Lecture Notes

PHIL 406

Table of contents

Week 2 Tuesday: African Feminism and Intersectionality

How to recognize wihthout marginalizing the people who are oppressed according to gender.
Ripples / waves of feminism
Assimilation / an anti-universality becoming a new universality – is the chameleon a metaphysically problematic (‘new universal’) being?
What is the metaphysical / ontological nature of the metaphor and the subject? Are they instantiations of the same Platonic form?
Crenshaw reading

Evolutionary biology – mammals, primates, linking concepts of sex / sexual dynamics in biology with human gender
What is Crenshaw trying to emphasize?
General problem with the single-axis: it captures important elements of discrimination, but it is not sufficient
Multiple axis: sex + gender + race + …
At a unique position: black women are uniquely discriminated against. It’s not about simply adding identities, but about unique intersections which are more than the sum of their parts.
Testimony on womens’ pain is often not taken seriously, especially Black womens’ pain

Discrimination along A:

	A’	A’’
B’	X
B’’	X

Discrimination along B:

	A’	A’’
B’	X	X
B’’

Discrimination against A or B:

	A’	A’’
B’	X	X
B’’	X

Discrimination uniquely at A and B:

	A’	A’’
B’	X
B’’

Waves of feminism

Knowledge and ignorance from the perspective of feminism.
Two questions for Haraway
- The metaphor of vision: what is the metaphor of vision doing in the text?
- What is the problem of objectivity for feminism / feminist epistemology and philosophy of science?
Surveillance and the male gaze, a perversion / false standing for universality
The view from nowhere, which transcends location, particularity, identity.
You will always have views from somewhere, based on embodiment.
Problem of objectivity: how can you have objective, situated knowledge?
Alcoff, epistemologies of ignorance
- Lorraine Code, epistemic knowers are not constant. Situated knowledge.
- Sandra Harding, group identities influence what knowledge you have and your ignorance.
- Charles Mills,
- Also, Horkheimer
Ignorance epistemology is always associated with a “rational” system of judgement
Our very conception of truth can be itself ignorant, in Horkheimer’s case, failing to be sociologically reflexive, that is, accounting for its conditions of (re)production.
Yet the notion of critical reason is still very dubious… and possibly reproduces instrumental reason’s logic.

Concern: “my feminism will be intersectional” has become a tired cliche
Whose intersection(s)?
Transnational feminism: race and colonization
Are you committed to decolonizing if you are committed to intersectional feminism?
Intersectionality not about individuals but about social axes / dimensions
Friendship? Care? Friendship throughotu colonialism? Is there a burden/strain of friendship?
Is friendship reciprocal?
“Affectively saturated” story – the main feeling about the stories we tell of intersectionality is of black feminism vs. the critic, the affect of defensiveness
Does Nash end up reproducing what she criticizes?
Political libido
the role of affect in feminist theory, what it means to theorize
Nash: Black feminists have adopted a vision of intersectionality which is not true to Black feminism
- Black feminism should not follow a capitalist logic of property accumulation (‘this is mine, this is my territory, this is my land’) – think about and be more critical about the concerns around ‘appropriation’, etc.

Is transnational feminism about intersectionality?
Decolonization vs intersectionality
Post-feminism: the idea that feminism is no longer necessary, that we have achieved equality
Post-colonialism: understanding the world after colonialism, after the end of colonialism. Imperialism after imperialism.
Settler colonialism.

What is ideal theory?