredients of subjectivity as well as
material objects.
(Grosz 1989: 171)

And here is Braidotti, in 1991, delivering a position statement after a decade of defending
sexual difference and a corporeal materialist approach:

The subject is not an abstract entity, but rather a material embodied one. The
body is not a natural thing, on the contrary, it is a culturally coded socialized
entity; . . . the site of intersection of the biological, the social, and the linguis-
tic . . . Feminist theories of sexual difference have . . . develop[ed] a new form
of “corporeal materialism,” which defines the body as an interface, a threshold,
a field of intersecting forces where multiple codes are inscribed.
(Braidotti 1991: 160)

It would seem that the subsequent “turn” to materialism after the linguisticism of
the 1980s and 1990s is turning against an anti-biologism that was the result of a
blindspot. That is, as Sara Ahmed has suggested, “‘theory’ is being constituted as
anti-biological by removing from the category of ‘theory’ work that engages with
the biological, . . . [work] which has a long genealogy, especially within feminism”
(Ahmed 2008: 26).

Sex, Gender, Mattering

We are already in messy and unclear territory, so let’s think about what these concepts
of matter, materialism, new materialism, materiality, and then “feminist” materialism
do. Within recent feminist theory the “clearest” indication of the problem of matter
comes in the playful use of the term in Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter (1993).
Butler uses “matter” as a verb, and as she uses it “mattering” is both what is recognized
or taken into account (therefore not physical or natural in any simple sense), and also
(because it is bodies that matter) she gestures to the fact that seemingly non-physical

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social processes such as recognition or taking into account rely upon bodies. In short,
“to matter” is a verb, but the actions that generate what matters occur through bodies.
One might ask why Butler makes this basic concept of matter so difficult. Wouldn’t
it be better if we thought of matter as something like physical substance, the building
blocks of the universe, the flesh and blood bodies that then compose social bodies?
Some sense of the necessary difficulty of Butler’s maneuvers in this text can be given
by looking at its place within the history of feminist thought.
When Butler published Gender Trouble in 1990 her argument rendered any sim-
ple relation between the material and non-material highly problematic. Previously
it was standard to distinguish between sex—the physical, biological, material body—
and gender—the social meanings and norms through which bodies are lived. The
“sex/gender” distinction had been important for warding off the supposed errors of
essentialism and biologism. If one distinguishes the physical/material body (the XX
chromosome body) from the body as it makes its way in the world as feminine, then
one can start to question any “natural” female qualities. Hence those feminists who
appealed to the intrinsic difference of the female body were, prior to Butler’s Gender
Trouble, already coming under fire for overlooking how the supposedly basic material
body is always constructed through norms of gender.
A sophisticated articulation of sex/gender difference was given by Teresa de Lauretis.
Gender, she argued, should not be seen as that which makes sense of sex. To assume
that there is something stable like sexual difference of which cultural gender codes then
make sense maintains the male-female binary that is at the heart of patriarchy, and pays
insufficient heed to how technologies of gender create multiple differences that are the
effects of representation and not their cause.

Gender is (a) representation—which is not to say that it does not have con-
crete or real implications, both social and subjective, for the material life
of individuals. . . . On the contrary, . . . The representation of gender is its
construction—and in the simplest sense it can be said that all of Western art
and high culture is the engraving of the history of that construction.
(Lauretis 1987: 3)

I refer to de Lauretis because any claim for “new materialism” (feminist or otherwise)
relies upon reacting against or overturning an undue emphasis on representation.
Butler’s work in Bodies That Matter is crucial because her earlier work in Gender Trouble
rendered the sex/gender binary even less straightforward. De Lauretis insists that gender
has “material implications,” but she refuses the notion of real, essential sexual differ-
ence being the basis for gender as representation. De Lauretis not only distinguishes the
social meaning of gender from the biological “reality” of sex; she also questions whether
sexual difference yields anything like a male versus female opposition. Butler’s Gender
Trouble went further. Not only was there no causal or straightforward relation between
the sexuality of one’s body and the social/cultural norms of gender; also, the very notion
that one has a sex that is the ground for gender is actually the effect of gender norms
and practices (for Butler).
Here Butler was drawing upon and transforming several poststructuralist strands of
thought. Michel Foucault argued that the notion that one has a sexuality that one
ought to discover, liberate, and disengage from social control was the effect of practices

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of self-monitoring and new discourses of sexual knowledge (Foucault 1978). Jacques

Derrida had challenged the idea that language or culture imposes itself upon an undif-
ferentiated reality or matter. Rather than see language as that which organizes a prior
reality, one should question how the opposition between language/culture/text and
reality/nature/matter is itself differentiated (Derrida 1978). For this reason Derrida
argued that materialism was a form of metaphysics, privileging a single term—“matter”—
that would explain all others.
Butler’s Gender Trouble had the influence and power it did because it created a spe-
cifically feminist form of post-structuralism, but also because it targeted a then almost
unquestioned insistence on gender as a cultural or normative overlay upon sexual dif-
ference as the preceding material reality. De Lauretis had already begun to criticize this
insistence. Butler went even further down the path of anti-essentialism (and possibly
anti-materialism) by arguing that one knows one’s real biological sex only after the fact,
as the supposed cause of which gender is an effect. I do not act a certain way because of
my body; it is through acting or performing that my body is then sexed as that which
must have been the material ground of gender.
The word “matter” is not used frequently in Gender Trouble, but in a key sentence
Butler situates matter alongside sex as the supposed ground of gender that is given only
through its discursive relations:

This very concept of sex-as-matter . . . is a discursive formation that acts as a

naturalized foundation for the nature/culture distinction and the strategies of
domination that that distinction supports. The binary relation between cul-
ture and nature promotes a relationship of hierarchy in which culture freely
“imposes” meaning on nature, and, hence, renders it into an “Other” to be
appropriated to its own limitless uses.
(Butler 1990: 47–48)

Not surprisingly a common criticism of Gender Trouble was of its signature move,
which shifted so far away from essentialism and biologism that embodiment and matter
seemed to be discounted entirely. For Butler, it is not only that we can never know sex
as it is in itself, prior to culture, nor only that (as de Lauretis argued) there is no direct
causal relation between sex and gender, but also that “sex-as-matter . . . is a discursive
foundation” (Butler 1990: 47). Yet Butler was not a social constructivist, and did not
see the real world as an effect of language or culture. Rather, her argument was to
question any opposition between nature/culture or matter/ideality. But in doing so she
did put out of play any straightforward materialism. There could not be anything like
matter as ground or basis of relations; rather, it is from relations and differences that
oppositions and stable terms are effected.
Even so, when Gender Trouble appeared there were already several material-
ist objections to constructivism and the sex/gender distinction, such as those of
Braidotti and Grosz, as we have seen. Perhaps the closest to Butler’s critique, but
subtly and importantly different, was Moira Gatens’s much earlier 1983 objection.
For Gatens, seeing gender as the constructing, normative and meaningful term while
seeing sex as passive matter awaiting cultural meaning repeated a long-standing
rationalist and dualist notion of the body or matter as nothing more than a blank
slate awaiting inscription.

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Concerning the neutrality of the body, let me be explicit, there is no neutral

body, there are at least two kinds of bodies: the male body and the female
body. If we locate social practices and behaviours as embedded in the sub-
ject . . . then this has the important repercussion that the subject is always
a sexed subject. If one accepts the notion of the sexually specific subject,
that is, the male or female subject, then one must dismiss the notion that
patriarchy can be characterized as a system of social organization that valor-
izes the masculine gender over the feminine gender. Gender is not the issue;
sexual difference is.
(Gatens 1991: 8)

But Gatens did not simply assert the sexual difference of the body against the
constructing power of mind. She insisted that the mind/matter distinction needed
to be done away with in favor of something like embodied mind, or a “subject” of
perceptions and affections: “Perception can be reduced to neither the body nor
consciousness but must be seen as an activity of the subject” (Gatens 1991: 8).
Rather than use the term “matter,” Gatens and others started writing about a
body that was neither a material container and substrate for the mind nor a simple
construction or image.
When Gender Trouble appeared in 1990 this criticism of constructivism in the
name of the body was well under way. Theorists of sexual difference, such as Gatens,
Grosz, and Braidotti insisted that one could not reduce sexual difference to biology
or essence. Rather than claiming, as Butler was to do in Bodies That Matter, that what
is given as matter is the outcome of complex discursive formations, social norms, and
performances, these feminists—well before Butler’s discursive and performative cri-
tique of sex—insisted that matter was sexual. Before the non-human turn, before the
materialist turn, before Butler’s critics asked her “What about the body?” feminists
were already insisting that there were different ways of thinking about matter that did
not take the form of simple materialism. Rather than treating matter as the ground
of culture and meaning, or social formations as based in material processes (such as
labor, violence, domination, and need) feminist scholars questioned how “matter”
had been situated in a series of binaries. Further, sex itself—sexual difference—was
one way to think about matter in a dynamic, inhuman, non-natural manner. Here is
Elizabeth Grosz in 1994, giving succinct form to claims about sexual embodiment that
she began articulating in the 1980s:

The narrow constraints our culture has imposed on the ways in which our
materiality can be thought means that altogether new conceptions of corpore-
ality . . . need to be developed, notions which see human materiality in con-
tinuity with organic and inorganic matter but also at odds with other forms of
matter, which see animate materiality and the materiality of language in inter-
action, which make possible a materialism beyond physicalism . . . [C]orporeal-
ity must no longer be associated with one sex (or race), which then takes on
the burden of the other’s corporeality for it. Women can no longer take on the
function of being the body for men while men are left free to soar to the heights
of theoretical reflection and cultural production.
(Grosz 1994: 22)

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To give a sense of the force of Grosz’s work and the very odd history of “matter,”
“materiality,” and “materialism” in feminist thought, one might look to her earlier
Sexual Subversions, where she produces highly original and influential readings of
Kristeva, Irigaray and Le Doeuff:

Irigaray has been concerned to explore a mode of women’s materiality and

corporeality which has been unable to find adequate representation in phal-
locentric paradigms. This search for a materialism outside of traditional def-
initions is necessary for her project of establishing an identity for women
cognisant of women’s corporeal specificity. . . . Irigaray thus turns to models
and theoretical systems outside of or repressed within mainstream philosoph-
ical and religious discourses . . . [such as in] her use of the metaphor of the
four elements.
(Grosz 1989: 168)

Butler’s Bodies That Matter (1993), therefore, should not be seen as an exemplary
text from which one can generalize about 1980s and 1990s feminism and its empha-
sis on culture and construction. Butler focused on the materiality of signifiers (which
could include bodily repetitions of norms and actions), and then argued that mat-
ter was not one side of a binary, but something that seemed to generate a binary
between mind and matter. Her theorization of matter after Gender Trouble was still
not a turn back to bodies and materiality, but an ongoing refusal of matter or sex
as something prior to normativity. And, yet, if we read her work alongside other
feminists writing in the 1980s and 1990s, her focus on performativity and signify-
ing materiality is at odds with more avowedly materialist modes of theory, such as
those of Gatens, Braidotti and Grosz. Here is Butler responding to the call to think
materiality and embodiment:

It is not enough to argue that there is no prediscursive “sex” that acts as the
stable point of reference on which . . . the cultural construction of gender pro-
ceeds. To claim that sex is already gendered . . . is not yet to explain in which
way the “materiality” of sex is forcibly produced.
(Butler 1993: 11)

At stake . . . [are] the following: (1) the recasting of the matter of bodies as

the effect of a dynamic of power, such that the matter of bodies will be indis-
sociable from the regulatory norms that govern their materialization . . . ;
(2) the understanding of performativity . . . as that reiterative power of
discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains;
(3) the construal of “sex” no longer as a bodily given on which the construct
of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the
materialization of bodies; (4) a rethinking of the process by which a bodily
norm is assumed, appropriated, taken on . . . (5) a linking of this process of
“assuming” a sex with the . . . discursive means by which the heterosexual
imperative enables certain sexed identifications and forecloses and/or disa-
vows other identifications.
(Butler 1993: xiii)

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Conclusion
I have suggested that the “new” of “new materialism” should not be seen as a chronological
marker (where “new materialists” correct the simplicity of radical feminists like Firestone
and then the “cultural turn” of feminists like Butler). But I am not offering my own
narrative as giving the proper series of events. Rather, I am suggesting that when we think
about materiality the very structure of the concept creates curious before- and after-effects.
Materiality is at once the simple “thisness” of all the feminist texts and movements that
we have, and to attend to materiality is to read, again, what writers such as Firestone,
Irigaray, and Butler actually wrote. This would be an attention to the materiality of the
archive of feminist writing. But materiality is also the complex milieu of bodies and habits
that surround and generate events of reading. To situate one type of matter—the matter
of texts—before another type of matter—the matter of bodies—is to efface the materiality
of the world’s interactions, and to allow some matters to stand for and speak for others. If
feminism has any unity—and it probably doesn’t!—one might gesture to all the ways in
which any claim about what really matters is precisely what ought to be questioned.

Further Reading
Alaimo, Stacy and Hekman, Susan (Eds.) (2008) Material Feminisms, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press.
Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha (2010) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.

Related Topics
The sex/gender distinction and the social construction of reality (Chapter 13); gender
essentialism and anti-essentialism (Chapter 14); embodiment and feminist philosophy
(Chapter 15); language, writing, and gender differences (Chapter 24); values, practices,
and metaphysical assumptions in the biological sciences (Chapter 26); feminist and
queer intersections with disability studies (Chapter 33).

References
Ahmed, Sara (2008) “Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the ‘New Materialism,’”
European Journal of Women’s Studies 15(1): 23–39.
Alaimo, Stacy and Hekman, Susan (Eds.) (2008) Material Feminisms, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press.
Assiter, Alison (1996) Enlightened Women: Modernist Feminism in a Postmodern Age, London: Routledge.
Bolt, Barbara (2012) “Introduction: Toward a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts,” in Estelle Barrett and
Barbara Bolt (Eds.) Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism” Through the Arts, London: Tauris,
1–14.
Braidotti, Rosi (1987a) “Des Organes Sans Corps,” Les Cahiers du GRIF 36(1): 7–22.
—— (1987b) “Du bio-pouvoir à la bio-éthique,” Le Cahier (Collège international de philosophie) 3: 123–127.
—— (1991) “The Subject in Feminism,” Hypatia 6(2): 155–172.
Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge.
—— (1993) Bodies That Matter, New York: Routledge.

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Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha (2010) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1978) Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Dolphijn, Rick and van der Tuin, Iris (2012) New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Michigan, MI:
Open Humanities Press.
Firestone, Shulamith (1970) The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, New York: Morrow.
Foucault, Michel (1978) The History of Sexuality: Volume One, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Pantheon.
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Lauretis, Teresa de (1987) Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction, Bloomington, IN:
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Moi, Toril (2002) Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

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 17
FEMINISM AND
BORDERLANDS IDENTITIES
Edwina Barvosa

Scholarly feminist meditations on the inner diversity of the self are many and
long-standing. While the inner diversity of the self takes many forms, significant
numbers of feminists across disciplines have focused frequently on the empirical phe-
nomenon of the self that is shaped through social life to have an inner configuration of
multiple identities that are in tension—a contradictory array of identities that is dis-
cussed below has been sometimes referred to as borderlands identities. While feminist
considerations have varied widely, they generally share common themes and significant
analytic complexity. This complexity arises in part because the very idea of the inner
diversity of the self that is socially derived inevitably invokes a wide array of related
factors. These factors include issues of agency and autonomy, the imprint on humanity
of social constructions of subordination, privilege, and social conflict, including gender
hierarchies, the phenomenon of intersectionality, and concepts of the self and subjec-
tivity. In this chapter, I offer a brief review of feminist engagement with the concept
of borderlands identities as one form of inner diversity. This account attends to the
origins of feminist concern with inner diversity, the social sources of borderland iden-
tity formations, and the lasting implications for feminist theory and feminist approaches
to envisioning and realizing greater social justice for all.

Feminist Thought on the Inner Diversity of the Self

Feminist engagement with the inner diversity of the self has itself been diverse. It
has been informed by various disciplines and undertaken by feminists with an array
of subject locations, experiences, and concerns. Some feminist engagement with
inner diversity—of which borderlands identities are one kind defined below—critique
the long-prevailing Western concept of the unitary self. In that concept, the self is
conceived as fully rational, self-transparent, internally consistent, and linguistically
immune to the thought distortions of social influence; its subjectivity is defined by
its capacity to reason. Ironically feminists have often found socially derived ideologi-
cal distortions in the depiction of the unitary self, which was debunked as implicitly
European, white, masculine, heterosexual, male of means in contrast to the stereotypes
of women as reasoning-impaired and prone to flights of emotion and social influence
(for feminist arguments against the unified self, see Meyers 1997; Brison 2003).
 BODY, MIND, AND THE WORLD

In her productively critical response, feminist linguist and psychoanalyst Julia

Kristeva (1991) argued in the early 1990s that the concept of unitary self was not merely
an ideology-biased inheritance—rooted in and perpetuating gender stereotypes—
it was also in practice false. Far from self-transparent, internally consistent, and
rationally above social influence, all human beings are socially shaped in their
embodied thoughts and emotions. Human social formation in the disparate dis-
courses and practices of modern life thus heavily influence the shape in a human
subjectivity—defined here as embodied consciousness. Consciousness is thus often
comprised of a hodge-podge of internalized, socially inherited dimensions, many if
not all of which are unbidden, and some would be unwanted. In turn, as Kristeva
illustrated, unwanted aspects of the self often become the “stranger within”—
elements of ourselves that we would cast out were it possible.
Failing that possibility, humans instead often self-deny the presence of unwelcome
aspects within ourselves, and then project that element outward as fear and rejection
(i.e., “abjection”) of others who in our struggling minds represent the attributes of our-
selves that we find an anathema. All humans alike are subject to these forms of self-
imposed internal blindness, aspects that not only muddle conscious reasoning but also
foster conflict (for further detail see Barvosa 2008: 109–139). For Kristeva the feminist
project of collective peace required each of us to face and come to peaceful terms with
the unwanted diversity within ourselves as a first and necessary step toward peaceful
contributions to collective human life. The self that is oriented toward peace and jus-
tice must thus see and engage itself as a self “in process.”
Other feminist thinkers have also explored diverse aspects of the link between
unacknowledged and unaccepted inner diversity of the self and social conflict. Jane
Flax (1990), for example, has elaborated the significance of self-fragmentation in
social life, including self-fragmentation manifest as contradictions and paradoxes
within feminist scholarship itself. Judith Butler (1990, 1993) has elaborated the social
construction of gender norms and embodied consciousness and gender identities.
Butler’s early work focused in part on the formation and stabilization of gender iden-
tity through abjection—that is, the casting out or demonizing of unwanted femininity
or masculinity as a means to stabilize gender identities based on an alleged gender
binary. Such identity-by-abjection aims to deny and—at times violently—tame the
otherwise lived diversity and contextual fluidity of human gender expression. In her
early analysis Butler at times suggested that identity itself would be best abandoned in
order to further the feminist project of peace.
In contrast to the view that identity should be dispensed with in the name of
feminist justice, feminist philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff has argued in her book,
Visible Identities, that although identity politics movements have been problematic
in many ways, identity itself cannot plausibly be abandoned, especially in social
justice efforts. Alcoff convincingly contends that identities are “in our embodied
selves at their deepest level of emotions, perception, imagination, and practical
movement” and thus form our “embodied horizons” (Alcoff 2006: 289). Resonant
with Alcoff’s analysis, many feminists— including feminists of color and feminists
working in postcolonial theory—have focused not on the banishing of identity,
but on how the inner diversity of the self can take the form of multiple identities
that straddle specific social divides. Such borderland identities, many have argued,
can have both advantages and hardships in relation to feminist aspirations for
peace and justice.

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Social Conflict, Borderlands Identities, and Feminism

As just noted, numerous feminist thinkers have explored the formation and implica-
tions of borderlands identities. Borderlands identities can be defined as configurations
of diversity in the self that include two or more identities that are socially constructed
as either uneasily/uncommonly combined, or constructed as entirely mutually exclu-
sive such as the social divided often drawn between Black/white, Jewish/Gentile (for
example, see work by feminist writer Rebecca Walker 2001). Borderlands identities are
formed through socialization in social contexts domains in which one or more ways
of life are in conflict or are at least uneasily co-present in the same location. These
uneasy cultural overlapping include areas of settler or neocolonialism, cultural diasporas
(Bammer 1994), and sites group displacement and resettlement arising from famines,
droughts, wars, migration and other social conflicts (Arana 2001). Tense co-presence
of ways of life commonly occur along political borders such as the US–Mexican border.
But incidents of group conflict may also occur far away from political borders.
Among many contributions, Chicana poet, activist, and independent feminist
scholar Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004) has offered one of the most influential accounts
of such borderland identities. Raised in and reflecting upon the racial conflict and
tension of the South Texas borderlands Anzaldúa used the terms mestiza consciousness
and nepantlera (among others) to refer to those with an embodied consciousness
shaped by immersion in multiple cultures that are mutually intolerant of each other:
Mexicans against Anglos (white Americans), Anglos against Chicanos (US born/raised
of Mexican heritage) and the tortured and adversarial relationships to the indigenous,
and the queer in both groups ignored and denied. Chicanas (Mexican Americans)
identify across these divides with borderland identities/mestiza consciousness provided
immersion in—and identification with—multiple ways of life at war with each other.
Anzaldúa holds that such borderland identities offered both personal pain and positive
possibility. On the side of hardship, having multiple identities with groups on both sides
of a hostile social divide results in inner division—in a consciousness that has absorbed
the group conflict into itself where it may either rage on and spill outward, or, with
effort, somehow peacefully resolve.
Like Kristeva, Anzaldúa thus meditates on the personal and political effects of the
inner war that attend borderlands identities. She writes,

I have internalized rage and contempt, one part of the self (the accusatory,
persecutory, judgmental) using defense strategies against another part of the
self (the object of contempt) . . . one does not “see” and awareness does not
happen. One remains ignorant of the fact that one is afraid, and that it is fear
that holds one petrified.
(Anzaldúa 1987: 45)

In terms of gendered violence, Anzaldúa finds that it is this kind of inner turmoil that
produce ongoing forms of gender conflict (1987: 83). At the same time, for Anzaldúa,
the person with borderland identities—the nepantlera who inhabits the terrain in and
between divided groups also has the opportunity to bridge these divided spheres. In
so doing, they have the chance to develop within themselves—and then perform for
others—the possibility of healing these inner divisions. Anzaldúa writes that the work
of the person with borderland identities is to

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break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in
the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The
answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males
and females, lies in healing the split that originates in . . . our languages and
our thoughts.
(1987: 80)

In various ways Anzaldúa’s entire corpus is dedicated to elaborating the pain and pos-
sibilities arising from living borderland identities (see Anzaldúa and Keating 2000,
2009). The reception of Anzaldúa’s work among feminists around the globe indicates
that the experience of borderlands identities takes many forms, arises from many global
conflicts, and the idea of the life of the nepantlera who straddles social divides continues
to inspire many who are engaged in feminist practice (Keating and González-López
2011). The qualities of borderlands identities and implications for feminist action have
also been taken up by numerous Chicana and Latina thinkers including María Lugones
(1990), Mariana Ortega (2016), Deena Gonzales (1997), Norma Alarcon (1994),
Cristina Beltrán (2004), Barvosa (2008, 2011) and many others.

Intersectionality within and Borderlands Identities

The concept of intersectionality is an important one in feminist thought. The concept
originates in Black feminist thought and can be traced from Sojourner Truth’s address
“Ain’t I a Woman?” in which Truth questions and probes the tendency to see her as
either a woman or as Black rather than to address the specificity of her life being and
identifying as Black on one hand, a woman on the other and also her living in the necessity
of negotiating both identities in tandem with all the hardships this duality may involve. Black
feminist thinkers Patricia Hill Collins (1998) and Kimberlé Crenshaw (1995) among
others have developed and deployed intersectionality as a conceptual framework for
understanding the multiple subject locations and identities of Black women in the study
of conflicts and patterns of social subordination including in Collins’s words: “systems of
race, economic class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nations and age [that] form mutually
constructing features of social organization” (1998: 278).
Building on their work, I have suggested elsewhere (Barvosa 2008: 76–82), that
borderlands identities also raise the possibility of seeing intersectionality as not only
a factor to be witnessed in the social world, but also as an imprint in embodied con-
sciousness itself. Seen from the perspective of borderlands identities, intersectional-
ity takes the form of internalized or internal intersectionality in which the imprint of
intersecting complexities in the social world directly shape embodied conscious-
ness. In the case of borderlands identities, for example, this includes both (a) the
internalized associations and presumed divisions among identities (group, personal,
and intrapersonal) that we inherit from the social world; and (b) any associations
among disparate identities that individuals may have created or transformed for
themselves. Seeing these intrapsychic interconnections as a form of inner intersec-
tionality is potentially important for feminist practice, because as both Anzaldúa
and Kristeva have pointed out, it is the rejecting of associations among diverse
aspects of the self that are at the heart of the internal tensions, fears, and turmoil,
that—when projected outward—produce and sustain social conflict including

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 Feminism and borderlands identities

conflicts involving race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, language community, nativity,

and so on. In order to fully understand inner intersectionality in relation to border-
lands identities, however, it is helpful to recognize in more detail how various identi-
ties are produced socially and in the self, and the social and physical formations of
borderlands identities.

Types of Identities and Identity Formations

To appreciate the full process of identity formation it is worthwhile to first recall
that there are at least three general types of types of identities and that all are in
different ways socially constructed either by social groups, the person holding the
identity, or both.
In terms of types of identities, sociology and areas of social psychology conventionally
recognize at least three types of identity formations: group identities (aka social identi-
ties), unique personal identities, and self-identity. Group or collective identities are those
associated with a social group or category such as ethnic groups, nations, or genders.
For our purposes this includes social roles such as mother, teacher, or attorney. A wom-
an’s ethnic and gender identities are thus examples of group identities. In this category
borderlands identities are those that include a straddling of social groups or domains
that are constructed at a given time as socially divided such as hearing/deaf, Black/
white, man/woman, and so on.
In addition to group identities, personal identities are the unique relationships between
pairs of individuals, such as mother of Jamie, brother to Albert, or supervisor to Alex.
Collective and personal identities are rarely, if ever, held singularly. Instead human
beings—as stressed by Hume and William James—in operating in different social
circles and domains, have often gained many different group and individual affilia-
tions and group belongings such that they identify and function differently in different
contexts. These multiple identities further combine in the mind with many other inter-
nalized elements, e.g., partial identities, isolated encoded beliefs, concepts, experiences,
and social scripts. Combined this multiplicity of identities makes up what is referred to
philosophically as human subjectivity, which can be defined as the totality of a person’s
embodied consciousness.
The totality of a person’s subjectivity leads to the third type of identity, namely self-
identity. As a term, self-identity is used in many ways, including some usages that refer
to an essential pre-linguistic core-self. Here, however, self-identity refers to the unique
identification and relationship that a person has with themselves—more specifically
with the totality of the many and diverse aspects of themselves as an entire self. As
such, self-identity encompasses one’s personal self-understanding and relationship
with the full collection of identities, partial-identities, fragments and isolated beliefs
and concepts that they have gained over the course of their lifetime. It also includes
their relationship to the current configuration of their identities, each of which may
stand in different—and potentially shifting—relationships to each other. In sum it is
a person’s overall sense of self, and their view of themselves as a unique configuration
of elements. This includes, how, if at all, they relate to inherited aspects of themselves
internalized from social life. It is not always the case that people identify with inherited
identities; for example, someone raised Catholic in childhood may disidentify with
Catholicism in adulthood and this disidentification becomes part of their self-identity.

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Thus self-identities are not static but rather always subject to revision. Self-identity is
an evolving sense of self, self-understanding, and self-relatedness, the kind of self “in
process” described by Kristeva.

Identity Schemes: The Social Sources and Formation

of Borderlands Identities
In their three forms, identities are not static, pre-linguistic forms. They are internalized
sets of social meanings, values, and practices that are associated with a given identity
as it is socially constructed in a given place and time. As such, identities are in practice
formed by the construction of a scheme of interrelated sets of meanings, values, and
practices that are constructed to define a given identity. These constructed schemes
are produced and circulated socially in and through the media, and major institutions
including churches, schools, commercial enterprises, and the state. Informally the con-
structions of identities—literally what it means socially to have and practice a cer-
tain identity—also circulate through social groupings ranging from pairs of friends and
nuclear families to large extended families, tribes, and ethnic groups.
These processes of identity formation are not only social and interactive, but they
have a material physiological dimension as well. This factor is sometimes overlooked
in feminist discussion, but it is significant for understanding both inner intersectional-
ity and the political potential of revising one’s borderlands identities as discussed by
Anzaldúa (for elaboration of Anzaldúa’s “mestiza way” of self craft, see Barvosa 2008:
175–206). Social psychology and neuroscience reveal that the meanings, values, prac-
tices, discourses, and other socially constructed aspects of identities are internalized by
being physically encoded in the human mind as neural pathways. In turn, interconnects
and associations among these neural pathways are formed in the physical brain. Ideas,
events, and concepts are linked in social life and become associated and linked in the
mind as elated neural pathways that often come to form a kind of web of intersecting
ideas, beliefs, and other imprints in the brain. Generally, social psychologists and neu-
roscientists describe this ongoing process of the linking of encoded meaning in the brain
with the catch phrase “what fires together, wires together.” The resulting embodiment
is a network of associated meanings that exist in the mind as webs intersecting materials
socially constructed as related in a given way (Kahneman 2011) such as the dangerous
group stereotype “young-black-male-criminal.” When this web of interrelated materi-
als is interpreted as relevant to a given context it is “activated” (subconsciously) as the
material basis for thought, feeling, and action in a given moment and for as long as that
scheme is relevant (Benaji and Greenwald 2013).
Identities can thus be seen within embodied consciousness as a socially encoded web
of associations in the mind—as a neural web of interconnected meanings, values, and
practices associated with what it means to identify in a given way in a given time and
place. As such, identities can be conceptualized both theoretically and empirically as
identity schemes (Barvosa 2008). Identity schemes, however, are not limited to cogni-
tive expression in the mind, but also contain associated ideas, concepts, and practices,
that express as feelings, thoughts, and also as material practices and even postures and
bodily expressions and experiences. The latter include, for example, identity specific
postures and socially constructed physical expressions, such as the postures and practices
of a marching soldier or dancing ballerina. The encoding that contains the postures are

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activated as the frames of reference for thought, feeling, and action in moments when
the identities as soldier and ballerina are relevant to the passing moment or “salient.”
As social formations, identity schemes in general are not innate or static aspects of
the self. Rather identity—when considered as a noun—refers to the specific, socially
constructed, time, place, and culturally specific content of a given identity scheme, as
it is prevails in a given time and place. The specific social constructions of the mean-
ings, values, and practices femininity and feminine identity, for example, have changed
over time containing both significant commonalities and extensive variations. Some
variations are cross-cultural and admit of variations in expression from one woman or
transwoman to the next. As such, identities are complex and socially encoded forma-
tions of the mind and body that are formed and may be transformed in and over time.
These shifts may include alterations in norms, values, and linguistic and cultural prac-
tices. These changes may be brought about by external influence such as war, conflict,
or technological change or through collective reimagining that occurs through social
movements or other societal transformation or simple changes in fashion.
Moreover in terms of inner intersectionality, different identity schemes may intersect
in three different types of associations that may be seen as three different moments of
inner intersectionality: additive, overlapping, and crosscutting. First, identity schemes
may be associated additively in that they come to share identity-related meanings,
values, and practices. For example, white male identities and identity as financially
affluent may contain separate meanings and practices that combine in the conscious-
ness of wealthy white men to a degree that these elements of their multiple identities
reinforce each other, perhaps even to the point that their two identities seem to be
nested or converged rather than distinct.
Second, identity schemes may overlap and share common meanings, values or
practices even though they are regarded as distinct and generally not overlapping. For
example, linguistic diversity among immigrant groups in America is such that some
immigrants share an accent with the mainstream Americans and others do not. The
overlap in speech patterns may make it easier for some to include linguistically accultur-
ated immigrants over those who have a residual accent on the basis of the overlap in the
identity schemes of the person and the mainstream American identity scheme.
Third, socially constructed identity schemes may be crosscutting in meaning and
influence. For example, Black men have racial and gender identity schemes involv-
ing meanings and practices of gender privilege as men, but meanings and practices
of subordination as Black. However, at the time of this writing, youth identity in the
US intersects in a crosscutting manner with male privilege and racial subordination,
resulting in a disproportionate risk of harm to young Black men at the hands of law
enforcement. This is likely attributed to the socially constructed frames of reference
that often become constructed as part of law enforcement identities for some officers.
When activated by events in context the neural script of “young-black-male-criminal”
activates neurologically as part of that lived identity, also trigging neurally linked fear
responses whether or not such fear is warranted by facts of the context. Likewise, to the
extent that young Black men internalize the gendered social relations of hierarchy and
risk, they too may have woven into their identities extreme fears related to social con-
texts involving law enforcement.
In the US, these dynamics have spawned a social movement and debate.
Theoretically at least, problematic identity formations admit of being amended and

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transformed over time. Identity schemes are more fluid than is often thought. Socially,
construction of identities and their relationships leaves people with borderlands iden-
tities facing unique identity-related challenges and also opportunities. However, to
recognize the special opportunities and challenges of borderlands identities, in particu-
lar, it is important to first understand how all human identities are fluid and changeable
in that they are not ultimately defined by the content of identity schemes, but rather by
the daily practices of claiming and negotiating identities in social contexts.

Borderlands Identities and Social Change: Negotiating

Identity Claims in Changing Times
Although the socially constructed content of identity schemes is important, it does
not ultimately define identities. Instead, as shown in classic anthropology, identities
are ultimately defined in and through the ever-ongoing daily processes of casting the
boundaries of an identity and having identity claim acknowledged and accepted by
others (Barth 1969). As such variation in content—and even role reversals—over time
does not dilute or destroy the identity as long as both partners in the connection con-
tinue to cast/name and claim the boundary and declare themselves as partaking of that
identity in and over time. Ethnic identities, for instance, frequently change over time
in the meanings, values, and practices that comprise the specificity of the ethnicity. For
example, in the late 1980s and 1990s for instance, in US Chicana/o culture, rap music
from hip-hop culture was hybridized by Chicano youth to create Chicano rap. Many
Chicana/o youth then claimed their ethnic identities through the new musical form. To
the extent that those identity claims were accepted, Chicana/o ethnic identities were
maintained but not through continuity of ethnic content. Instead Chicana/o ethnic
identities endured via the everyday practice of casting identity boundaries and nego-
tiating identity claims even in the face of cultural change. In the case of borderlands
identities it is this kind of negotiation of supposedly mutually exclusive identities that
is one of the most difficult challenges.
There are many other social cleavages among group identities that also produce con-
texts in which borderlands identities exist and must be navigated by border crossers (in
Anzaldúan terms, nepantleras). In some cases, however, social changes over time might
alter these cleavages and reduce the need to respond to them as persistent and trou-
blesome divides. For example, María Lugones, a US Latina feminist philosopher who
immigrated to the US from Latin America, has written about life as an activist in New
Mexico in the 1990s as she negotiated her border identities as a lesbian and a Latina/
Hispana. Working with and among poor Hispanos as an activist for social change
(idiosyncratically, “Hispanos” was the preferred term among Spanish/Mexican herit-
age in New Mexico at the time of her writing). Lugones’s experience taught her that
to identify openly as a lesbian among Hispanos would mean her rejection even as an
activist working for social change. Likewise, effective engagement in social activism
among the local lesbian community at that time also required Lugones to deemphasize
her ethnicity in order to have a voice and accepted presence in the queer commu-
nity. As I have discussed elsewhere, Lugones negotiated these sets of social foreclosures
as part of the border identity as a Latina, lesbian activist working for social change
in social contexts that refuse the combination of the identities most meaningful to
her (Barvosa 2008). In that refusal of others to acknowledge and accept her identities

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claims, Lugones is faced with the need to find ways to negotiate the implicit or explicit
forms of threatened identity-related rejection, and find a way to integrate her own sense
of self as including border identities. Today, however, in a time when strong majorities
across the US accept and endorse LGBT equality, it is likely that Lugones might not
face the same degree of intolerance as she did in previous decades as a Latina lesbian
activist-scholar.

The Special Challenges and Potential of

Borderlands Identities
As stressed above, borderlands identities are configurations of multiple identities that
include elements socially constructed as mutually exclusive at a given time. Such
divided identities are usually cast as an impassable social division such as woman/man,
Jewish/Gentile, hearing/deaf. In some cases, however, these constructed divisions are
encompassed in the life of a single person. For example, in his book My Sense of Silence,
Lennard Davis (2000) describes his life as the hearing child of deaf parents. Davis was
born and raised in deaf culture, immersed in and identified with that world, practicing
its ways. Yet as a hearing person, his identity claims to be a member of the deaf commu-
nity were at times rejected as a hearing person. His border identities as a hearing person
who is also deaf identified require that he endure and negotiate the identity ascriptions
that cast him in ways that do not acknowledge his own sense of self. In living across the
border between the hearing and deaf worlds, Davis’s identity claims and place in each
of these social domains is ambiguous, and ever subject to rejection.
Many other social conflicts and cleavages also yield borderland identities of the kind
described in this overview. Moreover, borderland identities may appear in any or all of
the three major types of identities: group identities, unique personal identities, and self-
identity. For example, gay, lesbian or bi-sexual children who are under threat of being
disowned by a parent on the basis of their sexual orientation, have a borderland identi-
ties regard to their sexual identities (group identities) and their unique personal identi-
ties with their parents. This conundrum will certainly also take shape in their unique
relationship to themselves or their self-identity. Hence social divides and conflicts that
produce borderland identities may take many diverse forms.
In the face of societal, intrafamilial, or interpersonal rejection however, those with
borderlands identities as described by Anzaldúa—and actually everyone as stressed by
Kristeva—may seek to face and reconcile whatever internalized societal anger, hate, or
fear that may exist in themselves. Those social inheritances may appear as patterns of
self-disregard, personal blind spots and/or projected anger at others supposedly different
from oneself. To consciously encounter and reconcile ourselves to our own diversity in
this way can create within ourselves greater comfort, self-acceptance, and inner peace.
In turn, becoming a peaceful presence in social life may in time feed back synergisti-
cally into social life contributing to greater societal peace with diversity of all kinds. As
Anzaldúa stated: “I change myself, I change the world” (1987: 70). This is not an overly
idealistic claim. At the time of this writing the increasing visibility of peaceful and
self-confident transgender people in the US is fostering increasing recognition and pro-
tections for transgender persons in American society. As transgender-related societal
meanings, values and practices shift, transgender—once regarded as a borderlands iden-
tity that united mutually exclusive aspects of gender—is becoming less contested over

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time. Transgender-related social change remains incomplete and trans persons may still
face refusal of their gender identity claims from one context to the next. Nevertheless
the projects of self-remaking that social conflicts, inner diversity, and borderlands iden-
tities present to all of us are in keeping with longstanding feminist projects of peace and
social justice—projects within which everyone may find a role to play.

Further Reading
Alcoff, Linda Martín (2006) Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, New York: Oxford University Press.
Barvosa, Edwina (2008) Wealth of Selves: Multiple Identities, Mestiza Consciousness, and the Subject of Politics,
College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press.
Flax, Jane (1990) Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kristeva, Julia (1991) Strangers to Ourselves, New York: Columbia University Press.
Meyers, Diana T. (1997) Feminists Rethink the Self, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Ortega, Mariana (2016) In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self, Albany: SUNY
Press.

Related Topics
Personal identity and relational selves (Chapter 18); psychoanalysis, subjectivity, and
feminism (Chapter 19); the genealogy and viability of the concept of intersectional-
ity (Chapter 28); through the looking glass: trans theory meets feminist philosophy
(Chapter 32); feminist and queer intersections with disability studies (Chapter 33).

References
Alarcón, Norma (1994) “Conjugating Subjects: Heteroglossia of Essence and Resistance,” in Alfred Arteaga
(Ed.) An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 125–138.
Alcoff, Linda Martín (2006) Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, New York: Oxford University Press.
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 18
PERSONAL IDENTITY
AND RELATIONAL SELVES
Susan J. Brison

It is a truism to say that selves exist in relation to other selves. What is more
controversial is the view, defended by many feminist philosophers, that selves exist only
in relation to other selves, that is, that they are fundamentally relational entities. On
this view, persons or selves—I shall be using these terms interchangeably—are what
Annette Baier has called “second persons.” On her account, “[a] person, perhaps, is
best seen as someone who was long enough dependent on other persons to acquire the
essential arts of personhood. Persons are essentially second persons who grow up with
other persons” (Baier 1985: 84). Another way of putting this is to say that selves are
constituted in relationship with other selves.
Precursors to the idea of a relational self may be found in the history of philosophy:
Aristotle, for example, held that, in cases of the most genuine friendship, a friend is
a second self, and Hegel argued that selves become aware of themselves only though
the presence of others. Feminist theorists have articulated, elaborated, and defended
the view that the self is essentially relational in a variety of new ways in several philo-
sophical subfields. While much feminist writing about the relational self has come in
response to the individualism of the liberal political ideal of autonomy, different theo-
ries of the relational self have been developed for different philosophical purposes.
There is no one answer to the question “what is a self?” unless perhaps it is another
question: “who wants to know?” The account of the self sought by someone looking for
a criterion for personal identity that will enable us to re-identify individuals in changed
conditions over time differs from that sought by someone who is interested in the nature
of a person’s mental states, or in moral personhood, or in how selves are socially con-
structed. In this chapter, I discuss different approaches to the idea of the relational self
that have been taken by feminist philosophers working in ethics, social/political/legal
philosophy, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics.
In Western philosophical traditions, virtually all of those theorizing about the self
were, until recently, white men whose primary preoccupations concerning personal
identity were: (1) what makes someone the same unique individual over time—for
example, possession of the same body or the same memories or character traits; and
(2) what distinguishes human beings from non-human animals—for example, the abil-
ity to think or to use language or the possession of an immortal soul. Little attention was
paid to the question of how we become persons.
 Personal identity and relational selves

Women and people of color have, historically, not been the ones doing the
philosophizing and have been either left out or viewed as “other” and devalued to
the extent we were seen as deviating from the (white male) norm. That philosophy
has traditionally been done primarily by white men is not surprising, given that
doing philosophy in the way it’s traditionally been done is a luxury, not merely in
the obvious material sense that it can be done only if one’s basic needs are met, but
also in a psychological sense. If one is dealing with racial, sexual, or other group-
based harassment or assault, with discrimination, with all-consuming dependency
care, or even with a surfeit of empathy that makes the suffering of others unbearably
vivid and demoralizing, it is virtually impossible to have the sustained concentra-
tion needed to solve philosophical problems. Add to this the realities of epistemic
and discursive injustice against marginalized groups plus the fact that indifference
to real-world concerns is valorized and academically rewarded in the discipline of
philosophy—and it is not surprising that certain demographics have been under-
represented in the discipline.
But as more people from underrepresented groups have entered the profession, the
discipline has begun to change and new perspectives on the self have emerged. Women
philosophers have experienced some form or other of feminine socialization as girls and
continue to confront gender-based stereotypes as adults, and so are conscious of the
constraints of societal expectations of us. Furthermore, because women have tradition-
ally been the ones caring for children and for others who cannot care for themselves, we
have been keenly aware of the extent to which people are dependent on other people
for their very survival.

Care Ethics and the Relational Self

In ethics, as well as in social, political, and legal philosophy, the relational self has been
defended as an alternative to what Lorraine Code has dubbed “autonomous man” who
“is the undoubted hero of philosophical moral and political discourse” (1991: 73).

Autonomous man is—and should be—self-sufficient, independent, and self-

reliant, a self-realizing individual who directs his efforts toward maximizing his
personal gains. His independence is under constant threat from other (equally
self-serving) individuals: hence he devises rules to protect himself from intrusion.
(1991: 77)

Code acknowledges that “autonomous man” is an abstraction, but one that nonetheless
“occupies the position of a character ideal in Western affluent societies” (1991: 78).
Seyla Benhabib criticizes social contract theorists, such as Hobbes and Locke, for
regarding the sphere of justice as “the domain wherein independent, male heads of
household transact with one another,” wheareas

[a]n entire domain of human activity, namely, nurture, reproduction, love, and
care . . . the woman’s lot in the course of the development of modern, bour-
geois society, is excluded from moral and political considerations, and confined
to the realm of “nature.”
(Benhabib 1987: 160)

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 BODY, MIND, AND THE WORLD

On this view, “in the beginning man was alone,” as Benhabib construes Hobbes to
be saying in this passage: “‘Let us consider men . . . if but even now sprung out of the
earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity, without all kind of engage-
ment to each other.’” Benhabib argues that this “vision of men as mushrooms”—
an “ultimate picture of autonomy”—involves “the denial of being born of woman”
and thus “frees the male ego from the most natural and basic bond of dependence”
(1987: 161). As Christine Di Stefano points out:

In the state of nature scene being considered here, which we might subtitle
the Case of the Missing Mother, the issue is not whether infants would sur-
vive untended in the wild. Hobbes . . . never intended self-sufficiency in this
sense . . . The issue concerns instead the ways in which early maternal and
parental care provide a social, intersubjective context for the development of
particular capacities in children—emotive, social and cognitive capacities.
(1983: 638)

Such capacities are required in order for beings in the state of nature to be capable
of forming and implementing contracts with one another, but no account is given,
by Hobbes or other contract theorists, of how these capacities, which are essential to
personhood, are acquired.
The concept of the relational self in feminist ethics has its roots in Carol Gilligan’s
(1982) psychological research on moral development, Nel Noddings’s (1986) account
of moral education, Nancy Chodorow’s (1978) sociological and psychoanalytic study
of children’s identity formation, and Sara Ruddick’s (1989) account of maternal think-
ing, drawn from women’s lived experience as mothers (see Chapters 19 and 43 in
this volume). In their groundbreaking anthology, Women and Moral Theory, Eva Feder
Kittay and Diana T. Meyers (1987), along with other feminist philosophers, articulate
and defend a relational view of the self underlying this distinctively feminist moral
theory—the ethics of care.
Although some feminist theorists reject the concept of autonomy because of its
perceived commitment to the ideal of the self-sufficient individual and its neglect of
the facts—and values—of care and interdependence, others reconceive of autonomy
as compatible with the view that persons are constituted by interpersonal relations to
others. On this view, autonomy itself is relational, a competency or capacity developed
only through interpersonal, societal, and institutional relations of the right sort (Brison
1997; 2000; Friedman 1997; 2003; Mackenzie and Stoljar, 2000; Meyers 1989; 1997;
Nedelsky 2011; West 1997; see also Chapter 41 in this volume).
Some theorists have rejected the valorization of maternal thinking in an ethics
of care because “participation in nurturing and mothering activities, and the social
ideologies and institutions that support them, have been instrumental in maintain-
ing women’s subordination, oppression, and economic dependence” (Code 1991: 92).
Catharine MacKinnon has argued that “[w]omen value care because men have valued
us according to the care we give them” and that “we think in relational terms because
our existence is defined in relation to men” (1987: 39).
Lorraine Code has proposed friendship as a preferable model for the relational self
since “[f]riendships are created around an implicit recognition that persons are essen-
tially (i.e., essential to their continued sense of self and well-being) ‘second persons’

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throughout their lives.” She considers it to be an advantage of the friendship model that
it “does not even implicitly exclude women who do not mother or who do not mother
well” (1991: 95). In addition, it can more easily acknowledge the value of this kind of
relationship for men than can Ruddick’s claim that men, too, can be mothers.
Taking friendship between equals as the paradigmatic human relation, however,
obscures the fact that we are all, at some point or other in our lives, utterly depend-
ent on others, requiring the care of those Eva Feder Kittay has labeled “dependency
workers” (1999). Some of us are dependent on others throughout our lives. The self of
a dependency worker, unlike “the self represented as participating as an equal in the
social relations of liberal political theory,” must be “a self through whom the needs of
another are discerned, a self that, when it looks to gauge its own needs, sees first the
needs of another” (Kittay 1999: 51). Kittay argues that a just society has an obligation
to meet the needs of dependency workers, since “[w]hether or not it is desirable to be a
relational, giving self, . . . the moral requirements of dependency work . . . make such a
self indispensable” (1999: 51).

Anti-Individualism in Philosophy of Mind

Traditional philosophy of mind has presupposed an individualistic view of the self.
As Naomi Scheman defines it, individualism is “the assumption that my pain, anger,
beliefs, intuitions, and so on are particular, (in theory) identifiable states that I am in,
which enter as particulars into causal relationships” (Scheman, 1983: 226). Scheman
argues that individualism in philosophy of mind has been almost universally accepted
because apparently it: (1) is demanded by physicalism; (2) follows from our assumed
privileged access to our own inner states; and (3) is presupposed by liberal political
ideology. In addition, she argues, it accords with male socialization and a male view of
the self that is taken to be the norm.
On Scheman’s alternative, relational, account of the mind, mental states, or the objects
of psychology, are “objects only with respect to socially embodied norms” (1983: 228).
As a result, “we are responsible for the meaning of each other’s inner lives” (1983: 241).
On this view, referred to as “semantic externalism,” meanings aren’t in the head;
they are not self-contained internal thoughts that get expressed to others via speech.
The meanings of words are a function of their use by linguistic communities. So the
contents of our thoughts are not in our heads, not introspectible, and not “up to us.”
Scheman argues that not only are meanings not in the head, but neither are such psy-
chological states as emotions.
Although Scheman draws primarily on the semantic externalism of Tyler Burge
(1979) and Hilary Putnam (1975) and a Wittgenstinian use theory of meaning in argu-
ing against individualism in philosophy of mind, she also considers individualism to
be “a piece of ideology,” one “connected with particular features of the psychosexual
development of males mothered by women in a patriarchal society, with the develop-
ment of the ego and of ego-boundaries” (Scheman 1983: 226).
Scheman’s view that such individualism is a piece of patriarchal ideology has its
feminist critics. For example, Louise Antony (1995a; 1995b) argues that “[p]sychologi-
cal individualism is perfectly compatible with and may even be required by feminist
political theory” (1995a: 157). Scheman’s responses to Antony’s objections and those
of other critics can be found in 1996a and 1996b.

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It is important to note that many of us live, simultaneously, in different linguistic

communities and cultural contexts, which, on a relational view of the self, has implica-
tions for who we are. For, as María Lugones writes, “[a]s outsiders to the mainstream,
women of color in the US practice ‘world’-travelling, mostly out of necessity” (1987: 3),
having different attributes in different “worlds.” On her view, one can inhabit more than
one world at a time and, thus, can have and not have an attribute (e.g., playfulness)
simultaneously. “In describing my sense of a ‘world,’” Lugones writes, “I [am] offering
something that is true to experience even if it is ontologically problematic,” adding that
“any account of identity that could not be true to the experience of outsiders to the
mainstream would be faulty even if ontologically unproblematic” (1987: 11).
Another issue in philosophy of mind on which the idea of a relational self bears
is that of extended cognition. Clark and Chalmers (1988) have argued for a kind of
“active externalism” that goes beyond semantic externalism. On this view, the mind—
the locus of cognition—extends beyond an individual’s physical boundaries and can
include artifacts such as notebooks and iPhones provided certain conditions are met
(Clark 2008). As James Lindemann Nelson notes, “externalism allows, at least in prin-
ciple, that our minds may extend not only into artifacts, but into other people as well”
(2010: 235). Clark, Chalmers, and Nelson focus on extended cognition and the ques-
tion of what beliefs a person can correctly be said to have, but, in addition, a person’s
emotions and other mental states can be seen to consist, at least in part, in relations to
other persons. Sustained by such relations, even someone with advanced Alzheimer’s
disease can be “held” in personhood by those who know and care for her, in spite of
severe mental decline (Lindemann 2010, 2014; Nelson 2010).

Personal Identity and Lived Experience

Philosophers—including those writing about something as personal as the self—have
tended to agree with Bertrand Russell that

the free intellect will value more the abstract and universal knowledge into
which the accidents of private history do not enter, than the knowledge
brought by the senses, and dependent, as such knowledge must be, upon an
exclusive and personal point of view and a body whose sense-organs distort as
much as they reveal.
(1969: 160)

In contrast, feminist proponents of relational accounts of the self (including Baier

1985 and Held 1993) agree with critical race theorists, such as Charles Lawrence,
Mari Matsuda, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Crenshaw (1993) that we all theorize
from a positioned perspective—and many of us from multiple perspectives—and that
it is important to acknowledge one’s own background and experiences. This focus
on the actual lives of real people has not only expanded the subject matter consid-
ered appropriate for philosophical analysis, but also introduced new methods such as
consciousness-raising and the use of first-person narratives into philosophy. As
Matsuda writes, “I can take on the cloak of the detached universal, but it is an uncom-
fortable garment. It is not me, and I do not do my best work wearing it” (1996: 14).
Traditional philosophical discussions of personal identity have tended to rely
on either abstract reasoning about the nature of the self or, alternatively, thought

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experiments to test our intuitions about the criterion or criteria for whether a person
continues to exist over time. As I note in “Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory, and
Personal Identity,”

Philosophers writing about the self, at least since Locke, have puzzled over
such question as whether persons can survive the loss or exchange of their
minds, brains, consciousness, memories, characters, and/or bodies. In recent
years, increasingly gruesome and high-tech thought experiments involving
fusion, fission, freezing, dissolution, reconstitution, and/or teletransportation
of an individual have been devised to test our intuitions about who, if anyone,
survives which permutations.
(Brison, 1997: 13)

Kathleen Wilkes (1988) was, until recently, one of the few to argue that students
of personal identity should eschew thought experiments and, instead, pay attention
to scientific research on real people who undergo sometimes stranger-than-fiction
transformations of the self. She takes a third-person approach to the self, arguing that
we can gain insights into what it is to have a self by studying scientific findings. In
contrast, I argue that paying attention to first-person narratives is essential for under-
standing the self. I pay particular attention to first-person narratives of survivors of
trauma who frequently remark that they are not the same people they were before
they were traumatized.
Of course, some traditional white male philosophers have purported to use first-person
narratives—as did Descartes in his Meditations. His argument for his own existence as
a thinking thing only works when stated in the first person. But, for Descartes, the I
was fungible. Any I would do, because, qua thinking thing engaged in rational thought,
each I was the same as every other.
What’s different about the I in genuine first-person narratives in philosophy is that it
is embodied, situated in multiple, ever-shifting contexts, so it can’t speak for everyone.
However, politically significant first person narratives (of discrimination, of oppression,
of trauma) involve an I speaking as a member of a larger, politically significant group.
What led me to a relational view of the self was the experience of having a self
shattered by being degraded by just one other person (in a context facilitating and
perpetuating that degradation) and then rebuilt only with the help of other persons. In
July of 1990, a man assaulted me while I was on a morning walk by myself on a country
road in the south of France. He jumped me from behind, threw me into the underbrush,
beat me, raped me, strangled me into unconsciousness several times, and then dragged
me into a ravine, hit me on the head with a rock, and left me for dead (Brison, 2002).
For a while, it seemed to me that I had failed to survive the assault—that I had
somehow managed to outlive myself. This didn’t make any sense, but, then, at the time,
nothing did. When, a few months after the assault, I sat down at my computer to write
about it for the first time, all I could come up with was a list of paradoxes.

Things had stopped making sense. I thought it was quite possible that I was
brain-damaged as a result of the head injuries I had sustained. Or perhaps the
heightened lucidity I had experienced during the assault remained, giving me a
clearer, although profoundly disorienting, picture of the world.
(Brison 2002: ix)

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I wanted—needed—to know what a self was in order to figure out what had happened to
my old one and whether I could get a new one. I was pretty clear that the old one was in
pieces and could not be put back together again. In reading others’ first-person accounts
of trauma I realized I wasn’t alone in feeling this. At the time, there were very few
first-person narratives of rape, but there was a whole genre of testimonies by Holocaust
survivors as well as third-person narratives by psychotherapists who treated them and
other trauma survivors. I came to learn that survivors of trauma frequently remark that
they are not the same people they were before they were traumatized.
Philosophers who have written about the self (with some notable exceptions, includ-
ing Hume and Nietzsche) have tended to be confident that they had selves and to feel
pretty good about them—good enough, anyway, that their chief concern was “how
long can this good thing last?” Plato, in the Phaedo, portrays Socrates as taking the
hemlock with equanimity, looking forward to his soul’s continued existence after his
self-administered execution. Descartes comforted himself with the thought that he was,
essentially, a thinking thing who would survive the death of his body. More contempo-
rary philosophers writing about the self have wanted to know whether the person one
currently clearly is (and is obviously quite attached to) would continue to exist through
transformations of various kinds.
My problem was quite the opposite: It seemed I had lost my self and not only was I
not sure how to put it back together again or acquire a new one, I wasn’t always entirely
sure that carrying on—with a new or revamped self—would be a desirable or worth-
while endeavor. It was only after I lost my self that I felt a need to come up with a theory
of the self. We so often learn about how things work by studying what happens when
they break down, and there’s nothing like having a self shattered to make you wonder
just what it was you once had.
Following Judith Herman (1992) and others, I defined a traumatic event as one in
which a person feels utterly helpless in the face of a force that is perceived to be life-
threatening. The immediate psychological responses to such trauma include terror,
loss of control, and intense fear of annihilation. Long-term effects include the physi-
ological responses of hypervigilance, heightened startle response, sleep disorders, and
the more psychological, yet still involuntary, responses of depression, inability to
concentrate, lack of interest in activities that used to give life meaning, and a sense
of a foreshortened future. When the trauma is of human origin and is intentionally
inflicted, the kind I discussed in Aftermath, it not only shatters one’s fundamental
assumptions about the world and one’s safety in it, but also severs sustaining connec-
tions between the self and the rest of humanity. Victims of human-inflicted trauma
are reduced to mere objects by their tormenters: their subjectivity is rendered useless
and viewed as worthless. As Herman observes, “The traumatic event thus destroys
the belief that one can be oneself in relation to others” (1992: 53). Without this
belief one can no longer be oneself even to oneself, since the self exists fundamentally
in relation to others.
I argued that the undoing of a self in trauma—and the remaking of a self in trauma’s
aftermath—reveals the fundamentally relational and embodied nature of the self. As
Catriona Mackenzie puts it “[t]o be a person is to be a temporally extended embodied
subject whose identity is constituted in and through one’s lived bodily engagement with
the world and with others” (2009: 119). To see this, we need to adopt a first-person per-
spective on embodiment; our experienced bodies are not just biological entities, things

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we have or are attached to. Our lived bodies are not just objects for our examination;
they are saturated with meaning and they are the grounds and limits of our agency.
Trauma survivors who claim not to be the same persons they once were don’t typi-
cally lose their memories of their pasts. What they lose is a past that makes sufficient
sense cognitively and is bearable enough emotionally to provide a basis for projecting
themselves into the future. And yet they often eventually find ways to reconstruct
themselves and carry on with reconfigured lives. Working through, or re-mastering,
traumatic memory (in the case of human-inflicted trauma, anyway), I’ve argued,
involves a shift from being the object or medium of someone else’s (the perpetrator’s)
speech (or other expressive behavior) to being the subject of one’s own. The act of
bearing witness to the trauma can help to facilitate this shift, not only by reintegrating
the survivor into a community, re-establishing connections essential to selfhood, but
also by transforming traumatic memory into a narrative that can then be worked into
the survivor’s sense of self and view of the world.
Being able to carry on after a self-shattering event is facilitated by our being in the
right sorts of relations to others. For, as Cheshire Calhoun notes,

[o]ur having a reason to go on at all—our being “motivationally rooted” in our

lives in such a way that we are propelled toward the future—may depend on
our being able to sustain deep attachments [among other things].
(2008: 197)

This is why traditional thought experiments analyzed by personal identity theorists

may make no sense to those holding a relational view of the self. For what would be
there, after arriving, via teletransportation in a distant galaxy? Even if one’s intuition
is that one would be numerically the same individual, why would one care about that
person or look forward to being that person if none of the people one cared about
would also be there?

Social Construction and Narrative Self-Constitution

Whereas traditional philosophical discussions of personal identity have focused on
what Marya Schechtman (1996) calls the reidentification question—what makes a
person numerically the same over time?—Schechtman and others have argued that
the account of the self that can helpfully address our ethical and other practical con-
cerns is one that answers the question “Who am I?” One such account, developed by
Shechtman and others (Brison 1997; Butler 2003; Cavarero 2000), is that the self is a
kind of narrative.
Although calling the self a narrative—or noting that it is constituted by some sort
of narrative structure—might seem to suggest that individuals construct themselves by
themselves in the solitary seclusion of a Cartesian dreamer, this is far from the case.
If the self is a narrative, it is made up of social constructs and relations, out of words
(whose meanings aren’t in the head), tropes, schemas, and narrative trajectories. It is
“discursively constructed,” to use Sally Haslanger’s terminology, which means that “it
is (to a significant extent) the way it is because of what is attributed to it or how it is
classified” (2012: 123). Although Haslanger’s focus is on the discursive construction
of social kinds (e.g., gender and race), her account is also relevant to our discussion

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of relational selves. For, as she notes, “[e]ach of us is socially constructed in this sense
because we are (to a significant extent) the individuals we are today as a result of what
has been attributed (and self-attributed) to us.” She adds, however, that

to say an entity is “discursively constructed” is not to say that language or dis-

course brings a material object into existence de novo. Rather something in
existence comes to have—partly as a result of having been categorized in a cer-
tain way—a set of features that qualify it as a member of a certain kind or sort.
(Haslanger 2012: 123; see also Chapter 13 in this volume)

To say that selves are socially constructed, however, is not to say that they don’t exist.
“The socially interconnected nature of human community, however, does not give a
sufficient reason for denying the existence of selves,” as Marilyn Friedman notes, for
“[i]n the midst of social interconnection stands the curious character of embodiment”
(2003: 32). Even though I am embodied in a particular body, however, I am a self by
virtue of my relations to others—and I am the particular self I am by virtue of my
relations to particular persons.
On my account, a self is an embodied, socially constructed narrative. On this view,
selves are relational in Baier’s sense of “second persons,” able to be brought into exist-
ence as persons only through interactions with a care provider. In addition, others pro-
vide the self-in-formation with instruction in language and social norms and skills.
Persons do not arise ex nihilo and cannot be generated from human beings—that is,
biological entities—in isolation. Given that personhood is a social/legal/moral con-
struct, this may be obvious.
I argue for the less obvious view that other persons also constitute me as who I
am; that is, they participate in the ongoing process of my self-constitution. By “self-
constitution,” I mean, not the constitution of a self all by itself, but rather the process
by which a self is constituted, however that happens. On my view, other selves are
essential to this process. More specifically, what others do with words plays a crucial
role in my self-constitution.
For example, how others use the term “woman” (and employ the concept woman)
affects my self-constitution as a woman. If the concept of a woman is, among other
things, the concept of someone who is rapeable with impunity, this is an inescapable
part of my self-definition, whether I like it or not. I would go so far as to say that even
those aspects of others’ definition of “woman” of which I am not aware can affect who I
am. For to the extent that we say (or conceive) anything about ourselves, we are using
language to categorize ourselves as members of groups and as bearers of properties.
What I am arguing is that the way we are constructed is both constrained and
facilitated by how others use the words (and images) we use to constitute ourselves.
For example, it wasn’t possible to constitute oneself as a homosexual before the
term “homosexuality”—and the category it denoted—came into existence. And
even the introductions of new labels that don’t apply to us can change our identities.
The existence of individuals who identify as transgender men and women changes
the identity of cisgender men and women by giving rise to a new, cisgender identity
(Shotwell and Sangrey 2009).
There are significant constraints on narrative self-construction, and self-reconstruction,
and these have been discussed in (among other places) Schechtman (1996) and

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Nelson (2001). The main obstacle to self-reconstruction after trauma that I focused
on in Aftermath was the difficulty of re-establishing bonds of trust with others. But
now it is clearer to me that even when one is able to re-establish trust with the help
of empathic listeners, there are significant obstacles to overcome, namely the facticity
of one’s past—the brute facts about what happened, neurological constraints and lin-
guistic constraints, including the fact that there is only a limited stock of tropes and
metaphors and other narratives available with which to make sense of one’s experi-
ence and the fact that the meanings of the words one uses in composing a narrative
are socially constructed.
The first two obstacles to self-reconstruction, not only after a discrete traumatic
event, but also in the face of ongoing oppression—the givenness of one’s past and of
one’s neurochemistry—might seem to pose the most extreme, unyielding constraints
on the narrative reconstruction of a self. But at least sometimes it is the third—the rep-
resentational constraint imposed by the culturally available means of expression—that
actually presents the most difficult obstacles for a trauma survivor to overcome.
Why might this be so? Strangely enough, to the extent that we are stories we tell
ourselves, we are not in control of our self-definition, because the meanings of the words
with which we construct our self-narratives are not in our heads, whereas, to the extent
that we are our neurochemistry, we are (at least at times and to some extent) in control
of our self-definition, provided we have at least the minimal motivation necessary to
follow a therapeutic regimen of, say, taking medications (or meditating or exercising or
using some other strategy to alter one’s brain chemistry).
But, as noted above, we are not in control of the linguistic means with which we
construct our selves narratively. This is another way in which we are fundamentally
relational beings. How other people use words constrains our self-narratives.

Conclusion
Let me conclude by discussing two of the puzzles that remain for the view that selves are
fundamentally relational. First, how are we to reconcile the view of the self as embodied
with the view that it is socially constructed and embedded in larger structures? How is it
that we are made up of both meanings and molecules (Brison 2002: 77–83)? This is not,
however, a problem peculiar to the relational account of the self. It is nothing less than
the intractable mind-body problem that vexes any account of the self.
Second, how are we to account for freedom in narrative self-constitution if the
self—and the categories that make it up—are social constructs? If our selves are socially
constructed, in ways that are, to a significant extent, out of our control, how do we
account for our (admittedly constrained) ability to choose how to narratively constitute
ourselves? How are we able to resist “oppressive self-concepts” (Khader 2011) and how
can we narratively repair “damaged identities” (Nelson 2001)?
Nelson (2001) discusses the means by which what she calls “counterstories” can
refigure personal identities. And although Serene Khader observes that “oppression
marks people as particular types of beings; it shapes people’s senses of who they are,”
she notes that even severely oppressed people are often able to respond with “inter-
nal resistance to oppressive self-concepts” (2011: 122). Even in oppressive socie-
ties, Khader argues, opportunities for cultivating positive self-images exist in what
she calls “resistant social spaces” (2011: 124). This does not relieve others of the

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responsibility to eradicate oppression. On the contrary, it is, as Scheman urges, up to

all of us to pay attention to “how we make each other up, especially across lines of
privilege,” and to “how we create the possibilities of meaningfulness in each other’s
lives” (1996a: 234).

Further Reading
Alcoff, Linda (2006) Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, New York: Oxford University Press.
Atkins, Kim and Mackenzie, Catriona (Eds.) (2008) Practical Identity and Narrative Agency, New York:
Routledge.
Mackenzie, Catriona and Stoljar, Natalie (Eds.) (2000) Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Agency
and the Social Self, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Meyers, Diana T. (Ed.) (1997) Feminists Rethink the Self, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Willett, Cynthia, Anderson, Ellie, and Meyers, Diana (2015) “Feminist Perspectives on the Self,” The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (Ed.) [online]. Available from:
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/feminism-self/.

Related Topics
The sex/gender distinction and the social construction or reality (Chapter 13); embod-
iment and feminist philosophy (Chapter 15); materiality: sex, gender, and what lies
beneath (Chapter 16); feminism and borderlands identities (Chapter 17); psychoanaly-
sis, subjectivity, and feminism (Chapter 19); epistemic injustice, ignorance, and trans
experience (Chapter 22); speech and silencing (Chapter 23); through the looking glass:
trans theory meets feminist philosophy (Chapter 32); feminist conceptions of autonomy
(Chapter 41); feminist ethics of care (Chapter 43).

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 19
PSYCHOANALYSIS,
SUBJECTIVITY, AND
FEMINISM
Kelly Oliver

Introduction
In this chapter I will argue that traditional psychoanalytic theory has been instructive
in formulating a developmental theory of subjectivity—that is, of our senses of ourselves
as selves with agency—but it has neglected the social context of subjects and their sub-
ject positions—that is their historical and social positions in their culture—which is
sometimes off-putting to feminist theorists. Nonetheless, there are various reasons why
psychoanalysis can be extremely useful to feminists who are interested in subjectivity
and in the relationships of social, historical, and political forces to subject formation.
For at least the last twenty years feminist thinkers such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva,
Teresa Brennan, Jane Gallop, Nancy Chodorow, Judith Butler, and Cynthia Willett—
among others—have grappled with Freudian psychoanalysis in an attempt to bring its
central insights into contemporary feminist contexts.
Certainly subjects, subjectivity, and agency only ever exist in political and social
contexts that affect them in their constitution. One’s social position and history pro-
foundly influence one’s very sense of oneself as an active agent in the world. Yet the
contradictions and inconsistencies in historical and social circumstances guarantee
that we are never completely determined by our subject position or our social context.
It is possible to develop a sense of agency in spite of or in resistance to an oppressive
social situation. When the social context provides positive images—figurative and
otherwise—with which one can identify, then one’s sense of agency and of oneself as a
subject are supported within the social sphere. But when the only available images are
demeaning, then it can be difficult to sustain a sense of one’s active agency and self-
worth. Ultimately, our experience of ourselves as subjects is maintained in the tension
between our subject positions and our subjectivity.

Subjectivity and Subject Positions

Although Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, acknowledges the effect of
social conditions on the psyche, he and his followers rarely consider how those social
 BODY, MIND, AND THE WORLD

conditions become the conditions of possibility for psychic life and subject formation
outside of the family drama. Like Freud, some contemporary psychoanalytic theorists,
including object relations theorists, consider the social to be founded on the relationship
between the infant and its caregiver; the social, then, is defined as a relation between two
people. But there is another social dimension to consider—the larger socio-historical
context and political economy within which that relationship between two develops.
Although “object relations” theorists, especially feminists, do consider the ways in
which patriarchal culture affects the development of gendered subjects, too often they
reduce the psychic dimension to sociological facts about the gender of care-takers and
simple imitation of gender roles. For example, this is true of Nancy Chodorow’s early
work in The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) in which, ultimately, she proposes that
patriarchal gender roles are perpetuated through women mothering and men being
breadwinners. Likewise Carol Gilligan’s groundbreaking early work began what is
called “care ethics,” now so prominent in feminist debates over ethics. Gilligan’s thesis
that men and women are socialized differently, and therefore develop different moral
attitudes, is heavily reliant—like Chodorow’s theory—on the fact that most caregivers
are women (Gilligan 1982). While these theorists consider subject position, then, they
give simplified accounts of subjectivity. It is important to give a more rich and nuanced
account of both subject position and subjectivity. Psychoanalysis combined with social
theory can help us to do that.
The distinction between subjectivity and subject position is, as I mentioned above,
the difference between one’s sense of oneself as a self with agency and one’s historical
and social position in one’s culture. Subject positions, although mobile, are constituted
in our social interactions, and our positions within cultures and contexts; history and
circumstance govern them. Subject positions are our relations to the finite world of
human history and relations—the realm of politics. Subjectivity, on the other hand,
is experienced as our sense of agency and responsiveness, which is constituted in the
encounter with otherness. And although subjectivity is logically prior to any possible
subject position, in our experience they are always profoundly interconnected. This
is why our experience of our own subjectivity is the result of the productive tension
between finite subject position and the infinite response-ability of the structure of
subjectivity itself.
By subjectivity, then, I mean one’s sense of oneself as an “I,” as an agent. By subject
position I mean one’s position in society and history as developed through various social
relationships. The structure of subjectivity is the structure that makes taking oneself
to be an agent (or a self) possible. This structure is a witnessing structure because it is
founded on the possibility of address and response; it is a fundamentally dialogic struc-
ture (in the broadest sense of the term “dialogic”). Subject position, on the other hand,
is the particular sense of one’s kind of agency, so to speak, that comes through one’s
social position and historical context. While distinct, subject position and subjectivity
are also intimately related. For example, if you are a black woman within a racist and
sexist culture, then your subject position as oppressed could undermine your subjectiv-
ity, your sense of yourself as an agent. If you are a white man within a racist and sexist
culture, then your subject position as privileged could shore up your subjectivity and
promote your sense of yourself as an agent. Of course, usually social situations are not so
black and white, but rather gray. And, among other things, psychoanalysis teaches us
that identity, whatever the situation, is always ambiguous and often ambivalent.

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The subject is thus a dynamic yet stable structure, which results from the interaction
between two sets of forces: finitude, being, and history (subject position) at the one
pole and infinity, meaning, and historicity (subjectivity) at the other. Architects
and engineers have worked with the principle of tension-loaded structures that use
the tension as support. A classic example is the Brooklyn Bridge. We could say that
the subject is a tension-loaded structure, but its flexibility makes it more like what
architects call a tensile structure. The stability of tensile structures is the result of
opposing forces pulling in two directions, through which a membrane’s double curva-
ture receives its structure and resistance. Subjectivity is analogous to the structure and
resistance that result from a membrane or skin being stretched in two directions and
held together by tension. The two axes of force whose tension supports the subject are
subject position and subjectivity.
One’s sense of oneself as a subject with agency is profoundly affected by one’s social
position. Indeed, we cannot separate subjectivity from subject position; any theory of
subjectivity—whether it is psychoanalytic, phenomenological, the result of critical
theory, or post-structuralist, etc.—must consider subject position. While Freudian psy-
choanalytic theory has addressed itself to questions of subjectivity and subject formation,
traditionally it has done so without considering subject position, or more significantly
the impact of subject position on subject formation. Even some recent applications of
psychoanalysis to the social context of subject formation have not reformulated the
very concepts of psychoanalysis such that they account for, or explain, how subjects
form within particular kinds of social contexts. Instead they apply psychoanalytic con-
cepts in order to diagnose certain kinds of psychic or social formations (see, e.g., Lane
1998). We need more than an application of psychoanalytic concepts to social institu-
tions or psychic formations in order to explain the effects of oppression on the psyche.
To explain why so many people suffer at the core of their subjectivity and in their
concomitant sense of agency when they are “abjected,” excluded, or oppressed by main-
stream culture, we need a psychoanalytic social theory that reformulates psychoanalytic
concepts as social concepts. We need a psychoanalytic social theory that is based on
social concepts of subject formation, and that considers how subjectivity is formed and
deformed within particular types of social contexts.
Theories that do not consider subject position and the role of social conditions in
subjectivity and subject formation not only cover over differential power, but also
cover over the differential subjectivities that are produced within those power rela-
tions. Without considering subject position, we assume that all subjects are alike,
we level differences, or—like traditional psychoanalysis—we develop a norma-
tive notion of subject-formation based on a particular group—traditionally, white
European men. Instead, a psychoanalytic theory of oppression must consider the role
of subject position in subject formation, which is to say the relationships between
subject position and subjectivity.
Most psychoanalytic models of subjectivity and subject formation, including both
ego psychology and object relations theories, suppose that there is a primary struggle
between the individual and the social or others that is constitutive of subjectivity.
For example, in The Bonds of Love (1988), Jessica Benjamin suggests that the infant
develops its individuality and autonomy in a Hegelian master–slave type dialectic with
its mother; Axel Honneth (1996), following Benjamin, also imagines relations with
others as a constant struggle for recognition; and Judith Butler (1997) describes all

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subject formation as subjugation. These theorists propose that subjectivity develops

through alienation from and/or subjection to the social realm. Likewise most nineteenth-
and twentieth-century psychoanalytic theory and continental philosophy (includ-
ing existentialism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and critical theory) are based
on, or presuppose, an antagonistic relationship between self and other, between sub-
ject and object, between individual and society. Contemporary French philosophy
(Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray)
has been an attempt to decenter the subject and move away from a subject-centered
philosophy toward a relational or other-centered philosophy. These Post-Hegelian
theorists—Freudians and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorists (including object
relations theorists), phenomenologists, and critical theorists—recognize the intersub-
jectivity of subjectivity, but they have not taken the relationality of subjectivity to its
limit. To do so would mean going beyond intersubjectivity and admitting that there is
no subject or individual to engage in a relationship with another subject—to engage in
an intersubjective relationship—prior to relationality itself. (For an excellent analysis
of how and why primary relationships are not intersubjective, see Willett 1995.)
Relationality is primary. This means that subjectivity is not the result of one auton-
omous subject in relation with another, or two self-consciousnesses encountering
each other and looking for mutual recognition—this can only come later, after the
foundation of subjectivity has been established, if only provisionally. Representation,
language, and other non-linguistic visceral and more bodily forms of communication
and meaning always mediate this relationality—it is always mediated by our attempts to
respond. Responsivity is thus both the prerequisite for subjectivity and one of its defini-
tive features. Subjectivity is constituted through response, responsiveness or response-
ability and not the other way around (see Oliver 2001). We do not respond because
we are subjects; rather, responsiveness and relationality make subjectivity and psychic
life possible in the first place. In this sense, response-ability precedes and constitutes
subjectivity, which is why the structure of subjectivity is fundamentally ethical. We are
by virtue of our ability to respond to others, and therefore we have a primary obligation
to our founding possibility, response-ability itself. We have a responsibility to open up
rather than close off the possibility of response, both from others and ourselves.

The Unconscious, Sublimation, and Meaning

If Freud normalizes a white male European subject, and we risk perpetuating this
normalization by using his concepts without transforming them, then why turn to
psychoanalytic theory at all to discuss gender and the effects of sexism on the psyche?
Even if we could do away with the prejudice of Freud’s nineteenth-century theories
and their twentieth-century versions, psychoanalysis still deals with individuals at
odds with the social, so what can feminism gain from turning to psychoanalysis? There
are at least two primary facets of psychoanalysis that make it crucial for social theory
in general, and feminist theory in particular: the centrality of the notion of the uncon-
scious and the importance of sublimation as an alternative to repression. Both of these
facets come to bear in important ways on the fact that all of our relationships are medi-
ated by meaning—that we are beings who mean. As beings that mean, our experiences
are both bodily and mental. Unconscious drive force or energy operates between soma
(body) and psyche. We could say that our being is brought into the realm of meaning
through unconscious drive energies and their affective representations.

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The psychoanalytic concept most appropriate to a discussion of unconscious drive

energy making its way into the realm of meaning is sublimation. Although this notion
remains underdeveloped in Freud’s writings (Freud supposedly burned his only paper
on sublimation thus subjecting it to literal sublimation by fire), and it has been used
without much further development since, it is central to social theory, especially to a
social theory of oppression and sexism. We need a theory that explains how we articu-
late or otherwise express our bodies, experiences, and affects, all of which are fluid
and energetic, in some form of meaningful signification so that we can communicate
with others. Oppression and sexism undermine the ability to sublimate by withholding
or foreclosing the possibility of articulating and thereby discharging bodily drives and
affects. The bodies and affects of those marginalized have already been excluded as
“abject” from the realm of proper society.
The colonization of psychic space operates by undermining the ability to sublimate.
This is why Freud concludes that women are less able to sublimate than men. But if
women are less able to sublimate than men it is not because of their anatomy, psychol-
ogy, or individual pathologies, but rather because of social repression and the lack of
social support required for sublimation. Sublimation is the hallmark of subjectivity,
such that an impaired ability to sublimate undermines agency and ultimately leads to
depression and melancholy—which, it could be argued, is why within patriarchal cul-
tures women are more likely to be diagnosed as depressed or melancholy than men. The
pathologization of women’s depression covers over the social and institutional causes
for that symptomology. Patriarchal culture continues to devalue and debase women and
girls in ways that colonize psychic space by undermining the possibility of sublimation
and meaning-making.
Sublimation is necessary for beings to enter the realm of meaning. The first acts of
meaning become available through the sublimation of bodily impulses into forms of
communication. Moreover, sublimation allows us to connect and communicate with
others by making our bodies and experiences meaningful; we become beings who mean
by sublimating our bodily drives and affects. Sublimation, then, is necessary for both
subjectivity (or individuality) and community (or sociality). Sublimation is the lynch-
pin of a psychoanalytic social theory, for sublimation makes idealization possible. And
without idealization we can neither conceptualize our experience nor set goals or ideals
for ourselves. Without the ability to idealize, we cannot imagine our situation other-
wise, which is to say, without idealization we cannot resist domination. Sublimation
and idealization are necessary not only for psychic life but also for transformative and
restorative resistance to racist oppression. Sublimation and idealization are the corner-
stones of our mental life, yet they have their source in bodies, bodies interacting with
each other. Sublimation is possible through the social relationality of bodies. But in
an oppressive culture that abjects, excludes, or marginalizes certain groups, or types, of
people by demeaning them, sublimation and idealization can become the privilege of
dominant groups. Psychoanalytic notions of sublimation and idealization thus need to
be transformed into social concepts.
Subjectivity develops through a process of sublimation, of elevating bodily drives
and their affective representations to a new level of meaning and signification.
Sublimation is the ongoing process of subjectivity and signification; it is the basis for
psychic life insofar as we are beings who mean. In addition, sublimation always and
only takes place in relation to others and the Other, which is the meaning into which
each individual is born. Sublimation in the constitution of subjectivity is analogous to

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sublimation in chemistry, which is defined as a chemical action or process of subliming

or converting a solid substance by means of heat into a vapor, which resolidifies upon
cooling. The process of sublimation transforms bodily drives and affects that seem
solid and intractable into a dynamic vapor, which liberates the drives and affects from
repression (specifically the repression inherent in oppression) and discharges them
into signifying systems, which re-solidify them. This process continues from birth
to death without end. Because we can never fully “speak our bodies” or our experi-
ences, we continue to try. We continue to speak and attempt communication precisely
because we never succeed, which is not to say that we completely fail. On the contrary,
we not only fill our own lives with meaning through sublimation but also make com-
munication with others possible, if always tenuous. The process must continue because
the bodily drives and affects are fluid and like vapors dynamic and volatile; therefore
they cannot be fixed or re-solidified in signification without a remainder or excess. But
this excess is not an alienating lack but is precisely what motivates us to continue to
commune. This excess is the unconscious itself, which can never be fully brought to
consciousness—that is to say, the singularity of each individual.
Without accounting for the unconscious processes inherent in sublimation and
thereby necessary to become beings that mean, we risk falling into the all too popular
discourse of autonomous self-governed individuals, which covers over the way in which
autonomy, self-governance, and individuality were formed. This discourse erases the
unconscious processes by virtue of which we become subjects with a sense of agency.
We are not born with feelings of autonomy and self-governance. Rather, these are the
effects of unconscious processes of sublimation and idealization. Autonomy, sovereignty
and individuality are effects—by-products if you will—and not causes of becoming a
being who means, of becoming subjectivity.
If we analyze the social merely in terms of bodies and behaviors without accounting
for the unconscious, we cannot fully explain the contradictory effects of oppression.
Indeed, in order to explain the bodies and the behaviors of those oppressed, not to
mention their oppressors, we need to account for the unconscious effects of oppres-
sion. We need to understand how oppression causes depression, shame, and anger.
But only a theory that incorporates an account of the unconscious can explain the
dynamic operations of the affects of oppression. In order to understand the relationship
between oppression or social context and affect, we need to postulate the existence
of the unconscious. Without this postulation, we become complicit with those who
would blame the victim, so to speak, for her own negative affects. Even if sociological
or psychological studies demonstrate a higher incidence of depression, shame, or anger
in particular groups, this information cannot be interpreted outside of social context
and without consideration of subject position and subject formation. Certainly, affec-
tive life is caught up in one’s sense of oneself as a subject and an agent. And oppression
and the affects of oppression undermine subjectivity and agency such that even those
very affects become signs of inferiority or weakness rather than symptoms of oppression.
In other words, it is only by postulating the unconscious that we can explain why
many people who are in some way excluded, oppressed, or marginalized at some level
blame themselves for their condition. In general, our culture blames individuals
rather than social institutions for negative “personality traits” and “flaws.” The psy-
choanalytic notion of the super-ego is useful in diagnosing how and why those who
are marginalized internalize the very values that abject and oppress them. Without
the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious, we could not adequately explain the

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conflicting, and especially the self-destructive, desires of those marginalized. Even the
Marxist notion of “false consciousness” implies not only that we are not transparent
to ourselves, but also that there are parts of our mental lives that we repress or cannot
access without intervention.
There is a complicated relationship between cultural values and an individual’s
sense of herself as an agent; this relationship goes beyond the internalization of abject
images. The internalization of abject images in turn results in ambivalence towards
one’s own personal and group identity. It also results in ambivalence at the level
of one’s desires. This is to say, oppression and sexism can lead women and girls to
embrace patriarchal traditions and values even as those very values demean them. For
example, even some feminists have embraced the notion that women are more caring
than men, and that women’s nurturing is definitive of women’s value. While there
is no denying that caring and nurturing are essential values for human existence, it
is also true that caring and nurturing are not essential to, or necessarily biologically
determined in, women and girls.
Some feminists have argued that women bear the affective or emotional burdens
for men in an unequal affective division of labor. As Sandra Bartky (1990) puts it,
women feed egos and tend emotional wounds. Like Bartky, Teresa Brennan (1992)
describes this emotional labor as feeding the masculine ego and self-esteem by direct-
ing attention toward it and away from oneself. And, Gayatri Spivak (1999) claims, the
civilizing mission rests on the foreclosure of affects, which are then projected onto the
oppressed, who are expected to carry the affective burden for dominant culture. This
denial of unwanted affects is not so much a projection as a transfer onto, or injection
of, affects into those who are marginalized within dominant society. Philosophers have
long associated lack of control over emotions with a lack of reason, and lack of reason
with a lack of humanity. Affects are associated with the irrational and barbaric, in a
complicated movement through which they are transferred onto the abjected other
and at once become signs or symptoms of that abjection. They are further disavowed by
the foreclosure of their articulation by those who are forced to carry them. Even main-
stream culture’s rage over difference—which should be met with anger by those whose
difference is abjected—is transferred to those who are marginalized, who are forced to
carry it. Their resistance, then, is seen as a symptom of their irrational monstrous rage,
while the domination, oppression, and abuse against which that resistance was directed
(perhaps misdirected) are normalized and naturalized as rational self-defenses against
monstrous evil or disease in order to maintain proper order.
In terms of psychoanalytic theory, those who are marginalized within culture are
subject to and interiorize a cruel and punishing super-ego, which excludes them as
abject. The super-ego of dominant culture judges them inferior and defective. This
harsh super-ego maintains the good upon which dominant values rest by projecting its
opposite onto those marginalized and excluded; they become evil. They are expected
to carry the burden of evil, sickness, weakness, and dejection for the entire culture.
They become the scapegoats of the dominant super-ego. But this super-ego and its good
are not only self-contradictory but also self-destructive, and therefore necessarily leave
open the possibility of resistance.
Ironically, those who are marginalized seek love and recognition from the very cul-
ture that rejects them as inferior. The dominant values with which someone is raised
cannot but affect her; she cannot but internalize those values as valuable, even if they
devalue her. The contradiction of valuing what devalues oneself can lead to feelings

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of inferiority, shame, and depression—or it can lead to reflection, resistance, and

revolt. Anger and aggression redirected outward or sublimated into creative expres-
sion can renew agency and self-esteem. Indeed, feelings of shame and discrimination
can become the basis for alternative communities and alternative modes of expression.
Eve Sedgwick concludes that because shame is constitutive of identity and not just
part of someone’s personality, and because shame is performative, it need not be toxic
but rather can become transformative (2002: 21). Those who are excluded or abjected
because of their race, sex, gender, sexuality, or class have to negotiate shame as an affect
that is constitutive of their identities. This negotiation can lead to depression, but it can
also lead to transformation, humor, solidarity, or political action.
Without social support and positive self-images available in culture girls, women,
and those who are marginalized suffer from the colonization of psychic space, which
can result in the inability to sublimate, and ultimately the inability to find or create
meaning in their lives. Without this accepting social support, psychic space can become
atrophied and impassable. Drives and affects, one’s bodily experience itself, devalued in
culture, become locked in some unnamable crypt, which either makes of the psyche a
prison that confines or immobilizes affects and experience, on the one hand, or flattens
psychic space, on the other. In either case, drives and affects—the very passions that
give meaning to life and love—become cut off from words and representations. One
necessary antidote, if not the cure, for sexism, then, is to have, find, or create the social
space within which to articulate women’s and girls’ drives and affects as positive, lov-
able, and loved, and thereby supporting of psychic space.
On the other hand, lack of social support can lead to feelings of emptiness, incom-
pleteness, and worthlessness; at the extreme, the lack of social support can lead to the
split between words and affects that psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (1989) identifies with
the depressive position. Within patriarchal cultures in which women’s affects are not
valued, it is no surprise that we lack the social space in which these affects can be sub-
limated or discharged. Women’s experience generally, and women’s depression more
specifically, remain subterranean within dominant discourses (for information on rates
of depression in women, see, for example, Peden et al. 2000; Kessler 2003; and Noble
2005). Therefore the depressed woman has given up on finding the words to discharge
or manifest her affects. The silence, especially women’s silence, which so often accompa-
nies depression, is a socially proscribed silence and its cause. Some, if not all, of women’s
depression should be diagnosed as social melancholy rather than individual pathol-
ogy, or merely biological chemical imbalance. The structure of psychic space through
which sublimation is possible depends upon the connection between words and affects.
It depends upon a primary identification with the meaning of language, which is to say
the operation of making meaning one’s own through a process of assimilation that allows
nourishment for both the body and for the soul or psyche.
Indeed, making meaning for oneself is the seat of subjectivity and agency; and this is
what oppression attempts to take away from those oppressed. Exclusion operates most
effectively by preventing the assimilation of authority that legitimates the individual
and authorizes her agency. This authorization is a prerequisite for the capacity to subli-
mate, through which an individual makes meaning her own and thereby gains a sense
of belonging to the community. Yet in spite of oppression, empowered subjectivity and
agency are possible for those marginalized within mainstream culture, by virtue of their
own resistance and revolt against oppression. Resistance and revolt reauthorize agency

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and restore the capacity to sublimate and make meaning one’s own. This resistance not
only brings people together to create meaning for themselves but also begins to pro-
vide the social space that is necessary for empowered psychic space. Creating the social
space for resistance to sexism provides the social support that is necessary to reverse
and counteract the process of internalization of oppressive values. As we create free and
open social spaces, we begin to create free and open psychic spaces. Social revolt and
psychic revolt go hand in hand; one is not possible without the other, which is why psy-
choanalysis is crucial for understanding subject formation within patriarchal cultures.

Further Reading
Benjamin, Jessica (1998) Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis, New York:
Routledge.
Brennan, Teresa (1992) The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity, New York: Routledge.
Chodorow, Nancy J. (1989) Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Khanna, Ranjana (2003) Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism, Durham, NC: Duke University
Press Books.
Lacan, Jacques (1982) Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, Jacqueline Rose and Juliet
Mitchell (Eds.), New York: Norton.
Oliver, Kelly (2004) The Colonization of Psychic Space: Toward a Psychoanalytic Theory of Oppression,
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Rose, Jacqueline (2006) Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London: Verso.
Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana (2000) Desiring Whiteness, New York: Routledge.

Related Topics
Embodiment and feminist philosophy (Chapter 15); materiality: sex, gender, and what
lies beneath (Chapter 16); feminism and borderlands identities (Chapter 17); personal
identity and relational selves (Chapter 18); critical race theory, intersectionality, and
feminist philosophy (Chapter 29); feminism and power (Chapter 54).

References
Bartky, Sandra (1990) Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression, New York:
Routledge.
Benjamin, Jessica (1988) The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination, New York:
Pantheon.
Brennan, Teresa (1992) The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity, New York: Routledge.
Butler, Judith (1997) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Chodorow, Nancy J. (1978) The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Gilligan, Carol (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Honneth, Axel (1996) The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Kessler, Ronald C. (2003) “Epidemiology of Women and Depression,” Journal of Affective Disorders 74(1):
5–13.
Kristeva, Julia (1989) Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, New York: Columbia University Press.

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 BODY, MIND, AND THE WORLD

Lane, Christopher (Ed.) (1998) The Psychoanalysis of Race, New York: Columbia University Press.
Noble, Rudolf E. (2005) “Depression in Women,” Metabolism 54(5 Supplement): 49–52.
Oliver, Kelly (2001) Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Peden, Ann, Hall, Lynne, Rayens, Mary Kay, and Beebe, Lora L. (2000) “Reducing Negative Thinking and
Depressive Symptoms in College Women,” Journal of Nursing Scholarship 32(2): 145–151.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2002) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Willett, Cynthia (1995) Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities, New York: Psychology Press.

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 Part III

KNOWLEDGE,
LANGUAGE, AND
SCIENCE
 20
RATIONALITY AND
OBJECTIVITY IN FEMINIST
PHILOSOPHY
Phyllis Rooney

Starting Places
Although the concept of knowledge is usually taken to be the central concept in
epistemology (theory of knowledge), the concepts rationality and objectivity are also very
prominent. These three concepts, along with the concept of truth, have regularly been
understood in terms of each other. “Knowledge” is usually taken to mean “objective
knowledge” or “objective truth,” and attaining knowledge typically requires the proper
exercise of reason or rationality.
Despite such general acknowledgements, philosophers have regularly disagreed about
more precise definitions or characterizations of these concepts. In particular, the history
of Western philosophy reveals a range of conceptions of rationality and objectivity. In
spite of these differences, a particular historical pattern is of special interest to feminist
philosophers. Rationality and objectivity as epistemic (knowledge-related) ideals were
regularly assumed to be exhibited only or primarily by men and, often too, only by
men of “higher” races and classes. This politically problematic history, which regularly
reflected and contributed to systems of injustice, marks an important starting place for
feminist reflections in epistemology and philosophy of science.
The histories of the “gendering” of rationality and objectivity were clearly linked
though not identical. In her influential work, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in
Western Philosophy, Genevieve Lloyd documents “the implicit maleness” of ideals of rea-
son in that history—a maleness that, she argues, “is no superficial linguistic bias . . . [but
is something that] lies deep in our philosophical tradition” (1993 [1984]: xviii). Women
were regularly thought to be less rational than men—a view that still prevails in many
places. Hegel’s claim has a familiar ring in the history of philosophy:

[women] are not made for activities which demand a universal faculty [reason]
such as the more advanced sciences, philosophy, and certain forms of artistic
production. Women may have happy ideas, taste, and elegance, but they cannot
attain to the ideal [of reason].
(quoted in Bell 1983: 269)
 KNOWLEDGE, LANGUAGE, AND SCIENCE

In addition, gender metaphors were often used to portray the rational faculty in humans
as that which requires the exclusion or control of emotion, passion, or instinct which
were metaphorically or symbolically cast as “feminine” (Rooney 1991). So, for example,
the first-century Alexandrian philosopher Philo stated: “So too with the two ingredi-
ents which constitute our life-principle, the rational and the irrational; the rational
which belongs to mind and reason is of the masculine gender, the irrational, the prov-
ince of sense, is of the feminine” (quoted in Lloyd 1993: 27).
The historical association of objectivity with masculinity has played out somewhat
differently, in part because that concept has had a more recent history closely linked
with the development of modern empirical science since the seventeenth century.
Scientific knowledge ideally aims to be objective, the result of careful, unbiased obser-
vations of the world. In their detailed history of the concept, Lorraine Daston and Peter
Galison argue that our familiar understanding of it (“[t]o be objective is to aspire to
knowledge that bears no trace of the knower—knowledge unmarked by prejudice or
skill, fantasy or judgment, wishing or striving”) only emerged in the mid-nineteenth
century (Daston and Galison 2007: 17).
We should note, however, that forerunners of the concept—typically expressed as
requirements about proper scientific method or about the proper stance or demeanor
of the scientist in relation to the objects of study in scientific inquiry—also had clear
gender connotations. Elizabeth Potter observes that prominent seventeenth-century
scientist Robert Boyle (of “Boyle’s Law of Gases”) was quite insistent that only gen-
tlemen of the upper classes had the qualities needed to properly conduct and record
scientific experiments—or even to witness and report them. The men who wrote labo-
ratory reports were to be “sober and modest men” who adopted a plain “masculine
style” of writing without any flowery “feminine” style of eloquence that would be dis-
tracting (Potter 2001: 10–11). In a related vein, Evelyn Fox Keller documents how
Francis Bacon (also a prominent theorist of early modern science) celebrated the birth
of modern science as a “masculine birth,” and metaphorically depicted scientific inquiry
in terms of a “chaste and lawful marriage between [male] Mind and [female] Nature”
(Keller 1985: 33–42).
In sum, conceptions and valuations of both rationality and objectivity regularly
associated both concepts with men, or with “masculine” traits, abilities, or symbols.
Familiar philosophical contrasts or dichotomies (reason versus emotion, objectivity
versus subjectivity, and mind versus body or nature) thus acquired gender associations
that both reflected and reinforced sexist cultural assumptions. In other words, the
association of some capacity, element, or symbol with women or “the feminine” was
deemed sufficient—typically without any argument—to mark that capacity or element
as something that was antithetical to or disruptive of reason, higher intellectual func-
tioning, and proper objective knowledge. Feminist rethinking in epistemology includes
critical reassessments of the role of these gender-inflected dichotomies in philosophi-
cal and in broader cultural understandings of rationality, objectivity, and knowledge.
Gender, however, was not the only social or cultural differentiation that figured into
philosophical associations with epistemic ideals. As Potter notes regarding Boyle’s com-
ments about the “sober and modest men” who would be scientists, these men were to
have a certain class status. Philosophers also regularly associated “savages” or “primitive
people” with inferior intellectual capacities, in statements that often reflected preju-
dices about racial and ethnic differences. Kant, for instance, asserted, “so fundamental

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is the difference between [the black and white] races of man . . . it appears to be as great
in regard to mental capacities as in color” (quoted in Mills 1997: 70). Thus, it would be
a mistake to assume that gender is the only category of social or cultural differentiation
that figures into feminist critiques. It is now more accurate to say that a starting point
for feminist epistemology is not gender per se, but social injustice or, more specifically,
forms of social injustice that were reinforced by historical assessments of intellectual
and epistemic status (Medina 2013). Gender is sometimes a useful category of analysis
(especially when philosophers made gender a notable marker of epistemic status), but
we should also keep in mind that gender is a social division that intersects with race,
class, or other social divisions, and these can mitigate or exacerbate the epistemic fall-
out of gender associations.
There is little doubt that the long-term practical and political impact of these cul-
tural associations with rationality and objectivity has been significant. Those deemed
intellectually inferior were, for centuries, excluded from educational institutions
and other venues of public influence and action. These exclusions have begun to be
addressed only relatively recently. What also needs to be addressed, feminist philoso-
phers argue, is the theoretical impact of these historical associations, that is, their impact
on philosophical theorizing about rationality and objectivity. Following Lloyd’s lead,
many feminist discussions start with a historical focus, with an examination of the role
of problematic cultural associations in the work of particular prominent philosophers.
Feminist work on Descartes provides a helpful illustration of what feminist historical
reassessments involve.
Lloyd notes that Descartes conceived of reason as involving a precise method of
thinking using “rules for the direction of mind,” a method that, with sufficient time
and energy, anyone could master—“even women” (Lloyd 1993: 44). Yet, she contin-
ues, despite his egalitarian intentions, Descartes’ reliance on a mind–body split (with
reason allied with mind, and the body considered a significant source of deception and
illusion) reinforced a distinction that already had a gender history, and “reinforced
already existing distinctions between male and female roles” (Lloyd 1993: 39–50).
Margaret Atherton, on the other hand, argues specifically for the feminist value of
Descartes’ conception. She observes that his view of “universal reason” was cham-
pioned by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century feminists who used it to argue for
women’s equal access to education (Atherton 2002).
These feminist assessments of Descartes’s reason are not necessarily in conflict, of
course (and they are not the only such assessments). A given philosopher’s view of
reason is likely to have various components, some more attuned to progressive political
concerns than others. But perhaps more to the point, differing feminist assessments of
key conceptions of rationality and objectivity appear to be at odds with one another
only if we expect a feminist analysis to take one form. As we will see, feminist work in
this area yields a rich variety of approaches, discussions, and insights that help us to
think about these central concepts in important new ways.
My emphasis here on historical starting places is designed to counter common mis-
understandings of feminist work in epistemology and philosophy of science. First, femi-
nist work is often mistakenly identified with fixed assertions or claims to which all
feminists assent. Feminists are certainly in agreement about the importance of par-
ticular questions (such as those noted above), but it is the developments generated
by differences and debates in answering these questions that more accurately define the

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field. Second, feminists are sometimes characterized as newly claiming that reason and
objectivity are “male.” To the contrary, they are simply pointing out that philosophers
often theorized or characterized these concepts as “male” in the ways outlined above.
Third (and following on the previous point), feminists are sometimes portrayed as uni-
formly rejecting reason and objectivity as “male” concepts. While there are differing
views about the extent to which these concepts need to be revamped (Alcoff 1995),
feminist critiques typically go hand in hand with the understanding that the concepts
are important enough to merit better analysis and theorizing, that is, free of limiting
historical connotations. Fourth, some have challenged the very idea of “feminist”
work in epistemology and philosophy of science, arguing that feminists are introducing
“politics” into areas where political “biases” or “agendas” do not properly belong.
However, insofar as feminist interventions in these areas are “political” interventions,
they are what I call corrective political interventions. The original political interven-
tions were the automatic, unreflective sexist, racist, and similarly problematic political
assumptions (interventions) that were accepted for centuries, interventions that now
warrant focused feminist and social justice critique. Granting that political intrusions
into philosophy may sometimes be problematic, it is not clear that feminist interven-
tions are the more problematic ones in this context.
Feminist work on rationality and objectivity goes beyond critiques of traditional con-
ceptions. By highlighting the concrete significance of these concepts across a range of
real-world knowledge projects and situations, this work provides new and expanded
understandings of these central concepts. We will focus on objectivity in the following
section, and on rationality in the third section.

Objectivity Naturalized, Situated

Feminist examinations of what had been forwarded as “objective” scientific knowledge
about sex differences (in the biological and social sciences especially) have served to
bring the theory and practice of objectivity into productive feminist focus. For example,
Anne Fausto-Sterling characterizes as “biological storytelling” the plethora of theo-
ries, dating from the late nineteenth century, which purported to explain why women
were intellectually inferior to men. When neuroanatomists were convinced that the
frontal lobe in the brain was linked with intelligence, they found “that this lobe was
visibly larger and more developed in males.” However, she continues, “when the pari-
etal lobe rather than the frontal lobe gained precedence as the seat of the intellect,”
studies began to appear that found that the parietal, not the frontal lobe, was somewhat
smaller in women (Fausto-Sterling 1992: 37–38). More recent theories have linked
gender differences in cognitive abilities with differences in the functioning of the two
hemispheres of the brain. Yet, as Ruth Bleier documents, efforts to find sex differences
in specialization between the two hemispheres, have regularly started “with the very
questionable assumption that there are true, probably ‘innate’ sex differences in verbal
and spatial abilities” (1984: 92). Other feminist critiques have drawn attention, not
just to sexism, but to androcentrism, the idea that males and their activities have been
the primary agents of biological and cultural change and evolution. In challenging this
view (often linked with the “man-the-hunter” hypothesis in anthropological theories),
Helen Longino argues that the available fossil data also support an alternative “woman-
the-gatherer” hypothesis that locates the pivotal role of the development of tool use

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with women’s activities (1990: 104–111). Background cultural values and assumptions
linked to androcentrism, Longino maintains, have long contributed to the acceptance
of the “man-the-hunter” hypothesis as the standard hypothesis.
Two important features of feminist philosophical work on objectivity emerge
from these and many similar examinations across different sciences. First, this work
has been and continues to be notably naturalized, that is, it recommends that philo-
sophical accounts of scientific objectivity (and related epistemic concepts) take
into account the ways in which scientific projects and theories actually, “naturally”
develop. This has also ensured that this area of research continues to be notice-
ably interdisciplinary: feminist scholars in many sciences and in philosophy have
contributed to developments in the field. A second important feature of feminist
work is a prominent focus on the social identity or location of scientists—their
gender, race, political sensitivities, among other identifying criteria. Many feminist
reassessments (such as those noted above) suggest, in Sandra Harding’s words, that
“women (or feminists, whether men or women) as a group are more likely to produce
unbiased and objective results than are men (or nonfeminists) as a group” (Harding
1986: 25). In her examination of the sociological significance of Black feminist
thought, Patricia Hill Collins similarly documents the anomalies and distortions
in knowledge about Black women that had taken root in sociological theory. She
argues that (newly admitted) “outsiders” in sociology, like herself, are often able to
detect “patterns [in thinking] that may be more difficult for established sociological
insiders to see” (Collins 1991: 53).
This attention to the social identity of scientists puts pressure on a central tenet of
traditional conceptions of objectivity—that objective knowledge “bears no trace of the
knower.” Feminists, in general, do not suggest that this attention warrants a rejection of
the ideal of objectivity, but they do argue that the concept needs specific refinements.
I outline some of these refinements in relation to three (related) topics and develop-
ments in feminist epistemology and philosophy of science: standpoint epistemology, the
significance of epistemic communities, and the role of values in science.
A recurring idea in work by Harding, Collins, and others, is that those on the
margins or in subdominant social locations may have an “epistemic advantage” in
certain situations. That is, they may be able to see, understand, or know aspects of
reality better than traditional “insiders” do; thus they may be in a position to develop
less partial, more objective knowledge in pertinent areas. This is a key idea explored
in (feminist) standpoint epistemology. There is now general agreement that epistemic
advantage does not automatically accrue to specific social locations, that is, “that
those who occupy particular standpoints (usually subdominant, oppressed, marginal
standpoints) automatically know more, or know better, by virtue of their social, polit-
ical location” (Wylie 2004: 341). Epistemically significant standpoints are achieved
through critical, conscious reflection on social locations with respect to power struc-
tures that play a role in the production of knowledge (Wylie 2004; Intemann 2010).
Justice-oriented political sensibilities can often serve to enhance such critical reflec-
tion. Harding has drawn from developments in standpoint epistemology to argue for
a feminist-inspired conception of “strong objectivity.” Drawing on the perspectives
and insights of those with marginal “standpoints” contributes, she maintains, to the
production of less false or “less partial and distorted” knowledge about human lives
(Harding 1993). Alison Wylie also underscores the importance of standpoint theory

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for “reframing ideals of objectivity,” and (stressing a naturalistic focus) she maintains
that such ideals cannot be determined in advance of careful study of actual epistemic
practices in many areas of knowledge as they unfold in “socially and politically struc-
tured fields of engagement” (Wylie 2004: 349).
Some theorists have pursued epistemological issues relating to social identity with
an explicit focus on scientific communities, their composition and structure. They note
that specific assumptions (incorporating limited views of race or gender, for instance)
could operate “invisibly” in science for so long because they were shared by all members
of the scientific communities in question (Longino 1990; Nelson 1990). Objectivity in
science is enhanced by having more diverse communities, but also communities that
promote practices of fair and equitable epistemic interaction. Such interaction helps
to eliminate individual errors and biases, thus, Longino maintains, the “objectivity of
scientific inquiry is a consequence of this inquiry’s being a social, and not an individual,
enterprise” (Longino 1990: 67). Feminist work in many sciences points to the need for
enhanced standards and practices of peer review and critical engagement (including
equality of intellectual authority for those who had been marginalized) if objectivity is
to be improved or secured (Longino 1996). This attention to social-epistemic interac-
tions among scientists is especially prominent in what is now called social epistemology
(Solomon 2001: Grasswick 2013).
This emphasis on the epistemic structure of communities upends a view of objec-
tivity as something that is simply a property of individual knowers who can “detach”
from their subjective interests and preferences in making judgments. Feminists point
out that “objectivity” has, in fact, included a variety of meanings attached to different
features or stages of inquiry (Lloyd 1995; Douglas 2004; Anderson 2015). Sometimes
“objective” is applied to methods—as in the applications of objective methods. Often
“objectivity” has meant “value-freedom,” in that objective knowledge does not reflect
the moral or political values of a particular culture or community. The role of values
in science has also been important in feminist work, particularly since feminists, while
being critical of sexist and racist values that have influenced theories of human dif-
ference, also argue that values linked to social justice movements, values promoting
human equality and respect, can have a positive epistemic impact on scientific devel-
opment. This work includes analyses of the role of different kinds of values in many
stages of scientific inquiry: in the questions and problems that scientists engage, in the
design of experiments, in the selection and interpretation of data, in the hypotheses
and theories developed to explain the data, and in the dissemination and use of the
theoretical and practical products of scientific inquiry (Anderson 1995; Longino 1996;
Crasnow 2004; Douglas 2009; Rolin 2015).
Feminist work clearly challenges simplistic conceptions of objectivity rooted in the
gender-inflected objectivity versus subjectivity dichotomy (and its extension in the objec-
tivity versus relativism dichotomy). Lorraine Code challenges this dichotomy by arguing
that “often, objectivity requires taking subjectivity into account” (Code 1991: 31).
In addition to criteria of evidence and justification, she maintains, an account of
objectivity also requires taking into account “the ‘nature’ of inquirers, their interests in
the inquiry, their emotional involvement and background assumptions . . . their mate-
rial, historical, and cultural circumstances” (Code 1993: 26). Donna Haraway argues
that feminist attention to “situated knowledges” challenges the idea of a “disembodied
scientific objectivity,” and she seeks a “doctrine of embodied objectivity that accom-
modates paradoxical and critical feminist science projects” (Haraway 1988: 576, 581).

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Her account does not recommend relativism, the view that all claims and accounts are
equally valuable or true: such an “‘equality’ of positioning [in relativism] is a denial of
responsibility and critical inquiry” (Haraway 1988: 584).

Rationality Situated, Naturalized

Rationality is, at bottom, about reasoning. Different types or forms of reasoning are
suitable for different situations. Moral and political situations typically invite forms of
practical reasoning. Arithmetical reasoning is appropriate when doing arithmetical com-
putations. In logic we distinguish between deductive reasoning (when, in arguments,
we draw conclusions that aim to follow necessarily from the premises), and inductive
reasoning (where the conclusion aims to follow, not necessarily, but with good prob-
ability from the premises). Different forms of statistical reasoning (which includes for-
malizations of specific forms of inductive reasoning) are appropriate in different areas
of inquiry, and different statistical methods applied to a given data set yield different
results, depending on the features of the situation that inquirers think are most impor-
tant. Complex reasoning contexts (in science, for example) incorporate many of these
specific forms of reasoning.
This proliferation of forms of reasoning raises questions about the possibility of
formulating a single or unitary concept or theory of reason or rationality—a point I
will return to in the following section. Whether or not we consider such a concept or
theory desirable or even possible, we can still value philosophical work that seeks to
clarify what specific forms of reasoning or rationality involve, what each purports to
accomplish or elucidate. Feminist reflections are very relevant here. I outline what
feminist engagement means for three philosophical projects concerning rationality
(and these are not the only such projects): moral reasoning, rationality naturalized,
and logic and rational argumentation. A feminist critical focus includes assessing
whether traditional associations of rationality with masculinity have influenced the
selection of situations and practices of reasoning that were thought to best exemplify
rationality. A recurring theme in feminist work is the claim that the activities and
practices of autonomous, relatively privileged men in public settings have framed
many accounts of rationality. Such is the case, some feminists argue, for character-
izations of the ideally rational agent in standard accounts of rational choice theory
(debated by Anderson 2002 and Cudd 2002).
One of the most significant debates about possible gender differences in reasoning
resulted from empirical studies that suggested that women are more likely to adopt “care
reasoning” in deliberations about moral dilemmas and choices, while men are more
likely to exhibit “justice reasoning” (Gilligan 1987: 22). Care reasoners purportedly pay
significant attention to relationships and contextual details of moral situations, while
justice reasoners appeal more to universal rules and principles concerning fairness and
rights among autonomous individuals. Subsequent empirical studies raised doubts about
the significance of the gender correlation with the care and justice “voices,” and some
theorists questioned the role of gender stereotyping in the researchers’ assessment and
interpretation of differences. The debate, however, has sparked significant discussion
among feminist moral philosophers about the “maleness” of much traditional moral
philosophy (Kittay and Meyers 1987).
Many feminists note that philosophers’ accounts of moral deliberation and action
regularly tracked the traditional roles and activities of influential men in public

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settings. Accounts of moral rationality often represented ideal moral reasoners as

autonomous, independent agents acting on principles of impartiality, fairness, and
equality. Feminist moral theorists have argued that traditional theories are inade-
quate when it comes to formulating moral deliberation and action in relationships
of dependency and partiality such as the relationships that women have traditionally
had in their care of dependent others, or that women and men have in close familial
and friendship relationships. Some have also paid particular attention to the role of
moral emotions such as compassion and empathy in moral reasoning. In addition,
traditional accounts of moral rationality typically presuppose forms of (moral) self-
hood and agency that, feminists have argued, give little or no attention to the lives
and experiences of those who experience systemic social injustice. In sum, feminists
argue, accounts of moral rationality need to be appropriately modified and expanded
to take into account the many different moral situations that people inhabit in worlds
of social and political complexity (Baier 1986; Jaggar 1989; Held 1990; Walker 2007).
In naturalized epistemology, accounts of “rationality naturalized” incorporate cogni-
tive scientific findings about how we humans actually (“naturally”) reason when we,
for instance, assess evidence to arrive at beliefs and judgements (traditionally cap-
tured in understandings of theoretical reason), or when we make decisions about how
to act (as captured in understandings of practical reason). In other words, naturalist
epistemologists maintain, normative claims about how we ought to reason should take
account of descriptive claims about how we do reason in various contexts. The many
cognitive sciences provide rich ground for (naturalized) epistemological and feminist
reflection. Two particular areas of cognitive scientific study—in neuroscience and
in the social psychological study of cognition—are of special interest in feminist
considerations about rationality.
By the 1990s feminist epistemological critiques contributed to growing interest in
the “cognitive role” of emotions, the idea that “appropriate emotions are indispensable
to reliable knowledge” (Jaggar 1996: 182). Neuroscientific findings support such moves
challenging the reason versus emotion dichotomy. In particular, the new “brain science
of emotion” led one prominent neuroscientist interested in “the neural underpinnings
of reason” to conclude that “certain aspects of the process of emotion and feeling are
indispensable for rationality” (Damasio 2005 [1994]: xv, xvii). Yet neuroscientific studies
of sex differences in the brain still reveal the lingering effects of the long association of
women with emotion and men with rationality and cognitive control. Robyn Bluhm
argues that neuroscientists still rely on gender stereotypes in their research, on “the com-
mon idea that women are more emotional than men . . . [and that] women are less able
to cognitively control their natural emotional responses” (Bluhm 2013: 870, 880). More
generally, feminist examinations of neuroscientific work on sex differences in the brain
has inspired some scholars to use the term “neurosexism” (Fine 2010: 155–175), a term
that inspires its own particular form of feminism, “neurofeminism” (Bluhm et al. 2012).
Findings from social psychology help to uncover some of the lingering cognitive effects
of the long historical association of rationality and objectivity with men of particular
races and classes. Researchers have documented the operation of “stereotype threat,”
when subjects perform less well in situations where negative stereotypes about their
group have prevailed—for instance, women’s stereotypical inferiority in mathematics
(Fine 2010; Banaji and Greenwald 2013). Similar research has also uncovered the role
of “implicit bias” in the judgments we all make about people’s authority, credibility, and
competence, based on their group identity—even when we have explicit egalitarian

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beliefs. For instance, reviewers rate identical CVs somewhat lower when they carry a
female instead of a male name. In effect, systematic social injustices have impaired our
capacity to make fair (rational) judgements about those who have long been associ-
ated with inferior intellectual abilities (Banaji and Greenwald 2013; Saul 2013). This
involves what is now called “epistemic injustice . . . [which is] a kind of injustice in
which someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower” (Fricker 2007: 20).
As all of this work advocates, when we take specific steps to counter both explicit and
implicit biases we are also taking important steps in improving our reasoning and know-
ing in situations involving interpersonal interactions and judgments.
As noted above, different forms of rational argumentation are captured in different
logical systems; thus, deductive and inductive logic formalize rules of deductive and
inductive reasoning respectively. Some feminist critiques have focused on logic as a
whole, on the limitations of abstract formal logical systems when we need to reason
about the practical realities of different forms of injustice (Nye 1990). Val Plumwood,
on the other hand, recognizes “the plurality of logical systems” that correspond to
“different forms of rationality,” and argues that feminist concerns should be directed
to the privileging of some forms of rationality (and logic) over others in the concep-
tual structures of Western thought (Plumwood 2002). There are many ways in which
one might abstract from and reason about particular contexts. Thus, not unlike the
situation with moral reasoning discussed above, we need to pay particular attention
to which aspects of social and political contexts a given system of logic reveals and
articulates, and which aspects are rendered invisible or “illogical” by that same system
(Falmagne and Hass 2002).
Many forms of logic present argumentation as a monological process, as something
engaged in by individuals making inferences from premises to conclusions. However,
argumentation more broadly understood also includes a dialogical model: as in debates,
it involves two or more people exchanging arguments and responses to arguments. This
form of argumentation is a central focus in “informal logic,” which examines “everyday”
processes of disagreement and debate and recommends normative procedures for rational
resolution. Feminist projects aimed at developing models of reasoning that address social
and political change draw productively from developments in this fields (Rooney and
Hundleby 2010). Yet feminist examinations are also critical of models of argumentation
that limit the possibilities for new insights and understandings across differences, espe-
cially across social differences that underwrite specific forms of injustice. I have argued
that findings about explicit and implicit biases need to be taken into account in our
(normative) accounts of good argumentative exchange (Rooney 2012). In particular, I
maintain that some forms of adversarial argumentation can effectively silence or misrep-
resent the contributions of those who belong to marginalized subgroups, especially when
they seek to address concerns that are of special significance for their subgroup.

Wherefore Concepts, Ideals, and Theories?

In the previous sections we have examined how feminist critiques and developments
add important new dimensions to our understandings of two central epistemic concepts.
So where does that leave us with respect to developing specific feminism-informed
unitary definitions and theories of rationality and objectivity? Can we think of these
concepts as ideals that lend themselves to precise philosophical characterizations—as
many philosophers have traditionally thought?

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Toward the end of her work examining the “maleness” of historical conceptions
of reason, Lloyd is somewhat optimistic about salvaging something “of the ideal of a
Reason which knows no sex . . . ; [though] if there is a Reason genuinely common to
all, it is something to be achieved in the future . . .” (Lloyd 1993: 107). Others have
questioned the projection of reason or rationality as a singular concept, and on feminist
grounds (Le Doeuff 1990). The portrayal of rationality as a specific distinct, measur-
able trait or ability (rather than as something like an umbrella term covering a range of
reasoning capacities, processes, and activities) was, it seems, required in order to readily
claim that some people had distinctly more of it than others (Rooney 1995). What if
we no longer make such ready assessments? In a related vein, Catharine MacKinnon
has questioned the “the stance of ‘objectivity’” as a stance that claims an authoritative
(objective) knowledge position that resists acknowledgement of social positioning with
respect to knowledge assertions. It (as a concept) can thus function politically as a
stance that resists or silences challenges to authoritative positions (MacKinnon 1989).
And yet, as we have seen above, the concepts rationality, objectivity, and knowledge
do carry significant epistemic, social, and cultural valence, and feminists have drawn on
them to advance key new understandings of the importance of better knowledge and
better knowing in a variety of contexts. We saw that objectivity has been a central focus
in feminist analyses of scientific knowledge: taking the concept seriously as a regulative
ideal has enabled feminists to develop important insights into the many factors that go
into producing good or better science (Harding 2015). Taking account of this work,
Naomi Scheman asks what it is about objectivity that makes its preservation so impor-
tant (Scheman 2001: 23). Despite critics of feminist work who erroneously portray fem-
inists as endangering objectivity, feminist work, she continues, “is better understood as
an attempt to save objectivity by understandings why it matters.” Objectivity matters
as a form of trustworthiness, she contends, since “objective judgments are judgments we
can rationally trust” (Scheman 2001: 23, 26).
In a work on “the virtue of feminist rationality,” Deborah Heikes argues for “a feminist
theory of rationality” that takes account of feminist concerns (2012: 1). She draws atten-
tion to central feminist practices of presenting reasons and arguments about the injustices
of oppression and the need for change. These practices, she maintains, capture an essen-
tial feature of rationality that grounds a feminist theory of rationality. However, as we saw
in the previous section, even when we take argumentation as a central practice of human
reasoning, we can still critique, from a feminist perspective, the limitations of traditional
understandings of rational argumentation. Heikes grants that “reason is not so much a
thing or an object as it is an activity,” and “[i]ts basic function is to guide our responses
to the world around [us] whether that world be material, social, or emotional” (2012: 4).
In taking up questions about what a feminist analysis, concept, or theory of ration-
ality or objectivity might involve, it is helpful to consider Sally Haslanger’s (1999)
analogous question about what a feminist analysis or theory of knowledge ought to
involve. She maintains that an epistemological analysis of knowledge as a normative
concept (as concerned fundamentally with questions about how we ought to reason and
form beliefs) necessitates examining why we need the concept at all, why the concept
is valuable for creatures like us who value certain kinds of moral/autonomous agency.
She maintains that when such considerations are in place, “an adequate definition of
knowledge will depend on an account of what is cognitively valuable for beings like us,
which raises moral and political issues on which feminists have much to contribute”
(Haslanger 1999: 473).

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To the extent that traditions and conceptions of rationality and objectivity incorpo-
rated and reinforced specific forms of injustice, they are concepts that many of us find
less than trustworthy, action-guiding, or valuable. When, guided by feminist and other
justice-oriented epistemological work, we uncover and uproot these lingering injustices
in their many forms, we are taking important steps toward establishing these concepts
as normatively significant in improving our many and varied epistemic practices in our
many and varied worlds of thought and action.

Acknowledgment
I wish to thank Ann Garry, Ami Harbin, Joyce Havstad, and Mark Navin for helpful
comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

Further Reading
Edited volumes of essays significant for the development of feminist epistemology and
philosophy of science include:
Alcoff, Linda and Potter, Elizabeth (Eds.) (1993) Feminist Epistemologies, New York: Routledge.
Antony, Louise M. and Charlotte E. Witt (Eds.) (2002) A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and
Objectivity, 2nd ed., Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Garry, Ann and Pearsall, Marilyn (Eds.) (1996) Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist
Philosophy, 2nd ed., New York: Routledge.
Grasswick, Heidi E. (Ed.) (2011) Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge,
New York: Springer. (The introduction is especially helpful.)
Harding, Sandra (Ed.) (2004) The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies,
New York: Routledge.
Tuana, Nancy (Ed.) (1989) Feminism and Science, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Another good introductory reading is:

Anderson, Elizabeth (2015) “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,” The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, Fall [online]. Available from: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/feminism-
epistemology.

Related Topics
Early modern feminism and Cartesian philosophy (Chapter 6); testimony, trust, and
trustworthiness (Chapter 21); epistemic injustice, ignorance and trans experience
(Chapter 22); philosophy of science and the feminist legacy (Chapter 25); values,
practices and metaphysical assumptions in the biological sciences (Chapter 26); femi-
nist philosophy of social science (Chapter 27); moral justification in an unjust world
(Chapter 40); feminist ethics of care (Chapter 43).

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 21
TRUST AND TESTIMONY IN
FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY
Heidi Grasswick

Feminist Accounts of Trust in Testimony

Trust and its counterpart trustworthiness have played important roles in the development
of both feminist ethics and feminist epistemology. This chapter focuses on their role in
feminist epistemology, particularly insofar as trust and trustworthiness have been crucial
concepts in feminist attempts to draw attention to the ethical dimensions of our epistemic
practices (Code 1991; 1995) while coming to terms with the inherently social nature of
knowledge-seeking (Grasswick 2013), as seen in part through our deep epistemic interde-
pendence through testimony.
In recent years, epistemologists of various ilks have turned their attention to the role
of testimony in knowing, recognizing that individuals are deeply epistemically depend-
ent on one another in everyday mundane epistemic activities such as asking one’s
housemate what was available at the grocery store that day, or being told when young
in what year one was born. They have also recognized the important epistemic role of
the testimony of experts, given that our modern world functions by way of a significant
cognitive division of labor (Goldman 2001; Kitcher 1990). With this renewed atten-
tion to the role of testimony, analyses of how we attribute cognitive authority to others
and when we should trust others have proliferated in philosophical literature.
While many epistemological analyses of trust work with a very minimal concept of
trust, equating trust with a mere reliance on someone else’s word (Goldman 1999),
feminist work has tended to work with a much richer sense of trust, examining its rela-
tional and interpersonal nature, its potential fragility, the epistemic benefits that can
stem from a deep and enduring trust in others, and the epistemic damage that can be
done by climates of distrust (Baier 1986; Code 1991, 2006; Jones 1996; Potter 2002).
Rather than focusing exclusively (as many testimony theorists do) on identifying the
conditions that would justify adopting a specific belief based on testimony, feminists
have been more interested in the systems and patterns of knowledge production, seek-
ing to understand the appropriate role of trust in ongoing successful practices of testi-
monial exchange and inquiry, and pointing out how inappropriate trust relations can
harm our epistemic projects. Even more noteworthy, feminist work has focused on the
role of social power dynamics in our attributions of epistemic trust and the demands
that might reasonably be placed on knowers who wish to be trustworthy in a world
 Trust and Testimony in Feminist Epistemology

permeated by such power dynamics. As Lorraine Code notes, “testimonial exchanges

are often tangled negotiations where it matters who the participants are, and where
issues of differential credulity and credibility cannot be ignored” (1995: 67).
That feminist analyses of testimony and trust have focused on social power dynam-
ics should be no surprise given that a common theme in feminist epistemologies is that
knowing is situated—varying across social locations. The tenet of situated knowing
maintains that one’s capacity to know is deeply shaped and limited by one’s social
situation. For example, feminist epistemologists have used the idea of situated know-
ing to reveal the ways in which the socially privileged position of the dominant classes
shapes and limits their range of experiences, experiences that the dominant use as
evidence to develop and support particular understandings of the social world. These
understandings are then conveyed as objective knowledge, masking their origins in
the social position of the dominant, and becoming the established forms of knowledge
produced and circulated throughout society (Code 1991; 2006). At the same time,
feminists have used the idea of situated knowledge in order to explain how experiences
specific to members of oppressed groups can, in the right contexts, serve as the basis
of the development of important insights that can counter the dominant understand-
ings of social relations, providing richer understandings of the workings of oppression
(Harding 1991; Hartsock 1983).
If, as feminists suggest, one’s social location shapes and limits one’s knowing pos-
sibilities, then testimony as a way of knowing takes on an even greater importance in
epistemology; we will be dependent on others for accessing that knowledge which we
are not in a position to obtain on our own, and the limitations of independent knowing
may be quite significant when it comes to knowledge of social relations, a full under-
standing of which will require consideration of the experiences of those situated differ-
ently from oneself.
At the same time, the idea of situated knowing complicates one’s analysis of testi-
mony. While it is one thing to suppose, as most testimony theorists do, that knowing
beyond one’s experience requires that we rely on the experiences of others who can
then offer testimony to us, if one’s social location runs deep enough that it helps shape
one’s epistemic perspective, it may be challenging to take the testimony of another
who is differently situated from oneself as seriously as one needs in order to know well.
Testimony from those differently situated from oneself may not easily fit in with the
body of one’s beliefs, experiences, and epistemic frameworks, sometimes leading one
to reject another’s testimony “not out of prejudice but out of sheer incomprehension”
(Anderson 2012: 170). Differences in social position and corresponding differences in
epistemic frameworks between speakers and hearers make a simple model of testimony
as a one-way transmission of knowledge implausible (Bergin 2002). Feminist accounts
of trust and testimony grapple with the challenges of negotiating through epistemic dif-
ferences across agents who are at the same time deeply dependent on each other.

Trust Relations and the Ethical Dimension of

Testimony Practices
Even within feminist work, sometimes “trust” in testimony is simply used as a synonym
for relying on someone else’s word, and being trustworthy amounts to merely being a
reliable source of the knowledge claim in question in that particular circumstance.

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But once we start investigating testimonial exchanges beyond the mundane, examining
cases where we are potentially seriously harmed by failures in testimony and where
we develop long-term relationships with other knowers, it becomes clear that in
many contexts epistemic trust involves more than mere reliance. Trust relations
between inquirers—that is patterns of relative trust/distrust and trustworthiness/
untrustworthiness—run thick through our cooperative epistemic practices, and their
specifics crucially contribute to epistemic success or failure. Several feminists have
drawn attention to both the cognitive and affective dimensions of trust in their
explanations of how our epistemic practices function, and how well-placed trust, or
“responsible trust” (Grasswick 2014) can foster successful epistemic endeavors (Code
1991; Jones 1996; Townley 2011).
Just as prominent trust theorist Annette Baier has argued for the case of moral theory
(Baier 1985; 1986), in epistemology trust has historically received insufficient atten-
tion, and yet remains a concept with rich potential for feminists. An epistemology
that focuses on trust directly confronts epistemic interactions where power differentials
make exploitation a real possibility. Trust in other knowers is not always a good thing;
feminists require an analysis of trust relations that explains not only when and how
people tend to trust or distrust others epistemically, but when and why such trust is or
is not well placed, or epistemically responsible.
When we trust, we make ourselves vulnerable. Trust is dangerous (McLeod 2015).
We depend on another’s good will and competence for something that we care about,
placing ourselves in a position where if we bump up against the limits of that person’s
good will or competence, we may be harmed (Baier 1986). In trusting another, we take
up a certain attitude towards the trusted. Karen Jones describes trust as involving an
attitude of optimism in the goodwill and competence of another, and adds the expecta-
tion that the trusted one “will be directly and favorably moved by the thought that we
are counting on her” (Jones 1996). We develop expectations of how the trusted will
(and should) behave in the long run. Furthermore, by adopting an affective attitude
towards another through epistemic trust, one implicitly recognizes them as an agent
rather than as a mere instrument of information conveyance (Townley 2011). There is
then, an ethical dimension to relationships of epistemic trust.
The affective component of trust helps identify one of the major differences between
relying on someone and trusting someone. When we trust, we are subject to betrayal
if we are let down, whereas if we rely on someone, we are merely disappointed in their
failure (Baier 1986). The difference between trust and reliance then is significant when
we move beyond an analysis of a singular testimonial exchange and consider the impor-
tance of building healthy climates and networks of trust that contribute to cooperative
and successful epistemic practices in the long term. Climates of trust and their benefits
can be destroyed quickly in the face of trust betrayals, and this feature of trust is not
captured in a description of disappointed reliance.
The building of such climates of trust in order to generate knowledge of the forces
and dynamics of oppression has been key to epistemic methods adopted by feminist
theorists and activists. The early feminist idea of consciousness-raising groups, in which
women come together in women-only spaces to share their gender-specific experiences,
is a case in point. Such groups provide climates of trust where very personal experi-
ences can be shared, allowing the common dimensions and structural elements of these
experiences to be revealed and then identified as connected to the forces of oppression.

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Furthermore, feminist theorists have recognized that even within feminist communities
themselves, trust relations across differently situated women cannot be taken for granted,
but require both ethical and epistemic work to generate relationships that are strong
enough to sustain the difficulties of working together across positions of relative privi-
lege and marginalization to come to understand oppression. Pressed most prominently
by the demands of women of color—but also by the demands of women marginalized
through their sexual orientation, economic status, or disabilities—white, heterosexual,
middle-class, and able-bodied women have had to come to terms with their relative
privilege and the dominance of their voices in constructing feminist knowledge. It
has become clear that feminists with relative privilege need to learn to listen hard to
differently situated women in order to incorporate, and allow others to incorporate,
the multiplicity of marginalized gendered experiences, and need to decenter their own
experiences in the development of a robust understanding of oppression. This is taxing
work, both cognitively and emotionally, and some have argued that it is difficult enough
that only a relationship of friendship between differently situated women could sustain
the challenges that it brings (Lugones and Spelman 1983). The common motivation
and commitment that comes through friendship offers the possibility of strong trust
relations through which each party can take risks with each other in the pursuit of
feminist knowledge.
Though discussions of trust often focus on the expectations the truster places on the
trusted in the relationship, Cynthia Townley (2011) also points out that the demands
of a trust relationship are not just one-sided, setting up expectations of the one trusted.
She argues that when one trusts another epistemically, the truster makes an implicit
commitment not to check up on the one trusted, but to take their word instead. At least
some forms of checking up on another’s testimony would violate the trust relationship.
Determining where the limits are of one’s employment of critical and evidence-seeking
capacities that are compatible with a trust relationship is a highly contextual matter,
but Townley’s point is that there is a limit, and “ignorance is embedded in the structure
of trust” (2011: 27), even as we use trust to widen our capacities to gain knowledge.
Townley understands this to mark a significant shift in the framing of epistemology: it
describes a way in which the acceptance of ignorance plays a central role in epistemic
practices, and demonstrates that epistemic practices are misconstrued if they are con-
ceptualized as always and only focused on the goal of attaining knowledge.
If certain forms of ignorance are a necessary part of social epistemic practices, then
the idea of epistemic responsibility cannot simply be about what kind of dispositions
and behavior leads one to more knowledge, but rather what kind of dispositions and
behavior leads one to the right kind of knowledge, alongside an acceptance of appro-
priate forms of ignorance—that is, forms of ignorance that are not harmful to others
or oneself. For an epistemology that sees trust relations as central and takes situated
knowledge seriously, accountability issues in inquiry loom large (Code 1991; 2006).

Testimonial Exchanges: Social Identity as

a Credibility Marker
In examining social practices of testimonial exchange, feminists are well aware that not
everyone is treated equally as a reliable testifier. As we engage with each other in epis-
temic matters we implicitly assign varying degrees of credibility to our fellow testifiers.

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We participate in economies of credibility (Fricker 2007). In making credibility assign-

ments, we use a variety of heuristics and cognitive strategies (Origgi 2012), some of
which may be good indicators of the reliability of the testifier, others less so.
A crucial question for testimony theorists is of course, to distinguish what kind of
indicator-properties (Fricker 1998) reasonably create credibility and trust in a speaker
and in what contexts. What serves as good evidence for the trustworthiness of a testi-
fier, and what kind of indicators do epistemic damage and lead to poorly grounded
trust that does not properly match a speaker’s trustworthiness? In sharp distinction from
traditional epistemological approaches that have emphasized the interchangeability of
knowers and the irrelevance of social identity as an independent credibility-marker (as
noted by Code 1991), feminists have investigated extensively the complex role social
identity plays in the economies of credibility and the grounding of trust.
On the one hand, feminists have argued that in some contexts, social identity can
serve as an important marker of epistemic trustworthiness, especially in cases where
the socially underprivileged may have experiences of oppression that shed light on a
particular issue or when the perspective of the marginalized might be required to cor-
rect for a bias in the dominant perspective. For example, a woman of color who has
experienced racism and sexism in the classroom (and in other environments) might be
better able than her white male colleagues to recognize cases of other professors expe-
riencing racism and sexism (Alcoff 2001). On the other hand, when social identities
do not line up with specific epistemic resources that can be brought to the table, their
use as credibility markers is both unfair and epistemically unsound.
Of particular concern for feminists are the ways in which social power dynamics
and cultural forces result in gendered and racialized stereotypes and identity prejudices
that affect the patterns and norms of credibility assignments. For example, the fact
that women have often been conceptualized as less rational and less measured in their
judgments than men leads their testimony in many contexts to be taken less seriously
than that of similarly positioned men. In such cases, a woman may suffer a credibility
deficit, as she is attributed less credibility than she deserves because of her gender and
its cultural associations. Similarly, Patricia Hill Collins (2000) argues that prevailing
stereotypes of black women make it more difficult for them to be seen as epistemically
competent. Such credibility deficits can be characterized as a misplaced withholding
of epistemic trust on the part of the hearer, where prejudices are getting in the way of
sound cooperative epistemic endeavors. Though this misguided distrust surely results in
an epistemic loss for the hearer, several feminists have focused their attention on the
epistemic wrongs done to the speaker in such cases, seeing these epistemic wrongs as
part of the dynamics of oppression.
Miranda Fricker has argued that when a speaker is attributed a credibility deficit due to
an identity prejudice (that is, a prejudice connected to their social identity), they suffer
a form of epistemic injustice that she calls testimonial injustice. According to Fricker,
testimonial injustice is both an ethical and an epistemic wrong; at its core, testimonial
injustice wrongs one as a giver of knowledge (2007: 45), which she takes to be a central
feature of our epistemic agency in a social world of cooperative knowledge production
and circulation. Fricker argues that testimonial injustice “excludes the subject from
trustful conversation” (2007: 53). Kristie Dotson (2011) characterizes such failures to
recognize someone as a knower as an epistemic violence perpetrated on the speaker—a
particular kind of silencing that she refers to as testimonial quieting. Importantly, when
regularly subjected to such silencing and epistemic injustices, a speaker can also suffer

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long-term damage to their self-trust that transpires by way of a loss of confidence in

their own epistemic abilities through the experience of others regularly doubting them
(Jones 2012). But even without any erosion of self-trust, Dotson points out that epis-
temic violence and a coerced silencing of speakers can occur through the phenomenon
of testimonial smothering, in which speakers restrict their testimony to hearers because
they know their testimony will not be understood and given proper uptake by perni-
ciously ignorant hearers (Dotson 2011).
José Medina also notes that we must consider the epistemic harms of credibility
excesses as well as credibility deficits, arguing that credibility judgments are “implicitly
comparative and contrastive” (2013: 63). For example, gender biases often simultane-
ously result in credibility excesses attributed to men and credibility deficits attributed
to women, especially (but not exclusively) when the content of the testimonies conflict
with each other. At the same time, these relative excesses and deficits will be further
complicated by cultural biases associated with additional social groupings such as race
and class. Medina seeks a broad analysis of the epistemic harms that follow from mala-
dapted practices of credibility assignments, including medium and long range harms
that affect an agent’s continued engagement in the practices, and harms that involve
not just the speaker, but also the hearer, other interlocutors, and members of the rel-
evant social groups who are affected in the network of ongoing testimonial exchanges.
Medina notes that credibility “never applies to subjects individually and in isolation
from others, but always affects clusters of subjects in particular social networks and
environments” (2013: 61).

Correcting for Maladapted Norms of Credibility

Recognizing the ways in which identity prejudices and their accompanying stereotypes
differentially affect speakers in the economies of credibility, feminists have sought to
articulate remedies that would right these epistemic and ethical wrongs, and improve
the soundness of our epistemic practices. Looking at individuals engaged in testimonial
exchanges, Fricker develops the idea of the virtue of testimonial justice, by which hearers
can correct for testimonial injustices by developing appropriate testimonial sensibilities
that contain an anti-prejudicial current (Fricker 2007: 86). Testimonial justice involves
a reflexive critical social awareness through which a hearer considers and corrects for
how prejudices might be influencing her perception of the credibility of the testifier
(Fricker 2007: 91).
Relatedly, Nancy Daukas offers a broad interpretation of the virtue of epistemic trust-
worthiness, understanding it as a social virtue that incorporates our abilities to make
sound credibility assignments of others. Epistemic trustworthiness amounts to a disposi-
tion to behave (in a given context and for a given domain of knowledge) in accordance
with one’s actual epistemic status (Daukas 2006: 112). An epistemically trustworthy
person does not over inflate the certainty of a claim when sharing it with others due
to excessive self-confidence, and does not under sell a claim out of undue diffidence.
Initially then, epistemic trustworthiness concerns each of us as speakers. But because we
are engaged in cooperative epistemic pursuits within a network of knowers, one’s virtue
of epistemic trustworthiness depends not only on one’s awareness of the strength of one’s
own abilities to know, but also on one’s attitudes to other knowers and corresponding
ability to assess their trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is possible “only when an agent is
attuned to her own, and particular others’, epistemic strengths and weaknesses relative

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to particular context and projects” (Daukas 2011: 52). When prejudices and stereotypes
adversely affect the relative level of credibility I assign to others, with these credibility
judgments helping to shape my beliefs, then so long as I am unaware of this weakness in
my epistemic work and do not account for it, my own trustworthiness as a contributor
to shared inquiry will be damaged. Similar to Fricker, Daukas recommends that agents
who wish to be epistemically trustworthy exercise a kind of “oppositional agency” that
resists the social norms of credibility assignments where social prejudices play a prob-
lematic role (Daukas 2011: 64), such that: “the epistemic agent works from dispositions
which enable her to unmask and transform epistemically unsound (and socially unjust)
practices of epistemic exclusions (i.e., testimonial injustice)” (Daukas 2011: 52).
The virtues suggested by Fricker and Daukas can be interpreted in two different ways.
First, they can be understood as neutralizing the effects of social identity as a credibility
marker by counteracting social identity prejudices. But they can also be interpreted as
incorporating social identity into testimonial judgments. These virtues do not assign
credibility directly from a marginalized social identity, but they do attend to social
identity and encourage epistemic agents to seek out marginalized voices when working
within practices of maladapted credibility norms.
Though neither Fricker nor Daukas are oblivious to the structural components of
these problems, they do focus on the transactional aspect of testimonial exchanges
and remedies that reside in individual agents, and many argue that such a focus is
inadequate. One reason for this is that remedies requiring individual reflection to
correct for bias are quite cognitively taxing (Anderson 2012: 168). What Fricker
and Daukas propose as individual reflective correctives is far from easy to pull off.
Another reason is that by focusing on individual exchanges the remedies may well be
insufficient for change by failing to challenge the overall structures of the practices
of credibility attributions (Dotson 2012). Understanding the significance of unequal
credibility deficits across groups and the depth of the challenges of remedying them
requires that we look to the full range of contributing factors that go well beyond
identity prejudices held by individuals.
For example, among the variety of heuristics and credibility markers that hearers use
to identify trustworthy speakers, some may work less well in socially unjust contexts.
Elizabeth Anderson argues that education levels might be reasonably used as credibility
markers in certain contexts, but in socially unjust systems where there is unequal access
to education, they can contribute to group-based credibility deficits for socially margin-
alized members of society (Anderson 2012). Additionally, she notes that psychological
tendencies to give higher levels of credibility to in-group members, and the “shared reality
bias” through which people who interact frequently tend to converge in their perspec-
tives on the world can create unfair patterns of credibility assignments in socially unjust
contexts where certain groups are underrepresented in recognized epistemic communities
(Anderson 2012: 169–170). Jones makes the related point that because social identity
makes a difference to one’s experiential base, a report of an event or experience (or, an
interpretation these) may seem astonishing to members of some groups, while seeming
quite likely to others who share a different experiential base (Jones 2002: 157). This
makes it challenging for the marginalized to be heard by the dominant, especially if there
are patterns of isolation or segregation between stratified groups in society. As Anderson
makes the point, it is only through creating epistemic democracies, in which there is
“universal participation on terms of equality of all inquirers” that sufficient remedies can
be found to these structural problems (Anderson 2012: 172).

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One source of these problems concerns the generation of the very conceptual
resources required for knowledge, and correspondingly, the need for those conceptual
resources need to be shared across knowers for one’s testimony to be at all intelligible.
An important feature of social marginalization is “hermeneutical marginalization”—
being unable to participate fully in the development of the community’s conceptual
resources. In cases where groups experience hermeneutical marginalization, society
as a whole (including the marginalized) will likely lack the hermeneutical resources
required to make the experiences of the marginalized intelligible, and without intel-
ligibility, they cannot be heard or given uptake. Fricker (2007) calls this hermeneutical
injustice, and offers the example of the evolution of the concept of sexual harassment:
before the concept was developed, women (and society as a whole) lacked the concep-
tual resources to be able to adequately interpret and describe what was happening to
them, and so their concerns about their experiences of harassment could not be heard.
Importantly, Medina has argued that hermeneutical and testimonial injustices are
deeply interconnected; they are maintained and passed on through the dynamics of
each other as those without adequate hermeneutical resources struggle to be granted
credibility, while low credibility assigned to a speaker due to prejudice makes it less
likely that a hearer will be able to attend to any hermeneutical kernels provided by
the speaker that could be developed into an insightful interpretation (Medina 2013:
96). Dotson also makes the point that hermeneutical resources are actually much more
dispersed than Fricker’s original idea of hermeneutical injustice makes out. She argues
that there often are conceptual resources available within marginalized communi-
ties through which they can understand their experiences (Dotson 2012). But these
resources are not recognized or taken up by the dominant due to what Gaile Pohlhaus
(2012) has termed a “willful hermeneutical ignorance” that transpires when dominantly
situated knowers refuse to learn to use the epistemic resources that marginally situated
knowers have developed to understand their experiences. For Dotson, such refusals to
look for and employ such epistemic resources of the marginalized constitutes another
kind of epistemic injustice: contributory injustice (Dotson 2012).
As feminist analyses begin to integrate the structural and individual dimensions of
practices of testimony, interesting implications emerge concerning accounts of the epis-
temic virtues. For example, Medina’s work emphasizes the need for a variety of epistemic
virtues and argues that some (such as epistemic humility and open-mindedness) are more
difficult for the socially privileged to develop (alongside a preponderance of epistemic
vices such as epistemic laziness and closed-mindedness), with other virtues being more
of a challenge for the marginalized (such as epistemic confidence or self-trust) (Medina
2013). Karen Frost-Arnold argues that even trustworthiness itself is not always virtuous.
She finds value in tricksters, and points out that for the marginalized, there can at times
be epistemic value in betraying the trust of the privileged when it results in the expan-
sion of networks of trust across the oppressed (Frost-Arnold 2014).

Trust in Knowledge-Producing Institutions and

Communities: The Case of Science
Beyond epistemic trust relations between individuals, feminists are also interested in
the fact that we regularly depend upon and place our trust in communities and institu-
tions themselves as testifiers and bearers of knowledge. This is especially true in the
case of specialized knowledge, in which individuals undertake education and training

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to become experts in particular fields, and then participate in specific practices of

knowledge-producing communities and institutions. Whether through individual
spokespersons or consensus statements from research communities, members of the
public look to these communities and institutions to fulfill the role of providing spe-
cialized knowledge and informed judgments on topics relevant to their lives.
Most trust theorists agree that interpersonal trust remains the paradigmatic form of
trust, with institutional trust being modeled after it (McLeod 2015). Trust in institutions
and communities shares core features of interpersonal trust: vulnerability, an attitude
of optimism toward the institution with certain expectations developing concerning its
ability to provide me with reliable knowledge, the possibility of being betrayed, and the
possibility of trust being more or less well grounded.
What is different about epistemic trust in institutions and communities compared
with trust in persons, however, is that evidence of the trustworthiness of the specific
practices of the institution (Frost-Arnold 2014) play a more significant role in determin-
ing well-placed trust than in the case of individual testifiers. It may be less important
that every participant in the institution be perfectly trustworthy if an institution oper-
ates with robustly trustworthy practices that help protect against the undue influence
untrustworthy individual members.
For example, many cite the objectivity of the scientific method (as a recognized cen-
tral piece of scientific practice) as justification for the trust they place in the testimony of
scientific research communities. While feminists tend to agree that the objectivity of a
practice grounds trust (Scheman 2001), they argue that focusing on the scientific method
is too narrow a characterization of the practices of science; to understand how objectivity
can ground trust in the testimony of scientific institutions (or any knowledge-producing
institution), we must also investigate the many social dimensions of the communal prac-
tices, scrutinizing the social arrangements under which science is done (Addelson 1983;
Longino 1990; Scheman 2001). Because scientific knowledge has such an overwhelming
influence on the conditions of contemporary life, it has received significant attention
from feminists interested in trust relations with communities and institutions and serves
as an excellent example of the issues at stake.
The highly specialized and in many cases complex and resource-intensive nature of
scientific research means that a large proportion of it needs to take place within organ-
ized research communities and institutions of knowledge production. Trust relations
operate internally among members of these communities (and among multiple scientific
sub-communities), as well as among these same knowledge-producing communities and
those who fall outside of the scope of the knowledge production, that is, layperson com-
munities and/or the general public. Internal trust relations must be relatively healthy
if scientific institutions are to function well in producing reliable knowledge, and trust
relations with those external to institutions must in turn be relatively healthy if these
institutions are to successfully provide the right kind of knowledge to lay communities.
Within scientific research communities there is a strong division of cognitive labor,
with scientists lacking both the time and money to fully replicate the results of others,
and the necessary background to understand very highly specialized work of others
that might serve as important evidence for their own research (Hardwig 1991; Kitcher
1990). For many, the main concern of this large role of trust in the production of scien-
tific knowledge lies in the potential for fraudulent results from unscrupulous scientists.
But feminists have argued that trust relations within scientific communities depend on
not just the character and work of the individual scientists, but also the structure and

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practices of these institutions themselves. As Kristina Rolin explains, trust in scientific

testimony depends in part on “trust in the community’s ability to facilitate inclusive
and responsive dialogue based on shared standards of argumentation” (Rolin 2002:
106). Inclusive dialogue not only offers a deterrent to unscrupulous individual scien-
tists, but increases the chances of detecting error and bias in the science itself. Focusing
on gender, Rolin cites evidence suggesting our current scientific institutions are not as
trustworthy as we might hope. For example, empirical evidence suggests a gender bias
within the established evaluation processes of scientific institutions, processes that are
the very means through which scientists decide who within their community is trust-
worthy and competent (Rolin 2002: 105). Additionally, micro inequities exist within
scientific communities that can “limit women’s opportunities to participate in scientific
dialogue” (Rolin 2002: 109), again threatening to skew the relative credibility assign-
ments upon which the generation of scientific knowledge depends.
Scientific institutions also have histories of interactions with lay communities
that are relevant to ascertaining their epistemic trustworthiness. Here, feminists have
applied the insights of situated knowing to cases where knowledge depends on trust,
arguing that it is possible for a scientific institution to fail to be trustworthy for a par-
ticularly situated lay community, especially a marginalized community, given certain
histories of interactions (Grasswick 2014; Scheman 2001). Most prominently, Naomi
Scheman argues that when there has been a poor history of scientific communities
generating knowledge that addresses serious concerns of the marginalized, and when
instead there has been a history of exclusion from scientific communities, poor quality
research on questions relevant to the lives of the marginalized, and abuse of the margin-
alized as research subjects, the marginalized have good reason not to trust the practices
and results of science. As she notes: “It is, in short, irrational to expect people to place
their trust in the results of practices about which they know little and that emerge from
institutions—universities, corporations, government agencies—which they know to be
inequitable” (Scheman 2001: 43).
Additionally, the epistemic tasks scientific institutions are entrusted with include mak-
ing judgments concerning what areas of knowledge are important enough to be researched,
what results need to be shared with laypersons, and what results need to be filtered out
(Grasswick 2010; 2011). Yet differently situated laypersons have different epistemic needs
and determinations of what knowledge is relevant for them. In the case of marginalized
groups for which scientific institutions have done a historically poor job of producing and
sharing knowledge of most importance to them, such a history can contribute to good
reasons for a marginalized group to distrust a particular scientific institution.

Implications of Feminist Analyses of Testimony

As feminist analyses of the role of trust in testimony have developed, they have increas-
ingly shown an awareness of the need to account for ways in which individual epistemic
dispositions are deeply interdependent with structural features of the social practices of
inquiry. They also clearly draw the connection between social conditions generally and
our specific epistemic practices. According to feminist accounts of testimony, working
toward the larger goal of social justice will simultaneously move us toward more reli-
able and responsible epistemic practices. But these accounts also imply that responsible
interventions into our epistemic practices can help move society in the direction of
increased social justice overall.

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Further Reading
Code, Lorraine (1991) What Can She Know?: Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge, Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press. (Code’s landmark work critiquing standard epistemological inquiry and
setting out her feminist approach to epistemology, with a focus on interpersonal relations between
interdependent knowers.)
—— (1995) Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations, New York: Routledge. (A collection of Code’s
essays, many of which take up the nuances of gendered credibility attributions.)
Fricker, Miranda (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford: Oxford University
Press. (Provides the first extensive handling of the ideas of epistemic injustice and its combined epis-
temic and ethical dimensions.)
Medina, José (2013) The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and
Resistant Imaginations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Provides both extensive critique and further
development of Fricker’s original idea of epistemic injustice, using virtue theory to understand the chal-
lenges of knowing from one’s particular social location.)

Related Topics
Epistemic injustice, ignorance, and trans experience (Chapter 22); speech and silenc-
ing (Chapter 23); philosophy of science and the feminist legacy (Chapter 25); feminist
philosophy of social science (Chapter 27); feminist virtue ethics (Chapter 45).

References
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Alcoff, Linda Martín (2001) “On Judging Epistemic Credibility: Is Social Identity Relevant?” in Nancy
Tuana and Sandra Morgen (Eds.) Engendering Rationalities, Albany: SUNY, 53–80.
Anderson, Elizabeth (2012) “Epistemic Justice as a Virtue of Social Institutions,” Social Epistemology 26:
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Baier, Annette (1985) “What Do Women Want in a Moral Theory?” Noûs 19: 53–63.
—— (1986) “Trust and Antitrust,” Ethics 96: 231–260.
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—— (1995) Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations, New York: Routledge.
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 22
EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE,
IGNORANCE, AND TRANS
EXPERIENCES
Miranda Fricker and Katharine Jenkins

What is the relation between ignorance and one or another kind of epistemic injustice?
First, let us set out the core concepts of epistemic injustice that we shall be using:
“testimonial injustice,” “hermeneutical injustice,” and its precondition “hermeneuti-
cal marginalization” (Fricker 2007). Testimonial injustice is the injustice of receiving
a degree of credibility that has been reduced by some kind of prejudice. This kind of
epistemic injustice consists in an unjust deficit of credibility. If a female politician’s policy pro-
posal receives a reduced level of credibility from the electorate owing to gender prejudice,
for instance, then she has been subject to a testimonial injustice. (Testimonial injustices
need not strictly be in respect of testimonial speech acts, but rather any speech act whose
acceptance depends on its receiving sufficient credibility; see Fricker 2007: 60.)
Hermeneutical injustice is the injustice of being frustrated in an attempt to render
a significant social experience intelligible (to oneself and/or to others) where herme-
neutical marginalization is a significant causal factor in that failure. Someone counts
as hermeneutically marginalized insofar as they belong to a social group that under-
contributes to the common pool of concepts and social meanings. And where this
under-contribution results in an experience being less than fully intelligible, either
to oneself or to another in a failed attempt to communicate it, a hermeneutical injus-
tice thereby occurs. Hermeneutical injustice therefore consists in an unjust deficit of
intelligibility. Imagine, for example, someone with a disability the experience of which
is well understood by him, by his family and friends, and also by some other social
groups to which he belongs (perhaps, for instance, those who have themselves had
relevantly similar life experiences) but not by members of other groups to whom he
may on occasion need to communicate his distinctive experience, such as his employer
or his neighbor. Such a person is frustrated in his attempts to render his experiences
intelligible to those significant others owing to the requisite concepts not being suffi-
ciently widely shared, and where a significant part of the explanation why they are not
sufficiently widely shared is his hermeneutical marginalization. When this happens, his
communicative frustration exemplifies hermeneutical injustice.
In the original elaboration of these concepts (Fricker 2007) testimonial injustices
always have a perpetrator (a hearer, individual, or collective, who makes a credibility
 Epistemic Injustice and Trans Experience

judgment that is negatively affected by prejudice); but hermeneutical injustices do

not—they are purely structural. Hermeneutical injustices are moments of unmet needs
of understanding where the explanation is an underlying poverty of intelligibility for
which (on Fricker’s definition) no individual agent is at fault. But it is instructive to see
how far testimonial injustice might be developed into a purely structural phenomenon,
and conversely how far hermeneutical injustice might be augmented to become a kind
of injustice that can sometimes involve individual culpability.
Taking testimonial injustice first, Elizabeth Anderson has offered the helpful dis-
tinction within testimonial injustice between “transactional” and “structural,” which
helps us imagine cases of testimonial injustice where there is no particular perpetrator
but, owing to a purely structural mechanism, some voice or voices fail to be heard, and
in a context that renders their silencing unjust (Anderson 2012). Perhaps a real-life
example of such a structural testimonial injustice might be the infamous all-white Oscar
nominations in 2016, inasmuch as this was the direct result of the Academy’s being
overwhelmingly composed of white voters. The white-majority Academy structurally
silenced the voices of potential black Academy members, who can therefore be consid-
ered the subject of a structural testimonial injustice. (And, as is typical, this epistemic
injustice then causes a secondary injustice: the reasonable presumption in this case
being that some black actors missed out on nominations they would have received were
it not for the structural epistemic injustice in the Academy.)
From the other direction, and now considering the augmentation of hermeneuti-
cal injustice, José Medina has challenged Fricker’s characterization of it as “purely
structural,” arguing that we should see hermeneutical injustices as having perpetrators
(at least sometimes) inasmuch as members of the epistemic community may have
colluded in the structural ignorances that sustain the hermeneutical marginalization
fueling the injustice (Medina 2012 and 2013). Individuals may be colluding in this way
any time they fail to be sufficiently open to the unfamiliar or alien concepts being used
by others, whether this is due to sheer laziness or to forms of motivated resistance—
such as when a socially privileged person resists social meanings that state or imply
unsettling challenges to their social standing. Both Fricker and Medina regard this
as a failure of epistemic virtue (specifically the virtue of hermeneutical justice), but
Medina presses the idea that such failure of virtue reveals an important sense in which
hermeneutical injustices can have perpetrators, and so are not always purely structural.

Epistemic Injustice and Ignorance

Let us, then, try to explore the relation of the phenomena of epistemic injustice as
described above to ignorance. It might be tempting to say that all prejudice is a kind
of ignorance, but that would be a stretch. Prejudice is better conceived as a determi-
nant of what one knows and ignores; and if we take prejudice always to involve some
motivated maladjustment to the evidence (see Fricker 2007 and 2016; Maitra 2010:
206–207), then its tendency will be to produce ignorance, for maladjustment to the
evidence tends to produce epistemic error and distorted social perception. Someone
who perceives social others according to an array of prejudicial stereotypes will get
many things wrong, thereby ignoring at least as many potential items of knowledge. In
a case of testimonial injustice the hearer whose judgment of credibility is affected by a
prejudice that consists, for instance, in a jingoistic mistrust of foreigners may well fail

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to acquire knowledge from a foreigner-interlocutor, and that failure—that blockage in

the interpersonal flow of knowledge—preserves ignorance. The hearer had something
to learn from the speaker, but prejudice got in the way, and so the ignorance remains.
Moreover, any further epistemic import that the missed item of propositional knowl-
edge might have had, for instance its inferential, justifying or defeating significance for
other beliefs in the hearer’s psychology, are blocked along with the primary content
of the testimony. So the preservation of ignorance that p, where p is the propositional
content of what was said, may often entail further missed epistemic opportunity to
better shape or inferentially enrich one’s belief system (see Fricker 2016). We might
express this by saying that testimonial injustice tends to preserve not only immediate
ignorance but also inferentially ramified ignorance. Imagine, for instance, a patient
who has a jingoistic mistrust of foreigners being told by his doctor of Pakistani origin
that he needs to lose weight or risk cardiovascular disease. Now if the patient’s jingo-
istic mistrust of foreigners depresses the level of credibility given to the doctor, then
the patient may not only miss out on this knowledge of the health risk he is running
(already a significant epistemic loss) but moreover when he later experiences chest
pain combined with shortness of breath he is likely to be in a worse position to infer
that he is experiencing symptoms of cardiac arrest. This latter, life-threatening, epis-
temic disadvantage is a secondary one, occurring further down the inferential chain
from the original testimonial injustice.
The relationship between epistemic injustice and ignorance is not only a matter
of preservation, however. Prejudice that blocks the flow of knowledge in the epistemic
system also produces ignorance—not propositional ignorance this time but rather what
we might usefully think of as a special sort of practical ignorance: lack of conceptual
know-how. Some social patterns of testimonial injustice will produce similar patterns of
hermeneutical marginalization. This is because a sustained susceptibility to testimonial
injustice in one’s attempts to put one’s point across concerning social phenomena will
tend to contribute to, and ultimately constitute some sphere of, hermeneutical margin-
alization: persistent testimonial injustice prevents the subject from achieving normal
levels of participation in the generation of commonly held concepts and social mean-
ings. Thus there is a causal and, at the limit, constitutive relation between persistent
testimonial injustice and hermeneutical marginalization. If a social group is herme-
neutically marginalized in this way, then their would-be contributions to the common
store of social meanings (the collective hermeneutical resource) will remain private.
Such local or in-group meanings might be actively corralled or kettled by resistant out-
groups who are resistant to knowing; or again they may be more passively ignored by
out-groups’ simply not making the effort to step outside their default ways of viewing
the world and their place in it. (Sometimes this will be a dereliction of epistemic and
ethical duty; though it need not be. There is no standing epistemic obligation to make
efforts to know how the world looks from absolutely all social points of view—an impos-
sible task—but there is such an obligation to make relevant efforts to do so in relation
to many social groups other than one’s own.)
Where an in-group’s concepts and social meanings are actively kettled by resistant
out-groups, the result in the out-group is what Gaile Pohlhaus has labeled “willful
ignorance,” and José Medina “active ignorance” (Pohlhaus 2012; Medina 2013; see also
Mason 2011; Mills 2007 and 2015; and Dotson 2012). Whether willful or inadvertent,
active or passive, the upshot from the point of view of ignorance is that members of
out-groups do not gain the conceptual know-how embodied in the in-group’s would-be

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hermeneutical contributions. And, in turn, nor do they gain the social understanding
those concepts would have furnished. Thus sustained testimonial injustice regarding
some patch of the social world and the sphere of hermeneutical marginalization to
which it leads, can produce a patch of ignorance—namely, an area of practical concep-
tual ignorance or lack of conceptual know-how. When this happens, members of the
relevant out-groups fail to acquire a range of conceptual competences requisite for
understanding a sphere of social experience had by the in-group. Furthermore, when
this happens, the conditions are in place for members of the in-group to experience her-
meneutical injustice as regards the intelligibility of their experiences to out-groups—
the speakers who possess the requisite conceptual competencies suffer an unjust deficit
of communicative intelligibility at the hands of those who lack such competencies
(see Medina 2013: 108).
As an illustration, imagine once again the man who has a disability that is not prop-
erly understood by certain people to whom he needs to render it intelligible. Let’s imag-
ine he has a specific post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for which there is a specific
trigger that tends to come up in his work context. If his boss is unversed in issues of
PTSD, and/or resistant to their significance for her as an employer, then our employee
may suffer a hermeneutical injustice when he requests exemption from the work-related
activity that contains the trigger. Insofar as his boss continues to resist, remaining
closed to the new meanings being used by the employee (notions of specific triggers, for
instance), then not only does she actively facilitate the hermeneutical injustice experi-
enced by the employee, but she herself misses out on new conceptual competences she
might otherwise have gained, and so a certain lack of conceptual know-how on her part
is maintained. This scenario exemplifies what Medina has termed “active ignorance”
that is motivated (perhaps unconsciously) by interests, or other biases on the part of
the resisting hearer (Medina 2013: ch. 1). Similarly, Kristie Dotson has identified a
phenomenon she names “contributory injustice,” where a hearer is willfully insensible
to what a (conceptually well-resourced) speaker is attempting to get her resistant inter-
locutor to understand (Dotson 2012).
Such hermeneutical injustices preserve the out-group’s ignorance, just as straightfor-
ward cases of testimonial injustice do. And so we see that hermeneutical marginaliza-
tion produces practical conceptual ignorance; and testimonial and hermeneutical injustice
both preserve propositional ignorance on the part of the interlocutor. Despite the fact
that, in general, knowledge is an enabling asset in life and ignorance a liability, in cases
of epistemic injustice, where the unwholesome catalyst is either prejudice or hermeneu-
tical marginalization, it is overwhelmingly likely that the reverse is true: in such cases
it is rather the knower who will suffer from the effects of the various ignorances that are
produced or preserved in their interlocutors. (This generalization is compatible with
the point, emphasized by both Mills and Medina, that sometimes oppressed groups can
successfully exploit their oppressors’ ignorance of them, turning it in strategic ways to
their own advantage (Mills 2007: 18; Medina 2013: 116).)

Trans Experiences and Testimonial Injustice

We now have a characterization in place that presents us with a rough and ready causal
flow chart of broadly categorized moments of epistemic injustice: (1) socially patterned
testimonial injustice tends to produce (2) hermeneutical marginalization in relation to
one or more areas of social experience; which in turn tends to produce (3) hermeneutical

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injustice in relation to the intelligibility of those areas of experience. We would like

to explore and illustrate these phenomena of epistemic injustice and their relation to
ignorance by reference to the current and fast-changing issue of trans experience and
identity. By “trans” we mean to refer, without distinction, to all people who identify as
transgender, as transsexual, as trans*, or as trans (simpliciter). The movement for trans
rights is not only a particularly pressing strand of social and legislative change, it is also
one with special relevance to questions of ignorance, for there has long been (and con-
tinues to be—ourselves being no exception) widespread ignorance of trans perspectives,
experiences, and the shared social meanings they call for. We believe the overcoming of
ignorances that attend epistemic injustice in the manner set out above is an important
part of the wider social project of overcoming ignorance in relation to trans experiences
and identities. For our conception of trans experiences we shall rely almost entirely on
the written testimony of people who are trans. It goes without saying that our bringing
these experiences under this or that category of epistemic injustice is done tentatively,
and in an exploratory spirit that welcomes multiple corrective responses on these com-
plex and fast-evolving issues.
Trans people report experiences that are surely ones of testimonial injustice. One
context in which this can occur is the clinical setting. Historically, at gender clinics
in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, trans people who presented with requests for
hormones and surgery to facilitate gender transition were required to fit a very narrow
set of criteria in order to access these things. Trans people were expected to have a
gender presentation and a sexual orientation that were normative for their identi-
fied gender—so a trans woman, for example, would need to present a traditionally
feminine appearance and to report sexual attraction to men. Trans people were also
required to report a strong sense of loathing towards their bodies and to say that these
experiences dated from their early childhood (Green 2004: 46; Serano 2007: ch. 7).
A trans person who did not meet these criteria would often be judged not to really
need to transition, and would be denied access to transition-related medical proce-
dures. Such a person would suffer a testimonial injustice: their testimony concerning
their conviction that they were trans and had a genuine need to access transition-
related medical procedures was subject to an unjustified credibility deficit stemming
from identity prejudice concerning trans identities. This kind of testimonial injustice
was supported by the interaction of anti-trans prejudice with mental health stigma:
the positioning of trans people as by definition experiencing a psychiatric disorder—
“gender identity disorder”—made them vulnerable to having their reports of their
own experience dismissed on the spurious grounds that mental health problems made
them unreliable or even deceptive (Green 2004: 93; Serano 2007: ch. 7). The imme-
diate upshot as regards ignorance is that the healthcare worker learned very little of
trans experience from the “patient,” because the prejudicial pathologization blocked
crucial aspects of the informational flow. Jamison Green relates a particularly pro-
nounced expression of such ignorance: “As recently as 1999,” he writes, “I heard a
physician declare, ‘All my FTMs [i.e., trans men] want tattoos,’ as if this proved ‘his’
FTMs were typical men, or that FTMs who didn’t want tattoos were somehow less
authentic than ‘his’ FTMs” (Green 2004: 46).
Moreover, trans people are also susceptible to the specifically “pre-emptive” form
of testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007: 130–131 and passim). Pre-emptive testimonial
injustice is effectively an advance credibility deficit sufficient to ensure that your word

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is not even solicited. All too often for trans authors this kind of epistemic injustice
threatens when attempts are made to address a wider audience. The media, including
publishing and the film industry, has for some time seemed most willing to publish work
by trans people that is autobiographical, and that focuses on the process of transition,
often in a sensationalizing way (Serano 2007: 2). For example, in some cases, trans
people report being invited to participate in news articles or documentaries only to be
dropped when it becomes clear that they will not pander to a preconceived narrative,
often one that includes normative gender presentation and detailed discussion of geni-
tal surgery (Serano 2007: 44–45). Such pre-emptive testimonial injustice functions to
maintain ignorance regarding trans experiences and identities by ensuring that only a
narrow subset of those experiences and identities reach a wider audience.
In some cases, an author may compromise in order to at least get some version of
her message across: recognizing that the media industries simply do not want to hear
about a certain range of trans life experiences, she may decide to curtail and adjust
her message in order at least to succeed in conveying some approximation of what she
originally intended. Such cases constitute what Dotson has identified as “testimonial
smothering” (Dotson 2011)—a partial kind of silencing. Juliet Jacques, a writer and
journalist, reports an experience of testimonial smothering in relation to her autobiog-
raphy, Trans: A Memoir: “Initially, I wanted to write a wider history of trans people in
Britain, as well as short stories, but all I could get publishers to consider was a personal
story” (Jacques 2015: 299).
Testimonial smothering also contributes to ignorance, because the audience receives
only the compromised (and in some cases possibly even misleading) version, and so
learns less than they might have done had the speaker been able to communicate in
accordance with their original intentions.

Trans Experiences, Hermeneutical Marginalization,

and Hermeneutical Injustice
The testimonial injustices of various kinds suffered by trans people offer a particularly
stark illustration of the connection between testimonial injustice and hermeneutical
marginalization. Discourses surrounding trans experiences and identities have tended
to develop out of clinical settings within which trans people held the status of patients
or research subjects, and cis (that is, non-trans) clinicians wielded considerable insti-
tutional power, including the power to control access to transition-related medical
services. Since trans people were not able to contribute to this discourse on a foot-
ing of equality, rather than being seen as experts on their own lives their voices were
effectively overridden by those of cis people with medical training but no first-hand
experience of being a trans person. Not only did trans people in these contexts suffer
testimonial injustice, as described above, but the pattern of silencing and dismissal has
also constituted a serious case of hermeneutical marginalization.
Hermeneutical marginalization, in turn, is the key condition for hermeneutical
injustice, which will occur with any failed or frustrated attempt at intelligibility that is
significantly due to the marginalization. This may involve an attempt to communicate
with another person, or it may simply involve the subject’s attempt to understand their
own situation. In the case under consideration, the concepts and terms that arose from
medicalized discourses were not shaped by trans people themselves, and so were often

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ill-suited to describing the experiences of trans people. Moreover, testimonial injustice

in other contexts, such as the media, has hindered the development and circulation of
better concepts and terms. For example, the mistaken idea that the desire for genital
surgery is a necessary condition of being trans is a product of the problematic medical-
ized discourse just described, and is also maintained and reinforced by the mainstream
media’s often prurient emphasis on genital surgery in depictions of trans experiences
(Serano 2007: 44–45). Hermeneutical injustice may also take more specific forms in
particular contexts. For example, B. Lee Aultman (2016) argues that trans people suffer
hermeneutical injustice in the US legal system because their claims of discrimination
are handled according to a model that takes cis people with non-normative gender
expression as the paradigm, rather than engaging with trans people on their own terms.
The various ways in which hermeneutical resources can fall short of what is required
to accurately describe trans experiences are illustrated in Jacques’ description of the dis-
satisfaction she felt regarding the concepts and terms that, as a teenager, she took to be
available to describe her experience of gender:

I wasn’t sure if [wearing women’s clothing] made me a “cross-dresser,” which

seemed the least loaded term, or “transvestite,” or “transsexual.” I didn’t much
like any of those labels . . . . The word [transvestite] . . . felt sexual in a seedy,
lonely way—the kind of thing featured on Suburbia Uncovered shows on late-
night television. It was not a word I wanted to apply to myself. “Transsexual”
wasn’t accurate either. You needed to be someone who’d been through some
medical process to alter your body, right? I hadn’t, and didn’t plan to: they’re
not like me either, I thought.
(Jacques 2015: 14)

Jacques is looking for the social meanings she needs in order to render her experience
fully intelligible, both to herself and to others. There are many misfit concepts in
the vicinity, but that merely exacerbates the problem. In the case of “transvestite,”
the word is loaded with negative connotations that do not fit with her understand-
ing of herself, while in the case of “transsexual,” the word implies criteria that
are too narrow to include her, at least at that point in time (Jacques 2015: see also
Mock 2014: chs. 6 and 8).
The primary harm of hermeneutical injustice is the intrinsic one—the unjust deficit
of intelligibility. But such injustices also have practical consequences that constitute
secondary harms. For example, difficulty in rendering their identities intelligible to
medical practitioners has meant that trans people have found it hard to access medi-
cal care related to transition. More generally, the fact that trans people have faced an
uphill struggle merely to explain how they identify and what that means has facili-
tated the stigmatization of trans people, resulting in worsened access to basic social
goods such as employment and housing, and in their being victims of physical violence
(Levitt and Ippolito 2014).
Besides these negative practical consequences of hermeneutical injustice, there
can be further, and perhaps deeper, harm caused by the intrinsic injustice—identity
related harm (Fricker 2007: ch. 7, esp. 163–166). Trans people can all too often expe-
rience such identity-related harm, either in relation to what they socially “count” as,
and/or in relation to how they thereby even come to see themselves. Although the

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stigmatization of trans identities is surely diminishing in some contexts, trans people

in many other contexts may still come to “count socially” as a particular “type” in a
way that is objectionable. Most notably, trans people are often misgendered, being
socially counted as members of the gender to which they were assigned at birth.
Such misgendering can become a matter of life and death, as it did in the tragic
case of Vicky Thompson, a trans woman sent to a men’s prison who killed herself
in custody, just as she had publicly declared she would if sent to the prison (see
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-34869620). Trans people may also be inter-
preted through negative interpretive tropes or stereotypes, such as the “deceptive
transsexual” who tries to trick people into sexual relations under false pretences, or
the “pathetic transsexual,” whose gender presentation is tragi-comically unsuccessful
(Bettcher 2007). In such cases they would “count” as deceptive/pathetic even if this
is not how they see themselves.
Trans people may also suffer the second kind of identity-related harm, in which a
person’s very sense of their own identity comes to be shaped by the negative meanings
structuring the social space. Serano eloquently describes such an experience:

And maybe I was born transgender—my brain preprogrammed to see myself

as female despite the male body I was given at birth—but like every child, I
turned to the rest of the world to figure out who I was and what I was worth.
And like a good little boy, I picked up on all of the not-so-subliminal messages
that surrounded me. TV shows where Father knows best and a woman’s place is
in the home; fairy tales where helpless girls await their handsome princes; car-
toon supermen who always save the damsel in distress; plus schoolyard taunts
like “sissy” and “fairy” and “pussy” all taught me to see “feminine” as a synonym
for “weakness.” And nobody needed to tell me that I should hate myself for
wanting to be what was so obviously the lesser sex.
(Serano 2007: 273–274)

Serano describes this self-directed hatred in relation to gender as having a deep impact
on the development of her identity, resulting in a sexual “submissive streak,” which she
describes as a “scar” left by an abusive culture (2007: 273–277). Serano’s experience
seems to us like a clear case of the second type of identity-related harm that can result
from hermeneutical injustice. Other cases that fall under this category of harm include
cases where a person experiences a delay in coming to realize that they are trans, a delay
that could have been avoided had relevant concepts been more readily to hand. As
Green puts it, “It is so easy to dismiss what we know to be true about ourselves because
the only words we have can so easily sound preposterous” (2004: 64).
It seems, then, that trans people may suffer the full range of harms associated with
hermeneutical injustice: unjust intelligibility deficit (the intrinsic, primary harm), its
negative practical consequences (secondary harms), and moreover those extended
and specifically identity-related secondary harms concerning both social perceptions
(what one “counts” as) and one’s actual self-identity. In such cases of hermeneuti-
cal injustice, ignorance is preserved not only on the part of out-groups, but in some
cases on the part of the subject, too, for she is hindered in the process of gaining self-
knowledge. Moreover, ignorance on the part of out-groups, in this case cis people, is a
key component in the kind of negative identity prejudices that lead in turn to further

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cases of testimonial injustice. Thus, here we see a complex interweaving of testimonial

injustice, hermeneutical marginalization and hermeneutical injustice that functions to
produce and maintain ignorance with regard to trans experiences.

Combatting Epistemic Injustice by Overcoming

Conceptual Practical Ignorance
These reflections on the various epistemic injustices suffered by trans people also serve
to highlight some of the complexities involved in combatting epistemic injustice. We
propose that part of an effort to combat epistemic injustice can usefully be conceived in
terms of overcoming ignorance in conceptual know-how. We turn to Sally Haslanger’s
invaluable distinction between “manifest concepts” and “operative concepts” to help us
substantiate this idea (Haslanger 2012). She illustrates this distinction by reference to
the concept of being “tardy,” or late to school. Tardiness might be officially defined by
the school rules as “arriving after 8.50 am”; but if no one is ever marked “tardy” unless
they miss the ten-minute registration period entirely, then in practice students will only
count as being tardy if they arrive after 9.00 am. If different teachers have different prac-
tices for taking the register, with some marking a student as tardy if she is not present
when her name is called and others taking a more lenient approach, then what counts
as tardy will vary from classroom to classroom. The manifest concept of tardiness in this
case would be the one given the by the school rules, and the practice followed by each
teacher would constitute a distinct operative concept.
Remedying hermeneutical injustice often begins by developing an operative concept
that is used by a particular community (an in-group, as we have been putting it) to fill
the hermeneutical lacuna. This means remedying a particular kind of ignorance: practi-
cal ignorance in relation to a certain set of concepts. What must be learned or acquired is
not any body of propositional knowledge in the first instance, but rather a patch of con-
ceptual know-how. In the Carmita Wood case discussed in Fricker 2007 (ch. 7), it takes
her participation in a consciousness-raising group to generate the concept she needs to
make proper sense of her experience—an experience we would now easily identify as one
of sexual harassment. In the case of trans people, this might mean that a trans commu-
nity adopts a practice of relating to everyone as members of their identified gender, using
the word “woman,” for example, to mean anyone who identifies as a woman, regardless
of birth-assigned gender or genital status (see, for example, Bettcher 2009). Often, then,
operative concepts are more progressive than manifest concepts. Consequently, a com-
mon focus of activism is trying to encourage people to use the operative concept instead
of the existing manifest concept: lobbying for laws and policies on sexual harassment
to be drawn up, or for legal recognition of trans people as members of their identified
genders. Insofar as the activist effort is successful, practical ignorance of how to use the
operative concept will have been overcome. That concept will have started out as local
to the in-group, but spread outwards to other groups, perhaps ultimately forming part of
the universally shared collective hermeneutical resource, so that anyone could use the
concept and expect to be understood by just about anyone else.
We should, however, be alert to the fact that where activism is successful, we may
end up with a situation in which the manifest or official concept is better than the oper-
ative concept actually used by most people (Jenkins 2017). In such circumstances, what
is needed is to make good the practical ignorance in the other direction by acquiring
more know-how vis-à-vis our manifest concept and its cognates. It seems that we may

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be in such a situation in the UK at present. The Gender Recognition Act of 2004 allows
for trans people to have their identified gender legally recognized without requiring
them to have undergone genital surgery. However, many people wrongly understand
transition as being defined by genital surgery, and will not consider trans people to be
members of their identified gender unless they have had genital surgery. This shows
that although fixing manifest concepts is a crucial part of combatting hermeneutical
injustice, it is not the end of the story. Besides continued work to improve manifest
concepts, ongoing efforts are needed to make sure that operative concepts are brought
into line with the improved manifest concepts.
Quite how we might learn a new concept and its cognates in any given case is far
from straightforward. It may not be possible to simply add a given operative concept and
make it manifest in a conceptual practice into which it does not easily fit. Sometimes
we need stepping-stone concepts, which might ultimately be found seriously wanting
by the community whose intelligibility they are meant to assist. Take the idea of being
a “woman trapped in the body of a man”:

[This] has become so popular and widespread that it’s safe to say these days that
it’s far more often parodied by cissexuals than used by transsexuals to describe
their own experiences. In fact, the regularity with which cissexuals use this
saying to mock trans women has always struck me as rather odd, since it was so
clearly coined not to encapsulate all of the intricacies and nuances of the trans
female experience, but rather as a way of dumbing down our experiences into a
sound bite that cissexuals might be better able to comprehend.
(Serano 2007, 215; see also Bettcher 2014)

The use of this phrase to belittle trans people does not, however, indicate that it
was always without value. Sometimes, as Serano suggests, a concept or interpretive
trope plays a useful transitional or stepping-stone role for those outside the core
community (and perhaps sometimes for those inside it too), and it can be thought
of as destined to be discarded after it has served its enabling purpose (see also Green
2004: 83). Perhaps the final point to be made here, then, is that when it comes to
the social evolution of our shared hermeneutical resource (principally by way of an
increasing contribution from more localized hermeneutical resources) our collective
hermeneutical progress may sometimes be two steps forward, one step back; but it
will be no less progress for that.

Further Reading
Bettcher, Talia (2014) “Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance,” Signs
39(2): 383–406. (A good entry point to philosophical work on trans experiences.)
Fricker, Miranda (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford: Oxford University
Press. (The primary source for the notion of “epistemic injustice.”)
Kidd, Ian James, Medina, Jose, and Pohlhaus Jr., Gaile (Eds.) (2017) The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic
Injustice, London: Routledge. (Offers a wide-ranging collection of new essays.)
Medina, José (2013) Epistemologies of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and
Resistant Imaginations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Develops interweaving themes of epistemic
injustice, “white ignorance,” and associated epistemic vices and virtues.)
Sullivan, Shannon and Tuana, Nancy (Eds.) (2007) Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, Albany, NY:
SUNY University Press. (A good reference for more on the epistemology of ignorance.)

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Related Topics
Testimony, trust, and trustworthiness (Chapter 21); speech and silencing (Chapter 23);
feminist philosophy of social science (Chapter 27); through the looking glass: trans
theory meets feminist philosophy (Chapter 32); moral justification in an unjust world
(Chapter 40).

References
Anderson, Elizabeth (2012) “Epistemic Justice as a Virtue of Social Institutions,” Social Epistemology 26(2):
163–173.
Aultman, B. Lee (2016) “Epistemic Injustice and the Construction of Transgender Legal Subjects,” Wagadu:
A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies 15(Summer): 11–34.
Bettcher, Talia Mae (2007) “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics
of Illusion,” Hypatia 22(3): 43–65.
—— (2009) “Trans Identities and First-Person Authority,” in Laurie J. Shrage (Ed.) “You’ve Changed”: Sex
Reassignment and Personal Identity, New York: Oxford University Press, 98–120.
—— (2014) “Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance,” Signs 39(2):
383–406.
Dotson, Kristie (2011) “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia 26(2):
236–257.
—— (2012) “A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression,” Frontiers 33(1): 24–47.
Fricker, Miranda (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—— (2016) “Epistemic Injustice and the Preservation of Ignorance,” in Martijn Blaauw and Rik Peels (Eds.)
The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Green, Jamison (2004) Becoming a Visible Man, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
Haslanger, Sally (2012) Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, New York: Oxford University
Press.
Jacques, Juliet (2015) Trans: A Memoir, London: Verso.
Jenkins, Katharine (2017) “Rape Myths and Domestic Abuse Myths as Hermeneutical Injustices,” Journal of
Applied Philosophy 34(2): 191–206.
Levitt, Heidi M. and Ippolito, Maria R. (2014) “Being Transgender: Navigating Minority Stressors and
Developing Authentic Self-Presentation,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 38(2): 46–64.
Maitra, Ishani (2010) “The Nature of Epistemic Injustice,” Philosophical Books 51: 195–211.
Mason, Rebecca (2011) “Two Kinds of Unknowing,” Hypatia 26(2): 294–307.
Medina, José (2012) “Hermeneutical Injustice and Polyphonic Contextualism: Social Silences and Shared
Hermeneutical Responsibilities,” Social Epistemology 26(2): 201–220.
—— (2013) Epistemologies of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant
Imaginations, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mills, Charles (2007) “White Ignorance,” in Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Eds.) Race and
Epistemologies of Ignorance, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 11–38.
—— (2015) “Global White Ignorance,” in Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey (Eds.) Routledge International
Handbook of Ignorance Studies, London/New York: Routledge, 217–227.
Mock, Janet (2014) Redefining Realness, New York: Atria Books.
Pohlhaus Jr., Gaile (2012) “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful
Hermeneutical Ignorance,” Hypatia 27(4): 715–735.
Serano, Julia (2007) Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Feminism and the Scapegoating of Femininity,
Emeryville, CA: Seal Press.

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 23
SPEECH AND SILENCING
Ishani Maitra

Introduction
A recurring concern within feminist philosophy of language has been with the ways
in which women (and others) are systematically disadvantaged qua language users.
There are several dimensions to this kind of disadvantage, but one that has particu-
larly interested theorists is silencing. It is clear that a speaker can be silenced by being
prevented from uttering words. But what about a speaker who is able to say some-
thing? In recent years, several theorists have argued that such a speaker may also be
silenced, if they are prevented from doing certain things with their words. Call this
“silencing in the broad sense.” This chapter explores several different conceptions of
silencing in this sense. It also asks when some related phenomena should be regarded
as further kinds of silencing.
Much of the recent literature on silencing gets its start from the work of Catharine
MacKinnon (MacKinnon 1987; 1993). In her 1993 monograph Only Words, MacKinnon
argues that we have failed to take seriously enough women’s testimony about sexual
abuse in the making and use of pornography. She writes:

Protecting pornography means protecting sexual abuse as speech, at the

same time that both pornography and its protection have deprived women
of speech, especially speech against sexual abuse. There is a connection
between the silence enforced on women, in which we are seen to love and
choose our chains because they have been sexualized, and the noise of por-
nography that surrounds us, passing for discourse (ours, even) and parading
under constitutional protection.
(MacKinnon 1993: 9–10, original emphasis)

MacKinnon thus points to two harms of pornography in this passage: first, that it
deprives women of speech, specifically speech about sexual abuse; and second, that it
passes for women’s speech. She also points to a tension between protecting pornography
“as speech” while it functions to deprive women of speech. I’ll return to each of these
points in the discussion below.
This chapter proceeds as follows. In the next section, I introduce several distinct
conceptions of silencing in the broad sense, focusing particularly on the work of Rae
Langton and Jennifer Hornsby. After that, I sketch what has come to be called “the
Silencing Argument,” which connects silencing in some of the senses distinguished in
 KNOWLEDGE, LANGUAGE, AND SCIENCE

the previous section with infringement of a right to free speech. In this section I also
describe what I take to be the most significant objections to that argument, and some
avenues of response to those objections. In the final section of this chapter, I consider
some further phenomena that are related to the conceptions of silencing introduced
earlier, and ask whether those phenomena should also count as kinds of silencing. I
offer two distinct approaches to this question, and compare them. In this section I also
discuss further wrongs, beyond infringement of a speech right, that may be associated
with one or another conception of silencing.
Though I will say more about MacKinnon’s influence in what follows, my focus in
this chapter is not on pornography per se (as opposed to other potential contributors to
silencing). There is at this point a vast literature on pornography and its functioning,
which I will not attempt to summarize here. Rather, my focus in this chapter is more
narrowly on silencing itself. That is to say, I will mostly be interested here in what
silencing in the broad sense amounts to, and following MacKinnon, in what harms—
and wrongs—it perpetrates against women, and others.

Conceptions of Silencing
In her 1993 paper, “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,” Rae Langton uses J. L. Austin’s
theory of speech acts to unpack MacKinnon’s claim that pornography silences women.
Austin (1975 [1962]) famously emphasized that speech is action, that words can do
things and not just say things. Extending this thought, Langton argues that silence can
consist in a failure to act, that a speaker can be silenced if she is prevented from doing
things she wants to do with her words.
Langton distinguishes three importantly distinct kinds of silence, each corre-
sponding to the failure of one of the parts of Austin’s tripartite distinction between
locutionary, perlocutionary, and illocutionary acts (Langton 1993: 314–315). Simple
silence happens when a speaker is prevented from uttering words at all, as might be
the case if she is threatened or intimidated. Perlocutionary frustration takes place
when the speaker utters words, but is prevented from achieving the (perlocutionary)
effects she intends via those words; this might be the case, for instance, if what she
says fails to persuade others to see things her way. And finally, illocutionary disable-
ment happens when the speaker is prevented from (fully successfully) performing the
illocutionary act she intends.
Following Austin, Langton takes illocutionary acts—e.g., warning, telling, promising,
christening, voting, and so on—to require uptake. Without that uptake, the utterance in
question is deprived of its intended illocutionary force (Langton 1993: 316). To illustrate,
consider Donald Davidson’s example of an actor on stage trying to warn their audience
about an actual, not fictional, fire (Davidson 1984: 269–270). The audience takes the
actor to still be performing; their lack of uptake prevents the actor’s utterance from being
a warning. What precisely is necessary for uptake in this sense is an interesting question
on its own, but one that I’ll leave aside here. (For discussion of whether uptake is genu-
inely necessary for illocutionary success, see Jacobson 1995; Hornsby and Langton 1998;
Bird 2002; McGowan et al. 2010; Mikkola 2011; Tumulty 2012.)
Further, Langton also takes illocutionary acts to have felicity conditions—roughly,
conditions that have to be satisfied for such acts to be fully successful—that are fixed
by convention (Langton 1993: 319). When those conditions are not satisfied, the

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attempted illocutionary act will go wrong in some way, perhaps by failing to secure
uptake. (For discussion of the role that conventions play in silencing, see Wieland
2007; Wyatt 2009.)
Failure of uptake, Langton argues, is precisely what happens when a woman attempts
to refuse a sexual overture or protest sexual abuse in a context in which the felicity con-
ditions of those acts are “set” by pornography (Langton 1993: 324). She writes:

Pornography might legitimate rape, and thus silence refusal, by doing some-
thing other than eroticizing refusal itself. It may simply leave no space for the
refusal move in its depictions of sex. In pornography of this kind there would be
all kinds of locutions the women depicted could use to make the consent move.
“Yes” is one such locution. “No” is just another. Here the refusal move is not
itself eroticized [as in other pornography]: it is absent altogether.
(Langton 1993: 324)

Pornography might do this by, for example, setting the felicity conditions for refusal
in such a way that a woman’s “No” in a sexual encounter is just a way in which she
plays along in a sexual game, rather than a genuine refusal. When this happens, that
“No” will not secure the necessary uptake, and so, will fail to count as a refusal. Note
that Langton’s account here picks up on both of MacKinnon’s claims about the harms
of pornography mentioned in the Introduction: pornography can deprive women of
speech (by disabling our refusals), and pass for women’s speech (by making it appear as
though we are consenting). (For further discussion of how pornography might do these
things, see Langton and West 1999; McGowan 2003.)
(It is worth noting at this point that Langton’s project is to show that pornography
could silence women, i.e., that that claim is not incoherent. Whether pornography does
silence is a further question, and a partly empirical one; she does not purport to have
settled that further question.)
Besides possibly contributing to illocutionary disablement, Langton argues that
pornography may also contribute to simple silence and perlocutionary frustration as
well. Indeed, when a speaker’s intended illocutionary acts are disabled in the manner
just described, her intended perlocutionary acts are also likely to fail. Nevertheless,
silencing understood as illocutionary disablement occupies a special place in Langton’s
discussion, in large part because of its connection to free speech; I’ll return to that con-
nection in the next section.
Langton’s way of unpacking MacKinnon’s view is closely related to Jennifer Hornsby’s
(Hornsby 1993; 1995). Hornsby distinguishes two kinds of silencing, namely, inaudibility
and ineffability. Inaudibility is similar to Langton’s illocutionary disablement: a speaker’s
attempt to refuse by saying “No” becomes inaudible when her audience fails to recognize
it as an attempt to refuse. In such a case, writes Hornsby, the speaker “through no fault
of her own, is deprived of her illocutionary potential” (Hornsby 1995: 137). She is thus
deprived of the power to do as she wishes with her words.
Despite these similarities, there are also some interesting differences between
Hornsby’s account and Langton’s. For example, where Langton emphasizes the
conventional aspects of illocutionary acts, Hornsby draws attention to their role in
communication (“When we uncover a concept of illocution, we reveal the use of words
to be communicative action” (Hornsby 1995: 133, original emphasis). (For more on

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Hornsby’s view of illocution, see Hornsby (1994).) Further, where Langton talks about
pornography illocutionarily disabling women by setting—i.e., constituting—felicity
conditions, Hornsby argues that pornography can contribute to inaudibility by causing
a breakdown in the reciprocity between speaker and audience that is needed for suc-
cessful communication (Hornsby 1995: 133–134).
Ineffability—Hornsby’s other notion of silencing—is importantly different. Whereas
inaudibility involves a speaker failing to get across what she means, ineffability has to
do with the speaker being unable to express that meaning in the first place. More care-
fully, a content becomes ineffable in a given language when any way of expressing it in
that language carries with it other contents that the speaker does not wish to convey.
Hornsby illustrates this phenomenon with the word “quota”: in the aftermath of right-
leaning criticisms of affirmative action and related controversies, the word has come
to be associated in the US with practices that are unfair or unreasonable. Accordingly,
writes Hornsby, it is difficult to speak favorably of, e.g., a school having a quota without
“representing yourself as a dangerous liberal (or perhaps by engaging in such circumlo-
cution as is bound to detract from the main message)” (Hornsby 1995: 135).
Unlike illocutionary disablement/inaudibility, ineffability has not received much
attention in the philosophical literature. The notion is arguably related to several
others that have been discussed in recent years, such as Miranda Fricker’s conception
of hermeneutical injustice, Kristie Dotson’s conception of testimonial smothering, and
Jason Stanley’s account of propaganda operating via not-at-issue content (Fricker 2007;
Dotson 2011; Stanley 2015; see also Chapter 22 in this volume). Further discussion of
ineffability, its harms/wrongs, and its connection to the other notions just mentioned
would, in my view, be a welcome addition to the literature.

The Silencing Argument

Not every speaker who is silenced in one of the senses just distinguished is thereby
harmed, or wronged. If I’m trying to make an argument, and you raise a devastating
objection to one of its premises, you may frustrate my intended perlocutionary act
(namely, persuasion); but at least if the stakes are low enough, you haven’t harmed
me. Nevertheless, it’s also clear that many speakers who are silenced are harmed—and
wronged—as a result of being silenced. Thus, the following questions should be crucial
to discussions of silencing: Given any particular conception of silencing, when does
silencing in that sense harm/wrong the silenced speaker? When does it harm/wrong
others? And what is the nature of those harms/wrongs?
Much of the literature on silencing has focused on one particular (moral and legal)
wrong, namely, infringement of the silenced speaker’s right to free speech. I’ll present
that argument below; but in the next section, I’ll emphasize that there are reasons to
be morally and politically concerned with silencing that go well beyond its relation
to free speech.
Let’s begin with Langton’s threefold distinction between simple silence, perlocu-
tionary frustration, and illocutionary disablement. A speaker who is prevented from
uttering words at all—and so has simple silence enforced upon her—may well suffer an
infringement of her right to free speech. By contrast, a speaker who is perlocutionarily
frustrated need not have her speech right violated. Consider again the example in the
opening paragraph of this section, in which I am perlocutionarily frustrated by having
my argument undermined. My speech right is surely not infringed in that case.

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(Of course, this leaves open the possibility that some kinds of perlocutionary frustration—
e.g., frustration of certain perlocutionary acts, or frustration that’s systematic in certain spe-
cial ways—could qualify as infringements of a right to free speech. That possibility has not
been discussed much in the literature.)
What about a speaker who is illocutionarily disabled? Both Langton and Hornsby
argue that at least some illocutionary disablement should qualify as an infringement of
the silenced speaker’s right to free speech (Langton 1993: 327–328; Hornsby 1995: 140;
Hornsby and Langton 1998: 35–37). For both, free speech is valuable not only because
it allows us to utter words, but because it enables us to do other things—such as refusing
and protesting and questioning and warning—in uttering those words. If we couldn’t
do those things, speech would not be nearly as valuable. Thus, Langton and Hornsby
both argue, our reasons for protecting speech extend beyond locution to illocution as
well. And insofar as pornography contributes to women’s illocutionary disablement,
i.e., insofar as pornography prevents us from refusing, protesting, and so on, it infringes
women’s right to free speech.
This argument is often dubbed “the Silencing Argument.” Note that the argument
focuses on silencing (i.e., illocutionary disablement) that is connected to an aspect of
the speaker’s social identity, namely, their gender. As such, that silencing is not inci-
dental, but systematic in a certain way. Not all illocutionary disablement is systematic
in this way: for example, a speaker’s intended illocutionary act may fail because her
audience is being particularly obtuse, for example. But it is systematic illocutionary
disablement that is most plausibly an infringement of the speech right.
The Silencing Argument offers a response to those who would acknowledge that
pornography systematically harms women, but still argue that, as speech, it must be
protected under any reasonable principle of free speech. On this latter line of thinking,
pornography’s harms create a tension between pornographers’ (and consumers’) right to
free speech, and women’s right to equality and respect. But in that conflict, free speech
has the greater priority (see, for example, Dworkin 1993 for an argument along these
lines). So the tension must be resolved in favor of pornography.
The Silencing Argument offers a re-framing of this debate. It suggests that there
is more at stake here than a conflict between two distinct rights (speech, equality).
There is also a conflict within the speech right itself, between pornographers’ (and
consumers’) exercise of that right, and women’s exercise of the same right. The argu-
ment doesn’t purport to settle what ought to be done about this conflict. In particular,
it doesn’t establish that pornography should be censored on these grounds. But if
successful, the argument does make pressing a question about how these competing
claims should be balanced against each other.
This argument has been widely discussed—and criticized—over the last several
years. In what follows, I’ll focus on three criticisms that are particularly noteworthy
in my view, in part because they have inspired philosophically interesting responses.
I’ll briefly sketch some of those responses as well, though I won’t be able to do them
justice here.

The Scope of the Right to Free Speech

The first, and perhaps most obvious, response to the Silencing Argument takes issue
with its interpretation of the right to free speech, arguing that that interpretation makes
the right out to be implausibly broad and overly demanding. A particularly trenchant

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example of this sort of criticism is offered by Ronald Dworkin (Dworkin 1993). Dworkin
argues that the Silencing Argument is committed to an understanding of the right to
free speech that “includes a right to circumstances that encourage one to speak, and a
right that others grasp and respect what one means to say” (Dworkin 1993: 38). But this
understanding is just “unacceptable” (Dworkin 1993: 38).
Daniel Jacobson also criticizes the understanding of free speech at play in the
Silencing Argument, drawing upon John Stuart Mill’s influential defense of free speech
for his critique (Jacobson 1995). Mill, on Jacobson’s construal, held that “no speech
should be restricted on grounds of its content” (Jacobson 1995: 68). But this prohibi-
tion on content-restriction was married with a recognition that not every speech act
should be protected: “even opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in
which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instiga-
tion to some mischievous act” (Mill 2008: 62, quoted in Jacobson 1995: 68). Mill is
thus committed, Jacobson thinks, to something like a freedom of locutionary acts,
but not to a more general freedom of illocutionary acts (Jacobson 1995: 71–72). In
fact, there are plenty of instances of illocutionary disablement—e.g., convicted felons
being unable to vote, and would-be-bigamists and twelve-year-olds being unable to
marry—where that disablement constitutes no infringement of the right to free speech
at all. Even in cases where the disablement does contribute to an injustice, as when
women’s sexual refusals are disabled, Jacobson argues that we can capture the injustice
by appealing to the attendant disablement of autonomy (Jacobson 1995: 75–76). (For
a related but distinct Millian argument against the invocation of free speech in the
Silencing Argument, see Bird 2002: 4–6.)
In a joint response to Jacobson, Hornsby and Langton contest his interpretation of
Mill (Hornsby and Langton 1998: 32–35). They argue, for example, that in the passage
quoted, Mill intended to exclude perlocutionary acts, not illocutionary ones, from the
realm of free speech. Though they agree that the right to free speech cannot extend to
all illocutionary acts, they also stress the importance of communication, and so of illo-
cutionary acts that are distinctively communicative, to free speech. (For more on this
latter line of thought, see Maitra 2009.)
Hornsby and Langton also argue that an illocutionarily disabled speaker suffers
more than a disablement of autonomy. They point to “a distinctively human capac-
ity that one has as a member of a speech community,” possession of which is crucial
for an individual “to flourish as a knowledgeable being,” for the spread of knowl-
edge across individuals, and for nonviolent decision-making, among other things
(Hornsby and Langton 1998: 37). It’s this human capacity that is undermined by
illocutionary disablement.
More recently, Caroline West has sketched an understanding of free speech that also
requires something more than the mere liberty to utter words (West 2003). She asks us
to imagine speakers whose words are systematically misheard because their government
has secretly implanted “voice scramblers” in their hearers; these speakers are able to
produce utterances, but still suffer infringements of their right to free speech. West takes
this case to suggest that the right to free speech comes with a “minimal comprehension
requirement,” but one that stops well short of Dworkin’s “right that others . . . respect
what one means to say” (West 2003: 409–410). And this interpretation of the speech
right, West argues, may be enough to vindicate the Silencing Argument. (For more on
this interpretation of the right to free speech, see also West 2012.)

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Authority to Silence
A second line of criticism focuses on how pornography can contribute to silencing.
Recall here Langton’s suggestion that pornography sets the felicity conditions for
women’s speech, at least in some contexts. Some speech can clearly set felicity condi-
tions for other speech: Langton’s example of lawmakers in apartheid-era South Africa
enacting, via voice vote, voting restrictions that disenfranchise black voters is a par-
ticularly vivid example (Langton 1993: 317). But in the clearest cases, this sort of
enactment of felicity conditions happens via speakers’ exercise of authority over some
relevant domain. Lawmakers clearly have the authority to enact voting restrictions.
Pornographers, by contrast, don’t seem to have the authority to enact norms about
sexual (or other) interactions. So pornography cannot set felicity conditions for
women’s speech in the relevant contexts. Or so the objection goes.
This objection is one aspect of a more general concern about how pornography
has the authority to subordinate women, by silencing them or in other ways. I’ve
elsewhere dubbed this “the Authority Problem” (for pornography) (Maitra 2012: 95).
Versions of this problem have been raised by several commentators (Butler 1997;
Green 1998; Sumner 2004; Bauer 2006, among others). Leslie Green, for example,
argues that pornography is, for us, “low-status speech,” speech that is “permitted
although disapproved” (Green 1998: 297). That means that even if it can articulate
norms about sexual behavior, it cannot enact those norms on others. That’s especially
so given that pornography must compete with other sources, such as “the state, the
family, and the church,” that do possess authority, and that prescribe countervailing
norms (Green 1998: 296).
The Authority Problem has inspired several distinct kinds of responses. Some have
argued that, contrary to first appearances, pornography does have the authority to
subordinate women, at least in some contexts (Langton 1993; 1998; Wieland 2007;
Maitra 2012). Langton, for example, argues that for certain consumers, pornography
“has all the authority of a monopoly” (Langton 1993: 312); while Nellie Wieland
compares the authority of pornographers to a kind of linguistic authority over what
certain words mean in sexual discourse (Wieland 2007: 441–445).
On other views, however, the Authority Problem is not so pressing. Recall, for
example, Hornsby’s view that pornography contributes to silencing by causing a
breakdown in reciprocity between speakers and hearers (Hornsby 1995). Speech can
erode the sort of minimal receptiveness needed for reciprocity by, e.g., relentlessly
vilifying members of a particular group, even if those doing the vilifying don’t pos-
sess any particular authority. If that’s right, then authority may not be necessary for
silencing (or subordination).
Mary Kate McGowan has also defended this last claim, though along very differ-
ent lines. McGowan suggests that we can think of sexual interactions as cooperative,
rule-governed activity, at least in a thin sense (McGowan 2003). In other coopera-
tive, rule-governed activities—including ordinary conversations—participants can set
felicity conditions for the speech of other participants. One way that this can happen
is via the operation of rules of accommodation. And this kind of accommodation can
occur even when the participants being accommodated have no particular authority. If
pornography can set felicity conditions for women’s speech via accommodation on the
part of consumers and others, then perhaps no authority on the part of pornographers is
required for silencing. The Authority Problem is then dissolved.

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Silencing, Consent, and Responsibility

The final response to the Silencing Argument that I will consider focuses on the question
of responsibility, both for silencing and for its aftermath. Consider again disablement of
women’s sexual refusals. One major reason to be concerned with this kind of silencing
is that it is likely to result in rape. But—according to this final response—we cannot
coherently say this. For if women’s sexual refusals are disabled, that means that women
are prevented from refusing sex. But if there is no refusal, then we cannot say that there
is rape (Jacobson 1995: 77).
Hornsby and Langton forcefully rebut this version of the objection (Hornsby
and Langton 1998: 31). They point out that absence of refusal is not the same as
consent: even if a woman is prevented from refusing, it does not follow she has
consented. In fact, even if her interlocutor takes her to be consenting, it still does
not follow that she has consented. And it’s the absence of consent that matters for
whether there is rape.
Some more recent commentators have granted this as a reply to the initial objec-
tion, but argued that the reply raises a further issue. That issue has to do with whether
silencing in some way mitigates the rapist’s responsibility for the rape (Bird 2002;
Wieland 2007). Wieland, for example, argues that if pornography contributes to
silencing in the way suggested by the Silencing Argument, then it must also deprive
its consumers—including those who go on to force sex on women—of the interpre-
tive resources necessary for recognizing women’s sexual refusals as such. That is to say,
on this picture, “whereas women are illocutionarily disabled, rapists are interpretively
disabled” (Wieland 2007: 452). And this in turn means that rapists could reasonably
interpret their victims as consenting. That’s enough to diminish rapists’ responsibility
for their actions, even if it doesn’t remove that responsibility altogether.
Again, there is more to say here. In particular, even if it’s true that pornography con-
tributes to interpretive mistakes, as the Silencing Argument suggests, it doesn’t imme-
diately follow that those mistakes are reasonable. For example, if we’re prone to mistakes
of certain kinds, it might fall upon us to take extra steps to avoid them; then, when we
fail to take those steps, we fail to behave reasonably. So, at the very least, more needs
to be said to establish that the interpretive mistakes at issue here are reasonable, and
so, responsibility-mitigating. (For related discussion, see Maitra and McGowan 2010;
McGowan et al. 2010; Tumulty 2012.)

Summing up: I began this section by emphasizing questions about how silencing (in any
sense) harms/wrongs the silenced speakers, and others. I’ve focused in this section on
one particular wrong that has been connected to silencing, namely, infringement of the
right to free speech. I’ll discuss some further wrongs in the next section.
Before leaving the Silencing Argument, though, let me emphasize again that my
survey of the literature related to that argument has not been exhaustive. I’ll close
this discussion by briefly mentioning one final question, namely, whether Austinian
speech act theory (and its successors) are well suited to capturing MacKinnon’s
insights about pornography, and its contribution to silencing. Applying speech act
theory in this way involves regarding pornography as speech, produced by certain
individuals (pornographers) and consumed by other individuals. But it has been
argued that this way of framing things gives rise to worries—e.g., about whether
pornography genuinely is speech, about variation in pornography’s illocutionary

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force across contexts, about the difference between illocution and perlocution, about
whether pornographers have speaker authority, and so on—that end up detracting
from the plausibility of MacKinnon’s claims. (For related discussion, see Saul 2006;
Antony 2011; Hornsby 2011; MacKinnon 2012; Finlayson 2014.) This in turn raises
an interesting question about whether some alternate framing would be better, or
whether any framing is needed at all.

Related Phenomena
In an earlier section, I presented several conceptions of silencing due to Hornsby and
Langton: simple silence, perlocutionary frustration, illocutionary disablement/inaudi-
bility, and ineffability. As I mentioned then, these notions are importantly different
from each other. That raises two questions. First, what makes all of these quite distinct
phenomena kinds of silencing? And second, what other related phenomena should also
count as kinds of silencing?
The second question is made pressing by recent discussions that present further phe-
nomena that resemble, at least superficially, those listed above. These discussions fall
into three (not mutually exclusive) categories. First, there are accounts that take as
paradigmatic the same examples that motivate one of the conceptions above—usu-
ally, illocutionary disablement/inaudibility—but argue that those examples should be
theorized differently. (See Wieland 2007 on meaning switches and Maitra 2009 on
communicative disablement for examples of this kind.) Second, there are accounts that
introduce further conceptions of silencing, understood as such. (See McGowan 2013
on sincerity silencing for an instance of this kind.) And finally, there are accounts that
introduce phenomena involving some kind of linguistic incapacitation, very broadly
speaking, where that is not described as a further kind of silencing. (See Fricker 2007 on
hermeneutical injustice, Kukla 2014 on discursive injustice, and Stanley 2015 on not-
at-issue content for examples of this kind.)
Here’s the most straightforward way to approach questions about what should count
as silencing: we can say that a speaker is silenced just in case she is prevented from
doing something she intends to do with her words. Call this the “silencing-as-linguistic-
frustration” approach. This approach has the twin virtues of simplicity and coverage:
unlike the alternate approach I’ll discuss below, silencing as linguistic frustration can
explain, in a relatively simple fashion, why all the distinct phenomena discussed by
Hornsby and Langton should qualify as kinds of silencing. And it arguably counts much
of the additional phenomena described in the previous paragraph as kinds of silencing
as well.
The capaciousness of this first approach is, however, also a drawback. On this
approach, silencing turns out to be a hugely varied phenomenon, because there are
so many different kinds of things that we intend to do with our words in various cir-
cumstances. Thus, on this approach, being prevented from doing any of the follow-
ing can count as an instance of silencing: scaring someone by yelling “boo”; amusing
someone by telling them a joke; marrying someone (because one is already married to
someone else); and persuading someone (because one’s credibility is unfairly deflated
by racist/sexist prejudice). But these instances are all very different from each other.
And if silencing includes all of them, then it becomes hard to say what is philosophi-
cally interesting about the category as a whole.

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A different approach to what should count as silencing might tie silencing more
closely to a particular kind of wrong. Just as some theorists have talked about injustices
that are distinctively epistemic in nature (compare Fricker 2007 and others), we might
also talk about injustices that are distinctively speech-related, or linguistic, in nature.
We could then say that a speaker is silenced just in case they suffer such a speech-related,
or linguistic, injustice. (For further discussion of speech-related/linguistic injustices in
connection with silencing, see Hornsby and Langton 1998; Maitra 2009; McGowan
2013.) Henceforth, I’ll use the phrase “linguistic injustice” for wrongs in this category.
But what is a linguistic injustice? There are several options here. On one view, a lin-
guistic injustice is related to unfairness in the distribution of linguistic goods, such as the
opportunity to speak, or to be heard. (Compare here epistemic goods, such as credibility
or information. Some goods may be both linguistic and epistemic.) On a second view, a
linguistic injustice may be an injustice committed against someone in their capacity as
a linguistic agent, e.g., a speaker or hearer. (Again, compare here injustices committed
against someone in their capacity as an epistemic agent, e.g., a knower.) And on yet
another view, a linguistic injustice may be unfair exclusion from a linguistic commu-
nity. (Compare here unfair exclusion from an epistemic community.) And there may
be further options as well.
These understandings of linguistic injustice are not equivalent; but I won’t try to
decide between them here, or to flesh them out further. Rather, I’ll note that given
any of these understandings, the silencing-as-linguistic-injustice approach gives us a
much narrower category than the earlier silencing-as-linguistic-frustration approach.
To see this, recall the four examples I used above to illustrate the capaciousness of the
earlier approach. Neither being prevented from scaring someone nor being prevented
from amusing someone counts as silencing on the second approach, since neither is
an injustice. Being prevented from marrying someone (because one is already mar-
ried) may be an injustice; but it is not a linguistic injustice, on any of the available
understandings. Being prevented from persuading someone (because of credibility
unfairly deflated by racist/sexist prejudice) is most clearly an injustice; but most usu-
ally, it will be an epistemic injustice, not a linguistic one. More specifically, it is some-
thing like a testimonial injustice, in Fricker’s sense (Fricker 2007). The fact that the
current approach doesn’t regard all testimonial injustice as silencing is, in my view, a
point in its favor.
The considerations raised above also show that the current approach counts only
some instances of the phenomena discussed by Hornsby and Langton to be silencing.
However, because silencing on this approach is tied to a particular kind of injustice, it
is easier to see why it is a philosophically interesting category. Further, if—as I think is
plausible—gender is systematically connected to injustices of this kind, it is also easy to
see why the category should be of interest to feminists.
To close my discussion of this second approach, I’ll briefly apply it to some of the
related phenomena mentioned near the beginning of this section. First, consider dis-
cursive injustice, in Rebecca Kukla’s sense. Roughly, a speaker suffers such an injustice
when they are entitled to perform a speech act of a given type, they use the “conven-
tionally appropriate words, tones, and gestures to produce it,” but nevertheless, due
to their disadvantaged social identity, end up producing a speech act of some other
type that further disadvantages them (Kukla 2014: 445). To illustrate, Kukla gives the
example of a woman manager in a nearly all-male factory giving what she intends to

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be orders, but having her speech acts constituted as requests by the response of her
subordinates (Kukla 2014: 445–448).
Being able to perform speech act types that one is entitled to perform—and that
other speakers would be able to perform in the same circumstances, using the same
words—is plausibly a linguistic good. Being prevented from performing such acts by
one’s gender is also plausibly an injustice, and one committed against an agent in their
capacity as a speaker. If so, discursive injustice in Kukla’s sense is a linguistic injustice
(on multiple understandings of the latter notion). As such, it would count as a further
kind of silencing on the current approach.
By contrast, consider hermeneutical injustice, in Fricker’s sense. Again roughly,
an agent suffers such an injustice when they are prevented—by “hermeneutical mar-
ginalization,” a kind of structural prejudice—from understanding some significant
part of their social experience (Fricker 2007: 154–155). Targets of sexual harass-
ment prior to the coinage of the expression can be said to have suffered this injustice
(Fricker 2007: 149–152).
Fricker considers hermeneutical injustice to be a species of epistemic injustice. But
it’s at least arguable that the injustice here is in fact primarily linguistic. The agent suf-
fering this wrong is prevented from accurately describing their own experience, and as
a result, from communicating the nature of that experience to others. But these look
like linguistic capacities that are undermined; so it seems plausible to say that this is
an injustice committed against someone in their capacity as a linguistic agent. If all of
that’s right—and of course, there is more to be said here—there is a prima facie case for
regarding hermeneutical injustice as a kind of silencing, rather than as an epistemic
injustice, on the current approach.

As I hope is clear at this point, discussions of silencing in the philosophical literature

intersect with a wide range of interesting philosophical questions, including questions
about how gender systematically disadvantages women, about the scope of the right to
free speech, about the nature of speaker authority, about the assignment of (moral and
legal) responsibility, and about the difference between linguistic and other injustices.
Further clarifying each of these intersections will help us better understand what is at
stake when a speaker is silenced in any of the senses I’ve discussed in this chapter.

Acknowledgment
Many thanks to Ann Garry and Mary Kate McGowan for helpful comments on a draft
of this chapter.

Further Reading
Langton, Rae (2012) “Beyond Belief: Pragmatics in Hate Speech and Philosophy,” in Ishani Maitra and
Mary Kate McGowan (Eds.) Speech and Harm: Controversies over Free Speech, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 72–93.
Saul, Jennifer and Diaz-Leon, Esa (2017) “Feminist Philosophy of Language,” in Edward N. Zalta (Ed.)
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [online]. Available from: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/
feminism-language/.
Tanesini, Alessandra (1996) “Whose Language?” in Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (Eds.) Women,
Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, 2nd ed., New York: Routledge, 353–365.

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Related Topics
Testimony, trust and trustworthiness (Chapter 21): epistemic injustice, ignorance, and
trans experience (Chapter 22); language, writing, and gender differences (Chapter 24).

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Bauer, Nancy (2006) “How to Do Things with Pornography,” in Sanford Shieh and Alice Crary (Eds.)
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 24
LANGUAGE, WRITING,
AND GENDER DIFFERENCES
Gertrude Postl

Introduction
Concern with language has not been limited to feminist philosophy, but already emerged
in the early debates of the second wave of the Women’s Movement during the late 1960s
and 1970s in the US and in Europe. The underlying assumption was that a patriarchal
world produces a patriarchal language, which in turn means that women and men are not
on the same playing field with respect to linguistic expression, either in speech or writing.
The most prominent themes of these early days—outside of philosophy—were the issue
of sexist language (e.g., the generic use of male pronouns and male job titles, derogatory
reference terms for women), the discovery that there were no linguistic expressions to
refer to certain gender-related phenomena (e.g., sexual harassment, date rape), and dif-
ferent speech behaviors between the genders (e.g., an allegedly more assertive speech
style for men versus a more timid, hesitant style for women).
Thus, language was understood from the beginning as a matter of power relations
between women and men, and language was commonly viewed by feminists as one of
the main means of women’s oppression. Contrary to the long held assumption that lan-
guage is gender-neutral, feminists considered the world we live in to be named by men
and thus to some extent created by men. While the view that language is actually con-
stitutive of reality was not shared by feminists across the board, the idea that language is
more than a mere reflection of reality—more than just a set of words referring to non-
linguistic entities—was already implied in some of the early debates. The emphasis was
on the effects that this male gesture of naming the world had on women. Most feminists
agreed that the language that we all speak disadvantages, alienates, excludes, or even
annihilates women.

A Language of the Body

The feminist approach to language within philosophy—especially within the so-called
continental tradition—is closely tied to authors such as Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous,
and Julia Kristeva. Grouped together (with others) under the labels of “French Feminists”
or “Difference Feminists,” these authors claimed that woman, or “the feminine,” has
never been adequately represented within the signifying economies of the Western
cultural and philosophical tradition.
 Language, writing, and gender differences

While these philosophers were influenced by a number of male thinkers (e.g., Merleau-
Ponty’s concept of the lived body, Foucault’s analysis of power, and Derrida’s deconstructive
reading strategies and his notion of différance, to just mention a few), their common, most
influential theoretical framework was psychoanalysis. Although critical of some fundamental
psychoanalytic premises (e.g., Freud’s notion of penis envy or Lacan’s notion of the phallus as
transcendental signifier), notions such as the unconscious, the drive (desire), the repressed,
sublimation, and also the distinction between primary and secondary processes, all served as
helpful analytic tools for continental feminists’ work on language.
Freud’s notion of the unconscious and Lacan’s reworking of it on the level of
language, in particular his reading of Freud’s concepts of condensation and displace-
ment (the functioning of the primary processes of the dream work) as metaphor
and metonymy, set the stage for a feminist psychoanalytic approach to understand-
ing women’s oppression through language. Lacan’s claim that the unconscious is
structured like a language, and his privileging of the signifier over the signified,
were to become highly influential for a feminist dismantling of the dominance of
consciousness and reason within Western metaphysics. The particular target of
feminist critique was the hierarchically organized dualisms characteristic of most
of Western thought, such as body/mind, body/language, nature/culture, matter/
form, emotion/reason, dark/light, etc., all of which were gender-marked by associat-
ing the feminine with the less-valued element of the two. Accordingly, the disap-
pearance of woman was already written into the very structure of Western thought
and language. As Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément put it: “Always the same
metaphor . . . wherever discourse is organized . . . throughout literature, philosophy,
criticism, centuries of representation and reflection. Thought has always worked
through opposition” (Cixous and Clément 1986: 63). The psychoanalytic notion
of the drive as being physiological as well as psychic served to unhinge the much
despised oppositional thinking of the past, most importantly the opposition between
material body and immaterial thought/language.
Feminists pointed out the exploitative relationship, which had never been admitted,
between the complementary elements of the respective pairs: “Language, however for-
mal it may be, feeds on blood, on flesh, on material elements. Who and what has nour-
ished language? How is this debt to be repaid?” (Irigaray 1993: 127). Given the cultural
association of the feminine with matter, nature, and the body (its blood and flesh),
woman was excluded from any form of representation. The female body, female desire,
and female sexuality were considered to be as repressed as the unconscious—accordingly,
a freeing of the body was synonymous with freeing the unconscious. Defined in terms
of a lack, a hole, a castrated being with invisible sexual organs, woman was forever left
out of systems of signification that represented only that which was visible and that
fitted an economy of calculable exchange and intelligibility. Summarized in Lacan’s
dictum that the phallus is the transcendental signifier, woman as castrated body-being
never had a voice of her own. The only way of expressing herself was to mime the
masculine codes, to participate in a language that she never contributed to creating.
In a situation in which a bodiless language encounters a voiceless body, her actual
experiences cannot be expressed. “What she ‘suffers,’ what she ‘lusts for,’ even what
she ‘takes pleasure in,’ all take place upon another stage, in relation to already codified
representations” (Irigaray 1985a: 140).
In order to liberate this voiceless, castrated mime or mirror-woman (Irigaray 1985a)
and to bring about a “new woman” (Cixous 2000 [1975]) a new language had to be

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created, a language that gives woman a voice and frees her from a situation of cultural
repression, a language capable of expressing woman’s experience—her desire, her lust,
her suffering. “Write your self. Your body must be heard” (Cixous 2000 [1975]: 262). Or,
in the words of Irigaray: “We have to discover a language . . . which does not replace the
bodily encounter, as paternal language . . . attempts to do, but which can go along with
it, words which do not bar the corporeal, but which speak corporeal” (Irigaray 1991: 43).
Disregarding the logical order of philosophical argumentation or the established
grammatical rules of a patriarchal linguistic economy, this language escapes any prede-
termined regulations and categories; instead, it aims for nearness, proximity, for sound
and touch. “How can we speak so as to escape from their compartments, their schemas,
their distinctions and oppositions . . . How can we . . . free ourselves from their catego-
ries, rid ourselves of their names?” (Irigaray 1985b: 212).
Interested in the role of language for a theory of subjectivity, Julia Kristeva found
this bodily-charged form of signification in the individual development of any subject.
She called it the “semiotic”—a form of expressivity that precedes the representational
modes of the symbolic or phallic order and that will later, from the Oedipal period on,
exist alongside them. Modelled on Freud’s pre-Oedipal primary processes (the mecha-
nisms of condensation and displacement), Kristeva uses the term “semiotic” to refer
to the rhythmic waves of energy that regulate the drives in their relation to the body
of the mother. Appropriating Plato’s notion of the chora—a formless receptive space,
in its original meaning also associated with the womb—Kristeva views the semiotic
as being structured and unstructured at once, a continuous movement of energy flows
that are bound and released time and again. Not yet signifying in the sense of the sym-
bolic order, this minimally structured totality already contains rudimentary forms of
expression—the immediate expressions of bodily functions and demands of the drives.
“Analogous only to vocal kinetic rhythm,” the semiotic chora is neither a sign nor a
signifier but precedes and prepares the stage for the symbolic to eventually take hold of
the system: “a modality of signifiance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated
as the absence of an object” (Kristeva 1984: 26).
However, although the semiotic is pre-linguistic, its movements dictated primarily
through auditory and tactile stimulation, it is nevertheless exposed to cultural influ-
ences or “socio-historical constraints such as the biological difference between the sexes
or family structure” (Kristeva 1984: 27). The semiotic continues its presence in the
symbolic by undermining or disrupting the latter’s thetic activities: i.e., the ability to
make statements as a result of identification and differentiation, which is learned—
in Lacanian terms—by passing through the mirror stage and the threat of castration.
These two heterogeneous forms of expressivity, semiotic and symbolic, continue to
coexist, albeit in an ongoing tension, since each functions according to a different sig-
nifying mechanism. Although this might sound like a gender-neutral theory of language
acquisition, the psychoanalytic foundation of Kristeva’s account suggests that those two
signifying systems are, in fact, gender marked—the semiotic in its directedness towards
the body of the mother associated with the feminine, the symbolic as manifestation of
the law of the father.
Kristeva’s own attitude to the gender-designation of the semiotic and the symbolic
was ambiguous. On the one hand, she viewed them as two distinct modes of expres-
sion and was interested in the connection between the semiotic and experimental
forms of modernist poetry (e.g., those of Mallarmé and Lautréamont). On the other

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hand, she suggested that the feminine position, in its incarnation as mother, shifts or
mediates between those two modes of expression, thus considering the possibility of a
feminine voice within the symbolic: “A mother is a continuous separation, a division
of the very flesh. And consequently a division of language—and it has always been
so” (Kristeva 1986: 178).

The Politics of Writing

The idea of a distinct feminine style has been considered by feminist philosophers in rela-
tion to speech as well as writing. Irigaray, for example, talks about parler femme or “speak-
ing (as) woman” and mentions a particular speaking style that might develop in places of
“women-among-themselves” (Irigaray 1985b: 135). And Cixous discusses, for instance,
the problems that women face when trying to speak in public (2000 [1975]: 262).
However, it was probably the idea of a distinct feminine style of writing that popu-
larized the language debate and made it known far beyond philosophical circles. The
concept of écriture féminine became the best-known shorthand reference for the claim
that women use language differently from men. Associated predominantly with the
work of Hélène Cixous, écriture féminine was considered either as a practice to follow
in the pursuit of women’s liberation or as something to be ridiculed and ignored for its
allegedly inherent misconception of women.
If we take Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” as a key text for understanding écrit-
ure féminine, the first sentence already reveals that this feminine writing style is a genu-
ine political project: “I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman
must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing” (Cixous 2000
[1975]: 257). Thus, the aforementioned speaking or writing of the body and the uncon-
scious is never to be understood in a self-referential fashion but always as an attempt to
build a connection among women. “I write woman: woman must write woman” (Cixous
2000 [1975]: 259). Cixous’s view of writing does not presuppose a text to be the product
of an individualized author creating an unchangeable written manifestation. Rather,
writing is to generate other writings, texts producing other texts—a continuous writing-
reading practice whose main goal is not to produce a text in terms of a final product, but
to initiate a textual chain that allows women to put themselves onto the map of cultural
history. “Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history”
(Cixous 2000 [1975]: 257).
And while this writing process is crucial for women’s liberation, Cixous refuses
to offer any stylistic characteristics of these women-generated texts (comparable to
Kristeva’s refusal to define woman): “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of
writing . . . for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded” (Cixous 2000
[1975]: 264). Or, in the words of Irigaray: “This ‘style,’ or ‘writing,’ of women tends
to put the torch to fetish words, proper terms, well-constructed forms . . . It is always
fluid . . . [it] resists and explodes every firmly established form, figure, idea or concept”
(Irigaray 1985b: 79). This style is as manifold and endless in its possibilities as woman
herself—a point frequently misunderstood by critics of écriture féminine who tended to
conceive of the entire project as an attempt to reduce the feminine to the irrational
stammering of a hysteric, and as an allegedly incomprehensible play with words, closer
to poetry than philosophy. The stylistic linguistic innovations and creative impulses
that resulted from this concept of a feminine writing style went unnoticed by critics.

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This view of writing, particularly in the version of Hélène Cixous, owes a lot to
Jacques Derrida. Like Derrida, Cixous privileges writing over speech, she employs sev-
eral layers of meaning at once, and she argues for a writing style that through the very
process of writing deconstructs the already mentioned traditional dualisms, includ-
ing those between writing/speech, literature/philosophy, unconscious/conscious, and
poetry/politics. And, like Derrida, she does not suggest a shift to the lower position in
the hierarchy but rather aims to open up a space between the two elements for some-
thing new, something yet unknown, to appear—in short, Derrida’s notion of différance.
Cixous goes beyond Derrida, though, in the way that she explores the signifying capaci-
ties of the body in all its poetic, audible, and theoretical facets.
The Derridian roots of Cixous’s thinking reveal that this project is not about a
simple reversal, about making the body more important than language or thought.
Rather, it means that body and language can no longer be separated from each other—
bodies speak (so to speak) and in turn, linguistic signification has a materiality that is
anchored in the body. In the words of Rosi Braidotti: “it is crucial to see that the ‘body’
in question in the écriture féminine movement is not a natural, biologically determined
body, but rather a cultural artifact that carries a whole history, a memory of coding and
conditioning” (Braidotti 1991: 243). This body, and the experiences that are inscribed
onto it, has to be put into writing (comparable to Irigaray’s “corporeal speaking”) so as
to make visible what had to be left out in traditional kinds of texts. On the other hand,
language—especially in its written form—has to be conceived of as the conveyer of
bodily occurrences, such as rhythm, touch, flows of energy, musicality (comparable to
Kristeva’s semiotic). This view of writing is political in so far as it responds to prohibi-
tions, exclusions, and the workings of mechanisms of power with respect to texts.
These political implications of écriture féminine are also relevant to a feminist
response to the history of philosophy. According to continental feminist thinkers,
existing texts as the manifestation of established systems of representation are to be
analyzed with respect to an unconscious undercurrent that reveals what was left out,
excluded, or repressed, for these texts to materialize. The actual meaning of texts is
exactly that which is not explicitly said. In short, authors such as Irigaray, Cixous, or
Kristeva treat texts similarly to the analysand in the clinical psychoanalytic situation—
using the explicit words of a text as a springboard to reach those layers of meaning that
are hidden, prohibited, or repressed. The most famous example of this type of reading/
writing strategy is Irigaray’s reading of the philosophical canon, which is central to a
feminist criticism of the philosophical discourse “as this discourse sets forth the law for
all others, inasmuch as it constitutes the discourse on discourse” (Irigaray 1985b: 74).
Rather than critically interpreting texts by neatly arranging argument and counter-
argument, Irigaray inserts herself into those texts and re-writes them from within, in a
way deconstructing and subverting them with their own words. Given the male hegem-
ony over philosophical discourse as well as its dominance and influence on the history
of Western thought, strategies to challenge these conditions certainly contribute to a
reconfiguration of given power arrangements.
This new “corporeal” language can be brought about only through radical linguistic
experimentation in writing. Cixous’s texts as well as the early texts of Irigaray offer
an overabundance of stylistic innovations, unheard-of metaphors, multiple layers of
meaning, and instances of irony and playfulness, and they certainly mark a cross-over
between philosophy and literature. Work on language itself became a political act.
Be it Cixous’s utopian vision of the daring, stormy, laughing “new woman” who refuses

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to be cast in terms of a lack, or Irigaray’s reading/re-writing of Plato’s Cave allegory and

Freud’s notion of penis envy (and many others)—these texts offered stylistic options,
previously unknown, that other feminist philosophers could employ, adapt, play with,
or simply use as stimulating inspirations for their own writing and reading. “She lets the
other language speak—the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure
nor death . . . Her language . . . does not hold back, it makes possible” (Cixous 2000
[1975]: 270). And it is this “making possible,” the opening up of new (linguistic) spaces
and forms, of an entirely different economy of producing texts—writing as an open-
ended, not author-oriented process, in which anybody can participate at any time,
where previous texts are not enshrined and untouchable—that gives the concept of a
feminine reading/writing style its political significance.

Sexual Difference and Many Languages

Shared among all the authors presented so far is the assumption of a radical sexual dif-
ference and accordingly, of two types of language or two modes of signification: one
is associated with the masculine, the language we speak, the language used for all the
grandiose manifestations of Western philosophical and cultural history. The other is a
language still to come, a language of the repressed unconscious, a language of the body,
a language associated with woman and the feminine. Irigaray literally talks about “two
syntaxes”: “a double syntax, without claiming to regulate the second by the standard of
representation, of re-presentation, of the first” (Irigaray 1985a: 138).
Neither the assumption of a sexual difference nor that of two distinct languages was
uncontroversial. Difference feminism with its discourse of two forms of desire, two types
of sexuality, two modes of thinking, two distinct representational economies, even two
distinct ontologies or ways of being (as to some extent is suggested by Irigaray), chal-
lenged a fundamental premise of the women’s movement: the notion of equality. This is
not to say that difference feminists were opposed to women’s equal access to economic,
legal, or cultural resources. But their focus was on making visible sexual difference on
the level of representation, so as to escape the dominant standards of the masculine.
And according to difference feminists, those standards of the masculine were
everywhere. Seeming cultural differences between women and men in terms of behav-
ior, looks, profession, language use, etc., were taken to be just pseudo-differences, still
operating according to the order of the same, with woman being assigned the comple-
mentary part respective to the original masculine one. Talking about Freud, Irigaray
asks: “Why make the little girl, the woman, fear, envy, hope, hate, reject, etc. in more
or less the same terms as the little boy, the man?” (Irigaray 1985a: 59). Difference femi-
nists criticized this misleading construction of difference—in their eyes no difference at
all—and aimed to make woman as the real other appear through radically new forms of
linguistic expression.
But since these new forms of expression or the “other” language of the feminine
were closely tied to the body, to materiality, to desire, and sexuality, critics quickly
accused difference feminists—in particular Irigaray and Cixous—of essentialism, more
specifically biological essentialism—the belief that certain “characteristics defined
as women’s essence are shared in common by all women at all times” and that “the
existence of fixed characteristics, given attributes, and ahistorical functions . . . limit
the possibilities of change and thus of social reorganization” (Grosz 1994: 84). The
preferred target of critics was Irigaray’s extensive metaphorical use of the morphology of

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the female body (e.g., her image of the “two lips”), which was taken as ultimate proof of
the looming danger of a biological determinism of gender under the disguise of an alleg-
edly new language, a language that actually only re-affirmed women’s lack of rational
ability and reduced (political) reality to texts.
What critics overlooked, though, was—first—the insistence on the part of differ-
ence feminists that this new language of the feminine is a linguistic position, that it
can be spoken/written by either gender. Thus, for example, Cixous’s and Kristeva’s ref-
erences to and analyses of male writers and poets (Genet, Kleist, Kafka, Joyce, among
many others) who, in their view, employed a version of this “other” language already,
long before the onset of the women’s movement. And second, there was a refusal to
define woman or a feminine style of writing—as stated already, Cixous talks about “the
language of 1,000 tongues” (2000 [1975]: 270). And Irigaray muses: “Neither one nor
two. I’ve never known to count” (1985b: 207). Thus this other, feminine language is
open-ended with respect to its possible forms of stylistic realization—it is exactly not
one language but opens up many languages. And we should not forget Irigaray’s claim
that woman is different in herself and that her language is “fluid”: “Woman never
speaks the same way. What she emits is flowing, fluctuating. Blurring” (Irigaray 1985b:
111, 112). If the feminine and the language it speaks are different in themselves,
constantly changing, “fluid,” then the notion of unchangeable essences becomes
meaningless. The very idea of essentialism rests on a concept of identity—but it is
exactly the notion of identity that the “new woman” with her fluctuating, blurring,
fluid language is supposed to undermine.
This controversy over the alleged essentialism of écriture féminine or “speaking (as)
woman” could never really be solved and marked the feminist debate for many years
(see Schor and Weed 1994). The alleged assumption of two genders and two languages
was evoked again within the more recent contexts of queer theory and the transgender
debate. Here, too, it was overlooked that difference feminism did favor a multiplicity
of genders (and not the overused two) and, furthermore, that Irigaray, Cixous, and
Kristeva all addressed issues of bisexuality and of lesbianism by discussing the (sexual)
relation among women.
Less well-known in the Anglo-American academic scene is a group of women philos-
ophers from Italy, particularly Verona and Milan, who called themselves the Diotima
group, and included authors such as Adriana Cavarero, Luisa Muraro, Diana Sartori,
and Chiara Zamboni. Their contributions to the question of gender and language reso-
nate with some of the ideas of the French authors, in particular those of Irigaray. But
their position is overall rather unique in that they aimed at political and institutional
interventions and a new form of women-centered authority, based on the superiority of
knowledge or experience, free from any exercise of power. This was called affidamento—
literally “trust,” “confidence,” or “assurance”—indicating a relationship among women
based on respect, trust, and acceptance of other women’s authority, thereby recognizing
differences in knowledge and experience.
Insisting on a theory of sexual difference and analyzing the impact that language has
on the immediate level of experience, these Italian authors understood their philosoph-
ical work to be in continuous interaction with the creation of new forms of life and dif-
ferent social institutions, e.g., experimentation with publishing or pedagogy. However,
while their texts are highly popular (outside of Italy) among feminist philosophers in
the German language context, hardly any—apart from Cavarero—have been translated
into English. Thus, this brief remark on the Diotima group shall suffice here.

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Mary Daly’s Wickedary Dictionary

Among US feminist philosophers a dominant figure in the discussion of language is, of
course, Mary Daly. While Daly does not share the psychoanalytic influence typical of
the authors discussed so far, she too assumes a radical gender difference and treats the
issue of language accordingly. Immensely popular among US feminists during the 1970s
and 1980s (even outside of strictly philosophical circles) and still quite influential for
feminist theology, her work on language is no longer very much present in contempo-
rary feminist debates. Nevertheless, her position on issues of representation is unique
and may serve to clarify difference feminism further by way of comparison.
While many of the themes that are relevant for difference feminists can also be
found in Daly’s texts—women’s commodification and exploitation within a patriarchal
culture, their closeness to nature, the importance of women’s connectedness, the role
of language in women’s oppression and liberation—Daly’s contributions to the lan-
guage debate differ significantly from those of the authors discussed so far. Although
also working within the continental tradition, most importantly phenomenology and
existentialism, Daly’s explicit critique of psychoanalysis prevents any interest in the
unconscious or the (female) body as the foundation of woman’s experience. Daly
approaches the distortions and destructions of patriarchy that make the “real” woman
disappear—resonating with Heidegger—via an interplay of forgetting and memory, as a
journey into the future through the past. Language is viewed as one of the prime means
for these distortions and destructions and has thus to be carefully analyzed—in all its
popular forms, not just focusing on philosophical discourse—and changed. Contrary to
the authors already discussed, Daly’s sources for linguistic transformation are the ety-
mology of the English language, orthographical experimentation, and, time and again,
a re-definition of the meaning of certain words. Women’s language, for Daly, is not
so much something that has to be newly created but rather results from a process of
re-appropriation: “For it is, after all, our ‘mother-tongue’ that has been turned against us
by the tongue-twisters. Learning to speak our Mothers’ Tongue is exorcising the male
‘mothers’” (Daly 1978: 330).
Daly’s theoretical world is somehow split in two: patriarchy, characterized by
misogyny, necrophilia and destruction, and a utopian, future world of women,
brought about by women embarking on a so-called metapatriarchal journey in order
to reach a forgotten background, a time/space where women were together and one
with nature, and that needs to be re-evoked through “deep memory.” According to
Daly, this journey will succeed only if women learn to speak a different language, if
they manage to escape the lies and distortions of patriarchal naming, in particular the
derogatory and misleading naming of women: “This means going beyond the imposed
definitions of ‘bad woman’ and ‘good woman,’ beyond the categories of prostitute and
wife” (Daly 1985 [1974]: 65–66).
This quote indicates already that Daly’s focus is on the vocabulary of the English
language, and she is the only feminist philosopher who actually published a diction-
ary, her Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (1987,
together with Jane Caputi). There we find, in neatly separated categories or “word-
webs,” lists of familiar words with Daly’s redefinition as well as newly created words.
To just give a few examples: patriarchy is—among other definitions—a “cockocracy:
the state of supranational, supernatural erections,” or “Godfather, Son & Company:
the church, the state, the family, and all other firms dedicated to the propagation of

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the male line” (Daly and Caputi 1987: 191, 203). Philosophy is turned into “foolosophy”
or “phallosophy” (Daly and Caputi 1987: 200, 217). Reference terms for women are
endless, partly drawing upon a revival of old meanings and partly redefining com-
monly known derogatory terms: e.g., “Witch . . . : an Elemental Soothsayer; one who
is in harmony with the rhythms of the universe: Wise Woman, Healer,” or “Bitchy
adj.: . . . a woman who is active, direct, blunt, obnoxious, competent, loud-mouthed,
independent, stubborn, demanding, achieving . . . strong-minded, scary, ambitious”
(Daly and Caputi 1987: 180, 108–109).
Daly’s approach to language is a theory of naming; concerns about syntax or
speech behavior are as absent as suggestions for a different style of writing. Absent,
furthermore, is—in spite of her constant reiteration of an elemental togetherness of
women—any indication as to what women are supposed to do with her dictionary
entries. Appropriate them for themselves and employ them as they are? Create similar
words or modified meanings? Continue to use the old words with the altered meanings
suggested by Daly?
Daly too believes in a radical gender difference and in two languages. Contrary to
the French feminist authors, though, her two languages turn out to be two sets of words,
with the second set lacking the openness and ongoing transformative potential that
we found in écriture féminine. Without a doubt, introducing new meanings to already
established words could be viewed as a deconstructive gesture (comparable to Derrida’s
notion of paleonymics). But in spite of Daly’s creative and often funny suggestions for
linguistic renewal, she seems to be stuck in a black and white account of language, of
the world, of women. There is a bad world (patriarchy) and a good world (the future),
there are bad women (those manipulated into serving patriarchal demands, called “fem-
bots” or “painted birds”), and good women (“Hags,” “Crones,” “Amazones,” the “wild
race of raging women”), there are wrong words (the English language as it is) and there
are correct words (Mary Daly’s dictionary entries). Contrary to, for example, Cixous’
many layers of meaning of a text and the open-ended writer/reader exchange that this is
supposed to generate, or Irigaray’s linguistic interventions in male-authored philosophi-
cal texts, Daly’s work on language seems like a closed system. She revolutionized the
vocabulary of the English language, but it is far from obvious how women readers of her
texts can enter the process and continue the project on their own terms. Furthermore,
it is not fully convincing that turning to the etymology of words, to the meaning they
had in past periods of patriarchy, should serve as source for a post-patriarchal semantics.
Furthermore, Daly’s account of sexual difference focuses not so much on making
sexual difference visible but on women. In Daly’s vision of a feminist future, men
disappear from the scene; her utopia is literally a world of women only—difference
does not have to be negotiated any longer. For comparison, here is Irigaray: “what I
want . . . is not to create a theory of woman, but to secure a place for the feminine
within sexual difference” (Irigaray 1985b: 159). In short, Daly’s work, including her
work on language, is about women and not about the feminine.

After Sexual Difference and Écriture Féminine:

Judith Butler’s Performative
Judith Butler, with the publication of Gender Trouble (1990) and the subsequent
Bodies That Matter (1993), moved the feminist discussion of language to an altogether
new level, thus establishing a link between the earlier debates over sexual difference

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and a feminine writing style and contemporary concerns regarding gender identity, the
multiplicity of genders, and transgender identities. Most importantly, for Butler as
well, language is crucial for the construction of gender.
Drawing upon J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, Butler claimed that sex is
“a performatively enacted signification” (Butler 1990: 33) and thus is always already
part of gender. In that gender is produced by a repetition of normative discursive
acts, it becomes a “doing” and not something “to be.” This “doing”—as in speech
act theory—is always also a doing through words. However, these words are not
limited to either speech (“speaking (as) woman”) or writing (écriture féminine) but
are conceived of within the totality of a performative enactment, an assumed inter-
play of language and the postures and gestures of the body. “Gender identity . . . is
performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results”
(Butler 1990: 25). Butler’s notion of the performative added a dimension to the
feminist discussion of language that freed it from the confinements of the actual
linguistic sign: the performative presupposes a context (social, historical, artistic,
etc.), an interaction between bodies, and a dimension of meaning that cuts across
the old divide between physicality and immateriality.
According to Butler, the discursive construction of gender can be conducted either
in an affirmative or a deviant fashion. Contrary to repeating the given gender norms,
a parodic re-signification of them has the potential to undermine established gender
arrangements. Thus Butler’s position is clearly political as well, and it opened the theo-
retical doors for what is now called gender identity. Challenging a seeming “natural”
alignment between a particular sexed body, gender roles, and sexual preference (or
desire) allowed for a (performative) disruption of the so-called heterosexual matrix and
thus for “abject” bodies to transgress the normativity of given gender arrangements.
Butler was also concerned with exclusions and with making the excluded visible
through language or discursive acts; in her case, though, it was not the exclusion of
the feminine but of those abject bodies that did not submit to the heterosexual norm.
Butler’s constructivist position was therefore soon posited against Irigaray’s alleged
essentialism of the female body. While Irigaray’s account of a radical sexual differ-
ence, enacted in language, probably has little to offer for questions concerning queer or
transgender identity, what does connect her with Butler (in spite of all the arguments to
the contrary, too numerous to retrace within the given context) is a view that the body
is not just a naturally given entity outside of culture or language. The following state-
ment by Butler underscores this: “Every time I try to write about the body, the writing
ends up being about language . . . The body is that upon which language falters, and the
body carries its own signs, in ways that remain largely unconscious” (Butler 2004: 198).
Thus, in spite of all the differences of positions, styles, political interventions, what
connects the various debates on gender and language within the continental tradition
of philosophy is a view of the body as a signifying entity.

Further Reading
Fuss, Diana (1989) Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference, New York: Routledge. (Discusses
various positions on the issue of essentialism and language.)
Minh-ha, Trinh T. (1989) Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press. (Explores issues of women’s writing from the non-Western perspective
of the other.)

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Moraga, Cherríe and Anzaldúa, Gloria (Eds.) (2015) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women
of Color, 4th ed., Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Originally published (1981), Boston,
MA: Women of Color Press. (Women and writing from the perspective of women of color, includes
Audre Lorde’s critique of Mary Daly and her essay on the “Master’s Tools.”)
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1987) “French Feminism in an International Frame,” in In Other Worlds:
Essays in Cultural Politics, New York: Routledge. (Critique of French Feminism from a post-colonial per-
spective. Volume includes also other essays on the relationship between women, language, and culture.)
Stone, Alison (2006) Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. (Discusses question of Irigaray’s essentialism by comparing her position to Butler, in particular
with respect to the body.)

Related Topics
Embodiment and feminist philosophy (Chapter 15); materiality: sex, gender and what
lies beneath (Chapter 16); psychoanalysis, subjectivity, and feminism (Chapter 19);
speech and silencing (Chapter 23); feminist theory, lesbian theory, and queer theory
(Chapter 31); aesthetics and the politics of gender (Chapter 38).

References
Braidotti, Rosi (1991) Patterns of Dissonance, New York: Routledge.
Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge.
—— (2004) Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge.
Cixous, Hélène (2000 [1975]) “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in Kelly Oliver (Ed.) French Feminism Reader,
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Cixous, Hélène and Clément, Catherine (1986) The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Daly, Mary (1978) Gyn/Ecology. The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
—— (1985 [1974]) Beyond God the Father. Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, Boston, MA: Beacon
Press.
Daly, Mary, and Jane Caputi (1987) Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language,
Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Grosz, Elizabeth (1994) “Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism,” in Naomi Schor and Elizabeth
Weed (Eds.) The Essential Difference, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 82–97.
Irigaray, Luce (1985a) Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
—— (1985b) This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
—— (1991) “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother,” in Margaret Whitford (Ed.) The Irigaray Reader,
Oxford: Blackwell, 34–46.
—— (1993) An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Kristeva, Julia (1984) Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia University
Press.
—— (1986) “Stabat Mater,” in Toril Moi (Ed.) The Kristeva Reader, New York: Columbia University Press,
160–186.
Schor, Naomi, and Elizabeth Weed (Eds.) (1994) The Essential Difference, Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.

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 25
PHILOSOPHY OF
SCIENCE AND THE
FEMINIST LEGACY
Janet A. Kourany

Philosophy of science is concerned with the nature of science, its practices and results.
But unlike other fields concerned with science, such as history of science and sociology
of science, philosophy of science aims not simply to describe science but to articulate
and even improve upon what lies at the very heart of its success, scientific rationality
itself. Feminist philosophy of science has furthered this enterprise in a variety of ways.
One way, for example, concerns the scope of the enterprise. Traditional philosophy of
science failed to consider women whether as scientific researchers, as subjects of scien-
tific research, or as individuals affected by such research, and feminist philosophers of
science have done much to rectify that failure. Many of these philosophers have even
suggested that women must be included in philosophy of science in at least some of
these capacities if scientific rationality is to be captured at all. But there are also other
contributions feminist philosophers have made to philosophy of science. In what fol-
lows we shall consider some of the most important of these contributions and their
impact on science and society as well as philosophy.

Pre-Feminist Philosophy of Science

Start with the way philosophy of science was before the advent of feminism. Most
scholars locate its roots in the “Vienna Circle,” that group of scientists, mathemati-
cians, and scientists-turned-philosophers who regularly met in Vienna at the beginning
of the twentieth century. What distinguished the group—aside from the illustriousness
of many of its members (such as Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and Kurt
Gödel) and followers (such as A. J. Ayer, Carl Hempel, and Alfred Tarski)—was the
ambitious task it had set for itself: the development of a “scientific world-conception.”
What this meant was a worldview based not on a priori speculation, as the metaphysical
system-building of the past had been, but instead on the results of empirical science. The
plan was to build into a unified whole the individual contributions of scientists from all
the various fields of study. And the method adopted to do this was two-fold: both active
encouragement of collaboration among scientists from different fields and countries to
 KNOWLEDGE, LANGUAGE, AND SCIENCE

gear their research toward such a unified result, and logical and epistemological analysis
of their contributions using a neutral system of symbols to make explicit the connections
among these contributions and thereby their overall unity.
The most impressive feature of the Vienna Circle’s activities, however, was the over-
arching goal that motivated them: not only progress in science, but also progress in
social life.

One cannot begin to give an account of the Vienna Circle without seeing it
not only as a movement for a scientific world conception in terms of its logical,
epistemological and methodological content, but also as a movement which
conceived of its theoretical contributions as being in the service of social
reform, and as, in significant measure, allied with the left social movements
of its time.
(Wartofsky 1996: 60)

And one of the important accomplishments of the Vienna Circle, as its 1929 “manifesto”
proclaimed, was just such social reform:

We witness the spirit of the scientific world-conception penetrating in grow-

ing measure the forms of personal and public life, in education, upbringing,
architecture and the shaping of economic and social life according to rational
principles. The scientific world-conception serves life, and life receives it.
(Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath 1973 [1929]: 317–318)

By the time “logical empiricism,” as the movement begun by the Vienna Circle came
to be called, had been transplanted to the United States after the war, however, this
concern with social life and social reform had disappeared. Philosophy of science was
still committed to unified science. But the commitment had degenerated from an active
movement—seeking to regularize collaboration among scientists from different coun-
tries and different academic fields for the improvement of both science and human
life—to an academic thesis—a hypothesis concerning the future internal development
of science “viewed, so to speak, from across the quadrangle as an independent intel-
lectual project neither requiring nor requesting input from philosophy” (Reisch 2005:
375). And, as time went on, even this very truncated connection with science fell away.
By the early 1960s logical empiricism was accused of having become little more than
the investigation of abstract logical and epistemological puzzles. What had happened?
According to recent scholarship, a variety of things (see, for various accounts, Giere
1999; McCumber 2001; Howard 2003; and Reisch 2005). For one, the North American
social/political context in which the surviving members of the Vienna Circle and their
followers found themselves after the war was much more stable, democratic, and liberal
than that of pre-war central Europe, much less evocative of the reformist zeal of the
Vienna Circle. Conceptualizing science and the philosophy of science within this new
context as sources of social transformation must have seemed increasingly out of place.
Second was the McCarthyism of 1950s America and its antipathy to anything that
even smacked of socialism. That certainly would have squelched the kind of politically
engaged philosophy of science championed by the Vienna Circle. The public record,
after all, “clearly indicates that philosophy was the most heavily attacked of all the

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academic disciplines” (McCumber 2001: 37). Philosophers of science who hoped to

retain their jobs and flourish in the field would have gotten the message to pursue safe,
politically neutral, socially disengaged research.
Third, the conception of science as a politically detached search for truth had been
institutionalized in the United States, thanks largely to Vannevar Bush and his 1945
Science—The Endless Frontier: Report to the President on a Program for Postwar Scientific
Research. It was this conception, in fact, that set science policy for much of the rest of
the century. Not surprisingly, therefore, philosophy of science, engaged as it was with
science and also modeling itself on science, embarked on its own similarly detached
intellectual enterprise.
Doubtless there were also other factors in play in mid-century America besides the
above three that moved philosophy of science away from the kind of social engagement
exemplified by the Vienna Circle, and doubtless many of these factors (such as the
impact of McCarthyism) changed over time. Yet, philosophy of science largely contin-
ued its social disengagement right up to the end of the twentieth century. The main
exception to this was feminist philosophy of science.

The Birth of Feminist Philosophy of Science

Feminist philosophy of science emerged in the 1980s, and from the start it was a very
different sort of enterprise from its parent discipline. True, its proponents were trained
in the same ways as other philosophers of science of the time, and their academic
employment and advancement largely depended on their pursuing the same kinds of
projects as these other philosophers. Yet, by the 1980s other conditions were operating
to move them in a different direction.
First, the women’s movement was exposing the inequalities that characterized
even liberal, democratic societies like the United States—the inequalities of job
opportunities and pay and advancement; the “second shift” of housework, child care,
and elder care expected of women even when they worked full-time outside the
home; the ever-present threats of rape and domestic violence, sexual harassment,
and other forms of violence directed at women; the constrictions of feminine gender
socialization; and so on.
Second, feminist scientists and historians of science were exposing the role that
science had played in perpetuating and even adding to these problems. Of course, the
hope had always been that science would help solve these problems—that it would
replace prevailing ignorance and prejudice and misinformation about women with more
adequate perspectives. But now feminists were showing that science all too frequently
had done just the opposite. Indeed, in fields such as anthropology, sociology, political
science, medical research, psychology, biology, and archaeology feminist scientists and
historians of science were documenting how extensively sexism had infected research.
And they documented, as well, the obstacles women scientists faced in such fields.
These events evoked in feminist philosophers of science a kind of reformist zeal very
like that previously exemplified by the Vienna Circle: a commitment to work with
scientists to reform science in order to reform society. But how? Feminist scientists
were not only exposing sexism in their fields, they were also correcting it. Sometimes
the corrections were quite straightforward. A great deal of sexist science was, by the
lights of traditional scientific methodology, simply bad science—science that failed

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to satisfy accepted standards of concept formation, experimental design, data analy-

sis, or the like (see, for example, Hubbard 1979; Bleier 1984; Fausto-Sterling 1985).
Correcting such sexism was simply a matter of enforcing accepted standards. At other
times, however, the accepted standards themselves had to be reformed, and feminist
scientists proposed and put into effect appropriate revisions to rid their fields of sex-
ism. For example, feminist sociologist Margrit Eichler (1988) proposed a set of general
“guidelines for non-sexist research” to supplement what science students and research-
ers were already expected to live up to. Her guidelines distinguished, illustrated, and
offered recipes for eliminating seven different types of sexism in their most frequently
occurring forms, and they covered all aspects of the research process, from the title
right down to the policy recommendations that might follow from the results. Other
scientists proposed more specialized revisions designed specifically for their own areas
of research.
The problem, however—the problem many feminist scientists were loath to
acknowledge—was that all these revisions were just as feminist as what they replaced
was sexist, and yet they resulted in, not new examples of biased science (though biased
in a different way from before), but less biased science (more accurate, more thorough,
more comprehensive, and better justified than what had gone before). And how was
that possible if science was, or at least was supposed to be, the politically detached
search for truth that Vannevar Bush had applauded? It was here that feminist philoso-
phers of science could and did make an important contribution—a very traditionally
philosophical contribution that attempted anew to articulate and even improve upon
scientific rationality, and yet one whose content in many ways broke with the philo-
sophical tradition as it was thus far formed. Actually, feminist philosophers of science
provided a number of such reconceptualizations of scientific rationality, each conflict-
ing with the others (what else would you have expected from philosophers?), and yet
each also supplying new insights complementing those of the others.

Scientific Rationality through Feminist Eyes

Consider just four of these reconceptualizations of scientific rationality offered by
feminist philosophers of science. Probably the most sophisticated is “critical contex-
tual empiricism” put forward by Helen Longino (see especially Longino 1990; 1993;
2002). According to this approach, the scientific search for truth need not be politically
detached (that is, value-free). What it needs to be is rational. For it is rationality that
will get scientists to the truth, if anything will. But contrary to what feminist scientists
assumed, rationality is to be understood in social terms, as a characteristic of scientific
communities, not in individual terms, as a characteristic of the methods or attitudes or
behavior of individual scientists. Why is that?
According to Longino, scientists are “situated” in particular social/cultural (gender,
racial/ethnic, class, sexual-orientation, political, etc.) as well as spatial-temporal loca-
tions (these are the “contextual” factors Longino wants to emphasize). As a result,
scientists conduct their research from particular—and different—spatial-temporal-
social/cultural vantage points, and these can have a decided effect on the nature of
that research. Though scientists might be trained in comparable ways and might use
comparable research methods, neither the training nor the methods, however rigor-
ous and however rigorously applied, can be guaranteed to screen out the difference in

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vantage points from which scientists approach their research. Indeed, such vantage
points, and the histories, interests, values, and sensitivities they incorporate, can and do
affect which questions scientists investigate and which they ignore, which background
assumptions they accept and which they reject, which observational or experimental
data they select to study and the way they interpret those data, and so on.
Now rationality, the effective search for truth, depends on limiting the intrusion
of these individual scientists’ subjective inputs into the scientific community’s shared
beliefs, its “knowledge,” and, hence, depends on the scientific community’s critical
scrutiny of each scientist’s particular vantage point and resulting scientific work. But
rationality in this sense is a matter of degree. More specifically, it depends on the degree
to which a scientific community satisfies four conditions. First, the community must
have public venues for criticism, such as journals and conferences. Second, it must have
publicly recognized standards—shared values as well as substantive principles—by ref-
erence to which the criticism can be made. Third, it must be responsive to the criticism.
That is, the beliefs of the community as a whole and over time—as measured by such
public phenomena as the content of textbooks, the distribution of grants and awards,
and the flexibility of dominant worldviews—must change in response to the critical
discussion taking place within it (“uptake”). And fourth, the community must recog-
nize the equal intellectual authority of all the parties qualified to engage in the debate
(“tempered equality”), among whom all relevant points of view that can serve as sources
of criticism must be represented.
A science will, then, be rational to the degree that it satisfies these four conditions—
to the degree that it permits what Longino calls “transformative criticism.” And the
output of such a science will constitute knowledge, even if that output is inspired and
informed by social/political values, if the community that practices it meets these con-
ditions and the output conforms sufficiently to its objects to enable the members of the
community to carry out their projects with respect to those objects.
Since feminist scientists starting in the 1970s were frequently new additions to their
fields, and since they approached their fields from vantage points different from those of
their colleagues (among other things, they were women whereas their colleagues were
men, and they shared feminist commitments not frequently shared by the men), they
provided new points of view from which to criticize the scientific contributions of the
men and, hence, they increased the rationality of the resulting science. Small wonder
what resulted was less biased than before.
Sandra Harding and other “standpoint theorists” offer a different analysis (see, e.g.,
Harding 1986; 1991). According to this analysis, just as the various spatial-temporal-
social/cultural vantage points of scientists can have a decided effect on what they
understand and can contribute, the various vantage points of everyone else can have a
decided effect on what they understand and can contribute. But these various vantage
points are not always equally valuable, epistemologically. Individuals who are in the
socially disadvantaged positions in society are often able to recognize more readily than
those in the more advantaged positions the structures that keep in place the hierarchy
of advantage and disadvantage. “They have less to lose by distancing themselves from
the social order; thus, the perspective from their lives can more easily generate fresh
and critical analyses” (Harding 1991: 126). As a result, the wheelchair-bound person
is painfully aware of the architectural choices and conventions (stairs and escalators
rather than elevators, for instance) that disenable her mobility while they enable the

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mobility of the abled; the abled are likely oblivious to all this. Gays and lesbians are
aware of the heterosexual expectations and customs that deny their sexuality while
straights comfortably take them for granted; women continue to be amazed by the sex-
ism that men fail to see; and so on.
This epistemological advantage especially holds if the wheelchair-bound, the gays
and lesbians, and the women have been engaged in the kinds of consciousness-raising
group activities and political activism that have characterized recent movements for
social equality, such as the civil rights, gay rights, and disability rights movements and
the women’s movement. “Only through such struggles can we begin to see beneath the
appearances created by an unjust social order to the reality of how this social order is in
fact constructed and maintained” (Harding 1991: 127). Such struggles help to create a
more collective vantage point, which Harding calls a “standpoint.” Thus, we can speak
of a women’s standpoint or a gay and lesbian standpoint or a disability standpoint.
Of course, men, straight persons, and abled persons can learn—have learned—to see
things from these less partial, less distorted, collective vantage points, these standpoints,
but the ones whose standpoints they are will typically have to be their teachers and will
still tend to be the epistemological path-breakers.
So some vantage points—those associated with social disadvantage—can bring with
them epistemological advantage. But this holds in science as well as out of it. Women
scientists, for example, though they may enjoy the class-related and other social advan-
tages associated with being scientists, still struggle both in and out of science with the
gender-related disadvantages associated with being women. And this can provide them
with vantage points on gender-related issues in their fields less distorted than the ones
available to their male colleagues. Small wonder it was the women scientists whose
consciousness had been raised by feminism, not the men, who uncovered and helped to
rectify the gender-related shortcomings in the sciences.
“Feminist naturalists” such as Elizabeth Anderson, Louise Antony, and Miriam
Solomon provide a still different analysis (see, e.g., Anderson 1995; 2004; Antony 1993;
1995; Solomon 2001). Indeed, their approach rejects a priori prescriptions regarding
the proper composition of scientific communities or the proper conduct of inquiry. It
rejects, as well, the single-minded focus of the other approaches on scientific practice
to the exclusion of scientific outcome. What the naturalist approach advocates instead
is a close look at successful scientific practice in order to identify those of its features
that contribute to and explain its success. For the naturalist approach, in fact, scientific
rationality just is whatever contributes to and explains scientific success.
When we take a close look at successful scientific practice during the last three
decades, however, we find that a great deal of that part of it that is gender-relevant
has been produced by feminists. We find, that is to say, that the contributions of
feminists—the wide-ranging critiques of traditional science in such fields as psychol-
ogy, sociology, economics, political science, archaeology, anthropology, biology,
and medical research, and the new research directions and research results forged in
the wake of those critiques—those contributions have been not only free of sexism
but also more empirically successful than the sexist science that went before (see,
e.g., Schiebinger 1999, and Creager, Lunbeck, and Schiebinger 2001 for the kinds of
wide-ranging changes in science that have occurred due to feminism).
Advocates of the naturalist approach hypothesize that those successes are a func-
tion of feminists’ political values, where political values, like any other apparently
non-epistemic feature of scientific practice (such as competitiveness or the desire for

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credit for one’s accomplishments) need not function as hindrances but might actually
function as aids in the acquisition of objective knowledge. Indeed, supporters of the
naturalist approach point out that cases in which feminist values have clearly influ-
enced science (for example, by motivating particular lines of research or the mainte-
nance of particular social structures) have been cases in which the science produced
is not only free of sexism but also more developed and more empirically adequate
than before (see, e.g., Antony 1993; 1995; Campbell 2001; Anderson 1995; 2004; and
Wylie and Nelson 2007). And since feminist values produce greater scientific success
than sexist values we have reason to rid science of the latter.
The “political” approach put forward by Janet Kourany (2010) moves in a somewhat
different direction. Like the naturalist approach, it advocates a close look at successful
scientific practice and what contributes to and explains its success. But it advocates this
close look in the context of the wider society in which science takes place. Indeed, it
emphasizes that society ultimately pays for science—through taxes and through con-
sumer spending. And it emphasizes that society is deeply affected by science. Science
shapes our lives, and perhaps most important, science shapes our conception of our-
selves. As philosopher and theologian A. J. Heschel explained half a century ago:

A theory about the stars never becomes a part of the being of the stars. A the-
ory about man enters his consciousness, determines his self-understanding, and
modifies his very existence. The image of a man affects the nature of man . . . We
become what we think of ourselves.
(Heschel 1965: 7)

As a result, science, so much a shaper of society and so much a beneficiary of society,

should be deeply responsive to the needs of society.
The political approach thus suggests that scientific success should be defined in
terms of social success—human flourishing, what makes for a good society—as well
as epistemic success. But it also suggests, like the naturalist approach, that scientific
rationality should be defined in terms of whatever contributes to and explains scientific
success. Hence, scientific rationality should be defined in terms of those features of
science that contribute to and explain the social as well as epistemic success of science.
Regarding gender-related research in particular, since one of the needs of society—of
both women and men—is justice, and equality for women is one aspect of that justice,
those features should include, in addition to ones that relate to epistemic goals, ones
that relate to feminist goals.
Returning, then, to the feminist scientists who, starting in the 1970s, did innova-
tive critical and constructive work in fields such as anthropology, sociology, political
science, medical research, psychology, biology, and archaeology, we can easily explain
why their work was superior to the sexist work that preceded it, and we can do this
without invoking any speculative hypotheses regarding the causes of the improve-
ments. The explanation is simply that they were scientists trying to do epistemically
responsible research, that at the same time they were feminist scientists trying to root
sexism out of that research, and that rooting sexism out of that research was tanta-
mount to implanting egalitarian social values in it. Thus, their research, unlike that
of their colleagues, ended up satisfying both epistemic criteria and criteria related to
feminist goals and, thus, fulfilled more stringent standards of scientific rationality than
their colleagues’ research.

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The Legacy
Feminist philosophy of science has thus contributed new understandings of scientific
rationality that are especially helpful to feminist scientists. For, in each case, these
new understandings show that feminism is not antithetical to the requirements of good
science. Indeed, in each case they show that feminism is partially constitutive of the
requirements of good science.
But these new understandings of scientific rationality are especially helpful to phi-
losophers of science as well. For one thing, they take into account the complex roles of
social values in science, and thereby, the complex ways in which science both shapes
and is shaped by society. And this answers a need pervasive in philosophy of science
since it came into its own as a professional discipline in the middle of the twentieth
century. Indeed, even after the demise of logical empiricism, and even after the his-
toricizing and naturalizing and socializing of philosophy of science that occurred there-
after, science was still treated in twentieth century philosophy of science as detached
from its social (political/cultural/economic) surround—as science in a vacuum. The
roles of social values in science either failed to enter philosophical discussion at all
or they were limited to the choice of research questions in the “context of discovery”
and the choice of research applications in the “context of application.” And now, in
the twenty-first century, science is still largely treated in the same way—even though
questions regarding the social relevance of science and the social responsibilities of
scientists have become particularly pressing in the world beyond philosophy of sci-
ence, and funding from sources such as the US National Science Foundation and the
US National Institutes of Health now requires detailed analysis and assessment of the
social values that operate in research. In short, the contributions of feminist rationality
studies regarding the roles of social values in science continue to be of prime importance
to philosophy of science.
Feminist rationality studies provide other important benefits to philosophy of science
as well. As we have seen, they deal with socially important problems—the problems of
gender inequality women still contend with and the roles that science has played and
is still playing in perpetuating these problems—problems that most non-feminist phi-
losophers of science completely ignore. Moreover, feminist rationality studies suggest
well-reasoned responses to these problems. For example, both Longino and Harding
argue that the distinctive vantage points from which women scientists pursue their
research are crucial to achieving objective results in at least all the fields in which
gender is relevant to the subject matter of the field. For Longino these objective results
are achieved through the increased critical dialogue to which women’s vantage points
contribute. For Harding they are achieved through the decreased distortion potentially
present in the women’s vantage points themselves. Either way, the contributions of
women scientists are necessary if scientific rationality is to be maximized and genuine
scientific knowledge produced, the kind of knowledge needed to correct the prejudice
and misinformation about women that still prevails.
Longino goes even further. She suggests that the world may be so complex that a
multiplicity of approaches may be required to capture all its various aspects. That is
to say, a pluralism in the conduct of inquiry, the pluralism that Longino holds to be
methodologically necessary, may also yield as its final outcome an irreducible pluralism
of representations, a pluralism that includes women’s distinctive contributions. But,
of course, even if the final outcome of inquiry is a single unified representation of the

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world rather than a pluralism of representations, that single representation may still
include women’s distinctive contributions. Either outcome would furnish an additional
reason women’s contributions are crucial to science.
Thus, both Longino and Harding provide reasons to develop affirmative action pro-
grams for women in the sciences, affirmative action programs that ultimately will help
deal with the problems that women in society still face thanks in significant part to
science. Other feminist philosophers of science suggest other policy initiatives to the
same end (see, e.g., Kourany 2010 and 2016, regarding the need for change in the pro-
fessional values and associated research programs of the sciences and some of the ways to
bring that about). All this is especially important to philosophy of science right now. For
philosophers of science—at least many of them—are now trying to be socially relevant.
Thus, organizations such as the Joint Caucus for Socially Engaged Philosophers and
Historians of Science (JCSEPHS), the Consortium for Socially Relevant Philosophy
of/in Science and Engineering (SRPoiSE), and the Society for Philosophy of Science in
Practice (SPSP) have been formed, and their meetings and other activities are designed
to develop and/or communicate information about socially relevant projects for phi-
losophers of science to pursue. They are also designed to encourage philosophers of
science to pursue these projects. Feminist philosophy of science, however, can offer
more than three decades of work on such projects. So, at the very least, it can serve as a
source for generating the more impressive sorts of philosophy of science programs that
many in the field now desire.
A third benefit feminist rationality studies provide to philosophy of science is atten-
tion to the work of women scientists. At a time when women are still not being fully
welcomed into the sciences (see, e.g., Hill, Corbett, and Rose 2010; Pollack 2013),
and much biological and psychological research is still devoted to finding out whether
women are as analytically able to do science as men (see, e.g., Caplan and Caplan
2005; Ceci and Williams 2007, 2010)—that is, whether women really belong in the
sciences, or at least the upper reaches of the sciences—it is especially important not
to ignore the scientific achievements of women. This is particularly true regarding the
scientific achievements of feminists, almost all of whom have been women. For here,
the relevant take-home message is not that women were able to do the same kinds of
scientific work as even the most distinguished men, but rather that women did impor-
tantly different work from these men—work that was more accurate, more thorough,
more comprehensive, and better justified than the men’s work that preceded it, and yet
at the same time was also more egalitarian, more fair-minded and more helpful to more
people than the men’s work. It is valuable, then, to have the case studies and theorizing
about women’s research that is provided by feminist philosophers to add to the non-
feminist philosophy of science corpus, almost all of which is devoted exclusively to the
scientific research of men.
There are, of course, still other benefits feminist philosophy of science provides
to philosophy of science: long-overdue attention to the social and biomedical
sciences to supplement all the attention that, traditionally, the physical sciences and,
more recently, certain parts of the biological sciences have received in philosophy of
science; contributions to important work in race studies of science, sexuality studies,
disability studies, and a number of other socially important areas whose develop-
ment is also long overdue; case studies and analyses informed by cutting-edge work
in the sciences as well as the social studies of science, and frequently the product of

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close interdisciplinary collaborations; and so on. But the most important benefit that
feminist philosophy of science provides to philosophy of science is an array of fasci-
nating questions on a host of very challenging new topics that philosophers of science
are especially well equipped to handle. All in all, an impressive legacy to philosophy
of science from one of its own offspring!

Related Topics
Rationality and objectivity in feminist philosophy (Chapter 20); testimony, trust, and
trustworthiness (Chapter 21); values, practices, and metaphysical assumptions in the
biological sciences (Chapter 26); feminist philosophy of social sciences (Chapter 27).

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 26
VALUES, PRACTICES,
AND METAPHYSICAL
ASSUMPTIONS IN THE
BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Sara Weaver and Carla Fehr

Introduction
The biological sciences provide ample opportunity and motivation for feminist
interventions. Today, some claims such as Dr. Clark’s nineteenth-century warning that
education placed women at risk of “hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous
system” seem ludicrous (Clark 2006 [1874]: 18). However, harmful biological accounts
of sex/gender continue to be produced and reproduced in scientific and public spheres.
Only forty years ago, E. O. Wilson argued that, for humans and non-humans alike,
“It pays for males to be aggressive, hasty, fickle and undiscriminating,” but that “it is
more profitable for females to be coy, to hold back until they can identify males with the
best genes” (1978: 125). This sort of biological claim is still echoed in a range of con-
texts. Twenty-first century evolutionary psychology developed similar harmful accounts
of human sex differences. For instance, Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer (2001) sug-
gest that human sexual assault is a facultative evolutionary reproductive strategy, and
a primary way to prevent it is to educate men about their evolutionary drives. Harmful
theories about inherent sex differences also continue to make their way to the center of
public attention. In 2005, Harvard President Lawrence Summers argued that “issues of
intrinsic aptitude” provide an important explanation of the dearth of women in high-
powered science careers (Harvard Crimson 2005). Regarding the serious problem of
sexual harassment in the Canadian military, the Canadian Chief of Defense General
Tom Lawson explained in 2015 that, “it’s because we’re biologically wired in a certain
way and there will be those who believe it is a reasonable thing to press themselves and
their desires on others” (CBC News 2015).
Feminist philosophy of biology focuses on the ethical and epistemic adequacy and
responsibility of biological claims about sex/gender. This work is critical in the sense
of identifying epistemically and ethically irresponsible knowledge claims, research
practices, and dissemination of biological research regarding sex/gender, including
ways that sex/gender interacts with other social categories. This critical work involves
 Feminist Values and Practices in Biology

investigations of sciences ranging from evolutionary psychology (e.g., Lloyd 1993;

1999; 2003; Fausto-Sterling 2000a; Dupré 2001; 2012; Travis 2003; Meynell 2012), to
neuroscience (Bluhm et al. 2012; Jacobson 2012; DesAutels 2015a; 2015b), to genetics
and genomics (Keller 1992; Richardson 2008; 2013). Feminist philosophy of biology
is also constructive in the sense of developing accounts of the role of values and of
epistemic frameworks in scientific practice (Longino 1990; 1997; 2002), metaphysical
approaches (Fehr 2004), and methods (Lloyd 2005). While some earlier work tended
to focus on identifying and eradicating sexist and androcentric bias, it is now more
common to focus on identifying values in knowledge production and determining
whether the deployment of particular values is responsible.
It is exciting to see new feminist scholarship keep pace with and engage with emerg-
ing areas of biological research. However, feminists have found that this emerging bio-
logical research remains vulnerable to what have become classic feminist critiques. In
the rest of this chapter we describe classic themes in feminist philosophy of biology,
with particular regard to research practices and metaphysical assumptions. We then
go on to argue that these classic themes remain salient in contemporary neuroscien-
tific investigations of human emotion and in feminist research on the evolution of
human behavior.

Values and Research Practices

Feminist philosophers of biology have demonstrated ways in which harmful values
can negatively affect the choice and structure of research questions, evidence, and
arguments in the biological sciences. Values influence a scientist’s choice of research
question. This seems obvious when we think of questions about how we can cure can-
cer or make our drinking water safe. In these cases the role of values is obvious and
unproblematic. However, research questions can be value-laden in ways that are less
obvious (to many) and that have a significant and problematic impact on knowledge
production. They can direct our attention away from potentially important questions,
lead us to believe that our claims have a broader scope than they actually do, or give us
confidence that our claims are accurate representations of the world when they are not.
Of particular interest to feminist philosophers of biology are research questions that are
loaded with sexist gender stereotypes, and with heterosexist and androcentric assump-
tions. For instance, investigating questions about romantic relationships between men
and women is loaded with the assumption that romantic relationships are heterosexual
and hence obscure LGBTQ relationships.
Paving the way for considerations of androcentrism in the production of biologi-
cal knowledge, feminists such as Donna Haraway, Evelyn Fox Keller, Ruth Hubbard,
and Sarah Hrdy drew attention to how the biological sciences were dominated both
by male researchers and an interest in males as the primary research subject. Striking
examples of this can be found in evolutionary biology, early primatology, and socio-
biology whose research questions assumed that natural selection acted primarily on
males. This gendered assumption led to the production of biological research that con-
firmed the importance of males for evolution. This sort of critique is evident in Donna
Haraway’s analysis of Zuckerman’s (1933) theory of non-human primate society.
Zuckerman sought to explain the origins of human society by studying the foundations
of non-human primate social order. He theorized that the advent of continuous female

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sexual receptivity created the impetus for the development of social order. Because
female primates are continuously receptive, he reasoned that social order required
cooperation among males in order to control female sexuality. He postulated that the
“harem” was a fundamental feature of human evolution. Supporting this, he argued
that through the “harem” such structures as grooming, feeding order, vocal and gestural
expression, and allotment of social space were able to take shape in primate societies
(Haraway 1978: 45). Commenting on how Zuckerman’s theory not only embodies
androcentric ideology but also contributes to a continuing androcentric knowledge
framework, Haraway says the following:

Zuckerman set questions for workers to follow that even in their asking
reinforced scientific beliefs about natural male competition and dangerous
female sexuality. His tie of sexuality to dominance in ways acceptable to the
physiological and behavioral sciences of the 1930s helped establish the status
of dominance as a trait or fact rather than a concept.
(1978: 47)

As Haraway demonstrates, the value laden beliefs that scientists like Zuckerman had
about males and females have the power to influence research questions and in turn the
kinds of knowledge produced about the natures of males and females and dominance
relations between them.
Connecting the preponderance of male researchers to a hyper-focus on male
primates, Haraway (1989) also drew attention to how the influx of women in prima-
tology led to critiques of existing androcentric theory and methods. Additionally, she
pointed out how this demographic shift lead to new theoretical and methodological
approaches that facilitated investigations of a wider range of phenomena including the
study of female primates.
Feminist philosophy of biology has also drawn attention to ways that evidence and
arguments can be problematically laden with implicit values that are both epistemi-
cally and ethically harmful. This can take the form of scientists overlooking or dis-
counting evidence that was inconsistent with traditional gender values. Birke (1986)
and Bleier (1988), for instance, discussed how guiding paradigms in neuroscientific and
psychological research prevented scientists from seeing or making sense of data that
challenged prevailing views about the cognitive differences between men and women.
Bleier (1988) puzzled over why research on sex differences in visuospatial cognition
often promoted the idea that robust differences exist both in terms of the types of hemi-
spheric structure underlying visuospatial processing and in men’s and women’s visu-
ospatial abilities (men were reported to have superior visuospatial skills). However,
looking more closely at the literature as a whole revealed that neither of these findings
were in any sense robust. The number of studies that confirmed the differences were
matched by the number of studies that turned up negative results. Variability within the
sexes was often matched or exceeded variability across the sexes. What differences that
were found were often weak and attributable to a variety of factors that had nothing to
do with sex per se, such as age, test procedures, task difficulty, information-processing
strategies of the individual, practice, attention, motivation, memory, and aptitude.
Another way implicit values influenced data was evidenced in the tendency of some
scientists to go beyond their data in order to confirm hypotheses that supported gender

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stereotypes. Emily Martin (1991) and Ruth Hubbard (1990) provide examples of cultural
beliefs about gender that are so powerful that they can influence interpretations of obser-
vations of plants and cells. Hubbard (1990) cites Wolfgang Wickler, an ethologist in the
1970s, who read Victorian gender stereotypes into his observations of algae:

Even among very simple organisms such as algae, which have threadlike rows
of cells one behind the other, one can observe that during copulation the
cells of one thread act as males with regard to the cells of a second thread,
but as females with regard to the cells of a third thread. The mark of male
behavior is that the cell actively crawls or swims over to the other; the female
cell remains passive.
(cited in Hubbard 1990: 98)

The problem is that algae do not actually have sexes in the way that many other
organisms do. The “males” that he is describing do not have sperm, testes, or XY
chromosomes. They are only male insofar as Wickler has decided that that which is
active is male and that which is passive is female.
The examples in this section exemplify research practices in which: (1) research
questions are limited by gender values such as androcentrism; (2) data contrary to gender
stereotypes are discounted; and (3) conclusions that are consistent with gender stereo-
types are drawn but are not warranted by the available evidence.

Values and Metaphysics

People aren’t malleable enough to create a society of perfect behavioral symmetry
between men and women. Some changes simply can’t be made, and others will
come only at some cost.
(Robert Wright 1994, cited in Fausto-Sterling et al. 1997: 414)

The relationship between values and metaphysical assumptions about the biology
of sex/gender is important because these assumptions facilitate the production and
reproduction of biological knowledge claims that are implicitly laden with stereotypi-
cal gender values. Classic and contemporary feminist philosophy of biology critically
engages the commonplace view that gender differences are the inevitable result of
biological sex differences. According to this essentialist/determinist model, “male” and
“female” are distinct categories, and sex differences in individual temperament and
behavior, as well as gendered patterns of social organization are natural and fixed. This
is because they are thought to be caused by low-level, putatively fixed biological facts
about things like genes, hormones, and brain structures. Feminist interventions regard-
ing this model address both essentialist assumptions of distinct sex/gender categories
and the determinist assumptions regarding causal relations and fixity.
To be essentialist about sex/gender is to assume that males and females belong to nat-
ural categories much like gold and silver do. And that to be a male or female is to have
a set of defining characteristics that assigns you to one or the other category. Essentialist
views about sex/gender have been problematized in feminist theory (e.g., Beauvoir 1953
[1949]; Frieden 2001 [1963]; for reviews see Grosz 1994; Weaver 2011). Essentialism has
been criticized on metaphysical grounds since human categories like sex/gender are not

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kinds like gold and silver. The variation within most human categories and the similarities
across them do not allow for robust sets of defining characteristics. Feminists have also
argued on ethical grounds that essentialism about human categories reifies these cat-
egories in harmful ways. For example, claiming that competitiveness and nurturance are
essential male and female traits respectively creates norms that associate gender with
those traits and that can marginalize nurturing men and competitive women.
Biological determinism is the view that higher-level phenomena, such as gendered
characteristics of people, institutions, and social organization, are only or primarily
caused by fixed and often low-level biological entities such as genes or hormones. There
are two metaphysical assumptions constitutive of biological determinism. The first is
a reductionist account of causation such that the only, or primary, relevant causes act at
relatively low levels of biological organization and are internal to the organism in ques-
tion. The second is the assumption that the causally efficacious bits of biological nature are
static and fixed. These two metaphysical aspects of biological determinism work together
to support the view that sex/gender differences are inevitable because they are caused
by genes, hormones, or brain structures.
Feminist concerns with causal reductionism are generally not with the investiga-
tion of low-level or internal causes, such as genetic and neurobiological causes of
traits and behavior, per se. Rather feminist concerns involve the failure to respect, or
engage in research that investigates social and environmental causes, as well as inter-
actions among causes acting at multiple levels (Fehr 2004). Focusing exclusively on
low-level and internal causes blocks consideration of a wider range of causal factors.
Once researchers in biology are willing to consider social and environmental causes
it becomes possible to explore ways that sex/gender differences can be the effect of
culture. If we find that cultural causes are efficacious and culture is changeable, then
sex/gender differences can be changeable as well.
This also has bearing on assumptions of fixity of low-level phenomena. It may not
only be the case that culture could impact gendered behavior, but it also becomes
possible to explore the possibility that these higher level causes can have an impact on
low-level biological processes like gene expression, hormone action, and brain develop-
ment and activity. Consistent with this, feminists have offered salient critiques of the
notion that processes such as gene expression (Keller 2000), hormone activity (Longino
and Doell 1983; Birke 1986; Longino 1990), and neurodevelopment (Bleier 1984) are
static in the face of higher level causal influences.
These metaphysical critiques are evident in feminist analyses of the linear-hormonal
model for the development of behavioral sex differences. Rats are a common model
system for this type of research. The model is based on essentialist, determinist
assumptions that male and female sexual behaviors are the result of a causal chain
moving up through levels of biological organization from genes, to hormones, to
brain structures, to behavior. According to this model, a gene on the Y chromosome
triggers testes development, and then these testes release hormones that cause male
brains to develop such that males perform stereotypical male sexual behavior. For
females the absence of a Y chromosome, testes, and the relevant hormones results
in the development of a brain that causes the female to perform stereotypical female
behavior. Feminist concerns with this model were not that chromosomes, hormones
and brain structures are not causally relevant. Their concerns had to do with near
exclusive focus on these low-level causes (Birke 1986: 96). Longino points out that

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in this explanatory model it is assumed that there is a “unidirectional and irreversible

sequence of (biochemical) events” (Longino 1990: 135).
Birke (1986) advocated an interactionist model instead of the linear-hormonal model.
She argued that biological research actually provided a much more complex under-
standing of the causes of sexual behavior. This new model includes interactions among
the mother, the fetus, the environment as well as the genes, the internal anatomy and
the brain structure of the developing fetus. Prenatal factors such as the sex of other
members of the litter, the mother’s environment, and the mother’s hormonal states
have also been shown to influence pup development. Birke also argued that there is
a wide range of postnatal influences on adult sexual behavior. In addition to the hor-
mones that the pup produces, postnatal influences such as maternal care, sibling inter-
actions, and the physical environment have an impact. This causal complexity extends
into adulthood when an individual’s behavior and hormonal states as well as its physical
and social environment influence its sexual behavior. Environmental factors can cause
males to perform stereotypical female behavior and vice versa. The interactionist model
does not ignore low-level causes, such as genes or hormones; it simply refuses to privi-
lege them over what may be thought of as higher level environmental and social causes
of behavior (Birke 1986).
This example demonstrates the critical and the constructive elements of feminist
philosophy of biology and the fruitfulness of questioning commonplace metaphysical
assumptions about the development of sex/gender differences.

Values, Practices, and Metaphysical

Assumptions in Neuroscience
Two influential themes running throughout feminist philosophy of biology are critical
and constructive investigations of the role of gender values in both (1) research prac-
tices and (2) underlying metaphysical assumptions in the biological sciences. Recently,
there has been significant feminist analysis of contemporary neuroscience (Fine 2010;
Bluhm et al. 2012; DesAutels 2015b). Although this feminist work investigates new
and in some cases technologically sophisticated areas of scientific research, the science
has many of the same problematic practices and assumptions, and has sparked similar
kinds of critical and constructive feminist responses, as much earlier research.
Robyn Bluhm offers incisive critique of contemporary research practices in neuroim-
aging work on human emotion. According to Bluhm this research produces results that
are consistent with what Stephanie Shields calls a “master stereotype” linking women
with emotion (Bluhm 2013a). She analyses studies that conclude that women are more
emotional and have less emotional control than men do, even though these studies did
not find gender differences in emotional experience or in the activity of relevant areas of
the brain. Bluhm also found that this research suffers from methodological and statisti-
cal weaknesses, and in many cases “its conclusions owe more to gender stereotypes than
to evidence” (Bluhm 2013b: 870). These problems with methods, data, and eviden-
tial inferences include cases in which experimental results are ignored in favor of what
researchers should have observed were the stereotypes true, and cases in which gender
stereotypes are used to bridge the gap between data and theory (Bluhm 2013b: 870).
Feminist philosophers of biology are also raising familiar metaphysical concerns
about this neuroscience research. While none of the scientists frame their work in

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terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in sex/gender categories,

much of this research is based on assumptions of distinct, binary gender categories.
It often starts from the position of looking for sex/gender differences rather than
looking for similarities or simply investigating these phenomena from a sex/gender
neutral perspective.
Assumptions of causal reductionism and the fixity of low-level causes are also targets
of this contemporary feminist critique of neuroscience. Rebecca Jordan-Young (2010)
demonstrates that models of development, very similar to the linear hormonal model
discussed above, in which there is a linear and unidirectional causal pathway from hor-
mones to brain structures to gendered behavior, remain very much in vogue in spite
of empirical evidence that is contrary to the model and weak evidence in favor of it.
Discussions of sex differences being “hardwired” in the brain are similarly a target of
contemporary, yet familiar, feminist critique. The critique points out the significance
of neuroplasticity and of social and environmental factors influencing both the devel-
opmental and ongoing changes in neurological structures as well as human experience
and behavior. We see similar research problems, and correspondingly similar critiques
in the 2010s as were raised in the 1980s (see also Bluhm 2013a on these similarities).
At first glance, it might seem as though neurobiology is inherently oriented toward
reductive explanations because it investigates things such as brain structure and physi-
ology. However, Peggy DesAutels’s research in feminist neuroethics provides an exam-
ple of how metaphysical assumptions interact with the choice of research questions and
methods in a way that unnecessarily limits our research perspectives on sex/gender.
DesAutels argues that the differences we see between men’s and women’s brains with
respect to broadly ethical traits are more consistent with differences between those who
are members of oppressing and of oppressed groups, rather than sex/gender differences
(DesAutels 2015a). DesAutels’s research makes obvious the importance of attending to
social categories in addition to sex/gender.

Values, Practices, and Metaphysical Assumptions in

Feminist Evolutionary Psychology
Over the last five years there has been an increase in scholarship attempting to inte-
grate feminism with evolutionary psychology (EP). Noteworthy work here includes a
collection of essays from a 2011 issue (no. 64) of Sex Roles and an anthology (Fisher
et al. 2013) arising from the Feminist Evolutionary Psychology Society (see Sokol-Chang
and Fisher 2013). Scholars from both of these sources label their work as feminist since
the aim of their research is to promote female-centered research. Here, female-centered
research refers to the study of females as relevant objects of evolutionary study, and
considers how they contribute to evolutionary change. This kind of focus on females
is meant to respond to androcentric bias in evolutionary studies, where competition
among males was assumed to be the main driver of evolutionary change. Feminist evo-
lutionary psychologists are also interested in how an understanding of the evolutionary
causes of human behavior can inform feminist social issues. In this section we offer
analysis and critique of this feminist evolutionary psychology (FEP). In particular we
find that FEP includes research practices and metaphysical assumptions laden with the
same kinds of implicit and harmful gender values that feminists have criticized more
traditional brands of EP and sociobiology for.

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Gender stereotypes are integrated into FEP research questions and methods. While
FEP researchers have made substantial strides to direct evolutionary psychology
research to focus on women and their significance for evolution, just how they focus
on women and which women they study remain influenced by cultural assumptions
about sex/gender. For example, because FEP researchers already assume women are
primarily caregivers, social supporters, and preoccupied with finding a long-term pro-
visioning mate, FEP research reflects a hyper-focus on women in domestic contexts. In
general there is a dearth of discussions or studies of women in professional, political,
technical, or competitive contexts (except for discussions of women’s competition for
men). This is particularly alarming in cases where FEP research is focused on women’s
aggression or competition (e.g., Fisher 2013; Liesen 2013). Even in these studies, dis-
cussions are limited to ways that women aggress or compete at home or among their
close friends. The lack of research questions about women’s competitive performances
and strategies outside of the home is surprising, especially when we consider how many
women compete (even aggressively) in professional contexts every day. It is important
to ask why women’s competitive performances and strategies outside of the home are
not relevant to FEP scholars.
Gender values also influence how FEP researchers construct and present their own
and secondary source data. On many occasions, FEP scholars cite contentious and con-
troversial research on sex differences, but do not draw any attention to the controver-
sies. Instead, findings of sex differences are presented as robust and widely agreed upon
(see especially presentations of controversial sex differences in cognitive research in
Ellis 2011; Oberzaucher 2013). This elision of controversies in putatively supporting
bodies of literature results in spurious support of gender stereotypes.
There are also cases in which FEP scholars make claims that are stronger than war-
ranted by their data. For example, referring to women as the “empresses of the kitchen,”
Coe and Palmer (2013) claim that selection on women’s cooking activities in the Stone
Age set the stage for the development of the human capacity to create traditions. The
evidence they provide for this view that Stone Age women’s cooking has evolutionary
import is that women are the primary cooks in all of the thirty-nine African cultures
recorded in the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF 2016). There are several significant
and unjustified assumptions that need to be made in order for this evidentiary relation-
ship to hold. In particular, no justification is provided for the troubling assumption that
African cultures offer insight into prehistoric human practices. Indeed, Coe and Palmer
need to do far more work to demonstrate that the division of labor in these cultures is
not the result of political factors—factors that are impermanent and could have cer-
tainly been different hundreds of thousands of years ago.
FEP also makes familiar assumptions regarding essentialism and causation. According
to some FEP research, because men and women experienced very particular selection
pressures in our prehistoric past, we can expect men and women in general to have spe-
cific sets of defining characteristics. In particular, this research is often based on familiar
accounts of the evolution of sex/gender differences: caring work was selected in women,
resulting in the evolution of nurturing, empathetic, and emotionally supportive women
focused on finding a good mate (e.g., Oberzaucher 2013). FEP scholars do maintain that
we should expect variation within the sexes and perhaps much overlap between them
(Buss and Schmitt 2011; Ellis 2011). Despite this, FEP scholars are primarily interested in
what makes the sexes robust, separate categories with characteristics that we can measure

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and make predictions about. The consequence is that evolutionary psychologists and
FEP scholars reflect back to their readership a poorly justified yet rhetorically powerful
set of generalizations about and comparisons between men and women.
Like other evolutionary psychologists, many FEP researchers assign primacy to bio-
logical causes of behavior, often ignoring or only gesturing toward possible sociocul-
tural causes. For example, often when FEP researchers “find” differences between men
and women, they tend to attribute these differences to inherent biological causes (e.g.,
Betzig 2013; Wilbur and Campbell 2013). Sociocultural causes are frequently not con-
sidered, even to rule those causes out.
There is also current work that sends highly reductionist messages regarding genetic
causes of behavior. Consider Frederick et al. (2013: 304): “Reproduction is the engine
that drives evolution. Genes that produce traits, tactics, and behaviors that promote
reproduction . . . can carry forward to future generations.” The idea that behaviors can
be influenced by heritable genetic processes is not controversial; however, there is con-
troversy regarding how behaviors are influenced by genes and the extent to which genes play
a role in producing human behavior. FEP, like non-feminist evolutionary psychology,
is very dependent on the idea that many contemporary behaviors are relics from the
past that have carried forward because they have been conserved in our genome.
However, evolutionary psychologists have yet to offer an acceptable genetic account
of behavior that explains how this is possible (Plaisance et  al. 2012). The pathway
from genotype to phenotype is a very complex process and often involves a myriad
of other factors (developmental, epigenetic, environmental), many of which prevent
reliable phenotypical replication across individuals, generations, environments, and
circumstances (Plaisance et al. 2012). Behavior is a special sort of phenotype in that
it is variable and flexible. It is quite possible that the genetics underlying behavior are
similar to those underlying the immune system (Buller 2005). The immune system is
specialized to fight diseases, but the particular diseases it can fight will depend on envi-
ronmental input and other physiological conditions of the individual. So it likely is
with behavior: because behaviors must be extremely variable and flexible, the genetics
that underlie them have to be domain general (Buller 2005; Plaisance et  al. 2012).
This, combined with the complexity of phenotype expression, complicates the extent
to which highly specific behavioral phenotypes can be conserved in our genome.
Either explicitly or implicitly, FEP research often sends the message that because
behaviors have biological causes they are fixed and unchanging. Evolutionary psychol-
ogy has been criticized so often for its messages of fixity that many researchers now
preface their discussions of biological causes of behavior with promises of plasticity
(e.g., Buss and Schmitt 2011; Johow et al. 2013). That is, they say, just because behav-
iors have biological causes, it does not follow that we shouldn’t work toward social
change or assume that humans are destined to be one way or another. Nevertheless,
much FEP research is lined with assumptions about fixity that come out in subtle (and
in some cases not-so-subtle) ways. The most general way in which fixity is implicated
in FEP goes something like this: putative sex differences and gender roles are the way
they are because they were once adaptive in a distant past. That we still see these behav-
ioral and psychological relics despite thousands of years of evolution and cultural and
environmental change and variability suggests (with or without evolutionary psychol-
ogists explicitly saying so) that these traits are very hard to change. Adding to this,
some FEP scholars have proposed that FEP research be used to inform social policy

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(e.g., see especially Buss and Schmitt 2011; Fisher et al. 2013; and Reiber 2013). This
notion of shaping policy to conform to our evolutionary biological nature is consist-
ent with the view of a static and unchanging biological nature. Altogether, this brief
analysis of FEP scholarship shows it to echo problematic research practices and meta-
physical assumptions that have been the target of feminist criticism for decades.

Conclusion
In this chapter, we demonstrate the continued relevance of classic feminist critiques of
biology. We focused on two categories of critique. The first reveals how gender stereo-
types and cultural expectations influenced research questions, methods, and inferences
in biology. The second reveals how reliance on an essentialist/deterministic model of
sex/gender illegitimately prioritizes explanations of sex/gender that promote ideas of
inherent and fixed differences between men and women. Both contemporary, techni-
cally sophisticated neuroscience research on gender and emotion, and current research
on human evolution that is intended by its practitioners to be feminist, are vulnerable
to feminist criticisms that have been available for nearly forty years.
It is reassuring that there are some feminist critiques of biology that have had an
impact on the science by contributing to improvements in biological research. Consider
Jeanne Altman. As a result of her concerns about androcentrism in primatology, she sig-
nificantly improved the methodology of animal behavior research (Haraway 1989; Fehr
2011). Joan Roughgarden (2012) has also received much attention for her development
of social selection, an alternative to sexual selection, which is so closely associated with
male competition and promiscuity, and female nurturing and coyness. Nevertheless,
as the troubling research coming out of neuroscience and feminist evolutionary psy-
chology shows, scientists are still embedded in social and institutional structures that
promote, enable, and reward sexist research. As we have demonstrated, scientists still
choose to study sex differences, look for evidence of the naturalness of putative gender
roles and norms, then to jump through hoops in order to present that evidence as cor-
roborating mainstream assumptions about sex/gender. As a result, many classic feminist
critiques of the biological sciences remain salient.
There are many opportunities for further research in feminist philosophy of biology.
First, the need for continued iterations of classic critiques demonstrates the impor-
tance of research on the scientific, policy, and public uptake of this feminist work
(Fehr and Plaisance 2010; Fehr 2012). This includes philosophical research on how
the culture and structure of scientific communities and institutions allows them to
avoid engaging critical responses to their ongoing research. Second, there is an oppor-
tunity for more research that engages axes of oppression in addition to sex/gender and
takes an intersectional approach to analyses of the biological sciences. Much feminist
philosophy of biology engages with science that investigates sex/gender per se, and
the critical response mirrors this focus on sex/gender; however, feminist philosophy
of biology is constructive as well as critical. This sort of constructive feminist work
is exemplified in recent neurofemninist scholarship that facilitates and advocates
biological research that is attentive to social categories such as race and sexuality
that interact with sex/gender (e.g., Dussauge and Kaiser 2012; Kraus 2012; Roy 2012;
Jacobson and Langley 2015). For example, Jacobson and Langley (2015) look at inter-
actions among critical race theory, cognitive neuroscience, and moral theory in order

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to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of some kinds of racial bias. Finally,

much feminist philosophy of biology is critical of the essentialist/determinist model of
sex/gender. Some feminists have provided alternative approaches to thinking about
sex/gender. Consider Anne Fausto-Sterling’s metaphysical argument that because of
the multiplicity of ways in which sex and gender identity are realized in people’s lives
and on their bodies, sex and gender should not be understood as binary. She argues
instead that “sex and gender are best conceptualized as points in a multidimensional
space” (Fausto-Sterling 2000b: 22). Opportunities remain for more engagement with
feminist metaphysics on this topic (for a review, see Mikkola 2016). The biological
sciences are seen by many as an authority on human nature and are highly relevant
to many issues of social justice and public policy. Feminist philosophy of biology has
tools to determine if this science is being produced and used in an epistemically and
ethically responsible manner.

Related Topics
The sex/gender distinction and the social construction of reality (Chapter 13); gender
essentialism and anti-essentialism (Chapter 14); materiality (Chapter 16); ration-
ality and objectivity (Chapter 20); philosophy of science and the feminist legacy
(Chapter 25); feminist philosophy of social science (Chapter 27); the genealogy and
viability of the concept of intersectionality (Chapter 28).

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 27
FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY OF
SOCIAL SCIENCE
Alison Wylie

Defining “feminist philosophy of social science” is a tricky business, not least because
philosophy of social science is itself such a sprawling, heterogeneous field. I begin
with a brief account of these field-defining difficulties as a way of situating the focus
of this chapter: the work analytic feminist philosophers of science have done, often
in dialog with practitioners, on a set of epistemic and methodological questions raised
by explicitly feminist research programs in the social sciences. Most fundamentally the
issue here is how to make sense of the fact that feminists, who bring to bear an explic-
itly situated, political angle of vision, have made significant, often transformative
contributions across the social sciences. Their critical and constructive interventions
pose a significant philosophical challenge to dominant “value free” ideals of epistemic
integrity and objectivity. I consider two points of feminist engagement with this chal-
lenge. One is the “feminist method” debate of the 1970s and 1980s in which feminist
social scientists, joined by feminist philosophers, wrestled with the question of what it
means to do social science as a feminist. The second is feminist standpoint theory, as
developed since the early 1980s by feminist social scientists and philosophers who take
on directly the question of why it is that, contra dominant wisdom, situated interests
and values not only play an ineliminable role in inquiry but, time and again, prove
to be a crucial resource in improving the reach and credibility of social research. This
analytic, epistemic engagement with feminist social science is just one area in which
feminist philosophers have addressed issues central to philosophy of social science,
anticipating by several decades a number of themes that are now coming to promi-
nence in philosophy of social science.

The Broader Context

The social sciences are themselves enormously diverse in subject and method, and they
raise issues that have been taken up by philosophers working in virtually all the major
subfields and traditions of philosophy. These include just the kinds of issues that interest
feminist philosophers given a commitment to rethink the conceptions of moral, politi-
cal, and epistemic agency that underpin mainstream philosophy, bringing into focus
features of the social, relational contexts of action that “ideal philosophy” (Mills 2005)
has systematically read out of account. Most obviously, feminist philosophers address
 Feminist philosophy of social science

questions of social ontology and action theory that are the conceptual core of philosophy
of social science; they ask how individual agency is enacted in social contexts, and
whether social institutions and collectives reduce to the intentions and behaviors of
their members, as individualists would claim, or have standing as entities in their own
right, as holists have argued. Feminist ethicists and political theorists also address ques-
tions that fall within the ambit of philosophy of social science when they investigate the
scope of moral responsibility when social conditions that constrain or enable agency.
In contesting conventional ideals of rationality and asking how understanding is pos-
sible across differences in worldview, feminist epistemologists engage many of the issues
central to the “rationality and relativism” debate of the 1970s and 1980s that set the
framework for contemporary analytic philosophy of social science.
There is, then, a case to be made that feminist philosophers have contributed to
philosophy of social science on many different fronts—contributions that are well
represented in this volume. But despite these points of connection, little explicitly
feminist work figures in the various anthologies, handbooks, and companion volumes
on philosophy of social science that have appeared in recent decades. Indeed, 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 (Hutchinson and Jenkins 2013). Take as a baseline for compari-
son the influential collection, Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, edited
by May Brodbeck in 1968. She and one other woman contributed 4 of the 41 entries.
They account for 5 percent of contributing authors and 10 percent of the entries; not
surprisingly, there was no feminist content. Since the mid-1990s when the first of the
contemporary anthologies appeared (Martin and MacIntyre 1994), a pattern emerges
that is remarkably stable whether these collections are made up of new work by cur-
rently active scholars or, as in the case of Brodbeck’s Readings, they include reprints
of classic articles that date to periods when the field was more heavily male domi-
nated and feminist philosophy was yet to take shape. The representation of feminist
work in these anthologies ranges from 4 percent to 8 percent of contributions, and
8 percent to 18 percent of authors are women. The one exception is the 2015 collec-
tion, Philosophy of Social Science: A New Introduction, for which Nancy Cartwright and
Eleanora Montuschi assembled sixteen contributions, all by women, many of whom
directly engage or are clearly cognizant of relevant work by feminist philosophers.
More work is needed to fully understand the feminist and gender profile of philoso-
phy of social science, but this snapshot, based on field-defining anthologies, does raise
the question of why more feminist philosophers have not made philosophy of social
science their disciplinary home. They have taken up philosophical issues raised by and
about the social sciences in other contexts: in feminist philosophy journals and collec-
tions, and in publications on feminist social science.

The Feminist Method Debate

This debate took shape in the 1980s in response to feminist critiques of mainstream
social science, which, by that time, had exposed some remarkable gaps and distortions in
the treatment of women and gender. Particularly sharp criticism was directed at research
programs that had traditionally pinned their authority on claims to scientific status,

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emphasizing their reliance on rigorously “objective” research tools and methodologies

modeled on those of the natural sciences. These include, for example, hypothesis test-
ing strategies designed to approximate experimental protocols, standardized interview
and survey research, quantitative sampling strategies and statistical analysis. Despite
their precision and analytic rigor, feminists found the results of these research programs
rife with androcentric and, in some cases, manifestly sexist bias. Experimental and
longitudinal studies of sex difference in cognitive function are an especially notorious
example. Several recent retrospective studies document how gender-normative assump-
tions about sex/gender difference pervade not just the articulation of hypotheses, but
also the definition of analytic categories and the choice of empirical measures used to
evaluate them. This, feminist critics argue, has ensured that, for decades, these research
programs have generated results that confirm bio-essentialist claims about sex differ-
ences. When confronted with evidence that does not fit these expectations a typical
response had been to shift the terms of reference (Jordan-Young 2010), a pattern of
insulating favored hypotheses from challenge that has been reinforced by ignoring the
implications of a growing body of research which shows that even sex-gender differences
that prove to be robust can often be explained in terms of patterns of gender socialization
(Fine 2010). The issue is not (or, not necessarily) that this work is fraudulent, but that
conventional assumptions about gender difference are so deeply embedded in the con-
ceptual framing of these research programs they are simply taken for granted. Rigorously
applied analytic and quantitative research methods can discriminate between hypoth-
eses formulated within this framework but, on their own, they cannot be counted on
to expose problematic assumptions that they all share (Okruhlik 1994); they reproduce
gender-normative bias built into the research framework.
Similar critiques had been leveled against the design of census surveys and indices
of national economic productivity based on these census data (GDP, GNP), to name
just two such examples. In the late 1970s feminist economists, sociologists and politi-
cal scientists drew attention to class-specific and ethnocentric as well as androcentric
assumptions that predetermine, for example, what will count as economically produc-
tive “work” and which domestic arrangements constitute a “household.” In many juris-
dictions, the data underlying official labor statistics had been gathered using survey
tools that explicitly exclude the unpaid work women were doing “at home for their
families” and on a volunteer basis in other contexts (Armstrong and Armstrong 1987:
56; Oakley and Oakley 1979: 180); those engaged in even the most casual and tem-
porary work were counted as “economically productive” so long they were paid, but
those doing unpaid domestic labor were considered “economically inactive” no matter
how essential it might be. Questions about household structure likewise assumed that
every household must have a “head” and that the “head of household” or “house-
hold maintainer” must be a man, regardless of who brings in the primary income
or pays the expenses. These gender-normative background assumptions determine,
for example, “the areas chosen for analysis, the data that are collected and the way
in which the statistics are both processed and presented” so that, “far from being a
superstructure imposed on raw unbiased data,” the data themselves and the statis-
tics based on them are constituted by this underlying “conceptual scheme” (Oakley
and Oakley 1979: 174). Although objections to this literal erasure of women’s labor
resulted in changes to census questionnaires in many contexts, as Marilyn Waring
argues in If Women Counted (1988) the proxies standardly used to measure economic

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wealth and productivity—GDP and GNP—still equate economically valuable work

with cash (or profit) generating activity, excluding the reproductive and care work
largely carried out by women that is required to maintain an employable workforce.
As critiques of these kinds proliferated, feminist social scientists came to question
the conviction that the gaps and distortions they were identifying could be corrected by
applying existing methodologies more systematically. Even the most rigorously “objec-
tive” methods—those it was hoped would establish the bona fides of social research as
scientific—had failed to protect against the influence of gender normative assumptions
which, when made explicit, were unsustainable on empirical and conceptual as much
as on political grounds. Worse, the conviction that these methods are self-correcting
had insulated the research programs that rely on them from critique. One response was
to reject them as inherently patriarchal and incapable of recuperation. Dorothy Smith
(1978) argued that, by enforcing a hierarchical dissociation of researcher from research
subject and attributing epistemic authority exclusively to professional researchers, the
social sciences had become “ruling practices” (1974: 8) that systematically “eclipse” the
lives, activities, interests, and expertise of women (1987: 17–36). Others objected that
the positivist rhetoric of objectivity and value neutrality compounded these problems,
masking the context-specific interests that animate the social sciences (Mies 1983;
Stanley and Wise 1983).
At this juncture some argued that what was needed as an antidote were precisely the
qualitative, engaged, interpretive methods that had been rejected by the advocates of
self-consciously “scientific” approaches to social inquiry. These would allow women’s
voices to be heard, bringing into focus the experience, knowledge, and critical perspec-
tives of insiders to the social worlds that social scientists had ignored. Smith advocated
a program of ethnomethodological research designed to understand how the “everyday
world” looks to those who operate off-stage, in gender-normative roles that put them
in the position of maintaining social relationships and collective physical well being
(Smith 1974). She studied the ways in which school-day routines and the work organi-
zation of women’s lives amplify rigidly gendered parenting responsibilities (Smith
1987: 181–187), documenting women’s own understanding of “mothering as work”
and the “concrete actualities” (Howard 1988: 21) that are ignored or caricatured when
“work” is equated with wage labor. Rather than impose categories that reflect the situ-
ated experience and assumptions of privileged outsiders, she urged feminist researchers
to take as their point of departure the experience, perspectives, and categories of those
who had been “eclipsed.” This would bring into focus oppressive institutions and norms
that are often not visible to those who operate “center stage,” and whose privilege put
them in a position to define the agenda of social sciences.
These research strategies are by no means unique to feminist social research. They
are stock in trade in fields like social anthropology, qualitative sociology, and oral his-
tory, and they had been put to good use for just the purposes Smith cites in a number
of well-established traditions of collaborative and participatory action research (Hickey
and Mohan 2004: 3–10). In many contexts they provided the empirical and concep-
tual resources feminists needed to grasp what it was that dominant modes of practice
had left out of account or misrecognized, and they continue to be a crucial resource
for feminist research (Hesse-Biber 2012). But as Smith herself had argued, it is not
the methods themselves that countered the “objectifying” effects of traditional social
science; what has given feminist research its distinctive critical edge and opened up

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new lines of inquiry is the use of these methods in the context of research that “starts
from the margins.” Moreover, it was quickly pointed out that, as powerful and useful as
they are, “face-to-face,” interpretive modes of practice are no methodological panacea;
androcentric and sexist partiality was as ubiquitous in the areas of social research that
had traditionally relied on them as in those that staked their reputation as scientific on
quantitative, “objectifying” methods.
For example, feminist critiques in anthropology of the 1960s documented a strik-
ing lack of attention to women’s roles and relationships, subcultures and activities
in many of the most highly regarded ethnographic accounts; despite being deeply
immersed in the lives and cultures of their subjects, anthropologists had routinely
brought to bear “dominant male [androcentric] systems of perception” (Ardener 1975:
xiii). This could sometimes be attributed to issues of access, but often the preoccupa-
tion with male-associated roles and activities reflected an entrenched assumption that
these are what matter: men are the primary locus of authority; what they value defines
what counts as cultural identity and accomplishment; masculine roles and activities
determine the dynamics characteristic of society as a whole. A classic example is the
research on “hunter-gatherers” that had largely ignored the “gathering” activities of
women even though, on reanalysis, these proved to account for as much as 70 percent
of the dietary intake in all but the most extreme arctic and subarctic environ-
ments. Recognizing the critical role of women not only reshaped the ethnography of
“foragers,” as they came to be known, but also called into question “man the hunter”
theories of human evolution that had assumed the activities of male hunters to be the
primary determinant of group success and reproductive fitness in foraging societies
(e.g., Dahlberg 1981; Slocum 1975).
In practice, few feminist social scientists advocated wholesale abandonment of any
of the tools of social research—scientistic or otherwise. Why limit feminist initiatives
to one particular set of methods or research strategy, they asked (Jayaratne, 1983)? By
the mid-1990s feminist practitioners had made a decisive “move from [methodological]
singularity to plurality” (Gottfried 1996: 12); the contributors to an influential collec-
tion, Feminist Methods in the Social Sciences (Reinharz 1992) make use of virtually every
research method available to social scientists. The pressing question was how to do
better, more inclusive research using these tools: How might feminists best address the
questions that had been left out of account and are especially relevant for understand-
ing and changing oppressive sex/gender systems? More generally, what research strate-
gies could ensure that feminists would recognize and hold accountable assumptions of
privilege that configure research and its results, including their own?
These issues were also a matter of active interest for feminist philosophers. They fig-
ure prominently in Discovering Reality (Harding and Hintikka 1983) and were the focus
of two essays that appeared in a special issue of Hypatia on “Feminism and Science”:
“Can There Be a Feminist Science?” by Helen Longino (1987), and “The Method
Question,” by Sandra Harding (1987a). Longino and Harding rejected the idea that
there might be a distinctive “feminist science” (or method, or “way of knowing”) for
reasons like those given by feminist social scientists; such claims simply reaffirm the
faith in method that practitioners had called into question in mainstream social science,
and they presuppose the very essentialism about gender difference that feminists were
intent on challenging more generally. That said, they recognized that feminist research
programs pose a distinctive challenge to conventional ideals of objectivity. As Harding

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put it in her 1983 essay, “Why Has the Sex/Gender System Become Visible Only Now?”
there was little indication that business-as-usual in the social and biological sciences
would ever have exposed the pervasive errors and distortions to which feminists drew
attention (Harding 1983: 26); the “infusion of [feminist] politics into scientific inquiry”
had improved research in these fields by many standard measures, including “empiri-
cal quality,” comprehensiveness and explanatory breadth, among other core epistemic
virtues associated with “objectivity.” She further argued that none of the epistemolo-
gies then on offer—especially not “received view” empiricism (Suppe 1977)—had the
resources to make sense of how research programs rooted in a political movement could
have generated “transformative criticism” (as Longino (1990) describes it), destabiliz-
ing entrenched assumptions and bringing sex/gender systems into focus as a “newly vis-
ible object . . . of scientific scrutiny” (Harding 1983: 312–313). What was needed, she
argued, is a “revolution in epistemology” (1983: 311). In their different ways, Harding
and Longino both took up this challenge, addressing two issues that arise directly out of
the method debate. One is the question of what methodological and epistemic norms
of practice characterize feminist research; I focus here on Longino’s account. The other
is the question of why these norms are epistemically salient, in connection with which
I consider the formulations of feminist standpoint theory associated with by Harding.

Feminist “Community Values”

Longino’s response to the method debate was to reframe its motivating question: the
issue is not whether there is a distinctive “feminist science,” but what it means to “do
science as a feminist” (1987: 53). A robust methodological pluralism, like that endorsed
by feminist social scientists, follows directly; feminist research will be as diverse as
the feminism(s) that inspire it, and as situationally specific as the challenges posed by
research traditions they critique and the questions they take up. Longino does, however,
locate common ground in a set of “community values” that inform feminist research
across the sciences.
Longino’s point of departure was a suite of well-established philosophical arguments
for recognizing that social, contextual values and interests pervade scientific inquiry
of all kinds. These presuppose a distinction between these “non-cognitive” values—
considerations that, on standard accounts, should never intrude into the practice of
science—and the “cognitive,” epistemic values, like truth-seeking and empirical ade-
quacy, that were widely assumed to be the only factors that can legitimately play a
role in scientific “contexts of justification” (Longino 1990: 4–7). Longino has since
called into question this “cognitive/social” divide. But even if you accept it, she argued,
“underdetermination” arguments establish that purely epistemic, cognitive considera-
tions rarely, if ever, determine theory choice.
The underdetermination arguments Longino drew on arise from an appreciation that
the evidence we rely on to judge the empirical adequacy of a claim is inevitably “theory
laden” (Hanson 1958: 19). Empirical observations stand as evidence only under inter-
pretation given an array of “auxiliary hypotheses” that link observational data to the
phenomena under investigation. These include, for example, the normative, evaluative
assumptions that justify treating data on paid employment as a proxy for economic pro-
ductivity described above. This means that a requirement of empirical adequacy—the
central “cognitive” value invoked as a guide for scientific practice—cannot, on its own,

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determine whether a given body of evidence “confirms” (or disconfirms) a hypothesis.

Longino draws the conclusion that “whatever grounds for knowledge we have, they are
not sufficient to warrant the assertion of claims beyond doubt” (Longino 1994: 472);
scientists must inevitably take an inferential leap that is guided by other considerations.
For a “critical contextual empiricist” (2002: 208) like Longino, what follows from these
“inferential gap” arguments (Intemann 2005) is a recognition that social, contextual
factors must take up the slack; they are essential to scientific reasoning, not a regret-
table intrusion that compromises its integrity. Whatever counts as epistemic integrity
and credibility, it cannot plausibly be equated with “value free” ideals of objectivity that
require the elimination of non-cognitive values. Longino’s response to the epistemic
challenge posed by the successes of explicitly feminist research programs is to argue
that any viable philosophical theory of science must take into account the irreducibly
situated nature of social scientific inquiry and inquirers. On this view, doing (social)
science as a feminist is a matter of insisting that researchers be accountable for the
values and interests that inevitably play a role in all aspects of scientific inquiry.
In this spirit Longino’s contribution to the “method debate” was to make explicit
and provide a justification for six “community values” that she finds cited by feminist
researchers. These, she argues, are justified both on general epistemic grounds and in
terms of an explicitly feminist “bottom line” principle: they “prevent gender from being
disappeared” (1994: 481; 1995: 391). I organize them around four focal themes (Longino
1994: 476–478; 1995: 386–389):

1. Epistemic values: Doing science as a feminist requires, first and foremost, a commitment
to empirical adequacy.
2. Ontological pluralism: Feminist researchers should give preference to hypotheses
that are novel and to those that take full account of the causal complexity and
ontological diversity of their objects of study.
3. Pragmatic values: Feminists should use the tools of scientific inquiry to produce
knowledge that is “applicab[le] to current human needs.”
4. Diffusion of power: Feminists should “democratize” knowledge production in ways
that foster an “equality of intellectual authority.”

Each of these “community values” is subject to a further principle of epistemic provi-

sionalism; they must be held open to revision (Longino 1994: 483).
Although Longino was not specifically concerned with social science, there is a
striking resonance between this roster of orienting commitments and the guidelines
that feminist social scientists developed, from the ground up, as they pursued an
increasingly diverse array of research initiatives (Wylie 1995; 2012a). The cornerstone
of these guidelines for practice is a specification of Longino’s third value; the “human
needs” that should be addressed by feminist researchers are defined by the interests
of women or, more generally, of those who are oppressed by sex/gender systems of
inequality. There was much debate about whether this required all feminist research-
ers to do intervention-oriented research, and whether research counts as “feminist” if,
as intersectional analysis suggests it must, it focuses on factors other than gender. The
wisdom of Longino’s “bottom line” commitment is that it requires an attentiveness to
gender but does not assume that this will prove to be the only or the primary dimension
of difference in a given context of inquiry or intervention.

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Although the requirement of empirical adequacy seems generic to empirical

inquiry, feminist social scientists often make the point that it has an ethical, political
justification as well. Far from being a license to project expectations and gerryman-
der wished-for outcomes, a commitment to produce knowledge relevant to feminist
political goals raises the epistemic stakes. If feminist research is to produce a robust
understanding of sex/gender systems that can inform effective action it is especially
important that it be empirically accurate and explanatorily probative. Even strength-
ened in this way, however, arguments from underdetermination establish that this
guideline is never adequate on its own.
The arguments Longino gives for the second and fourth community values are
also both ethical/political and epistemic and have wide relevance. A preference for
novelty—a willingness to think outside the box—has been crucial for counteracting
the gender-disappearing effects of conventional wisdom, and it has often led femi-
nist social scientists to emphasize ontological and causal complexity that had been
treated as irrelevant “noise.” Although Longino originally argued that this is a value
that feminist researchers should embrace so long as ”feminism has oppositional status”
(1994: 477), she has since made the case that a pragmatic pluralism—a commitment
to support diverse lines of inquiry—is important for all of science (Kellert et al. 2006;
Longino 2012).
Where the principle of “democratizing” research practice is concerned, Longino’s
argument for giving priority to accessible, widely distributed, non-hierarchical forms of
practice converges on a recurrent theme in the guidelines for feminist social science:
that feminist research practice must not, itself, be exploitative or oppressive, consistent
with feminist ethical commitments. She argues that such “diffusion of power is a key
means of ensuring that gender will be recognized as “a relevant axis of investigation”
wherever it is salient (Longino 1994: 481). Patricia Hill Collins powerfully illustrates
the epistemic value of fostering an “equality of intellectual authority” among research-
ers when she describes the “mismatch” between her own working-class Black expe-
rience and the “taken-for-granted assumptions” of her discipline—sociology—about
family structures, “human capital,” and the causes and effects of poverty (1991: 47–54).
It was this dissonance that put her in a position to identify ways in which core socio-
logical concepts reflect the dominantly white, middle-class, male-gendered experience
of its practitioners, and to reframe them in terms adequate to the social and economic
realities navigated by black women.
A commitment to counteract “testimonial” and “hermeneutical” injustice (Fricker
2007; Chapter 22 in this volume) as it affects research practice is a reason for feminists
to embrace the “democratizing” principle, and in guidelines for feminist social research
this is often articulated as a demand for reflexivity. As Uma Narayan puts it, “one of
the most attractive features of feminist thinking is its commitment to contextualizing
[and critically scrutinizing] its claims” (1988: 32). Longino argues, however, that the
justification for a norm of “tempered equality of epistemic authority” (2002: 131–133)
extends well beyond research animated by social justice concerns. It is one of four social/
cognitive norms central to her influential “proceduralist” account of objectivity, in con-
nection with which she argues that the beliefs we ratify as knowledge should be those
that arise from processes of critical scrutiny designed to ensure that contending beliefs
are subject to “criticism from multiple points of view” (Longino 2002, 129): “not only
must potentially dissenting voices not be discounted, they must be cultivated”; to fail

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to do this is “not only a social injustice but a cognitive failing” (2002: 132). Given that
there is no self-warranting foundation or transcendent “view from nowhere” that can
serve as a standard for assessing epistemic credibility, Longino argues that our evolving
practices of vigilant empirical and conceptual critique are the only basis we have for
determining which beliefs warrant acceptance (1994: 483; 2002: 128–133). And in
identifying norms of inclusiveness as pivotal for ensuring that these practices will be
accountable, she draws inspiration from the role of feminist community values in suc-
cessful research programs across the sciences.

Standpoint Theory
In the hands of feminist standpoint theorists, this commitment to democratize
research is interpreted as requiring that “intellectual authority” be attributed, not just
to all members of a research community, but to research subjects and a diversity of
external stakeholders as well. Smith (1997) characterizes this as a methodological
directive to “start from the margins,” while for Harding it was the centerpiece of a
broader epistemic stance. Integrating and extending the insights of feminist social
scientists, Harding elaborated standpoint theory as an alternative to empiricist and
postmodern epistemologies that has the resources, she argues, to explain the (counter-
intuitive) successes of explicitly political feminist research programs (1986: 136–162).
What is distinctive about feminist research practice she argued, in response to the
“method debate,” is a commitment to “locate the researcher in the same critical plane”
as those they study (Harding 1987b: 8), so that the epistemic resources of the excluded
“standpoint” of women—their experience, understanding, critical angle of vision—
can be brought to bear on all aspects of research, from agenda setting and research
design to the interpretation of results. In its most radical formulations, the rationale
for democratizing research practice is a conviction that those who suffer systematic
oppression have an experience-grounded understanding of dimensions of the world we
live in that those who benefit from social and political-economic privilege typically do
not have, and of the ways in which these are obscured or misrecognized by dominant
knowledge systems. They are, in this sense, epistemically privileged (Petras and Porpora
1993: 107), and for this reason researchers should deliberately subvert the conditions
of epistemic injustice that systematically marginalize what they know and the critical
insights about dominant social and epistemic norms that arise from their “bifurcated
consciousness” as subjugated social agents.
The theoretical underpinnings of a distinctively feminist standpoint theory had
been developed by political scientist Nancy Hartsock (1983). She reframed class-
based, Marxist formulations of standpoint theory showing how, in a society structured
by hierarchical sex-gender norms and institutions, our material conditions of life and
social relations can result in systematic differences in what we experience and what
we know that runs along gender as well as class lines (Hartsock 1983). Harding (2006)
expanded the scope of this analysis to a wider range of dissident standpoints rooted,
for example, in social divisions entrenched by systems of colonial and race-based
oppression. Her influential argument for “strong objectivity” likewise reinforces and
generalizes arguments for reflexivity that were central to feminist guidelines for social
research (Harding 1991: 138–163; 1993). Rather than adjudicate knowledge claims
strictly in terms of established conventions of “good method,” credible attributions
of objectivity require, as well, systematic investigation of the conditions under which

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these conventions have arisen. If all knowledge production and all knowledge claims
are situated—if there is no possibility of “purifying” research of contextual influ-
ences (Harding 1993: 56)—it is incumbent upon researchers to make “the relation[s]
between knowledge and politics” an explicit subject of critical appraisal. An integral
part of all inquiry must be the use of the tools of scientific inquiry to understand how
particular research programs have been shaped by, and reflect the interests of elites
in inegalitarian societies that are structured by racism and global imperialism, as well
as gender and class divisions. This is, in effect, a matter of calibrating the claims
made for accepting (or rejecting) research results in light of an appraisal of the ways
in which these contexts of research practice “enable and set limits on what one can
know” (Harding 1993: 55).
Feminist standpoint theory has faced a number of critical challenges since its initial
formulation in the 1970s and 1980s. Chief among them are two concerns raised by
Longino in the context of the method debate when she cautioned against appeals to
a generic women’s standpoint as the basis for positing a distinctive feminist method
or “women’s way of knowing”: that women’s experience is too diverse to underwrite
an epistemically robust “standpoint” and, even construed as “critically self-conscious
female experience,” it cannot sustain any but the most limited claims of epistemic
“privilege” (1994: 474–475). Although Harding, Hartsock, and Smith, among other
prominent advocates of standpoint theory, share Longino’s mistrust of essentializing
appeals to a “women’s” standpoint and do not invoke the resources of standpoint theory
to support the claim that women, or feminists, have a distinctive “way of knowing,”
objections of the kind she sketches were prominent in the 1990s and led many to reject
standpoint theory as a crude form of epistemic identity politics (Hekman 1997): a coun-
sel of relativist despair at best or, at worst, a capitulation to cynical arguments that
science is just politics (Haack 2003 [1993]; Wylie 1995). In fact, standpoint theory is
much more subtle and complex than this; its advocates give it a variety of formulations
and Harding’s own account has evolved over time. Considered as a purpose-specific
epistemic stance rather than an all-purpose epistemology, I argue that it is characterized
by three central tenets that can be formulated in terms that do not assume or entail
commitment to an untenable epistemic essentialism of the “girls-know-best-because-
they’re-girls” variety (Wylie 2012b).

1. A structural “situated knowledge” thesis: Standpoint theorizing takes as its point of

departure a recognition that all knowers and all research programs are shaped by
their histories and social contexts, but focuses specifically on the epistemic effects
of hierarchical systems of power relations.
2. An “inversion” thesis: Formulated in terms of contingent advantage rather than
automatic privilege, this is the claim that those who occupy subdominant or mar-
ginal social positions often have epistemic resources that the comparatively privi-
leged lack. These epistemic advantages can take a number of different forms: access
to evidence, interpretive heuristics, explanatory resources and, crucially, critical
dissociation from the taken-for-granteds of a dominant worldview (Wylie 2003).
3. An “accomplishment” thesis: Situated experience is a crucial resource, but articu-
lating an epistemically salient standpoint requires, as well, “critical practice”: the
articulation of a “disidentifying collective subject of critique” through systemic
analysis of the social production of difference and the ways this configures the pro-
duction and authorization of knowledge (Hennessy 1993).

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Formulated in these terms, standpoint theorists need not invoke an “essential” gender,
race, or class identity as the ground for an epistemically distinctive “standpoint on”
the claims of a dominant worldview and the social/cognitive norms that legitimate
them. Historical materialists like Hartsock (1983) emphasized the contingency of the
lines of social differentiation that underpin systemic inequality, and Linda Alcoff
(2006, 2010) has developed compelling arguments for recognizing that historically and
culturally contingent collective identities can be a robust basis for mobilizing political
and epistemic critique. Standpoint theorists certainly recognize the ways systems of
oppression perpetuate epistemic disadvantages, but their emphasis is on bringing into
focus the flip side of epistemic injustice in order to understand how it is that explic-
itly political research programs, like feminist social science, have repeatedly generated
transformative criticism of dominant systems of knowledge. As such, standpoint theory
is an innovative contribution to philosophical thinking about the social sciences that
crystallizes three decades of close analysis by feminist philosophers and social scientists
of the role these values play in social inquiry, questions that have always been central
to philosophy of social science, and are especially relevant now. It also offers lessons
that apply reflexively to philosophy social science.

Further Reading
Anderson, Elizabeth (2004) “How Not to Criticize Feminist Epistemology: A Review of Scrutinizing Feminist
Epistemology,” Metascience 13(3): 395–399. (A longer version is available online from: www-personal.
umich.edu/%7Eeandersn/hownotreview.html.)
Haraway, Donna (1991) “Situated Knowledges,” Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599.
Intemann, Kristen (2010) “25 Years of Feminist Empiricism and Standpoint Theory: Where Are We Now?”
Hypatia 25(4): 778–796.
Potter, Elizabeth (2006) Feminism and Philosophy of Science: An Introduction, London: Routledge.
Wylie, Alison (1997) “Good Science, Bad Science, or Science as Usual?: Feminist Critiques of Science,” in
Lori D. Hager (Ed.) Women in Human Evolution, New York: Routledge, 29–55.

Related Topics
Rationality and objectivity in feminist philosophy (Chapter 20); epistemic injustice,
ignorance, and trans experience (Chapter 22); philosophy of science and the feminist
legacy (Chapter 25); values, practices, and metaphysical assumptions in the biological
sciences (Chapter 26).

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Suppe (Ed.) The Structure of Scientific Theories, 2nd ed., Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 32–33.
Waring, Marilyn (1988) If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, San Francisco, CA: Harper and
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Philosophical Topics 23(2): 345–358.
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 Part IV

INTERSECTIONS
 28
THE GENEALOGY
AND VIABILITY OF
THE CONCEPT OF
INTERSECTIONALITY
Tina Fernandes Botts

The focus of this chapter is the concept of intersectionality, primarily in the North
American context. By turns a research program, a description of personal identity, a
theory of oppression, a counter-hegemonic political agenda, a symbolic antidote to
mainstream (liberal) legal theory, and a critique of the methods and practices of main-
stream philosophy, the concept of intersectionality (or simply “intersectionality”)
wears many hats. The concept is at the center of much contemporary research in the
social sciences and humanities, is the fulcrum around which contemporary feminist
theory and practice rotates, and is at the same time systematically ignored by main-
stream philosophy.
As a research program, the concept of intersectionality is pervasively deployed in
the social sciences and the humanities, and stands for the proposition that no phenom-
enon is adequately researched or understood without factoring in the ways in which
socialized identity markers like race, gender, sexuality, ability status, and class inter-
act and affect the phenomenon being researched (McCall 2005). As a description
of personal identity, intersectionality disrupts the idea that personal identity can be
described in terms of neat, mono-linear, timeless categories (see, e.g., Shrage 2009;
Garry 2011; Levine-Rasky 2013; Botts 2016). As a theory of oppression, intersectional-
ity represents the idea that forms, modes, or “axes” of oppression (such as race, gender,
class, sexuality, and ability status) overlap and fuse in the lives of the oppressed, result-
ing in an account of oppression that highlights its complexity and its resistance to
being addressed through means that focus exclusively on one form, mode, or “axis” of
oppression or another (see Crenshaw 1989; 1991).
As a counter-hegemonic political agenda, intersectionality is a call to remember the
oppositionality that originally motivated intersectional analysis (Bilge 2013) as well as
the concept’s roots in radical women of color feminism (Gines 2014; Waters 2014). As
a symbolic antidote to mainstream (liberal) legal theory, intersectionality is a practical
call to the complex legal and social needs of the oppressed, including a suspicion that
 INTERSECTIONS

mainstream jurisprudence cannot meet those needs adequately (Cho, Crenshaw, and
McCall 2013). And finally, as a critique of the methods and practices of mainstream
philosophy, intersectionality calls the discipline of philosophy to take account of its
European, androcentric, and white biases as a rudimentary first step toward opening its
curricular and conceptual vista to the myriad ways of knowing and being the discipline
currently systematically excludes from the realm of legitimate knowledge and reality
claims (Goswami, O’Donovan, and Yount 2014).
The aim of this chapter is to examine the evolutionary trajectory of the concept of
intersectionality, with the goal of shedding light on both its centrality to contemporary
feminist work and its anomalous absence from mainstream philosophizing. To accom-
plish this aim, I will first develop a genealogy of the concept, after which I will con-
sider contemporary articulations of the concept. After that, I will explore critiques and
controversies surrounding the concept, and then end with an inquiry into the future of
the concept. Despite being mired in controversy, the prospects for the survival of the
concept of intersectionality look good, especially as a reminder to those who study and
work to combat oppression to remain self-reflexive and attendant to the unique and
multivariate experiences of the particular oppressed person(s) involved in a given set
of circumstances.

Genealogy
While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact starting point for any concept, the concept of
intersectionality can be traced back at least as far as nineteenth-century black feminist
thought (Gines 2014). For nineteenth-century black feminists, race, gender, and class
oppression operated in tandem to oppress black American women in the post-Civil
War era in unique ways. For example, Maria Stewart was concerned with the exploita-
tion of young black women in the labor force, noting that many white women’s hands
had not been soiled, nor their muscles strained in similar ways; Sojourner Truth “inter-
rupted representations of ‘woman’ as exclusively white and of ‘black’ as only male”;
and Anna Julia Cooper identified that black women were simultaneously impacted by
racism and sexism, while at the same time unacknowledged as agents in the examina-
tion or elimination of these forms of oppression (Gines 2014: 14–17). By focusing on
the ways in which race, gender, and class overlapped to generate a distinctive form of
oppression experienced by black women, nineteenth-century black feminists set the
stage for the concept of intersectionality
First formally theorized in the 1950s, the social science research method known
as multivariate analysis (or multilinear regression analysis) has also contributed to
what we now call intersectionality. Multivariate analysis is a way of analyzing social
problems that utilizes multivariate statistical methods (Randolph and Myers 2013).
Multivariate analysis involves the examination of several interrelated statistical
variables at the same time, including the causal effects of some variables on other vari-
ables (Anderson 2003). Based on the idea that social problems are more complex than
traditional statistical methods are able to accommodate, multivariate analysis stresses
the interrelatedness between variables and within sets of variables. Historically, most
applications of multivariate research methods were in the behavioral and biological
sciences, but recently interest in multivariate methods has spread into many other
fields (Rencher and Christensen 2012). At least to the extent that the concept of

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 The Genealogy of Intersectionality

intersectionality acknowledges the interrelatedness of seemingly disparate variables

that affect research outcomes, multivariate analysis is at work in the concept.
The critical legal studies movement also influenced the evolution of the con-
cept of intersectionality. An intellectual movement in the late 1970s and early
1980s that stood for the proposition that there is radical indeterminacy in the law,
and conceptually based in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, critical legal
studies stood for the idea that legal doctrine is an empty shell. There is no such
thing as the law, on this view (Binder 1999: 282). For the advocates of critical
legal studies, “the Crits,” the liberal ideal of the rule of law devoid of influence
from power differentials was an illusion. The disconnect the Crits saw between
the law and its efficacy arguably laid the groundwork for what later became known
as “critical race theory” and, after that, “outsider jurisprudence,” although part of
early critical race theory was certainly the view that the Crits had failed to take
adequate account of the fact that antidiscrimination law had proven effective for
change for persons of color (see Crenshaw 1988).
In the late 1980s, legal scholars of color began explicitly interrogating the ways
in which the law and mainstream legal theory (including that of the Crits) appeared
to ignore and disregard the lived experiences of African Americans, particularly
the ways in which African Americans were uniquely affected or ignored by the law.
The main question for these scholars, was how to achieve racial justice in a society
teeming with systemic racism. The starting point for all of these theorists was that a
given culture constructs its social reality in ways that promote its own self-interest.
This means denying the rights and realities of those whose very existence chal-
lenges that self-interest, for example, persons of color. One goal of these scholars
was to confront the presuppositions upon which the racist institutional structures
of American society have been built. The ultimate goal was to create new reali-
ties, new structures, and new laws in which the rights of African Americans could
be satisfactorily addressed. The work of Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé
Crenshaw, Randall Kennedy, and Patricia J. Williams were early examples of this
movement in legal scholarship (Bell 1987; Williams 1992; Crenshaw et al. 1996;
Kennedy 1998; Delgado and Stefancic 2012).
Within this context, legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw first used the term “inter-
sectionality” to highlight the experiences of black women in particular with the
American legal system (Crenshaw 1989). For Crenshaw, race and gender discrimi-
nation combined on the bodies of black women in a way that neither race discrimi-
nation nor gender discrimination alone captured or addressed. Crenshaw’s point was
that ignoring race when taking up gender reinforces the oppression of people of
color, and anti-racist perspectives that ignore patriarchy reinforce the oppression of
women (Crenshaw 1991: 1252). But, more specifically, taking up any form of oppres-
sion in a vacuum ignores the way that oppression actually works in the lives of the
oppressed. For the law to help combat oppression, it must grapple with the complexi-
ties and nuances of the lived experience of oppression. Intersectionality is alive and
well in critical race theory today, operating as the key theoretical fulcrum around
which it rotates (see, e.g., Walby 2007; Walby, Armstrong, and Strid 2012; Cho
et  al. 2013; MacKinnon 2013). To the extent that the intersectional frameworks
central to critical race theory have been expanded to avenues of oppression beyond
race, gender, and class—including sexuality, ability status, and other marginalized

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 INTERSECTIONS

identity markers—these ideas have come to be subsumed under the title “outsider
jurisprudence,” the key idea of which is that the law does not well accommodate the
complexities of human difference (Delgado 1993).
Queer theory is another area of inquiry that has had significant impact on the con-
cept of intersectionality. An interdisciplinary way of thinking about personal iden-
tity, the human experience, sexuality, knowledge, and politics that is rooted in work
of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick, among others, queer theory’s
focus is inquiry into the perceived difference between natural and unnatural (sexual)
identities and acts (Foucault 1978; Butler 1990; Sedgwick 1994; Jagose 1996; Turner
2000). Motivating queer theory is the debunking of stable (sexual) identities in favor
of understanding identity as a conglomeration of unstable identities. Queer theory,
like intersectionality theory, is “world-making” (Duong 2012: 378), that is, it has
the power “to wrench frames” (Duong 2012: 371). It is capable of producing schemas
of reality that are beyond preconceived (metaphysical and epistemological) sense-
making mechanisms. Queer worlds, thus defined, transcend conventional notions of
personal identity and politics to create room for countercultural (sexual) practices,
ways of being in the world, and alternative accounts of phenomenological experience
(Halperin 1990; Ahmed 2006). Such a vision of personal identity is central to the
concept of intersectionality.
Postmodern theory, another key influence on the concept of intersectionality,
focuses on skepticism regarding modernity’s narratives of universalism. Having its
start in the 1970s and gaining prominence in the 1990s, postmodern theory denies
the existence of one, universal, objective truth or reality in favor of a multiplicity
of realities and ways of knowing. Postmodernism holds that there are no “grand
narratives” or metanarratives that accurately describe the world, only micronar-
ratives. In other words, there is only the particular for the postmodernist, not the
universal. And there are only stories about the world, no objective world itself (Lyotard
1984; Hassan 1987; Benhabib 1995; Butler 1995). At the core of postmodern the-
ory is a profound anti-realism that implicitly posits a world (or anti-world) beyond
categorical description.
Hermeneutic ontology can also be said to foreshadow intersectional themes.
Contained in the hermeneutical concepts of “being-in-the-world” and “being-with-
others,” a core idea of hermeneutic ontology is that things are what they are as a
result of how they pragmatically operate in the world (Heidegger 1962 and 1999).
This characterization of the nature of reality is at odds with traditional presumptions
about a separation between mind and body that allows, for example, a subject to stand
back from an object and make an assessment about what it is. From a hermeneutical
point of view, such a process is nonsensical. Instead, to navigate the terrain of that
which is, it is necessary to understand that the persons and things within what we call
“reality,” are world disclosing. In other words, what things are and what they mean
(or in the case of human beings, who they are) tell tales about the varied and complex
ways in which persons and things act on, and are acted upon by, each other and the
world. This is particularly the case with regard to phenomena such as race and gender,
mired as they are in the messy realities of our corporeal world (Botts 2014). Such an
interpretation of (human) identity lies at the core of the concept of intersectionality,
calling the researcher to take sober account of the wide array of factors affecting the
lived experience of a given social agent.

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 The Genealogy of Intersectionality

Standpoint epistemology has arguably had one of the strongest influences on the
concept of intersectionality. While mainstream epistemology understands its objective
as the pursuit of “justified true belief” (code for so-called objective knowledge),
standpoint epistemology begins with the idea that all social knowledge claims are not
only gendered but also

drawn from, bear the marks of, and perpetuate structures of power and privilege
that are sustained as much by racial, class, religious, ethnic, age, and physical
ability differentials as they are by a sex/gender system that could be discretely
and univocally characterized.
(Code 2000: 174)

For the standpoint epistemologist, in other words, the business of knowledge production is
necessarily political. Within this context, standpoint theories take as their starting point
“the material-historical circumstances of female lives” (Code 2000: 180). According to
standpoint theorists,

the minute, detailed, strategic knowledge that the oppressed have had to
acquire of the workings of the social order just so as to be able to function
within it can be brought to serve as a resource for undermining that very order.
(Code 2000: 180)

The concept of intersectionality can be understood to have taken from this framework
its focus on the experience of oppression of the marginalized knower.
Within the realm of continental ethics, the work of Emmanuel Levinas in the twen-
tieth century in many ways presaged the concern for the “radical alterity of the other”
inherent in the concept of intersectionality. For Levinas, our encounter with the alter-
ity of others (that which makes them different from ourselves) is an ethical call to
acknowledge the complexity of the human experience (Levinas 1969). For Levinas,
the Enlightenment focus on identity, sameness, and the individual subject reflects an
extreme neglect for the other that is indicative of a deep neglect of the ethical. For
Levinas, then, the traditional focus on the importance of epistemology and metaphysics
in Western philosophy must accordingly be abandoned in favor of an ethics of alterity
that places epistemology and metaphysics at the bottom of the priority list, rather than
at the top (Levinas 1987). In practice, this would seem to mean focusing on the ethical
needs of others qua others, which, in the case of the oppressed, means understanding
their oppression as it is experienced by them, and taking whatever steps are morally neces-
sary based on that understanding.
Finally, there are themes in moral particularism and care ethics that have had clear
impact on the concept of intersectionality. According to moral particularism, there
are no moral principles that can be applied broadly across all cases and the legiti-
macy of moral decisions is limited to particular situations (see, e.g., Hooker and Little
2001; Dancy 2004). Care ethics, in its appreciation for context and its insistence that
others should be taken on their own terms, challenges mainstream ethical inquiry,
which blindly applies rules or principles to facts without regard to the unique particu-
larity of those facts, and without regard for the alterity of the others affected by the
ethical decision. From the vantage point of care, the utilitarian focus on the greatest

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 INTERSECTIONS

good for the greatest number and the Kantian focus on duty, just to name two exam-
ples, both miss a key aspect of a satisfactory approach to morality: care, or a concern for
the welfare of the specific moral patient before one rather than an appeal to abstract
principle (see, e.g., Jaggar 1992; Held 1995; Noddings 2003).

Contemporary Articulations
Whatever its origins, the concept of intersectionality is at the center of an ever-
growing field known as “intersectional studies” that some scholars characterize as
an “analytic disposition,” that is, a “way of thinking about and conducting analyses”
(Cho et al. 2013: 795). For these scholars, what makes an analysis intersectional is
“its adoption of a particular way of thinking about the problem of sameness and dif-
ference and its relation to power” (2013: 795). Keeping the focus on the permeability
of categories and emphasizing what intersectionality does instead of what it is, say
these thinkers, is the core of intersectional studies. Also important is continuing to
expand our conception of intersectional methods to include interdisciplinary projects
that bring critical theoretical, methodological, and substantive resources to the table.
There is much scholarship on the scene that self-consciously adopts the concept of
intersectionality as its “analytic disposition.”
For example, Priscilla Ocen has suggested that applying intersectional analysis to
black women in prison could have a liberatory effect as yet unexplored (Ocen 2013).
Focusing on legal scholarship, Ocen has pointed out that although black women are
the fastest growing segment of the prison population, they are largely invisible in mass-
incarceration discourse. She cites the handling of prison rape, medical services, and
reproduction concerns in prison as examples of this intersectional fissure. In the case of
prison rape, mainstream feminist legal scholarship, according to Ocen, fails to account
for the ways in which the construction of black women as sexually available influ-
ences the forms of violence imposed upon black women in prisons. In terms of medical
services, the same feminist legal scholarship focuses on access to abortion rather than
the ways in which black women have been historically punished for exercising their
reproductive capacities.
Similarly, Tricia Rose uses the concept of intersectionality to confront head-on
what she calls the “invisible intersections of colorblind racism” (Rose 2013). Through
deconstructing the case of Kelly Williams-Bolar, an African American single mother
from Akron, Ohio who in 2011 was arrested, charged with a felony, and jailed for
sending her two daughters to a predominantly white suburban public school in Copley
Township without meeting the town’s residency requirements, Rose self-consciously
deploys the classical critical race theory method of storytelling. Rose’s goal is to gen-
erate outrage and concern over a clear and unambiguous example showing that the
concept of intersectionality is uniquely suited to explain and address the oppression
experienced by black women in the United States of America in the twenty-first
century. The retelling of the real details of a real story about a real experience of a
real woman who underwent a ludicrously racist and sexist experience reminds the
reader that these sorts of things actually occur, not just in theory but in life; which
simultaneously reminds the reader that simplistic, mono-linear, theoretical solutions
to the lived experience of oppression cannot and do not exist. One must begin with
the complex reality, grounded in facts.

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 The Genealogy of Intersectionality

The concept of intersectionality is frequently deployed in contemporary inquiries into

the transgender experience. Julie Nagoshi, Stephan/ie Brzuzy, and Heather K. Terrell
recently used the concept, for example, to interview eleven self-identified transgender
individuals about their definitions of, understanding of the relationships between, and
perceptions of their own gender roles, gender identity, and sexual orientation (Nagoshi,
Brzuzy, and Terrell 2012), and what they perceive to be the intersectional relationships
between gender roles, gender identity, and sexual orientation. What was revealed was
that all of the participants viewed gender roles to be social constructs, viewed gender
identity as fluid, and viewed gender itself in a way that transcended both essential-
ist, traditional ideas, and the social constructionist views of feminist and queer
theories. Citing transgender theorists like Katrina Roen (2002) and Surya Monro
(2000), Nagoshi et al. (2012) highlight that through an intersectional lens, transgen-
derism can be understood more as transgressing the gender binary than as a story about
physically transitioning from one gender category to another. The concept of intersec-
tionality is at work in this analysis through the focus on the perceptions of transgender
people themselves as the starting point for the research, rather than, say, available data
on the relevant topics derived from other sources. The authors explain,

While previous qualitative research with female-to-male transsexuals by Devor

(1997) and Rubin (2003) has attempted to discuss [the issues of gender roles,
gender identity, sexual orientation and the intersections between these], the
present research advances this knowledge by interviewing a more diverse
sample of trans individuals using a comprehensive interview that explicitly gave
participants a chance to compare and contrast concepts of gender identity, gender
roles, and sexual orientation.
(Nagoshi et al. 2012: 406; emphasis added)

In other words, explicitly asking study participants not only to provide testimony, but
also analysis provided new (intersectionally generated) and important insights into the
relevant topics. Moreover, deductive qualitative analysis of the data was done based
on verbatim transcripts of the responses to interview questions rather than characteri-
zations of the data by the researchers. Some of the results were surprising. For exam-
ple, when asked about whether they considered themselves masculine or feminine, all
eleven participants responded that they expressed both masculine and feminine behav-
iors and physical characteristics. This is in contrast to the popular idea that a transgen-
der person feels like “a man trapped in a woman’s body” or “a woman trapped in a
man’s body.” Instead, at least according to the study, transgender persons feel “trapped”
somewhere in between, finding the entire notion of having to choose out of step with
their experience.
The field of disability studies is heavily infused with intersectional inflections.
For example, Alfredo J. Artiles has recently approached racial inequities in special
education with analysis of the problem through an intersectional lens (Artiles 2013).
Noting that within the educational system, both racial minorities and disabled learn-
ers have “complicated and politically charged histories linked to assumptions of
deficit often used to justify inequities” (Artiles 2013: 329), Artiles highlights that
remedies for one group can have deleterious consequences for the other, “thus mud-
dling the effects of well-intentioned justice projects” (2013: 329). Artiles provides

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 INTERSECTIONS

the example of a “double bind” that is created when disabled students of color seek
to obtain benefits under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Although
a disability diagnosis is often beneficial to covered students, in practice there is a
disproportionate diagnosis of disability in students of color, further compounding the
structural disadvantages that each group has historically endured.
Feminist philosophy engages with the concept of intersectionality primarily at the
meta level; that is, with notable exceptions, feminist philosophers tend to engage in
defenses and critiques of the concept, rather than taking a more hands-on approach
(see, e.g., Lugones 2007; Zack 2005; Garry 2011; Dotson 2014). Feminist philosophers
who see a window through which to theorize a new socialized difference tend to defend
the concept; while those who see it more as an ideological plaything that accomplishes
little to combat oppression tend to critique it. The most popular defense of the concept
is that it can operate as a vehicle through which differences among and between women,
and groups of women, can finally be theorized and addressed satisfactorily. Some popu-
lar critiques of the concept are that: (1) it contains no clear theory; (2) it contains no
clear method; (3) it is too focused on black women; (4) it has been disturbingly appro-
priated by white feminism to the detriment of black feminism; (5) it is vacuous; (6) it
is a disturbing form of identity politics; and (7) the concept has an ontological problem
that cannot be surmounted (see Gimenez 2001; Razack 2005; Srivastava 2005; Zack
2005; Ludvig 2006; Sengupta 2006; Russell 2007; Cole 2008; Yuval-Davis 2011; Bilge
2013; and Carastathis 2014).
In addition, within feminist philosophy, intersectionality has recently developed
a metaphilosophical strain that operates as a statement on the ineffectiveness of
traditional ways of doing philosophy. Notorious for excluding information coming
in from the lived realities of members of marginalized, oppressed, and subjugated
groups from the systems and structures of philosophical knowledge production on the
grounds that these realities are insufficiently “universal” to count as philosophically
relevant, intersectionality theory has recently been deployed in an attempt to disrupt
the business-as-usual dismissiveness of mainstream philosophy. The claims to knowl-
edge access and production of persons other than white, cis-gendered, heterosexual,
able-bodied, males, insist thinkers who use intersectionality theory in this way, are
legitimate claims; and if philosophy is to truly seek wisdom, it should open itself up
to include the knowledge production of those historically excluded from the philo-
sophical canon (Dotson 2011; Goswami et al. 2014: 1; Botts 2016).
For example, Kristin Waters is concerned with mainstream philosophy’s sum-
mary dismissal of intersectionality as a topic worthy of consideration (Waters 2014).
Given that research guidelines, codes of ethics, and institutional review boards place
restrictions on studies that do not include representative populations, as well as the
fact that both private and public funding agencies in the United States (such as the
National Science Foundation and the National Institutes for Health) are hesitant
to finance research restricted to select populations, particularly those that occupy
dominant positions of power, Waters argues, philosophy’s rejection of the call to
implement intersectional research methods is self-deception at best and bad faith
at worst. Waters paints a picture of philosophy, borrowed from critical philosopher
of race Charles Mills, in which whiteness is central to philosophy’s self-conception
(Mills 2013; Waters 2014: 28). The result, for Waters, is that “common topics often
assumed not to be raced or gendered may reveal themselves to be so under close
scrutiny” (Waters 2014: 33).

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 The Genealogy of Intersectionality

Critiques and Controversies

In recent years, along with immense popularity within the social sciences, the humani-
ties, and feminist scholarship more broadly, the concept of intersectionality has elicited
much criticism.
The charge has been levied, for example, that intersectionality’s claim that the social
world is beyond categorization inherently entails that combatting oppression is an exer-
cise in futility (Ludvig 2006; Sengupta 2006; Russell 2007). These thinkers raise the
question of how exactly the responsible intersectional researcher can or should go about
addressing oppression if not through each axis of oppression, one at a time.
The concept of intersectionality has also been charged with lacking clarity as to
the scale of its applicability (Gimenez 2001; Razack 2005). Does the concept apply
to structural and institutionalized oppression or does it apply to the lived experience
of oppression of individuals or both? (see Collins 2000; Davis 2008). If both, then
just exactly how would the responsible intersectional researcher go about addressing
that fact?
Similarly, to the extent that intersectionality grapples with intergroup, and not intra-
group, oppression, some charge the concept with being necessarily reduced to additivity
(Cole 2008; Yuval-Davis 2011). Moreover, some are concerned that the concept simply
cannot deliver on its promise of inclusion, generating, as it does, a seemingly infinite
number of micro-groups leading to a fragmentation among women that undermines the
achievement of common goals (Zack 2005).
Still others are concerned that intersectionality has been systematically depoliti-
cized by mainstream academic feminism through the calibration of intersectionality
with neoliberal knowledge production (Bilge 2013). For these thinkers, restricting
feminist engagement with intersectionality to “metatheoretical contemplation” or
understanding intersectionality as the product of mainstream feminism is counter-
productive for intersectionality’s original purposes. Sirma Bilge uses the examples of
SlutWalks and the Occupy Movement to develop this concern. Bilge reports that
during an October 2011 NYC SlutWalk, at least two young white women carried plac-
ards reading: “Woman is the N* of the world” (referencing a John Lennon and Yoko
Ono song and using the complete racial slur). Similarly, the Occupy Movement’s motto
(“occupy”) “re-enacts colonial violence and disregards the fact that, from the indig-
enous standpoint, those spaces and places it calls for occupation are already occupied”
(Bilge 2013: 406). On this view, to the extent that intersectionality is deployed within
the context of neoliberal political agendas, it is robbed of its power due to the inability
of neoliberalism to speak a “complex” language of diversity (emphasis in original) (Bilge
2013: 408). In order to get back to the root aims of intersectionality, on this view, the
task at hand for feminist work is to counteract this trend by “encouraging methods of
debate that reconnect intersectionality with its initial vision of generating counter-
hegemonic and transformative knowledge production, activism, pedagogy, and non-
oppressive coalitions” (Bilge 2013: 408).
Finally are those who are concerned about what they see as the flippant and non-
substantive way that intersectionality has been brought into mainstream feminist the-
orizing. For these thinkers, mass appropriation of the concept has brought into the
light of day the fact that intersectional identity and intersectional oppression are not
side issues in feminist work but rather lie at the very core of it (Carastathis 2014).
Problematically, according to Anna Carastathis, intersectionality has “come to play

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 INTERSECTIONS

a role in the historical construction of white feminist moral identity,” which has been
“historically focused on the benevolence and innocence” of white women (2014: 68).
Citing Sarita Srivastava, Carastathis points out that some of the deadlocks of anti-racist
efforts are linked to white feminist preoccupations with morality and self (Carastathis
2014: 68; Srivastava 2005). The observation is that often when white feminists are
challenged on their stance of non-racism, they reply defensively and with emotional
resistance. Anger, tears, indignation, and disbelief are common reactions that can be
summed up in the defensive question, “You’re calling me a racist?” (Srivastava 2005).
Carastathis’ point is that such defensive posturing often serves to impede personal and
organizational change:

[T]he problem is that discussions about personnel, decision-making, or pro-

gramming become derailed by emotional protestations that one is not a
racist and by efforts to take care of colleagues upset by antiracist agen-
das . . . . Intersectionality is often used, in these contexts . . . to diffuse moral
anxieties about racism, and to project an ethical white feminist self.
(Carastathis 2014: 68)

Carastathis concludes that “intersectionality reassures white feminists that they have
not become obsolete or superfluous in what is heralded as a new feminist paradigm that
decenters them and centers women of color” (2014: 68). Meanwhile, white, liberal fem-
inists motivated by the internalization of egalitarian values to appear non-racist “have
also internalized a systemic racism, which influences their implicit, unconscious and
automatic attitudes, of which they are typically unaware or unreflective” (Carastathis
2014: 69). One result is that the reification of the concept of intersectionality as the
guarantor of inclusion and diversity may actually impede meaningful engagement with
the lived experience of oppression itself, and with women of color feminisms. In this
way, to the extent that mainstream feminism purports to speak for women of color femi-
nisms, the ethical and epistemological issues raised by the concept of intersectionality
can remain unresolved. Here, Carastathis cites Linda Martín Alcoff, “[T]he impetus to
always be the speaker . . . must be seen for what it is: a desire for mastery and domina-
tion” (Alcoff 1991–1992: 7; Carastathis 2014: 69).

Future of the Concept

Here, early in the twenty-first century, a lot is demanded of the concept of intersec-
tionality. The concept lies at the core of contemporary feminist theory and practice,
and stands for many different things at once. The concept is by turns a research pro-
gram, a description of personal identity, a theory of oppression, a counter-hegemonic
political agenda, and a symbolic antidote to mainstream (liberal) legal theory. In femi-
nist philosophy, the concept operates primarily as a vehicle through which to critique
mainstream philosophy, charging it with a Eurocentric, gendered, heteronormative,
cis-gendered, classist bias that is both out of step with standards for scholarly research
programs in most other related disciplines, but also undermines meaningful knowledge
production in a disturbing and pervasive way. At the same time, however, mainstream
feminist philosophy itself has been subject to intersectional critique on charges of a
Eurocentric, bias that operates to exclude from received feminist discourse the voices
of women of color feminist thinkers (see, e.g., Botts and Tong 2014).

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 The Genealogy of Intersectionality

Moreover, for many, the concept of intersectionality is so vague and amorphous that
attempts at pinning down a methodology or modus operandi for it have proven almost
impossible. While the concept calls on scholars, thinkers, and seekers of social justice
to proactively include considerations of race, gender, sexuality, ability status, class, and
other socialized identity markers into their programs, the concept provides little or no
guidance on just how that process should take place.
Nonetheless, when one digs into specific examples of intersectional analysis at work,
the lesson of intersectionality is clear: As regards the lived experience of oppression, the
responsible approach to addressing that oppression is through attendance to the multi-
ple modes of oppression that may be at work in the given oppressed person before one,
particularly as regards the ways in which the various modes of oppression may operate
in tandem so as to overshadow each other.
So, it seems that if the concept of intersectionality is to have longevity, it may be
most productive to keep the focus on specific applications; that is, it may be best to
avoid abstract discussions about whether intersectionality can work conceptually and
focus on attending to the particular needs of the specific oppressed person(s) at hand. If
the concept of intersectionality has any lasting lesson, in other words, it may be that the
key to combatting oppression is a radical openness to the other. In practice, this would
mean, at a minimum, consultation with the particular victim of oppression herself for
clues as to what exactly the problem is and what she thinks should be done about it.
In keeping with this train of thought, Tina Chanter has suggested that if we are
to achieve the ostensible goals of intersectional analysis (for example, combating the
essentializing and otherwise limiting epistemological frameworks for analyzing oppres-
sion rooted in Enlightenment thought), it may be necessary to “get beyond” intersec-
tionality as an abstract ideal and back into the specific particularities of the individual
lives of the oppressed (Chanter 2014). As the history of anti-racism within feminist
struggles has shown, in other words, the master’s tools—in this case abstraction—will
likely never dismantle the master’s house (Lorde 1984).
Accordingly, since a radical openness to the other seems to be at the heart of the
concept of intersectionality, it should be no surprise that the concept has not found a
home in mainstream philosophy. With mainstream philosophy’s focus on abstraction,
the making of distinctions, universal principles, endless categorization, and the fetishi-
zation of the “objective,” in a sense mainstream philosophy cannot hold a concept as
amorphous, fluid, and subjectively grounded as intersectionality within its tightly held
grasp, a grasp forever attempting to impose order and structure on a world (including
multivariate personal identity and oppression forms) that is arguably far more complex
and unstable than the boundaries of the discipline can accommodate.
However, intersectionality’s necessary incompatibility with mainstream philoso-
phy need not bode intersectionality’s imminent demise. On the contrary, mainstream
philosophy’s failure to acknowledge its Eurocentric, androcentric, homophobic biases
arguably says more about mainstream philosophy’s prospects for survival than about the
survival prospects of intersectionality. For intersectionality is not a theory, nor an
epistemological paradigm, nor a fantastical metaphysical fantasy designed to reinforce
its own privileged status in the Western intellectual hierarchy. Instead, it is a sober
acknowledgment of the epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, and political value of
the lived experiences of the vast majority of human beings on the planet (who are not
white, male, heterosexual, “able-bodied,” or wealthy). Posterity will decide which is
more valuable and has more endurance.

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 INTERSECTIONS

Further Reading
Collins, Patricia Hill and Bilge, Sirma (2016) Intersectionality (Key Concepts), Cambridge, UK and Malden,
MA: Polity Press.
Grzanka, Patrick R. (2014) Intersectionality: A Foundations and Frontiers Reader, Boulder, CO: Westview
Press.
Hancock, Ange-Marie (2016) Intersectionality: An Intellectual History, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lorde, Audre (2016) “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions,” UC San Diego LGBT Resource Center
[online]. Available from: https://lgbt.ucsd.edu/education/oppressions.html.
Mohanty, Chandra (1991) “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,”
in Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Eds.) Third World Women and the Politics of
Feminism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 51–80.

Related Topics
Feminism, philosophy, and culture in Africa (Chapter 4); feminist engagements with
social contract theory (Chapter 7); Black women’s intellectual traditions (Chapter 10);
feminist phenomenology (Chapter 12); the sex/gender distinction and the social
construction of reality (Chapter 13); essentialism and anti-essentialism (Chapter 14);
feminism and borderlands identities (Chapter 17); epistemic ignorance, injustice, and
trans experience (Chapter 22); intersectional themes (Chapters 29–33); feminist ethics
of care (Chapter 43); multicultural and postcolonial feminisms (Chapter 47); neolib-
eralism, global justice, and transnational feminisms (Chapter 48); feminism, structural
injustice, and responsibility (Chapter 49); feminist philosophy of law, legal positivism,
and non-ideal theory (Chapter 56).

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 29
CRITICAL RACE THEORY,
INTERSECTIONALITY, AND
FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY
Falguni A. Sheth

Introduction
Critical Race Theory (CRT) arose as a legal approach to address racial invisibility,
exploitation, and injustice in the early 1980s and 1990s. It emerged in dissension with
the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement. CLS, which came into existence along-
side the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, took issue with the notion
that law was marked by historical progress. CLS emerged from the tradition of Legal
Realism of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, as well as from Marxian notions of “the
radical contingency of law” (Belliotti 1995: 23). Critical Legal scholars argued that
rather than being marked by historical progress, law was a form of political legitimation
and ideology and was radically indeterminate rather than objective (Belliotti 1995: 27).
Correspondingly, justice was elusive and should be sought by any and all means at one’s
disposal. For Critical Legal scholars, law and politics were the same.
Critical Race Theorists challenged the anti-teleological stance that was the hall-
mark of CLS, even as they agreed with CLS scholars that law favored the side of the
powerful. CRT initially emerged in response to several events: (1) a challenge to the
liberal discourse that framed intellectual merit as color blind and rising above
the particularities of race; and (2) a challenge to the Critical Legal Studies school
of thought, which defined rights and justice as tools to advantage those who already
had power, and that considered itself radical, but also did not acknowledge the
influence of race in shaping legal outcomes. Critical Race Theorists challenged
this definition by arguing that a number of legal concepts, such as rights, were in
fact of use to those who were politically and legally vulnerable, especially African
Americans (Williams 1991).
One of the more prominent members of CRT to critique the CLS movement was
Kimberlé Crenshaw, a feminist legal scholar. Crenshaw, along with other feminists of
color such as Angela Harris, Mari Matsuda, and Dorothy Roberts, were active partici-
pants in CRT. Crenshaw describes Critical Race Theorists as having two interests in
common, regardless of the approaches taken and the specific arguments made by any
given scholar: (1) An interest in the way white supremacy, as a political framework,
 Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality

enabled the maintenance of “the subordination of people of color . . . in America”; and

(2) The “desire not merely to understand the vexed bond between law and racial power
but to change it” (Crenshaw et al. 1995: xiii; author’s emphasis).

Critical Race Theory

Methodologically, Critical Race Theory emerges as a framework to challenge several
problems that have long held in politics and law. First, it challenges the abstract model
of universal inclusion, which assumes that general principles apply equally and rel-
evantly to individuals regardless of their particular characteristics or situations. Second,
it challenges set assumptions about what kinds of situations and traits subsets of the
population embody.
The first problem that the framework of Critical Race Theory was addressing was
that of a deceptive universality, which assumes that justice can be extended equally to
all individuals through the assertion of universal principles. The framework of univer-
sality has systematically ignored gender and racial differences, in many ways that have
been illustrated by many feminist and race theorists, on the grounds that these differ-
ences are as inconsequential as the color of one’s eyes. As such, the argument continues,
even though the original foundation of US society, namely the US Constitution, was
limited to able-bodied, property-owning white men, today the protections of the US
Constitution are easily extended to all who live within its purview. There is a question
about the veracity of this position: for example, why does the right to free speech, that
is, speech free from interference of the US government, apply to all people equally?
Does the abolition of slavery immediately put Blacks and whites on an equal footing in
terms of justice? Intersectionality, to be explained below, addresses such questions by
taking up the historical, economic, political—as well as the gender, race, and social—
ramifications of such changes.
Critical Race Theory challenges the ideas that: (1) discrimination can be adequately
addressed through single-concept analytical perspectives; and (2) differences can be
productively neglected or ignored. Patricia Williams, another Critical Race Theorist,
argues that Critical Race Theory addresses the absence of protections for minorities
in a way that other frameworks such as Critical Legal Studies do not. Telling a story
in which she and Peter Gabel, a white law professor and proponent of Critical Legal
Studies, simultaneously began a search for apartments in New York City, she highlights
the different attitudes each took. Gabel approached the search by showing how infor-
mal, flexible, and trusting he was, handing over a deposit for an apartment without
having a signed a contract, received keys, or obtained a receipt. Williams, who found
an apartment in a building owned by friends, was eager to illustrate her “good faith and
trustworthiness” by signing a finely detailed and lengthily negotiated contract (Williams
1991: 147). She points to this anecdote, among many other examples, to show that
rights—a concept dismissed or devalued by Critical Legal Studies scholars—is in fact
a crucial institution for populations who are much less powerful, indeed who are often
powerless to challenge their legal or political exploitation, abuse, or oppression. She
argues as well that often rights are important to challenge the perception that lack on
the part of minorities is not merely a question of need or want. Rather, these needs
are often the target of legislation “against the self-described needs of black people”
(Williams 1991: 151). This legislation exemplifies a structural exploitation that is

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often camouflaged as a rhetoric of cultural inadequacy or inferiority of reason or rational

thinking, often implied by beliefs such as “Blacks are lazy,” etc. (Williams 1991: 151).
As she argues:

For blacks, then, the battle is not deconstructing rights, in a world of no rights;
nor of constructing statements of need, in a world of abundantly apparent
need. Rather the goal is to find a political mechanism that can confront the
denial of need.
(Williams 1991: 152; emphasis in original)

Rights, then, in Williams’ analysis, is also a concept that affects different populations
differently. As such, it can be understood more vividly through an approach that illus-
trates the different consequences of the same concept for disparate populations.
As importantly, the assumption that race or gender as identity categories could
simply represent all members of a particular group emerges from a liberal framework
that does not assign much significance or complexity to either race or gender. In part,
this is because liberal political frameworks posit that the ontological status of any
given person can abstract away identity features such as race, ethnicity, nationality,
gender as extraneous to one’s basic existence (Rawls 1971). Feminist and race theo-
rists have shown that in fact that such features are not only crucial to understanding
the basic ontological status and/or social/political location of an individual, but must
be part of an analysis of discrimination, exploitation, or oppression (Collins 2000;
Lorde 1984; Mills 1997).
Some may object that if race and gender are socially constructed, as has been claimed
by many theorists over the last few decades, then shouldn’t such differences indeed be
seen as incidental? (see Sally Haslanger, Chapter 13 in this volume). Technically, this
might seem a proper response; however, the missing dimension from that analysis is the
issue of power: the concept of universality is often shaped by those who have the power
to make and shape the dominant political conversation, whether through media, com-
munity mores, or law.
Thus, consider the following questions as more specific instances that betray
the promise of equal and universal protection of all individuals who fall under the
purview of the US Constitution: Why does the right to free speech, free from the
interference of the US government, apply to white men who make social media
comments about raping Black women (Latimer 2016), but not to Black women
who make social media comments about killing white police officers in retaliation
for brutality against Black men (Atlanta Journal Constitution 2016)? Another ques-
tion: Does abolishing slavery, whereby Black men, women and children were legally
exploited for their labor and sexuality by white slave owners, immediately put the
free descendants of slaves on an equal footing with the descendants of slave-owning
families or the descendants of free people generally? If this is true, then why are
whites wealthier than Blacks? If we rule out the “character” explanation, namely
that whites are smarter, more productive and more able than Blacks (which would
contradict the need for slavery), then we must turn to other sources for our answer,
such as racism, power, or structural bias.
The editors of one of the first Critical Race Theory anthologies speak to this point
in their introduction:

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[W]e began to think of our project as uncovering how law was a constitutive
element of race itself: in other words, how law constructed race. Racial power,
in our view, was not simply—or even primarily—a product of biased decision-
making on the part of judges, but instead the sum total of the pervasive ways
in which law shapes and is shaped by “race relations” across the social plane.
Laws produced racial power not simply through narrowing the scope of, say,
anti-discrimination remedies, nor through racially-biased decision-making,
but instead, through myriad legal rules, many of them having nothing to
do with rules against discrimination, that continued to reproduce the struc-
tures and practices of racial domination. In short, we accepted the crit [CLS]
emphasis on how law produces and is the product of social power and we
cross-cut this theme with an effort to understand this dynamic in the context
of race and racism. With such an analysis in hand, critical race theory allows
us to better understand how racial power can be produced even from within
a liberal discourse.
(Crenshaw et al. 1995: xxv)

Intersectionality as a Feminist Response to Race and Racism

Crenshaw offered a feminist framework, which would be called “intersectionality,” that
responded directly to these worldviews. The initial concern that Crenshaw had was
with the way that antidiscrimination law attempted to assess discrimination through
whole categories such as “woman” or “race,” which often had the tendency of excluding
numerous populations. She centered Black women as the focal point and example of
her analysis so as to offer a vivid illustration of how this exclusion occurs. She pointed
to the limitations of the single-axis framework (considering discrimination from the
perspective solely of race or solely from gender), such that anti-discrimination law was
not very effective in identifying and addressing the injustices of groups who weren’t
evoked or didn’t fit easily into such wholesale categories.
Crenshaw first popularized the term “intersectionality” in two important articles
(Crenshaw 1989; 1991). In her 1989 article, she illustrated the difficulty of rectify-
ing race and gender discrimination through the US legal system due to the overly
abstract categories of race and gender that mark those subsets of the population who
have more symbolic resonance (thus, race marks Black men and gender signifies white
women), which has the effect of rendering Black women invisible. As Crenshaw says
there, discrimination was assumed to be linked across singular widespread concepts
such as race or gender. “I want to suggest further that this single-axis framework erases
Black women in the conceptualization, identification, and remediation of race and sex
discrimination by limiting inquiry to the otherwise-privileged members of the group”
(Crenshaw 1989: 140).
In her 1991 article, Crenshaw illustrates that the overly general nature of domestic
violence laws again are more effective for those groups who fall squarely within the focus
of the law (i.e., white women who are US citizens) than poor US or migrant women of
color. As such, Crenshaw argues for an intersectional approach by which multiple ana-
lytic axes (race and gender and class) can better attend to populations who exist on the
margins of society and law (Crenshaw 1991). She argues that “[t]he concept of political
intersectionality highlights the fact that women of color are situated within at least two

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subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas,” something

that the more visible, powerful members of racial or gendered groups did not have to
address very often (Crenshaw 1991: 1251–1252). As such, intersectionality draws on a
multiple-axis approach to attend more aptly to the multiple structural sources of oppres-
sion that produce the marginalized subject or population.

What’s Critical about Intersectionality?

Crenshaw’s approach to intersectionality fits well with a CRT approach to oppression
and discrimination, since, like CRT, intersectional approaches assume that hierarchies
of power influence how we cognize and identify marginalized populations, whether
through the production of their identity or through the racialized, gendered focus of the
legal structures that either recognize or render certain subgroups invisible.
In this sense, the conceptual link between CRT and intersectionality is an intimate
one. Both explore the role that power has in constructing our ideas of race, gender,
and how social and political (and legal) institutions shape those categories to reflect
certain facets or populations more visibly than others. Intersectionality, then, illus-
trates the way that power shapes abstract categories such as race and gender and class,
such that the intersections of these factors will reveal different political standings, dif-
ferent (more or less) just outcomes, and different legal protections (or lack of such
protections) for various populations. In this way, intersectional frameworks challenge
the idea that racial, gender, and class differences are incidental or additive features of
individuals who are assumed to have identical interests or concerns but for these fea-
tures. Intersectionality shows instead that understanding subjects through their racial,
gendered, and class identities reveals qualitatively (and quantitatively) different out-
comes in terms of exploitation, discrimination and justice.
Other feminist Critical Race Theorists draw on intersectionality in their approaches
in order to combat such essentialisms or conflations. For example, legal scholar Angela
Harris argues that even feminist theorist Catharine MacKinnon, whose pointed argu-
ments that patriarchal and heterosexist culture is oppressive to women, is engaging in
essentialisms. MacKinnon conflates the situations of white women and Black women,
such that Black women become white women except more so. As Harris explains,
MacKinnon points to heterosexual sex as a form of rape, whereby women have no
ability truly to engage in consent as long as they are dominated by men. MacKinnon,
as Harris points out, adds Black women to this analysis, but does not see that rape
for Black women does not exist in the same form as it does for white women. For
Black women, rape is complicated by race, by political institutions such as slavery,
and by being forced to labor for white men who have both economic and racial/cul-
tural advantages over them. These are conflations that cannot be disarticulated merely
by distinguishing between white and Black women, but rather must be accounted
for by understanding the differences in their situations historically, politically, and,
indeed, through gender as well. Rape was considered an act of terrorism against white
women, most often assumed to have been committed by Black men, regardless of facts
to the contrary or of white women’s participation in interracial sexual relationships.
For Black women, the notion of rape was thought to have been irrelevant, since there
was neither acknowledgment that such an act could occur nor were there legal protec-
tions against such acts for Black women. As Harris states, “[t]he rift between white

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 Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality

and black women over the issue of rape is highlighted by the contemporary feminist
analyses of rape that have explicitly relied on racist ideology to minimize white
women’s complicity in racial terrorism” (Harris 1995: 263). In contrast, an intersec-
tional analysis of the historical, political, legal, and cultural differences would illustrate
that different acts, practices, and protections have distinct consequences for subjects
in terms of race, gender, and class.
Feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins develops another perspective on intersection-
ality as a framework that reveals how race and gender are shaped by power. She argues
that race, class and gender should be thought of as “interlocking systems of oppression,”
rather than as axes of identity or simple categories. The second version of intersec-
tionality allows for these axes to be understood as “interlocking,” which implies that
our analysis must take into account these axes as necessarily linked and intersecting in
order to truly understand how oppression works. Collins’s position emerges from the
view that historical, political, social situations, along with other institutions—such as
marriage, heterosexuality, slavery, immigration, national boundaries—must be consid-
ered as producing both categories/axes such as race and gender and also constructing
identities. These institutions connect with each other to form common but also unique
situations for any given subject (Collins 1990: 222).
Collins looks to geopolitical history, among other factors, in implementing an inter-
sectional analysis. For example, in a 2000 article, she points to a racial hierarchy that
emerges from the unique history of colonialism, slavery, and geographical annexation
that locates white men and women at the top of a “familial” racial hierarchy, with
American Indians, Latinos, and Black Americans arranged below them. Her racial hier-
archy can be seen as a critical analysis of the history of the United States, in which

[n]otions of US national identity that take both family and race into account
result in a view of the United States as a large national family with racial fami-
lies hierarchically arranged within it. Representing the epitome of racial purity
that is also associated with US national interests, Whites constitute the most
valuable citizens. In this racialized nation-state, Native Americans, African-
Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Puerto Ricans become second-class
citizens, whereas people of color from the Caribbean, Asia, Latin America,
and Africa encounter more difficulty becoming naturalized citizens than immi-
grants from European nations. Because all of these groups are not White and
thereby lack appropriate blood ties, they are deemed to be less worthy actual
and potential US citizens.
(Collins 1998: 70)

Collins’s version of intersectionality brings a range of structural features to the issue of

how to make less visible, or more marginal (and more marginalized), populations more
prominent in the landscape of political and legal justice.

What’s Intersectional about Critical Race Theory?

How do we understand intersectionality within the context of Critical Race Theory?
Critical Race Theory not only challenges the universal categories of liberalism, but
also endorses the idea that multiple axes of analysis facilitate a better understanding of

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 INTERSECTIONS

different subjects and populations, to borrow Michel Foucault’s terms (Foucault 1982;
2003). Since Critical Race Theory’s debut among US legal scholars, CRT’s worldview
has expanded to attract scholars in numerous fields, including English, Comparative
Literature, Ethnic Studies, and Philosophy. Understandably, the contours of the field
have also changed in relation to the fields in which scholars have approached CRT.
One prominent example of this uptake would be the work of Charles Mills, whose book,
The Racial Contract, not only adhered to some of the same basic tenets as those articu-
lated by Crenshaw, but also explored and developed a strong theoretical framework
that theorized white supremacy in intrinsic relation to the tenets of liberal political
philosophy (Mills 1997).
Mills’ analysis of the trope of the Social Contract in the tradition of liberal politi-
cal theory draws on an intersectional framework, at least partially, to dissect its racial
and economic underpinnings. He points to the inherent contradiction in the claim
of the universality of the Social Contract, namely that The Social Contract enfran-
chises white men in the same breath that it accommodates, perhaps even requires, the
enslavement of black men and women—a pact that he calls the Racial Contract. In his
book, Mills argues that the Racial Contract is the counterpart and foundation of the
Social Contract. By insisting that the universal claims of the Social Contract cannot
possibly hold given the facts of colonialism and imperialism, he requires us to consider
race and class in order to understand which populations are entitled to political and
legal enfranchisement and recognition. However, he does not explicitly include gender
in this analysis, a fact that has been criticized by feminist theorists. (In later work Mills
attends more directly to gender and intersectionality, e.g., in Pateman and Mills 2007.)
Mills’ interpretation of the Social Contract as a fundamental Racial Contract has
expanded the space by which to discuss race as a philosophical concept in the twenty-
first century, as have the writings of other philosophers of race. (See also Richardson,
Chapter 7 in this volume.)
Similarly, for many scholars who work in Critical Race Theory—from Kevin
Johnson, Devon Carbado, Keith Aoki, Angela Harris, Richard Delgado, to Leti
Volpp, and many others—their analyses are fundamentally informed by intersection-
ality. For example, Keith Aoki’s article, “No Right to Own?: The Early Twentieth-
Century ‘Alien Land Law’ as a Prelude to Internment” (1998) illustrates how the
disenfranchising of Asian populations (mostly Japanese-American or migrants of
Japanese descent, but also other Asian populations), was but one important stage in
the stripping of economic and legal protections that paved the way to facilitating the
incarceration of Japanese-Americans at the onset of World War II. Such an analysis
would not have been possible had Aoki not taken as his fundamental question: What
were the historical, institutional, racial, and economic factors that led to the intern-
ment of Japanese Americans—full US citizens—despite the ostensible promise of the
universal protections of the US Constitution?

Intersectionality across Time and Multiple Fields

It is important to note that the conceptual framework known as intersectionality names
a number of different phenomena that span a broad range of thinkers and historical
epochs. Others have mapped it thoroughly (e.g., see Botts, Chapter 28 in this volume).
This section explores a more specific question about the breadth of intersectionality.

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 Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality

As feminist philosophers Kathryn Gines and Kristie Dotson have noted, intersectional
frameworks are not new to our contemporary moment; they have been articulated in
different ways for centuries (see Dotson, Chapter 10 in this volume). Gines points to
Maria Stewart who, in 1831, criticized paternalism and racism while “calling on all Black
women—‘the fair daughters of Africa’ to unite in support for one another”; as well as
ex-slave and activist Sojourner Truth, whose famous question, “Ain’t I a woman?” chal-
lenged the idea that white women or Black men were more deserving of rights than
Black women; and numerous other Black feminist thinkers and activists who raise the
importance of thinking race and gender together intersectionally (Gines 2014: 15–16).
Truth is reputed to have responded as follows:

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and
lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. 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 have ploughed and planted, and
gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could
work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the
lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen
most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none
but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
Then they talk about this thing in the head; what’s this they call it?
[member of audience whispers, “intellect”] That’s it, honey. What’s that got
to do with women’s rights or negroes’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint,
and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half
measure full?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much
rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come
from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had
nothing to do with Him.
(Truth 1851)

[Note that this speech may not have been delivered exactly in these words; see
Gines 2014: 16.]
As can be seen in Truth’s response, she challenged the notion that women were inferior
intellectually or physically to men; she challenged as well the embedded, implicit assump-
tion that Black women were inferior to white men or women. She pointed to her capacity
to labor and to endure suffering—whether grief or cruelty—as being inferior to none. Her
response regarding the assumed inferiority of intellect was that it had little bearing on the
entitlement to rights. In her comments, we begin to glimpse the urgency of an intersec-
tional framework: it enables the separation of multiple social features of groups—race,
gender, class (and political caste) that converge into a myopic picture of which subset
of the population deserves political rights. White men? White women? Where do Black
women and women of color fit into this picture? Wealthy and poor women?
Today intersectionality, as a method, has become so widespread and prominent as
to be an institutional anchor of many Women’s/Gender/Sexuality Studies programs. It
is for example, part of the National Women’s Studies Association mission statement
(“National Women’s Studies Association” 2016). As Leslie McCall noted in 2005,

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 INTERSECTIONS

“One could say that intersectionality is the most important theoretical contribution
made to women’s studies, in conjunction with related fields, so far” (McCall 2005:
1771). In part, this may be because intersectionality has been so useful in reformulating
identity-based knowledge fields, due to the approach of using multiple axes to under-
stand both individual subjects and groups. I make this point not to valorize intersection-
ality, but to point to its entrenched status in many areas.
In addition to Crenshaw, Williams, and other Critical Race Theorists’ writing on
intersectionality, many other scholars—especially feminist scholars of color—have
engaged in similar considerations. These include Patricia Hill Collins (as discussed
above), Angela Davis (2003), bell hooks (1990), Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa
(2002), Barbara Smith (1978), Chela Sandoval (2000), Chandra Mohanty (1991), and
María Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman (1983), among others.
As intersectionality has become better known across a variety of disciplines and
fields, there have been a number of rejoinders and discussions about intersectional-
ity. In particular, questions have arisen about whether the “multiple axis” model of
intersectionality could adequately address the problem of occlusion or the eclipse of
different kinds of populations. For example, Nira Yuval-Davis offers a challenge to one
reading of intersectionality by asking whether multiple overlapping oppressions is really
useful to seeing invisible populations. She argues that there is no such thing as suffering
merely “‘as Black,’ ‘as a woman,’ ‘as a working-class person’” because these identities
are too complex to be treated as essential, simple concepts. Thus, being Black does not
necessarily entail that all subjects who fit this category necessarily experience oppres-
sion in the same way. The contrary assumption, for Yuval-Davis, reflects “hegemonic
discourses of identity politics that render invisible experiences of the more marginal
members of that specific social category and construct an homogenized ‘right way’ to be
its member” (Yuval-Davis 2006: 195). Yet, as Yuval-Davis points out, it was this very
problem—of not being seen or always having to be seen in the “right way”— that led
scholars of color to try to theorize frameworks such as intersectionality.
Some scholars, such as Jennifer Nash, have argued that intersectionality is a frame-
work that, in becoming institutionalized, has also become a stand-in for situations
pertaining primarily to women of color, and even more specifically to Black women,
rather than for a range of vulnerable populations. Further, she suggests that inter-
sectionality initially emerged as the product of black feminism, and expanded across
disciplinary boundaries and populations. However, while it has the potential to expand
across numerous populations, axes, and issues, it has morphed into a narrower form of
intersectionality that attends to race and gender but not the other possible analytical
axes, such as class, nationality, sexuality, etc. As she suggests,

[M]arginalization has emerged as the principal analytic used to study this inter-
section. Because intersectionality has come to equate black women’s lived
experiences with marginalization, black feminism has neglected to rigorously
study the heterogeneity of “black woman” as a category. Second, because black
feminism attends to race/gender almost exclusively, black feminism has effec-
tively subcontracted out explorations of other intersections to a range of related
intellectual projects. Third, and most importantly, because intersectionality
has become the preeminent black feminist lens for studying black women’s
experiences, intersectionality itself is never subjected to critical scrutiny.
(Nash 2011: 446)

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 Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality

Nash’s concern is that the equation between Black women’s experiences and margin-
alization renders intersectionality the primary, if not the sole, framework into which
to force black women’s experiences, and conversely, that Black women’s experiences
cannot be understood in more expansive, complex ways. Her diagnosis is that this
narrowness is the result of understanding intersectionality as an ahistorical construct,
rather than a framework that is both continually altered and whose terrain has been and
should remain to be continually contested (Nash 2011: 449).
Another critical response to intersectionality in relation to Critical Race Theory
is one that I have addressed in previous writing (Sheth 2014). There I suggest that
intersectionality could usefully be augmented by a larger-scale analysis in which histori-
cal, institutional, legal, and migratory factors also be taken into consideration in order
to help understand: (1) invisible or less obvious populations; (2) nuances of interests
and features pertaining to subjects of the same perceived populations; (3) why certain
members of the same perceived populations might understand themselves to be distinct
in key ways from others in “their own group”; and (4) why certain members of different
populations might understand themselves to have more in common with each other
than with other members of “their own group.”
Thus, I suggest that historical factors such as the 1948 Partition between India
and Pakistan might help to explain why South Asian Hindu women and Muslim
women of a certain generation in the United States might not necessarily see them-
selves as part of a group with similar interests, whereas their daughters might very
well see themselves as part of group with similar concerns. This approach takes into
consideration history, migration law, visa statuses, geopolitical concerns, property
laws, and foreign and domestic policies designed to scrutinize certain populations
as being threats to the safety of a nation or other populations (as in the case of the
“War on Terror”).
This view is an augmentation to intersectionality and Critical Race Theory, build-
ing on Crenshaw’s metaphor of road intersections to consider their interstices, which
would include building codes, regulations, policies, and other structural factors as a
way of recognizing the particular features of a variety of populations who may not be
otherwise visible.

Conclusion
Critical Race Theory can be used to highlight multiple populations that might have
heretofore been invisible, as well as to illustrate the contingent details and situation of
a given population. CRT can also show how a richer and more adequate understand-
ing of a population can enable us to see a population in its own singular light without
necessarily conflating its experiences with those of other populations. Also, an impor-
tant version of intersectionality arose in tandem with the field of (legal) Critical Race
Theory, which then quickly gained popularity across a range of disciplines over the
last several decades. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Critical Race Theory legal scholar, had an
important role in popularizing one of the predominant forms of intersectionality that
is still drawn on by feminist theorists and race theorists. However, intersectionality has
existed for decades, if not centuries, prior to Crenshaw’s important articles. It is impor-
tant to note that Crenshaw herself makes no claims about being the original proponent
of intersectionality; rather, she challenges those who attribute the original framework
to her (Crenshaw 2011).

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 INTERSECTIONS

There are multiple viewpoints on the usefulness or the confusing aspects of

intersectionality, as manifested through the critical responses of, for example, Nira
Yuval-Davis, Jennifer Nash, and myself. However, these critical responses are an impor-
tant element of enabling and enlivening intersectionality and Critical Race Theory as
useful analytic tools. Intersectionality, combined with a Critical Race Theory perspec-
tive, can help us to understand historical institutions—such as the Social Contract
and its counterpart, the Racial Contract—and the consequences of such institutions—
slavery, subpersonhood, vulnerability, precarity, etc.—as they manifest themselves in
unique ways for different groups.

Related Topics
Feminist engagements with social contract theory (Chapter 7); introducing Black femi-
nist philosophy (Chapter 10); the sex/gender distinction and the social construction of
reality (Chapter 13); gender essentialism and anti-essentialism (Chapter 14); the gene-
alogy and viability of the concept of intersectionality (Chapter 28); feminist philosophy
of law, legal positivism, and non-ideal theory (Chapter 56).

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 30
NATIVE AMERICAN CHAOS
THEORY AND THE POLITICS
OF DIFFERENCE
Shay Welch

Introduction
Native American philosophy raises feminist philosophical questions and offers a new
perspective for rethinking longstanding feminist disputes. I focus in this chapter on
ways Native American metaphysics can contribute to a question in feminist political
philosophy. I choose this approach over a focus on Native American feminisms for
three reasons. First, what Western women call “feminist” is just the core set of Native
American philosophical values. I see feminism as a construct invented to redress atroc-
ities committed by and through the Western worldview. Second, Native American
women would prefer that Western feminists live up to their own values; the failure of
Western feminists to put their money where their mouth is, is the reason why many
Native women, like many other women of color, do not identify as feminist (Anderson
2010; Mayer 2007). Third, the more Western feminism interacts with Native American
philosophy, the better chance Native American philosophers have to revive, substanti-
ate, and legitimate their worldview in the discipline and in the world.
I argue here that Native metaphysics can help Western philosophy imagine socio-
political communities in ways that do not regard difference as a threat. Native chaos
theory is useful for imagining an inclusive non-oppressive, normative democratic
harmony. Native metaphysics portrays creativity vis-à-vis difference as, not only
inherently valuable as an individual and social attribute, but also as vital to an inclu-
sive, democratic political structure. To demonstrate both how this is possible and
why this is desirable, I resituate Iris Marion Young’s conceptions of a politics of differ-
ence and democratic inclusion in the Native American metaphysical system of chaos
theory. A Native American metaphysical foundation includes chaos, creativity, and
difference, and so escapes the trappings of liberalism against which feminist politics
of difference continues to hammer.
Within diverse communities, individuals’ and groups’ motley modes of political
participation produce friction. Feminist philosophers have criticized liberal political
philosophy for aiming to eliminate or conceal differences. Many feminists rightly argue
that the traditional liberal aim of achieving and enforcing cooperation via the values
 Native american chaos theory

of universality and impartiality excludes, marginalizes, and silences diverse perspec-

tives that fall outside of the arbitrarily conceived universal norm. The politics of dif-
ference is one approach through which feminist political philosophers have attempted
to alleviate this problem. A central claim of the politics of difference is that traditional
liberal objectives of universality, individualism, and impartiality are inapt conditions
for democratic mechanisms, such as inclusion and representation. Feminist models
of politics of difference strive to eliminate the lived consequences of liberal political
theory by demonstrating the inclusive capabilities of the acceptance, normalization,
and valuation of diversity in social and political interaction. Liberal universality is
predisposed towards, and so ultimately produces, sameness for the purpose of manage-
able unity. It hinges on an assimilation ideal. A politics of difference rejects univer-
sality, and so sameness, insofar as the end of sameness marks distinction as deviance
and yields hostile competition rather than presumed cooperation. Liberal values, and
not the differences themselves, are inadvertently the source of antagonism between
community members. A politics of difference opens space for agonism but does so
purposefully for the sake of democracy. Difference generates tension but the struggle of
negotiation results in a form of cooperation that is not a feigned, obedient, conformity
to what is signified as “normal.”
The reductive tendency of universality in politics of difference not only stifles,
but also intentionally controls, creativity. It smothers communities’ motivation for
agonistic public participation. Yet it is for the sake of democratic cooperation, one
might purport; otherwise, agonism would revert to antagonism and society would
quickly collapse into chaos. The irony, or rather the ignorance, of preventing agonis-
tic chaos to promote cooperation is that chaos is a creative and harmonizing energy.
The discipline of quantum mechanics is just now learning what Native Americans
have known all along—chaos is a natural ordering process through which the balanc-
ing and self-organization of collectives emerges. The liberal operation of stultifying a
natural ordering process in fact generates massive breakdowns in social harmony by
over-determining an unnatural state of stagnate sameness. Through chaos, balance
is short-lived yet is forever renewing through intervals of varied interaction and the
introduction of new elements into the ordering schema. Through chaos, rich forms of
organization and cooperation can be achieved through unpredictable, creative activ-
ity rather than enforced through formalized procedures of suppression. From a Native
American perspective, the socio-political differences that agonism thrives on are
forces through which inclusive and representative democratic arrangements can flour-
ish, since these arrangements are incessantly rearranged in the direction of cooperative
harmony through the ongoing stabilizing of perpetually new contributions. Even if the
liberal ideals of universality and impartiality could give rise to strict equality among
community members, the requisite conformity underlying sameness would preclude
innovative ways of producing, and living in, multifarious arrangements for interaction
required for an explorative and expressive society. Exploration and expressiveness qua
creativity are central to a properly democratic society; without inclusive and diverse
participation, democratic practices turn subsumptive and reduce individual contribu-
tions into a singularity, contrary to normatively ideal democratic mechanisms. Chaos,
creativity, and difference are the life forces of difficult yet non-oppressive democratic
structures grounded in agonism, since they can simultaneously integrate community
members in explorative dispute and attune them to the advantages of complicated but

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 INTERSECTIONS

malleable and expressive collaboration. A true politics of difference must regard these
metaphysical life forces as legitimate and justifiable. Native American metaphysics is
a resource for conceiving difference as inherently liberatory and cooperative.

A Brief Overview of the Native American Worldview

The Native American philosophical worldview does not demarcate different ethical,
social, metaphysical, and epistemological domains. Native logic is a non-hierarchical
logic that informs knowledge and living vis-à-vis a complementary, non-oppositional,
non-dualistic, fluid system that acknowledges and accounts for the connections between
phenomena and their relationships to entities both similar and distinct (Cajete 2000,
2004; Fixico 2003; Peat 2002; Waters 2004) Brian Burkhart terms this worldview as the
moral universe principle: “The idea is simply that the universe is moral. Facts, truth,
meaning, even our existence are normative. In this way, there is no difference between
what is true and what is right” (Burkhart 2004: 17). In simplistic terms, from the Native
perspective, what ought to be is and so what is ought to be.
Given the integration of facets of philosophical inquiry, the values of interrelated-
ness, relationality, and equality are primary. The framing commitment of the Native
worldview is that of respectful coexistence, which, as I will show shortly, grounds the
epistemological conception of truth as respectful success. In Navajo thought, this con-
cept is called hóɀhó, but it is a common value throughout the Native framework. Hóɀ
signifies a life path, which should always flow towards wellness, happiness, and sustain-
ability. Lloyd Lee explains that life is comprised of energies, both positive and negative,
and one must live a life that strives towards equilibrium between them. Balance and
harmony, particularly concerning social arrangements, are taken as the norm and it is
the responsibility of both individuals and communities to sustain them (Lee 2014: 56).
Similarly, Viola Cordova uses the notion of kinship to explain the relationship between
and responsibility to balancing and sustaining harmony between all of the world’s occu-
pants: “The Native American recognizes his dependence on the Earth and the Universe.
It recognizes no hierarchy of ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ or ‘simple’ or ‘complex,’ and certainly
not of ‘primitive’ and ‘modern.’ Instead of hierarchies he sees differences, which exist
among equal ‘beings’ (mountains, as well as water and air and plants and animals would
be included here). The equality is based on the notion, often unstated, that everything
that is, is of one process” (Cordova 2004: 177).
Taiaiake Alfred sees respectful coexistence as a universal value affecting all elements
of creation and he posits it specifically as the goal of justice (Alfred 2009a: 14). All per-
sons are co-creators of and with the world, so every action we engage in or commitment
we affirm affects and substantiates nature and other persons (Cajete 2000: 76). Justice,
he says, requires the restoration of harmony to social relations and a perpetually renew-
ing commitment to the integrity of all individuals and communities (Alfred 2009a:
66); the process of justice, he states, is the healing of relations to ensure individuals can
fulfill their responsibilities to one another (Alfred 2009a: 67).
Narrative is the heart and soul of both knowledge and ethical relations in the
Native tradition, particularly because narrative is born through an oral tradition that
relies on the sharing of individual experiences for knowledge construction. Narrative
serves many complementary functions. First, narrative bonds members of the com-
munity (Fixico 2003: 29). This is possible because, second, narrative helps individuals

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apprehend and handle the complexity of the world through a storied picture through
which to see particular instantiations of more general occurrences (Deloria 1999: 67;
McPherson and Rabb 2011: 110). An audience is imbued with a “reactionary power
waiting to be acted upon” (Fixico 2003: 27) by speakers and the stories told by
others provide a medium through which to share experiences and generate meaning
and connection. As a result, community members can better engage in public forms
of moral deliberation because stories feed collective knowledge and imagination and
reveal potential trajectories for individuals to determine and converge on the right
path of respectful coexistence. Put another way, narrative effects respectful coexist-
ence through deliberative engagements, because experiential knowledge is the funda-
mental source of moral education, and thus identity formation, within communities
(McPherson and Rabb 2011: 104).
From within a Native American paradigm knowledge functions as a conduit between
community members and allows them to converge on the right path to respectful coex-
istence. This understanding of knowledge as an active and interactive means through
which to discover the right path requires a shift in how we understand the conception
of truth itself. Because individuals co-create the world, their creative participation in
construction processes is a meaning-shaping principle of action (Burkhart 2004: 16–17).
Truth, which emanates from narrative sharing aimed at harmonious collective living,
is determined by successful respect. Narrative does not emerge from knowledge; rather,
knowledge emerges from narrative. It cannot exist apart from persons or communities.
Knowledge is relational. The centrality of narrative to knowledge construction presents
knowledge as lived and embodied (Norton-Smith 2010: 60), active—procedural. One
cannot “know P” without “knowing how to P.” Because knowledge is ethical and rela-
tional, the procurement of knowledge imposes stringent constraints on the way knowers
go about acting in, and thus knowing about, the world.
Since science is the product of information that is gifted to us from and through
nature, the domain of Native scientific inquiry intertwines with epistemology so tightly
that knowledge and science are used interchangeably (Cajete 2000: 21). Ultimately, the
objective of Native science is to integrate the heart and being with rational perception
to surpass superficial understanding of what is toward a deeper understanding of one’s
relationship to that thing (Cajete 2000: 72). Thus, Native science is procedural. Its
truth is not fixed but rather evolves and renews with all new interactions with nature.
Gregory Cajete explains: “Native science reflects the unfolding story of a creative uni-
verse in which human beings are active, creative participants. When viewed from this
perspective, science is evolutionary—its expression unfolds through the general scheme
of the creative process of first insight, immersion, creation, and reflection. Native
science is a reflection of the metaphoric mind and is embedded in creative participation
with nature. It reflects the sensual capacities of humans” (Cajete 2000: 14).
Because the world is in constant flux, codifying knowledge is unnecessary. Flux and
flexibility involve substantial creativity by both individual actors and the universe. A
deep understanding of creativity as a foundation of action and, thus, knowledge makes
the notion of animism within Native ontology intelligible. The universe, and all of
its inhabitants—human and non-human—possess, act on, and contribute their own
unique energies to the creative, collaborative function of natural organization; they are
all regarded and respected as alive (Cajete 2000: 21). Without creativity and flux, the
world can be nothing other than static—dead.

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 INTERSECTIONS

According to both Native American science and Western quantum mechanics,

chaos is non-linear movement and evolution. It is itself the generative force and thus
the process of becoming for the universe. Cajete describes chaos as flux, as ebb and flow,
that is in everything at all times and in all places (Cajete 2004: 48). Chaos theory is
predominantly characterized by the butterfly effect; it is not a massive wave of influence
that hurls about radical change. Contrary to many folk conceptions, chaos, as a process,
is subtle; it nudges the natural world through small-scale adjustments and connections
that are imperceptible in a time slice, but are, cumulatively and over time, momen-
tously dynamic. The chaos driving these tiny connections and reconnections and pro-
gressions progresses from the synergism of unpredictability, flux, and socio-ecological
participation. All aspects of the universe interact in a sort of cosmic dance where all
participants interact but only some, by sheer chance of attraction, emerge as temporary
partners in the grand scheme of things. Chance or, rather, spontaneity, is a core signifier
of chaos, which indicates an inherent indeterminism within the universe (Sheldrake,
McKenna, and Abraham 1992: 26). Given these traits, chaos theory elucidates social
life qua human creativity, which Cajete terms our “butterfly power.” Chaos is embodied
in persons and it is this that allows us to respond creatively to constant change. He
explains: “The basic presupposition of chaos theory is that predictability and control
over nature, persons, and society is therefore impossible and their creative participation
cannot be trapped or stamped out without inevitable systemic collapses at the indi-
vidual and collective levels” (Cajete 2000: 19).
The product of cycles of indeterminate but creative chaos is, unexpectedly, order.
According to quantum mechanics, there is an underlying relationship between order
and chaos such that order cannot exist without chaos and each follows from the other
(Peat 2002: 176). The chaotic interactions between natural phenomena actualize new
forms and structures from potentiality and then re-organizes them as they continue to
interact. Though chaos is uncontrolled and unpredictable, like all highly complex sys-
tems, the magnitude of chance causes the relations of the universe to be probabilistic
(Sheldrake, et al. 1992: 26). Order, in this sense, is better thought of as an equilibrium
or bifurcation point in the midst of the chaos, which Cajete refers to as an eye of a
hurricane (Cajete 2004: 48). He posits order as the point when a connection is made
to a natural principle manifesting itself in the unfolding of the greater natural process
(Cajete 2004: 48); the equilibrium occurs just as the system begins to transform itself
(Cajete 2000: 18). But order in this sense, reflects not a convergence on or in con-
formity but rather convergence in diversity—in this paradigm, there is no such thing
as an anomaly. In generating organized structures, the universe does not discard any
participatory activity or phenomena, which means that apprehension of the workings
of the world requires us not to dismiss any of our experiences.
Chaos imparts a particularly meaningful prescription about how individuals should
interpellate social life. All information and experiences must be conceived of in relation
to the framework of moral interpretation in the community. For stable organization,
differing experiences among individuals cannot be pushed to the margins of respect-
ability (Cajete 2000: 44). That chaos drives change and movement in nature reveals
the senselessness of externally imposed mechanisms of control. The presumption of
control demonstrates Western intellectual chauvinism (Deloria 1999: 6). Western met-
aphysics discards anomalous occurrences because, as Deloria apprehends, these facts are
discerned through their own measuring devices that disrupt the security of the “universal”

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laws (Deloria 1999: 12). Deloria expounds: “Any damn fool can treat a living thing as if
it were a machine and establish conditions under which it is required to perform certain
functions—all that is required is a sufficient application of brute force” (Deloria 1999: 6).
Chaos theory asserts that predictability and control over nature, persons, and society
is impossible. Their creative participation cannot be trapped or stamped out without
systemic collapses at the individual and collective levels.

The Politics of Difference and Native

American Chaos Theory
Though the politics of difference is a socio-political framework, the questions of dif-
ference and creative chaos boil down to ontology. The functioning of difference and
its relationships to creativity and chaos require a particular metaphysical system that
recognizes both phenomena as inherent. To be workable and sustainable, a politics of
difference must replace its Western colonizing worldview with one that centers creativ-
ity and chaos. The Native American worldview is the apposite theoretical home for a
politics of difference.
Native chaos theory illuminates a strong correlation between organizational prac-
tices at the ontological level and ethico-political relations. The universe aims at a
cooperative harmony that sustains the interdependence of all participants. Nature
and all of its infrastructures demonstrate a tendency to self-organize and generate bal-
ance. This balance is achieved when there is no interference or attempt to control
its organizing capacities—the only restriction on equilibriums is that organization
follows ethically from diversity. The notion of respectful success as the foundation
of truth in the Native schema mirrors the efficacy of this ethical restraint. Whereas
the Western paradigm marks stark differentiations between nature and humans, the
Native framework understands humans as just one among different kinds of persons
and phenomena that must flourish. If the entirety of the universe must, does, and
can self-organize in ways that respect difference and interrelatedness, then so too can
humans and/with all other persons. The Native worldview conceives of this global
interrelation and cooperation within nature as a communal soul that operates accord-
ing to a natural democracy (Cajete 2000, 2004). Native chaos theory evidences how
creativity and spontaneity among wildly divergent community members gives rise to
order and permits continual renewal and reorganization, which, politically, manifests
as freedom in and through revolving social consent and participation in social arrange-
ments (Welch 2012). Liberation is only possible when different selves recognize and
respond to their radical relationality with all others (Alfred 2009a; 2009b; Cordova
2007; Deloria 1999; Norton-Smith 2010).
Young grounds a politics of difference in a diachronic conception of equality that
emanates from a cultural democratic pluralism. Cultural democratic pluralism is a
communicative mode of democracy predicated on a heterogeneous public that exacts
mutual respect among socially and culturally differentiated groups and affirms as valu-
able the differences between them (Young 1990: 163). Recognition of cultural and
individual difference is crucial to equality; a homogenous society is not only undesirable
but it is impossible (Young 1990, 163). Cultural democratic pluralism fosters equal-
ity through individual and social group participation in democratic practices (Young
1990: 158). When community members value group differences as positive social

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 INTERSECTIONS

goods they are then positioned to communicate with others through relations of per-
spectival difference rather than deviance from a normative perspective (Young 1990:
166). Narrative is essential to democratic communication under a politics of differ-
ence (Young 1996: 120). By refusing that shared understandings are given, Young
unknowingly aligns her political theory with the Native scientific commitment to
anomalies as enlightening and instructive.
Through her emphasis on narrative, Young positions recognition as a starting point
rather than the end of equality (Young 2000: 61). Substantive recognition is inextrica-
ble from processes of listening. What must accompany the listener’s recognition, is an
ongoing openness to hear the speaker (Young 2000: 112). The dismissal or discounting
of others’ perspectives post-recognition often occurs because of community members’
ignorance of their unique experiences and differing shared histories. When community
members are unfamiliar with others’ trajectories, they bring to the table empty generali-
ties and/or false assumptions about those with whom they interact, which habitually
triggers the othering of those perspectives as insignificant anomalies (Young 2000: 74).
Recognition without listening is merely a glorified form of tolerance.
Narrative does its democratic work by transmuting anomaly into collective knowl-
edge contribution. It conveys one’s subjective particularity through the uniqueness of
one’s story and the cultural specificity of social group membership by unveiling systemic
patterns of shared histories and social locations between group members. And while
narrative proves central to demonstrating the particularity of “others,” it also illumi-
nates one’s own particularity and difference. In light of multifarious expositions about
differing lived experiences and preferences, individuals can see that their perspective
regarding subjective being, social life, and political organization is just one of many,
rather than wrongly presuming their standpoint aligns with some presumed majority
view from which divergent experiences can or should be othered.
The process of distinction reveals how entrenched community members are in rela-
tions of mutual effect. Stories, rather than claims, reflect how they are shaped by and
through one another as a result of their intersecting social relations. Narrative makes it
possible for community members to discern at least some shared premises from which
to build and sculpt dialogical understanding because narratives target underlying false
assumptions for correction (Young 2000: 53, 74). When values and priorities are shared
through experiences and histories in narrative form, listeners can grasp more meaning
behind the values invoked than they would if the values had been presented as uncon-
textualized, impartial claims. Public narratives of plural perspectives are essential for
understanding individuals’ needs for inclusion, the consequences of being excluded,
and the significance of differing values, since stories impart affective illocutionary force.
This affective force resonates and can motivate listeners to hear and attempt to appre-
hend others’ narratives to effect individual and social group participatory parity, which
positions community members in relations of mutual respect.
According to Young, shared understandings inadvertently force assimilation because
any narrative that is “anomalous” is marked as deviant. Therefore, the success of this
narrative-based sculpting process depends on the ability of community members to
navigate the chaos of infinite perspectives creatively through agonistic negotiation of
what is, can, and should be shared as knowledge, Native philosophy presumes a shared
epistemology by virtue of far-reaching interaction and the fact that language constructs
a shared cognitive orientation among community members without also presuming
shared understandings (Overholt and Callicott 1982: 11). Native philosophers hold

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that a right understanding of the world, requires communities to synthesize diverse

experience through interpretive practices to reflect evolving knowledge that emanates
from and builds on the communal narrative (Overholt and Callicott 1982: 73). Because
Native philosophy sees knowledge as procedural, it cannot be acquired independently.
For individuals or social groups to have shared understandings, they must be co-creative
through active praxes of learning. Narrative as a performative practice fosters the crea-
tion of the same thin shared understandings that Young posits as central to deliberation,
because unique interpretations are excavated through ethical discursive relations.
In a Native American worldview, dictates for the community are modeled after an
ethically interdependent nature. In nature, all participants and contributions are use-
ful and so beneficially interact either directly or tangentially. This implies, rather than
invites, mutual reciprocity as respect for what participants bring to the wholeness of the
systemic structure. Will Roscoe avows that you don’t waste people because every person
has a gift (Roscoe 2000: 4). All beings must in principle be respectfully recognized for
the reciprocity inherent in their unique talents without which there would be no system
and no organizational arrangements (Fixico 2003: 52). This interdependence between,
and reliance on, all of nature’s and humanity’s contributions to sociality exists in the
Western schema but goes unnoticed because the foundational metaphysical conditions
of Western philosophy encourage marginalization and fragmentation. Fragmentation
comes from the impolitic splitting of domains: the personal from the political, the
public from the private, the metaphysical from the ethical. Relatedly, the binary logic
that motivates such boundaries is hierarchical, which parses domains of activity and
contributions within them so that some are worthy of recognition and others are not.
Human efforts are more valuable than natural efforts and one of the objectives of per-
sonhood involves controlling and dominating nature to the point of its extermination
through imbalance. The partitioning between the valuable and not-valuable continues
to bracket down between the normative and the deviant, the regular and the anoma-
lous, and the desirable and detestable until the vast majority of individual and social
group contributions that differ from those of the dominant groups no longer have any
recognizable value.
One example of the relationship between Native logic and practices of inclusive
and intersectional reciprocity is that Native communities often have third and fourth
genders. The spectrum contains sharp instantiations only on each of its ends but the
spectrum itself is constituted by multifarious versions of ambiguity, amalgamation, and
complexity. Native North America is believed to have been the queerest continent on
the planet (Roscoe 2000: 4). Individuals who are multigendered are deemed as having
pivotal roles in the community by virtue of the specificity of their intersectional gender
expressions. Third and fourth genders participate in creative contributions in commu-
nity praxes such as crafting, warring, advising, and healing or ethical relations such
as non-procreative sex and romantic love (Roscoe 2000; Waters 2004). Other times,
gender is wholly contextually and relationally dependent.
In the Native framework, difference is neither as a site of competition nor conflict.
Differences, much as feminists like Young attempt to advocate, are unproblematically
sites of inherent intersectionality by virtue of systemic interdependence; difference is
required for balance and cooperative harmony. At its metaphysical foundation, the
Native framework is inclusive and designates difference as crucial strata rather than as
anomalous glitches. The “Native mind” operates from “a symbolic kinship based on the
ethos of totality and inclusions” (Fixico 2003: 48) because no system can be regarded

377
 INTERSECTIONS

as complete. All that can be known are patterns in arrangements, but difference stimu-
lates our ability to see patterns and interactions change. Bohm and Peat (1987) assert
that fundamental ideas must always be subjected to differences to ensure that society
does not become rigidly committed to normative assumptions and conformist arrange-
ments. Individuals must engage in free and creative play to test the legitimacy of their
conditions because it is only through free play vis-à-vis difference that the true creative
potential of society can emerge (Bohm and Peat 1987: 59, 111). But Western philoso-
phy repudiates difference and creativity for specifically this reason; it is committed to
stasis and control that resists the liberatory practices of a politics of difference.
Even as Young encourages inclusive deliberation, inclusive forms of deliberation
are not without their own melees. Young notes that inclusion can make deliberative
exchanges more difficult and less efficient (Young 2000: 119). A justice framework
imbued by a politics of difference fosters conditions for agonism. This is because rela-
tions of mutual effect are relations of togetherness, which means that disagreements
and conflicts arise simply as a result of inevitable relationality. As Honig argues, taking
differences seriously requires communities to “affirm the inescapability of conflict and
the ineradicability of resistance to the political and moral projects of ordering subjects,
institutions, and values” (Honig 1996: 258). Additionally, the shift in focus from the
atomistic individual to individuals as members of social groups doubles the accept-
able number of justice claims for equality (Honig 1996; 2001). Discord and dispute
in deliberation must be met head on if equality and justice can ensue. Without the
acknowledgement of difference and the profound importance of negotiating difference
through assorted modes of public participation, an inclusive and equal—harmonious
and balanced—social configuration will be impossible.
What Young overlooks due to her Western metaphysical assumptions—and that
a Native philosophical metaphysics can make sense of—is that agonism inherent in
a politics of difference thrives on and evokes the creative force of chaos. Agonistic,
creative chaos manifests in the clash of different narratives, preferences, and lived
experiences, in individuals’ attempts to reconcile and adapt to varying modes of com-
munication, in the deliberative negotiation process, and in the commotion of packed
out participatory activities. When resituating a politics of difference into a Native
worldview, chaos is less about conflict than creative participation. It is a mere fact
about the universe that if we desire order, there must be moments of disorder, but
disorder does not lead to the Leviathan.
In the Native American worldview, equality is not a state but is achieved through
participatory activity. Chaos is not one of the flaws in inclusive practices but is merely
the Archimedean point of participation. Equality through inclusion is a wildly event-
ful endeavor. Deliberative practices must proceed hither and thither through convo-
luted channels of interpellation, interpretation, and collaboration instead of down the
linear, sterile method undergirding liberalism. Chaos and disorder mark the moments
of participation and negotiation prior to the settling of justice claims and the realiza-
tion of intermittent relations of equality. Because community members incessantly
and creatively co-construct one another via their individuality and the social group
memberships, justice claims will never be fully settled and a state of equality will never
be permanent. Even though narrative and other creative communicative devices aim
at familiarizing others with the distinctive experiences of social groups, there will
always be a gap in the understanding between those who have particular experiences

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and those who do not—at least until they have engaged in extensive public exchanges
to construct bridges. And because gaps exist, states of equality between individuals and
between social groups will never be for once and all achieved. Though the processes of
a politics of difference cultivate equality through equalizing practices, differences that
need attending to, whether innocuous or oppressive will always cause an undulation
of power relations. Between the valleys of the chaos of discursive play and disconnect
exist peaks of balance through which cooperation and harmony can emanate. The
Native American view expands on a politics of difference’s acceptance of flux in social
location in participation, by taking flux to be given as a fact of collective existence.
Young argues that community members should interact in respectful wonder (Young
1996), which directly connects to Native American metaphysics. Respectful wonder
calls on community members to engage imaginatively to try to understand the needs
of others. Imagination is a creative and chaotic place. This wonder must be respectful,
since chaotic imaginative capacities unconstrained by normative dictates sometimes
trend toward exoticization rather than empathizing. The employment but management
of imaginative perceptions involves creatively piecing together pictures of lived experi-
ence that are both similar to and different from one’s own. Respectful wonder facilitates
deliberation and negotiation, which are themselves creative in three ways. First, indi-
viduals must employ creativity to determine how to communicate their perspectives
in pointed but rhetorical ways to ensure uptake. Second, individuals’ suggestions and
input require the excavation of experience and the shaping of contributions that speak
to their own and others’ justice claims and social arrangements. Third, praxes of nego-
tiation are raucous as much as they are intentional and end-directed. Negotiation fash-
ions itself much like the process of a group trying to work together to construct a jigsaw
puzzle with too many pieces.
Young is well aware that many liberatory impediments reduce to problems with lib-
eral social ontology (Young 1990: 228). Yet knowing how to get outside of one’s own
worldview is nearly inconceivable if other reasonable worldview perspectives have them-
selves been all but vanquished by the worldview in question. If the perspective is there
but foreign, the possibility of traversing a foreign worldview is, well, chaotic. This is why
I think Western feminists must see the power and liberatory potential inherent in Native
American metaphysics. For it just is the case that we live in Western society, and feminists
need to see that their values are not utopian goals but have been the norm for successful,
healthy democratic societies. Unfortunately, the perspective that shares feminist goals has
been subject to genocide, which ultimately reveals how dangerous—and so liberatory—
metaphysical assumptions of given interrelatedness and harmony can truly be.

Further Reading
DuFour, John (2004) “Ethics and Understanding,” in Anne Waters (Ed.) American Indian Thought. Oxford:
Blackwell, 34–41.
Hester, Thomas Lee (2004) “Choctaw Conceptions of the Excellence of the Self, with Implication for
Education,” in Anne Waters (Ed.) American Indian Thought, Oxford: Blackwell, 182–187.
Napoleon, Val (2005) “Aboriginal Self-Determination: Individual Self and Collective Selves,” Atlantis
29(2): 1–21.
Nichols, Robert and Singh, Jakeet (Eds.) (2014) Freedom and Democracy in an Imperial Context: Dialogues
with James Tully, New York: Routledge Press.

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 INTERSECTIONS

Simpson, Audra and Smith, Andrea (Eds.) (2014) Theorizing Native Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Tsosie, Rebecca (2010) “Native Women and Leadership: An Ethic of Culture and Relationship,” in Cheryl
Suzack, Shari M. Huhndorf, Jeanne Perreault, and Jean Barman (Eds.) Indigenous Women and Feminism:
Politics, Activism, and Culture, Vancouver, BC: The University of British Columbia Press, 29–52.
Vandenabeele, Bart (2012) “No Need for Essences. On Non-Verbal Communication in First Inter-Cultural
Contacts,” South African Journal of Philosophy 21(2): 85–96.

Related Topics
Dao becomes female (Chapter 3); feminism and borderlands identities (Chapter 17);
personal identity and relational selves (Chapter 18); moral justification in an unjust
world (Chapter 40); feminist engagements with democratic theory (Chapter 51);
feminism and freedom (Chapter 53).

References
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—— (2009b) Peace, Power, and Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Anderson, Kim (2010) “Affirmations of an Indigenous Feminist,” in Cheryl Suzack, Shari M. Huhndorf,
Jeanne Perreault, and Jean Barman (Eds.) Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, and Culture,
Vancouver, BC: The University of British Columbia Press, 81–91.
Bohm, David and Peat, F. David (1987) Science, Order, and Creativity, New York: Routledge Press.
Burkhart, Brian (2004) “What Coyote and Thales Can Teach Us: An Outline of American Indian
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Cajete, Gregory (2000) Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence, Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light.
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Peat, F. David (2002) Blackfoot Physics, Boston, MA: Weiser Books.
Roscoe, Will (2000) Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America, London: Palgrave
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Sheldrake, Rupert, McKenna, Terence, and Abraham, Ralph (1992) Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic
Consciousness, Rochester, VT: Park Street Press.
Waters, Anne (2004) “Language Matters: Nondiscrete Nonbinary Dualism,” in Anne Waters (Ed.) American
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Welch, Shay (2012) A Theory of Freedom: Feminism and the Social Contract, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
—— (2014) “Radical-cum-Relational: Bridging Feminist Ethics and Native Individual Autonomy,”
Philosophical Topics 41(2): 203–223.
Young, Iris Marion (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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 31
FEMINIST THEORY,
LESBIAN THEORY, AND
QUEER THEORY
Mimi Marinucci

Introduction
Feminist theory intersects with theories of sexuality in rather complicated ways. There are
many different forms of feminism, but the most widely represented (and misrepresented)
include what is usually referred to as liberal feminism and what is usually referred to as rad-
ical feminism. Liberal feminism is often presented as the definitive version of feminism.
Rachel Fudge, for example, characterizes liberal feminism as “just plain feminism” (Fudge
2006) and the definition of feminism found in most general use dictionaries is best charac-
terized as a liberal feminist position. Liberal feminism focuses on the cornerstone Western
democratic ideal of equality, which is probably why it is the form of feminism that people
often refer to when they are motivated to make feminism seem uncontroversial. Feminist
analyses focused on equality have also been referred to as libertarian feminism, equality
feminism, and equity feminism.
To the extent that liberal feminism is the example offered in order to make feminism
seem as accessible and acceptable as possible, radical feminism is the example offered in
order to make it seem as extreme and objectionable as possible. Unlike liberal feminism,
which is focused on establishing equality within existing social structures, radical femi-
nism regards the oppression of women by men as the inevitable product of patriarchy,
which is believed to be a system of power that is built into existing social institutions.
Radical feminism therefore seeks a more thorough (that is to say, more radical) restruc-
turing of the social order than liberal feminism. Some radical feminists find oppression
of women by men in virtually all contexts where women and men interact and, for this
reason, advocate a completely separatist agenda. When critics of feminism, particu-
larly those associated with the emerging men’s rights movement, characterize feminism
as anti-male, radical feminism is the position to which they are usually referring. An
online men’s rights movement frequently asked questions (FAQ) page, for example,
identifies “vilification” of men as the first of several “focal topics” within the men’s
rights movement, and claims, “Men are regularly vilified and demeaned, both in the
media and by feminist and government groups” (MensRights FAQ 2015).
 Feminist, Lesbian, and Queer Theory

From the somewhat superficial point that feminism takes an interest in women, and
at least some women identify as lesbian or queer, to the more substantive point that
feminism is invested in expanding the social roles to which women have access, and
women who identify as lesbian or queer typically disrupt at least some of the expecta-
tions associated with traditional women’s roles, feminist theory is closely connected
with theories of sexuality. This connection notwithstanding, however, these fields also
have areas of disconnection and disagreement, particularly regarding the question of
essentialism. Briefly, essentialism is the idea that there are specific properties that are
intrinsic to and definitive of any particular thing or type of thing.

Born This Way

The prevailing position among many contemporary lesbian and gay rights advocates
is that sexuality is fixed from birth. Those who adhere to this account often regard
the suggestion that sexual identity is a matter of personal choice or the product of
socialization as a threat to the campaign for legal and social equality. This concern is
likely fueled by critics of lesbian and gay acceptance who have been quick to attribute
lesbian and gay identity to personal and social causal factors. Lesbian and gay rights
advocates, however, often maintain that sexuality is something that we simply are, and
not something that we do or become. The reasoning that accompanies this position is
that it makes sense to hold people accountable, be it individually or collectively, only
for what can be attributed to human agency, and not for what is beyond our individual
or collective control.
Whereas many lesbian and gay rights advocates deny that sexuality is something
for which we can be held personally or socially responsible, radical feminism has a his-
tory of enthusiastically and unapologetically attributing lesbian identity to personal
choice and even upholding lesbian identity as something that can be adopted, and
indeed should be adopted, as a voluntary alternative to what is sometimes referred to
as compulsory heterosexuality, or heteronormativity. This branch of radical feminism,
which is less prevalent today than it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is usually
referred to as radical lesbian feminism, though it is sometimes also referred to simply
as lesbian feminism, or as separatist feminism, lesbian separatism, radical lesbian sepa-
ratist feminism, and so forth. Regardless of the label used, it is important to note
that the pairing of “lesbian” and “feminist” is not simply a reference to lesbians who
just happen to be feminists (nor to feminists who just happen to be lesbians). Nor
does this pairing indicate an automatic connection between being a lesbian and being
a feminist; there are certainly lesbians who do not identify as feminists (as well as
feminists who do not identify as lesbians). According to the ideology of radical lesbian
feminism, however, such a connection ought to exist between feminist identity and les-
bian identity, because, on this account, lesbian existence is the ultimate expression of
feminist ideals. According to many, including Charlotte Bunch (1975), Sheila Jeffreys
(1991), Monique Wittig (1992), and Adrienne Rich (1993), and others, heterosexual-
ity supports the oppression of women by men. Monique Wittig, for example, indicates
that heterosexuality allows men to “appropriate for themselves the reproduction and
production of women and also their physical persons by means of a contract called
the marriage contract” (1992: 7). Adrienne Rich refers to lesbian existence as “an act

383
 INTERSECTIONS

of resistance” against this arrangement, “a direct or indirect attack on male right of

access to women.” (1993: 239). Similarly, Sheila Jeffreys (1991) suggests that women
who experience sexual pleasure with men do so by only by eroticizing their own subor-
dination, while lesbian existence offers women the possibility of experiencing sexual
pleasure between equal partners.
Just what is meant by lesbian existence is neither clear nor consistent, even among
those who seem united through their shared interest in promoting it as an expression
of feminism. It might be tempting to assume that it refers unproblematically to women
whose preferred object of sexual intimacy is other women, but Audre Lorde resists this
definition, along with the notion that lesbian consciousness arises from specific sexual
experiences (Hammond 1980).
For Lorde, lesbian sexuality is a potential component of lesbian existence, and
hence of lesbian feminism, but it is not a necessary component of either. On this
understanding, being a lesbian has at least as much to do with being aligned emo-
tionally, politically, and symbolically with other women as it has with being aligned
sexually with other women. Even so, words are not chosen at random. “Lesbian” has
unmistakably sexual connotations, and the decision to characterize lesbian identity
as a voluntary form of feminist expression is simultaneously a decision to characterize
lesbian sexuality in a manner that runs counter to the rhetoric of contemporary les-
bian and gay rights advocacy. Contemporary lesbian and gay rights advocacy centers
on the assumption that, whatever our sexuality, we were, in the words of pop icon
Lady Gaga, “born this way.”

Not Born a Woman

Gender is a familiar concept today, but it did not come into widespread popular
use until the 1970s. Feminist theorists introduced the distinction between sex and
gender in order to provide the necessary terminology to differentiate the characteristics
of women and men that are thought to be the direct result of biological sex, such as
different genital and hormonal patterns, from the characteristics of women and men
that are thought to be the result of socialization and learning, such as differences in
clothing and grooming patterns. There is a great deal of disagreement in scholarly as
well as popular discussions regarding the boundary between sex and gender, both in
general and in regard to particular characteristics. Some have little use for the concept
of gender because they attribute virtually everything—from how likely we are to seek
multiple sexual partners to whether we are good at multitasking—to biological sex.
Others, however, particularly some feminists, attribute the vast majority of what makes
us who we are as women and men to gender socialization.
To add an element of confusion to the public discourse on gender, its popular use
seems to have drifted away from what feminists had in mind when they began using it in
the 1970s as a strategy for expressing the belief that, in the words of Simone de Beauvoir,
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (1974 [1949]: 295). Increasingly, refer-
ences to gender within mainstream popular culture use it as a straightforward synonym
for biological sex. Consider, for instance, the use of the expression “gender testing” to
refer both to the controversial practice of performing DNA tests on athletes to ensure
that those competing as women are indeed biologically female (Kolata 1992; Saner
2008), as well as the somewhat less controversial practice of using ultrasound imaging of
unborn fetuses to help expectant parents select names, clothing, and toys in accordance

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with cultural norms about raising girls and boys. What a DNA test can actually identify
is one set of biological criteria (in this case, chromosome patterns) used for categorizing
people as female, as male or, less frequently, as intersex. What an ultrasound can actu-
ally identify is another set of biological criteria (in this case, genital structures) used for
categorizing people as female, as male or, less frequently, as intersex. In the case of the
athletes, the gender is already known. The question that underlies the testing is not an
effort to determine the gender of the athletes, but rather to determine whether their
gender matches the sex categories to which they are believed to belong. In the case of
unborn fetuses, their gender socialization begins when, perhaps as a result of an ultra-
sound, they are assigned the names, clothing, toys, and various other artifacts that will
begin to identify them, not merely as newborn infants, but as newborn girls and boys.
To add yet another element of confusion to an increasingly complicated conversa-
tion, while many feminist theorists, particularly most liberal feminists, are critical of
the process of gender socialization, there are also some feminist theorists, particularly
some radical feminists, who reject the very concept of gender and therefore identify
as gender critical feminists. What makes this situation confusing, of course, is that, to
the uninitiated, it would be impossible to determine whether the label “gender critical
feminism” denotes the belief that gender exists, accompanied by a critical perspective
on how gender impacts our existence, or whether it denotes the belief that gender does
not exist, accompanied by a critical perspective, not on gender as a phenomenon, but
rather on the existence of the concept of gender.
Not all radical feminists label themselves as gender critical. Among those who do,
this label was developed as an alternative to “trans exclusionary,” which has been
applied to them by others, particularly transgender theorists, who reject their position
regarding transgender identity (Williams 2014). According to trans exclusionary radi-
cal feminism, the separation of the sexes, and the subsequent oppression of women by
men, is an innate feature of human existence. On this account, transgender women are,
in virtue of their assignment at birth as male, inevitably still men, and this is not some-
thing that can be changed by act of will, nor even as the result of medical intervention.
Whereas contemporary lesbian and gay rights theory maintains that, regardless of
how we identify our sexuality, we were “born this way,” liberal feminism claims that
“one is not born, but rather becomes a woman” through the process of gender sociali-
zation. In other words, lesbian and gay rights theory claims that important identity
features (namely, sexuality) are innate, and therefore are beyond the scope of what we
change, while liberal feminism claims that important identity features (namely, gender)
are socially constructed and therefore fall within the scope of what we can change. Both
positions are present within radical feminism. Gender critical radical feminism main-
tains that some identity features (namely, sex) are innate and thus beyond the scope of
change, while radical lesbian feminism maintains that some identity features (namely,
sexuality) are within the scope of change. It might seem as if these two forms of radical
feminism have nothing in common because of their different ideas about what is innate
and what is open to change. However, when we shift to examine the motivations and
consequences attached to each of these positions, different connections are revealed.

We Are the Same

Unlike lesbian and gay rights advocates who defend biological determinism in order to
deny personal or social accountability for the production of lesbian and gay identities,

385
 INTERSECTIONS

liberal feminists use the distinction between sex and gender to deny biological determinism.
Despite their mutual interest in securing legal and social equality, lesbian and gay rights
theorists and liberal feminists adopt what initially might appear to be antithetical strat-
egies. Ironically, however, closer inspection reveals that the reasoning that goes into
these two strategies is actually quite similar. In either case, the twofold message to the
dominant group is, first, that we are all fundamentally the same and, second, that the
absence of a principled basis for unequal treatment constitutes a case in favor of equal
treatment. In the case of sexuality, the claim that we are all fundamentally the same
refers, not to our sexual inclinations themselves, but rather to the manner in which
those inclinations are experienced. While lesbian women and gay men are not the same
as heterosexual women and men when it comes to partner choice, we are all the same
insofar as we experience our sexual attractions as spontaneous and natural, rather than
as the product of conscious choice. People who disrupt this line of thought—be it the
conservative Christian who touts the alleged success of sexual reorientation therapy or
the radical feminist who claims to have chosen lesbian sexuality as an alternative to
sleeping with the enemy—pose a threat to the prevailing position within contemporary
lesbian and gay rights theory.
The liberal feminist claim that we are all fundamentally the same is in appar-
ent conflict with the countless ways in which women and men are believed to dif-
fer. This is where the concept of gender is especially useful, as it attributes many of
the differences that might otherwise be enlisted in order to justify different treat-
ment for women and men to that different treatment itself. Early examples of this
reasoning (which predate the term “feminism,” but may nevertheless be regarded as
proto-feminist, or pre-feminist) can be found in Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 essay,
“A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1967 [1792]), and John Stuart Mill’s 1869
essay, “The Subjection of Women” (1970 [1896]), both of which raise the possibility
that, given the same education and opportunities as men, women might be capable of
far more than they were known to achieve at that time. Instead of using the apparent
differences between women and men to justify different education and opportunities,
which was an even more prevalent practice then than it is today (refer, for example,
to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 book, Emile (2003 [1762])), Wollstonecraft and Mill
identified the differences in education and opportunities as the potential source of
those apparent differences.
In more recent years, liberal feminists have successfully used this same basic line of
reasoning when advocating to increase the opportunities available to girls and women.
One such example is Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendment to the United States
Constitution. Although Title IX mandates gender equality in all educational programs
that receive federal funding, it is known primarily for its impact on athletic programs.
Prior to the implementation of Title IX, those who even bothered trying to defend the
disproportionate investment in athletic programs for boys and men often did so by high-
lighting the inclination toward and aptitude for physical activity that seemed to come
so naturally for boys but not for girls. In 1972, when Title IX was first enacted, only 7.4
percent of all athletes in US high schools were girls. After almost 30 years under Title
IX, however, that number had risen to 41.5 percent. In 1972, there were only 32,000
women who participated in college athletics, but by 2007 there were more than 166,000
(ACLU 2015). These are just a few of the many statistics, from various surveys and
reports, that all seem to indicate that it simply is not the case that girls are naturally dis-
inclined to participate in athletics when given the opportunity to do so. It would seem

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to be the case, instead, that the apparent lack of athleticism among girls prior to Title
IX was not an innate characteristic, but rather the consequence of limited opportunity.
Ever mindful of equality—even when it comes to establishing the value of equality—
liberal feminists are often quick to acknowledge that gender socialization prevents men,
as well as women, from achieving their full human potential. In a more recent exam-
ple of liberal feminist thinking, United Nations Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson
made the following remarks in a 2014 speech to the United Nations entitled “Gender
Equality is Your Issue Too.”

We don’t often talk about men being imprisoned by gender stereotypes but I
can see that that they are and that when they are free, things will change for
women as a natural consequence.
If men don’t have to be aggressive in order to be accepted women won’t feel
compelled to be submissive. If men don’t have to control, women won’t have
to be controlled.
Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women
should feel free to be strong . . . It is time that we all perceive gender on a spec-
trum not as two opposing sets of ideals.
(Watson 2014)

According to this line of reasoning, women and men are fundamentally the same, but
gender socialization creates the appearance that we are different. Furthermore, because
women and men are fundamentally the same, we deserve to be treated the same. Finally,
both women and men are in a position to benefit from eliminating the inequality that sex-
ism has produced. If we could eliminate gender socialization, we could thereby create the
opportunity, for example, not just for women to become better negotiators thus enabled
to enjoy more rewarding careers, but we could likewise create the opportunity for men to
become better nurturers thus enabled to enjoy more rewarding family lives.
For liberal feminists, the justification for social reform is an unwavering commitment
to the belief that people are basically the same, regardless of their gender. Similarly,
for lesbian and gay rights advocates, it is the belief that people are basically the same,
regardless of their sexuality. The difference between the liberal feminist perspective
and the lesbian and gay rights perspective is not so much what they say, but rather who
they make the effort to say it about. Liberal feminist theory focuses on the oppression
of women, but nothing inherent within liberal feminist theory precludes extending
the same framework to an analysis of oppression based on sexuality. Likewise, noth-
ing inherent within lesbian and gay rights theory precludes extending the same frame-
work to an analysis of oppression based on gender. Indeed, there is nothing inherent
within either theory that precludes extending the same framework to oppression based
on transgender identity, racial identity, disability status, and various other dimensions
of identity for which people are systematically oppressed.

It’s Complicated
Unlike both liberal feminist theory and lesbian and gay rights theory, which presuppose
that people are fundamentally the same, radical feminism in general, as well as radical
lesbian feminism and gender critical radical feminism in particular, presupposes funda-
mental differences among people. For this reason, radical feminism does not generalize

387
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as a framework for addressing other forms of oppression. According to radical feminism,

we divide naturally into two sex categories—in this regard they are in agreement with
those who make the same claim as the foundation for deeply sexist ideas. For radical
feminism, the sex-based system of categorization is an inherent feature of human exist-
ence, and the sex-based system of oppression is likewise an inherent feature of human
existence. Because it takes sexism to be the primary form of oppression, radical femi-
nism is not directly concerned with, and is occasionally even dismissive of, other forms
of oppression.
While radical feminism is supportive of lesbian women, it is not similarly supportive
of gay men. This is not to imply that it is actively hostile toward gay men, but rather
that it is simply unconcerned with working to improve social conditions for men. For
gender critical radical feminists, however, the notion that men are the natural enemy
of women is so powerful that it extends even to transgender women simply in virtue of
their biological history. Radical feminism is similarly critical when those who are bio-
logically female express their identity in ways typically reserved for men. As Judith Roof
explains, radical lesbian feminism is critical of the butch–femme dichotomy, which
is assumed to constitute “an imitation of heterosexuality as the central form of sex/
gender oppression” (1999: 29). On this line of reasoning, all other forms of oppression,
including racism, are secondary to sexism. Dismissing racism is itself a form of racism,
although it is certainly less blatant than the overtly hostile attitude displayed within
radical feminism toward all men, including transgender and gay men, as well as some
women, including transgender and butch women. As Barbara Crow explains, “While
radical feminists attempted to work against racism with the tools that were available to
them at the time, white women had yet to learn how central racism was to the struggle
for social change” (2000: 4). White radical feminists eventually began to take seriously
the experiences of Black radical feminists, and the movement has overcome much of
the carelessly racist perspective of some of its early proponents (Crow 2000: 4–5).
Centered on the basic assumption of human equality, liberal feminist theory and les-
bian and gay rights theory are consistent with other movements that emphasize equal-
ity, such as the movement to secure transgender acceptance and the movement to end
racism. Even so, however, neither liberal feminism nor lesbian and gay rights theory
has an unproblematic history of solidarity with other oppressed groups. Consider, for
example, that when the National Organization for Women was first formed, its founder,
Betty Friedan, sought to distance the organization from the concerns of lesbian women,
and focused the 1966 NOW Statement of Purpose on the concerns of mainstream,
white, straight women (National Organization for Women 2015a). Today, however,
NOW clearly identifies “opposing bigotry against lesbians and gays” among the organi-
zation’s official priorities (National Organization for Women 2015b).
The desire to avoid associating NOW with lesbian women is reminiscent of the
desire, several decades earlier, among many suffragettes to avoid any affiliation
between their movement and the abolitionist movement. In both cases, the underly-
ing concern was strategic rather than principled. The strategy was not particularly
effective, given that the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution extended
elective franchise to Black men fifty years before the Nineteenth Amendment did
the same for women. What at least some suffragettes believed, however, was that
it would be easier to gain support for the rights of just one group (namely, white
women) than it would to gain support for the rights of two groups (namely, all women

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 Feminist, Lesbian, and Queer Theory

and all Blacks). Meanwhile, many abolitionists shared this belief and focused their
attention on just one group (namely, Black men).
Similar negotiations are ongoing in contemporary discussions about the rights of gay
men and lesbian women in connection with transgender rights. The Human Rights
Campaign, for example, has been accused of devoting insufficient resources to support-
ing transgender people and issues.

The point is that this has been a pattern with HRC over the years: proactively
taking steps to publicly promote the idea that they’re trans-inclusive and sup-
portive, but then quickly throwing those ideals and the promises they repre-
sent out the window the moment they become a little inconvenient, the very
moment when being a true trans ally would mean that HRC would have to be
willing to step aside, just a little, and share the spotlight with the trans people
that they say they want to represent and support.
(Juro 2013)

Like so many other movements in the past, the contemporary lesbian and gay rights
movement has been known to sacrifice the interests of other oppressed groups when
they are in competition for limited resources. A common response to this concern is
that it is sometimes necessary to focus on one group at a time because it is simply not
possible to attend to the needs of all groups at the same time. Sometimes we just have
to wait for our turn. Although Black men got there first, US women eventually got the
opportunity to go to the polls as well. If we inadvertently (or perhaps strategically) draft
non-discrimination legislation that does not specifically include transgender identity as
a protected category, we can remedy that omission later.
Sometimes the concern is not so much which group of people is first to gain access
to a particular goal (such as elective franchise, educational opportunities, marriage
equality, quality healthcare, etc.), but rather who gets to decide which goals the move-
ment should even pursue. Now that same sex marriage is legal in all fifty US States,
transgender people are not therefore seeking legislation regarding transgender marriage.
Although many transgender people supported the campaign for marriage equality, it
was never really their issue. Transgender people were, and still are, more personally
invested in issues related to healthcare, for example. This is where the notion, central
to both liberal feminist theory and lesbian and gay rights theory, that we are all the
same and deserve, therefore, to be treated the same, begins to lose relevance. Whatever
rhetorical strength is gained by assuming that we all share a common human essence is
lost with the realization that sometimes we are not the same, that sometimes we do not
want the same things. Ignoring relevant differences in who we are and what we desire
amounts to erasure. Far too often, the suggestion to ignore our differences and focus on
our common humanity, is really code for doing whatever it is that the most privileged
(or least oppressed) person or group involved in the conversation wants to do.

Queering It Up
Queer theory offers an alternative to the rhetoric of an underlying human essence that ren-
ders everyone equal. “Broadly speaking,” according to Annamarie Jagose, “queer describes
those gestures or analytical models which dramatize incoherencies in the allegedly stable

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 INTERSECTIONS

relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire” (1996: 3). To put it another
way, much of what we think we know about how sex, gender, and sexuality are intercon-
nected is confused as well as confusing; queer theory makes a project out of coming up with
ways to demonstrate this confusion. Queer theory tends to employ the concept of social
construction, thus regarding sex, gender, and sexuality, not as innate natural properties,
but rather as categories created under particular social conditions, historical conditions,
political conditions, economic conditions, and so on.
Queer theory takes the liberal feminist idea that gender is not something we inher-
ently are, but something we become, and extends it to both sex and sexuality. Indeed,
queer theory tends to be suspicious of essentialist claims, certainly about sex, gender,
and sexuality, but about virtually all other concepts as well:

Queer theory disrupts lesbian and gay studies, as well as women’s studies, by
avoiding binary contrasts between female and male, feminine and masculine,
homosexual and heterosexual, and so on. Nevertheless, queer theory is com-
patible with the existence of female and male identities, butch and femme
identities, homosexual and heterosexual identities, transgender identities,
and various other identities that exist, be it comfortably or uncomfortably,
within the binary system. Quite simply, queer theory does not dictate the
eradication of existing categories of gender, sex, and sexuality, though many
people assume that it must. Within queer theory, what is sometimes described
as a rejection of binary contrasts is perhaps better described as social con-
structionism with respect to those contrasts. Recall that essentialism is the
belief that various identity categories, such as female and male, feminine and
masculine, homosexual and heterosexual, reflect innate characteristics that
comprise the fundamental nature of the members of those categories, whereas
social constructionism is the belief that such identity categories are historical
and cultural developments.
(Marinucci 2010: 34)

Liberal feminism implies that stripping away the socialization by which our gender
identities are constructed, were it possible to do so, would expose our essential human
nature underneath. Given the more thoroughgoing social construction associated with
queer theory, however, there is no underlying human essence.
Abandoning the notion of a common human essence means abandoning the notion
that our common human essence provides the foundation for human equality. It means
abandoning the problematic assumption that we are all basically the same, and along
with it, the equally problematic tendency to ignore our differences. It means recogniz-
ing our differences, but without thereby attributing them to differences in our essen-
tial nature in the way that radical lesbian feminism attributes the differences between
women and men to differences between the essential nature of women and the essen-
tial nature of men. It means extending the liberal feminist project of interrogating
the mechanisms involved in the social construction of gender to an interrogation
into the mechanisms involved in the social construction of other identity features as
well. It means interrogating the mechanisms involved in the social construction, for
example, of sex categories, by examining the enforcement of rigid bodily norms. It means
interrogating dramatic examples of this, like the practice of subjecting intersex infants
to surgical alteration of otherwise healthy genitals, and it also means interrogating

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more subtle examples, like the widespread practice of pretending to be utterly baffled
about which gender pronouns to apply in conversations with or about transgender
people. Moreover, it means interrogating these practices as mechanisms that produce
and reproduce the categories that structure our existence, and not merely interrogating
them as possible human rights violations or examples of unequal treatment—though it
does not necessarily mean abandoning the rhetoric of rights and equality insofar as this
rhetoric continues to be a useful tool for resisting existing forms of power and control.
Indeed, a queer theoretical framework can be meaningfully understood as an extension
of the liberal feminist project, the lesbian and gay rights project, and even the radical
feminist project, insofar as each of these projects, in one form or another, make it a
priority to resist structures of power and control.

Further Reading
Calhoun, Cheshire (1994) “Separating Lesbian Theory from Feminist Theory,” Ethics, 104(3): 558–581.
(Addresses the complicated relationship between lesbian and feminist theory.)
Fudge, Rachel (2006) “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Feminism but Were Afraid to Ask,”
Bitch Magazine 31: 58–67. (Summarizes various positions within contemporary feminism.)
Jagose, Annamarie (1996) Queer Theory: An Introduction, New York: New York University Press. (Discusses
queer theory in some depth and detail.)
Marinucci, Mimi (2010) Feminism Is Queer: The Intimate Connection between Queer and Feminist Theory,
London: Zed Books. (Discusses queer theory in some depth and detail.)

Related Topics
The sex/gender distinction and the social construction of reality (Chapter 13);
gender essentialism and anti-essentialism (Chapter 14); through the looking glass:
trans theory meets feminist philosophy (Chapter 32); feminist and queer intersections
with disability studies (Chapter 33); feminism and liberalism (Chapter 52).

References
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Bunch, Charlotte (1975) “Not for Lesbians Only,” Quest: A Feminist Quarterly 2: 50–56.
Crow, Barbara (2000) “Introduction: Radical Feminism,” in Barbara Crow (Ed.) Radical Feminism: A
Documentary Reader, New York: New York University Press, 1–9.
Fudge, Rachel (2006) “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Feminism but Were Afraid to Ask,”
Bitch Magazine 31: 58–67.
Hammond, Karla (1980) “An Interview with Audre Lorde,” American Poetry Review March/April: 18–21.
Jagose, Annamarie (1996) Queer Theory: An Introduction, New York: New York University Press.
Jeffreys, Sheila (1991) Anticlimax: Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution, New York: New York
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Rebecca Juro (2013) “Even After All These Years, HRC Still Doesn’t Get It,” Huffington Post (April 1,
2013) [online]. Available from: www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-juro/even-after-all-these-years-hrc-
still-doesnt-get-it_b_2989826.html
Kolata, Gina (1992) “Who Is Female? Science Can’t Say,” The New York Times, February 16.
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MensRights FAQ (2015) MensRights Subreddit [online]. Available from: www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/

wiki/faq
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 32
THROUGH THE
LOOKING GLASS
Trans Theory Meets
Feminist Philosophy
Talia Mae Bettcher

Judith Butler argues that professional philosophy has, in a kind of Hegelian dialectic,
created its own mirror image by seeking to police its boundaries: There is much excit-
ing theoretical work in other disciplines in the humanities and elsewhere, Butler says,
that draws on philosophical traditions. As mainstream Anglo-American philosophy
becomes increasingly rarified, this work outside of the boundaries of professional phi-
losophy flourishes. Indeed, suggests Butler (2004), this work of the Other more properly
captures the meaning of “philosophy.”
This matters when it comes to trans theory since most of it has blossomed from out-
side the bounds of professional philosophy, which itself has demonstrated little interest
in trans issues. Yet, while there is something right about Butler’s view about the dialec-
tical rise of Philosophy’s Other, it also carves too sharp a binary. There is work being
done inside the profession of philosophy that interfaces with the other philosophical
work being done beyond its confines. Butler seems to suggest incorrectly that all of the
feminist philosophers have left the profession of philosophy. And when one works at
the boundaries of philosophy, in feminist philosophy, the line between philosophy and
its Other becomes somewhat blurred.
This chapter considers some of the most important philosophical questions that
have been explored by trans and non-trans feminist philosophers in the liminal space
between philosophy and its Other: What is a woman? How should we understand trans
experiences of dissatisfaction with their assigned gender, their bodies, and their desires
to transition (I use the expression “gender dissatisfaction” in light of the pathologiz-
ing character of “gender dysphoria”)? Finally, how might we understand sexist and
transphobic oppression as both distinct and yet intersecting? And what light can an
answer to this question shed on the first two questions?
 INTERSECTIONS

Preliminaries
While trans people have been theorized by sexologists since the late 1800s, trans theory
proper didn’t emerge until the early to mid-1990s. Part of the nascence of US transgender
politics in the nineties, trans theory was characterized by the coming to authorship
of (at least some) trans people. Standard medicalized accounts of transsexuality came
under fire and trans theory began to make explicit the oppression of trans and gender
variant people as a distinctive form of gender oppression, one that wasn’t reducible to
sexist oppression (Stone 1991). Indeed, trans studies emerged in response to feminist
politics and theory that had been expressly skeptical, even outright hostile, to trans
people since the early seventies, best exemplified by the work of Mary Daly (1978) and
Janice Raymond (1994 [1979]).
Instead, trans theory developed in tense, but close symbiotic relation to the queer
theory that was then being pioneered by Judith Butler (1991, 1993). Indeed, it often
drew on Butler’s theory, which destabilized the notion of gender oppression by show-
ing how queer gender (e.g., butch, femme, trans) subverted heteronormative gender
in ways that traditional feminist theory foreclosed (Stone 1991). There were tensions,
however, since some trans theorists strongly objected to the assimilation of trans the-
ory into a queer paradigm. They worried that while Butler harnessed the trope of trans
to make her points, she obscured the real violence that trans people faced (Namaste
2000 [1996]; Prosser 1998); they worried that Butler’s theories required trans subver-
sion to be understood in such a way that trans people who attempted to conform
to heteronormative gender relations, could only be viewed as politically complicit
(Namaste 2000 [1996]; Prosser 1998; Rubin 2003). Despite such opposition, trans
theory has remained closely linked to queer theory. Yet with queer theory now find-
ing an institutional home in academia, Susan Stryker argues, it has come to privilege
the theorization of gender through the lens of sexuality and even left trans as the site
of all gender trouble. As a consequence, she suggests, trans theory has become queer
theory’s “evil twin” (Stryker 2004).
Trans feminist theory and politics have now come into increasing prominence,
promising an integrative analysis of sexist, trans, racial, and other forms of oppression.
Consider a few examples. Intersex activist Emi Koyama pioneered an expressly inter-
sectional analysis that highlights the importance of race and class (2003, 2006). Julia
Serano (2007), the “Kate Bornstein” of a new generation, introduced and popularized
concepts such “trans-misogyny.” In Spanish and some Latin American contexts where
“queer” has little semantic or political resonance, transfeminismo may now seem to
replace or supersede it (Espineira and Bourcier 2016: 90; Stryker and Bettcher 2016).
This is hopeful because it suggests a locus for shifting the center of gravity away from
a universalizing tendency of Anglo, First-World-centered, trans studies towards some-
thing more genuinely transnational and trans-lingual.
Finally, “trans*” is increasingly being used as a replacement for “transgender”
and “trans.” The asterisk was introduced largely because those who saw themselves
as gender fluid or genderqueer, neither man nor woman, had been left out of the
“trans” of “transgender.” This is ironic since at the inception of transgender politics,
Virginia Prince’s “transgenderist” (people who live in their gender of preference with-
out undergoing medical interventions) was expanded into a broad umbrella term that
was supposed to capture a host of gender variant people (Stryker 2008). Indeed, the

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 Trans Theory Meets Feminist Philosophy

theories of trans oppression largely identified a hostile gender binary as the source of
transgender oppression. No doubt owing to the de facto dominance of binary-identified
trans people (itself a dissonance between theory and practice), it appeared necessary
adjust to the terminology. Whether “trans*” or “trans” ought to be used remains a
controversial matter: some worry that it erases the specificity of violence against trans
women, and others worry that it does no real work combating the erasure of non-
binary identified people. Because most of the issues I discuss centralize trans people
who are binary-identified, at any rate, I will use the term “trans” in part to avoid dupli-
cating the problem that led to introduction of “trans*” in the first place.

Conceptual Analysis of Gender Categories

Philosophers have a long history of asking questions of the form “What is an x?”
(I’ll treat the analysis of the concept of x, the analysis of the category of x, and the
analysis of the meaning of the term “x” as equivalent answers to the question “What is
an x?”). And one can pose such questions about man and woman. Insofar as these are
contested political concepts, however, they raise important political questions as well
as methodological issues about the nature of analysis.
Consider the traditional analysis of woman as “adult, female human being.” This
Socratic-style definition specifies necessarily and sufficient conditions for membership.
Such a standard definition can appear problematic from a feminist perspective in sug-
gesting woman isn’t a cultural category through which women are oppressed, but rather,
a biological one. Moreover, it appears to invalidate the identities of many trans people
who live as men and women but who may be regarded (by some) as female and male
respectively. So it’s also important from a trans political stance.
Jennifer Saul (2012) argues that the political intuition that trans women are women
may lead one to rightfully reject certain analyses of gender terms excluding them or
trivializing their identity claims. In effect, she argues, politics may be relevant to one’s
philosophy of language. Katharine Jenkins (2016) has pursued this insight by critiquing
Sally Haslanger’s (2012) feminist account of gender concepts.
Haslanger distinguishes between conceptual analysis, which yields the ordinary
or manifest concept, descriptive analysis, which yields the operative concept (the
concept as it is actually deployed), and ameliorative analysis, which yields “the target
concept” that we should use for “our” legitimate purposes (2012: 376). She proposes
the target concept of woman as, roughly, someone systematically subordinated on “the
basis of actual or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s role
in biological reproduction” and man as, roughly, someone systematically privileged on
“the basis of actual or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a male’s
role in biological reproduction” (Haslanger 2012: 230). As Jenkins (2016) argues,
trans women who don’t pass as female or who aren’t validated as women on the basis
of presumptions about their bodily sex won’t be viewed as women in this account.
Jenkins proposes another target concept in addition to the concept of gender as
social class, namely, gender as gender identity (as a woman, say), where this is under-
stood as an internal “map” that is “formed to guide someone classed as a woman through
the social and/or material realities that are, in that context, characteristic of women as
a class” (Jenkins 2016: 410).

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 INTERSECTIONS

She concludes that gender as class and gender identity ought to have equal weight
in the ameliorative project which may take a branching route—two target concepts
emerging from the same preliminary commitments.
Providing an account of gender identity is a messy business, however. Consider that
in some ways, many trans women don’t, when they first transition, have much of a map
to guide them through the social and material realities of being classed as a woman.
Sadly, this can leave some ill-prepared to deal with sexist threats about to befall them.
Admittedly, in Jenkins’ account, one need only take the social and material realities of
womanhood as relevant to oneself in some way (2016: 412). One might worry, how-
ever, that in this account it will turn out that some trans women have gender identi-
ties of both men and women. Raised as males, some trans woman may have acquired a
decent internalized map of the social and material realities for men taken as a class. The
cleanest move may well involve avoiding the issues altogether through an appeal to sin-
cere self-identification. Admittedly, this means trans women who don’t yet self-identify
as women aren’t yet women (in this sense). That said, once she does self-identify as
a woman, she may well re-assess her entire life by saying she’s always been a woman
(something we should respect, too).
Just as there are conceptual analyses proceeding from a feminist vantage point, how-
ever, there can be analyses of the gender concepts that proceed from a trans political
vantage point. While ultimately a trans feminist analysis may be preferable, let’s not insist
on this for the moment in order to make explicit the possibility of such a politico-
conceptual project. Instead let’s note that an analysis shaped by a trans political per-
spective ought to accomplish at least two things: (1) provide an analysis that validates
trans identities; and (2) provide an explanation of the invalidation of trans identities as
a form of transphobic oppression.
Haslanger’s analysis can be critiqued from a trans political vantage point as failing
to aim for, let  alone achieve, the second desideratum. The account does little work
illuminating why claims that trans women aren’t women and trans men aren’t men, are
in fact, instances of transphobic invalidation. The analysis of woman as “subordinated
on the basis of presumed female sex” cannot accommodate trans-specific oppression.
While such an account could explain how a trans man, presumed to be of the female
sex, may be oppressed as a woman, it doesn’t elucidate the mechanisms of his identity
invalidation. The oppression involves not merely being placed in a subordinated class,
but in being categorized at odds with his gender identity. While a class-based analysis may be
useful from a feminist perspective, an interpretation-based analysis may be more useful
from a trans political perspective. Methodologically, such an approach requires particu-
lar attention to ordinary concepts that are given in socio-linguistic practices insofar as
they’re often used to categorize/interpret trans people in hostile ways. For the rest of this
section, I’ll consider such a strategy.
In one of the earliest papers in trans philosophy of language, C. Jacob Hale (1996)
argues that woman can be analyzed as what Wittgenstein called a family-resemblance
concept. Such an analysis rejects the Socratic demand for the specification of nec-
essary and sufficient conditions. One merely lists several overlapping features that
some, not all, of the members have in common. While several of the features Hale
lists are biological, many are explicitly cultural, such as leisure pursuits, occupation,
and gender presentation.
The analysis has a benefit, from a feminist perspective, in elucidating how woman
contains at least some cultural content. And it may also appear to support a trans political

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project by broadening the analysis of gender concepts in moving away from traditional
definitions. For example, at least some trans women will count as women since they’ll
possess enough of the features. Moreover, the invalidation of their identities can be
understood as the wrongful insistence on a Socratic-style definition that, in central-
izing sex characteristics such as genitalia, leaves out the cultural content that is in fact
relevant to the concept.
Yet, it appears the analysis is actually problematic from a trans political vantage
point in implying many trans people are still wrong about their self-identities. Consider
that in Corvino’s (2000) family resemblance account, individuals who possess some
of the features (gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, gender
presentation) but not all (biological sex) ought to be considered “intergendered.”
This leads to the result that such individuals who identify as men and women are
wrong. Moreover, in any family-resemblance analysis, even in those cases in which
a trans person’s identity is validated, they’ll nonetheless count as members of the
relevant category only to a marginal extent, unlike many non-trans women who fall
centrally within the category (Bettcher 2013).
To validate the identities of trans people, it seems to me, we must turn instead to
the socio-linguistic practices that exist in trans subcultures (Bettcher 2013, 2014).
In many of these subcultures, being a trans woman is a sufficient condition for being
a woman and being a trans man is a sufficient condition for being a man. Thus, I’ve
argued, there must be at least two sets of concepts in play—the ones that are given
in dominant socio-linguistic practices, and the ones that are given in resistant socio-
linguistic practices. From the “logic” of trans subcultures, which says trans women
are paradigmatic women, it follows possession of XY chromosomes, a penis, etc., goes
no distance in detracting from the womanhood of a trans woman. This inarguably
departs significantly from dominant socio-linguistic practice. Indeed, it’s such a sig-
nificant departure that we must surely speak of two sets of concepts/meanings rather
than one (Bettcher 2013, 2014).
With trans identities validated, it is possible to elucidate transphobic invalidation.
Since trans identities are validated through trans subcultural linguistic practices, it can
be useful to understand the ways in which the dominant socio-linguistic practices func-
tion to invalidate trans identities. The invalidation of trans identities can be understood
in terms of a conflict between mainstream socio-linguistic practices and trans subcul-
tural socio-linguistic practices (Bettcher 2014). This, in turn can be framed in terms of
Lugones’s notion of “worlds”—sufficiently coherent instances of the social that exist in
semantical/ontological tension with other sufficiently coherent instances of the social
where these relations are shot through with relations of power, that is to say, oppression
and resistance (Lugones 2003). For instance, one might argue the standard definitions
of gender terms that deploy the genus human being and the differentia of sex and matu-
rity are actually close to the best analysis of dominant gender concepts/meanings.
This raises fascinating politico-methodological questions about analysis. Typically
philosophers draw on their own linguistic intuitions in developing an analysis of ordi-
nary concepts. However, there can be radically different intuitions depending upon
whether one is familiar with only dominant socio-linguistic practices, or resistant sub-
cultural ones as well. Which intuitions are of more philosophical value in performing
the analysis? Why? This also raises important methodological considerations with regard
to any ameliorative analysis of gender concepts. Can a target concept be given first by an
ordinary concept arising in resistant subcultures? Indeed, must an ameliorative analysis

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 INTERSECTIONS

be grounded in a pre-existing resistant concept if it is to have reach outside the narrow

bounds of professional philosophy? And if so, has not the ameliorative analysis simply
collapsed into a conceptual/descriptive analysis of resistant concepts?

Trans Embodiment
Trans gender dissatisfaction and the motivation to transition out of one’s assigned gen-
der category to another has traditionally been explained by appeal to a Wrong Body
Account, which postulates an innate gender identity or body scheme incongruent with
what is materially given. While that type of account certainly came under attack with
the rise of the queer-inflected transgender politics of the 1990s, Jay Prosser (1998) theo-
retically and politically reinvigorated the view, bringing it into conversation with a
social constructionist queer theory, and, in particular the early work of Judith Butler
(1991, 1993), with the aim of carving out a space for trans politics that doesn’t reduce
to queer politics. Appealing to Didier Anzieu’s psychoanalytic notion of the “skin ego”
as well as Oliver Sacks’ discussions of proprioceptive awareness, Prosser argues that the
Wrong Body trope is a phenomenologically apt description of trans body dysphoria
(1998: 68–69): For the pre-transition transsexual there is a contrast between internal
felt self and external, material body. Crucially, Prosser proposes that the bodily sense of
oneself arises fundamentally from the body, undercutting social constructionist theories
of sex of the type posited in queer theory (1998: 7, 65).
There are, however, serious difficulties with this view. Once the categories female
and male are viewed as every bit as socially constituted as the categories man and
woman, the claim that there is an innate experience of oneself as male or female can’t
get off the ground. Moreover, the account forces a sharp theoretical distinction between
trans people who desire technological alterations of the body and those who desire only
a change in gender presentation and social recognition. But the differences between
binary-identified trans people (trans men and trans women) who seek various types of
bodily alterations and those who do not appear to be merely idiosyncratic.
In response to Prosser’s view, Gayle Salamon (2010) has highlighted the implausibil-
ity of viewing proprioceptive awareness of the body as somehow culturally-transcendent.
She argues that the body postulated in such a view is ultimately unrecognizable as human
(Salamon 2010: 88). Indeed, she argues that “Prosser asks the wrong question” and suggests
“that the usefulness of the body image for theorizing gendered embodiment is precisely not
that the body image is material, but that it allows for a resignification of materiality itself”
(Salamon 2010: 38)
While Salamon draws from many psychoanalytic thinkers, Schilder’s (1950) account
of body image plays an important role in her understanding of how it works (Salamon
2010: 29–34). In this view, the postural body image rather than arising innately is built
up over time through experiential contact with the world (including interactions with
other people) (Schilder 1950: 30). Crucially, this body image is much dependent upon
one’s history of experience, unintelligible without memory: The body image is histor-
ically-layered, and “encrusted” as an accumulation over time. Consequently, the body
image may well be at odds with one’s material body, allowing for a lack of complete
fit between body image and the material body. Schilder thereby de-pathologizes phan-
tom limb experiences, pointing to the normality of a disjunction between internal body
image and the material body. This is important for Salamon, who wishes to argue that

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since an incongruence between body image and body is an ordinary affair, trans people
who experience this incongruence cannot be viewed as aberrant (2010: 2).
It is doubtful, however, that this can adequately explain the origin of trans expe-
riences of incongruence. Consider a trans person who is raised to see themselves as
male and to follow male-assigned gender norms. While the body image may be layered,
saturated and encrusted through historical accumulation, it is difficult to see why there
would be a significant gendered incongruence between body image and the material
body. What are the worldly experiences that this trans woman might have had that
could have given her the body image of a woman, given her constant subjection to the
norms that determine and gender such interactions in advance?
To be sure, both Schilder and Salamon allow for more than mere environmental
engagement—affective investment in one’s body is paramount. Salmon writes that
“without that investment, our relationship to our bodies is one of depersonalized
estrangement: my sense of the ‘mine-ness’ of my own body—and, crucially, even my
sense of its coherence—depends on this narcissistic investment” (2010: 42). And cer-
tainly such investments allow for much less tethering to environmental engagement,
thereby offering at least the possibility of an affect-saturated body image arising at odds
with the environmental engagements proscribed in advance by gender norms. What
remains unexplained, however, are just what these affective investments are and how
they arise in the first place. Far from an account of the origins of trans gender dissatisfac-
tion, it appears to be the virtual absence of one.
In this respect, nativist and constructionist accounts may be operating at different
theoretical levels. While the broad sweep of the constructionist argument appears con-
vincing enough, by itself it provides insufficient detail in explaining how trans gender
dissatisfaction arises. By contrast, while the nativist account purports to provide such
detail, thereby answering the question how one’s sense of embodiment could arise in
incongruence with not only one’s material body but also the environmental engage-
ments that have been normatively laid out, it is rendered ineligible by these general
constructionist insights.
To be sure, the very question which demands a causal explanation for trans gender
dissatisfaction may be rightfully viewed with suspicion: Does it not proceed with the
assumption that trans lives are anomalous, in need of targeted explanation for their
deviance from the norm? In this respect, Salamon’s generalizing account does work
disabling the marginalizing character of such a question. Yet a version of the question
exists not for intrigued theorists aiming to explaining a curious phenomenon, but for
trans people themselves who may very well wonder about the why’s and the how’s.
Viewed in such a light, the question is not theoretical so much as existential, bear-
ing on one’s understanding one’s own life. In this respect, Salamon may leave those
trans theorists who point to the question how their gender dissatisfaction could have
possibly arisen at odds with the norm-determined environmental engagements, still
searching for answers.
It is also notable that Salamon’s account, like the nativist account, centralizes inter-
nal awareness as an awareness of one’s body. As such, the social phenomenon of public
gender presentation seems somewhat marginalized. To be sure, in her account gender
presentation can be incorporated into one’s internal bodily awareness. For example, in
engaging with one’s environment through use of walking stick, a person without sight
could incorporate the stick into her experience of her body as it served as a means of

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sensory, navigational engagement with the world (Salamon 2006). But what would it
be to take the role of public gender presentation more seriously?
In Prosser’s view, a transsexual’s change in embodiment is deep, while a mere change
in gender presentation is superficial. In my view, by contrast, what I call “proper” and
“intimate” appearances are on par, equally morally laden, equally culturally constituted
appearances. Consider that human nakedness as a cultural possibility is socially consti-
tuted through the subjection of bodies to moral boundaries governing sensory access
within a system of interpersonal spatiality (Bettcher 2014, 2016). Indeed, because these
boundaries are sex-differentiated, we may speak of two boundary structures, two forms,
of moral nakedness, male and female. For example, female nakedness has two tiers (top-
less, fully naked) while male nakedness doesn’t. When viewed this way, differentiated
forms of nakedness (intimate appearances) couldn’t exist without the presumption of
clothedness—their possibility depends upon differential forms of public gender pres-
entation (proper appearances). A change in one’s proper appearance must surely be
viewed as just as weighty as a change in one’s intimate appearance; therefore, both
are essential in the constitution of one’s physical person as morally bounded. So what
would it be to understand one’s bodily experience as necessarily including normative
boundaries, as bifurcated between the experience of the proper and intimate appearance
of one’s physical person? Such a view is certainly suggestive of particularly moral affec-
tive investments such as gendered dignity, indignity, vulnerability, and so forth. While
this line of thought cannot be pursued in depth here, at the end of this chapter I briefly
suggest one way these investments might arise in opposition to societal expectations.

Trans Feminism Conversations

Trans/feminist engagements can be distinguished into intersectional and interactive
variations (Scott-Dixon 2006). Presupposing the concept of intersectionality, the
former proceeds with the insight that trans and sexist oppressions can be blended
with each other in complex ways. For example, Rachel McKinnon (2014) argues
that trans women face “dual layer” stereotype threats. While a non-trans woman may
avoid being “assertive or firm in argumentation” due to the threat of being perceived
as manly, a trans woman may avoid it due to the threat of being perceived as manly,
and hence a man.
An interactional approach, by contrast, proceeds by viewing feminist and trans
theory/politics as distinct and asks questions about their possibilities for solidary. At
first blush, this approach seems to arise from a mere failure to take seriously intersec-
tions of sexist and transphobic oppressions: The alleged contrast between feminism and
trans theory/politics turns out to be nothing more than a contrast between (non-trans)
feminist and trans theory/politics. Yet the historical facts are that US trans theory/
politics arose in partial response to forms of feminism that were outright hostile to trans
people. We can therefore raise questions about the underlying theoretical basis of those
forms of feminism as well as the trans politics that emerged in response.
Cressida Heyes (2003) critiques the radical feminism of Janice Raymond (1994
[1979]), while raising worries about the particular vision of transgender liberation
espoused by Leslie Feinberg (1998). Heyes argues that while Raymond erases the agency
of trans people altogether, Feinberg endorses an agency unfettered by a feminist ethics
of self-transformation. To say that one should be free to express gender however one

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 Trans Theory Meets Feminist Philosophy

pleases is to treat gender as a property of an atomic self, rather than as relational

(i.e., expressing one’s gender involves interacting with others in particular ways). When
viewed as relational, it is clear certain gender enactments (e.g., misogynistic forms of
masculinity) ought to be subject to both feminist and trans political critique. While rhe-
torically useful, the appeal to unfettered gender expression isn’t a viable political move.
Beyond such concerns, however, there is an argument to be found in the work of
Raymond (and others) that had hitherto remained unanswered—one concerning the
semantics and politics of resistant terms such as “lesbian,” “womon,” and “woman”
(when taken up for feminist purposes) (Bettcher 2016). Raymond’s own version of
the argument is obscured by an appeal to chromosomal essentialism as well as virulent
transphobia (1994 [1979]). Because there is no space for detailed exegesis, I’ll simply
reconstruct what I take to be the best version of the argument.
The idea is that the self-identifying use of a term in resistance to oppression is both
morally/politically and semantically constrained. It would be morally/politically inap-
propriate for a white person to claim to be “a person of color” because the resistant
self-identification emerges from a specific history of oppression to which this white
person has not been subjected. In effect, it would be appropriative. Moreover, the
very meaning of the resistant term is given by a history of oppression to which it is a
response. When a white person who hasn’t experienced racial oppression claims the
label “person of color” it cannot possibly have resistant meaning, and it’s unclear what
meaning it does have.
Heyes takes up some of Raymond’s racial analogies. She points to Raymond’s rhetori-
cal question, “Does a Black person who wants to be white suffer from the ‘disease’ of
being a ‘transracial’?” and her reply, “there is no demand for transracial medical inter-
vention precisely because most Blacks recognize that it is their society, not their skin,
that needs changing” (Raymond 1994 [1979]: xvi). She points out, first, Raymond’s
claim is false insofar as there exists a veritable industry for cosmetic technologies
designed to lessen the ethnically and racially marked features of the body. More deeply,
she argues, the historical conditions of the construction of race and gender are impor-
tantly different, preventing easy analogies. She points to the historical role played by
heredity in determining race, which helps undermine the possibility of “transracialism”
(Heyes 2006: 271). By contrast, insofar as sex has been constituted as a core ontological
fact in a strict binary scheme (unlike race), the conditions are ironically in place for the
possibility of sex change as well as medicalized discourse, which reinscribes the binary
(Heyes 2003: 1102; 2006: 277).
However, Heyes doesn’t appear to address the radical feminist argument. While
she points to the way that “changing race” has a history of being associated with
“racial passing,” leaving a nonwhite-to-white transitioner subject to accusations of
“passing” (2006: 272), Heyes underdescribes cases in which white people pass as peo-
ple of color. It’s not clear why the argument that white people are both semantically
and morally ruled out from using racially resistant terms doesn’t apply in the case of
gender terms as well.
Consider an individual, assigned male at birth, who lives part of their life “as a man,”
who then goes on to transition, now self-identifying as a woman. Since they may not
have yet experienced sexist oppression, how can “woman” be claimed in any resistant
sense? To be sure, one might allow that at some point down the road they may experi-
ence enough sexist oppression for the term to take on that resistant sense (Raymond

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 INTERSECTIONS

wouldn’t agree, of course). But this doesn’t help secure a trans political vision that she’s
a woman as soon as she self-identifies and possibly earlier, so that the denial of her self-
identity is a form of transphobic invalidation. It won’t do any good to claim that she
counts as a woman in the dominant sense. At best she might count marginally. But if
the legitimacy of her claim arises as a resistant sense, we’ll need to know the oppression
from which that claim derives its resistant import (Bettcher 2016).
I begin by noting that trans people are regularly harassed, assaulted, raped, and
murdered because they’re trans. They have trouble finding employment, have difficul-
ties with appropriate healthcare. The list goes on. And I would argue that identity
invalidation can only be understood as oppressive when it’s situated within such a
broader context of violence and harassment. Consider a particular kind of trans iden-
tity invalidation—“reality enforcement.” In such cases trans women are not merely
viewed as men, but as “really men, appearances to the contrary.” This appearance/reality
contrast is the basis for regarding trans people as either deceivers and pretenders. Such
representations are not mere stereotypes, but arise as a consequence of gendered sar-
torial practices of bodily concealment. Because public gender presentation (proper
appearance) communicates the form of one’s intimate appearance, trans people taken
to “misalign” public gender presentation with private body are situated within an
appearance/reality contrast and consequently viewed as either deceivers or pretend-
ers. The reason for this is that within dominant practices, public gender presentation
communicates genital status. Importantly, this system of communication is an abusive
practice of mandatory disclosure of private information about genitalia, revealed by
genital verification practices and, less severely, euphemistic but invasive questions
(“Have you had the surgery?”) that attend reality enforcement (Bettcher 2014, 2016).
This view lays the ground for an intersectional trans feminist analysis as the commu-
nication of genital status is part of a more general system that constitutes and provides
the resources for negotiating, closeness and distance between people (“interpersonal
spatiality”) (Bettcher 2014, 2016). It lays down the possibilities of standard manipu-
lative (hetero) sexual engagements (for example, a woman’s gender presentation, or
her accepting a drink, may be taken to euphemistically communicate sexual interest,
regardless of her intentions). While distinct, transphobic, and sexist violence are there-
fore blended together in a unitary system that leaves trans women vulnerable to both
forms of oppression in interblended ways (Bettcher 2014).
And it also affords an answer to the radical feminist argument by linking the change
in meaning of gender terms to a more fundamental resistance to an inherently abusive
gender system relevant to trans-specific oppression (Bettcher 2016). In trans subcul-
tures such abusive practices are not in play—public gender presentation does not com-
municate genital status, and the nature of one’s intimate appearance is left entirely
open. It’s not merely that the meanings of “man” and “woman” have changed in trans
resistant cultures, rather, the extra-linguistic (primarily sartorial) practices that pro-
vide the social context for the linguistic practices have themselves necessarily changed
(Bettcher 2014, 2016).
This points to the resistant force of trans identities prior to transitioning, even though
much of the violence bound-up with reality enforcement occurs afterwards. For exam-
ple, the struggle to come out to oneself and to others as a woman or a man is invariably
informed by the appearance/reality contrast and the deceiver/pretender bind (e.g., the
fear that one might be engaging in deception, that one can only pretend). That is,
reality enforcement as a condition of violence against trans people typically saturates

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the entire process of transition, leading to the conclusion that the work of transition
is, of necessity, resistant. Indeed, it’s not implausible to suppose that very trans affec-
tive investments in both public and intimate manifestations of their bodies that help
motivate transition (discussed in the previous section) might themselves be seen as aris-
ing at odds with their original assignments, providing the foundation for trans gender
dissatisfaction and the desire to transition. That is, trans affective investments at the
root of gender dissatisfaction may be inherently resistant in character—a reaction to
an inherently abusive system. If so, the problematic nature of the question why trans
people are motivated to transition might be turned inside out by asking, instead, why
non-trans people aren’t similarly motivated.

Further Reading
Diaz-Leon, Esa (2016) “‘Woman’ as a Politically Significant Term: A Solution to the Puzzle,” Hypatia 31(2):
245–258.
Heyes, Cressida (2003) “Feminist Solidarity after Queer Theory: The Case of Transgender,” Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 28(4): 1093–1120.
Kapusta, Stephanie (2016) “Misgendering and Its Moral Contestability,” Hypatia 31(3): 502–519.
McKinnon, Rachel (forthcoming) “The Epistemology of Propaganda,” Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research.
Overall, Christine (2004) “Transsexualism and ‘Transracialism,’” Social Philosophy Today 20(3): 183–193.
Watson, Lori (2016) “The Woman Question,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3(1–2): 248–255.

Related Topics
The sex/gender distinction and the social construction of reality (Chapter 13); gender
essentialism and anti-essentialism (Chapter 14); materialism: sex, gender, and what lies
beneath (Chapter 16); personal identity and relational selves (Chapter 18); epistemic
injustice, ignorance, and trans experience (Chapter 22); the genealogy and viability
of the concept of intersectionality (Chapter 28); feminist theory, lesbian theory, and
queer theory (Chapter 31); feminist and queer intersections with disability studies
(Chapter 33).

References
Bettcher, Talia (2013) “Trans Women and the Meaning of ‘Woman,’” in Alan Soble, Nicholas Power, Raja
Halwani (Eds.) Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings 6th ed., Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
233–250.
—— (2014) “Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance,” Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society 39(2): 43–65.
—— (2016) “Intersexuality, Transsexuality, Transgender,” in Lisa Jane Disch and Mary Hawkesworth
(Eds.) Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 407–427.
Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge.
—— (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York: Routledge.
—— (2004) “Can the ‘Other’ of Philosophy Speak?” in Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge, 232–250.
Corvino, John (2000) “Analyzing Gender,” Southwest Philosophy Review 17(1): 173–180.
Daly, Mary (1978) Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Espineira, Karine and Bourcier, Marie-Hélène/Sam (2016)“Transfeminism: Something Else, Somewhere
Else,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3(1–2): 86–96.
Feinberg, Leslie (1998) Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

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Hale, C. Jacob (1996) “Are Lesbians Women?” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 11(2): 94–121.
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: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 28(4): 1093–1120.
—— (2006) “Changing Race, Changing Sex: The Ethics of Self-Transformation,” Journal of Social Philosophy
37(2): 266–282.
Jenkins, Katharine (2016) “Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept of Woman,”
Ethics 126(2): 394–421.
Lugones, María (2003) Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Koyama, Emi (2003) “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” in Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier (Eds.) Catching
a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century, Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 244–259.
—— (2006) “Whose Feminism Is It Anyway? The Unspoken Racism of the Trans Inclusion Debate,” in
S. Stryker and S. Whittle (Eds.) The Transgender Studies Reader, New York: Routledge, 698–705.
McKinnon, Rachel (2014) “Stereotype Threat and Attributional Ambiguity for Trans Women,” Hypatia
29(4): 857–872.
Namaste, Viviane (2000 [1996]) “‘Tragic Misreadings’: Queer Theory’s Erasure of Transgender
Subjectivity,” in Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People, Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 9–23.
Prosser, Jay (1998) Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, New York: Columbia University Press.
Raymond, Janice (1994 [1979]) The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, New York: Teachers
College Press.
Rubin, Henry (2003) Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among Transsexual Men, Nashville, TN:
Vanderbilt University Press.
Salamon, Gayle (2006) “‘The Place Where Life Hides Away’: Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, and the Place of
Bodily Being,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17(2): 96–112.
—— (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 Sharon L. Crasnow and Anita M. Superson (Eds.) Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist
Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 195–216.
Schilder, Paul (1950) The Image and Appearance of the Human Body, New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Scott-Dixon, Krista (2006) Trans/forming Feminisms: Trans/Feminist Voices Speak Out, Toronto, ON:
Sumach Press.
Serano, Julia (2007) Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity,
Emeryville, CA: Seal Press.
Stone, Sandy (1991) “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto,” in Julia Epstein and Kristina
Straub (Eds.) Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, New York: Routledge, 280–304.
Stryker, Susan (2004) “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and
Gay Studies 10(2): 212–215.
—— (2008) Transgender History, Berkeley, CA: Seal Press.
—— and Talia M. Bettcher (2016) “Editors’ Introduction,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3(1–2): 1–4.

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 33
FEMINIST AND QUEER
INTERSECTIONS WITH
DISABILITY STUDIES
Kim Q. Hall

The meanings of disability and gender are taken for granted in dominant Western contexts.
Both are presumed to be the inevitable consequence of “bodymind” characteristics.
However, just as feminist theory questions the taken-for-grantedness of gender, disabil-
ity studies advance a critical approach to disability that denaturalizes and politicizes it.
Within disability studies, the meaning of the concept and lived experience of disabil-
ity is not understood to be an inevitable, unmediated result of bodymind impairment.
Instead, disability studies theorizes disability as an important social category whose con-
tingent meanings are forged, negotiated, and transformed within a cauldron of lived
experience and relationships, conceptual and built architectures, normalizing ideolo-
gies, and the globalized uneven distribution of life chances. Disability studies scholars
posit disability as a critical concept with which to imagine and create a theory and
politics aimed at social, political, and economic justice.
Like all dynamic, vibrant fields, disability studies is itself contested terrain, and dif-
ferences within the field have generated feminist, queer, transnational, and decolonial
approaches. In what follows, I lay out some important discussions in the field, focus-
ing specifically on intersections with feminist philosophy in disability theorizing about
feminist, queer, transnational, and decolonial approaches; the models and meanings of
disability and its relation to impairment; sex, gender, and disability; minds, bodies, and
mental disability; disability epistemology; dependency, vulnerability, and justice; and
the nature of philosophy itself.

Feminist, Queer, Crip: Theorizing Disability and Debility

Feminist disability studies is an interdisciplinary field that draws upon both disability
studies’ critique of disability and feminist theory’s critique of sex and gender, along
with their co-constitutive interrelationship with other axes of difference such as race,
class, and sexuality in an effort to forge new understanding of power and difference.
Despite various areas of contestation, feminist disability theorists share a concern that
the co-constitutive relationship between gender and disability has been undertheorized
 INTERSECTIONS

in both feminist theory and disability studies. Feminist disability studies calls for more
than an additive approach to gender and disability, aiming instead for a transformation
of both fields (Garland-Thomson 2011).
Queer disability studies, or crip theory, shares feminist disability studies’ interest in
understanding the mutually reinforcing relationship between gender, sexuality, and dis-
ability. In addition, crip theory is influenced by queer theory’s critique of normalization
and identity, as well as the queer of color critique of whiteness as the unexamined
identity that orients queer theory (see Muñoz 1999; Johnson 2001). Thus, crip theory
builds on queer theory’s critique of identity by questioning normalizing conceptions of
disability in disability theory, politics, and communities, while acknowledging the cru-
cial role of identity in disability activism (Sandahl 2003: 27; McRuer 2006: 35). While
pointing to areas of generative intersection between queer theory and disability studies,
crip theorists also caution against conflation of the two fields, turning their critical
attention to exclusions within queer theory. Carrie Sandahl writes,

My project of extricating disability studies from queer theory echoes the work
of other scholars who have criticized queer theory’s tendency to absorb and
flatten internal differences, in particular to neutralize its constituents’ material
and cultural differences and to elevate the concerns of gay white men above
all others.
(2003: 27)

Crip theory interrogates the interdependence of systems of compulsory heterosexuality,

compulsory ablebodiedness, and compulsory ablemindedness that deploys queerness and
disability in the service of normalizing and naturalizing heterosexuality, ablebodiedness,
and ablemindedness (McRuer 2006: 89). Building on Judith Butler’s (1993) concept
of critically queer, Alison Kafer and Robert McRuer argue for a disability theory and
politics that is “critically crip” (Kafer 2013: 15–18; McRuer 2006: 40–41). A critically
crip position understands the meaning of disability as open to revision and possible
replacement (McRuer 2006; Kafer 2013).
Crip theorists critique the neoliberalism of a rights-based, inclusion-centered approach
to disability justice (McRuer 2006: 2). Thus, rather than assume the common ground of
disability identity, crip theory questions the normalizing boundaries that define member-
ship in the category of disability. In so doing, crip theorists point to exclusions within
disability theories and politics that also, paradoxically, reinforce one of the main targets
of disability studies critique: namely, that the distinction between disability and abil-
ity is self-evident. The emphasis on inclusion of disabled people often relies on claims
of similarity between disabled and abled people. Most often, the inclusion-centered
argument focuses on disability as a shared human characteristic, something all human
beings experience in infancy, when injured or ill, or in our elder years. Such arguments,
according to McRuer, reflect a liberal disability rights politics that fails to pay sufficient
critical attention to the fact that celebration and recognition of different identities is
consistent with neoliberalism (2006: 2). One problematic consequence of a neoliberal,
rights-based, inclusion-centered politics is that it enables the incorporation of privileged
members of a minority group at the expense of its more marginalized members.
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder use the term “able-nationalism” for dis-
ability politics centered on quests for access to the full benefits of US citizenship.
Able-nationalism, according to Mitchell and Snyder, is a

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 Feminism, Queer Theory, and Disabilities

tactic of interpreting a privileged minority at the expense of the further abjection

of the many . . . Ablenationalist inclusion models involve treating [disabled
people] as exceptional bodies in ways that further valorize able-bodied norms
as universally desirable and as the naturalized qualifications of fully capacitated
citizenship to which others inevitably aspire.
(2015: 44–45)

Mitchell’s and Snyder’s concept of able-nationalism is informed by Jasbir Puar’s (2007)

notion of homonationalism. Both homonationalism and ablenationalism promote US
exceptionalism by portraying the US as a beacon of a just and inclusive society that
recognizes the rights of minority groups (in this case, LGBTQ and disabled people)
and then uses this purported evidence of social justice to justify its violent practices
in other countries characterized as more oppressive. As Nirmala Erevelles points out,
globalized neoliberal capitalism and war produce disability in third world contexts, thus
producing a situation in which Western countries like the United States point to anti-
disability discrimination policies in order to portray themselves as promoters of disabil-
ity rights while producing disability in non-Western countries (Erevelles 2011, 2014b).
Additionally, a disability identity politics of inclusion obscures the neoliberal elimina-
tion of social services that support disabled people (Mitchell and Synder 2015: 38).
Puar questions the distinction between abled and disabled at the heart of Western
disability studies’ preoccupation with a representational, identity politics conception
of disability. Reflecting on the assertion that we will all be disabled if we live long
enough, a claim that has played a pivotal role in depathologizing and destigmatizing
disability, Puar (2009) asserts that this claim normalizes a conception of ordinary life
that is available only to the global elite. Locating disability at the end of “ordinary life,”
Puar contends, assumes that all bodies share a common temporal horizon characterized
by general bodymind stability and health (barring congenital impairment, illness, or
injury), a conception that relies on a universalized Western distinction between normal
and abnormal to define disability (2009: 165–166). Instead, Puar proposes to place in
question globalized assumptions about able-bodied capacity (2009: 166). Influenced
by Julie Livingston’s analysis of how the meanings of disability and impairment in
Botswana challenge Western assumptions about distinctions between disability and
ability, Puar uses Livingston’s term debility to develop a critique of globalized neolib-
eralism’s production of precarity (Livingston 2006: 112–113; Puar 2009). Puar argues
that, within a context of neoliberalism, all bodies are debilitated or incapacitated in
some way, but only the bodies of global elites are able to be recapacitated while other
bodies are expendable (2009: 167–168).
Investigations into the history of disability as an exclusionary rather than unifying
category reveal the white and Western-centeredness of disability studies. Accordingly,
Chris Bell (2006) argues that the field remains ignorant of its white-centeredness. In
his critique of the field Bell points out that most examples of disability discrimination
and experience focus on white disabled people and that citational practices in disabil-
ity studies privilege white scholars in the field (277–278). Given this, Bell contends
that white disability studies is a more accurate name for the field. Erevelles (2011) cri-
tiques both the white and Western-centeredness of US feminist disability studies and
the ableism of third world feminism. In addition, Erevelles (2014b) questions queer
and feminist conceptions of disability’s desirability as possibly constitutive of another
version of disability as universal human condition. Erevelles asks, “How is disability

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 INTERSECTIONS

celebrated if its very existence is inextricably linked to the violence of social/economic

conditions of capitalism?” (2011: 17). As Erevelles points out, the social, political, and
economic conditions that produce disability (e.g., poverty, lack of access to healthcare,
war, epidemics, and racism) are not equally shared by all bodies; therefore, in order
to avoid false universalization of the experiences of globally privileged bodyminds,
disability studies must contextualize its analysis (2011: 17–18). In order to address
these concerns, Erevelles calls for a transnational materialist critical disability studies
(Erevelles 2014b).
Clare Barker and Stuart Murray (2010) also challenge the assumption of the uni-
versal applicability of Western disability studies’ framework. They observe that while
disability may be deemed abnormal in the economic north, the violence of colonial-
ism, neocolonialism, and neoliberal globalization have normalized disability in the eco-
nomic south. Barker and Murray argue for a situated approach to disability that resists
universalizing Western ontological and epistemological assumptions about disability
(2010: 228–229). In pointing toward indigenous communal conceptions of health, they
challenge Western individualist definitions of normalcy that are embedded in Western
disability studies’ critiques and suggest possible future directions for a decolonial dis-
ability studies (Barker and Murray 2010: 229).
Kafer names her approach “feminist queer crip” in order to acknowledge the impor-
tance of feminist and queer theories, activism, and communities, as well as affirm crip
resistance to normalization and commitment to radical politics of disability (2013: 15).
Rather than present a more unifying, inclusive approach, Kafer aims to keep in pro-
ductive tension areas of contestation and achieved provisional common ground that
characterize coalitional possibilities between feminist, queer, and crip politics. Within
a feminist queer crip approach, Kafer contends, disability is best understood as a set of
questions rather than fixed definitions (2013: 11). To understand disability as a site
of questions maintains a critically self-reflexive perspective on the use of disability
as a unifying term, to situate its political potential, and acknowledge “the exclusions
enacted in the desire for a unified disability community” (Kafer 2013: 17).

Impairment and Disability

Kafer offers a coalitional method that places in question distinctions between impair-
ment and disability and the medical and social models that have been foundational
in disability studies. Its critique of the medical model distinguishes disability studies
from clinical and rehabilitative approaches to disability. The medical model con-
ceives of disability as the inevitable result of bodymind impairment and is informed by
what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2012) calls a “eugenic logic” that aims to eradi-
cate or prevent disability. Thus the medical model conceives of disability as an indi-
vidual’s problem characterized by disruption of norms of bodymind function and/or
bodily appearance.
By contrast, the social model distinguishes between impairment and disability and
conceives of disability as produced by norms that characterize the built and attitudinal
environment. Not all impairments count as disabilities. For instance, high blood pres-
sure and nearsightedness are not considered disabilities in Western cultural contexts.
While the medical model conceives of disability as a problem rooted in the abnormality
of an individual’s bodymind, the social model conceives of disability as a social justice
problem (Clare 1999: 105–106).

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 Feminism, Queer Theory, and Disabilities

While the distinction between the medical and social models of disability has been
politically useful in the fight against disability discrimination, a critique of the social
model has emerged within disability studies. Some contend that by overemphasizing
the social model, disability theory and activism ignores rather than de-pathologizes
real disabled bodies (Siebers 2001; Wendell 2001; Siebers 2008a). For example, Tobin
Siebers and Susan Wendell assert that while disability is certainly a social formation,
it is also an embodied experience of limitation that is not solely a result of ableist
ideology. Siebers writes,

I am not claiming that the body exists apart from social forces or that it rep-
resents something more real, natural, or authentic than things of culture. I am
claiming that the body has its own forces and that we need to recognize them
if we are to get a less than one-sided picture of how bodies and their represen-
tations affect each other for good and bad. The body is, first and foremost, a
biological agent teeming with vital and chaotic forces. It is not inert matter
subject to easy manipulation by social representations.
(2001: 749)

In his efforts to develop a disability studies analysis of the body’s agency, Siebers
situates his approach within new materialist emphasis on the interaction between
matter and meaning, nature and culture (Siebers 2008b). Similarly, Garland-
Thomson proposes the concept of “misfit” as a feminist new materialist understand-
ing of disability as “a dynamic encounter between flesh and world” (2011: 592).
Such an account strives to be attuned to both the embodied experiences of disability
and the social world that influences but does not wholly determine that experience.
Conceived as a “material-discursive site of becoming,” disability from a feminist
new materialist perspective is neither individual pathology nor social construction
(Garland-Thompson 2011: 592).
Pain figures centrally in both Siebers’s and Wendell’s critique of the social model.
In their accounts, pain marks a boundary of the real bodymind that pushes back against
the social model. Wendell (2001) argues that the centrality of the social model in dis-
ability studies reflects the privileged experiences of the “healthy disabled.” According
to Wendell, the healthy disabled are people whose impairments have permanent and
predictable effects on their lives (2001: 19). Conversely, the “unhealthy disabled” are
people whose impairments affect their lives in unpredictable and inconsistent ways
(2001: 19). Simply put, healthy disabled people are not ill, and unhealthy disabled people
have disabling illnesses. Wendell argues that the distinction between the social model
and the medical model has produced a distinction between disability and illness within
disability studies and activism that fails to accommodate those who are chronically ill,
many of whom are disabled women (2001: 19). Wendell asserts disability studies can

pay more attention to impairment while supporting a social constructionist

analysis of disability, especially if we focus our attention on the phenomenology
of impairment, rather than accepting a medical approach to it. Knowing more
about how people experience, live with, and think about their own impair-
ments could contribute to an appreciation of disability as a valuable difference
from the medical norms of body and mind.
(2001: 23)

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 INTERSECTIONS

In other words, refusing to be silent about experiences of impairment need not involve
a re-medicalization of disability (Wendell 2001: 23).
Other critics of the social model express concern about how distinctions between
impairment and disability, like feminist distinctions between sex and gender, tend to
naturalize impairment (Clare 1999: 6–7). According to Kafer, the assumption that disa-
bility is social and impairment is a physical fact ignores the extent to which impairment
is also social (2013: 7). While some critics often invoke pain as evidence of impairment’s
non-socially constructed reality, other disability theorists discuss the impossibility of
extracting pain’s physiological features from social and cultural dimensions in lived
experience (Pastavas 2014). For example, as Alyson Pastavas notes, the experience of
pain is also significantly gendered and shaped by gender, medical and popular discourse,
and the pharmaceutical industry, as well as biology (2014: 212). Understanding “pain as
a cultural event” allows Pastavas to critically intervene in dominant cultural narratives
that assume an intrinsic connection between pain and suffering (2014: 203).
Questioning the social model’s distinction between impairment and disability leads
Kafer (2013) to propose a third model that she calls the political relational model. The
political relational model situates impairment and disability within social, cultural,
political, and economic structures. It offers a provisional account of impairment and
disability in the service of coalitional, transformative disability politics (Kafer 2013).
A political relational model is critically and reflexively attuned to both ableist exclu-
sions and exclusions within disability communities, and it emerges from provisional,
coalitional ground between disability activism and other political movements that
are not typically perceived as connected to disability, such as transgender activism
(Kafer 2013: 12–13, 150–151).

Sex, Gender, and Disability

Feminist and queer disability studies challenges ableist and heteronormative concep-
tions of sex and gender. For instance, Eli Clare points out that gender norms are ableist
(1999: 112). Being disabled places one outside the categories of “real man” and “real
woman.” As a result of failure to successfully embody dominant gender norms, the sexu-
ality of disabled people has been rendered invisible in dominant contexts (Garland-
Thomson 2011; Wilkerson 2011; McRuer and Mollow 2012). Thus, while feminist
theory critiques the sexual objectification of women, many feminist disability theo-
rists argue for the importance of sexual visibility and sexual agency of disabled women
(Garland-Thomson 2011; Wilkerson 2011). Many queer crip feminist theorists advance
a disability sexual politics that both makes visible disabled people’s sexual desire and
experience and offers resistant alternatives to compulsory able-bodiedness and compul-
sory heterosexuality (Finkelstein 2003; McRuer and Mollow 2012).
Rethinking sex and gender through the lens of critical disability studies suggests
possible connections between transgender studies and disability studies (Clare 1999;
Hall 2009; Kafer 2013; Baril 2015). Like lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people
share with disabled people a history of pathologization. For example, both homosexual-
ity and gender identity disorder (GID) were categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Medical Disorders, and many people diagnosed with homosexuality or GID
were incarcerated in mental institutions and subjected to various treatments designed
to cure them. Homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973, and in 2013 Gender
Dysphoria (GD) replaced GID in the DSM-V. The intention behind changing GID to

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 Feminism, Queer Theory, and Disabilities

GD was to destigmatize gender nonconformity by emphasizing the feeling of dysphoria

with one’s assigned sex and gender rather than gender nonconformity itself (American
Psychiatric Association 2013).
Despite a shared history of pathologization, some transgender people reject the
notion that there are similarities between transgender and disability. While he is con-
cerned about the need to rely on disability anti-discrimination law to advocate for
transgender rights, Dean Spade cautions against a transgender politics that aims to
de-stigmatize transgender by re-stigmatizing disability (2003: 34). Spade resists the
ableism that refuses to make connections between disability and transgender and
instead focuses his critique on the medicalization of transgender that follows from
the need to rely on a GID (or now GD) diagnosis in legal arguments for trans rights
(2003: 34–35). While many transgender people desire diagnosis, Spade is concerned
about the coercive and regulatory effects that seem to reinforce rather than challenge
binary gender and the misuse of diagnosis (2003: 34–35).
There are important critical resonances between Spade’s concerns about the medi-
calization of transgender and Kafer’s critique of unintended implications of distinc-
tions between the medical and social models in disability studies. Kafer stresses that
criticism of the medical model is not a rejection of medicine or healthcare; rather, to
critique the medical model is to critique the depoliticization of disability (2013: 5).
Similarly, Spade’s critique of the medicalization of transgender is not directed at the
desire for access to hormones, surgical procedures, or psychiatric treatment. Instead,
Spade critiques the gatekeeping function of diagnosis that determines access to health
care and legal recognition of identity for transgender people. Spade argues for access
to healthcare and legal protections that do not require proof of “desire for gender con-
formity” (2003: 26), and Kafer argues for conceptions of disability identity and forms
of disability solidarity that do not rely on a diagnosis as proof of belonging in disability
community (2013: 12–13).
Alexandre Baril makes a case for commonalities, not absolute identity, between
transsexuality and transability (an able-bodied person’s desire for body modification to
acquire an impairment), arguing that both challenge cis and abled assumptions about
“real” bodies (2015: 31, 39). Baril is concerned about a cisgender bias in disability
studies and an ableist bias in trans studies that informs resistance to the development
of intersectional approaches between these two fields. While both transability and
transsexuality involve voluntary body modifications, Baril contends that the major-
ity of work in trans and disability studies seems to assume that body modifications
involving primary and secondary sex characteristics belong to gender and trans studies
and all other body modifications belong to disability studies (2015: 37–38). Baril cri-
tiques “the ableist gendering and sexualization of specific parts of the body” (2015: 35).
Against feminist and disability studies arguments against body modification premised
on the value of real bodies, Baril contends that the assumption of a real body that is
transformed by body modification relies on a distinction between “real” and “artificial”
bodies that pathologizes and erases trans embodied experience (2015: 40–41).

Minds, Bodies, and Knowledge

Disability studies’ prevailing emphasis on the body has tended to ignore mental disa-
bility and compulsory able-mindedness, resulting in a reinforcement of the notion that
mental disability is innate and biologically real in ways that physical disability is not

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 INTERSECTIONS

(Price 2011; Kafer 2013). Furthermore, as Margaret Price argues, the marginalization
of mentally disabled people within disability studies reinforces the Western assump-
tion of a mind/body binary, an assumption whose gendered and racialized dimensions
have been the subject of much discussion within feminist and critical race theories
(2015: 268–269).
Feminist and queer disability studies approaches to mental disability suggest that
philosophy’s ableism may be rooted in assumptions about the relationship between per-
sonhood and rationality that are normalized in the field. In her critique of “concep-
tual exploitation” in philosophical writing about disability, Licia Carlson clarifies the
connection between how disability is conceptualized in case studies and how disabled
people are treated in the world (2010: 199). Her analysis reveals disability’s ghostly
presence in philosophical arguments about human nature, personhood, and justice.
While disabled people serve as fodder for marginal cases in philosophy, their perspec-
tives on their own lives remain largely absent (Carlson 2010; Garland Thomson 2015).
According to Carlson, intellectually disabled people circulate in philosophical texts as
silent, passive others against which philosophy defines what it means to be rational and
thus a person. Working against philosophy’s ableism requires understanding that the
perspectives of disabled people along with critical inquiry into the social, cultural, and
historical meanings of disability must be recognized as central to philosophical concerns
about disability (Carlson 2010: 12, 17).
A note about terminology is important here since the words used to characterize
mentally disabled people are part of historical and contemporary discrimination against
them (Clare 1999). As Price puts it,

the problem of naming has always preoccupied DS scholars, but acquires a

particular urgency when considered in the context of disabilities of the mind,
for often the very terms used to name persons with mental disabilities have
explicitly foreclosed our status as persons. Aristotle’s famous declaration that
man is a rational animal . . . gave rise to centuries of insistence that to be
named mad was to lose one’s personhood.
(2011: 9)

Carlson (2010) uses the term intellectual disability for conditions that have been
included under the more pejorative category “mental retardation.” Other disability
studies scholars use the term mental disability to refer more broadly to the myriad ways
in which one may fail to conform to “the normal mind” (Price 2011). The identity
categories used by people with mental disabilities reflects how they choose to situate
themselves in relation to the history of conceiving and treating mental disability, a his-
tory that has denied their personhood and agency (2011: 11–12).
Reason is a prized, defining ability in philosophy, and its conception as white and
male has worked against perceiving white women, women of color, and men of color
as “real” philosophers (Haslanger 2008; 2013; Hutchison and Jenkins 2013; Jenkins
2013). Dominant conceptions of rationality also circulate at the expense of disabled
people. According to Price (2011), assumptions about rationality, truth, and coherence
can function as unacknowledged modes of social purification in academia. As a mode of
social purification, assumptions about rationality de-authorize members of marginalized
groups as legitimate producers of knowledge.

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 Feminism, Queer Theory, and Disabilities

Critics of mainstream philosophy’s conception of rationality are often accused of

advocating for the elimination of all standards. However, Price (2011) argues for the
creation of greater access for mentally disabled students and faculty who have the poten-
tial to make important contributions to academia but who are unjustifiably excluded
by institutions that are unwilling to think creatively about access. As both Carlson
(2010) and Genevieve Lloyd (1993) assert, one can critique conceptions of rational-
ity or reason without advocating for irrationality or relativism. After all, part of what
philosophers do is unearth and question underlying assumptions, including assumptions
about reason, rationality, and knowledge (Lloyd 1993).
In their 2014 special issue of The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies
McRuer and Lisa Johnson use the term “cripistemology” to invite reflection on the
meaning of disability as an epistemic space, a space from which one can know and
a space from which knowledge might be reconceived (2014: 149). Cripistemology is
informed by feminist, queer, and disability epistemologies (2014: 214). In his contri-
bution to McRuer and Johnson’s virtual roundtable that serves as an introduction to
the special issue, Jack Halberstam suggests that cripistemology should focus only on
limitations and failure at the heart of claims to know (2014: 152). However, some
feminist queer crip theorists contest the use of disability as a metaphor for failure
in queer theory (Johnson 2015). For example, Johnson critiques the romanticization
of bodymind failure as a form of queer resistance, asserting that such appropriations
ignore what mentally disabled people know about the embodied, lived experience of
failure (2015: 251). Rather than a failure of knowledge, a feminist queer crip episte-
mology seeks to know truth and identity differently and reconceives what one thought
one knew (Hall 2015; 2017, forthcoming).

Dependency, Vulnerability, and Justice

Ableist assumptions about personhood have informed Western philosophical theories
of justice. Eva Kittay and Anita Silvers have offered major contributions to rethink-
ing justice from the perspective of disability experience and what Kittay (1999) calls
“dependency workers,” people who care for those who are dependent. Kittay points out
that dependency characterizes the beginning and the end of human life and that the
majority of dependency workers are women (1999: xii). She argues that the exclusion of
dependency from social and political concerns supports the pretense that all humans are
independent and that any interdependence is simply voluntary, reciprocal cooperation
between persons (1999: xii).
Disability theorists affirm the importance of critiquing the myth of human inde-
pendency but nonetheless point to the reality that dependency workers do not
always act in the best interests of disabled people. In fact, disabled people are often
abused by family members and other dependency workers (Clare 1999; Silvers 2015).
Accordingly, Silvers argues for the importance of acknowledging the violence that can
be perpetrated by care workers and for a conception of disability justice that places
the interests of disabled people at its center. As Silvers (2015) points out, improving
conditions for dependency workers does not necessarily translate into ending discrimi-
nation against disabled people.
The term “severely disabled” is often used to distinguish between disabled people
who are dependent from those who are able to live independently; however, feminist

413
 INTERSECTIONS

and queer theorists attempt to reframe and crip the meaning associated with it. Such
efforts reconceive severe as “fierce critique” in order to “reverse the able-bodied under-
standing of severely disabled bodies as the most marginalized, the most excluded from
a privileged and always elusive normalcy, and would instead suggest that it is precisely
those bodies that are best positioned to refuse ‘mere toleration’ and to call out the inad-
equacies of compulsory able-bodiedness [and I would add compulsory able-mindedness]”
(McRuer 2006: 30–31). Queer crip feminist reframing of the meaning of severely disa-
bled fosters critique of the various ways compulsory able-mindedness and compulsory
able-bodiedness “contain” disabled people (McRuer 2006: 31).
Disability justice also attends to the literal containment of disabled people in prisons,
nursing homes, and mental institutions, and a number of disability scholars argue that
prisons and carceral power are disability issues (Ben-Moshe et al. 2014). In particular,
they investigate how assumptions about disability inform the historical and contem-
porary manifestations of carceral power in Western contexts (Ben-Moshe et al. 2014).
Sue Schweik traces the history of “unsightly beggar ordinances” in the US in the 1880s
and 1890s and demonstrates how discourses of disability, poverty, gender, and race pro-
duced the “unsightly beggar” as an unbearable “street obstruction” in need of removal
and containment (2009: 1–2). Such laws appeared in cities all over the United States
and targeted poor people who were forced to beg due to impairments, including impair-
ments resulting from work or war-related injuries, that made it impossible for them to
find employment. Schweik demonstrates how the ideology of individualism informed
the ugly laws by casting the dependency as an individual problem rather than a problem
of justice (2009: 5).
The “unsightliness” of disability and poverty in public is perceived as even more
threatening when embodied by people of color. Erevelles explains how disability
informs the school-to-prison pipeline that results in the disproportionate incarceration
of Latinos and black men (2014a: 91). For example, students of color are dispropor-
tionately perceived as behavioral problems, a perception that leads to their segrega-
tion in school or their removal from school (Erevelles 2014a: 91–92). While bodies of
white class-privileged disabled people may be objects of pity in an abled society, bodies
of black disabled disabled people are targets for violence. As Michelle Jarman notes,
there is an understanding in black communities that “acting crazy” in public can get
you killed (2011: 21). In revealing and analyzing connections between disability and
carceral power, disability studies theorists focus on state sanctioned violence against
disabled people in public spaces and the violence of institutionalization, as well as forms
of state punishment, like solitary confinement, that produce disability (Guenther 2013,
Ben-Moshe et al. 2014).

Cripping Philosophy
Butler characterizes the contemporary situation of philosophy as one in which
“the other” that has been excluded from institutionalized philosophy has become
the site of philosophy (2004: 233). As she points out, it is precisely this so-called
“non-philosophical” other that most people in other disciplines now recognize
as philosophy. Thus, the question for Butler is not whether philosophy’s other
should count as philosophy; the question is whether institutionalized philosophy
is itself philosophy (2004: 242). As Butler’s discussion of the other of philosophy
indicates, critical engagement with the disciplinary borders of philosophy itself is

414
 Feminism, Queer Theory, and Disabilities

philosophical, and some contend that thinking philosophically from the perspec-
tive of disability occasions critical engagement with the disciplinary borders of
philosophy (Hall 2015).
Cripping philosophy invites critical attention to how the philosophical is distin-
guished from the non-philosophical and to the consequences of that distinction, as well
as the underlying “culture of philosophy” that informs it (Dotson 2012). It also enables,
as Garland-Thomson puts it, a practice of recruitment that claims as relevant for dis-
ability studies work that may not be explicitly situated within the field (2005: 1561).
Philosophers who work in feminist and disability studies have discussed philosophy’s
ableism in two ways: (1) the field’s demographics; and (2) the culture and borders of
philosophy. In looking at the low numbers of self-identified disabled people in philoso-
phy, some speculate that stigma and implicit bias against disabled people may prevent
some philosophers from identifying as disabled (Tremain 2013). While acknowledg-
ing the importance of strengthening the inclusiveness of the field, others suggest that
demographics alone cannot resolve philosophy’s ableism for at least two reasons: (1) the
question of who counts as disabled is itself a subject of much debate (Kafer 2013); and
(2) members of targeted groups can harbor biases against their own group (Valian 1998;
Fine 2010). Thus, addressing philosophy’s inclusiveness also requires attention to the
culture and self-definition of the field (Parker 2014: 223; Hall 2015).
Cripping philosophy claims disability as constitutive of philosophy itself. In their dis-
cussion of what philosophy is, Deleuze and Guattari state that the time for the question
of the meaning of philosophy is the time of old age (1994: 1). It is, as they put it, a ques-
tion that if asked correctly cannot be controlled. It is a question that opens its subject to
transformation, to the possibility of becoming something other than it has been (Deleuze
and Guattari 1994: 1). By locating the time of the question of philosophy in the time
of old age, Deleuze and Guattari locate it in the time of disability, in crip time. Crip
time resists normalizing, linear progressions of ableist time (Kafer 2013; Hall 2015). As
Wendell (1997) contends, ableism is fueled by the illusion of control over our bodyminds,
a control that denies the ever-changing, interactive emergent nature of material reality
(Barad 2007; Alaimo 2010). These denials include, for Wendell, a denial of aging—the
fact that no matter how strong the illusion of bodymind control, aging reminds us that
our bodyminds constantly change. Perhaps one way to understand the significance of the
claim that the time of philosophy is the time of old age is that it understands the desire
for control as an illusion, control here conceived as desire for control over what philoso-
phy is, can be, or will become. Cripping philosophy opens philosophy to transformation
by the perspectives of underrepresented groups, and it posits disability and disabled expe-
rience as subjects, rather than only objects or case studies, of philosophy.

Further Reading
Barker, Clare and Murray, Stuart (Eds.) (2010) Disabling Postcolonialism: Global Disability Cultures and
Democratic Criticism, a special issue of Journal of Cultural and Literary Disability Studies 4(3). (A collection of
essays that analyze the meaning of disability in non-Western contexts and critique ableism in postcolonial
theories and the presumed universality of the foundational distinction between impairment and disability
in Western disability studies.)
Bell, Christopher M. (Ed.) (2011) Blackness and Disability: Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions,
Berlin: LIT Verlag and East Lansing. MI: Michigan State University Press. (A collection of essays that
analyze the meanings of blackness and disability and critically intervene in the able body centeredness of
African American Studies and the white body centeredness of Disability Studies.)

415
 INTERSECTIONS

Davis, Lennard J. (Ed.) (1997) The Disability Studies Reader, New York: Routledge. (The first of five editions
and a good introduction to early work in Disability Studies. It is worth looking at later editions of this
text because each edition contains new essays.)
Hall, Kim Q. (Ed.) (2015) New Conversations in Feminist Disability Studies, Special Issue of Hypatia 30(1).
(A collection of essays that offers a critical feminist disability studies perspective on how assump-
tions about disability inform feminist philosophy, feminist theory more generally, queer theory, and
disability studies.)
Kittay, Eva, Schriempf, Alex, Silvers, Anita, and Wendell, Susan (Eds.) (2001) Feminism and Disability, Part 2,
Special Issue of Hypatia 17(3). (A collection of essays that analyze concepts and issues of feminist
philosophy and feminist organizing from the perspective of disabled women’s experiences, as well as criti-
cally examine the meaning and significance of disabled women’s experiences in political, professional,
and personal contexts. See also Part 1 of this special issue of Hypatia 16(4) for essays that analyze the
intersections of gender and disability and the meaning of disabled women’s identity.)
McRuer, Robert and Wilkerson, Abby (Eds.) (2003) Desiring Disability, a special issue of GLQ: Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies 9(1–2). (A collection of essays that seek to queer disability studies and consider
how critical disability analysis might transform queer theory.)
Snyder, Sharon L. and Mitchell, David T. (2006) Cultural Politics of Disability, Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press. (Examines the history of eugenics as a site for the emergence of the idea of disabled people
as biologically abnormal. Suggests alternative ways to know disability.)

Related Topics
Embodiment and feminist philosophy (Chapter 15); materiality: sex, gender, and
what lies beneath (Chapter 16); rationality and objectivity in feminist philoso-
phy (Chapter 20); the genealogy and viability of the concept of intersectional-
ity (Chapter 28); feminist theory, lesbian theory, and queer theory (Chapter 31);
through the looking glass: trans theory meets feminist philosophy (Chapter 32);
feminist ethics of care (Chapter 43); feminist bioethics (Chapter 46).

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 34
WOMEN, GENDER, AND
PHILOSOPHIES OF GLOBAL
DEVELOPMENT
Sandra Harding and Anna Malavisi

Introduction
In his 1949 second inaugural speech, President Harry Truman introduced a narrative
about the need for well-off societies around the globe to help poor societies improve
their standard of living.

More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching
misery. Their food is inadequate, they are victims of disease. Their economic
life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both
to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history human-
ity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these
people . . . I believe that we should make available to peace-loving peoples
the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize
their aspirations for a better life . . . Greater production is the key to prosper-
ity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous
application of modern scientific and technical knowledge.
(Truman 1964)

Only the introduction of market economies into the underdeveloped societies could
eliminate their poverty, he claimed. Poverty should be perceived as “a threat both to
them and to more prosperous areas” because it had caused the social disorders that had
enabled the rise of fascism in Europe and military expansionism in Japan. Moreover, the
consequences of social disorder were even more terrifying to imagine after Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. The availability of nuclear weapons increased the urgency of addressing
how to eradicate poverty around the globe.
This narrative has now directed development projects for over six decades. Much
that today is regarded as wrong with development theory, policies and practices has
its origins in the narrative’s assumptions. As critics have pointed out for decades,
development policies and practices have succeeded primarily in de-developing and
mal-developing most of the globe’s already existing poor, and in further “developing”
 INTERSECTIONS

mostly the investing classes of the North and what have become middle-class allies
around the world (Escobar 1995; Sachs 1992; Third World Network 1993). The gap
between rich and poor both within and between societies around the globe has vastly
increased during the development decades.
With the emergence of women’s movements around the globe beginning in the late
1960s, feminists began to raise critical questions about how development policies usu-
ally not only failed to improve poor women’s conditions but, worse, tended to remove
even more resources from their control. The Danish economist Ester Boserup’s (1970)
influential account of how women were being left out of development was just the first
of an illuminating series of analyses that came out of the new women’s movements. Yet
today leading feminist development theorists hold that women and their dependents
have never been left out of development planning. Rather, women’s labor and rights
to land (along with those of poor men) were always intended to subsidize—to make
possible—both continued capitalist expansion and the legitimacy of state policies that
oppress the poor (Agarwal 1994; Jaggar 2009). In these accounts, “millions of men are
missing” (to riff on a phrase from Amartya Sen 1990) from taking responsibility for
the persistent impoverishment of women and their dependents through sexist, racist,
and profiteering development theory, policy, and practice (Chant 2011). Of course
one should expect the gap between rich and poor to expand under such conditions! Of
course one should expect women’s conditions to worsen!
Though philosophers have tended to focus on the ethics of development, a
small number of analyses by feminist philosophers have recently begun to take up
political philosophy and structural economic issues about development as well as
revisions in epistemology and ontology of development that such work requires
(e.g., Jaggar 2014; Jaggar and Wisor 2013; Khader 2011; Koggel 2013). These have
learned from accounts by feminist economists especially (e.g., Benaria, Berik and
Floro 2015; Visvanathan et al. 2011).
The first section of this chapter briefly sketches out the history since 1970 of how
feminist economists and political scientists have changed how they think about the
causes of women’s poverty in development contexts. The second section focuses on the
failures of mainstream development theory and policies to engage with just who is poor,
what counts as women’s work, and consequently how to reduce poverty effectively. The
third section takes up mainstream philosophy’s ethical issues about development and
its failure to address both issues of social justice in general and of feminist social science
and political theory in particular. The fourth section then goes on to highlight some
of the recently emerging feminist approaches to social justice issues in development
theory, policies and practices. In the final section of the chapter, questions are raised
about how to improve the performances of the development professionals who design,
manage and evaluate projects around the globe, but usually have little knowledge of
either critical political philosophy in general or of feminist findings beyond the early
liberal work on how women were left out of development projects.

Were Women Left Out of Development?

Ester Boserup’s (1970) influential study argued that women had been left out of devel-
opment policies and practices. Their brothers were given the technical education nec-
essary to work in the new export economies created by the corporations and financial
institutions that directed international development projects. Such jobs entailed rural

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men having to move to the new, often distant, agricultural plantations or manufacturing
industries. The formerly communally held land, on which they and their women kin
had worked to supply the daily subsistence needs of households and communities, had
been appropriated as “unowned” by the newly empowered Northern development cor-
porations and their local allies. Rural women were left as the primary providers of the
everyday resources needed for their own survival and that of their families and com-
munities. Yet they lacked the labor that their menfolk had provided as well as the
traditional rights to the land on which they had farmed and herded cattle, and that
had provided also water and the raw materials for clothing and shelter. The solution,
Boserup argued, was to educate girls and women so that they, too, could earn wages in
the new cash economies of these societies.
Of course there is much to be said for such efforts to increase girls’ and women’s lit-
eracy and their access to cash resources. Yet providing literacy for girls is not as simple
a matter as development professionals have assumed. In poor families, girls’ labor is
needed in their households for child care, elder care, water fetching, cooking, garden-
ing, and cleaning, as well as for work on household manufacturing for both household
use and for sale or exchange: this is one reason why poor families need many children
(Hartmann 1995). Moreover, poor families lack resources to pay school fees for daugh-
ters. Additionally, the absence of private toilets in public places such as schools leaves
girls and women vulnerable to shaming, harassment, and worse.
The assumptions of 1970s socialist feminisms contrasted with Boserup’s liberal
assumptions. These feminists focused on how men’s control of women’s lives in
households all too often meant that women could not get permission to work out-
side or often even to leave the household. When they were permitted to do so, their
household duties siphoned off energy and time that limited their abilities to be as
productive as their brothers in wage labor. Moreover, the sexist assumptions of their
bosses and co-workers invariably led to their being underpaid and under-valued. This
weak position in wage labor in turn deprived them of the financial resources needed
to gain power in, or to leave, their often abusive households. This interlocking of
women’s disempowerment in households and in wage labor, and its accompanying
violence, must end, feminists argued. Recently Alison Jaggar (2009) has pointed out
how this interlocking of patriarchy and capitalism has insured women’s inequality in
globalization processes just as it does in local contexts.
Meanwhile, German sociologist Maria Mies (1986) argued that in fact women had
never been left out of development planning. Their further immiseration, along with
that of male peasants, had been envisioned from the beginning. Appropriation of rural
women’s and men’s labor and land rights was planned as the source of the “primitive
capital accumulation” that would enable development projects to succeed. Thus devel-
opment was planned as a violent project from its origins. Yes, the “transfer” of scien-
tific rationality and technical expertise from North to South did contribute to creating
effective market economies. But the huge wealth that development delivered to already
privileged groups around the globe required much more land and labor on which capi-
talism could exercise its exploitative magic. The kind of feminist analysis exemplified
by Mies undermined conventional liberal assumptions of Boserup’s account as well as
Marxian assumptions.
Though the history of feminist approaches to development recounted above
emphasizes its relations to Northern feminist theoretical traditions, attention to
development issues has been one of the most important contexts in which alliances

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and collaborations with Southern grass-roots activists and theorists have influenced
Northern feminist theory in general and especially its postcolonial theory. We return
to important epistemological and methodological issues here.

More Unrecognized Facts about Women’s Poverty

Mainstream development theory has consistently misunderstood and/or ignored
additional gender facts (Benaria et  al. 2015; Visvanathan et  al. 2011). Failure to
recognize these realities of development contexts accounts for a great deal of the per-
sistent increase in gaps between the rich and the poor during the development era.
Note how ontological, epistemological, methodological, and philosophy of science
assumptions characteristic of research disciplines, including philosophy, are explic-
itly or implicitly contested in these analyses, as are the ethics and political philoso-
phies of development to be addressed further in later sections.
First women’s labor is consistently undercounted. Feminists have insisted on the
importance of counting women’s work not just as what they do when they are employed
full-time, year-round, for wages, in child-free, outside the household, and formal labor
contexts. These are the conditions that characterize the idealized male workers of mod-
ernization and its development theory. Women’s labor, which also delivers socially nec-
essary benefits, has not been recognized as real work by international agencies, social
science data collectors, or labor unions (with the exception of the International Labor
Organization) (Benaria 2011; Waring 1988).
What kinds of undercounted work do women perform? Domestic work in house-
holds: shopping, cooking, and cleaning. They work in informal markets, both street
markets and paid or exchange work done in their own or others’ households, such as
cooking, child care, washing, cleaning, and managing household activities. They do
“caring labor” with children, the sick and elderly, both in their own households and in
their communities (Folbre 2001). In the context of globalization, this caring labor has
become an international issue. Elites in the North are “care deficient,” as middle-class
women have increasingly entered wage labor outside their households. Consequently
the North needs huge supplies of foreign service workers to do child care, cleaning,
cooking and healthcare in households and public institutions. Women also voluntarily
organize and do domestic, caring and advocacy work for each other in their own impov-
erished communities, both on an everyday basis and especially in times of economic
crises. The latter situation has been especially visible in poor communities’ responses to
“structural adjustment” policies of the 1980s and recently again in response to the 2008
global financial crises (Elson 2011; Harcourt 1994).
This kind of analysis begins to reveal a second underappreciated issue in the main-
stream development theory, policy, and practice: women and their dependents consti-
tute the vast majority of the world’s poor. Women, and especially mothers, still earn
less than men in virtually all wage-labor contexts in the developing world. Moreover,
men tend to distribute their “family wages” unequally in households, depriving women
and children of kinds of resources that men reserve for themselves. So women would be
the majority of the poor on these measures alone. But when one adds to the count the
huge number of children, sick, elderly, and others who depend on women’s labor to stay
functioning and even alive on an everyday basis, especially in the constantly increas-
ing number of female-headed households around the globe, it is clear that women and

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their dependents constitute a vast majority of the poor everywhere around the globe.
Of course poor men’s needs also should be met. But lack of attention to the particular
needs of poor women guarantees that the gap between the rich and the poor will con-
tinue to grow both locally and globally.
The underappreciation of these two facts draws attention to a third: eliminating
the impoverishment of women and their dependents requires direct attention to the
needs of these groups. The typical “trickle-down” strategy of development theory, in
which it is assumed that men who head households are the appropriate recipients of
development aid, does little to improve the conditions of women and their depend-
ents, and thus does little to lower poverty levels in general (Khader 2015). Yet to
address women’s needs directly requires transformations of social and political theory
and of the policies and practices of dominant economic, political, and social institu-
tions. This means direct attention to creating equitable gender relations in households
as well as in public life, and thereby to changing prevailing conceptions of desirable
masculinity. These two projects have always been taboo for public policy, and few
development projects have designed programs to address such challenges. Moreover,
to get these issues addressed in public policy, requires addressing similar gender rela-
tions also among the professional men who theorize, design, fund, administer, and
carry out development projects, including male philosophers (Agarwal 1997; Elson
1995; Khader 2015). How can these taboo projects be addressed? But how can poverty
be eliminated if they are not addressed?
To summarize, development theory, including the work of male philosophers, has
not much been touched by the most innovative feminist work on development, which
has focused on the kinds of facts and new directions produced by economists and politi-
cal theorists. At issue are ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions
and principles that are embedded in mainstream development theory, policy, and prac-
tices. For example, women’s domestic, child care, and caring activities have been recon-
ceptualized as labor, as “real work” no less socially necessary than men’s paid labor. “The
poor” have been expanded to explicitly include women and their dependents. Gender
has been re-conceptualized not just as an identity of individuals, but also of structural
relations between men and women as well as between men such as fathers and sons, and
between women such as wives and daughters-in law. One challenge here is that this
feminist work clearly defies conventional standards for objective research that demand
the exclusion of emotions and politics from research processes. Yet feminist work begins
with anger at mainstream toleration of women’s exploitation and impoverishment, and
then continues with specifically feminist political frameworks for research projects
(Jaggar 1989). Thus feminist research is overtly value- and interest-rich, instead of
adopting a “weakly objectivist” posture that invariably obscures those widely shared
exploitative values and interests that shape mainstream Northern research processes
(Harding 2004; 2015).
Moreover, feminist work assumes that poor women themselves can identify many
of the ontological realities and appropriate methodological and epistemological
approaches required to improve the conditions of their lives. And researchers, what-
ever their gender or class, can learn to start off their research and analyses from the
daily lives of such oppressed groups and from their testimony in order to “study up” and
identify just which dominant concepts, theories, policies and practices are responsible
for such immiseration. Thus feminist development theory and analyses stay close to a

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 INTERSECTIONS

diverse set of global social justice movements through which the daily lives of women
and other oppressed and exploited groups are made visible. In doing so, these produce
“rear guard” theory and analyses, in contrast to the “avant garde” theory typical of
mainstream philosophic and social theory approaches to such real-life situations.

The Rise of Development Ethics

It is time to focus on mainstream development ethics. As indicated earlier, by the 1970s
development theory, policy and practices were widely perceived to have failed to reduce
poverty. Philosophers began to notice that there could be an important role for them in
development theory. They began to ask how should the ethical and practical effects of
development be conceptualized and measured, and even how development should be
redefined. These analyses have successively expanded the criteria for what should count
as valuable forms of development.
Yet in 2010, philosopher Thomas Pogge could still say that

world poverty has overtaken war as the greatest source of avoidable human
misery. Many more people—some 360 million—have died from hunger and
remediable diseases in peacetime in the 20 years since the end of the Cold War
than perished from wars, civil wars, and government repression over the entire
twentieth century.
(Pogge 2010: 11)

In the context of a globally affluent world, Pogge charged that these huge death rates
from poverty signified a continued moral failing on the part of citizens of rich countries.
Yet Pogge, like other mainstream development theorists and policy-makers, ignores
powerful feminist economic analyses. One can wonder if a focus on the moral failings
of citizens is an adequate response to this horror. Just what were the contributions of
philosophers to development thinking since the 1970s?
In the 1970s Denis Goulet (1997), who can be considered the pioneer of develop-
ment ethics, strongly contested the lack of a normative framework with which to evalu-
ate the means and goals of development policies and practices. Goulet’s thinking was
heavily influenced by three notable precursors whose analyses of development were
value oriented: Mahatma Gandhi, French economist L.-J. Lebret, and Swedish econo-
mist Gunnar Myrdal. Goulet argued that development policies and programs espoused
by the United Nations and other multilateral agencies should be guided by such norma-
tive goals as reduced suffering, the attainment of a better life, and enhanced freedoms.
The concept of development was in need of redefinition within an ethical framework.
As Goulet saw, development theory and practice must be linked; yet theorists have
tended to give little attention to practice. Consequently, they lack resources to ana-
lyze how development projects have succeeded primarily in “developing” the invest-
ing classes in the North, while de-developing and mal-developing the world’s poor, as
indicated earlier. Thus development requires a type of philosophy that is both critical
and practical: one that thus moves away from the Western philosophical tradition of
ideal theory, consisting of abstract principles, and focused on the moral obligations of
individuals. It has taken philosophers some time to recognize and begin to address the
several components of this challenge.

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Another influential philosophical analysis of the 1970s was Peter Singer’s “Famine,
Affluence and Morality.” Singer’s utilitarian argument is focused on individuals and
their moral obligations. He argued, “If it is in our power to do or prevent something bad
from happening without thereby sacrificing anything of moral importance, we ought
morally to do it” (Singer 1972: 231). Although this argument was not directly focused
on development, it did provoke much discussion about people in vulnerable conditions,
the moral obligations of those living in affluent countries, and the work of charities.
Singer’s argument has been criticized by many for being too morally demanding, but it
also elicited the charge that his focus was too narrow. Poverty and famine are structural
problems that require different kinds of strategies than are possible for the moral actions
of individuals. They require a political philosophy (Kuper 2002).
Meanwhile, by the early 1990s the concept of development started to shift from
measures of only economic growth, such as of a country’s gross domestic product (GDP),
to ones that included “human values.” This new conception soon influenced how
development was carried out. In the 1990s the United Nations Development Program
(UNDP) announced a new definition of development: “Development embraces not
only access to goods and services, but also the opportunity to choose a fully satisfying,
valuable and valued way of living together, the flourishing of human existence in all its
forms and as a whole” (Gasper 2004: 37).
This human development conception was made popular by Nobel Prize winning
economist and philosopher, Amartya Sen. For Sen (1999), the absence of individual
freedoms is one of the main obstacles today to the ability of individuals to flourish.
Development must therefore be the expansion of freedom. He focused on how increas-
ing people’s capabilities would lead to an enhanced quality of life. As a practical
approach, this theory is widely regarded as a more reasonable attempt to address global
poverty and inequities. Especially valuable has been his insistence on the normative
meanings of development. Yet, in itself, this approach is not sufficient for addressing
the structural causes of poverty since it still retains a focus only on individuals, and is
silent on the responsibilities to address these structural causes..
Meanwhile, the “basic needs” approach was yet one more theory in the 1970s that
was committed to shifting the focus of development away from economic growth (Rai
2011). The argument here was that basic needs must be satisfied in order to reach a
morally acceptable standard of living. Basic needs were conceptualized as physical ones,
such as water, nutrition, shelter, and access to healthcare, but also less tangible ones
such as participation, empowerment and agency. Although the basic needs approach
was lauded as a step in the right direction, it was still embedded within a paradigm
that neglected the dimensions of power and oppression within the social structures of
society, such as in families, communities, and other social institutions. Thus it failed
to address the main causes of gender inequity. Yet this approach provided the ground-
work for the transformation of Sen’s human development model into the capability
approach. Here, finally, gender inequalities begin to be addressed in more than demo-
graphic contexts. Martha Nussbaum (2000) later provided further insights from a femi-
nist theoretical perspective.
There is widespread agreement within a conventional ethics framework that the
capabilities approach is the most desirable counter to the traditional conception
of development as only economic growth. Nussbaum’s renaming it as a capabilities
approach is a post-humanist move that allows for the inclusion of non-human animals

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as ethical subjects. This shift away from anthropocentric assumptions aligns the theory
with a progressive environmental ethic (Nussbaum 2011).
One of the most important contributions of the capabilities approach is that it is not
an ideal theory. It is not a “theory from above,” but rather starts off from considering
the injustices and inequalities experienced by people in their everyday lives, which
is consistent with feminist methodologies. It gestures toward social structures, such
as institutionalized preferences for male children as a cause of such inequalities. This
marks a major shift in development ethics. Yet, critics point out that in both Sen’s and
Nussbaum’s accounts, this approach still retains the focus on what individual agents are
morally obligated to do. It still doesn’t address social structural issues, or, consequently,
a wider array of political philosophy issues that feminist philosophers have identified
(Malavisi 2014).

Feminist Philosophic Issues about Development

Philosophical work on global gender justice has begun to appear only over the last ten
years. It is not that it was completely ignored in the work of pioneers such as Pogge
(2010), Miller (2010), Singer (1972), and others, but it was never their focus, and failed
to engage with the scope of feminist economic analyses. Feminist philosophic accounts
bring the powerful history of forty-five years of debate between feminist theorists and
activists representing many different groups of women from around the globe to bear
on women’s diverse family and public life situations in development contexts (Jaggar
2014). (Note that this feminist work has not limited its focus to such issues as female
genital mutilation, sex trafficking, and violence against women, important as these are.)
Feminist philosophy provides useful resources for analyses of development theory,
policies and practices for the obvious reason that it addresses a crucial but missing
topic, namely poor women’s issues. But it also does so because it had never assumed
that economic issues were the only important ones in women’s lives, crucial as they
are, or that they can be effectively addressed without attention to men’s control of
women’s lives in households and in the public sphere. It understood that the immis-
eration of women could not be effectively addressed by a focus only on individual
women, either on those immiserated or on the development professionals trying to
eliminate such misery. Rather it required attention to the macro social structures that
both enabled and limited every single person’s life both in households and in the pub-
lic sphere, though in different ways for different groups. Moreover feminist philosophy
had already gone through decades of vigorous and often painful critical discussions of
the problems with relying on elite white women’s conceptions of the important femi-
nist approaches to guide policies—ones that inevitably turned out to be disastrous for
other groups of women. Central tendencies of feminist thinking had long rejected ideal
theory as a guide to policies and to research designs and, instead, achieved startling
empirical and theoretical revelations in biology and the social sciences by starting off
research and planning from women’s daily lives. And feminist criticism of familiar
sexist practices of associating women with nature and with animals had produced rich
post-humanist feminist accounts.
Here there is space only to gesture toward a few examples of this recent work. Uma
Narayan (2002) challenges the objectionable assumptions that Other women (not white,
well-off, of European ancestry, heterosexual, abled) are either “just like us” relatively

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privileged women, or else that they are totally different from us. Rather, women in every
culture always “bargain with patriarchy,” giving up some freedoms to obtain others
(Kandiyoti 1988). Thus it is a mistake to assume that Other women whose life-choices
are different from ours, are dupes of their patriarchal cultures. As Narayan puts the point,
they have “a mind of their own.” And it is a mistake to assume that Other cultures can-
not be sources of both theory frameworks and practical information about what consti-
tutes women’s empowerment. Westerners, including feminists, tend to lack the kinds of
critical perspectives on themselves that they insist mark women in other cultures as
immiserated and backward.
Serene Khader (2011) focuses such insights on the central Northern value of auton-
omy. She argues that Western thinking about autonomy fails to grasp how women’s
“adaptive preferences” do not invariably express some kind of deficit in autonomy.
That is, a woman’s choice to veil or for an arranged marriage, for example, does not
necessarily indicate that she is a dupe of her particular patriarchy and has not really
been free to form her own values. Rather, adherence to cultural norms need not be
regarded as manifesting a lack of autonomy; cultural belonging is not necessarily a
constraint on autonomy.
Christine Koggel (2013) argues for a relational approach, which draws from femi-
nist care ethics. It puts relationships instead of individuals at the center of analysis.
Its focus is on how concepts such as agency and autonomy, which are central to Sen’s
and Nussbaum’s capability approach, must be understood within a complex network of
power relationships that are constantly changing. Such an account expands agency in
ways that challenge mainstream policies for removing gender inequalities. At the same
time, a relational approach can capture an account of empowerment with valuable
implications for undermining power and empowering women.
Alison M. Jaggar (2014) points to the consequences of feminist assessments of how
what are presumed to be gender-neutral institutions and policies, such as those that
deliver global development, nevertheless “have had systematically disparate and often
burdensome consequences for specific groups of women in both the global North and
the global South” (2014: 10). They then began to produce charges that “go beyond
recent recognition that the domain of justice includes the sphere of global politics and
trade and that states as well as individuals may be subjects of justice claims” (2014: 13).
They argued that “the domain of justice includes households and families . . . the subjects
of justice in the global sphere include gendered and sometimes transnational collectivi-
ties, . . . the objects of global justice include the transnational organization of caretaking
contributions and responsibilities” (2014: 13). In these respects feminists are challeng-
ing fundamental assumptions of political philosophy more generally.

A Fourth Fact: Inadequate Resources and Competence

Requirements for Development Designers, Funders,
Managers, and Other Professionals
There is a fourth fact that has been ignored by all too many sponsors, funders, and devel-
opment professionals. This is that in two respects the current competence requirements
for development professionals are insufficient to enable them effectively to contribute
to eliminating global poverty. First, women should be considered highly desirable lead-
ers and managers of progressive social change. They should be recruited and resourced

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 INTERSECTIONS

at the very highest levels of development design and funding to shape the selection of
the development policies and practices that will have such huge effects on women and
their dependents around the globe. And top-level designers and funders of any gender
should also come from the groups so affected, not just from elite strata.
Second, both men and women development professionals should have a solid
grasp of the best of critical theoretical shifts during the development era—and, we
argue, especially of the critical feminist insights—in order to understand and inter-
pret the nature, implications, and constraints of existing development interventions
(Hanna and Kleinman 2013). Unfortunately, women and men at higher and lower
levels usually lack such backgrounds, and their work schedules do not offer the space
or time to gain them.
One situation where this problem shows up is in the prevalence of cultural paternal-
ism among development practitioners (and, of course, among scholars also). This kind
of thinking “from above” disables them from fully understanding the context of others,
and especially their suffering. Extreme poverty, hunger, squalor, and endemic disease
are difficult situations for outside observers to understand or even empathize with. For
those living under these conditions, feelings of helplessness and hopelessness can pre-
vail (Goulet 1997; Malavisi 2010). Martha Nussbaum’s work has often been criticized
as only theorizing “from above” (Ackerly 2000; Charusheela 2009; Jaggar 2006; Nzegwu
1995; and Tobin 2007).
Another challenge is the ongoing one of pushing “gender mainstreaming” to more
competent projects. It took huge global political struggles to get such a perspective into
development agencies at all. At least it does put women’s concerns on the develop-
ment agenda. Yet the gender assumptions inherent to these projects often seem little
advanced from Ester Boserup’s in 1970. Although practitioners tend to be well aware
of cultural differences, development plans and strategies tend to see such differences
only as obstacles to achieving Western goals, rather than as resources for rethinking
them (Saunders 2002: 14). Moreover, gender mainstreaming, too, is often grounded in
anthropocentric assumptions (Apffel-Marglin and Sanchez 2002). It only focuses on
the human and does not consider the inter-relationality and interdependence between
humans and the non-human world. Thus it fails to engage with issues of human rela-
tions to land and of ecology.
A further problem with gender mainstreaming projects is that they add a third burden
to demands on women’s time and energy in wage labor and domestic responsibilities,
namely attendance at meetings and workshops. This is a version of a familiar challenge
for participatory democracy more generally. Additionally, enthusiasm for small-scale
projects tends to obscure the need for attention to issues that require long-term solu-
tions. The feminist criticisms of micro-credit schemes target one example of this ten-
dency (Khader 2014). Finally, Chant (2011) has argued against the “feminization of
responsibility” that all too often characterizes gender mainstreaming.
Underlying many of these issues about development professionals is the fact that
both development research and policy structurally tend to replicate colonial relations
to the objects of their attention—an old issue since the 1960s for social scientists com-
mitted to social justice. Alison M. Jaggar and Scott Wisor (2013) have designed a femi-
nist research methodology that can effectively counter the tendency for development
agencies’ Western assumptions and practices to dominate the expertise of vulnerable
groups. This requires collaboration with a “partner organization” of “Southern feminist

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scholars and Southern-based feminist organizations that are driven by citizens rather
than by donors” (Jaggar and Wisor 2013: 512). Then there are several steps that must
be taken to block domination:

Making decision-making formal and transparent (even if discussions leading to

decisions are informal); providing avenues for dissent, with regard to both indi-
vidual decisions or evaluations and the overarching structure of the project;
tracking such dissent over time; committing to producing a minority report of
disagreements; . . . and explicitly recognizing the differential social locations of
official team members and other project participants and explaining in official
publications how this may have affected research results.
(Jaggar and Wisor 2013: 512)

Thus feminist philosophical attention to the fieldwork situations that development

professionals encounter is also producing valuable guides to more desirable outcomes
for women (see also Wylie 2015).

Conclusion
Issues about women and gender in global development projects provide a fine oppor-
tunity to link feminist philosophy to progressive real life contexts. Moreover, feminist
philosophers’ struggles to get the voices and everyday needs of poor women heard
in development theory, policy and in practice are leading them to make significant
contributions not only to ethics or only to development theory, but also to political
philosophy, epistemology, ontology, philosophy of science, and research methodology
more generally. This feminist philosophic work can benefit development institutions,
agencies and, most importantly, the huge numbers of poor women and their depend-
ents around the globe who are the targets of development policies and practices. It also
makes important contributions to decentering problematic Eurocentric assumptions
from feminist theory more generally.

Related Topics
Epistemic injustice, ignorance, and trans experience (Chapter 22); feminist philoso-
phy of social science (Chapter 27); feminist intersections with environmentalism and
ecological thought (Chapter 35); feminist conceptions of autonomy (Chapter 41);
feminist ethics of care (Chapter 43); multiculturalism and postcolonial feminisms
(Chapter 47); neoliberalism, global justice, and transnational feminisms (Chapter 48);
feminism, structural injustice, and responsibility (Chapter 49).

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 35
FEMINIST INTERSECTIONS
WITH ENVIRONMENTALISM
AND ECOLOGICAL
THOUGHT
Trish Glazebrook

Feminism has intersected with environmentalism and ecological thinking since the
1970s. Concerning method, both feminists and ecofeminists recognize the value
of empirical data, and re-conceive epistemic authority in terms of narrative voice.
Ecofeminism deploys feminist conclusions in environmental philosophy where justice-
based analysis shows that women suffer disproportionate economic and other harms in
consequence of environmental degradation. As a standpoint issue, women bring unique
perspectives to environmental issues, and their women’s cultural location situates them
well to critique prevailing norms. Ecofeminism draws insights from feminist policy
analysis: functional policy cannot address environmental problems without challeng-
ing women’s marginalization and incorporating information on their daily living con-
ditions. Ecofeminism brings novel research to growing bodies of literature that assess
strategies for gender-sensitive policy and recognize women’s resilience, as well as the
remedial potential of their approaches.
In the 1970s, the earth goddess was a focal symbol in women’s reclamation and
celebration of the female creative principle. Feminist spirituality offered an alterna-
tive to the modernist, patriarchal ideology of science and technology that defines
rationality in terms of objectivity. Because “objectivity” universalizes the Cartesian
subject, it is androcentric. At the same time, the ideology of science and technol-
ogy dismisses other knowledge systems as “old wives’ tales,” and women’s embodied
knowledge as “intuition.” Because natural sciences aim to understand nature, ecofem-
inism is extremely amenable to such feminist critiques of science. It diagnoses science
as a logic of domination that treats both women and nature as “object,” and seeks to
validate alternative knowledge systems, e.g. traditional ecological knowledge. Such
knowledge systems are built over generations as cultures develop expertise in survival
and thriving in their particular ecological context. Globally speaking, ecofeminism is
therefore not just a theory, but a praxical examination of women’s experience of their
environment and the livelihoods it affords.
 Feminism and Environmentalism

Ecofeminism arose in the United States out of non-violent, direct action against
nuclear weaponry. Ynestra King, Anna Gyorgy, Grace Paley, and other activists in anti-
nuclear, lesbian feminist, and environmental movements organized a conference at
Amherst College in 1980 that led to demonstrations and other actions. The Women’s
Pentagon Actions of 1980 and 1981 connected sexism, racism and classism with mili-
tarism and environmental destruction. Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein organized
a second conference in 1987 that connected these activists with a developing group of
ecofeminist academics.
Throughout the last four decades, massive environmental catastrophes and threats
have emerged from the practices of technoscientific-empowered global capital. At the
intersection of feminism with environmentalism and ecological thinking, critiques of
science, technology and global capital, coupled with articulation of ways of thinking
and praxes of care that are alternate to modernity’s assault upon nature, have led to
a productive thinking of gender difference that is at present emerging. Crucial to this
genesis and development of ecofeminism has been the presence since the 1980s of
voices from the global South that have led ecofeminists away from the “feminist” label
and deep into world-changing, gender-conscious interventions into policy and practice.
This chapter traces that story.

Nature, Culture, Feminism

Ecofeminism began conceptually with a deep entanglement of woman and nature. In
1952, Simone de Beauvoir argued that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,”
(Beauvoir 1952: 267) in a revolutionary move to free woman from biological reduction-
ism. Yet she also aligned woman with nature by arguing that they both appear as other to
man in the logic of patriarchy (1952: 144). She later criticized the merging of feminism
with ecology because appeal to “traditional feminine values, such as woman and her
rapport with nature, . . . [is a] renewed attempt to pin women down to their traditional
role” (Beauvoir 1984: 103). Ecofeminism’s early theoretical challenge was accordingly
how to critique the politics of patriarchy without re-inscribing biological essentialism.
Challenging assumptions at the heart of this question, Sherry Ortner asked in 1974,
“Is woman to nature as man is to culture?” She answered that though woman is not
closer to nature than man, she is culturally constructed to appear so; thus genuine
change concerning women’s secondary societal status can only come about through
simultaneous change to social institutions and cultural assumptions. Catherine Roach
argued further that the phrases “Mother nature” and “Mother Earth,”

given the meaning and function traditionally assigned to “mother” and

“motherhood” in patriarchal culture, will not achieve the desired aim of
making our behavior more environmentally sound, but will instead help to
maintain the mutually supportive, exploitative stances we take toward our
mothers and our environment.
(Roach 1991: 46)

That is, the association of women with nature reciprocally reinforces the denigration of
each. The initial encounter of feminism with environment and ecology is, on one hand,
an attempt to retrieve women’s relationship to nature by re-appropriating the creative,

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 INTERSECTIONS

reproductive function in women’s embodied experience, and on the other, a struggle

not to “other” woman into an alterity shared with nature that reduces her to her body
and universalizes women as mothers.
While Ortner was writing in the United States, Francoise d’Eaubonne was coin-
ing the term ‘l’écofeminism’ in France. Her book Feminism or Death (Le féminisme ou
la mort) aligned, as de Beauvoir had, the oppression of women with the exploitation
of nature. Her title was not a battle cry so much as a warning. She argued that just as
the exploitation of nature in an excess of production was creating resource scarcity, so
exploitation of women’s bodies in an excess of reproduction was causing overpopula-
tion. She warned that these factors in tandem were a threat to the human species. This
was the first shot across the bow of not just patriarchy, but capitalist patriarchy. The
history of ecofeminism is the history of its movement from metaphysics of gender to a
critical, global, political critique of capital.

Ecofeminism in the Global North: The Goddess,

Science, and Deep Ecology
Feminists in the late 1960s and early 1970s were typically North American, white,
married, college educated and middle class. They found themselves still entrenched in
a public/private split that consigned them to labor in the home, while the public realm
remained a “man’s world.” Post-1950s conceptions of the nuclear family measured
middle-class success by a male “breadwinner’s” ability to support the family. Feminists
accordingly focused on equal rights in the workplace, and thereby won more access to
middle-class jobs. Yet traditional divisions of labor did not change substantially. The
“supermom” emerged, working hard both at the office and at home. This woman is
thoroughly vulnerable to internalizing feminist backlash—she has no spare time and is
exhausted, while her “exceptional” status in exceeding gender expectations alienates
her from traditional female gender identity. The stay-at-home mom can be just as alien-
ated from feminism, perhaps projecting that her choices let feminism down. Women in
the societal mainstream are accordingly not likely to identify as feminist. The “second
wave” of feminism that began with de Beauvoir thus washed over North America, and
dissipated from the mainstream.
Yet in the 1970s and 1980s, interest in gender difference remained among activist
and academic feminists. Doulas and midwives re-appropriated women’s reproductive
capacity from the male-dominated medical industry. A concurrent symbolic of the
earth mother informed women’s self-conception and self-definition in contrast to
patriarchal conceptions. A retrieval of goddess mythologies, whether or not histori-
cally or anthropologically accurate, reclaimed woman from patriarchy by exploring
their connections to nature and the earth. In 1978, Mary Daly’s radical feminist
Gyn/ecology was published, and Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside
Her. Each argued that philosophy and religion have bolstered patriarchal power over
women and nature. The journal Heresies also published “The Great Goddess” that
reclaimed religion from patriarchy through the “Goddess as symbol of life and death
powers and waxing and waning energies in the universe and in themselves” (Christ
1978). Ecofeminists were developing a spiritual alternative of nourishing, love,
and life in contrast to patriarchal religions, while critiquing modernity’s material-
ist, scientific worldview. Judith Plant (1989) writes of “healing the wounds.” Karen

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Warren (1993; 2000) assesses ecofeminsm’s healing power for women, men, and the
planet. Rosemary Radford Reuther (1994) provides an ecofeminist theology of earth-
healing, and Reuther (1996) recounts how environmental degradation exacerbates
global poverty by increasing women’s labor and suffering. The goddess’s promise of
healing became a liberation theology, i.e., more a prayer for a promised future than
the Dionysian celebration of 1978 to reclaim the power of creation and life.
Native American voices work in knowledge systems that do not separate science
from religion. Starhawk (1979), Paula Gunn Allen (1990), and Winona LaDuke
(2005) write fiction and non-fiction, and it makes little sense to speak of how their
work is at the intersection of gender, indigenous rights and environment as if these
things can be easily separated out. They have academic affiliations, but also are activ-
ists. Discourse in North America concerning indigenous knowledge systems has moved
from the language of “spirituality” to “traditional ecological knowledge” in order in
large part to avoid landing on the wrong side of the modernist distinction that identi-
fies science with knowledge and religion with superstition and myth. This transition
has made indigenous knowledge systems more compatible with academic practices of
science, and easier to integrate into equally male-dominated science-driven environ-
mental policy contexts; but it has also cut out gender. LaDuke, who has a strong voice
in environmental policy critique, does not identify as an ecofeminist, Nonetheless, she
wrote the introduction to Baumgardner and Richards’s field guide for feminist activists
(2005). No one has to be an ecofeminist to be working toward ecofeminist goals. But
anyone with gender consciousness and commitment can contribute to the ecofeminist
struggle to overcome logics of domination.
Concerning science, feminists have strongly critiqued gender bias in the ideology
and practice of science (Harding 1986; 1991; Tuana 1989). Merchant (1980) offers a
much stronger critique, and moreover connects gender issues with ecology. She identi-
fies misogyny at the roots of modern science in Bacon’s writings. He used language from
witch trials to describe how nature’s secrets could be extracted “out of the very bowels
of nature” (Bacon 1980 [1620]: 23) when “she” is “under constraint and vexed; that
is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and
squeezed and moulded” (Bacon 1980 [1620]: 27). Merchant argues moreover that the
mechanistic model of the universe, epitomized in Cartesian metaphysics that reduce
nature to inert matter standing by for appropriation to man’s needs, sanctions the domi-
nation of both women and nature. As nature is a machine at man’s disposal, so woman
can likewise be reduced to a body that can be used instrumentally for reproduction
and pleasure. Val Plumwood lays out the Western intellectual history of domination
over women and nature from the Greeks to its culmination in modern science. She
assesses also how “dominant trends in environmental philosophy . . . embed themselves
within rationalist philosophical frameworks which are not only biased from a gender
perspective, but . . . inimical to nature as well” (Plumwood 1993: 165). Deep ecology in
particular remains sexist because it fails to acknowledge gender difference, and retains
dualisms that support logics of mastery (Plumwood 1993: 174).
The ecofeminism/deep ecology debate is significant not just as a debate about
environmental issues, but about gender bias and exclusion in environmental philoso-
phy. It began when Ariel Salleh argued that from the ecofeminist standpoint, deep
ecology is just another self-congratulatory, reformist move that “fails to face up to
the uncomfortable psychosexual origins of our culture and its crisis” in motives of

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control (Salleh 1984: 344). In 1987, Jim Cheney (1987) accused deep ecology of being
androcentric, and Janet Biehl (1987) argued that deep ecologists implicate women in
the male project of domination over nature. Salleh returned to the debate to argue
that deep ecologists underestimate both the ecofeminist challenge to epistemology,
and how much work is necessary to bring about social change (Salleh 1992: 195). Deep
ecology is incapable of social critique because its political attitudes are meaningful only
to “white-male, middle-class professionals whose thought is not grounded in the labor
of daily maintenance and survival” (Salleh 1993: 225). Slicer argued that unless deep
ecologists read feminist analyses, genuine debate would not be possible (Slicer 1995:
151). In continuing failure to engage ecofeminism, deep ecologists reproduce the very
logic of domination they want to overcome.

Ecofeminism: Discipline and Praxis

One of the first times the word “ecofeminism” appeared in print in North America
was in Diamond and Orenstein’s edited volume Reweaving the World: The Emergence
of Ecofeminism (1990) from the 1987 conference noted in the introduction above.
Contributions from poets, artists, novelists, scholars, scientists, ecological activists,
and spiritual teachers captured how ecofeminism began as a social movement and
philosophy, initiated a critique of science and technology, and sought healing in
the face of contemporary destructive, life-denying practices. The diversity of genres
and perspectives show that ecofeminism in the 1980s was much more than an aca-
demic enterprise. Karen Warren nonetheless planted a solid ecofeminist foot in the
Academy over the next few years.
Warren’s influential 1990 essay argued that the power of ecological feminism is
its promise to re-conceive feminism and develop an environmental ethic founded
in the idea that the domination of women and the domination of nature, in fact,
all the “-isms” of domination, are connected insofar as they arise from the oppres-
sive conceptual framework of patriarchy. Oppressive frameworks generate a logic of
domination based on dualisms, e.g., man/nature, man/woman, reason/emotion, that
privilege one term over the other, and thereby justify domination of the latter by
the former. She also described and defended narrative voice as a research method,
in contrast to the dismissal of experience-based arguments as anecdotal and unsci-
entific. In 1991, she edited a special issue of Hypatia that was the first philosophical
collection on ecological feminism, later revising and expanding it into a book
(Warren 1991, 1996). These essays assess what is unique about ecofeminist ethics
and philosophy, but they also address the grassroots origins of ecofeminism, revisit
the debate with deep ecology, and present ecofeminist perspectives on concrete
issues of animal rights, abortion, and nuclear deterrence.
Feminist philosophy had been coming to terms with its own logic of domina-
tion since bell hooks’s 1984 critique that it marginalized black voices. Drawing on
“emergent Afrocentric eco-womanism” Riley (1992) argues, however, against think-
ing of environmentalism as a “white issue.” She connects ecofeminism to African
activism—not just its direct-action protests but its remedial activity, e.g., Wangari
Maathai’s Green Belt program in Kenya, and other women’s work in Kenya and Niger.
Riley argues against dualism; in these African women’s perspectives, people are part
of nature, nature and humans are interdependent, and the life force that permeates

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all nature is sacred. This Africanist account shares what Salleh (1984) also noted
distinguishes ecofeminism from other environmental philosophies. Women’s experi-
ence of embodiment does not readily generate a dualism against nature that must be
overcome. Environmental ethicists have been at great pains to argue that human
being is part of the natural order rather than superior to it. The feminist problem has
been, rather that woman is relegated to the nature side of the man/nature dichotomy.
Ecofeminism turns this feminist problem into a solution, and can get on addressing
actual issues in the world rather than remaining caught up in providing theoretical
argument for what is already the case.
The turn to real-world issues, to “taking empirical data seriously,” as Warren
(1997; 2000) puts it, immediately uncovers urgent global issues in women’s daily lived
experience as food providers and primary caregivers tasked with meeting the daily liv-
ing needs of their family. Marilyn Waring’s groundbreaking work exposed the global
invisibility of women’s livelihoods (1988; 1999). The invisibility of women’s agricul-
tural labor in developing countries has in particular been documented (Dixon-Mueller
1991), despite the fact that their traditional agricultural expertise has been success-
ful in feeding populations over long historical periods (Curtin 1999). In 1991, Cheryl
Johnson-Odim argued that feminists in the global North need to do more than include
women from the global South on their conference agenda. The Third World feminist
agenda is different because feminists in the global South are “connected as much to
the struggle of their communities for liberation and autonomy as to the work against
gender discrimination” (Johnson-Odim 1991: 317). They cannot depoliticize feminism
to issues of equality and women’s rights because the men of their community also suffer
from and share their struggle against racism, imperialism and economic exploitation.
Rather than just including women from the global South in discussion, Northern femi-
nists should include them in agenda-setting.
From an ecofeminist perspective, “letting” anyone set the agenda re-inscribes a
logic of domination—as if the agenda belonged to ecofeminists anywhere who might
magnanimously share it. In its earliest beginnings, ecofeminism connected sexism with
exploitation and destruction of the environment. When Warren (1990) made explicit
that all the “-isms” of domination (including but not limited to colonialism, impe-
rialism, racism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, classism) are connected by logics of
domination, it was clear that the agenda was already shared. The ecofeminist agenda
connects women everywhere, not because of biology, but through shared (which does
not mean undifferentiated) oppression.
Ecofeminism is accordingly far too of-this-world to be only theoretical. When
feminism meets environmentalism and ecological thinking, not only are connections
between the South and North shown already to exist, but also connections between
theory and practice are revealed as always already in play. Ecofeminism arose out of
women’s lived experience in a world of gender discrimination, heterosexism, envi-
ronmental devastation and threat, increasing militarism, and nuclear proliferation.
Changing this world means understanding it through historical and other analyses
that uncover the role of science and technology in supporting and enabling the deg-
radation of ecosystems, labor conditions, and lived experience. It means uncovering
alternative logics—ways of thinking—in gynocentric practices of livelihood, labor and
care. That is, it means praxis—the inseparability of thoughtful, intentional activity
and experience-generated reflection.

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 INTERSECTIONS

Changing the World: Food, Care, and Climate

Contemporary ecofeminism takes environmental philosophy beyond traditional debates
in deep ecology, anthropocentrism, and the land ethic to real-world impacts in daily,
lived experience. In the United States, ecofeminism has moved into political ecology.
Chaone Mallory (2009; 2010) argues, for example, that ecofeminist activism opens
spaces for subaltern others. She includes non-humans in these others, and argues that
non-human species have sufficient agency and subjectivity to warrant ethico-political
consideration. Her 2013 analysis of locavorism, i.e., eating only locally produced foods,
assesses how gender, race, and class affect food access and food choices. Is such discus-
sion of privileged food choices appropriate or irresponsible in a world where others
face pressing issues of food insecurity? As Salleh notes, “we in the North are the big-
gest problem for the South” (2006: 56–57). The question of responsibility serves as a
reminder that everybody’s choices are much more connected with people’s experiences
elsewhere than it may seem. Food transport generates greenhouse gases that contrib-
ute to climate change that is already causing droughts and subsequent starvation in
Ethiopia (Lott, Christidis, and Stott 2013). Everyone is deeply entangled in the web of
global capital and its impacts.
The intersection of feminism with environmentalism and ecological thought increas-
ingly engages global issues of environmental justice that are socio-political and eco-
nomic. For example, industry generates profits; but the environmental costs of toxins
also generated are “externalities” typically not borne by the polluter. Though sperm can
also be damaged by environmental toxins, women’s reproductive systems are uniquely
vulnerable. Carcinogens collect in fatty tissue, e.g., the breasts. The womb is every per-
son’s first environment; developing organisms are drastically impacted by exposure to
toxins in utero, with results that often have lifelong consequences. Sperm survive for a
few days, so risk of exposure to toxins is short-lived in comparison with the nine months
of human gestation. Women’s role in housing the fetus accordingly entails relational
duties of care that environmental toxins deny her the capacity to meet. Ecofeminists
connect this gendered health issue to the environmental issue. Gender disparity in cor-
porate ownership and reproductive health impacts means that principles of distributive
justice are doubly breached by the costs and benefits of environmental toxins.
Women also bear a significant disproportion of harms when environmental degra-
dation affects their labor and livelihood. Since women in developing countries work
closely with nature to reproduce the material conditions of daily living through agricul-
ture, foraging, and water and fuel collection, environmental degradation can have an
immediate, potentially catastrophic impact on their livelihoods and food security. In
response to challenges women face everywhere in bearing the costs of environmental
degradation, ecofeminism aims at world-changing praxis. As d’Eaubonne knew when
she coined the word l’écoféminisme, it’s a question of survival.
From 1986 to 1989, physicist turned ecofeminist turned environmental, gender, and
development policy critic Vandana Shiva led a major project on resource conflicts over
forests and water in the Punjab region of India. This project led to three books. Shiva
(1988) made a plea for recovery of the feminine principle as the living force of nature,
in contrast to modern science that drives economies from the goal of sustenance toward
profit. This happened in India through intensive Green Revolution agricultural prac-
tices that deforested much of India and left the land either waterlogged or desertified.
Shiva thus argued that ecology is a politics of survival (1991a) and showed the extent of

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what science-based agriculture threatens through analysis of the violence of the Green
Revolution toward nature, soil, seeds, biodiversity and farmers (1991b).
Given her background in physics and philosophy of science, Shiva is well placed
to critique science. Her 1988 analysis characterizes the “destruction of ecologies and
knowledge systems . . . as the violence of reductionism.” Reductionist ecology is at the
root of growing ecological crisis, she argues, because reductionism transforms nature into
passive, inert, manipulable matter—“its organic processes and regularities and regenera-
tive capacities are destroyed” (1988: 24). By denying the validity of other knowledge
systems, contemporary science reduces knowledge in three ways: (i) ontologically (other
properties, e.g., regenerative capacity, are excluded from the account); (ii) epistemo-
logically (alternative ways of perceiving and knowing can no longer be recognized); and
(iii) sociologically (the non-expert is deprived of the right to access knowledge and judge
its claims) (Shiva 1988: 30). In contradiction of its own epistemological standards, con-
temporary scientific knowledge “declares organic systems of knowledge irrational, and
rejects the belief systems of others . . . without full rational evaluation” (Shiva 1988: 26).
Violence is thus done not just to nature and to people, but to knowledge itself.
In 1993, Maria Mies and Shiva published Ecofeminism as a North-South collabora-
tion in which they argued that women bear the burden of responding to life-threatening
industrial disasters and ecological devastation. Drawing on analyses of women’s experi-
ence of poverty globally, the impact of GATT on women in the global South, reproduc-
tive technologies in the global North, and the Chipko movement in India, Mies and
Shiva condemn the destructive, homogenizing and fragmenting ideology and practices
of science-enabled global capital. They offer instead women’s subsistence practices as
functional, liberating alternatives that meet human needs by working within the lim-
its of nature. By denying nature’s reproductive function, the modern scientific world-
view instead privileges production. The logic of industrial science accordingly enables
the patriarchal, capital economy to feminize global poverty and exploit the labor and
resources of the global South while profiting from environmental destruction.
Salleh, noted above for her part in the ecofeminism/deep ecology debate, is long
familiar with critiques of global capital and wrote a Preface for Shiva and Mies (1993).
Salleh’s “embodied materialism” accepts neither that woman is closer to nature, nor
that gender is a purely cultural phenomenon (1997). She negotiates the nature/nurture
dichotomy as I do by accepting neither that nature reduces women to her body, nor
that her social construction as female has no grounding in the material conditions of
her lived reality (Glazebrook 2010b). She envisions ecofeminism that can ground, unify
and empower socialism, ecology, feminism and postcolonial struggle. Salleh (1997:
190) argues that women’s work, their “mothering or organic cultivation,” for example,
demonstrates that “mastery is not the only model for agency.” Women’s daily chores
“are not just ‘running around in circles’ . . . but exercises in balancing internal relations
with decentered foresight.” This work generates “an estrangement of consciousness that
provides reflexivity and the possibility of new insights” (Salleh 1997: 190). This labor-
based analysis of embodied materialism provides Salleh with a conceptual framework
that can be brought to bear on a variety of cross-disciplinary topics. Over the next two
decades, her work focuses on the problematic impacts of the global North on the South
while ranging across climate change, global justice and political economy, ecological
economics, and the politics of reproduction. What ties her work together is a critique of
global capital, and attention to the economic realities of women’s everyday life as they
bear the costs of ecodegradation and the exploitation of their labor.

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 INTERSECTIONS

Shiva’s work subsequent to the 1993 volume is also materialist and economic,
and focused on the everyday realities of women’s experience. She provides gendered
analysis of ecological issues in health and development and argues against the destruc-
tive force of globalization on women’s agriculture-based livelihoods and food security
(Shiva 1994a; 1996, 2000). Further work—for example, on hijacking of the global food
supply, water privatization, justice and sustainability, the impacts of globalization on
seeds, water and life, and climate justice—engages women’s experiences and needs, but
aims more generally at critique of the politics that submit both men and women to food
insecurity, livelihood threat and loss, increased poverty, and deteriorating ecosystem
and labor conditions. Her point is to work in the complex constellation of globali-
zation, patriarchy, capitalism, and technoscience-enabled environmental devastation
where struggles affect not only women. Shiva goes beyond ecofeminist theory to expose
policies and practices that cause suffering by destroying environments and damaging
human health, food security, and well-being.
When theorizing solutions, Shiva proposes women’s agricultural practices as sustain-
able knowledge systems that work within the cyclical limits of nature. When assess-
ing the violence of the Green Revolution, Shiva argued for organic-based agricultural
strategies aimed at “preserving and building on nature’s process and nature’s patterns”
(Shiva 1991b: 26), and traditional practices “built up over generations on the basis
of knowledge generated over centuries” (Shiva 1991b: 44–45). She quotes Dr. John
Augustus Voelker reporting on Indian agriculture to the Royal Agricultural Society
of England: “I, at least, have never seen a more perfect picture of careful cultivation”
(Shiva 1991b: 26). The “cultivation” he is describing is subsistence agriculture, which
is overwhelmingly practiced by women. Shiva is soon arguing that women’s “experience
of interdependence and integrity is the basis for creating a science and knowledge that
nurtures, rather than violates, nature’s sustainable systems” (Mies and Shiva 1993: 34).
She promotes reinstatement of “organic metaphors, in which concepts of order and
power were based on interdependence and reciprocity” (Mies and Shiva 1993: 23).
Shiva’s 1994 article, “Empowering Women,” is a heart-wrenching reflection written
on a train after working all day with rural Punjabi women, but also an argument for a
return to women’s knowledge systems and technologies. The Punjab was the “home
of the green revolution,” so heavily criticized by Shiva while working in the Punjab
several years earlier. Now its consequences are fully evident. Rather than deliver on the
promise to eliminate a threat of a mass starvation, the Green Revolution put farmers
in debt in order to commercialize their farming. When these debts could not be paid
because practices of commercialization, e.g., eucalyptus plantation, sucked down the
water table and caused widespread drought that created poverty and starvation, farmers
resorted to suicide. Their debts grew alongside an ecological burden that the earth also
could no longer carry—traditional biodiversity was displaced by monoculture, disease
and pest explosions led to large-scale pesticide use, and overuse of water caused deserti-
fication. Shiva argues that women pay the highest price for this so-called development:
while adult women are displaced from their traditional agriculture, disempowered, and
faced with food insecurity as mothers, girls are murdered in prenatal femicide through
sex-selective abortion as gender discrimination and dowry practices make women dis-
posable in “‘development’ which excludes and devalues women” (Shiva 1994b). In the
face of these realities, Shiva argues against the “patriarchal logic of exclusion” inform-
ing industrial agriculture on the grounds that women’s traditional agriculture is more

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productive. Women’s “knowledge systems and technologies produce more while using
less.” But also, in women’s value system, “it is unacceptable that in 2015, 500 million
should continue to go hungry,” she wrote, anticipating the Millennium Development
Goals target date for hunger alleviation (Shiva 1994b).
That date has now past. A multi-agency, international report (FAO, IFAD,
and WFP 2015) indicates that “hunger remains an everyday challenge” for almost
795 million people worldwide in 2014–2016 (FAO et al. 2015: 4). Over 98 percent of
the hungry are in the global South, almost a quarter in India, and some 220 million in
sub-Saharan Africa (FAO et al. 2015: 46, 12). This is the current, pressing challenge in
ecofeminism: a humanitarian crisis in hunger in which women are globally responsible
for meeting their family’s daily needs, but are unable to do so.
But if women’s knowledge systems and activities—farming to feed their family, cook-
ing, cleaning, provision of primary medical care, and all the other things a woman might
do in a day to met the needs of others—are care practices rather than logics of domina-
tion, why do women care? I argue that woman’s body is a political site that situates her
in society, culture, and the family by establishing her labor role (Glazebrook 2010b).
In this neo-Marxist, materialist perspective, women are not inherently or inevitably
caring. Yet they exercise (more or less) a capacity to care in their work that provides
new logics contrary to the destructive logic of capitalist patriarchy that is incapable
of ethical decision-making even when corporate leaders want to do the right thing
(Glazebrook and Story 2012).
Looking at Ogoni women’s resistance to oil development in the Niger Delta, wom-
en’s labor can be seen not as actualization of a biological essence or destiny, but as care
that arises relationally in their work (Glazebrook and Olusanya 2009; 2011). Ten years
of field data collected in Ghana working with women subsistence farmers has shown
how vulnerable these women are to impacts of climate change, but also how resilient
they are in adapting, and what potential their knowledge systems have to contribute
to adaptation in similarly changing ecosystems elsewhere, including the global North
(Glazebrook 2010b; 2011; Glazebrook and Tiessen 2011; Glazebrook 2016a; 2016b).
Women’s care practices promote cooperation because many women are already so
over-worked that sharing responsibilities is a benefit, while valuing well-being above
profit safeguards precious, limited resources (Glazebrook 2016c). Women’s agriculture
and knowledge systems offer a new beginning for understanding nature and human
possibilities of dwelling. These possibilities are alternative economics aimed not at the
individual accumulation of private wealth. Rather, capital can appears in an alterna-
tive economics as a sociocultural system aimed at opening the public space to pro-
mote the thriving of people, non-human others, ecosystems and future generations
(Glazebrook and Story 2015).
Patriarchal logics of domination, environmental degradation and its impacts on
women’s lives, global South–North relations, and the role of technoscience in ena-
bling global conquest of the earth by capital come together in the perfect storm of
climate change. Buckingham (2004) outlined impacts of ecofeminism-influenced
groups on European environmental and equalities policy, and national forestry policy
impacts of Chipko women’s interventions in India have been well documented. The
women’s caucus of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
hoped that the stalled process for an international climate agreement would be pushed
forward by the increasing intervention of women’s voices and growing awareness of

441
 INTERSECTIONS

women’s situations. As early as 1987, Michael Zimmerman was arguing for “the global
awakening of the quest for the feminine voice” to counter-balance the one-sidedness
of the masculine voice (1987: 44). The Paris Agreement indeed achieved more than
seemed possible, though still not enough, and possibly nothing if the Agreement
remains unsigned by UN member states. It is impossible to know if ecofeminism
influenced the discussions to break the deadlock. The most recent UNFCCC Gender
Decision was taken in 2012 under the executive leadership of Christiana Figueres and
with the strong and extremely active support of Mary Robinson, former President
of Ireland. The presence of women’s leadership with deep gender consciousness and
strong commitment to women’s needs advanced ecofeminist goals while making the
explicit discourse of ecofeminism redundant.
Before we all hang up our ecofeminist hats and call it a day, however, it is important
to remember how fragile gender gains can be. Gender difference is easily forgotten in
patriarchy’s logic that totalizes the human experience in the absence of explicitly gen-
dered discourse. A post-ecofeminist world in which real change is being made toward
the ecofeminist vision of alternative logics of human practice, policy and experience
risks loss of momentum if academic, activist, spiritual and other ecofeminists do not
keep theorizing, poetizing, acting, and intervening in policy. Insofar as feminism inter-
sects with environmental and ecological thinking, it is clear that when it comes to log-
ics of domination and the struggle to end oppression, we are all in it together. None of
us are free, if one of us is chained.

Related Topics
Native American chaos theory and the politics of difference (Chapter 30); women,
gender, and philosophies of global development (Chapter 34); feminist ethics of care
(Chapter 43); neoliberalism, transnational feminisms, and global justice (Chapter 48);
feminism, structural injustice, and responsibility (Chapter 49).

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 36
ENCOUNTERING
RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY
Perspectives from Feminist
Philosophy of Religion
Patrice Haynes

Introduction
While feminist theology has flourished since the 1970s, it is something of a marginalized
enclave in feminist theory, which is largely secular, if not thoroughly anti-religious, in
outlook. However, the late 1990s saw the publication of two monographs expounding
a feminist philosophy of religion (Anderson 1998; Jantzen 1998). Since then the field
continues to reconfigure “malestream” philosophical reflection on religion in cogent
and novel ways (on some of these, see Chapter 5 in this volume). Nevertheless, feminist
philosophy of religion remains curiously mute on the topic of religious diversity (but see
Anderson 2011). This is an oversight, not least because recent post-secular debates are
often cashed out in terms of the “Muslim issue” (Braidotti 2008: 4), thus fuelling a toxic
climate of “gendered Islamophobia” (see Perry 2014; Zine 2006).
In this chapter I consider how feminist philosophy of religion might address the
so-called “problem” of religious diversity (see Gross 2005 for a critique of the treat-
ment of religious diversity as a problem). While appreciating the overlapping ter-
rain that brings feminist philosophy of religion and feminist theology into creative
proximity, I highlight the epistemological issues raised by religious diversity as an
area in which the feminist philosophy of religion can offer analyses distinct from
feminist theology. I then suggest that dialectical materialism offers resources for
avoiding the modern, secular reduction of religion to pure thought—i.e., to con-
sciously held beliefs. Dialectical materialism endorses the feminist insistence on
contextualizing truth claims, such that feminist philosophy of religion must seek
to make explicit the socio-cultural and historical milieu in which religious beliefs
gain their valence. But when women’s religious subjectivity is contextualized the
emancipatory impulse driving feminist critique is thrown into a disorienting spin.
For the encounter with religiously diverse women reveals forms of religious subjec-
tivity that conserve rather than confront the patriarchal gender hierarchy of their
 Religious Diversity: Feminist Perspectives

religious tradition. Insofar as this chapter ends with a provocation, it testifies to

the richness and vitality promised by feminist philosophy of religion as we move
through the twenty-first century.

Gendering Religious Diversity

The 1893 World Parliament of Religions, a feature of the Chicago World Fair held to
celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the “New
World,” marks the first trial of modern interreligious dialogue. This watershed event
saw religious leaders from around the world convene to promote mutual understand-
ing between different religious traditions and a spirit of “brotherhood.” Jeannine Hill
Fletcher suggests that the Parliament is a useful point of departure for discussion on
women in interreligious dialogue. She cites a newspaper account of the event, which
noted: “The fair sex were there, too, and they were not neglected. But sisterhood in such
a gathering was superfluous. The air was full of brotherhood, and it was of the generic
kind, such as fits both sexes” (Fletcher 2013: 169). As feminists routinely explain, how-
ever, the notion of generic man is mistaken: supposedly universally applicable to both
men and women, it implicitly presupposes the perspectives and experiences of men,
which are held to be normative.
As it turns out, Fletcher explains, women were very much present at the Parliament—
no doubt spurred by the growing global women’s movement in the late nineteenth
century. That said, women’s involvement in the Parliament was downplayed in John
Barrow’s official editorship of the Parliament’s proceedings (he failed to record that a
distinct Women’s Committee had even taken place). Nevertheless, after the 1893
Parliament, women from different religious traditions would increasingly foster interreli-
gious encounters and relations with each other, seeking solidarity across religious borders
in the face of shared patriarchal oppression, and desiring to share stories of their faith as
lived. However, at official and formal levels women remained overlooked in the work of
interreligious dialogue. As late as 1998, feminist theologian Ursula King remarked that
“feminism remains a missing dimension in interreligious dialogue” (King 1998: 42).
While feminist theology gained serious traction in the academy from the 1970s on,
the standard preoccupation revolved around questioning and reconfiguring Christian
doctrines. At the turn of the twenty-first century, feminist theologian Rita Gross (who
was raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition but became a Western Tibetan Buddhist as
an adult) would rightly complain that whenever feminist theology addressed religious
diversity it would principally be in the Christian context—intra-Christian, not inter-
religious, diversity (Gross 2000: 73). With the twenty-first century well underway the
picture has begun to change: Gross’ plea for feminist theology to engage seriously with
religious diversity is being heeded in various ways.
Feminist theologians promise distinctive contributions to debates on religious
diversity (Egnell 2009; Fletcher 2013). These include: (1) a hermeneutics of suspicion
sensitive to ways religions uncritically justify and propagate gendered norms; (2) an
emphasis on sharing personal experiences and life stories, placing the accent on reli-
gion as lived rather than grounded in doctrine; (3) a stress on relationality and recog-
nition of multiple or “hybrid” identities; (4) orienting interreligious dialogue so that it
is life-enhancing; and (5) probing the category “religions” in ways that resist reifying
traditions and effacing their dynamic and internally diverse character.

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 INTERSECTIONS

Indeed, regarding (5), the very terms “religion” and “the religions”—the former a
generic notion and the latter particular expressions of religious beliefs and practices—
are decidedly modern, Western (Christian) categories. They emerge in theological and
philosophical discourses grappling with Enlightenment disputes on faith and reason,
and with a colonial project bringing Europeans into contact with people and cultures
around the world. Feminist perspectives on religious diversity must, therefore, engage
with postcolonial critiques of the Eurocentrism prevailing in theoretical reflection on
religious diversity (Daggers 2012; Kwok 2005).
It is by addressing the epistemic implications of religious diversity that feminist phi-
losophy of religion can bring a perspective distinct from feminist theology to debates on
religious diversity. Both feminist theology and feminist philosophy of religion share a
common dedication to a feminist project that is at once theoretical, seeking to disclose
the multiple causes of women’s subordination, and practical, aiming to bring about equi-
table relations between women and men. Feminist theology and feminist philosophy of
religion diverge, though, insofar as the former can legitimately appeal to scriptural texts
and religious doctrines informed by scripture, while the latter admits no confessional
authorities. However, if feminist philosophy of religion restricts itself to reason alone, it
does not assume the universal reason of much analytic philosophy of religion but takes
seriously the feminist contention that there is no impossible God’s eye view, because
thought is always situated in embodied life and socio-historical context.

Feminist Epistemology and Religious Beliefs

By complicating notions of truth and rationality, feminist philosophy of religion can
create illuminating pathways through the issues generated by religious diversity. Indeed,
incorporating developments in feminist epistemology into philosophy of religion is
an important way in which this sphere may be transformed by feminist perspectives.
Admittedly, not all feminist philosophers of religion would foreground epistemology
in this way, suspecting that epistemology remains invested in a “masculinist” symbolic
(see Jantzen 1998: 77–99). However, religious diversity raises the question of truth in
a stark way: How to make sense of varying religious propositions, regarding ultimate
sacred reality and human salvation (or fulfilment), when these often appear to con-
flict with each other? Is, for example, ultimate sacred reality to be identified with a
personal God as in the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), or
with an impersonal Oneness (as in certain forms of Hinduism) or emptiness (as in
Buddhism)? Is human salvation to be attained through faith in Christ and the gift
of God’s grace (Christianity), or by abolishing all desires and cravings (Buddhism)?
Typically, analytic philosophers of religion hold to the realist tenet that there is “a
truth to the matter” (Basinger 2014). But rather than sidelining questions of truth,
feminist philosophy of religion can contest religious truth claims from a feminist per-
spective without abandoning the notion of truth altogether (see Anderson 2011: 406).
In keeping with a standard move in feminist epistemology, Pamela Sue Anderson
maintains that feminist philosophical reflection on religious diversity should uncover
points of gender-blindness that create sites of “epistemic inertia” (Anderson 2011: 409).
Such inertia not only impedes efforts to ascertain the truth of religious beliefs but also
leaves unchallenged the ethical implications of certain religious beliefs for women (and,
similarly, some groups of men).

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 Religious Diversity: Feminist Perspectives

To elaborate, for the feminist philosopher of religion it is not simply a matter of

disputing, say, the nature of ultimate sacred reality—God, Oneness, emptiness—but of
recognizing how beliefs about ultimate sacred reality inform our understanding of sexual
difference. For instance, Jewish and Christian feminists have noted that the prevalence
of male imagery for God in Judeo-Christian religious language reinforces a gender hier-
archy whereby men are considered more God-like than women—as Mary Daly once
claimed, “If God is male, then the male is God” (Daly 1973: 19). Rita Gross points out
that Buddhist women do not face the issue of the maleness of God since Buddhism is a
non-theistic religion. Nevertheless the Buddhist tradition devalues women in different
ways. One is the contention that to be born a woman is the result of bad karma (see
Anālayo 2014). As to accounts of human salvation, the major world religions tend to
view women as more prone to err from the righteous path, often leading men astray
in the process. In the Abrahamic religions, Eve disobeys God by eating the forbidden
fruit of the tree of knowledge, tempting Adam to do the same. Consequently, Jewish,
Christian, and Muslim women are viewed to be the gateway to sinfulness, guilt and
immorality. It then becomes the role of men to ensure that women uphold “female”
virtues: chastity, fidelity, and modesty. Indian religions also contain sacred writings
(e.g., The Laws of Manu in Hinduism) that stress the need for women to defer to men to
ensure a well-functioning society.
These examples only touch on some ways in which a range of religious traditions
often produce claims that denigrate women. However, when analytic philosophy of
religion considers the implications of religious diversity for religious truth it rarely
considers how religious beliefs depict women in controversial, often sexist, ways. In
seeking to glean the truth of religious beliefs, feminist theologians might bring a her-
meneutical lens, reinterpreting tradition in ways that disclose insights congruent with
feminist thought that have been suppressed by patriarchal society. A Muslim feminist
might point out that unlike the Genesis story in Judeo-Christian scripture, the Qur’an
holds Adam and Eve equally responsible for defying God. She could argue that those
hadiths—the sayings and actions of the Prophet Mohammed recorded by others after
his death—that proclaim Eve to be the first transgressor are most likely influenced by
Jewish and Christian thought (for a critique of such a reading see Hidayatullah 2013).
By contrast, feminist philosophers of religion can interrogate religious claims to truth
by examining epistemological problems arising from the repeated failure to consider
religions’ assumptions around sex and gender.
The following illustrates this gender-blindness. In Religious Ambiguity and Religious
Diversity, Robert McKim explains why religious diversity may be viewed as problematic:

It is not just the fact that there are diverse [religious] beliefs that is striking: it
is the fact that wise people who think carefully and judiciously, who are intel-
ligent, clever, honest, reflective and serious, . . . who admit ignorance when
appropriate and who have relied on what has seemed to them to be the rel-
evant considerations in . . . acquiring their beliefs, hold these diverse beliefs.
(McKim 2001: 129)

For McKim, the philosophical task is to reflect critically on the fact of disagreement about
religious beliefs among “people of integrity.” The contentious point, for McKim, is how
far one must hold one’s religious beliefs (or rejection of such beliefs) tentatively given

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conflict among one’s “epistemic peers” (Basinger 2014). However, no consideration

is given to how norms and values regarding rationality and belief formation are imbri-
cated in a context of relations of power that downgrades women’s epistemic status so
that they cannot be regarded as epistemic peers. Here is a case of epistemic inertia that
feminists can overcome by raising questions about epistemic norms and who counts as
a knowing subject (Fricker 2000; Langton 2000).
Furthermore, the attempt to resolve (or minimize) conflict among religious epistemic
peers presumes that there are “experts” capable of grasping the whole of a religious tra-
dition and representing it in interreligious dialogue (McKim 2001: 134–135). Indeed,
the very term “dialogue” is moot because it overemphasizes intellectual argument at the
expense of creative, affective encounters. However, as Fletcher notes, what counts as
representing a religious tradition is problematic (2013: 173). Insofar as women in inter-
religious settings often draw attention to religion as lived and embodied in everyday life
(not reducible to propositions and doctrinal orthodoxy), philosophy of religion, mind-
ful of women’s voices, may be reminded that “‘religions’ are ultimately unrepresentable
in any totalizing or comprehensive sense” (Fletcher 2013: 173).
Anxiety about truth in the face of religious diversity has since the 1980s seen philo-
sophical and theological discussions circulate around three main positions (Race 1983).
The first is exclusivism: the claims of one’s own religious tradition are true while all
others are false. The second is inclusivism, which grants that other religions may recog-
nise some truths while upholding one’s own tradition as possessing the most complete
and significant religious truths. Finally, religious pluralism (at least the sort inspired by
John Hick) asserts that many of the world’s religions are different yet equally veridical
manifestations of, and responses to, one ultimate sacred reality.
At first glance, religious pluralism seems the most promising option for a feminist
perspective on religious diversity. This is certainly Gross’s view. For her it is inconceiva-
ble that a feminist, committed to affirming diversity, would emphasize the superiority of
one religious tradition over others—particularly since all religions historically enshrine
patriarchal beliefs and practices that harm women (Gross 2001: 89). For Gross, reli-
gion’s proper job is “transforming humans into gentler, kinder, more compassionate
beings” (2001: 90). Accordingly, she gives primacy to ethics rather than doctrinal truth,
and so holds that exclusivist and inclusivist positions can only ever invite discord and,
at worse, conflict.
However, feminist theologian Jenny Daggers is wary of the sort of transreligious
theology of religions proposed by Gross because it excludes women committed to the
truth and integrity of their religious tradition—even as these demand critical scru-
tiny with respect to their engrained patriarchy (Daggers 2012). Moreover, the plu-
ralist position viewed through a postcolonial lens could be charged with reinstating
Eurocentric universalism in a new guise, as it downplays differences in favor of high-
lighting commonalities between religious traditions. Seeking to preserve the incom-
mensurable differences between religious traditions without homogenizing them,
while also encouraging creative interreligious relations, Daggers turns from pluralism
to particularism. She does so with the aim of articulating a Christian (white) feminist
theology of religions (2012: 159–184). Presumably feminist theologians from other
religious traditions and socio-cultural locations could adopt the sort of particularism
elaborated by Daggers so that they too may engage in interreligious relations using
terms drawn from their particular religion.

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By contrast, a feminist philosopher of religion concerned with making visible the

gender-blindness of epistemological models, could examine the theories of truth and
error, epistemic norms around disagreement, and values (both constitutive and con-
textual) that guide exclusivist, inclusivist, pluralist, and even particularist positions.
For example, Anderson (2011: 408–409) targets the epistemic framework espoused by
Christian exclusivists such as Alvin Plantinga. For Plantinga there are central Christian
tenets that are “properly basic.” That the world was created by God, an almighty, all-
knowing and perfectly good personal being, and that human salvation is by way of the
life and sacrificial death of God’s son, are two such beliefs (Plantinga 2008 [1995]: 41).
Aside from his failing to address the gendered conception of the divine, Anderson
indicts Plantinga for exempting core religious beliefs from questioning and revision. The
trouble is, Anderson argues, upholding such exemption leads to an epistemic inertia at
odds with the pursuit of truth. For Anderson, it is only by pursuing truth that we can
discern how religious beliefs contribute to women’s subjugation.
This suggests that commitment to a particular religious tradition risks producing
epistemic inertia insofar as such commitment demands treating certain doctrinal
claims as unquestionable. Does this mean that Daggers’ particularism is at odds with
the effort to surmount epistemic inertia endorsed by Anderson? Seeking to show
how her revised particularism, with its stress on the incommensurability of religious
traditions, does not preclude interreligious exchange, Daggers indirectly responds to
Anderson’s concerns. Drawing on theologian Catherine Cornille, Daggers maintains
that commitment to a religious tradition must be tempered by openness to other tra-
ditions. This encourages a level of “‘doctrinal humility’ and ‘doctrinal hospitality’”
(Daggers citing Cornille 2012: 173) that can provoke the transformation of—in
Daggers’ case—Christian tradition. Yet if the integrity of a religious tradition is to
hold then the transformation occasioned by encountering religious others can only
go so far. There is, therefore, a tension between the desire for openness and trans-
formation (countering epistemic inertia) and upholding the particularity of religious
traditions. However, it is my contention that feminist theorists must question all
religious beliefs and practices that enhance men’s lives at the expense of women’s.
Such questioning need not be antipathetic to tradition—feminist theology shows
how critique is possible while remaining rooted within a religious tradition.
A further intervention that a feminist philosopher might make in debates about
exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism is to question the demand for neutral or common
ground from which to assess the truth of competing claims objectively. That neutral
ground must be sought is a claim that most feminist thinkers would contest (Jantzen
2001). Such ground presupposes a disinterested subject detached from any socio-cultural
location: an ideal observer able to achieve a “view from nowhere.” This conception
of the subject is the centerpiece of an androcentric philosophy that refuses to admit
the relevance of socio-cultural location to epistemic practitioners. Without abandon-
ing rationality, feminist philosophers of religion can draw on feminist epistemology to
tackle the difficult aim of establishing ways to adjudicate competing religious beliefs
without presupposing an impossible view from nowhere.
I have suggested that epistemology offers a fertile site for bringing feminist philo-
sophical perspectives to bear on the “problem” of religious diversity. A key strategy for
feminist philosophy of religion, then, is to expose how epistemological models used by
“malestream” philosophy of religion entrench the discipline in gender-blindness. In

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taking a constructive turn, feminist philosophy of religion could seek to articulate an

epistemology that is both attentive to epistemic locatedness and, given an adequately
revised conception of rationality, emboldened to tackle thorny questions on how truth
should be figured in discussions on religious diversity. Could a feminist philosopher of
religion defend some form of exclusivism? Or, approaching the question of truth from
another angle, how might the feminist philosopher of religion facilitate learning the
truths, however disputed, of other religious traditions? This could be an exercise in
cross-cultural understanding that dovetails with the ethical intent to promote open and
hospitable relations with religious others. I am sympathetic to Gross’ criticisms of reli-
gious exclusivism and inclusivism noted earlier. Nevertheless, I do not think that com-
mitment to the truth claims of a particular religious tradition is necessarily hostile to the
feminist endeavour to overcome women’s subjugation by patriarchal orders. Daggers’
revised particularism points to the idea of “critical commitment” to one’s religious tradi-
tion, which values both its integrity and its receptiveness to critique from those internal
and external to that tradition.

Materialist Interventions: Religion as Real Abstraction

Insofar as feminist philosophy of religion is feminist it is at once a form of social
criticism—its theoretical reasoning strives to connect with collective efforts to over-
come the devaluing of women by patriarchal socio-cultural orders. It may be feared
that this practical orientation of feminist philosophy of religion evades questions
regarding the epistemic truth of religious beliefs and the rationality of maintain-
ing an exclusivist, inclusivist or pluralist response to religious diversity. For sure,
feminist philosophy of religion directed towards the “problem” of religious diversity
will seek to examine how traditional epistemic norms implicitly support false and
damaging beliefs about women. However, I have advocated a more rigorously self-
reflexive philosophical method that refuses to excise contextual socio-cultural values
and interests as irrelevant to philosophical inquiry. Such a method can enhance our
ability to rationally assess religious truth claims.
That said, fixation on the epistemic status of religious belief may be queried by
post-secular discourse informed by Marx’s dialectical materialism. Seeking to develop a
critical philosophy of religion, Daniel Whistler draws on Marxist social theorist Alberto
Toscano and feminist philosopher Gillian Howie to rethink religions in terms of “real
abstraction” (Whistler 2014). For all his antipathy towards religion, along with his
Feuerbachian contention that “man makes religion,” Marx “provides us with a potent
critique of the [Enlightenment] critique of religion” (Toscano 2010: 10). Boldly put, for
Marx, religion is a form of real abstraction because it is both true and false. It is true
because it bears witness to an antagonistic social reality (namely, social relations that
produce economic inequality); false because it invokes an autonomous, spiritual reality
independent of humanity. For Marx, “the crucial error is to treat real abstractions as
mere ‘arbitrary product[s] of human reflection’” (Marx cited in Toscano 2010: 12)—for
they are necessary illusions. Theistic beliefs, therefore, are not founded on a mistaken
understanding of reality that can be corrected by pointing out the lack of evidence for
the existence of God. Rather such beliefs are a rational way of making sense of, and
living in, a world characterized by social injustice—a world that fails to deliver genuine
freedom, equality, and happiness. The emancipatory task, for Marx, is not to correct

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religious beliefs as illusory but to “give up a [social] condition that requires illusion”
(Marx cited in McLellan 2000: 72).
Religious realists (myself included) who maintain that ultimate sacred reality is
objectively real may worry that Marx undermines religious truths by anthropologizing
or naturalizing them. However, I leave this concern in suspense so that we do not miss
the key point that, for Marx, religion as real abstraction has material efficacy. Religion
concretely articulates the complex and contradictory lived experience of alienated
social relations produced by the capitalist system. The notion of religion as real abstrac-
tion shifts attention away from its conceptual representation (i.e., religious beliefs) to
its extra-conceptual social actuality.
Given these insights, Marx criticizes anti-religious critique for focusing on the truth
content of religious belief when a materialist, emancipatory critique requires scrutiny
of the social relations constitutive of such beliefs. Whistler suggests that philosophy of
religion in accord with dialectical materialism continually oscillates between critique
and the critique of critique (Whistler 2014: 184). Citing Toscano, Whistler explains
that the principal task for a critical philosophy of religion is “to confront the social
logic into which they [religious abstractions] are inscribed, and the dependence of these
abstractions on given modes of production and social intercourse” (2014: 191).
This materialist re-orienting of critique is, as Whistler notes, paralleled in Howie’s
important work Between Feminism and Materialism. Whistler’s focus on real abstraction
in Howie’s work reveals that the feminist critique of reason, identity and universality
must also be critiqued. For feminist theory to begin at all, according to Howie, it must
use theoretical abstractions as tools that afford the “critical distance” needed to turn real
abstractions (e.g., epistemic norms such as identity and objectivity) against themselves
by tracing their imbrication in contingent socio-cultural conditions (Howie 2010: 58).
Taking its lead from dialectical materialism, critical theory reminds us that critique
must not be limited to theoretical disputes. There must also be a dialectical critique of
critique. Thus, the critique of religion will remain myopic so long as it remains gripped
by arguments about the truth of religious beliefs and epistemic justifications for uphold-
ing exclusivism, inclusivism or pluralism. With this in mind, feminist philosophy of
religion in a dialectical materialist register would not repeat the Enlightenment reduc-
tion of religion to mere thought. Rather it would challenge “both the universalising
and ahistoricising tendencies of contemporary philosophy of religion” (Whistler 2014:
192) by conceiving religions as real abstractions, thus attending to the concrete ways in
which religious beliefs are efficacious in women’s lives.
One area in which feminist philosophers of religion would do well to view religion
in terms of real abstraction, i.e., as socially located, is regarding the practice of veiling
by some Muslim women. Islam has long been criticized by Western societies for being
oppressive towards women, the veil serving as the most potent symbol of (purported)
Islamic misogyny. The scriptural basis for veiling can be found in certain verses of the
Qur’an and some hadiths. For example, the Qur’an states: “And say to the believing
women that they should avert their gaze and guard their modesty . . . and they should
throw their veils over their bosoms, and not display their adornment except to their
husbands or fathers” (Holy Qur’an 33: 59 cited in Zine 2006: 243). Islamic scholars
dispute how to interpret scripture, particularly the hadiths, with respect to women’s
veiling. However, of interest here is the set of beliefs concerning ideals of Islamic
womanhood that support the practice of veiling: modesty, obedience, humility, and

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similar qualities. It might be tempting for liberal-minded feminists—whether secular or

religious—to discredit such beliefs by pointing out their erroneous sexist assumptions,
lack of adequate justification and harsh disciplining of women’s bodies. But this reduces
the issue of veiling to a matter of Muslim patriarchal ideology, that is, a set of beliefs to
be debunked by liberal feminist theory. Such an approach overlooks the specific socio-
historical, cultural and political matrix in which Muslim women veil.
In her work on Islamic women’s organizations in Cairo, Egypt, Sherine Hafez
explains that efforts to understand the situation of pious, veil-wearing Muslim women
in contemporary Egypt are thwarted if the focus is solely on how Islamic beliefs shape
these women’s lives. Rather, the status of such women must be “contextualized within
the historical development of anti-colonial nationalism, state building projects, and
nationalism” (Hafez cited in Kassam 2013: 145). In the particular locale of Egypt’s
Islamic revival over the last two decades or so, the increasing number of women wear-
ing the veil cannot be entirely attributed to the imposition of androcentric Islamic
ideals. Geopolitical and socio-historical factors also affect the practice of veiling and
the religious comportment of contemporary Egyptian women. The significance of the
veil shifts according to the specific contexts within which it is worn. The veil worn
in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan cannot be understood in the same way as the veil worn
by, for example, converted (or reverted, to use the preferred Muslim term) African
American Sunni Muslim women in twenty-first-century South Central Los Angeles
(Rouse 2004). By taking heed of how women’s religiosity is distinctively contextualized,
feminist philosophers of religion can avoid the simplistic identification of religion with
religious beliefs.

Contextualizing Women’s Religious Subjectivity

I now wish to return to the issue of religious diversity to highlight how feminist phi-
losophy of religion is faced with a frankly alarming challenge when it reflects on certain
models of women’s religious subjectivities evident in a range of religious traditions—
namely, those subjectivities that appear to be fundamentally at odds with feminist
emancipatory aspirations.
In recent years anthropologists (e.g., Saba Mahmood) and historians of religion
(e.g., Mary L. Keller and Phyllis Mack) have provided rich empirical details on how
women in particular socio-historical situations construct their religious subjectivity
and with this establish distinctive forms of agency. All too briefly: Mahmood’s Politics
of Piety examines the women’s mosque movement in 1990s Cairo, Egypt, which saw
participants endeavoring to cultivate a pious subjectivity by fostering “those bodily apti-
tudes, virtues, habits and desires that serve to ground Islamic principles” (2012 [2005]:
45); Keller’s work has explored the religious subjectivity of spirit-possessed women in
Shona (Zimbabwean) history (Keller 2003); and Mack’s research on Quaker women
in eighteenth-century England highlights their efforts to do “what is right” as this is
determined by God, rather than personal desires (Mack 2003: 156).
These studies elucidate notions of religious subjectivity that do not centre on
an individual’s assenting to a set of consciously held beliefs, in the manner of the
autonomous, rational subject of Western modernity. Rather, the religious subjectivi-
ties described are constituted by a woman embodying practices that endeavour to
accomplish a way of life, an ethos, delineated by the norms and ideals of her tradition.

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Scholars such as Mahmood, Keller, and Mack concentrate on the local conditions
in which women live their lives: the specific social relations, institutions, discur-
sive traditions, embodied practices and networks of power. They identify notions of
(religious) subjectivity that challenge what Keller calls the “hypervaluation of
autonomy” (Keller 2003: 78) in secular, Western thought, including feminist theory.
Liberal, humanist subjects act according to their own will or conscious intention. In
contrast the religious subjectivity of the women described above is characterized less
by self-expression and more by self-transcendence (Mack 2003: 153). However, to
interpret such women as exhibiting no more than a “deplorable passivity and docility”
(Mahmood 2012 [2005]: 15) would be to presume a Western, secular conception
of agency. It would miss how religious subjectivity may be understood as achieving
agency and selfhood through embodied, normative relations (e.g., obedience, duty,
responsibility, etc.) with otherness (e.g., the will of God, tradition, the needs of
others), relations that constrain as well as empower.
Of course, the liberal account of agency premised on an autonomous, fully rational
subject unencumbered by social relations has been criticized by feminist philosophers
(Stoljar 2013). However, despite the various theories of agency and autonomy devel-
oped in feminist thought, Mahmood contends that they rarely problematize “the uni-
versality of the desire—central for liberal and progressive thought, and presupposed by
the concept of resistance it authorizes—to be free from relations of subordination, and
for women, from structures of male domination” (Mahmood 2012 [2005]: 10).
While feminism is far from uniform, it is fair to say that the basic axiom shared by
all feminists is that the patriarchal subordination of women by men is unjust and must
be overcome. In that feminist philosophy of religion is committed to opposing gender
inequality could it be viewed as eulogizing a Eurocentric, secular idea of subjectivity at
odds with socially conservative models of religious subjectivity and agency? The danger
is twofold. Either feminist philosophy of religion risks finding itself deaf to those voices
that sound out a different story to that of the supposedly universal liberal subject. Or it
takes seriously the historicization of religious subjectivity but, unable to adopt a critical
position, finds itself swept off by the currents of cultural relativism.
These are grave difficulties that I cannot address here. Certainly the dialectical
materialist approach to feminist philosophy of religion developed in this chapter would
press for fine-grained, localized conceptions of religious subjectivity and agency. But
as a form of social criticism, feminist philosophy of religion would also seek to identify
unjust relations between men and women so that these may be overcome. Howie sug-
gests that a focus on interests offers a way to make sense of the patriarchal relation as
one of domination: “the systematic subordination of the interests of women to those
of men” (2010: 200). However, problems arise when feminist theory takes into con-
sideration women whose religious subjectivity pursues fulfilling the interests of God
or their community rather than their own personal interests.
We need to avoid treating conservative religious subjectivities as merely instances
of false consciousness (the internalization of oppressive norms). Instead, a key task
for feminist philosophy of religion is to theorize how concepts such as interest, con-
straint, power and patriarchy may do explanatory work while being appreciative of
“what agency means in relation to specifically religious grammars” (Bracke 2008: 63).
Because I believe it is overly simplistic to ossify a distinction between liberal “agency as
autonomy” and religious “agency as submission,” I am drawn to Tanya Zion-Waldok’s

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concept of “devoted resistance.” She seeks to articulate the possibility of social critique
and political resistance for women who, nevertheless, are deeply committed to their
religious tradition (Zion-Waldok 2015).
The dialectical materialist insight to be added is that social transformation is unlikely
to result simply by changing consciousness (Mahmood 2012 [2005]: 188). Rather con-
crete transformation will be prompted by, and organized around, local problems. To the
extent that these problems concern women’s interests or flourishing the response may
be considered feminist in character. The forming of alliances between (differently) reli-
gious and secular women, between socially conservative and progressive women need
not appeal to a priori, universal principles but to relations of solidarity that emerge as
similarities are discerned “between one woman’s situation and another’s, between this
local group of women and other groups” (Howie 2010: 204).

Conclusion
According to Basinger, among the issues philosophers discuss that have practical bearings
“none is more relevant today than the question of religious diversity” (Basinger 2014).
Given this, it is incumbent on feminist philosophers of religion to address the gendered
implications of debates on religious diversity and interreligious encounters. Challenging
gender-blind concepts of truth and rationality is one way feminist philosophers of religion
can agitate this field. The notion of religion as “real abstraction” helps us circumvent
interminable debates about the epistemic status of religious belief, focusing instead on
religion as a lived experience, enmeshed in specific socio-historical relations. However,
contextualized accounts of women’s religious subjectivities tug at the secular, Eurocentric
values woven into progressive feminism. Feminist philosophy of religion is thus provoked
to think afresh the nature of its emancipatory aims in light of women who prioritise their
religious commitments over resisting the patriarchal structure of their tradition. The way
forward for feminist philosophy of religion is far from obvious. The dialectical materialist
point is that feminist philosophy of religion must remain alert to the concrete actualities
of women’s religious lives, including any local problems such women seek to address, such
as the problem of piety. The wider point for feminist theory is that it must engage with
the experiences of religiously diverse women if it wishes to expose its entanglement with
assumptions regarding subjectivity, agency and even the nature of critique that could
only ever blunt its emancipatory force.

Further Reading
Cady, Linell E. and Tracy Fessenden (2013) Religion, The Secular and the Politics of Sexual Difference,
New York: Columbia University Press. (A timely, interdisciplinary collection of essays questioning
whether secularism is good for women as often presumed.)
Cheetham, David, Pratt, Douglas, and Thomas, David (2013) Understanding Interreligious Relations, Oxford:
Oxford University Press. (A comprehensive volume on engaging with religious others; Part One offers
perspectives from a range of world religions.)
Griffiths, Paul J. (2001) Problems of Religious Diversity, Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. (A clear over-
view of philosophical approaches to debates on religious diversity.)
King, Ursula and Beattie, Tina (Eds.) (2005) Gender, Religion and Diversity: Cross-Cultural Perspectives.
(A useful volume of essays on women and contemporary religious studies.)

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Related Topics
Feminist engagement with Judeo-Christian religious traditions (Chapter 5); rationality
and objectivity in feminist philosophy (Chapter 20); testimony, trust, and trustwor-
thiness (Chapter 21); epistemic injustice, ignorance, and trans experience (Chapter
22); the genealogy and viability of the concept of intersectionality (Chapter 28); femi-
nist conceptions of autonomy (Chapter 41); multicultural and postcolonial feminisms
(Chapter 47); feminism and freedom (Chapter 53); feminism and power (Chapter 54);
feminist approaches to violence and vulnerability (Chapter 55).

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 Part V

ETHICS, POLITICS,
AND AESTHETICS
Aesthetics
 37
HISTORICIZING
FEMINIST AESTHETICS
Tina Chanter

This chapter is organized around two central questions. First, if art is political, in what
ways is it political? Most theorists who identify themselves in some way with feminist
aesthetics agree that art is political, but differ in how they think it is political. The
second question is, if we assert that art is political in some way—although we need to
clarify in exactly what ways it is political—is there anything to be learned from those
philosophers such as Immanuel Kant who have argued for the universality of aesthetics?
Feminists have produced a variety of answers to this question. In order to appreciate
why and how the question has been answered so variously, we will need to understand
something about the arguments that Kant put forward for the universality of aesthetics,
and the relation between his view of aesthetic judgment and the other two domains
of his critical philosophy, i.e. the metaphysical and the practical. We will also need to
understand how and why, despite the severely problematic sexist, classist, and racist
claims that Kant makes, his philosophy—in particular his aesthetics—remains a source
of inspiration for some feminists and social-political philosophers.
In the first section I expand on the sense in which art is political; in the second
section I expand further on exactly how this is so; and in the remaining sections I play
this out in relation to Kant. The third section explores the paradoxes that structure
Kant’s philosophy of aesthetics, embedded in which are both progressive and regressive
elements. The fourth section situates Kant’s aesthetics in his philosophy as a whole.
Finally, in the fifth section I explore some ways in which feminists have responded to
Kant’s aesthetics and reworked it.

Art as Political
The very architecture of aesthetics—its conceptual vocabulary—has unfolded and
developed in ways that cannot be divorced from social and political assumptions, which
are local and contingent rather than universal and necessary. What counts as art is itself
a matter of judgment that is subject to political, cultural, and historical shifts. If the his-
tory of aesthetics shows itself open to challenge, and capable of reworking, this includes
the history of feminist aesthetics.
Not only are aesthetic criteria open to challenge, and capable of undergoing redefini-
tion, but so too what counts as political is open to challenge. Insofar as some versions of
 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

feminist aesthetics have been blind to the dynamic of race, for example, those versions
of feminist aesthetics have tended to represent the traditions or conventions against
which they define themselves, and which they attempt to reshape, as masculinist, but
not as white. We might say then that to the extent that the politics of feminism has
played out in ways that are not racially inclusive, the very shape of both feminist aes-
thetics and the masculinist aesthetic traditions that it has reflected have been infused
with a political inability of their practitioners to think through their racial implications.
This inability has much to do with the race of those who have taken it upon them-
selves to define the terms of feminism, and those to whom it has fallen—or who have
arrogated to themselves—the prerogative to define the terms of aesthetics. If white,
masculinist theories predominate in aesthetics as traditionally defined, this is in no
small part due to the parameters that have defined the communities of practitioners
who have set the terms of aesthetic enquiry. So too the communities of those who have
come to represent feminist aesthetics, those whose voices have been defined as its cred-
ible representatives and spokespersons, have been constituted in terms of racial param-
eters. In turn, the very differentiation between ostensibly formal and universal features
of both art works and aesthetics, and the ways in which these features organize, specify,
and define the material content of works of art are laden with historical and socio-
political assumptions. What counts as art is open to question, so that, for example, some
might grant that a quilt has the status of a work of art, while others would discount it.
The dividing line between art and non-art is unstable. This opens up questions about
aesthetic judgment itself, as something that is applicable beyond any specific domain
of aesthetic objects, establishing the relevance of aesthetic judgment to that which as a
rule might be cordoned off from aesthetics: reason, morality, and concepts, for example.

How Is Art Political?

If there is general agreement in the field of feminist aesthetics that art is political, it
remains to clarify exactly what this means. At issue is whether there is a complete
collapse of the boundaries between aesthetics and politics, or whether some kind of
boundary remains, even if it is fungible and fuzzy rather than rigid and static.
Rita Felski (1989) sets up two extremes that she argues must be avoided in aesthetics.
On the one hand, she wants to avoid positing a rigid, dualistic dichotomy between
art and politics, and on the other hand, she is wary of identifying art and politics so
that they become indistinguishable. To endorse a rigidly dichotomous view of art and
politics suggests that art can exist as a pure, transcendent realm, uncontaminated by
the political sphere. To equate art and political ideology would be to reduce art to an
unambiguous political content, where its use value prevails, such that it immediately
and directly reflects a political message. Distancing herself from both these positions,
Felski defends the “relative autonomy” of art, in order to avoid construing art as mere
ideology, as if art were merely a reflection of politics, while also rejecting the other
extreme, the idea that art is impervious to all political influence (Felski 1989: 176).
Felski identifies feminist aesthetics with the reduction of art to political ideology.
Consequently she argues that the very attempt to formulate what might be regarded
as feminist aesthetics is fundamentally misguided. While I think that Felski is right
to avoid reducing art to politics or maintaining the purity of art, her identification of
feminist aesthetics with the equation of art and political ideology needs to be rethought.

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At the same time, Felski’s understanding of politics needs to be complicated, insofar as

she assumes that the politics of feminist aesthetics is unidimensional—it is a politics
opposed to patriarchy. The demands of thinking through intersectionality mean that
things are not so simple.
To characterize the entire field of feminist aesthetics as rendering art equivalent
to ideology is to misrepresent what is in fact a much more variegated set of views. I
suggest not that we should abandon feminist aesthetics, but that we take its develop-
ment, history, and differentiations seriously. My effort here is intended to contribute to
that project. It is true that some feminists—although certainly not all—have claimed
that feminist art is an instrument of feminist politics. Hilde Hein states, for example,
“Feminist art is . . . a means to consciousness raising” (1995: 452). In defending such
a position Hein makes the point that those who object that politics has “no place in
art” fail to “grasp that ‘conventional’ art is equally political,” but its politics is “cast as
‘neutral’ or masculinist” in a way that “appears invisible” (1995: 451). The suggestion is
that art in general has been inadvertently political: that is, even if it has presented itself
and has been regarded as art that occupies an autonomous realm purified of politics, in
fact it has been thoroughly imbued with political assumptions.
By contrast, feminist art has cast itself as self-consciously political, overtly advocating
a particular ideological stance. In doing so, it uncovers and reworks masculinist pro-
cedures and assumptions embedded in the tradition of art. These include the fact that
women have often been the objects of art, rather than its creators, and that the conven-
tions of artistic representation have tended to confirm, rather than interrogate, women’s
subservient socio-political roles—painterly representations of women performing tasks
and duties typically coded as feminine in domestic interiors, for example (Gallop 1986).
Feminist reworking of more conventional approaches to art also include the use of new
materials, the introduction of new subject matter, and the interrogation and rethinking
of the boundaries distinguishing women as objects of the male gaze from artists as crea-
tors. Feminist painters, photographers, and film directors, for example, have orchestrated
the gaze in new ways that subvert, remake, and intervene in artistic conventions.
Two issues demand attention. The first is that the claim that “conventional” art
is political, but is so in a way that disavows its political character, tends to play itself
out by reducing art’s politics to white patriarchy. Although Hein nods toward the
diversity of women, this diversity plays no substantial role in her analysis, in which
the two major examples that she develops—Laura Mulvey (1988) and Susan Stanford
Friedman (1987)—occupy mainstream positions that do not challenge the default
whiteness and heteronormativity of feminist theory. Mulvey’s article on the male
gaze, though making some important conceptual breakthroughs, has been rightly criti-
cized for ignoring the question of race, and Friedman’s argument, which focuses upon
birthing metaphors, tends to reinscribe the normative identification of women with
maternity. The demands of an intersectional approach to feminist aesthetics require
that we take into account and challenge the ways in which art and aesthetics have not
merely perpetuated and recreated gender hierarchies, but have also participated in and
confirmed racial and other disparities. The second issue is that in contesting artistic
conventions that have previously passed as neutral, while in fact being implicated in
classist, gendered, and racist assumptions, there is a need to confront how the history
of aesthetics has condoned, produced, and articulated standards and values that are
complicit with such assumptions.

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It becomes clear that the very terms in which art has been defined as art are infused
with political assumptions and moral judgments about the relative worth of artworks
based on their provenance. So, for example, the effort to specify art as pure has typically
proceeded in ways that privilege certain types of art over others precisely by drawing
upon pre-existing cultural and political stereotypes. These stereotypes are informed by
prejudices, which have resulted in various hierarchies such that some art genres have
been valued above others, and such that distinctions have been erected in the name of
distinguishing high art from low or popular art, or art from craft. These very distinctions
are informed by assumptions about the relative worth of the originators and creators of
artworks, such that, for example, gendered and raced assumptions play into aesthetic
decisions about which objects come to accrue value in certain contexts, and which do
not. The articulation of the relationship between concepts such as form and matter,
which has been central to aesthetics, is itself infused with assumptions that are not
immune from cultural bias.
Aesthetic judgments occur within cultural contexts that accord to privileged voices
the authority to define the boundaries of art, and those definitions will inevitably influ-
ence both consumers of art and creators of art. Consequently the communities that
cohere around these judgments and definitions in the hope of legitimation will in turn
shape and circumscribe aesthetic taste and the possibilities, aspirations and legitimacy
of artists. Members of such communities, both artists and consumers of art, will be accul-
turated by the aesthetic standards and values that circulate between artists and aestheti-
cians. The transformation of aesthetics then is bound up with challenging which voices
are counted as definitively authoritative when it comes to defining what qualifies as art.
In the remainder of this chapter, I turn to Kant. I do so not only in order to play out
the political imperative to contest the biases built into his aesthetic philosophy, which
has accumulated such authority as to have become almost synonymous with the field of
aesthetics, at least in some circles. I turn to Kant also because his aesthetic philosophy
is rife with paradoxes that have proven to be productive for some feminist and political
philosophers, even as they have alienated others. In the very same contexts in which
he denigrates the humanity of women, certain races, and certain classes, Kant also offers
insights as to how such judgments might be contested.

Kant’s Aesthetics: Regressive or Progressive?

Kant confronts us with a contradictory state of affairs on several levels. He makes
universal communicability a requirement of aesthetic judgments in a way that is belied
by his own raced and gendered denigrations of those whose inclusion in the commu-
nity of rational and moral subjects Kant imagines is thereby put in doubt. On the one
hand, Kant demonstrates by his own subjective judgments concerning race and gender,
art and craft, the beautiful and the sublime, the partiality to which our judgments can
incline. On the other hand, he acknowledges the importance of opening up the particu-
larity of taste to the influence of others, appealing to a universal community in which
everyone is enjoined to assent to subjective judgments of the beautiful, but in which
assent cannot be mandated. For Kant, sociability is built into his account of aesthetic
judgment such that to make an aesthetic judgment is both to demand that others see
the beauty that I see, and to open myself up to the possibility of challenge. It is to invite
the views of others, to open up a conversation, and in doing so to position oneself in
such a way as potentially to revise one’s own aesthetic sensibility.

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Kant’s articulation of aesthetic judgment suggests a significant reworking of his

earlier claims for the operative conditions for knowing the world and acting morally.
Therefore, we might say that Kant’s aesthetics offers the resources for rendering his
transcendental approach to philosophy as a whole more open-ended and provisional
than his presentation of it in its earlier formulations. Given this, Kant’s insistence
upon the purity not only of aesthetic judgment but also of cognition and morality is
potentially undercut by the claims that he makes in articulating how judgment func-
tions. Going beyond the letter of Kant, his work has been enlisted in philosophical
projects that acknowledge the radical potential that art has to reconfigure that which
previously passed as impervious to interrogation. There is something powerful and
unsettling about aesthetic judgment, something that renders it capable of refiguring
that which had established itself in the sedimented grooves of accumulated knowl-
edge. That knowledge turns out to be capable of reconfiguration, so that concepts such
as universality no longer seem tenable—or at least the parameters of what counts as
universal are shown to be riven with contingency, such that what counts as universal
itself undergoes constant rethinking. What seemed to be indispensable conditions of
possibility, not only for aesthetics but also for knowledge in general, thereby present
themselves for interrogation.

Situating Kant’s Aesthetics in the Context of

His Philosophical Project
Kant articulates aesthetic judgment in such a way as to provide tools that bring into
question his own earlier stipulations regarding transcendental philosophy. It can be argued
that his discussion of aesthetics in The Critique of the Power of Judgment (2000 [1790])—
which has come to be known as Kant’s third Critique—significantly revitalizes the parame-
ters of his philosophical project. It does so to the point that even the meaning of terms that
played a vital and decisively determining role in his earlier philosophy undergo significant
transformation. How key terms such as “universality,” “necessity,” and “a priori” function,
for example—and therefore the very meaning of a transcendental approach to philosophy
as the search for the conditions of the possibility of experience—appear to be thought in
a way that departs from how these terms operate in the first two Critiques. The very condi-
tions that Kant stipulates as a priori, universal, and necessary for knowledge and morality
are thus cast in a new light by Kant’s discussion of aesthetics, which has been seen by some
readers as not merely bridging a divide between nature and freedom created by his two
earlier Critiques, but as potentially renegotiating the terrain of knowledge and morality.
To put the point more forcefully, some have claimed that Kant’s discussion of aesthetics
effects a radical disruption of and reworking of Kant’s transcendental philosophy.
To explain: Kant wrote three Critiques, the first of which deals with the legislative
function of the understanding for the domain of nature, and the second of which deals
with the legislative function of reason for freedom. These two philosophical investi-
gations concern respectively the necessary conditions for how we can have objective
knowledge of the world and for the moral law that determines how we should act.
In both cases, Kant articulates rules that he takes to be universally applicable for all
subjects of cognition, or for all moral agents.
The first Critique asks about the universal, necessary, a priori conditions according
to which we have knowledge of nature, the way in which we cognize objects. Kant
describes the process of understanding in terms of subsumption of particulars under

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universals. The universals under which we subsume particulars are given to us. We do
not have to seek after them. The understanding provides the general form according
to which our experience must proceed in order for us to represent objects. The second
Critique asks after the universal moral law, according to which all our actions should
conform. In both the case of theoretical cognition of nature and that of practical reason
that guides moral actions, Kant asserts the objective necessity of the law (Kant 2000
[1790]: 121). The form that this argument takes in the case of cognition is that objects
conform to our understanding in such a way that we bring sensible intuitions of the
empirical world under concepts of nature. These concepts constitute universal rules for
understanding. With regard to morality, it is in accordance with the concept of a pure
will that moral actions must be determined.
A tension arises between the epistemological account that Kant provides in the
Critique of Pure Reason, in which he articulates how the understanding provides rules
that organize intuitions according to concepts of nature that hold universally, and the
moral account he provides in the Critique of Practical Reason, where he argues that rea-
son provides the concept of the pure will that holds universally. For, in the former, Kant
treats humans as if they were subject to the mechanical laws of nature. In the latter,
however, he considers humans from the perspective of our capacity to be moral agents,
that is, to act in the world in such a way as to affect it with the purpose that consists
of intervening in a morally meaningful way, based on our freedom to act in conformity
with the moral law. The third Critique is then invested with a transitional or mediating
role, which creates a bridge that can span the chasm between the mechanical causality
of the natural world and the moral will of human agents capable of affecting change in
the world on account of their freedom (Kant 2000 [1790]: 81).

Feminist Philosophers Rework Kant

In her essay “Crystallisation: Artful Matter and the Productive Imagination,” Rachel
Jones (2000) takes up and exploits a tension that structures how Kant construes
the reflective judgments of aesthetics. By taking seriously, and pushing to its limits,
the analogical relationship that Kant posits between nature and art, Jones focuses
on the instance of crystallization, which presents an anomaly to the rule-governed
explanatory models on which Kant usually relies to account for natural processes. On
the one hand Kant suggests that nature must be thought as if it were art, yet on the
other hand he proposes to think art as nature.
Exploring the complex analogical relationship between nature and art that Kant
sustains throughout his discussion of aesthetic judgment, Jones suggests that in the
third Critique Kant revises the mechanical concept of nature operative in the first
Critique. In the third Critique, says Jones, we can no longer construe nature as a “blind
mechanism”; rather “we must see nature as if it were intentionally designed, as if it
were art” (Jones 2000: 20–21). On the basis of this, she argues that Kant formulates a
productive, rather than a legislative, role for imagination, emphasizing creativity and
unpredictability rather than a rule-bound approach.
Jones shows that there are moments in which the distinction between form and mat-
ter can be seen to break down and is reworked within Kant’s philosophy, for example,
in relation to his account of crystallization, which Jones takes up and invokes as a meta-
phor for the productive imagination of artistic genius. Jones suggests that the process of

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crystallization breaks with the governing model of active form as the organizing principle
of passive matter. This parallels the sense in which the originality of the genius, in
Kant’s philosophy, consists not in following pre-existing rules, but rather in inventing
new rules. The natural process of crystallization, Jones argues, can be read as an image
for the productive imagination, whereby unexpected formations occur, which do not
follow any rule, but are accomplished, rather, by a leap. The notion of unpredictability
embedded in the formation of crystals is disruptive of the model that otherwise governs
Kant’s understanding of the relation of form to matter in the natural world, whereby
form is endowed with an active power of organization over passive or inert matter. As
Jones says, then, “Kant’s text itself can be made to leap and move in unpredictable ways,
allowing new possibilities to emerge, new insights, and crystallisations” (2000: 33).
Kant’s third Critique revises his previous accounts of understanding and reason in
a variety of ways. As suggested by Jones, not only does the concept of nature undergo
a shift, but Kant also reserves a more creative and pervasive role for imagination than
previously, and suggests that the judgment operative in the aesthetic realm has impli-
cations for judgment in the realms of knowledge and morality too. Furthermore, the
account of aesthetic judgment stipulates a decisive role for the feeling of pleasure in
which aesthetic judgment is said to consist, thus highlighting the significance of feeling
in a way that Kant had not done before. At the same time, by building into his account
of aesthetic judgment a reference to the judgment of others, Kant can be said to bring to
the fore the communal aspect of judging in a way that goes beyond his previous claims.
Unlike the realms of theoretical cognition and knowledge or that of practical rea-
son and morality, whatever necessity might be attributed to aesthetic judgment can-
not be conferred by the universality of rules. In cognition and morality there are rules
that determine their object, which Kant asserts are objectively valid and universal—
the concepts of nature and of pure will. In the case of aesthetic judgment there are
no such rules. In the matter of taste, judgments are singular, indeterminate, and
subjective. Yet Kant still maintains that aesthetic judgments have a priori validity.
The question remains as to the sense in which aesthetic judgments can have a priori
universality that is subjective.
As we have said, Kant’s aesthetics reworks his earlier philosophy by building into his
account of the specific feeling of pleasure, in which he understands subjective aesthetic
judgment to consist, a reference to community. In his analysis, the subjective judgment
that something is beautiful is at the same time an appeal to the assent of the universal
community of judging subjects. It is a call to humanity in general also to find the object
in question beautiful. Even if, as a matter of empirical fact, others do not share the
judgment that a given object is beautiful, Kant maintains that to pronounce something
beautiful is at the same time to propose that others should agree. The trouble is that the
claim that some subjects have on humanity, on Kant’s account, is distinctly tenuous,
such that whether they qualify as part of the ostensibly universal community of judg-
ing subjects is dubious at best. This presents a problem for feminist and race theorists,
namely how to respond to Kant’s prejudicial account of women and of subjects whom
Kant regards as racially differentiated from white, European men. Before developing
this point further, we need first to say more about the specific feeling of pleasure in
which aesthetic pleasure consists.
Kant specifies the peculiarity of aesthetic judgment in terms of what he identifies,
on the one hand, as conceptual indeterminacy and on the other hand as subjective

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universality (Rehberg 2015). Cognitive judgment, which produces knowledge, proceeds

by subsuming particular instances under universal concepts, such that the concept is
given, and the particular has to be recognized as conforming to it, and is thus subsumed
under it. In aesthetic judgment, however, there is no determinate concept. The con-
cept is not provided in advance but has to be discovered, or rather “generated” through
imaginative reflection (Moen 1997: 237). Kant specifies the type of judgment that is
peculiar to aesthetic judgment—as distinct from cognitive judgment—as “reflective”
judgment. In reflective judgment, the form of a particular object is apprehended by the
imagination. Whereas in cognitive judgment, knowledge is produced through the sub-
sumption of particulars under universal concepts, in the case of aesthetic judgments,
no such concept is available as pregiven. There is no subsumption of the particular
under a concept; there is “no definite concept” and thus there is “no knowledge” as
John Sallis says (1987: 90).
In reflection, there is a comparison between how the imagination apprehends forms
and how they would be taken up by the understanding through the referral of intuitions
to concepts (Kant 2000 [1790]: 26). Yet there is no such referral, as Sallis emphasizes,
since there are no determinate concepts in aesthetic judgment, and since aesthetic judg-
ment is not a matter of knowledge, but rather a feeling of pleasure. If there is agreement
between the imagination and understanding, this harmony produces a feeling of pleas-
ure. It is the free play between imagination and understanding in which the feeling of
pleasure of aesthetic judgment consists. There is an “interplay” between the understand-
ing and imagination, one in which the understanding does not govern the imagination,
but in which they are “mutually conducive” for one another (Sallis 1987: 94). As we
have seen, Kant proposes an analogical relationship between nature and art, on the basis
of which we presuppose nature’s purposiveness. In so far as the purposiveness is presup-
posed as an aim, it is provisional and indeterminate. As Jones puts it,

all human subjects must be able to see the world as harmonising with the
potential of their own ordering faculties [and] this singular feeling of pleasure
reflects a universal a priori principle, which is nothing other than the indeter-
minate principle of judgment itself.
(2000: 21)

The relation between the understanding and imagination becomes a site of free play,
which Kant describes in terms of spontaneity. That which produces aesthetic pleas-
ure cannot be anticipated in advance nor determined by intent. It arises unsolicited.
Neither can it be subordinated to a higher end. It is not a mere means to an end.
Aesthetic judgment, Kant argues, is disinterested. The argument that aesthetic judg-
ment is disinterested suggests that there are strict boundaries between art and politics.
Yet as we have begun to see, Kant’s own argument is freighted with difficulty in that
the very texts in which he puts forward his arguments themselves betray consistent
racist and sexist biases and prejudice, which suggest that the purity of aesthetic judg-
ment is not easily achieved. So too we have seen that in specifying the role of reflective
judgment, Kant admits unpredictability into his system of thought, in such a way as to
undercut the purity of both the transcendental and the separation of his thought into
hermetically sealed domains of cognition, morality, and aesthetics. While Kant captures
something vital about aesthetic judgment when he insists that it arises spontaneously,

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rather than being something we intend or will, even this insight must be surrounded by
qualifications if we are to take seriously other features of his account.
In keeping with the earlier suggestion that the conceptual vocabulary of aesthet-
ics is infused with normative assumptions, Christine Battersby suggests that Kant does
not manage to sustain his attempt to treat “aesthetic philosophy in purely formal terms
(in terms of the ‘universal’)” (2007: 46). And, Battersby says, his

very way of marking out the “truly universal” and distinguishing it from the
“merely particular” and the “detailed” relies on racial and cultural norms that
privilege the non-sensuous, the conceptual, the abstract and the logical as
viewed from the perspective of “old Europe.”
(2007: 83)

If there is a normative framing of universal claims, then this suggests that Kant’s claims
for a transcendental approach to philosophy need to be interrogated. This is not only
from a standpoint interior to the lexicon of Kant’s own philosophy, with respect to the
hermeneutical relationship between the three Critiques, but also from a critical stand-
point that raises questions about and puts pressure on the integrity of the distinction
between the empirical and the transcendental as it functions in his texts.
As we have seen, Kant’s aesthetics appeals to the notion of community as definitive
of the dynamic at stake in aesthetic judgment. Feminist theorists have argued that the
formal requirements that Kant builds into his account of aesthetic judgments, which
includes their universal communicability, are undercut by his raced and gendered dis-
paragement of some subjects. Both Kim Hall and Battersby focus on the fact that Kant
specifies that aesthetic judgment must be universally communicable (Battersby 2007:
31; Hall 1997: 258). Yet at the same time he disqualifies “whole classes” of people from
counting properly human or as enjoying full personhood, placing them “outside the
imagined community of rational beings” (Battersby 2007: 46). In doing so, he differ-
entiates between white or European women and ostensibly “primitive” or “uncivilized”
women. As Hall puts it, “While European women occupy a secondary place in the
community of judging subjects in the third Critique, Carib and Iroquois women have no
place” (1997: 265). Thus “Kant’s ideal of universal communicability is encoded through
cultural and sexual difference” (Battersby 2007: 42).
Respecting and attending to the singularity of the gestures by which various others
are written out of full humanity in Kant, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak emphasizes the
discontinuity between rhetorical gestures of exclusion. Spivak understands the occlu-
sion of the native informant as constituting the “condition of possibility” of Kant’s
investigation (1999: 9). She reminds us to bear in mind that the disciplining mecha-
nisms of gendered subjects and “geo-politically differentiated” subjects are not figured
in the same way (1999: 31). While the former are “argued into” dismissal, the latter are
“foreclosed” (1999: 30). We need to resist efforts to reduce all difference to the same
model, as if they all followed the same dynamic, as if all differences were equivalent
to one another, as if it were merely a question of slotting in the relevant grounds of
oppression, marginalization, discrimination, or domination into a preconceived mold,
as if gender and race and class could somehow be thought according to the same logic.
At the same time as attending to the specificity of the rhetoric according to which
certain subjects are barred from full access to subjectivity in Kant’s texts, I would argue

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that we also need to resist the impulse to structure feminist aesthetics by appealing to
transcendental grounds, as if such grounds were themselves free of political impera-
tives. We should therefore avoid making any kind of oppression the ground of another,
as if one were more foundational than another. For example, we should be wary of
feminism that foregrounds whiteness as the condition of possibility of discourses of
sexual difference or feminism.

Concluding Remarks
In Kant’s aesthetics there is an appeal to the similarity of how judgment occurs in all
those who, as Kant puts it, “lay claim to the name of a human being” (2000 [1790]:
173), and it is on the basis of our common potential to order our faculties that Kant
claims that aesthetic judgments can have universal a priori status. Yet as we have seen
there is a tension between the argument for the a priori status of aesthetic judgment and
the disparaging remarks that Kant makes about women and certain racial groups. One
way of responding to this is to argue that the barriers Kant erects between aesthetics on
the one hand and ethics and politics on the other hand need to be broken down. As
Battersby puts it, “feminist philosophers should refuse Kantian markers for the bound-
ary between the aesthetic, the ethical, and the political” (2007: 46). In the preceding
discussion I have suggested that Kant’s own aesthetic philosophy begins to dismantle
the barriers that his earlier systematic philosophy erected. If, as I have also suggested,
aesthetics is embedded in discourses that accord legitimacy to some voices over others,
any transformation of aesthetics will at the same time intervene in the politics that
accord some voices legitimacy over others. The development and transformation of aes-
thetics goes hand in hand with negotiations that determine whose claims to humanity
are heard, and whose are discounted. If the relative autonomy of politics and aesthetics
needs to be respected, it also needs to be appreciated that the very distinction between
aesthetics and politics is one whose articulation is a matter of political negotiation. The
politics of feminist aesthetics constitutes one such area of negotiation.

Further Reading
Freeman, Barbara Claire (1995) The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Hughes, Fiona (2010) Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement: A Reader’s Guide, London: Continuum.
Jones, Rachel, and Rehberg, Andrea (Eds.) (2000) The Matter of Critique: Readings in Kant’s Philosophy,
Manchester: Clinamen Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1991) Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Schott, Robin May (Ed.) (1997) Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press.

Related Topics
Feminist engagements with nineteenth-century German philosophy (Chapter 9); crit-
ical race theory, intersectionality, and feminist philosophy (Chapter 29); aesthetics
and the politics of gender (Chapter 38); feminist aesthetics and the categories of the
beautiful and the sublime (Chapter 39).

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 Historicizing feminist aesthetics

References
Battersby, Christine (2007) The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, New York: Routledge.
Felski, Rita (1989) Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Gallop, Jane (1986) “Annie Leclerc Writing a Letter, with Vermeer,” in Nancy K. Miller (Ed.) The Poetics
of Gender, New York: Columbia University Press, 137–156.
Hall, Kim (1997) “Sensus Communis and Violence: A Feminist Reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgement,” in
Robin May Schott (Ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 257–272.
Hein, Hilde (1995) “The Role of Feminist Aesthetics in Feminist Theory,” in Peggy Zeglin Brand and
Carolyn Korsmeyer (Eds.) Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 446–463.
Jones, Rachel (2000) “Crystallisation: Artful Matter and Productive Imagination in Kant’s Account of
Genius,” in Andrea Rehberg and Rachel Jones (Eds.) The Matter of Critique: Readings in Kant’s Philosophy,
Manchester: Clinamen Press, 19–36.
Kant, Immanuel (2000 [1790]) Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Moen, Marcia (1997) “Feminist Themes in Unlikely Places: Re-Reading Kant’s Critique of Judgment,” in
Robin May Schott (Ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 213–256.
Mulvey, Laura (1988) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Constance Penley (Ed.) Feminism and
Film Theory, New York: Routledge, 57–68.
Rehberg, Andrea (2015) “On Affective Universality: Kant and Lyotard on sensus communis,” Paper pre-
sented at the Society for European Philosophy Conference, Dundee.
Sallis, John (1987) Spacings—of Reason and Imagination in Texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2000) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing
Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Stanford Friedman, Susan (1987) “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary
Discourse,” Feminist Studies 13: 49–82.

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 38
AESTHETICS AND THE
POLITICS OF GENDER
On Arendt’s Theory of Narrative
and Action
Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

Dilemmas of Feminist Aesthetics

The relation between gender and aesthetics is central to any formulation of feminist
aesthetics, and yet the meanings of these terms are continually contested and revised.
Both gender and aesthetics carry diverse, interdisciplinary significations, which are
shaped by complex histories of disagreements. When the term “aesthetic” was first intro-
duced in the eighteenth century by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, it
did not refer to artistic production but rather to the mode of knowledge gained through
the senses. Aesthetics today can have at least three different meanings: (1) a general
theory of artistic practices; (2) a theory of reception, focused upon how we appreciate
or judge natural beauty and artworks; and (3) a theory of sensibility shaping our expe-
rience, practice, and knowledge. In this last sense aesthetics does not have to refer to
art at all, but is rather concerned with the role of different senses, such as touch, sight,
taste, smell, or with different affects: pleasure, pain, or disgust (Korsmeyer 2012). One
could make an argument that the affective turn in feminist and queer theory today is
also implicitly informed by this third historical meaning of aesthetics, even if theorists
themselves do not engage aesthetics directly (Ahmed 2004; Berlant 2011). Gender is
also a contested category in feminist philosophy and theory (Chanter 2007); in general
it refers to social and political determinations and regulations of biological sex and
sexual practices, but there is no consensus on the relationship of gender to power, the
body, sexuality, or sensibility. Following feminist theories of intersectionality, intro-
duced by black feminists (Crenshaw 1991), I assume in this chapter that the category
of gender is relational, political, and historical; that is, that its significance and its rela-
tion to embodiment are shaped by desire and power relations, which also determine the
meaning of class, race, labor, environment, and other political phenomena.
As Korsmeyer argues, different traditions of aesthetics and different methodologies of
gender lend different meanings to feminist aesthetics (Korsmeyer 2012). Although in
 Aesthetics and the politics of gender

this chapter I will primarily focus on aesthetics as a feminist theory of artistic practice,
I also want to stress that one of the most significant feminist interventions is a critique
of the gendered and racialized lexicon of aesthetics, such as genius, taste, form/mat-
ter distinctions, originality, and the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment (Battersby
1989; Felski 1989; Korsmeyer 2004, 2012; Ziarek 2013). Equally important is the con-
testation of the gendered and racialized divisions between high art, on the one hand,
and decorative arts, fashion, and popular art, on the other (Hanson 1993; Korsmeyer
2012; Worth 2001). Feminist theorists of aesthetic sensibility have contested what
counts as the aesthetic cultivation of the senses and have expanded the field to include
eroticism, bodily feelings, and such non-aesthetic phenomena as appreciation of food
(Korsmeyer 2004: 84–103). For example, Elizabeth Grosz (2012) sees art as an enhance-
ment of bodily sensations, intensities, and sexual attractions.
Despite the fact that art and aesthetics, implicitly or explicitly, have been a rich
resource for feminist thinking about gender, sexuality, and politics, the project of femi-
nist aesthetics has also suffered from a double marginalization. Feminist aesthetics is
marginalized not only in continental philosophy, included in various collections at
the very end as a gesture of tokenism, but also within feminist philosophy and cul-
tural theory where it is subordinated to the more urgent issues of feminist politics
(Musgrave 2014). Although Luce Irigaray (1993) has argued that the new politics and
ethics of sexual difference are inseparable from a new feminist poetics, this argument
has received more attention from feminist artists than from feminist philosophers or
theorists. The effects of this subordination of aesthetics to the more pressing issues
of gender politics are insufficient attention to the liberating potential of aesthetics
in feminist antiracist struggles (hooks 1995) and skepticism about the feasibility of
gendered aesthetics (Felski 1989).
However, the fact that gender is an eminently political category can also invite fem-
inist re-articulations of the long-standing philosophical debate about aesthetics and
politics (Adorno 1997; Benjamin 1968; and Rancière 2006). What has been most fre-
quently and rigorously criticized by numerous feminist theorists in this respect is the
idea of art’s autonomy, that is, its independence from politics. This critique of autonomy
often leads to formulations of the political function of art. However, the autonomy of
art can have different meanings: it can mean art for art’s sake or, on the contrary, it can
emphasize the capacity of art to resist market ideology and its instrumentality (Adorno
1997). If most feminist critics reject the first meaning of autonomy, understood as the
aesthetic transcendence of politics, desires, and market driven instrumentality, the
second meaning of autonomy as the contestation of the status quo is presupposed by
any argument about the transformative effects of feminist artistic practices, which can
resist gender, racist, and imperialist domination. Without the assumption that art can
intervene in dominant power relations, the artistic practices of such diverse women
writers and artists as Lyn Hejinian, Kara Walker, Mary Kelly, Adrian Piper—to name
only a few—would simply be limited to the reproduction of the status quo, and the role
of feminist criticism would be reduced to the critique of power shaping these artists’
work, or to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) calls paranoid reading.
Another way to approach the relationship between feminist art and the politics of
gender is to recognize the mutual interdependence and difference between artistic and
political practices (Ziarek 2012). This position rejects both the anti-aesthetic deter-
mination of women’s artistic practices by political power and the apparent separation

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(autonomy) of women’s art from politics. However, this approach also contests the
autonomy of politics, that is, its separation from all aspects of aesthetics. Such a feminist
analysis of the interdependence between art and gender politics is partially indebted
to Adorno’s theory of the heteronomous autonomy of modern art. Heteronomous
autonomy means that art is both determined by and independent of its socio-political
material conditions. This contradictory and ambivalent relation of art to its material
conditions calls for both a feminist analysis of the emancipatory possibilities of women’s
art and for a critique of art’s complicity with power.
The greatest limitation of Adorno’s aesthetic theory is his failure not only to analyze
different forms of racist and gender oppression but also, more importantly, to provide a
theory of transformative political action. In contrast to Adorno, I argue that both femi-
nist artworks and gender politics can be forms of transformative practice (Ziarek 2012:
1–15). Furthermore, their relative inter-dependence means that there are enabling aes-
thetic elements in politics, such as creativity, experimentation, sensible experience, and
novelty, just as there are political aspects of artistic practices—such as contestations of
gendered modes of being and language, or experimentation with alternative possibili-
ties of living and signification. This interaction between aesthetics and politics does
not mean that feminism aspires to some imaginary aesthetic unity of the political col-
lectivity modeled on the harmonious structure of a great artwork, as Walter Benjamin
worries. Nor does it mean that art is merely a means for women to accumulate more
cultural capital and gain social status (Bourdieu 2013), though of course it can partially
serve this purpose as well; or that women’s artworks should help to achieve feminist
political goals. Rather the interaction means that both aesthetic and political practices
lose their complete separation from each other and from other aspects of our collective
lives, without losing their relative specificity. For example, we can tell apart political
manifestations and protests—which can incorporate many creative elements—from
theatrical performances, poetry readings, or public artistic installations.

Between Politics and Aesthetics: Action, Narrative,

and Gender Intersectionality
To explore the interdependence between political and aesthetic practices in the con-
text of gender intersectionality, I want to focus on the mutual relation between political
action and narrative in Arendt’s work and to reinterpret this relation in the context
of feminist aesthetics. In contrast to Adorno’s political pessimism, Arendt defends the
possibilities of transformative political action as the only weapon we have against total-
itarianism, biopolitics, and the destruction of the planet, even though she recognizes
the fragility and limitations of action. Although she is not consistent, Arendt reflects
on the similarities and differences between aesthetics and politics. On the one hand,
she famously bases political judgments of action on Kant’s judgments of beauty and she
argues that what both political and aesthetic judgments share is the evaluation of the
particular—this event, this work of art—without subordinating them to general concepts
(Arendt 1982). She also stresses the crucial role of imagination not only in art but also in
politics and testimony. On the other hand, she argues that there is a difference between
political action and artistic practice in so far as the latter does not always require direct
involvement of other people, and especially not of non-artists (although contemporary
artists and numerous artistic practices would contest this claim).

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Although Arendt’s own reflections on artistic practice are limited, several of her critics
have debated the aesthetic elements of Arendt’s theory of political action (Curtis 1999;
Kateb 1983: 30–35; Sjöholm 2015; Villa 1995: 81–92). Curtis even goes so far as to argue
that Arendt’s philosophy as a whole takes “an aesthetic turn” (1999: 10–13). We have
to stress that these aesthetic elements are irreducible to what Benjamin calls an aesthetic
unity of politics because Arendt rejects any notion of action and narrative based on the
model of fabrication, understood as the realization of one central idea, and she argues
instead that politics requires a plurality of participants, conflicting perspectives, and
acknowledgment of unpredictability. What her critics identify as “aesthetic” elements of
politics is, therefore, not the aesthetic unity of the people, but, on the contrary, multiplic-
ity of the sensible appearances of actors and artworks in the public space (Sjöholm 2015),
the expression of the uniqueness of political agents (Curtis 1999: 23–66), and the creation
of a new beginning in political life (Ziarek 2012: 10–26).
The most explicit intersection between Arendt’s theories of political and artistic
practices is a mutually constitutive relationship between action and narrative. Arendt
famously argues that action “‘produces’ stories” the way other activities, such as work,
produce objects (Arendt 1958: 184). Why is this relationship important for feminist
aesthetics? First of all, both political acts and narrative acts have transformative poten-
tial even though they occur in the midst of historical domination. That is why Adriana
Cavarero and Shari Stone-Mediatore deploy Arendt’s concept of narrative for a femi-
nist analysis of storytelling as a means of the political expression of marginalized subjec-
tivities. Second, in Arendt’s work both political and aesthetic acts are mutually related:
transformative political practice produces stories while narrative supplements action by
making it memorable (Kristeva 2001), by retrospectively shaping its meaning. Focusing
on this intersection between action and narrative allows us, therefore, to analyze both
the political elements of women’s art and the aesthetic elements of intersectional gen-
der politics. And finally, the consideration of feminist aesthetics through the prism of
narrative reveals not only the necessary aesthetic supplement of the political act but
also the heterogeneity of aesthetic practices (or in Adorno’s terms—theirs heterono-
mous autonomy). Narrative not only pertains to multiple arts—there are narrative ele-
ments in fiction, poetry, paintings, songs, film, theater, installations—but storytelling is
irreducible to artistic practice alone. It is also a ubiquitous practice of everyday life and
an established methodology of the human sciences (Mitchell 1981: ix–x), including
history, anthropology, sociology, critical race studies, law, disability studies, and queer
transgender studies. Consequently, although narrative alone cannot express the speci-
ficity of diverse artistic practices, it is an important example as it subverts numerous
distinctions that are contested by feminist critiques of aesthetics, such as the hierarchies
between high and low art or artistic practices and everyday life.
Since narrative is both produced by and supplements action, let us begin with
Arendt’s theory of action, which, though not explicitly connected with gender, is use-
ful for feminist politics because it does not presuppose a common collective identity or
shared experience of oppression, presuppositions that have been contested by feminists
since the 1980s, and yet Arendt provides a robust theory of agency, based on the mutual
commitment to act together. Second, Arendt’s model reverses the agent/action rela-
tion: it is not subjective agency—identity, initiative, capacity to act—that explains
action, but rather acting together that creates inter-subjective agency. The urgency
of action is especially acute in response to political and economic injustices, such as

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the resurgence of anti-black racism and police brutality in the US. It is this political
urgency that has led to the new wave of activism—from rallies and die-ins, to the for-
mation of the #BlackLifeMatters and #SayHerName movements.
In the context of feminist debates about aesthetics and politics, the main interven-
tion that Arendt allows us to make is that political action is irreducible to means-ends
rationality. This claim subverts the usual opposition between a narrow view of politics
driven by pragmatic interests and goals and the creative artistic practice that exceeds
such instrumentalism. According to Arendt, not only artistic practice but also politi-
cal action has to be considered in non-instrumental terms. Action is an end in itself
because what is at stake in every political act is the struggle for freedom. Of course,
every action is mobilized by specific goals and strategies, but these are not determined
in advance by existing power/knowledge relations because they are also generated by
conflicting alliances among actors. That is why the material objective “interests” of
action, such as struggles against gender discrimination, poverty, and racism, disclose
not only patterns of domination, but also an objective “inter-esse” (Arendt 1958: 182),
or in-betweenness, by which the participants of action are inter-related, separated, or
excluded from each other. More importantly, in the course of the struggle with these
objective patterns of domination, political actors perform among themselves the sec-
ond level of in-betweenness. In so far as they act together, the participants of action
create together mutual equality and intersubjective freedom, if only for the duration of
the event. Acting together for the sake of intersubjective freedom is an end in itself,
and this is ultimately what distinguishes political action from what feminist sociologist
Margaret Somers criticizes as the instrumental category of “behavior . . . [measured by]
rational preferences” (1994: 615).
By rejecting the instrumentality of politics, Arendt also contests any ideological
uses of the aesthetic to suggest the fictitious unity of the people. On the contrary, if we
can speak of the aesthetic dimensions of political action in Arendt’s work, these would
include: (a) the creation of a new beginning, and thus the initiation of unpredictable
difference in public lives; and (b) the negotiation between the plurality and uniqueness
of political actors. The new beginning in public lives and the singularity of actors can
be called the aesthetic dimensions of the political because their particularities exceed
the available general political, philosophical, and linguistic meanings. Evocative of
the modernist artistic slogan, “make it new,” the new beginning in action, whether
it occurs on a miniscule local or a revolutionary collective scale, initiates something
unexpected, “infinitely improbable” (Arendt 1958: 178): it interrupts historical conti-
nuity and the re-production of the relations of power/knowledge in which it is situated.
Action can initiate a new beginning precisely because it creates intersubjective agency
and new forms of political power. Arendt distinguishes power generated through action,
which depends upon human plurality and alliances, from the violence that destroys
such plurality, and from the already constituted, systemic, or structural relations of
power/knowledge—the complex patterns of racism, capital, anti-Semitism, homopho-
bia, gender discrimination, and biopolitics—in the context of which action occurs. We
can point to many contemporary examples of such unpredictable new beginnings, for
instance, political protests in Istanbul’s Gezi Park in 2013, which began as a protest
against the destruction of the park and grew into the demand to change the govern-
ment. Although this unpredictable novelty is what action shares with experimental
artistic practice, at the same time it contests the traditional aesthetic notion of the
originality of the isolated artist or genius. And since the new beginning in politics is

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intertwined with a transformation of both inter-human relations and human relations

to the world, such transformation is fundamentally different from the production and
consumption of the ever-same “novelty” of commodities.
The second aesthetic element of action consists in the disclosure of the uniqueness of
political agents in the context of human plurality. Being unique means being unrepeat-
able, unreplaceable, but it is not the same as having individual identity in isolation from
other people. On the contrary, from birth we appear first to others then to ourselves; our
singularity depends, therefore, on being with others. Since there is no speaker without
the speech act, no agent without the act, uniqueness can be glimpsed only retrospec-
tively, in the aftermath of speaking and acting with others. Why is this relation between
human plurality and uniqueness an aesthetic as well as a political problem? In the his-
tory of aesthetics, it was Kant in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment who first posed the
question about the communication of the particular—in his case, the communication
of judgments about the beautiful and the sublime—and the idea of community. In The
Human Condition, Arendt reformulates the Kantian aesthetic problematic as the politi-
cal relation between the uniqueness and the plurality of political actors. At the end
of her life she directly returns to Kant and rereads the Critique of Judgment as his most
political work (Arendt 1982: 14–22).
Arendt calls the unrepeatable singularity of the agent “who” and distinguishes it
from “what,” or the general meaning of individual or collective identities. The whatness
of identity is composed of the attributes and qualities that we share with others and of
the differences that set us apart. In feminist interpretation (although not in Arendt’s)
these differences and attributes include race, gender, class, profession, ethnicity, age,
nationality, occupation, religion, as well as all kinds of affiliations, and so forth. Only
the whatness of racialized gendered subjects can be defined—and, as feminist scholars
have argued, this definition occurs in the context of the political relations of power/
knowledge and therefore is intertwined with discipline, normalization, and domination.
However, what a feminist interpretation of Arendt’s work can add to feminist theory is
the claim that political struggles not only transform the power relations of race, gender,
and class, but also disclose the uniqueness of every participant. In the world increasingly
defined by big data and statistical analysis, in which we figure as exchangeable numbers,
both uniqueness and action are threatened by being converted into predictable, calcu-
lable behavior.
The final disclosure of a who in the web of relations of gender, class, and race occurs
in the form of a life story. This narrative disclosure of uniqueness is most debated among
feminist theorists (Butler 2005; Cavarero 2000; Kristeva 2001), though not always
in the context of feminist aesthetics. In her response to Cavarero’s interpretation of
Arendt’s conception of narrative, Butler (2005: 15) argues that uniqueness emerging
from the address to the other provides an alternative to Nietzsche’s punitive account of
morality and to Hegel’s reciprocity of recognition. However, according to Butler (2005:
36), any narrative account of singularity is interrupted by the indifference of discursive
norms, which make us recognizable to others but also “substitutable” (2005: 37–39).
Second, narrative fails to account for those relations to others that precede our memory.
Ultimately, norms, relations to others, and disconnection of narrative from lived bodily
experience reveal not only uniqueness but my “opacity to myself.”
However, these tensions between uniqueness and generality of norms, or what
Arendt calls “who” and “what,” do not undermine irreplaceable singularity but pre-
cisely characterize its political/aesthetic mode of disclosure in language and narrative.

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According to Kristeva, such disclosure is characterized by the uncanny interplay

between disalienation and estrangement (2001: 86, 83). Arendt stresses the constitu-
tive relationship between the disclosure of uniqueness and the obscurity of agents to
themselves (Arendt 1958: 179). Since the uniqueness of a “who” exceeds any political
category of classification and normalization as well as the philosophical or cultural
attributes of identity, it cannot be defined but only posed in the form of a question,
“who are you?” Any answer to such a question in the form of self-definition—I am
an immigrant white feminist—is necessarily general, shared by other white feminist
immigrants, and therefore slides into a “what.” As Arendt underscores, “The moment
we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he
is” (1958: 181). That is why uniqueness seems to push the generality of language to the
limits of expression: “The manifestation of who the speaker and doer unexchangeably
is . . . retains a curious intangibility that confounds all efforts toward unequivocal ver-
bal expression” (Arendt 1958: 181). Could we say that this challenge posed to politi-
cal, ordinary, and philosophical languages calls for their expansion towards the literary
or the aesthetic manner of expression, which, in the post-Kantian tradition, seems to
be better suited toward the negotiation between generality and singularity?
In the context of narrative, whether it is a fictional or a true story, what maintains
this tension between singularity and exposure to otherness, between irreplaceable
uniqueness and the shared generality of language, is a specific interplay between nar-
rators, characters, and open-ended plot. Despite obscurity, the exposure of agents to
others through speech and action prior to their relation to themselves also positions
those others—whether they are actors or spectators—as potential narrators. Because
of the multiplicity of inter-human relations in which these potential narrators are
situated, such a narrative point of view, invariably gendered and racialized, can never
aspire to the impersonal or omniscient narrator, because it always represents a partial,
contingent perspective. Since life is narratable thanks to others in their role as poten-
tial narrators, the crucial implication of this indebtedness of narration to others does
not lie in my dispossession from my own story as Butler argues. More fundamentally, it
lies in the reframing of any autobiography as always already a biography: “Who some-
body . . . was we can know only by knowing . . . his biography” (Arendt 1958: 186).
The reason why the primary genre of any life story is biography rather than autobi-
ography is because every auto/biography takes place within the parameters of stories
told or withheld by others. It is especially the case with the beginning and the end of
life—birth and death—which, if narratable at all, are always told by others.
The second narrative element that makes the disclosure of uniqueness possible is
the construction of a plot. In Aristotle’s Poetics, plot or mythos constitutes the primary
feature of narratives imitating, or more precisely, re-enacting, action (Aristotle 1989:
13–14). For Aristotle as for Arendt action enables stories because the events it initiates
create the possibility of a plot; however, by re-enacting action, narrative becomes a new
performative act in its own right. For both Arendt and Aristotle, plot, which estab-
lishes a temporal sequence among the selected events, cannot be explained by the psy-
chological or moral makeup of the characters. Despite these similarities, Arendt’s and
Aristotle’s understandings of the plot or mythos differ. In contrast to the Aristotelian
definition of mythos, the Arendtian notions of action and plot do not have a clear
sense of an ending, or narrative closure, because Arendt focuses primarily on the way
action creates a new beginning, which in turn calls for a new story. Without a new
beginning, there is neither need nor desire for a new story. Paradoxically, it is this

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open-endedness of action, its lack of a predictable telos, which generates storytelling,

which reveals the meaning of action retrospectively through the act of narrative recol-
lection. Furthermore, such a retrospective disclosure of the meaning of action through
the narrative act is itself incomplete; it engenders further, often conflicting, plots and
the interpretations of these narratives.
It is thanks to the contingent plot and partial, plural narrative points of view that the
uniqueness and plurality of agents can be expressed in narrative. As Arendt suggests,
the disclosure of uniqueness in the web of conflicting relationships “eventually emerges
as the unique life story of the newcomer, affecting uniquely the life stories of all those
with whom he comes into contact” (Arendt 1958: 184). What political action discloses
as the uniqueness of agents in relation to others, the narrative act transforms into a dis-
tinct character in a life story. However, this transformation is by no means self-evident
or based on realist assumptions. In addition to the construction of plot and multiple
points of view, it involves, as Kristeva suggests, the complex negotiations among indi-
vidual and public memories, contestations of the available narrative norms, modes of
storytelling, discourses (Kristeva 2001: 75–76), as well as a confrontation with the poli-
tics of culture. One of the effects of these multiple negotiations is Arendt’s rejection of
authorship, before such rejection became a hallmark of postmodernism. As she puts it,
“Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story” (Arendt 1958: 184). If there is
an “author” of a life story at all then perhaps it is an interplay of political and narrative
acts, which, according to Arendt, create stories the way other activities produce objects.
My emphasis on the performativity of the narrative act contests not only the autonomy
of the political subject but also the originality of the author, so frequently criticized by
postmodern as well as feminist theorists and artists.
Despite Arendt’s, Butler’s, and Cavarero’s disregard of textuality, consideration of the
political and aesthetic aspects of the narrative act brings back the question of form, or the
manner of storytelling. We can recall at this point Adorno’s claim that formal aspects of
literary works, and in fact of all artworks, are implicated in political antagonisms, which
the artworks both reproduce and contest (Adorno 1997: 6). Although Arendt does not
develop the politics and aesthetics of form, it is clear that not every story performs a
disclosure of uniqueness or safeguards a new beginning. In fact, quite the opposite is the
case. The politics of narration has both normalizing and subversive functions, which
manifest themselves on the level of narrative form. For example, the familiar gender,
class, and race master plots in Western culture—the Oedipal plot, the Orpheus plot,
the Medusa plot, the terrorist plot, the from rags to riches plot, the alien invasion plots
(ranging from science fiction to immigration policy), the war and marriage plot—all
perform disciplinary and normalizing functions. It is the relationship between narrative
and power that determines the choice of the actors as characters (for example, the rulers
and generals rather than workers) or the selection of significant events (Barthes 1989;
White 1981). These “master plots,” selected from the vast repertoire of possible stories,
become foundational for a given society, a political group, or a state. Consequently, for a
story to disclose uniqueness and to open a new beginning, it has to contest these recur-
rent plots in the public imaginary and invent new ways of storytelling. And vice versa,
feminist storytelling has to be attentive to many marks of erasure, silencing, and invis-
ibility in the politics of narration. By acknowledging these erasures, feminist politics and
the aesthetic of experimental narrative form challenge the way storytelling is entangled
in the network of gendered power/knowledge, which makes some narrative forms more
readily disseminated and others more easily silenced. What I call here briefly a political

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function of narrative form, and of aesthetic experimentation more generally, is an ongo-

ing formal struggle against normalization and exclusion in order to keep the possibility of
a new beginning viable within language and culture.

Life and Narrative

A different politics of narration is suggested by Kristeva, according to whom narrative
produces political forms of life, understood as bios (that is, as politically significant)
rather than zōē (biological). The interpretation of political bios in terms of narratabil-
ity is also suggested by Arendt’s own claim that life without action and speech is dead
to the world, that is, it stops being bios and becomes superfluous, or to use Agamben’s
term (1998), is reduced to bare life. This interpretation of the political bios in terms of
narrativity is a crucial supplement to citizenship and human rights. And, vice versa, the
notion of narrative bios effects a shift in narrative studies, away from structural analysis
or epistemic problems (focused on the relation between narrative and knowledge). The
shift is instead to narrative’s ontological functions—to the way narratives change the
political status of collective and singular lives. In particular, the narrative formation
of the political bios undermines the sovereign power of the state to devalue the sym-
bolic significance of dominated groups—refugees, racial minorities, or immigrants—by
suspending or limiting their rights. Although the rights of citizens can be curtailed by
sovereign power in a state of emergency (Agamben 1998), sovereignty alone cannot
altogether destroy inter-human relations and narratives, which constitute the political
meanings of bios. One could even claim that sovereign decision alone cannot silence
storytelling, which continues to circulate, protest against justice, and thus preserve the
web of human relations.
Although narratives cannot be suspended by sovereign decision, the paradox of
the narrative bios lies in the simultaneous ubiquity and fragility of life stories. The
narratability of life, its status as a bios, does not guarantee that every life will have a
narrated story, because the telling or writing of such a story depends not only on the
recollections of others and their willingness to narrate a story, but also on multiple,
often invisible, power relations determining whose life stories are “worthy” of nar-
ration and memorialization in the public sphere. In the context of the ever-growing
circles of superfluous humanity, value judgments about whose stories are told are emi-
nently political, implicated in the race, gender, capitalist, and imperialist institutions
and networks of power. It is precisely because of the ontological status of narrative, of
its capacity to constitute bios, that subjugated groups deprived of narration are even
further denigrated and dispossessed (Somers 1994: 63). According to Cavarero, “what
is intolerable” is not only the life of poverty and exclusion but also the fact “that the
life-story that results from it remains without narration” (2000: 57). By contrast, as
Stone-Mediatore argues, narration and counter histories, which challenge the domi-
nant assumptions, values, and boundaries of the political, become powerful political
weapons of dispossessed groups (2003: 5–10).

Conclusion
In this chapter I have argued that the most productive way to approach the relation
between feminist aesthetics and gender politics is to treat both of them as hybrid and
mutually dependent areas of human activity. This means that we should explore not

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only the political, gendered elements of artistic practices but also the enabling aesthetic
elements of political activism. One possible model of such mutual interdependence
can be found in Arendt’s theory of action and narrative. By reinterpreting her work in
the context of gender intersectionality, I have argued that both narrative—which at
first glance belongs to literature—and action—which is preeminently political—are in
fact heterogeneous practices, through which gender politics and aesthetics ceaselessly
confront each other in order to expand or to shrink their limits.

Further Reading
Chanter, Tina (2008) The Picture of Abjection: Film, Fetish, and the Nature of Difference, Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press.
Davis, Whitney (2010) Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond,
New York: Columbia University Press.
Moten, Fred (2003) In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press.
Ziarek, Ewa (2014) “The Stakes of Feminist Aesthetics: Transformative Practice, Neoliberalism, and the
Violence of Formalism,” differences 25: 101–115.

Related Topics
Language, writing and gender differences (Chapter 24); the genealogy and viabil-
ity of the concept of intersectionality (Chapter 28); historicizing feminist aesthetics
(Chapter 37); feminist aesthetics and the categories of the beautiful and the sublime
(Chapter 39); feminism and freedom (Chapter 53); feminism and power (Chapter 54).

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CA: Stanford University Press.
Ahmed, Sara (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 1st edition, New York: Routledge.
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Aristotle (1989), On Poetry and Style, trans. G. M. A. Grube, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Barthes, Roland (1989) “The Discourse of History,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 127–140.
Battersby, Christine (1989) Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics, Bloomington, IN: Indiana
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Benjamin, Walter (1968) “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Hannah Arendt
(Ed.) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 217–252.
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Curtis, Kimberley (1999) Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics, Ithaca, NY:
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Felski, Rita (1989) Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change, Cambridge, MA:
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Grosz, Elizabeth (2012) Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, New York: Columbia
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Hanson, Karen (1993) “Dressing Down Dressing Up: the Philosophic Fear of Fashion,” in Hilde Hein and
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hooks, bell (1995) Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, New York: The New Press.
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Mitchell, W. J. T. (Ed.) (1981) On Narrative, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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Visions and Creative Engagement, New York: Springer.
Rancière, Jacques (2006) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill,
London: Continuum.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2003) “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” in Touching Feeling: Affect,
Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 123–152.
Sjöholm, Cecilia (2015) Doing Aesthetics with Arendt, New York: Columbia University Press.
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White, Hayden (1981) “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in W. J. T. Mitchell
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 39
FEMINIST AESTHETICS
AND THE CATEGORIES OF
THE BEAUTIFUL AND
THE SUBLIME
Christine Battersby

Introduction
Feminist explorations of the sublime and the beautiful have developed in markedly
different directions. This is not surprising given the different histories of the two terms.
Whereas the nature of the beautiful had been of key importance to Plato, Aristotle, and
other ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, it was only during the Enlightenment
period that a strong contrast was established between the beautiful and the sublime.
But this was also the time when there was a decisive shift away from regarding the
well-honed male body as best exemplifying the ideal of the beautiful, and beauty itself
was domesticated and downgraded. As Mary Wollstonecraft registered in A Vindication
of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft 1996 [1792])—one of the earliest European
feminist texts—to associate women with the duties of being beautiful in this newly
demoted mode was, in effect, to give them the status of subordinate beings. Instead,
Wollstonecraft aspired to the newly emergent category of the sublime, which was all too
frequently being denied to ideally “feminine” women.

Beauty
In the case of beauty, philosophers generally maintained that what is involved is a
response to an object or entity which is universal, disinterested, with all questions
of desire, use-value, and personal taste set to one side. By contrast, in the case of
the sublime, philosophers claimed that the pleasure in the sublime is not universal
and also not simply formalist. Disinterestedness and embodiment were also given
an entirely different role, in that physiological affect was registered as a signifi-
cant element in the response to the sublime, even when the bodily response was
also “transcended” or subsequently brought back under control. As a consequence,
feminists have required different strategies when analyzing and countering two very
different models of aesthetic judgement.
 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

Feminist philosophers who write about the beautiful have primarily concentrated on
showing the inadequacy of claims that peoples across all cultures, periods of history, and
ethnicities agree on the qualities, properties, or descriptors of beauty. This is evident
in such significant anthologies as Peg Zeglin Brand’s Beauty Matters (Brand 2000) and
her later collection, Beauty Unlimited (Brand 2013). These two books include essays on
beauty in the early modern era, in contemporary non-Western cultures, and also dis-
tinct modes of beauty in particular genres of art, such as ballet, Bollywood cinema, and
Balinese dance. Alongside these pieces, there are also articles on two related topics that
frequently crop up in other major feminist texts on beauty and taste, for example, in
Carolyn Korsmeyer’s Gender and Aesthetics (2004) and Savoring Disgust (2011). The first
topic involves challenging the traditional linking of aesthetics, beauty, and disinterest-
edness. The second, related issue concerns the role of the body—and more specifically
the female body—in the making of and appreciation of beautiful art. These emphases
mean that relatively little attention has been paid to the beauty of natural landscape
by those working in the field of feminist aesthetics, as Sheila Lintott (2010) somewhat
despairingly observes.
Much of the most popular work by feminists on beauty has been by non-philosophers.
A recent example is Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (2010), which
focuses on the socialization of women, and the role that the ideal of beauty plays in our
hypersexualized society. Walters can be read as updating the argument of Naomi Wolf
in her bestselling book, The Beauty Myth (1990), who argued that contemporary women
imbibe from patriarchal society an ideal of beauty that is as psychologically disabling
as the medieval torture apparatus of the “iron maiden.” During the middle ages, Wolf
claims, transgressive women were on occasions enclosed within “a body-shaped casket
painted with the limbs and features of a lovely, smiling young woman” (1990: 493).
Within these wooden caskets, women’s bodies were pierced by protruding iron spikes,
or if these missed the mark, the women lost consciousness as they slowly suffocated and
died. It turns out, however, that in repeating this story Wolf has herself been taken in by
a different kind of male myth. The machinery of these “iron maidens” does not date back
to the twelfth century, but was devised in the late eighteenth century at the earliest.
Featuring in nineteenth-century “cabinets of curiosities” we find various authentic
medieval artefacts, but displayed in a way that is entirely inauthentic, giving rise to the
myth of the “iron maidens” which figure so often in later fictions and films, as well as in
sensationalist museum displays. In this, males projected back onto the past their fears of
female sexuality and of the newly emergent claims for female equality. Philosophically
speaking, the male philosophers linked with this “invented history” also aimed to keep
unruly matter within the constraints of form as they struggled to secure male dominance
(Tanner 2006). Since beauty has been so frequently linked with the pleasures of “form,”
and since women have been historically linked to a materiality that is uncontrolla-
ble, chaotic and hence also formless (Battersby 1989), these fantasy “iron maidens” are
more philosophically interesting, and more closely linked to an ideal of beauty, than
Wolf’s account initially suggests.
Much more careful, and also more philosophically sophisticated, is Sandra Lee
Bartky’s Femininity and Domination (1990). Although not primarily a series of essays on
aesthetics, Bartky’s text explores what she terms “the fashion-beauty complex,” which
“produces in woman an estrangement from her bodily being” through the projection
of an image of her own body as somehow lacking, of being “what I am not” (1990: 40).

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Bartky situates herself in a phenomenological tradition, and is expanding on Simone

de Beauvoir’s analysis of the condition of woman, as “made, not born,” in The Second
Sex (Beauvoir 1952 [1949]). Beauvoir engaged extensively with the ways in which
“beauty” and “woman” align to produce alienation between the lived body and the
body as object of the gaze—not only of the other, but also the gaze of one’s own self,
which internalizes the viewpoint of the other. Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight (2005
[1993]) is another important philosophical exploration of twentieth-century beauty
ideals, especially that of the ideal of the well-honed, slim and athletic body. Bordo’s
highly influential analysis of female beauty was groundbreaking in its use of feminist
and empirical research, but nevertheless it fits awkwardly within the category of femi-
nist aesthetics, especially since it challenges analyses that remain at the level of “the
merely aesthetic” (2005 [1993]: 46).

The Sublime: Early Developments

The fuzzy boundaries of the category of the “aesthetic” are particularly clear in the case
of the sublime, as the history of the term makes clear. The craze for the sublime can be
traced back to Nicolas Boileau’s 1674 translation of a fragmentary Greek text on rheto-
ric by Longinus, Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime) (2005 [c.100–c.200]), written sometime
between the first and third centuries ce. The Greek author—whose true identity is
not known—set out to analyze an apparently simple style of communication, which
has such “irresistible power and mastery” that it produces “wonder” and transports the
hearer (2005 [c.100–c.200]: 163). Longinus put down the effects to the “divine frenzy”
of the speaker (2005 [c.100–c.200]: 258) and to a simple style that “casts a spell” on
the audience (2005 [c.100–c.200]: 287). In Boileau’s version of the text, the power of
the sublime is ascribed to an obscure quality, a “je-ne-sais-quoi” (“I-know-not-what”),
leading others to focus on Longinus’ examples, including the love poetry of Sappho and
also the account of creation in the Old Testament, as they attempted to understand the
audience response.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, British writers on theatre, landscape, lit-
erature, and the visual arts could not get enough of the sublime; but now the focus had
shifted to the nature of the sublime object, rather than questions of style. The sublime
was said to involve an encounter with that which seems infinite, indefinitely large or
microscopically small, uncanny, mysterious, obscure, dark, or sudden. What was essen-
tial was a feeling of terror, astonishment, or awe in the face of that which exceeds
man’s cognitive, visual, auditory, or imaginative grasp, leading to a sense of the inef-
fable: something that language, music, or the visual arts can only point towards, and
that remains suggestively half-hidden. Breaking with conscious control and individual
personality or preferences, the pleasure-in-pain that was integral to the sublime seemed
to take man temporarily beyond the human; but the pleasure was generated by the
object—not by a god or by the divine—and opened up a kind of split within the subject
before consciousness and reason re-established control.
When Wollstonecraft protests angrily about the way in which women are educated
to render themselves beautiful and also shun the sublime, she was responding to Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, but also to Edmund Burke’s enormously influential A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1987 [1757/1759]).
Wollstonecraft took on Burke’s ideal of the sublime, but argued that, in the case of

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women, “artificial notions of beauty and false descriptions of sensibility” distort the
educational and moral development of girls, making “genteel” women “slaves to their
bodies” so that they come to “glory in their subjection” (Wollstonecraft 1996 [1792]:
42–43). Wollstonecraft argues vehemently against those writers who try to make women
“more pleasing” by giving “a sex to morals” (1996 [1792]: 35); and in so doing she also
offers a critique of those who—like Burke—either implicitly or explicitly gender the
categories of the beautiful and the sublime. Women, she maintains, should be allowed
to “cultivate their minds,” including with “the salutary, sublime curb of principle” (1996
[1792]: 35), since it is only through cultivating a sense of moral duty and obligation that
women can free themselves from their slave-like state. (On Wollstonecraft, see also
Chapter 8 in this volume.)
Burke had divided the passions into two broad types: those that are “social” and
linked to sexual reproduction and care for others; and those which are linked with
“self-preservation” and the protection of the individual’s body or mind (Burke 1987
[1757/1759]: 38–42). Burke saw beauty as bound up with the social passions; by con-
trast, the enjoyment in the sublime is generated when the ego operates in a defensive
mode. In particular, Burke links the sublime to “astonishment,” “horror,” “fear,” and
“terror,” but also to “delight”: a term that is given a narrow and technical definition
involving the “removal of pain or danger” (1987 [1757/1759]: 57, 37). Burke’s examples
of the sublime include terrifying kings and commanders; incomprehensible darkness
and depths; looming towers and awe-inspiring mountains; and a range of other experi-
ences that engender mental and also physiological (muscular and nervous) tension.
Although the sublime is only implicitly linked to the male body (by means of Burke’s
chosen examples), its polar opposite—beauty—is quite explicitly linked to the bodies of
women which are described as (ideally) small, smooth, delicate and graceful, to match
women’s “weak” temperament and social disposition (1987 [1757/1759]: 116, 117).
Burke describes beauty as being intimately bound up with the need to propagate
the species:

The object, therefore, of this mixed passion which we call love is the beauty of
the sex. Men are carried to the sex in general, as it is the sex, and by the com-
mon law of nature; but they are attached to particulars by personal beauty.
(1987 [1757/1759]: 42)

The “we” that Burke uses here is sexually specific, and “men” means “males.” According
to Burke, it is the beautiful that operates on the (male) observer by a form of flattery,
the sublime that threatens to overwhelm the ego through a form of mental rape that
renders him (temporarily) passive:

There is a wide difference between admiration and love. The sublime, which is
the cause of the former, always dwells on great objects, and terrible; the latter on
small ones, and pleasing; we submit to what we admire, but we love what submits
to us; in one case we are forced, in the other we are flattered into compliance.
(1987 [1757/1759]: 113)

Beauty, Burke claims, involves properties that “operate by nature,” and our responses
are unaffected by “caprice” or by “a diversity of tastes” (1987 [1757/1759]: 117). But
he never made the adjustments to his vocabulary that would have been necessary had

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he thought at all about the sexual, or aesthetic, pleasures of women. He also failed to
consider the question of racial and cultural differences, insisting that “darkness and
blackness” are always psychologically and physiologically “painful,” and hence excluded
from the beautiful (1987 [1757/1759]: 144). As evidence, Burke cites the example of a
(white) boy who was blind from birth who feels “great horror” when he first sees “a negro
woman” after regaining his sight (1987 [1757/1759]: 144–145). In failing to explore
how the world might seem to black or dark-skinned persons, Burke does, in effect, place
non-white humanity outside the confines of those idealized human beings—not only
male, but also belonging to the white and Northern races—whose responses serve as the
aesthetic norm. In so doing, Burke prefigures a tendency in later literature and philoso-
phy, which not only genders sublimity in complex fashions, but also links it to specific
races and ethnicities (Battersby 2007).
Thus, in the historical discourse of the sublime, the (male) subject who is celebrated
as mastering terror is generally of European stock and white. The sublime became linked
with the exploration of oceans, deserts and wildernesses, insofar as the potential extent
or features of these territories remained excessive to the “human” (European/white)
imagination. Certain indigenous peoples—most notably Arabs and North American
Indians—who inhabited the wildernesses were allowed sublimity (Kant 2011 [1764]:
2/252–253; 58–59). However, once the landscape was tamed by the colonists, its per-
ceived sublimity—and those of its inhabitants—tended to decline. Indeed, towards the
end of the eighteenth century, we see the emergence of a third aesthetic category—the
picturesque—which was treated as intermediate between the beautiful and the sublime,
and that set out to frame, map, block, or otherwise contain the potential disturbance
to the observer which was presented by the more raw experience of the sublime. We
also find a fourth aesthetic category—the grotesque—increasingly deployed to separate
European high arts, religions, and physiognomic features from those of Asia, Africa, and
other so-called “primitive” cultures (Mitter 1992 [1977]; Cassuto 1996).

Kant’s Aesthetics
Strictly speaking, Burke and his contemporaries do not offer an aesthetics of the sublime
and the beautiful, but what might instead be termed a philosophy of taste. Although
some philosophers and historians trace the notion of aesthetics back to Alexander
Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762), it is Immanuel Kant’s development of the concept
of aesthetic judgment in his critical writings that is important in terms of the distinc-
tion between aesthetics and a philosophy of taste. Kant’s writings are generally divided
into two distinct periods: the pre-critical writings (1746–1770) and the critical writings
(1781–1804), and the distinctive emergence of the notion of aesthetic judgment did
not occur until late in the critical period, with The Critique of the Power of Judgment
(1790), also sometimes referred as Kant’s Third Critique. (On Kant’s aesthetics, see also
Chapters 37 and 38 in this volume.)
At the start of Kant’s critical project, he outlined two primary philosophical enquir-
ies: into pure reason (concerning what we can know) and pure practical reason (con-
cerning how we should act). The power of judgment that Kant explores in his Third
Critique is hollowed out in the space between these two enterprises. Judgment is con-
cerned with aesthetic experience—and the beautiful and the sublime in particular—but
also with the way in which we treat nature as an ordered whole. It is the task of judgment
to determine what everyone ought to judge on the basis of the data that is available to

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them. It is in this context that Kant develops the argument that aesthetic judgment is
not just a response to external stimuli, but a response that is simultaneously immediate
and also compelling. Pleasure (or displeasure) is an integral part of the experience, but
the pleasure is such that we have to suppose that all human subjects would respond in
exactly the same kind of way if they were in a similar position and faced with the same
type of sensory input. In other words, Kant insists that in the case of a pure aesthetic
judgment—and, for Kant, it is only judgments of beauty that count as pure—there is
always a normative element.
For Kant, the pleasure in beauty comes not from a particular sense or taste, but
through the mode in which all the different faculties of the mind operate harmoni-
ously. Beauty, he argues, is so pleasing to mankind that it seems as if the world had
been created for man’s delight, and that means, he maintains, that we have to assume
subjective universalizability. Aesthetics is more than simply a report on what the indi-
vidual does or does not like. This is, however, where problems of sexual and racial
difference intrude, and in very different ways insofar as the beautiful and the sublime
are involved. In the case of beauty, the judgment that the “I” makes is so abstract that
cultural differences are made to seem irrelevant; but Kant also fails to question his own
(Northern European) standards of what is “harmonious” to the various faculties of the
mind. By contrast, in the case of the sublime—which is not a pure aesthetic judgment,
but a “mixed” judgment straddling the aesthetic and the moral—Kant differentiates
between the two sexes and also between specific racial groupings. Women, “Orientals,”
and Africans are debarred from the sublime, but males of Arab and North American
Indian descent are credited with the noble character necessary for its enjoyment (Kant
2011 [1764]: 2/252–253, 58–59, and see Battersby 2007).
For Kant, the pleasures of the sublime are linked to mental turmoil. And this is
because what is enjoyed in the first place is not, as with the beautiful, the sense of a
perfect “fit” between the self and its surroundings. Instead, what is striking about the
sublime is precisely the impression of something ineffable, indefinite, infinitely great
(or small), and the incapacity of the mind to grasp what it is that is being observed or
otherwise sensed or contemplated. Instead of the pleasure coming from the feeling that
the world or the object had been created for my delight, the pleasure now comes from
an initial sense of horror, terror, or astonishment, which is then overcome as the mind
moves up a level—to that of the supersensible—and registers that at this level there is,
after all, an order that was initially obscured. The sublime allows us a glimpse of some-
thing that we simply cannot know: a supersensible power (infinite nature or a God) in
relation to which man can only feel humble and weak. In giving us some sense of what
might lie beyond the knowable space–time world, the sublime is thus not a purely aes-
thetic pleasure, but one intermediate between the aesthetic and the moral. Crucially it
involves an attitude of respect (Achtung) for that which could conceivably annihilate
the “I” that Kant positions as being at the center of the knowable world.
For Kant, “true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the one who judges,
not in the object in nature, the judging of which occasions this disposition in it” (2000
[1790]: 5/256, 139). Thus, whereas for Burke, the enjoyment of the sublime was a mat-
ter of taste and of affect, for Kant what is involved is judgment: the mind responds to the
data or “intuitions” that come in through the senses and, in so doing, the “I” discov-
ers “a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses” (2000 [1790]:
5/250, p. 134; bold in original). The enjoyment of the sublime is produced by the “I” as it

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responds to—and masters—the initial fear, disharmony, or discomfort that is produced

as it encounters those vast, infinite, and indefinite entities that seem to threaten its very
survival. Kant’s claim is that only those who have undergone an appropriate “moral”
education and also have a suitable, non-timorous, and also non-sensuous character have
the capacity to rise above the initial response of fear or bafflement, and to respond to the
sublime with the appropriate feelings of enjoyment, respect, and “awe.”
Kant makes it clear in a series of minor texts that bridge the critical and pre-critical
periods that he does not think that women should be educated to transcend fear. In his
Lectures on Anthropology (2012 [1782–1789]), for example, he claims that “preserva-
tion of the species” is an “aim” of nature, “which is entrusted to the woman’s womb,”
limiting women’s education to care for “three items, kitchen, children, and sick room.”
It is the “tenderness” of nature that makes women more “fearful” than men, and this
is a “universal” quality of women—even those who are “savages” (2012 [1782–1789]:
25/706–707, 236–238). Woman’s timidity is a social and biological necessity, since
“nature has entrusted to woman her dearest pledge, the child.” “Feminine qualities,” such as
fearfulness, which are regarded as weaknesses in males, are thus entirely appropriate for
women since, in them, “masculine qualities are always unseemly” (2012 [1782–1789]:
25/1189, 322, emphasis in original).
In his Lectures on Anthropology, Kant maintains that women should never transcend
fear and take delight in the sublime. However, in his early essay, Observations on the
Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (2011 [1764])—which is clearly influenced by both
Burke and by Rousseau—Kant makes the more empirical claim that women are incapable
of acting on the basis of true moral “principle” and enjoying the sublime:

The virtue of the woman is a beautiful virtue. The virtue of the male ought to
be a noble virtue. Women will avoid evil not because it is unjust, but because
it is ugly, and for them virtuous actions mean those that are ethically beautiful.
Nothing of ought, nothing of must, nothing of obligation. . . . It is difficult for
me to believe that the fair sex is capable of principles, and I hope not to give
offense by this, for these are also extremely rare amongst the male sex.
(2011 [1764]: 2/231–232, 39; bold in original)

In other words, Kant adopts in this early work exactly the type of view to which
Wollstonecraft objected so vehemently in 1792: he sexes morality and reserves for
males “the salutary, sublime curb of principle” (Wollstonecraft 1996 [1792]: 35).

The “Feminine” Sublime

There is by now a large body of feminist literature analysing the significance of sexual
difference in Kant’s aesthetics––including texts by Cornelia Klinger (1997 [1995]),
Timothy Gould (1995), Battersby (1995; 2007)––or charting female writers’ responses
to Kant (Jones 2000). However, it’s only very recently that a reliable English trans-
lation has been offered of Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology (2012 [1782–1789]) and
his misogynistic marginal “Remarks” (1764–1765) to the Observations (2011 [1764]),
meaning that more work remains to be done. As well as these feminist approaches, a
number of extremely influential theorists of the “feminine” have also drawn on Kant’s
writings—and often in rather surprising ways.

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For Kant, as well as for many of the post-Kantian philosophers, the sublime is barred to
women, but is associated with a feminine object, and with a (terrifying and awe-inspiring)
female figure, who is concealed behind a veil. The key passage in Kant is to be found in
the Third Critique (2000 [1790]):

Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, or any thought more sub-
limely expressed, than in the inscription over the Temple of Isis (Mother
Nature): “I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and my veil no mortal
has removed.”
(2000 [1790]: 5/316 n., 194 n., bold in original)

For many post-Kantian writers—including the influential philosopher, poet and

dramatist Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), and the widely-read German novelist,
poet, and philosopher Novalis (1772–1801)—the sublime became associated with an
“unveiling” of this infinite “other,” but, as I have argued in detail elsewhere (Battersby
2007), it remains a male agent who encounters the “feminine” other and, as such, the
sexual biases of the sublime are not deeply disturbed.
Kant himself (2002 [1796]) was deeply scornful of those philosophers who thought
that they could lift the veil of Isis, and access the sublime “truth” concealed beneath
it. More recently, Jacques Derrida (1993 [1981]) has responded to Kant’s ban on
access to Isis, emphasizing that Kant requires this unknowable and feminine “other”
to secure the boundaries of what can be known and what can be expressed. In the
wake of Derrida, a school of literary and cultural criticism has developed which looks
to deconstruction to develop a positive account of a “feminine” sublime. Some of
these critics engage productively with women writers, and also with questions of
race (Freeman 1995). However, the link between “the feminine” and women is not
straightforward. As Joanna Zylinska explains,

The feminine sublime . . . is born from the excess that the earlier theorists of
the sublime attempted to tame or annul. I am not interested . . . in determining
whether or not there is a sublime which is specific to women. Instead, I use this
term to explore instances in which absolute and incalculable alterity can no
longer be housed by the discursive restraints of traditional aesthetics, leading,
as a consequence, to the eruption of affect and the weakening of the idea of the
universal subject.
(2001: 8, emphasis in original)

Zylinska then goes on to equate “death” with “the ultimate source of fear in the
experience of the sublime,” and to interpret “the feminine sublime” as a “recogni-
tion” of “mortality and finitude to which the self is exposed in its encounter with
absolute difference” (2001: 8). We thus find a curious contrast between two strands
of gendered critique. Whereas most feminist theorists of the beautiful have been
concerned to argue that aesthetic qualities cannot be universalized, in critical theory
a distinctive mode of analysis has emerged that emphasizes the feminine whilst, at the
same time, downplaying sexual, racial, and ethnic differences in face of the universal
experience and fear of death.
Arguably there are analogous difficulties with Jean-François Lyotard’s extensive
engagement with the Kantian sublime, which has also been extremely important for

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some feminist critics (Klinger 1997 [1995]; Zylinska 2007). In Peregrinations (1988)
Lyotard argues that Kant’s account of the sublime dissolves the subject into a “stream
of sensitive clouds,” through which “no ‘I’ swims or sails; only mere affections float.
Feelings felt by no one, attached to no identity, but making one cloud ‘affected’ by
another” (1988: 34). Lyotard himself floats happily along with this notion of the disso-
lution of the subject; but for women who have historically been denied full personhood,
and whose subject position has yet to be adequately theorized from a philosophical
point of view, this embrace of disembodied affect is premature. By treating difference in
an extremely abstract way, Lyotard makes specific bodily, cultural, and historical differ-
ences disappear. By contrast, Lyotard’s emphasis on the role of dissensus and inaudibil-
ity in the Kantian account of the sublime is politically useful for feminists (Ziarek 2001;
Grebowicz 2007).
Thus in his Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1994 [1991]), Lyotard argues that
what is distinctive about the Kantian sublime is that it involves a “differend,” which
entails “neither moral universality nor aesthetic universalization, but is, rather, the
destruction of the one by the other” (1994 [1991]: 239). This differend involves irre-
solvable tension and “cannot demand, even subjectively, to be communicated to all
thought” (1994 [1991]: 239). In political terms, the differend involves a conflict or
dispute that is irresolvable because it brings into play at least two language games that
would describe what is at stake in incommensurable terms. Any resort to “solving”
the dispute by appeal to one of the language games simply covers up the difference
and rests on something that is, from the perspective of the language game adopted,
“unpresentable.” I find Lyotard’s emphasis on differences concealed within languages,
and also within history, enabling. What is also important is the way in which he puts
gender issues at the center of philosophical debate. However, gender for Lyotard
does not mean sexual difference, but rather the feminine/masculine distinction. And
since the sublime is so often linked to a “feminine” object or a passive—“feminine”—
spectator who is nevertheless allocated the body of a male, Lyotard’s position is
promising but also ultimately disappointing for those who are concerned to develop
an aesthetics that is feminist, and who are not simply concerned with a concealed
Otherness which is coded as “feminine.”
Also important to these developments has been the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques
Lacan who draws on Hegel—as well as Kant—as he positions “woman” as a kind of
unrepresentable “Other” that cannot be spoken or, indeed, represented, but that also
forever haunts the boundaries of language and also of vision. In his 1959–1960 Seminar
Lacan turns to Kant’s account of the beautiful and the sublime in the Critique of the
Power of Judgment as a means of understanding the character of Sophocles’ Antigone
who, for Hegel, represented “woman” in her purest form (Hegel 1977 [1807]: §456–475,
273–289; Battersby 1998: 109–116). Lacan’s Antigone/woman is constructed as beauti-
ful (as the object of desire), in order to cover over that which threatens the ego (death
and the sublime). Antigone “pushes to the limit the realization of something that might
be called the pure and simple desire of death as such. She incarnates that desire” (Lacan
1992 [1959–1960]: 282).
Lacan’s Antigone/woman represents the threat of the dissolution of the self into the
Otherness that bounds it; but, for Lacan, “woman” and “women” are two quite different
things. He argues that women only attain identity by separating from the Other/the
Mother, and taking on a masculine subject-position. Women can speak; but they can’t
speak as “woman”: that inexpressible and unrepresentable Otherness, which constitutes

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a feminine—not female—sublime. Given this framework, it is not surprising that several

of the most important French theorists of the féminin, including Julia Kristeva, Hélène
Cixous, Catherine Clément, and Luce Irigaray, engage with the question of the sublime
as they explore how the féminin functions in language in ways that give it more power
than Lacan allowed. In none of their writings, however, can the féminin be equated
with the female. It is Irigaray who comes closest to promoting a female sublime, espe-
cially in Speculum of the Other Woman (1985 [1972]); but her approach to the sublime
is always mediated by Lacan and her wish to “jam” the machinery of psychoanalysis and
philosophy (Irigaray 1985 [1977]: 78).

Reimagining the Sublime

Bonnie Mann’s Women’s Liberation and the Sublime (2006) engages with both Irigaray
and Lyotard. And whereas I have argued that Lyotard pays insufficient attention to bod-
ily differences, Mann shows how Lyotard gets “entangled” in the complex temporalities
of the sublime while neglecting spatiality and locatedness (2006: 69). She “talks back”
to theorists of the postmodern sublime, and argues that “certain kinds of sublime experi-
ence are both rooted in and disclosive of our relations of dependency on other persons
and on places, of our vulnerability and injurability” (2006: 145). Drawing on the “fickle
feeling” (2006: 131) of the sublime and also feminist theory and practice, she develops
a powerful argument for the need to develop an ethics and aesthetics of place and of
environmentalism (2006: 159ff).
Less influential than Irigaray in terms of English-language feminism, but more con-
sistently engaged with the question of the sublime, was Sarah Kofman (1934–1994).
Opposed to the stylistic obfuscation of both Lacanianism and l’écriture féminine, she
was nevertheless always interested in showing how philosophy has been driven not
solely by reason and rationality, but also by male libido and sexual desire. Thus, for
example, she reads the Kantian sublime through Freudian psychoanalysis, linking
respect for women to a horror of their bodies (Kofman 2007 [1982]). Writing as a
Jew whose rabbi father had been deported from Paris and killed in Auschwitz, she
is also painfully aware of the links between “the sublime,” the “smothered words,”
and the “infinite, untransmissible knowledge” of the detainees in the Camps (Kofman
1998 [1987]: 40–41, 37) As well as engaging extensively with Freud, she was also
a close reader of Nietzsche, who was profoundly influenced by—and ultimately an
opponent of—Arthur Schopenhauer and his aesthetics of the sublime. Like Nietzsche,
Kofman developed an ideal of counter-sublime “laughter,” in the face of the profound
despair at living which Schopenhauer linked to the sublime in The World as Will and
Representation of 1818–1859. Haunted, however, by “the inexpressible affliction” of
Auschwitz, and the demand to express “that which cannot be said and yet must be
said” (Kofman 1998 [1987]: 31), Kofman’s life ended not in laughter, but in suicide—
on Nietzsche’s birthday, in an apparently symbolic act.
The sublime is an elusive category, and one that stretches the boundaries of aesthetics.
Responses to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the genocide at Auschwitz, the ground
zeroes of Hiroshima and 9/11, the Middle Passage endured by those transported on
the slave ships, and the tortured bodies of slaves, have all been linked to the themat-
ics of the sublime (Gilroy 1993: 187–223; Fulford 2005; Ray 2005; Battersby 2007).
Elsewhere I have argued that what is needed is an aesthetics that pays attention to

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embodiment. I have also emphasized (Battersby 1998; 2007) the need to treat preg-
nancy as normal to the human subject position: the sublime is transformed if we stop
treating the “I”/“other” boundary in a way that normalizes the body of males. From such
a female perspective, the sublime object is not simply an excess, pushed beyond the
limits of language, but is instead more like an “other within,” concealed within diverse
histories and cultures—or rather one of a number of “smothered others” whom we need
to learn to hear and also to see.

Further Reading
Ashfield, Andrew and De Bolla, Peter (Eds.) (1996) The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth Aesthetic
Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brady, Emily (2013) The Sublime in Modern Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brand, Peg Zeglin and Devereaux, Mary (Eds.) (2003) Women, Art and Aesthetics, Special Issue of Hypatia
18(4).
Korsmeyer, Carolyn (2012) “Feminist Aesthetics,” in Edward N. Zalta (Ed.) Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, Winter 2012 Edition [online]. Available from: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/
entries/feminism-aesthetics/.
Llewellyn, Nigel and Riding, Christine (Eds.) The Art of the Sublime, [online] London: Tate Gallery.
Available from www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime.

Related Topics
Feminist methods in the history of philosophy (Chapter 1); feminism and the
Enlightenment (Chapter 8); feminist engagements with nineteenth-century German
philosophy (Chapter 9); language, writing and gender differences (Chapter 24);
historicizing feminist aesthetics (Chapter 37); aesthetics and the politics of gender
(Chapter 38).

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and Carolyn Korsmeyer (Eds.) Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
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—— (1998) The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity, New York: Routledge.
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Derrida, Jacques (1993 [1981]) “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” in Peter Fenves
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—— (2012 [1782–1789]) Lectures on Anthropology, Eds. Allen W. Wood and Robert B. Louden, trans.
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—— (1994 [1991]) Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Mann, Bonnie (2006) Women’s Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment, Oxford:
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Wollstonecraft, Mary (1996 [1792]) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 2nd edition, Candace Ward (Ed.),
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Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska (2001) An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical
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Zylinska, Joanna (2001) On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: The Feminine and the Sublime, Manchester
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 40
MORAL JUSTIFICATION
IN AN UNJUST WORLD
Alison M. Jaggar and Theresa W. Tobin

Diversity, Inequality, and Moral Justification

Social inequality and cultural diversity are inescapable features of our world.
Their conceptual richness and variety of perspectives provide valuable resources
for moral thinking but they also complicate moral reasoning, especially reason-
ing among members of differently situated social groups. When cultural values are
diverse, different groups may prioritize similar values differently, the values of one
culture may not have obvious correlates in another, and different forms of reason-
ing may be taken as authoritative. Inequality may allow members of powerful social
groups to repress the moral views of the less powerful by ignoring, dismissing, or
silencing them.
Many inter-group disputes concern gender norms. Examples include: female geni-
tal cutting, abortion, marriage equality, and legislation that requires or bans women’s
veiling. In order to address such disputes equitably, Western philosophers have pro-
posed a variety of methodological models. Feminist philosophers have criticized many
of these models because they are too easily used to justify the oppression of women
or render invisible moral issues that are especially significant in the lives of women.
In the longer work from which this article is drawn, we build on these criticisms. We
examine several popular models of moral justification and find that, in contexts of
diversity and inequality, they often facilitate epistemic and moral injustice, allowing
members of more powerful groups to rationalize proposals that favor their own partial
interests. We, along with many other feminist philosophers, tried initially to fix or
tweak existing models to make them less gender biased and more likely to yield war-
ranted moral outcomes (Okin 1989; Benhabib 1992; Jaggar 1995; Mills 1994). Yet
the revised models failed to escape the problems of their originals, remaining insuf-
ficiently responsive to the ways in which differences in situation and social identity
markers such as race, ethnicity, class, and global positioning influence credibility
judgments about who and what may count as reasonable. This chapter offers one illus-
tration of how this can happen and uses it to motivate our proposal for an alternative
mission and method for moral epistemology.
 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

Our alternative proposal rejects the epistemological assumption that there exists
a single, one-size-fits-all model of moral justification capable of reliably yielding
warranted moral conclusions in all contexts. The approach we advocate is inspired
by previous feminist work and suggests one direction for pushing that work further
toward realizing the goals of epistemic justice in the practice of moral justification.

Epistemic Injustice and Moral Justification

Epistemic injustice occurs when processes of knowledge production are influenced
by social power in ways unfair to some inquirers. Philosophers, including many femi-
nists, have long reflected on the relations between power and knowledge but the term
“epistemic injustice” recently gained currency in Western analytic philosophy with
the publication of Miranda Fricker’s influential book, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the
Ethics of Knowing (2007; Collins 2000; Mills 1994).
Fricker identifies two main forms of epistemic injustice, testimonial and herme-
neutic. Testimonial injustice occurs when hearers assess knowledge claims wrongly
because they hold unjust prejudices, either positive or negative, about the credibility
of those putting forward the claims. Negatively prejudiced listeners often hold some
wrongful stereotype or “identity prejudice” about the epistemic capacity of a group to
which the individual belongs. Positive epistemic prejudice allows the claims of some
speakers to be accorded more weight than the speakers’ credentials deserve. Not all
prejudices are overt or explicit; some stereotypes affect people’s perceptions without
their conscious awareness and they are called implicit biases. Implicit biases may
not be easily accessible through introspection and sometimes are outside people’s
intentional control.
Hermeneutic injustice occurs when the available linguistic resources are inade-
quate for communicating what a speaker wishes to convey. Feminists of the 1960s and
1970s famously used the practice of consciousness-raising to develop a new vocabulary
for expressing previously unarticulated wrongs, such as date rape, sexual harassment,
and hostile work environments. Canadian aboriginal people have contended that
“A distinct category of Aboriginal property rights demands the willingness and capac-
ity to comprehend and evaluate an altogether different (alterior) concept of property”
(Means 2003: 224). They have argued in Canada’s Supreme Court “for the right to
present various sacred ‘texts’; oral history, totems, and other ‘expressive discourses’”
(Means 2003: 223).
The harms resulting from epistemic injustice fall disproportionately, though not
exclusively, on those with less power. When testimonial or hermeneutical injustice
hinder people in voicing or even articulating their moral perspectives, those people
are wronged in their distinctively human capacities as givers of knowledge, reasoners,
or subjects of social understanding. They are epistemically marginalized, excluded
from trustful conversation, and may lose faith in their own epistemic capacities
(Fricker 2007).
As well as harming particular individuals, epistemic injustice tends to produce
untrustworthy outcomes. Knowledge claims produced via unjust processes are more
likely to be biased, incomplete, misleading, or distorting. Epistemic injustice in moral
discourse typically results in moral conclusions that obscure social injustice, sometimes
by promoting systematic ignorance. For instance, those who are more powerful may

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dismiss reports of wrongs committed against those less powerful or they may frame
moral wrongs in misleading ways that blame bad luck or individual perpetrators while
ignoring systemic factors.
We wish to develop an approach to moral reasoning that is less susceptible to
epistemic injustice than many familiar philosophical approaches. Our approach
invokes the ideal of epistemic democracy, which has gained considerable traction
in feminist philosophy since 1990 (Longino 1990; 2002; Anderson 1995; 2010:
89–111). We think that this can provide valuable guidance for moral epistemology
but we regard it as a thin and contestable ideal that must be specified differently in
different contexts. In particular, we think that the frequent formulation of “universal
participation on terms of equality of inquirers” (Anderson 2012: 172) may not always
ensure epistemic justice among people reasoning together in contexts of diversity and
inequality.
One way in which “formal” epistemic democracy may be less than just is by refusing
to take account of legitimate differences in people’s moral competence or expertise. For
instance, some cultural or religious communities regard the words of particular commu-
nity members as having extra moral weight, perhaps in virtue of their having privileged
access to divine meaning or the wisdom of the ancestors. In other contexts, some indi-
viduals have specialized or deeper knowledge of salient hermeneutical resources, such
as sacred texts or cultural traditions. Some individuals have firsthand experience of
various kinds of oppression (Thomas 1992–1993). Because moral expertise is typically
limited to specific domains, epistemic justice requires that moral experts receive due
deference when they speak about the areas in which they are experts. We advocate a
version of epistemic democracy that we call “inclusive.” Although it requires universal
participation, it is nonetheless open to the possibilities of differing moral expertise in
some domains and consequent legitimate differences in epistemic authority for some
individuals in some contexts.

Four Necessary Conditions of Inclusive

Epistemic Democracy
Our conception of inclusive epistemic democracy is specified in terms of four condi-
tions. In contexts of diversity and inequality, we think that the best chance of reaching
reliable and authoritative moral conclusions is gained by relying on models and prac-
tices of moral reasoning that are able to meet the following conditions:

•• Plausibility. To justify a normative conclusion is to explain convincingly why it has

moral authority. All disputants must recognize the reasoning practice as capable of
conferring moral authority on the conclusions reached.
•• Usability. Everyone involved in a particular dispute must be able to utilize the justi-
ficatory practices employed. This does not mean that everyone must be able to par-
ticipate as a formal equal; instead, people must be able to participate in a way that
accords with whatever strategies of moral justification their communities regard as
authoritative. Our interpretation of “usability” may seem to open the door to injus-
tice, but our first and third conditions are designed to block this door.
•• Non-abuse of power and vulnerability. No reasoning practice is epistemically inclu-
sive if it relies on abusing power or vulnerability. In contexts of moral reasoning,

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there are innumerable ways short of overt physical coercion in which some dis-
putants make their own views appear unduly credible while taking advantage of
others’ vulnerability to discredit them. Abuse can include misrepresentation or
selective presentation of evidence, distortion, intimidation, logical trickery, mysti-
fication, ridicule, disregard, and refusal to understand. It also occurs when some dis-
putants insist on a particular style of argumentation in which others are unskilled
or uncomfortable or on using a vocabulary that does not fit well with the moral
concepts of some disputants or is inadequate to express their perspectives.
•• Practical feasibility. Finally, no model or practice of moral justification is inclusive
in a given context if it prescribes a course of action that is not feasible or realisti-
cally possible for some people in the situation. As Onora O’Neill writes, “Proposals
for action will . . . not be reasoned unless they are not only intelligible, but real
possibilities for those who are to be offered reasons for certain recommendations or
prescriptions, warnings or proscriptions” (1996: 57–58).

Even when our four conditions are accepted in principle, it is always possible for people
to disagree about how to apply them in specific contexts. None of our conditions can
be deployed mechanically, and, as we invoke them to assess the use of particular rea-
soning strategies, we offer arguments about what should count in particular contexts as
plausibility, usability, power abuse, and practical feasibility.

Moral and Political Universalism

Our larger work examines several methodological models of moral justification, such as
intuitionism, original position thinking, discourse ethics, and communitarianism. Here
we sketch two examples of the method of appealing to universal principles.
Moral universalism is the idea that there exist substantive moral values, norms or
principles valid in all times and places. Universal values and norms seem especially
promising as courts of appeal for disputes among different communities or among
diverse members of one community. One example of a principle asserted to be univer-
sally valid is the “moral law” or Categorical Imperative proposed by Immanuel Kant
(1785). Moral agents checking whether a particular action they contemplate accords
with the Categorical Imperative should ask themselves whether or not their maxim, or
reason for action in that case, could be universalized or whether it would produce any
contradictions or irrationalities if everyone acted on the same maxim in similar cases.
The Principle of Utility is another example of a moral principle claimed to hold uni-
versally. Proposed by British utilitarians in the nineteenth century, the principle states
that an action or practice is morally right when it leads to the greatest possible balance
of good over bad consequences. Different utilitarian philosophers characterize good and
bad consequences differently but, regardless of how they define the good, all utilitarians
regard the Principle of Utility as morally supreme.
Although these two supposedly universal principles present famously sharp con-
trasts to each other, they also resemble each other in significant ways. Both insist that
all persons have equal moral weight and that moral reasoning should be impartial;
both focus on assessing specific actions or practices, as opposed to qualities of charac-
ter; and both purport to provide a single standard of morality that enables moral agents
to determine objectively what is right and wrong. Both assume that practical moral

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reasoning has a deductive structure, in which general moral principles are applied to
specific situations.
Adjudicating cross-cultural disputes by invoking supposedly universal moral
principles raises several problems. One concerns the justification of the principles
themselves. The moral core of each principle is controversial in Western societies,
let  alone beyond them, in part because each principle appears to mandate some
actions that are morally wrong. One famous problem for Kantian theory is posed by
the hypothetical murderer at the door who is seeking someone hidden in the house.
According to Kant’s exposition of the Categorical Imperative, lying is never permis-
sible even though telling the truth to the potential killer is likely to enable murder.
The Principle of Utility also justifies many morally problematic actions, such as kill-
ing one person to save others or torturing someone in hope of extracting information
about a ticking time bomb.
A second cluster of problems concerns the formulation, interpretation and appli-
cation of the principles. Formulating them can be controversial. For instance, as
Henry Sidgwick noticed (1962 [1907]) and as Derek Parfit among others has elabo-
rated (1984), increasing the numbers of human (or sentient) beings might maximize
the total utility in the world but at the cost of decreasing each individual’s utility.
Moreover, even when their formulation is agreed, the principles are extremely general
and vague, so that appealing to them in particular situations leaves enormous scope
for further dispute.
Partly because of these difficulties, recent efforts to address intercultural disputes
often appeal to principles that are political rather than moral. Political principles may
appear more plausible than moral principles, in part because they are taken to be univer-
sal in a sense that is more constrained. Rather than being considered timeless or holding
in all possible moral worlds, most contemporary political principles are designed for the
existing world at the present time. Although they have far-reaching implications for
individual conduct, they are designed to apply in the first instance to legislation and
social practices. Their justifications are more explicit than the rationales for suppos-
edly ultimate moral principles and they are open in theory to revision or amendment.
Finally, these political principles promise to reduce indeterminacy because they do not
attempt to define moral rightness and wrongness in terms of a single broad principle but
instead offer longer and more specific lists.
The most familiar example of political universalism is the 1948 Universal Decla­
ration of Human Rights (UDHR). This is the basis not only of a cosmopolitan or
global morality but an international law above national law. A second example of
political universalism is the idea of capabilities, developed originally by Amartya Sen
(1984). Sen intended the capabilities as a global standard of human well-being and
he defined them as socially available opportunities for valuable functioning. Sen has
resisted offering a comprehensive list of capabilities, but Martha Nussbaum has devel-
oped an explicit list that purports to provide a universal standard for assessing local
ways of life and thus offers a concrete alternative to cultural relativism (Nussbaum
2000: 13).
Unfortunately for those hoping to adjudicate inter-group disputes by reference to
universal political principles, such principles are assailed by the same problems of
justification and interpretation that beset universal moral principles. Neither moral
nor political universalism is able to meet our adequacy conditions.

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Plausibility. First, problems with justification. The human rights accepted across the
world are justified by explicit political consensus but real world consensus is always
shaped by the context in which it occurs. Some countries have ratified human rights
with many reservations and many countries that have ratified them are not democratic,
so that their governments may not reflect the views of their citizenry. Moreover, many
civil society groups believe that currently recognized rights need to be supplemented
and there is constant political pressure to reinterpret and expand them. For instance,
lively controversy currently exists over whether the right to sex equality should include
sexuality and abortion. Whether or not revisions to rights are accepted depends on the
outcome of political contests in which the views of small groups may well go unheard.
Attempting to resolve cross-cultural disputes by appealing to human rights that are
themselves contested begs crucial questions at issue.
Nussbaum uses four methods to legitimate her list of capabilities but all have been
subjected to various criticisms. The methods that Nussbaum invokes are: (1) The
Aristotelian approach of critically refining eudoxa or reputable beliefs; (2) the narrative
method; (3) morally constrained proceduralism; (4) the non-platonic substantive good
method. All these methods have been challenged by, respectively (Ackerly 2000; Okin
2003; Robeyns 2005; Jaggar 2006). Underlying many particular criticisms of Nussbaum’s
methods is the larger thought that no political ideals are legitimate or authoritative if
they are not justified through processes of public reason, which is not the case for the
capabilities (Robeyns 2005; Jaggar 2006).

Usability. As we noted earlier, general ideals and principles are inevitably indetermi-
nate and although indeterminacy can be reduced by producing relatively specific lists
of human rights and capabilities, it cannot be eliminated. Neither of the two lists we
have given as examples offers a priority ranking among its items; human rights are said
to be indivisible and Nussbaum denies that capabilities can be traded off against each
other. Furthermore, even quite specific items on any list must be interpreted in par-
ticular situations and increasing specificity to reduce indeterminacy heightens the risk
of tendentiousness. The method of invoking universal principles as guides to action
always struggles with a dilemma between appealing to principles that are, on the one
hand, so broad or general that they are too vague to provide specific guidance or, on
the other hand, so narrow that they are applicable only to a limited range of situations
and may even appear arbitrary or ad hoc.

Non-Abusiveness. Universal principles always require interpretation in particular con-

texts, which often provide opportunities for the abuse of power and vulnerability. For
instance, items on the lists may be spelled out in ways that repress the moral views of
less powerful groups. In the following section, we illustrate how this can occur by show-
ing how the principle of women’s human rights has been deployed in oppressive and
disrespectful ways against some communities, particularly in Africa (Nnaemeka 2005).

Practical Feasibility. Whether or not the use of a model or practice of moral justifica-
tion prescribes a course of action that is feasible or realistically possible for everyone
in that situation can be determined only in particular contexts. In the next section,
we describe one case study where the use of this model failed to meet our condition of
practical feasibility.

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Case Study: Is Female Genital Cutting (FGC) as Practiced by

the Maasai a Violation of Women’s Human Rights?
Over the past three decades, eradicating a cluster of practices known as female geni-
tal cutting (FGC) has been a high priority on the moral agenda of many women’s
human rights and development organizations. These organizations argue that FGC
is morally wrong and that the international community has a moral responsibility
to support eradication efforts or even spearhead them. We call this influential line
of thinking the Women’s Human Rights Approach (WHR). WHR has come under
criticism from some scholars and activists who study or work in communities where
FGC is practiced. Their shared line of critique is that WHR generates misleading,
and even morally mistaken, conclusions about why these practices are wrong, who is
responsible for the harm, and how to address the harm. The critics offer an alterna-
tive moral evaluation of FGC that relies on a different method of justification. Both
“sides” of this dispute use human rights as moral standards to evaluate FGC and both
find moral fault with FGC. However, each uses a distinct practice of moral justifica-
tion in which human rights function very differently, generating divergent grounds
for their respective assessments.
WHR asserts that what it calls female genital mutilation is an act of violence
against women, which violates their human rights (United Nations 2015). It also
states that this violence is rooted in historically unjust power relations between
men and women, which derive essentially from certain traditional or customary
practices (United Nations 2015). The method of moral justification WHR uses
deductively applies a very specific interpretation of women’s rights women’s human
rights which is assumed to apply in all global contexts to concrete cases in order
to demonstrate to doubters that particular instantiations of FGC violate women’s
human rights.
The specific interpretation of the WHR standard already defines which social
practices are morally wrong and provides an account of why they are wrong, so
that anyone using the standard starts her moral evaluation with a prefabricated
moral frame that foregrounds gender and culture. When the standard is applied in
particular cases, it is assumed that other contextual information has no moral sali-
ence. For example, FGC as practiced among the Maasai in Kenya is very different
from FGC as practiced among Muslims in Indonesia but, when using the WHR
approach, a person enters both contexts already knowing that these practices are
wrong, and knowing why they are wrong (i.e., all instances of FGC reflect and
reinforce culturally specific gender relations premised on male domination and
female subordination). Contextual details are used to recruit evidence showing
how a particular practice is indeed an instance of FGC, but not to revise the
standard or determine its meaning.
The critics of WHR whose approach we favor do not deny that many practices
of FGC are in some sense harmful nor do they reject women’s human rights as
important moral tools. Rather, they object to the moral reasoning used by WHR
advocates and the way that WHR advocates frame the issue and characterize moral
agency. Taken collectively, the work of these critics offers a sustained argument
that WHR systematically conceals features of the social and historical contexts
in which FGC occurs that are highly relevant for an adequate moral evaluation of

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these practices. It offers an alternative moral analysis of FGC as practiced in spe-

cific communities through the frame of colonial history. We call this a postcolonial
analysis approach (PCA).
PCA begins by looking at a specific practice of FGC among a particular group
of people within a specified historical time frame. The scholars whose work we
highlight focus on understanding the evolving cultural and moral significance of
FGC among Maasai communities of Tanzania and Kenya from the pre-colonial
period of the late nineteenth century through the period of formal colonization by
the British from 1920–1961. For the Maasai, FGC initiates the social transition of
a girl into womanhood. In the period prior to formal colonization, social responsi-
bilities associated with Maasai womanhood included a significant amount of eco-
nomic and political authority. For example, Maasai wives had authority to initiate
and testify at judicial proceedings and they participated in dispute resolution both
within and between homesteads. They were also the primary economic agents in
a barter economy trading surplus milk and hides in exchange for other important
goods. During and after formal colonization by the British, however, Maasai gender
relations shifted dramatically.
At least three colonial policies significantly altered Maasai gender relations.
First, the policy of indirect rule required identifying a central Maasai authority to
act as an intermediary between the Maasai and the British. In implementing this
policy, British authorities assumed that male elders were already “the” political lead-
ers, thereby extending the authority of select male elders over both women and
junior men, strengthening and consolidating their power. Second, needing to cre-
ate a cash economy in order to produce tax revenue for the crown, the British also
transformed a previously female-based barter economy into a newly male-dominated
cash economy. Livestock was now to be bought and sold on the market for cash
and colonial authorities assumed that males were the “owners” of cattle. So Maasai
men were integrated into the new economy as buyers and sellers of livestock, while
Maasai women were dispossessed from their previously shared cattle rights and
now struggled to gain access to cash “indirectly through gifts from men or the sale
of cattle by their sons or husbands (Hodgson 1999: 57).” The third policy, which
followed directly from the second, was to implement a new system of taxation. This
system designated male elders as “tax payers” and “heads of household,” who were
now required to pay a “plural wives” tax for “dependent” women living on their
homestead (Hodgson 1999: 58).
These policies reflected a British gender ideology that was deeply patriarchal. Their
combined effect was severe political and economic disempowerment and symbolic
devaluation of Maasai women. Foregrounding colonial history reveals that contempo-
rary Maasai gender relations, which today are identified as “authentically” and deeply
embedded in Maasai culture, are really a “co-invention” by British colonial authorities
and opportunistic Maasai in a fairly recent struggle for power.
Where WHR concludes that the harmful gender relations supporting Maasai FGC
derive from cultural patterns that belong essentially to the Maasai (see IRIN 2005),
PCA argues that this claim is false. Physical harms or risks associated with Maasai
FGC likely have always been present, but PCA suggests that the practice becomes
a tool of male domination only in the context of the colonial encounter. The harm-
ful gender relations that today give symbolic meaning to Maasai FGC derive from

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cultural patterns, but these resulted from a forced blend of British gender ideology
with pre-existing Maasai social categories.
PCA relies on an alternative practice of moral justification, although advocates
of this approach do not make it explicit. PCA uses women’s human rights as one
important moral tool in an empirically informed reflective equilibrium which takes
human rights as moral standards that need interpreting in light of particular cases
rather than just being implemented in a deductive manner. Contextual details
have salience in shaping the moral assessment of the situation and the interpre-
tation of women’s human rights and not just in persuading doubters or tailoring
eradication efforts. In this case, PCA uses historical details to generate a more
transparent moral analysis of contemporary practices of FGC among the Maasai
based on a more comprehensive account of the human rights abuses Maasai women
have suffered, which includes the abuse of colonial experience (see Walker 2002
on transparency in moral life).
We use our four conditions for inclusive epistemic democracy—plausibility,
usability, non-abuse of social power or vulnerability, and feasibility—to argue that
PCA is more likely than WHR to yield authoritative moral conclusions about FGC
in this situation.

Plausibility. WHR and PCA both appeal to human rights, but in this case we think
that, PCA enables a more plausible way of using human rights as tools of moral
assessment than WHR does. WHR assumes that “the” answer to “the” problem exists
already in the form of a universal principle of women’s human rights that is already
formulated at the appropriate level of abstraction for application in all contexts;
it is not too thin and not too thick. By contrast, PCA assumes that the relevant
standard or principle and the appropriate level of interpretation for it, will emerge
as the “wrong” comes into clearer focus. Using PCA does not preclude questioning
the universal validity of the human rights framework, but opens the possibility that
more than one human rights principle may be morally relevant here and assumes
that human rights principles always need interpreting in a way appropriate to the
facts and the context. Interpreting human rights in light of the details of a particular
practice of FGC in a specific place is more likely to be able to link the moral authority
of the conclusion with the reasoning that generates that conclusion, to tell a more
plausible story about the variety of rights violations involved in this case, and to offer
a more plausible interpretation of those violations that is likely to seem less arbitrary
or baffling to those most directly impacted.

Usability. This condition requires that all those affected be able to participate in
moral reasoning; this may require, for example, that participants utilize particular rit-
uals or forms of speech. In this case, most Maasai people who are directly affected are
not actually using either reasoning strategy, which is a significant weakness of both
approaches. However, in our view, PCA has greater potential than WHR to better
satisfy the usability condition in situations like this one. The WHR strategy does not
make room for cultural standards or contextual details to interpret or reinterpret the
meaning of rights, but only to tailor eradication efforts. Moreover, Maasai opposi-
tion to moral arguments supported by WHR reasoning suggests that the reasoning
being offered is not plausible to many Maasai. One reason for this may be that the

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WHR reasoning strategy is not usable by them in the sense of broadly conforming to
internal cultural standards. PCA leaves open the possibility for Maasai standards of
justification to be used because the reasoning strategy of PCA encourages its users to
continually seek out new information from the particular social context under scru-
tiny, and so it can incorporate Maasai moral perspectives in order to interpret, revise,
or broaden human rights principles.

Non-Abuse of Power or Vulnerability. In this case, we think that WHR is lends itself
more readily to abusing power and vulnerability than does PCA. WHR as used in this
case brings under moral scrutiny the least powerful while shielding the most powerful
from scrutiny. WHR also makes its own moral framework appear incontrovertible
while too easily lending itself to discrediting anyone who uses an alternative frame-
work. In our assessment, WHR is more susceptible to power abuse in this context for
at least three reasons. First, it relies on a static and oversimplified notion of culture
in a context in which cultural interventions are not innocent but track global power
relations both historically and at present. Second, it also tends to assign “culture” to
those with the least global power while simultaneously making dominant global per-
spectives appear cultureless, which they are not. Finally, WHR foregrounds gender
but places gender relations in a historical vacuum, and so obscures the complex web
of historical interactions among nations and cultures that have produced the specific
gender relations within Maasai communities that are today the object of global moral
criticism. The epistemic stance enabled by WHR is eerily similar to the perspective of
British colonizers who perceived gender and culture in the Maasai practices that were
exotic or foreign to them, but failed to see their own policies as gendered and instead
regarded them as natural. Although PCA is certainly not immune from being used in
abusive ways, it enables corrigibility and discourages dogmatism. PCA’s insistence on
seeking out empirical information relevant to understanding the contemporary social
meaning of Maasai FGC and the conditions that enable its continuance, as well as
PCA’s ability to incorporate Maasai perspectives, make this reasoning strategy less
apt to be used abusively than WHR in this situation.

Feasibility. Maasai are reported as very resistant to eradication efforts justified using
WHR reasoning. These efforts include state prohibition of FGC coupled with NGO
and religious organization interventions that advocate cultural change. In our view,
this resistance provides prima facie evidence that the moral conclusions defended
by WHR are not feasible to many Maasai. The conclusions may seem arbitrary, baf-
fling, or suspicious given previously devastating interventions premised on cultural
change. The interventions might also be materially or existentially devastating for
many Maasai given the real limitations of their situation and the complicated links
between Maasai FGC and social life. In our view, PCA is likely more capable of
delivering more feasible recommendations than WHR because people using PCA
are less rigidly committed to prejudging cases, and instead try to seek out all mor-
ally salient information including alternative moral perspectives. This means that
PCA-derived solutions are likely to be premised on more nuanced assessments of
the risks and benefits of eradication efforts in particular situations and to find solu-
tions that are more likely to be real possibilities for people in the contexts they
actually live in.

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Changing the Mission and Method of

Moral Epistemology
Many philosophers have assumed that moral justification can be pared down to
a single reasoning practice or set of practices, which can be used to justify moral
claims in any context. They therefore take the mission of moral epistemology to
be discovering or constructing a single, multi-purpose model of moral justification
(Walker 2002: ch. 1–2). Philosophers have typically pursued this mission using
“armchair” philosophical methods. They imagine what moral reasoning should be
like either by constructing fictitious models of justification or by conceptualizing
the logical constraints of moral reasoning under ideal conditions. In our view, the
fruits of this philosophical labor as well as this way of laboring—i.e., of doing moral
epistemology—are inadequate for understanding how justified moral claims can be
established in situations of cultural diversity and power inequality. We have come
to believe that no single method or model of moral rationality can yield substantive
and authoritative normative conclusions in all circumstances. On our view, reason-
ing strategies must fit the context in which they are used.
A model of moral justification developed under the controlled conditions of the
philosopher’s imagination and relying on his or her acknowledged or unacknowl-
edged assumptions may or may not be capable of justifying moral claims under the
conditions of real life. This may not be because the model has been applied incor-
rectly or unfairly, but because it has been developed assuming a context with one
set of features and then prescribed for all contexts, are very unlike that assumed
in the philosopher’s imagination. For example, the controlled conditions of phil-
osophical imagination have tended to assume conditions in which interlocutors
exchanging reasons have equal social power, and so philosophers have developed
models of moral justification based on this assumption. Yet a model of moral justi-
fication designed for conditions of social equality may be ineffective in situations
where people have unequal social power, and may even be harmful if the model
obscures or makes it easy to rationalize power abuse.
These considerations suggest two points about moral epistemology. First, moral
epistemology should adopt a more modest mission. A single, multi-purpose model
of reasoning might be suitable for a world in which diversity and inequality were
not ubiquitous. However, in our world, to prescribe for all contexts a single prac-
tice of justification that has been developed under the controlled conditions of
the philosopher’s imagination may at best be ineffective and at worst epistemi-
cally unjust in situations that do not match these conditions. Certain features of
the context partially determine which reasoning practices are capable of justifying
moral claims in that context.
Second, the study of moral justification needs to be much more empirically grounded
(Walker 2002). In order to understand which reasoning practices are capable of
justifying moral claims in different types of contexts, we need to study empirically
the relationships between reasoning practices and the contexts in which they work
well. Features of a context that influence the adequacy of a method of moral justifica-
tion include social relations of power and vulnerability among interlocutors as well
as particular moral vocabularies and styles of reasoning that are available, meaning-
ful, and usable to and by various parties. Many areas of contemporary philosophy

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have recently seen a methodological turn toward more empirically informed research.
This turn is often called a move toward naturalizing methodology because philoso-
phers are attempting to make their research more continuous with results from empiri-
cal science. Our proposal shares in the naturalizing spirit of these developments, but
suggests a new and distinct method for doing empirically grounded—naturalized—
moral epistemology.
Specifically, we propose that philosophers investigate case studies of real world moral
disputes in which people lack shared cultural assumptions and/or are unequal in social
power rather than relying exclusively or too heavily on thought experiments about
what philosophers imagine these situations to be like. Case studies always focus on
what is being studied in relation to its environment, which makes this a promising
method for investigating relationships between reasoning practices and their contexts
of use (Flyvbjerg 2011: 301). Working through case studies may enable philosophers
to understand better how various features of the context operate either to support or
undermine reasoning that is plausible, usable, power sensitive, and capable of delivering
feasible conclusions.
Our main point is not the uncontroversial claim that empirical information is
required at the stage of applying philosophical models of moral and political justifica-
tion; instead, we propose that the development of the models be empirically informed.
This means that those developing models of moral justification must incorporate mul-
tidisciplinary scholarship at all stages. Identifying case studies of successful reasoning
practices requires collaborating with scholars from many disciplines, and with moral
reasoners who are not academics.
Finally, philosophers working collaboratively to develop new philosophical models
of justification must reflect continually on our specific identities and situations. Who
are we? For whom are we philosophizing? What are our credentials and authority?
This kind of reflexivity will help us stay modest and humble, to remember that, if our
conceptions of justification are useful at all, they are useful only for particular con-
texts, not for all times and places. Moral justification, like justice, cannot be viewed
sub specie aeternitatis.

Note
This paper draws on a book project tentatively titled, Undisciplining Moral Epistemology. Our work on this
project has been supported over several years by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of
Excellence funding scheme, project number 179566/V20. Parts of this work are published in Jaggar and
Tobin 2013 and Tobin and Jaggar 2013.

Related Topics
Feminism, philosophy, and culture in Africa (Chapter 4); epistemic injustice, igno-
rance, and trans experience (Chapter 22); women, gender, and philosophies of global
development (Chapter 34); feminist metaethics (Chapter 42); feminist ethics of care
(Chapter 43); Confucianism and care ethics (Chapter 44); multicultural and postcolo-
nial feminisms (Chapter 47); neoliberalism, global justice, and transnational feminisms
(Chapter 48).

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 41
FEMINIST CONCEPTIONS
OF AUTONOMY
Catriona Mackenzie

Introduction
Autonomy is both a status and a capacity concept. As a status concept, it refers to the
idea that individuals are entitled to exercise self-determining authority over their own
lives. A foundational principle of liberal democratic societies is that each individual
should be respected as having this authority. As a capacity concept, autonomy refers to
the capacity to be self-defining and self-governing; that is, to make decisions and act
on the basis of preferences, values or commitments that are authentically “one’s own.”
Debates about autonomy in the mainstream philosophical literature seek to analyze
the characteristics of self-governing agency and to explain how it can be undermined
by external threats, such as coercion, manipulation or paternalistic interference, and
impaired by internal threats, such as compulsion, addiction and failures of self-control,
including weakness of will.
Feminist relational theories of autonomy are motivated by the intuition that gen-
der oppression can threaten women’s abilities to lead self-determining, self-governing
lives—to different degrees and in different ways. Gender oppression includes overt
forms of domination, such as gender-based violence, sexual harassment and sexual
exploitation, as well as gender-based discrimination and inequalities of opportunity.
It also includes more subtle manifestations such as implicit bias, for example in hiring
practices; silencing, or the discrediting of women’s testimony and epistemic authority
(see e.g., Roessler 2015); and gender-based stereotyping schemas, the internalization
of which can undermine women’s sense of themselves as competent and autonomous
agents (see e.g., Benson 2015). Relational autonomy theorists charge that the main-
stream literature fails to recognize or account for the autonomy-undermining effects of
oppression. One of the central aims of relational theories is to address this deficit in the
literature, and to explain how the internalization of gender and other kinds of social
oppression, such as racial oppression, can threaten the autonomy of persons who are
subject to such oppression.
Some feminist theorists have criticized autonomy on grounds that it reinforces hyper-
individualism and is inimical to social relationships of care and interdependence (e.g.,
Code 1991). This criticism is misplaced insofar as it conflates autonomy with a carica-
ture of self-sufficient independence (Friedman 1997). Nevertheless, relational autonomy
 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

theorists are sensitive to the feminist critique of hyperindividualism. A further aim of

relational theories is therefore to counter the overly individualistic assumptions about
agency and identity that are prevalent in much of the mainstream literature. Relational
theories remain committed to a form of normative individualism, that is, to the view
that the rights, welfare, dignity, freedom, and autonomy of individuals matter and impose
normative constraints on the claims of social groups or collectives. However, these theo-
ries are relational in at least two senses. First, they are committed to a socio-relational
ontology of persons; that is, to the view that we develop our individual identities only
in and through interpersonal, familial and social relationships, and through processes
of enculturation into specific linguistic, cultural, political and historical communities.
Second, they hold that autonomous agency involves a complex suite of competences,
which can only be developed and exercised with extensive interpersonal, social, and
institutional scaffolding.
Relational autonomy theorists thus seek to explicate both the social constitution
of autonomy and the ways in which the internalization of oppressive social relation-
ships can impair its development and exercise. Relational autonomy is, however, an
“umbrella term” (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000), and over the last decade there has
been substantial debate about the adequacy of rival relational theories to explain how
oppressive socialization can threaten personal autonomy. This debate centers on the
question of whether a procedural account of autonomy is sufficient to explain the
autonomy-impairing effects of oppression or whether autonomy needs to be under-
stood more substantively, and, if so, what kind of substantive theory is most plausible.
The next section provides an overview of the main positions in this debate. In the
course of outlining these positions, it will also briefly address two further questions: Is
autonomy social in a causal or constitutive sense? and should autonomy be understood
globally, as a characteristic of a person’s life overall, or locally, as a characteristic of
particular actions or decisions? The final section sketches out a positive proposal for
moving the debate beyond the current impasse in the literature concerning proce-
dural versus substantive theories, suggesting that autonomy should be understood as a
multidimensional concept involving three distinct but causally interdependent axes:
self-determination, self-governance, and self-authorization.

Relational Autonomy and Social Oppression

One challenge facing relational autonomy theorists is to explicate the sense in which
individual autonomy is social and to explain how the internalization of oppression can
undermine autonomy. Responses to this challenge fall into two broad categories: proce-
dural and substantive theories.

Procedural Theories
Procedural theories explain the necessary and sufficient conditions for a particular
preference, motive, commitment, or value to count as autonomous by appealing
to a critical reflection procedure of some kind. The focus of these theories is pre-
dominantly on local, rather than global, autonomy. Further, according to procedural
theories, the specific content of a person’s preferences, commitments or values is
immaterial; what matters for autonomy is whether these pass the test of the relevant
critical reflection procedure.

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John Christman (2009) distinguishes two broad kinds of procedural conditions for
autonomy: authenticity and competence. Authenticity conditions explicate what it
means for a person’s preferences, motives, commitments or values to count as one’s
own. Competence conditions explicate the range of cognitive, volitional, emotional
and other competences a person must possess in order to be self-governing.

Authenticity
There is substantial debate in the literature concerning the meaning of authenticity and
the necessary and sufficient conditions for authentic critical reflection. The influential
hierarchical theories of Gerald Dworkin (1988) and Harry Frankfurt (1988) characterize
critical reflection as the capacity for second-order reflection on one’s first-order prefer-
ences, commitments or values. These elements of a person’s motivational structure count
as authentically her own if she identifies with them or endorses them in light of such reflec-
tion. However, if upon reflection she feels alienated from these elements of her motivational
structure, she is not autonomous with respect to them. Hierarchical reflective endorsement
procedures therefore explain autonomy in terms of structural features of the agent’s will at
the time of reflection and action, specifically internal psychic coherence between second-
order reflection and first-order elements of the agent’s motivational structure.
Relational autonomy theorists argue, however, that, this analysis is not sufficient
to distinguish autonomous from non-autonomous reflection. First, it overlooks the
historical processes of identity formation, the way a person acquired her preferences,
commitments, values and so on (Christman 1991; 2009). Attention to these historical
processes is crucial, however, for understanding how the psychologies of persons who
are subject to oppression may have been shaped by the internalization of autonomy-
impairing oppressive norms and stereotypes. Second-order reflection is insufficient
to address this problem, because a thoroughly socialized agent is likely to endorse
oppressive preferences and norms as her own when engaging in such reflection.
This problem is particularly salient to the phenomenon of adaptive preference
formation—the phenomenon whereby persons who are subject to social domination,
oppression or deprivation adapt their preferences (or goals) to their circumstances,
eliminating or failing to form preferences (or goals) that cannot be satisfied, and
even failing to conceive how their preferences might differ in different circumstances
(for further discussion of adaptive preferences and autonomy see e.g., Stoljar (2014),
Cudd (2015), Mackenzie (2015); for a critique of the view that adaptive preferences
should be defined in terms of autonomy impairment see Khader (2011). The upshot
of the argument is that hierarchical reflective endorsement procedures are insuffi-
cient to distinguish authentic from inauthentic critical reflection.
Second, the requirement of internal coherence between second-order reflection
and first-order elements of the agent’s motivational structure seems to rule out any
kind of ambivalence or internal psychic conflict or fragmentation as inconsistent
with self-governance. Frankfurt, for example, regards ambivalence as a “disease of the
will” (1999: 100). But this view seems to set the bar for self-integration unrealistically
high and to equate autonomous agency with psychological rigidity. Ambivalence
and some degree of inner psychic conflict or fragmentation are not only inescapable
aspects of individual identity formation but also may be necessary for psychological
health (Velleman 2002; Christman 2009), even if too much ambivalence and psychic
fragmentation can impair autonomy.

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Procedural relational autonomy theorists have responded to these two problems

in different ways. Marilyn Friedman recognizes that the internalization of oppres-
sion is not typically global but rather partial, and may give rise to internal conflict,
struggle, and resistance to some degree. One of her examples is of a conflicted 1950s
housewife who 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 (Friedman 1986). At the second-order level, the housewife 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 proposes that in situations such as these, second-order reflection may simply
reinforce oppressive social conditioning, whereas the woman’s apparently wayward
first-order desires and emotions may be more expressive of her authentic wants and
values. Friedman thus proposes an integration reflective endorsement test, such that
reflective endorsement is autonomous when lower order preferences and higher-order
normative commitments are integrated in a person’s motivational structure as a result
of two-way processes of bottom up and top down reflection.
John Christman’s response to these two problems is to propose a historical, coun-
terfactual, non-alienation test for authentic critical reflection (see e.g., Christman
1991, 2009). Christman recognizes that a person may be autonomous with respect
to elements of her motivational set even if she has not consciously and critically
reflected on whether she endorses them. He also recognizes that as agents we are often
not motivationally transparent to ourselves. His counterfactual test therefore speci-
fies 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 forma-
tion, she would not repudiate or feel alienated from that element. Christman defines
authenticity as “non-alienation upon (historically sensitive, adequate) self-reflection,
given one’s diachronic practical identity and one’s position in the world” or as reflec-
tive self-acceptance (2009: 155). The non-alienation test is weaker than endorsement
tests in acknowledging that there are elements of our motivational set that we may
not endorse but nevertheless accept as our own.
Like hierarchical procedural theories, both Friedman’s integration test and
Christman’s non-alienation test understand authentic critical reflection and autonomy
as requiring some degree of coherence within the agent’s psyche. Unlike standard hier-
archical views, however, their versions of procedural theory are premised on a thick,
socio-historical conception of the person, and Christman’s historical analysis of authen-
ticity is dynamic, rather than static and structural. Both theories are relational in a
causal sense, insofar as they regard interpersonal relationships and background social
conditions as crucial causal conditions for the development and exercise of autonomy.
Substantive theorists, in contrast, hold that autonomy is social not just causally but
also constitutively. They also argue that despite being relational, procedural theories
such as those of Christman and Friedman are insufficient to account for the autonomy-
impairing effects of internalized oppression.

Competence
Competence conditions specify the range of competences or skills a person must
possess, to some degree at least, in order to be self-governing. Relational autonomy
theorists, such as Diana Meyers (1989), argue that conceptions of competence in the

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mainstream literature over-emphasize the importance for autonomy of cognitive skills

and of volitional skills, such as self-control, while neglecting a broad array of emotional,
imaginative and reflective competences. Meyers proposes that autonomy competence
requires a complex repertoire or suite of reflective skills, which may be developed and
exercised to varying degrees and in different domains. These include emotional skills,
such as the capacity to interpret and regulate one’s own emotions; imaginative skills,
required for understanding the implications of one’s decisions and envisaging alterna-
tive possible courses of action; and capacities to reflect critically on social norms and
values. According to Meyers, a person is autonomous, and her choices are authenti-
cally her own, to the degree that she has developed these skills and can exercise them
in understanding herself (self-discovery), defining her values and commitments (self-
definition), and directing her life (self-direction).
Meyers’ response to the problem of how to distinguish authentic from non-authentic
forms of critical reflection appeals to this notion of autonomy competence. Reflection
is authentic, in her view, if a person possesses and can exercise the full repertoire of cog-
nitive, volitional, emotional, and imaginative competences required to direct her life
and make choices that express her authentic self-conception. Oppressive socialization
can impair autonomy by truncating the development or stunting the exercise of these
skills. For example, 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 self-definition and self-direction.
Meyers’ account of autonomy competence is procedural or content-neutral,
because she thinks judgments about autonomy do not turn on the specific content
of the person’s preferences, values and commitments, but rather on whether or not
she exercises the necessary reflective skills to express her authentic self-conception.
Meyers’ theory is also causally relational insofar as it emphasizes the crucial role of
social relationships and institutions in scaffolding the development and exercise of
autonomy competences. An important feature of Meyers’ account is that she regards
autonomy as a matter of degree and domain rather than an all or nothing matter.
Meyers distinguishes several different levels at which a person can exercise autonomy:
episodic, narrowly programmatic, and programmatic. Episodic autonomy refers to
the capacity to exercise autonomy with respect to a particular action or decision.
Narrowly programmatic autonomy refers to the capacity to exercise autonomy with
respect to a series of actions and decisions. Programmatic autonomy refers to the
capacity to exercise autonomy with respect to a range of long-term life plans and
goals. For example, while Friedman’s 1950s housewife might exercise episodic and
narrowly programmatic autonomy with respect to matters of household organization
and mothering responsibilities, she does not exercise programmatic autonomy with
respect to her life overall since she places her own needs secondary to those of her
husband and children and is unlikely to have developed the skills and competences
needed to have a successful career, or organize her financial affairs.

Substantive Theories
Procedural relational theorists are committed to developing theories of autonomy that
are maximally socially and politically inclusive and that respect agents’ first-person per-
spectives on their values and commitments, whatever their content (Friedman 2003). For
these theorists, this is a strong reason to favor content-neutrality. Substantive theorists

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charge, however, that procedural theories such as Friedman’s, are either overly inclusive
and set the bar for autonomy too low, thus failing to explain how oppressive socialization
impairs autonomy, or implicitly appeal to more substantive constraints. It is sometimes
claimed that Meyers’ and Christman’s theories, for example, are more substantive than
they acknowledge (see e.g., Benson 2005b; Mackenzie 2008).
In the literature, a distinction is often drawn between strong and weak substantive
theories (see e.g., Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000; Benson 2005a; Stoljar 2013). Strong
substantive theories are typically characterized as being committed to the view that, to
count as autonomous, a person’s preferences, values or commitments must meet specific
normative, rational, or other constraints. While this characterization is true of some
strong substantive theories, it is misleading when applied to Marina Oshana’s (2006;
2015) socio-relational theory of autonomy.
Oshana is primarily concerned with autonomy as a status concept and with global,
rather than local autonomy. Her theory is substantive in the sense that she thinks a
person’s socio-relational status is the crucial determinant of her autonomy. Oshana
argues that to be autonomous is to have both de jure and de facto authority and power
to exercise effective practical control over important aspects of one’s life. For this
reason, certain structural, socio-relational conditions must be in place for an agent
to be genuinely autonomous. Agents who stand in relations of subordination, sub-
servience, deference, or economic or psychological dependence, such as Friedman’s
housewife for example, cannot be autonomous because they do not enjoy effective
practical control over significant domains of their life. This is the case even if the
agents in question endorse (or are not alienated from) their subordinate, subservient
or dependent position, and even if they seem to satisfy the authenticity and com-
petence requirements for self-governance. This is why Oshana thinks that neither
Friedman’s nor Christman’s procedural theories can explain the autonomy-impairing
effects of oppression. Oshana uses an array of examples—voluntary slaves, prisoners,
women subject to extreme forms of gender oppression, members of restrictive reli-
gious orders—to support the guiding intuition behind her account; namely, that a
person cannot lead an autonomous life if her options are severely restricted and she
is effectively under the control of others, whether financially, legally, or psychologi-
cally. Oshana understands autonomy as constitutively social, because autonomy, in
her view, is a function of a person’s socio-relational status.
Critics of Oshana’s view argue that it expects the concept of autonomy to do too
much work in explaining the ills of social and political domination and injustice
(Benson 2014); that it conflates autonomy with substantive independence; that it is
overly prescriptive in dictating to people the kind of lives they should lead; and 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). Such critics
point to people like Martin Luther King as counter-examples to Oshana’s view. In
response, Oshana acknowledges that King, and others like him who struggled against
racial oppression and injustice, managed to exercise some degree of autonomy despite
the oppression and domination to which they were subject. However, rather than
demonstrating the implausibility of the socio-relational account, she suggests that
such heroism “should rather serve as an example of an exception to the socio-relational
account” (Oshana 2015: 11). In my view, the guiding intuition behind Oshana’s anal-
ysis, that social relationships involving domination and subordination compromise

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autonomy, is correct. However, Oshana and her critics may be talking past each other
because their debate has focused on the conditions for self-governance. Oshana’s con-
cern, however, is to explain how social and political domination and oppression can
impair not only self-governance, but also self-determination and self-authorization.
The distinction between these different dimensions of autonomy will be discussed in
the following section.
Other strong substantive theorists, such as Paul Benson in his earlier work (1991)
and Natalie Stoljar (2000), object to procedural theories on different grounds. Their
strong substantive theories hold that only preferences, values or commitments that
meet specific normative constraints count as autonomous. Benson proposes a normative
competence constraint such that, to be autonomous a person must be able to critically
discern the difference between true and false norms and her choices and actions must
be guided by true norms. He uses the example of a college student who, despite being
intelligent and capable, lacks a sense of self-worth because she has internalized the false
norm that a woman’s worth is bound up with conventional ideals of feminine beauty.
Stoljar (2000) takes up Benson’s notion of normative competence in discussing a study
of women who repeatedly fail to take contraceptive precautions and end up seeking
multiple abortions. Stoljar appeals to what she terms the “feminist intuition” in arguing
that these women fail to act autonomously with respect to 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. Benson
and Stoljar thus characterize the agents in their examples as non-autonomous insofar as
their choices and actions are guided by false social norms, which they have internalized
without critically reflecting on them.
It is important to note that in characterizing the agents in their examples as non-
autonomous, neither Benson nor Stoljar are making global claims about these agents’
autonomy. Their claim is rather that these agents’ autonomy is impaired with respect to
the specific norms in question and the choices and actions that flow from them. Despite
this caveat, the normative competence view has been criticized for failing to recog-
nize the range of reasons that people might have for complying with oppressive norms
(Narayan 2002; Khader 2011; Sperry 2013), thereby encouraging condescending atti-
tudes towards persons who are subject to oppression, impugning their agency, and open-
ing the door to objectionably paternalistic and coercive forms of intervention in their
lives. Khader, for example, argues that it might be instrumentally rational for a woman
to comply with oppressive norms in one domain of life, for example, with respect to
cultural norms of feminine beauty or sexuality, in order to achieve her goals in another
domain. Although this argument conflates autonomy with instrumental rationality
(Stoljar 2014; Cudd 2015; Mackenzie 2015), critics such as Khader are correct to point
to the importance of recognizing the diversity of autonomous responses to oppression.
Benson (2014) has also recently rejected the normative competence account on simi-
lar grounds. He further claims that it conflates autonomy (or self-rule) with “orthonomy”
(or right rule, that is the ability to discern the true and the good). Benson nevertheless
remains committed to the view that competence and authentic critical reflection are
insufficient to secure autonomy. The weak substantive view he has proposed in recent
work seeks to reconcile procedural theorists’ concern with respecting agents’ first-person
perspectives, or what he refers to as agential “voice,” with substantive theorists’ focus on
agential authority (Benson 2005a; 2014). According to this view, autonomous agency is

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characterized by a sense of ownership of one’s choices and actions. It involves regarding

oneself as positioned, and as having the appropriate authority, to speak for oneself and to
answer others’ critical perspectives. One of the effects of internalized oppression on this
account is that it impairs autonomy by impairing an agent’s sense of herself as having
a legitimate voice, and as competent and authorized to speak or answer for her values
and commitments. Andrea Westlund (2009) proposes a similar view of autonomy as
the capacity for interpersonal accountability and answerability. Being accountable does
not require being accountable to certain specific others. Nor does it mean being held to
account for each and every belief, value, commitment or action. What it requires is what
Westlund refers to as a disposition for “dialogical answerability” or “the disposition to
hold oneself answerable to external critical perspectives” (2009: 28).
Other weak substantive theorists propose a related view, according to which a con-
dition for autonomous agency is that a person holds certain self-regarding attitudes, in
particular attitudes of appropriate self-respect, self-trust, and self-esteem or self-worth.
To have appropriate self-respect is to regard oneself as the moral equal of others and
hence entitled to call them into account. To have appropriate self-trust is to have a
sense of basic self-confidence in one’s judgment. To have appropriate self-esteem or
self-worth is to regard one’s life and one’s commitments as meaningful and worthwhile
(see especially Anderson and Honneth 2005; see also Benson 1994; 2000; 2005a;
Govier 2003; Mackenzie 2008). According to this view, internalized oppression can
impair autonomy by undermining these self-regarding attitudes.
Weak substantive views are both causally and constitutively relational. They are
causally relational because psychologically our self-regarding attitudes are typically
dependent on the character of our social relationships. It is difficult to develop a sense
of self-respect, for example, if by virtue of one’s social group membership one is system-
atically treated as an inferior. Likewise, it is difficult to develop a sense of trust in one’s
judgment if by virtue of one’s social group membership one is susceptible to stereotype
threat (the fear that one will conform to negative stereotypes about the social group
to which one belongs, for example, that women are irrational and overly emotional).
Weak substantive views are constitutively relational because self-regarding attitudes of
self-respect, self-trust and self-esteem, and the sense of oneself as authorized to answer
for one’s conduct, require participating in social relationships in which one is recognized
by others as a respect-worthy, self-authorizing agent. In other words, these attitudes are
constituted within normative structures and practices of social recognition. In oppressive
social contexts, for example of institutionalized racism or sexism, the prevailing norma-
tive structures and practices do not afford to members of oppressed social groups the
kind of recognition required to regard oneself as positioned to speak for oneself or to
answer to others for one’s conduct.
Jennifer Warriner (2015) argues, however, that weak substantive theories such as
Benson’s are as vulnerable as procedural theories to the problem of oppressive sociali-
zation. She 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 reli-
gious commitments. 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 authority and are expected to authorize their agency” (Warriner 2015: 37).
However, it seems counter-intuitive to say these women are autonomous, because their

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agential authority can only be exercised within the constraints of a social script of male
dominance and female subordination, the reasons for which they are not permitted to
question or challenge.
The debates between procedural and substantive relational theorists have yielded
important insights into the autonomy-impairing effects of oppression. However, the
trading back and forth of examples and counterexamples designed to challenge the
necessity and sufficiency of rival views has also led to something of an impasse, since
different examples pull our philosophical intuitions in different directions. The multidi-
mensional analysis of autonomy outlined in the following section aims to help in diag-
nosing, and hopefully suggesting a route beyond this impasse. It also helps to respond
to the concerns raised by critics of strong substantive theories. By identifying different
dimensions or axes of autonomy, this analysis can explain how oppression might impair
an agent’s autonomy in one domain but not in others.

Beyond the Procedural/Substantive Debate:

A Multidimensional Theory of Autonomy
Autonomy is a complex concept. As the discussion in the preceding sections has
shown, it refers to both status and capacity, and is conceptually allied to a range
of other concepts, such as freedom, authenticity, responsibility for self, and self-
respect. This conceptual complexity may explain why our philosophical intuitions
are pulled in different directions by examples that highlight different aspects of the
concept. For example, returning to the example of Martin Luther King, if autonomy
is understood as a status concept allied to the concept of freedom, Oshana seems
correct in pointing out that King’s ability to lead a self-determining life was highly
restricted, since as an African American in the Jim Crow era he did not enjoy the
socio-relational status of a free and equal citizen entitled to be treated with respect
by others. However, if autonomy is understood in terms of taking responsibility for
self, or having an authentic voice and a sense of agential authority, and if we focus on
King’s heroic defense of the rights of African Americans to equal treatment and his
persistence in the face of brutal oppression, he seems an exemplar of self-governing,
self-authorizing agency. A multidimensional analysis of autonomy seeks to do jus-
tice to these conflicting intuitions, drawing on the important insights developed by
relational autonomy theorists over the last two decades.
My proposal is that the concept of autonomy refers to three distinct but causally inter-
connected axes: self-determination, self-governance and self-authorization (Mackenzie
2014). Each of these dimensions can and 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. This explains how it is
possible for a person such as King, whose freedom and opportunities have been severely
curtailed, nevertheless to exhibit high degrees of self-governance and have a strong
sense of himself as a self-authorizing agent.

Self-Determination
The self-determination axis is conceptually allied to the notion of freedom. To be self-
determining is to be able to exercise control over important domains of one’s life and
to make and enact decisions of practical import, concerning what matters, who to be,

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and what to do. This requires being free from domination and undue interference by
others as well as having the freedom and opportunities required to exercise this kind
of control. The notion of self-determination thus identifies the kind of external, struc-
tural conditions for personal autonomy to which Oshana draws attention, specifically
freedom and opportunity.
Freedom is necessary for autonomy because, as Oshana insists, people’s abilities to
lead self-determining lives are severely curtailed if they lack political and personal lib-
erty, and if they are subject to social and political domination. Opportunity is important
for autonomy because opportunities translate formal liberties into substantive freedom.
A person who has formal access to political and personal liberty but lacks access to an
adequate array of genuine opportunities will find it difficult to lead a self-determining
life (Raz 1986). Poor education, limited employment opportunities, poverty, and social
marginalization, can all undermine a person’s ability to exercise control over important
domains of her life.
Self-determination is therefore both causally and constitutively social because indi-
vidual freedom and opportunity are both constituted and enabled (or hindered) by
social relationships and by social, political, legal, economic, and educational structures.

Self-Governance
Whereas the self-determination axis identifies external, structural conditions for
autonomy, the self-governance axis identifies internal conditions for autonomy, spe-
cifically authenticity and competence, as explicated by procedural theorists, such
as Christman, Friedman, and Meyers. To be self-governing is to have the skills and
capacities necessary to make and enact decisions that express or cohere with one’s
deeply held values and commitments. However, the distinction between internal and
external conditions is complicated. For if, as relational autonomy theorists claim, per-
sons are socially constituted, then external conditions (social relationships, political,
legal, and economic structures, available opportunities) shape the historical processes
of individual identity formation—both who a person is, or the authentic self of self-
governance, and the development and exercise of the skills and competences required
for governing the self. This is why, in oppressive social contexts, the internalization
of limited freedom and opportunity, and of social relationships structured by rela-
tions of domination and subordination, can manifest in adaptive preference formation
(Stoljar 2014; Cudd 2015), restricted imaginative horizons (Mackenzie 2000) and
constricted psychological freedom (Stoljar 2015).
Self-governance is therefore both causally and constitutively social, because our
individual identities are constituted in and through social relationships, and the com-
petences required for being self-governing agents can only be developed and exercised
with extensive interpersonal, social, and institutional scaffolding.

Self-Authorization
To be self-authorizing is to regard oneself as normatively authorized to take respon-
sibility for one’s life, one’s values and one’s decisions, and as able to account for one-
self to others. Self-authorization is a central concern of Oshana’s socio-relational view,
which holds that autonomous persons have a “characteristic type of social standing”

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(2014: 159). It is also central to the concerns of weak substantive theorists who hold
that to be autonomous an agent must hold certain self-regarding attitudes. Rather than
understanding these attitudes as conditions of self-governance, however, the multidi-
mensional analysis proposed here suggests that they should be understood as a separate
axis of autonomy. This axis signals the importance to autonomy of accountability, or
regarding oneself as a responsible agent who is able to stand in relations of reciprocal
accountability with others; of having appropriate self-regarding attitudes, in particular
of self-respect, self-trust, and self-esteem; and of social recognition, or being regarded by
others as having the social standing of an autonomous agent. The self-authorization
axis provides a further explication of autonomy as a status concept and of the sense in
which autonomy is constitutively relational.
A virtue of my multidimensional analysis is that it can diagnose multiple pathways
via which internalized oppression can damage autonomy. Social relations of domi-
nation, restrictions on political and personal freedom, and limited opportunities are
structural constraints on autonomy that make it difficult to lead a self-determining life.
Internalized oppression shapes the very self of self-governance, as well as the skills and
competences needed to govern that self. Social relations of misrecognition can erode
agents’ self-regarding attitudes and their sense of themselves as self-authorizing agents.

Conclusion
Relational autonomy theory seeks to explain the sense in which autonomy is social and
to analyze the ways that internalized oppression can impair autonomy. In providing an
overview of recent debates within the literature, this chapter has explicated a variety
of views among relational theorists concerning whether autonomy is social in a causal
or constitutive sense, whether procedural or substantive theories provide more plausi-
ble analyses of the autonomy-impairing effects of internalized oppression, and whether
autonomy should be understood as a local characteristic of specific choices and actions,
or more globally, as a characteristic of a person’s life overall. The multidimensional
analysis of autonomy proposed in the final section has sought to do justice to the impor-
tant insights of relational autonomy theorists while suggesting a way of moving beyond
some of the impasses in the current debate.

Related Topics
Feminism and borderlands identities (Chapter 17); personal identity and relational selves
(Chapter 18); feminist ethics of care (Chapter 43); feminist bioethics (Chapter 46).

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 42
FEMINIST METAETHICS
Anita Superson

Introduction
Ethics is the study of moral behavior, specifically, how we ought to act or what kind of
persons we ought to be. Metaethics literally means “about” or “beyond” ethics. It has
been described as the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, seman-
tic, and psychological presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and
practice (Sayre-McCord 2015 [2012]: 1). It presupposes no commitments to particular
normative moral theories but goes beyond them or talks about them and their underly-
ing assumptions. One major topic in metaethics concerns moral ontology. This issue
covers the question of whether there are moral facts, and if there are, what their nature
is. Are moral facts like scientific facts? Does wrongness exist in the world the way the
water in your glass does? Suppose moral facts exist in some sense. Is the truth they yield
relative to societies or even to individuals, or is it absolute, holding for all persons at
all times? A second major topic in metaethics concerns the interconnection between
moral action, reasons, and motivation. How can we rationally justify morally required
action? Which theory of practical reason is best for grounding moral reasons? Does hav-
ing a moral obligation to act necessarily entail having a motive to act? A third major
topic in metaethics is that of moral epistemology: how do we come to know our moral
duties? Is reason sufficient for knowing them, or do emotions play a role? These topics,
which feminist philosophers have only recently begun to explore from a feminist angle,
will be the focus of this chapter.
But there are other issues in traditional metaethics—e.g., the meaning of moral
terms, the nature of moral disagreement, whether moral reasons are binding on us, and
whether morality is just a fiction—that feminists have not yet directly explored. I sus-
pect that this is largely because metaethics in general is done at a highly abstract level,
allegedly completely independent of gender. Perhaps much of the work can be done at
the level of normative ethics, modifying traditional theories in ways that address the
main aim of feminism, which is to end women’s oppression (Dillon 2012; Hampton
2002; Kittay 1999; Tessman 2001), and then the answers to traditional metaethical
questions will fall out in ways informed by feminist aims. Alternatively, feminists
might challenge some of the assumptions made in traditional metaethics (Anderson
2002; Cudd 2002; Driver 2012; Superson 2009). More radically, feminists might ques-
tion whether the entire framework of metaethics is askew by demonstrating that there
is something sexist, or at least antithetical to the aim of ending women’s oppres-
sion, about the methodology or questions asked in metaethics (Noddings 1984: 50;
 Feminist metaethics

Tessman 2011). Such groundbreaking work that would effect a wholesale change in
the nature of the discussion in metaethics has not yet been robustly taken on. It might
entail a shift away from issues such as the nature of moral disagreement or the mean-
ing of moral terms to issues such as questioning the point of morality if actual persons
do not follow it especially in oppressive contexts, or how best to bring about moral
progress. This shift highlights the disconnection between theory and practice in much
of traditional ethics that feminists have complained about, but it is just one direction
feminists might go in a field that is largely untapped. Meanwhile, let us turn to areas
where there has been feminist progress.

Truth in Ethics
Moral realism is the view that moral claims such as “Rape is morally wrong” report facts
and are true if they get the facts right, and that at least some moral claims are actually
true (Sayre-McCord 2015 [2012]: 1). Some philosophers believe that on moral realism,
moral facts have to be independent of humans, that they are somehow “out there” in
the real world like natural properties, or occupy their own world like Platonic facts,
while others believe that moral facts need not be real in these senses. For instance,
Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant believe that human reason gives us moral truths,
so truth is not “out there” in the world awaiting human discovery. Feminists have said
very little about this contentious metaphysical issue.
One worry that Julia Driver raises is that feminism is transformative, that is, that it
creates new “realities” in the context of social change (Driver 2012: 175), which seems
to be at odds with moral realism, especially the view that moral facts exist independ-
ent of humans. In light of this concern, Driver offers a complex version of feminist
moral realism that construes moral facts to be dependent on humans. Driver’s theory
is constructivist. Constructivism is the view that insofar as there is truth in ethics, it is
determined by an idealized or hypothetical process of rational deliberation, choice, or
agreement (Bagnoli 2015 [2011]). Hobbes is a classic example of a constructivist who
believes that in order to arrive at the true moral code, we should presuppose hypotheti-
cally that persons are equal in strength and intent to satisfy their own desires, have as
their strongest desire a desire for self-preservation, are self-interested in the sense that
they want to maximize the satisfaction of their own desires whatever these are, have
a right or privilege to everything including use of another’s body, and that goods are
scarce. Hobbes argues that under these conditions, which he called a hypothetical State
of Nature, rational beings would agree to give up some of their liberties in order to avoid
a state of all-out war and to achieve the benefits of cooperation. When persons give
up these liberties, they incur corresponding obligations. For example, if a person had a
desire to harm others, she would be rational to give up the pursuit of satisfaction of this
desire and incur an obligation not to harm others—provided that others do so as well,
Hobbes believes, since otherwise she would jeopardize her self-preservation, which
would never be rational to do. Hobbes believes that any rational person would agree
to give up the same rights or liberties. The list of corresponding obligations constitutes
the true moral code. Hobbes’s account is constructivist since morality is constructed by
human reason, not “out there” waiting to be discovered.
Driver’s feminist constructivism also purports to avoid a feminist worry about
moral relativism—the view that truth in ethics is relative to cultures—which is

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that culturally relative truth might entrench oppressive norms. Her theory builds on
Hume’s sentimentalism, the view that morality is grounded in emotion. It is in line
with the ethic of care, a moral theory proposed by a number of feminists in the 1980s
in response to Carol Gilligan’s book on moral psychology that argued that females’
responses to moral dilemmas were generally different from those of males in that they
focused on caring, maintaining relationships, and fulfilling needs, while the “justice”
perspective largely followed by male subjects in her experiments focused on rule-
following (Gilligan 1982). Care ethicists argued that moral theories need to import
emotions, particularly care, more than they do. Hume, however, did import emotion
in his version of sentimentalism, arguing that our feeling of approval or disapproval
of a number of instances of acts of a certain kind, such as honest acts, determines
whether the act is a virtue or a vice. Hume’s theory has won the favor of some femi-
nists because of its emphasis on virtues, particularly those concerning our relations
with others. These involve the heart’s response to particular persons rather than uni-
versal principles of justice (Baier 1987: 41). His theory is also constructivist in that
an impartial observer, one removed from the particular act in question, determines
the moral status of an act. An act is deemed a virtue when an impartial observer has a
feeling of approval of acts of this kind. The feeling of approval stems from this kind of
act being pleasant or useful. An act is deemed a vice when acts of this kind generate
a feeling of disapproval. Hume’s theory does not generate such idiosyncratic results as
first meets the eye, not only because it invokes an impartial observer, but also because
the feeling of approval is generated by a universal sentiment of benevolence that
causes us all to make the same pronouncements about an act’s moral status. These
assumptions, though controversial, attempt to remove the relativism in his theory
that concerns some feminists.
Yet many feminists worry that if rape is morally wrong, it is morally wrong regard-
less of how anyone feels about it. Hume’s theory seems to make wrongness contingent
on emotional responses, albeit those of an impartial observer under the right condi-
tions. But Driver’s Humean feminist constructivist theory has it that moral norms are
both mind-dependent, because the property of being a virtue rests on the feeling of
approval in an observer, and mind-independent in the sense that they are independent
of any individual and cultural beliefs. This addresses the feminist worry that were moral
norms mind-dependent in virtue of an observer’s approval, it could not be the case
that rape is universally wrong. The notion of truth that emerges from Driver’s feminist
constructivism is that there is no possible world exactly descriptively like our own but
different normatively (Driver 2012: 189). This is not to endorse relativism; rather, the
view is that wherever certain acts turn out to be morally wrong, in any society with
the same conditions they will be wrong. Furthermore, Driver’s theory adds to Hume’s
by requiring that caring agents, in order to be caring agents, endorse certain features of
acts. Driver believes that this makes the view of moral truth almost universal. Almost,
because non-caring agents will likely not endorse these features, but Driver dismisses
these agents as not moral agents. Hers is a complex view, no doubt, but it demonstrates
how feminists can be moral realists, incorporate care in their moral theory, and avoid
a problematic relativism.
Most of the feminist debate about truth in ethics has not been about the nature
of moral facts, but about whether feminists should endorse moral absolutism or moral
relativism. While moral relativists believe that truth in ethics is relative to cultures or

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even individuals, moral absolutists believe that there is one true moral code. For the
moral absolutist, if rape is wrong, it is wrong full stop, while for the relativist, rape can
be morally wrong in one society but morally permissible in another. Why would femi-
nists endorse moral relativism? If rape, or more generally, oppression is morally wrong,
it would seem that it is wrong universally, and that there is some fact about it that
explains its wrongness. Indeed, for any feminist claims about oppression to have any
bite, it would seem that moral absolutism must be true.
One of the main reasons why some feminists have hesitations about moral absolut-
ism is the worry about judging other cultures and tolerance. Since women have been
judged throughout history according to patriarchal standards (e.g., “A good woman
is not aggressive”; “A good woman serves her family first”; “A childless woman is
selfish”), some feminists believe that we should refrain from judging women any fur-
ther. A common belief is that if we are moral relativists, the only judgments we can
legitimately make are ones about persons in our own culture who fail to live up to the
culture’s moral code. Additionally, Western feminists have been accused of unfairly
judging women in other cultures while not pointing the finger at women in their
own culture for participating in patriarchal practices. Uma Narayan accuses Western
feminists of unfairly judging Sufi Pirzada women in Old Delhi who veil for having a
compromised agency because they see these women as either the “dupes of patriarchy,”
who have only desires deformed by patriarchy, or the “prisoners of patriarchy,” who
have extreme restrictions on their liberty (Narayan 2002). Narayan believes that
the situation is much more complex. She portrays these women as “bargainers with
patriarchy” who have both external constraints on their liberty as well as internal
constraints in the form of deformed desires, but who also have non-deformed desires
and can make autonomous choices about veiling. They both want to veil because of
the message it sends about their sexuality, and do not want to veil because veiling is
uncomfortable and restrictive, but not veiling flies in the face of deeply held religious
convictions. Narayan compares them to Western women who do not go out in public
without makeup or with their hairy legs uncovered and argues that Western women
are wrong to judge veiling women as constrained while viewing Western women as
having choices and full agency (Narayan 2002: 421). Narayan herself does not explic-
itly endorse moral relativism, but her concerns about unfairly judging women from
other cultures make moral relativism appealing to some feminists.
Having said all of this, however, it is false that moral relativism necessarily endorses
tolerance, since it is an open question whether any particular moral code endorses
tolerance. Thus this is not a good reason for feminists to favor relativism over abso-
lutism. Additionally, Margaret Urban Walker argues that it is possible to criticize
prevailing moral standards while recognizing that morality is culturally and socially
situated (Walker 2008). Walker believes that we justify and critique morality from the
standpoint of our own society’s moral perspective, rather than from the standpoint
of an objective, universal standard, in a way that is sensitive to the standpoint of the
non-privileged in our society. We ask how we fare under our morality, what we get
from it, and what we pay for it, moving back and forth and making changes as needed
(Walker 2008: 247–249).
Another reason feminists might shy away from moral absolutism is their belief that
it can lead to moral imperialism, having moral standards, particularly ones grounded
in patriarchy, dictated for all. To avoid moral imperialism, some feminists endorse

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multiculturalism, the view that minority cultures should be protected by special group
rights or privileges. But other feminists such as Susan Moller Okin, urge that feminists
should be skeptical about multiculturalism because it is often at odds with the basic
tenets of feminism—that women should not be disadvantaged by their sex, that they
have human dignity equal to that of men, and that they should have the same oppor-
tunity as men to live fulfilling and freely chosen lives (Okin 2004: 192). Okin cites
the French government’s tolerance of men bringing multiple wives into the country
in the 1970s despite the fact that these arrangements were detrimental to the women
involved because they lived in overcrowded apartments and had immense hostility and
resentment and were even violent against the other wives and each other’s children
(Okin 2004: 192). Lurking behind the tolerance of this practice is the belief that moral
truth is relative to cultures: it is true that polygamy is morally permissible for these men,
while it is true that it is morally wrong for others. Okin endorses an objective, universal
standard of value consistent with the feminist aims listed above, using it to critique such
practices. She rejects multiculturalism because it is at odds with a universal standard
of value that protects the dignity, rights, and opportunities of women as well as men,
and in doing so she rejects the moral relativism that lurks behind it. Similarly, Martha
Nussbaum criticizes female genital mutilation on the grounds that it is objectively bad
for women: it causes repeated infections, painful intercourse, obstructed labor and
delivery, involves force against usually very young girls who have no chance to refuse
it, is irreversible, and is practiced on females who are illiterate or poor or intimidated
and so have compromised autonomy (Nussbaum 1999). These and other feminists who
identify certain objective values that should apply universally are moral absolutists.
But this raises a third concern that feminists have about moral absolutism, namely,
how do we defend universal values in a non-patriarchal way? How do we show, non-
paternalistically, that some practices are objectively bad for women? Nussbaum is one
feminist who offers a detailed account, what she calls the “capabilities theory,” an abso-
lutist moral view according to which we should pursue the fulfilment of central human
capabilities that are common to all, thereby treating each person as an end rather than
as a tool of the ends of others (Nussbaum 2000: 5). Nussbaum dismisses the worries
about imperialism and paternalism about women’s good as being unfounded. While she
acknowledges that many existing value systems are paternalistic toward women,
she believes that we should endorse a universalistic one that respects the universal
value of having the opportunity to think and choose for oneself (Nussbaum 2000: 51).
The capabilities that Nussbaum believes all humans have that, when fulfilled, lead to
a good life include: being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length, to have
good health, to have one’s bodily boundaries treated as sovereign, to use one’s senses,
imagination, thought, and reason especially in ways that produce self-expression, to
form a conception of the good and plan one’s life critically, and to engage in social inter-
action and to play (Nussbaum 2000: 78–80). Feminists could use the objective value of
having a good life, and the capabilities that go into it, as a standard by which to measure
and judge the practices in which women engage in any society. Using our example, the
practice of rape would be condemned universally because it violates a person’s bodily
boundaries and disrespects her own choice about having sex. Whether they endorse the
capabilities theory, most feminists are moral absolutists because they believe there are
objectively wrong acts and practices. This does not mean that feminists have not found
Nussbaum’s approach unproblematic. Alison Jaggar critiques the methodology—but

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not the notion of universal value—used to obtain the list of capabilities (Jaggar 2006).
She argues that it is a combination of a substantive-good approach that appeals to an
independent standard of value and an informed-desire approach that relies on reflec-
tive equilibrium to eliminate preferences corrupted by patriarchy and misinforma-
tion. At base, however, Jaggar says that the method is a kind of intuitionism because
we test out the list against our intuitions (Jaggar 2006: 307–308). Jaggar’s objections
include the following: there is no guarantee that our desires are free from corruption
or error; the procedure may be exclusionary because it fails to mandate that every-
one participate; and the procedure is non-egalitarian because some unidentified “we”
has the authority to determine whether people’s desires are “informed,” “corrupt,” or
“mistaken” (Jaggar 2006: 307–308, 318). Thus, the approach might not avoid paternal-
ism and imperialism after all.
Most feminists also believe that we have made feminist progress, politically, socially,
and economically, though we still have a way to go. Were moral relativism true, there
could be no feminist moral progress, since progress implies a standard by which we
measure improvement. Some feminists suggest that feminists make advances in moral
knowledge faster than the general public because they engage in sophisticated analysis
of oppression and come up with new terminology (e.g., “marginalize”) and categories
that others do not have, at least not until this knowledge gets disseminated into the
general public (Calhoun 1989). Once it does, there is room for blaming and holding
responsible those who fall short, judging them according to the newly acquired knowl-
edge about a universally true moral code.

Moral Skepticism
Suppose that moral realism and moral absolutism are true. Do we have reason to follow
the true moral code? The skeptic about acting morally—the practical skeptic—denies
that we do. The challenge for the moral philosopher is to show that every morally
required action is rationally required.
On the traditional view, the practical skeptic adopts a theory of practical reason
according to which rational action is action that maximizes the agent’s expected utility,
or, the satisfaction of the agent’s interests, desires, or preferences. This is the expected
theory of utility. In order to defeat the skeptic, the moral philosopher must show that
practical reason dictates acting in morally required ways, even when doing so is against
the agent’s self-interest, defined as maximal desire or preference satisfaction.
Feminists have raised a number of challenges to the project of defeating the practi-
cal skeptic. One objection is whether the expected theory of utility, or rational choice
theory, is compatible with feminism, since if it is not, it is a poor starting point for
attempting to defeat skepticism. Rational choice theory is put forth as a theory that
explains and predicts behavior, which seems to be a purely empirical matter. But
Elizabeth Anderson argues that it has normative import, and for this reason feminist
values are relevant in determining rational action (Anderson 2002). Anderson recog-
nizes different dimensions of rational choice theory. One is its formal version according
to which people tend to maximize their utility. Anderson argues that this dimension
is not nuanced enough to relate to feminist concerns for at least the reason that it is
oblivious to how the formation of people’s preferences is socially influenced. Anderson
favors, but still finds problematic, the rhetorical version of the theory, which is supposed

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to explain how people actually behave. According to this version, the rational agent,
who is deemed to be male, is described as follows: he is self-transparent in that he knows
what he wants and has no unconscious drives that interfere with his conscious desires; is
opportunistic in that he takes every opportunity to advance his goals; is resourceful and
enterprising; is self-reliant and expects others to be so too; is coolly calculating and not
impeded by irrational thinking; and is autonomous and self-confident, in that he knows
his own preferences and orders them as he sees fit, and sees himself as their source and
feels entitled to be such (Anderson 2002: 375–378).
Some feminists take issue with this view of rational agency because it is at odds with
the caring and emotional engagement that are common in intimate interactions associ-
ated with women, such as mothering. However, other feminists welcome the same view
because it counteracts stereotypically feminine vices of self-effacement, passivity, servil-
ity, and niceness (Anderson 2002: 378). Anderson suggests that this view of rational
agency is a good model for all, so we could use it as a standard by which to measure how
women fall short and to try to overcome the obstacles in their way. Moreover, this view
of rational agency can account for the fact that women do not always act on their own
preferences but are sometimes under the sway of oppressive social norms. But it wrongly
assumes that we develop our autonomy in a vacuum without the support of others,
particularly mothers who enable their children in this way (Anderson 2002: 392–393).
Some feminists see rational choice theory as a useful tool for feminism because it
requires self-interested or “non-tuistic” action, which is action that is not motivated
by the preferences of others. Self-interested action is distinguished from selfish action,
which is to prefer one’s own well-being to that of others. Since women have tended
to be caregivers, even to the point of losing their selves or not having or asserting
their own interests, rational choice theory can show that it is not rational for them to
give care unless doing so is reciprocated (Cudd 2002: 412–413). Alternatively, sup-
pose we supplement the Hobbesian model of the State of Nature discussed earlier with
Kant’s notion that every rational agent has intrinsic value. This would make it the case
that all the bargainers in an interaction could assert their interests equally rather than
[having] counting only the interests of the strong [count]. Rational action would not
require servility on behalf of the weak, who have less to offer (Hampton 2002).
Rational choice theory can also be used for feminist ends by revealing that social
structures need to be changed in order to promote feminist ends such as equality.
Consider Ann Cudd’s analysis of the gendered wage gap (Cudd 1988: 36–40). Suppose
Larry and Lisa believe that it is best for their family if one stays home with their chil-
dren while the other enters the paid labor force, and neither subscribes to gendered
social norms. They are rational in that they act self-interestedly by maximizing the
amount of money their family obtains so that they can provide for their children
as best they can. Since women make much less than men for equal work, they rea-
son that it would be best for the family were Lisa to raise the children while Larry
becomes the wage earner. One problem, however, is that if enough women make
Lisa’s choice, this reinforces the stereotype that women are unreliable wage workers
who put domestic work ahead of wage work, which was the cause of the gendered
wage gap in the first place. A vicious cycle is set up where women make voluntary,
rational choices that contribute to their own oppression if enough others do so as
well. Rational choice theory reveals how this happens, and shows how women have
bad or unfair options that need to be rectified.

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So far, we have questioned the skeptic’s starting point of rational choice theory and
its implications for feminism. Other feminists question specifically how the skeptic’s
position bears on demonstrating the rationality of morally required action. One issue
is whether the traditional account of the skeptic is too narrow because a defeat of
the skeptic would demonstrate that acting morally was rationally required only when
moral action conflicts with self-interested action. The traditional picture of the skeptic
is, among other things, supposed to leave open no further skeptical challenge by rep-
resenting the worst-case scenario in opposition to morally required action. Defeating
skepticism is a huge challenge because the skeptic accepts only self-interested reasons,
and it might be the case that we have set up too big of a challenge, much like Descartes’s
attempt to defeat the epistemological skeptic by doubting all of his beliefs. I argue that,
nevertheless, we need to broaden the skeptic’s position so that it is more politically
sensitive than the traditional one (Superson 2009). A complete defeat of skepticism
would demonstrate that actions that discount, ignore, or even set back the status of
women as full and equal persons would be irrational. Thus feminists should challenge
the view that self-interested action provides the biggest challenge to morality because
it is most in opposition to moral action. Other immoral actions that take sexist forms,
such as doing evil for its own sake, displaying moral indifference, moral negligence,
conscientious wickedness, and weakness of will, and acts that are performed as part of
harmful social practices that may not directly be in the agent’s self-interest but only
indirectly benefit the group of which he is a member, should also be represented in
the skeptic’s challenge to morality. I argue for changing the skeptic’s position to one
according to which the skeptic endorses reasons relating to privilege rather than self-
interest so as to capture many immoral acts other than self-interested ones, particularly
ones that take sexist forms.
I also endorse the Kantian view that each person has intrinsic value, which gives
each equal standing to make claims on anyone else or to put forward reasons relating
to her ends. These reasons are sufficient for making her a being we ought to respect.
Failure to respect another is to privilege oneself, by not recognizing another’s worth,
disregarding it, seeking to set it back, failing to focus on it, or not caring about it, all
of which are captured in the various forms of immoral action. On my view, feminists
might re-construe the skeptic’s position as the view that rationality requires acting in
ways that privilege oneself and one’s reasons. A successful and comprehensive defeat of
skepticism will demonstrate that these kinds of disrespect for others are irrational. We
might apply my account to the issue of rape: a common feminist view is that rapists rape
because it gives them a sense of power over their victim and over all members of her
group (Hampton 1999), not because they are self-interested and seek to satisfy a prefer-
ence. Rape attempts to lower the victim’s worth along with the worth of all women.
My account of the skeptic in terms of privilege rather than self-interest can make better
sense of the irrationality of rape, were skepticism defeated.
Yet other feminists believe that the project of defeating the practical skeptic
ought to be jettisoned or at least reframed. Some are suspicious that reason, though
put forward as universal, is a male-biased concept since women have been associ-
ated only with emotions and men with reason throughout the history of philosophy
(Lloyd 1984; Tong 1993; Tuana 1992). Some believe that the notion of reason could
never be neutral, but that it has gender built into it in such a way that it would have
to be a different concept were gender eradicated from it (Held 1990: 323). Feminists

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must be careful, however, in jettisoning reason and the project of justification lest
they reinforce the stereotype that women are more emotional than rational.
A more recent suggestion in the realm of action theory is to expand the scope of
philosophy to include psychology and other empirical sciences to help critique actual
moral practices with an eye toward making them not support oppression. Lisa Tessman
argues that the project of defeating skepticism needs to speak to actual persons, not
the skeptic, since real people are not skeptical in the sense that they refuse morality
only if they are given justifying reasons for following it, but only in the sense that
they question or reject pieces of morality or ground morality in something other than
merely their rationality (Tessman 2011: 884). But Tessman misses the point about
the traditional skeptic’s position, which is defined broadly to cover all possible cases
of immoral action, and thus assumes that any rationally required act is self-interested.
Describing the skeptic’s position this way does not mean that actual people reject
moral action wholesale; rather, it means that were the skeptic defeated, there would be
no immoral action about which the skeptic can claim that it may be rationally required
or at least permissible to act that way. The description is strategic, not intended to
represent reality. Tessman’s suggestion that the project of defeating skepticism tap into
other disciplines in order to change oppressive practices is addressed by my expansion
of the skeptic’s position to include behaviors that are performed as part of harmful
social practices that indirectly benefit an agent who is a member of a privileged group.
Both Tessman and I want changes in oppressive social structures, but I insist on the
project of justification because demonstrating the rationality of acting morally would
strengthen morality by backing it with reason, whether or not the reasons take on real
people. When they do take, a successful defeat of the skeptic promises to make head-
way in achieving the desired effect of people’s acting morally.
Suppose we defeat the skeptic. How do we motivate persons who recognize moral
reasons to act on them? Internalists about reasons and motivations believe that reasons
necessarily motivate a rational agent who recognizes them, while externalists deny that
they necessarily do so (Smith 2007). Some feminists question internalism and its conse-
quences. Some challenge the view that part of the concept of a reason is that it motivates,
arguing that unrecognized psychological habits such as stereotyping, or social pressure to
conform to the attitudes of others, can make a person who is somewhat aware of her
moral demands fail to attend fully to them and be motivated to act (DesAutels 2004).
Other feminists question whether if a rational agent acts immorally because he is not
motivated, he could not possibly have believed the relevant moral judgment. Lacking
the motivation need not mean that he completely lacks an authentic belief about what
morality demands. He might truly believe that his society takes something to be morally
required, but not be fully motivated by these requirements because they dictate sexist
behavior (Nelson 2004). Still other feminists question the view that if an agent fails to
be motivated by her moral judgment, she must be irrational. Some people who are vic-
tims of oppressive socialization are confused about their worth as persons and so fail to
be moved by the moral judgment that one ought to be self-respecting. For instance, the
deferential wife puts her husband’s and family’s interests ahead of her own when she even
recognizes the latter because she believes that women ought to serve their families (Hill
1995). Since she does not see herself as having the same worth as a person as others, she
is unlikely to be motivated by the moral judgment that one ought to be self-respecting
rather than servile. Judging such persons to be irrational when they fail to be motivated

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is to blame the victim for her bad circumstances (Superson 2009). Some feminists suggest
that we ought not to blame persons for harboring implicit bias, the unconscious bias that
affects how we perceive, evaluate, and interact with people who are members of groups
at which our biases are directed, for at least the reason that they may be completely
unaware of having the bias which is the product of living in, for instance, a sexist society
(Saul 2013: 40, 55). Thus invoking internalism does not solve the motivation issue about
acting morally, even if the skeptic is defeated.

Moral Epistemology
How do we know that rape is morally wrong? According to traditional moral philoso-
phy, reason gives us this information, and our will or motivational capacity responds
or not. Reason and motivation are completely separate on this model; a person can
know what is morally called for yet fail to be moved in the right way. Margaret Little
objects to this model of obtaining moral knowledge. Borrowing from the ethic of care,
which showed the significance of emotion to morality, Little argues that the possession
of various emotions and desires is a necessary condition for seeing the moral landscape
(2007: 421). Little attributes the separation of reason from affect to the historical asso-
ciation with and subsequent devaluation of emotion along with women. Contrary to
the traditional model, Little argues that moral deliberation begins with being aware of
the salient features of a moral situation, which involves emotion. In particular, if one
cares about something, one is ready to respond on its behalf in a way that is receptive
to the particularities of one’s situation, including one’s hopes, fears, and worries, as is a
mother who notices that her child needs help (Little 2007: 423, 245). Someone who is
truly morally aware has a certain attentiveness, a gestalt view of a situation that allows
her to see things a certain way rather than to approach a moral situation with a con-
scious grocery list of moral features to check for (Little 2007: 423). She sees an action
that causes pain not just in this way but also as a cruel action. Furthermore, she sees
it as meriting a response, such as calling for some action or responding appropriately
emotionally. Most importantly, she sees the morally salient features of the situation as
constituting a reason for the response, as when a person sees the evil of torture as con-
stituting a reason not to torture because of the revulsion of torture (Little 2007: 426).
If a person lacks the appropriate response, she does not see clearly the moral status of
a situation. Only when she has the response and lets it inform her moral judgment of
the situation can she acquire moral knowledge. Little gives the following example to
illustrate the gestalt switch and appropriate emotionality involved in seeing the moral
landscape. Suppose that a woman gives to a homeless person only because she wants
to avoid guilt, but one day has a change in perspective and identifies with the person’s
loneliness, and helps him because he is a fellow human in need. (Little 2007: 426).
Applying Little’s view to our example, a person who has the right perspective on
morality comes to know that rape is wrong not just in virtue of its meeting certain
objective criteria of wrongness, but also because he has the right affect about it in that
he sees it as cruel, disgusting, and degrading of a person’s worth, sees how it affects a par-
ticular victim, and sees that this response yields a reason to avoid rape. The insight from
feminism is that traditional moral theory has ignored affect because of its association
with women, when it turns out that affect is necessary to knowing the moral landscape,
making correct moral judgments, and acquiring moral truths.

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Conclusion
We have seen that feminists have weighed in on some timeless, intractable issues in
metaethics. They have offered accounts of moral realism that incorporate the sentiment
of caring rather than being grounded strictly in reason. They have debated whether it
is better for feminism for us to be relativists or absolutists about moral truth, and have
offered ways of justifying objective, universal values. They have challenged many of the
assumptions associated with the project of defeating the skeptic about moral action,
including the notion of rationality and whether traditional philosophers have described
the project broadly enough to cover all sexist behaviors. Finally, they have expanded
traditional philosophy’s view of how we acquire moral knowledge to a more poignant
account that is grounded in both reason and emotions so that we can better respond to
our moral world. The area of metaethics is ripe for further feminist challenges.

Related Topics
Moral justification in an unjust world (Chapter 40); feminist conceptions of autonomy
(Chapter 41); multicultural and postcolonial feminisms (Chapter 47).

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 43
FEMINIST ETHICS
OF CARE
Jean Keller and Eva Feder Kittay

Care ethics has changed dramatically over the decades. Initially articulated by moral
psychologist, Carol Gilligan, the key concepts of care ethics have not only been further
developed by feminist philosophers; care has become a key concept for political science,
economics, sociology, history, nursing and biomedical ethics, and theology. This article
will focus on philosophical conceptions of care, yet given the interdisciplinary investi-
gation and development of this concept, our analysis cannot be limited to philosophical
conceptions of care alone.
While often initially depicted as an ethic of interpersonal relations, in the past two
decades, the political and global dimensions of care, which were pointed to early on
by Sara Ruddick in Maternal Thinking, have taken on ever greater importance in the
theory.

Early Articulations of Care Ethics

Articulated nearly simultaneously, but in somewhat different forms, by Carol
Gilligan (In a Different Voice, 1982), Nel Noddings (Caring, 1986), and Sara Ruddick
(“Maternal Thinking,” article in 1980 and book in 1989), care ethics was initially
conceived as providing an alternate frame to the justice-oriented moral theories of
utilitarianism, deontology, and rights theory that then predominated in Western phi-
losophy. Focusing on domains of life in which women were the major ethical actors,
these early care theorists addressed topics such as mothering; abortion decisions;
caring for the sick, elderly, disabled; and caring within intimate relations. These top-
ics had been largely neglected by dominant moral theories, because they were viewed
as “private” concerns most naturally dealt with by women, rather than as moral con-
cerns per se. Care ethicists challenged this implicit public/private divide in moral
theory (Tronto 1993; Clement 1996), contending that the moral domain, as tradi-
tionally conceived, was too narrow; it cut off from theoretical consideration important
dimensions of human life, particularly those aspects associated with human depend-
ency and reproduction. Thus, needs that arise from inevitable human dependencies
became a central concern of care ethics. Care ethicists demonstrated that the sorts of
moral considerations operative within caring relations involved different sets of moral
 Feminist ethics of care

questions than those addressed in justice-oriented moral theories, as well as distinctive

moral capacities and forms of deliberation. Furthermore, they believed that these
moral considerations proffered resources that could inform other spheres such as edu-
cation, politics, and peace politics.
By affirming care and caregiving as morally significant, care ethics both reflected and
gave shape and form to the feminist concern that moral theories written by men do not
adequately address the range of women’s life experiences. It also provided affirmation
and validation for a set of activities that, for most women, takes up much of their energy
and attention. This feminist reappropriation of some aspects of “femininity,” as opposed
to the feminist critique of women’s roles as tout court oppressive, was appealing to many
and helps account for the wide-ranging discussion and debate that emerged.
From the beginning, care ethicists had to address concerns raised by both moral-
philosophical and feminist-philosophical skeptics. These debates took place as moral
philosophers attempted to articulate, evaluate, and situate within the broader tradition
of moral theory the new concepts presented by early care theorists, and as feminist phi-
losophers attempted to evaluate care ethics against the background of enduring feminist
insights and commitments. Some of these debates continue to preoccupy care ethicists
while others are viewed as more or less settled.

Moral-Philosophical Debates Regarding Care Ethics

Since care ethics was first articulated as providing an alternative to justice theories,
early philosophical debates, reviewed below, centered on whether or not central
components of care theory truly provided a theoretically and morally defensible
alternative approach.

The Relational Self vs. the Independent and Autonomous Self

Western philosophy has overwhelmingly depicted the moral and political agent as an
independent and autonomous adult. Yet, as Seyla Benhabib (1992) points out, humans
don’t just pop up out of the earth like mushrooms. Care ethicists see this dependence
and interdependence of persons as a central aspect of human experience that requires a
new model of moral agency. Thus care ethicists not only conceive the self as constituted
through and situated in relationships with others, but they also insist that the full range
of human experience, from dependence and vulnerability at birth to frail old age, be
considered when conceiving human agency and interactions.
This relational conception of moral agency has implications for how autonomy
is conceived. On the relational view of self, others play a constitutive role in moral
deliberation, both because of the way we, and hence our thinking, have been shaped
through our relationships to others, and because we often make moral decisions by
deliberating with others (Keller 1997). In the moral tradition, particularly stem-
ming from Kant, others were seen as heteronomous influences that impeded auton-
omy, but the understanding of the self as relational requires that autonomy itself
must be conceived relationally. (For a detailed discussion of how the relational self
reconfigured philosophy’s conception of agency and autonomy see Chapters 18 and
41 in this volume.)

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The Role of Emotion vs. Reason in Moral Deliberation

Although care ethicists are not the only moral theorists who have questioned the exclu-
sion of emotions as morally important (Williams 1973; Rorty 1980; Nussbaum 2001; see
also sentimentalist moral theorists, such as Slote 2010), care as a phenomenon presents
a serious problem for purely rationalistic theories. Care done without the right affect,
such as love and empathy, is often not experienced as care at all. Similarly, when care
is not offered through an intuitive and immediate response but mediated by reasoning,
care can be experienced as insincere and calculated. But reason and principled thinking
still play a role in care thinking. We care and because we care we ask—what are our
responsibilities for this situation? When the feeling of care is absent or is insufficient
to motivate action despite the very real need or vulnerability before us, care guides us
to ask about why care broke down. Has the caregiver received inadequate care herself,
is she overburdened, has care been insufficiently supported by social norms and social
systems? Thus, for care ethicists, morality focuses on how reason and emotion, together,
inform and motivate moral deliberation and moral action.

The Role of Partiality vs. Impartiality in Moral Judgment

Impartiality has been considered the hallmark of moral thinking in the modern era.
Care ethicists, by contrast, think partiality in one’s moral thinking can be a moral good.
Our relationships with others come with privileged access to the other’s thoughts, feel-
ings, cares, and concerns—and with such knowledge comes special responsibilities to
respond to the other in a caring way. This special consideration is part of what it means
to care for another; it confirms the special status of the relationship. Thus, partiality is a
mark of care that enhances the sense of intimacy and closeness within the relationship
and helps ensure that a person’s particular needs will be met.
Care ethics was swept up in what became known as the partiality/impartiality
debates within moral theory (See Friedman 1991). While care and justice theory
clearly have very different starting points for describing moral deliberation, few
impartialists claim that special relationships with others should never receive spe-
cial consideration (Friedman 1991: 174). For its part, care ethics recognizes the need
to critically engage partialist moral judgments, as some forms of partiality, such as
whites giving preference to members of their racial group, are clearly morally sus-
pect. Thus the apparent gulf between impartialist and partialist moral may not be as
large as it at first appeared.

Moral Deliberation as Entailing Context, Narrativity,

and Particularity vs. Deduction from Universal
Pre-Established Principles
Nel Noddings described care ethics as eschewing universal principles, a view that later
care ethicists distanced themselves from (see for example, Kittay and Meyers 1987,
Held 1995 and 2007, Clement 1996). Maintaining caring relations and responding to
those in need, two central tenets of care ethics, are themselves moral principles. Rather
than being derived from a rationalistic ideal theory, however, they emerge from philo-
sophical observations of caring relations themselves. This highlights a key difference

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between care and other dominant moral theories. Care ethics doesn’t see a particular
“moral dilemma” as one discrete event, but as unfolding in time and involving multiple
sets of relationships. To understand what went wrong in a particular situation and how
one might go about addressing the moral problem, care ethics emphasizes that one
needs to know more about the story. Thus, care ethics emphasizes that moral delibera-
tion itself is contextual and narrative in approach. It must attend to the particular fea-
tures of the situation, as these often make a difference for what actions are considered
right or wrong. Thus care ethics tends to be a “bottom up” moral theory rather than
one relying on a top-down application of universal principles.
Even while care ethicists have come to acknowledge that care incorporates moral
principles, some justice theorists have acknowledged the importance of context and
narrativity in moral deliberation but limit their role to the application of principles—a
limitation that care ethicists resist (see, for example, Habermas 1993).

Care and Justice as Contrasting vs. Complementary Perspectives

Carol Gilligan (1987) depicted care and justice as contrasting moral frames: one either
sees a duck or a rabbit, care or justice. As can be seen from the discussion thus far, as
the care/justice debates evolved, this conception of the relation between the two theo-
ries was increasingly called into question. Care ethics’ insights influenced philosophers’
understanding of fundamental moral categories and conception of the moral domain.
At the same time, care ethics integrated within its theory key components of justice
theory that were seen as too valuable for feminists to give up, such as, moral principles
and the notion of autonomy. Thus, as a result of these debates, care and justice no
longer seemed to be the polar opposite moral perspectives that they at first appeared to
be, and the door was opened for rich and varied analyses of how the two theories might
fit together. Questions regarding the relation of these two perspectives are ongoing and
will be discussed further in the next section.

Early Feminist Misgivings Regarding Care Ethics

Even as care ethicists addressed the moral-philosophical concerns just elucidated, femi-
nist skeptics raised a number of objections to early versions of the theory. The most
trenchant concerns have informed the subsequent development of the ethic.

Feminine or Feminist Ethic?

Gilligan’s initial finding were based largely on girls and women, thus opening her to the
charge that she merely described a “feminine” ethic expected of women by the patriar-
chal culture. And Noddings (2002) initially called care ethics a “feminine” (rather than
feminist) ethics, although she later abandoned the claim that this was a gendered ethic.
Ruddick, by contrast, theorized a putatively feminine practice, “mothering,” but main-
tained that the practice could be carried on by men no less than women, and she explic-
itly addressed inequalities of power between genders. However, because few early care
theorists systematically addressed inequalities of power, the question of whether care is a
feminine or feminist ethic has endured. (See, for example, Houston’s critique of Noddings
1989 and 1990; Hoagland 1991; see also Card 1990; Scaltsas 1992; Tong 1993).

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Intersectionality and Postcolonial Concerns

Concerns that the gender claims associated with care ethics are oversimplified and don’t
do justice to the complexity of women’s lived experiences emerged early on (Stack 1986;
Harding 1987; Moody Adams 1991; Lugones 2003 [1991]; Nicholson 1993). Patricia
Hill Collins’s ground-breaking work, Black Feminist Thought (1990), gave proof to these
concerns with her analysis of racially specific controlling images (such as the matri-
arch or welfare queen) that contribute to the oppression of black mothers, as well as
her rich account of extended kin networks and “other-mothering” practices in African
American communities. Her work inspired and informed both the development of
womanist theological ethics and further research into black motherhood studies, two
cognate traditions to philosophical accounts of care ethics. (See, for example Bailey
1995; Townes 1998; Story 2014; Craddock 2015). Taking this concern in a somewhat
different direction, Narayan (1995: 134) cautioned care theorists to attend to the ways
in which the value of care has been invoked to support and justify colonial practices and
thus, has been used to justify practices of imperialism, domination, and control.

Care: A Parochial Ethic?

Early feminist critics insisted that fulfilling our obligations to care for proximate others
can obscure the ways in which such actions negatively impact distant others (Card
1990; Hoagland 1991). For example, consumption habits of persons in developed coun-
tries, to satisfy individual desires or meet the needs of dependent others, may rest on the
exploitation of people around the globe. Moreover, obligations to care for proximate
others may be so demanding as to eclipse obligations to distant others. Despite the fact
that Ruddick explicitly saw (maternal) care as offering resources for global peace poli-
tics, in its early years care ethics as a whole did not have sufficient conceptual resources
to address global care concerns systematically and well. Contemporary care ethicists,
as we will see, have gone into the breach and tried to develop care ethics in a way that
allows it to challenge systems of global inequality and domination.

Subsequent Developments
From the mid 1990s onward, care theorists apply and further refine the care concepts
introduced above. They address why we ought to care and what is meant by care,
raise epistemic questions revealed through practices of care, and draw attention to
the politics of care. Theorists begin to analyze care as labor and with this develop-
ment they necessarily draw more explicit and sustained attention to the larger social,
political, and economic contexts in which care practices are embedded and that con-
strain how care labor will be carried out. Care theorists, from multiple disciplines,
draw attention to the fact that our social and political life is dependent both on the
labor of care and the ethics that accompanies such labor, and that therefore the
ethics and labor of care should inform our social and political life. These develop-
ments belie the concern that care is limited to an ethic of interpersonal relationships
and even call into question whether care and care ethics ought to be understood
as gendered. Examination of the social context in which care labor is carried out
requires that issues of power are given a more prominent focus. Ultimately we are
required to rethink the relation between care and justice.

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Re(de)fining the Concept of Care

In the 1990s Tronto and Fisher moved to define care so that it accommodated a broader
swath of our lives than relationships among intimates. They define care as all the ways in
which we “maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as
possible” (Fisher and Tronto 1990: 40). They define four “moments” of care. Care begins
by a concern for the other, “caring about.” Such concern prompts a move to take on
responsibility for care: “taking care of.” The actual meeting of the needs is the “caregiving.”
The final moment occurs when the other takes up the caregiver’s actions as care, “care
receiving.” The last of these phases is one that Nel Noddings calls “the completion of
care” in the other. It is the least developed, but according to Kittay is the aspect of care
that dictates many of the terms of the preceding phases. Kittay (2014) asks, is care that
is not taken up as care by the cared for, normatively speaking, care at all?
Parsing the concept differently, we can define care as a virtue (or moral value), an
attitude or disposition to act (wherein the motivation comes not from one’s own needs
and wants, but rather from those who require care), and as a labor. Each emphasis gives
rise to different, though related, sets of concerns.

Care as a Virtue (or Moral Value) and as

Disposition (or Attitude)
When we ask about care as a virtue, the following foundational questions arise: from
whence comes an ethic of care, why ought we to care, is care a distinctive ethic, and what
is its moral epistemology? Kittay gives a naturalist answer to the question of why we ought
to care. We care because humans, with their extended periods of dependency, require
care to survive. In order to survive as a species, we had to evolve physiologically as well as
emotionally and morally, such that we would value care and develop the socio-emotional
means of responding (Hrdy 1999; Kittay 2012; see also Engster 2015). Miller (2005) gives
a Kantian response, deriving a duty to care from the Kantian duty of beneficence. Walker
(1998) speaks of care as being part of an expressive collaborative model that utilizes
expressive means such as narrative, along with collaborative efforts at living together well,
to help us come to shared moral understandings. Walker thereby distinguishes her model
from the regnant ones that are judicial and deduce moral prescriptions from full blown
theoretical constructs. In the process, she develops a moral epistemology for an ethics of
care. Michael Slote makes care central to virtue theory and develops virtue theory as an
ethics of care (2001; 2007; 2010). We care because care emerges out of the development
of a natural disposition, empathy, one that he argues is basic to all moral concepts.
Virginia Held, Joan Tronto, Fiona Robinson and many others explore how care
as a moral value and a virtue can be expanded to areas far from the intimate domain
that tended to occupy the earliest period. The possibilities of using the values of care
to govern domains such as social welfare (Tronto 2013), healthcare and biomedi-
cine (Sherwin 1989 and 1992; Nelson, Verkerk, and Walker 2008), culture (Held
2003 and 2007), economic structures (Folbre 2002 and 2012), environmental policies
(Moosa 2015), citizenship (Sevenhuisen 1998), animal welfare (Donovan and Adams
2000 and 2007; Gruen 2011; Crary 2016), international relations (Robinson 1999 and
2011a), LGBTQ relationships (Hoagland 1989), and disability (Kittay 2011; Rogers
2016) are added to the peace politics Sarah Ruddick advocated and the educational
reform called for by Nel Noddings (1986 and 2005).

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From an Ethic of Care to a Politics of Care

The neglect of care as an important concept in moral and political philosophy derives
in part from a perception that care is merely a “natural sentiment” largely exhibited by
women. An ethic built on care, however, allows us to understand care as more than a
natural sentiment. Rather, it is a moral concept and its significance extends beyond the
gender of the moral agent. An ethic of care requires cultivation and the resources to align
the normative demands of care with other morally important values, and its demands are
no less binding for men than for women. When care is viewed as labor, not just the natu-
ral response born of affection for someone, another important moment in de-naturalizing
and de-gendering care is reached. We ask about how to “socialize care” (Hamington and
Miller 2006). Once we ask, “who cares for whom?” what comes into view is the way in
which power relations structure and are implicated in the labor of care. Just as important
are the questions of the adequacy of support and just organization offered by social, politi-
cal and economic institutions—both to those who are carers and those who are cared for
(Hamington and Engster 2015). The questions of caring are no longer set in opposition
to questions of justice. Instead we ask how can caring be just, and justice be caring.

Care as Labor
Care theorists have demonstrated that the social organization of care work today
continues to impede the full political and economic participation of those who have
traditionally, and continue to be, charged with the task of caring labor. For instance,
Selma Sevenhuisjen (1998) looks at the implications of care work for citizenship;
Diemut Bubeck (1995), using the Marxian concept of “necessary labor,” explores
the economic implications for women; Nancy Folbre (2002; 2012) investigates the
economic value of women’s caring labor; Eva Kittay (1999) demonstrates that the
contractualist foundations of liberal democratic society have failed adequately to
include women who serve as “dependency workers,” thus disadvantaging them with
respect to political and economic participation.
Furthermore care theorists have asked: Which persons’ social realities are illumi-
nated and obscured by how one defines and delineates care? What are the gender,
cultural, racial, and colonial histories and politics behind this? Have more privileged
women achieved their success in male-dominated fields, in part, by relying on less privi-
leged women to replace the caring labor they would otherwise be expected to do? And
what are the implications of the answers to these questions for the ongoing project of
women’s liberation? (Tronto 1993; Bubeck 1995; Roberts 1997; Sevenhuisjen 1998;
Kittay 1999; Folbre 2002 and 2012; Duffy 2005 and 2011; Nakano Glenn 2012).

Reconceiving the Connection of Care and Gender in

Light of Intersectional Concerns
As the definition of care and examples of care are broadened, the connection of care to
gender is altered and attenuated in a number of interesting ways. Developing an inter-
sectional analysis, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Mignon Duffy, and Joan Tronto point out
that it is not only white women who have been assigned a disproportionate responsibil-
ity to engage in care work but also, and perhaps primarily, men and women of color,
especially when they are also from the working class. Intersectional concerns have

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also challenged the definition of care, prompting a distinction between nurturant and
non-nurturant care. Duffy describes nurturant work as having a significant relational
dimension; it is more visible and public, and white and privileged women continue
to carry on this sort of care work even as they delegate to women of color the less vis-
ible, “backroom work” of non-nurturant care (Nakano Glenn 2012)—cleaning, food
preparation and service, laundry (Duffy 2007; see also Roberts’ distinction between
“spiritual” and “menial” work, 1997).
In a different vein, Tronto (2013) expands the virtue of care beyond what have
traditionally been women’s domains, by pointing out that police work and firefight-
ing are two ways in which men have traditionally satisfied a social imperative to care.
Care, surprisingly, is a value that is sometimes fostered even in the military—although
the attitude is confined to those who are not the designated enemy. Against this back-
ground, perhaps it should not be surprising when Hankivsky (2014) recommends that
care theorists abandon the association of gender and care in the interest of developing
a truly intersectional understanding of care ethics.
At the same time, research into similarities between African moralities and care
ethics and between Confucian ethics and care ethics indicate that care has not always
been conceived and carried out as a distinctively feminine practice (see Harding 1987;
Gouws and Zyl 2015; Chapter 44 in this volume). Even though in non-Western socie-
ties care work often remains the domain of women, care is not construed as a feminine
virtue, as it has been in the West. Rather, in the concepts of ren for Confucians (see
also Chapter 44 in this volume) and ubuntu in some African cultures care is recognized
as a universal feature of morality. In a related vein, Vrinda Dalmiya (2016) develops
a care-based epistemology by drawing on classic texts in Indian philosophy, thereby
demonstrating how these two traditions can strengthen each other.
This decoupling of care and gender is, from a feminist perspective, both troubling
and promising. Troubling in that women still do most of the care work around the
globe. Furthermore, care became an important concept by examining and taking seri-
ously women’s lives. Thus, a de-gendered conception of care risks losing the political
importance of the place of care in actual women’s lives. At the same time, this devel-
opment is promising—in that care is, after all, an important (albeit frequently mar-
ginalized) human value. De-gendering the concept facilitates the recognition of care
as a universal moral value and can spur us to insist that the work be shared equitably
between men and women.

Inequalities of Power and the Reconception of

the Care/Justice Relations
As the discussion thus far indicates, from the 1990s on analyses of power are more
explicitly and more frequently developed as part of care ethics, thereby securing its posi-
tion as a feminist rather than a feminine ethic. Theorists address not only inequalities
of power among women, but also the power of those outside the care relation and how
their actions or lack thereof impact caregivers’ ability to provide care. Thus the concept
of care and development of a public ethic of care prove useful for criticizing the system
of welfare targeting poor families in the United States today and provide theoretical
grounds for envisioning the social welfare policies that ought to be in place to support
poor families and families caring for frail elderly relatives and disabled people.

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 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

Attention to the influence of power in structuring relations of care calls attention

to the need for an ethics of care that insists that care work be non-exploitative and so
brings concerns traditionally conceived as matters of justice into care ethics. Once care
theorists start discussing the distribution of care work and the institutional structures
necessary to carry out care well, we move to a public ethic of care and the question of
justice. At the same time we see that caring relations are a necessary precondition for
a just society—in order to have citizens at all, children need adequate care to survive
childhood; to have citizens who are prepared to engage in the responsibilities of citizen-
ship and who have a developed sense of justice, they need to be raised such that their
basic emotional and physical needs are met and they receive adequate support/stimula-
tion necessary to develop their basic capabilities. Once we no longer posit an opposition
between care and justice, we also recognize that citizens need a well-developed sense of
caring for citizens and distant others. Care, as Engster (2007) puts it, is at the heart of
justice, even as justice is needed for a true ethics of care.

Care in a Global Context

While Ruddick (1989), Narayan (1995), Harding (1987), and Robinson (1999) con-
ceived care ethics in global terms from its inception, it wasn’t until the 2000s that care
theorists as a whole began systematically to address what it might mean to consider
care a global ethic (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002; Kittay 2005; 2008; 2009; Weir
2005; Miller 2006; 2011; Held 2007; Eckenweiler 2009; and Eckenweiler and Meghani
2009). At the same time, feminist theorists from the Global South have found care
ethics to be a useful framework for analyzing the failure of states with more mini-
mal welfare provisions and a traditional sexual division of labor firmly entrenched. In
South Korea, for example, several feminists have used a framework of care ethics to
address the pressing issue of long-term care (Cheon 2010; Kim and Kang 2010).
Central concerns addressed in this period include using care theory to diagnose a crisis
of care on a global scale; utilizing care premises to provide alternate moral approaches
to international concerns, such as development ethics and military conflict; and a more
systematic examination of similarities between care ethics and non-Western ethical
traditions, such as Confucianism, African, and Indian philosophies.

The Crisis of Care on a Global Level

Developed countries have implemented the comprehensive policies necessary to meet
the care and caregiving needs of their populace to a greater or lesser extent. The
United States remains an outlier among wealthy industrial societies in so poorly meet-
ing these needs. Neoliberal structural adjustment programs promoted by the World
Bank and International Monetary Fund have required that developing countries in
need of loans sharply curtail their investments in social programs (Schutte 2002). As
large numbers of women entered the paid workforce, as care needs have increased with
the aging of the population globally, as pandemics such as AIDS and ebola eviscer-
ated local populations of care workers, and as armed conflicts have resulted in wide-
spread displacements and disruption, these policy failures have contributed to a global
care deficit. With faltering economies and shredded safety nets at home, and with
gendered expectations of who engages in care work firmly entrenched in countries

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around the globe, large numbers of women from economically stressed families,
especially from the global south, are “pushed” to migrate to the Global North to pro-
vide for their loved ones. At the same time, the relatively generous social welfare
system of Western Europe and the higher salaries in wealthy nations have exerted a
“pull.” Given the global care deficit, most of the available jobs entail doing care work,
both in the domestic sphere and in the public sector. Ironically, the aspirational mod-
els for care in Western Europe that feminists and care theorists from the US extoll
are often staffed by doctors, nurses, educators, and childcare workers hired from third
world countries, a situation that exerts a greater strain on care resources in the poorer
nations. (Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild 2002; Kittay 2008; Eckenwiler 2009; and
Robinson 2011b). As migrant women leave their home countries for extended periods
of time, they “pass on” their own care obligations, often to even poorer women with
the result that, on a global scale, care work is typically done by the least advantaged.
For feminist care theory, which is not only premised upon rendering care work visible
and valuing/supporting it, but is also committed to ending systematic exploitation and
oppression, such an outcome violates its core values.
The transfer of care from developing to developed countries becomes still more
problematic when we consider how privileged women have appropriated the reproduc-
tive labor of third world women through the practices of global surrogacy (Parks 2010;
Bailey 2011; Panitch 2013; Banerjee 2014) and, some might argue, international adop-
tion. Viewed together, these practices ensure that first world women will be able to
carry out the nurturant work associated with raising children and will receive the emo-
tional and status enhancing benefits associated with this practice at the same time they
outsource the non-nurturant aspects of care—domestic work, childbearing, and some
aspects of childrearing. While privileged women have long relegated non-nurturant
care work to less privileged women, the global scale of this transfer, the transfer of the
task of reproduction itself, and the creation of what some have called a permanent
servant class based on race, nationality, gender, and social class (Tronto 2013) bring
this practice to a new and troubling low. The global sex trade and procurement of “mail
order brides” are distinctive but related practices that likewise exploit the bodies of
vulnerable women and children (Brennan 2002; Hankivsky 2011).
In the wake of such empirical considerations, care theorists have posed the follow-
ing theoretical questions and asked if care ethics can address them: What is the nature
of the moral harm that is inflicted by the practice of hiring immigrant women to do
care work, especially when these women must leave their children behind? Is there a
right to provide care for one’s loved ones, and can a care ethics issue in rights as well
as responsibilities (West 2002; Weir 2005; Engster 2007; Kittay 2009; Gheaus 2013)?
Can a care ethics or a related “social-connection model” articulated by Iris Young
(2011) address the responsibilities and duties we have to persons around the globe,
particularly with regard to ensuring that the right to give and receive care is upheld?
In particular, does the ethic of care give us a different way to think of the nature of
harms suffered by women globally (such as genocide by rape) (Miller 2009)? As we
draw this discussion to a close, it is noteworthy that we are deploying notions such as
“rights” and “duties,” language more readily associated with justice rather than care.
When care is examined on a global scale, the interrelatedness of care and justice,
noted earlier, becomes even more evident and the necessity of conceptualizing the
two theories together becomes more urgent.

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 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

Care Ethics Provides an Alternative Moral

Approach to Global Concerns
Global care theorists have not only analyzed the breakdown of care relations on a global
scale, they have also utilized the concepts of care ethics to propose new and innovative
theoretical approaches and solutions to issues of global concern. Serene Khader (2011)
argues that if care virtues, specifically those of loving attention, the transparent self, and
narrative understanding, were used in the practice of international development, they
would help correct the tendency of development practitioners to paternalistically (and
often unconsciously) substitute their judgment for that of their intended beneficiaries.
Daniel Levine (2010) argues that successful counter-insurgency efforts require use of the
care virtues of attentiveness, restraint, and creativity to win over the “hearts and minds”
of citizens alienated from their government and to re-establish relationships of trust.
Virginia Held (2008), Jess Kyle (2013), Sigal Ben Porath (2008), Joan Tronto
(2007), and Fiona Robinson (1999, 2011a, and 2011b) explore what an ethic of care
brings to international relations, specifically with regard to the ethics of military inter-
vention. An emphasis on prevention versus intervention, on attending to the long-
term relationships between countries and peoples, and on the responsibility to protect
promises that a care-based approach to international relations would be dramatically
different from the current one. For example, Fiona Robinson argues that a feminist care
ethic cannot conceive of security solely in militaristic terms. She insists that “efforts
to enhance human security must recognize the importance of relations and networks
of responsibility and care in determining people’s everyday experiences of security and
insecurity” (2011a: 10). Human security is not only threatened by violent conflict,
but also by environmental degradation, food insecurity, economic insecurity, tyrannical
governments, and violation of religious rights. Each of these has contributed to the vio-
lent confrontations and refugee crises with which we are faced in the mid-2010s. Thus,
we need a broader understanding of human security than military intervention if we are
to have a caring system of international relations. Such an approach would give center
stage to ensuring that people from around the globe can meet their responsibilities to
care for themselves, their families, their communities, and the natural world around
them. Such a world would be more caring, more just, and more secure than the one in
which we currently live.
In this section we have suggested that as care “goes global” it proposes a new moral
grounding on the basis of which we reprioritize and reorganize international policies,
from migration, to development, to our approach to human security. Against this
backdrop, the theoretical project noted previously, of drawing attention to similarities
between the ethics of care and similar values in the Confucian tradition, Buddhism,
and among some African philosophies, takes on added import. Namely, by demonstrat-
ing that care is not only a Western or a women’s value but a fundamental human value
already acknowledged by peoples around the globe, care theorists could help facili-
tate this larger practical project of international cooperation on fundamental issues of
human well-being and security.

Conclusion
Care ethics has come a long way since its near-simultaneous inception in the work of
Gilligan, Noddings, and Ruddick and has also come full circle in demonstrating how

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care ethics can illuminate our global connections and responsibilities that Ruddick first
foresaw in trying to use maternal thinking for a peace politics.
Rather than being limited to an ethics of interpersonal relationships, care ethics
has shown that it can help illuminate not only important moral dimensions of these
relations but of domestic policies and international relations as well. Moreover, care
ethics has made a major contribution to moral theory by introducing a new ethical
vocabulary, bringing renewed moral attention to human relationships, and new moral
attention to the role of dependency in human life. Along with the development of
care ethics, there has been a resurgence of interest in virtue ethics, in friendship and
interpersonal ethics, new approaches to autonomy (see Chapter 41 in this volume),
explorations of the moral dimensions of dependency relations and the emergence of
particularism in moral theory (Friedman 1993; Blum 1994; Little and Hooker 2000;
MacIntyre 2001; Nussbaum 2007). Thus, care ethics has significantly influenced the
field of ethics in developing an ethic of care, by acknowledging and developing the role
of emotion and empathy in moral deliberation and action, as well as by calling atten-
tion to the partialist, particularist, and contextual features of our ethical life with both
intimates and distant others.
Examination of care as labor, both within the US and internationally, has brought
to the foreground of care ethics the intersectional and power analyses that were seen
as missing by early feminist critics of the theory. At the same time, examination of the
political, social, and economic context of care has laid the groundwork for a rethinking
of the relationship between care and justice.

Related Topics
Personal identity and relational selves (Chapter 18); the genealogy and viability of the
concept of intersectionality (Chapter 28); feminist and queer intersections with disabil-
ity studies (Chapter 33); feminist approaches to autonomy (Chapter 41); Confucianism
and care ethics (Chapter 44); neoliberalism, global justice, and transnational feminisms
(Chapter 48).

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 44
CONFUCIANISM AND
CARE ETHICS
Sin Yee Chan

As a critical response to the prevailing ethical theories of Utilitarianism and Kantianism

that emphasize individual judgment, rational thinking, and reliance on impartial, uni-
versalistic and general principles, care ethics breaks significant new ground. Drawing
heavily from women’s experience of caring for dependents, care ethics focuses on
relations, contextual thinking, emotions, partiality, and particularity. Interestingly,
Confucianism, developed more than two centuries ago, shares many of these foci.
Consequently, many scholars consider Confucianism a kind of care ethics. In what
follows, I shall first explain briefly the main ideas of Confucianism and care ethics,
provide an overview of the debate of whether Confucianism is a kind of care ethics, and
reflect on one major question raised from the debate, namely what constitutes a generic
account of care ethics. Finally, I suggest that Confucian scholars and care ethicists
should collaborate, especially on the issue of how to extend from partial caring (caring
for close relations) to general caring (caring for people outside one’s close circle). In
explaining Confucianism, I shall reference to the Confucian canons the Analects, the
Mencius, the Xunzi and the Liji (Book of Rites). I shall rely mostly on Noddings’s account
when outlining care ethics.

Confucianism
The cardinal concept in Confucianism is ren (仁)which is often translated as love,
goodness, benevolence, or humaneness. The Chinese character of “ren” is a combi-
nation of the two characters, “person” (人) and “two” (二). Ren pertains to human
relatedness (Tu 1985), especially about their embedment in relationships. In the
Analects, the term has two meanings (Shun 1993). The first refers to a perfect vir-
tue that includes various specific virtues such as loyalty, purity, diligence, wisdom,
respectfulness, courage, etc. (Analects 4: 15, 5: 18, 7: 24, 12: 1, 20, 13: 4, 19, 14:
5, 12, 17: 6). The second refers to love or benevolence and includes both familial
sentiments and general benevolent sentiments towards anyone in the world. A junzi
(gentleman) is someone who is committed to moral cultivation to acquire the vir-
tue of ren and has attained a certain level of accomplishment in doing so. Since ren
includes benevolence/love, which implies a motivation to benefit others for their
own sake, personal moral cultivation is connected to worldly obligations. The ideal of
 Confucianism and care ethics

“inner sage, outer king” ascribes to a junzi the moral obligation to bring benefits and
peace to the world through political participation, either as a ruler or as an official,
unless political participation involves immorality due to a corrupted government.
Let us examine the meaning of ren as love/benevolence more closely. The text clearly
connects ren to love/benevolence: “The man of ren loves people” (Analects 12: 22),

Zigong asked, “If a person can shower benefits widely among people, and pro-
vide relief to them, will you call him a person of ren?” Confucius replied, “It
would no longer be a matter of ren. He would no doubt be a sage.”
(Analects 6: 30)

The above passages relate ren to loving people in general and bringing benefit to them. In
addition, ren is constituted by familial sentiments: “Loving one’s parents is ren,” (Mencius
7A: 15) “The way of (the sages) Yao and Shun is simply to be filial to one’s parents and
respectful to one’s elder brother” (Mencius 6B: 2). Moreover, familial sentiments such as
loving one’s father and elder brother are seen as innate (Mencius 7A: 15). These two mean-
ings of ren—as familial love and as general benevolence—are not isolated from each other.
Familial love is fundamental to, as well as instrumental in developing general benevolence:
“Youzi said, ‘few of those who are filial sons and respectful brothers will show disrespect to
superiors . . . Filial piety and brotherly respect are the root of ren’” (Analects 1: 2),

Treat the aged of your own family in a manner befitting their venerable age and
extend the treatment to the aged of other families; treat your own young in a
manner befitting their tender age and extend this to the young of other families.
(Mencius 1A: 7)

In this way, the family is viewed as an essential training ground for both familial and
general love. Ren is not merely about sentiments; it also requires altruistic actions: “The
actuality of ren is the serving of one’s parents” (Mencius 4A: 27), showering benefits
widely among people is also ren (Analects 6: 30).
Ren is also seen as stemming from innate compassion besides the familial sentiments.
The innateness of compassion is presumably illustrated in the following famous anecdote:

Suppose a man were, all of a sudden, to see a young child on the verge of fall-
ing into a well. He would certainly be moved to compassion, not because he
wanted to get in the good graces of the parents . . . The mind of compassion is
the germ of ren.
(Mencius 2A: 6)

Compassion serves as the basis of a government of ren—a compassionate government

(Mencius 1A: 7). The role of compassion and love in ren underpins the importance of
emotions in Confucian ethics.
Since familial sentiments constitute the core of ren, Confucian social order consists
in a nexus of personal relationships modeling after the family. It is epitomized by the
Five Relationships: ruler–minister, father–son, older–younger brother, husband–wife,
friend–friend relationships. In this social order, each person is an occupant of various
relationship roles and incurs the related role duties. For example,

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What makes a person a father? I reply: To be generous, kind, and to possess

ritual principles . . . What makes a person a wife? I reply: if the husband pos-
sesses ritual principles, then meekly follow after him and docilely attend him; if
he lacks them, then be fearful, anxious, and apprehensive about herself.
(Xunzi 12: 3)

All of these relationships are governed by reciprocity and, with the exception of friends,
are hierarchical. For example, father and son are urged to reciprocate love (Mencius
7B: 24) and rulers and ministers respect. (Mencius 2B: 2). Thus Confucianism can be
understood as a kind of relationship-role ethics (Chan 2000b; Ames 2011). One impli-
cation of taking family as the microcosm of the social/political order is that the private
(domestic) and the public (social/political) are not sharply divided and familial virtues
presumably can be applicable in the public sphere as well: filial piety towards parents
can be extended to serve the ruler.
In addition to familial sentiments and compassion, following li (禮 rites) is another
important way to develop the virtue of ren. Li, which originally refers to ritual rules
but then expands to include rules of varied nature such moral, conventional, religious,
ceremonial and etiquette rules. To support one’s parents, to mourn in accordance with
certain rites, to bow before ascending to a hall, all are examples of rules of li. Li is seen
by Confucius as the expression of ren: “What can a man do with li who does not have
ren?” (Analects 3: 3). Following li presumably makes one act in a civil, refined and aes-
thetically pleasing manner. More importantly, following li helps one acquire ren and
brings about social harmony: “To return to the observance of li through overcoming
the self constitutes ren” (Analects 12: 1); “Of the things brought about by li, harmony is
the most valuable” (Analects 1: 12). Li, however, is not normative principles or stand-
ards like utilitarianism or the Categorical Imperatives that define morally rightness and
presume universal applicability. Li pertains to specific rules of conduct. Exceptions to
and changes in li are often allowed to ensure adaptation to particular circumstances
and changing times (Analects 9: 3) in order to attain social harmony. Above all, it
is ren rather than strict rule-following that enables one to make the most sagacious
responses to a situation: “A gentleman needs not keep his word nor does he necessar-
ily see his action through to the end. He aims only at what is right” (Mencius 4B: 11).
Confucius claims, “I have no preconceptions about the permissible and the impermis-
sible” (Analects 18: 8). Besides practicing li, learning, thinking, music, and dancing
also contribute to develop ren. When one has ren and follows li, often one does what is
morally proper or yi (義 moral rightness).

Care Ethics
In In a Different Voice (Gilligan 1982), Carol Gilligan argues that women have “a differ-
ent voice” in ethical thinking, which she calls the “care perspective.” This perspective
emphasizes responsibility, relationships, interconnectedness, response, contextual judg-
ments, and using emotions and intuitions. The care perspective is juxtaposed against
the traditional “justice perspective” often embraced by men. This latter perspective
assumes independent, autonomous agency, and approaches ethical problems by rational
application of impartial, general and universal principles.
Nel Noddings in her groundbreaking work, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and
Moral Education (Noddings 2003 [1984]) develops a comprehensive and distinct ethical

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perspective and eschews the justice perspective altogether. And since her account is the
one most referenced by philosophers comparing Confucianism and care ethics I shall
focus on her account when expounding care ethics below.
This new ethical vision articulated by Noddings comprises several elements. First,
it assumes a relational ontology: “Relations, not individuals, are ontologically basic”
(Noddings 2003 [1984]: xiii). Humans are born into relationships, and they depend
on relationships for their survival as infants and flourishing as adults. Of special
importance are close personal relationships, with the mother–child as the paradigm
of relationship.
Second, this new ethics revolves around caring rather than morally right action.
Caring refers to many things. It is a form of relationship: “caring is a relationship
that contains another.” It is also an activity or practice that often takes place in the
context of close personal relationships. It can also be an attitude and a motive con-
stituting a virtue (Noddings 2003 [1984]). A caring relationship includes the caring
person/the one-caring (who gives caring) and the cared-for (who receives caring).
There are three components of caring: (1) engrossment (which she changes to recep-
tive attention and then attention in her later works); (2) motivational displacement,
on the part of the caring person; and (3) reception or reciprocity on the part of the
cared-for (Noddings 2003 [1984]: 69). To be engrossed is to be in a receptive state:
“I receive the other into myself, and I see and feel with the other. I become duality”
(Noddings 2003 [1984]: 30). “Apprehending the other’s reality, feeling what he feels
as nearly as possible” (Noddings 2003 [1984]: 16). Engrossment requires abstaining
from evaluation of the cared-for. Motivational displacement means rendering the
caring person’s motivational energy and resources at the service of the cared-for
and adopting his/her goal as the caring person’s goal (Noddings 2003 [1984]: 17).
To reciprocate, the cared-for responds, for example, in the form of being happy, or
sharing his/her aspirations and worries, or vigorously pursuing his/her own projects
(Noddings 2003 [1984]:72). More basically, merely receiving the caring is counted as
reciprocity. Reciprocity completes the caring.
The third element of the ethical vision is valuing particularity and rejecting any
appeal to impartial, general, and universal principles. Valuing particularity means
appreciating a relationship and persons in a relationship as unique and irreplace-
able and the embedding situation of an action as concrete and particular. “To act as
one-caring, then, is to act with special regard for the particular person in a concrete
situation.” Rules and principles are only held “loosely, tentatively, as economies
of a sort” (Noddings 2003 [1984]: 24, 55). Appreciation of particularity calls forth
contextual judgment, use of emotions, intuitions and engrossment.
In addition to particularistic caring within relationships, which Noddings calls
natural caring, we also need to develop an ethical ideal of caring to ensure our car-
ing about people outside our close circles from whom we cannot receive reciprocity.
To Noddings, natural caring has ethical priority because it is the root and the goal
of the ethical ideal of caring.
Other philosophers continue to develop versions of care ethics, distinct from those
of Noddings and Gilligan, and extending it to social, political, and global contexts, and
out of the sphere of intimate family relationships on which Noddings focuses (Tronto
1993; Kittay 2001; Slote 2001; Held 2006). It should also be noted that most of the
later versions are feminist, i.e. stressing more the identification as well as the elimina-
tion of the injustice associated with caring work assigned to women, as contrasted to

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the feminine approach of Gilligan and Noddings who focus on articulately a distinctive
perspective of women. Nonetheless, for purposes of comparison with Confucianism I
shall continue to focus on Noddings’s version.

Is Confucianism a Kind of Care Ethics?

Confucianism shares significant commonalities with care ethics. Both accounts assign
utmost ethical importance to some kind of affective concern for others—caring or
love/benevolence. Both consider close personal relationships as the optimal context
in which this kind of concern is nurtured and expressed. Engagement in close personal
relationships are also seen as instrumental to the development of an ethical ideal that
requires partiality towards one’s close relationships as well as general caring for people
not related to oneself. In addition, both assume a relational ontology and conceive of
close personal relationships as the primary form in which humans relate to each other.
Thus it is not surprising that scholarship relating Confucianism to care ethics in
the past two decades has evolved around the question of whether Confucianism is a
kind of care ethics. Chenyang Li initiated this dialogue by arguing that Confucianism
can be seen as a kind of care-ethics (Li 1994) because (1) the Confucian ethical ideal,
ren, is about love; (2) Confucian ethics, like care ethics, is not based on general,
universal principles; and (3) Confucianism values close personal relationships and
allows partiality.
Julia Tao describes Confucianism as Confucian care ethics because of its basic orienta-
tion towards caring. Yet she also observes important differences between Confucianism
and care ethics (Tao 2000). Tao points out that care ethics resists impartial ethical
reasoning, i.e. reasoning done from an impartial perspective, which treats everyone
alike and does not accord anyone more or less ethical consideration, regardless of the
person’s relationship to the agent. In contrast, even though Confucianism does not
discuss the issue, one could imagine it accepting principles endorsed from an impartial
perspective (Chan 1993: 69). For example, particularistic principles such as “To care
for one’s family more than a stranger” or impartial principles like “Everyone should be
treated equally before the law.” Tao believes that a Confucian agent is indeed required
to develop both particularistic and impartial perspectives, though the two perspectives
may sometimes generate conflicting duties.
Another difference noted by Tao concerns virtue. Ren is a virtue and Confucianism
can be seen as a form of virtue ethics (Sim 2015). Noddings, however, is skeptical of
virtue ethics and rejects understanding caring as a virtue (Noddings 2003 [1984]: 96)
though she sometimes does describe caring as a virtue (Noddings 2003 [1984]: xiii).
Concurring that Confucianism is a care ethics, Ann Pang notes a further similar-
ity between Confucianism and care ethics in that neither postulates a sharp division
between the private and the public, and both use domestic relationship as a model for
relationship in the public sphere (Pang-White 2011).
There are dissenters. One type of opposition is based on noting the close connec-
tion between care ethics and gender. Gilligan’s “In a Different Voice” is often seen as
marking a distinct voice of women in ethical reasoning. The word “feminine” occurs in
the title of Noddings’s groundbreaking book. By now, care ethics is generally accepted
as a feminist ethics. Bundling Confucianism with the feminine or feminism, however,
is seen by some as too restrictive: ren applies to both genders. For example, Karyn Lai

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objects, “the Confucian notion of interdependence of relationship reaches beyond the

confines of gender-determined construction of relationality and ethics” (Lai 2013: 128).
Lijun Yuan argues that since the Confucian texts contain so many sexist assumptions
and claims, Confucianism is not feminist ethics (Yuan 2002).
Another set of objections focus on the issue of particularity. Ranjoo Seodu Herr
observes that Noddings’s engrossment enables the capturing of the particularity of the
cared-for as it eradicates the emotional boundaries separating the caring person and the
cared-for. Engrossment, however, is impossible in Confucianism. Confucianism requires
people in relationships to follow li in their interaction. The attitude of respect embodied
in li, however, emphasizes vigilance about one’s duties and deferential distance from
others. In this way, respect checks one’s spontaneous emotional expression and prohib-
its engrossment (Herr 2012). This concern about particularity is shared by Daniel Star.
Star worries that cardinal relationship roles in Confucianism such as mother, husband,
friend are “communally based categories, through which others are approached primar-
ily (although not necessarily only) via general types, rather than as unique concrete
individuals” (Star 2002: 90). Particularity is lost when one is perceived merely as an
instance of a general category. Star concludes that Confucianism is “a care-originating
or care-interested virtue ethics,” but not a care ethics (2002: 86).
Some care ethicists raise similar concerns. Believing that Confucianism emphasizes
too much on rules and prioritizes the development of virtues over relationship caring,
Noddings objects to seeing Confucianism as a care ethics (Noddings 2010: 137–138).
Held judges that the inclusion of a non-feminist version of relational ethics such as
Confucianism into care ethics is to “unduly disregard the history of how this ethics has
developed and come to be a candidate for serious consideration among contemporary
moral theory” (Held 2006: 22).

Beyond the Question of Whether Confucianism Is a Care Ethics

The discussions outlined above certainly shed interesting and helpful light on the
question of whether Confucianism is a care ethics. To strive for a definitive answer at
this point, however, seems futile. Given that Confucianism was developed more than
two centuries earlier than care ethics, and hence there are drastic differences between
the two accounts with respect to their embedding ways of life and their social, cultural,
political, and economic backgrounds, it is obvious that the two are not exact coun-
terparts. A straightforward approach to map Confucianism onto the account of care
ethics developed by Noddings and others might yield the answer that Confucianism is
not a care ethics. But to do so is like rejecting Confucianism as a virtue ethics merely
because it differs from Aristotle’s account of virtue ethics. This does not make sense!
The straightforward approach is ill-advised also because it treats the account of care
ethics put forward by Noddings and others—a young, evolving moral theory—as a
well-established, paradigmatic account to which other theories need to conform. To
do so seems chauvinistic, not paying due respect to other kindred theories. It also
thwarts the various potential ways in which this young account of care ethics can use-
fully develop. Whether the decision concerning what constitutes a generic account
of care ethics is a political—in the sense that it is about who has the power to decide
(Li 2015), or a philosophical matter, it seems premature at this point to claim that
we already have a yardstick to determine which care-based account is a care ethics

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and which is not. (For clarity’s sake, I shall henceforth call the account developed by
Noddings and others as Care Ethics without implying that it is the paradigmatic or
generic account of care ethics.)
To continue to explore and contest the nature of Care Ethics so as to arrive at a
generic account of care ethics therefore is imperative. The Confucianism-Care Ethics
discussions outlined above are extremely useful in this regard as they highlight certain
“core elements” based on which Confucianism is rejected as a care ethics. These ele-
ments include the priority of relationships over virtues, particularity, and the tie to
gender. Should they be the core elements of a generic account of care ethics?
Let us look at the priority of relationship first. Whether Care Ethics should be incor-
porated under virtue ethics is much debated among care ethicists. Raja Halwani (2003)
and Michael Slote (2001), for example, believe that doing so will make Care Ethics
become a comprehensive theory and help it address criticisms such as its neglect of our
responsibility for people not closely related to us (Card 1990), and of the interests and
integrity of the caring person (Davion 1993). Virtue ethics can help because it requires
the cultivation of virtues besides caring such as justice, wisdom, etc., which enable a
caring person to critically evaluate her caring. Held (2006) responds that Care Ethics
can also attend to these other virtues as they contribute to the success of caring.
More important, however, is the worry, shared by Noddings, Held, and others, that
virtue ethics misses out a distinctive insight of Care Ethics—ethics is about relation-
ships. “It is the relatedness of human beings, built and rebuilt, that the ethics of care is
being developed to try to understand, evaluate, and guide” (Held 2006: 30). Noddings
similarly emphasizes caring as a relationship (2003 [1984]: xiii). Held criticizes virtue
ethics for assuming an individualistic perspective because it often takes caring as benev-
olence. Benevolence is problematic because it is an altruistic attitude. Since an altru-
istic act is done by one person for the sake of a separate person, an altruistic attitude
assumes a “radical separation between self and others” (Blum 1994: 195). In contrast,
“to be concerned for a friend . . . is to reach out not to someone or something wholly
other than oneself but to what shares a part of one’s own self and is implicated in one’s
sense of one’s own identity” (Blum 1994: 195). The interests of people in relationships
are inevitably and deeply interconnected.
Furthermore, like Noddings (2003 [1984]: xiii), Held believes that virtue ethics
assumes an individualistic perspective because of its focus on the dispositions of
an individual rather than relationships. Virtue ethics does not prioritize or require
participation in caring relations, the cultivation of mutuality in the contexts of
interdependencies or evaluations of relations between persons (Held 2006: 52).
Consequently, virtue ethics may help to nurture effective caring agents but not good,
fulfilling relationships (Held 2006: 53). Besides Held, Sara Ruddick also emphasizes
relationship in caring. She comments, “Caring labor is intrinsically relational. The
work is constituted in and through the relation of those who give and receive care”
(Ruddick 1998: 13–14).
Does virtue ethics fail to capture the priority of relationship? We do not need to
settle the issue here, but some points are worth pondering. If virtue ethics cares about
a flourishing life and a flourishing life must include having deep, affectionate, and
close personal relationships, as care ethicists so firmly insist, why would virtue ethics
ignore them? As a matter of fact, both Aristotle’s and Confucius’s account require
cultivation of relationships: Aristotle values friendship and takes relationship among
citizens as basing on friendship like sentiments; Confucianism can be understood as

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a relationship-role ethics. And both discuss and provide normative guides on how to
sustain good relationships, hence promoting mutuality and interconnectedness.
And focusing on the dispositions of an agent need not assume an individualistic
framework, if the dispositions are about caring and engaging in personal relationships.
Above all, if focusing on disposition is problematic, it would mean that Care Ethics
can never render a developmental account of caring agency. And that will be a serious
weakness for caring to be a workable practice! Or does priority of relationship mean that
caring is confined to relationship caring as Ruddick’s comment seem to suggest? Since
virtue ethics allows caring to go beyond relationship it fails to capture the priority of
relationship? This cannot be right, however, because even Noddings allows for caring
for anonymous strangers.
The second element we should examine is particularity. Particularity in Care Ethics
involves seeing a situation as unique and perceiving a person as irreplaceable and having
distinctive traits and preferences. Particularity of situations calls forth the use of con-
textual judgments and does not invoke much dispute (especially if it is seen as accept-
ing general rule following as expedient measures). Particularity of individual persons,
on the other hand, is more controversial. Diemut Elisabet Bubeck (1995) puts meeting
needs ahead of particularity. She worries that requiring particularity would limit caring
only to close personal relationships and disallow us to care for others who may have
strong and urgent needs. In reply, many care ethicists agree with Noddings’s prioritiza-
tion of personal relationships though they also advocate extending particularistic caring
attitude to the public settings.
Whether particularistic caring is viable in non-personal settings, however, is dubitable.
Absent the support of strong emotional attachments and sustained interactions inherent
in close personal relationships, it requires tremendous conscious efforts and determina-
tion to capture the particularity of a stranger, if it can ever be done. Even if the practice
is feasible, it remains unclear whether public/social policy should require such practice.
Take the example of healthcare. It will be ideal if each patient’s particular needs are met
in a way that is attuned to her personality and circumstances. Such quality care, however,
must be prohibitively expensive. A more caring goal is to provide basic, generic, but
affordable, healthcare to more people who would otherwise be in poor or even inhumane
conditions. It is more realistic to accept that relations are inevitably more “extended and
thinner” in the public settings and that “considerations of care will not deal well with all
issues” (Held 2006: 136). Shouldn’t Care Ethics allow some form of impersonal ethics?
Particularity in the context of close personal relationships is also problematic. For
it is an unambiguous expression of individualism. It is ironic that many care ethicists
who so vehemently argue against, rightly or wrongly, liberalism’s stark individualism
and blindness to the relational nature of humans are themselves unconscious subscrib-
ers to individualism. Admittedly, for (good) close personal relationships anywhere,
there must be some degree of recognition between the individuals of each other’s per-
sonal traits, specific emotional contours, particular dreams and aversions. Each must
also value the other as a distinct and irreplaceable person. One does not love and will
not feel loved if particularistic recognition, given or taken, is totally absent. However,
it is another question whether this kind of particularity is constantly sought, empha-
sized, and celebrated in close personal relationships globally, especially for societies
that are more communitarian or collectivistic oriented. Yet it would be arrogant,
unfair and mistaken to judge personal relationships in those societies as less fulfill-
ing, deep or valuable. Focusing on the connectedness between herself as a mother

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and her child as a daughter, and seeing both as part of a cherished family, a Chinese
woman, for example, can be appreciated and loved dearly as a wonderful mother by
her children. Her identity can be constituted by her relationships with her children
to an equal, if not higher, degree as an ideal mother in Noddings’s account with-
out her practicing Noddings’s notions of engrossment or motivational displacement.
Instead of busily tending to the individual needs and traits of her children, she may
be preoccupied with creating common goods for the whole family: cooking a deli-
cious dinner, planning a family vacation, fixing up the bathroom and working for
an income. She endeavors tirelessly to forge and maintain a powerful bond binding
everyone in the family together, including herself and her daughter.
The third issue concerns the connection between Care Ethics and gender. As a
historical fact, Care Ethics was associated with feminism. Care Ethics was meant to
articulate women’s distinctive moral vision, a vision that was presumed to source from
and be grounded in the moral experience of women as carers. For a long time in his-
tory women have been assigned that role and often they discharge their caring duties
at the expense of their own interests and opportunities, sometimes voluntarily, some-
times not. Developing Care Ethics as a moral theory therefore can be understood as
a way in which women are empowered to find their own voice and perspective in the
ethical realm. A wide acceptance and practice of the theory evidences and further
enhances women’s power to shape the world in accordance with their vision and
values. Moreover, Care Ethics’ recognition of the ethical, social, cultural and political
significance of caring work will contribute to advance women’s status. In these ways,
Care Ethics constitutes a move towards attaining gender equality. And, as caring is
still mostly done by women, their experience and insights will continue to be a major
resource fueling the development of Care Ethics.
On the other hand, the content of Care Ethics has no inherent connection with
gender. Noddings stresses that both males and females can be carers (2003 [1984]: 4). If
we examine care ethics as ethicists and not as historians of ethics, we should not focus
on gender. Perhaps, as widely recognized by care ethicists such as Kittay, Ruddick, and
Held, the feminist goal will be served better if we exhort everyone, male and female, to
adopt the caring perspective, knowing that its wide acceptance will improve everyone’s
well-being, including, and, especially, that of women.

The Path of Comradeship in Caring

Confucians and care ethicists can definitely be comrades with the shared goal of pro-
moting caring and close personal relationships as ethical priorities. As comrades, they
should share experiences, insights, and raise friendly challenges to each other. Attempts
have indeed been made to use resources from Confucianism to inform Care Ethics
(Chan 2000a; Epley 2015). From the other end, the idea of family in Care Ethics is
considered when developing the model of modern Confucian family (Herr 2012).
One topic that Confucianism and care ethics should collaborate is: how to extend
from partial caring to general caring. The topic can be broken down into two parts:
(1) how to grow general caring from partial caring; and (2) how to promote and insti-
tute caring in the public settings.
Let us examine the second part first. Traditionally, Confucianism adopts a top-down
approach in instituting caring in the public setting. The ideal of “inner sage, outer

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king” entails that it is the responsibility of a few elites—the “sage” or the “junzi”—
who have acquired the virtue of ren and the privileged access to government, to enact
policies of ren. Unfortunately, the mass is excluded from sharing the task of general
caring. Perhaps, this approach was pragmatic in traditional China where authoritarian
governments allowed no mass political participation. Citizens’ political participation
makes this exclusion unacceptable today. Care Ethics as a newly developed theory
rooted in democratic societies should be able to demonstrate how to involve and
mobilize people to navigate caring in a public setting. Kittay’s work, for example, will
be a useful reference for the Confucians (Kittay 2001). On the other hand, if care
ethicists believe that the role of a government should not be limited to the protection
of rights or promotion of preference satisfaction but should include fostering the value
and practice of caring (Held 2006), then they should look at Confucianism with its
strong perfectionistic commitment.
Let us now turn to the issue of developing general caring from partial caring.
Due to its focus on promoting close personal relationships, Confucianism has
sometimes been criticized as breeding nepotism, cronyism, narrow familism, and
various kinds of unethical networking (Liu 2003). The practice of Confucianism
in history therefore provides good lessons, for better or for worse, for Care Ethicists
when they ponder the practical implications of their theories. The voluminous
scholarship on the Confucian developmental process would certainly shed light on
the issue of bridging partial and general caring. Moreover, Confucianism credits
general caring to multiple sources (e.g. compassion, following li) besides partial
caring. If care ethicists take general caring seriously, then perhaps they need to
re-examine Noddings’s idea that general caring stems merely from the memories of
being cared for or caring.
On the other hand, unlike Care Ethics, the development of Confucianism received
little input from women—the experts on the subject of caring due to their role as pri-
mary carers and the gender that has often been placed in a subordinate, dominated
position. Consequently, it is reasonable to speculate that Confucianism might be miss-
ing important insights about caring and power dynamic in relationships that might be
captured in Care Ethics. The importance of garnering input from one’s child, the object
of one’s caring, is an excellent example of such insight.
One thing that does not require speculation, however, is that when these two
accounts care more about each other, we will develop better caring!

Further Reading
Chan, Alan and Tan, Sor-hoon (Ed.) (2006) Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and History, London: Routledge.
(Contains many interesting discussions on the prized relationship-role virtue of filial piety.)
Chan, Joseph (2004) Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press. (Provides an in depth defense of perfectionism by appealing to Confucianism
conceptions.)
Dalmiya, Vrinda (2009) “Caring Comparisons: Thoughts on Comparative Care Ethics,” Journal of Chinese
Philosophy 36(2): 192–209. (An insightful piece comparing care ethics with Confucianism and Indian
philosophy.)
Sander-Staudt, Maureen (2006) “The Unhappy Marriage of Care Ethics and Virtue Ethics,” Hypatia
21(4): 21–39. (Examines various attempts to subsume care ethics under virtue ethics and recommends
the two accounts should collaborate but remain separate.)

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Related Topics
Dao becomes female (Chapter 3); feminist engagements with social contract theory
(Chapter 7); rationality and objectivity in feminist philosophy (Chapter 20); feminist
and queer intersections with disability studies (Chapter 33); feminist intersections
with environmentalism and ecological thoughts (Chapter 35); moral justification in
an unjust world (Chapter 40); feminist conceptions of autonomy (Chapter 41); fem-
inist metaethics (Chapter 42); feminist ethics of care (Chapter 43); feminist virtue
ethics (Chapter 45); feminist bioethics (Chapter 46); neoliberalism, global justice, and
transnational feminisms (Chapter 48); feminism, structural injustice, and responsibility
(Chapter 49); Latin American feminist ethics and politics (Chapter 50); feminism and
liberalism (Chapter 52).

References
Ames, Roger (2011) Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.
Blum, Lawrence (1994) Moral Perception and Particularity, London: Routledge.
Bubeck, Diemut Elisabet (1995) Care, Gender and Justice, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Card, Claudia (1990) “Caring and Evil,” Hypatia 5(1): 101–108.
Chan, Sin Yee (1993) An Ethic of Loving: Ethical Particularism and the Engaged Perspective, Dissertation, Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan.
—— (2000a) “Can ‘Shu’ Be the One World that Serves as the Guiding Principle of Caring Actions?”
Philosophy East and West 50(4): 507–524.
—— (2000b) “Gender and Relationship Roles in the ‘Analects’ and the ‘Mencius,’” Asian Philosophy 10(2):
115–132.
Davion, Victoria (1993) “Autonomy, Integrity, and Care,” Social Theory and Practice 19(2): 161–182.
Epley, Kelly (2015) “Care Ethics and Confucianism: Caring through Li,” Hypatia 30(4): 881–896.
Gilligan, Carol (1982) In a Different Voice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Halwani, Raja (2003) “Care Ethics and Virtue Ethics,” Hypatia 18(3): 161–192.
Held, Virginia (2006) The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global, New York: Oxford University Press.
Herr, Ranjoo (2012) “Confucian Family for a Feminist Future,” Asian Philosophy 22(4): 327–346.
Kittay, Eva (2001) “A Feminist Public Ethic of Care Meets the New Communitarian Family Policy,” Ethics
111: 523–547
Lai, Karyn (2013) Learning from Chinese Philosophies: Ethics of Interdependent and Contextualised Self,
Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Li, Chenyang (1994) “The Concept of Jen and the Feminist Ethic of Care,” Hypatia 9(1): 70–89.
—— (2015) “Confucian Ethics and Care Ethics: The Political Dimension of a Scholarly Debate,” Hypatia
30(4): 897–903.
Liu, Qingping (2003) “Filiality versus Sociality and Individuality: On Confucianism as ‘Consanguinitism,’”
Philosophy East and West 53(2): 234–250.
Noddings, Nell (2003 [1984]) Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, 2nd ed., Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
—— (2010) The Maternal Factor: Two Paths to Morality, Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of
California Press.
Pang-White, Ann (2011) “Caring in Confucian Philosophy,” Philosophy Compass 6(6): 374–384.
Ruddick, Sara (1998) “Care as Labor and Relationship,” in Mark Halfon and Joram Haber (Eds.) Norms and
Values: Essays on the Work of Virginia Held, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 3–25.
Shun, Kwong-loi (1993) “Jen and Li, in the ‘Analects,’” Philosophy East and West 43(3): 457–479.
Sim, May (2015) “Why Confucian Ethics Is a Virtue Ethics,” in Lorraine Besser-Jones and Michael Slote
(Eds.) The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics, New York: Routledge, 63–76.

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Star, Daniel (2002) “Do Confucians Really Care? A Defense of the Distinctiveness of Care Ethics: A Reply
to Chenyang Li,” Hypatia 17(1): 77–106.
—— (1997) Mencius and Early Chinese Thought, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Slote, Michael (2001) Morals from Motives, New York: Oxford University Press.
Tao, Julia (2000) “Two Perspectives of Care: Confucian Ren and Feminist Care,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy
27(2): 215–240.
Tronto, Joan C. (1993) Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York: Routledge.
Tu, Wei-ming (1985) Confucian Thought, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Yuan, Lijuan (2002) “Ethics of Care and Concept of Jen: A Reply to Chenyang Li,” Hypatia 17(1): 107–129.

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 45
FEMINIST VIRTUE ETHICS
Robin S. Dillon

Feminist virtue ethics is an approach to issues in moral philosophy that draws from both
one of the oldest approaches, virtue ethics, and one of the more recent developments
in ethical theorizing, feminist ethics. It brings to the concerns that animate feminist
ethics a particular orientation to the moral life, a set of questions, and an array of con-
cepts that have long been of importance in virtue ethics, and to the concerns that
animate virtue ethics, a certain perspective, a set of questions, and tools and methods
that are distinctively feminist. Thus, an understanding of feminist virtue ethics requires
understanding something of both traditional virtue ethics and feminist ethics.

Virtue Ethics, Feminist Ethics, and Feminist Virtue Ethics

Virtue Ethics
Traditional normative ethics can be understood to address four interrelated moral ques-
tions: How should we act and how can we determine what actions are right? What
should we value and how should we value it? What kind of person(s) is it good to be
and how should such a person live? How would it be best for all of us to live together?
An ethical theory may address all four questions and issues related to them, but differ-
ent kinds of theories can be distinguished by which question they prioritize or focus on.
Traditional virtue ethics focuses on the third question. Rather than centering actions
and the principles that should guide them, as is the case with deontological and conse-
quentialist theories, virtue ethical theories address the whole trajectory of human lives
and ways that it would be best to live; and rather than taking the kind of persons we
should be to be wholly determined by, e.g., our duties to act rightly, virtue ethics works
with rich conceptions of admirable qualities of character, or virtues, which compose the
kinds of lives that it is good for human beings to live but that are not reducible to fol-
lowing moral rules. On this approach, the moral task facing a person is that of striving to
develop and exercise the moral virtues that will enable her to live well. Virtue ethics is
the oldest form of moral philosophy, tracing its origins to ancient Greek philosophy. It
was eclipsed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the development of Kantian
deontology and utilitarianism, but was revived in the late 1950s and 1960s and is now
regarded as one of the chief contemporary approaches to ethics. (The approach has also
been taken up in epistemology by theorists who examine intellectual virtues, traits that
contribute to doing well as a cognizer. While there are interesting connections between
intellectual virtues and moral virtues, this essay will focus just on the latter.)
 Feminist virtue ethics

There are a variety of theories that can be classified as virtue ethics, but they all share
an emphasis on virtues of character as an organizing concept for philosophical inquiry. A
person’s character is the kind of person she is, morally speaking—a kind or inconsider-
ate one, a brave or cowardly one, a trustworthy or unreliable one, overall a good person
or a despicable one. Typically, “character” refers not to what makes someone a unique
individual, but, rather, to a person’s overall ethical structure and so to the combination
of qualities that make someone, on the whole, a morally admirable person or an unwor-
thy one. A moral virtue is a specific trait of character that makes a person to that extent
morally admirable, while a vice is a character trait that makes a person to that extent
unworthy of admiration, despicable or shameful, or even wicked. Virtues and vices are
what Rosalind Hursthouse (1999) calls “complex mindsets” that involve relatively settled
patterns of sensibility, perception, attention, reasoning, value, interest, desire, attitude,
emotion, commitment, expectation, motive, choice, and action.
Two approaches to virtue ethics have been of particular interest to feminist theo-
rists. The first, and traditionally dominant, approach is eudaimonism. The Greek term
“eudaimonia” refers to the good life for a human, which is a life of long-term well-being,
happiness, or flourishing. According to Aristotle, whose ethics is the paradigm eudai-
monistic theory, the flourishing life is the greatest good and the ultimate aim of all
human activity. To flourish as a human is to live a rich and fulfilling life in which one
engages well or excellently in the activities that are distinctively human. Chief among
these is rational activity, which includes not only thinking and reasoning but also
acting, desiring, and experiencing emotions in ways that are guided by practical wisdom.
The virtues, as dispositions to engage in excellent rational activity in this broad sense,
are necessary for or partially constitutive of human flourishing. Thus, on this view,
nothing counts as a virtue that is not beneficial in this way to its possessor, and the
possession of (enough or particular) vices precludes living a good life. While the virtues
are necessary for flourishing, they are not sufficient; as Aristotle recognizes, external
goods, especially an appropriate social context and proper education, are also necessary.
Attention to social context gives eudaimonism a potentially critical orientation that
has made it attractive to many feminist theorists.
The other approach includes a variety of non-eudaimonistic virtue theories that take
virtue and morality to depend on feelings and feeling-based motivations rather than
on reason or rationality and that regard the virtuousness of a character trait as not
dependent on its contribution to the possessor’s long-term welfare. Because this kind
of approach emphasizes emotional aspects of our nature, which have been marginalized
by the male-dominant rationalistic theories of Enlightenment philosophy, it has been
appealing to other feminist theorists.

Feminist Ethics
By contrast with the long tradition of virtue ethics, this is a relatively new approach in
normative ethics, developing only since the 1980s as increasing numbers of women phi-
losophers who self-identify as feminists have entered the profession. It is distinguished
from other ethical approaches by its concern with the moral status of women and its
critical examination of the cultural devaluation of women and everything feminine. It
cuts across all of the central questions of normative ethics, asking each in a way that
centers the subordination in society of women and women’s interests to men and men’s
interests. A defining tenet of feminist ethics is that the systematic subordination of any

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group of humans is wrong, and so feminist ethics seeks to develop practical approaches
to subverting the subordination of all peoples but especially women. Feminist ethics
is also concerned with the depreciation or exclusion in moral philosophy of women’s
perspectives. It takes the experiences of women to be as worthy of respect and concern
as men’s, and so it seeks to revise or rethink aspects of ethical concepts, methods, and
theories that ignore or denigrate women’s experiences.
The concepts of gender and power are focal for feminist ethics. Margaret Walker,
for example, holds that “feminist ethics is inevitably and fundamentally about moral-
ity and power and the moral meaning of relations of unequal power” (Walker 2001: 4);
indeed, as Susan Sherwin says, “feminist ethics asks about power, about domination
and subordination, even before it asks about good and evil” (Sherwin 1992: 54).
Feminist ethics begins with the recognition that in human societies that are organized
along lines of gendered hierarchies of power and so in which women are subordinated
and men are privileged (which is to say, all known societies), gender makes a great
deal of difference to how human lives go and to how social institutions and practices,
including the practices of mainstream moral philosophy, are structured, function, and
shape our lives individually and collectively. The questions feminist ethics asks about
action, values, character, thought, emotion, motivation, responsibility, and individual
and collective lives take seriously the contexts of unequal power, opportunities, and
possibilities into which we are born, in which we develop, from which we absorb
values that affirm some kinds of us and devalue others kinds of us, and in which we
live together, some kinds of us privileged because other kinds of us are constrained,
marginalized, exploited, or harmed.

Feminist Virtue Ethics

Feminist virtue ethics can be understood, then, as an approach to moral theorizing that
examines issues of character critically in light of gender and power, and highlights char-
acter dimensions of gendered subordination and dominance. As feminist, it is critical
of traditional virtue ethics insofar as the latter’s lack of explicit, prioritized attention to
the effects of systemic forces of unjust power hierarchies on the constitutions of selves
makes it liable to define virtue and vice in general, and specific virtues and vices, in
ways that reinforce domination values, and liable also to distort what would count as
flourishing of both those who are subordinated and those who are privileged in vari-
ous power hierarchies. As virtue-theoretic, it holds that examinations of character are
important for understanding the nature, mechanisms, and harms of oppression and for
envisioning possibilities for genuinely free and fully human lives.
Susan Moller Okin once asked, “How does virtue ethics look from a feminist point
of view—that is to say, from a perspective that expects women and men to be treated
as equally human and due equal concern and respect?” (Okin 1996: 211). We can now
identify a number of features characteristic of feminist virtue ethics (hereafter, FVE)
that distinguish it from both traditional virtue ethics (TVE) and feminist ethics more
generally (FE). I will highlight three.
First, as feminist, FVE has an explicitly political orientation and aim: it shares with
FE the goal of theorizing women’s subordination in order to help end it, but does so by
focusing on character and lives and on philosophical theories about character and lives.
In particular, FVE theorists address distortions of character that are engendered under
conditions of subordination and privilege and that contribute to the maintenance of

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oppression; they identify virtues that might enable their possessors to resist or struggle
against oppression in morally justifiable and non-self-corrupting ways; they bring to the
foreground virtues and vices that have been neglected by TVE or that take on a new
significance, even a different valence, when viewed from a feminist perspective; and
they envision possibilities for all human beings of developing genuinely good characters
and living humane, free, and mutually respectful lives in just societies.
Feminist theorists have also been concerned to identify ways in which traditional
Western philosophical approaches to virtue, such as the accounts of Aristotle, Hume,
Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, reinforce the devaluation and subordi-
nation of women. Accounts like these, Nancy Snow says,

either expound different lists of virtues that apply separately to men and
women and privilege men’s virtues over women’s; apply the same virtues, such
as chastity, unequally to men and women; or elaborate social roles with accom-
panying virtues—such as wife and mother—that require women to subordinate
themselves to men.
(1992: 34–35)

More troubling is the way such accounts

set identity conditions for women by making descriptive claims about women’s
nature that have normative implications for the kinds of virtues women can
hope to achieve . . . [and so] limit who they can and should be. At their worst,
these claims deny women’s full and equal humanity.
(Snow 1992: 34–35)

Thus an important task for FVE is to develop accounts of virtue and vice that express
right valuing of women. This involves rethinking traditional virtues and vices, as well
as identifying heretofore unacknowledged virtues and vices. More interestingly, it has
proved to involve the transvaluation of traditional virtues and vice. Traits that have
traditionally been regarded as virtues, particular those thought to be distinctive of
“good women,” such as patience, obedience, and humility, have been reconceptualized
as vices that contribute to women’s continued subordination, while other traits tradi-
tionally regarded as vices, or vices of women, such as defiance, distrustfulness, unreli-
ability, and arrogance, have been reclaimed as liberatory virtues.
A second feature of FVE is its emphasis on the great significance for character and
life possibilities of social contexts and social institutions as shaped by hierarchies of
power. This focus makes FVE, unlike most TVE, both non-universalizing and more
likely to hold that the characters of individuals cannot be understood or evaluated in
isolation from social context. TVE is a universalizing approach: it typically assumes that
character psychology is universally human, that virtues and vices are linked to human
goodness and human flourishing, and that all humans are liable to the same deficiencies
of character for which the same virtues are universally corrective. But FVE holds social
contexts shape psychologies differently, depending on the social location of individuals,
that social context matters to the development of various character traits and to pos-
sibilities for flourishing, and that differently situated people may be subject to different
kinds of character problems calling for different forms of character transformation, or
may have opportunities or the need to develop different, context-specific virtues. FVE

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also recognizes that social and theoretical conceptions of virtues, vices, and flourishing
are linked in important ways to conceptions of gender: traits have long been differ-
entially identified as virtues or vices depending on whether it is women or men who
possess and exercise them.
TVE also has an individualist focus: it evaluates character based on facts about indi-
viduals’ psychologies, such as individuals’ motivations, values, and cognitive, affective,
and desiderative dispositions, and it regards individuals as having primary responsibil-
ity for the development of their characters and sole responsibility for maintaining or
changing them. FVE, by contrast, takes the more realistic view that character disposi-
tions are inculcated, nurtured, directed, shaped, and given significance and value by
social interactions, institutions, cultural understandings, and traditions. Thus, certain
character traits may not be well understood or even visible apart from particular social
contexts; some FVE theories, such as Nancy Potter’s (2002) account of trustworthiness,
maintain that some virtues and vices are not dispositions of individuals at all but are
constituted by relations among individuals. Moreover, FVE recognizes that individuals
are never the sole architects of their own characters, that it may take interpersonal
interaction or social change to make character transformation possible, and that social
circumstances can damage people’s characters in ways that are not reparable.
In emphasizing issues of character development and transformation, FVE has also, as
TVE has not, called attention to which groups are assigned what kinds of responsibility,
and with what kind of acknowledgement (or lack thereof), for what dimensions of char-
acter development and transformation; and it asks how relationships and institutions
would have to be reconfigured so that no group of humans is excluded from the possibility
of becoming and staying good and living flourishing lives. As Okin has argued, even
when TVE accounts, such as Aristotle’s, attend to character development and point
to the importance of proper moral education, they typically covertly rely on women,
who are subordinated in the family and the larger society, to do the important work of
guiding character development in early childhood, while simultaneously regarding
women as inherently defective beings who are incapable of full human virtue, with-
out facing the question of how children could develop good moral characters within a
“defective,” not to mention unjust, environment.
A third feature of FVE is one essential to FE generally, according to Alison Jaggar
(1991): FVE takes women’s experiences seriously, but not uncritically. Because some
FE theories give special emphasis to women’s experiences in relationships, particularly
mothering and caring for dependent elderly, disabled, and infirm persons, which have
long been neglected in mainstream philosophy, some FVE theories attend especially to
virtues that are important for good mothering and caring. Insofar as FVE views women’s
experiences critically, it takes them as likely to reflect in manifold ways the interplay of
subordinating and privileging contexts of diverse women’s lives. In particular, it is alive
to the possibility that in contexts of oppression, the characters of both subordinated and
privileged people can have been distorted in ways that makes it difficult if not impos-
sible for them to live flourishing lives.

Care Ethics and Virtue Ethics

One prominent branch of feminist ethics with virtue theoretic dimensions is care ethics.
Drawing on the work of psychologist Carol Gilligan (1982), who identified a distinctive
moral voice speaking a language of care that emphasizes relationships and responsibilities,

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in contrast to the dominant voice in moral philosophy whose language of justice stresses
rights and principles, feminist theorists such as Nel Noddings (1984), Sara Ruddick
(1989), Eva Kittay (1999), and Virginia Held (2006) have developed theories that com-
mend virtues and values traditionally linked to women and activities for which women
have traditionally born the primary responsibility. These theories emphasize the kinds of
human relationships that hold between unequal and interdependent persons, including
mothers and children, those Kittay refers to as “dependency workers” and dependents,
and in general caregivers and those cared for. While the initial focus of care ethics was on
personal relationships in the private realm, these theorists and others have argued that
values central to care ethics can and should be extended to the public realm, relations
among strangers, and even global contexts (e.g., Khader 2011).
Although some care theorists maintain that care should be understood primarily as a
practice rather than as a virtue, others have developed accounts in a non-eudaimonistic
vein that focus on emotion-based care as a virtue or on virtues that develop or are needed
in care-taking or relational contexts. For example, in Maternal Thinking Ruddick analyses
what she calls “maternal practice,” identifying several virtues, such as the ability to see
things in perspective, humility, cheerfulness, and conscientiousness, that equip mothers
to engage in activities necessary both to realize the maternal goals of preserving the lives
and fostering the growth of their children and also to negotiate tensions between train-
ing children to conform to society’s needs and expectations and encouraging them to
challenge morally objectionable social norms.
Early versions of care ethics drew criticisms from many feminists who identified
problems facing the project of what Barbara Houston (1987) called “rescuing womanly
virtues.” While virtues such as care, compassion, sympathy, and altruism have long been
assigned to women, not only have these traits been valued less than virtues traditionally
assigned to men, such as justice, rationality, and self-sufficiency, but the gendering of
caring virtues bolsters the subordinating view that women are well-suited to domestic
duties but unsuited to public life. An uncritical valorization of care, critics fear, may
promote gender essentialism by implying that the virtues of caring are ones that only
women can have or that all women have—so that caring is something that all and only
women should do—or it may reinforce the view that women’s other-directed care is
virtuous no matter the cost to the carer; and in either case it would buttress rather than
undermine women’s continued subordination. Nevertheless, many feminist theorists
regard care as the sine qua non of genuinely good human relations, and so they have
engaged in rethinking virtues of care to avoid reinforcing subordinating implications.
While the task of retrieving virtues of care from distortions wrought by women’s
subordination is one with which many FVE theorists may agree, there is a debate about
how to understand the general relation between care ethics and virtue ethics. Some
theorists such as Michael Slote (2007) and Margaret McLaren (2001) situate care ethics
within virtue ethics. Slote, for example, takes the morality of caring to be best understood
as a form of non-eudaimonistic, “agent-based” virtue ethics, in which caring motivation
is the most basic feature of morality. McLaren highlight similarities between virtue ethics
and care ethics, such as that both emphasize relationality, partiality, and emotions, both
hold that intentions and actions are important, and both take the concrete, particular
aspects of moral situations to be morally salient. She argues that embedding care ethics
in virtue ethics allows the dissociation of care from gender and so from subordinating
feminine stereotypes. Other theorists, such as Maureen Sanders-Staudt (2006), resist
the “marriage” of care ethics and virtue ethics. Sanders-Staudt highlights differences

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between care ethics and virtue ethics, opposes subsuming care ethics under virtue
ethics, and argues for, at most, a collaborative relationship that preserves the distinc-
tively feminist dimensions of care ethics. We could also see in the appropriation of
care ethics by virtue ethicists a theoretical recapitulation of the social subordination of
women’s work, both domestic and philosophical. In my view, any connection between
care ethics and virtue ethics must not only preserve but also give priority in moral theo-
rizing to the feminist goal of examining the subordination of women and seeking to end
it. But given that some virtue theorists define “virtue ethics” as giving priority to virtue
concepts in theorizing morality, it is not at all clear whether a care-virtue ethics that
prioritizes a feminist orientation, rather than merely valorizing traditionally feminine
virtue or treating care as a non-gendered virtue, is even possible.

Critical Feminist Eudaimonism

Care ethics was for some time the dominant approach in feminist ethics and so femi-
nist discussions of virtue. More recently, however, as feminist ethics has broadened,
so feminist work on virtues has embraced other approaches, especially eudaimonism.
Despite the sexism inherent in his writings, Aristotle’s virtue ethics has been of par-
ticular importance. For example, some of Martha Nussbaum’s work on the capability
approach to justice and development ethics, especially as it affects women, draws on
an Aristotelian view of human flourishing (Nussbaum 1992; 2000). According to this
view, because humans have certain inherent capabilities the development and exercise
of which is essential for living a life that is both recognizably human and flourishing,
justice requires that societies be organized so as to enable every human to flourish by
developing and exercising the distinctively human capabilities. Marcia Homiak has
argued that Aristotle’s ideal of the flourishing for a rational being provides valuable
resources for feminist theory and has defended his account against charges of elitism
that, if applicable, would make it uncongenial for feminist theorizing (Homiak 1993;
2010). Among the most interesting work in feminist eudaimonism is that of Lisa
Tessman. In a series of essays and her book, Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory
Struggles (2005), Tessman draws on a reconstructed Aristotelian eudaimonism to focus
on ways that oppression can damage character and so interfere with flourishing.
Aristotelian eudaimonism takes the flourishing life to be the ultimate aim of all
human activity. Tessman holds further that flourishing is the implicit aim of liberatory
struggles and an ideal that guides feminist activism, and that flourishing provides a
framework for analyzing the badness of oppression. Instead of focusing, as does tradi-
tional Aristotelian eudaimonism, on the goodness of the virtuous and flourishing life,
Tessman employs eudaimonism to focus on ways that oppression seriously harms peo-
ple. She identifies three kinds of character-related harm. First, oppression can impede
the development or exercise of certain virtues or encourage the development of certain
vices, such as dishonesty, cunning, or manipulativeness. Since the possession of virtue
and the absence of vice are required for flourishing, oppression thus interferes with
individuals living good lives. And if the virtues that can’t be developed are precisely
those that would enable people to resist their oppression, character damage can help
sustain subordination. Second, surviving or resisting oppression can require the culti-
vation of traits, which Tessman calls “burdened virtues,” that are virtues only under
non-ideal conditions, that do not contribute to the possessor’s well-being, and that one
has good reason to regret having to cultivate. So, whereas Aristotle held that virtues

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necessarily contribute to or constitute the possessor’s flourishing, Tessman argues

that oppression disrupts the connection between virtue and flourishing. Third, while
Aristotelian eudaimonism emphasizes that virtues contribute to the possessor’s well-
being, Tessman holds that a trait cannot count as a virtue if it does not also contribute
to the general flourishing of the members of an inclusive community.
Several criticisms have been raised against feminist eudaimonism. One is a version of
a question as old as Plato: is it indeed the case that the wicked cannot flourish? Marilyn
Friedman (2009) has argued that it is not obvious that, e.g., men who live lives of privi-
lege and are socially supported in their view of themselves as good persons living good
lives aren’t happy or living well. Yet such a claim has to be made for feminist eudai-
monism to have any motivational power for ending domination. This leads to a second
criticism. The justification that eudaimonistic theories provide for ending domination
and subordination points primarily to the consequences for the possessors of virtue or
vice (and, on Tessman’s view, for other members of the community). Since most of
those putatively experiencing the character harms from oppression don’t perceive their
lives as unhappy and defective, the virtue-consequentialist justification strikes some
theorists as a less strong moral argument against oppression than, say, a Kantian one
that centers the inherent injustice of not respecting all persons as equals. A third criti-
cism addresses the conceptual relation between flourishing and virtues. Feminist eudai-
monism needs liberatory accounts of both. But the history of accounts of virtues that
rationalize the subordination of women makes the project of developing an account of
flourishing from a list of virtues problematic. It would seem, then, that a specific account
of flourishing is required in order to determine which traits of character are really virtues
and which are vices. But, as Macalester Bell (2006) has noted, different theorists and
groups engaged in liberatory struggle, such as liberal feminists and lesbian separatists,
have quite different conceptions of flourishing; which one should be the basis for FVE?
Fully resolving these problems requires further work on flourishing, virtues, and vices.

Feminist Accounts of Specific Virtues and Vices

An alternative TVE approach that avoids many of the problems associated with both
care virtue ethics and feminist eudaimonism is Christine Swanton’s (2003) target
account of virtue. On this account, a virtue is disposition to respond in an excellent way
to objects, people, actions, situations, etc., that are in the field, or sphere of concern, of
the virtue. For example, the traditional virtue of courage is the disposition to respond
excellently to dangerous situations. Although it has not received much explicit atten-
tion from feminist theorists, Swanton’s approach has several features that recommend
it for feminist theorizing: it is pluralistic, allowing that different kinds of virtues and
vices might be analyzed in quite different ways, so it doesn’t require, e.g., privileging
one among the many accounts of flourishing; it is non-idealizing, so it doesn’t require
reconstruction to be able to address the non-ideal circumstances of oppression; and its
call for analyses of contexts, targets, and responses gives room for distinctively feminist
analyses that center issues of gender and power. In not being tied to a particular kind of
virtue theory, such as eudaimonism, the target approach also fits with an interesting fea-
ture of feminist virtue theorizing: most of the work in this area has not been concerned
to develop full-blown ethical theories but has focused on analyses of specific virtues or
vices. Although there are, of course, problems with Swanton’s account, I think feminist
work on virtues and vices might be helped by drawing explicitly on such an approach.

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Feminist theorists have addressed specific virtues and vices in three ways. First, some
have identified new virtues or vices or brought forward neglected ones. For example,
care virtue theorists have moved caring virtues to the center of ethics; Ruddick ana-
lyzed maternal humility; Tessman has identified the burdened virtues of sensitivity and
attentiveness to others’ unjust suffering and of hard resolve against oppressors; Margaret
Walker (1991) has drawn attention to grace and lucidity as “virtues of impure agency”
in contexts of moral bad luck, such as oppression; Rebecca Whisnant (2004) analyzed
self-centering as a virtue for resisting sexist exploitation and for maintaining oneself
as a fully responsible person. Second, theorists have analyzed traditional virtues and
vices in new ways. For example, Cheshire Calhoun (1995) and Victoria Davion (1991)
developed accounts of integrity that take seriously the experiences of people facing
multiple and conflicting oppressions; Anne Barnhill (2012) has developed an account
of modesty as a female sexual virtue that promotes feminist change; Macalester Bell’s
(2009) examination of the Aristotelian virtue of appropriate anger in the non-ideal
conditions of life under oppression leads her to argue that its justification as a virtue
should not appeal to considerations of flourishing; Marilyn Frye (1983) has argued that
arrogance is at the heart of male domination; I have developed feminist accounts of
self-respect (Dillon 2004). Other traditional virtues and vices explored by FVE theorists
include justice, inattention, honesty, submissiveness, generosity, chastity, shame, self-
trust, trustworthiness, responsibility, hospitality, and decency.
Finally, some theorists have engaged in transvaluation of character traits, arguing
that some traits traditionally viewed as virtues are actually vices that keep women
subordinated, or advocating other traits, traditionally viewed as vices, as feminist vir-
tues. For example, Claudia Card (1996) argued that women’s gratitude to men who
don’t abuse them or who protect them in quid pro quo arrangements is a vice, and
that politeness is not a feminist virtue but feisty insubordination is (Card 1991);
in contrast to the dominant view that trust is unqualifiedly a virtue, Annette Baier
(1994) took a more cautious approach, advocating women’s cultivation of appropriate
distrust in exploitative conditions; Lisa Heldke has praised unreliability (1997) and
being a responsible traitor (1998); Bell (2006) and I (Dillon 2012) have suggested
that arrogance might be a virtue that enables subordinated people to demand respect
and develop self-respect. Among other traits that have been seen in different lights by
FVE theorists are forgiveness, defiance, altruism, bitterness, obedience, resentfulness,
self-coherence, envy, selflessness, selfishness, vulnerability, and deference.
One valuable aspect of feminist work in this area has been an increased emphasis
on vice. VE has assumed that people are mostly good and so has emphasized virtues
(hence, the name of the approach). But it is implausible that mostly good people
could create and maintain oppressive structures, or participate in them in ignorance
of the manifest injustice of their societies, or actively resist emancipatory efforts;
and yet innumerably many of us do just these things. Tessman (2005) and Anita
Superson (2004) identify a number of traits that Tessman calls “ordinary vices of
domination,” which enable members of dominant groups to maintain their domi-
nance without thinking themselves unjust. The widespread possession of these vices
entails that dominants as well as subordinates, and hence most people, do not live
flourishing lives. Continued work on vices of domination, as well as vices of the
oppressed that reinforce continued subordination, would be of great value to feminist
ethics for understanding the nature and mechanisms of oppression and what needs to
be done towards emancipation. In highlighting the character issues connected with

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unjust hierarchies of power, uncovering heretofore ignored admirable dimensions of

women’s lives, and identifying virtues needed for resisting oppression and living fully
human lives, feminist virtue ethics has already made a tremendous contribution to
moral philosophy.

Related Topics
Feminism and ancient Greek philosophy (Chapter 2); personal identity and relational
selves (Chapter 18); feminist ethics of care (Chapter 43); Confucianism and care ethics
(Chapter 44); feminist bioethics (Chapter 46); feminism and freedom (Chapter 53);
feminism and power (Chapter 54).

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 46
FEMINIST BIOETHICS
Wendy A. Rogers

Introduction
Bioethics emerged as an academic discipline in the 1960s and 1970s, largely in
response to social and technological changes that challenged established attitudes
and practices. Questions arose concerning the rights of patients and research par-
ticipants, while the use of emerging medical technologies raised moral questions
about the nature of life, decision-making and the legitimate boundaries of medicine.
Bioethics as a discipline sought to foster ethical debate about challenging cases;
provide ethical guidance to physicians and researchers about practice; and advise
governmental authorities regarding relevant policy. However, the nascent discipline
seemed oblivious to many of the gendered aspects of healthcare and the ways that
healthcare practices reinforced oppressive gender norms. Entrenched gender biases
in the foundational disciplines of bioethics such as philosophy, law, medicine, and
theology were transplanted largely intact into the new discipline. By the late 1980s,
feminist bioethicists, drawing upon feminist ethics and epistemology, started to
challenge the gendered norms and assumptions of bioethics. While early feminist
attention focused on reproductive practices, a sustained critique of the assumptions
and theoretical approaches of traditional bioethics emerged during the 1990s. Since
then, contributions of feminist bioethics have shaped the way that central bioethical
notions, such as autonomy, are conceptualized; provoked methodological diversity;
and extended the agenda of bioethics to include global and social issues far beyond the
initially narrow concerns of medical care and biomedical research.
Alison Jaggar acknowledges the challenge of characterizing feminist approaches
to ethics, but nonetheless, identifies three “minimum conditions of adequacy for any
approach to ethics that purports to be feminist” (1989: 910). These are: to offer
action guides aimed at subverting the subordination of women; to span both the
public and the private realms; and, to take seriously, but not uncritically, the experi-
ences of all women. Following Jaggar, the term “feminist bioethics” is used here to
describe an approach to bioethics that takes gender to be a central analytic category,
and that is concerned with identifying and seeking to change relations of oppression
and domination (Sherwin 1992). Within this broad definition, there are many differ-
ences among feminist bioethicists in terms of methodology, theoretical foundations,
focus, and so forth.
 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

In what follows, I describe some of the broad concerns motivating feminist bioethics
before describing substantive and methodological contributions made by feminist bio-
ethics to the field. The chapter ends with a survey of future directions and emerging
topics attracting feminist analysis.

Bioethics and Gender

Feminist bioethics is premised upon the notion that both the focus of traditional
bioethics, and its very concepts, are imbued with unacknowledged androcentric bias,
thereby marginalising gender as a significant category when considering the ethical
issues that arise in the biological and life sciences. Yet gender permeates the subject
matter of bioethics in multiple ways. Hierarchies and power relations are ubiqui-
tous within the institutions and practices of healthcare, often to the disadvantage
of women. Gender bias exists in research, and in the definition of various conditions
that track gender. There are gendered aspects to many medical interventions; while
gendered patterns associated with social inequities and the distribution of resources
perpetuate women’s poverty and oppression. While women are marginalized as a
group in male dominated societies, nonetheless there are also hierarchies and ineq-
uities among women themselves due to race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and so forth,
which intersect in various ways with explicitly gendered hierarchies.
Gender-based hierarchies are widespread within healthcare. Men continue to
dominate high-prestige and high-income medical specialties, while the nursing
workforce remains largely feminized, creating an inter-professional knowledge and
power hierarchy. Those providing personal care are further disenfranchised. In
healthcare consultations, women are more likely to be patients than men for reasons
including higher rates of morbidity, gendered patterns of help-seeking behavior, and
the medicalization of normal female reproductive functions. These factors replicate
wider societal patterns in which men are seen as experts, well suited to rational
decision-making based upon privileged knowledge, while women are associated with
the irrationalities of the flesh and a lack of knowledge and expertise, especially where
this is based upon personal experience.
Implicit hierarchies of knowledge and power contribute to both gender essential-
ism and insensibility to gender in healthcare. The former manifests in viewing women
largely in terms of their reproductive capacities, leading to a focus on the medical man-
agement of various aspects of reproductive functions ranging from menstruation to
menopause; and the associated skewing of research on women towards disorders affect-
ing the female reproductive tract (Rogers and Ballantyne 2008). Gender essentialism
also underlies the historic (and in some areas) continuing exclusion of women from
research due to concerns that they may be, or become, pregnant thus risking harm to
the fetus, or that the menstrual cycle will unduly interfere with research results.
Gender insensibility exerts the opposite effect by denying any significant difference
between men and women such that the results of research performed with exclusively
male cohorts are deemed to be equally applicable to women. This approach takes no
account of relevant physiological or anatomical differences between men and women
that can affect both manifestations of disease and responses to treatment (Adshead
2011; Bluhm 2011; Mosca et  al. 2011). In addition, it fails to apprehend the wide-
reaching impact of entrenched gender norms on all aspects of health and healthcare.
Taken together, gender insensibility and gender essentialism result in a skewing of

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medical attention towards the female reproductive tract and its functions, and away
from other health problems that affect women just as much as men.
Gender bias, evident in the ways that diseases are defined, diagnosed and treated,
illustrates another way in which gender and bioethics intersect. There is a long history
of associating femaleness with madness, reflected in gendering within psychiatric diag-
nostic categories (Chesler 2005; Bluhm 2011; Gould 2011). In diseases that affect both
men and women, there are gendered patterns in medical responses to presentations
of the same disorders. Cardiovascular disease, for example, has been under recognized
and under treated in women, with men more likely than women to receive appropriate
interventions; and women are under treated for pain compared with men (Hoffman
and Tarzian 2001). There may be many reasons for these gender-based disparities. They
may, for example, reflect stereotypical views about women’s behavior or propensity to
complain, but at the very least, findings such as these indicate that gender equity in
healthcare is an ongoing challenge.
Next, some of the signature technological advances that ignited interest in bioeth-
ics relate to reproduction, and are mediated in and through the bodies of women.
Assisted reproductive technologies, from artificial insemination and in vitro ferti-
lization through to surrogacy and uterus transplantations, take place exclusively in
female bodies. Likewise the creation of embryos for donation or research is a gen-
dered activity, with different consequences for those donating ova rather than sperm
(Dickenson 2006). Abortion is a perennially contentious topic in bioethics, where
mainstream discussions tended to focus on the status of the fetus while failing to take
account of the unavoidable impact of continuing or terminating a pregnancy on the
woman involved (Tooley 1972; Marquis 1989).
Finally, in what is by no means an exhaustive list of the ways that gender is central
to its subject matter, bioethics is concerned with issues of justice, ranging from local
resource allocation decisions through to global inequities. Around the globe, women
are over-represented among the socio-economically disadvantaged, have access to
fewer material resources than men, and form the vast majority of those providing per-
sonal care to others. These are clearly matters of social injustice in their own right,
but these social inequities are amplified through the effects of social disadvantage on
health, leading to inequitable burdens of morbidity on women.
All of the factors discussed briefly above support the view that the central con-
cerns of bioethics are deeply gendered, and that gender is a morally relevant category
when discussing and analyzing the ethical issues associated with healthcare and the life
sciences. Yet, as Susan Wolf notes (1996), bioethics was relatively oblivious to gender
and slow to adopt relevant developments in feminist ethics and epistemology. Wolf
attributes this tardiness to a number of causes. First, from its earliest inception, bioethics
was concerned with the rights of patients and research participants. This led to a focus
on decision-making in the clinical/research encounter, understood in terms of indi-
vidual autonomy. Drawing upon the resources of liberal individualism, the autonomous
individual was conceptualized in terms of isolated and self-serving decision-making; a
being bereft of morally significant relationships and with no identifiable group charac-
teristics, such as race or gender.
Second, bioethics was dominated by principles, understood as universal moral rules
for generic and substitutable individual persons. In the interests of impartiality, gender
and other potentially relevant contextual features were stripped from the generic indi-
viduals subject to these abstract principles. Third, bioethics emerged in response to the

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concerns of physicians and policy makers, thus the viewpoint and interests of those
male-dominated groups dictated the subject matter under investigation. Once again,
women, especially women as patients and carers, were not among those setting the
agenda for the new discipline. Finally, Wolf argues that bioethics developed in relative
isolation from areas of scholarship where feminist concerns were firmly on the agenda,
such as critical theory and postmodernism.
These reasons help to explain both the androcentric bias of bioethics, and why there
was little engagement with feminism despite the highly gendered nature of much of
the substance of bioethics. Starting in the 1980s, a series of feminist critiques sought to
remedy this situation.

Feminist Critiques of Bioethics

In a comprehensive history of feminist bioethics, Anne Donchin and Jackie Leach
Scully (2015) identify a number of key publications from the early 1980s onwards.
These include work by Helen B. Holmes (with Betty Hoskins and Michael Gross 1980;
1981; with Laura Purdy 1982), Gena Corea (1985), Susan Sherwin (1992), and Wolf
(1996). Much of this initial work focused on critiques of healthcare practices affect-
ing women, largely to do with reproduction. These concerns broadened to include
the experiences of women as patients (Sherwin 1992); the politics of women’s health
(Sherwin et al. 1998); disability standpoint (Wendell 1996); and broader cultural cri-
tiques of attitudes towards women’s bodies (Bordo 1993; Mahowald 1993). Wolf (1996)
explicitly expanded the horizons of feminist bioethics beyond reproduction to an overt
critique of both the subject matter and the methodological approaches of bioethics,
drawing attention to androcentric biases affecting the structure and nature of the field.
Further critiques drew on key thinking in feminist ethics by scholars such as Carol
Gilligan (1982), Nel Noddings (1984), Eva Kittay and Diana Meyers (1987), Jaggar
(1989), Sarah Ruddick (1989), Rosemary Tong (1993), Margrit Shildrick (1997),
Kittay (1999), and Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar (2000).
Despite considerable diversity in approaches among the authors mentioned above,
they are all identified as feminist by their commitment to identifying and correcting
male bias in theory and in practice. And while these critiques of male-dominated bio-
ethics are by no means univocal, I discuss them here in terms of two overarching con-
cerns: to do with conceptions of agency, and to do with equality.
The identity of the individual agent in early bioethics discourse can be traced back
to two sources: that of the neo-Cartesian ideal moral self; and the independent rational
decision maker of liberal individualism (Jaggar 1989; Wolf 1996). Jaggar describes
the neo-Cartesian ideal moral self as “a disembodied, separate, autonomous, unified,
rational being, essentially similar to all other moral selves” (1989: 99), while Wolf
(1996) characterizes the liberal individual as serving only his own atomistic interests.
Feminists found much to criticise in this conception of the agent.
First, this account of agency strips away the body in order to valorize the independ-
ent and rational decision-making capacities of the agent. But of course, the decision
maker does not exist independent of her body. An individual’s body is central to, or
constitutive of her identity, and inexorably shapes the choices and options open to
that individual (Young 1980). Being a human agent is a lived experience, such that
an individual’s subjectivity and desires stem from her experiences with this rather

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than that kind of body, while her options for choice and action are likewise shaped by
physical characteristics such as age, shape, gender, race, ability or disability. To many
feminists, it makes no sense to consider the agent as disembodied; agents are always
this particular person with these specific bodily characteristics. Further, it seems that
the agent of bioethical theory does in fact have a bodily identity, but the body in
question is male rather than female, thereby building in a bias towards male experi-
ence and male values at the centre of the notionally universal agent of bioethical
theory. The disembodied agent of bioethical theory just happens to have character-
istics (such as rationality and objectivity) that are traditionally associated with being
male, and that are frequently described in opposition to characteristics attributed to
women (such as irrationality, partiality).
This covert male gendering of the bioethical subject disenfranchises the experiences
of women and disregards the effects of embodiment on subjectivity. Such an approach
discounts the central role of the (gendered) body in constituting identity, ignores the
lasting effects of interventions in the body, and overlooks the role of the body in medi-
ating perception, consciousness and action. In addition, adopting an implicitly male
universal agent thereby excludes consideration of the bodily experiences of women,
such as pregnancy and childbirth, physical vulnerability, or providing personal care to
others. These experiences are thereby stripped of their moral import and deemed irrel-
evant to bioethics. Where the body does intrude, it is largely construed as property, as
something owned by the agent and therefore something that may be disposed of as the
agent sees fit. This view is reflected in arguments for free markets in organs or in sur-
rogacy, on the grounds that the individual owns her body and can therefore sell its parts
or services as one would sell other property (Radcliffe-Richards 2007).
Questions about control over one’s body lead directly to the conception of auton-
omy associated with the universal moral agent of early bioethics. Feminists were con-
cerned about the largely individualistic view of autonomy attributed to such agents,
especially in its more libertarian manifestations (e.g., Englehardt 1986). This view was
characterized by a focus on state neutrality regarding values; freedom from interfer-
ence; and satisfaction of preferences through the exercise of choice. On this account,
the prevention of harm to others is the only justification for interfering in an autono-
mous individual’s uncoerced choices. However, there are concerns regarding liber-
tarian accounts of autonomy (Mackenzie 2015). First, freedom from interference or
negative liberty is insufficient for guaranteeing autonomy, because autonomy requires
both freedom and access to genuine opportunities. Second, the notion of freely exer-
cised choice fails to take account of the social context of, and constraints on, indi-
vidual choice. Many individuals have a limited palette of opportunities from which to
choose (circumscribed not only by their gender, but also by their class, ethnicity, sexu-
ality, etc.), significantly constraining their autonomy. These kinds of limits cannot be
remedied by non-interference alone. Third, by discounting the need for opportunities
as well as freedom, and the inequalities that exist in access to opportunities, libertar-
ian approaches to autonomy ignore questions of social justice, overlook exploitation,
and may exacerbate existing inequalities (Sherwin 1992). For example, on libertarian
accounts, a person may be deemed to be exercising her autonomy if she enters into
a surrogacy arrangement, so long as her choice is not coerced (narrowly understood).
But this approach fails to take account of the person’s context; her lack of other oppor-
tunities; the nature of her relationships and the responsibilities these entail; her sense

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of herself as an agent in the world; the corrosive and patterned effects of poverty;
hierarchies in the commissioning process, and so forth, all of which undermine claims
about the freedom of her choice. Feminist methodologies draw attention to these con-
cerns through a focus on embodiment, personal identity, relationships and opportuni-
ties, and through interrogation of the context within which individuals have more or
less power to imagine or realize their chosen ends.
Feminists are particularly concerned about the asocial and self-interested nature
attributed to the universal agent. This approach takes social relationships to be con-
tingent rather than necessary in any way to the development or exercise of individual
autonomy. To the extent that an individual does have social relationships, these are
understood to be voluntary, as for example, a friendship between colleagues at work.
Any responsibilities engendered by relationships are understood as voluntarily assumed
constraints on autonomy. Wolf argues that this notion that autonomous agents are
self-sufficient and independent is impoverished, harmful, and inaccurate. In particu-
lar, it takes no account of the dependency and interdependency that characterizes
human relationships, and by focusing on the individual, it excludes consideration of
the moral dimensions of relationships. Claiming that relationships are voluntary and
largely between equals takes no account of the dependency of children and frail adults.
Furthermore, this gender-insensible approach ignores the fact that the responsibilities
of caring for dependent others fall largely to women, whether or not those relation-
ships are undertaken voluntarily. Many relationships, biological or otherwise, are non-
voluntary, creating networks of unavoidable rather than assumed responsibilities that
constrain and shape the autonomy of those involved.
A second group of feminist concerns about traditional bioethics focuses on equal-
ity. These concerns overlap to some extent with issues emerging from the critiques of
agency and autonomy noted above, such as lack of opportunities, exploitation, and
disadvantage. Jaggar (1989) tracks the history of feminist debate about sexual equal-
ity, initially premised on the belief that equality before the law for men and women
would lead to an end to gender-based inequalities. By the late 1970s, it became
clear that legal equality did not always lead to substantive equality. For example,
“no-fault” divorce settlements in which men and women received equal shares of
household assets left women in substantially weaker economic positions than men,
exacerbating existing inequalities (Weitzman 1985). Feminist philosophers wrestled
with how to resolve this problem, acutely aware both of the shortcomings of gender-
insensible approaches and of the danger that initiatives intended to recognize sexual
difference and redress inequalities might equally be used to disadvantage women,
reinforce notions of gender essentialism and entrench gender-based hierarchies.
Gilligan’s key work (1982) supporting the view that there are gendered differences
in moral reasoning lead to vigorous debates about the value of this line of reasoning
(see for example Kittay and Meyers 1987).
Despite differences between theorists, feminist ethics and bioethics generally
assumes that gender is a morally salient feature of individuals. Rather than accept-
ing that individuals are identical and substitutable, feminist approaches argue that,
unless proven otherwise, men and women are not equally situated and that equality
requires taking account of gendered (and other) differences. These views challenge lib-
eral notions of justice that focus on equality as procedural fairness or freedom to pursue
opportunities, accounts that fail to consider either the patterning of inequalities or the
actual outcomes of “fair” procedures.

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Feminist critiques of equality are linked to concerns about impartiality. Central to

liberal notions of justice is the requirement that individuals be treated impartially by
weighing the interests of each person equally. Jaggar identifies two feminist critiques
of this view. First, Noddings’ 1984 account of the ethics of care is premised upon the
claim that care is the natural basis of morality, in which case impartiality would require
us to care equally for all humankind. But, Noddings argues, given that we cannot care
equally for all, but only for those with whom we are in specific relationships, it is impos-
sible and hypocritical to make claims about impartiality understood as a universal moral
duty. Many feminist bioethicists treat Noddings’ ethics of care warily as it is prem-
ised on ostensibly essentialist claims about women being better at caring than men.
Nonetheless, she has been highly influential in establishing the moral relevance and
gendered nature of caring and care work, and the significance of the context within
which care is offered. In addition, her work has contributed to debates about the respec-
tive roles of justice and care as foundations of morality.
Sherwin (1989) and Code (1988) provide an alternative critique of impartiality,
claiming that impartiality paradoxically undermines respect for individuals and fairness,
as without knowledge of context it is not possible to distinguish appropriately between
individuals and thus treat them accordingly. On these accounts individuals are not
substitutable; rather it is imperative to understand and take account of context, as indi-
vidual circumstances are morally relevant in assessing claims and weighing interests. In
feminist bioethics, this has led to a focus on thick descriptions and detailed narratives in
ethical analysis. Sherwin (1992) makes the related point that an impartial individual-
istic approach to morality ignores socially patterned inequalities that track membership
of groups, and is thus unable to tackle inequalities that are distributed differentially
among identifiable social groups.
This brief summary focused on feminist critiques of the abstract and individualistic
notions of agency, autonomy, and equality seen to be implicit or explicit within early
and dominant bioethical theory. Feminists built on these critiques by developing com-
peting accounts of key concepts and new methodological approaches, and countering
male bias by extending the scope of bioethical concern to wider social and global issues.

Shaping the Field: Feminist Contributions to Bioethics

Feminist bioethics is now a recognized academic sub-discipline, with its own specialist
journal (International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics [IJFAB]), and national
and international organizations and conferences. Given the disciplinary and methodo-
logical diversity within the field, it is challenging to single out a few key contributions.
Here I focus on relational autonomy and feminist accounts of care, dependency and
vulnerability; and identify features of feminist methodological approaches.
Relational autonomy is the term used to describe feminist approaches to under-
standing and analyzing autonomy. As discussed above, feminists were critical of the
notion of autonomy implicit within bioethics, understood as the free and rational
exercise of will by atomistic and self sufficient agents (Stoljar 2013). The qualifier
“relational” refers to the claim that any plausible theory of autonomy must con-
cede that exercising autonomy is compatible with agents being part of and valu-
ing social relationships (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000). In addition, “relational”
emphasizes the nature of agents as socially and historically embedded and shaped
by their circumstances.

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There are four key features of relational theory (Mackenzie 2015). The first concerns
the socially scaffolded nature of the skills that are required to exercise autonomy, known
as autonomy competencies. Autonomous decisions require the individual to understand
information, imagine the effects of different options, reflect on her values, make a deci-
sion taking a range of relevant information into account, and so forth. These skills do
not arise fully formed; rather they are developed in and through interactions with others
in socially significant relationships. No one is born with autonomy competency; rather
we are born vulnerable, dependent, and requiring care. Relational autonomy recognizes
that achieving autonomy competencies relies upon the relationships through which
care and support are provided to the initially vulnerable.
The second feature of relational theory concerns the identity of the autonomous
agent. Rather than taking identity to be given, isolated and self-sufficient, relational
theorists argue that identity is constituted in and through social relationships that take
place in specific historical contexts and that are subject to prevailing social norms
regarding race, gender, ability, and so forth. This view of socially constituted identity
has implications for how we think about authenticity, and about the sources and mean-
ing of our preferences. The view of the self as socially constituted recognizes that values
and preferences may change as identity evolves over time.
The third and fourth features of relational accounts concern internal and external
constraints on autonomy. Exercising autonomy requires the individual to hold a set
of self-evaluative attitudes that allow her to see herself, and be seen as autonomous—
attitudes such as self-trust, self-respect and self-esteem. And just as supportive relation-
ships can scaffold and build autonomy competency, hostile, abusive or oppressive rela-
tionships can undermine or destroy the self-regarding attitudes that enable individuals
to exercise autonomy. This feature of relational theory helps to explain why a person
may hold autonomy competencies, but be unable to act autonomously if she lacks the
requisite self-attitudes. Finally, relational theorists identify external barriers to exercis-
ing autonomy in the form of access to meaningful opportunities. This feature of rela-
tional theory clearly links autonomy and justice by identifying that freedom to make
choices is not sufficient to guarantee autonomy as individuals require resources to put
their preferences into action.
Relational theory has been hugely influential in feminist bioethics. Feminist schol-
ars have drawn upon insights from relational theory to develop accounts of self-trust
(McLeod 2002), informed consent (Stoljar 2011), conscientious autonomy (Kukla
2005), public health ethics (Baylis et  al. 2008) and healthcare ethics more broadly
(Sherwin et al. 1998); as well as to investigate related concepts.
The moral salience of relationships figures prominently in feminist contributions
to our understanding of care, dependency, and vulnerability. Regarding care, Gilligan
(1982) argues for a form of moral reasoning specific to women that prioritizes care
and relationships of care, in contrast to the justice orientation attributed to male
moral reasoning. On her account, the highest level of female moral reasoning is char-
acterized by an individual considering what is best for herself and others, taken as a
relational unit. Noddings (1984), who identifies her work as feminine rather than
feminist, takes care to be the fundamental moral virtue of women, expressed in and
through the relationship of the “one-caring” and the “cared-for.” For Noddings, care
is specific, occurring between identifiable individuals, and providing the cared-for
with a model for future relationships (Tong 2009). The ethics of care has been highly

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influential in nursing ethics as this approach provides a theoretical framework for the
practical work of providing patient care (Kuhse 1997; Groenhout 2004).
While many disagree with the specifics of Gilligan and Noddings, the recognition
that relationships are not between equals, and often if not always involve some degree
of dependency, has been highly influential on thinkers such as Sara Ruddick (1989)
and Eva Kittay (1999). Kittay uses the language of dependency and dependency work,
thereby avoiding concerns about stereotyping women as natural carers. On Kittay’s
account, it is relationships rather than rights that ground the care of dependents, where
relationships morally demand meeting the needs of dependents. Dependency relations
are socially constructed, but often not voluntarily chosen as they arise in the context
of existing relationships and responsibilities. Kittay bases her account of equality in the
notion that we are totally dependent as infants and children, and that our very survival
is premised upon the labors of some mother (or dependency worker), making depend-
ency a universally shared experience grounding our common humanity. In turn, this
universal experience gives rise to a responsibility on the part of society to recognize and
support dependency workers.
Like care and dependency, vulnerability is a third concept taken up by feminist theo-
rists interested in relational theory. The concept of vulnerability is foundational in
bioethics, grounding protections for patients and research participants. Yet for some
time the concept was little theorized, leading at times to a labeling approach associated
with stereotyping and discrimination (Rogers 2014). Florencia Luna (2009) proposes
an account of vulnerability understood as separate layers rather than a general attrib-
ute, requiring careful examination of context-sensitive features to inform responses. In
their account, Mackenzie et al. (2014) propose a typology of vulnerability that draws
particular attention to vulnerability arising as the result of oppressive social relations.
They argue that responses to the vulnerable must be directed by the obligation to foster
autonomy, in order to counter objectionable paternalism and mitigate the threats to
agency that often accompany vulnerability.
Questions of social justice permeate feminist discussions of autonomy, dependency
and vulnerability (Mackenzie 2014). Social justice is crucial to the development and
exercise of autonomy, understood relationally. Achieving this requires recognition of
inequalities, including those that are gendered, in ways that explicitly address their
causes. On feminist accounts, social justice requires attention to the distribution of
power as much as of material resources (Young 1990). Sherwin (2008) develops this
line of reasoning in her work, arguing for a focus on the social and institutional con-
stitution of agency and the need to understand how patterns of power and privilege,
which shape the opportunities and choices available to citizens, are reinforced or
challenged by public practices, policies and institutions. Feminist accounts of public
health ethics are likewise premised on the demand for social justice (Rogers 2006;
Baylis et  al. 2008), partly in recognition of the connections between disadvantage,
discrimination and ill health. Baylis et al. argue that a relational account of public
health illuminates the ways in which health policy decisions shape opportunities, and
exert different effects on different social groups.
In addition to substantive contributions to theory, feminist approaches have had a
lasting impact upon methodology in bioethics. There is no single feminist methodo-
logical approach to bioethics. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to claim that feminist bio-
ethics is characterized by an interest in rich empiricism, attention to lived experiences

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and explicit recognition of one’s own perspective or standpoint (Wolf 1996). Feminists
favor an expanded understanding of the dimensions of moral reasoning, in contrast to
the abstract principlism of at least some mainstream bioethics (Rawlinson 2008). One
response to abstraction lies in the use of narrative, placing great emphasis upon hear-
ing and understanding the specific details of a bioethical issue from the perspective of
the main protagonists (Lindemann 1997). Mary Rawlinson (2001) draws on resources
from European philosophy to argue for greater attention to lived experience and proposes
the pregnant body as a metaphor for relations of moral decision-making in bioethics.
Postmodern approaches provide another avenue for critiquing claims about universalism
to build a more particularist feminist framework (Shildrick 1997; Shildrick and Mykitiuk,
2005; see also the work of Margaret Little 2001). Philosophy of the body has proved to
be a useful tool in investigating the moral dimensions of lived experience, the integrity of
the body, and the boundaries between life and death (Young 1980; Shildrick 2008), while
insights from disability theorists have illustrated the complex interplay of power, discrimi-
nation and limited choice affecting people living with disability (Leach Scully 2010).
This section has briefly surveyed some of the main contributions of feminist bioeth-
ics to the field, of which relational theory is the most influential. Relational autonomy
is now a widespread, although not always accurately employed concept in bioethics,
while thick descriptions of cases and attention to context have become commonplace.
In the final section, I consider future directions for feminist bioethics.

Future Directions for Feminist Bioethics

Feminist bioethics has moved far beyond an early focus on reproduction, although
aspects of reproduction such as surrogacy, uterus transplantation, gender selection and
genetic technologies continue to attract attention. A scan of issues of IJFAB (for exam-
ple, 6.2, 7.2 and 8.2) reveals growing interest in globalism, and attention to the way
that national domestic issues reverberate on a global scale. Investigations into the long-
term care needs of ageing populations in wealthy countries, treatment of migrant health
workers, the effects of health tourism, transnational reproduction, and inter-country dis-
parities reflect the concerns and methods identified above while extending the scope of
bioethics beyond the clinical encounter. Transnational interest encompasses a critique
of Western-centric perspectives in bioethics, with attempts to engage feminist bioethics
scholars from around the globe (Narayan and Hardy 2000; Tong et  al. 2001; Ryan
2004). There is developing interest in environmental bioethics, drawing upon resources
from environmental ethics and ecofeminism (Mies and Shiva 1993; Mellor 1997).
Environmental concerns link to those about sustainability and food ethics (Rawlinson
2016), both of which lend themselves to feminist analysis, as does the topic of animal
ethics. Technological innovations continue to drive debate, with a new investigation
of sexism sparked by developments in neural imaging (Fine 2010), while old inequities
recur in new clinical contexts such as surgery (Biller-Andorno 2002).
Anne Donchin describes feminist bioethics as a response to the “tepid agenda and
exclusionary practices of the burgeoning field of bioethics” (2008, 146). The schol-
ars who first identified themselves as feminist bioethicists, as well as those joining the
field subsequently, have challenged theoretical foundations, demanded justice, opposed
oppression and discrimination and developed new avenues of enquiry. Nonetheless,
there remains much to do.

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Related Topics
Feminist methods in the history of philosophy (Chapter 1); the sex/gender distinction
and the social construction of reality (Chapter 13); embodiment and feminist philoso-
phy (Chapter 15); personal identity and relational selves (Chapter 18); rationality
and objectivity in feminist philosophy (Chapter 20); feminist and queer intersections
with disability studies (Chapter 30); feminist conceptions of autonomy (Chapter 41);
feminist ethics of care (Chapter 43); neoliberalism, global justice, and transnational
feminisms (Chapter 48).

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 47
MULTICULTURAL
AND POSTCOLONIAL
FEMINISMS
Monica Mookherjee

The growth of writings on multiculturalism and postcolonialism over the past decades
has produced new approaches to feminist philosophy associated with the “third
wave.” These approaches have heightened appreciation of differences among women,
such as class, geopolitical region, religion, and culture. This chapter examines and
contrasts postcolonial and multicultural feminist approaches, and suggests that the
main controversy between them lies in the multicultural feminists’ acceptance of
the Enlightenment humanist subject, in relation to which the rights and interests of
women are presented. Fraught debates around the world over practices like genital
cutting and sexist cultural membership rules have heightened the relevance of these
critical projects. Multicultural and postcolonial feminisms are increasingly crucial in
a globalizing, diverse world. Though supporting the multicultural feminist agenda of
pluralizing the rights of the humanist subject, this chapter also recommends engage-
ment with postcolonial critics, who problematize the very notion of a unified subject of
rights. Briefly, postcolonial feminists raise important moral-epistemological questions
about knowledge of women’s interests, and reject a framing of their entitlements in
terms of “culture” in any simple sense. However, common to both feminisms is the task
of unsettling some universalist certainties of earlier liberal feminists. The approaches
also share a desire to avoid the relativism of postmodern positions, which question the
possibility of certain knowledge about human beings generally, and, in this context, of
diverse women who are differently located in structures of power.

Multiculturalism Feminism: Rethinking Liberal Humanism

The term “multiculturalism” is deeply contested, and bears different sociological and
philosophical meanings. In one sense, the word is descriptive, and denotes the reality
of many states in the world today, namely the fact that most countries are composed of
different cultural and ethnic groups. The term may also be understood, in the norma-
tive sense of many liberal theorists, as suggesting that cultural diversity is valuable and
requires institutional and social support. Liberals, concerned to equalize minorities’
 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

access to the opportunities that members of the dominant culture enjoy, usually hold
that the social bases of minority peoples’ dignity should be ensured by respecting
their cherished traditions. In spite of deep controversies following heightened post-
9/11 scrutiny of Muslims in the West in particular, multiculturalism informs distinct
approaches in contemporary liberal and republican political theories (e.g., Laborde
2008; Levey 2010).
Furthermore, following controversies surrounding gendered issues like female geni-
tal mutilation and the Muslim veil, “multicultural feminism” has itself emerged as a
specific area of research. The early years of the new millennium witnessed innovative
negotiations of conflicts of gender and culture (e.g., Deveaux 2006; Dhamoon 2006;
Baumeister 2009). The questions that motivated these approaches included: Which
interests and needs are shared across cultural boundaries? Which risk being hidden if
cultural diversity is not recognized?
Going beyond earlier second-wave debates about a biological or affective essence
of womanhood (e.g., Firestone 1970), the new multicultural feminists are wary of uni-
versal theories that confine women to particular roles. They seek to pluralize femi-
nism, without renouncing some universal claims. Taking up and extending the liberal
humanist faith in a society of free and equal autonomous subjects, moreover, they fol-
low the general multicultural demand for inclusion in the social contracts of much
political theory. Historically, feminist political theorists took their male counterparts
to task for focusing on masculine interests, and for disregarding reproductive and other
gender rights (Pateman and Shanley 1991). Multicultural feminists extend this chal-
lenge. While supporting the values of bodily integrity and autonomy, they add that the
good of cultural belonging sometimes necessitates different rights. Instead of rejecting
the rational liberal subject of classical political thought, they pluralize it and orient it to
“communitarian” concerns.
There is, however, much debate between multicultural feminists, and Eisenberg
(2010) distinguishes two emerging approaches. The first focuses on the value of auton-
omy; and the second on political inclusion and humanist democracy. Anne Phillips’s
idea of “multiculturalism without culture” (2007) could be taken to illustrate the first
approach. It recommends that feminist theories conscious of disparities of social power
focus on the value of personal autonomy across cultures (Narayan 1997; Meyers 2014).
While Phillips does not disregard the importance of democratic deliberation, she focuses
on how sensitivity to culture yields different understandings of the pressures that under-
mine women’s abilities to choose. In doing so, she relies on a conception of “culture”
as fluid and contested, and avoids an exaggerated “clash-of-civilizations” narrative that
takes the ideal of the autonomous, humanist subject to be Eurocentric and inapplicable
to cultures that diverge from a Western norm (cf. Saharso 2006). However, confronted
with the need to say how, without a stable concept of culture, there would be any-
thing for multicultural policy to do, Phillips explains that minority membership can
still affect life-chances. This is so, just as denying the concept of “race” does not rule
out considering the impact of racial discrimination on people’s lives (Phillips 2007: 21).
Therefore, although Phillips accepts the liberal feminist ideals of autonomy and
equality, she asks: “Who is to say what gender equality is? And by what right does
someone with one set of cultural experiences have the right to comment on and judge
the practices and beliefs of someone from a different background?” (Phillips 2007: 38).
While values may be interpreted differently across cultures, agreement may be taken

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to exist on basic norms, she believes, at least in North American and European
immigrant societies (2007: 41). On this reading, autonomy-based theories like
Phillips’s help to pluralize a feminist understanding of human interests, without falling
prey to “cultural essentialism.”
However, a number of challenges confront this approach, including defining the
emotional and cognitive threshold of self-determination across cultures. How much
control over one’s life should a person have to be regarded as autonomous? Moreover,
the approach faces the task of specifying a distinction between the “core” meaning of a
value and its interpretation. What is the limit to the different cultural interpretations
of autonomy that human beings might endorse? In addition, even accepting that most
conflicts over gender and culture tend not to raise questions of fundamental value-
conflict, one might question the seemingly controversial assumption that the autono-
mous life has more value than a mode of life that emphasizes, say, communal harmony.
A possible response to this question would be to suggest that non-domination does
not require a “thick” theory of autonomy of the kind associated, say, with Nussbaum’s
(1999) capabilities approach. However, partly because of the difficulties of defining a
“thinner” concept of autonomy, some theorists turn instead to democratic deliberation
as a resource for resolving conflicts over gendered practices (Deveaux 2006; Baumeister
2009). Eisenberg (2010) identifies Seyla Benhabib’s (2002) approach as a key exam-
ple. Drawing from Habermas’ discourse theory, Benhabib supports Phillips’s concep-
tion of cultural groups as fluid and internally contested. But she focuses on inclusive
deliberation to encourage understanding between different perspectives. However,
conscious that the conduct of democracy itself requires normative guidelines, she
specifies three conditions: (a) egalitarian reciprocity; (b) voluntary self-ascription; and
(c) freedom of exit and assimilation (Benhabib 2002: 132). These considerations infer
that participants in democratic dialogue must enjoy at least some independence to voice
an undominated view. Yet, while appearing modest and realistic, ambiguities could arise
in practice over which forms of deliberation should count as “democratic.” In addition,
such efforts to constrain democratic deliberation may ultimately involve prioritizing
humanist ideals like individual agency and sex equality (Eisenberg 2010: 132). On this
reading, there may be not so great a distance between the two multicultural feminist
approaches, and both may ultimately confront similar challenges.
This is to say, if multicultural humanist feminists join other third-wave feminists in
celebrating differences between women (Gillis, Howie, and Munford 2007) and aim to
foster unity within this diversity, they seem to bring both advantages and drawbacks.
Positively, their concern for social equality absolves them from criticisms of certain
forms of multiculturalism, which presuppose cultural essences, and have been faulted
for creating divisions and for failing to attend to economic inequalities or structural
power (Barry 2001). They avoid what has been called an “ossificatory imperative”—i.e.,
the tendency to freeze cultural groups into preconceived definitions (Bannerji 2000).
The multicultural feminist agenda unsettles the assumption that multicultural theory
need be merely decorative, or exclusionary in paradoxical ways (Chanady 1995: 426).
However, perhaps the real cost of bringing a humanist framework into the third
wave—whether based on autonomy or democracy—is that of ultimately relying on
the contestable normative assumption that women share generalizable interests in
autonomy and market-based equality. While it could be thought that feminism cannot
do without some conception of autonomy or agency (Saharso 2006; Madhok 2013),

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multicultural feminists might risk assuming static distinctions between acceptable and
unacceptable diversity (Chanady 1995: 421). Although the focus on inequalities arising
from minority membership seems informative and valuable, multicultural feminists risk
failing to offer a realistic account of how “culture” and “cultural differences” are materi-
ally, socially, and geopolitically constructed.
We will turn to these problems; but, for now, it is worth emphasizing that the new
multicultural feminisms seem particularly helpful and insightful in societies character-
ized by immigration, with long traditions of human rights and civil liberties. Addressing
issues that had not been considered fully by “First World” liberal feminists, they plural-
ize an understanding of women’s interests, and encourage deeper reflection on issues
that might otherwise be regarded as simple instances of patriarchy, such as the hijab,
polygamy, or gender-differentiated membership rules. Their approaches offer, there-
fore, a diversity-centered third-wave approach, at once sensitive to culture and strongly
humanist and anti-relativist.

Postcolonial Feminists Unsettle the Humanist Subject

While the concept of multiculturalism is variously interpreted, “postcolonialism” may
appear still more complex. Rather than referring to the historical period after the end of
colonialism, the term signals awareness of the persistence of colonial structures of thought
after decolonization, or what has been termed “re-colonization” (Schutte 2007). The
idea of the “postcolonial” also overlaps with the related concepts of the “transnational”
and the “de-colonial.” Transnational feminism is related to “postcolonial” counterpart,
but its focus could be thought to differ. Although transnational feminists are concerned
about the effects of colonialism, and particularly of “neo-colonialism,” on gendered
subjects, they view the issues confronting women, say in relation to human rights and
humanitarian interventions, through a reading of how “race,” gender, and sexuality are
constructed by the ongoing imperialism that certain nations exert in relation to others.
The general idea of transnational feminism is that, as “nations” with distinct identities
and values are constructed through the neo-imperialism of global capitalist relations,
any gendered analysis should remain cognizant of this in considering the disadvantages
that women experience in distinct parts of the world (Mohanty 2003, 2013; Razack
2004; Alexander and Mohanty 2013). Thus, transnational feminists have located the
debate about the assumed subjection of women in Islam within an understanding of
the US invasion of Iraq, for instance, to show that women are further subjugated when
humanitarian groups represent the “Muslim woman” solely as victims and portray those
who assist them as paternal saviors (Hesford and Kozol 2005; Conway 2012). Briefly,
then, transnational feminism unsettles the concept of the nation to better understand
and intervene in gender disadvantages. While their approach is consistent with postco-
lonial feminism, the latter, as we will see, concentrates on the distinct ways that women
in postcolonial contexts may reclaim a distinctive “voice,” agency or identity.
Turning to another similar term, decolonial feminists (e.g., Alcoff 2007; Lugones
2010) focus on Latin American and Caribbean modernities, and, specifically, on
the oppositional strategies that challenged colonialist representations of abject-
ness, dehumanization, and slavery that began in sixteenth-century occupations of
these territories, and coexisted with colonial power. Decolonial feminism, therefore,
re-reads the histories of such early colonial encounters to theorize what Lugones calls

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 Multicultural and Postcolonial Feminisms

“the coloniality of gender.” This term refers to the fact that, owing to the hierarchi-
cal dichotomies constructed by colonization, the idea of the “colonized female” could
not emerge. As the hierarchical relation between male and female was contingent on
the human/non-human distinction created by colonization, on account of which the
colonized were not deemed fully human, it was impossible to conceive of a “colonized
woman” subject within normative gender codes. Against this background, decolo-
nial feminism depicts a process by which the identities of women under colonialism
become subject to racialized, capitalist, and gender oppressions (Lugones 2010: 747).
Thus, while the terms are linked, decolonialism focuses on subjection and resistance
that precedes the oppositional strategies on which postcolonial writers focus.
Postcolonial feminists, for their part, are influenced by figures as diverse as Gramsci,
Said, and Fanon. In spite of this theoretical diversity, an integrated perspective has
emerged in cultural studies by, among others, Gayatri Spivak (1987), Anne McClintock
(1995), Sara Suleri (1992), and Chandra Mohanty (2003). Their perspective goes
deeper than the new multicultural feminists in rethinking the conceptual basis for
gender interests in a more nuanced and challenging approach. As we shall see, however,
questions arise as to whether postcolonial feminists succeed in unsettling the unified
humanist Enlightenment subject, and, if they do, a question arises as to the basis on
which they may challenge patriarchy, which survives after colonialism’s formal end.
By way of a working definition, postcolonial feminism provides “an exploration of,
at the intersections of, colonialism and neo-colonialism with gender, nation, class, race
and sexualities in the different contexts of women’s lives” (Rajan and Park 2005: 53; see
also Kapur 2002). The postcolonial desire to unsettle the unified subjectivity of liberal
humanist thought is linked to an understanding of gender interests as continually pro-
duced and re-produced by the webs of power relations that persist after colonization and
that form the subject’s identity. A stable individual should not be presupposed, accord-
ing to this view, because notions of “gender” and “culture” that produce individuality
are themselves products of power. Postcolonial feminists focus on the potential arising
from this instability, drawing attention to the significance of what is excluded by domi-
nant interpretations of individual interests.
Gayatri Spivak, in particular, follows Derrida in suggesting that these gaps signal the
“quite other” (tout-autre) (1987: 573; Derrida 1967), or an other who is not the counter-
image of the self. She encourages those writing in and about postcolonial contexts to
see that the representation of others often involves a certain “epistemic violence,” in
the sense of presenting others through colonial dualities—e.g., oppressor/oppressed;
powerful/vulnerable—and, thus, failing to portray them accurately. Such representa-
tions fail critically to engage and question colonial relations. More critical engagement
would enable a “third space” of articulation, to use Homi Bhabha’s (1994) term, neither
purely modern nor an expression of authentic, traditional culture.
Spivak understands this third space to be productive in theorizing gender, because
awareness of the potential for resistance that it contains allows the theorist to learn
from women whose experiences differ considerably from her own (1986: 287).
Furthermore, if the subaltern female cannot speak or be spoken for, in the sense of
fully represented, then Spivak argues that one must learn not to speak in her place.
This imperative challenges feminists of more dominant positions to attempt to
“unlearn female privilege” (1986: 294), by considering the history of her relation
to other women in regards to the production of social meanings. Spivak (1993) and

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Rajan (1993) later clarify that the different subject-positions that emerge through
this critical awareness bring to light a conception of agency, which relates strongly
to indigenous females (Mills 1988). Such an insight also suggests that the multicul-
turalist focus on “culture” or “cultural practices” could constitute a form of epistemic
violence that repeats colonialism (Jaggar 2005).
These insights are extremely important because, historically, practices like veil-
ing and polygamy constituted significant areas of conflict and negotiation between
colonizers and colonized (Narayan 1997: 16). By locating their analysis in global
economic relations, postcolonial feminists clear space to theorize new forms of sub-
jectivity. Awareness of the possibility of agency even in the most constraining social
circumstances entails recognition that conventional assumptions of colonial subjec-
tion often conceal resistance (Khader 2009; 2011). Thus, postcolonial writers do not
reject concepts of justice and human rights as bourgeois ideology in a Marxist sense.
Rather, combining Marxist and poststructuralist insights, they work within the prob-
lematic of Western Enlightenment thought as it operates after the formal end of
colonialism (Spivak 2004; Sa’ar 2005). In doing so, they recognize the possibility
of what Spivak calls subaltern “catachresis,” or in Homi Bhabha’s (1984) phrase,
“in-betweenness.” This is the creativity that arises from re-presenting the colonizer’s
language in ways that are, to cite Bhabha again, “almost the same, but not quite.”
The hybrid ways that women in postcolonial situations use classic Enlightenment
notions generates new meanings. These concepts should not be rejected for being
the “master’s tools,” in Audré Lorde’s phrase.
Postcolonial feminists therefore go beyond the focus in the new multicultural femi-
nisms on inequalities arising from cultural membership, straightforwardly understood. A
wider study of history and geopolitics is needed, because, as Jaggar (2005: 67) observes,
when multinational corporations exploit women in export-processing zones in poor
countries, for instance, it is impossible to say that this practice reflects “Western” or
“non-Western” culture. Yet, although postcolonial feminists destabilize the terms on
which transcultural gender interests are formulated, by suggesting the provisionality of
all human interests articulated in the context of power, they value the possibility of cre-
ating new meaning through this problematic. As we have seen, the new multicultural
feminists pluralize the liberal agenda, by deepening debate about the rights of women in
Enlightenment arising from values of autonomy and equality. In contrast, postcolonial
feminists characterize these expressions of humanist universalism as the products of
power relations. Yet, because they have a political project too, they concede the need
at times to rely on a stable concept of women’s interests, in what Spivak (1990) calls
“strategic essentialism.” Without assuming, she suggests, that women in any culture or
tradition are particular kinds of subjects with interests that may be revealed through
interpretation, it should be conceded that women will find it necessary at times to take
up a subject position out of political necessity. Here, Spivak considers the remobiliza-
tion of women during the Algerian liberation struggle, based upon their stereotyped
image as bomb carriers or messengers. Although it served a goal, Spivak concedes that
invoking such fixed images of “Algerian womanhood” was unlikely to be empowering.
As she concludes, a “strategy is a situation; it is not a theory” (1993: 104; Morton 2007).
The issue of mobilizing upon a “cultural” or “nationalist” concept of women’s inter-
ests, in the absence of a firm grounding, is therefore a controversial issue arising from
postcolonial feminism.

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 Multicultural and Postcolonial Feminisms

Although multicultural feminists might be advised to take seriously postcolonial

feminist insights concerning the geopolitical specificities that configure “gender” and
“culture,” questions do remain. If women’s interests may be fixed for strategic purposes
only, one might ask about the normative basis of feminism under the postcolonial
approach, and its capacity to theorize the frequently extreme material disadvantages
experienced by women globally. Furthermore, Mukherjee (1991) is concerned that
in spite of their attention to diversity, postcolonial theorists perhaps re-create a fixed
subject, one defined by the experience of marginality. Similarly, Suleri (1992) asks
whether the celebration of hybridity can amount to an orthodoxy, which assumes that
individual experiences of resisting power inevitably amount to a capacity to overturn
it. Such difficulties can lead to wariness of some writing in postcolonial situations to
call themselves feminists (Kishwar 1990). At an extreme, some have even found post-
colonial feminist writings to be “self-indulgent, polemic and self-righteous” (cited in
Rajan and Park 2005: 54).
Although these criticisms may go too far, given the progressive motivations of post-
colonial feminists, a difficult question remains as to whether they ultimately rely on the
universalist gender images they aim to transcend. Is the figure of the “female subaltern”
another subject position with humanist interests in autonomy and equality? This is a
difficult question; and without having space in this chapter fully to address it we turn
to the issue of how valuable postcolonial insights have been taken up in feminist philo-
sophical debates concerning the person, the body and the mind.

Bringing Postcolonial Insights to Philosophy: Selves

and Others, Reasons and Emotions
Feminists outside cultural and literary studies have brought postcolonial insights
productively into current philosophical debate. Uma Narayan (1997; 2002), for
instance, questions the colonialist presuppositions that affect an understanding of
the relationship between self and other. Kanchana Mahadevan (2014) furthers the
debate about rational individualism and care ethics in culturally diverse, postcolonial
conditions. Their contributions demonstrate that, while feminism may be sensitive
to diversity and critical of structures of power, these commitments need not rule out
defining some universal gender interests too.
Narayan, for her part, concentrates on the fact that those writing from the diaspora or
from within decolonized countries often encounter unexpected reactions to their feminist
ideas. In their dialogue with others, they are often assigned particular roles, which risk
forestalling an understanding between self and the other. The first role, the “emissary,”
involves placing on the critic of third world origin a responsibility to convey her culture
in wholly celebratory terms. Referring to Ananda Coomaraswamy’s The Dance of Shiva
(1957), Narayan explains that this text utilizes clichéd oppositions between “materialist”
Western and “spiritual” Indian culture; and that those who question these dichotomies,
such as feminists critical of gender disparities, are met with anxiety and defensiveness
(Narayan 1997: 131). In contrast, the second role, the “mirror,” suggests that the post-
colonial writer’s representation of gender issues within their culture is often treated as an
opportunity to reflect on the limitations, or “orientalism,” of Western, Enlightenment
values (Narayan 1997: 138). The risk is that discussions about gender issues within
“other” cultures become a foil through which the dominant reflect upon their norms.

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While Narayan’s depiction of these roles might seem controversial from some
feminist perspectives, she alerts attention to the important ways in which knowledge of
“the other” can be foreclosed. The problem is deepened by a third role, the “authentic
insider.” Narayan explains that the insider, though licenced to raise certain cultural
criticisms, is deemed representative of the whole society that she discusses. Narayan
worries that this tendency makes it easy to reject, when convenient to do so, her views
as being “too Westernized” or “not really different enough.” The role therefore works
to silence or de-legitimize differences (Narayan 1997: 148). Narayan later connects
these issues to the difficulties that feminists confront of comprehending the agency
of diverse women more broadly (Narayan 2002). The tendency to generalize the view
of certain women within the culture regarding autonomy or human rights makes it
hard to appreciate that others within the tradition rationally accept different trade-offs
between goods and interests, without false consciousness and without being “dupes of
culture” (Saharso 2006). Although the three roles may function more complexly than
Narayan depicts, her focus emphasizes the challenges involved in understanding the
self–other relation in such a way that sensibly recognizes differences and commonalities
both within cultural traditions and outside them.
Meanwhile, other feminists draw on postcolonial insights to rethink feminist debates
about the mind and the body and between individualism and relationality. This seems
important because of the controversial historical association of the ethic of care with
female bodily and psychological difference. It is significant, too, owing to the associa-
tion of the care ethic with non-Western, formerly colonized cultures (Narayan 2009).
Rather than accept what she views as an unrealistic distinction between individual-
ism and relationality, in Between Femininity and Feminism (2014) Kanchana Mahadevan
turns to debates about rationalism and embodiment in depth. She defends a notion
of embodied and relational freedom relevant to postcolonial theories of gender. For
Mahadevan, the historical writings of Indian thinker, Pandita Ramabai, and British
political philosopher, Mary Wollstonecraft—women on different sides of a colonial
relationship—equally reveal the need to integrate these concepts. Mahadevan re-reads
the history of feminist thought in a way that unsettles the association of “women” or
“other” cultures exclusively with the body or with care. Wollstonecraft and Ramabai were
both committed, Mahadevan observes, to the equal rationality of the sexes, and the
co-dependence of reason and emotion in all humanity.
For Mahadevan, moreover, postcolonial hybridity and syncretism are not new ideas,
but were implicit in the twentieth-century Western feminisms of Simone de Beauvoir
(1949) and Carole Gilligan (1982). Associated with the second wave, Gilligan’s
account of the “different voice” in which women express their ethical natures has
been criticized for its seeming gender essentialism. Beauvoir, for her part, is often
interpreted to defend the “masculine” requirement that women reclaim a disembod-
ied form of freedom. As all notions of the Eternal Feminine are socially constructed,
according to Beauvoir, she believed that women may only assert their humanity by
practicing freedom (1949: 41). Although wary that global feminists like Maria Mies
(1996) have taken issue with both care ethics and Western existentialist philoso-
phies for failing to respond to the structural gender equalities in postcolonial condi-
tions, Mahadevan’s reading compellingly demonstrates that these approaches need
not oppose care to freedom; and that appreciating their integration may prove useful
to theorizing gender in multicultural and postcolonial conditions.

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 Multicultural and Postcolonial Feminisms

More specifically, Mahadevan interprets Beauvoir not to defend disembodied

freedom so much as an embodied conception relevant not only to women but to histori-
cally dominated cultural traditions, too. Locating in Beauvoir’s thought an opposition to
all manifestations of colonial power (Murphy 2010), she invokes existentialist thought
to contest the assumed incapacity of certain individuals for freedom, by unsettling the
association of subaltern cultures or women with the body—an idea that was invoked
historically to deny their self-determination. While Beauvoir acknowledged the diffi-
culties of representing a universal “women’s experience,” particularly in the context of
colonial relations between France and Algeria, she acknowledges individual subjectivity
as dependent on others’ (Beauvoir 1949: 14; Vintges 2006). Many questions remain
as to how multicultural and postcolonial feminists might build further on Beauvoir’s
existentialism to form a theory that fully responds to the multiple, cross-cutting axes of
power through which postcolonial subjectivities are formed. However, recent feminists
not only suggest this possibility. Moreover, they do so by deepening debate about uni-
versal gender interests, without silencing the others for whom they cannot speak.

Conclusion
I have contended in this chapter that the development of multicultural and post-
colonial approaches has challenged earlier feminist certainties about the priority of
universal political rights. In doing so, these discourses contribute significantly to con-
temporary feminist thought. Both approaches destabilize, without discrediting, the idea
of universal gender interests that concern feminism as a critical movement. We also
found, more specifically, that both multicultural and postcolonial feminist thinkers
assist feminism to surpass the problems with assuming a uniform set of rights arising
from a “common humanity,” unproblematically understood. Given the forms of dehu-
manization that colonialism involved, not least through the construction of “cultural”
and “ethnic” differences, feminists in this field draw significant critical attention to
cross-cutting lenses of gender, culture, class, and geopolitical location without losing
feminism’s normative potential. As the perspectives considered in this chapter dem-
onstrate, the project of formulating interests in multicultural and postcolonial times
might involve continual rethinking, in light of one’s embodied nature and location in
different structures of power.

Further Reading
Fatima, Saba (2013) “Muslim-American Scripts,” Hypatia 28(2): 341–349.
Harding, Sandra (2009) “Postcolonial Feminist Philosophies of Science and Technology,” Postcolonial
Studies 12(4): 401–421.
Mendoza, Breny (2002) “Transnational Feminisms in Question,” Feminist Theory December 3(3): 295–314.
Mookherjee, Monica (2005) “Affective Citizenship,” Critical Review of International Social and Political
Philosophy 8(1): 31–50.
Puar, Jasbir (2008) “‘The Turban is not a Hat’: Queer Diaspora and Practices of Profiling,” Sikh Formations
4(1): 47–91.
Reitman, Oonagh (2005) “Multiculturalism and Feminism: Incompatibility, Compatibility or Synonymity,”
Ethnicities 5(2): 216–248.
Volpp, Leti (2011) “Framing Cultural Difference: Immigrant Women and Discourses of Tradition,” differences
22(1): 90–110.

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Related Topics
Dao becomes female (Chapter 3); feminism, philosophy, and culture in Africa (Chapter 4);
introducing Black feminist philosophy (Chapter 10); gender essentialism and anti-
essentialism (Chapter 14); feminist borderlands identities (Chapter 17); critical race
theory, intersectionality, and feminist philosophy (Chapter 29); Native American chaos
theory and politics of difference (Chapter 30); women, gender, and philosophies of
global development (Chapter 34); moral justification in an unjust world (Chapter 40);
Confucianism and feminist ethics of care (Chapter 41); neoliberalism, global justice,
and transnational feminisms (Chapter 48); feminism, structural injustice, and respon-
sibility (Chapter 49); Latin American feminist ethics and politics (Chapter 50);
feminism and liberalism (Chapter 52).

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 48
NEOLIBERALISM,
GLOBAL JUSTICE, AND
TRANSNATIONAL
FEMINISMS
Serene J. Khader

The processes collectively referred to as “globalization” have shifted our moral and
political landscape. The transnational flow of ideas, people, and capital that began
during the colonial period continues at an unprecedented speed. Neoliberalism, a
school of economic thought that favors deregulation of markets and privatization of
social services, drives international trade and development agendas. This has pro-
duced new vulnerabilities and contributed to existing ones. According to the World
Bank, 700 million people live in extreme poverty (earning less than $1.90 a day)
(Cruz, et al. 2015). In the last five years, the wealth of the poorer half of the world’s
population has fallen by almost 40 percent (Oxfam 2016). Almost a quarter of the
GDP of poor countries is owed as external debt (MDG Task Force 2015).
Many contemporary forms of deprivation are poorly understood without attention
to gender and race. Women are especially vulnerable to poverty because environ-
mental degradation and economic liberalization increase their unpaid work burdens
(Jaggar 2013b), they are less likely to own assets, and they are more likely to engage
in precarious employment with no cash returns (United Nations Statistics Division
2010). New cross-border markets place specific labor demands on women of color.
Women constitute the vast majority of the garment labor force (International Labor
Organization 2014). They are often targeted for gendered reasons—such as that they
will accept lesser pay. Sex trafficking is increasing, especially in outsourcing and pro-
cessing zones created by “free trade” (O’Brien 2008/2009). Transnational labor flows
have also altered the distribution of care and domestic work, creating what Rhacel
Salazar Parrenas calls a “three-tier” transfer wherein the public sphere labor of women
in rich countries is sustained by immigrant women who leave their own children
behind with women who are too poor to migrate (Salazar Parrenas 2000).
Feminist philosophies of global justice, like all philosophies of global justice, develop
normative frameworks for evaluating and responding to practices that cross national bor-
ders. Characteristic of feminist approaches is an insistence that evaluating the effects
 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

of globalization requires attention to social and structural hierarchies. These social and
structural hierarchies include, but are not limited to, sexist and racist oppression, coloni-
alism, and cultural domination. It is striking that, in a world where women’s susceptibility
to poverty is far greater than men’s, that the vast majority of the philosophical literature
on global justice makes no mention of women or gender.
I focus in this chapter on another characteristic feature of feminist philosophies of
global justice—their emphasis on questions that arise out of practices, especially prac-
tices of transnational movement building. In their orientation toward political praxis,
many feminist philosophies of global justice belong to the realm of what Charles Mills
refers to as non-ideal theory. Non-ideal theory attempts to “cope with injustices in our
current world and move to something better” (Anderson 2010: 3) rather than develop
a vision of a just world. Feminist philosophies of global justice respond to the needs of a
world that is, in Chandra Mohanty’s words,

only definable in relational terms, a world traversed with intersecting lines

of power and resistance, a world that can only be understood in terms of its
destructive divisions of gender, color, class, sexuality, and nation, a world that
must be transformed through a necessary process of “pivoting the center.”
(Mohanty 2003: 43)

Feminist philosophers expand the set of questions raised by prevailing liberal theories
of global justice. The latter have focused on identifying duties to the global poor and
developing principles of justice for the global order. Feminist philosophers add questions
that arise out of real-world difficulties recognizing and rectifying cross-border injustices,
such as: What types of processes are appropriate to developing normative goals across
differences of culture and power? What kinds of representations of “others” prevent
Northerners from perceiving their own responsibilities? and What can we learn about
justice from social movements? In what follows, I describe three concerns of feminist
philosophies of global justice that demonstrate a commitment to analyzing political
practices under non-ideal conditions. I use the term “feminist philosophies” broadly and
include normative insights from interdisciplinary feminist theory.

Relational Understandings of Harm and Responsibility

Many feminist philosophers criticize individualistic approaches to diagnosing and
rectifying harm. Rather than denying that individual humans can be loci of harm and
reparation, they argue that we cannot see many injustices without looking at patterns
of relationship. Following Iris Young, feminist philosophers argue that many emerging
practices are harmful insofar as they establish certain relational patterns—not merely
insofar as they cause suffering to individuals or distribute goods unfairly (Young 1990).
According to Ofelia Schutte, for instance, neoliberal economic policies that pressure
women to migrate to the United States have caused a “care deficit” in Latin America
(Schutte 2003). As I will discuss in more depth in the last section of this chapter, the
unpaid labor of women in the global South is effectively subsidizing the lifestyle of those
in the affluent North (see Jaggar 2013b). I argue elsewhere that a transnational surro-
gacy industry wherein South Asian women gestate babies for Northerners, promotes
recognition harms to women of a color as a group. It perpetuates a global view of women
of color as unentitled to have their own children, capable of producing only inferior,

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commodified forms of affect (Khader 2013). A distinctive moral epistemological shift

underlies this focus on unjust patterns of relationship. Recognizing these patterns
requires looking at multiple interactions and how actors are reconfigured relative to
one another through these interactions—or what Fiona Robinson call “the perma-
nent background of interaction.” Robinson suggests that a feminist moral epistemol-
ogy would recommend a distinctive approach to poverty alleviation, one that focused
on long-term connections between people in the global North and South rather than
isolated charity. Such an approach would lead, in the long term, not only to ending
poverty, but ending domination (Robinson 1999: 153).

Institutional Rather than Individualist Approaches

When feminists ask us to turn our moral attention to relations and contexts, they
often mean institutional contexts—not just relations among private actors like citizens
of the North and the “global poor.” Many of the earliest feminist interventions in
the global justice literature rejected what might be called the “moral methodologi-
cal individualism” of mainstream philosophical approaches. By “moral methodological
individualism,” I mean the view that rectifying injustice is primarily the responsi-
bility of individual actors. The watershed article in Anglo-American global ethics,
Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (1972) analogized the relationship
between people in the North and the global poor to the relationship between a pas-
serby and a drowning child. Uma Narayan argues that the methodologically individu-
alist emphasis ignores the role Northern corporations, states, and development actors
actually play in promoting poverty in the global South (Narayan 2005). According
to Hye-Ryoung Kang, even state-focused understandings of transnational justice are
insufficiently institutional. International institutional practices, such as International
Monetary Fund-imposed Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), have required
Southern states to decrease spending on health and education. According to Kang,
we cannot morally evaluate these effects on women by looking at the actions of states
alone (Kang 2014: 42).
According to feminist philosophers, existing patterns of domination matter in deter-
mining who owes what to whom and why. Alison Jaggar, Diana Meyers, Shelley Wilcox,
and Iris Marion Young independently argue that Northerners incur special obligations
to women in the global South because of existing institutional relationships. Among
the institutional harms Jaggar mentions are SAPs, unfair trade agreements (wherein,
for example, Southern countries must weaken labor regulations), and militarism (Jaggar
2001; 2002; 2005a; 2005b; 2009). These cause gender-based harms beyond poverty. For
example, military bases increase the demand for sex work. Jaggar argues that Northern
feminists should make reforming these institutional relationships a high priority goal,
both because Northern countries cause harm through them, and because international
institutions are more likely to listen to the voices of Northerners than poor women in
the global South (Jaggar 2005b). Similarly, Wilcox develops a Global Harm Principle,
according to which agents who harm others must stop harming them immediately and
provide reparation. Using the example of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, Wilcox
argues that Northern-caused human rights deficits in the global South that can trig-
ger a reparative duty to admit immigrants (Wilcox 2007: 277). Where Jaggar and
Wilcox argue that institutionally caused harms trigger reparative duties, other femi-
nists develop institutional understandings of obligation that do not rely on historical

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claims about harm. Meyers argues that Northerners have special moral obligations to
trafficked women because Northern governments “provide strong markets for sex work
and little deterrent to sex traffickers” (Meyers 2016). Young argues against a “liability
model” of responsibility in general (Young 2006). According to Young, it is difficult to
isolate an agent—even a collective agent—that is causally responsible for global pov-
erty, and inequalities within Northern counties dictate that not all Northern agents are
equally responsible. However, because of existing social and institutional connections,
Northerners bear forward-looking responsibilities to engage in collective action.

Relational Notions of Duty, Harm, and Repair

Other feminists take more metaphysical forms of social embeddedness to be morally
significant. Sarah Clark Miller argues for a “global duty to care.” This duty differs from
Kantian duties, because it takes human interdependence, rather than the ability of each
human person to reason, as foundational (Miller 2011: 41). Some feminists, especially
care ethicists, argue that obligation itself—and not merely obligations to rectify global
injustice—arise from relationships. Virginia Held (2005) argues that, even if individ-
ual human beings are loci of moral worth, we should think of caring relationships as
“normatively prior” to individual rights. According to her, respect for individuals can
only be actualized in contexts where caring relations are sustained.
Feminist philosophers also envision the types of relationships that would prevail under
a more just global order. Part of this task is, of course, envisioning more just institutional
structures. For instance, Gillian Brock (2014) advocates reforming the international tax
regime in ways that promote gender equality. However, many argue that sustaining just
institutions requires more; in Ann Ferguson’s words, fostering “felt senses of community
or publics when they don’t initially exist” (Ferguson 2011: 232; Held 2005: 102). In this
vein, Held argues that creating and sustaining caring relations across borders is more
important for ending human rights abuses than enforcing international law. Her point
is not that international law lacks value, but rather that proclamations do little in the
absence of relationships that ground genuine concern for specific distant others (Held
2005: 166). Kang argues that cross-border women’s movements, such as the Central
American Network of Women in Solidarity with Maquila Workers, play a crucial role
in moving toward a more just global order; they allow women to theorize and act against
new forms of vulnerability in ways that national-level associations do not (Kang 2014:
54–56). Breny Mendoza, however, argues that the focus on transnational-level asso-
ciations privileges the concerns of elite women in the global South (Mendoza 2002).
Feminists have also envisioned new forms of relationship for international development
practice that take seriously power differences between practitioners and intended ben-
eficiaries (Ferguson 1998; Cudd 2005; Jaggar 2006; Tobin 2009; Khader 2010; Khader
2011; Rivera 2011; Tobin and Jaggar forthcoming).
Feminists have also developed relational conceptions of harm and repair. Drawing
on narratives from victims and activists responding to the Darfur genocide, Miller
argues that the genocidal rape causes a distinctive type of harm. It impairs the victim’s
community standing, impairs her relationships with others, and harms her community
as well as her (Miller 2009). Using Margaret Urban Walker’s work on moral repair
(Walker 2006), Alisa Carse and Lynne Tirrell (2010) argue that forgiving very grave
wrongs, such as the wrongs of genocide, requires extended processes of reclaiming
moral authority and resituating one’s self understanding in relation to both the

610
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perpetrator(s) and one’s community. Eva Feder Kittay argues that what she calls the
“global heart transplant” wherein women from the global South migrate to care for
children in the North must be understood as a harm to a relationship between car-
egivers and their children. Filipina domestic workers in the United States see their
migration to the United States as undermining forms of care they wish they could
offer their own children (Kittay 2008: 156).

Naturalized Approaches to Normative Frameworks

In addition to beginning from existing unjust practices, many feminists demonstrate
non-ideal theoretical commitments by taking a naturalized moral epistemological
approach. In her groundbreaking Moral Understandings, Walker argues that moral-
ity itself should be understood as a set of social practices (Walker 2007). Developing
Walker’s argument, Jaggar describes feminist ethics as naturalized in the same sense that
certain approaches to epistemology are naturalized; rather than positing that inquiry
occurs in a “pure” form uncontaminated by social practices, inquiries themselves are
subject to analysis as social phenomena (Jaggar 2000: 457). Naturalists see empirical
knowledge as relevant to normative inquiry. An important upshot is that the normative
frameworks can be assessed in terms of their practical effects. Contemporary feminist
approaches to global justice take into account the way theoretical approaches to global
justice continue gender, colonial, racist, and class domination. The point of naturalized
approaches is not to do away with normativity; feminists cannot do without concepts
like justice and harm. Instead, moral and political philosophy should not ignore the
effects of concepts and discourses on the world.

The Moral Graphics of Global Justice

Feminist philosophers argue that what Walker calls the “moral graphics” of discussions
of global justice affect our perceptions of what we owe to one another. For example,
Scott Wisor rejects Singer’s aforementioned analogy of the global poor to children
drowning in a pond on the grounds that it encourages harmful interventions. Singer’s
analogy, and the utilitarian reasoning behind it, suggest that people should intervene
in whatever way is most likely to be efficacious. According to Wisor, this in turn
suggests that it is easy to know whether aid is harming or helping and promotes a
focus away from long-term solutions and institutional reform (Wisor 2011: 24; see
also Kuper 2002).
Another moral graphical frame challenged by feminists depicts “other” women
as victims of brutal cultures. This frame interweaves normative and non-normative
assumptions. In her classic Dislocating Cultures, Narayan argues that the idea that injus-
tices toward “other” women are culturally caused prevents Westerners from perceiving
their role in these injustices. The practice of sati (ritualized widow immolation) in
India, widely perceived as an “indigenous” practice, became more prominent because
of the British colonial fascination with it. The colonial construction of new gender
roles and/or heightening of sexist oppression did not only occur in India (Nzegwu 1995,
2006; Narayan 1997; Lugones 2010; Whyte 2013). This culture-focused moral graphi-
cal frame misassigns moral responsibility, first by preventing Westerners from perceiv-
ing remedial responsibility they incur because of their causal roles in sexist oppression
of “other” women. Second, as Jaggar argues, it causes Westerners to weight their moral

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responsibilities inappropriately—a preoccupation with burqas or female genital mutila-

tion conveniently distracts from other very severe harms they cause, such as militarism
and poverty (Jaggar 2005a, 2005b). Third, it may lead to development interventions
that villainize “other” men, do not rectify colonial and economic injustices to men and
burden “other” women with sole responsibility to improve their societies (Chant 2006;
Narayan 2010; Khader 2016).
Fourth, the view of “other” women’s oppression as culturally caused may suggest
that eradicating their cultures is a solution. This has been a common criticism of
Susan Moller Okin’s influential work on feminism and multiculturalism. Though
Okin explicitly argues for cultural reform over destruction, she also writes that some
women might be better off if “their cultures became extinct” (Okin 1999: 22). Two
distinct worries have stemmed from the potential recommendation that other cul-
tures should be eradicated. One is that it promotes marginalization of immigrant com-
munities living in the West (Spinner-Halev 2001; Deveaux 2007; Phillips 2009).
Another is that it makes Western militarism appear morally necessary. The idea that
“other” cultures needed to be eradicated because of how they treat their women was
widespread during the (colonial) Victorian period and revived with the so-called war
on terror (Grewal 1996).
Recent feminist work on Muslim women is an important locus of feminist theoretical
attention to the moral graphics of global justice. Images of Muslim women as oppressed
by a backward, medieval culture are ubiquitous in the post-September 11 West (Razack
2008). Rhetorical justifications of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq portrayed freedom
from culture as necessary for women’s liberation. In Europe and Canada, the values of
both freedom and secularism are routinely evoked to justify policies that marginalize
Muslims, such as the banning of Mosques and Muslim women’s forms of modest dress.
Though many liberals would reject these policies, many justifications of such policies
involve plausible interpretations of liberal values. For instance, some justify bans on
veiling by portraying public exposition of one’s body as an enactment of freedom (Abu-
Lughod 2002; Mahmood 2005) or by claiming that religion threatens the democratic
public sphere (Oliver 2010; Scott 2010). Responding to such political effects of cer-
tain forms of liberalism has led feminist philosophers to argue against certain osten-
sibly liberal commitments (Hirschkind and Mahmood 2002; Laborde 2008; Razack
2008; Khader 2016). For instance, Sherene Razack argues that religion became a racial
dog-whistle in Canadian debates about faith-based arbitration (Razack 2008). I argue
elsewhere that this work on the moral graphics surrounding Muslim women should be
viewed as an invitation to question the normative importance of freedom from tradition
to feminism (Khader 2016; see also Weir 2013). I suggest that feminism as a normative
doctrine does not require the view that traditional dictates are inherently oppressive.

Connection to Cross-Border Movements and Practices

Feminist philosophers also demonstrate a naturalized and non-ideal approach to ethics
by approaching transnational movements as sites of normative inquiry. Ofelia Schutte
uses Latin American social movements to argue that the ideal of women’s independ-
ence promoted by neoliberalism is deeply self-contradictory. It purports to increase
women’s ability to pursue education, participation in public life, yet at the same time
makes them dependent by cutting social supports for care work. For Schutte, this con-
tradiction suggests a need to recognize that what neoliberalism calls “freedom” may

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not be freedom at all. Jaggar (2001) argues that the women’s human rights movement
is a site of the creation of new norms. According to Jaggar, feminist human rights argu-
ments have brought forward important questions regarding the relationships between
first-generation (so-called “liberty”) rights and second-generation (“social”) rights.
They show how women cannot attain the objects of first-generation rights unless their
societies secure second-generation ones.
Feminist philosophers, often responding to the needs of activists, also work to cor-
rect theoretical gaps in human rights discourse. Meyers responds to advocacy discourses
about sex trafficking in her work on victim narratives and human rights. According
to Meyers, many difficulties in victim advocacy arise partly from a legal and cultural
association of victimhood with the lack of agency. As she puts it, “an undocumented
transnational migrant’s fate hangs on whether that individual is deemed an agent or
a victim of the transport process” (Meyers 2014: 10). Women who collaborate with
their traffickers (a large number of those trafficked) have difficulty making legal claims,
because they lack the passivity associated with victimhood—even though many experi-
ence “slavery-like conditions” and severe physical and psychological trauma. Serena
Parekh notices a different theoretical gap in human rights practice. The absence of an
understanding of the relationship between gender and injustice has made it difficult to
win asylum cases on grounds of gender-based persecution. In cases of domestic violence
and rape, it is often argued that the state can protect women. According to Parekh, the
idea of structural injustice both makes sense of why states often do not protect women
when they can and explains why this failure is an issue for justice (Parekh 2012: 277).
A second element of the feminist view of social movements and practices as sites
of normative inquiry is a methodological commitment to seeing women in the global
South as theorizers. Many feminist philosophers argue that theorizing about “other”
women treats them as “raw data” (Nnaemeka 2004), and this produces normative
and non-normative distortions. This point has been particularly important in discus-
sions of how to measure and respond to poverty. Feminists have long been attentive
to the ways in which concepts of deprivation can further marginalize the deprived—
particularly when those concepts are formulated without their input. For example,
the idea that dependency work is inherently mindless and degrading has perpetuated
stereotypes of women as irrational. Though there is disagreement about the role and
extent of involvement, there is broad agreement among feminist philosophers on the
idea that the perspectives of women in the global South are key to developing meas-
ures of deprivation and implementing them (Nzegwu 1995; Ferguson 1998; Ackerly
2000; Nussbaum 2001; Nnaemeka 2004; Jaggar 2006; Charusheela 2008; Khader 2011;
2012; Jaggar 2013a; Khader 2015). One reason for the insistence on what are often
called “pro-poor methodologies” is prudential. People’s lives get worse when they are
subject to misguided attempts to “develop them,” and as Jaggar puts it, “poverty is a
stigmatizing term” (2013a: 6). To call someone “poor” in our current global order is to
make them a legitimate target of certain social policies—policies that may worsen their
lives and/or that they themselves may find objectionable. Consider one of the most
controversial feminist philosophical claims about poverty, Martha Nussbaum’s claim
that literacy is a basic capability to which everyone should have access (Nussbaum
2001). Nussbaum’s basis for this claim is that literacy is important for political partici-
pation and access to income. As Brooke Ackerly (2000), Nkiru Nzegwu (1995), and
S. Charusheela (2008) have all argued, Nussbaum’s claim about the instrumental value
of literacy varies in truth from context to context. That is, whether literacy secures

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these other functionings depends on certain context-variant facts about how income
and power can be accessed (Nzegwu 1995; Ackerly 2000; Charusheela 2008). Ackerly
argues that, in rural Bangladesh, literacy just is not that important to the types of jobs
that women need to gain a basic income. Nzegwu argues that focusing on literacy in
certain sub-Saharan African contexts is likely to further the marginalization of women
who are not from the upper classes. Charusheela interprets Nzegwu as claiming that
the assumption that literacy is a requirement for power facilitates upper-class women’s
exclusion of lower-class women from leadership positions in Igbo society. She also
argues that it causes illiterate women to see themselves as lesser and accept domination
by women from the other classes (Charusheela 2008: 8–9).
Though it might be argued that expanding literacy would reduce domination of
non-elite women, Charusheela’s point is that policies that advance literacy are not
neutral among ways of life. Literacy is more important to securing other goods within
certain class and cultural contexts, and taking literacy promotion supports making
cultural contexts of poor rural women more like those contexts—and not vice versa.
Some arguments against methodologies for diagnosing deprivation that originate from
“above” also point to deeper metaethical issues making judgments across difference. For
instance, it is a consequence of the view of morality as a social practice that values may
not always be translatable from context to context. See Jaggar and Tobin (Chapter 40
in this volume) for further discussion of the relationship of the non-modularity of moral
knowledge to global justice.

Feminized Labor as a Justice Concern

Feminist philosophers also demonstrate a non-ideal theoretical orientation to global
justice by calling for renewed moral and political attention to labor. On one hand,
attention to what counts as labor and its distribution among social groups is a classic
feminist concern, especially in socialist feminism. Feminists argue that dependency/care
work, housework, and sex work maintain unjust power relations. On the other hand,
the renewed emphasis on labor directly reflects the embeddedness of feminist theory in
contemporary social movements and practices. Chandra Mohanty argues that changes
in the material conditions of women’s lives in recent years justify a shift in philosophical
attention. Her 1988 “Under Western Eyes,” perhaps the most influential essay in third-
world feminist theory, concentrated on cultural imperialism. In the intervening years,
according to Mohanty, neoliberalism created new forms of gender and racial oppression
and has fomented the view that unregulated capitalism is both “natural” and normatively
justified. In the words of Mohanty’s 2008 essay, “Under Western Eyes Revisited,” “global
political and economic processes have become more brutal, exacerbating economic,
racial, and gender inequalities, and thus they need to be demystified, re-examined, and
theorized” (Mohanty 2008: 230; see also Schutte 2000; Weir 2008; Ruiz-Aho 2011).

New Forms of Gendered, Racialized Labor

Feminist philosophers analyze the resultant forms of gendered, racialized vulnerability. For
instance, Vandana Shiva argues that the spread of genetically modified organisms has mar-
ginalized poor farmers, who are often women, all over the world (Mohanty 2008: 230).
Neoliberal globalization has also made women, and especially women of color, the
preferred workforce in “‘flexible, temporary’” labor markets (Mohanty 2008: 232). Some

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of the gendered and racialized occupations in this new disposable economy are sweatshop
labor (women are more “docile” and can be paid less (Ong 1987; Mohanty 2008: 246),
the international “maid [and nanny] trade,” and reproductive and sex tourism. Further,
the international economic policies initially adopted as part of SAPs continue to increase
women’s unpaid labor burdens. SAPs were a package of conditions poor countries must
meet to receive IMF loans. These conditions included privatization, currency devaluation,
and cuts in social expenditures. Such policies have forced women to perform unpaid labor
to fill in the gaps in care for children, the elderly, and the disabled. The environmental
effects of such policies have also increased women’s unpaid labor, since women are tra-
ditionally tasked with collecting firewood and water (Desai 2002). Moral and political
questions about feminized and racialized forms of labor under neoliberalism align with
an analytical paradigm recently developed in interdisciplinary Women’s Studies, trans-
national feminisms. Transnational feminist theorists emphasize the ways in which glo-
balization, in its economic, military, and political forms, creates both impediments and
opportunities for transnational feminist solidarity.
Feminists have also engaged in constructing philosophical frameworks for assess-
ing injustices enacted through labor. Jaggar (2009) offers the notion of “transnational
cycles of gendered vulnerability” to criticize the effects of the global economy on
women in the global South. Jaggar states that interlocked global and local cultural
processes make some people especially vulnerable to abuse, violence, and exploitation.
The targeting of certain people for such heightened vulnerability is a distinct moral and
political problem. According to Jaggar, recognizing this requires going beyond Rawlsian
approaches to distributive justice that insist we must be able to identify the “least well-
off.” In another constructive approach to labor, Wisor (2014) extends arguments about
what has come to be known as “the resource curse” to include gender impacts. The
term “resource curse” describes a difficulty facing many resource-rich countries. The
presence of desirable resources creates incentives for other nations to plunder them,
and/or make deals with authoritarian political actors to access the resources. Wisor
argues that we must take gender impacts into account to morally evaluate the resource
curse. The labor impacts of the resource curse can adversely affect gender equality; for
instance, oil production prevents the establishment of a highly developed service sector
and thus reduces the likelihood that women will participate in the workforce (Jaggar
2009). In addition to offering gender-sensitive frameworks for normatively evaluating
the impacts of gendered labor, Jaggar (2005a, 2005b) and Wisor (2014) offset the ten-
dency to assume that “other” women’s oppression is simply “culturally caused” and/or
that changing local cultural norms is the highest moral priority.

Renewed Interest in Exploitation

Feminist philosophical discussions of gendered labor have also led to a revival of interest
in the concept of exploitation. Where discussions of exploitation in Anglo-American
philosophy in the last thirty years have been largely restricted to “taking unfair advan-
tage of a situation” over “taking advantage of an unfair situation,” feminist philosophers
increasingly recognize a need to describe unfair situations as themselves exploitative.
Jaggar argues that gendered time-use disparities can only be morally understood within
an exploitation framework. We need to understand poor Southern women’s nearly end-
less and increasing work burdens as both coerced and benefitting not only men, but
private employers and state institutions (Jaggar 2013a, 2013b). Sylvia Chant argues

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that international development policy has created a “feminization of responsibility” in

which women’s unpaid labor is a vehicle for the development of their countries (Chant
2006). I draw on Chant’s work to argue that the feminization of responsibility consti-
tutes exploitation, because it shifts an obligation of people in the global North onto
women in the global South (Khader 2017). Agomoni Ganguli (Ganguli 2016, 2017)
and Monique Deveaux (2016) argue that cross-border markets in reproductive labor
require an analysis of structural injustice as producing exploitation. Understanding the
moral dimensions of transnational surrogacy requires attention to the ways in which
legal structures protecting surrogates have been responsive to international financial
pressures (Ganguli 2016, 2017). According to Deveaux (2016), brokers in markets for
ova who pay women less than is required to meet their needs take advantage of the
economically vulnerable in ways that constitute exploitation. The notion of exploita-
tion as mere extraction of an unfair price fails to capture the ways in which women who
“donate” eggs are being used because of their economic need.
Though she does not explicitly use an exploitation framework, Narayan (2010; see
also Khader 2014) argues that microcredit conscripts women into reproducing a colo-
nial economic system that is ultimately bad for them and their states. Though celebra-
tory development discourses paint microcredit as “entrepreneurship” that empowers
women, most microcredit initiatives encourage women to operate in the informal
economy. Not only does the informal economy provide women with few workplace
protections or opportunities for advancement, the informal economy is, by definition,
not taxed. External encouragement of untaxable forms of labor encourages continued
poor country dependence on rich countries and makes it difficult for poor countries to
provide social services to their citizens.

Conclusion
Feminist philosophical approaches to globalization often begin from non-ideal theo-
retical commitments. They start with an analysis of the real-world problems wrought
by neoliberalism and maintain an active dialogue with social movements attempt-
ing to respond to those problems. This continued dialogue with political practices
has produced heightened attention to the political effects of academic and advocacy
discourses, as well as attention to the processes by which deprivation and oppression
are generated and diagnosed. It has offered reasons to change intellectual priorities as
real world political realities shift as the shift from the focus on “cultural” oppression of
women to transnational flows of feminized labor suggests. Feminist approaches have
also highlighted the multidimensional character of oppression and deprivation; politi-
cal responses to our current transnational landscape must take into account disparities
besides poverty, such as gendered and racialized vulnerabilities.

Related Topics
Critical race theory, intersectionality, and feminist philosophy (Chapter 29); women,
gender, and philosophies of global development (Chapter 34); feminist intersections
with environmental and ecological thought (Chapter 35); moral justification in an
unjust world (Chapter 40); feminist ethics of care (Chapter 43); multicultural and
postcolonial feminisms (Chapter 47); feminism, structural injustice, and responsibility
(Chapter 49); Latin American feminist ethics and politics (Chapter 50).

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 49
FEMINISM, STRUCTURAL
INJUSTICE, AND
RESPONSIBILITY
Serena Parekh

One of the enduring questions of feminist philosophy is how to conceptualize the

injustices that women experience. The term most often used to express this unjust
treatment is oppression, defined by Ann Cudd as “a harm through which groups of
persons are systematically and unfairly or unjustly constrained, burdened, or reduced
by any of several forces” (Cudd 2006: 23). However, driven largely by the work of Iris
Young, some recent feminist scholarship has moved toward a particular understand-
ing of oppression as a structural injustice as a better way to account for many, if not all,
of the particular kinds of injustices women around the world experience today and to
explain why oppression persists despite changes in laws and policies aimed at reducing
inequality and discrimination. Structural injustice refers to unjust structural limitations
that unfairly constrain the opportunities of some while granting privileges to others.
However, understanding women’s oppression as structural presents a challenge around
responsibility. One feature of structural injustice is that it is often unintentional, that is,
it is often grounded in “unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions
underlying institutional rules” (Young 1990: 41) rather than in the malicious intent
of an individual or intentionally discriminatory policies or practices. How then do we
determine who is responsible for this and how do we hold people responsible for reme-
dying it? If oppression results for interpersonal interactions, then we can ascribe respon-
sibility to the individual doing the oppressive actions; if oppression is rooted in unjust
and discriminatory laws, policies, and institutions, then responsibility entails changing
these so that they eliminate their unjust elements. However neither the source of the
injustice nor what needs to be done to change it is so clear when oppression is under-
stood as structural. Yet nonetheless, contemporary philosophers have argued for chang-
ing our notion of responsibility to better address this. Though some feminist analyses of
injustice have focused on how it is possible for collectives to be responsible (see Isaacs
2011 and May and Strikwerda 1994), I focus here on the concept of structural injustice.
In the entry below, I will give a deeper explanation of the concept of structural injus-
tice and show why many thinkers hold that it is a better way to account for contempo-
rary forms of oppression. I will then outline ways thinkers have tried to overcome the
problem of responsibility and note some of the lingering problems.
 Feminism, Injustice, and Responsibility

My approach to this issue is representative of a feminist method of theorizing

injustice. It is representative of a feminist approach to injustice not merely because its
primary focus is the injustice experienced on the basis of gender; the structural injus-
tice approach can be brought to bear on a variety of persistent injustices such as those
connected to race, religion, and economic status, among others. Rather, what makes
it a feminist analysis is that it is in the long line of feminist scholarship that seeks to
go beyond traditional concepts and categories and articulate new ways of understand-
ing many of the persistent and deep injustices and inequalities in the world today. For
example, in more traditional methodologies, either an individual is responsible or she
is not, either a law is non-discriminatory and therefore just, or it is not; the structural
injustice approach challenges both of these assumptions. In Susan Sherwin’s view, the
feminist methodology has been helpful in pointing out that the danger “within tradi-
tional methodologies is that of accepting dichotomies. Dichotomous thinking forces
ideas, persons, roles, and disciplines into rigid polarities. It reduces richness and com-
plexity in the interest of logical neatness, and in doing so, it distorts truth” (Sherwin
1998: 25). In this chapter, I demonstrate how feminist methodology can help us to
expand our dichotomous thinking around concepts of injustice, oppression, and respon-
sibility by showing that often these concepts—and the problems they are intended to
reveal—are much more complex than usually understood.

What Is Structural Injustice?

The most influential account of structural injustice originates in the work of Iris Young.
In her early and very influential book, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Young writes
that that oppression is best conceptualized as the structural and systemic constraints
that arise from the everyday practices of ordinary people, rather than intentional harm
or discrimination on the part of individuals or the state. Oppression is structural in the
sense that it is based on, “unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions
underlying institutional rules and the collective consequences of following those rules,”
and further, in “unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordi-
nary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes, and structural features of bureaucratic
hierarchies and market mechanisms—in short, the normal processes of everyday life”
(Young 1990: 41).
In her posthumously published book, Responsibility for Justice, Young develops this
understanding of oppression in more detail and applies the concept to the global level
(Young 2011). She notes that individuals vulnerable to structural injustice differ from
other people in terms of the range of options available to them and the kind of con-
straints on their actions. The kind and degree of harm experienced by people in a par-
ticular structural position will vary and depend on numerous other factors (including
their own choices, luck, the actions of others), but the injustice is simply that some are
made vulnerable to harms because of the social structural position they are in, while
others are not and may even benefit. This position of vulnerability occurs on the global,
as well as domestic, levels.
Two features of structural injustice are worth highlighting for the way that they
complicate the question of responsibility. First, though a form of severe injustice, it
is often not intentionally caused. Structural injustice arises from the actions of many
people acting according to normal rules and accepted, morally justifiable practices

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(Young 2011: 48). In other words, structural injustice arises from people living their
everyday lives and pursuing their own interests uncoordinated with each other.
Like gridlock traffic, the outcome is not intended and may even run counter to the
intentions of the individuals who contribute to it. This lack of direct causal agency
is also why people often fail to recognize oppression as structural. The results, how-
ever, are social-structural processes that create channels for action, channels that
guide people to act in certain ways and constrain them in others. These structures,
Young notes, appear as objective, given, and constraining. Institutional and social
rules, implicit and explicit, function to limit the kinds and range of options open to
people in various structural positions, but this is rarely experienced as a limitation.
Freedom is not eliminated, but individuals are channeled towards some possibilities
and blocked from others. Even Claudia Card, who had previously argued that evils
such as oppression were the result of culpable wrongdoing, agrees with Young’s posi-
tion that oppression does not necessarily presuppose culpability (Card 2005; 2009).
“Evil,” Card writes,

in institutions or practices can, of course, take the form of inexcusably culpable

deeds by individuals. But it can also, or instead, take the form of norms that are
utterly indefensible, from a moral point of view, whether those who are guided
by those norms are aware of it or not.
(Card 2009: 158)

Second, structural injustice differs from other forms of oppression because of its focus on
background conditions. “When we judge that structural injustice exists,” Young writes,
“we are saying precisely that at least some of the normal and accepted background
conditions of action are not morally acceptable” (Young 2004: 378). Because structural
injustice is embedded in background conditions, norms, habits, and everyday interac-
tions most people remain unaware of it. In fact, Young notes that we often only become
aware of structural injustice when we determine something is morally wrong but can
find no other clear causal explanation, that is, the harm cannot be attributed to the
victim’s poor choices, bad luck, the wrongful actions of some persons, or overtly dis-
criminatory laws and policies, or other powerful institutions. This feature of structural
injustice, as we’ll see below, complicates the question of responsibility since, as Cudd
notes, most moral theories agree that you cannot hold a person responsible to end a
situation that one does not see; to put it in terms of a well-known example, you cannot
have a responsibility to pull a child out of a shallow pond if you do not see the child
struggling in the pond (Cudd 2006). Coming to critically evaluate the justice of the
status quo and the background conditions against which we act and live is one of the
challenges of thinking of oppression as structural.
We can understand gender oppression as a form of structural injustice because it
constrains and shapes individual choices and circumstances, not through intentional,
conscious actions but rather through largely unconscious and implicit norms, habits,
and institutions. For example, the range of careers that young women aspire to are not
limited because of explicit rules or policies, but often because of the implicit understand-
ing of the roles a woman ought and ought not to play in society. It may seem natural and
normal for women to aspire to jobs that center around care taking, but unnatural, and
perhaps even inconceivable, to aspire to leadership roles, either in government or the
corporate world. When an individual decides to pursue a career as an elementary school

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teacher, for example, rather than something with higher pay or prestige, the individual
herself does not experience this as a limitation or constraint, nor does she experience
herself as being channeled in one direction rather than another. Social structures seem
objectified and not controllable by human agency. This is what Young means by saying
that social structures appear as objective, given and constraining, and why they are so
important in understanding gender injustice.
Understanding why such patterns may constitute an injustice requires taking a
broad view of the systematic relations that provide the context for individual action
to occur. This means confronting the structural categories that are largely grounded
on inequality—class, race, gender, ability, sexual orientation, and gender presenta-
tion—that shape and constrain individuals. Young insists that focusing too much on
individual actions and intentions takes away the focus from systematic relations in the
context of which structural injustice may arise. As Elizabeth Anderson has shown, it is
impossible to understand the persistence of racism without seeing how it is embodied
in structural relations and sustained through social practices such as segregation. In
her view, counteracting racial inequality requires more than celebrating cultural diver-
sity or focusing on distributive justice; it requires attention to the structural processes
such as housing and work integration that sustain and often even cause inequality
(Anderson 2010). “To capture the race-based injuries we need a theory that begins
from a structural account of the systematic disadvantages imposed on people because
of their race in society” (Anderson 2013: 6).
Sally Haslanger has recently situated the concept of implicit bias within the account
of oppression as structural injustice. She agrees that the best way to understand social
injustices like sexism or racism is not through focusing on action and attitudes of indi-
viduals, but in terms of unjust and interlocking social structures. “The normative core of
what is wrong with racism/sexism lies not in the ‘bad attitudes’ of individuals but in the
asymmetrical burdens and benefits and inegalitarian relationships that societies impose
on such groups” (Haslanger 2015: 2). Without seeing injustice as structural it is hard to
explain the persistence of racism and sexism despite changing legal and social norms. In
addition to social structures, structural injustice must be understood to include schemas
or social meanings, “clusters of culturally shared (public) concepts, propositions, and
norms that enable us, collectively, to interpret and organize information and coordinate
action, thought, and affect,” as well as the presence or absence of resources for certain
social groups (Haslanger 2015: 4). Taken together, these three factors—interacting
structures, schemas, resources—go a long way in explaining the persistence of social
injustices like sexism and racism.
Yet for many reasons, much recent feminist scholarship has focused on implicit bias
as a source of oppression and explanation for the persistence of racism and sexism,
rather than structural conditions. An individual can be said to harbor an implicit bias
against a stigmatized group when “she has automatic cognitive or affective associa-
tions between (her concept of) G and some negative property (P) or stereotypic trait
(T), which are accessible and can be operative in influencing judgment and behavior
without the conscious awareness of the agent” (Holroyd 2012: 275, italics added; also see
Crouch 2012 and Saul 2013). If many agents hold implicit bias without realizing it,
they can perpetuate norms around gender and race that are oppressive. Even though
individuals may wish to avoid racist or sexist actions, they may find themselves still
acting according to negative implicit biases. Though Haslanger acknowledges that
implicit bias is appealing as an explanation for the persistence of sexism and racism

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and understanding it may play a role in achieving justice, this role is tangential to
what are really needed, namely structural change, cultural contestation, and a more
just distribution of resources. The focus on implicit bias makes it appear, erroneously,
that if we merely change how we think, we can end injustice without attending to the
material and structural roots of the problem.
Haslanger demonstrates this clearly with the example of Lisa and Larry’s parental
leave. In this scenario, Lisa and Larry are married, work at the same company and
earn the same income. Once they have a baby, Lisa ends up taking maternity leave
(the company does not offer paid parental leave and so Larry cannot stay home to
take care of the infant), and having spent more time early on with the baby, ends
up becoming the primary care giver. When she returns to work, she asks for more
flexibility in her schedule. Ten years later, Larry’s salary is significantly higher than
Lisa’s and this gives him more power both at home and in the workplace. The point
of Haslanger’s example is that the interacting structures of work and family life, and
the norms and practices around them, are what explain Larry’s ability to accumulate
power and wealth, not implicit bias. In other words, the way sexism manifests itself
in this scenario is through structural processes, social schemas (the assumption, for
example, that maternity leave is necessary but paternity leave is not), and the dis-
tribution of resources (care work does not earn economic rewards) and not implicit
biases on the part of Lisa, Larry, or their employer.
To summarize, structural injustice refers to harms that arise from the accumulated
outcomes of millions of people pursuing their own morally acceptable ends but who are
unintentionally producing outcomes that constrain some based on their social posi-
tion and benefit others. The outcomes are often reified and experienced as natural
and unchangeable. Alison Jaggar has shown how structural injustice may be applied
in a more global context. Jaggar has argued that global gender inequalities ought to be
understood as arising not merely from harmful domestic laws or practices, but as linked
with transnational arrangements (Jaggar 2014: 171). These arrangements, while not
intending to contribute to gender injustice, play a role in the structural injustice that
gives rise to gender specific harms. For example, on the global level, feminized labor
has come to be associated with informal work, low pay, and a lack of labor protections.
Feminized labor can be understood as a gendered exploitation insofar as it takes advan-
tage of people who have been made vulnerable due to structural injustice (in this case,
specific gender norms about women’s labor capacities). Without seeing exploitation at
a systematic level, it is impossible to account for why women are often in positions of
vulnerability. Jaggar argues that the most important aspect for understanding the root
of gender injustice is social institutions that make various menus of options socially
available and assign costs and benefits to various decisions (Jaggar 2014). In this sense,
particular gendered harms must be understood in the context of the structural injustices
that support and inculcate them.
For Jaggar, it is “interlocking transnational cycles of gendered vulnerability” that
place women in systematically weaker bargaining situations and enable gender rights
violations and exploitation (Jaggar 2014). An adequate understanding of structural
injustice requires the inclusion of transnational actors and institutions. Her example is
the maid trade. Annually, thousands of women choose to leave their home countries
to become domestic workers in foreign lands, making themselves vulnerable to exploi-
tation and other harms. That so many choose to place themselves in this vulnerable

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situation is often the result of a rational response to gendered institutional constraints.

For example, women are often unable to get good paying jobs in their home countries
and this might be a push factor for women to leave. On the other hand, in Western
countries because of the decline in real wages, two income families often need child and
other domestic help; because care work is gendered female, there is a demand for female
care workers. In addition, there are transnational factors that contribute to the situation
of vulnerability as well. In this case, global inequality makes it appealing for people from
poor countries to want to migrate to wealthier ones (one of the major sources of income
in the Philippines, for example, is remittances from workers abroad, especially domes-
tic workers). In short, labor migration is gendered and is in part grounded on globally
shared views of how labor should be distributed among different genders so that we must
understand that systematic gender vulnerabilities are produced by interactions among
both national and transnational factors. Importantly, structural injustice produced by
transnational factors can undermine the effectiveness of national policies that aim to
eradicate gender injustices.
Young, Haslanger, and Jaggar show that understanding gender injustice as structural
leads to a different way of addressing the problem. If sexism were a matter of inter-
personal interaction or unjust laws, we could address it directly. But as Young notes,
addressing structural injustice requires collective action to address unjust social norms
and practices, on the level of individuals, not the state. For Haslanger, addressing
enduring inequalities like sexism or racism requires that we challenge social structures,
schemas, and the distribution of resources. For Jaggar, if we are going to address gender
injustice at the global level, we must also address transnational cycles of gendered vul-
nerability that are part of global political and economic arrangements that function as
a kind of structural injustice that make women vulnerable to and permit many forms
of gender injustice. Recommendations for institutional reform to end gender dispari-
ties should address not only situations in particular countries but also transnational
arrangements that perpetuate structural injustice. But before any of these changes can
be implemented a more fundamental question must be answered: who is responsible for
changing social structures and transnational arrangements?

Responsibility for Structural Injustice

Young acknowledges that the question, “How shall moral agents think about our
responsibility in relation to social injustice?” is a particularly challenging one when dis-
cussing structural injustice (Young 2011: 75). The fact that we recognize something as
an injustice implies that someone ought to be held responsible (we don’t, for example,
talk about the wind that blew my hat off my head as being unjust because there would
be no one to hold responsible). Yet structural injustice is produced and reproduced
through the actions of many people acting within accepted norms and rules. As a result,
there is no clear wrongdoer as is often the case with interpersonal injustice. Because of
this, our usual methods of assigning responsibility are not applicable. To respond to this
dilemma, Young proposes her own account of political responsibility grounded in the
social connection model. Political responsibility is “a duty for individuals to take public
stands about actions and events that affect broad masses of people, and to try to organize
collective action to prevent massive harm or foster institutional change for the better”
(Young 2011: 76).

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Young begins her defense of this kind of responsibility by explaining why other
attempts have failed. Traditionally, individuals can be held responsible for an unjust
outcome if they are causally connected to the harm, acted voluntarily and with sufficient
knowledge. Yet these conditions do not apply to structural injustice, which, as noted
above, is often the result of good intentions and ordinary actions on the part of many
individuals who may not even be aware of the effects of their action. Further, traditional
responsibility is backwards looking—it aims to remedy a past injustice without think-
ing about how to alter conditions so that future harms do not arise. For Young, the goal
of responsibility is to change unjust structures so that they do not reproduce injustice
going forward. On the global level, both dominant schools of thought—cosmopolitans
and nationalists—also fail to provide a ground for responsibility for structural injustice.
Cosmopolitans, who hold that we are responsible to all people equally, have an account
of responsibility that is implausibly demanding in Young’s view. Nationalists, on the
other hand, seem to root their account in something morally arbitrary, namely, our
social location in particular nations that have arisen contingently. Neither traditional
conceptions of responsibility nor contemporary global reformulations seem adequate to
address responsibility for structural injustice according to Young.
Young refers to her alternative as “political responsibility,” a term she takes from an
essay by Hannah Arendt (Young 2004; 2011; Arendt 2003). Political responsibility is
a form of collective responsibility that holds individuals responsible for contributing
to injustice, regardless of their intentions. It says that individuals bear responsibility
for structural injustice because they contribute by their actions to the processes that
produce unjust outcomes (Young 2011: 105). In other words, though individuals are
not guilty of a crime, they nonetheless bear responsibility because of their connection
to unjust social processes. Responsibility is grounded not in a shared nation-state or in
the universal category of humanity, but rather it arises from our belonging together in
a system of interdependent processes of cooperation and competition, through which
we try to realize our aims. “Responsibility in relation to injustice thus derives not from
living under a common constitution, but rather from participating in the diverse insti-
tutional processes that produce structural injustice” (Young 2011: 105).
Political responsibility is the appropriate form of responsibility for structural injustice
because it includes the following features: it is not isolating (it does not seek to pick out
an individual responsible for a harm and find them guilty of wrongful action); it judges
background conditions (it does not merely evaluate the harm, but brings into question
the background conditions that may themselves not be morally acceptable); it is for-
ward, not backward looking (the aim is not to ascribe guilt but to improve conditions in
the future); it is fundamentally a shared responsibility (though an individual personally
bears responsibility, she does not bear it alone; there is a tacit acknowledgment of the
collective that together produces injustice); and it can only be discharged through col-
lective action (political responsibility cannot be born alone but requires that we work
together with others to discharge our duty). Though Young makes clear that it is indi-
viduals who bear political responsibility, states too can play important roles in helping
individuals discharge their political responsibility (Parekh 2011).
What Young means by “political” must be understood through her reading of
Hannah Arendt. For Arendt, to be political means to act in concert with other people,
not merely to participate in elected office or to pass laws (Arendt 1998). Reflecting this
understanding of politics, Young writes that politics is

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the activity in which people organize collectively to regulate or transform some

aspect of their shared social conditions, along with the communicative activi-
ties in which they try to persuade one another to join such collective action or
decide what direction they wish to take it.
(Young 2004: 377)

To say that we have a political responsibility for Young is to say that we have a
responsibility not just to change discriminatory laws or unjust practices, but also to
work with others to transform the world through speech and action and to challenge
the status quo.
This is an extremely tall order. Young acknowledges that many will resist the idea
that they are responsible for large-scale social processes, the injustice of which they do
not directly bring about or intend. To use Samuel Scheffler’s phrase, Young’s concep-
tion of responsibility goes against our ordinary “phenomenology of agency,” where we
are responsible only for what we experience ourselves as causing (Scheffler 2008). Even
if we were willing to embrace responsibility, it may simply be too overwhelming for us to
bear. Young fully acknowledges the challenge of political responsibility but rather than
dwell on its seemingly overwhelming character, we ought to seek to understand what
is possible and reasonable to expect of our selves and of others. To achieve this, Young
proposes some parameters of reasoning that individuals can refer to in order to workout
how they can discharge their responsibility for structural injustice.
There are four “parameters” that we can use to reason through how to discharge
our political responsibility: power, privilege, interest, and collective agency. Different
agents have different kinds and degrees of responsibility depending on first, how much
power they have over or influence on the processes that produce structural injustice. For
example, the anti-sweatshop movement focused on those with most power to change
conditions for the workers producing their garments, namely multinational designers
and retailers. Second, we are responsible to the extent that we are the beneficiaries
of the processes that produce structural injustice. For example, middle-class clothing
consumers while not necessarily powerful in regards to the injustice of sweatshops, are
nonetheless privileged vis-à-vis the sweatshop workers. Third, responsibility maps onto
the extent of our interest in the structural injustice. For example, victims of structural
injustice have a unique interest in remedying it, and thus share responsibility for chang-
ing the structures (along with others, to be sure). Finally, we are responsible to the
extent that we have a “collective ability, ” that is, we are in positions where we can draw
on the resources of already organized entities and use them in new ways to promote
change (Young 2011: 147). In this sense, unions, churches, student groups, etc., have a
particular kind and degree of responsibility because they can help to coordinate action.
One of the unique features of Young’s account is that individuals can be held respon-
sible for structural injustice even though they are not guilty for producing it, in the sense
of being isolated for a culpable wrongdoing. Further, individuals have a responsibility and
not a strict duty to rectify injustice. For Young, duties specify moral rules of what we
must and must not do, while responsibility, though no less obligatory, does not specify
precisely which actions one must do or refrain from doing. There is more discretion for
individual agents to decide how to discharge responsibility and ultimately it is up to
each individual to do what she thinks is best. This claim has opened Young up to criti-
cism. For example, Jeffrey Reiman (2012) has argued that Young’s account of political

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responsibility requires a stronger conception of guilt. He argues that there is a logically

reciprocal relationship between prospective responsibility and retrospective guilt. For
Reiman, it does not make sense to say that someone is responsible to fix something in
the future if they did nothing wrong in the past and were guilty of nothing. Further,
if an individual is responsible for doing something, then, logically speaking, she must
be guilty for not doing it. Using Young’s example, if people are responsible to join
with others to making sure that conditions are more just in the future, then individuals
would be guilty by omission is they failed to do this. Reiman insists that we can only
hold people politically responsible for their contribution to structural injustice if they
are retrospectively responsible as well.
If Reiman is right, then we are left without a satisfying account of responsibility.
Reiman is not so pessimistic; he thinks that it is possible to supplement political respon-
sibility with a form of guilt and draws on the law to demonstrate this. He points out
that legally, there are crimes where individual actions are hard to disentangle from the
totality—much like structural injustice—but nonetheless individuals are held legally
responsible, such as conspiracy, racketeering and felony murder. In these examples,
the crimes are so multifaceted that it is difficult to pick out who did what and caused
which harm, yet nonetheless, prosecutors are able to charge individuals for particular
crimes. The difference, however, between these crimes and structural injustice is that
in the former, the individuals held guilty are in some way connected to the crimes,
even if not directly. This is not the case for structural injustice. If Young is right that
structural injustice is sustained by the actions of ordinary people, which indirectly con-
tributes to and sustains the injustice, then it is much harder to pick out a guilty party
than, for example, in the case of felony murder (where any individual who participated
in a felony that ended in murder can be held guilty for the murder even if they did not
participate in the murder itself). It is not at all clear that individuals can be held guilty
for structural injustice in the way that Reiman suggests.
David Miller, working in the context of global justice, provides another plausible
route to think about responsibility for injustice that is structural. For Miller, responsibil-
ity for global justice must be divided into two different kinds of responsibility. The first,
outcome responsibility, is the responsibility that we bare for the results of our actions and
decisions. The second, remedial responsibility, is the responsibility that we have to help
others, even when we may not have caused the problem. Outcome responsibility is not
applicable to structural injustice because as we have noted, structural injustice by defini-
tion does not have a single causal agent who can be held responsible for the outcome.
Remedial responsibility, however, is particularly appropriate for assessing responsibility
for structural injustice since it starts with the injustice or harm and asks who is best posi-
tioned to help; the source of the harm is not relevant and we do not need to assign guilt
before determining responsibility. In assigning remedial responsibility we may be justified
or unjustified, but we cannot be wrong (unlike the case for outcome responsibility).
What justifies an assignment of remedial responsibility for Miller? One is remedially
responsible for an outcome if one is connected to the outcome in one of the following
six ways. He refers to this as his “connection theory” of remedial responsibility (Miller
2007: 99). The first three ways have to do with being causally connected to the harm
through being morally responsible, outcome responsible, or causally responsible. That
is, if our actions can be shown to be in some way connected to the harm in question,
remedial responsibilities also follow. Even if not directly connected to the harm, we
may be connected through benefitting from the harm, having the capacity to fix the

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harm (by both being able to bear the cost of redressing the harm and being able to do
so effectively), and finally by simply sharing community (through family, nationality,
or religious ties). Miller notes that there may be many cases where people are con-
nected to a harm in different ways and most deprivation involves numerous people
who are connected in varying ways and to varying extents. Thus the precise way to
locate remedial responsibility remains a matter of some debate. Nonetheless, its clear
that for Miller at least, prospective responsibility does not require retrospective guilt,
and to deal with the most pressing structural and global problems requires this broader
conception of responsibility.

Conclusion
Is political responsibility, even supplemented with Miller’s conception of remedial
responsibility, adequate to say who is responsible for changing structural injustice? Even
if it is the best way to think about responsibility, is it so different from our everyday
intuitive sense of responsibility and agency as to be meaningless to the vast majority
of people? Perhaps. Nonetheless, structural injustice, like all injustice, demands that
we address it, and Young has at the very least given us a platform from which to begin.
In taking up this challenge it is helpful to return to the work of Hannah Arendt, on
whom Young draws for many of her concepts. Arendt argued that when we are acting
politically, we ought to be concerned, not with ourselves, but with the world. To act
politically for Arendt is to transcend individual interests and particularities and focus
instead on that which we hold in common, the common world. Such an understand-
ing of politics while not completely idiosyncratic (Aristotle held a similar view of
politics, for example) is certainly very different from how we think about politics today.
To be politically active today is to work on election campaigns, attend rallies, or try
to influence elected officials in some other capacity, to encourage them to reflect our
interests and concern for particular groups or set of issues. Political responsibility as
Young presents it asks us to return to a more Arendtian conception of politics, prem-
ised on the determination to make the common world more just. Rather than focusing
on whether I myself am acting unjustly, it asks that we take the larger perspective of
the world and think about the ways in which the common world can be made less
unjust in the future. Moving beyond private morality to a more robust sense of politics
does require a shift in perspective, but it is one that for Arendt at least, is rooted in our
experience of living together with others. Understood in this way, political responsi-
bility for structural injustice, while still quite different than our traditional conception
of responsibility, can be seen as grounded in the uniquely human experience of living
and acting with others who, though unlike ourselves, share the same common world.

Related Topics
Feminism, philosophy, and culture in Africa (Chapter 4); feminist engagements with
social contract theory (Chapter 7); Native American chaos theory and the politics
of difference (Chapter 30); women, gender, and philosophies of global development
(Chapter 34); feminist bioethics (Chapter 46); neoliberalism, global justice, and trans-
national feminisms (Chapter 48); feminism and liberalism (Chapter 52); Feminism and
power (Chapter 54); feminist approaches to violence and vulnerability (Chapter 55);
feminist philosophy of law, legal positivism, and non-ideal theory (Chapter 56).

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Card, Claudia (2005) The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—— (2009) “Injustice, Evil, and Oppression,” in Ann Ferguson and Mechthild Nagel (Eds.) Dancing with
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 50
LATIN AMERICAN
FEMINIST ETHICS
AND POLITICS
Amy A. Oliver

Examining feminist ethics in Latin America is necessarily an interdisciplinary

endeavor. While the number of feminists in professional philosophy in Latin America
continues to increase, historians and social scientists such as the Mexican anthropolo-
gist Lourdes Arizpe, of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and Elizabeth
Jelin, an Argentine sociologist who earned her doctorate at the University of Texas,
have been important forerunners in engaging in feminist ethical discussions. Human
rights and relatively new academic fields such as memory studies also intersect with
feminist ethics. Writers, artists, and filmmakers additionally contribute to shaping
the contours of feminist ethics. This chapter addresses common practices in women’s
expression, ethical perspectives on women’s historical struggles, late twentieth-century
consciousness-raising, and contemporary feminist ethics.

Testimonio and Public Protest

An especially effective means of conveying women’s situations is the genre known as
testimonio:

an authentic narrative, told by a witness who is moved to narrate by the urgency

of a situation (e.g., war, oppression, revolution, etc.) Emphasizing popular oral
discourse, the witness portrays his or her own experience as a representative of a
collective memory and identity. Truth is summoned in the cause of denouncing
a present situation of exploitation and oppression or exorcising and setting
aright official history.
(Yúdice 1991: 17; original emphasis)

For example, Let Me Speak! is an account by a woman married to a Bolivian tin miner
of her efforts to organize women in the mining community and confront class strug-
gle, exploitation, and repression (Barrios de Chúngara et  al. 1978). Similarly, the
1992 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Rigoberta Menchú, details the plight of indigenous
Guatemalans in one of the most violent contexts in the Americas (Menchú 1987).
 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

In Massacre in Mexico (Poniatowska 1991), a collection of cleverly imbricated,

eyewitness accounts of the massacre of 325 students who had peacefully protested
police repression the week before the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City combine to por-
tray an assault that went far beyond the Kent State and Jackson State shootings and
the incident of the eleven people who were bayoneted by National Guardsmen at the
University of New Mexico. The military repression of Mexican students continues
to resonate, particularly in the context of the 2014 kidnapping of forty-three student
teachers of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Teachers College in Ayotzinapa, Mexico.
In the above testimonios, more educated, literate women facilitate the transmission
of other women’s accounts of their lives. This practice in itself generates ethical issues
as some accounts stem from responses to a series of guided questions and others are
more free-flowing transcriptions with few prompts (Patai 1993 [1988]). Documentary
films incorporate testimonio in various ways. Rigoberta Menchu’s fight for existence and
political voice during troubled United States-Guatemala relations is featured in Cuando
tiemblan las montañas (1983, When the Mountains Tremble). Que bom te ver viva (1989,
How Nice to See You Alive Again) graphically explores the brutal challenges women face
decades after they were tortured during Brazil’s military dictatorship.
Beyond the academy, Chilean women who created arpilleras, colorful patchwork
scenes on burlap that depict the abuses of General Augusto Pinochet’s regime, pow-
erfully express their ethical indignation. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the
human rights group formed in 1977 by women whose children were disappeared by
the military regime in Argentina, had to witness the pardons of military leaders in the
early 1990s, but now many of these women may live to see their children’s torturers
and murderers sentenced to prison terms. Ongoing trials represent an overwhelming
achievement after long years of struggle. In most Latin American countries, women
have had occasion to participate in the caceroleada, the simple act of taking to the
streets as a group and banging on pots and pans to draw attention to their ethical
indignation over events or policies.

Theorizing Women’s Ethical Challenges in History

Throughout Latin American history women have faced ethical challenges, and some
have been able to report on how they handled them. More than five centuries ago,
the woman known alternately as Malinal, Malintzin, Malinche, or Doña Marina was
assigned to Hernán Cortés as a slave. La Malinche (the Traitor) became one of the most
reviled figures in Mexican history because she was believed to have opened the door to
the European invaders and enabled the conquest. La Malinche and a Spanish priest,
Gerónimo Aguilar, worked in tandem to interpret for Cortés by transferring Nahuatl
(the Aztec language) first to the Chontal Mayan language and then to Spanish. They
continued this practice until La Malinche learned Spanish and could herself interpret
directly from Nahuatl to Spanish for Cortés. La Malinche also had a child by Cortés.
Sandra Cypess interprets Malinche as “Protector of the foreigner, she was also the Great
Mother; the child she bore Cortés, Don Martín, was considered the first mestizo, origin
of the Mexican nation, the union of the Amerindian and European” (Cypess 2010: 9).
Gloria Anzaldúa portrays Malinche as one of three Chicana mother figures, the oth-
ers being the Virgin of Guadalupe and La Llorona, the weeping woman featured in a
well-known Mexican legend (Anzaldúa 2012: 54). Used as an adjective, Malinche’s
name is synonymous with “traitorous,” but what if La Malinche had been a man? While

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he would not have had a child with Cortés, he would presumably still have been his
interpreter. Rather than becoming known as El Malinche, he instead might be viewed
today as a brilliant entrepreneur who secured privilege and status for himself, cleverly
working his way out of slavery. Gerónimo Aguilar, the Spanish priest who co-interpreted
with La Malinche, appears to share none of the blame for the betrayal. He has been
de-emphasized almost to the point of invisibility, as if La Malinche had single-handedly
interpreted for Cortés and must, therefore, assume all of the blame for the conquest.
Another noteworthy woman who experienced ethical dilemmas was Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz, a nun, Mexican baroque poet and philosopher who has become a
powerful symbol for independent and socially exploratory thought in the Americas
(Oliver 2014). Octavio Paz, Nobel Prize Winner and Mexican poet and essayist,
wrote a sensitive biography of Sor Juana in which he did not fully develop her femi-
nist dimensions though he did compellingly reveal her to be a poet of equal standing
in the Americas with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson (Paz 1990). A decade after
Paz’s biography, Stephanie Merrim published Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés
de la Cruz (Merrim 1999), in which key feminist essays explore Sor Juana’s ethical
dilemmas. In the world of seventeenth-century Mexico in which women had only
two lifestyle options, marriage or the convent, Sor Juana chose the one she perceived
as the lesser of evils, and the one that would give her the greatest independence.
A passage in her poem, “Foolish Men,” questions the hypocrisy of men regarding
sexual behavior, especially prostitution, and the Eve-Mary dichotomy many such men
seek to perpetuate:

Or which is more to be blamed—

though both will have cause for chagrin:
the woman who sins for money
or the man who pays money to sin?

So why are you men all so stunned

at the thought you’re all guilty alike?
Either like them for what you’ve made them
or make of them what you can like.
(Trueblood 1988: 113)

Sor Juana, battling the “primitive instincts” of men during the colonial period, was
certainly a thinker ahead of her time, and it took considerable courage to express
her views, perspectives that revealed hypocritical stereotypes that trapped women
into spaces that stunted their intellectual and moral growth. Indeed, Sor Juana’s
writings put her at great risk for censure and punishment. Sor Juana’s most famous
essay, “Reply to Sister Philothea de la Cruz,” has been translated into English five
times, which gives a measure of its perceived importance. This essay resulted from a
discussion with Sor Juana’s long-time friend, the Bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández
de Santa Cruz, in which she expressed criticism of a well-known sermon given
forty years earlier by an eminent Portuguese Jesuit, Antonio de Vieyra. The bishop
was impressed with Sor Juana’s argument and requested that she put it in writing.
Without Sor Juana’s permission or knowledge, the bishop then paid for her critique
to be published and titled it “Missive Worthy of Athena.” However, in an appar-
ent contradiction, he simultaneously sent a letter to Sor Juana admonishing her for

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her intellectualism and suggesting that she comport herself more like other nuns by
devoting her time to religious rather than secular matters. He signed his letter with a
feminine pen name, Sor Philothea de la Cruz.
The bishop was evidently not the friend Sor Juana thought him to be, since his letter
left her open to attack from a rather misogynist establishment in the Mexico City of her
day. The bishop benefited from the public circulation of Sor Juana’s critique because it
coincided with his own negative assessment of Vieyra’s sermon and because it helped
him advance in his rivalry with the Archbishop of Mexico, Francisco Aguiar y Seijas,
who was an admirer of Vieyra in addition to being well known for his misogyny. That
a woman wrote a brilliant critique of Vieyra’s sermon was heresy enough, but that Sor
Juana was a nun also raised issues of religious authority and hierarchy. Sor Juana found
herself entangled in the contentious relationship between two powerful figures in the
Church. Thus, it comes as no surprise that she was pressured to conform to traditional
expectations for nuns by accepting the punishment of selling her substantial library and
musical and scientific instruments.
Among the many techniques analyzed in How to Suppress Women’s Writing (Russ
1983), the one that most closely corresponds to the suppression of Sor Juana’s
expression is, “She wrote it, but she shouldn’t have.” In an extraordinary twist on
how to perpetrate this particular form of suppression, the bishop asked Sor Juana to
put in writing an oral analysis he thought brilliant, then without her permission paid
for her written analysis to be published, and finally admonished her in writing for
having written it. Sor Juana’s case, then, requires an unusual addition to the suppres-
sion technique described by Russ, and becomes “She wrote it, but she shouldn’t have
(even though she was asked to).” Sor Juana’s response to this treatment by the bishop
came to be a famously defining moment in her life.
After maintaining a silence of several months following the surprise publication
of the “Missive Worthy of Athena” and receipt of the bishop’s letter of admonition,
and no doubt acutely aware of the greatly circumscribed space available to women
in colonial times, Sor Juana wrote her now famous “Reply to Sister Philothea de la
Cruz.” In Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism, Debra
A. Castillo distinguishes between choosing to remain silent and simply remaining
silent: “One reaction to the pressures of the dominant social force is silence. Initially,
however, silence is not a response but a condition imposed from outside: silencing,
rather than silence freely chosen” (Castillo 1992: 37). Sor Juana announces her silence
in her Reply; that is, she explains that she is not going to remain silent, but that talking
back, or breaking her silence, is her choice. Castillo rightly argues that “no decir” (not
speaking) and “callar” (remaining silent) are actions of different orders. After months
of not commenting, Sor Juana chose to break her silence by voicing through the Reply
at least a partial version of her objections. In view of the sad politics of her context,
she most likely could not have gotten away with more than what she writes explicitly
and implies indirectly in her Reply.
The Reply is largely autobiographical and what little we know of Sor Juana’s life
comes primarily from this crucial letter. Sor Juana seeks through her own example,
and the example of classical and biblical women, to defend a woman’s right to edu-
cation, knowledge, and reflection. She also manages to extract from St. Paul and
St. Jerome passages that she uses to support a woman’s right to be educated. The
Reply showcases Sor Juana’s mastery of theology, but she devotes much of the letter
to explaining how the study of the secular world enhances and is necessary for the

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understanding of theology. Thus, she indirectly challenges the bishop’s contention

that she should devote herself solely to religious matters by proving her erudition in
theology and church history at the same time as she demonstrates her mastery of many
secular intellectual domains. Following St. Theresa of Avila, Sor Juana explains to “Sor
Philothea” how she philosophizes even while cooking. She writes, “If Aristotle had
been a cook, he would have written much more” (Trueblood 1988: 226). Ultimately,
Sor Juana proves that devoting herself solely to religious matters would not serve to
enhance her unparalleled knowledge or practice of them, but would only diminish her
knowledge of the secular subjects that she had also mastered. In this sense, Sor Juana
demonstrates that the bishop’s “suggestion” that she limit her pursuits to the religious
could only be interpreted as arbitrary and punitive.
A few years after sending the Reply to the bishop, and after having been forced to
give up her books and instruments for having written this missive, Sor Juana succumbed
to a plague while ministering to her sisters. Her last years were undoubtedly marked by
frustration, fear, and repression, but the Reply serves as an inspiring defense of her ear-
lier participation in public life, her studies, and her poetry and prose writings. The ways
in which she defends intellectual autonomy, particularly for women, and indirectly
questions authority that seeks to repress such an endeavor, have led many to champion
her as a symbol of independent thought.

Suffrage and Women’s Rights

With the stirrings of suffrage in the beginning of the twentieth century, a wide swath
of women in Latin America engaged in discussion of women’s rights and possibili-
ties. Perhaps unexpected was that a man was the first philosopher to write a book on
feminism. Carlos Vaz Ferreira (1872–1958) was Uruguay’s leading twentieth-century
philosopher. He was exceptionally dedicated to public education at all levels and was
arguably the most famous and public professor at the University of Montevideo. Almost
all of his published work stemmed from lectures he gave at the university. Among the
best known of his many works are Lógica viva (Living Logic) and Moral para intelectuales
(Ethics for Intellectuals). To the surprise of many male colleagues, who did not see a par-
ticular need to think seriously about feminism, Vaz Ferreira delivered a series of public
lectures on feminism between 1914 and 1917.
Vaz Ferreira, in the context of a progressive political climate in Montevideo, later
published Sobre feminismo (1945 [1933]). During the two presidencies of José Batlle y
Ordóñez (1903–1907 and 1911–1915), Uruguay became the first country to legislate
the eight-hour workday, the first to guarantee healthcare to the poor, and the home of
a social security system that served as a model for the rest of the continent. Changes in
the law also made it easier for women to divorce and gain access to higher education
and social services, and in 1932 Uruguay became the second Latin American nation
to grant women the vote in national elections (after Ecuador in 1929). Vaz Ferreira’s
feminist thought was supported by the progressive political climate established by poli-
ticians such as Batlle y Ordóñez and Baltasar Brum, but Vaz was himself an agent of
change. Concerned with the civil and political rights of women and the social par-
ticipation of women, Vaz Ferreira, working with many others, had a decisive impact in
favor of women in the Uruguayan legislature. Vaz Ferreira proposed a bill that passed
into law exactly as he had conceived it: the law of “unilateral divorce,” which gave
“women the power to obtain a divorce at will, without giving cause, while men have to

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show just cause” (Vaz Ferreira 1945 [1933]: 83). This law is consistent with his theory
that the situations of men and women are fundamentally different.
In confronting the problem of the social situation of women, Vaz Ferreira’s philo-
sophical strategy had two steps: (1) examining questions of fact, the possible questions
about the similarities and differences between the two sexes; (2) examining normative
problems. Vaz distinguished factual questions from normative ones in his Lógica viva
(1910). Factual questions were those of knowledge and verification. Among the ques-
tions of fact, of similarities and differences between the sexes, Vaz Ferreira maintained
that debatable data and undebatable data existed. The undebatable detail that was most
crucial to him and most radical for his time was: “From the union between a man and a
woman, the woman can become pregnant; nothing happens to the man.” He argued fur-
ther, “Finding this fact to be satisfactory is to be ‘antifeminist’” (Vaz Ferreira 1958: 25).
Normative questions were those of action, preference, and choice. For Vaz Ferreira,
the normative issues were most relevant to the condition of women. The normative
feminist problems for Vaz Ferreira were: (1) a woman’s political rights; (2) a woman’s
activity in society, her access to public office, her access to careers, professions, and
education; (3) civil rights; and (4) the relations between the sexes and the organization
of the family. He addressed such structural issues sometimes before suffragist feminists
did, and made significant contributions to theorizing about women in relation to the
family. Two Uruguayan scholars argue, “Vaz Ferreira’s ideas about the family and the
role of women in it constitute, even today, a kind of paradigm in Uruguayan society”
(Rodríguez and Sapriza 1984: 12).
A central idea in his analysis of the above issues was to maintain the difference
between feminism of equality and affirmative or corrective feminism. Feminism of
equality was based on the idea that

jobs and careers should be open to women as they are to men; that women
should have the same civil capacity as men, the same level of education; that,
in general, the sexes should be equalized by diminishing the difference between
them and by placing women in the same situation as men, making them more
like men.
(Vaz Ferreira 1933: 16)

For Vaz Ferreira, “feminism of equality” did not merit much attention because of the
fact that women were biologically mistreated by the likelihood of pregnancy in their
unions with men and, therefore, to speak of “equalization” was not pragmatic. The only
acceptable feminism, for Vaz Ferreira, was corrective, based on the idea that society
must compensate physiological injustice given that it will never be possible to equal-
ize it and that it would be counter-productive to attempt to do so. For Vaz Ferreira,
“Antifeminism takes as its guide that fact [women’s biological disadvantage]. Bad femi-
nism does not even take it into account. Good feminism strives to correct it and com-
pensate for it” (Vaz Ferreira 1933: 38).
Vaz Ferreira examined a wide range of additional issues affecting women as he for-
mulated theories about what would be necessary to correct their disadvantaged status.
Contemporary readers may be made uncomfortable by some of his assertions, which
seem antiquated or lodged in Uruguayan social conditions now nearly a century old, but
at other moments, his ideas seem contemporary and insightful. The occasional presence

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in the text of its author being in the patriarchal mode of helping women does not, in
the end, taint the surprisingly early advances that men and women together achieved
in early twentieth-century Uruguay. Maximizing freedom for women and men was a
prominent theme in much of Vaz Ferreira’s work:

His thought was fragmentary and spontaneous and germinal; he opposed sys-
tematizing; he sought to open windows, not to build walls; he describes “two
types of souls: liberal souls and tutorial souls—souls whose instinctive ideal is
freedom (for themselves and for others) and souls which have an ideal of tute-
lage and consequently of authority,” identifying the former position as his own.
(Haddox 1966: 596)

Shortly after Uruguay enacted suffrage, women in other South American countries
gained the vote, and it extended throughout most of Latin America by the late 1950s,
with Paraguay being the last in 1961.

Modern Women’s Movements and Consciousness-Raising

The International Year of the Woman in 1975 was a catalyst for the women’s movement
in much of Latin America. In 1973, Mexican author and feminist Rosario Castellanos
published Mujer que sabe latín (the title is an abbreviated version of the expression
“A woman who knows Latin has no husband and does not come to a good end”), a
collection of essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women and feminist topics,
which was widely read and appreciated as women prepared for the 1975 events. Her
short story collection Album de familia (1971) features “Lección de cocina” (Cooking
lesson) in which a recently married woman contemplates the requirements brought
about by her new civil status such as cooking, remaining silent, obeying her husband,
and being a perfect housekeeper. While reflecting on the double standards present in
Mexican society, the protagonist comes to identify with a piece of meat she is cooking,
and eventually overcooks, a metaphor for the state in which she finds herself.
After 1975, films about the plight of women in Latin America were made more fre-
quently and involved a wider range of themes. Retrato de Teresa (Portrait of Teresa, 1979)
examines gender relations, double standards, la doble jornada (the double workday of
working for pay and then doing all the household tasks once home), and domestic vio-
lence. This film powerfully raised awareness of male privilege and the need for gender
equality in Cuba. Although day care centers were established to free women to do paid
work, and although Cuban law demanded gender equality, stereotypes endure. “Camila”
is based on a true story of nineteenth-century Argentina about Camila O’Gorman, and
is a reflection on strategies women use to try to cope with patriarchy and authoritarian
governments. It was no accident that this film was made in 1984 and served as a thinly
veiled call for resistance to the “dirty war” that was ravaging the country. In Brazil, A hora
da estrela (Hour of the Star, 1986) highlights the marginality of the poor, and the phenom-
enon of rural women who are forced to move to urban centers to find work. This natural-
ist film portrays work as underemployment that stems from lack of access to education,
leading finally to mental underdevelopment of the poor. Lastly, the Mexican film Danzón
(1991) shows how a single, middle-class woman, while initially trapped in the typically
female occupation of telephone operator, can exercise the right to self-discovery in a

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man’s world with the result of gaining substantial autonomy and relative empowerment.
These films and many others were an effective way for women to reflect on the women’s
movement and social change on various levels.

Contemporary Feminist Ethics

Consciousness-raising about feminism through literature, testimonio, art and film, and
studies and publications by social scientists have been followed by more philosophical
treatments of feminist ethics. Most Latin American feminist ethicists have no quarrel
with the contention by Western feminists that women have not been granted equal
value with men in traditional Western ethical theory. There is substantial interest
among Latin American feminist philosophers in reading translations of key works by
colleagues outside Latin America. Among the thinkers who have been translated into
Spanish are Carol Gilligan, Marilyn Frye, Adrienne Rich, Simone de Beauvoir, Juliet
Mitchell, Kate Millett, Alison M. Jaggar, and Arleen L. F. Salles. Far fewer works by
Latin American women have been translated into English and there is a great need to
remedy this discrepancy.
María Pía Lara Zavala is a Mexican moral and political philosopher at the Universidad
Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa, several of whose works have been translated into
English, which has allowed her to engage fruitfully with American and British ethicists.
In Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere (1999), Lara employs Hannah
Arendt’s notion of storytelling to establish feminist narratives as critical sources of iden-
tity production, which have impact in quests for justice. Lara explores human cruelty in
history, moral memory, and reflective judgments in Narrating Evil: A Post-Metaphysical
Theory of Reflective Judgment (2007). While Lara does not work exclusively on feminist
topics, her work has much to suggest in this area.
An alternative understanding exists across borders that different epistemologies
and ontologies can undergird feminist ethics. Francesca Gargallo studied philosophy
in Rome before moving to Mexico, where she earned a doctorate in Latin American
Studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, specializing in the his-
tory of feminist thought, especially indigenous feminisms. Gargallo observes, “Noting
that criticism of European and North American feminist concepts and categories has
been present throughout the history of Latin American thought is imperative because
recovering universals to interpret societies where no underlying political unity exists is
impossible” (Femenías and Oliver 2007: 75).
Accordingly, the differences that obtain between Northern and Southern femi-
nist ethics are perhaps more worthy of study than the points of common discourse.
In Latin American feminist philosophy, greater concerns with violence, development,
and domestic work are three distinctive traits (Schutte 1989). Violence against women
includes domestic violence, which is not uncommon, rape, and torture, but these cat-
egories should be updated and extended to include hostility and violence toward lesbi-
ans, human trafficking, sex trafficking, forced exile, and forced residency of women who
would prefer to flee their countries as refugees. Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador
are the three countries with the highest levels of community violence against women,
or violence committed by organized crime as distinguished from domestic violence.
“Pleasure kidnappings” are quite common in which a member of organized crime decides
he wants a certain girl or woman. She is then abducted and sexually abused, and, if she
is lucky, she is not killed.

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Femicide is a pandemic in Mexico partly because of social acceptance of violence

against women, but also because murders of women have been caught up in the phe-
nomena of other murders stemming from increasing drug violence and lack of reliable
law enforcement. After twenty years of denouncing femicides, activists and experts see
the same pattern that was observed in Ciudad Juarez at the beginning of the 1990s
throughout Mexico; that is, disappearance, followed by sexual torture, murder, and
later the dumping of bodies or body parts in public spaces. Feminist and human rights
groups are much more proactive about collecting data and finding solutions than are
local, regional, or national governments. Still, rape, torture, and femicide are increasing
problems in several countries, so it makes a good deal of sense for feminist ethicists to
think and write urgently about ways to ameliorate the systemic violence. Philosopher
Urania Ungo of Panama believes that femicide is “a concept that synthesizes and com-
prises the extreme form of violence founded on gender inequalities” (Ungo 2008: 13).
Violence against feminists is a problem of long standing as well. One of the founders of
the celebrated journal fem, which was published in Mexico from 1976 to 2005, Alaíde
Foppa, was abducted in Guatemala in 1980 and later killed. Some Latin American
feminists, journalists, and other women who fear for their lives have been forced into
exile (Agosín and Sepúlveda 2001).
These kinds of extreme conditions have made theory a luxury for many, but a neces-
sary luxury. Philosopher and writer Francesca Gargallo provides compelling reasons for
putting feminist ethics into practice:

Feminist ethics acts against male social and moral privilege, recognized uni-
versally in culture, and discovers that this constitutes a fundamental injustice
upon which a political system has been constructed that has led humanity
down a path of destruction and made it incapable of peace.
(Bedregal 1994: 24)

Gargallo’s work makes clear that women must participate in change. The current chal-
lenge resides in continuing to find how and where women can best access solidarity and
participatory democracy.
Mexican philosopher Graciela Hierro (1928–2003) maintained that liberation of
pleasure for women is a necessary condition for them to exercise power. Her philoso-
phy contributed to women reflecting on their having a body under their control, and
deriving pleasure from it. These topics were generally taboo in Mexican society prior to
Hierro writing explicitly about them. She identified women’s oppression as the ethical
problem of our time (Hierro 2014 [1985]: 8). Much of her work explores the mascu-
line slant found throughout the history of Western ethics. She believed that respect
for human rights is the point on which women and men most coincide. More bridges
between scholarly and political work still need to be constructed to continue dialogue
between the feminist movement and supporters of human rights.

Further Reading
Bellatin, Mario, Poniatowska, Elena and Itúrbide, Graciela (2010) Graciela Itúrbide: Juchitán de las Mujeres
1979–1989, Mexico City: RM/Editorial Calamus. (Iconic photographs taken in a matriarchal society in
southern Oaxaca.)
Debate feminista (1990– present) Mexico City. (These journal issues contain a wealth of reflection on women’s
issues in Latin America.)

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 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés, and Arenal, Electa (1994) The Answer/La Repuesta, Including a Selection of Poems,
New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. (One of five translations of Sor
Juana’s letter, this edition provides a facing translation.)
Gargallo, Francesca (2012) Feminismos desde Abya Yala: 607 Pueblos en Nuestra América, Colombia: Editorial
Desde Abajo. (Exploration and analysis of indigenous feminisms throughout Latin America.)
Lavrín, Asunción (1995) Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940,
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. (A half-century of Women’s history during a period of rapid
modernization.)
Meyer, Doris (1995) Rereading the Spanish American Essay: Translations of 19th and 20th Century Women’s
Essays, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. (Makes available excellent essays by writers and thinkers.)
Partnoy, Alicia (1998 [1986]) The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival, Berkeley, CA: Cleis
Press. (Memoir of abduction and torture during Argentina’s “dirty war.”)

Related Topics
Feminism and borderlands identities (Chapter 17); testimony, trust, and trustworthiness
(Chapter 21); women, gender, and philosophies of global development (Chapter 34); fem-
inist ethics of care (Chapter 43); multicultural and postcolonial feminisms (Chapter 47).

References
Agosín, Marjorie and Sepúlveda, Emma (2001) Amigas: Letters of Friendship and Exile, trans. Bridget
M. Morgan, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Anzaldúa, Gloria (2012) Borderlands/La frontera, San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.
Barrios de Chungara, Domitila, Ortiz, Victoria and Viezzer, Moema (1978) Let Me Speak! Testimony of
Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Bedregal, Ximena (Ed.) (1994) Ética y feminismo, Mexico City: Fem-e-libros.
Castellanos, Rosario (1971) Album de familia, Mexico City: Joaquin Mortiz.
—— (1973) Mujer que sabe latín, Mexico City: SepSetentas.
Castillo, Debra (1992) Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism, Ithaca, NY and
London: Cornell University Press.
Cypess, Sandra Messinger (2010) La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth, Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press.
Femenías, María Luisa and Oliver, Amy A. (Eds.) (2007) Feminist Philosophy in Latin America and Spain,
Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi.
Haddox, John H. (1966) “Carlos Vaz Ferreira: Uruguayan Philosopher,” Journal of Inter-American Studies,
Special Issue 8(4): 595–600.
Hierro, Graciela (2014 [1985]) Ética y feminism, Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Lara Zavala, María Pía (1999) Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
—— (2007) Narrating Evil: A Post-Metaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, New York: Columbia University
Press.
Menchu, Rigoberta (1987) I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Ed. Elisabeth Burgos-
Debray trans. Ann Wright, Brooklyn, NY: Verso.
Merrim, Stephanie (1999) Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Detroit: Wayne State University
Press.
Oliver, Amy A. (2014) “Seeking Latina Origins: The Philosophical Context of Identity,” Inter-American
Journal of Philosophy 5(1): 65–80.
Patai, Daphne (1993 [1988]) Brazilian Women Speak: Contemporary Life Stories, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Paz, Octavio (1990) Sor Juana: Or, The Traps of Faith, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

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Poniatowska, Elena (1991) Massacre in Mexico, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press.
Rodríguez, Villamil and Sapriza, Gabriela (1984) El voto femenino en el Uruguay ¿conquista o concesión?
Montevideo, Uruguay: Grupo de Estudios sobre la Condición de la Mujer en el Uruguay.
Russ, Joanna (1983) How to Suppress Women’s Writing, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Schutte, Ofelia (1989) “Philosophy and Feminism in Latin America: Perspectives on Gender Identity and
Culture,” The Philosophical Forum 20: 62–84.
Trueblood, Alan S. (1988) A Sor Juana Anthology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ungo, Urania (2008) Femicidio en Panamá 2000–2006, San José, Costa Rica: Asociación Feminista de
Información y Acción.
Vaz Ferreira, Carlos (1945) [1933] Sobre feminismo [On Feminism], Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada.
—— (1958) Obras: Homenaje de la Cámara de Representantes de la República Oriental del Uruguay, volumes 3,
4, and 9, Uruguay: Montevideo.
Yúdice, George (1991) “Testimonio and Postmodernism,” Latin American Perspectives 18(3): 15–31.

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 51
FEMINIST ENGAGEMENTS
WITH DEMOCRATIC
THEORY
Noëlle McAfee

Introduction
Democratic theory is manifold; there are those who think of democracy as a
representative form of government and those who think of it as direct self-rule. There
are those who think of it in empirical terms—for example, charting out the rise and fall
of successful democratic regimes (Diamond 2015)—and those who prefer to inquire
about the norms that ought to be followed for democracy to work. An empirical focus
on democracy zeroes in on the facts on the ground, including people’s actual interests,
levels of participation and representation, that is, the actual workings of democratic
communities. The normative approach focuses not on what is, but on what ought to be,
that is, the proper principles and methods that would be most democratic, and what the
ideals of democracy ought to be.
This chapter focuses on the normative rather than solely empirical dimensions of
democratic theory and practice. It does so by explaining the normative turn in demo-
cratic theory, about forty years ago, which began with John Rawls’ work and continued
through Jürgen Habermas’s development of discourse ethics and subsequent work in
what came to be known as deliberative democratic theory. Throughout these four dec-
ades, feminist theorists have raised key objections and made important interventions
that have led to what is today a more robust and inclusive democratic theory.

Democratic Theory in the Twentieth Century

Through most of the twentieth century, political thought took as self-evident that modern
day democracies must be representative and that the role of the citizen was to elect
its leaders and, if those leaders did a poor job, elect someone else. It also approached
democracy with the tools of behaviorism, statistics, and science (hence the rise of
“political science” programs). Parting ways with idealistic notions of democracy as self-
governance, political thought was taken up by the empirical, the scientific, and the
descriptive. What they found did not bode terribly well for ancient models of democ-
racy where each citizen (however delimited that class) had a large role in deciding
 Feminism and Democratic Theory

matters of common concern. Leading political thinkers such as Walter Lippmann and
Joseph Schumpeter pointed to the ignorance and apathy of the typical voter and the
need for better governance structures and elite rule. Some noted that it would in fact be
irrational for people to squander their valuable time on investigating how to vote when
the typical person’s vote did not matter anyway (Buchanan and Tullock 1962). Instead
of the ideals of democratic self-governance, these thinkers focused on interests, power,
and expediency. They were hard-headed realists.
In that milieu, the philosopher John Rawls’ 1971 book, the unabashedly normative
Theory of Justice, caused quite a stir. Instead of reporting on how politics worked in
the real world, it provided a justification for how it ought to work and of what kind of
principles of justice would square with what a thoughtful public would support as legiti-
mate. Where earlier normative theories rested on supposed universal truths or natu-
ral law, foundations that had become untenable in a “post-metaphysical” world, Rawls
developed a way to derive principles of justice that were rooted in human reason, not
metaphysical absolutes. The key device was a notion of an “original position” where one
could imagine oneself behind a “veil of ignorance” as to what one’s fortunes and skills
might be in a possible political society. “The idea of the original position,” Rawls writes,
“is to set up a fair procedure so that any principles [of justice] agreed to will be just” and
this is best achieved by nullifying the “effects of specific contingencies” that some might
exploit at the expense of others (Rawls 1971: 136). By imagining themselves behind a
veil of ignorance, they disregard their own circumstances in order to arrive at princi-
ples of justice that would be best for everyone, no matter their particular circumstances
(Rawls 1971: 137). Rawls argued that through such a procedure, any participant would
arrive at two principles of justice: one that would guarantee equal rights to basic liberties
and another that would set limits to the degree of social and economic inequality, only
allowing that which also benefits those at the bottom. After decades of hard-headed
(and hard-hearted) empirical theorizing, Rawls provided a theory of justice that was nor-
mative and rooted in what would be agreed to by people when they deliberate rationally.
Just two years later, Jürgen Habermas coined the term “legitimation crisis” to point to
the ways in which, in liberal capitalist societies, economic systems have become decoupled
from public will; and then governmental systems, which act to ease the way for economic
systems, and also aim toward independence from the public, trying to maintain public
support but with as little public input as possible (Habermas 1975). Thus arises a conflict
between the imperatives of systems and the imperatives of society, or between function-
alist reason and what Habermas would later call communicative reason. With Rawls,
Habermas shares a view dating back to Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, that governmental
legitimacy can only be grounded in public will and consent. In this view, only a public can
decide political legitimacy and any governmental institutions that disregard the public
will hence lack legitimacy. These twentieth-century theories of legitimacy emerged, per-
haps not coincidentally, as the Watergate crisis led to large-scale disenchantment with
the workings of modern-day political parties and bureaucratic governments. Between the
works of Rawls and Habermas and those who worked in the space their works created,
the seemingly passé notion that governmental systems were legitimate only to the extent
that they could have been authored by a democratic public was rejuvenated. And so the
door opened to thinking about the role that citizens themselves could play in democracy.
While Rawls’ theory rejuvenated normative political philosophy, it also opened
itself to charges from two distinct but interconnected realms: communitarians and

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feminist care ethicists. Drawing on Aristotle, Hegel, and the civic republican tradition,
communitarian thinkers (such as Amitai Etzioni, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel,
Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer) worried that the classical liberalism resurrected in
Rawls’ Theory of Justice glorified the individual over community and rights over respon-
sibilities (Daly 1994). With some leaning left (e.g., Walzer) and others leaning right
(namely MacIntyre), they shared an understanding of human beings as social creatures
who do not originate prior to their social conditions. In many ways they echo, and
some like MacIntyre (1999) draw explicitly, on feminist criticisms of liberal theory.
(Habermas, to whom I will return below, shares the communitarians’ view of individua-
tion being a social process.) Hence they criticized Rawls’s central device of the original
position from which deliberators decide what the principles of justice should be.
Likewise, feminist ethics of care theorists worried about liberalism’s tendency to
value the universal over the particular and justice over care. (See Chapter 43 in this
volume on ethics of care feminism.) Beginning with Carol Gilligan’s criticism of the
Kantian bias in mainstream developmental psychology (Gilligan 1982), a bias that saw
principled universalist reason as superior to context-sensitive reason and care, ethics
of care theorists have sought to show the importance of the role of care in the devel-
opment of individuals and society (Gilligan 1982; Ruddick 1989; Kittay 1999; Held
2006). Where liberal theory would relegate care to the private realm as a private matter
unfit for politics, ethics of care theorists argue that care has a place in the public realm.
Moreover, they argue, many of the qualities that are cultivated in the home are much
needed in public life.
It was not just the communitarians and ethics of care theorists who took on liberal
democratic theory. As Alison Jaggar explained in her 1983 book, Feminist Politics and
Human Nature, approaches as different as liberal, radical, Marxist, and socialist femi-
nism were all concerned with liberal democratic theory. Liberal feminists did much
to call into question some of the underlying misogynist elements of liberal democratic
theory, including the very idea of the “man of reason” (Lloyd 1979) as well as the
social contract (Pateman 1988). Liberal feminist critics of mainstream political phi-
losophy called into question the supposed gender-neutrality of terms like “man” as well
as the sequestering of the household from political scrutiny, which allowed men heads
of households free rein in the household along with supposedly being able to represent
the interests of their dependents in public life. But most importantly, they questioned
the supposed objectivity and neutrality of leading political notions of justice, free-
dom, and autonomy, ideals that emerged most clearly during the Enlightenment era of
eighteenth-century Europe.
For the past century, philosophers, including feminist theorists, have vigorously
debated the status of such ideals as reason, principle, truth, freedom, justice, and autonomy.
Are they metaphysical truths about human nature? Or, more modestly, are they ide-
als we hold as measures by which to judge existing conditions, virtues that might be
achieved through historical progress? Or, as some argue, are they hopelessly patriarchal
notions founded on a binary dichotomy of male reason and its feminine other, margin-
alizing and denigrating important features that allow communities to flourish, such as
emotion, relatedness, particularity, and care?
Radical feminists for the most part turned away from all “male-stream” political phi-
losophy and identified the violence and domination at the root of patriarchal systems.
MacKinnon (2005), for example, argues that feminists’ focus on where it is and isn’t
appropriate to treat women differently (e.g., with maternity leave) completely overlook

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the fact that the social system was set up to oppress and exploit women. From a radical
feminist perspective, governments are tools of a patriarchal ruling class and should be
dismantled or rejected altogether.
Socialist and Marxist feminists focused on issues of class and the economic repro-
duction of labor, e.g., the role of housewives as unpaid tools of capitalism. Capitalism,
they note, is founded on the “primitive accumulation” of resources through exploita-
tion and the unpaid labor of the household. Along with other leftist critics going back
a century, they generally saw the state as a “superstructural” outgrowth of capitalism.
Any notion that democracy itself could lead to freedom and equality, or vice versa,
was simply naïve given that capitalistic governmental structures would never tolerate
full and equal participation.
Looking back now from the vantage point of the second decade of the twenty-first
century, it is easy to see that through much of the twentieth century, especially through
the Cold War, political philosophy had its eyes trained on forms of governance and on
economic systems. Moreover, these were seen as thoroughly entwined, so much that
it seemed to be a truism that capitalist economies accompanied liberal democracies,
welfare state systems went with more socialist politics, and planned economies went
with communist party led governments. If an anomaly arose, such as the democrati-
cally elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile, a coup d’état quietly
orchestrated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency quickly and conveni-
ently restored the world order (Prados 1986: 315–322). Whether liberal or Marxist,
socialist or anarchist, political philosophers, feminists included, theorized largely about
forms of governance and the kinds of economies they fostered.
Almost entirely absent was any attention to the practices of the people themselves or
to the networks of associations and civil society they moved within. Few theorists rec-
ognized the political power of associational life. In fact, while theorists were ruminating
about the state and states were engaged in their machinations, many people within
oppressive regimes were organizing themselves in ways that created nascent but very
real political power. In Poland during the 1980s, the Solidarity labor movement defied
the oppressive state to take to the streets. In Czechoslovakia of Eastern Europe, firmly
on the other side of the Iron Curtain, people were defying laws against meeting outside
Party sanctioned meetings to form literary societies, to read books, put on plays, to “act
as if they were free until they became so” (Goldfarb 2006). One of the very few theorists
to recognize this kind of power was Hannah Arendt who, in her 1958 masterpiece, The
Human Condition, described the power that springs up in the space of appearance when
people come together to speak and act on matters of common concern. This is a power
potential—a power with, not a power over—that emerges in their coming together and
dissipates when they move apart. Arendt’s work remained largely idiosyncratic to her,
though a certain young Jürgen Habermas did pay attention.

The Sea Change in Democratic Theory

Up through the 1980s, Soviet-backed communist parties ruled the countries of the
Eastern Europe, claiming to be “the People’s” parties. But in at least two of these
countries, Poland and Czechoslovakia, the people themselves were quietly organizing
(Goldfarb 2006). So when opportunities arose as the Soviet Union began to crumble
and pulled its tanks out of Eastern Europe, the real people’s civic organizations began to
call the lie of the faux People’s parties. During a few heady weeks in November 1989 the

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Czechoslovakian citizen group, Civic Forum, protested, brought down the government,
and from its membership produced the first democratically elected president of
Czechoslovakia since 1946, Vaclav Havel. Poland had a longer history of a self-
organized public apart from the state apparatus, thanks to the labor movement
Solidarity and the somewhat less repressive state. Finally recognized by the government
in February 1989, Solidarity negotiated a process for open and democratic elections,
leading to the end of authoritarian rule. The most memorable part of the end of the
Cold War was the opening and then the fall of the Berlin Wall, precipitated by a hap-
less bureaucrat who on November 9, 1989, announced that the wall was open for pas-
sage and then thousands of East Germans seizing the opportunity. But it was the work
of regular citizens in their associations in civil society that paved the way for peaceful
transition. (The best counterexample is Romania, which had neither a memory nor a
practice of civil society and in December 1989 summarily executed the dictator and his
wife, hardly a peaceful transition nor a good omen for any future democracy.)
The fall of the Berlin Wall not only ended the Cold War, it also ended political the-
orists’ exclusive focus on the state. Previously, debates between liberals, socialists, and
Western Marxists (who had long eschewed Soviet-style communism), had all revolved
around matters of state governance and economic systems. With the supposed triumph
of capitalism and liberal democracy, liberal theorists’ positions stayed mostly the same,
but those on the radical left were rather unmoored since their old categories no longer
seemed to matter. In fact, when the Cold War ended, all the Marxists seemed to disap-
pear. As Douglas Kellner explains it,

With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and then the Soviet Union
in the late 1980s and early 1990s, . . . there was a turn against many versions of
Marxism and toward newer forms of postmodern and poststructural theory and
multicultural approaches of a variety of forms, often based on identity politics, as
well as a turn by many former leftists to liberal theory and politics. Ernest Laclau
and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy helped shape an influen-
tial version of post-Marxism that criticized the orthodox model and developed
a model of “radical democracy” based on “new social movements.” A later dia-
logue between Laclau, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek continued to reconstruct
the Western Marxist project on poststructuralist and multicultural lines.
(Kellner 2005)

For many theorists post-1989, what became really interesting were civil society and
the public sphere, namely the non-governmental arenas of public life, the very spaces
from which eastern-European challenges to communism emerged. Propitiously, Jürgen
Habermas’s book of the 1960s, Strukturwandel der Öffenticheit, was translated into
English just after the wall fell as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. While
the reviews were mixed, the book added a new dimension to the word, public, from a
mass of people with little power to a network of people capable of creating sound public
opinion and will on matters of public concern. Now seen as a potent political actor, the
public, along with its space, the public sphere, drew the attention of political theorists
from many orientations. Politics suddenly seemed to be about much more than state
and economy, it was also about civil society and the public sphere, about inclusion and
identity, about new social movements, and, increasingly over the next decade, about
public deliberation.

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While this all looked good for progressive politics, the feminist philosopher Nancy
Fraser quickly raised a key concern: Was Habermas’s conception of the public sphere
empowering for women, or was it another patriarchal construction? Fraser pointed out
that a notion of a unitary public sphere could easily become masculinist and exclu-
sionary; and so she called for notions of multiple publics, some strong and some weak,
including counterpublics that would allow for the development of public voices from
those who have been excluded, including women’s groups, from the mainstream of
society (Fraser 1992). This piece seems to have had an effect on Habermas’s thinking
as he later developed a theory of a more decentered and pluralized the public sphere
(Habermas 1996).

Discourse Ethics
With the turn from state to society, much political theory of the 1990s took up the
question of how to make the political system—understood broadly to include the
public sphere—more democratic, not just with electoral politics but with the ways in
which society overall deliberates and chooses (see Barker et al. 2012). This “delibera-
tive turn” in politics was aided by Habermas’ new discourse ethics, which built upon
his two-volume work, the Theory of Communicative Action (TCA), and paved the way
for his subsequent work on deliberative democracy. Previous thinkers in the history
of philosophy, especially Kant and Hegel, had identified reason as an inherent faculty
of the subject, a kernel of hope for the eventual development of a more rational and
just society. Contrary to this philosophical thinking, Habermas argues against the old
idea of a presocial being with a monological or purely individual capacity for reason.
Following G. H. Mead’s pragmatic account of socialization, Habermas argues that we
are individuated through a social process of role taking, being called to and respond-
ing. If our individuation and development as rational beings is socially constituted,
then we can hardly appeal to an Enlightenment notion that reason would lead to
freedom and justice.
So in many respects, Habermas is just as skeptical as many contemporary feminist
theorists about there being any antecedent metaphysical truths. At the same time,
though, Habermas refused to dispense with the ideal of reason itself. Instead of resid-
ing in the subject as some kind of faculty, he located it pragmatically in the social
realm as a set of presuppositions that made communication possible. “I call interactions
communicative,” Habermas writes, “when the participants coordinate their plans of
action consensually, with the agreement reached at any point being evaluated in terms
of the intersubjective recognition of validity claims” (Habermas 1990 [1983]: 58).
Habermas identifies three validity claims that people are making as they reach
agreement through speech acts: “claims to truth, claims to rightness, and claims to
truthfulness, according to whether the speaker refers to something in the objective
world . . . , to something in the shared social world . . . , or to something in his own
subjective world” (Habermas 1990 [1983]: 58). These validity claims are pragmatic
presuppositions that make discourse possible. If we did not hold them, we would not
bother to talk with each other. But at the same time, that we do tend to hold them
means that we are easily preyed upon, for example in celebrity endorsements of prod-
ucts that may not be as good as the celebrity says. When the validity claims are war-
ranted, speech can go well; when exploited, the result can be systematically distorted
communication, that is, manipulation. Habermas calls the first communicative action

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and the second strategic action. That others will prey upon our expectations is not
reason to abandon hope; rather, those validity expectations are the source for identify-
ing and calling out manipulation.
From this theory of communicative action it was a short step to discourse ethics,
a theory of how moral agreement can be reached communicatively. Unlike non-
cognitivists who think there is no truth of the matter on moral claims, Habermas argues
that there is a truth. But unlike emotivists who think these truths are simple empiri-
cal observations of likes and dislikes, moral “truths” are not empirical but linked to a
social reality of interpersonal relationships in which people are trying to decide together
what to do (Habermas 1990 [1983]: 60–61). Any “truth” of such matters arises through
agreement. Discourse ethics is based on a principle of universalization (U), which holds
that “[a]ll affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general obser-
vance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests (and these
consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation”
(Habermas 1990 [1983]: 65; emphasis in original).
But the trouble with something like U, Habermas realized, is that it is impossible
to know abstractly whether any given norm could pass this test, hence the need for
another principle, D, for the Discourse Principle. D holds that a norm for action—that
is, a decision about what ought to be done—is valid if all those affected by it could
accept it in a reasonable discourse. So where U posits the more general claim of uni-
versalization, D brings it down to earth by testing whether people would actually agree
to it in their discussions with others. In a post-metaphysical era only actual agreements
that people are willing to make with each other can provide justification, certainly not
abstract appeals to truth or validity.
The upshot of Habermas’s discourse principle is a conception of legitimacy that does
not rely on metaphysical or objective truths. What is valid is only what withstands
the tribunal of public judgment. This shows how radical democracy really is—and
always has been—to those who want truth to be independent of the vagaries of public
opinion. This is what makes democracy’s “truths,” which are always contingent and up
for revision, so threatening to philosophers like Plato and his heirs who wanted truth
to be timeless and constant. The radical side of Habermas’s theory is that it is non-
foundational in very deep way. But the rub for Habermas’s position is that it is also
hard for it to be cognitivist, even though Habermas wants his theory to be cognitivist.
What is the cognition, that is, what is the truth that discourse ethics tries to get a
hold of? Is there a truth waiting to be discovered by discourse ethics? Habermas seems
to think there is, though not in any straightforward way. It is to be found through a
rational, procedural form of deliberation.
First, moral-practical judgments will be based not on subjective opinions, emotions,
and opinions but on reasons that participants offer in their discourse (Habermas 1990
[1983]: 120). These reasons have cognitive content that others can accept or deny,
unlike statements of preference that have no hold over anyone else. In principle if
someone agrees with a reason then that person is compelled to go along with what
follows from it. (If I agree with reasons against the death penalty then I ought to agree
that the death penalty is wrong.) The upshot is that all who agree with a set of reasons
for some moral judgment should share the same moral judgments. Unlike preferences,
reasons compel agreement. And to the extent that all agree, then the judgment is uni-
versal. Second, the U principle “works like a rule that eliminates as nongeneralizable
content all those concrete value orientations with which particular biographies or forms

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of life are permeated” (Habermas 1990 [1983]: 121). So, reminiscent of Rawls’ original
position with its veil of ignorance, any particular contingencies or particularities should
be stripped away. They are not only irrelevant to deliberations about normative issues,
they also distort these deliberations. The goal is for deliberations to be as impartial as
possible. This is the only way people might possibly get hold of any truth of the matter.
Many poststructuralist theorists and feminist theorists are deeply suspicious of there
being any truths waiting to be discovered by rational discourse or otherwise. Moreover,
many worry that the focus on rationality, universality, and objectivity in effect sidelines
the concerns and perspectives of those on the margins and ends up maintaining systems
of domination and exclusion.

Feminist Responses to Discourse Ethics

Of the overlapping worries, first is the worry that the model of the self is too atomistic,
shorn of any social roots or attachments. Rawls’ deliberator behind the veil of ignorance
is a prime example of this error. As Virginia Held has noted, such a view, going back
to Hobbes, presumes that the self emerges as a full-grown adult with no assistance of a
mother or community (Held 1993, 2006). Habermas, as noted above, eschews the phi-
losophy of a monological subject in favor of a view of individuation occurring through
socialization. Still, his insistence that, when it comes to discourse on normative mat-
ters people should set aside their particularities, subjects his theory to this criticism. As
care ethicists, communitarians, and some pragmatists have long pointed out, it is our
particular solidarities and attachments that both make us who we are and dispose us to
look after the welfare of others.
To address these concerns, especially the challenge that Carol Gilligan poses to one
of his heroes, Lawrence Kohlberg, Habermas has sharpened his Hegelian distinction
between ethics and morality, that is, between Sittlichkeit and Moralität, or between the
good and the right (Habermas 1990 [1983]: 175–182). It is true, he grants, that in our
actual communities, particularity matters; but when we are trying to ascertain universal
moral principles, particularities and solidarity have to be set aside. But this “response”
to feminist criticisms only served to sharpen the divide.
Another worry is that Habermas’s discourse ethics valorizes some forms of speech over
others, especially in how it came to be used in deliberative democratic theory. In her
essay, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” Iris Marion
Young criticizes the ideal of deliberative speech for the way that it valorizes the kinds of
speech practiced by those in power and sidelines the modes of speaking engaged by those
on the margins, such as greeting, rhetoric, and storytelling. Young’s criticism got a lot
of traction, leading many on the left, especially those concerned about multiculturalism
and identity, to write off deliberative democratic theory as antithetical to a more mul-
ticultural politics. (As noted below, Habermas’ later work addressed Young’s real-world
concerns, offering a “de-centered” account of deliberation that she came to champion.)
Some feminist theorists, who have more sympathy to Habermas’s project, argue that
there is a conflict between those committed to, on the one side, a critical theory of
social change, and on the other, postmodern feminists and other feminists who criticize
reason itself (e.g., Benhabib et  al. 1995; Meehan 2000). They claim that postmod-
ern philosophers (a) eschew reason altogether and (b) engage in reason to debunk
reason. Hence, they argue, critics fall into a “performative contradiction.” This argu-
ment reprises a claim that Habermas made repeatedly in his Philosophical Discourse of

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Modernity, arguing that Derrida and other postmodernists had fallen into this trap. The
problem with his criticism and like ones of his followers is that postmodern theorists
do not eschew the ability to make claims and offer reasons; rather, they are worried
about claims that stretch too far and try to say too much, often at the expense of other
voices and concerns. A more accurate claim is that feminist theorists more broadly
have questioned the primacy of reason as an attribute for being human. Stretching
back to Aristotle, philosophers have made this claim broadly, saying that what distin-
guishes us from other animals is our ability to reason and speak, and also noting that
men seem to be better able than women to reason. The feminist response to this claim
has been twofold: (1) give women enough education and they can reason like men do
(Wollstonecraft 1792); and/or (2) that the strict delineation between reason and other
attributes, such as feeling, is overdrawn and masculinist (Lloyd 1983).
The most trenchant critics of discourse ethics and deliberative theory are those who
follow the agonistic model of radical democracy where the very search for consensus
is seen as anti-democratic (e.g., Mouffe 1999). Many feminists who draw on Hannah
Arendt’s political theory find this agonistic critique of deliberative theory to be persua-
sive. But Arendt can also be used to support a deliberative model of politics. In Arendt’s
“space of appearance,” it is true that there is debate and disagreement, but there is also
a search for deciding together what ought to be done (Lederman 2014).

Conclusion: Deliberation in a Decentralized Public Sphere

Feminist calls for a less idealized and more inclusive politics seem to have made their
way into Habermas’s work following his writings on discourse ethics, namely in Between
Facts and Norms (1996) where instead of pure rational proceduralism we get an account
of how democracy can operate in complex modern societies. Here deliberation occurs
throughout society from the informal decentered public spheres of public life to more
formal bodies that are able to translate publicly generated public will into law.
Iris Young, whose 1996 article did so much to disparage deliberative theory,
found Habermas’ new account to be much richer and more promising (Young 2012).
Other feminist theorists also found this decentered approach promising (Jaggar 1998;
Mansbridge 2012). Its virtues include the possibility of more diversity and inclusion,
the recognition of alternative venues for political action, and the linking up of infor-
mal spaces otherwise unrecognized as political. While it would be a stretch to say that
Habermas became a feminist, it is no stretch at all to say that feminist engagements
with discourse ethics made this theory as inclusive and robust as it is today.

Related Topics
Epistemic injustice, ignorance, and trans experience (Chapter 22); multicultural and
postcolonial feminisms (Chapter 47); feminism and liberalism (Chapter 52); feminism
and freedom (Chapter 53).

References
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 Feminism and Democratic Theory

Benhabib, Seyla, Butler, Judith, Cornell, Drucilla, and Fraser, Nancy (1995) Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical
Exchange, London: Routledge.
Buchanan, James M. and Tullock, Gordon (1962) The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of
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392–402.
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 52
FEMINISM AND
LIBERALISM
Clare Chambers

For some feminists, liberalism is little more than patriarchy in disguise; for others, it
is the framework for securing justice. Feminism, like all other positions in political
philosophy, is a range of views rather than a single determinate viewpoint. One aspect
of this range is that feminism includes both academics and activists, for whom the
term “liberalism” can signify rather different things; after all, liberalism is not one
single thing either.
In this chapter I start by considering feminist criticisms of liberalism. I discuss two
aspects of feminist critique: first, academic feminist critiques of non-feminist lib-
eral philosophy; second, activist feminist critiques of what is variously called “choice
feminism,” “third-wave feminism,” or simply “liberal feminism.”
I then move to those feminists who endorse liberalism and argue that a suitably modi-
fied liberalism offers the best path to gender equality. This position, “feminist liberalism,”
is mostly found in contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy. Feminist liberals
understand liberalism as a commitment to substantive, demanding principles of justice
based on freedom and equality. Included in this section are those feminist approaches
that combine radical feminism’s insights about the limitations of individual choice with
feminist liberalism’s commitment to autonomy, equality, and justice.

Feminist Critiques of Liberalism

To get a handle on feminist critiques of liberalism, we first need an account of what
liberalism is. Landmark twentieth-century liberal John Rawls defines liberal accounts
of justice as having “three main elements: a list of equal basic rights and liberties, a
priority for these freedoms, and an assurance that all members of society have adequate
all-purpose means to make use of these rights and liberties” (Rawls 2007: 12). A simpli-
fied version of Rawls’s account would describe contemporary liberalism as combining
two key values: freedom and equality. Liberals want individuals to have a significant
and protected domain of freedom, they believe that individuals are equally eligible
for this freedom, and they believe that this freedom requires a certain amount of, and
possibly even equal, economic resources.
Beyond these basic liberal premises there is much variation. For example, some but
not all liberals base their understanding of justice and obligation on a contractarian
 Feminism and liberalism

view of relationships between individuals, and between individuals and the state.
Liberals also differ in how they understand freedom—is it constituted by the mere
absence of coercion, or does it require the presence of rationality? All liberals uti-
lize some sort of distinction between the public or political sphere, considered to be
the appropriate place for politics and power, and the private or non-political sphere,
considered to be the appropriate place for non-interference. But, once again, there is
significant variation in the detail.
A detailed, critical account of liberalism is offered by radical feminist Catharine
MacKinnon in her major work Toward A Feminist Theory of The State (1989).
MacKinnon identifies five aspects of liberal theory: individualism, naturalism,
voluntarism, idealism, and moralism (1989: 45). For MacKinnon, each of these is
problematic and must be rejected. Feminism, she argues, must necessarily be radical
rather than liberal.
Individualism means that liberalism sees people as individuals first and foremost, and
assesses the political position of each individual separately. John Stuart Mill, for exam-
ple, devotes much of his On Liberty to defending the rights and interests of the indi-
vidual and the need for individuality in living; Rawls criticizes utilitarian theory for
failing to respect the separateness of persons (Mill 1993 [1859]; Rawls 1971). Radical
feminism, in contrast, sees people as necessarily socially constructed and analyses their
freedom and equality as a structural aspect of the social group to which they belong
(MacKinnon 1989; see also Jaggar 1983).
Naturalism means that liberalism assumes that there is such a thing as human nature.
For classical liberals, accounts of human nature are often substantive and gendered.
For example, John Locke connects political power and freedom to a rationality that
is denied to women (Hirschmann 2008: 48), and Immanuel Kant “constructs women
as unfree subjects” (Hirschmann 2008: 62). Some later liberals reject crude versions
of essentialist gender roles: Mill argues at length that most differences between men
and women are wrongly attributed to nature rather than culture (Mill 1996 [1868]).
Nonetheless, liberals generally assume that there is some biological truth to sex dif-
ference, and may employ a sex/gender distinction to separate biological from cultural
roles. So liberals might critically assess masculinity and femininity, but they tend to
retain faith in male and female as natural, biological categories. For MacKinnon,
feminism shows that even biological sex difference is social, since it is a social act to
identify particular biological features as politically relevant and to create social hierarchy
around them (MacKinnon 1989).
Voluntarism occurs when liberalism conceptualizes people as autonomous, choos-
ing, intentional individuals. According to voluntarism people have freedom before and
unless they are constrained by others. This way of thinking about freedom is often
referred to as negative liberty, and is a central tenet of much liberal thought. Negative
liberty means the absence of coercion, understood as intentional interference by other
humans (Hayek 1960; Berlin 1969). Liberals focus on minimizing coercion: a person
is free just so long as there is no other human being deliberately interfering in her
actions, and the way to maximize liberty is to minimize wrongful interference (Mill
1993 [1859]). MacKinnon argues that feminists reject voluntarism in favor of “a com-
plex political determinism” (MacKinnon 1989: 46). Our actions and our identities are
socially constructed: they respond to the social conditions in which we find ourselves.
But our actions also act as conditions for other people: we both react to, and create, the

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 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

social conditions in which we must all operate MacKinnon recognizes and praises Mill’s
recognition that liberty is restricted by private oppression and social norms as well as
formal coercive law, but for her his fundamentally voluntaristic instinct remains prob-
lematic (MacKinnon 1989: 41).
Idealism means that liberalism tends to “treat thinking as a sphere unto itself
and as the prime mover of social life” (MacKinnon 1989: 46). Rationality, on this
view, exists independently of action and of social context. This tendency can be
seen in the core tenets of Enlightenment liberalism, in contemporary liberal theo-
ries that focus on idealized accounts of justice, and indeed in early feminists such as
Mary Wollstonecraft and Mill (Wollstonecraft 2003 [1792]; Mill 1993 [1859], 1996
[1868]). Radical feminism requires the rejection of idealism in favor of an account
that sees consciousness as inseparable from the social conditions in which it is situ-
ated, and sees consciousness-raising as the method by which change can be effected
(MacKinnon 1989).
Finally, moralism means that liberalism proceeds in terms of principles of behaviour
that are right or wrong in themselves, viewed in the abstract. Contemporary liberal
theory provides many examples of this approach, with Rawls’s principles of justice being
the most prominent (Rawls 1971). Rawls also distinguishes political and comprehen-
sive liberalism. Comprehensive liberalism is a controversial commitment to autonomy
and equality as essential parts of a good or valuable life, but Rawls argues that political
liberalism is neutral between conceptions of the good and thus acceptable to all reason-
able people (Rawls 1993). Many feminists find political liberalism appealing as it offers
a way of protecting equality while respecting diversity (Nussbaum 1999b; Hartley and
Watson 2010), but others criticize it for failing to protect women adequately from cul-
tural oppression (Okin 1999; Chambers 2008). A more general problem with moralism
is that claims to neutrality and objectivity often conceal partiality and bias, specifi-
cally the bias of the dominant group (MacKinnon 1989; see also Young 1990). Radical
feminism proceeds in terms of an analysis of power and powerlessness, and aims for a
redistribution of power as a precondition of a theory of justice.
A recurring theme in MacKinnon’s account of liberal theory is thus liberalism’s fail-
ure to understand the existence and significance of power. A number of contemporary
feminists take up that theme, often using the work of non-liberal theories of power
such as those of Michel Foucault to explore the ways that power exists in all social
interactions, and is thus both the cause and the effect of gender hierarchy (Butler 1989;
McNay 1992; Ramazanoğlu 1993).
A failure to recognize the significance of power is one of the five feminist critiques
of liberalism identified by Ruth Abbey. The others are: a critique of contract thinking, a
critique of the public/private distinction, a critique of the gendered nature of liberalism as
a tradition, and the significance of care (Abbey 2011).
Feminism’s critique of liberal contract theory is most significantly stated in Carole
Pateman’s classic text The Sexual Contract (1988). Pateman argues that liberalism
bases its ideas of freedom and equality on contract thinking, most prominently in
liberal social contract theory. Social contract theory is the approach exemplified by
philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who
justify political obligation (the obligation we have to obey the law) by reference to
some sort of contractual agreement between people, or between citizens and the state
(Hobbes 1994 [1651]; Locke 1994 [1689]; Rousseau 1987 [1762]). This contract may be
explicit or tacit, actual or hypothetical. Social contract theorists argue that contract is a

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mechanism for preserving equality and freedom while justifying authority and
constraint, solving the puzzle of how a liberal state could ever be legitimate. But Pateman
asks how a social contract, supposedly based on free consent between equals, can justify
the existing social order in which men and women are unequal. She concludes that
women are excluded from the social contract both implicitly and explicitly. Instead
of a social contract women are the subjects of a sexual contract, one that subordinates
them to men in marriage and private life. Liberals continue to use contract thinking
as a mechanism for securing freedom in areas such as economics, employment, and
marriage. But, for Pateman, the sexual contract shows that contract thinking does not
always secure freedom. If the parties are unequal, the contract entrenches inequality.
Pateman’s account leads to the feminist criticism of liberalism’s public/private distinc-
tion. This distinction takes different forms in different versions of liberalism. In some
versions of liberalism the public/private distinction separates a public sphere of govern-
ment, law, economics, and civil society from a private sphere of family and intimate
relationships. The public sphere, on this account, is the proper concern of politics and
also of men, whereas the private sphere lies outside the purview of justice and is the
proper location for women (Elshtain 1981). More recent versions of this idea include
the Rawlsian notion that justice should apply only to the basic structure of society
(Rawls 1971; for discussion see Okin 1989; Abbey 2011; Chambers 2013). In other ver-
sions of liberalism, the distinction concerns the appropriate scope of interference from
others: interference may be legitimate in the public sphere but not in the private sphere.
For Hayek the private sphere is an area of state non-interference, a necessary protection
from coercion (Hayek 1960); for Mill the public/private distinction is best understood
as the distinction between other-regarding and self-regarding actions and should not be
understood as corresponding to the distinction between public life and family life (Mill
1993 [1859]). But many feminists point out that the public/private distinction, in what-
ever form, generally serves to exclude women’s lives and activities from consideration as
matters of politics, as relevant for justice, as areas of freedom or unfreedom, power and
subordination, when in fact they are all of these things (Hochschild 1989; Okin 1989;
Fineman 1995; Card 1996; Kittay 1999; Williams 2000). “The personal is political” is a
feminist slogan that insists that the distinction is untenable.
Much liberal theory pays no special attention to sex. Feminists argue that liberal-
ism is a gendered tradition, sometimes explicitly and sometimes not. Susan Moller Okin
identifies what she calls “false gender neutrality” in philosophers of all kinds, from
Aristotle to the present day. Even if they abandon the use of “man” and “he” as generics
in favor of gender-neutral terms, liberals and other non-feminists err by “ignoring the
irreducible biological differences between the sexes, and/or by ignoring their different
assigned social roles and consequent power differentials, and the ideologies that have
supported them” (Okin 1989: 11). A prominent example of false gender neutrality is
the fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1868), which declares “No state
shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”
but goes on to guarantee the vote only to “male citizens.” It seems that, at the time of
writing, the only “persons” were men. As MacKinnon puts it:

Men’s physiology defines most sports, their health needs largely define
insurance coverage, their socially designed biographies define workplace
expectations and successful career patterns, their perspectives and concerns
define quality in scholarship, their experiences and obsessions define merit,

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 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

their military service defines citizenship, their presence defines family, their
inability to get along with each other—their wars and rulerships—defines
history, their image defines god, and their genitals define sex. These are the
standards that are presented as gender neutral.
(MacKinnon 1989: 229)

Finally, a strand of feminist philosophy known as the ethics of care criticizes liberalism
for focusing on justice and abstract reasoning at the expense of care and relationships.
Many feminists argue that liberalism fetishizes abstract principles of impartial justice
between isolated independent individuals (Gilligan 1982; Jaggar 1983; Tronto 1993;
Kittay 1999; Held 2007; Nedelsky 2012). This fetish is problematic for several rea-
sons. First, it is based on distortion: all human beings are dependent on others. No
human being reaches adulthood without extensive care from parents or guardians, and
we all need care throughout our lives when ill or frail. Moreover, the sort of care that
is required for human flourishing and even basic well-being goes beyond the provision
of basic survival needs: we are fundamentally social beings who cannot do well without
intimate, reciprocal relationships. It follows, according to advocates of the ethics of
care, that a liberal approach to morality and justice that relies on abstract principles of
impartial rights and obligations misses the most salient and valuable forms of human
interaction and normative thinking.
The criticisms of liberalism discussed so far come from academic feminism.
Contemporary radical feminist activists extend this critique to include what they some-
times call “liberal feminism.” In the activist context, and sometimes elsewhere, “liberal
feminism” refers to a version of feminism that prioritizes the individual above the social,
and choice above social construction. Liberal feminism of this kind is mostly located in
popular culture and media, associated with terms like “girl power,” “choice feminism,”
and “third-wave feminism.” It involves the claim that feminism means allowing indi-
vidual women to make their own choices free from judgment, even if those choices
involve participating in activities that other feminists criticize, such as pornography,
prostitution, or cosmetic surgery (Wolf 1993; Walker 1995; Walter 1998; Baumgardner
and Richards 2000; Snyder-Hall 2010; for discussion see Levy 2006; Snyder 2008;
Ferguson 2010; Hirschmann 2010; Kirkpatrick 2010).
Radical feminists criticize this focus on choice. Miranda Kiraly and Meagan Tyler argue:

Individualism lies at the heart of liberal feminism, championing the ben-

efits of “choice” and the possibility that freedom is within reach . . . Liberal
feminism has helped recast women’s liberation as an individual and private
struggle, rather than one which acknowledges the systemic shortcomings of
existing systems of power and privilege that continue to hold women back,
as a class.
(Kiraly and Tyler 2015: xi; see also Jeffreys 1997
and 2005; MacKinnon 2001)

For radical feminists, gender inequality is explained by structural patterns of male domi-
nance, particularly centered around sex. Women are a sex class, subordinated by virtue
of their sex and by the eroticization of male dominance and female submission. Practices
such as pornography, prostitution, BDSM, and beauty practices are thus not neutral
choices but structural requirements, part and parcel of women’s subordination.

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Feminist Liberalism
In this section I discuss those feminists who recognize or even endorse the strong
critiques of liberalism just described, yet who still think that liberalism is the best
path towards women’s equality. The feminists discussed in this section do not support
the simplistic choice-based liberal feminism that has just been considered. I refer to
them as “feminist liberals” to distinguish them from that approach. This section also
discusses how feminist liberals respond to some of the critiques of liberalism raised
earlier in this chapter.
For feminist liberals writing within contemporary political philosophy, “liberalism”
signals the strongly egalitarian school of thought that is exemplified, in its non-feminist
form, by the work of theorists such as John Rawls (1971) and Ronald Dworkin (2000).
Feminist liberalism focuses on the implications of that work for women, and on the
question of whether the extremely demanding egalitarianism of this sort of liberalism
is, or can be, enough to satisfy the feminist demand for gender equality. For feminist
liberals a version of contemporary liberal egalitarianism is the correct approach, perhaps
after modification in response to the criticisms described earlier.
Martha Nussbaum is a feminist liberal who argues that three liberal insights
are crucial to women. These are that all humans are “of equal dignity and worth,”
that “the primary source of this worth is a power of moral choice within them,” and
that “the moral equality of persons gives them a fair claim to certain types of treatment
at the hands of society and politics” (Nussbaum 1999a: 57). Nussbaum endorses some
of the feminist critiques of liberalism that have been discussed so far: she rejects the
public/private distinction in favor of paying close attention to inequality within families
and relationships; she rejects simple voluntarism and idealism in favor of recognizing
the social construction of choices, emotions, and desires—although choice retains a
prominent role in her account (see Chambers 2008 for discussion). In these respects,
then, Nussbaum endorses the general feminist critique of liberalism. But she argues
that liberalism should not be abandoned. On the contrary, she argues that the liberal
values of individualism and moralism both require liberalism to become more feminist,
and provide reasons for feminism to be liberal.
For Nussbaum, the individualism of liberalism is not a problematic egoism or a denial
of the significance of groups. Instead

it just asks us to concern ourselves with the distribution of resources and oppor-
tunities in a certain way, namely, with concern to see how well each and every
one of them is doing, seeing each and every one as an end, worthy of concern.
(Nussbaum 1999a: 63; emphasis in original)

This concern is vital for feminism, Nussbaum argues, since “women have too rarely
been treated as ends in themselves, and too frequently been treated as means to the
ends of others . . . where women and the family are concerned, liberal political thought
has not been nearly individualist enough” (Nussbaum 1999a: 63). In making this claim
Nussbaum endorses the feminist critique of the liberal public/private distinction. It is
necessary to apply liberal principles within the family, and to the care work that is an
essential part of human life, because both care and family have been a source of gender
injustice. Liberals have largely failed to take that into account (Nussbaum 2004). But
Nussbaum believes that liberalism is up to the challenge: its commitment to individualism

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 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

provides the conceptual tools and the conceptual necessity to do so, particularly if
complemented by a focus on capabilities (Nussbaum 1999a; 2004).
Nussbaum also sees moralism and one version of idealism as strengths rather than
weaknesses of liberalism. Moralism, recall, is the idea that there can be abstract princi-
ples of right and wrong or, as contemporary liberals would put it, principles of justice.
Idealism is the related idea that reason is at least some of the way to get there. While
it is true that reason and justice are historically associated with men, and tradition and
emotion are associated with women, Nussbaum argues that reason and justice actually
serve women’s interests. As she puts it,

wherever you most mistrust habit, there you have the most need for reason.
Women have lots of grounds to mistrust most habits people have had through
the centuries, just as poor people have had reasons to distrust the moral emo-
tions of kings. This means that women have an especially great need for reason.
(Nussbaum 1999a: 79; see also Laden 2013)

In a similar vein, Jean Hampton argues that contractarianism can actually help the
feminist concern to secure justice in all relationships, including intimate ones
(Hampton 2004: 172; for discussion see Richardson 2013). Hampton’s idea is that
relationships can be subjected to a “contractarian test” that asks:

Given the fact that we are in this relationship, could both of us reasonably
accept the distribution of costs and benefits (that is, the costs and benefits that
are not themselves side effects of any affective or duty-based tie between us) if
it were the subject of an informed, unforced agreement in which we think of
ourselves as motivated solely by self-interest?
(Hampton 2004: 173)

For Hampton, this test enables us to take full account of a person’s human worth and
legitimate interests, and avoids making women into martyrs to others as the ethics of
care threatens to do.
More specifically, various feminists find the work of paradigmatic contemporary
liberal Rawls useful for feminism. Prominent among them is Okin, who criticizes Rawls
for failing adequately to take gender inequality to account in his actual writing, while
at the same time praising his theory for having the potential to be profoundly femi-
nist. Okin joins the chorus of feminists who have no time for liberalism’s public/private
distinction: justice must apply to the family, she argues, since the personal is political
in four different ways. First, the private sphere is a sphere of power: “what happens in
domestic and personal life is not immune from the dynamics of power, which has typi-
cally been seen as the distinguishing feature of the political” (Okin 1989: 128). Second,
the private sphere is a political creation: it is law that defines what counts as a family
or a marriage or a legitimate sexual relationship. Third, the private sphere creates psy-
chological conditions that govern public life: it is an important school of justice and
injustice (see also Mill 1996 [1868]). Fourth, the gendered division of labor within the
family affects women everywhere: it creates barriers in public life, as women are not
represented in positions of power or when their words are not taken seriously in the
workplace, in civil society, or in personal relationships.

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Justice must apply within the family, then, and Okin is highly critical of Rawls’s A
Theory of Justice for considering only heads of households and for failing adequately to
consider whether sex should be concealed behind the veil of ignorance (Okin 1989;
Rawls 1971). “On the other hand,” she argues,

the feminist potential of Rawls’s method of thinking and his conclusions is

considerable. The original position, with the veil of ignorance hiding from
its participants their sex as well as their other particular characteristics, tal-
ents, circumstances, and aims, is a powerful concept for challenging the
gender structure.
(Okin 1989: 109)

Justice, including as Rawls conceives it, is incompatible with gender difference and
requires significant changes to all aspects of society. In his later work, Rawls directly
addresses Okin’s critique and concludes “I should like to think that Okin is right”
(Rawls 2001: 176; for discussion see Baehr 1996; Abbey 2011; Chambers 2013).
Moreover, whereas Okin sees feminist potential mainly in Rawls’s earlier work, other
feminists argue that his later political liberalism best meets women’s interests (Cornell
1995; Nussbaum 1999b; Lloyd 2004; Hartley and Watson 2010; Brake 2012; Baehr
2013; Laden 2013).
Some feminist liberals argue that liberalism can—and should—take proper account
of care. Eva Kittay argues that care and caring relationships count as primary goods in
the Rawlsian sense, even though Rawls himself fails to recognize this, so that care is
a crucial part of liberal justice (Kittay 1999; see also Brake 2012). Jennifer Nedelsky
develops an account of relational autonomy that, she argues, speaks to both feminist
and liberal concerns (Nedelsky 2012). And Elizabeth Anderson develops a version of
democratic equality that is both fundamentally relational and appeals to liberal egali-
tarianism (Anderson 1999).
Finally, a number of contemporary feminists argue that it is possible to develop
feminist approaches that combine a deep understanding of power of the sort that is
found in radical feminism, critical theory, or postmodern/poststructural theory with a
commitment to liberal values such as autonomy, equality, democracy, and universal-
ism. For Nancy Hirschmann feminism requires both a detailed understanding of the
processes of social construction and a liberal-like commitment to freedom as a funda-
mentally important political value (Hirschmann 2003). The problem with liberalism,
Hirschmann argues, is that its conception of freedom is inadequate. What is needed
is a “feminist freedom” with a “political analysis of patriarchal power” (Hirschmann
2003, 217) and an understanding of how the very subject of freedom is shaped. Marilyn
Friedman (2003) argues that the liberal conception of autonomy is vital for women,
and that understanding it requires deep analysis of the limiting conditions of systematic
injustice, subordination, and oppression; oppression is also the focus of the work of
feminist liberal Ann Cudd (2006).
Seyla Benhabib argues that there is a “powerful kernel of truth” in many feminist
criticisms of liberalism. Nonetheless, she argues in favor of what she calls a “post-
Enlightenment defence of universalism,” one that is “interactive not legislative, cog-
nizant of gender difference not gender-blind, contextually sensitive and not situation
indifferent” (Benhabib 1992: 3). In later work Benhabib develops “discourse ethics,”

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a version of deliberative democracy that draws on both liberal principles of freedom

and equality and feminist/postmodern theories of power (Benhabib 2002; see also
Benhabib et al. 1995).
Nancy Fraser argues in favor of a feminism that combines both an awareness of
inequalities of power and recognition with a commitment to egalitarian redistribution
(Fraser 1997; 2013). Fraser identifies redistribution and recognition as “two analytically
distinct paradigms of justice” (Fraser 1997: 13), the former allied with liberalism and
the latter with communitarianism and postmodernism. But women, she argues, face
both distributive and recognitional injustice, requiring “socialism in the economy plus
deconstruction in the culture” (Fraser 1997, 31). Realising this sort of justice requires
the sort of universal standpoint that liberals advocate: “all people [must] be weaned
from their attachment to current cultural constructions of their interests and identities”
(Fraser 1997: 31).
Finally, in my own work I argue that the liberal reliance on choice is deeply prob-
lematic since it makes it difficult for liberalism to explain or criticize what is going on
when people make choices that harm them (Chambers 2008). For liberals, choices that
harm only the choosing individual are normatively unproblematic; and yet social norms
mean that many such choices are gendered. That is, women are strongly encouraged to
choose or accept many harmful practices ranging from gendered appearance norms and
sexual objectification to the gendered division of labor and explicit political and legal
inequality. Liberals tend to argue that these inequalities are unproblematic if they are
chosen, as in this example from Brian Barry:

Suppose . . . that women were as highly qualified as men but disproportionately

chose to devote their lives to activities incompatible with reaching the top of
a large corporation. An egalitarian liberal could not then complain of injustice
if, as a result, women were underrepresented in “top corporate jobs.”
(Barry 2001: 95)

In this example Barry is using choice as what I call a “normative transformer,” some-
thing that transforms an inequality from unjust to just by its mere presence. This is a
common move in liberalism just as it was in liberal or choice feminism. But it is deeply
problematic to consider choice as a normative transformer.
The reason that choice is problematic is that we choose in a context of social con-
struction. There are two main aspects of social construction: the construction of options
and the construction of preferences. The social construction of options means that our
social context affects which options are available to us and which options are cast as
appropriate for us. The choice to be a rocket scientist, for example, is only available
in a society that contains rocket science; and it will be available to women only if it is
not set up an exclusively male role. The social construction of preferences means that
we often want precisely those things that our society presents as appropriate for us.
Extensive gendered socialisation means that women are more likely to want careers,
activities, and products that are gendered as female and men are more likely to want
things that are gendered as male.
But if our options and our preferences are socially constructed, it does not make
sense to use those choices to legitimate the social context on which they depend. We
choose things because our society makes those things available to us and, in large part,

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because it casts them as appropriate for us. Women are more likely than men are to
choose family over career because gendered societies construct working life around the
assumption that someone else will be looking after children, and social norms dictate
that that person should almost always be a woman.
Liberal values still have a place, though. If social construction is not to lead to rela-
tivism (a situation in which we may as well rely on choice since we have no standards
of judgement) then we need normative standards and a commitment to at least some
universal values. Liberalism offers both. It offers the twin values of freedom and equal-
ity, so crucial to women’s liberation, and it offers a variety of philosophical mechanisms
for theorizing those values as universal, crucial to ensuring that liberation is not the
preserve of the privileged. What we need is an uncompromisingly feminist liberalism
that takes social construction seriously.

Conclusion
It is possible, then, to combine feminist and liberal insights, and many contemporary
feminist liberals do just that. But why should feminists want to be liberals? As MacKinnon
points out, liberalism has

yet to face either the facts or implications of women’s material inequality as a

group, has not controlled male violence societywide, and has not equalized the
status of women relative to men. . . . if liberalism “inherently” can meet femi-
nism’s challenges, having had the chance for some time, why hasn’t it?
(MacKinnon 2001: 709)

Some feminists thus abandon the language and traditions of liberalism, arguing for, as
MacKinnon puts it in the title of one of her books, Feminism Unmodified.
For other feminists, the language and “radical vision” of liberalism still resonate
(Nussbaum 1999a: 79). Liberalism has certainly failed fully to realise its commitments
to universal freedom and equality, both philosophically and politically, but few if any
liberals claim that the project is complete. The political and philosophical dominance
of liberalism makes constructive engagement with it essential. Feminists cannot ignore
liberalism, and liberalism certainly cannot ignore feminism. The question is how to
realise both liberal and feminist commitments to genuine equality and liberation for all.

Further Reading
Abbey, Ruth (2011) The Return of Feminist Liberalism, Durham: Acumen. (An in-depth discussion of
the work of contemporary feminist liberalism, with particular focus on Susan Moller Okin, Martha
Nussbaum, and Jean Hampton.)
—— (2013) Feminist Interpretations of John Rawls, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
(An edited collection in which theorists consider feminist implications for, and criticisms of, Rawls’s work.)
Baehr, Amy R., Ed. (2004) Varieties of Feminist Liberalism, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. (An edited
collection of leading feminist and liberal philosophers, exploring the ways that the two traditions can
work together.)
Zerilli, Linda M. G. (2015) “Feminist critiques of liberalism,” in Steven Wall (Ed.) The Cambridge Companion
to Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 355–380. (A discussion of feminist criticisms of
liberalism, with a focus on contemporary political philosophy.)

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 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

Related Topics
Feminism and enlightenment (Chapter 8); feminist engagements with social contract
theory (Chapter 7); feminist conceptions of autonomy (Chapter 41); feminist care
ethics (Chapter 43); multicultural and postcolonial feminisms (Chapter 47); neoliber-
alism, global justice, and transnational feminisms (Chapter 48); feminism and freedom
(Chapter 53); feminism and power (Chapter 54).

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 53
FEMINISM AND FREEDOM
Allison Weir

In New York harbor, at the entrance to the United States of America, stands the
Statue of Liberty: Liberty Enlightening the World. Liberty stands as a beacon welcom-
ing all to the land of the free, holding a torch and a tablet inscribed with the date of
American Declaration of Independence. At her feet lies a broken chain. The Statue
of Liberty, like the statue of Freedom on top of the Capitol in Washington, is mod-
eled on the Roman goddess Libertas, who was also a symbol of the French Revolution:
Delacroix’s painting of the 1830 July Revolution, Liberty Leading the People, shows her
holding the French flag and a bayonet. Through the history of Western civilization,
freedom, like other abstract ideals, has been personified as a woman. This is ironic,
given the status of actual women in these societies. Though women in Rome who were
“freeborn” were classed as citizens, they could not vote or hold public office. Neither
the Declaration of the Rights of Man in France nor the Declaration of Independence
and Bill of Rights in America granted full citizenship or equal rights to women. Today
the Equal Rights Amendment to the American Constitution, which would accord
equal rights to women, still has not been ratified. Many are excluded from the ideal of
freedom: the American Declaration of Independence was signed by slave owners, and
the land that was declared independent was stolen from indigenous peoples; America
has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, and more than 60 percent
of the prison population is Black or Hispanic; Indigenous peoples around the world
struggle for freedom from colonization; and the land of the free, like other “developed”
nations, polices its borders to keep out unwanted foreigners. Worldwide, the freedom of
some depends on the exploitation and oppression of most of the world’s people.
None of this should be surprising: throughout the history of Western civilization
and Western philosophy, freedom has been defined through opposition to the unfree-
dom of slaves, barbarians, foreigners, and women. The concept of freedom in ancient
Greek and Roman societies was defined in opposition to slavery. The fathers of modern
Western philosophy—Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Mill—all defined human free-
dom through explicit opposition to the “savage peoples” of the Americas and Africa,
thus legitimizing colonization and slavery by constructing raced others as not fully
human (Gordon 1995; Tully 1995; Mills 1997). And as many feminist theorists have
pointed out, the freedom of men in the public realm has been enabled by the imprison-
ment of women, as housewives, and as servants and slaves, in the private realm: women
have done the work of caring for children and households so that free men could be free
(Pateman 1988; Okin 1989; Folbre 1994). Thus, as Nancy Hirschmann writes, there is a
 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

tension in modern theories of freedom between “the theoretical need to define freedom
as a universal concept and the political need to exclude most people, including laborers
and women, from its expression and enactment” (Hirschmann 2003: 70).
These are arguably constitutive exclusions: in other words, these exclusions are not
contingent or secondary to a prior concept of freedom, but have shaped the ways in
which we define what freedom is. If our modern Western conception of freedom has
been produced through the explicit exclusion of women and raced others, then it will
not be enough to just add those who have been excluded. Feminist philosophers and
activists thus face a challenge: when we struggle for freedom, we need to reimagine
what freedom might be. To do this we can draw critically on the history of philosophies
of freedom, but we also need to draw on histories of local and global struggles for and
practices of freedom.
In her provocative 1986 essay, “Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White
Feminism,” Paula Gunn Allen argued that the power and agency of Indigenous
women in Indigenous communities served as a model of freedom for the white suf-
fragist feminist movement in America. She also argues that Indigenous practices of
freedom, and in particular the role of women in Indigenous communities, served as a
model for American and European ideals of freedom, and influenced the work of phi-
losophers including Michel de Montaigne and Frederick Engels (Allen 1986). While
many of her claims are unsubstantiated, some are supported by scholars who argue that
American ideals of freedom, and the American constitution, were influenced by the
settlers’ encounter with Indigenous peoples, who were seen as exemplars of freedom
(Grinde and Johansen 1991). This is just one example of the ways in which concepts
and philosophies of freedom are influenced by struggles for and practices of freedom.
Struggles for freedom have historically been central to feminist movements
and activism. The “second wave” of the feminist movement in Europe and North
America was referred to as the “women’s liberation movement,” and while the ideal
and possibility of liberty are subjects of controversy, feminist activists continue to
struggle for individual and collective freedoms, including freedom from male domi-
nation and violence and from many forms of oppression, including heterosexism,
racism, capitalism, colonization, and imperialism.
Feminists struggle for freedom of choice and autonomy, freedom of movement, free-
dom of expression and assembly, and freedom of participation in the public realm and in
political governance. The ideal of freedom is central to feminism. But what is freedom?

Freedom in Theory and Practice: Rights and Privacy,

Interdependence and Solidarity
The ancient Greeks and Romans understood freedom as the capacity to participate in the
public realm, in collective self-government. The Roman conception of republicanism—
freedom as popular sovereignty, or freedom of collective self-government—strongly
influenced modern European and North American conceptions of freedom as collective
resistance to tyranny, in particular the tyranny of monarchies, through the establishment of
democratic governments. But in modern Western philosophies, the ideal of freedom took
on a new emphasis: individual freedom, understood as freedom from constraint, not only by
tyrannical governments but by other individuals.
In the social contract theories of Hobbes and Locke, freedom was understood to
be an individual’s capacity to act without constraint, to own private property, to own

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oneself as property, and to exercise rational self-interest, through freely entering into
contracts with other men. Hobbes imagined a state of nature in which every individual
lived in fear of attack. To alleviate this fear, men agree to submit to government and
laws to protect themselves: thus society is born of the rational self-interest of individu-
als, men who freely enter into social contracts to avoid being killed. (Though whether
any action taken to avoid being killed is an act of freedom is an interesting question.)
The image of the state of nature driving men to form society, understood as a set of legal
contracts among individuals, proved to be an enduring fantasy. Thus the social con-
tract theories of the early modern Anglo-European philosophers conceptualized mod-
ern society through an explicit contrast with an imagined state of nature populated by
savages and barbarians who lived either in a condition of abject unfreedom or in a state
of primitive natural freedom, which is in turn either feared as lawless and chaotic, as in
Hobbes, or romanticized as idyllic, as in Rousseau. As Charles Mills has argued, these
images were not just imagined but were inspired by perceptions of what Hobbes termed
“the savage people in many places in America” and in Africa (Mills 1997).
The civilized freedom of the modern Western world was thus understood to be
founded on rational agreements to respect individual rights, and the imagined freedom
as absolute lack of constraint was traded for freedom within the security of law, as a
contracting bearer of rights. Thus in the tradition of liberal individual freedom, freedom
is often privatized as a circumscribed area within which a man can be free from inter-
ference by others. While the public freedom of participation in democracy is highly
valued, it is also treated with suspicion: J. S. Mill criticized democracy as the tyranny
of the majority over the individual; Isaiah Berlin argued that what he called “positive
freedoms” in the tradition of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx—freedom to align one’s
will with an ideal, and with the general will—supported totalitarian rule. Berlin held
that the only freedom worthy of the name was “negative freedom”—an individual’s
freedom to act without constraint (Berlin 2008). Mill, on the other hand, argued for
the importance of the “positive freedoms” of the individual to engage in a project of
self-realization and self-determination, through exploring the world, and through free-
dom of expression and debate. Neither had much interest in what has been called a
third form of freedom: freedom in solidarity (the French fraternité), and in collective
resistance to colonization. (Note that the term “positive freedom” is used to refer to
many different kinds of freedom; I discuss some of these below. While some theorists
distinguish between individual liberty and a broader conception of freedom, many use
the terms interchangeably to refer to individual freedom.)
As critics of liberal individualism since Hegel have pointed out, the social contract
theories are based on a strange conception of history: society is born of freely con-
tracting individuals, who are fundamentally atomistic, independent, and competitive.
Drawing on ancient philosophy, and especially Aristotle, Hegel and Marx argued that
human beings are essentially social beings, and that individuals develop through social
relations. Marx argued that the liberal conception of the self as private property, and
of freedom as the right of individuals to compete with each other in the marketplace,
is produced through the capitalist system: thus this ideal of freedom is founded on
class exploitation and inequality. Because capitalism values individuals only insofar as
they produce commodities for the private profit of the owners of factories and corpora-
tions, individuals are themselves reduced to commodities. Individuals come to define
their very selves as private property (as in Locke) rather than as humans—as social
beings. True individual freedom, for both Hegel and Marx, could only be found in

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self-realization in social relations. For Marx, freedom would be possible only through
solidarity to resist class exploitation and alienated labour (Marx 1963).
Feminist philosophers have taken this critique of atomistic individualism further.
All of the social contract theories imagine a society founded by men who have, as
Hobbes puts it, sprung up like mushrooms, separate and independent. This, as feminist
philosophers have pointed out, is a gross distortion of history. The reality, of course, is
that all are born of mothers, into human groups. We are born dependent, and remain
interdependent through our lives. Thus our freedom can be understood only in the
context of this interdependence (Jaggar 1983; Benhabib 1992; Held 1993; Fraser and
Gordon 1994; Irigaray 1985; Kittay 1999; Weir 2013). If the freedom of elite men in
the social contract was founded on the exclusion of women (Pateman 1988) and raced
others (Mills 1997) and the freedom of the atomistic individual is founded on defensive
denial of connection to others, then real freedom can only be found through solidarity
struggles attentive to all forms of interlocking oppressions (Mohanty 2003).
It remains true, however, that many feminist struggles for freedom are struggles for
liberal individual freedoms. In modern Western philosophical and legal traditions, indi-
vidual freedom is most often construed in terms of rights. And Western feminism has a
long history of struggles for equal rights.
Yet the legacy of rights is problematic for feminists. In the modern liberal tradition,
individual rights were conceived as rights to privacy, and specifically as the rights and free-
doms of male household heads to exercise authority, over their private property, which
was understood to include women, children, and servants—household chattel. One way
of dealing with this is to argue that the rights and freedoms historically accorded to white
propertied males should be extended to all individuals. Moreover, this inclusion of those
formerly excluded can transform the nature of rights. Susan Okin argues for a reconcep-
tion of human rights to include specific women’s rights, such as rights to protection from
violence and abuse (Okin 2000). Thus the nature and scope of rights are transformed:
whereas rights have traditionally protected men’s right to privacy, construed as freedom
from interference of the state in the private realm, once women’s rights are recognized,
the private realm, and men’s authority within it, are no longer protected from legal inter-
vention. Critics argue that this formulation of a global feminism fighting for universal
women’s rights fails to attend to transnational relations of power, taking elite Western
women as the privileged subjects of feminist politics, “who [see] themselves as ‘free’ in
comparison to their ‘sisters’ in the developing world” (Grewal 2005: 142).
It is important to note that many local, national and transnational struggles for
women’s rights have not focused on rights to privacy or rights to non-interference but
have been directed toward public civil and political rights: feminist suffrage move-
ments worldwide have fought for the right to participate in democratic political life,
including rights to vote and run for public office, and feminist movements fight for
rights to freedom of speech and assembly, freedom from involuntary servitude, and
equality in public places, as well as economic, social and cultural rights. Yet women’s
legal rights in the United States are still often framed in the language of privacy and
noninterference: the historic Roe vs. Wade ruling in 1973 granted the right to abor-
tion on the basis of a woman’s right to privacy. Catharine MacKinnon has argued that
abortion is construed as a private privilege, not a public right, in the United States: the
state has no obligation to provide access to abortion, or public funding (MacKinnon
1987). The focus on abortion rights has typically neglected the interests of poor women
and women of color, who have been subject to programs of forced sterilization in the

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United States and elsewhere. Activists have worked to shift the discourse to focus
more broadly on reproductive freedom (Fried 1990). Still, rights to privacy are invoked
and have been upheld in rulings that corporations and individuals are free to withhold
access to contraception and to discriminate on the basis of sexuality. (In contrast, the
Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that bans on gay marriage contravened constitutional
guarantees of equality as well as liberty.) And the right to privacy is granted selectively:
the power of the state to intervene in the private realm increases the vulnerability of
the poor and oppressed to regulation of their private lives.
Many feminist theorists draw on socialist and Foucauldian theories to argue that the
focus on individual rights problematically constructs individuals as free choosers unen-
cumbered by social contexts and relations of power. Legal rights mask substantive ine-
qualities and oppression. Many argue that the language of individual rights is specific to
modern European cultures, and draw on postcolonial theory and critical legal studies to
point out that the legacy of rights is entangled with the legacy of colonization. Focusing
on cases in India, Nivedita Menon argues that the feminist focus on rights has achieved
little in the way of substantive change (Menon 2004). Yet Patricia Williams asserts the
importance of rights as the mark of citizenship for African Americans (Williams 1991).
Some feminist political theorists argue that theories and struggles for freedom need
to shift from demands for individual rights to practices of participation—and hence
from demands for protections of privacy and non-interference to agonistic practices of
public freedom. Yet these arguments must also confront the legacy of the public/private
split in republican arguments for public freedom. As has been noted, the freedom of
male citizens to participate in the public realm has historically been dependent upon
the labour of women and slaves in the private realm. The affirmation of the public/
private split reappears in the work of republican theorists like Hannah Arendt, who
argued that freedom can be found only in action free from necessity—and hence free
from labour, as well as the private realm of the household (Arendt 1958).
Second-wave liberal and socialist feminists often located freedom in the public
realm of work, calling for women’s liberation through escape from the household into
paid work (e.g., Friedan 1963). While they differ as to the location of the public realm
(Arendt’s argument was a pointed critique of the Marxist faith in freedom through work)
both the call for freedom through participation in political life and the call for freedom
through entering the workforce share a faith in freedom from the private realm that can
leave women’s exploitation in the household unchanged: women in the workforce and
in political life still typically bear most of the responsibility for childcare and housework.
And conversely, the belief that freedom can be found only in escape from the household
perpetuates the repudiation of everything associated with femininity: the body, children
and relationships, our animality and mortality (e.g., Beauvoir 2010 [1949]).
Working-class women have known all along that the workforce is not a realm of free-
dom. As bell hooks points out, for black women and for poor and working-class women
working in factories or in white homes, paid work is not liberation.

Historically black women have identified work in the context of family as

humanizing labor, work that affirms their identity as women, as human beings
showing love and care . . . . In contrast to labor done in a caring environ-
ment inside the home, labor outside the home was most often seen as stressful,
degrading, and dehumanizing.
(hooks 1984: 134)

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Drawing on the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, on feminist theories of relational identity,

and particularly on the “love and justice tradition of Black America” Patricia Hill
Collins and Cynthia Willett offer accounts of freedom situated in relationship and
rooted in home. Hill Collins draws on Toni Morrison’s Beloved: for the ex-slaves Sethe
and Paul D, freedom is “a place where you could love anything you chose” (Collins
1990: 182). Willett draws on the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass to argue that
this freedom is rooted in “home,” understood not as ownership of property but as a
source of connection with others and a nurturing of spirit (Willett 2001).
Many first-wave and second-wave feminists argued that women’s liberation would
require the socialist restructuring of households to eliminate the public/private split
(Firestone 1970; Gilman 1996 [1898]), but this argument has generally been ignored
in practice. Increasingly, the work of care for children and households, along with
care for the elderly, sick, and disabled, is “passed on” from capitalist economies to
private households, from private households to contracted labor, from men to women,
and from women to other, poorer women. Thus “global care chains” are part of a sys-
tem of interlocking oppressions in which migrants and women of color do most of the
world’s care work and domestic work for little or no pay, so that a privileged few can
be “free” (Hochschild 2002; Weir 2005). Real freedom, then, would require transna-
tional feminist solidarity to resist interlocking oppressions, with the recognition that
no one is free when others are enslaved.

The Subject of Freedom and Its Discontents: Contemporary

Feminist Philosophies of Freedom
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir famously argued that the “drama of woman”
lies in the contradiction between each woman’s aspiration to be a free subject and the
demand that she conform to social ideals of womanhood. Women in this situation oscil-
late between two opposed ideals: as human individuals, we aspire to freedom; as women,
we are expected to fulfil the conventions peculiar to the second sex. What would it
mean then for women to be free? Is being a woman fundamentally opposed to being free?
For Beauvoir, freedom required self-transcendence. “Every subject posits itself as a
transcendence concretely, thorough projects; it accomplishes its freedom only by per-
petual surpassing towards other freedoms; there is no other justification for present
existence than its expansion towards an indefinitely open future” (Beauvoir 2010
[1949]: 17). Beauvoir linked individual freedom to a universal struggle for liberation,
arguing that freedom is the aim of human existence, and that the freedom of the indi-
vidual is bound up with the freedom of all. “To will oneself free is to will others free”
(Beauvoir 2010 [1949]: 73). Thus Sally Scholz notes that for Beauvoir an individual’s
freedom presumes solidarity with others (Scholz 2005: 51). In The Second Sex, Beauvoir
argued that if women are to liberate themselves from their situation as the second sex,
they must commit themselves to the collective struggle for women’s liberation. They
must “posit themselves authentically as Subjects,” both individually and collectively as
a “we” (Beauvoir 2010 [1949]: 8).
Thus Beauvoir points feminist philosophies of freedom in two directions: individ-
ual freedom and women’s collective freedom. In what follows I shall discuss critical
responses to these two directions and articulations of other possibilities for freedom in
feminist philosophy.

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Individual Freedom
Many feminist theorists continue to frame individual freedom in liberal terms as
capacity for choice. For bell hooks “Being oppressed means the absence of choices”
(hooks 1984: 5). But feminist theorists situate and contextualize this capacity within
social relations of power. Nancy Hirschmann argues for a conception of feminist free-
dom that prioritizes the capacity for choice, but argues that such a conception must
address both the external and internal conditions of choice, and the relations between
them, in patriarchal societies stratified by systems of race and class, and further argues
that feminist freedom requires the capacity to participate in reshaping those conditions:
in order to formulate choices women must have meaningful power in the construction
of contexts of choice (Hirschmann 2003). Shay Welch argues for a feminist theory of
social freedom as the freedom “to choose and act with and through other community
members” and “ to partake in the construction of the community’s values, norms, and
institutions that shape one’s own daily life” (Welch 2012: 23).
In their focus on choice, these theorists follow Isaiah Berlin’s argument that the
essence of freedom is negative freedom: the capacity to act without constraint or inter-
ference. Thus freedom requires the absence of obstacles to the exercise of choice (Berlin
2008). But they also contend that freedom cannot be only negative. Hirschmann argues
that her attention to contexts of choice to address the issue of power relations distin-
guishes her approach from models of negative freedom.

Like classic negative-liberty theorists, I maintain that the ability to make

choices and act on them is the basic condition for freedom. However, like
positive-liberty theorists, I maintain that choice needs to be understood in
terms of the desiring subject, of her preferences, her will, and identity. For
subjectivity exists in social contexts of relations, practices, policies, and institu-
tions that affect and shape desires, will, and identity.
(Hirschmann 2003: 30)

For Hirschmann, there are three ways in which theories of positive freedom chal-
lenge or expand the negative conception of freedom: (1) they are concerned with the
“positive” provision of the conditions necessary to take advantage of negative liberties;
(2) they focus on “internal barriers” to realizing my true or higher self; (3) they focus
on the social construction of the choosing subject (Hirschmann 2003: 6–14). Charles
Taylor argues that positive freedom is an “exercise concept,” focusing on self-realization,
and the achievement of a substantive end or condition of freedom, whereas negative
freedom is an “opportunity concept,” focusing on unconstrained action with no specifi-
cation of an end (Taylor 1985). Kantians argue that positive freedom or autonomy is a
proceduralist principle according to which one follows one’s own will or law, in relation
to an ideal. Other theorists argue that positive freedoms identify specific substantive
rights. Berlin’s account of positive freedom ranges among a number of different concep-
tions of freedom, including self-mastery, rational alignment with an ideal and with a
general will, substantive freedom, and collective participation in democratic govern-
ance. Amartya Sen proposes a model of “development as freedom,” emphasizing the
ways in which poverty and oppression limit human freedom, and focusing on the role of
specific rights and opportunities that foster human capabilities to achieve substantive
freedoms (Sen 1999). Martha Nussbaum draws on Sen’s work to argue that freedom

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requires the ability to exercise a specific substantive set of capabilities, and argues that
specifying these capabilities as normative ideals is essential for advancing global wom-
en’s freedom (Nussbaum 2000). Republican theorists including Hannah Arendt point
out that all of these are liberal individual freedoms, and argue that positive freedom is
participation in public life and democratic governance, while postcolonial and antico-
lonial theorists argue for collective resistance to colonization.
Poststructuralist theorists argue that even when liberal theories of individual freedom
attend to the contexts of individual choice, they do not adequately address Foucauldian
critiques of the individual as the subject of power. If the individual is deeply constituted
through relations of power, then it makes no sense to advocate the liberation of the
individual. Our desires, ideals, and choices, and the very concept of the individual, are
all produced through regimes of power. This produces the paradox of the subject:

Subjection consists precisely in this fundamental dependency on a discourse

we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency. . . . 
“Subjection” signifies the process of becoming subordinated by power as well as
the process of becoming a subject.
(Butler 1997: 1–2)

Thus any call for the liberation of the subject, or the freedom of the individual, con-
fronts the paradox of freedom: the individual who is supposed to be liberated is itself an
effect of relations of power. How then can poststructuralist feminist theorists advocate
individual agency and resistance to oppression?
Poststructuralist and queer theorists draw on Michel Foucault’s distinction between
liberation and freedom. For Foucault, the call for liberation of individuals and their
desires relies on the repressive hypothesis, the belief that “all that is required is to break
these repressive deadlocks and man will be reconciled with himself, rediscover his
nature or regain contact with his origins, and re-establish a full and positive relationship
with himself” (Foucault 1997: 282). Freedom, Foucault argues, is possible only in and
through relations of power. He does affirm the struggles of colonized peoples for libera-
tion from domination by their colonizers, but argues that this practice of liberation will
not be enough to define “the practices of freedom that will still be needed if this people,
this society, and these individuals are to be able to define admissible and acceptable
forms of existence or political society” (Foucault 1997: 282).
Foucault thematizes multiple conceptions of freedom: agonistic politics of contesta-
tion and struggle; practices of critique, questioning, experiment, testing of limits; ethics
of care of the self and aesthetics of existence, emphasizing bodies and their pleasures
rather than individuals and their desires, in relations of humans with themselves and
with each other.
Judith Butler argues that resistant agency can be exercised through subversive
citations of norms, through performances that, intentionally or not, question and
transform social norms. For example, drag performances expose the fact that all gender
performances are forms of drag, that gender is not an essence but a social construct,
constituted through repetitive citations of gender norms. Thus gender norms can be
denaturalized and displaced by citations that invariably fall short of or challenge those
norms (Butler 1990).
Postcolonial feminist theorists agree that the liberal individual is a specific histori-
cal and cultural production, but emphasize the imposition of this ideal on colonized

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peoples. While some believe that some ideal of individual freedom will be found in all
societies, others argue that it is inappropriate to generalize this provincial ideal beyond
modern European cultures. Saba Mahmood argues that poststructuralist feminists’ affir-
mations of agency as resistance and subversion of norms actually reassert the liberal
ideal of individual freedom. Like liberals, poststructuralist feminist theorists and cul-
tural anthropologists conceive of agency only within the binary terms of subordination
or resistance to norms. Mahmood argues, then, for a conception of agency entailed “not
only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits
norms” (Mahmood 2005:15). Drawing on Foucault’s ethics of the care of the self,
Mahmood analyzes Islamic women’s piety movements in Cairo to show how the agency
of the participants is produced through practices of inhabiting norms.
Though she draws on Foucault, Mahmood does not distinguish between individual
liberation and freedom. And not all liberal theories construe individual freedom as
resistance to norms. While Mahmood articulates it in terms of embodied practice, the
conception of agency as a practice of inhabiting norms is actually indebted to Kant,
and aligns with Taylor’s conception of positive freedom as realizing an ideal. Thus we
can understand feminists to be oriented toward realizing an ideal of freedom. Serene
Khader argues that Mahmood fails to distinguish between those practices that entail
sexist oppression and those that do not: a transnational feminism does not depend on
identifying freedom with individual critical agency, but must focus on the content of
the practices (Khader 2016). Weir argues that the women in the piety movement are
engaged in practices of freedom as practices of belonging—a conception of freedom that
can be found in many religious and spiritual practices, both Western and non-Western,
and exemplified in Islamic and Indigenous feminisms (Weir 2013). There are many
diverse practices and conceptions of freedom, and not all are reducible to dominant
Western conceptions of individual freedom. We need to beware of the assumption that
all struggles for and practices of freedom are attempts to realize the kinds of freedom
with which Western Europeans are already familiar.

From Women’s Liberation to Feminist Practices of Freedom

While first- and second-wave feminists identified with a women’s liberation movement,
the claim to a collective social identity of “women” has been extensively criticized.
Critics point out that theories and movements for women’s liberation have failed to
acknowledge differences and power relations among women (hooks 1984; Anzaldua
1987; Mohanty 2003). Others argue that the identity “women” depends on a claim to
sameness or essence constituted through a hetero-patriarchal binary logic of exclusion
(Rubin 1975; Riley 1988; Butler 1990). Thus the identity politics of women’s liberation
are regarded not as a politics of freedom but a politics of oppression, and as self-defeating
affirmations of the very identities that colonize us (Brown 1995). Many advocate shifting
our collective struggles to coalitions that do not rely on any claims to identity (Reagon
1983). As Chandra Mohanty writes, “the unity of women is best understood not as a
given . . . it is something that has to be worked for, struggled toward—in history” (2003:
116). Nivedita Menon echoes this argument: “the creation of ‘women’ as subject should
be understood to be the goal of feminist politics, not its starting point” (2004: 21).
Transnational feminist theorists avoid making universal claims about women, arguing
that feminists must collectively address sexism in the context of critiques of imperialism
and interlocking oppressions (Mohanty 2003; Jaggar 2014; Khader 2016).

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Linda Zerilli argues that feminist theorists have been overly preoccupied with what
she calls the “subject question,” which includes both questions about individual subjects
and their agency, and questions about the category of women as the subject of feminism.
Zerilli argues that feminists need to follow Arendt in shifting the question of freedom
outside its current subject-centered frame, as a way to escape “our current entanglement
in the paradoxes of subject formation and the vicious circle of agency” (Zerilli 2005: 12)
To avoid these paradoxes and entanglements, we need to shift to a practice of freedom
that focuses on the “who”—the “unique disclosure of human action,” in contrast to the
“what”—the identity or substance (Zerilli 2005: 13). According to Arendt, freedom is
action in the context of plurality: we act always in relation to different and diverse oth-
ers in a common world (Arendt 1958). Feminists, Zerilli argues, need to shift from our
introspective preoccupation with our subjectivity and agency and step into what Arendt
calls the “abyss of freedom”—to practice political freedom through practices of world-
building. Thus Zerilli, with Bonnie Honig, affirms an agonistic performative feminism
that involves critique and contestation, and participation in practices of freedom in
collective and public spaces (Honig 1992). Zerilli takes the Milan Women’s Bookstore
Collective as an example of this practice: the women in the collective are creating
feminist space to practice free relations among women. This involves the free practice
of affirming community with and accountability to other women—in Beauvoir’s words,
of saying “we”—through engaging in struggle with each other in a politics of sexual dif-
ference directed toward transforming the given reality.
Queer theory and practice has opened up new possibilities for freedom, questioning
and destabilizing fixed identities of sex, gender, and sexuality, and engaging the imagi-
nation to create techniques for thinking and acting differently. Butler’s conception of
gender as performance has inspired arguments for performing genders differently, and
for transforming gender.
As Shannon Winnubst writes: “to queer is to create”—to practice freedom in a
space of endless contestation and excessive possibilities. To inhabit and confront this
space requires, as bell hooks writes, decolonizing our imaginations. “To live in the
world queerly is then to live in the world transformatively, with an eye always toward
how relations of bodies and pleasures can be multiplied and intensified . . . to veer
off the rails of utility and reason” (Winnubst 2006: 148). Thus queer politics are
techniques for transformation “from the pain of anxiety to the exuberance of joy”
(Winnubst 2006: 200).
Jana Sawicki argues for a queer feminism: “an eccentric, provocative and unruly
feminist practice, one able to risk, challenge, and transform itself, any static sense of
its beloved objects and self-understandings, its sense of temporal and spatial orders”
(Sawicki 2013: 75). Queer feminisms draw on Foucault’s understanding of thought as
a “critical (and ethical) practice designed to loosen our attachment to present ways of
thinking and doing” and thus to open up possibilities for experiment, for thinking and
living otherwise (Sawicki 2013: 75). As Sawicki notes, Eve Sedgwick offers a meth-
odology: a shift from “paranoid readings” that obsessively unmask and expose systems
of domination to “reparative readings” that depend on curiosity, creativity, and imagi-
nation, attending to the ways in which selves and communities flourish, to open up
possibilities for pleasure, joy, excitement. While paranoid readings are focused on the
binary of desire and lack, reparative readings open up “other ways of knowing, ways less
oriented around suspicion, that are actually being practiced” provoking and sustaining

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affects of surprise and hope (Sedgwick 2003: 144). While some see these strategies as
insufficiently political, Sawicki suggests that a political practice needs to create some-
thing to be free for (2013: 85). And to the critiques that reparative motives are merely
about pleasure (merely aesthetic) and are frankly ameliorative (merely reformist)
Sedgwick responds, “What makes pleasure and amelioration so ‘mere’?” (2003: 144)
In fact queer and feminist political activism, from Emma Goldman to Act Up to
PussyRiot, has often worked through creative practices that engage the imagination
and that multiply and intensify relations of bodies and pleasures.
In this spirit of openness and curiosity, Western feminist philosophers need to
learn more about non-Western and Southern conceptions and practices of freedom.
By attending to diverse Indigenous, African, Asian, Middle Eastern philosophies and
practices of freedom, we might detach from our habits of thinking about what freedom
is, and create new connections and alliances.
For example, Indigenous anticolonial struggles draw on traditions of freedom in
connection to “all my relations,” including other humans, the ancestors, and nonhu-
man persons, and on practices of freedom as collective joy and love enacted in danced
rituals as sources of solidarity and resistance to colonization. How might these be
connected to queer practices of freedom of bodies and pleasures, Islamic feminist strug-
gles for gender equality within an ideal of freedom in union with the divine, African
American freedom songs, and Buddhist practices of cultivating joy? All of these diverse
practices pursue freedom from oppression within a theory and practice of freedom in
relationship, rather than negative freedom from interference. How might connections
with all such diverse movements and practices of freedom change feminist politics and
philosophies of freedom in the twenty-first century?

Related Topics
Feminism, philosophy and culture in Africa (Chapter 4); feminist engagements with
social contract theory (Chapter 7); feminism and the enlightenment (Chapter 8);
introducing black feminist philosophy (Chapter 10); Native American chaos theory
and politics of difference (Chapter 30); feminist theory, lesbian theory, and queer
theory (Chapter 31); through the looking glass (Chapter 32); feminist and queer inter-
sections with disability studies (Chapter 33); feminist intersections with environmental
and ecological thought (Chapter 35); feminist conceptions of autonomy (Chapter 41);
Latin American feminist ethics (Chapter 52); feminism and liberalism (Chapter 52).

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Welch, Shay (2012) A Theory of Freedom: Feminism and the Social Contract, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Willett, Cynthia (2001) The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Williams, Patricia J. (1991) The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Winnubst, Shannon (2006) Queering Freedom, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Zerilli, Linda M.G. (2005) Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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 54
FEMINISM AND POWER
Johanna Oksala

Introduction
Power is a pivotal concept for feminist theory. While feminists strongly disagree on
a host of issues, most of them take it for granted that feminism is at least somehow
concerned with power relations between men and women. Whether they use the word
“oppression,” “subjection,” “subordination,” or “domination,” the key claim is that
these power relations are problematic—illegitimate or unjust. As a political project,
feminism aims to alter, subvert, or eradicate them; as a theoretical project it aims to
expose and understand them.
Power is a highly contested philosophical concept, however, not just in feminist
philosophy, but in critical social and political theory more generally. While some phi-
losophers have cast doubt on the possibility of there being some entity called “power”
that could be usefully studied or systematically defined, others have argued that any
objective, theoretical definition of power is impossible because our conceptions of
power are themselves shaped by power relations (see e.g., Foucault 1982; 1991; Lukes
2005 [1974]). They contend that ultimately all conceptions of power are an outcome
of political contestation and struggle, and depending on how we conceive of power, we
may end up with very different views on its legitimacy and desirability, and hence its
concrete political implications. As Steven Lukes formulates this:

[H]ow we think of power may serve to reproduce and reinforce power struc-
tures and relations, or alternatively it may challenge and subvert them. It may
contribute to their continued functioning, or it may unmask their principles
of operation, whose effectiveness is increased by their being hidden from view.
(Lukes 2005 [1974]: 63)

Accepting such a politicized view of power does obviously not preclude the impor-
tance studying it—on the contrary. It is vital that feminists take part in the political
contestation over the meaning of power in order to endorse conceptions of it that are
theoretically and politically effective for the attempts to resist male domination.
In this chapter, I will provide a critical overview of the most common ways of under-
standing power in feminist theory. I will begin by examining the distinction between
two broad theoretical models—power-over and power-to—and I will discuss some of
the feminist attempts to appropriate these models. I will then look at systemic accounts
of power and focus on Marxist and poststructuralist approaches. I will discuss Michel
 Feminism and power

Foucault’s conception of power in particular, as it is arguably the most influential

approach to power in contemporary feminist philosophy. I will conclude by consider-
ing some of the consequences of the feminist views on power for the crucial question
of resistance.

Power-Over and Power-To

The most common way of defining power is to understand it simply as a capacity to get
someone else to do what you want them to do. Robert Dahl’s influential definition, for
example, states “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something
that B would not otherwise do” (1957: 202–203). This “intuitive view” of power under-
lies most feminist accounts of gender oppression: in patriarchal societies men generally
have the capacity to exercise power over women through various means ranging from
physical coercion to subtle forms of discrimination and belittling.
The most extreme form of power over someone is arguably slavery, and for
the early feminist writers such as Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft, slavery
and the abolitionist debate provided a model for theorizing power (Astell 1996;
Wollstonecraft 2001). Astell, a contemporary of John Locke, asked sarcastically: “if
all Men are born Free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves” (Astell 1996: 18).
Wollstonecraft’s major polemic A Vindication of the Rights of Women also adapts the
terms of contemporary political debate on slavery. Throughout the eighteenth cen-
tury, feminist writers railed against marriage as a form of slavery. The power relations
between men and women were viewed as relations of domination and coercion simi-
lar to the relations between slave owners and slaves. Until late into the nineteenth
century the legal and civil position of a wife resembled that of a slave. Like a slave,
she was her husband’s possession in the sense that she had no legal existence apart
from him, and he was also entitled to punish her physically.
By the time the second-wave feminist movement emerged in the 1960s and 1970s,
the legal and civil position of women in most nations had dramatically improved, yet
the power imbalances between men and women seemed to persist. The theoretical
model of master/slave remained central in many of the radical feminist accounts of
gender oppression at the time. The imbalance between power and powerlessness was
understood as definitional for what it meant to be a man or a woman. In other words,
the key feminist claim was that the categories of men and women were not just politi-
cally neutral descriptions, symmetrical and complementary, but in a gendered social
order such as ours being a woman was only possible as a being subordinated to men.
As the American legal theorists, Catharine MacKinnon provocatively put it: “women/
men is a distinction not just of difference, but of power and powerlessness . . . power/
powerlessness is the sex difference” (1987: 123). Sexuality became the flashpoint of the
radical feminist analyses. It was not just a central arena of male domination; sexuality
itself was understood as a form of power.

A woman is a being who identifies and is identified as one whose sexuality

exists for someone else, who is socially male. Women’s sexuality is the capac-
ity to arouse desire in that someone . . . Sexual objectification is the primary
process of the subjection of women . . . Man fucks woman; subject verb object.
(MacKinnon 1983: 533)

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The political philosopher Carole Pateman’s seminal book The Sexual Contract (1988)
also relies on the master/slave model for understanding how male domination becomes
constitutive of the meaning of the gender difference itself. She examines critically the
story of the social contract, perhaps the most celebrated story of modern philosophy
hailing universal freedom as the guiding principle of our historical era. Pateman con-
tends that only half of that story is ever told: standard commentaries do not mention
that women were excluded from the contract. The naturally free and equal individuals
who people the pages written by social contract theorists are a disparate collection, cov-
ering “the spectrum of Rousseau’s social beings to Hobbes’ entities reduced to matter in
motion,” but what they have in common is that they are all male (Pateman 1988: 41).
In other words, the theory states that, if relations of subordination between men are
to be legitimate, they must originate in a contract. Women were not party to the con-
tract, they are subject to it: the contract established not only men’s political freedom,
but also their political right over women and their bodies—essentially the right of a
master over a slave. Pateman argues that the significance of this position is not limited
to a bit of poor philosophical reasoning by philosophers long dead. The structures of our
society and our everyday lives still incorporate features of a patriarchal conception of
marriage and family. Husbands obviously no longer enjoy the extensive rights over their
wives that they still possessed in the mid-nineteenth century. However, aspects of con-
jugal subjection linger on, both in cultural attitudes, and in the legal jurisdictions of the
many countries that refuse to admit that rape is possible within marriage, for example.
The problem with the master/slave model for theorizing women’s subordination is
that it makes it difficult to account for women’s agency and resistance. Feminist theory
clearly calls for a conception of power that does not view women solely as helpless vic-
tims of overbearing male power, but recognizes their specific strengths and strategies
of resistance. A further problem concerns the desirability of such power: if feminists
want women to gain more power, is the power of a master over a slave really the kind
of power they want? Do they want to exercise more power if power means seeking
hierarchical control, causing others to submit to one’s will or limiting and putting
down another person?
These problems have prompted many feminists to criticize views of power that con-
ceive it only negatively, as power over somebody. They have sought to develop instead
alternative accounts of power that define power as a positive capacity to act, as a power
to do something. They have turned to the thought of the political philosopher Hannah
Arendt for help, for example (see, e.g., Hartsock 1983; Honig 1995). Arendt offers a
classic definition of a positive conception of power when she defines it as “the human
ability not just to act but to act in concert” (Arendt 1970: 44). Her key idea is that
power is never a means to something else, but an end in itself and should therefore be
sharply distinguished from such related concepts as authority, strength, force, and vio-
lence. Power is essentially the shared ability to bring about change, to collectively and
creatively transform and shape the world.
Feminists from various other theoretical backgrounds such as ecofeminism and
maternal feminism have also argued that feminists need a conception of power that is
integrally tied to the feminist idea of empowerment. Feminists should theorize power
as a capacity to positively transform oneself and others. Jean Baker Miller (1992:
241–243), for example, argues that it is a convenient myth that women do not and
should not have power. If we re-think power as the capacity to produce a change,
then it is clear that women, in their traditional role as mothers and caretakers, have

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invariably exercised power to foster the growth of others. “This might be called using
one’s power to empower another—increasing the other’s resources, capabilities,
effectiveness, and ability to act” (Miller 1992: 242). The problem is that we are not
accustomed to include such effective action within the accepted notions of power
and therefore end up overlooking the strengths that women have demonstrated all
through history. In other words, the fact that women are often reluctant to take or
exercise power over others does not indicate that women have a problem; it indicates
that there is a problem in our understanding of power, as well as in our relationships
with each other in patriarchal society (see also e.g., Held 1993).
Feminists working in the liberal tradition also usually understand power as a positive
social good, a resource or a capacity that should be equally distributed among indi-
viduals in society. The problem that liberal feminists seek to combat is the unequal
distribution of power among men and women, and their political aim is to create equal
opportunities for women to acquire more political and economic power. Betty Friedan
(1968: 454), the author of the feminist classic The Feminine Mystique (1963), for exam-
ple, argued that women “need political power” meaning equal access to political institu-
tions (on liberal feminist approaches, see also, e.g., Okin 1989).
Whether we understand power as power-over or power-to both of these approaches
suffer from an important oversight, however. Their focus is on individual women’s
capacities and/or their relationships to individual men. This means that they have dif-
ficulties accounting for the systemic or structural aspects of power. Liberal feminists’
understanding of power as a resource or a capacity, for example, does not seem to rec-
ognize sufficiently the relational and contextual character of power. Women’s lack of
power cannot be understood in isolation and independently of their relationships to
men in a patriarchal society. Feminist critiques of liberalism have foregrounded the
insight that any critical social theory that begins with an isolated individual is bound
to lead to absurd political consequences. People are always members of communities,
and only their fundamental social bonds and familial ties make individual interests and
goals possible. Liberal rights thus falsely equate emancipation with protected isolation
(on feminist critiques of liberalism, see e.g., Elshtain 1981; Young 1990; Brown 2005).
When power is understood as power-over or a relationship of domination, on the
other hand, this view also seems to leave the systemic or structural constraints out of
the picture. It is obviously important to acknowledge that power relations are ulti-
mately always exercised between individual subjects, but in order to understand how
they function and why they persist, it is often not very helpful to focus on the motives
or intentions of the individual actors. Instead it is crucial to examine the larger soci-
etal structures, rationalities and norms that make the actions of the individual actors
possible and intelligible. Amy Allen (1996: 267) formulates this idea by arguing that
an adequate feminist theory of power should include both the micro-level and the
macro-level analyses. The micro-level analysis would examine a specific power rela-
tion between two individuals or groups of individuals. The macro-level analysis, on
the other hand, should focus on the background to such particular power relations.
It must examine the cultural meanings, practices, and larger structures of domination
that make up the context within which a particular power relation is able to emerge.
A feminist analysis of power relations that remained solely on the micro level would
be seriously inadequate because power relations studied in isolation from their cultural
and institutional context can be easily perceived as anomalies, and not as part of a
larger system of domination such as sexism (Allen 1996: 268).

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Socialist Feminist Approaches

Socialist feminists have readily appropriated this imperative to focus on the macro
level in their analyses of power. They have emphasized the necessity to study the
systemic aspects of capitalism in particular. When attempting to understand such
diverse contemporary feminist issues as the feminization of poverty, the rapid growth
of the sex industry in the global South or the care deficit in the global North, it seems
apparent that feminists need a critical analysis of global capitalism and its implica-
tions for gender oppression.
Marx’s important contribution in his major work Capital, Volume 1 was to bring to
light how behind the supposedly free relations of exchange between individual capital-
ists and workers laid deeper structures of exploitation. For Marx, an obvious problem
with the idyllic picture that the defenders of the “free market” were portraying was that
the worker and the capitalist were not in a symmetrical situation when they came to
exchange their products—labor power for money. The capitalist was not forced to buy
anything because he was in a position to wait, move his factory elsewhere, or reinvest
his money in something else. The worker, on the other hand, could not wait. He con-
stantly had to sell his labor power if he wanted to survive, because in a capitalist system
all other means of making a living had been eradicated. Marx argued that a society
of landless wage laborers with nothing but their labor power to sell was an historical
outcome of the social upheaval that followed the breakdown of feudalism. It was not a
result of some natural inequality of talents and preferences—some people did not freely
choose to become workers and some capitalists. Deliberate and violent political acts,
such as the appropriation of common resources and property legislation favoring rich
landowners, led to the accumulation of property and raw materials into the hands of
a few and made it necessary for the vast masses of landless peasants to sell their labor
power. In other words, in the new commercial society organized on the principles of
private ownership and monetary exchanges new kinds of power relations were estab-
lished between people: behind the supposedly free relations of exchange lay a structural,
institutionalized compulsion for the worker to sell his labor power to the capitalist.
Feminist thinkers appropriating the Marxist framework have argued that the struc-
tural domination of the working class by the capitalist class was analogous to the domi-
nation of women by men in a patriarchal society. Women formed an oppressed class in
relation to men in capitalism because they had been forced to bear the responsibility
for social reproduction—the daily, intergenerational, social and biological reproduction
of the workforce. While capitalism was also exploiting women’s labor power through
varied forms of waged labor, women were still expected to do another shift at home for
free. They were expected to do housework, clean, cook, and so on, but they were also
mainly responsible for social reproduction in a much broader sense: the socialization of
the young, the maintenance of social bonds and production and reproduction of shared
meanings and values (for some pioneering Marxist-feminist work on social reproduc-
tion, see e.g., Vogel 1983; Dalla Costa and James 1997).
The imposition of social reproduction on women has been effectively disguised
either as a woman’s free choice, or as her natural propensity, however. Marxist-feminists
insisted that the care work women did at home had to be finally recognized as a sys-
temic condition indispensable for capitalism: it was materially producing and forming
capitalism’s human subjects, the exploitable workers the capitalist economic systems
needs in order to function properly and to continue to generate wealth. Historically,

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capitalism’s social organization thus rests on a structural division between the private,
familial, female sphere of reproduction and the public, male sphere of production. As
Nancy Fraser writes:

With capitalism . . . reproductive labor is split off, relegated to a separate,

“private” sphere, where its social importance is obscured. And where money
is the primary medium of power, the fact of its being unpaid seals the matter:
those who do this work are structurally subordinate to those who earn cash
wages, even as their work also supplies necessary preconditions for wage labor.
(Fraser 2014: 8)

In the 1970s, feminist theory in Western Europe was to a large extent dominated
by Marxism and the parallel questions of class and gender oppression. However, the
Marxist-feminist attempts to model gender oppression on the model of class oppression
suffered from various theoretical problems and became progressively marginalized in
the 1980s and 1990s. While effectively exposing forms of exploitation and alienation,
Marxist theory tended to theorize power relations in terms of class antagonism between
capital and the proletariat. Women did not form a unified class with similar interests
and needs, however. Instead the intersections of class, gender, and racial oppression
seemed to call for more specific and historically varied analyses than what was allowed
by the framework of class antagonism.

Poststructuralist Feminist Approaches

At this theoretical and political crossroads Michel Foucault’s conception of power opened
up completely new avenues for feminist theory. Although Foucault had little interest in
the feminist politics of his time, his theorization of the various historical rationalities and
technologies of power has both opened up new resources for feminist critique, as well as
being controversial among feminists. The feminist body of work appropriating Foucault’s
analysis of power that exists today is exceedingly large and diverse (see e.g., Sawicki
1991; McNay 1992; McWhorter 1999; Heyes 2007; Oksala 2016).
Foucault insisted that one should not start by looking for the center of power, or for
the individuals, institutions or classes that rule, but should rather construct a “micro-
physics of power” that focuses on the extremities: families, workplaces, everyday prac-
tices, and marginal institutions. One has to analyze power relations from the bottom up
and not from the top down, and to study the myriad ways in which the power relations
operate in different but intersecting capillary networks (Foucault 1978: 94–96).
The idea of a microphysics of power resonated strongly with the feminist credo that
personal was political. The second-wave feminists saw it as vitally important to expose
power relations in what was considered the private sphere, and not only in what was
considered the public and properly political sphere. The feminist establishment of sex-
ual politics as a central area of struggle required a conception of power that was able
to account for its capillary forms in everyday practices and habits. Feminist theorists
appropriated the idea of a microphysics of power by studying the different ways that
women shape their bodies, for example—from cosmetic surgery to dieting and eating
disorders. They analyzed these everyday feminine practices as disciplinary technologies
in the service of patriarchal, normalizing power. These normative practices train the
female body in docility and obedience to cultural demands, while at the same time they

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are often paradoxically experienced in terms of “power” and “control” by the women
themselves (see, e.g., Bartky 1988, 2002; Bordo 1989, 2001).
Apart from the idea that power is always relational, capillary, and diffuse, Foucault’s
conception of power also provided another major insight for feminism: power relations
are productive of the subjects embedded in them. His perhaps most important theoreti-
cal contribution for feminist theory has been his idea of productive power, the idea that
power does not operate primarily through repression, prohibition, and censorship, but is
essentially productive. Being a subject, a socially recognized individual with intelligible
intentions, desires and actions, is only possible within the power/knowledge networks
of a society. Individuals do not enter the public, political arena as fully formed subjects
who then demand rights and represent interests. The supposedly personal or private
aspects of their being are already traversed by power relations, which not only restrain
them, but produce them as certain kinds of subjects. In other words, the subjects over
whom the power network is defined cannot be thought to exist apart from it.
The consequences of the idea of productive power for feminist theory were momen-
tous: it formed the starting point of what has undoubtedly been the most influential
appropriation of Foucault’s thought for gender theory, namely Judith Butler’s Gender
Trouble (1990). The book opens with troubling questions: If we accept Foucault’s argu-
ment about productive power and acknowledge that subjects are produced by power
relations, does this not imply that the subject of feminism, “women,” is produced by
the very same oppressive power relations that it aims to theorize and eradicate? Would
“women” even exist if society was not structured by sexist power relations? Who are the
subjects that feminism aims to liberate?
Butler thus takes on Foucault’s idea of productive power and asks what the conse-
quences of this idea are for feminist politics. She insists that it implies that it is not
enough to try to include more women in politics or to seek to represent their interests
more effectively. We have to ask more fundamentally who these women are: how the
very identity and the category of women are constituted through practices of power.
This implies reconsidering the viability of feminist identity politics. The problem is
not merely that the category of women denies the differences between women and
thereby inadvertently privileges one group of women. More fundamentally, we have to
pose critical questions about the desirability of embracing an oppressive identity that
excluded women from politics in the first place.
It is no exaggeration to say that Gender Trouble caused a paradigm shift in the way
that the intertwinement of power, feminist emancipation and the female subject was
theorized. It was subjected to extensive feminist commentary, and Butler responded to
the criticism in the books that followed Gender Trouble (Butler 1993; 1997; 2004).
Foucault’s views on power and Butler’s appropriation of them have also been
formative for the key ideas behind queer politics: the identities of gay and lesbian—
as well as of heterosexual—are not essential or authentic identities, but are cultur-
ally constructed through the power relations regulating the “healthy” and “normal”
expressions of sexuality. This does not mean that homosexuality does not “really”
exist. Just because something is constructed through practices of power does not
mean that it is not real. People are defined by and must think and live according to
such constructions. This idea does have important consequences for how we con-
ceive of resistance, however, as I will show in the last section (on projects delineat-
ing “queer feminism” with the help of Foucault’s work, see, e.g., Winnubst 2006;
Huffer 2010; Sawicki 2013).

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Power and Violence

In my own work (Oksala 2012) I have argued that Foucault’s conception of power and
the way that he theoretically distinguishes it from violence can also be helpful for femi-
nist attempts to theorize gendered forms of violence such as domestic violence. It is my
contention that a Foucauldian approach to gendered violence accomplishes two things:
it refuses to explain men’s violence against women in terms of inherent male aggres-
sion, yet it makes it possible to argue that it is not just incidental, but has structural and
macro-level political aspects.
Foucault explicitly distinguished power from violence and denied that the essence of
power would be violence. In his seminal essay “Subject and Power” from 1982 he poses
the classic question of political philosophy—the same one as Hannah Arendt did in On
Violence, for example—namely whether violence is simply the ultimate form of power
(Foucault 1982: 220). He also follows Arendt in his negative reply, and puts forward an
oppositional view of the relationship between power and violence. They are opposites
in the sense that where one rules absolutely the other is absent. Foucault distinguishes
power from violence by arguing that a power relationship is a mode of action that does
not act directly and immediately on others, but rather acts upon their actions: it is a set of
actions upon other actions. This means, first, that the one over whom power is exercised
is thoroughly recognized as a subject, as a person who acts. Second, he or she must be free,
meaning here that when faced with a relationship of power, “a whole field of responses,
reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up” (Foucault 1982: 220). Violence,
on the other hand, acts directly and immediately on the body. It is not an action upon an
action of a subject, but an action upon a body or things.
Foucault’s view here seems, at first glance, to explicitly support a gender-neutral
view on violence: men have power over women in our society, but their power is not
based on or upheld by violence. To exercise power is not to physically determine the
conduct of passive objects, but to govern actions. A more careful reading of Foucault’s
writings on power and violence complicates the picture, however. He argued that even
though power relations were essentially fluid and reversible, what usually characterized
power was that these relationships had become stabilized through institutions. This
means that the mobility of power relations is limited, and that there are strongholds
that are difficult to suppress because they have been institutionalized in courts, codes,
and so on. In other words, the power relations between people have become rigid
(Foucault 1997: 169).
Patriarchal power, or power of men over women in our society, provides clear exam-
ples of institutionalized and rigid power relations or states of domination. The ongoing
feminist struggles have made it obvious that the subordination of women is difficult to
eradicate because it is often codified in economic and institutional structures. The flu-
idity and reversibility of the individual power relations between men and women have,
in many cases, been effectively blocked. In a situation in which a woman is unable to
leave her violent husband because of economic reasons and child care arrangements, for
example, the power relation is clearly a form of domination that is, furthermore, linked
with violence (Oksala 2012: 70–71).
Moreover, Foucault’s analyses of governmentality open up a wider perspective on
the issue of gendered violence (Foucault 2007; 2008). The practices and institutions
of power are always enabled, regulated, and justified by a specific form of reasoning
or rationality. The analytics of power technologies concentrates not only on the

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mechanisms of power, but also on the rationality that is part of the practices of
governing. It is important to point out that while practices of power have rational-
ity, so do practices of violence. Foucault repeatedly emphasized that there was no
incompatibility between violence and rationality, but what is most dangerous about
violence is its rationality (Foucault 2001: 803).
On this basis we could argue that what is most dangerous about gendered violence
are those aspects of it that make it look like perfectly rational behavior. Even though
male domination and male violence against women should not be theoretically con-
flated, feminist analysis must study the extent to which rationalities upholding male
domination and those supporting forms of male violence against women are inter-
related, mutually supportive, or even identical. When a form of rationality according
to which a husband’s responsibility is to provide for but also to control his wife and
children is coupled with the acceptance of physical force as a means of control, for
example, the patterns of domestic violence are set. From a Foucauldian perspective,
therefore, it is important to take seriously the feminist insight that inequality between
men and women is a key factor in explaining phenomena such as domestic violence.
Domestic violence is effectively depoliticized when it is viewed in gender-neutral
terms and reduced to an individual pathology. What is required is a careful analysis of
the functioning, maintenance, and legitimacy of the power technologies on which it
rests (Oksala 2012: 71).

Resistance
The key problem with systemic accounts of power seems to be how to account for
agency and resistance. If subjects are always caught up in large social and economic
structures such as capitalism and patriarchy that operate with deeply ingrained systemic
logics, there seems to be very little that the subjects can do in order to affect change.
Moreover, if we accept Foucault’s claim that power is constitutive of the subject itself,
we seem to be unable to distinguish genuine resistance from conformity: agency, auton-
omy, and resistance appear to be merely illusions or power’s clever ruses.
For Foucault, power does not form a deterministic system of overbearing constraints,
however. Because it is understood as an unstable network of practices, where there is
power, there is resistance. What makes his position contested—and original—is pre-
cisely the way he understands the relationship between power and resistance. He for-
bids us to think that resistance is outside of power and also denies that we could ever
locate it in a single point: “there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt,
source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary” (Foucault 1978: 95). To view
the relationship between power and resistance as external would mean misunderstand-
ing the relational character of power. Because power is not something that an indi-
vidual acquires, holds or gives away, its existence depends on resistance: since power
exists only in a relation, resistance must be located in these very same power relations.
The aim of feminist politics becomes more complicated than liberation from patri-
archal power and the affirmation of one’s true gender identity: resisting power entails
questioning and even denying the identities that are imposed on us by making visible
their cultural construction and dependence on the power relations that are operative in
society. The goal is not a discovery of an identity, but its critical deconstruction.
In sum, an adequate understanding of power is crucial for any feminist theorizing
of gender subordination, as well as the attempts to transform it. We have to recognize

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that even our innermost selves are always constituted in social and political practices
incorporating gendered power relations. Without an adequate acknowledgment of
how widespread and systematic power relations are and how profoundly they consti-
tute the subjects’ interests, desires and capacities for critical reflection we will not be
able to understand the extent and the recalcitrance of gender oppression. However, we
also have to maintain an adequate understanding of agency and feminist resistance.
Conceptions of power that fail to account for the possibility of some measure of resist-
ance will make it impossible to theorize feminist transformations—transformations of
the self as well as political transformations. Moreover, our theoretical understanding of
resistance has to translate into concrete practices of resistance. Feminism as a political
project must aim at profound social transformation, not merely at some quantitative
gain such as increase in women’s power, political rights, or social benefits, for example.
It has to aim to also change who we are and how we relate to each other.

Related Topics
Introducing Black feminist philosophy (Chapter 10); personal identity and relational
selves (Chapter 18); speech and silencing (Chapter 23); feminist conceptions of auton-
omy (Chapter 41); feminism, structural injustice, and responsibility (Chapter 49);
feminism and liberalism (Chapter 52); feminism and freedom (Chapter 53); feminist
approaches to violence and vulnerability (Chapter 55).

References
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Interpretations of Michel Foucault, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 265–282.
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 55
FEMINIST APPROACHES
TO VIOLENCE AND
VULNERABILITY
Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings

Introduction
Considerations of violence and vulnerability are central to feminist philosophy. This is
unsurprising given, not only that these are heavily gendered concepts, but also that
gendered experiences of violence and vulnerability affect the lives of contemporary
women and men across the world. For these reasons, feminist philosophers have wanted
to address ontological, phenomenological, epistemological, and ethico-political ques-
tions about violence and vulnerability. In doing so, they have developed philosophical
insights into a range of topics, from the fundamental nature of the Western philosophi-
cal imaginary, to the production of the gendered subject, to the ethics of war and peace,
to the nature and meaning of structural and symbolic violence. It is not possible to
deal adequately with all of this work here. In what follows, we will focus on two areas
of debate within feminist philosophical work on violence and vulnerability: first, how
violence and vulnerability are and should be conceptualized; second, feminist responses
to normative questions about the ethics of political violence.

Conceptualizing Violence and Vulnerability

At first glance, violence and vulnerability make for a straightforward conceptual
pairing. To be vulnerable is to be able to be wounded, and the most obvious form of
violence is a physical act of wounding, or what Elaine Scarry refers to when describing
war as a contest of “injuring and out-injuring” (Scarry 1985: 63). This is certainly an
understanding of the two concepts that feminist philosophers have used, often in order
to draw attention to acts of wounding that have not traditionally been the focus of
philosophical debate. In a collection of essays on philosophical perspectives on violence
against women, the editors ask: “How can there be an elaborate historical discourse
on just war theory and no theory of rape or wife beating?” (French, Teays, and Purdy
1998b: 1). Feminist philosophers have brought domestic and sexual violence onto the
philosophical agenda as phenomena that need to be understood and evaluated as much
as other forms of violence such as war fighting or torture.
 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

However, the introduction of these topics into philosophical debate opened up

problems with conceptualizing violence. To the extent that mainstream analytic
philosophy has been concerned with questions of violence and vulnerability, mostly
within the context of debates between deontological and consequentialist approaches
in applied ethics, it has tended to treat violence as a form of intentional action with
specifiable consequences. On this view, violence is a tool that can be reliably used
to fulfil certain purposes for an individual or collective actor. In contrast to this
instrumentalist view, feminist philosophers have been sensitive to the embodied and
embedded nature and experience of domestic and sexual violence, including the sig-
nificance of psychological, as much as physical, wounding and injury. They have also
been sensitive to the gendered social structures and discourses through which such
violence may be rendered meaningful and legitimate, or even invisible, to perpetrators
and victims alike. This has focused feminist attention on the meaning of violence/vul-
nerability as a conceptual pairing and inspired phenomenological work on violence,
in particular from the perspective of the vulnerable feminized subject. It has also led
to re-conceptualizations of violence as importantly structural and discursive/symbolic.
Feminist phenomenologies of violence have unpacked the experience of vulnerabil-
ity and pointed to a whole host of ways violence can exceed the terms of descriptions
that focus on the immediate results of particular physical acts of violence. Susan Brison
courageously put her own experience of being the victim of murderous sexual assault
onto the philosophical agenda in order to demonstrate the limitations of standard phil-
osophical treatments of violence: “for the first several months after my attack, I led a
spectral existence, not quite sure whether I had died and the world went on without
me, or whether I was alive but in a totally alien world” (Brison 1998: 17). Her work
drew attention to the world-destroying effects of violence on victims, going far beyond
material damage. When this was taken into account it became much more difficult to,
for example, engage in consequentialist ethical calculation in which the pleasures of
the rapist were balanced against the pains of the victim (Brison 1998: 14). This kind
of contribution not only enriched philosophical understandings of the meaning and
implications of sexual violence, it allowed for comparisons of sexual violence with other
forms of violence, such as terrorism and torture (Card 2007; 2010). Moreover, it opened
up a range of questions about the nature and production of gendered subjectivities, and
in particular the relation between vulnerability and the feminine.
The concept of structural violence was originally used in the neo-Marxist work of
Johann Galtung. In Galtung’s case it was used to refer to ways in which people were
materially damaged through poverty and deprivation under capitalism, as opposed to
through intentional, individual action (Galtung 1975). Feminist work developed the
concept of structural violence in a somewhat different way, to refer to the system of
patriarchal domination of men over women, masculine over feminine, that produces
and legitimates gendered violence and vulnerability, and in which direct, physical vio-
lence or the threat of violence is an element in the system of norms that reproduces
the structure. This structural violence could be traced in the ways in which gendered
subjects were socialized to be manly or womanly, so that inflicting and suffering vio-
lence were presumed as part of set gender roles. For example, Susan Brownmiller (1975)
identified rape as underpinning systems of male domination from primordial times. She
argued that patriarchy was essentially a protection racket based on men’s sexual preda-
toriness and women’s fear. Catharine MacKinnon argued that violence against women
was underpinned by a system of male domination in which men were the norm and

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women counted as less than human: “A kind of war is being fought unrecognized in
a conflict that one suspects would be seen as such if men were not the aggressors and
women the victims” (MacKinnon 2006: 272). Both Brownmiller and MacKinnon saw
the prevalence of rape in warfare as demonstrating the ways in which sexual violence
was not a matter of individual pathology, but should be understood as integral to the
systematic domination of men over women. Other kinds of violence against women,
from genital mutilation to the abortion of female foetuses to so-called “honor” killings
were seen as part of the same pattern (French, Teays, and Purdy 1998a; Dobash and
Dobash 1998). In this respect, individual violences and vulnerabilities could not be
understood or addressed without reference to structural violence.
Structural violence could be identified in material inequalities between men and
women, which deprived many women of the power to escape from violent relation-
ships. It could be found in social, legal, and political arrangements that perpetu-
ated men’s power over women, including the power to attack and physically control
them. Feminist legal theorists pointed to the longstanding (until very recently) fea-
ture of many legal systems in supposedly liberal countries that rendered rape within
marriage a legal impossibility. And also to the problems surrounding the issue of
“consent” in relation to sexual violence, and the ways in which women’s testimony
was routinely devalued inside and outside of the courts (Pateman 1988; Kazan 1998;
MacKinnon 2006). For many of these theorists, one could trace a direct link between
woman’s less than human status in Western traditions of thought and routine domes-
tic and sexual abuse. One could also trace a direct link—a continuum—between
routine everyday sexual and domestic violence and the organized violence of war,
including systematic sexual violence.
Feminist work on structural violence pointed to the importance of discourse to the
perpetuation of patriarchy and to the relative silence of philosophy on the subject of
gendered violence. This led to the development of concepts of discursive or symbolic
violence. These terms referred to modes of legitimating structural and physical violence
through ideological gendered systems of valuation. Discursive and symbolic violence
rendered direct physical violence against women unremarkable. It included ways in
which domestic and sexual violence were justified in terms of nature (sexual violence
is a manifestation of biological drives), privilege (control over women is a matter of
male entitlement) or desert (she asked for it). It also included the host of everyday ways
in which women and the feminine were denigrated and their victimization thereby
rendered simultaneously as part of common sense expectations and invisible. In this
respect, feminist philosophers identified immanent links between the ways in which
violent men justified their violence as acts of love, marital commitment or construc-
tive correction (Lundgren 1998), and the ways in which philosophy, even in its critical
Marxist variants, naturalized violence against women and therefore did not feel the
need to subject the phenomenon to political critique or ethical justification.
We noted above that “violence” tended to figure in analytic philosophy solely in
instrumental terms, as a tool to be used for either good or bad ends. In contrast to this,
structuralist and poststructuralist philosophy used the concept of violence to capture
the primordial conditions of subjectivity, language, and law. Gendered binary opposi-
tions associate masculine with active, perpetrator, feminine with passive, victim; these
generate and engender discourses and practices that valorize violent masculinities and
that legitimate violence against women. This is much more than ideology in the classi-
cal Marxist sense. Rather, these categories are given to subjects as a condition of their

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agency—the embodiment of gender is non-optional if a subject is to enter into the

intelligible world of symbols and meaning. This non-optionality is, itself, a primary
violence—in its deepest sense this is what “symbolic violence” refers to. Looking at things
this way puts gender at the root not only of sexual and domestic violence but of all
forms of physical, structural, and discursive violence. Feminist philosophers reacting to
and building on Lacanian insights demonstrated that the way in which the subject was
produced through incorporation into the symbolic order was premised on the violent
expulsion of the feminine. For thinkers such as Irigaray and Kristeva, symbolic violence
therefore had a deeper meaning than as one element in a threefold combination of
physical, structural and discursive gendered violence; and deeper than the justificatory
function that legitimates physical and psychological violence. Here symbolic violence
takes on primary philosophical and political importance.
Although their arguments are not the same, Jantzen and Reineke both relate the
ubiquity of violence in Western history and thought to the exclusion of radical other-
ness, exemplified by the inability to conceptualize what falls outside of binary oppositions
between masculine and feminine, violent and vulnerable. Jantzen traces the gendered
violence of the Western symbolic order back to the Greeks’ naturalization of mortality
and the fear of death as the grounding feature of human existence:

From militarization, death camps and genocide to exploitation, commodifica-

tion and the accumulation of wealth, from the construction of pleasure and
desire to the development of terminator genes, from the violence on the streets
to the heaven obsessed hymnody of evangelical churches, preoccupation with
death and the means of death and the combat with death is ubiquitous. It is a
necrophilia so deeply a part of the western symbolic that it emerges at every turn.
(Jantzen 2004: 5)

Following Kristeva, Reineke argues for the need to think about symbolic and embodied
gendered violence as part of a single sacrificial economy of violence in which the scape-
goating of women is historically repeated in phenomena such as the European witch
hunts (Reineke 1997).
Most feminist work on violence recognizes that structural and symbolic violence are
part of what violence means. Nevertheless, for some feminists, the turn to symbolic vio-
lence, in particular in work influenced by psychoanalysis, undermines feminist engage-
ments with the lived experience of physical violence. It collapses too much under the
umbrella of the concept of violence and focuses too much attention on discourse and
language. And it thereby detracts from feminist attempts to bring specific gendered
violences and vulnerabilities onto the philosophical agenda. Moreover, its holistic
approach to the meaning of violence for feminists makes it difficult to unpack the pre-
cise links between different aspects of violence and seems to make an escape from sym-
bolic violence and its gendered violent consequences extremely difficult. Jantzen argues
for the denaturalization of death and violence in the Western philosophical and politi-
cal imaginary, and its replacement with a “poetics of natality,” in which the maternal
principle of life-giving underpins the symbolic order. Reineke argues for the embrace of
Kristeva’s category of the “uncanny” as a way to escape the sacrificial economy of vio-
lence. But it is not clear how the deconstruction and reconstruction required could be
played out in practice in a world still dominated by all of the violences that these think-
ers trace back to the Western symbolic order. The distinct, more materialist, positions

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of thinkers such as Brownmiller, which trace gendered violence back to a pre-historical

protection racket are similarly overwhelming and appear to make escape and resistance
next to impossible.
There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of response to the analyses of feminist phi-
losophers who make, in Reineke’s terms, a gendered economy of violence fundamental
to the world we inhabit. The first response challenges the focus of feminist philosophers
on women or other feminised actors as the victims of violence, particularly sexual vio-
lence. Responding specifically to Brownmiller, Burton argues that the latter, in help-
fully demonstrating the systematic nature of violence against women also, much less
helpfully, generalizes women’s position as one of fear and victimhood. For Burton, the
focus on victimhood potentially undermines women’s capacity for resistance in ways
that are effectively complicit with masculinist identifications of feminine with vulner-
ability. She argues for more philosophical attention to be paid to women’s capacity for
agency and resistance, including the capacity to fight back (Burton 1998). From this
point of view, the focus on women’s victimization perpetuates a long-term bias in the
Western philosophical tradition against women’s agency and autonomy, and arguably
an equally long-term silence about women and other feminized actors as practitioners,
not just victims, of violence.
The idea that women’s capacity to resist or fight may be tied to women’s capacity for
autonomy opens up a new set of questions in feminist philosophy in relation to violence.
In the work of thinkers such as Brownmiller or MacKinnon, it is clearly the case that
vulnerability, meaning vulnerability to violence, is a bad thing, a source of fear and, for
Brownmiller, the origin of women’s oppression by men across all times and places. In
these analyses, violence and vulnerability go together historically, phenomenologically,
and ethically, and are explicitly identified with the feminine/women. In contrast to
this, Bar On (2002: 149–166) explores how feminized bodies are reproduced as violent
bodies, in the context of discussing the production of her own embodied existence as a
young Israeli and practitioner of Martial Arts. She refers back to Beauvoir’s discussion
of how the upbringing of girls and boys divides at the point at which adolescent boys
undergo a “real apprenticeship” in violence and girls cease to participate in physical
games (Beauvoir 1997a: 353). Beauvoir emphasizes how the embodied experience of
fighting enables the boy to feel that his will impacts on the world. Bar On draws atten-
tion to ways in which violence may be experienced as positively liberating for women,
and yet is also part of the story of the gendered economy of violence, both in helping to
reproduce nationalist, patriarchal structures of power and in being identified and expe-
rienced as transgressive. The association of women with the use of violence, whether to
resist an attacker or sustain identification with a nationalist project, displaces the terms
of the violence/vulnerability binary analytically and normatively. It associates violence
with the feminine by disturbing a necessary link between the feminine and vulnerabil-
ity and by potentially re-valuing violence as a positive affirmation of autonomy.
However, from the point of view of other feminist philosophers, this kind of response
is mistaken because it keeps the masculinist hierarchy in place by continuing to privi-
lege violence over vulnerability. Bar On’s own analysis draws attention to how gendered
structural and symbolic violence is perpetuated through the participation of women as
well as men, in the enforcement of normative expectations through physically violent
as well as other means. An alternative response accepts neither the inescapability of a
gendered economy of violence nor the revaluation of violence from a feminist perspec-
tive. Instead, it challenges the dominant way of conceiving the meaning of vulnerability

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as the correlate of violence. For these feminist thinkers, it is the myth of a link between
violence and invulnerability, celebrated by Western ideals of the autonomous masculine
subject that is the problem. The way beyond the gendered economy of violence is to
recognize the absurdity of the idea of invulnerability and to start from vulnerability as the
common and prior condition of the production of the human subject.
We find this move in a range of distinct feminist philosophical positions. For example
in various versions of maternalist and care ethics (Ruddick 1990; Held 1993; 2006)
and in work more influenced by continental and psychoanalytic feminist philosophy
(Cavarero 2007; Butler 2004, 2009). This work extends the meaning of vulnerability
beyond vulnerability to violence. In being paired with “invulnerability,” we come to
understand vulnerability as much more broadly to do with the permeability of the
boundaries between embodied subjects, the inherent relationality of subjects, and
the capacity of subjects to be affected in general, not only through violent assault
(Mackenzie 2014). Thought about in this way, vulnerability has become foundational
for some feminist ethical and political theorizing. For example, Fineman’s work build-
ing on her influential article, “The Vulnerable Subject” (Fineman 2008; Fineman and
Grear 2013) and a developing focus on vulnerability within feminist applied ethics
and bioethics (Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds 2014). The latter literature has strong
links with feminist accounts of relational autonomy as well as with the ethics of care.
It rejects the rather generalized account of vulnerability to be found in Fineman’s work
and seeks to conceptualize vulnerability in ways that distinguish between vulnerability
as a general ontological condition shared by all, and vulnerability as specific to situ-
ations of liability to harm. This is in order to show how different moral obligations
follow from different aspects of vulnerability and to underline the point that vulner-
ability is neither good nor bad in itself (Dodds 2014; Mackenzie 2014).
Few feminist philosophers uncritically embrace the identification of autonomy with
violence, or read vulnerability in wholly positive terms. In general, feminist thinkers
remain convinced of the link between the devaluation of women in Western thought,
and also in other cultural traditions, and their specific vulnerabilities to domestic and
sexual violence, and identify a continuum between gendered violence in domestic con-
texts and the systematic violences of states and other collective actors. However, the
questioning of the necessity of the link between the feminine and vulnerability to vio-
lence creates different kinds of possibilities for feminist normative judgment in relation
to women’s own violence and to organized political violence. Feminists remain united
in their condemnation of sexual and domestic violence, but they are much less united
when it comes to the moral and political judgement of war and resistant violence.

Feminism and the Ethics of Political Violence

Feminist philosophical arguments about political violence are always influenced by polit-
ical context as well as by the philosophical presuppositions embedded in particular femi-
nist positions. Feminist pacifist positions formulated in the 1980s were in part responding
to an escalation of the nuclear arms race, and to developments such as the women-only
peace camp at Greenham Common. They also intersected with the political construc-
tion of “violence against women” as a primary focus for feminist political organization
and action, and the phenomena of sexual and gender violence, as we have seen, turned
philosophical and ethical analysis away from a model of intentional physical action and

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its consequential injury or resistance, to a more complex model of structural and symbolic
violence and hence the implication of violence in the very heart of identity and agency.
More recently, feminist revisiting of just war theory has been largely a response to the
growth of military humanitarian interventions since the 1990s, the “War on Terror,”
and specifically the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The ways in which state rhetoric has
focused on women’s human rights as a justification for various kind of intervention has
provoked strong criticism from feminist activists and philosophers. In particular, femi-
nist have been critical of military humanitarian intervention and the “War on Terror,”
which perpetuated a politics of rescue in which white Western men “save,” in Spivak’s
words, brown women from brown men (Bar On 2008a).
At the beginning of the World War I, Western feminist movements were divided
between nationalist and pacifist positions. In the work of Jane Addams, who embraced
a pacifist position, one can identify themes in the analysis of war that have continued
to work through feminist thought about war and other forms of organized political vio-
lence ever since (Addams, Balch, and Hamilton 2003). Addams challenged prevailing
views about war by bringing gender into her analysis of nationalism, militarism, the
logic of violence, and myths of chivalry and heroism. She was concerned about the
structural effects of war on society in times of both war and peace, and how nation-
alist and militarist agendas were linked to the oppression of populations and in the
gendered presuppositions and effects of war. Over the past century, feminist schol-
ars have followed Addams by systematically demonstrating that gendered identities
are fundamental to the meaning and practice of war (Elshtain 1987; Harris and King
1993; Kinsella 2011). Feminists have documented the gendered presuppositions and
consequences of war, the ways in which war is embedded in and reproduces gendered
political, economic, and ideological structures, and the continuum between the organ-
ized violence of the state and inter-personal violence at a domestic level. However,
there has been no philosophical or political consensus as to whether the intimate links
between organized political violence and gendered violence and oppression means
that feminists must necessarily be pacifists (Frazer and Hutchings 2014).
Feminist pacifism has had different philosophical roots. Earlier Western feminists
were inspired by Christian, deontological positions, following thinkers such as Tolstoy
and later Gandhi. During the latter part of the Cold War, as part of the increasing
importance of maternalist and radical feminisms, pacifism was linked to the valorization
of feminine principles of life-giving and peace-making in opposition to the destructive
logic of masculinist war-making. Some feminists made the case that feminism necessar-
ily implied pacifism (Carroll 1987). Sarah Ruddick’s work developed a philosophically
sophisticated version of a maternalist, care ethics position on violence (1990; 1993):

Caregivers are not, predictably, better people than are militarists. Rather, they
are engaged in a different project. Militarists aim to dominate by creating the
structural vulnerabilities that caregivers take for granted. They arm and train
so that they can, if other means of domination fail, terrify and injure their
opponents. By contrast, in situations where domination through bodily pain,
and the fear of pain, is a structural possibility, caregivers try to resist tempta-
tions to assault and neglect, even though they work among smaller, frailer,
vulnerable people who may excite domination.
(Ruddick 1993: 121)

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It is clear from the above quotation that Ruddick sees a different attitude towards
vulnerability as fundamental to an alternative ethics of war. For Ruddick, both milita-
rism and just war theory share a commitment to the expendability of concrete lives in
abstract causes to which maternal thinking is inherently opposed. Ruddick claims that
this means that the implication of maternal thinking is not just the rejection of war but
the active embracing of peace politics, a fight against war that draws on the acknowl-
edgment of responsibility and relationship and the specificity of need and obligations
that are inherent in a proper understanding of the labour of caring (Ruddick 1990:
141–159). Although Ruddick argues that maternal thinking is aligned to the idea of
non-violence, she is also insistent that it is sensitive to the specific contexts in which
ethical dilemmas are embedded. For Ruddick, ethical judgment has to be on a case-
by-case basis, but without ready-made principles of adjudication. Although the idea
of maternal thinking is in principle non-violent, there are no universally applicable
algorithms that can be applied to any given situation to render definitive answers to
ethical questions, so that even the use of violence cannot be entirely ruled out a priori
(Ruddick 1990: 138). Ruddick gives two examples of where it would be inappropriate to
condemn violence out of hand, both of them are examples of resistant violence towards
racist, militarist regimes in Nazi Germany and South Africa respectively.
Ruddick’s reluctance to embrace a wholly pacifist position links her argument
to an alternative feminist tradition of thinking about the ethics of resistant politi-
cal violence, in which the arguments of Beauvoir and Arendt are more influential
than care ethics. For both Beauvoir and Arendt, the circumstances of World War I
and of anti-colonial struggles demonstrated that resistant violence was sometimes
morally and politically required. In her Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir examined con-
sequentialist justifications of revolutionary violence. Although she demonstrated the
problems with these kinds of moral calculations, she also argued that it was no more
possible to rule violence out absolutely than it was to provide an ethical argument for
its ethical or political necessity (Beauvoir 1997b). Her conclusions emphasized the
importance of context and the impossibility of establishing a “pure” moral position
on the question of the use of violence.
Arendt famously argued that violence could not be legitimate, but might in some
cases be justifiable. It might be justifiable as being the only way to address an injus-
tice at either individual or collective levels. For example, in an individual act of vio-
lence to defend the vulnerable innocent, or in a just war against an enemy such as the
Nazi regime. On the other hand, the use of violence could not be legitimate because it
was ultimately a purely instrumental action, in contrast to genuinely political power,
and the most likely outcome of the use of violence was more violence (Arendt 1969).
Beauvoir’s arguments about political violence were not formulated explicitly as part of
her feminist philosophy, and Arendt famously distanced her own work from feminism.
Nevertheless, these two philosophers, and Arendt in particular have been important
for contemporary feminist philosophers, especially those influenced by postcolonial
thought, who are convinced by the antithetical relation between feminist values and
the use of violence, and yet reluctant to rule out political violence from the repertoire
of feminist action altogether (Bar On 2002; Hutchings 2007).
This ambivalence about the relation between feminism and political violence has
also been manifested in some feminist attempts to re-work just war theory (Peach 1994;
Sjoberg 2006; Held 2008a; 2008b; Eide 2008). Virginia Held introduces the values of

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care as a supplement to more traditional, deontological, and utilitarian criteria, for the
moral assessment of war. At one level, in the light of the feminist ethic of care the
presumption against the use of violence as an effective way of responding to injustice is
very strong and implies a commitment to developing alternatives to the use of violence:
“We should seek to restrain rather than destroy those who become violent, we should
work to prevent violence rather than wipe out violent persons, and we should contain
violence as non-violently as possible” (Held 2008b: 4) Held also acknowledges that to
the extent that one is making moral judgements about justice ad bellum and in bello, then
one is neglecting the moral evaluation of all of the other aspects of warfare that feminist
scholarship had brought to our attention, in terms of its material and ideological condi-
tions and effects beyond the field of battle. Her response to this is to subsume the above
concerns, specific to the ethic of care, largely to holistic or “long-term” evaluation,
while admitting more familiar consequentialist and deontological moral principles as
still adequate for the evaluation of moral dilemmas relating to immediate judgment and
action before and during war.
Held attempts to operationalize the values inherent in care, grounded in a com-
mon vulnerability, while at the same time enabling feminist judgment about spe-
cific uses of organized violence, in particular for humanitarian ends. One obvious
problem with her argument is the tension it perpetuates between the specifically
feminist ethic of care and its orientation towards non-violence, and traditional con-
sequentialist and deontological modes of moral theorizing. The two are only made
compatible by assigning care ethics to long-term matters and just war theory to
immediate judgments about specific uses of violence. Bar On, speaking from a non-
pacifist position suggests another problem and criticises Held, not because Held
is arguing that uses of violence may sometimes be justified in feminist terms, but
because she attempts to do this by reference back to pure moral theory. Bar On
argues that questions about the use of violence for political ends are fundamentally
political questions and need to be open to political contestation, they are simply not
resolvable at the level of philosophy (Bar On 2008b). The philosophical difficulties
raised by Held’s arguments reflect two broader problems encountered by feminists
addressing the ethics of organized political violence: first, how specifically feminist
insights are to be operationalized for the purposes of moral judgement; second, how
feminists ought to think about the relation between ethics and politics when it
comes to the judgement of political violence.
Although it is very differently grounded, Butler’s recent work, in which she argues
for a link between corporeal vulnerability and the appeal of non-violence, grapples
with similar problems concerning the operationalizing of feminist insights for prescrip-
tive purposes and the relation between ethics and politics in the judgment of violence.
Butler responds to the first problem by rejecting the idea of a necessary link between
the recognition of vulnerability and a normative ethics of non-violence. Nevertheless,
following aspects of Levinas’s ethics, she locates a “claim” of non-violence in the shared
“precarity” of human existence (Butler 2009: 166–184). In this respect, Butler’s notion
of vulnerability means that we are all, as a primary condition of our embodied exist-
ence, open equally to violence and non-violence. However, this is a shared condition
that is denied by violent responses, which shore up the fantasy of the invulnerability
of the violent subject, and that is affirmed by non-violent responses, which recognize
an underlying equality of exposure of all subjects regardless of power relations between

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them. In this respect, the role of ethics in Butler’s writings on political violence is
fundamentally bound up with politics, since there is no recognition of others outside
of frames and power relations that produce us in different, including gendered ways.
Rather than attempting to resolve feminist dilemmas about the judgment of political
violence by seeking to generate prescriptive consequences from philosophical presup-
positions, or by giving priority to ethics over politics, Butler leaves those dilemmas
firmly in place.

Conclusion
In conclusion, we would like to suggest that the philosophical difficulties encountered
by feminists in coming to ethical conclusions about the justice of various forms of
political violence is precisely a reflection of the power of the insights feminists have
generated into the nature and meaning of violence and vulnerability. In this respect,
feminist work on violence and vulnerability acts as Butler argues non-violence acts,
that is to say as a spanner in the works of the philosophical apparatuses through which
violence has been made to appear necessary and legitimate in contexts from the bed-
room to the battlefield (Butler 2009: 183–184). Once you start to unpack not only how
violence is gendered, but also how violence reproduces gender, at all levels from that
of subjective identity to that of the nation-state. And once you start to unpack the
possibilities inherent in taking vulnerability rather than violence as a starting point for
thought, it becomes much more difficult to reduce violence to a tool or to engage in any
kind of cost-benefit analysis of its conditions and effects in any particular instance. This
does not mean that feminists must be pacifists, but it does mean that feminists who are
and are not pacifists both accept the impossibility of any clean resolution to questions
about who has the right to kill or injure whom.

Further Reading
Bar On, Bat-Ami (2002) The Subject of Violence: Arendtian Exercises in Understanding, Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Butler, Judith (2009) Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
Card, Claudia (2010) Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Cavarero, Alessandra (2007) Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, New York: Columbia University
Press.
French, Stanley G., Teays, Wanda, and Purdy, Laura M. (Eds.) (1998) Violence Against Women: Philosophical
Perspectives, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.
Scarry, Elaine (1985) The Body in Pain, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Related Topics
Speech and silencing (Chapter 23); personal identity and relational selves (Chapter 18);
psychoanalysis, subjectivity, and feminism (Chapter 19); feminist and queer inter-
sections with disability studies (Chapter 33); aesthetics and the politics of gender:
on Arendt’s theory of narrative and action (Chapter 38); feminist ethics of care
(Chapter 43); feminism, structural injustice, and responsibility (Chapter 49); feminism
and power (Chapter 54).

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 56
FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY OF
LAW, LEGAL POSITIVISM,
AND NON-IDEAL THEORY
Leslie P. Francis

Feminist philosophy of law has been shaped by debates between liberal feminists who
emphasize non-discrimination and equality of opportunity and more radical feminists
who offer a variety of far-reaching criticisms of the law as a structure of patriarchal
power. Among philosophers, these debates have taken place largely separately from
the debates in philosophy of law over legal positivism and natural law theory: whether
law as it is should be distinguished from law as it ought to be. Here, I argue the issues
are deeply interconnected and feminist philosophy of law is better aligned with legal
positivism. My argument has four steps: a brief methodological note about non-ideal
theory, an account of the conceptual separation between law and morality advocated
by legal positivists, a sketch of approaches to feminist philosophy of law, and two
illustrative examples.
Just as there are many feminisms, there are many approaches to philosophy of law
among feminists. There are also many issues in law and legal criticism that feminists
have taken on. Critical legal studies, critical race theory, and disability studies raise
some of these issues in alignment with feminists (see Crenshaw 1991; Harris 1990;
Silvers, and Francis 2005; see also Botts (Chapter 28), Hall (Chapter 33), and Sheth
(Chapter 29) in this volume. These are all important projects for the philosophy of
law that could have been the subject of an essay on feminism and philosophy of law. I
have chosen this particular set of issues in legal theory because they are at the core of
many discussions in legal philosophy today, because their relevance to feminists has I
believe been under recognized, and because they illustrate what feminist projects can
contribute to legal theory and vice versa.

Non-Ideal Theory
Although the debates between legal positivists and natural law theorists are generally
understood to be conceptual—how law is to be defined—they are, in my judgment,
ultimately normative. Answers to questions such as what it is to have a legal system,
to judge that a rule is a rule of that system, or to determine whether there is an obliga-
tion to obey some or all laws reach to deep questions about the legitimacy of political
 ETHICS, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS

authority, the purpose of law, and the role of law in the lives of people who live under
it. It is no accident that the renewal of the positivism-natural law debate occurred in
the wake of the horrors of Nazism and the world’s efforts to address it through the use
of law in the Nuremburg tribunals. Nor is it an accident, as we will see below, that
H. L. A. Hart’s defense of positivism was shaped by his liberal view that the law should
provide a framework within which different lives could flourish and that conceptual
commingling of law and morality risked allowing judges unknowingly to inflict on
others their views of what would be good for them. If there are any natural rights,
Hart (1955) argued, there is an equal right of all to be free.
My argument about legal theory is shaped by my overall approach to normative ques-
tions. I am a non-ideal theorist in the sense that I think normative questions should be
addressed from the recognition that natural or social circumstances are less than ideal,
as John Rawls famously observed in A Theory of Justice (1971) in the midst of the civil
rights movement (see Francis 2016).
While theorizing about justice for ideal circumstances, Rawls understood that differ-
ent approaches might be needed where either natural or social circumstances were less
than ideal. Rawls’s theory of justice for ideal circumstances was soon confronted with
objections rooted in non-ideal theory such as whether his views could be publicly justi-
fied to those with illiberal conceptions of the good (Freeman 2003: 29). And in his next
book, Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls retreated to the idea that he was developing a
theory of justice for a liberal society. But arguably he did not fully recognize the force
of the challenge; Waldron points out (1999: 152–153) that Rawls understood the chal-
lenge to concern fundamental disputes about the good, not fundamental disagreement
about justice itself.
For the discussion here, what is most important is how non-ideal theory approaches
the role of law in pursuing justice under conditions of injustice. Concerning the project
of justice, non-ideal theory treats issues such as how progress can best be made toward
justice, what injustices take precedence to address, what strategies are likely to create
new roadblocks to overcoming injustice, or what are the obligations of individuals or
institutions when others continue to behave unjustly (Cohen 2000; Miller 2011). As I
see justice, it is a matter of ongoing work at inclusion and flourishing: what next steps,
at individual or social levels, will enable individuals in all their differences to do well
at what matters to them? Law, as the primary social institution that does justice, plays
a central role in this project.

Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morality

Since the Nazi era, a prominent—if not the prominent—theme in Anglo-American
legal philosophy has been the debate over legal positivism. Legal positivists hold that
law and morality should be understood as conceptually separate. On this “separation”
thesis, “what is law?” is a different question from “what law ought to be.” In adjudica-
tion, the separation thesis is manifest as the view that judges apply the law or, more
controversially, have the authority that legislators do to make new law in difficult
cases when existing law runs out. But when it occurs, judicial legislation should be
recognized as such: judges are making new law rather than applying the law already
on the books. They may have the authority to do this in a given society, just as legis-
lators do—but whether they are exercising this authority appropriately is what must
be critically examined.

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Thomas Hobbes, holding as he did that justice is acting according to the require-
ments of covenant (in Leviathan 1651: Ch. XV), may have been the first proponent of
legal positivism (see, e.g., Dyzenhaus 1991; Tucker 2013). The development of the tra-
dition of utilitarian liberalism in Britain was an early setting for the fuller development
of legal positivism, particularly in the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. The
debate was rekindled in the wake of the Nuremberg trials, where the controversial ques-
tion was whether punishment could be justified for those who had arguably followed
Nazi law. H. L. A. Hart (1958) defended the separation thesis because he believed it
would create clarity about what was at stake in deploying the force of the law against
the Nazis accused of war crimes: the extraordinary, yet justifiable, use of the law as a
statement of moral condemnation. The Nuremberg trials were not ordinary exercises
of the legal process but a determination that the force of law should, ethically, be used
to punish what the Nazis had done. In reply to Hart, Lon Fuller (1958) took the posi-
tion that the most odious of Nazi commands were not law at all, because they violated
what he termed the “internal morality of law.” For Fuller, the aim of law was to enable
people to engage in purposive activity; law must be constructed so as to enable people
to conduct their lives in accord with it. This led Fuller to adopt a procedural version of
natural law incorporating requirements such as consistency that were designed to evade
the far-reaching moral commitments of earlier versions such as those associated with
traditions in Catholic theology.
The canonical contemporary statement of legal positivism remains H. L. A. Hart’s
The Concept of Law (1961). In Concept, Hart distinguishes the conceptual question of
whether there are logically necessary connections between what is law and what is mor-
ally right (no), from the historical question of whether the law has been influenced by
morality (yes) and the ethical question of whether law can be subject to ethical critique
(emphatically yes). What makes a precept a law is that it is recognized as such under the
constitutional rules of the system in question. At bottom, whether there exists a legal
system at all is a matter of fact: whether a sufficient number of those in relevant places
in a society accept its basic constitutional structure.
In a famous debate with Lord Patrick Devlin, the British High Court Judge, Hart
argued that the law should not be used to enforce morality. Hart’s contribution to the
debate, published as Law, Liberty, and Morality, argued for decriminalization of a num-
ber of what were thought to be victimless crimes, such as the voluntary sale of sex or
homosexual sexual acts. Punishment of such consensual acts as crimes, Hart thought,
amounted to an unwarranted imposition of conservative social values and could not be
justified as legitimate protection of some from harm by others. Thus Hart’s views about
the nature of law were ultimately justified by his political liberalism (Lacey 2004).
Hart’s views about adjudication are perhaps the most maligned of his views. For Hart,
judges in applying the law need first to try to understand what the laws of a given system
require. The laws may run out and there are problems of the penumbra where what the
law requires is unclear. Prior adjudications may help with this interpretive task. But
when the law runs out, faced with novel interpretive choices, judges must recognize
that they are creating new law. Leaving judges to call on moral values in interpreting
penumbral law—as though they were merely applying law—risks imposing the values
of some, the judges, on others, in unrecognized fashion. This is so whether these values
protect moral rights or traditional social mores.
The laws also may be evil, but if judges fail to apply them, they are stepping outside of the
judicial role. If so, apartheid South Africa had a legal system that judges applied—despite

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the grievous immorality of these laws and the moral obligation to change. Hart did not
hold the view that identifying law was the end of the matter. He thought that being
clear about what the law is—to the extent that we can be clear—is an important first
step in appreciating when we are making moral choices about law.
David Dyzenhaus (1991) criticized legal positivism for a politics of authoritarianism.
But arguably Dyzenhaus attributes an overly strong form of majoritarianism to Hart, the
view that judges must apply statutory law as enacted (Tucker 2013). Hart held a more
complex view about how law was to be identified, in terms of the actual rule or rules
for recognizing law in a given society. And he combined this ultimately descriptive
account with the view that as a matter of political morality we would be more clear-
headed if we recognized when judges were legislating and considered whether what they
were doing was morally justifiable.
Hart’s view about adjudication was also subject to the attack that instead of being
authoritarian it could only account for the very small set of legal decisions in which the
law’s requirements were clear. Ronald Dworkin (1967) argued that Hart’s view left most
judges exercising a strong form of discretion, selecting new law unbound. This is not
how most judges conceive of their roles, nor how judging should be conceived, Dworkin
claimed (1967: 46). Instead, Dworkin argued, judges in applying the law call on a
variety of principles, often moral, that have a dimension of weight; thus a murder-
ing heir could not profit from his own wrong even though the statute of wills did not
specifically provide for this case.
Separating law from morality as it does, positivism faces the challenge of explaining
how law can carry obligatory force. Natural law theorists such as Dworkin or Fuller
answer that it can do so because morality is endemic in law—and, if not, a coercive
system is not law at all. Positivists before Hart, such as Hobbes (1651) or John Austin
(1832) had identified law with sovereign commands. Critics of this view distinguished
between being “obliged”—coerced—and being obligated. Hart’s reply was to continue
the project of identifying law as descriptive, not normative, but to say that the fun-
damental grounding of law was simply a matter of acceptance. Terribly bad laws, or
legal systems that did not serve fundamental human interests, would not endure, he
thought. The ultimate foundation of norm-governed behavior was social acceptance
(Shapiro 2001). But the point of Hart’s positivism was to create the space to recognize
that such acceptance may be morally problematic. And feminist philosophers of law
eagerly occupied this space.

Feminist Philosophy of Law

Interestingly, feminist legal theorists have paid little attention to the debates about
legal positivism. They have focused elsewhere: on the critique of law as a system of
patriarchal power, on civil rights and equality, on critical race and disability theory,
and on problem areas such as abortion, rape, sexual harassment, or child custody and
divorce.
Feminist philosophy of law has been informed by different approaches to feminism
itself (Francis and Smith 2015). The so-called “first-wave” feminism of the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries attempted to achieve political rights for women.
These feminists were critical of how the law gave women unequal political and legal
status. Establishing the right to vote was a critical step towards political equality. But legal
status mattered, too, such as the rights to own property, to be licensed as a professional,

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and to enter into contracts, even as a married woman. Such deficiencies in status had
been justified on views of the natural condition of women, a position rooted in a certain
picture of natural law (Kimmel 1987: 266). For example, when Myra Bradshaw sought
to be licensed as a lawyer in Illinois, she was met with the observation that the legis-
lature could not have meant to allow women to practice law, because it was regarded
as axiomatic that God had designed the sexes to occupy different spheres of action
(Bradwell v. State of Illinois, 83 US 1380 (1873)).
The liberal feminism of the civil rights era aimed to establish non-discrimination in
economic and social life as well: in education, in employment, and even in marriage
and family formation and dissolution. These feminists sought both constitutional and
statutory equality. Proposals for an Equal Rights Amendment finally bore fruit in 1972
when Congress adopted the Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. The
Amendment did not, however, succeed in receiving the necessary support of three-fourths
of the states by the deadline of 1979. In the judgment of some commentators, many of
its goals have been achieved through subsequent litigation and legislation. But assessing
this claim is difficult, as goals changed, from formal to substantive equality and to the end
of laws that although neutral on their face perpetuated inequality (Mayeri 2009).
Concomitantly, liberal feminists pursued efforts to move the Supreme Court to rec-
ognize women as a suspect classification so that any different treatment would require
strict scrutiny. Cases such as Reed v. Reed, 404 US 71 (1971), struck down Idaho’s
preference for males as probate administrators in a conflict between the separated par-
ents of a deceased son. The preference, the Court concluded, did not bear a rational
relationship to the legislature’s goal of reducing the workload of probate courts by
eliminating a need for a hearing to determine the relative merits of the competing
parties. The constitutional standard used in Reed was formally the rational basis test,
not a more heightened test that would make it easier to strike down other statutes
treating men and women differently. However, the Court, in this first case applying
the equal protection clause to women, used a citation from a brief authored by then law
professor and later Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to a case holding that states could not
give in state residents tax advantages over out of state residents unless the difference
has a “fair and substantial relation” to the legislature’s purpose. (F.S. Royster Guano v.
Virginia, 253 U.S 412, 415 (1920); see also Hirshman 2015)
In a succession of cases, many argued by Justice Ginsburg, the Court moved towards
tighter scrutiny of statutes and regulations distinguishing men and women. Justice
Ginsburg’s goal as an advocate was to bring the law of sex discrimination under the
“strict scrutiny” used for discrimination on the basis of race: that for different treat-
ment to be justified, states must demonstrate a compelling state interest and treatment
narrowly tailored to furthering that interest. In Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 US 677
(1973)—a case decided in the same year as Roe v. Wade—the Court rejected the mili-
tary’s assumption that wives were dependent on their male serviceman husbands for
support but husbands were not so dependent on their female serviceman wives. But it
did not adopt the strict scrutiny standard advocated by Ginsburg in an amicus brief filed
on behalf of the ACLU. Craig v. Boren, 429 US 190 (1976), a further case presenting an
equal protection challenge to a statute differentiating men and women, this time disfa-
voring men by setting their age for the sale of 3.2 beer at 21 while women could drink at
18, brought the Court to adopt an intermediate level of scrutiny. The state’s rationale
for the differentiation was traffic safety: that males of the relevant age were more likely
to drive while intoxicated and to be killed or injured in alcohol related traffic accidents.

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The Court applied what has been termed “heightened” (albeit not strict) scrutiny at
the test that had been established in earlier decisions (429 US at 198). Although the
Court assumed that traffic safety enhancement could be an important governmental
objective, the statistics about males and females as drivers were insufficient to show that
the gender-based distinction “closely serves to achieve that objective” (429 US at 200).
This level of scrutiny—important objective, closely served by the state’s distinction—is
as far as women ever got towards constitutional equality.
So liberal feminists pursued statutory reforms as well in the effort to achieve social
and economic equality. The initial important statute was the Equal Pay Act of 1963,
which prohibited unequal pay for “for equal work on jobs the performance of which
requires equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and which are performed under similar
working conditions” (29 USC. § 206(d)(1)(2015)). The statutory language famously
compromised between equal work and comparable work, a compromise that continues
to be implicated in gender pay gaps today.
Other statutes followed quickly, most importantly the employment discrimination
section of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 (Title VII) and the prohibition of discrimina-
tion based on sex in federally funded educational programs (Title IX) in 1969, and
several amendments to Title VII including the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009
(42 USC. § 2000e(5)(e)(3)(A)(2015)), which allowed women to challenge historical
discrimination reflected in continuing pay disparities. Title VII, about which more
below, prohibited discrimination in the terms or conditions of employment, a provi-
sion designed to rule out practices that while not singling out sex per se might have
differing impacts based on sex. Despite their potential, disparate impact challenges
to apparently neutral employment practices have had a troubled history. One of the
ongoing difficulties in using disparate impact theories to counter inequality is the
continuing failure of courts to recognize structural impacts on subordination. Radical
feminists from the beginning challenged the structure of law, seeing it as the embodi-
ment of patriarchy. Law itself is a form of dominance (Francis and Smith 2015). Legal
systems in both structure and content reflect coercion and subordination, hallmarks
of masculinity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in how the criminal law deals
with sexual offenses. Rape law, the law of prostitution, and legalization of pornography
reflect the dominance of masculinity (e.g., MacKinnon 1989).
Prostitution is an example of this disagreement between liberal and radical feminists.
For many liberal feminists, if prostitution is a choice that is not coerced, it should not
be prohibited. When prostitution threatens to blend into sex trafficking, to be sure, that
should be prohibited. The potential inability to distinguish the voluntary sale of sex
from trafficking is the concern that has led Sweden to criminalize the purchase, but not
the sale, of sex (Crouch 2015) and the Netherlands to reconsider its toleration of pros-
titution (e.g., Bindel 2013; Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2012). Nonetheless, on
the liberal view voluntary choices to sell sex, like voluntary choices to sell soap or labor
power, should be legally permitted. To say that women—and their customers—should
not engage in prostitution is a form of legal moralism, of exactly the kind criticized by
Hart in Law, Liberty and Morality.
Radical feminist critics object that the choice of prostitution can never be vol-
untary in situations of economic distress or patriarchal subordination (e.g., Freeman
1989–1990). Moreover, they claim that the commodification and objectification of
women’s bodies found in prostitution—or in other practices of bodily commodifi-
cation such as surrogate reproduction—violates human dignity and is thus harmful

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even if apparently consensual (e.g., Dickenson 2017). Their view, they argue, is not
unjustified moral condemnation of prostitution but rooted in an understanding of
pervasive sexual dominance.
Pornography is another example of how radical and liberal feminists are divided in
how to address the dominance model of sexuality in law and society. Feminists such as
Catharine MacKinnon opposed pornography (especially violent pornography) as the
symbol of the dominance model. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin developed a model
anti-pornography statute for jurisdictions to enact, a statute that was held to violate the
First Amendment in American Booksellers v. Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323 (7th Cir. 1985). The
proposed statute was much criticized as moralistic—although explicitly not by Ronald
Dworkin, who saw the issue in terms of the importance of freedom of expression (see,
e.g., MacKinnon, reply to Dworkin 1994; Duggan, Hunter, and Vance 1993).
The debates between liberal and radical feminists are related to, but not the same
as, the disputes between positivists and natural law theorists. The former debate criti-
cizes how law may be used, with liberal feminists arguing that it should be used to
further equality in economic and civil rights and radical feminists that it should be
stripped of patriarchal dominance. The latter debate is about what law is, that it is
separate from morality. In the view of the positivists, only when we separate law from
it is from law as it ought to be, can we see clearly what is at stake in debates about what
law ought to be. To explore this point further, I now turn briefly to two examples,
sexual harassment and abortion.

Sexual Harassment
When Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the section on employment discrimination,
was introduced, sex discrimination was an apparent afterthought to race, color, religion,
or natural origin. Sex was added as a category in the last days before the bill’s passage,
perhaps to try to defeat the bill or more likely because of advocacy of gender equality
(e.g., Freeman 1991).
Whether or not sex was an afterthought to Title VII, the statute did little to explain
what the right to non-discrimination in employment meant in several employment
contexts relevant to women. While it prescribed non-discrimination in the “compen-
sation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment” (42 USC. § 2000e-2(a)(1)
(2016)), it said nothing further about the myriad of workplace rules, apparently neutral
but in practice making work difficult for women, such as the failure to provide leave
time for pregnancy.
And employers continued to fire women for becoming pregnant. In 1974, the
Supreme Court held that mandatory unpaid leaves for pregnant schoolteachers vio-
lated the Fourteenth Amendment because they imposed arbitrary and irrebuttable pre-
sumptions about women’s fitness to work (Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur, 414
US 632 (1974)). The Court’s analysis rested in due process, not equal protection; the
reasoning was that the requirement to quit work unduly burdened women’s constitu-
tional freedom of reproductive decision-making, the same liberty that had been the
basis of the abortion decision the previous year. In 1978, Congress amended Title VII
to add to the definition of discrimination because of sex different treatment “on the
basis of pregnancy, childbirth, of related medical conditions . . .” (42 USC. § 2000e(k))
(2016)). The Pregnancy Discrimination Act did not, however, require accommo-
dations for pregnancy—accommodations that are still largely unavailable today.

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Thus Title VII’s prohibitions of employment discrimination still do not extend to

many workplace practices that, in Martha Minow’s (1991) phrase, “make all the differ-
ence” for genuine workplace equality.
Nor did Title VII explain what was meant by conditions of employment. Early on,
however, in race and ethnicity cases, courts determined that hostile work environments
were discriminatory. In the words of one court:

This language [of Title VII] evinces a Congressional intention to define dis-
crimination in the broadest possible terms . . . But today employment discrimi-
nation is a far more complex and pervasive phenomenon, as the nuances and
subtleties of discriminatory employment practices are no longer confined to
bread and butter issue.
(Rogers v. EEOC, 454 F.2d 234, 238)

But these were race, not sex cases. MacKinnon is generally credited with “inventing”
the theory of workplace sexual harassment (Caplan-Bricker 2012). MacKinnon is
indeed the first person to crystallize the concept of sexual harassment and argue that
it was a violation of Title VII, but whether she “invented” the concept is another
matter. MacKinnon’s own description of the process of generating sexual harassment
law is that it was “judge-made” (2002: 813), a claim that can be taken simplistically
to imply that in finding a cause of action for sexual harassment under Title VII
judges were legislating.
If judges were legislating in recognizing sexual harassment as a cause of action, how-
ever, they would be vulnerable to the criticism that they were stepping out of the judi-
cial role to implement their own values, no matter how defensible those values were. A
concomitant vulnerability is that acceptance of the theory could be seen as moralizing,
imposing the values of some onto others. Not surprisingly, women who claimed sexual
harassment were seen as overly sensitive or prudish. These kinds of criticisms were
levelled against the development of sexual harassment law, but they are based on a mis-
understanding of it as a matter of judges illegitimately imposing their values on the law.
There is, however, a way to see the theory of sexual harassment as far more defensi-
ble as a matter of legal theory. Sexual harassment, like other forms of discrimination in
the workplace denies women equal work opportunities. Vicki Schultz (1998) explains
in powerful detail how both quid pro quo harassment (harassment that takes the form
of coercive offer exchange of supposed favors) and hostile environment harassment
(harassment that creates an unwelcoming workplace) excludes women from entire cat-
egories of employment. Sexual advances by superiors, firehouses full of girlie posters, or
ridicule directed at performance, all signal to women that they should not be present in
the hostile workplace. Understanding sexual harassment as sexualized oppression—as
the dominance theory of MacKinnon does—is both under and over inclusive, accord-
ing to Schultz. It is under inclusive because it encourages courts to devalue forms of
harassment that are not explicitly sexual, finding harassment for crude sexual advances
but not for more delicate flirting or non-sexual ridicule. It is over-inclusive because it
suggests that workplaces should be sexually pure. Instead, Schultz contends, harass-
ment, sexual or not, should be understood as a form of workplace inequality created by
a hostile environment.
Seeing sexual harassment as a discriminatory condition of employment places it cen-
trally within the scope of Title VII. Rather than “invented,” the theory is developed

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from within Title VII. It is thus not a case of judges legislating, but of judges imple-
menting what the legislature has enacted. What judges do in interpreting Title VII—in
understanding its prohibitions—is consider how various fact situations closely resemble
the clear cases of inequality already recognized as Title VII violations. The novelty of
the theory of sexual harassment was not that it was new law, but that it brought new
insight into what workplace conditions were genuinely exclusionary.

Abortion
The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, 410 US 113 (1973), is one of the most
controversial in its history. In the decision, the Court determined that reproductive
liberty, characterized as privacy, is a fundamental constitutional right that can be lim-
ited only by a compelling state interest. This interpretation of due process liberty was
characterized as a form of substantive due process, reading substantive rather than pro-
cedural liberties into the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection. It was thus maligned as
the justices imposing their own values in distrust of democracy (Ely 1980).
There is, however, another way of reading Roe: that it could, and should, have been
decided as a matter of equal protection. Abortion restrictions deny women reproductive
control, with consequent difficulties for their ability to achieve in education, work, or other
pursuits. Justice Ginsburg has staunchly defended this view. In an essay published while she
was serving on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, she
wrote that Roe had become a “storm center” because the Court both “ventured too far” and
“presented an incomplete justification for its action” (Ginsburg 1985: 376). The Court’s
inadequacy, she said, was that it had treated abortion as a matter of due process liberty, not
as a matter of sex discrimination (Ginsburg 1985: 386).
Justice Ginsburg’s jurisprudence is generally seen as “minimalist” in the sense that
she seeks to carve judicial reasoning closely to existing law (e.g., Siegel 2009). In this
commentary on Roe, and in many other writings, she applies such minimalism to explain
the problems with the Court’s due process approach.
In her arguments for an equal protection approach to abortion, Justice Ginsburg
harbors no illusions about whether this could have avoided the controversy Roe gen-
erated (Ginsburg 1985). Abortion is an issue that reaches to the very basic and con-
tested issue in moral theory, that of the status of the fetus. What an equal protection
analysis can do, however, is change the legal theory terms of the debate, for it locates
the question of abortion squarely within evolving equal protection doctrine. This
is a positivist, not a natural law theory approach. And like the positivist approach
to sexual harassment law as a matter of workplace equality, it shows how abortion
jurisprudence can be defended without courting the charge that judges are in activist
fashion imposing their own values.

Conclusion
Let me return briefly to my initial methodological remarks about non-ideal theory. Both
the sexual harassment and the abortion examples suggest how the positivist approach to
adjudication can further progress toward gender justice and justice more generally. The
understanding that sexual harassment is a form of employment discrimination located
exclusionary workplace practices squarely within the statutory prohibition of Title VII.
Seeing reproductive liberty as a matter of women’s ability to participate in economic

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life constructs it as a matter of progress toward inclusive justice. Similar points might be
made about disability civil rights or other civil rights.
Now, abortion opponents may raise an objection at this point: what about inclusion
of the fetus, is that not also needed for progress towards justice? Here, positivism has a
response that natural law theory may not. The history of feminist jurisprudence in the
US is the gradual achievement of political, economic, and social equality for women.
Viewing the abortion cases as equal protection cases locates them within this equality
project as legally constituted. There is no question whether women are citizens enti-
tled to equal status under law. Fetuses have not been so recognized; to argue that they
should be is to advance a moral critique of contemporary law. Natural law theory, as the
Court’s opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart illustrates, confuses on just this point: it is not a
continuation of an ongoing equality project, but an argument for a new one.
All too frequently, positivists have failed to develop their theory in the progressive
ways suggested by the sexual harassment and abortion examples. There are forms of
positivism that have imposed literalist strictures on statutory and constitutional inter-
pretation or that have been myopic about structural inequality. Some positivism was
associated with the logical positivists’ skepticism of normative theory—a position that
Hart took pains from the beginning to disavow. Robin West (2011) takes contemporary
positivism to task for failing to develop what she calls “a sustained tradition of censorial
jurisprudence.” Nonetheless, positivism has theoretical resources for legal development
and criticism that are critical to furthering inclusive justice.

Related Topics
Feminist theory, lesbian theory, and queer theory (Chapter 31); the genealogy and viabil-
ity of the concept of intersectionality (Chapter 28); critical race theory, intersectionality,
and feminist philosophy (Chapter 29); feminism and liberalism (Chapter 52).

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 INDEX

A hora da estrela (Hour of the Star) (film) 637 Agamben, G. 482

Abbey, R. 654 agency 262, 400–1, 409–10, 573; aesthetics and
abjection 29, 97, 150, 208; subjectivity and 233, 235, uniqueness 468, 477, 479, 480, 481; autonomy
237, 238 and 515, 516, 520, 521–3, 541; bioethics 582–4,
able-bodiedness and ableism 8, 125, 171, 259, 437; 585, 586, 587; freedom 672, 673; postcolonialism
disability and 407, 410, 411, 412, 414, 415; 597, 600, 602; power dynamics 680, 686–7;
intersectionality 350, 353, 359 rationality 534, 536; religious diversity 454, 455–6;
able-nationalism 406–7 structural injustice 622, 623–4, 627; subjectivity
abolitionist movement 96–7, 101 and 231, 232, 233, 236, 237, 238–9; violence and
abortion 348, 440, 506, 581, 668–9, 691; legal vulnerability 693, 695
positivism 709, 710; see also maternity and agonistic performative feminism 674
maternalist feminism; sexual reproduction agriculture 437, 440, 441
academic feminism 652–6 Aguilar, Gerónimo 633
‘accomplishment’ thesis 337 Ahmed, S. 200
accountability 259, 385, 522, 525, 674 ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ (Truth) 210
Ackerly, B. 613, 614 Alaimo, S. 194
action theory see narrative and action theory Album de familia (Castellanos) 637
active externalism 222 Alcoff, L.M. 148, 163–4, 172, 208, 338, 352
active ignorance 270 Alfred, T. 372
activist feminism 52, 656 Algeria 600
adaptive preference formation 517–18 ‘alien’ other 150
Addams, Jane 133, 134, 136–7, 139, 695 Allen, A. 681
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 51 Allen, P.G. 435, 666
adjudication 703–4, 708, 709 Altman, J. 323
Adorno, T.W. 476, 477, 481 Amar y Borbón, J. 96–7
aesthetics: art as political 463–6; dilemmas of ambivalence 237, 517
474–6; feminist reworking of Kant 468–72; gender American Booksellers v. Hudnut (1985) 707
intersectionality and political action/narrative American Declaration of Independence 665
476–82, 483; Kantian viewpoint 466–8, 489–91; Analects 556, 557, 558
life and narrative 482; see also beautiful and sublime Ancient Greece 23–32, 485, 666
affectivity 143, 145–6, 180 Anderson, E. 262, 269, 617, 623, 659;
affidamento (women-centred authority) 298 metaethics 533, 534
affirmative action programs 311 Anderson, P.S. 66, 448, 451
affirmative/corrective feminism 636–7 androcentrism (centred on man) 246–7, 344, 353,
Africa 49–50, 52–4, 56–8; care ethics 547, 548, 550; 432, 436; Ancient Greece 25, 26, 31; bioethics 580,
ecofeminism 436–7; feminism as engagement 50–2; 582; biological sciences 315, 316, 317, 323; body
gender and injustice 54–6; language barriers 54; and embodiment 185–6, 188–9; religious diversity
women’s silence and reproduction of patriarchal 451, 454; social science and 329–30, 332
ideology 56 Anglophone feminism 5, 53, 54, 329
African Americans 345–6, 348, 358, 363, 669 animal spirits 183
African Gender Institute 53 anonymous writers 17, 20
African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) 53–4 anthropology 332
Aftermath (Brison) 224, 227 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant) 103
 INDEX

anti-essentialism: contemporary views 176–8; gender basic needs approach: development 425
essentialism and 168–76 Basinger, D. 456
anti-individualism 221–2 Battersby, C. 471, 472
anti-sweatshop movement 627 ‘Baubo: Theological Perversion and Fetishism’
Antigone (Sophocles) 111–12 (Kofman) 113, 114
Antony, L. 221 Baumgarten, Alexander 474, 489
Anzaldúa, G. 209–10, 212, 215, 632 Baylis, F. et al. (2008)
Anzieu, D. 398 Beale, F. 122, 123
Aoki, K. 364 Beattie, T. 62
Arendt, Hannah 50, 64, 112, 116, 638; democratic beautiful and sublime 479; concept of beauty 485–7;
theory 645, 650; freedom 669, 672, 674; narrative early developments of sublime 487–9; ‘feminine’
and action theory 476–82, 483; power dynamics sublime 491–4; Kant’s critique of 489–91;
680, 685; structural injustice 626, 629 reimagining the sublime 494–5; see also aesthetics
argumentation (logic and rational) 249, 251, 252 Beauty Matters (Zeglin) 486
Aristotle 31–2, 50, 67, 181, 218, 506; aesthetics 480, Beauty Myth, The (Wolf) 486
485; care ethics 562; virtue ethics 569, 572, 574–5 Beauty Unlimited (Zeglin) 486
arithmetical reasoning 249 de Beauvoir, Simone 13, 14, 15, 62, 384, 487; African
Armour, E. 61 culture 50, 55; body and embodiment 185–6, 189;
Arnauld, Antoine 74, 77 ecofeminism 433, 434; feminist phenomenology
Arndt, S. 50 143, 144, 152; master-slave dialectic 110–11;
arpilleras (colourful patchwork scenes) 632 postcolonialism 602, 603; social constructionism
art see aesthetics 162, 169, 170, 670; violence and vulnerability 696
Artiles, A.J. 349–50 Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 188–9
assisted reproductive technologies 581 ‘being-in-the-world’/‘being-with-others’ 346
associational life 645 Bell, C. 407
Astell, Mary 76–80, 679 Bell, M. 575, 576
Athenäum (literary journal) 115 benevolence 556–7, 560, 562
Atherton, M. 245 Benhabib, S. 104, 219–20, 541, 597, 659–60
Aufhebung (sublation) 110, 112 Benjamin, J. 233
Aultman, B.L. 274 Benjamin, W. 476, 477
Austin, J.L. 280, 301, 703, 704 Benson, P. 521–2
authenticity 517–18, 519, 523 Bentham, Jeremy 20, 703
autonomy 15, 103–4, 219, 284, 427, 455; aesthetics Bergoffen, D. 114
and politics 464, 472, 475, 476, 477, 481; bioethics Berlin, Isaiah 667, 671
579, 581, 583, 584, 588; care ethics and 541, betrayal 83, 258, 263, 264
543, 644; intellectual 633–5; liberalism 653, Between Facts and Norms (Habermas) 650
654, 659; multiculturalism and 596–7, 597–8; Between Femininity and Feminism (Mahadevan) 602
multidimensional theory of 523–5; postcolonialism Between Feminism and Materialism (Howie) 453, 455
602; relational autonomy 516–23, 585–7; status/ Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche) 113, 115
capacity concept 515–16; subjectivity and 233, Bhabha, H. 599, 600
236; violence and vulnerability 693, 694 Biehl, J. 436
AWDF see African Women’s Development Fund Bilge, S. 351
binary logic 64, 160, 194, 196, 201, 324; Ancient
Bâ, Mariama 56 Greece 23–4, 25, 26, 28, 29–30, 31
Bach, T. 176–7 Binghamton University (New York) 53
Bacon, Francis 244, 435 bio-mechanisms: body and embodiment 189–90
Baier, A. 218, 226, 258, 576 bioethics: feminist contributions to 585–8; feminist
Ban Gu (班固) 40 critiques of 582–5; gender and 579–82
Bao (抱) (to embrace) 40 biological determinism 318, 323, 324, 386–7
Barad, K. 198 biological essentialism 169, 317–18, 321, 323, 324;
Bardwell-Jones, C. 138–9 materiality 195, 196–7, 199–200
Baril, A. 411 biological sciences 314–15, 323–4; feminist
Barker, C. 408 evolutionary psychology 320–2; neuroscience 316,
Barnhill, A. 576 319–20; values and metaphysics 317–19; values and
Barrios de Chungara, D. et al. 631 research practices 315–17
Barry, B. 660 bios 482
Bartky, S. 237, 486–7 Birke, L. 316, 319

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 INDEX

bisexuality 298 Buffon 95

Black Feminism: borderlands identities 210; Critical Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles
Race Theory (CRT) 358–9, 366–7; gender (Tessman) 574
oppression 170; intersectionality 344, 350; Burke, Edmund 100, 487–9, 490, 491
multistability of oppression 120, 121–6; negative Burkhart, B. 372
socio-epistemic status 120, 126–9; politics of Burton, N. 693
spatiality 129–30; rationality/objectivity 247; see Bush, V. 305, 306
also women of colour Busia, A.P.A. 139–40
‘Black Feminist Statement, A’ (Combahee River Butler, J. 104, 115, 208, 233, 684; disability 406,
Collective) 121–4, 125, 126 414–15; freedom 672, 674; gender essentialism
Black Feminist Thought (Collins) 544 172–3, 174; language and gender 300–1; materiality
#BlackLifeMatters 478 197, 200–1, 202, 203, 204, 205; narrative and
black motherhood 544 action theory 479, 480, 481; trans* theory 393,
Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 148 394, 398; violence and vulnerability 697, 698
Bleier, R. 248, 316
Bluestockings 96, 100 Cabot, Ella Lymon 137
Bluhm, R. 250, 319 caceroleada (political protest) 632
Bodies That Matter (Butler) 200–1, 202, 203, 204, 300 Cajete, G. 373–4
body and embodiment 13,107, 128, 143, 164, Calhoun, C. 225, 576
180–1; beautiful and sublime 486, 495; bioethics ‘Camila’ (film) 637
582–3, 584, 588; bodies as instruments and Cao Wenyi (曹文逸) 41
expressions 187–9; bodily integrity 596, 639; capabilities approach 505–6, 574, 597, 672; global
consciousness 208, 210, 211, 212–13; contemporary development 425–6, 427, 613; metaethics 532, 533
viewpoints 183–5; disability 409–10; gender 474; capitalism 645, 646, 667–8, 682–3, 690
historical background 181–3; intersubjectivity/ Caputi, J. 299–300
intercorporeality 188; intuition and 432; language Carastathis, A. 351–2
and 295–6, 297–8; limits of naturalism 189–90; Card, C. 576, 622
materiality 204; phenomenology of 185–7; self- care ethics 89, 137, 232, 250, 347–8, 422; bioethics
constitution 226, 227; trans* theory 398–400; 586–7; Confucianism 547, 548, 550, 558–65;
violence and vulnerability 693 democratic theory 644, 649; dependency 540, 546,
Bohm, D. 378 548, 613; early articulations of 540–3; early feminist
Boileau, N. 487 misgivings regarding 543–4; ecofeminism 441–2;
Bolt, B. 195 global care chains 670; global context
Bonds of Love, The (Benjamin) 233 548–50, 608, 610–11; liberalism 656, 659; metaethics
Book of Lieh-tzu: A Classic of Tao, The (Graham) 45 530, 534, 537; modern development of 544–6, 551;
borderlands identity: inner diversity of the self 207–8; move to politics of care 546–8; postcolonialism
intersectionality within 210–11; social change and 601, 602; relational self 219–21; structural injustice
214–15; social conflict and 209–10; social sources 622–3, 625; violence and vulnerability 695–6, 697;
212–14; special challenges and potential of 215–16; virtue ethics 545, 550, 551, 572–4
types of identities/identity formations 211–12; see care reasoning 249
also identity politics Caribbean 598
Bordo, S. 188, 487 Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral
Boserup, E. 420, 421, 428 Education (Noddings) 558–9
bourgeois notion of the political 98, 102–3 Carlson, L. 412, 413
Boyle, Robert 244 Carnap, Rudolf 303, 304
Bradwell v. State of Illinois (1873) 705 Carse, A. 610–11
Braidotti, R. 115, 197, 200, 204, 296 Cartesian philosophy see Descartes, R.
Brennan, T. 237 Cartwright, N. 329
Brison, S.J. 223, 224, 227, 690 Castellanos, R. 637
Brock, G. 610 Castillo, D.A. 634
Brodbeck, M. 329 Categorical Imperative 504, 505, 558
Brownmiller, S. 690, 691, 693 causal reductionism 318, 320, 322
Bryson, C. 78 Cavarero, A. 477, 479, 481, 482
Brzuzy, S. 349 CEDAW see Convention on the Elimination of all
Bubeck, D. 546, 563 Forms of Discrimination against Women
Buckingham, S. 441 census surveys 330
Buddhism 449, 550 Chalmers, D. 222

715
 INDEX

Chant, S. 428, 616 communicative action theory 647–8

Chanter, T. 110–11, 353 ‘communism’ 26–7
character traits 576 communitarianism 643, 644, 649, 660
‘Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists’ community building 67
(African Women’s Development Fund) 53–4 compassion 557, 565
Charusheela, S. 613, 614 competence: autonomy 517, 518–19, 521, 586
Cheney, J. 436 comprehensive liberalism 654
Chicana/o feminism 209–10, 214 compulsory heterosexuality see heteronormativity
childbearing 30, 31, 111, 187, 465, 549 Concept of Law, The (Hart) 703–4
Chodorow, N. 232 Condorcet, Marquis de 98–9
choice feminism 656, 657, 660, 671, 682 ‘Confessions of a Beautiful Soul’ (Goethe) 116
chora (amorphous matter) 27, 28, 29–30, 31, 32, 294 Confucianism 43, 46; care ethics 547, 548, 550,
Christ, C. 60, 62 558–64; comradeship and caring 564–5; main ideas
Christian Religion, The (Astell) 77 556–8; virtue ethics 556, 560, 561–2
Christianity consciousness 186, 308, 374; embodied 208, 210, 211,
Christman, J. 517, 518, 520, 524 212–13
Church and the Second Sex, The (Daly) 60 consciousness-raising 222, 258–9, 276, 502, 637–8, 654
cisgender 226, 273, 274, 277, 352, 411 consent 286–7
citizenship 91, 98–9, 546, 548, 669 Consortium for Socially Relevant Philosophy of/in
Civic Forum 646 Science and Engineering (SRPoiSE) 311
Civil Rights Act (1964) (United States) 706, 707 Constitution (United States) 666
Cixous, H. 199; language/writing 292, 293, 294, constructivism 529–30
295–7, 298, 300 Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism (Hammington and
Clare, E. 410 Bardwell-Jones) 138–9
Clark, A. 222 contextual thinking 556, 559, 563
Clark, Dr Edward 314 continental tradition 292, 293, 296, 299, 494
‘clash-of-civilizations’ narrative 596 contraception 669
class 244–5, 335, 546–7, 614, 645, 682–3; Critical contractualism/contractarianism 13, 88–9, 654–5, 658
Race Theory (CRT) 363, 364; essentialism 170, contributory injustice 263
171; freedom 669–70; intersectionality 344, 345; Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of
trust/trustworthiness 257, 259 Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)
classic social contract theory 84–6, 88, 89 (United Nations General Assembly) 52
classificatory gender essentialism 170–1, 172, 174, 175 Coole, D. 195
Clément, C. 293 Coomaraswamy, A. 601
Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur (1974) 707 Cooper, A.J. 120, 129, 130, 344
Coakley, S. 61 Cordova, V. 372
‘Coalition Politics: Turning the Century’ Cornell, D. 84, 90–1
(Reagon) 120 Corvino, J. 397
Code, L. 127, 248, 257, 347, 585; personal identity cosmogony 27, 28–9, 29–30
219, 220–1 Council for the Development of Social Science
CODESRIA see Council for the Development of Research in Africa (CODESRIA) 52
Social Science Research in Africa couples 55
Coe, K. 321 Craig v. Boren (1976) 705–6
cogito 72, 73, 78 creativity 371–2, 373, 375, 377, 378–9, 476
cognitive abilities 246–7, 250, 470 credibility 259–63, 268–9, 272–3
Coherence of Theism, The (Swinburne) 65 Crenshaw, K. 128, 210, 345, 358–9, 362, 367; et al.
Collins, P.H. 247, 260, 335, 544, 670; intersectionality (1995) 361
210, 363 crime 628, 638–9, 665, 703
colonialism 101–2, 489, 508, 510, 544; freedom and criminal law 89
665, 672; global justice 611–12; multiculturalism crip theory (queer disability studies) 406, 414–15
598, 599; see also Critical Race Theory (CRT); critical feminist eudaimonism 574–5
postcolonialism; race and racism; slavery Critical Legal Studies (CLS) 345, 358, 361, 669
‘Colored Girl, The’ (Williams) 127, 128 critical phenomenology 150, 151–2
Combahee River Collective 121–4, 125 critical race phenomenology 147–8
commonality 164, 165, 168, 171 Critical Race Theory (CRT) 171, 222, 323, 358–61;
‘Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative intersectionality 345, 348, 350, 359, 361–8; see also
Democracy’ (Young) 649 colonialism; postcolonialism; race and racism; slavery

716
 INDEX

critical reflection 64, 66, 68 deep ecology 435–6, 439

critical theory 61, 104, 345, 453, 492, 582; political Deleuze, G. 415
philosophy 649, 659; subjectivity 233, 234 deliberative democratic theory 649, 650, 659–60
Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Kant) 479 Deloria, V. Jr. 375
‘Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity’ (Butler) 104 DeLucia, J. 96
Critique of Judgment (Kant) 107, 109 democratic theory 18–21, 90–1, 305, 642–5; changes
Critique of the Power of Judgment, The (Kant) 467–8, in 645–7; creativity 371–2, 375–6; discourse
489, 492, 493 ethics 647–50; inclusive epistemic 503–4;
Critique of Pure Reason/Critique of Practical Reason multiculturalism 597; social science 335, 336; see
(Kant) 468 also politics
cross-border social movements 607, 608, 610, deontology 540
612–14, 616 dependency 221, 413–14, 573, 586, 587; care ethics
Crow, B. 388 540, 546, 548, 613
‘Crystallisation: Artful Matter and the Productive Derrida, J. 113, 202, 296, 492, 599, 650
Imagination’ (Jones) 468–9 DesAutels, P. 320
Cuando tiemblan las montañas (When the Mountains Descartes, R. 15, 18, 66, 71–80, 159; body and
Tremble) (film) 632 embodiment 181–2, 183; doubt methodology 72,
Cudd, A. 534, 620, 622 73, 77, 78; rationality/objectivity 223, 224, 245
cultural democratic pluralism 375–6 Deutscher, P. 102
cultural diversity 501–2, 594, 595, 596, 597, 598 Deveaux, M. 616
cultural paternalism 428 development ethics 424–6, 548–50
culture 186, 209–10, 507, 510, 516, 600 Dewey, John 132, 133, 134, 135–6, 138, 139
culture-specific essentialism 171 Dialectic of Sex, The (Firestone) 198
Cureau de la Chambre, Marin 71, 73 Dialectics of Enlightenment (Frankfurt School) 104
Curtis, K. 477 Diamond, Irene 433, 436
Cypess, S. 632 dichotomous values/thinking 14, 621
Czechoslovakia 645–6 ‘Difference Feminism’ 292, 293, 296, 297, 299, 475;
Native American chaos theory 371, 375–9
Daggers, J. 450, 451, 452 Dillon, R.S. 576
Dahl, R. 679 Diotima group 298
Dalmiya, V. 547 ‘Diotima’s speech’ (Irigaray) 30–1
Daly, M. 60, 299–300, 434, 449 disability 164, 271, 307–8, 349–50, 588, 710; cripping
Dance of Shiva, The (Coomaraswamy) 601 philosophy 414–15; dependency/vulnerability and
Danzón (film) 637–8 justice 413–14; impairment and 408–10; mental
Daodejing (Classics of Way and Its Power) (Laozi) disability 411–13; queer theory and 405–8; sex/
35, 47; cosmic mother/female body 36–9; female gender and 410–11
power/strategy 43–6; femininity and 39–43 ‘Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers
d’Argenteuil, Héloïse 14–15, 62 and their Fate in History’ (O’Neill) 17–18
Daston, L. 158, 159, 244 Discours de la méthode (Discourse on the Method)
Daukas, N. 261–2 (Descartes) 74
Davidson, D. 280 Discourse in Defense of the Talent of Women, and of
Davion, V. 576 Their Aptitude for Governing and Other Positions in
Davis, L. 215 Which Men Are Employed (Amar y Borbón) 96–7
De L’Éducation des dames (On the Education of Ladies) discourse ethics 647–50, 659–60
(Poullain de la Barre) 74, 76 Discovering Reality (Harding and Hintikka) 332
De L’Égalité des deux sexes (On the Equality of the Two discrimination 360–1, 362, 478, 515; sexual 701,
Sexes) (Poullain de la Barre) 74–5, 76, 77, 79 704–6, 707
De L’Excellence des hommes (On the Excellence of Men) discursive injustice 288
(Poullain de la Barre) 74 discursive violence 691
de Staël, Germaine 95 disidentification 211
deaf culture 215 Dislocating Cultures (Narayan) 611
d’Eaubonne, F. 434, 438 DiStefano, C. 173, 220
Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female diversity see cultural diversity; multiculturalism;
Citizen (Gouges) 97–9 postcolonialism
decolonial feminism 598–9 divisible-identity essentialism 171
deductive reasoning 249 divorce 86, 584, 635–6
Deegan, M.J. 137 DNA testing 384–5

717
 INDEX

doctrinal humility/hospitality 451 England 96

documentary films 632 engrossment 559, 561, 564
Dodds, S. see Mackenzie, C. et al. (2014) Engster, D. 548
Dohm, Christian Wilhelm 97 Enlightenment, The 485, 595, 600; equality/difference
Dolphijn, R. 197, 198 and human rights 97–9; equality/independence and
domestic violence 161–2, 361–2, 638–9, 686; education 99–102; feminist engagement 102–4;
vulnerability 689, 690, 691, 692, 694, 695 plurality of 94–7
domestic work 624–5 enquiry methods 13–21
dominance model of sexuality 707 environmentalism and ecological thought 432–3,
Donchin, A. 582, 588 476, 494, 588; ecofeminism 434–42; nature/culture
Dotson, K. 260–1, 263, 271, 273, 282, 365 433–4
‘Double Jeopardy’ (Beale) 122, 123 Epicurus 198
doubt methodology 72, 73, 77, 78 episodic autonomy 519
Driver, J. 529–30 epistemic ignorance 268–71, 276–7
Du Bois, W.E.B. 128 Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing
dualism 114, 115, 137, 324, 387, 412; body and (Fricker) 502
embodiment 180, 181–3, 186; borderlands epistemic injustice 251, 268–71, 276–7, 288, 289, 338;
identities 210; language/writing and 293, 296, moral justification and 502–3
297–8, 300 epistemic trustworthiness 261–2
Duffy, M. 546, 547 epistemic values 334
Dworkin, A. 707 Equal Pay Act (1963) (United States) 706
Dworkin, G. 517 Equal Rights Amendment (American Constitution)
Dworkin, R. 284, 657, 704, 707 665, 705
Dyzenhaus, D. 704 equality 386–7, 378–9, 390, 636–7; between sexes
26–7, 46, 71–2, 597; bioethics and 584–5; The
early modern feminism 71–80 Enlightenment 94, 98–9; equal moral worth 88, 89,
earth goddess 432, 434–6 90; sexual harassment 707–9
eating disorders 188 equality/equity feminism see liberal feminism
ecofeminism 66, 432, 437–42, 680; Global North Erevelles, N. 407–8
434–6; nature/culture 433–4 eroticism 189
Ecofeminism or Death (L’écofeminism ou le mort) erotico-theoretical transference 14–15
(d’Eaubonne) 434 erroneous judgments 74, 78, 80
Ecofeminism (Mies and Shiva) 439 ‘Essay to Prove, that Women May Apply Themselves
ecological thought see environmentalism and to Liberal Arts and Sciences, An’ (Poullain de la
ecological thinking Barre) 77
economic productivity 330–1, 333 essentialism see anti-essentialism; biological
écriture féminine 295, 298, 300–1 essentialism; gender essentialism; strategic
education 421, 491, 614, 650; body and embodiment essentialism
187; credibility and 262; equality/independence Eternal Irony of the Community, The (Hegel) 111–12
and 96, 99–102; gendered toys/equipment 139 ethical social contract theory 88–90, 111–12
egalitarianism 26, 27, 97; liberalism and 657, 659, 660 ethics see autonomy; bioethics; care ethics; metaethics;
ego psychology 233–4, 236–7 moral justification; virtue ethics
Eichler, M. 306 ethics of alterity 347
Eisenberg, A. 596, 597 Ethics of Ambiguity (de Beauvoir) 696
Eleusinian mysteries 114 ethics of care see care ethics
Eliot, George 13, 18, 20–1 Ethics of Sexual Difference, An (Irigaray) 189
Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess 15, 73, 75, 182–3 ethnic identities 214
Ellison, R. 127 eudaimonism 569, 574–5
emancipation 27 eudoxa (reputable beliefs) 506
embodiment see body and embodiment Eurocentric bias 352, 353, 429, 596, 673;
Emile, Or On Education (Rousseau) 14, 95, 100–1, 102 multiculturalism 596; religious diversity 448, 450,
emotions 250, 319–20, 519; care ethics 542, 556, 455, 456
559, 573 evolution 315–16, 322
empirical science 511–12 Evolution’s Empress (Feminist Evolutionary Psychology
employment; contracts 86, 87 Society) 320
‘Empowering Women’ (Shiva) 440–1 exceptionalism 407
encoded meaning 212–13 exclusivism 450, 451, 452

718
 INDEX

experience see feminist phenomenology feminist phenomenology 143–4; credibility and 262;
experiential oppression 122–4, 125 critical phenomenology and hesitation 151–2;
explicit/implicit bias 250–1 embodiment and 184, 185–7; lived experience and
exploitation 615–16, 624, 665, 667–8, 683 pathologies of the social 148–51; as method 144–8
feminist politics 172; ‘identity crisis’ 168
false consciousness 237 Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Jagger) 644
‘false duty’ 88 feminist queer crip 408, 413
false gender neutrality 655–6 feminist recovery projects 132–3
family: care ethics 557–8, 564; gender oppression and feminist virtue ethics 570–2
170; male dominance 84–5, 87, 680; poverty and feminized labour 614–16, 624
421; women’s subordination in 86–7, 89, 90, 91 Ferguson, A. 610
family-resemblance concept 396–7 Ferguson, M. 100, 101
‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’ (Singer) 425, 426, Fielding, H. 149
609, 611 Figueres, Christiana 442
Fanon, F. 144, 148, 150, 152 Fineman, M.A. 694
fatherhood 56 Firestone, S. 198, 199, 205
Fausto-Sterling, A. 159–60, 246, 317, 324 first-person narratives 222, 223, 224–5
Feinberg, L. 400–1 first-wave feminism 670, 673, 704–5
Felski, R. 464–5 Fischer, M. 137
fem (journal) 639 Fisher, B. 545
female 16, 165, 184, 398, 400 Fisher, M.L. see Frederick, D.A. et al.
female genital mutilation (FMG) 55, 501, 507–10, Five Relationships: Confucianism 557–8
532, 612, 691; postcolonialism 595, 596; see also Flax, J. 208
genitalia Fletcher, J.H. 447, 450
female-centred research 320–1 flourishing 574–5
femicide 639 FMG see female genital mutilation
feminine and femininity 16, 17, 18, 29, 30, 53; Folbre, N. 546
beautiful and sublime 485, 491–4; beauty and ‘Foolish Men’ (Juana Inés de la Cruz) 633
521; care ethics 541, 543, 547, 560–1, 586; cosmic Foppa, Alaíde 639
mother/female body 36–9; The Enlightenment 95, forced sterilization 668–9
100, 101; eternal feminine and truth as a woman Foucault, M. 201–2, 669; freedom 672, 673, 674;
112–15; female power/strategy 35, 39–46; freedom power dynamics 683–4, 685, 686
669; gender identity 173, 349; language and 294–6, fragmentation 377
297, 298, 300; master and slave 111; metaphysical Fraisse, G. 18–19
dualisms 114, 115; pragmatism and 136; rational France 95, 96, 97–9
agency 534; rationality 244; self-positing 109; Francophone feminism 51, 53, 54, 56, 57–8
sexuality 170; social constructionism and 161, 176, Frankfurt, H. 517
213; violence and vulnerability 690–1, 693; virtue Franklin Lewis, Elizabeth 96, 97
ethics 569; see also masculinity; men and boys; Fraser, N. 104, 647, 660, 683
women and girls Frederick, D.A. et al. 322
Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan) 681 free and equal persons 83–4, 85
Femininity and Domination (Bartky) 486–7 free will 76
feminism of equality 636–7 Freedman, E.B. 135
‘Feminism and Science’: ‘Can There Be a Feminist freedom 524, 665–6; human rights and 666–70;
Science?’ (Longino) 332 individual freedom 670, 671–3; women’s collective
Feminism Unmodified (MacKinnon) 661 freedom 670, 671–3
feminist action research 139 freedom of speech 98, 282, 283–4, 359, 360
Feminist Africa (journal) 53 ‘French Feminism’ 27–31, 292, 296, 299, 494
‘Feminist Contractarianism’ (Hampton) 82–3, Freud, Sigmund 231–2, 233, 234, 235, 293; language
88–90 293, 294, 297
feminist ethics 569–70, 611 Fricker, M. 260, 261, 262, 263, 276; epistemic
feminist evolutionary psychology (FEP) 320–2 injustice 502; silencing 282, 288, 289
Feminist Evolutionary Psychology Society 320 Friedan, B. 170, 388, 681
Feminist Methods in the Social Sciences (Reinharz) 332 Friedman, M. 226, 575; autonomy 518, 519,
feminist naturalists 308–9 520, 524, 659
Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Friedman, S.S. 465
(Merrim) 633 friendship model 220–1

719
 INDEX

Frontiero v. Richardson (1973) 705 gender essentialism 160–1, 580, 653; anti-essentialism
Frost, S. 195 and 168–76; contemporary views 176–8; materiality
Frost-Arnold, K. 263 195, 196–7, 199–200
Frye, M. 576 gender fluid 394
fu (負) (embody) 40–1 gender identity disorder see gender dissatisfaction
Fudge, R. 382 gender insensibility 580, 584
Fuller, L. 703, 704 gender mainstreaming 428
gender presentation 272, 273, 275, 396–7, 402
Galison, P. 158, 159, 244 gender realism 174–5
Gallagher, C. 72 Gender Recognition Act (2004) (United
Galtung, J. 690 Kingdom) 277
Ganguli, A. 616 gender socialization 170, 384–5, 387
Gardner, C. 18 gender testing 384–5
Gargallo, Francesca 638, 639 Gender Trouble (Butler) 172, 300, 301; materiality
Garland-Thomson, R. 408, 409, 415 197, 200, 201, 202, 203–4, 684
Gatens, M. 202–3, 204 gender variant 394
Gauthier, David 83, 88 gender-blindness 448, 449, 451–2, 456
Gay Science, The (Nietzsche) 114 genderqueer see queer theory
gender 17–18, 50, 201, 245; abjection 208; aesthetics genealogical inquiry 158, 159, 161, 162, 176
465, 466, 471, 493; Ancient Greece 24, 26, 31; genealogy 115
animal sets 43; autonomy 519; bioethics 579, Generation of Animals (Aristotle) 31–2
580–2, 584; biological sciences 316–17, 321–3; genetics see sexual reproduction
care ethics 543, 544, 546–7, 548–9; Confucianism genitalia 38, 189, 402; intersex 160, 385, 390; status of
560–1, 562, 564; credibility and 260, 261; Critical 276, 384, 397, 402; surgery 273, 274, 277; see also
Race Theory (CRT) 362, 363; Daoism and female genital mutilation (FMG)
35, 37, 46–7; educational toys/equipment 139; genocidal rape 610–11
feminist ethics/virtue ethics 569–72; fluidity of Gentleman’s Journal, The 77
roles 47; global justice 609–10, 613; injustice and German Idealism 107, 108–112
54–6, 57; intersectionality 344, 345, 346, 347, German Romanticism 115, 116
349, 352; intersectionality and political action/ Germany 97, 107; eternal feminine and truth as a
narrative 476–82, 83; labour markets 614–15; woman 112–15; idealism 108–112; women’s voices
language and 292–5, 298, 299, 300–1; lesbian/ in nineteenth century 115–16
queer theory 384–5, 388, 390; liberalism and 655, Gezi Park (Instanbul) 478
658; ‘mind has no sex’ 72–3, 75, 80; misgendering Gillberg, C. 139
274–5; moral justification 501, 507, 508, 509, Gilligan, C. 232, 530, 602, 644, 649; bioethics 584,
510; multiculturalism 596, 599–600; narrative 586, 587; care ethics 540, 543, 550, 558,
and action theory 474, 475–6, 478, 480, 482–3; 560, 573
Native American Chaos Theory 377; naturalism Gilman, C.P. 133, 134
184; Nietzschean genealogy 115; objectivity 245; Gines, K. 365
philosophical practice 63; postcolonialism 600, Ginsburg, Justice Ruth Bader 705, 709
601, 603; poverty 607; science and 265, 309; girl power 656
silencing 288, 289; social construction of 157–66, Glenn, E.N. 546–7
176, 219; social science 329–31; spatiality 149, 152; global development 419–20; bioethics 588;
structural injustice 621, 622, 623, 624, 625; trans* care ethics 544, 548–50; development ethics
theory 272, 273, 276, 395–8; violence 685–6; virtue 424–6; feminist philosophic issues about 426–7;
ethics 573, 574, 575 resources and competence requirements 427–9;
Gender and Aesthetics (Korsmeyer) 486 women’s involvement in 420–2; women’s poverty
gender complementarity 95, 100–1, 103 422–44, 615
gender critical feminists 385 Global Harm Principle 609
Gender and the Department of Women’s Studies for global justice 607–8; feminized labour and 614–16;
Africa’s transformation (GWS) (University of harm/responsibility 608–11; naturalized moral
Cape Town) 53 epistemological approach 611–14
gender difference 13, 96, 98–9, 102, 103; causal/ God-In-Three-Persons see Trinity, The
bodily factors 76; reasoning 249–50; social goddess spirituality 60
constructionism and 165; see also sexual difference Goddess, The 64–5
gender dissatisfaction 393, 398, 399, 403, 410–11 goddesses (Greek/Roman) 37
‘Gender Equality is Your Issue Too’ (Watson) 387 Goethe, J. 116

720
 INDEX

Gotanda, N. see Crenshaw, K. et al. (1995) Hekman, S. 62, 194

Gottsched (née Kalmus), Louise 97 Held, V. 89–90, 573, 610, 649; care ethics 562, 564,
Gouges, Olympe de 95, 97–9, 102 696–7
Goulet, D. 424 Heldke, L. 576
governmentality 685–6 ‘Héloïse complex’ 14–15, 62
Graham, A.C. 45 Heresies (journal) 434
Grear, A. 694 Herman, J. 224
‘Great Goddess, The’ (Heresies (journal)) 434 hermeneutical ontology: intersectionality 346;
Greece see Ancient Greece marginalization/injustice 263, 335, 502; silencing
Green, J. 272, 275 282, 289; trans* theory 268, 269, 270, 271–2,
Green, K. 95, 96 273–6
Green, L. 285 Herr, R.S. 561
Green Revolution 438–9, 440 Heschel, A.J. 309
Griffin, S. 434 heteronomous autonomy 476, 477
Gross, R. 447, 449, 450, 452 heteronormativity 301, 308, 315, 352, 383–4;
Grosz, E. 200, 203–4, 475 aesthetics 476, 477; Critical Race Theory (CRT)
group (collective) identities 211, 212, 215 362; disability 410; gender essentialism 171, 173,
Guattari, F. 415 188–9; trans theory 394
guilt 627–8 heterosexual relationships 83, 84, 88, 386
Gyn/ecology (Daly) 434 Heyes, C. 168, 400–1
Gyorgy, A. 433 hierarchical reflective endorsement 517, 518
Hierro, Graciela 639
Habermas, J.: critical theory 104; democratic theory Hintikka, M.B. 332
642, 643, 644, 646, 647–8, 649–50 Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women,
Hacking, I. 157, 162, 163 Philosophy, Etc. (Le Doeuff) 15, 62
Haddox, J.H. 637 Hippel, Theodor Gottlieb von 97, 103
Hafez, S. 454 Hirschmann, N. 173, 659, 665–6, 671
Hagengruber, R. 37 history of philosophy 13–21
Hahn, Hans 304 Hoagland, S. 137
Halberstam, J. 413 Hobbes, Thomas 219, 220, 703, 704; social contract
Hale, C.J. 396 theory 82–5, 87, 88, 89, 654, 666–7; State of
Hall, K. 471 Nature 529, 534
Halwani, R. 562 Hollywood, A. 61
Hammington, M. 136–7, 138–9 Homiak, M. 574
Hampson, D. 62 homonationalism 407
Hampton, J. 82–3, 88–90, 91, 658 ‘homosexuality’ 226
Hankivsky, O. 547 Honig, B. 378, 674
Hanshu (漢書) (The Book of Han) 40 Honneth, A. 233
Haraway, D. 248, 315–16 ‘honor’ killings 691
Harding, S. 247, 307–8, 310, 311, 332–3, 336–7 hooks, b. 170, 436, 669, 671, 674
harm 621, 623–4, 626, 628–9, 660 Hornsby, J. 281–3, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288
Harris, A. 362–3 households: democratic theory 644–5; gender
Harris, D. 123 oppression and 170; male dominance 84–5, 87;
Harris, H. 68 poverty and 421, 423–4, 428; privacy 668, 669;
Harris-Perry, M. 128–9 women’s subordination in 86–7, 89, 90, 91
Harrison, B. 67 Houston, B. 573
Hart, H.L.A. 702, 703–4, 706, 710 How to Suppress Women’s Writing (Russ) 634
Harth, E. 72 Howie, G. 452, 453, 455
Hartsock, N. 336, 337, 338 Hubbard, R. 317
Haslanger, S. 174, 184, 225–6, 252, 276; structural Human Condition, The (Arendt) 479, 645
injustice 623–4, 625; trans* theory 395, 396 human flourishing 65–8, 656
Hayek, F. von 655 Human Relations Area Files 321
Haynes, P. 68 human rights 94, 602, 613; equality/difference and
healthcare see bioethics 97–9; freedom 666–70; moral justification 505, 506,
Hegel, G.W.F. 107, 108–12, 218, 243, 667–8, 670 507–10; multiculturalism 595, 600
Heikes, D. 252 Human Rights Campaign (HRC) 389
Hein, H. 465 human security 550

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humanism: multiculturalism and 595–8; injustice 168, 176, 245, 251, 260, 263; ignorance and
postcolonialism and 598–603; visionary pragmatism epistemic injustice 268–71, 276–7; trans* theory
139–40 and hermeneutical marginalization/injustice 273–6;
humanitarian intervention 695, 697 trans* theory and testimonial injustice 271–3
Hume, D. 530 Innerlichkeit (inwardness) 116
hunger 440–1 institutional harms/responsibilities 609, 610, 620
‘hunter-gatherers’ 246–7, 332 integration reflective endorsement 518
Hursthouse, R. 569 intellectual virtues 568
Husserl, E. 144, 145, 146, 151, 186, 190 intelligibility 147, 268, 269, 272; hermeneutical
hybridity see multiculturialism; postcolonialism injustice 273, 274, 275
Hypatia (journal) 133, 134, 137, 332, 436 intentionality 189
hyperindividualism 515, 516 interactionist model: sex differences 319; trans*
theory 400
idea-construction 157–61, 163 intergender 397
ideal moral self 582 internal intersectionality 210
ideal/non-ideal theory 194 International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics
idealism 654, 657, 658 (IJFAB) 585, 588
idealization 235 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 609, 615
identity politics 52, 479, 517, 694; bioethics and international relations: care ethics 550, 551
582–3, 584, 586; Black Feminism 123, 124–5; International Year of the Woman (1975) 637
Critical Race Theory (CRT) 360; freedom interpersonal relationships; bioethics 584, 585–6; care
673–4; gender 163–4, 170, 172; intersectionality ethics 610, 656; Confucianism 556, 559, 560, 561,
343, 350, 353; power dynamics 684, 686–7; 562–4, 565; structural injustice 620, 625
social identity and credibility 259–61; see also interpersonal trust 264
borderlands identity intersectionality 101, 343–4, 352–3, 465, 474;
identity schemes 212–14 borderlands identity 210–11; care ethics 544,
identity-related harm 274–5 546–7; Critical Race Theory (CRT) 345, 348, 350,
If Women Counted (Waring) 330–1 359, 361–8; critiques and controversies 351–2;
Ignorance 259, 275–6, 305, 643, 649, 659; epistemic gender essentialism 171, 172, 176; gender and
injustice and 268–71, 272, 276–7 political action/narrative 476–82, 83; genealogy
illocutionary disablement 280–1, 282, 284, 286, 287 of 343–8; intersectional methods/studies 348–50;
imagination 208, 373, 379, 532, 674–5; aesthetics trans* theory 400, 402
468–70, 476, 489; body and embodiment 182–3; intersex 158, 160, 394
moral justification 511 intuition 225, 395, 432, 520, 521, 559
impartiality 542, 560, 585 ‘inversion’ thesis 337
imperialism 52, 337, 364, 475, 532, 544; moral Invisibility Blues (Wallace) 126
justification 508, 510; postcolonialism 598 Invisible Man, The (Ellison) 127
implicit bias 502, 623–4 invulnerability 693–4
In a Different Voice (Gilligan) 558, 560 Irigaray, L. 65, 66, 89, 151, 189, 475; Ancient
inaudibility 281, 282, 287 Greece 24, 27, 28, 29, 30; beautiful and sublime
inclusive epistemic democracy 503–6, 509–10 494; Germany 111–12, 114; language 292, 293,
inclusivism 450, 451, 452 294, 295, 296–8, 300; materiality 196, 199, 200,
indigenous people 666, 673, 675 204, 205
individual essentialism 174–5, 177, 178 ‘iron maidens’ 486
individual freedom 666, 670, 671–3, 667–8, 670 Isherwood, L. 64–5
individualism 172, 218, 236, 479, 601, 602; anti- Islam 453–4, 596, 598, 600, 612, 673
individualism in philosophy of mind 221–2;
autonomy 515, 516; bioethics 581, 582, 583; Jacobson, A.J. 323–4
global justice 609; liberalism 652–3, 656, 657–8; Jacobson, D. 284
power dynamics 681–2; social contract theory Jacques, J. 273, 274
89–90, 91; virtue ethics 572; see also particularity/ Jaggar, A. 532–3, 644; bioethics 579, 582, 585; global
particularism development 421, 427, 428–9; global justice 608,
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (United 609, 611, 612, 613, 615–16; structural injustice
States) 350 624, 625
inductive reasoning 249 Jagger, G. 195
ineffability 281, 282 Jagose, A, 389–90, 572
Inessential Woman (Spelman) 171 James, S.M. 139–40

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James, William 132 Kiraly, M. 656

Jantzen, G. 63, 66, 692 Kittay, E.F. 220, 221, 413, 611; care ethics 545, 546,
Jarman, M. 414 573, 587, 659; Confucianism 564, 565
JCSEPHS see Joint Caucus for Socially Engaged Klinger, C. 104
Philosophers and Historians of Science Knoblock, J. 45
Jeffreys, S. 384 Knott, S. 95
Jena Romantic Circle 115 knowing and knowledge 270, 284, 337, 502;
JENDA: A Journal of Cultural and African Women’s debatable/undebatable data 636; intersectionality
Studies 53 347, 350, 351; knowledge-producing institutions
Jenkins, K. 395, 396 and communities 263–5; Native American chaos
jeopardy model: oppression 122, 123, 125, 126 theory 373, 377; situated 256, 258
Johnson, L. 413 Kofman, S. 113, 114, 494
Johnson-Odim, C. 437 Koggel, C. 427
Joint Caucus for Socially Engaged Philosophers and Korsmeyer, C. 474–5, 486
Historians of Science (JCSEPHS) 311 Kourany, J. 309
Jones, K. 258, 262 Koyama, E. 394
Jones, R. 468–9, 470 Kristeva, J. 27, 30, 173, 204, 238; Judeo-Christian
Jordan-Young, R. 320 religious traditions 66, 67; language 292, 294–5,
Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 296, 298; narrative and action theory 480, 481,
The 413 482; unitary self 208, 210, 212
journals 115, 116 Kukla, R. 288
Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor 633–5
Judeo-Christian religious/theological traditions: La Logique, ou l’art de penser (Logic, or the Art of
attraction of engagement with 61–3, 64–5; Thinking) (Arnauld and Nicole) 74, 77
historical religious/theological critiques 60–1; labour 637, 658, 660–1; aesthetics and 465; care ethics
plurality and feminist flourishing 65–8; practical 544, 546, 548–9, 551; discrimination/equality
philosophy of 63–4; see also religious diversity 705, 706, 707, 708; ecofeminism and 438–9, 441;
judgement 77–8, 80, 542; Kantian viewpoint 466–8, freedom 669–70; gendered wage gap 534; global
489–91 development and 421, 422, 426, 428; global justice
Juro, R. 389 and 611, 614–16; materiality 198, 199; migration
just war theory 695–7 625; power dynamics and 682–3; social contract
justice 414, 573, 600, 703; bioethics 581, 586, 587; theory 86, 89; statistics 330–1; structural injustice
care ethics and 543, 546, 547–8, 549, 551, 558–9; 624–5, 627
ecofeminism 438–9; reasoning 249; testimony and Lacan, J. 30, 91, 293, 294, 493–4
261, 265 LaDuke, W. 435
Justice and the Politics of Difference (Young) 621 Lai, K. 560–1
Landes, J. 99
Kaag, J. 137 Lange, L. 102
Kafer, A. 406, 408, 410, 411 Langley, W. 323–4
Kang, H.-R. 609, 610 Langton, R. 280–3, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288
Kant, Immanuel 65, 244–5, 504, 671, 673; aesthetics language: barriers to equality/justice 51, 54, 57–8;
463, 466–8, 476; beautiful and sublime 479, construction of gender 300–1; gender and 292–5;
489–92; care ethics 545, 644; The Enlightenment masculinist theological 60; patriarchal order and
102, 103, 107; feminist reworking of 468–72; 299–300; politics of writing 295–7; sexual
liberalism 653; nature and freedom 108; rational difference and 297–8, 493; socio-linguistic practices
agency 529, 534, 535, 541; social contract theory and trans* theory 397–8, 402
82, 83, 85–6, 88, 89, 90; virtue ethics 568, 575 Laozi see Daodejing (Classics of Way and Its Power)
Keller, E.F. 244 Lara Zavala, M.P. 638
Keller, M. 454, 455 Latin America 598, 608, 612, 645; contemporary
Kellner, D. 646 feminist ethics 638–9; historical ethical challenges
Kenny, N.P. see Baylis, F. et al (2008) 632–5; modern women’s movements and
Keralio-Robert, L. 95 consciousness-raising 637–8; suffrage and women’s
Khader, S. 227–8, 427, 521, 550, 673 rights 635–7; testimonio and public protest 631–2
King, D. 128 Latina feminism 209–10, 214–15
King, Martin Luther 520, 523 ‘Laugh of the Medusa, The’ (Cixous) 295–6
King, U. 447 Lauretis, T. de 201
King, Ynestra 433 law see legal philosophy

723
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Law, Liberty, and Morality (Hart) 703, 706 Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (Walter) 486
Lawson, Tom 314 Livingston, J. 407
Le Doeuff, M. 14–15, 16, 61–3, 67, 68, 204 Lloyd, G. 15–17, 103, 243, 245, 252
‘learned woman’ model 97 locavorism 438
‘Lección de cocina’ (‘Cooking lesson’) (Castellanos) 637 Locke, John 85, 87, 653, 654, 666
Lectures on Anthropology (Kant) 491 Lógica viva (Living Logic) (Vaz Ferreira) 635, 636
Lee, L. 372 logical empiricism 303, 304, 310
legal philosophy 91, 345, 704–7, 710; abortion 709; logos see reasoning
non-ideal theory 701–2; positivism and separation Longino, H.E. 247, 248; science 306–7, 310–11,
of law/morality 702–4; principles of equality and 318–19; social science 332, 333, 334, 335, 336, 337
84; sexual harassment 707–9 Longinus 487
legal positivism 701, 702–3, 704 ‘looping effect’: social construction 162, 163, 164
legitimacy: political 643, 648 Lorde, A. 384, 600
Legrand, D. 188 love 66–7
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex Lugones, María 214–15, 222, 397, 598–9
(LGBTI) 226, 308, 315, 407; Africa 53, Lukes, S. 678
57; borderlands identities 214–15; social Luna, F. 587
constructionism 158, 160 Lüshi Chunqiu 44–5
lesbian theory and ethics 137, 298, 383–9 Lyotard, J.-F. 492–3
Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (Lyotard) 493
Let Me Speak! (Barrios de Chúngara et al.) 631 Maasai communities 507, 508, 509, 510
letter writing 95, 115, 116 Maathai, Wangari 56
Letters on Education (Macaulay) 100 Macaulay, Catherine 18, 100
Letters from Sweden (Wollstonecraft) 102 McCall, L. 365–6
Leviathan (Hobbes) 84–5 McFague, S. 67
Levinas, E. 347, 697 McGowan, M.K. 285
Levine, D. 550 Mack, P. 454, 455
LGBTI see lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and McKenna, E. 136, 138
intersex Mackenzie, C. 224; et al. (2014) 587
Li, C. 560, 561 McKim, R. 449–50
li (禮 rites) 558, 565 MacKinnon, C. 170, 220, 252, 362; freedom
‘liability model’ of responsibility 610 668; liberalism 653, 654, 655–6, 661; political
liberal feminism 88, 382–3, 644, 669, 681, 705–6; philosophy 644–5, 679, 690–1; pornography 707;
lesbian theory and ethics 383–9; queer theory sexual harassment 708; silencing 279, 280, 281,
389–91 286–7
liberal social contract theory 83, 88 McKinnon, R. 400
liberalism 26, 90, 363, 595–6, 612, 703; democratic McLaren, M. 573
theory 644, 646; feminist critiques of 652–6; Macpherson, C.B. 86–7
feminist liberalism 657–61; Native American McRuer, R. 406, 413
Chaos Theory 370–1, 379 Mahadevan, K. 601, 602, 603
liberation theology 60–1 Mahmood, S. 454, 455, 673
libertarian feminism see liberal feminism maid trade see domestic work
liberty see freedom ‘mail order brides’ 549
Liji (Book of Rites) 556 majoritarianism 704
Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (2009) (United male 16, 55, 165, 184; trans* theory 398, 399, 400
States) 706 male pseudonyms 17
linear-hormonal model: sex differences 318–19, 320 Malebranche, Nicolas 78
linguistic injustice 287–8, 289 La Malinche (the Traitor) 632–3
linguistic turn 195, 200 Mallory, C. 438
linguistics see language man: definition 395, 402
Lintott, S. 486 Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western
literacy 613, 614 Philosophy (Lloyd) 15–17, 243
Little, M. 537 ‘man-the-hunter’ hypothesis 246, 247
Liu Xuyi (刘绪义) 38–9 manifest concepts 276–7
lived experience 148–51, 221–5 Mann, B. 494
Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, Bishop of Puebla
Pragmatism, and Feminism (Sullivan) 138 633–4

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marginalization 377, 475, 502, 601, 612; testimony Merleau-Ponty, M.; body and embodiment 184;
263, 265 feminist phenomenology, 144–6, 147, 148, 149,
Maria, or the Wrongs of Women (Wollstonecraft) 150, 151
100, 102 Merrim, S. 633
Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (Irigaray) 114 mestiza consciousness 209
Marinucci, M. 390 metaethics 528–9, 538; moral epistemology 537; moral
marriage 19, 84–5, 532, 669, 691; power dynamics 679, scepticism 533–7; truth and 529–33
680; women’s subordination in 86–7, 89, 90, 91 Metaphysics of Morals (Kant) 103
Martin, E. 317 method 25, 30, 40, 108, 246; doubt methodology
Marxism 237, 336, 645; freedom 667–8; materiality 72–3, 74, 75, 77–80; ‘feminist method’ 328,
198, 199; power dynamics 682, 683; religious 329–30, 337; feminist phenomenology 143–8, 149;
diversity 452, 453; social contract theory 86, 89 pragmatism 135, 138; social sciences 332–4, 336,
masculinity 53, 401; aesthetics 464; criminal law 337; theological 62, 63, 64, 67
706; gender identity 173, 349; gendered reality ‘Method Question, The’ (Harding) 332
37, 38, 39, 40, 41; global development and 423; ‘Methodological Interpretation of Feminist
language and 297; metaphysical dualisms 114, Pragmatism, A’ (Gillberg) 139
115; objectivity 244; power and 42–3, 46, 47, 51; Meyers, D.T. 220, 518, 519, 520, 524, 613
pragmatism and 136; reasoning/objectivity 101, microcredit initiatives 616
245–6, 249; sexuality and 170; see also feminine microphysics of power 683–4
and femininity; men and boys; women and girls Mies, M. 421, 439, 602
Massacre in Mexico (Poniatowska) 632 Mikkola, M. 174–5
master and slave 62, 63, 110–11, 233, 679, 680 Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective 674
materiality 194, 205, 439, 440; new materialism militarism 52, 140, 314, 419, 437, 705; care ethics 547,
195–200; religious diversity and dialectical 548, 550; global development 609, 612, 615; Latin
materialism 446, 452–4, 456; sex/gender and America 632; liberalism 656; violence and 691,
mattering 200–4 692, 693, 695–6
Maternal Thinking (Ruddick) 540, 573, 576, 584 Mill, John Stuart 19, 284, 386, 667; liberalism 653,
maternity and maternalist feminism 28–31, 32, 151, 654, 655
465, 680; African culture 55; care ethics 220, 544, Miller, D. 628–9
549; cosmic mother/female body 36–9, 47; love and Miller, J.B. 680
67; violence and vulnerability 692, 695, 696; see Miller, S.C. 545, 610
also abortion; sexual reproduction Millett, K. 170
Matsuda, M. 222 Mills, C.W. 271, 350, 364, 608; social contract theory
mattering 197, 200–4 83, 84, 90, 667
Mead, G.H. 647 Mind (philosophy journal) 21
meaning: sublimation and 234–9 mind theory 72–3, 75, 78, 80, 212; anti-individualism
medical model: disability 408, 409–10, 411 in philosophy of 221–2
medicine see bioethics mind–body duality 180, 181–3, 186
Medina, J. 261, 263, 269, 270, 271 Minow, M. 708
Meditationes de prima philosophiae (Meditations on First misogynism 85, 113, 435; Aristotle 31–2; religious/
Philosophy) (Descartes) 73, 74, 181, 223 theological tradition 65
Meillassoux, Q. 197–8 ‘Missive Worthy of Athena’ see ‘Reply to Sister
men and boys 165; bodily qualities 71; care ethics 546, Philothea de la Cruz’ (Juana Inés de la Cruz)
547, 564, 573; domination of science and research Mitchell, D. 406–7
315; identity schemes 212, 213, 214; ‘man the modernization 96
hunter’ theory 332; rape and sexual assault 314; Moeller, H.-G. 36–7, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44
rights movement 382; sense of entitlement 91; Mohanty, C. 608, 614, 673
traditional power over women 18–21, 50; trans* Moi, T. 169, 199
theory 396; see also feminine and femininity; Monro, S. 349
masculinity; women and girls Montagu, Elizabeth 96
Menchú, R. 631, 632 Montuschi, E. 329
Mencius 556, 557, 558 moral justification: diversity/inequality and 501–2;
Mendoza, B. 610 epistemic injustice and 502–3; female genital
Menon, N. 669, 673 cutting (FGC) 507–10; inclusive epistemic
mental disability 411–13 democracy 503–6, 509–10; legal positivism 703;
mental health disorders 161–2, 238, 272, 581 mission/method of moral epistemology 511–12;
Merchant, C. 435 moral and political universalism 504–7

725
 INDEX

Moral para intelectuales (Ethics for Intellectuals) (Vaz natural law theory 700, 701, 703–4, 705, 707, 710
Ferreira) 635 naturalism 183–4, 186, 189–90, 611, 653
Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere naturalized epistemology 249, 250
(Lara Zavala) 638 nature: art and 468–9, 470
Moral Understandings (Walker) 611 Nazism 702, 703
morality and moral theory 323, 469, 538, 654, 657, Nedelsky, J. 659
658; absolutism 531, 532, 533, 538; agreement ‘Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, The’ (Dewey)
647–8; care ethics 540, 542, 561; deliberation 132, 133
542–3, 551; The Enlightenment 83, 88, 89, 90; negative freedom 667, 671, 675
epistemology 528, 537, 545; facts 528, 529; global negative liberty 653
justice 611–12; imperialism 531–2; methodological negative socio-epistemic status: Black women 120,
individualism 609; particularism 347; positivism 126–9
and separation of law/morality 702–4; realism 529, nego-feminism 54
533, 538; relativism 530–1, 532, 533, 538; repair Négritude 148
610–11; scepticism 533–7, 538; universal principles Nelson, J.L. 222, 227
372, 504; virtue ethics 568, 569, 573 Neo-Platonism 17
morally required action 535 neoliberalism 67–8, 88, 351, 548; disability and 406,
mothers and motherhood see maternity and 407; global justice 607, 613, 614–15, 616
maternalist feminism nepantlera (among others) 209, 210
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo 632 neural imaging 588
motivational displacement 559, 564 Neurath, Otto 303, 304
Mujer que sabe latín (Castellanos) 637 neuroscience 316, 319–20, 323–4
Mukherjee, A.P. 601 neurosexism 250
Mulder, A.-M. 63 new materialism 184, 194, 195–200, 205
multiculturalism 532, 595–8, 612 New Materialism (Dolphijn and van der Tuin) 197
multistability: oppression 120, 121–6 Nicholson, L. 173
multivariate analysis (multilinear regression analysis) Nicole, Pierre 74, 77
344–5, 353 Nietzsche, Friedrich 65–6, 107, 112–15, 494
Mulvey, L. 465 Nnaemeka, Obioma 54
Murray, S. 408 ‘No Right to Own?: The Early Twentieth-Century
Muslim communities 97, 598, 673; veiling of women ‘Alien Land Law’ as a Prelude to Internment’
453–4, 531, 596, 600, 612 (Aoki) 364
Mussett, S. 111 Noddings, N.: bioethics 586, 587; care ethics 540, 542,
My Sense of Silence (Davis) 215 543, 545, 550, 585; Confucianism 558–9, 560, 561,
myth of the cave (Plato) 27–31 562, 563, 564
mythos (plot) 480–2 non-alienation 518
non-binary identified 396
Nagoshi, J. 349 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 50
naming theory 300 non-human primate society 315–16
Narayan, U. 171, 335, 426–7, 531, 544, 601–2; global non-ideal theory 9, 90, 608, 616; legal positivism
justice 609, 611, 616 701–2, 709–10; virtue ethics 575, 576
Narrating Evil: A Post-Metaphysical Theory of Reflective non-truism 88
Judgment (Lara Zavala) 638 normative approach; democratic theory 642, 643–4
narrative and action theory 222, 223, 224; care ethics normative transformer 660
543; gender intersectionality and aesthetic/political Norris, John 78
action/narrative 476–82, 483; Native American Nuremberg trials 703
chaos theory 372–3, 376–7; self-constitution nurturant/non-nurturant care 547, 549, 560
225–7; see also testimony Nussbaum, M.532–3, 613, 657–8; capabilities
narrowly programmatic autonomy 519 approach 505–6, 574, 597, 671–2; global
Nash, J. 366–7, 368 development 425–6, 428
natality 692 Nzegwu, N. 613, 614
National Organization for Women 388
nationalism 695 ‘object relations’ theory 232, 233
Native Americans: chaos theory 370, 372–5; object-construction 162–4
ecofeminism 435; politics of difference 371, 375–9 objectification 188
nativism 399 objectivity 158–9, 186; rationality and 246–9; science
natural attitude 144–5 and 264–5, 432; social science 331, 334, 335, 336

726
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Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime Pang, A. 560

(Kant) 491 paranoid readings 674–5
Occupy Movement 351 Parekh, S. 613
Ocen, P. 348 parenting 331, 434, 624
Ogundipe-Leslie, Molara 54 Parfit, D. 505
Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo 54 parler femme (‘speaking (as) woman’) 295
Okin, S.M. 532, 612; freedom 668; liberalism 658, Parrenas, R.S. 607
659; social contract theory 83, 84, 88, 90, 102; partiality 542, 556, 560, 564, 565, 654
virtue ethics 570, 572 participatory democracy 378–9, 428, 565; freedom
Oksala, J. 685 667, 669, 672; social contract theory 90, 91
On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship particularity/particularism 98, 103, 149, 376, 451; care
(Condorcet) 98 ethics 542–3; Confucianism 556, 559, 560, 561,
On, B. 693, 697 562, 563–4; see also individualism
On the Beautiful and the Sublime (Kant) 103 Passions de l’âme, Les (The Passions of the Soul)
On the Civil Improvement of the Jews (Dohm) 97 (Descartes) 73, 77, 79
On the Civil Improvement of Women (Hippel) 97 Pastavas, A. 410
On Liberty (Mill) 653 Pateman, C. 654–5, 680; social contract theory 82, 83,
On The Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) 115 84, 85, 86–8, 90–1
On Violence (Arendt) 685 paternal power 87
O’Neill, E. 17–18 pathologies of the social 150
O’Neill, O. 504 patriarchal order 18–21, 456, 645; Africa 49, 56,
Only Words (MacKinnon) 279 57; Ancient Greece 25, 26; Critical Race Theory
ontological pluralism 334 (CRT) 362; Daoism 35, 46; desire for male
operative concepts 276, 277 child 55; ecofeminism 432, 436, 439–40, 441–2;
opportunity 524, 583, 620, 671, 701 free and equal persons 83–4, 85, 90, 91; global
oppression 150, 320, 387, 659, 687; autonomy development and 421; Judeo-Christian religious
and 515–23; bioethics 580; care ethics 544, tradition 60, 61, 62, 66; language and 292, 294,
549; Critical Race Theory (CRT) 362, 363; 299–300; Latin America 637; legal positivism
ecofeminism 436, 437; feminist virtue ethics 701, 704, 707; liberalism 652; mental health
571, 572; freedom and 665, 666, 670, 671, 675; disorders 238; metaethics 531; oppression 382,
intersectionality 343–4, 345, 346, 347, 351–2, 427, 452; power and 42–3, 46, 47, 51, 62, 508;
353; language and 292, 293; metaethics 528–9, silencing and 56; sublimation and meaning 235,
536; moral justification 501, 503; multistability 237; violence and vulnerability 690–1; see also
of 120, 121–6; negative socio-epistemic status oppression; power dynamics
126–9; patriarchal order 382; politics of spatiality Patton, P. 107
129–30; relational autonomy and 516–23; religious Paz, O. 633
diversity 453–4; sexual harassment 314, 515, peace project 208
707–9; structural injustice 620, 621, 622, 623; Peat, F.D. 378
subjectivity and 232, 233, 235, 236, 238; trans Peirce, Charles S. 132, 135
theory 393, 394, 396, 400, 401, 402; trauma and Peller, G. see Crenshaw, K. et al. (1995)
traumatic survivors 227, 228; trust/trustworthiness perception 147–8, 149, 150, 151, 203
258–9, 260; virtue ethics 574–5, 576; see also Peregrinations (Lyotard) 493
patriarchal order; power dynamics Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime) (Longinus) 487
Orenstein, G. 433, 436 perlocutionary frustration 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 286
Ortiz, V. see Barrios de Chungara, D. et al. Perry, R. 72, 73, 77
Ortner, S. 433, 434 personal identity 211, 215, 218–19, 227–8;
Oshana, M. 520–1, 523, 524–5 anti-individualism in philosophy of mind
Otherness 493–4, 495, 601–2 221–2; bioethics 582–3, 584, 586; care ethics
outcome responsibility 628 and relational self 219–21; intersectionality 343,
‘Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory, and Personal 346, 352, 353; lived experience and 222–5; social
Identity’ (Brison) 223 construction and narrative self-constitution 225–7
outsider jurisprudence 345, 346 Phaedo (Plato) 224
‘oxymoron problem’ 18 phallologocentric/phallogocentric approach 25, 32
phenomenology see feminist phenomenology
pacifism 694, 695–6, 698 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty) 145
Paley, G. 433 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 108, 109, 110, 111–12
Palmer, C. 314, 321 phenotypes 322

727
 INDEX

Phillips, A. 596, 597 postmodernism 173, 346, 595, 649–50, 660

Philo 244 poststructuralism 649, 672, 683–4, 691
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Habermas) Potter, E. 244
649–50 Potter, N. 572
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Poullain de la Barre, François 74–6, 77, 79, 80
Sublime and Beautiful, A (Burke) 487–9, 490 poverty 164, 478, 590, 671; global development 419,
Philosophical Imaginary, The (Le Doeuff) 14 420, 422–4, 426; global justice 607, 608, 609,
Philosophical Radicals 20 610, 613
philosophy: historical origins of 24–6; ‘male master’ power dynamics 678–9; aesthetics and 475, 478, 479;
62, 63; participation rates 20; terminology 24–6; associational life 645; autonomy and 520, 543, 596;
women’s absence from 18–21, 50, 57, 61, 62, 219 bioethics 580, 587; care ethics 547–8; diffusion
Philosophy of Social Science: A New Introduction of 334, 335; female power/strategy 43–6; feminist
(Cartwright and Montuschi) 329 ethics/virtue ethics 569–72, 575; freedom 671, 672;
physicalism 183, 184, 221 language 292; liberalism 654, 659; moral justification
piety movements 673 503–4, 506, 507, 510, 511; multiculturalism 599;
Plant, J. 434 poststructuralist feminism 683–4; power-over/
Plantinga, A. 451 power-to 679–81; resistance 686–7; socialist
Plato 181, 224, 294, 297, 485; as a feminist 25, 26–31, feminism 682–3; trust/trustworthiness and testimony
32, 39 257, 258, 260; violence and 685–6; see also
pleasure 469–70, 487, 490 oppression; patriarchal order
‘pleasure kidnappings’ 638 practical conceptual ignorance 271
Plumwood, V. 251, 435 practical reasoning 249, 250
pluralism 94–7, 138–9, 310–11, 333, 375–6; pragmatic values 334
multiculturalism/postcolonialism 595, 596; pragmatism 133–6, 649; contemporary 137–40;
religious diversity 450, 451, 452; uniqueness and feminist recovery projects 132–3, 137; historical
aesthetics 479 connections 136–7
Poetics (Aristotle) 480 pregnancy 113, 114, 187–8, 707–8
Pogge, T. 424, 426 Pregnancy Discrimination Act (United States) 707–8
Pohlhaus, G. 263, 270 prejudice 269, 272, 289, 305, 466, 502
Poland 645–6 prenatal femicide 440
political bios 482 prescriptive essentialism 172–3, 174
political determinism 653–4 Price, M. 412, 413
political ecology 438 Prince, V. 394
political liberalism 654 Principia philosophiae (Principles of Philosophy)
Political Liberalism (Rawls) 702 (Descartes) 18, 77, 183
political relational model: disability 410 Principle of Utility 504, 505
political responsibility 625–7, 628, 629 prisons 348, 665
political rights 169, 668 privacy 668–9, 709
political social contract theory 82, 86–8 probate courts 705
political violence 694–8 procedural relational autonomy 516–19, 520, 522,
politics 31, 52, 66, 68, 246, 309; aesthetics and 463–6; 523, 524
gender intersectionality and action/narrative productive imagination 468–9
476–82, 483; moral justification 505; see also productive power 684
democratic theory programmatic autonomy 519
Politics (Aristotle) 31 ‘property in the person’ 86, 90
Politics of Piety (Mahmood) 454 propositional ignorance 271
polygamy 55, 532, 600 proprioceptive awareness 398
Poniatowska, E. 632 prospective responsibility 629
pornography 706, 707; speech and silencing 279, 280, Prosser, J. 398, 400
281, 282, 283, 285 prostitution 706–7
positive freedoms 667, 671, 673 proto-lesbian ethics 137
positivism 701, 702–4, 709–10 psychoanalytic theory 66, 293; subjectivity and subject
postcolonial analysis approach (PCA) 507–9, 510 positions 231–4; unconscious and sublimation
postcolonialism 544, 669, 672–3, 696; Africa 49, 234–9
52, 57; multiculturalism 595, 598–603; see also Puar, J. 407
colonialism; Critical Race Theory (CRT); race and public/private sphere 31, 99, 104, 434; bioethics 579;
racism; slavery care ethics 540, 558, 560, 564–5; democratic theory

728
 INDEX

646, 647, 650; freedom 668, 669, 670; liberalism democratic theory 643, 647, 648–9, 650; The
653, 655, 657, 658; power dynamics 683, 684 Enlightenment 94, 101, 103–4; German Idealism
purposiveness 109 108; ‘maleness’ of 252; metaethics and 533, 535,
Pythagoras 63, 65; table of opposites 15–16 536, 537; morality and 249–50, 501, 503, 504,
509–10, 511–12; rationality and 249–51; structural
Que bom te ver viva (How Nice to See You Alive Again) injustice 627; understanding and 85–6, 469; unitary
(film) 632 self 207–8; women lacking 25, 29, 30, 31, 75, 237;
queer theory 158, 171, 214–15, 298, 301; disability see also rationality
and 405–8; freedom 672, 674–5; intersectionality Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of
346, 377; liberal feminism 383, 389–91; power Democracy (Fraisse) 18–19
dynamics 684–5; trans theory and 394, 398 reciprocity 559
‘quite other’ (tout-autre) 599 recognition 376
reductionist ecology 439
race and racism 164, 260, 324, 388, 515, 596; aesthetics Reed v. Reed (1971) 705
and 464, 465–6, 471, 475, 478, 480; beautiful and Reflections on Black Men (Réflexions sur les hommes
sublime 489, 490; gender essentialism 170, 171; nègres) (Gouges) 99
intersectionality 344, 345, 346, 352, 353; labour Reflections on the French Revolution (Burke) 100
markets 614–15; legal positivism 703–4; structural reflective judgment 470–1
injustice 623–4; trans* theory and 401; violence and reflexivity 261
vulnerability 696; see also colonialism; Critical Race reidentification 225–7
Theory (CRT); postcolonialism; slavery Reigel, J. 45
Racial Contract, The (Mills) 364 Reiman, J. 627–8
racial contract theory 84 Reineke, M.J. 692, 693
racial oppression 61, 152, 232 Reinharz, S. 332
radical feminism 400–1, 644–5, 679, 695; legal relational autonomy 516–23, 585–7, 588, 659
positivism 701, 706–7; lesbian/queer theory 382, relational self 218, 222, 234, 427; care ethics and
383, 385, 386, 387–8, 390; liberalism 653, 654, 656 219–21, 541
Rajan, R.S. 600 relationship: religion and 65–6, 67
Ramabai, Pandita 602 relativism 249, 595
rape and sexual assault 87, 223–4, 286, 314, 362–3, Religious Ambiguity and Religious Diversity (McKim)
680; abuse 279, 281; global justice 610–11; Latin 449–50
America 638–9; masculinity and 706; metaethics religious diversity 446–7; autonomy 522–3;
and 529, 530, 531, 532, 535, 537; vulnerability and Eurocentric bias 450, 455, 456; feminist
689, 690, 691, 692, 693, 694 epistemology and 448–52; gender and 447–8;
Raphael, M. 61 global justice 612; materialism and 452–4; moral
rational choice theory 249, 533–5 justification 503; subjectivity and 454–6; see also
rationality 42–3, 64, 243–6, 251–3, 412–13, 448; Judeo-Christian religious/theological traditions
aesthetics and 478; agency 534, 535; liberalism Remarks (Kant) 491
653, 654; moral scepticism 533, 536; objectivity remedial responsibility 628–9
and 246–9; power dynamics 685–6; reasoning and ren (仁 love/goodness/benevolence/humaneness)
249–51, 511; science and 303, 306–9, 310, 311; see 556–7, 560, 565
also reasoning ‘Reply to Sister Philothea de la Cruz’ (Juana Inés de la
Rawlinson, M. 588 Cruz) 633–5
Rawls, J. 702; democratic theory 642, 643–4, 649; reproduction see sexual reproduction
liberalism 652, 654, 655, 657, 658, 659; social Reproduction of Mothering, The (Chodorow) 232
contract theory 82, 83, 84, 88, 89, 90 reproductive freedom 668–9
Raymond, J. 400 Republic (Plato) 25–7, 27–8, 29
Razack, S. 612 republicanism 666, 672
Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences research centres and institutes 52
(Brodbeck) 329 resistance 680, 686–7, 693, 694, 696
Reagon, B.J. 120 responsibility 286–7; structural injustice 620, 621–2,
reality and realism: enforcement of 402; masculinity 625–9
37, 38, 39, 40, 41; moral realism 529, 533, 538; Responsibility for Justice (Young) 621
social reality 7, 175, 345, 452, 648; see also social responsivity 234
constructionism Retrato de Teresa (Portrait of Teresa) (film) 637
reasoning (logos) 15–17, 77, 78, 412, democracy Reuter, M. 76
and 18–21; bioethics 586; care ethics 542, 560; Reuther, R.R. 435

729
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Revolution in Poetic Language (Kristeva) 27, 30 School of Purity and Stillness (清靜) (Qingjing) 41
Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism Schopenhauer, Arthur 494
(Diamond and Orenstein) 436 Schultz, V. 708
Reynolds, T.A. see Frederick, D.A. et al. Schutte, O. 608, 612–13
Rich, A. 170, 383–4 Schweik, S. 414
‘right of man’ 19 science 244, 310–12; birth of feminist philosophy
Riley, D. 173 of 305–6; ecofeminism 432, 435, 439; feminist
Riley, S.S. 436–7 rationality 306–9; knowledge-producing
Roach, C. 433 institutions and communities 263–5; Native
Robinson, F. 550, 609 American chaos theory 373; pre-feminist
Robinson, Mary 442 philosophy of 303–5
Roe vs. Wade (1973) 668, 709 Science–The Endless Frontier: Report to the President
Roen, K. 349 on a Program for Postwar Scientific Research
Rogers v. EEOC (1971) 708 (Bush) 305
Rogers, W.A. see Mackenzie, C. et al. (2014) scientific communities 246–9
Rolin, K. 265 ‘scientific world-conception’ 303–4
Roman Empire 666 Scotland 96
Roof, J. 388 Scott, J. 98, 148
Rorty, R. 134–5, 136 Scott, Sarah 96
Roscoe, W. 377 Scully, J.L. 582
Rose, G. 112, 116 Second Sex, The (de Beauvoir) 14, 111, 185–6, 189,
Rose, T. 348 487, 670
Roughgarden, J. 323 second-order reflection 517, 518
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 14, 85, 91, 491, 654; The second-wave feminism 13, 15, 19, 679, 683; freedom
Enlightenment 95, 100–1, 102–3 669, 670, 673
Rublev, A. 67 Sedgwick, E. 238, 475, 674–5
Ruddick, S.: care ethics 540, 543, 544, 550, 551, 587; Seigfried, Charlene Haddock 133, 134, 135–6
Confucianism 562, 563, 564; virtue ethics 573, self-authorization 523, 524–5
576, 584 self-denial 208
Ruether, R.R. 60–1 self-determination 180, 597, 603, 667; autonomy 521,
Russ, J. 634 523–4, 525
Russell, B. 222 self-fragmentation 208
self-governance 236, 520, 521, 523, 524, 525
Sacks, O. 398 self-identity 211–12, 215, 396, 401–2
Salamon, G. 398–9 self-interested action 534, 535
Salleh, A. 435, 436, 437, 438, 439 self-positing 108–9
Sallis, J. 470 self-preservation 529
salons 95, 96, 97, 107, 115, 116 self-regarding attitudes 522, 523, 525, 576, 586
same-sex love 137 self-transcendence 670
Sandahl, C. 406 self-transformation 100
Sanders-Staudt, M. 573–4 semantic externalism 221
Sartre, J.-P. 188–9 ‘semiotic’ 294–5, 296
sati (ritualized widow immolation) 611 Sen, A. 425, 426, 505–6, 671–2
Saul, J. 395 sensibility: aesthetics and 474, 475, 476, 488;
Savoring Disgust (Korsmeyer) 486 perception and 147–8, 149, 150
Sawicki, Jana 674, 675 separatist feminism see radical feminism
#SayHerName 478 Serano, J. 275, 277, 394
Scarry, E. 689 Serious Proposal to the Ladies, A (Astell) 77
Schechtman, M. 225 Sevenhuisjen, S. 546
Scheffler, S. 627 sex discrimination 704–6, 707
Scheman, N. 221, 228, 252, 265 sex education 101
Schilder, P. 398, 399 sex (gendered) 17–18; construction of 157–66
Schlegel, Dorothea Veit 115, 116 Sex of Knowing, The (Le Doeff) 15
Schlegel-Schelling, Caroline 115–16 Sex Roles 320
scholarship 19 sex trade/trafficking 549, 607, 609, 610, 613, 706
Scholasticism 17 sex/gender distinction 201, 317–18, 320, 323,
Scholz, S. 670 324; disability and 410–11; liberal feminism

730
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384–5, 386–7; radical feminism 388–9; social slavery 96–7, 101, 360, 665, 679; see also colonialism;
constructionism 157–70; social science 330, 335 Critical Race Theory (CRT); postcolonialism; race
Sexing the Body (Fausto-Sterling) 159–60 and racism
sexism 344, 426, 673; cultural membership 595; Slicer, D. 436
religious diversity and 449; science and 305–6, Slote, M. 545, 562, 573
308–9, 315, 323; social science and 329–30, 332; SlutWalks 351
structural injustice 623–4, 625; subjectivity 235, Smith, D. 331–2, 336, 337
237, 238, 239; trans* theory 396 Smith, H. 77
sexual abuse/assault see rape and sexual assault Snow, N. 571
Sexual Contract, The (Pateman) 86–8, 90, 654–5, 680 Snyder, S. 406–7
sexual difference 18–19, 89, 100, 111, 653; Sobre feminismo (Vaz Ferreira) 635
aesthetics and 475, 491–2, 493; Ancient Greece social constructionism 38, 390, 587; autonomy
24–5, 26; biological sciences 316, 317, 318–19, 516–23, 586; borderlands identity 207, 209–10,
321–23; language/writing 297–8; materiality and 212–15; definition of ‘woman’ 396–7; gender 166,
196, 197, 200, 202–3; myth of the cave 27, 28, 169–70, 176; ideas and concepts 157–61; illusion
29, 30, 32; rationality/objectivity 246; religious and 161–2; kinds and 161, 164–5; liberalism
diversity 449; social constructionism 160, 165; 657, 659, 660–1; materiality 202–3; narrative
see also gender difference self-constitution 225–7; objects and 162–4; queer
sexual harassment 314, 515, 707–9 theory 398; race and racism 360; trans* theory
sexual objectification 170 398–9, 400; see also reality and realism
sexual orientation 272 social contract theory 82–91, 219–20, 654–5, 666–7,
sexual reproduction 322, 438, 691, 709–10; aesthetics 680; intersectionality 364, 368
and 488–9, 491; bioethics 579, 580–1, 582, 588; social epistemology 248
ethics 521, 549; historical philosophy 31–2, 39, social imaginaries 127, 128, 130, 213
55; see also abortion; maternity and maternal social individuals 175–6
reproduction social inequality 501–2, 515
Sexual Subversions (Grosz) 204 social kinds 161, 162, 164–5, 168, 174
sexual violence see rape and sexual assault social model: disability 408, 409–10, 411
sexual visibility/agency 410 social recognition 521–2, 525
Sexual/Textual Politics (Moi) 199 social reproduction 682–3
sexuality 101, 170, 201, 506, 679, 686; aesthetics and social science 328–9; community values 333–6;
474, 475; dominance model 706–7; lesbian/queer feminist method debate 328, 329–33, 334;
theory 383, 386 intersectionality 343, 344–5; standpoint theory
shame 185, 236, 238, 288, 576 336–8
Sherwin, S. 570, 585, 587, 621; see also Baylis, F. et al social transformation including women in Africa
(2008) (STIWA) 54
Shields, S. 319 socialist feminism 26, 645, 669, 682–3
Shiva, V. 438–9, 440–1, 615 Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice
Shuowen Jiezi (說文解字) (Xu Shen (許慎)) 40 (SPSP) 311
Sidgwick, H. 505 socio-historical processes 157–8, 160, 166, 176–7,
Siebers, T. 409 231–4
silencing 238, 279–80; conceptions of 280–2; harm/ Socrates 26, 27–8, 30, 31, 224
wrong argument 282–7; related phenomena Solidarity (labour movement) 646
287–9; reproduction of patriarchal ideology and Somers, M. 478
56; testimonial quieting/smothering 260–1, 269, Sophist (Plato) 30
273, 282 Sophocles 111–12
‘silencing-as-linguistic- frustration’ approach Soskice, J.M. 61
287, 288 soul 180, 181–2
Silvers, A. 413 Souls of Black Folks, The (Du Bois) 128
simple silence 280, 281, 282 Spade, D. 411
simultaneity 123 Spain 96
Singer, P. 425, 426, 609, 611 spatiality politics 129–30, 149
Sister Citizen (Harris-Perry) 128–9 Speculum of the Other Woman (Irigaray) 27, 28, 29,
sisterhood 55 30, 494
situated knowing 256, 257, 265, 337 speech 98, 647–8, 649; gender differences 292, 295,
situated self 104 296; silencing 279, 283–4, 287
‘skin ego’ 398 speech act theory 286, 288–9, 301

731
 INDEX

‘Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts’ (Langton) 280 Sully, J. 21

Spelman, E. 171 Summers, Lawrence 314
spirituality 432, 435 Sun Buer (孫不二) 41
Spivak, G. 237, 471, 599–600, 695 Superson, A. 576
SPSP see Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice surrogacy 549, 581, 583–4, 608–9, 616
Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (Derrida) 113 Swanton, C. 575
Squires, J. 173 Swinburne, R. 65
Srivastava, S. 352 symbolic matricide 30
SRPoiSE see Consortium for Socially Relevant symbolic violence 691, 692, 693
Philosophy of/in Science and Engineering Symposium (Plato) 30, 39
‘Stabat Mater’ (Kristeva) 67 syncretism see multiculturalism; postcolonialism
standpoint approach 13, 247–8, 307–8, 310, 432, 588; system-based oppression 121–2, 124, 125
intersectionality 347; pragmatism 137, 138; social systematic relations 623, 625
science and 328, 336–8
Stanley, J. 282 Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist
Star, D. 561 Literary Criticism (Castillo) 634
Starhawk 435 Tao, J. 560
state-organized feminism 52 target approach: virtue ethics 575
statistical reasoning 249 Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist Feminist Perspective, The
Stein, Edith 143 (McKenna) 138
Steinbrügge, L. 102–3 taxation 610
stereotype threat 250–1 Taylor, B. 95
sterility 55 Taylor, C. 671, 673
Stewart, M. 344, 365 Taylor, Harriet 19
STIWA see social transformation including women tempered equality 307
in Africa tension-loaded structures 233
Stoljar, N. 521 Terrell, H.K. 349
Stone, A. 160–1, 164, 176 Tessman, L. 536, 574–5, 576
Stone-Mediatore, S. 477, 482 testimonial injustice: moral justification 502;
strategic essentialism 600 trans* theory 268–9, 270, 272–3, 276; trust/
Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) trustworthiness 260, 261, 262, 263
(International Monetary Fund) 609, 615 testimonio (Latin America) 631–2
structural injustice 269, 620–9, 656, 706 testimony 256–7, 335; ethics and 257–9; feminist
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere analyses of 265; knowledge-producing institutions
(Habermas) 646, 647 and communities 263–5; maladapted norms of
structural violence 690–1, 692, 693 credibility 261–3; social identity 259–61; see also
structures/social structures 636 narrative and action theory
Stryker, S. 394 theoretical reason 250
Stuart, E. 65 Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism
subaltern counter-publics 104, 600, 601 of Black Women (James and Busia) 139–40
subject positions 231–4 Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas) 647
‘Subject and Power’ (Foucault) 685 Theory of Justice, A (Rawls) 659, 702; democratic
subject-centered philosophy 233–4 theory 643, 644; social contract theory 82, 83, 84
‘Subjection of Women, The’ (Mill) 386 ‘There Is No Alternative’ (‘TINA’ doctrine) 64
subjectivity 211, 248–9; psychoanalytic theory 231–4; third sex 158
religious diversity and 446, 454–6 third-person narratives 223, 224
sublimation 234–9 third-wave feminism 656
sublime see beautiful and sublime Thomas, K. see Crenshaw, K. et al. (1995)
subordination 673, 706; bioethics 579; in family/ Thornhill, R. 314
marriage 86–7, 89, 90, 91, 134, 136; pornography Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
and 285, 656; power dynamics 679, 680, 685, 687; (Wollstonecraft) 100
in society 96; virtue ethics and 569–72, 573, 574, ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ (Young) 147–8, 187
575, 576 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche) 113, 114
substantive relational autonomy 518, 519–23 Timaeus (Plato) 27, 28–9, 29–30
suffrage 635–7, 666, 668 Tirrell, L. 114–15, 610–11
Suleri, S. 601 Title IX (Education Amendment to the United States
Sullivan, S. 138, 149–50 Constitution) (1972) 386–7

732
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Todd, J. 100 unitary self 207–8

torture 638–9, 690 United Nations Development Program (UNDP) 425
Toscano, A. 452, 453 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Toward A Feminist Theory of The State Change (UNFCCC) 441–2
(MacKinnon) 653 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)
Townley, C. 259 (1948) 505
traditional ecological knowledge 435 universal moral rules/principles 581–2, 643, 649;
trans* theory 165, 215, 226, 393–5; body and aesthetics and 467–8, 471; care ethics 542–3, 547
embodiment 398–400; conceptual analysis of universalism 346, 359, 371, 450, 588; disability and
gender categories 395–8; disability and 410–11; 408; The Enlightenment 98, 99, 104; gender
gender essentialism 175, 177; hermeneutical essentialism 175, 176; liberalism and 659, 661;
marginalization/injustice and 273–6; moral and political 504–7
intersectionality 349; language and 298, 301; universalization 648–9
lesbian/queer theory 388, 389, 391; testimonial University of Cape Town 53
injustice and 271–3; trans feminism conversations unknowability: Black women 126–8
394, 396, 400–3 utilitarianism 533, 540, 558, 653, 703; moral
Trans: A Memoir (Jacques) 273 justification 504, 505
trans exclusionary radical feminism 385 utopian thinking 138
trans/transsexuality
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 133 values 237–8, 248–9, 328; biological sciences 315–22;
transcendental subjectivity 145, 146, 466, human values 425; moral virtue 545, 547; social
467, 471, 472 science and community 333–6
transfeminismo see trans* theory van der Tuin, I. 197, 198
transference 15 Varnhagen, Rahel 115–16
transformative practice 529, 572, 680; aesthetics Vaz Ferreira, Carlos 635–7
and 475, 476, 477, 479, 481; criticism and 307, vices 534, 569, 570–2, 574, 575–7
333, 338 victim/victimization/victimhood 613, 691, 693
transnational feminism 598, 607, 608, 609, ‘Vienna Circle’ 303–5
615, 673 Viezzer, M. see Barrios de Chungara, D. et al.
transnational materialist critical disability Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft) 96,
studies 408 99–100, 386, 485, 491, 679
transnationalism violence 161–2, 223–4, 515, 638–9; ethics of political
trauma and trauma survivors 223–4, 225, 227 violence 694–8; female genital mutilation (FMG)
Trinity, The (icon) 67 55, 501, 507–10; vulnerability and 689–94
Tronto, J. 545, 546, 547 Virey, Julien-Joseph 19
Truman, Harry 419 virtue ethics 79, 568–72; care ethics 545, 550, 551,
trust/trustworthiness 112, 113–14, 256–7; ethics and 572–4; Confucianism 556, 560, 561–2; critical
testimony practices 257–9; feminist analyses of feminist eudaimonism 569, 574–5; specific virtues
testimony 265; knowledge-producing institutions and vices 575–7
and communities 263–5; maladapted norms of Visible Identities (Alcoff) 208
credibility 261–3; testimony and social identity Voelker, Dr J.A. 440
259–61 voice 115–16, 597
truth: metaethics and 529–33; religious diversity Voltaire 95
448–52 voluntarism 653–4, 657
Truth, S. 210, 344, 365 vulnerability 61, 264, 421, 542, 669; bioethics 586,
Twenty Years at Hull House (Addams) 136 587; disability and 413–14; moral justification
Two Treatises of Government (Locke) 87 503–4, 506, 510, 511; poverty and 607, 608, 615;
Tyler, M. 656 structural injustice 620, 624–5; violence and
689–94
Übermensch 66 ‘Vulnerable Subject, The’ (Fineman) 694
ultimate sacred reality 448, 449, 450, 453
Unbearable Weight (Bordo) 487 Waldron, J. 702
unconscious, the 66, 293, 297; sublimation and Walker, Alice 54
meaning 234–9 Walker, M.U. 531, 545, 570, 576, 610, 611
‘Under Western Eyes’ (Mohanty) 614 Wallace, M. 126, 128, 129
Ungo, Urania 639 Walter, N. 486
uniessentialism 175–6, 177, 178 Waring, M. 330–1, 437

733
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Warren, K. 435, 436, 437 Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her
Warriner, J. 522 (Griffin) 434
Wartofsky, M.W. 304 ‘Woman Question, The’ 19
Waters, K. 350 ‘Woman vs. the Indians’ (Cooper) 129
Watson, Emma 387 ‘woman’ and ‘womanhood’ 18, 51, 173–4; definition
Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the 395, 396–7, 402, 673
English Language (Daly and Caputi) 299–300 ‘woman-the-gatherer’ hypothesis 246–7
Weil, Simone 50 ‘womanism’/‘womanists’ 49–50, 54, 61
Weir, A. 673 ‘Woman’s Part in the Man’s Business, The’ (Williams)
Welch, M.M. 72 126–7
Welch, S. 671 women of colour 3, 19, 170, 219, 335, 370; care
Wendell, S. 409–10, 415 ethics 546–7; Critical Race Theory (CRT) 359,
West, C. 284 361, 362, 365; disability 414; global justice 607;
West, R. 710 intersectionality 343, 345, 348, 350, 352, 401, 414;
Western worldview 382, 394, 455, 508, 531, 683; care testimony and trust/trustworthiness 259, 260; see
ethics 547, 548; devaluation of woman’s status 691, also Black Feminism
694; disability 407–8, 412; freedom 666, 667, 668, women and girls 165, 491; bioethics 579, 581;
675; invulnerability 693–4; Latin America and 638; bodily passions 76, 77, 78–9; bodily qualities 71,
Native American Chaos Theory 370, 375, 378, 73, 74–6; care ethics 543, 544, 546, 564, 565,
380; virtue ethics 571 573; ‘civilising’ role 95–6; collective freedom
Westlund, A. 161–2, 522 665–6, 670, 671–3; competitive performances
Westminster Review 20 and strategies 321–2; domesticity and 99; feminist
What is Enlightenment? (Kant) 103 virtue ethics 572; ‘generic’ 171; Islamic veiling
Whipps, J. 137 of 453–4, 531, 596, 600, 612; poverty 607; self-
Whisnant, R. 576 constitution 226; structural injustice 622–3, 625;
Whistler, D. 452, 453 sublimation 235; subordination in family/marriage
white feminism 61, 350, 351–2, 426 86–7, 89, 90, 91, 134; supposed incapacity to
‘white feminist’ theology 61 reason 16–17; as truth 112, 113–14; as ‘victims’
white solipsism 170, 173 611–12; see also feminine and femininity;
‘Who is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism’ masculinity; men and boys
(Allen) 666 Women and Moral Theory (Kittay and Meyers) 220
‘Why Has the Sex/Gender System Become Visible Women Philosophers: Genre and the Boundaries of
Only Now?’ (Harding) 333 Philosophy (Gardner) 18
Wickler, W. 317 ‘Women and Philosophy’ (Le Doeuff) 14–15
Wieland, N. 285, 286 Women’s Human Rights Approach (WHR) 507,
Wilcox, S. 609 509, 510
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Goethe) 116 ‘women’s liberation movement’ 666, 673
Wilkes, K. 223 Women’s Liberation and the Sublime (Mann) 494
will to power 112, 114, 115 Women’s Pentagon Actions (1980/81) 433
Willett, C. 670 women’s rights 26, 79–80, 506, 540, 613,
‘willful ignorance’ 270 635–7, 668
Williams, D. 61 work see labour
Williams, Fannie Barrier 120, 121, 126–8, World Bank 607
129, 130 World Parliament of Religions (1893) 447
Williams, P. 359–60, 669 World as Will and Representation, The
Wilson, E.O. 314 (Schopenhauer) 494
Winnicott, D. 66 Wright, R. 317
Winnubst, S. 674 writing: anonymous writers 17, 20; écriture féminine
Wisor, S. 428–9, 611, 615 295, 298, 300–1; gender and 292–5; inequality/
Witt, C. 175–6, 177, 178 injustice in literature/publishing 51, 54, 57–8;
Wittig, M. 383 male pseudonyms 20–1; politics of 295–7; sexual
Wolf, N. 486, 584 difference and 297–8; silencing and 56; suppression
Wolf, S. 581, 582 of 633–4
Wollstonecraft, Mary 18, 386, 602, 654, 679; Wrong Body Account 398
beautiful and sublime 485, 487, 488, 491; The wu (無) (no-presence/nothingness) 40
Enlightenment 95, 96, 99–102 Wylie, A. 247–8

734
 INDEX

xu and jing 41–2 Yúdice, G. 631

Xunzi 556, 558 Yuval-Davis, N. 366, 368

Yellow Wallpaper, The (Gilman) 134 Zeglin, P. 486

yi (義moral rightness) 558 Zerilli, L. 103, 674
yin (因relying on) 44–5, 46 Zhuangzi (Ziporyan) 40
yin/yang 36, 38, 39, 47 Zimmerman, Michael 442
Young, I.M. 171, 187, 620, 649, 650; feminist Zion-Waldok, T. 455–6
phenomenology, 147–8, 149, 152; global justice 608, Ziporyn, B. 40
610; Native American Chaos Theory 370, 375–7, ‘zoon politikon’ (‘social animal’) 67
378–9; structural injustice 620, 621–2, 623, 625–8, 629 Zuckerman, S. 315–16
Yuan, L. 561 Zylinska, J. 492

735