Feminist
Philosophy
Time, history and thetransformation of thought

Edited by
Synne Myrebøe,
Valgerður Pálmadóttir
& Johanna Sjöstedt

SÖDERTÖRN ACADEMIC STUDIES

82. Anders Burman, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback& Synne Myrebøe (eds.), En plats för tänkande –Essäer om universitetet och filosofin, 2020.
83. Anders Bartonek & Sven-Olov Wallenstein(eds.), Critical Theory – Past, Present, Future, 2021.
84. Anders Burman & Sven-Olov Wallenstein (eds.),
Benjamin Höijer: Metafysik, estetik, historia, 2021.
85. Mikael Lönnborg, Benson Otieno Ndiege& Besrat Tesfaye (eds.), Beyond Borders –Entrepreneurship, Co-operatives and Education in
Sweden and Tanzania, 2021.
86. Anders Burman, Joakim Landahl & Daniel
Lövheim (eds.), Moderna pedagogiska utopier, 2021.
87. Håkan Blomqvist (eds.), Socialism in Yiddish:
The Jewish Labor Bund in Sweden, 2022.
88. Håkan Nilsson (eds.), Omförhandlingar: Den
offentliga konstens roll efter millennieskiftet, 2021.
89. Amelie Björck, Claudia Lindén & Ann-Sofie
Lönngren (eds.), Squirrelling: Human–AnimalStudies in the Northern European Region, 2022.
90. Anders Burman & Petra Lundberg Bouquelon(eds.), I rörelse: Estetiska erfarenheter i Pedagogiska
sammanhang, 2022.
91. Håkan Nilsson (eds.), Renegotiations: The role ofpublic art in the new millennium, kommande.
92. Ulrika Dahl, Raili Uibo, Joanna Mizielińska &Antu Sorainen (eds.), Queer(y)ing Kinship in theBaltic Region and Beyond, 2023.
93. Hjalmar Falk, My Klockar Linder & Petter Tistedt(eds.), Perspektiv på politisk idéhistoria, 2023.
94. Synne Myrebøe, Valgerður Pálmadóttir &Johanna Sjöstedt (eds.) Feminist Philosophy – Time,
History and the Transformation of Thought, 2023.
Cover image: Miniatur aus der »Cité des Dames« der
Christine de Pisan, (Master of the City of Ladies, f.
from 1400 until 1415, Public domain, via Wikimedia
Commons).

Feminist
Philosophy
Time, history and thetransformation of thought

Edited by
Synne Myrebøe,
Valgerður Pálmadóttir
& Johanna Sjöstedt
Södertörns högskola(CC BY 3.0)
Published under Creative Commons Attribution
3.0 Unported License© the Authors
Södertörn University
Library
SE-141 89 Huddingewww.sh.se/publications

The Nordic Summer University
Cover layout: Jonathan Robson
Graphic form: Per Lindblom & Jonathan Robson
Printed by E-Print, Stockholm 2023
Södertörn Studies in Intellectual and Cultural History 10
Södertörn Academic Studies 94
ISSN 1650-433X
ISBN 978-91-89504-36-3 (print)
ISBN 978-91-89504-37-0 (digital)

Contents
Introduction
Synne Myrebøe, Valgerður Pálmadóttir & Johanna Sjöstedt ......................... 9PART 1Feminist Philosophy in the Present Tense .................................. 25
Chapter 1
Feminism and Philosophy– A Matter of History and Politics
Tuija Pulkkinen ........................................................................................ 27

Chapter 2
Desiring Difference and the Hierarchies of Time
Kristina Fjelkestam............................................................ .............. 45
Chapter 3
The Demands of the Historical Unconscious– the Psychopathology of History
Sara Edenheim............................................................................... 57

Chapter 4
The Problem with the Problems of Philosophy– Challenging European Modernity
Naomi Scheman ............................................................................. 67

PART 2
Transformations in History .................................................... 81
Chapter 5“Suppose a man be in a deep contemplative study”
Margaret Cavendish, Descartes’ Cogito and the Freedom of Thought
Cecilia Rosengren ........................................................................... 83

Chapter 6
Hannah Arendt– To Think “Without Banisters”
Helgard Mahrdt ...................................................................................... 107

Chapter 7
Reflections on the Feminist Archive– The Case of the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand
Marta-Laura Cenedese ........................................................................... 127

PART 3
Transformations in Art ............................................................... 145
Chapter 8
Possessing the Past
– Revisiting (a Feminist) Swedish 19th Century in Contemporary Fiction
Claudia Lindén ....................................................................................... 147

Chapter 9
Fantastic Antigones– The Tragic Legacy of Trans Grief
Fanny Söderbäck ................................................................................... 169

Chapter 10
Haunting Histories– Regarding the Political Unconscious
in the Television Series Stranger Things and the Film Ghostbusters
Erik Poulsen ........................................................................................... 191

PART 4
Transforming Knowledge Regimes ............................................ 209
Chapter 11
Paradox of Stubbornness– The Epistemology of Stereotypes Regarding Women
Sagy Watemberg Izraeli .......................................................................... 211

Chapter 12
The Child as the Other– Some Epistemological Considerations
Zlatana Knezevic .................................................................................... 231

Chapter 13
The Emotionalization of Burnout in the Health Care Sector
Ylva Gustafsson ...................................................................................... 251

Chapter 14
Emancipatory Engagement with Oppression– The Perils of Identity in Feminist and Anti-Racist Politics
Oda K. S. Davanger ................................................................................ 273

Part 5Openings of Understanding ....................................................... 297
Chapter 15
Private, Public, Sacred Space– Why gender studies in Particular Should Consider
Sacred Space a Third Spatial Category
Jorunn Økland........................................................................................ 299

Chapter 16
The Inner Landscape of the Body
– Phenomenology of Thinking
Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir .................................................................... 317

Chapter 17
Philosophical Compassion and Active Hesitation– A Non-Critical Approach to Understanding
Nicole des Bouvrie ................................................................................. 339

Configuring Feminist Philosophy
in the Context of the Nordic Summer University
Synne Myrebøe, Valgerður Pálmadóttir & Johanna Sjöstedt ..................... 359

The Authors ......................................................................................... 379

Introduction
Synne Myrebøe, Valgerður Pálmadóttir & Johanna Sjöstedt

Although feminist philosophy is now a recognized field in theinstitution of philosophy, a tension between the two terms
feminism and philosophy persists. Compared to the status offeminism in other disciplines in the humanities and the social
sciences, feminist philosophy is generally marginalized in philosophy departments. Similarly, women comprise a smaller portion of the student body and faculty in philosophy in comparison to other disciplines.1 A great deal of work in feminist philosophy is undertaken in other disciplines, such as literary studies,
the history of ideas, gender studies, and sociology.2 This collection of texts bears witness to the trans-disciplinarity of feminist
philosophy or feminist theory as some prefer. The anthology is
an interdisciplinary initiative at the intersection of philosophy,
the history of ideas, and feminist theory where philosophy isscrutinized from a feminist perspective and further asks questions about what philosophy has to offer feminism.

1
Schwitzgebel, Eric and Dicey Jennings, Carolyn, “Women in Philosophy: Quantitative
analysis of specialization, prevalence, visibility, and generational change” in Public
Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 2 April, 2017; Reuter, Martina, “Varf.r s. f. kvinnor?
Könsfördelningen inom den akademiska filosofin” in Tidskrift för politisk filosofi, Vol.
19, No. 3 (2015).
2This can be seen as an indicator that people who are interested in feminist philosophy
pursue their philosophical scholarly endeavors in fields other than academic philosophy. Interestingly, in her critique of the male dominated philosophical canon, Mary
Ellen Waithe has argued that throughout history, women’s philosophical works havebeen classified as belonging to disciplines other than philosophy and they have thus
been omitted from what we understand as the Western philosophical tradition i.e. thephilosophical canon. Mary Ellen Waithe, “Sex, Lies, and Bigotry: The Canon of Philosophy” in Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir and Ruth E. Hagengruber (eds.), Methodological
Reflections on Women’s Contribution and Influence in the History of Philosophy(Springer, 2020).

9

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Concepts, Contexts, Critique
Philosophy can be described as a tradition of texts, questions,and concepts. It is a discipline with a long history and it has arich tradition of dialogue with historical thinkers. As philosopher Andrea Nye has pointed out: “thinking necessarily uses
concepts with roots in the past. Always in language, thinking is
a reshaping, never an original creation.”3 This simple observation highlights the connection between thinking and language
and the importance of taking into consideration the historicalcontext of both the production and the reception of thinking.
Critique, finally, refers to feminist scholarship as a transformative practice aimed at change and emancipation. In bringing
these notions together, the anthology creates a space for dialogues on feminist practices of reading. Following a feminist
tradition, reading is to be considered as a political act with close
connections to feminist activism.
According to Nye, there are three main strands in the works
and methods of feminist philosophy, the first of which is a critical examination of the exclusion of women from the ranks ofphilosophers as well as outright misogyny and racism in canonical texts. The second has to do with a revision of the canonwith respect to gender; a vast body of literature now exists inwhich historical women philosophers have been acknowledged
as thinkers in their own right.4 The third strand concerns questions about the possibility of problematizing the very conceptual
foundations of modern philosophy in light of critical readings ofstandard texts and contemporary feminist perspectives. In addition to these three strategies discussed by Nye, there is a growinginterest in a productive re-reading and actualization of the history of philosophy for new and creative feminist applications.5
Feminist theory understood as an interdisciplinary traditionof texts that interrogates gender, sexuality, and other similar
3
Andrea Nye, Feminism and Modern Philosophy. An Introduction, (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. ix.
4
See for example Mary Ellen Waithe, A history of women philosophers (Vol. 4), (Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987–1994).
5
Nye, 2004. p. x.

10INTRODUCTION

categories in critical perspectives, has a rather paradoxical relationship to time and history. If philosophy, as Finnish feminist
philosopher and historian of ideas Tuija Pulkkinen points out inthe first chapter of this anthology, generally takes an omnipresent ahistorical point of view, feminist theory rather tends tostress what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledges”: thehistorical, the local, which are first and foremost concerned withquestions of transformation.6 However, the emphasis of historical situatedness is not necessarily matched by an awarenessof or interest in the historicity of the concepts that are employedin making such claims. Rather, with the aim of changing oppressive conditions, feminist theory runs the risk of overemphasizing the present and the future at the expense of the past. A
similar point is made by Ingeborg W. Owesen who maintains
that “contemporary feminist theory is largely oriented towards
the present” and that the philosophical history of modern feminism has not received much scholarly attention. This intellectual
history of feminist theory, Owesen concludes, “might reveal
itself as a valuable source for contemporary feminism in as muchas there are several parallels between the arguments of the pastand those of the present.”7 We tend to agree with Owesen on thismatter, and we also want to emphasize our view that feminist
theory needs the modes of reflection developed in the humanities in general and in disciplines such as philosophy, the historyof ideas and literary studies specifically. This anthology provides
both empirical and theoretical interrogation in this domain.
The chapters in this volume are divided into five thematic
parts. Arguing that the tensions between feminism and philosophy should be considered productive conditions for thinking,this anthology demonstrates the transformative potential offeminist philosophy in history, art and in knowledge regimes.
The multiple angles, perspectives, interrogations, and applications of feminist philosophy invites openings of understanding
6

Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges. The Science Question in Feminism and thePrivilege of Partial Perspective” in Feminist Studies, (Vol. 14, No. 3, Fall 1988).
7
Ingeborg W. Owesen, The Genealogy of Modern Feminist Thinking: Feminist Thought
as Historical Present, (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), p. 1.

11

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

and further elaborations for future inquiry. The multiple angles,
perspectives, interrogations, and applications of feminist philosophy invites openings of understanding and further elaborations for future inquiry.

Part 1Feminist Philosophy in the Present Tense
In the opening chapter Tuija Pulkkinen reflects on the relationship between philosophy and feminist scholarship withrespect to time. Philosophy is underpinned by omnitemporality,
the notion that thinking is atemporal in nature, engaging with a
2500-year-old history and tradition of texts without necessarily
taking into consideration the circumstances in which the texts
were written. Feminism, on the other hand, emerged as an academic endeavour in the 1970s and is permeated by an acuteawareness of the situatedness of the claims made in its name.
Omnitemporality is rarely seen; its very rationale is political, andbecause of that “feminist research is crucially dependent on theidea of historical change”. Moreover, the disciplines are situateddifferently in relation to truth. While philosophy aims for ahistorical truth, Pulkkinen argues, the project of feminism is rather
to undermine (false) claims to universal truth and to demonstrate how patriarchal beliefs have excluded women and othersfrom being considered as subjects of knowledge. However,Pulkkinen also traces points of convergence; by virtue of its
claim to being beyond politics, philosophy in some circumstances attains a particular critical force to take a stand in political issues.
A central concern for feminist philosophy is historiographical and philosophical conceptions of time and temporality. In
her chapter, “Desiring Difference and the Hierarchies of Time”,
Kristina Fjelkestam addresses the problems with conceptualizations of time and history that have their origins in Westernmodernity. Without approaching history through binary positions of similarity or difference, Fjelkestam highlights these
positions as desirable narratives that need to be challenged.

12

INTRODUCTION

Departing from discussions of power and politics in critical temporality studies, and in dialogue with queer temporality studies
and political theories on affects, Fjelkestam emphasizes theaffective and somatic aspects of historiography. Thus, understandings of temporality not only constitute conceptions of thepast, but also how difference is conceptualized in the present
within a hierarchical structure. Through an exposition of different theoretical perspectives on affect and temporality, the last
decades’ discussions on chrononormativity, erotohistoriography and anachronism, positions of interpretive precedence are
un-tied in favor of pluralistic temporalities that show “a multidimensional model of the desire for the past”.
In her chapter, “The Demands of the Historical Unconscious– the psychopathology of history”, Sara Edenheim challenges
the “liberal humanist orientation in [most] versions of historicalresearch,” which postulates ‘historical consciousness’ as its main
objective. Edenheim specifically targets a perspective that was
introduced by German historians of didactics in the 1970s,
which, according to her, conflates historical consciousness withhuman consciousness. According to Edenheim, this perspective
entails that “the aim of historical consciousness is to fill [the past,present and future] with recognizable contents, coherency, andcommon sense that all make a claim on reality”. Edenheim
makes the point that in Germanic languages ‘common sense’
literally means sane- or healthy sense and that our search forprogressive narratives and coherence between past, presence
and future is a pathological holding on to “sameness” i.e.,“identity”. In Edenheim’s account, this pathological search forhistorical meaning forecloses other ways of approaching thepast. She argues instead that we should approach the present as
the emergency that it is, with all the dangers that this implies.
Naomi Scheman traces the questions posed in modern
philosophy back to the historical conditions that produced
them. In her chapter “The problems with the problems of philosophy: Challenging Euro-Modernity”, she finds that philosophy’s questions are the expression of changing power structures
and are marked by the emerging democratic efforts to recon13

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

ceive political coexistence. Tearing philosophical authority frominstitutions, and placing it within the idea of a generic individual, the individual of modern philosophy was marked by anidea of sameness, equated to a white European, bourgeois male,producing women, queers, indigenous, and colonial subjects as
its others. While rooted in specific historical and politicalconditions, the problems of philosophy have in contemporary
academic philosophy lost their historical specificity and areconsidered timeless problems. As such, they can neither be“solved” – whatever a solution means – nor are they put to theside. The result, Scheman writes, is that we are left with “zombie
problems: the life sucked out of them, they stalk the halls of
academe, undead unkillable”. In contrast to the image of philosophy as the pursuer of eternal truth beyond the various historical and political entanglements, according to Scheman,philosophy ought to reflect on precisely those empirical conditions, if it is to be relevant in today’s world. Scheman suggeststhat philosophers, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not,are “always already engaged”. Black Power, queer activism,
indigenous cultures, have “emphasized the depth of difference
and the resources of differences for knowing and acting”, andScheman argues that we should embrace “diversity as an epistemic and political resource, not a problem to be surmounted”.

Part 2
Transformations in Time
The second theme concerns different aspects of women as
thinkers, as philosophers, and as producers of texts and ideas:
What kind of thinking becomes canonized and integrated into
tradition, what kind of ideas deserve the epithet philosophy?
How and in what way have women’s scholarly and literary work
been interpreted, categorized, and archived? These questions are
related to the historical, social, and material conditions ofthought and of thinking.
In her chapter “Suppose a man be in a deep contemplative
study: Margaret Cavendish, Descartes’ cogito and the freedom

14

INTRODUCTIONof thought”, Cecilia Rosengren discusses the thought of earlymodern British philosopher Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673)
and asks whether she should be counted among the society offeminist philosophers. Writing in a period when the personae ofthe philosopher, the scientist, and the public speaker were coded
masculine, yet being reconfigured by the emergence of the ideaof the layman philosopher, the printing press, and the publicsphere, Rosengren demonstrates how Cavendish through rhetorical strategies navigated the conventions connected to genderand speaking and arrogated to herself the right to a philosophical voice. Cavendish’s thought is situated in relation to
influential intellectual currents in her time and Rosengren
demonstrates how she enters the debate both with Descartes’
rationalism and the empiricism of the Royal Society. Cavendish
was critical of the Cartesian mechanistic worldview yet proposed a modified version of rationalism that also incorporated
the senses. She also criticized what she saw as the unfounded
optimist belief in the senses and scientific experiments of theempiricists and emphasized that reason had to evaluate theexperience. Rosengren suggests that Cavendish produced anearly critique of the “view from nowhere” and that her naturalphilosophy articulates a feminist ethos.
In Helgard Mahrdt’s chapter “Hannah Arendt: To think‘without banisters’”, thinking as a political act is in question. For
can there be – as Mahrdt asks with Arendt – “a thinking without
being tyrannical”? Departing from this dilemma of politicaltheory, the chapter explores how Arendt approaches the difficult
task of thinking after the experience of WWII. Through
Mahrdt’s work, we are introduced to a range of the practicalevents in which Arendt laid out her trains of thought. Inspiredby Walter Benjamin’s “Concepts of History”, Arendt argues thatthe past can be nothing but fragmented in the present imagery,whereby what is needed is “a thinking that is poetical”. Practicing this performative poiesis, Marhrdt explains how Arendt,
in her rejection of the history of ideas and political philosophy,
turns to experience, storytelling, and imagination as the site ofpolitical plurality. Here, Mahrdt makes a distinction between a
15

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

liberal notion of plurality and Arendt’s emphasis on pluralism
as intersubjective experiences. Thinking without banisters is afragile act of orientation but also what Arendt has presented as
relating without subordination.
In her article “Reflections on the Feminist Archive The caseof the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand”, Marta-Laura Cenedese discusses the conditions for the production of feminist
knowledge and history using an archive as a case in point. Built
by French actress, journalist, and collector Marguerite Durand(1864–1936), who founded the feminist daily newspaper La
Fronde, the archive is the only one of its kind in the Frenchcontext. Collecting material dating back to the 17th century, itconsists of 60 000 documents that relate to women and the fightfor women’s rights: for example, letters by Colette and Mme deStaël. The chapter accounts for how the library was threatened
to be closed and moved to become a part of the regular librarysystem of Paris; thereby assimilating to the patriarchal norms ofknowledge that had made it necessary in the first place. It also
discusses the ultimately successful campaign to restore it and thepolitics of knowledge involved. Cenedese emphasizes the libraryas a physical, affective space that makes possible a connection
between the past, the present, and the future and between generations of women. She argues that the library could be an example of what Griselda Pollock calls “contexts populated by many
women”, where each woman might develop her singularity in ashared space.

Part 3
Transformations in Artistic Representations
A central concern for feminist philosophy is to trace thoughtsthat have been excluded from the ratio constituting the philosophical canon. For this, questions of art come to the fore. In“Possessing the Past. Revisiting (a feminist) Swedish 19th
Century in Contemporary Fiction”, Claudia Lindén discuss
how fiction plays a central role in the formation of historicalconsciousness and how the historical novel can facilitate a16

INTRODUCTION

deconstructive stance to History that highlights its narrative
structure. Hence, referring to William Godwin, Lindén showsthat the idea that historical novels have a potential for critical
historiography is part of a British tradition that long precedes
late 20th century’s theories on deconstruction. In her article,
Lindén sets Derrida’s concept of hauntology in dialogue with
Godwin’s remarks on fiction as history. Following this, Lindén
invites her readers to see “how the past is not only stuck in thepast but continues to live on and affect us in the present”. Thus,
what is at stake in the play between fiction and history is not only
conceptions of the past, but also of our own contemporality.
Lindén gives examples on how the fictional narrative of progressand modernization becomes part of a national identity in
Sweden. But contrary to mainstream history writing, the historical novel has been at the forefront of highlighting the importance of women and minorities. Lindén shows how historicalnovels have functioned as a critical historiography that distributes knowledge on women’s role in history to a wider audience.
As such, fiction exposes a feminist consciousness and a re-writing of a gendered historical narrative that haunts the present.
The Sophoclean figure Antigone has been actualized invarious situations as an omnitemporal image of political resistance. In her chapter “Fantastic Antigones: The Tragic Legacy
of Trans Grief”, Fanny Söderbäck sheds light on the denial ofgrief as experienced by trans women and exposed in Sebastián
Lelio’s 2017 film A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantástica).
Here, the character of Antigone defies the death that is imposed on her by those who refuse to recognize her as a woman
in grief. At the same time, Söderbäck opens for a transgressionof a cis-interpretation of Antigone and thus offers queer
imagery of Antigone as a temporal yet omnitemporal figure of
ethico-political concern.
In the chapter “Haunting Histories: Regarding the politicalunconscious in the television series Stranger Things and the film
Ghostbusters,” Erik Poulsen analyzes and contrasts two worksof popular culture produced in 2017 and 1984 respectively.
Basing his analysis on psychoanalytic theory, Poulsen highlights
17

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

the unconscious desires at work in both productions. In a comparison of the two works, Poulsen argues that feminism has had
considerable influence on film production in the 21st century.
For example, while Ghostbusters (1984) is filled with heteronormative anxiety concerning gender expressions and women’s
excessive sexual desire, Stranger Things’ (2017) seemingly apolitical and nostalgic outlook (the series takes place in 1984) nevertheless expresses a desire to correct the past in terms of how “wewish that it would have been” according to contemporary ideas
about gender, sexuality, and representation.

Part 4
Transforming Knowledge Regimes
A growing literature on feminist epistemologies has challenged
hegemonic preconditions for knowledge and truth. Questions
on epistemic structures have been a recurrent theme in feminist
philosophy. In understanding the social, historical, temporal,
and spatial aspects of knowledge production, epistemic normativity is challenged from several perspectives. In the following
sequence, the chapters are in different ways concerned with theways in which feminist critique has been, and can be a part of,academic practice broadly speaking. This includes both discussions about and within feminist theory, as well as feminist philosophical engagements with current socio-cultural issues.
In her chapter “Paradox of stubbornness: The epistemology
of stereotypes regarding women”, Sagy Watemberg Izraeli
appropriates American analytic philosopher Willard Quine’s
classical essay “Two dogmas of empiricism” to present an epistemology of stereotypes. Izraeli’s point of departure is the factthat stereotypes persist in the face of contrary evidence. What
are the epistemic mechanisms which enable conflict between thestereotype and the evidence, and between the stereotype andother knowledge? What is the epistemic source of stereotypes?
Quine has proved useful because, although an empiricist, heshifts the question of verification of knowledge from adequacy
between knowledge and reality, to internal coherence within the18INTRODUCTION

body of knowledge. This opens a space for other influences as tohow knowledge is constituted. It is this space in which thechapter situates itself. Izraeli argues that stereotypes are bothsocial and individual and that they “do not originate fromempirical evidence but are rather a socially constructedmechanism for the processing and use of empirical evidence”.
Izraeli also discusses what it would take to change the conceptual
schemes that underpin stereotypes, suggesting that a collective
effort might produce a critical mass of pressure that could reacha tipping point, thereby exposing the stereotypes as false andforcing a readjustment.
In the chapter “The Child as the Other: Some Epistemological Considerations” Zlatana Knezevic brings together perspectives from critical childhood studies and postcolonial
feminism to challenge the idea of a universal childhood and simplistic notions of otherness. With a reference to Claudia
Castañeda’s analysis of figures of childhood in poststructuralist
and feminist philosophy, Knezevic argues that “the pre-subjectial generic infant” is a persistent theme in representations ofhuman ontology and alternative ways of being. However, thisfigure of the child remains empty of subjectivity since, according
to Knezevic, it is both dehumanized and decontextualized. In
the chapter, she presents both advantages and dangers involvedin conceptualizing otherness in terms of children and childhoods and suggests making an analytical distinction between“the child as the other” and “othered childhoods.” The former
can, according to Knezevic, be used to critically address axes ofpower related to age, while the second refers to the silencing ofchildhoods that do not fit the category of the decontextualized
image of the child.
In the chapter “The emotionalization of burnout in thehealth care sector,” Ylva Gustafsson discusses the implicationsof applications of New Public Management in the health caresector during the 1990s. NPM’s rationalization of health care
was accompanied by an increased workload for health professionals with less time dedicated for each patient, which resulted
in burnouts among nurses. Gustafsson then connects these19

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

effects of NPM to literature about the supposed role of “emotional intelligence” in work-life – and identifies a gendered discourse about work-related stress. While men’s coping withstress is described in terms of endurance to be rewarded with“health and wealth”, women are expected to be resilient andcope without reward – and their failure to do so is defined as acharacter issue, described in terms of a lack of emotional intelligence. Furthermore, nurses’ narratives of work-related stressare often interpreted as expressing “emotional distress” or“emotional dissonance” while Gustafsson reads them as expressions of ethical distress, related to a lack of time and resources toprovide adequate care.
In the chapter “Emancipatory Engagement with Oppression:
The Perils of Identity in Feminist and Anti-Racist Politics” Oda
Davanger argues against basing emancipatory struggles on
identity categories. According to Davanger, conceptualizing
oppression in terms of different axes, i.e. identity categories, canbe harmful to feminist philosophy and ideology since it contributes to upholding whiteness and maleness as norms and therefore fails to “dismantle the system of domination”. In opposition
to different versions of identity politics and the analytical andpolitical concept of intersectionality, Davanger complements
bell hooks’ notion of imperialist white supremacist capitalist
patriarchy with a post-structuralist perspective. Davanger’s
answer to feminist and anti-racist struggles based on identity
categories is a politics that is built around an “abstract andalienated desire” that makes possible engaging in the struggle fora world without oppression based on identity, regardless of
individuals’ own experience of oppression.

Part 5Openings of Understanding
Andrea Nye’s reminder of the basic premise of thinking as
something which “necessarily uses concepts with roots in thepast” is, as we have seen, not to be understood as an ingrained
cementation of meaning. Within feminist philosophy there is20

INTRODUCTION

also a desire to break with tradition and open up for novel waysof conceptualizing and connecting the seemingly unrelated. In
this last sequence of texts, three chapters will expose some of theways in which feminist philosophy offers trains of thought with
an ambition of grafting the roots of the past.
Feminist attention to the division of the private and the
public as an ahistorical exclusionary practice is called into
question by Jorunn Økland in her chapter “Private, Public,
Sacred Space: Why Gender Studies, in Particular, should consider Sacred Space a Third Spatial Category”. Here, Økland
follows Joan Scott, in exposing the ways in which the connection
between secularization and gender equality has underpinned theidea of the uniqueness of white Western culture. In focusing on
the public space as the space for free speech and emancipation,
historical roles of women in religious spheres are recurrently
ignored. In her chapter, Økland explores various examples from
Ancient Greece to 19th century English poetry and shows how
the distinction of the private and the public leads to misunderstandings about women’s roles in sacred- or religious space.
In the chapter “The Inner Landscape of the Body: Phenomenology of Thinking” Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir begins bymaking a series of conceptual and metaphorical connections
between body parts and names for features of the landscape.
Jóhannesdóttir pays particular attention to the Icelandic word“leg” (which means a place where something lies; for example, auterus and a final resting place) and its connection to the
Icelandic word for landscape “landslag,” which in many older
sources is written as “landsleg.” Starting from these linguistic
connections, Jóhannesdóttir continues by phenomenologically
exploring “the feeling of situatedness” in an environment and its
role in the creation of knowledge. While feminist philosophies
of situated knowledge have primarily focused on socio-politicalconditions of knowledge, Jóhannesdóttir’s approach is rooted infeminist phenomenologies of embodiment.
How is it possible to approach truth without violence? In her
chapter “Philosophical Compassion and Active Hesitation: A
Non-Critical Approach to Understanding”, Nicole des Bouvrie
21

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

explores different paths of understanding as a philosophicaltask. Engaging with Bracha Ettinger, Anne Dufourmantelle, andothers, des Bouvrie develops an ethical approach that takes holdof the radical openness of a matrixial borderspace as the toposof truth. The practice within this spatiality is what Des Bouvrie
calls philosophical compassion and active hesitation.

Afterword
Feminist philosophy: Time, history, and the transformation ofthought is the result of the eponymous network hosted by the
Nordic Summer University (NSU) from 2016– 2019. Founded
in 1950, the NSU is an independent, nomadic and non-profit
academic institution that fosters intellectual and cultural
exchange between the Nordic and the Baltic countries – although open for participation irrespective of one’s location.
Committed to egalitarian and interdisciplinary modes of learning, the NSU is open for senior scholars, doctoral and masterstudents as well as artists and professionals with relevant backgrounds.
During a four-year period, the NSU network Feminist Philosophy organized two symposia per year, four of which have beenin collaboration with the University of Umeå and Södertörn
University in Sweden, Oslo University in Norway and the
University of Iceland. These symposia have gathered around 200
scholars and students from around the world to discuss feminist
philosophy in relation to questions of history and time fromvarious angles. The aims of the network were inter alia: toexplore the borders, connections, and tensions between feminism and philosophy from critical perspectives; to emphasize theimportance of time and history for contemporary feminist
theory, and to create a generous transdisciplinary platform tophilosophize about feminism. The chapters in the book are all
written by participants in the network and include young andsenior scholars from various fields within the humanities andsocial sciences, as well as invited keynote speakers who mostly
come from the discipline of philosophy.

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INTRODUCTION

The closing Afterword, “Configurations of Feminist Philosophy: Time, History, and the Transformation of Thought within
the Context of Nordic Summer University”, gives a brief understanding of the institutional structure and history of The Nordic
Summer University in general and the circle Feminist philosophy
in particular. As coordinators of the study circle Feminist Philosophy, we, Synne Myrebøe, Valgerður Pálmadóttir and Johanna
Sjöstedt, provide an overview of the questions and themes of thesymposia organized. As part of this, we reflect on feminist pedagogy and philosophize about feminist intellectual spaces, with
the NSU network and the organized symposia as case studies.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

24

PART 1Feminist Philosophy in the Present Tense

25

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

26

Chapter 1
Feminism and Philosophy– A Matter of History and Politics

Tuija Pulkkinen

In this essay I will address the relation between feminism andphilosophy and will highlight two aspects that I see as being
relevant to it. First, the aspect of history: both the history offeminism as a social movement and the history of philosophy asa particular type of textual tradition. And second, the aspect ofpolitics: politics that I believe is inextricably intertwined withfeminism, and politics which ideally remains outside of philosophy as a tradition of pure thought. I will discuss these two
aspects of the relation between feminism and philosophy, but I
will start and end with something that had caught my interest in
the call for papers for the Feminist philosophy event for which I
originally gave this talk. What caught my attention was the word‘tension’ in the following sentence: “although feminist philosophy is now a recognized field, a tension between the two terms
seem to persist.” It is this tension between the two terms, feminism, and philosophy, that I will be focusing on here.
For inspiration, and following in the footsteps of Jacques
Derrida, I looked up the word ‘tension’ in some online dictionaries. ‘Tension’ is a word used in physics, in electricity, and in
psychology. It is, for example, a “Condition of being held in astate between two or more forces, which are acting in opposition
to each other”, as well as being “a psychological state of being
tense.”1 Pictures of tension on the internet include lots ofstretched ropes and pictures of people with headaches.
I realized that as a word in English, tension has quite a negative connotation, apart from electricity where high or low tension in terms of voltage are fairly neutral expressions. Tension isconnected with opposition, and with being psychologically
1

HS Sanakirja.org. https://www.sanakirja.org/search.php?q=tension&l=3&l2=15.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

tense. I also realized that in Finnish and in Swedish the equivalent word carries with it slightly less negative associations: in
Finnish jännite, jännitys, jännittävä, and in Swedish spänning,
spännande can also have a positive meaning. Jännitys and jännittävä as well as spänning and spännande not only mean
opposition and headache, but they also mean exciting, interesting, and even fun.
In this essay, I would like to invoke some of that feeling of funand excitement – that electric tension – which is also very productive, and which I believe is at work in between feminism andphilosophy. Or, perhaps not between feminism and philosophy
as abstract entities, but rather, which is present in the work of
those people who do both feminist and philosophical scholarship: that is, those who take part in both academic traditions.
My own current work consists of looking at the tensions
related to philosophy in between some known contemporary
feminist theorists, such as Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Adriana Cavarero, and Luce Irigaray, among others.
Primarily I work on tensions in between their respective texts
and their use of concepts. I call this project ‘the politics ofphilosophy in contemporary feminist theory’.2 Simultaneously,of course, I am working with the tension between philosophy
and feminism in these authors’ texts. While I will provide somespecific examples from contemporary feminist theory, my primary focus here is at a more general level, concerning the tension between feminism and philosophy as academic traditions.
In what does this tension consist? Why is there a tension? I argue
here that the tension between philosophy and feminism has twodimensions. It is a matter of history, on the one hand, and amatter of politics on the other. I will concentrate on each of thesetwo dimensions of the tension in turn.
First, the dimension of history. This is related to what I callthe ‘trace of omnitemporality’ within the philosophical tradi2
The phrase has appeared over a decade in various forms in my Academy of Finland
funded research projects, in talk titles and in publications. https://researchportal.
helsinki.fi/en/persons/tuija-pulkkinen28

1. FEMINISM – A MATTER OF HISTORY AND POLITICS

tion, in contradistinction to feminist scholarship, where the emphasis is on change in time. Second, the dimension of politics.
In feminist scholarship, this is related to the role of conflict,contestation and, most of all, to what I call ‘intervention’. This
contrasts significantly with the role of these same aspects inphilosophy. By way of a conclusion, I will return to tension in
general, and reflect on what to do with the tension. I argue thatthe tradition of philosophy needs the perspectives of both history and of politics in order to serve feminist thought well, andthat with the combination of philosophy, history and politics, apositive tension is achieved, and feminist philosophy will thrive.
Alternatively, and in order to add more tension, I suggest thatrather than talk of ‘feminist philosophy’ it would be more radical
instead to use the phrase ‘feminist theorizing.’

History
Why is there tension between philosophy and feminist scholarship in relation to history and time?
Philosophy is a very peculiar discipline in terms of time andtradition: both within the analytical and the phenomenologicaltraditions of philosophy, a philosopher can start thinking about
or analyzing an object of thought as if that thought happened
only right here and now. It is as if nothing had happened before,
and as if the thinking started with a completely clean slate. In
multidisciplinary settings, this quite often amazes scholars whocome from other traditions within the social sciences andhumanities, traditions in which beginnings are generally lessself-secure. As a philosopher, one can just simply pose a question: What is money? What is justice? What is gender?
Simultaneously, within the discipline of philosophy – andthis is also unlike most other disciplines – discussions constantly
refer to texts which stretch over a period of more than 2000
years. Some of the oldest texts are quite often considered to bejust as valid as contemporary ones, or even more significant.
With respect to argumentation, they are often deemed to bebetter than many contemporary texts. Basically, there is a strong

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

trace within philosophy which states that so far as the content
and value of ideas and thoughts are concerned, it is irrelevant
whether they were formulated in Athens in 300 BC, around 1800
in Germany, or in present-day United States. It is also irrelevant
in which language they were formulated. This level of universal
validity and abstraction from context is exactly the point, asmuch as we can say it is, say, in geometry.
I call the above a ‘trace of omnitemporality’, again improvising from Derrida.3 This trace, as we know, is not an explicit roadand rule to be followed, and it is not all that is done, or done in
all philosophy, but it is a strong feature in the textual traditionand practice of philosophy. It is followed, although also sometimes lost, but it persists, and like footsteps in a forest, it is created by those who went before. It is also a stronger trace than justa feature of one kind of philosophy, the Platonist type. Derrida,for example, comes up with the term ‘omnitemporality’ in his
Politics of Friendship in the section in which he discusses Aristotle and certainty, stability, and fidelity with respect to philosophical knowledge, instead of discussing Plato and eternal
ideas. With respect to stable, reliable, certain, stability, reliability,
certainty, bébaios, Derrida writes:
In a state of immense philosophical concentration, we havehere the whole story of eidos all the way up to the Husserlianinterpretation of the idealization or production of ideal objects as the production of omnitemporality, of intemporality
qua omnitemporality.4

This is the same theme that Derrida worked on in his Writing
and Difference, where he writes about “[…] absolute, infinite
omni-temporality and universality, without limits of any kind.

3

Derrida has used the phrase ‘omnitemporality,’ although more or less in passing, and
it is not one of his regularly cited phrases.
4
Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, transl. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005),
pp. 16–17.

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1. FEMINISM – A MATTER OF HISTORY AND POLITICS

The Idea of truth, [….]5 Of course, we know that in reality, doing
philosophy means not only focusing on pure truth, but it isinstead much more like doing research in other disciplines.
Those who do philosophy follow particular conventions interms of constructing a paper, an argument, a chapter, or a book,
as is done in other disciplines which follow their own conventions. Quite often this happens in a determined setting withparticular discussants at a particular point in time: in order toqualify as part of a discussion, a set of people and texts, as well
as repetitions and new ideas, must be included. It is like this inphilosophy as it is in other disciplines, but I have the sense thatphilosophers are regularly in denial about that. Quite often thediscussion is posed in philosophy as if it started from a new
beginning around a table which could be in any place and at any
time, a table at which the present writer sits alongside Aristotle
and/or Kant, Dewey and/or Wittgenstein, Heidegger and/or
Deleuze, or Parfit and/or Rawls, perhaps, or some other past orcontemporary leading figures within the discipline. When andwhere they wrote their contribution is not very often referred toat all. This is what I refer to here as the omnitemporal setting.
How is feminist scholarship constructed in terms of time?
There is a completely different trace in feminist scholarship,
which has to do with the history of feminist studies arriving inuniversity settings along with the feminist movement in thecourse of the second wave of feminism in the 1970s. It is rarely
the case that you encounter omnitemporality in feminist-inclined scholarship – although, again, there are exceptions. Quite
often in discussions of theory, and after more than fifty years of
feminist argumentation in academic settings, time and place areattached to arguments.
I argue that this is because through its history of becoming
an academic field, feminist scholarship has become thoroughly
and acutely aware of the time-and-place relatedness of thoughts,
and also aware of how thoughts change the world. That the5

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, transl. Alan Bass. (London: Routledge, 2001),
p. 200.

31

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

world changes, that new thoughts and new conceptions are born
– this, which is not the area of strength of philosophy – is thearea of strength of feminist studies: feminist research is cruciallydependent on the idea of historical change, it is indeed, thewhole point of study within feminist movements.
By being aware of the time and place of study, I do not mean
only the idea of situated knowledges, which is in itself an
important theme in feminist scholarship. I mean more profoundly and in a more general sense the heightened consciousness of the time-relation of truths. There is the strong memoryof all that knowledge, which was claimed to be universal, and nottime- and place-specific, and which was questioned in thecourse of feminist consciousness-raising and in the wake ofacademic feminism. These truths proved to be the production ofvery time- and place specific gender hierarchies, gender orders,and gendered oppressions. This knowledge included various
ideas on and about gender and sexuality, which after all were notat all eternal, even if strongly claimed to be so.
This realization, precisely, that the status of a truth changes,
and that academic authority can be on the side of change, rather
than on the side of stability and reliability of knowledge andideas, is foundational for all feminist scholarship.6
In sum, given that the dominant trace in the philosophicaltradition is omnitemporality, and in feminist scholarship it ischange, it is not hard to see that this creates a certain tension for
those who take part in both academic traditions, the feminist
and the philosophical. The profound impulse for change, on the
one hand, and the ideal of omnitemporality, on the other; highhistory-consciousness, on the one hand, and an imperative to6

I have elaborated more on the specificity of feminist scholarship in Tuija Pulkkinen,“Identity and Intervention: Transdisciplinarity and Disciplinarity in Gender Studies” inSpecial Issue Transdisciplinary Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford, and Eric Alliez (Eds.).
Theory, Culture & Society, 32 (5–6) September–November 2015, pp. 183–205; and in
Tuija Pulkkinen, “Feelings of Injustice: The Institutionalization of Gender Studies andthe Pluralization of Feminism” in special issue Transatlantic Gender Crossings eds.
Anne-Emmanuelle Berger and Éric Fassin. differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural
Studies 27 (2), (2016), pp. 103–124.

32

1. FEMINISM – A MATTER OF HISTORY AND POLITICS

universalize and maximize stability, on the other. Unsurprisingly, the two orientations often clash.
I think this same tension between omnitemporality andtime-and-place boundedness is present in the work of Derrida,
though perhaps for other reasons, and this is also, perhaps, why
he appears in this essay. Derrida constantly returns to the canonof the philosophical tradition, and even to a certain degree formulates omnitemporal statements, that is, non-time and place
specific statements. He calls them ‘structures,’ but always with a‘perhaps’ attached. Yet he never fails to attach a ‘here’ and ‘now’
to whatever he says, as if to ward off the thought of this being
said in an omnitemporal manner, in order to underline the place
and the time.7 The simultaneity of the two approaches, the playwith the tradition of omnitemporality combined with a constantdeconstruction of it, produces a different type of text than would
result from a focus solely on time-bound phenomena. Perhaps
it is a play between the two registers that makes the text more
exciting.
What do the contemporary feminist theorists whom I study– such as Luce Irigaray, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Elizabeth
Grosz, Adriana Cavarero – do with this tension? I would argue
that the tension between philosophy and feminism is productive
in all of their work. None of them have a simple or uncomplicated, or a simply positive relation to the textual tradition ofphilosophy, but rather, all have a tense, and many a highly
charged relationship with it.
The philosophy they relate to most intimately is contemporary philosophy from the second half of the 20th century, andin particular, contemporary French philosophy. This is philosophy based in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, andtherefore relates to the omnitemporal subject of thought – thatis, consciousness. From the beginning to the current moment,
Rosi Braidotti’s work, for example, circulates around the issues
7
I discuss this also in Tuija Pulkkinen “Tradition, Gender and Democracy to Come –Derrida on Fraternity” in Redescriptions. Yearbook of Political Thought, Conceptual
Change and Feminist Theory, Vol. 13, (2009), pp. 103–124.

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of the philosophical subject, and subject-philosophy in general.8
Cavarero’s work circulates around the singularity of the subject
within the same tradition, but in a more Heideggerian mode,9and Irigaray focuses on the oneness of the subject.10 They all havean intense relationship with the subject of philosophy, yet also
an intensively troubled or negative relation. This is a fascinationthat is simultaneously a denunciation. It is a very interesting andindeed, tense relationship.
Braidotti is a good example. If you look through her entire
published work, from beginning to the end, she emphasizes
constantly that she was trained in philosophy, yet what she mostintensively struggles against is subject-philosophy. She says that
this tradition is what she works to undo, if philosophy is perceived as “the rational discourse of (the) dominant masculine,
Eurocentric subject.”11 Yet in her self-presentations she writes
that she wants to connect to the tradition,12 and she often emphasizes her own formation as a philosopher: “As a first-generation poststructuralist who was initiated into these philosophies by those who founded them, I shall not even attempt todeny that I am approaching feminist theory as a philosopher
trained in Paris in the late seventies by Deleuze, Lyotard, Fou8
Some indication of this are: that the phrase ‘the death of the subject’ appears as a
subtitle frequently in Braidotti’s books, from her earliest to her latest; that one of her
book-titles is Nomadic Subjects, and that she writes of herself as looking for “building
blocks for a posthuman theory of subjectivity.” Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity 2013), p. 56.
9I have discussed this more in Tuija Pulkkinen, “Judith Butler’s Politics of Philosophy
in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly: Arendt, Cavarero, and Human‘Appearing’ and ‘Plurality’” Redescriptions. Political Thought, Conceptual History andFeminist Theory Vol 21:2, (Autumn 2018), pp. 128–147.
10
Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros. Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York:
Routledge, 1995); Sara Heinämaa, “On Luce Irigaray’s Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity” in Maria C. Cimitile & Elaine P. Miller (eds.) Returning to Irigaray (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2007) pp. 243–265; Tuija Pulkkinen, “The Role of Darwin in Elizabeth
Grosz’s Deleuzian Feminist Theory – Sexual Difference, Ontology, and Intervention.”
Hypatia. A Journal of Feminist Philosophy Vol 32: 2, (Spring 2017), pp. 279–295.
11
Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. Second Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011),
p. 14.
12
Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 14.

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1. FEMINISM – A MATTER OF HISTORY AND POLITICS

cault, and Irigaray.”13 What the negative charge towards philosophy mostly consists of in Braidotti’s work is quite often its
status as the discourse of mastery and domination, yet it is also
directed against its purported universality and omnitemporality.
Within the phenomenological tradition, there always is a pull
toward the universal. Some feminist theorists are closer to thatthan others. In my view Irigaray, for example, is closer to suggesting omnitemporal structures, to the extent that she engages
with the philosophical subject, which in her work merges withthe psychoanalytical subject. She proposes that instead of being
one, the subject is two or more. In other words, sexual difference
is to a degree an omnitemporal claim. Cavarero also makes theclaim of sexual difference, – which is evident in the body andalso in the voice –, in an omnitemporal manner although she
does it in a more Heideggerian mode, in terms of the singularityof the finite subject.
Sexual difference is, to a degree, an omnitemporal claim, yetposing it within the tradition of oneness of the omnitemporalsubject expresses a heightened sense of historical change. Morethan anything, there is an appeal to change in both Irigaray’s andCavarero’s work: they aim to change something with theiromnitemporal claims concerning unveiling of the difference
that has been forgotten. The content of the philosophizing slips
from omnitemporality, and the tone slips occasionally too,because the context of the philosophizing is done in the context
of claims for change.
Most feminist thinkers, philosophers, and theorists struggle
with this tension. For example, consider Elizabeth Grosz: there
is a pull towards the universal from within the philosophicaltradition. In her case, it manifests itself in terms of a Deleuzianphilosophical ontology. Grosz combines an interest in Deleuze,and Bergson in the background of Deleuze, with Irigaray’s
sexual difference, and proceeds to make some omnitemporal
claims of her own. This is all philosophy, and yet, the entire
13

Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 69.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

purpose of Grosz’s complicated maneuvering is to convince thereader of the possibility of change.14
Judith Butler has been quite consistent in her resistance toomnitemporality. She is very careful to avoid both proposing
truths and working as a philosopher, by consistently avoiding
omnitemporal claims. So, although she is often referred to as
having proposed a ‘theory of gender,’ I would argue that it ishard to find an explicit proposition of a theory in her work.
Instead of presenting a theory, she presents an act of theorizing;
mostly, this happens in relation to some other work of theory
and in the form of constant interventions into whatever ismoving in time. She does not primarily pose an omnitemporal
question such as, ‘what is gender?’In a peculiar way, which deserves study, Butler draws fromthe resources of the textual tradition of philosophy in a very
serious and engaging fashion, yet at the same time, she absolutely does not do this in the tradition of a philosopher.15 The
same holds for Braidotti, in fact. In many respects they are very
different, but in this regard there is resonance. Both the work of
Braidotti and Butler is in constant motion with whatever is here
and now. Both of them, as well as the others I have mentioned –perhaps with the exception of Cavarero – also clearly state thatthey work not as philosophers, while constantly referring to philosophy. This is a difficult balance to achieve: building on philosophical challenges, yet completely living within time.
I argue that we should not underestimate this quality offeminist scholarship, it may well be its strength: the philosophical pull of omnitemporality, while simultaneously challenging that with a profound reluctance towards it. This tension isvery productive. In my view, the most interesting work in contemporary feminist thought is informed by the philosophical14

I have argued this more extensively in Pulkkinen, “The Role of Darwin in Elizabeth
Grosz’s Deleuzian Feminist Theory – Sexual Difference, Ontology, and Intervention.”15
I have analyzed the ways Butler does this through ‘discharging’ some philosophicallycharged concepts used by Hannah Arendt and Adriana Cavarero in Pulkkinen, “Judith
Butler’s Politics of Philosophy in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly:
Arendt, Cavarero, and Human ‘Appearing’ and ‘Plurality’”.

36

1. FEMINISM – A MATTER OF HISTORY AND POLITICS

tradition and various traditions within the philosophical tradition, and yet it does not engage in doing philosophy.
This is why it could be said that feminist philosophy is always
at the edge of philosophy. It cannot wholeheartedly take part in
the omnitemporal or universal human project. The feminist
tradition is, so to say, too conscious of historical change and its
stakes. But it can work along its borders, changing perspective
constantly from the universal to its challenge, and in this manner, it can profit from, and take part in, the strengths of theacademic tradition of philosophy.
I will end my reflection on the dimension of history here, andtake up the second dimension, namely politics. This is anotherangle that is very much part of the same or similar tension
between philosophy and feminism.

Politics
Interestingly, politics is in itself related to an opposition which
is present in the word ‘tension.’ Politics is always about opposition, at least if we believe Chantal Mouffe, for whom politics isabout agonism. In that sense, politics is related to the very topic
of tension. I If we are to believe Chantal Mouffe, for whom
politics is about agonism, politics is always about opposition.16
This way construed, politics is related to the very topic of tension. The tension between the tradition of philosophy andfeminist scholarship in terms of politics is based on a fundamentally different attitude toward politics in each of them.
In terms of the relationship between philosophy and politics,
no one has been clearer than Hannah Arendt in expressing an
opposition or tension between them. Much has been written on
Arendt’s views on philosophy.17 Famously for Arendt, instead ofbeing a rational animal, the human is a political animal. Instead
16

Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking of the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013).
Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger. The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996); Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid and the Professional
Thinker, Arendt, and Heidegger. Trans. Michael Gendre. (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1997); Linda M. G. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
17

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

of being regarded as a subject or consciousness, the humanshould, according to her, be conceived as being in a condition ofplurality. By virtue of speech, humans, in Arendt’s view, constantly act vis-à-vis each other in a state of plurality, and this is
more distinctive of humanity than solitary thought, which thetradition of philosophy has always emphasized.18
The philosophical tradition, which Arendt is critical of here,
carries a strong trace of respect for thinking that is carried out ina solitary mode. It is as if it is beyond politics, beyond multiplicity, plurality, beyond conflict and tension. Ideally, philosophical truth is calm. Yet, we all know – at least those working at
philosophy departments and also those who study the history ofphilosophers and their ideas – that there are plenty of tensions
and oppositions lurking within the discipline, and also that there
exist plenty of political struggles between different schools ofphilosophy. This does not disturb the self-image of philosophy
as calm: no politics, no opposition, just strict and rigorous reasoning.
In the self-image of philosophy, calm reason rules. Although
thinking itself consists of critique, opposition, and challenge, theultimate measure of reasoning is still supposed to be evident andthe best argument wins. There is a strong ethics of argumentation here involved within philosophy. There is no reason tomock or to underestimate the power of this ethical code in thefield: it produces a more rigorous way of arguing than is prevalent in many other fields, and there is much good in it. It also
produces its own space for doing politics within the argumentation. Nevertheless, politics as a state of permanent disagreement
can never be declared to be a desired end state within philosophy. Philosophical truth is not supposed to be a matter ofpolitics, it is opposed to politics.
18
Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics”, Social Research, Vol. 57 (1) Spring 1990,
73–103; Villa, Arendt, and Heidegger. The Fate of the Political; Taminiaux, The Thracian
Maid and the Professional Thinker. Arendt and Heidegger; Pulkkinen, “Judith Butler’s
Politics of Philosophy in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly: Arendt,
Cavarero, and Human ‘Appearing’ and ‘Plurality’”.

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1. FEMINISM – A MATTER OF HISTORY AND POLITICS

How is feminist scholarship different? Unlike philosophy, in
feminist scholarship awareness of conflict and politics is – again
because of the history of the field – extremely acute. It has beenargued by bell hooks,19 for example, and in an interesting dissertation in my own department by Anna Elomäki,20 that feminist
awareness grows through conflicts, that feminist political togetherness is strongly bound to conflict. As a movement feminism
is all about conflict with, and contesting of, what is presently
believed to be true. Historically, this is at the heart of feminism.
It is unsurprising then, that within academic study which hasdeveloped as a result of the feminist movement, the contestationof established truths is a central element. As an academic discipline feminist scholarship is primarily designed to make interventions. I have argued elsewhere that as an academic discipline,
gender studies is different precisely because it does not aim toestablish truths, but to contest established truths. Unlike manyother disciplines, gender studies, which is based in feminist
scholarship, is not primarily aimed at knowledge production, as
it were, but rather at challenging established conceptions, that is,
at making interventions.21
More precisely, what I mean is that there are many disciplines
within academia in which gender and sexuality are studied with
the intention of producing knowledge about gender and sexuality: medicine; sociology; sexology; anthropology, and ethnology, etc. But within feminist studies, at gender studies departments, there is a distinctly different tone. That difference in tone
consists of the relationship to politics and to the political dimension of academic study. That relationship is extremely in-tense,
and in-tensively positive in feminist studies.
The special relationship to politics in feminist scholarship ispresent in everyday work at gender studies departments. You do
19bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. (Boston, MA: South End
Press, 1989).
20
Anna Elomäki, Feminist Political Togetherness: Rethinking the Collective Dimension
of Feminist Politics (University of Helsinki, 2012), pp. 113–119.
21
More extensively in Pulkkinen, “Identity and Intervention: Transdisciplinarity andDisciplinarity in Gender Studies.”

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not apologize for having an agenda, as you would in a philosophy or social science setting. For example, at the University of
Helsinki, where I teach, I recently had a discussion with some of
the MA students who are also trans-activists. Having written
their BA theses in another discipline, and now working on athesis in our MA program, they were worried about ‘objectivity’and about the tone of their theses. Is it okay to indicate that you
also wish some change in these matters? I found myself explaining that yes, in Gender studies it is actually very common forresearchers to be involved in the very political processes ofchange that constitute the objects of their studies. A fact that one
should not be ashamed of. On the contrary, the kind of wide (ordeeply ethnographic, if you wish) knowledge of the field is very
good. And also, you can, yes, be openly in favor of certainchange, and dispense with the need to dress your views into aseemingly neutral, objective, scientific point of view jargon. You
just need to argue well, and with good grounds and references.
This is not completely foreign within philosophy departments, either. As an academic tradition, perhaps, philosophy
also sometimes differs from many other fields which more pronouncedly ‘produce knowledge.’ In philosophy people are, perhaps, more critically minded in inquiry. Yet, the difference fromgender studies is notable. There is a crucial difference between
the transformative intervening principle of feminist scholarshipin its entirety, and the intervening character of some philosophical scholarship. Most importantly, intervention is not the goal inphilosophical scholarship, as it is in feminist scholarship; in philosophy the goal is truth, the non-political truth.
With that truth, the most general and the most abstract oftruths, as the posited end of philosophical contemplation or philosophical analysis, analysis, the discipline of philosophy often
also places itself above other disciplines which aim to simply
produce knowledge to organize those disciplines. What it arrogates for itself is the task of organizing those disciplines. In thephilosophy of science, it is common to talk of ‘specialist sciences’
versus philosophy as the general science; and to talk about ‘folk’science as opposed to the sciences proper, amongst which phi40

1. FEMINISM – A MATTER OF HISTORY AND POLITICS

losophy is furthest away from the ‘people’. There is, both inanalytical and in phenomenological modes of doing philosophy,
a particular certainty of being above the other disciplines. Philosophy never seems to be just a perspective, not even for those
who do Nietzschean perspectivism; it is the perspective. The
mode of doing philosophy is just this; it is a tradition, even if
philosophy does not acknowledge itself as a tradition, constantly
claiming instead the authoritative voice of pure thought.
As an attitude, this is very different from the one prevalent infeminist studies, which not only entertains politics, disagreement – and with that a constant state of disagreement – as its
horizon but it is also constantly aware of the open nature of what
is considered to be true and real. Feminist academia is therefore
often busy in actually producing new concepts that transform
what we can see and feel as reality.
Again, the experience of second wave feminist activists is
crucial here: there was a huge amount of academic knowledge
that seemed to address ‘the truth’ while systematically ignoring,
torturing, mistreating, twisting, misinforming, and bullying
women and purposefully misunderstanding gender in order tomaintain certain orders and hierarchies. This academic knowledge could only be understood as being political through andthrough and confronted as such. As this is the ‘founding act’ ofthe discipline, it results in a very different attitude from that of
the tradition of philosophy. The calm is not the horizon, neither
is its goal to establish the most general possible truth on thematter; instead the horizon is change, the possibilities of openings for politics within the stability of truth. You cannot imagine
feminist scholarship without a horizon of change and politics.
Concerning those contemporary feminist thinkers whom I
study, there are differences, of course, depending on the philosophical attachments of the thinker concerned, in terms of how
they relate both to the production of ‘truth’ and the task of intervention. However, in a manner very similar to their relationships with history and change, their relationship with politics
and openings for change, only vary in degree. Of course, all ofthem are interventionist in the sense that all feminist scholarship41

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

is interventionist. But they have various degrees of a sense ofpolitics – whether in terms of openings, or in terms of conflict –in their approaches.
Irigaray, even with her omnitemporal arguments concerning
sexual difference, is very hopeful, since her horizon is change;
Grosz, whom I would criticize for having as her goal a scientificform of explanation, one that closes down the space for politics,
nevertheless constructs such scientific explanations in order toexplain that change can happen.22 And Braidotti and Butler
entirely refuse a non-political stance, as far as I can see. Theirwork is driven by intervening politically, and it is precisely thisdrive that accounts for the fact that they constantly change theirfields and topics of interest. While these traits are common toboth authors, it would be a matter for other investigations to go
deeper into their specific differences and similarities.

Conclusion
Philosophy and feminism: there is indeed a tension between
these terms. So much tension in fact that for quite a long time, I
myself have verbally rejected the combination. I have refused to
speak of ‘feminist philosophy’, instead choosing to speak of‘feminist theory’ or ‘feminist theorizing’. As a by-product of that
position, I have also acknowledged other intellectual traditions
comprising theoretical discussions in feminist studies, such as
psychoanalysis, literary theory, semiotics, etc.
While avoiding the term ‘feminist philosophy’ I was for along time a board member of the International Association of
Women Philosophers (IAPh). This board usually includes
people who work in philosophy departments and those ingender studies departments. I have mostly talked of ‘feminist
theory,’ even if I deal principally with the tradition of philosophy, and truly enjoy it, and even if moreover I have a particular research interest in how philosophy as a tradition works
within feminist scholarship. If I reflect on why I would have22

My criticism is published in Pulkkinen, “The Role of Darwin in Elizabeth Grosz’s
Deleuzian Feminist Theory – Sexual Difference, Ontology, and Intervention.”421. FEMINISM – A MATTER OF HISTORY AND POLITICS

avoided using ‘feminist philosophy,’ I think it has been, morethan anything, in response to the attitude that sometimes seems
to creep in with this phrase: it brings in omnitemporality and thehorizon of truth, instead of highlighting the horizon of politics.
I think philosophy needs history and politics in order to serve
feminist thought properly; simultaneously, I think the philosophical tradition is essential to make feminist theory the exciting
intellectual journey that it is. My own recipe for doing feminist
research is constantly trying to challenge the three traditions ofphilosophy, history, and politics, with each other.
Yet I also fully engage with the philosophical tradition within
feminist scholarship. I enjoy Elizabeth Grosz’s ambitious
developments in the area of ontology, Luce Irigaray’s incredible
work, and Adriana Cavarero’s ideas of voice as unique.23 I probably enjoy them precisely because they are all overambitious ingeneralizing and universalizing. And I think that even those who
more consistently battle against the trace of omnitemporality incontemporary feminist theory, as I see both Braidotti and Butler
do, would not really be so intriguing if their work was not set
against that tradition of omnitemporality and truth, and constantly referring to it. This means I am not against philosophy;
it is just that philosophy needs a constant reminder, a constantpulling back and forth, and it needs to be taken a little lessseriously. I suppose this is quite a Derridean position: even without proper faith in ‘real philosophy,’ it makes sense to act ‘as if’
there was one. Philosophy is an incredible tradition which needs
exercise to be kept alive, meaningful, and in motion. And this iswhat feminist theorizing today is also doing, in its way.
For feminist theorizing, the tradition of philosophy, I believe,
brings with it that tension, that exciting tension, that we can
express with the words jännittävä and spännande. The mostinteresting work in contemporary feminist thought, I think, isinformed by the philosophical tradition and, what is even more
jännittävää /spännande, it is inspired by different and contra23

Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, transl. Paul Kottman (California: Stanford University Press, 2005).

43

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

dictory traditions within the philosophical tradition, and therefore creates interesting tensions in the field. It is a productive
tension.
In conclusion, indeed the tension between the two terms
philosophy and feminism persists – and so it should, as far as I
am concerned. Tension is not necessarily a bad thing, and as I
have noted, it may be exactly the thing that keeps thinking alive;
it is productive, and it is spännande, jännittävää, interesting!

44

Chapter 2
Desiring Difference and the Hierarchies of Time
Kristina Fjelkestam

When do we claim to have seen better days, look forward to abrighter future, or strive to be more present in the actual
moment? Whose time is considered valuable and whose is considered worthless?
In this essay I want to critique hierarchical valuations of timethrough the lens of queer temporality, focusing on “difference”.
We are still under the influence of a conception of time indicative of sharp distinctions between then, now, and later, in which
temporality is continually valued and assessed. This time paradigm of Western modernity, shaped by European Enlightenment and its idea of progress in the form of the linear and irreversible sequence, “forces us to emphasise change, development
and replacement and to ignore the contemporary in the noncontemporary”, as the literary scholar and cultural historian
Aleida Assmann points out.1 The past thus turns into what nolonger happens, and such a construct makes us define time assomething in which the present can only exist in relation to what
it is not, i.e. the non-contemporary. Contemporaneity thenbecomes the norm for our understanding of the world, and inwhich the past, but also the future, are assigned only the role of
the Other.
Sure, our perception of the past always contains a measure ofcontemporaneity, but problems arise when present perspectives
include hierarchical evaluations. These ratings can have various
discriminating consequences and be sexist (as in a classic interpretation of Goethe’s Faust in which Faust is named “modern”
1

Aleida Assmann, Zeit und Tradition: Kulturelle Strategien de Dauer (Köln: Böhlau
Verlag, 1999), p. 50: “zwingt dazu, Wandel, Entwicklung und Ersetzung zu betonen und
die Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigkeiten des Ungleichzeitigkeiten zu übersehen”(my translation).

45

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

and Gretchen “outdated”), ageist (children as a stretch of “notyets” and the elderly as a pile of rattling “has-beens”), heteronormative (when the heterosexual life curve is deemed normal),or xenophobic (non-Western cultures depicted as “primitive”).2
In the end, strategies of temporal difference are all about power
and the precedence of certain interpretations.
Practices such as history writing take place in the present andare thus limited by knowledge and ideas of its time. We are thenforced to revise history at regular intervals based on new facts
and changed values, something which may sound reasonable inan epistemological sense. But this conception on the other hand
ontologically implies that the past is static, frozen in time, andsupposed to be something we can return to again and again withever sharpened analytical tools. This means that the idea of thepast as a kind of fixed essence, as constantly “the same” waiting
to be continually visited, might be just as problematic as theconcept of “difference”.3 Critique of a conception of time basedon “similarity” is here put into words by new historicist scholar
Catherine Belsey:
Time travel is a fantasy. We cannot reproduce the conditions– the economy, the diseases, the manners, the language andthe corresponding subjectivity – of another century. To do sowould be, in any case, to eliminate the difference which makes
the fantasy pleasurable […] Reading the past depends on thisdifference. The real anachronism, then, is of another kind.
Here history as time travel gives way to history as costume
drama, the reconstruction of the past as the present in fancy
dress. The project is to explain away the surface strangeness2

Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (NewYork: Simon&Chuster, 1982); Clary Krekula & Barbro Johansson (Ed.), Introduktion
till kritiska åldersstudier (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2017); Elizabeth Freeman, Time
Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010);
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other; How Anthropology Makes Its Subject (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002).
3
Ethan Kleinberg, Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017).

46

2. DESIRING DIFFERENCE

of another century in order to release its profound continuity
with the present.4

The conception of ontological “similarity” between past andpresent creates the figure of the “time traveller” in which differences are erased. The time traveler strives to experience the pastin terms of temporal location, which generates a historicalperspective in which similarity and continuity are emphasized
in a static and ahistorical fashion. The possibility of change andthe emancipatory potential are then ignored.
When the relation between past, present, and future isdefined in terms of similarity, people are considered to have thesame driving forces throughout history and also in what is tocome. We are, amongst other things, presumed to love ourchildren and to feel pain in the same way as both our ancestors
and our future generations. The conception of similarity erases
the sharp distinction between then, now, and later which isotherwise characteristic of modernity’s chronologically sequential temporality governed by notions of development andprogress. History or futurity as similes and parables transgress
the conception of a one-way movement of time, and also diffuse
conceptions such as anachronism as non-chronological, unsynchronized, what is misplaced. As such, similarity embodies aneffort to compensate for the loss of what no longer exists, or the
want of what may never exist.
So, to regard history as something which is “similar” to thepresent obviously presents problems, but I claim that it is just as
questionable to emphasize “difference” even though Belsey inthe quote above seems to prefer it. The concept of difference on
the one hand certainly makes our historical fantasies enjoyable
since they then can contain exoticizing aspects of both threat
and allure in our longing for something else. But on the other
hand distinct boundaries between various time dimensions tend
to function hierarchically by emphasizing either the now of the4

Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama(London: Methuen, 1985), p. 2.

47

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

present or the then of the past as something superior – either wetalk about the good old days, or of the past as something weshould count ourselves lucky to have missed out on.
I will here argue that a pivotal driving force in Western
hierarchical historiography consists of a desire for the past
which implicates a desire for difference. In the following I will
try to unnaturalize this driving force without ending up inlocked binaries where difference is set against similarity, linear
time is set against cyclical, the timeless against the time-bound,etc. I am not alone in doing so, however. Several interesting
contributions have appeared in the growing research field ofcritical temporality studies. Sure, mainstream historiographicalresearch has also had a renaissance of late, for instance proposing an ongoing “time crisis” in Western historical consciousness, but I find the discussions of power and politics in critical
temporality studies more innovative.5 The political implicationsof the Western time paradigm have first and foremost been
observed in the feminist critique of linear progression, queer
theory’s questioning of chrononormativity, and in postcolonial
analyses of the continuous impact of history.6 Temporality has
in this context been defined as “power relations as they play out
in time”.7
My contribution to this field involves establishing a multidimensional model of the desire for the past which complicatesthe hierarchical time paradigm of difference. In this mission I
will also relate to findings of the so-called affective turn in which
affects and emotions in political, economic, social, and cultural
power structures are actualized. History scholars, for example,
write up various kinds of histories of emotion, media scholars
5

Cf. François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2015).
6
Cf. Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Freeman, Time Binds; Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000).
7Sarah Sharma, In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2014), p. 4.

48

2. DESIRING DIFFERENCE

talk about popular culture trends of “affective history”, while
queer theorists discuss “erotohistoriography”.8 This kind ofresearch on embodied emotional reaction to realizations of thepast is something which will be of interest to me here.

Diffusing Desire
The desire for the past is a multidimensional and complex
driving force for historiographical expressions which in various
ways represent a strive to replace what no longer exists – or,rather, what may never even have existed. These close to erotically charged desires contain also cognitive, emotional, andpolitical aspects. That is, the desire for the past includes a quest
to achieve not only knowledge but an emotion-laden sensual
relationship to the past. It can also be driven by the politicallonging for recognition and restoration or an effort to recapture
what is perceived of as past phenomena such as “the nation” or“the welfare state”. I regard this multidimensional desire for the
past as the driving force through which the past is actualized by
the queries and questions of the present, thus turning into what
we call “history”.
In postcolonial and queer theory of history, the binary division of either “difference” or “similarity” between the past andthe present has been deconstructed through a focus on asynchronous temporalities that intersect each other. Instead ofbeing similar or different to the present, the past can be regardedin Derridean terms as an absent presence and a haunting
spectre.9 In the United States, for example, the history of slavery
still has implications for African-American citizens, and invarious ways the colonial legacy lives on in previously colonizedcountries. This has been described by Achille Mbembe as a
8

Cf. Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2017); Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production ofHistorical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Freeman, Time
Binds.
9
Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle
Internationale (Paris: Galilée, 1993).

49

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

temporal “entanglement”, something which “encloses multiple
durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings
that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another”.10 History is not considered as made up of diachronic linear seriality, but rather as a synchronous “interlocking of presents, pasts and futures that retain their depths ofother presents, pasts and futures, each age bearing, altering, andmaintaining the previous ones.”11
Queer theorists, such as Carolyn Dinshaw, for their part
speak of “a touch across time” in which emotional connections
are forged through the epochs and create context and evenpolitical solidarity over time, or as Elizabeth Freeman who uses
the term “erotohistoriography” based on the idea of temporal
hybridization creating bodily affect.12 Freeman, perhaps themost well-known scholar of queer temporality studies, is also theeditor of the GLQ issue in which this new research field waspresented in 2007. The focus on body and emotion characteristic of queer temporality studies becomes obvious already in
her introduction, for instance in her interpretation of theHamlet quote most often cited by scholars of the theory ofhistory – “time is out of joint.” The familiar words are uttered byHamlet as he speaks to his father, the ghost, who informs his sonthat he has been murdered. Since the publication of Derrida’s
Spectres of Marx in 1993, the quote has been used as pretext forthe postcolonial conception of the past as something still
haunting the present. This conception has prompted several
important and interesting interpretations, but instead Freeman
significantly chooses to shed light on the somatic aspects of thequote. “Time is out of joint” turns into an image representing
something felt on the bare skin and bones, even the actual
skeleton being dislodged: “In this metaphor, time has, indeed is,10

Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001),
p. 14.
11
Mbembe, On the Postcolony, p. 16.
12
Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 21; Freeman, Time Binds, p. 95.

50

2. DESIRING DIFFERENCE

a body.”13 The asynchronous, the queer, in this sense becomes apurely bodily experience. In relation to sexuality, time has alsopreviously been a central marker – Freeman highlights Freud
who based his theories on normative sexuality on temporalterms such as Nachträglichkeit (deferred action), and considered
deviation either as “a sign of being stuck in a developmental
phase or as an endless return to the past in a kind of psychic
atavism.”14 Normative aspects of time in relation to sexuality canof course still be found today, also in queer theory, but queering
temporality contains more than just observing feelings of timelessness, lateness, failure and delay. It can also be about politicalvisions of the future and queer utopias.15
Indeed, perceptions and conceptions of time have somatic aswell as political consequence; “temporality itself raises thequestion of embodiment and subjectivity”, as queer theorist andmedieval historian Carolyn Dinshaw points out.16 An important
aspect highlighted in queer temporality studies is the problem of“chrononormativity”, i.e. the chronological norm of the heterosexual life curve which constitutes “a technique by which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts”, both shaping
and being shaped by our actual bodies.17 Childhood and puberty
must in the right order be followed by adulthood’s marriage andchildbirth, which in older age leads to grandchildren – life’s“dessert”. The concept of chrononormativity, as coined by
Elizabeth Freeman, reveals how naturalized this pattern is andhow self-evidently individuals, society and politics relate to thisnorm for the supposedly ultimate distribution of reproduction
and production.
In the end, the values that are critically highlighted by chrononormativity are about succession, maturity and development,
13

Freeman, “Introduction”, GLQ 13:2–3 2007, p. 159.
Freeman, “Introduction”, p. 162.
15
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NewYork: New York University Press, 2009).
16
Carolyn Dinshaw, “Temporalities”, in Paul Strohm (Ed.), Oxford Twenty-FirstCentury Approaches to Literature: Middle English (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), p. 109.
17
Freeman, Time Binds, p. 3.
1451

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

and if you oppose them, you risk appearing immature, outdated
and out of joint with time. However, violations of normative
conceptions of time also make possible a multiplication or dissemination of time. Alternate and queer violations of timenorms can consist of “asynchrony, anachronism, anastrophe,
belatedness, compression, delay, ellipsis, flashback, hysteroneproteron, pause, prolepsis, repetition, reversal, surprise”, asElizabeth Freeman puts it.18 These kinds of terms and concepts
describing time ruptures flourish also within Western modernity. For example, the concept of “anachronism” is an invention
that was established in the 18th century.19 In pre-modernity“syncretic chronology”, a kind of timelessness, reigned instead.20
A medieval painting could quite obviously depict soldiers at
Jesus’ tomb in contemporary 14th century armor, which createda temporal unity between the past and the now where Jesus is“not of a distant, foreign past, but of an eternal present”.21
Carolyn Dinshaw gives another example when she highlights
the medieval mystic Margareta Kempe who falls into inconsolable tears in front of the altar’s Jesus figure, exhibiting feelings of
him just having died.22 A syncretic chronology forms a temporalunity between past and present into an eternal now, the pastturning constantly present instead of being “different”.
Today, the worst anachronistic sin is to apply contemporary
theories and concepts to the past – to talk about “homosexuality” when discussing pre-modernity, for instance. On the other
hand, it becomes necessary to commit a certain amount ofinterpretive violence against the past in order to be able to con18

Freeman, Time Binds, p. xxii.
Cf. Margreta De Grazia, “Anachronism”, in Brian Cummings & James Simpson(Eds.), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010); Peter Burke, “The Sense of Anachronism from Petrarch
to Poussin”, in Chris Humphrey & W. M. Ormrod, Time in the Medieval World (York:York Medieval Press, 2001.
20
Anthony Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern
Historical Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 47.
21
Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past, p. 50.
22Dinshaw, “Temporalities”.
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2. DESIRING DIFFERENCE

ceptualize it at all in the present; if it is to be possible to approach
the past, a “necessary anachronism” is required (at least according to G. W. F. Hegel’s claim in his Ästhetik). In classical historical materialist terms à la Walter Benjamin it is rather amatter of actualizing history, i.e. to constantly put the past in
dialogue with the present perception of it in order to achieve
political change.23 New historicists point out that actualization inthis sense actually constitutes an approach that can be comparedto that of anachronism, which means that an interpretation – aswell as objects, people, events or ideas – is placed in a time where
it does not belong. Catherine Belsey emphasizes in the previously cited quotation that it is precisely this concept of difference
between now and then that makes our imagination about thepast enjoyable, while a figure like the time traveler, who strives
to experience the past in its temporal location, instead creates atime conception in which similarity and continuity are stressedat the expense of possibilities of change.
Thus, anachronism in the sense of awareness of difference
displays productive aspects too. It does not have to equal accusations of mistakes and wrongdoings but can infer contemporaneous political commitment. The real mistake, according toBelsey, is to try to reconstruct the past on the premise ofsimilarity and its implied strive to bridge the time gap between
now and then. To smooth out difference instead of affirming it
and believing that the past and the present “resemble” eachother, is according to Belsey in fact the properly pejorative anachronism. A conscious use of anachronism in the sense of clashing differences also implies that one takes responsibility for one’s
political and ideological positions, according to Swedish historian Sara Edenheim.24 Rather, according to both Belsey and
Edenheim, it ought to be a matter of alienating the past insteadof identifying with it. In this way our questions of the past canbe nothing but anachronistic. But precisely because of this can
23

Walter Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker”, Gesammelte
Schriften II:2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 468.
24
Sara Edenheim, Anakronismen: Mot den historiska manin (Gothenburg: Glänta,2011), p. 75.

53

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

our contemporary questions become interesting, importanteven, and a measure of “untimeliness” can hold emancipatory
potential.
To dictatorially place the Other into a homogenizing temporality can be likened to abusive behavior, resulting in a loss of
meaning: “History cannot represent, except through a processof translation and a consequent loss of status and significancefor the translated, the heterotemporality of that world”, writes
postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty.25 Although temporality indeed requires some rewriting and translation – timerequires metaphor according to Lynn Hunt26, but to emphasize
Otherness is not only a spatial marker but also a temporal one.
The colonial heritage makes it obvious that space instead holds“a plurality of times existing together”.27

Conclusion
Crucial ideas concerning asynchronous temporality have beenpresented by postcolonial and queer theorists in the last decade,but oddly enough they have left no mark whatsoever in mainstream history of theory.28 Beside norm-critical aspects of temporality, which are key, queer- and postcolonial theory also pay
attention to the somatising effects of temporality norms. Bodily
affect, interwoven with sensory sensations and cognitive reactions, turns into emotions. They can entail feeling immature, tofeel ahead of your time, passé, or even timeless. Emotions are
not about chronology. Various emotions and emotional structures can exist in parallel at the same time, in the same place andin the same person. Mainstream history of emotions is moreinterested in studying diachronic perspectives, while a post25

Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 95.
Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time: Making History (Budapest: Central European
University Press, 2008), p. 3.
27
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 109.
28
Cf. Breaking Up Time: Negotiating Border Between Present, Past and Future, Berber
Bevernage & Chris Lorenz (Eds.) (Göttingen: Vandehoeck & Rupprecht, 2013), a mainstream anthology discussing historiographical issues similar to this essay but without
any reference to queer theorists and with only one reference to a postcolonial theorist.
26

54

2. DESIRING DIFFERENCE

colonial theorist like Achille Mbembe instead studies synchronic “entanglements” and its intersecting and clashing dimensions of time and emotion, and a queer theorist like Carolyn
Dinshaw talks about a “touch across time” in which emotional
connections are forged through the epochs creating coherence
and political solidarity across temporal dimensions.
So, what kind of time conception ultimately takes shape –who speaks to whom, how and why? If the historical past in theuniversalizing sense of the Enlightenment signifies all pasts
since it is assumed to be the only past, then the number of histories has certainly multiplied by now. Queer temporalities are
critiquing linearity and causality, but not by opposing them andthus getting stuck in binaries such as linearity versus cyclicity,
timeless versus time bound, contemporary versus non-contemporary, and so on. Instead of alteritism’s static difference inthe singular between present and past, it is all about differencesin the plural. Time has several histories, evoked by multidimensional desires in which the past does not have to be assigned
to the role of the excluded Other. Assuming the relevance of the
body and its sensory experiences in relation to temporality,
alternate non-hierarchical ways of conceiving connections
between past, present, and future present themselves.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

56

Chapter 3
The Demands of the Historical Unconscious– the Psychopathology of History

Sara Edenheim1

History is a deferred, symbolic substitution for the traumatic
loss the past represents, an imaginary compensation for the
temporality of existence, the projection of the desire for aredemptive significance in human behaviour. Consciousness
needs this symbolic dimension since it cannot cope adequately, immediately, with the predicaments human behaviour occasions. The historical predicament is psychopathological.2

The liberal humanist orientation in most versions of historicalresearch assumes that a historical consciousness is essential forhuman beings – often to such a high degree that human consciousness in itself has become synonymous with this historicalconsciousness. If history is the “common sense” of a society,then our “sense” is historical. As “common sense” in Swedishand other Germanic languages literally translates to “sane sense”(sunt förnuft, sunt meaning “healthy”, “sound”, “sane”), there isindeed a direct link to claims on knowledge of history and saneness, which are now lost in translation.
“Consciousness” often refers to cognition or understanding
and it is possible to find historians also using concepts such as“historical understanding” or “historical awareness”. The specific term consciousness (medvetande/Bewusstsein/conscience),
however, dominates within the specific field and perspective
introduced by German historians of didactics in the 1970s and1

This is a longer and translated version of an article entitled “Historiens psykopatologi”
published in Glänta, Vol. 2 (2016).
2
Martin L. Davies, Historics – Why History Dominates Contemporary Society (NewYork: Routledge, 2005), p. 236.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

specifically developed by Jörn Rüsen and others. Even though
the concept obviously can be found within many other different
fields such as philosophy, psychology, phenomenology, neurosciences, psycho-analytical theory, etc., it is not evident fromwhich of these fields historians of didactics have picked it up.
Rüsen occasionally refers to the cognitive sciences, mainly in
relation to different types of learning, but otherwise there arefew definitions of the concept “consciousness” itself in historians’ writing on historical consciousness. Rather focus is on
the “historical” part, i.e., what it is that makes (the undefined)
consciousness specifically historical:
Rüsen’s premise is that we comprehend the past in the formof narratives. Through ‘narrative competence’, Rüsen postulates, historical consciousness informs moral deliberation byconnecting past, present, and future into a perceived actuality.
Narrative competence brings this actuality into focus alongwith concomitant moral obligations. By creating a typology ofpossible narrative interpretations of the past, as his work seeks
to do, empirical researchers may ask questions such as ‘Whatrole does historical consciousness play in everyday life, inpolitics, and in other spheres of life? Are there laws governing
its development that are analogous to the laws that govern thedevelopment of logical, moral, and other cognitive skills[…]?’3

There are exceptions. In an interview with Rüsen and historian
Roger Simon, Simon argues that focusing on identity, recognition, and narrative are insufficient to understand historicalconsciousness. Simon wants to draw attention to other forces
organizing memory and temporality (such as social performance, fragments/trace, or fantasies of wholeness).4 Their discrepancies are defined by the interviewer in the following way:3

Roger Simon and Jörn Rüsen, “A dialogue on narrative and historical consciousness”,
in K. D. Heyer (Ed.) Theorizing Historical Consciousness (Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2004), p. 203.
4
Simon Rüsen, “A dialogue on narrative and historical consciousness”.

58

3. THE DEMANDS OF THE HISTORICALFor Simon, a historical consciousness is a moral awarenessthat traces of the past arrive ‘demanding something of us.’Rüsen too recognizes that the past demands something of us,
but that something is cognitive coherence and moral action
formed through narrative interpretations by the subject […].5This demand, issued from the past in the cases of both Simonand Rüsen, takes a very different form depending on how thepast is perceived: as traces or as coherent narratives. For Rüsen,the demand is a clear moral imperative: only by knowing yourpast will you know yourself and know which action is right andwhich is wrong. The past is here filled with agency, and the consciousness is pre-filled with the capability to handle the demandsof the past: it is a consciousness that already knows that bymaking a narrative interpretation it will manage to translate thedemand into a comprehensible message, where only that whichis comprehensible is moral. Consciousness hence seems to overlap with the historical: they are one and the same, making“historical consciousness” a tautology that embraces all humanthinking and action. This is not specific to historians using theconcept, but rather a signifying trait of all historical research thatex-historian Martin L. Davies describes as “organic”: “[t]heorganic conception of history has thus a distinct, pragmaticforce. It underpins a self-authenticating, holistic view of history‘as everything’’ […]”.6
The historical consciousness is imagined as sovereign and allinclusive, and therefore there would be no point in going‘behind’ it, to understand its causes and its constitutive limits.
However, this organic history, Davies argues, is a late creation,
modern and Western, where we are all assumed to be constituted through historical thinking (“historic sense as naturalsense”). In its place, Davies proposes a splitting of the tautology,
by showing how consciousness precedes the historical andhence is independent of the historical. His is neither a decon5
6

Rüsen, “A dialogue on narrative and historical consciousness”, p. 203.
Davies, Historics – Why History Dominates Contemporary Society, p. 38.

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structive nor a psychoanalytical approach, but I think this splitting of the historical from consciousness is helpful to start aninvestigation into the important difference between history andtemporality. When Derrida, e.g., states that time is the origin ofdifference, and hence for subjectification, he meant time and nothistory. Historical consciousness is rather based on the assumption of history as the origin of sameness; historical consciousness
requires recognition and identification over time, not alienationand difference. Even though the differentiation between thepast, the present, and the future is intrinsic to historical consciousness (as well as to many other versions of consciousness),the aim of the historical consciousness is to fill these entities withrecognizable contents, coherency, and common sense that all
make a claim on reality. This is what makes history legitimate inrelation to, for example, myths, bad memory, anachronisms,
fantasies, and gossip. History hence uses a certain perception of
the past to stabilize not only the present, but also the future, by
filling these temporal states with coherency and meaning, i.e.
what is recognizable as the same. To not only be constituted bythis historical consciousness, but also to accept it and notinterrogate it, are the prerequisites of organic historical research.
This consciousness is usually presented as the only resource wehave to understand ourselves and our world. Because it
demands sameness, Davies claims that the historical consciousness is not only a conservative impulse, but also instigates anunethical approach by foreclosing other alternatives of humanaction and responsibility. It also, interestingly, produces quite
dogmatic and inferior forms of representation:
The ‘organic’ conception of history is, then, the most comprehensive, coercive version form of knowledge. It explains why
history perpetuates ‘the same old thing’, is regarded associety’s ‘default knowledge’, and inevitably affirmative. It
also explains why history is essentially conservative, why it
activates archaic, regressive tendencies. Though it imposes
itself metaphorically, e.g., as (a) ‘an everlasting animal’ or asan ‘inexorable chain’, history proves to be (b) secondary to the60

3. THE DEMANDS OF THE HISTORICAL

immediate sense of personal purpose or self-possession [aesthesis, Eigensinn], and (c) a subordinate genre of aesthetic
representation.7

Within psychoanalytic theory there are many ways to relate totemporality and especially the relationship between the past,present, and future. As metaphor, of course, the Id could be seenas the past – uncontrollable, incomprehensible drives that constitute us but that are difficult, usually impossible to acknowledge and handle without enormous psychological dangers, justas immutable as the acts of the past that cannot be changed
because they have already been committed. Still they are our
responsibility since we are dependent on them for who we are.
The Ego, that present state we always find ourselves in, that we
can influence and alter, orient ourselves in, feel at home or lostin, that which we think we know. And then the Super-ego, thefuture, for whom we do everything for, for whom we act andadapt ourselves for, for this is where the verdict will come from,
where we will be held responsible for our acts and desires. A very
simplified metaphor, but still one example of a relation to past,present, future that is not dependent on coherent narratives for
ethical orientation and knowledge.
It is also an approach that takes in account all events andexperiences from the past, not only those we remember or havetaken notice of and hence have ended up in an archive of sorts.
As Djuna Barnes once wrote: “Those long remembered canalone claim to be long forgotten”.8 Rather, it is by assuming thatmost things happening to us are forgotten or foreclosed, andthat all we will be able to know about them is that they (forever
undefined and unknown) are part of that which constitutes us
and our present state, that the unknown, the incomprehensible,
the non-colonizable – that which escapes us – is not going away
no matter how hard we try. They are there as our memento
mori. They are so many and vast, these events and experiences,
7
8

Davies, Historics – Why History dominates Contemporary Society, p. 39.
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: A New Direction 2006; 1937).

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forever lost and not recoupable, and what they can teach us is‘only’ how to handle and live with lost events and experiences,
without dreaming of their redemption.9
Why are some events treated as more historical than others?
Are they remembered for no particular reason? Of course, allevents – also the most well-known ones – are forever lost, but
we keep reproducing narratives of them for specific reasons,reasons that have more to do with us than with the events themselves. Arbitrariness and coincidences are part of everything, but
the unconscious tries to make sense even of that and hence,
retroactively, even the random fluke is accorded meaning. What
we have then are unnarratable events (as all events are) thathaunt us – sometimes because they are traumatic and sometimes it is just their general unnarratability that haunts us – andthen we have the efforts to make sense of some of these events:that we call history. And this history is therefore always contingent.
Now, the institutionalization of historical research andmethods has made history ‘less’ arbitrary and more predictable(one could even say more boring): the national archives organize
history in accordance with state laws and state interests, and thearchives of social movements organize history in accordancewith a specific group’s interests. Desire, then, seems to organize
history, no matter if it is a nation’s desire or that of an individual.
This could make history interesting and useful, but only if it
stops reproducing ‘the same old thing’.
Lacan, too, wanted to understand how we perceive temporality. Just as in the case of Derrida, time is not about history
or even narratives. Even though language is the cause of thetemporal experience, it is language in the form of sentences,words, phonemes, that interest Lacan – not the specific and contextual content of language – as is the case of the historian thathas to fill ‘the past’ with a specific content to be able to write
anything historical to constitute the historical consciousness (no9

See also Sara Edenheim, Anakronismen – mot den historiska manin (Gothenburg:
Glänta, 2011).

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3. THE DEMANDS OF THE HISTORICAL

wonder this consciousness always ends up belonging to amodernist, liberal subject). A syllable must be placed in front ofanother to become a word; when I speak, I am dependent on theability (or rather the limitation) to make a temporal difference
between the first and the next syllable, and when I write, I am
equally dependent on the spatial difference between letters orsigns. This is a physical dependency; we cannot place thesyllables and letters on top of each other or utter them all at once
even if we wanted to. It is this that Davies refers to as the realorganic consciousness – as opposed to the historical one that
only tries to become organic. The ability to make temporal differences – gaps in time that create a before and an after – isnecessary for any language. As we all know, though we often
forget it, language is something we all must learn – it is not there
from the beginning and, hence, our sense of temporality is notthere from the beginning either. More importantly though, thekind of temporality that language requires and that is requiredof all of us, is not the same temporality which is produced by ahistorical consciousness. The necessary temporality of language
is a source of frustration – every time we say something we areforced to subject ourselves to this temporality that tears up all
emotions and thoughts into systematically organized syllables,
while simultaneously having to deal with the fact that it is only
through this tearing up that we become intelligible subjects
before others and ourselves, that it is only through this constantdestruction of any imaginary wholeness that our emotions andthoughts can not only be expressed but even constituted (theunconscious is, as Lacan remarks, structured like a language).
The temporality of language uncovers our lack and impotence,
our inability to communicate freely and autonomously without
limitations. This is why we continue to speak, hoping that thecontinuous flow of words will somehow fill the gaps, make themless noticeable, and maybe even reach a stage of completeness,of a successful transmission, a final concluding remark wherenothing more has to be added.
Historical temporality, on the other hand, is a source ofenjoyment – not despair – where the petty fantasy scenarios of63

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

the Ego all fall in place, the gaps are filled and the content pointing towards the present (i.e. us), explaining our existence, ourorigin and our objective. This is why the end of history –famously declared by Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin wall
– created a hysteric reaction in the field of history. Not because
the field was critical of the liberal capitalist positioning of
Fukuyama, but because the statement itself threatened to uncover the underlying fundament of history as a field: that
historians always consider themselves to be at the end of history(what Walter Benjamin called “empty time”). At the same time,
seemingly paradoxical, the statement also threatened the very
idea that historians could become redundant if there were no
more history. “The end of history”, hence, worked on two levels:
the representative and the literal. The representative was too
close to the truth and hence dangerous; the literal was too close
to the fantasy scenario of historians: of having filled all the gaps
and reached the final concluding remark, and that afterward, allthat would remain is the death of the field, the death of thehistorian. That which in one sense is the force of history – to fill
the gaps – is hence simultaneously the most dreaded aim if
fulfilled. The possible fulfillment of this aim therefore must be
foreclosed for the enjoyment to go on – forever into the future.
The field of history is founded on this foreclosing of the death
drive and the continuation of the imaginary omnipotence of thepresent/Ego. Davies describes this as follows:
Historians may well claim to revive the past. In reality the past
keeps historians alive; through history death directs present
life. If the past really were over and done with, history would
be redundant, historians superfluous. Were it not so selfabsorbed, present historical consciousness would realize that,to identify with the past at all, it must first have produced itself
as a historical object, become petrified in historical form. Thatis ultimately why historical interests are not existential
interests, why history is an anaesthetic [an-aesthesis], nothingvital. As a ‘pure culture of the death drive’, the already historicized world is a typically melancholic formation (Freud64

3. THE DEMANDS OF THE HISTORICAL

1982: 203). The historicization process conceals a morbid
psychopathology.10

The field of history is founded on this foreclosing of the death
drive and the reproduction of an imaginary omnipotent“present/Ego” that this foreclosure enables. There are manyreasons why it is important to identify this psychopathology ofhistory: one reason is that this pathology demands a historicalconsciousness of us all, not least those marginalized groups thatcan only reach recognition and rights by demonstrating a historical continuity, an inborn identity, and a common experience
over time (not to mention those groups that cannot demonstratesuch a narrative and hence are left without recognition andrights). As Benjamin wrote, we live in a constant state of emergency, but the demand of a historical consciousness permits us
to call this state progress:
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of
emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
We must attain to a conception of history that is in keepingwith this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task
to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve
our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why
Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazementthat the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in thetwentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not
the beginning of knowledge – unless it is the knowledge thatthe view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.11

Is it not quite remarkable how Benjamin’s words, written in
1940, also portray Europe in 2023? His own text has becomesuch a monad, a snapshot, that he claimed we need to shatter theidea of history as inexorable progression. If the unconscious isconditioned by temporality, it is a temporality without any
1011

Davies, Historics – Why History Dominates Contemporary Society, pp. 243–235.
Walter Benjamin, On the Concepts of History (1940) Thesis VIII.

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demands on continuity; it is rather discontinuity, disruption,and the silence in between words, that constitute it. The conscious, too, is structured like a language, but with a demand on
continuity between the past, the present, and the future, at least
when it is forced to be historical. The conscious consists of what
the unconscious has condensed, that is, of that which the subject
can handle without risking a total dissolving of the self (psychosis), of that which is picked out to build consistent andcomprehensible identities (images) of this self. Today there is aneffort to build such selves and as in all efforts, a certain pleasure
is involved. A pleasure to replace that which hurts – here andnow. Through this flight from pain, from the real, history
becomes synonymous with consciousness; as a condensation of
the past, a corrected comprehension of acts and desires alreadycarried out and experienced by others. This is why history isboth conservative and pleasurable: it shelters the subject from allthat demands change and hence prevents the eradication of theself as it is known by itself. Instead, organic history promises
more of the same. If the present is an emergency, which it is, wemust look at the past and its relation to our time in another way
than the one that is presently mass-produced in an almost
hysterical effort to deny us the responsibility of this emergency.

66

Chapter 4
The Problem with the Problems of Philosophy– Challenging European Modernity

Naomi Scheman1

The sickness of a time is cured by an alteration in the mode oflife of human beings, and it was possible for the sickness ofphilosophical problems to get cured only through a changed
mode of thought and of life, not through a medicine invented
by an individual.2

Three-year-olds (in many, though perhaps not all times, andplaces) are given to asking “why?”, persistently repeating thequery long after grown-ups take themselves to have adequately
responded to it. As proto-scientists, children are trying to figureout the world around them, and they have not yet been disciplined into distinguishing between proper and improperquestions – the “proper” ones being those that lend themselves
to being answered, either by someone who already knows theanswer or by some form of investigation likely to produce one.
“Improper” questions are often the residue, what’s left over after
experts have been consulted and investigations carried out.
There will always be residue – in particular, the unexaminedassumptions that form the ground on which we stand and that1

An earlier version of this paper was written for, and presented at, a conference on
Feminist Utopias: Transforming the Present of Philosophy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, which met in Reykjavík and Skálholt, Iceland, 30 March–2 April
2017, co-hosted by Feminist Philosophy Transforming Philosophy at the University of
Iceland and the Nordic Summer University Study Circle on “Feminist Philosophy:
Time, History, and the Transformation of Thought”. My thanks to my fellow participants for lively discussions and, especially, to the organizers Eyja Brynjarsdóttir, Synne
Myrebøe, Valgerður Pálmadóttir, Johanna Sjöstedt, and Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir.
2
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, (Ed.) G. H. vonWright, R. Rhees, & G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd ed. (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1978), p. 132.

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cannot be excavated down to bedrock. The demand for such
absolute excavation was at the heart of Descartes’s agenda-setting for modern European philosophy, and the impossibility ofcarrying it out is at the heart of Wittgenstein’s revolutionary
attempt to wean us from what he saw as the problematic problems of philosophy.
Descartes’ method of doubt was his response to the crises
facing Europe as it attempted to democratically overturn structures that had been grounded in stable religious, social, economic, and political hierarchies, at the same time as voyages of“discovery” led to encounters with people who thought andacted in radically different ways. The challenge was to empower
ordinary people without unleashing a cacophony of different,
conflicting voices; and the solution was to posit that, underneathmerely superficial differences, people (those who mattered: see
below) were fundamentally the same, and could be counted on
to reach the same conclusions, whether concerning (to take theparadigm example) mathematics, or science, or even how toorganize society. Descartes’s method was an attempt to find that
common ground, that core of rational selfhood that could yield
unassailable knowledge, the bedrock on which science and,ultimately, ethics, could rest. As I will suggest below, this projectgenerated what we have come to identify as the central problemsof philosophy, the problems Wittgenstein works not to solve but
to dissolve.
The problem with philosophical problems, however, is notwith our tendency to ask them, but rather with our demand thatthey be properly, finally, answered. Unlike most three-year-olds,
who grow out of what they are taught to see as pointless querying, philosophers persist in being preoccupied with what’s left
over to worry about after the serious grown-ups have gotten on
with whatever it is that serious grown-ups do, including asking
only proper questions. This disciplining of inquiry is especiallyevident in the training of scientists and other credentialed
grown-up inquirers. Those who raise questions unsanctioned by
the relevant disciplinary methods often find those questions
characterized as “philosophical”, and some of those undisci68

4. THE PROBLEM WITH THE PROBLEMS

plined inquirers discover that the term is not just a slur but
rather an actual discipline of its own, and they sometimes findtheir way to our classrooms and offices. Unfortunately, however,what they too often find there is, precisely, a discipline, committed to framing answerable questions, even if those questions
continue to look odd to outsiders. Academic, especially analytic,
philosophy has, I want to suggest, succumbed to the prestige
structures that reward inquiry that looks “scientific”. I want tomake a case for undisciplining philosophy, for keeping open thespace for improper questions, and for thinking critically about
what those questions ought to be, and about why – despite notlending themselves to proper answers – it is nonetheless important to ask them.

Modern Philosophy and Euro-Modernity
Modern (Western) philosophy emerged in explicit engagementwith the political, economic, and social transformations thatshaped modern Europe, including Europe’s interactions withthe rest of the world. The philosophical subject – the bearer ofthe problems of philosophy, the philosophical “we” – was the(allegedly) generically human modern European, heterosexual,
able-bodied, Christian, bourgeois man (sic); and he needed to bearticulated, theorized, and empowered, alongside the “external”
world that complemented him. This practical, political philosophical task was explicit in the work of early modern philosophers, even when they were doing what we would now characterize as epistemology or metaphysics (i.e., what in many European universities explicitly, and problematically, contrasts with“practical” philosophy). The problems that have definedmodern Western philosophy are the residue of the specific project of becoming this sort of person, that is, of acquiring theforms of distinctively modern privilege that allow one to countas an exemplar of generic humanness. I follow Stanley Cavell inplacing skepticisms of various sorts at the heart of these problems – not surprisingly, I have argued, when the projects of selfcrafting demand that one push away anything that threatens the69

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

autonomy and rationality of the self. Small wonder that everything – one’s own body, including one’s senses, the “external”
world, other people – on the other side of this carefully craftedchasm should seem problematic, and that admitting all of that,
however tenuously, into the sphere of what one knows should
require exercizing control over it.3
These are not “pseudo-problems”; they are poignantly real,and it is not the need to ask them that Wittgenstein finds problematic. They do genuinely trouble the projects of constructing
privileged (as generic) modern European subjectivity. And they
haunt all those who have, over the centuries, succeeded, however tenuously and incompletely, in being included in the ranksof those who are taken, however grudgingly, to be relevantly thesame as European heterosexual, able-bodied, Christian, bourgeois men. But over the centuries the project of constructing thischaracter – of articulating his possibility and enthroning his
status as generic – has receded from explicit attention, no longer
needing to be fought for.
Along with the normalization of modern European subjectivity – that is, the hegemonic status of that way of being
human – we have seen the institutionalizing of philosophy as an
academic discipline, increasingly specialized as other disciplines
broke off from it, going their own ways at the point at which
their problems became methodologically tractable. The combination of these two processes has led to the hollowing out ofphilosophical problems, which have become increasingly abstract, scholasticized, needing to be “motivated”. Thus, forexample, we try to convince our students that the ground on
which they uncritically stand when judging both what is andwhat ought to be the case is, strictly speaking (we say, speaking
strictly) mere quicksand, however firm it may feel beneath theirfeet. We may take this unsettling to be heroic, disrupting the3

I have made this argument in a number of papers, most explicitly in “Othello’s
Doubt/Desdemona’s Death: The Engendering of Skepticism” in Judith Genova (Ed.),
Power, Gender, Values (Edmonta, Alberta: Academic Printing and Publishing, 1987),
reprinted in Scheman, Naomi, Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority,
and Privilege (New York: Routledge, 1993).

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4. THE PROBLEM WITH THE PROBLEMS

complacency of unexamined assumptions, challenging entrenched ideologies. But a wholly general, unfocused demand to“question everything” is ill-suited to genuine critique, not somuch because it is a demand that cannot be met as because it
cannot coherently be undertaken: we are always of necessity
making choices about just what to call into question, and thosechoices are guided by the projects in which we are engaged.
Academic philosophy’s questions have been framed by the
project of grounding the authority of the privileged modern
European subject, and while those questions may reveal theground under his feet to be unstable, it has been far too easy to
dismiss that instability as both inevitable and, for serious grownups, ignorable. The instability seems inevitable so long as the
project that rests on that particular ground is seen as the achievement of generically human rationality, while the demonstrable
successes of that project (the achievements of Euro-modernity,science not least among them) license ignoring the instability,
shunting the problem off onto philosophers and taking neither
it nor them seriously. What doesn’t get called into question isprecisely the project itself. What we are left with are what I call“zombie problems”: with life sucked out of them, they stalk thehalls of academe, undead and unkillable.
Might the solution be to breathe life back into those problems– to reconnect with the political projects that originally animated them? After all, the achievement of privileged-as-genericsubjectivity is an on-going project, both for those individuals
expected to engage in it and for those who have fought for theright to be included, not to mention that this fight for inclusion
is far from won. Maybe, that is, the core philosophical problemsof Euro-modernity are the problems we ought to have, and what
we need to do is to recognize them for what they are – not thefree-floating scholastic zombies they have become, but the flesh
and blood anxieties that haunt the achievement of subjectivity.
The work of Stanley Cavell can be seen as engaging in this sortof resuscitation, uncovering the anxieties that pulse beneath the71

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

tamed and trivialized problems that exercise academic philosophy.4
Looking back on how I became a feminist philosopher (specifically, a feminist epistemologist), I am struck by the major role
played by Cavell’s work. I was immensely moved by his grounding philosophical problems – notably those of skepticism – inthe human condition, but I was unable to place myself, as awoman philosopher, within the story. His central example was
Othello, whose gender is hardly irrelevant to the story; nor, ofcourse, is Desdemona’s.5 If a woman philosopher is to take on
the problems emblematized by Othello’s inability to live with orwithout Desdemona’s separate, independent subjectivity, sheneeds to regard her own gendered experience as irrelevant to herphilosophizing. For many women – even many feminists – suchirrelevance is more a promise than a threat, a liberation fromsexist constraints rather than a deprivation of a liberatory standpoint.6 But such a move requires our accepting the generic statusof the markers of masculine privilege, making the feminist project one of extending that status and that privilege to women.
Such, of course, is the unfulfilled promise of liberalism, including liberal feminism, along with analogous (also unfulfilled)
promises made with respect to the other sorts of privilege (race,class, etc.) that mark the subject of Euro-modernity.

4

See especially Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say, updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein,
Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, new edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999).
5
It was grappling with Cavell that framed “Othello’s Doubt/Desdemona’s Death: The
Engendering of Skepticism”, my first paper on the ways in which the “human condition” is in fact gendered. For a fuller discussion of the dilemmas of finding one’s voice
as a woman philosopher, see Naomi Scheman, “A Storied World: On Meeting andBeing Met” in Richard Eldridge & Bernie Rhie (Eds.), Stanley Cavell & Literary Studies(New York: Continuum Press, 2011).
6
See, for example, Louise Antony, “Sisters, Please, I’d Rather Do It Myself”, Philosophical Topics (1995) 23: 59–94.

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4. THE PROBLEM WITH THE PROBLEMS

Philosophy Beyond Euro-Modernity
The struggles for inclusion in the ranks of those who count asessentially the same as privileged European men are on-going,but especially since the mid-20th century those struggles havelost their grip on liberatory imaginations. Movements such as
anti-colonial nationalisms, Black Power, queer activism, indigenous politics and culture, and some strains of feminism have all
emphasized the depth of difference and the resources of differences for knowing and acting. While some of these movements
have embraced essentialisms of various forms, many have not:differences are often seen as historical, multiple, intersecting,and shifting – but all the same neither superficial nor ignorable,
and, importantly, they are sources of insight, passion, resistance,
and imagination. Versions of standpoint epistemologies haveemphasized the ways in which marginalized perspectives canyield (with intellectual and activist effort) knowledge lessavailable to those who see the world through the distorting
lenses of privilege. And resistant imaginations have expanded
the repertoire of the possible, “queering” the presumptively normal and desirable. As diverse as these new (and some not-sonew) visions are, there are many points of striking congruence
across great distances of time, space, and social location, acongruence that can seem puzzling until one understands it asrevealing the specific peculiarity of Euro-modernity.7
Central to that peculiarity is the figure of the autonomous
individual, crucially articulated through a focus on epistemic
independence. The central figures of early modern European
philosophy were arguably more attentive than they are often
portrayed to the necessities of relying on the testimony of others
for much of what we know (or at least, on their view, justifiably
believe).8 And certainly the growth of modern science would
have been impossible without the ability to rely on the observa7

See, for example, Sandra Harding, Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
8
See Joseph Shieber, “Locke on Testimony: A Reexamination”, History of Philosophy
Quarterly (2009) 26: 21–41.

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tions and experimental results of others. But the rationality ofsuch reliance rested in large measure on the essential interchangeability of those dependent on one another: it was a mere
accident that placed you but not me in a position to acquire aparticular piece of knowledge – presuming, of course, that both
you and I are among those whose observational and rational
capacities are deemed worthy of respect. In other words, themodern European individual is fundamentally generic; individualism in practice rested on a denial of the deep significance ofindividuality. We may be dependent, but those on whom weproperly depend are in all important respects indistinguishable
from us. And the progress of liberalism has in large measure
been a matter of the expansion of the ranks of the “we” whocount as essentially the same.
Thus, for example, recent analytic epistemology has explicitly
recognized the fact of massive doxastic dependency (albeit
primarily in the marked subfield of “social epistemology”,
leaving the individualist conception at the unmarked center).
While people were always dependent on others for much ofwhat they believed, when it came to the sorts of systematizedknowledge with which the philosophers were most concerned, alarge degree of independence made a certain amount of sense –as today it obviously does not.9 This recognition centrally
includes taking on the problem of testimony, meaning theacquisition of beliefs based on what others tell us. But in most
discussions of the problem, both the testifiers and those who aredependent on them are generic, “zombifying” the problem by
writing out of its conceptualization social locations and relations, importantly those that involve the discrepancies and inequities of power and privilege that crucially inflect questions ofwhom and when and why to trust what we are given to believe.
It is within feminist epistemology – and allied fields committed,
often explicitly intersectionally, to addressing issues from post9
For the classic statement of this situation – even among people who are experts in
aspects of the relevant field – see John Hardwig, “Epistemic Dependence”, The Journalof Philosophy (1985) 82: 335–49.

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and de-colonial, anti-racist, indigenous, queer, and anti-ableist
perspectives – that these important questions are transforming
epistemology, breathing life back into it through engagementwith the problems distinctive of the 21st century.10
If we take seriously the historical specificity of the philosophical subject and of the problems of philosophy, the metaquestion becomes: What are the tasks of philosophy in a worldin which the allegedly generic status of the modern European
bourgeois (etc.) man is increasingly challenged by a diverse
range of “others”? What residues of the diverse projects of theacquisition of subjectivity in today’s world shape the philosophical problems we ought to have – not in order to answer
them, but rather to critically trouble those projects, to have asense of when and how and why we (different ones of us) needto unsettle the ground on which we stand? Distinctively feminist– along with anti-colonial, indigenous, critical race theoretic,
queer, and disability-centered – philosophy grapples with thisquestion about philosophy’s questions. However, to date thechallenge has had little impact, especially in analytic epistemology and metaphysics, where the core problems are still seen,
zombie-like, as ahistorical, and universal.

10

Much of this attention has been prompted by Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice:
Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) but a great
deal of related work both precedes and critically responds to that important book,including work in standpoint epistemology and in epistemologies of ignorance. See, forexample, Partricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness andthe Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000); Charles Mills, Black
Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2017); and José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial
Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013). For overviews of the field, see, for example, Kristie Dotson (Ed.), Interstices:
Inheriting Women of Color Feminist Philosophy, Special issue of Hypatia 29 (2014); andIan James Kidd, Gaile Pohlhaus, & José Médina (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of
Epistemic Injustice (New York: Routledge, 2017). I drew on the trope of breathing life
back into a moribund subject in Naomi Scheman, “Epistemology Resuscitated: Objectivity as Trustworthiness” in Sandra Morgen & Nancy Tuana (Eds.), (En)Gendering
Rationalities (New York: SUNY Press, 2001); reprinted in Scheman, Shifting Ground:
Knowledge & Reality, Transgression & Trustworthiness (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011).

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Among the very few things these days about which I am
optimistic is that the discipline of philosophy is changing. Herefeminist philosophy has played and will continue to play a majorrole in those changes – so long as it is deeply committed tointersectionality and to solidarity with other, intertwined liberatory struggles. Thus, we need to start by asking, not whether
philosophy ought to engage with the larger society, as thoughthat were one option some of us some of the time might pursue,
but, rather, how philosophers (all of us) ought to grapple with
our various personal and institutional entanglements (ofdependence, complicity, vulnerability, resistance) in political,
economic, and social structures. We (meaning here philosophers, even those who take their work to have no political ramifications whatsoever) are, whether we choose to acknowledge it
or not, always already engaged; and those engagements andentanglements are part of who we are, parts of the subjectivities
whose problems it is our disciplinary mission to take on. As
María Lugones has argued, we “animate”, independently of ourown intentions, the figures whose social locations we occupy,
and the meanings of our words are (not determined but) shapedby that animation.11 If, to use a Cavellian turn of phrase, we don’t
want to mean what we say, if we want to mean differently, weneed to struggle to change the social structures within which we,and what we mean, take shape.
Some questions we need to be asking: What will become ofphilosophy when those who practice it engage explicitly andcritically with the fraught complexities of saying “we”? Whatwould it mean for philosophy to play as germinal a role in the
struggles around diverse emerging alternative (post)modernities as it did in the emergence of European modernity? In orderto play that role philosophers will need to be variously engaged
with those struggles – to learn from them as much as to contribute to them – and that argues for the importance not only of
11Maria Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception”, Hypatia(1987) 2: 3–19; reprinted in Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes (Lanham MD: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2003).

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4. THE PROBLEM WITH THE PROBLEMS

increasing diversity in the professoriate but equally for confronting the zombies and moving “from margin to center” approaches to core philosophical problems that take such diversity
seriously.
Increasing diversity in academic philosophy is not just a
matter of justice, of remedying histories of unjust exclusion: it isequally a matter of challenging the nature of philosophy itself.
While people from under-represented groups have diverse
philosophical interests and should not be expected to choose
their fields of interest based on their membership in thosegroups, it is nonetheless true that a great deal of philosophicalwork is emerging from the perspectives of those who, for a wide
range of reasons, do not see themselves as generic subjects andwhose philosophizing is inflected by that sense of alienation.
They are, in José Medina’s words, “speaking from elsewhere”, in(in Lugones’s terms) new and emerging “worlds of sense”, inwhich they and their words mean differently.12 From such perspectives, saying “we” is a consciously political move, one that isgrounded not in demographic commonality but rather in political solidarity. As such, it calls for acknowledgment – not agreement, but respectful, thoughtful engagement.13 Such engagement, as an intentional activity, needs to start with acknowledgment of the multifarious ways in which we are always
already engaged, specifically as philosophers, especially those of
us who are institutionally embedded and supported, but more
broadly as the people we are, located in a landscape shaped by arange of entangled inequities – engaged in what the Chicana
theorist Cherríe Moraga has called “theories in the flesh” and thetrans philosopher Talia Bettcher has called “ground-bound philosophy”.14 What – we need to ask – are we doing when we speak,
12

José Medina, Speaking from Elsewhere (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2006); Maria
Lugones, “On the Logic of Pluralist Feminism” in Card, Claudia (Ed.), Feminist Ethics(Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas, 1991), reprinted in Lugones, Pilgrimages/
Peregrinajes, where “worlds of sense” are further theorized in many of the chapters.
13
See Naomi Scheman, “A Storied World: On Meeting and Being Met”.
14
Cherrie Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa (Eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by
Radical Women of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1981), p. 23; Talia Mae
Bettcher, “What Is Trans Philosophy”, Hypatia (2019) 34: 644–667.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

write, and teach? To whom do we hold ourselves accountable?
To whom do we listen; from whom do we learn; whose criticalresponses do we take seriously?
One place to start is with a slogan with a long history but
nowadays most associated with the disability rights movement:“Nothing about us without us”. As many have pointed out, whilemuch philosophy and other theorizing have gone on as though
everyone (or, anyway, everyone who mattered) were able-bodyminded, heterosexual, affluent, Christian, European cis-men, it
has hardly been uncommon for there to be treatises aimed at
accounting for one or another sort of deviation from that norm.
Being “other”, that is, has frequently meant being a particularly
fascinating or problematic object of knowledge, never being
either a knowing subject or a credible critic of the knowledge
claims being made about one. Talia Mae Bettcher has aptly
characterized this state of affairs in a paper entitled, “WhenTables Speak”, in which she takes on those who theorize transidentities from an unproblematized stance of gender conformity, seemingly oblivious to the fact that there are trans womenand men (along with variously other gender non-conforming
people) among one’s readers, actual people struggling with thestigmatization that comes from having one’s identity subject tolegitimacy tests set by privileged outsiders.15
The field of epistemologies of ignorance also addresses thisproblem. Starting with Charles Mills’ work on white ignorance,16
the field focuses on the ways in which privilege creates, sustains,
and rewards ignorance: white people, for example, are both
enabled and motivated not to know the extent and depth ofracism and derive tangible benefits not just from the operationsof white supremacy but also from their ignorance of those
operations. And the flip side of the epistemology of ignorance is
15

Talia Mae Bettcher, “When Tables Speak: On the Existence of Trans Philosophy”,
Guest post on the Daily Nous blog, 30 May 2018. https://dailynous.com/2018/05/30/tables-speak-existence-trans-philosophy-guest-talia-mae-bettcher/, accessed 26
October 2021.
16Charles Mills, “White Ignorance” in Shannon Sullivan & Nancy Tuana (Eds.), Raceand Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2007).

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4. THE PROBLEM WITH THE PROBLEMS

standpoint epistemology, going back to Marx’s account of how
and why the proletariat is better positioned – given the development of class consciousness – to understand the workings ofcapitalism than are the capitalists. It is not just that those in subordinated locations have the right to theorize their own situation, not even that they are better placed than are privileged
outsiders to do so, but also that those in such locations are in abetter position to understand the structures that subordinate
them and, even, to provide insight into those who oppress them– as Lugones urges white women to regard women of color as“credible mirrors”. “Nothing about us without us”, that is, is nota blanket shield against the perspectives of others but rather a setof power-inflected demands for credible subjectivities on thepart of those relegated to the status of objects.
The achievement of those subjectivities requires politicalstruggle – as did the achievement of the normative generic subjectivity of Euro-modernity. One distinctive feature of the shift
away from Euro-modernity is relinquishing the demand for thegeneric, in favor of the embracing of diversity as an epistemic
and political resource, not a problem to be surmounted. Consequently, the political struggles will need to be coalitional, andthe theories that help make sense of them will need to be intersectional. Such coalitional praxis calls for what María Lugones
has called “complex communication”, which relinquishes thedemand that others make themselves intelligible to me before I
can engage with them:Complex communication thrives on recognition of opacityand on reading opacity, not through assimilating the texts ofothers to our own. Rather, it is enacted through a change in
one’s own vocabulary, one’s sense of self, one’s way of living,in the extension of one’s collective memory, through developing forms of communication that signal disruption of the
reduction attempted by the oppressor.17

17Maria Lugones, “On Complex Communication”, Hypatia (2006) 21: 75–85, p. 84.

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We will, that is, need to learn to move in other worlds of sense,
to grapple with disorientation,18 to acknowledge that we are inpart the people others see us as and to take responsibility for how
we animate those beings, to live on shifting ground, recognizingthat the ground is not bedrock and that that makes it more, notless, worthy of our respect, as it is in need of our care.

This paper, like almost everything I write, is deeply indebted to María’s work and theinspiration of her life.
18
On the moral value of disorientation, see Ami Harbin, Disorientation and Moral Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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PART 2
Transformations in History

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82

Chapter 5“Suppose a man be in a deep contemplative study”
Margaret Cavendish, Descartes’ Cogito and the Freedomof Thought

Cecilia Rosengren

Opinion is Free
Should Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) be included in thesociety of feminist philosophers? For she did not elaborate on
the rights of women in general, neither did she actively defendchanges to the legal system that would favor women’s autonomy, nor explicitly propose an education system for girls.1
However, she was a philosopher who wrote and publishedextensively at a time when women were generally consideredless capable of intellectual work. She also developed an originalnatural philosophy and sent her books to university libraries andto other scholars hoping for a response and the prospect of being
part of the republic of letters and learning of her age. Meaningthat she did not let her opinions remain in private circulation,
under a pseudonym nor anonymously, as many other earlymodern women preferred, but licensed herself to be a public
thinker. As she declared in Philosophical Letters (1664):

1
Scholars have been puzzled by Cavendish’s contradictory opinions on gender. See for
instance the chapter “Cavendish, a Feminist?” in Londa Schiebinger, The Mind has no
Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (London/Cambridge Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 54–59. For a critical reading of Cavendish as afeminist (or proto-feminist) see Deborah Boyle, “Margaret Cavendish on Gender,
Nature, and Freedom” in Hypatia, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Summer 2013) and “Margaret Cavendish’s Non-feminist Natural Philosophy” in Configurations, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring2004). For an affirmative view see for instance, John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution:
Science, Poetry and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University
Press, 1996) who maintains that the metaphysical writings of Cavendish aimed at “theliberation of women from the constraints of patriarchy”, p. 181.

83

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY[B]y reason Opinion is free, and may pass without passport, I
took the liberty to declare my own opinions as other Philosophers do […] I am willing to have my opinions contradicted,
as I do contradict others: for I love Reason so well, that whosoever can bring most rational and probable argument, shallhave my vote, although against my own opinion.2

Her œuvre consists of fourteen published volumes between 1653
and 1668, including essays on natural philosophy as well as fictitious correspondence, a biography on her husband, plays,
novellas, poems, and orations.3 Despite being a prolific writer,
the immediate impact of her intellectual endeavors was negligible and the public attitude toward her philosophy was overall
negative. The reaction of the Cambridge philosopher Henry
More is telling. After browsing through one of Cavendish’sbooks, he condescendingly rejected her critical opinions of his
work and remarked in a private letter:
This great Philosopher. She is affrayed some man should quitt
his breeches and putt on a petticoat to answer her in that
disguize, […] but I believe she may be secure from anyone
giving her the trouble of a reply.4

2

Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical letters (London, 1664) “A Preface to the Reader”,
p.(b). In Philosophical Letters Cavendish develops a critical assessment of the major
natural philosophers of her time – Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Henry More andothers – in the form of fictitious correspondences.
3
Margaret Cavendish’s works, all printed in London, no second editions included here:
Poems and Fancies (1653), Philosophical Fancies (1653), Philosophical and PhysicalOpinions (1655), The World’s Olio (1655), Nature’s Pictures Drawn by Fancie’s Pencil toLife (1655/56), Playes (1662), Orations of Divers sorts, Accommodated to Divers Places(1662/63), CCXI Sociable Letters (1664), Philosophical Letters: Or Modest Reflections
Upon some Opinions in Natural Philosophy (1664), Observations upon Experimental
Philosophy. To which is added, The Description of a New Blazing World (1666), The Lifeof the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe (1667), Plays, neverbefore printed (1668), Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668).
4
Henry More, letter to Lady Conway, 15 May 1665, in Marjorie Hope Nicolson (Ed.) &Sarah Hutton (Rev. Ed.), The Conway Letters. The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess
Conway, Henry More, and their Friends. 1642–1684 (Cambridge: Cambridge University84

5. SUPPOSE A MAN BE IN A DEEP CONTEMPLATIVE STUDYIn More’s eyes, therefore, Cavendish was “no competition” – touse the phrase from Siri Hustvedt’s essay on male dismissal ofwomen as fellow competitors in the literary field.5
Cavendish was well aware of the misogynist circumstances ofher times, and she anticipated the great amnesia that she (andother contemporary women philosophers) would suffer. Still,
she remained hopeful that, as she wrote in the preface to Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), “if she [her philosophy] be slighted now and buried in silence, she may perhaps
rise more gloriously here after; for her ground being sense andreason, she may meet with an age where she will be moreregarded, than she is in this”.6 Cavendish’s foresight turned out
to be right. Since the late twentieth century she has emerged
from oblivion with her work attracting growing scholarly attention, both within philosophy and across the wider humanities.7
There are, of course, various reasons why this recuperation has
occurred, including the establishment of women’s history inacademia, the appraisal of women intellectuals in history byfeminist philosophers, and growing availability of sources fromPress, 1992 [1930]), p. 237.
5
Siri Hustvedt, “No competition” in A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women.
Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind (London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd/Sceptre books,2017), p. 83f.
6
Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, Eileen O’Neill (Ed.)(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 [1666/1668]), “To the Reader”, p. 12f.
All quotes from Observations are from this edition.
7
For a recent historiography on this interest in early modern women philosophers(including Margaret Cavendish), see Sarah Hutton, “Women, philosophy and thehistory of philosophy” in British Journal for the History of Philosophy (2019), Vol. 27,
No. 4, pp. 684–701. For a substantial bibliography on secondary literature concerning
the philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, see the article by David Cunning, “Margaret
Lucas Cavendish” in Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Summer 2017 Edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/
margaret-cavendish/ [accessed 2020-10-29]. To Cunning’s list I would like to add Lisa
T. Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish. Reason and Fancy during
the Scientific Revolution (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2010); Emma
L. E. Rees, Margaret Cavendish. Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester and New York:
Manchester University Press, 2003); Deborah Boyle, The Well-Ordered Universe: The
Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). For
ongoing digital work on Margaret Cavendish see: http://digitalcavendish.org

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the digitalization of early modern texts. Beyond this, however, it
is worth underscoring the topicality of Cavendish’s philosophical ideas to contested issues in modern times and theirresonance concerning the concepts of nature, body and mind,
knowledge and perception, technology, and communication, as
well as the private and public spheres.8 In particular, Cavendish
was deeply critical of the Cartesian dualistic worldview that
presupposed a clear distinction between free thinking andmechanistic matter. Accounting for Cavendish’s non-dualistic
understanding of nature, I aim to show in this article how she,in relation to her public presence as a woman and intellectual,negotiated the question of Cartesian free thinking through her
natural philosophy. In what way did Cavendish consider herself
a free thinker?
Cavendish was in many respects a typical philosopher of theseventeenth century. Her intellectual life was partly madepossible by growing protections for intellectual pluralism thatmany, as Sarah Hutton argued, considered a way to fight an
outdated and dogmatic variant of Aristotelian philosophy.9 As
Cavendish commented: “In this present age those are thought
the greatest wits that rail most against the ancient philosophers,
especially Aristotle, who is beaten by all”.10 Cavendish did notjoin in the bashing, but she agreed on the fact that theAristotelian paradigm had reached a dead-end in European
knowledge production. It could no longer function as theoverarching explanation of nature and an alternative system ofknowledge was opening. One of “the greatest wits” Cavendish
8

Jacqueline Broad, “Is Margaret Cavendish worthy of study today” in Studies in History
and Philosophy of Science (2011), Vol. 42, pp. 457–461, is a thorough review essay ofSarasohn’s book The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, and of the topicality ofCavendish’s philosophy, focusing on its originality, quality of argument, influence, andenduring relevance.
9
Sarah Hutton, “Liberty of Mind. Women Philosophers and the Freedom to Philosophize”, in Jacqueline Broad & Karen Detlefsen (Eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600–
1800. Philosophical essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 123–137.
10
Cavendish, Observations, “Ancient Learning Ought Not to be Exploded, nor the
Experimental Part of Philosophy Preferred Before the Speculative”, p. 195.

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5. SUPPOSE A MAN BE IN A DEEP CONTEMPLATIVE STUDY

had in mind, René Descartes, famously wrote in his Discours dela Methode (1637) that every human being has the capacity tochallenge Aristotle to think, because:[…] the power to judge correctly and to distinguish the true
from the false – which is, strictly speaking, what we mean bycommon sense or reason – is naturally equal in all men. Hencethe diversity of our opinions arises, not because some of us are
more reasonable than others, but only because we direct ourthoughts along different paths, and consider different things.11

The time was ripe for Descartes’ message. It spread to a wider
public and encouraged the emergence of “a new kind of philosopher – the philosophical ‘layman’”, who was associated withintellectual pluralism and skepticism, and for whom the printingpress and public sphere constituted a space for different outlooks and new modes of philosophizing.12 Indeed, Descartes’views on intellectual pluralism echo in Cavendish’s writings, forinstance when she is claiming that “[…] it is impossible for one
Person to be of every one’s Opinion, if their opinions be different, and that my Opinion in Philosophy, being new, andnever thought of, at least not divulged by any, but myself, arequite different from others”.13 Epistemological skepticism of aCartesian kind was, for sure, as Lisa Sarasohn rightly states,“particularly congenial to a woman who wanted to write naturalphilosophy. [Cavendish’s] work shows that the new philosophy
had radical implications far beyond the purview of science. It
became a self-fashioning tool for a woman trying to define a new
11

René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, translationand introduction by Olscamp, Paul J., (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing
Company 2001), p. 4; Discours de la Méthode, (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin,
1989), p. 44: “[…] la puissance de bien juger, et distinguer le vrai d’avec le faux, qui est
proprement ce qu’on nomme le bon sens ou la raison, est naturellement égale en tous
les hommes; et ainsi que la diversité de nos opinions ne vient pas de ce que les uns sontplus raisonnables que les autres, mais seulement de ce que nous conduisons nos pensées
par diverses voies, et ne considérons pas les mêmes choses.”
12
Hutton, “Liberty of Mind”, p. 125.
13
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, p. (a).

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construct: a woman natural philosopher”.14 Cavendish had infact met Descartes several times during the scientific gatherings
arranged by her husband and brother-in-law during their exile
in Paris in the 1640s.15 He appears to have made no great impression on her on these occasions – neither seems to have been
talkative. All the same, the quote that inspired the title of thisarticle – “suppose a man be in a deep contemplative study” –denotes a Cartesian starting point for Cavendish’s philosophicalpractice and its anticipated result.16 For one thing, free thinking
demands certain conditions, such as privacy and rest, asDescartes himself stresses in his Méditations métaphysiques(1641):
Accordingly, I have today suitably freed my mind of all cares,
secured for myself a period of leisurely tranquillity, and am
withdrawing into solitude. At last I will apply myself earnestly
and unreservedly to this general demolition of my opinions.17

Even if Cavendish did not agree with Descartes that it waspossible to rid oneself of all opinions, she shared his trust in thenecessity of privately engaged reason and freedom of mind. She
said: “I will not eagerly affirm what I do not certainly know; I
only endeavour to deliver my judgement as reason directs me.”18
Following this rationalist impulse, she criticized those of hercontemporaries (the experimental philosophers at the Royal
Society) for relying on the senses rather than reason in theirsearch for knowledge. In her opinion, the senses were not a
14

Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, p. 17.
Margaret Rees, Cavendish. Gender, Genre, Exile, p. 35.
16
Cavendish, Observations, “Of the Different Perceptions of Sense and Reason”, p. 150.
17
René Descartes, Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, translation Donald A. Cress, (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998),(“Meditation One” in Meditations on First Philosophy [1641]) p. 59; Méditations
métaphysiques (Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), p. 26: “Maintenant donc que mon esprit est libre de tous soins, et que je me suis procuré un repos
assuré dans une paisible solitude, je m’appliquerai sérieusement et avec liberté à détruire
généralement toutes mes anciennes opinions.
18
Cavendish, Observations, “Of Telescopes”, p. 136.
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5. SUPPOSE A MAN BE IN A DEEP CONTEMPLATIVE STUDY

reliable basis for knowledge, for “how shall a man practise, if hedoes not know what or which way to practice? Reason must
direct first how sense ought to work”.19
Already in her first publications in exile, Poems and Fancies(1653) and Philosophicall Fancies (1653), natural philosophy
was the focus of Cavendish’s intellectual attention. Her interest
grew upon returning to England in 1660, which allowed her theopportunity to deepen her study of major philosophical works
in her mother tongue. As a result, Cavendish’s mature naturalphilosophy appears in publications from the 1660s onwards:
Philosophical Letters, or, Modest reflections upon some opinions
in natural philosophy maintained by several famous and learned
authors of this age, expressed by way of letters (1664), Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, to which is added the Description of a New Blazing World (1666), and Grounds of Natural
Philosophy (1668). Considering Cavendish’s mode of philosophizing, letting opinions meet opinions with repetitive variations, it would be conceivable to discuss Cavendish as a free
thinker through all these books. My examples, however, focus
on Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666) due to its
central position in Cavendish’s work on natural philosophy. It
provides, on the one hand, the most comprehensive account of
her alternative to a Cartesian mechanistic worldview; on theother hand, the text offers an important critique of the experimental philosophical method favored by the newly establishedRoyal Society.

Speaking in public
The transformation of the private and the public spheres in earlymodern times, which for long has been regarded as one of thedecisive aspects in the shaping of modern scientific, political,
and social institutions, was crucial to the development ofMargaret Cavendish as a free thinker.20 New distinctions
19

Cavendish, Observations, “Ancient Learning Ought Not to be Exploded, nor the
Experimental Part of Philosophy Preferred Before the Speculative”, p. 196.
20
Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer

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between the private and public realms implied a gender divide,
which excluded women’s intellectual agency from public visibility. The situation was nevertheless often muddled in reality
and the private thinking individual – woman or man – was, asMartine van Elk interestingly suggests, “paradoxically producedin the imagination by being published”.21 As a private thinker
Cavendish could thus insist on her presence, agency and right toengage in public philosophical disputes. However, as mentioned, she lived at a time when a woman intellectual was generally considered a contradiction in terms, regardless of the factthat societal changes and advancements in communication
technologies since the Renaissance had made it possible for a
growing number of women to participate in the creation ofculture and science.22 A woman who wanted to publicize her
Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962) is ofcourse the groundbreaking analysis in this regard, a very influential and still thoughtprovoking study.
21
For inspiring reflections on theoretical, historical as well as gender perspectives on theprivate and public distinction, see the chapter “Public and Private” in Michael Warner,
Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), pp. 21–63; Michael
McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity. Public, Private, and the Division of
Knowledge (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2005). In relation to
Cavendish’s own historical context, see Peter Lake & Steven Pincus (Eds.), The politics
of the public sphere in early modern England (Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press, 2012). For the theme in this chapter, I am also very much in debt tothe studies by Martine van Elk, Early Modern Women’s Writing. Domesticity, Privacy,
and the Public Sphere in England and the Dutch Republic (London: Palgrave Macmillan,2017), citation p. 6; David Norbrook, “Women, the Republic of Letters, and the Public
Sphere in the Mid-Seventeenth Century” in Criticism, Vol. 46, No. 2, Spring 2004, pp.
223–240; Marta Straznicky, Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama 1550–
1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), “Margaret Cavendish: theclosing of the theaters and the politics of playreading”, pp. 67–90; Sylvia Brown,“Margaret Cavendish: Strategies Rhetorical and Philosophical Against the Charge ofWantonness, Or Her Excuses for Writing So Much” in Critical Matrix, Vol. 6, No. 1(1991).
22
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008 [third edition]), “Part II: Mind”, pp. 141–204, gives agood overview, including further reading of the situation for early modern womenconcerning learning and participation in cultural and scientific production. The
developments in media and society were connected to the burgeoning public sphere,
for which court-supported academies, salons, learned societies, public lectures, theprinting press, journals, and other institutions played a part. Londa Schiebinger’s90

5. SUPPOSE A MAN BE IN A DEEP CONTEMPLATIVE STUDY

intellectual endeavors was almost always alarming, as the wellknown quote by Cavendish’s contemporary, the author andteacher Bathsua Makin, indicated: “A Learned Woman isthought to be a Comet, that bodes Mischief, whenever it
appears.”23
Certainly, the public sphere offered women different spaces
and possibilities within which to make themselves heard.24 But,
the formation of a distinct private sphere in contrast to thispublic realm also “strengthened the long-standing prohibitionon the female public speech.”25 Indeed, the silencing of women’svoices from public spaces has a long history, which the classicist
Mary Beard illustrates in her manifesto, Women & Power(2017).26 She points to the fact that public speech has been an
attribute of masculinity since antiquity: “Or, to quote a wellknown Roman slogan, the elite male citizen could be summonedup as vir bonus dicendi peritus, ‘a good man, skilled in speaking.’
A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, bydefinition not a woman.”27 Nonetheless, Beard mentions two
exceptions to this rule, which can be applicable to Cavendish’s
public performance. Firstly, a woman could be tolerated to raise
her voice in public in the defense of her family in need; or,secondly, she could do so to tell her personal story of sacrificeand martyrdom (as in the face of a death sentence).
In line with this thinking, it has been suggested that Margaret
Cavendish’s writings can be interpreted as a reappraisal anddefense of the wealth and social status that her husband William
seminal work The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origin of Modern Science (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) discusses the (partial) inclusion of earlymodern intellectual women in these settings, pp. 10–65.
23
Quote from Eileen O’Neill, “Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophersand Their Fate in History” in Janet Kourany (Ed.), Philosophy in a Feminist Voice(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 36.
24
Norbrook writes “[s]ome women in the seventeenth century did indeed assume thatcertain spheres of discourse were universal, rather than specifically masculine, andhence vigorously claimed inclusion”, in “Women, the Republic of Letters”, p. 224.
25
van Elk, Early Modern Women’s Writing, p. 2.
26
Mary Beard, Women & Power. A Manifesto (London: Profile Books, 2017).
27
Beard, Women & Power, p. 17.

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Cavendish, and exiled British royalists more broadly, lost during
the English civil war. Her writings can be seen as an effort tomemorialize their aristocratic way of life.28 Alternatively, one canargue that she raised her voice in public to expose her lived
experience as a woman banished from her home-country for
sixteen years, suffering difficult and uncertain circumstances –even if her testimony came from a place of considerable privilege. Such confessional accounts reflect a form of “public
femininity”, which Martine van Elk argues is comprised of threecomponents: “deliberative performativity, a public voice that isthe product of retirement, and a reputation that includes only
occasional display and visibility.”29 Indeed, the third, visual
dimension was especially problematic for female public speech,
since it was most often associated with disreputable sexuality
and lower social status. Thus, this made it hard for learned
women to play a part in discussions that were taking place on
the male domain. A woman speaking from a general point ofview, promoting her own opinions with a universal audience in
mind, was disturbing.
Moreover, the idea that a woman’s voice in public had a
harmful effect on society at large was common in the seventeenth century – it was certainly believed to seduce and confuse
men as Eve had lured Adam into sin by her speech. This explains
why women were normally advised to shut their mouths inpublic in early modern handbooks on rhetoric and social con28
Modern readers might react against Cavendish’s insistence and straightforward wish
for her writings to bring her posthumous fame, but in the seventeenth century this wasa conventional desire. See Keith Thomas, Keith, The Ends of Life. Roads to Fulfilment in
Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), “Fame and afterlife”,
pp. 236–267. Thomas writes that in the literary and scientific culture of early modern
England it was commonplace to fear oblivion and to regard posthumous remembrance
as the ultimate fulfillment of human life: “Many of the central social practices of the earlymodern period, from publishing books to commissioning portraits, become more
intelligible when they are seen as the product of this concern with posthumous fame”,
p. 240. John Milton wrote that “the desire for immortal fame was ‘seated in the breast of
every true scholar.’ The learned knew that if they did not publish, their learning would
perish with them”, p. 239.
29
van Elk, Early Modern Women’s Writing, p. 168.

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duct. An example: Richard Brathwait, author of the popularbook The English Gentlewoman, drawne out of the full Body
(1631), claimed that “without Speech can no Society subsist” butsince women’s voices were intrinsically treacherous they must
hold their tongues and “in publike consorts to observe rather
than discourse”.30 Indeed, Brathwait admitted that he had met
women who discoursed rather than observed, but from his pointof view these prattling women, these “She-Clarkes […] broach
strange opinions” that no one understands, not least the speaker
herself.31 Cavendish was equally, perhaps unfairly, judgemental
towards what she saw as women’s fondness for idle gossip andtrivialities, but she would have refuted Brathwait’s sexist statement. She wrote that as a woman of learning – a “she-clarke” –she did not publicize her thoughts “out of an ambitious humour,to fill the world with useless books [equivalent to useless speech],but to explain and illustrate my own opinions. For, what benefit
would it be to me, if I should put forth a work, which by reasonof its obscure and hard notions, could not be understood?”32
Furthermore, she assured readers that she did not seek a “pedantical kind of quarrelling”, but to see the philosophical venture“united for the good and benefit for the whole CommonWealth, nay, the whole World”.33
Unsurprisingly, all of Cavendish’s works comment in some
way or another on the situation of being a woman in a fielddominated by men. These views are often presented in a satiricaltone, as in the introduction to Observations:
It is probable, some will say, that my much writing is a disease;
but what disease they will judge it to be, I cannot tell [---] if
30

Richard Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman Drawne out of the Full Body (London,
1631), p. 88ff.
31
The word ‘clarke’ was, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, used in earlymodern times for “a man (or woman) of book learning, one able to read and write; ascholar. (Now a historical archaism.)”, “clerk, n.”. OED Online. September 2020. Oxford
University Press [accessed 2020-10-29].
32
Cavendish, Observations, “To the Reader”, p. 11.
33
Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, p. (a2).

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much writing be a disease, then the best philosophers, both
moral and natural, as also the best divines, lawyers, physicians, poets, historians, orators, mathematicians, chemists,
and many more have been grievously sick: and Seneca, Pliny,
Aristotle, Cicero, Tacitus, Plutarch, Euclid, Homer, Virgil,
Ovid, St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, Scotus, Hippocrates, Galen,
Paracelsus, and hundreds more, have been at death’s door
with the disease of writing.34

For Cavendish, a woman’s lack of learning said nothing of her
potential to learn. She acknowledged that “many of our sex may
have as much wit, and be capable of learning as well as men; but
since they want instructions, it is not possible they should attainto it.”35 And yet, a lack of schooling was not necessarily the mostimportant impediment for someone, woman or man, who
aspired for true philosophical thinking. Thus, in line with
Descartes’ opinion, Cavendish thought it far better not totrouble the “conscience by being a mountebank in learning, but[…] rather prove naturally wise than artificially foolish.”36 The
difficult question was how and where a woman might practicethis natural wisdom.

In the Company of Philosophers
Cavendish described herself as bashful and taciturn in company,
and therefore as a woman who – true to Brathwait’s pleasing –observed rather than discoursed in public settings. To efface her
intellectual persona, she often used the so-called “the plea ofincapacity.”37 This humble and unassuming voice in public wasprobably a rhetorical gesture. Cavendish was a savvy orator andperformed her expected femininity when circumstances re34

Cavendish, Observations, “The Preface to the Ensuing Treatise”, p. 7.
Cavendish, Observations, “To the Reader”, p. 11.
36
Cavendish, Observations, “To the Reader”, p. 12.
37
Gérard Genette, Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 208. Genette writes that the plea of incapacity is “above all thesurest way […] for an author to ward off critics, that is, to neutralize them – and indeed,
to forestall criticism by taking the initiative”.
35

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5. SUPPOSE A MAN BE IN A DEEP CONTEMPLATIVE STUDY

quired, but always reluctantly. There is no doubt she preferred
her privacy where she could act in accordance with the philosophical persona Descartes imagined: “I had rather sit at home
and write, or walk […] in my chamber and contemplate.”38
Cavendish chose the company of her own inner life rather thanattending social gatherings for “the effeminate Sex” or public
recreations where she would be marginalized as philosopher.
Her famous visit to the Royal Society in May 1667 is a case inpoint. The Society, as a new scientific institution in London, hada demonstratively public profile. Yet, although the Society
described itself as a novel public space for knowledge production, its members were unwilling to include women, since “theprospect of a woman attending the meeting led members of theRoyal Society to fear the tarnishing of their reputation as‘serious’ scientists.”39 Jo Wallwork has convincingly shown that
Cavendish must have realized that she had not been invited tothe society as a participant in the scientific enterprise, nor evenas a spectator, but as the spectacle herself. Her bleak and oftcited words that she was “full of admiration” of the performedexperiments, reveal that she really had nothing to say while
there.40 All the same, Cavendish was remarkably eager to communicate her ideas in public: “I hope my Book may set a worke
every Tongue” she wrote in her first publication Poems andFancies (1653).41 This sense of urgency was strong throughout
38

Margaret Cavendish, Natures Pictures, drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life (London,
1656), “A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life”, p. 386.
39
Jo Wallwork, “Disruptive Behaviour in the Making of Science: Cavendish and theCommunity of Seventeenth-Century Science” in Salzman, Paul and Wallwork, Jo(Eds.), Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate
Publishing Limited, 2011), p. 43. For a nuanced interpretation of Cavendish’s hostility
toward the programme of Royal Society, see Emma Wilkins, “Margaret Cavendish and
The Royal Society” in Notes & Records. The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science(2014), 68, pp. 245–360.
40
Samuel Pepys, who was very negative toward Margaret Cavendish in his diary, hadbeen at the Royal Society and heard her comments on the performed experiments. See
Wallwork, “Disruptive Behaviour in the Making of Science”, p. 44.
41
Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies (London, 1653), “To all Noble, and Worthy
Ladies”, p. (A3).

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her career, always “confident and resolute”, she wrote in
Orations of divers sorts (1662), “to put them [her ideas] to thePress, and so to the Publik view, in despite of these Critical times
and Censorious age, which is apt to find fault with every
Action.”42
Hence, when circumstances made it possible, she did nothesitate, but sent her manuscripts to the press in haste. How
could she be so daring? One explanation is that Cavendish had
a strong commitment to her natural philosophy, which she
considered to be more in line with common sense and reason
than her counterparts – Descartes, Hobbes, More, Boyle, among
others. After reading Thomas Stanley’s three-volume History ofPhilosophy (1655/1656/1661), covering ancient philosophy fromThales to Sextus Empiricus, she was also certain that her philosophy was original. She was convinced, referring to Stanley’sbook in Observations, that were it not for her gender it might
have been possible to found her own philosophical school:[…] were it allowable or usual for our sex, I might set up a sector a school for myself, without any prejudice to them: But I,
being a woman, do fear they would soon cast me out of theirschools; for, though the muses, graces and sciences are all of
female gender, yet they were more esteemed in the former
ages, than they are now; nay, could it be done handsomely,
they would now turn them all from females into males: So
great is grown the self-conceit of the masculine, and the disregard of the female sex.43

42

Margaret Cavendish, Orations of Divers Sorts, Accommodated to Divers Places(London, 1662), p. (a). Quote from the dedication to her supportive husband, “To his
Excellency the Lord Marquis of Newcastle”.
43
Cavendish, Observations, “Observations upon the Opinions of Some Ancient
Philosophers”, p. 249. The sole woman philosopher mentioned with a paragraph in
Stanley’s extensive book of male voices – the cynic Hipparchia. Cavendish does notcomment upon it, but she probably read the story of Hipparchia standing up for her
choice of life, how she was harassed by Theodorus the atheist, and how she answered
when he said: “Her Web and Loom/She left at home, I did, saith she, Theodorus, and I
think have not erred in choosing to bestow that time which I should have spent in96

5. SUPPOSE A MAN BE IN A DEEP CONTEMPLATIVE STUDY

Cavendish questioned why her fellow male philosophers did not
acknowledge the roots of their own thinking: in feigning thenovelty of their ideas and ignoring the influence of the ancientphilosophers, they were nothing but intellectual “botchers andbrokers”.44 Though she did not mention anyone by name, hercriticism clearly applied to the rationalists and empiricists of hertime. Her words were consciously chosen: Botcher, rarely usedin modern English, was a common expression in early modern
times.45 It referred to a person who made a living by mending
and repairing things, but not creating anything new. The result
was often unskillful and clumsy work. There was a difference
between a botcher and a tailor, a cobbler, and a shoemaker. A
broker referred to both a second-hand dealer and an intermediary of a dubious kind. Cavendish therefore questioned theauthority of her fellow philosophers. In a paragraph entitled“Ancient Learning Ought Not to be Exploded, nor the Experimental Part of Philosophy Preferred Before the Speculative” shecalled for greater analytical reflexivity:
I perceive the knowledge of several ages and times, is like theincrease and decrease of the moon; for in some ages ‘art andlearning’ flourishes better than in others, and therefore it is
not only an injury, but a sign of ill nature, to exclaim against
ancient learning, and call it pedantry; for if the ancients had
not been, I question whether we should have arrived to thatknowledge we boast of at this present.46

Furthermore, Cavendish doubted it was possible to establish
facts by putting artificial effects on par with natural effects, as theexperimental philosophers of Royal Society had done. To her
weaving, on Philosophy.” Stanley, Thomas, The History of Philosophy: Containing theLives, Opinions, Actions and Discourses of the Philosophers of every Sect, second edition,(London, 1687), p. 420.
44
Cavendish, Observations, “Observations upon the Opinions”, p. 250.
45
The words ‘botcher’ and ‘broker’, Oxford English Dictionary, OED Online. September
2020. Oxford University Press [accessed 2020-10-29].
46
Cavendish, Observations, “Ancient Learning Ought not to be Exploded”, p. 196.

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mind, experimental philosophers naïvely trusted what they saw– i.e. privileging the eye as a witness to experience and truth – asit brought “ignorance, instead of advancing knowledge; forwhen the light of reason begins to be eclipsed, darkness ofunderstanding must needs follow.”47 All the same, the critique
did not make her less motivated to proceed with scientific investigations. Cavendish was not, as Emma Wilkins writes, “arguing
against scientific inquiry per se; rather, she was deeply troubled
by the uncritical enthusiasm for inquiry based on artifice.”48
In hindsight, the Royal Society proved to be very productive
in a way Cavendish could not predict. Nevertheless, she may
have recognized the exploitative practices of the new science thatreinforced the idea of human superiority and the objectificationof nature. A rationalistic-inclined philosopher, Cavendish could
not support its scientific program, since:[…] the variety of nature, is a stumbling block to most men,at which they break their heads of understanding, like blindmen, that run against several posts or walls […] For, they [theexperimental philosophers] consider not so much the interior
natures of several creatures, as their exterior figures andphenomena […] supposing that sense and art can only leadthem to the knowledge of truth; whereas they rather delude
their judgement, instead of informing them. But nature has
placed sense and reason together, so there is not a part orparticle of nature, which has not its share of reason, as well asof sense: for, every part having self-motion, has also knowledge, which is sense and reason; and therefore it is fit weshould not only employ our senses, but chiefly our reason, inthe search of the causes of natural effects […] leaving to ourmoderns, their experimental, or mode philosophy, built upondeluding art, I shall addict myself to the study of contemplative philosophy, and reason shall be my guide.49

47

Cavendish, Observations, “Ancient Learning Ought not to be Exploded”, p. 197.
Wilkins, “Margaret Cavendish and The Royal Society”, p. 250.
49
Cavendish, Observations, “Of the Motions of Heat and Cold”, p. 99.
48

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5. SUPPOSE A MAN BE IN A DEEP CONTEMPLATIVE STUDY

Though, by putting “sense and reason together” Cavendish
comes out as an unorthodox rationalist. She is not averse to
sensory knowledge, but is aware of how our senses can mislead
us and thus how artificial devices, such as scientific instruments,
telescopes and microscopes, can magnify the error. So:[…] that particular sensitive knowledge in man, which is built
merely upon artificial experiments, will never make him agood philosopher [---] The truth is, our exterior senses can go
no further than the exterior figures of creatures, and theirexterior actions: but our reason may pierce deeper, andconsider their inherent natures, and interior actions. And
although it does sometimes err, (for there can be no perfect oruniversal knowledge in a finite part, concerning the infinite
actions of nature) yet it may also probably guess at them, andmay chance to hit the truth.50

These statements clearly show that Cavendish considered theepistemological “view from nowhere” nonsensical, and strictlydeductive modes of thinking as artificial as the search fornature’s essence through a microscope. This constant play of
opinions demands a degree of skepticism, and therefore the
sharp Cartesian distinction between scientia (what is true andcertain) and opiniones (the shifting and changeable) must be
considered invalid.51 Cavendish’s own “rational inquisition”
manifests itself through various intimate deliberations of contrasting opinions – pro et contra, questions, and answers, thenand now, natural and artificial, particular and general, and so on.
This recurring, open interrogation of opinions, her own andothers, lead up to the most probable, rational argument con50

Cavendish, Observations, “Of the Motions of Heat and Cold”, p. 100.
For Cavendish as a modest skeptic, see Deborah Boyle, “Margaret Cavendish on
Perception, Self-Knowledge, and Probable Opinion” in Philosophical Compass 10/7
(2015), pp. 447. On the concept of probability in Cavendish’s reasoning, see Boyle,“Margaret Cavendish on perception”, p. 447; Stephen Clucas, “Variation, Irregularity
and Probabilism: Margaret Cavendish and Natural Philosophy as Rhetoric”, in A
Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Stephen
Clucas, (Ed.), (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 199–209.

51

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

cerning the philosophical problem under debate. Doing so, she
defends repetition as a philosophical method of writing:
I am not ignorant, that endless questions and objections may
be raised upon one subject; and, to answer them, would be an
infinite labour. But since I desire to be perspicuous in delivering my opinions, and to remove all those scruples which seemto obstruct the sense thereof, I have chosen to rather to be
guilty of prolixity and repetitions, than to be obscure by too
much brevity.52

Cavendish’s Philosophical Opinions
A good illustration of Cavendish’s way of reasoning, and how
she uses natural philosophy to establish herself as a free thinker,
is found in her discussion of what cold is.53 Cavendish scrutinized the problem over several chapters in Observations, withquestions like: What is the origin of cold? What kind of qualities
does cold exhibit? Are these primary or secondary characteristics? Is it possible to measure coldness? The issue of cold wasof considerable interest not only to Cavendish, but many contemporary rationalists and experimentalists alike during theperiod we now often call “the little ice age”.54 It was a sign of thetimes, but also closely connected to new theories on matter andcriticism toward Aristotelian knowledge about nature. The
experimental philosopher Robert Boyle, for example, designed anumber of experiments to solve the mystery.55 Descartes
52

Cavendish, Observations, “Several Questions and Answers Concerning Knowledge
and Perception”, p. 155.
53
Cavendish, Observations, “Of the Motions of Heat and Cold”, pp. 95–100; “Of the
Measures, Degrees, and Different Sorts of Heat and Cold”, pp. 101–106; “OfCongelation and Freezing”, pp. 106–117; “Of Thawing or Dissolving of Frozen Bodies”,
pp. 117–119; “Several Questions Resolved Concerning Cold, and Frozen Bodies”, pp.
120–124.
54
Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis. War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the SeventeenthCentury (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), “The Little Ice Age”,
pp. 15–25.
55
Robert Boyle, New Experiments and Observations touching Cold, or an Experimental
History of Cold, begun (London, 1665). Many of the experiments relate to everyday

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5. SUPPOSE A MAN BE IN A DEEP CONTEMPLATIVE STUDY

deduced truths about coldness from his own personal experience of extreme winters in Amsterdam.56 For her part, Cavendish approached the problem by activating her own senses andreasoning to judge different opinions about the motions andmeasures of hot and cold, the freezing, thawing and dissolvingof frozen bodies, and finally to present the most credible
opinion. Her observations were taken from everyday life – in a
way the same kind of experiences as Descartes used in his observations on cold matter – so as to invite readers to add their own
opinions about the different sensations of coldness, “shaking,freezing, chilly, windy, numb, stiff, rare, dense, moist, dry, contracting, dilating, ascending, descending, and other numerous
sorts of cold.”57 She asks the reader why the cold retreats intocellars during the summer heat, if the cold preserves bodies from
corruption, if wood is apt to freeze, what produces floating icebergs, if there is a difference between natural and artificial snow,
which animal is most sensible of cold, etc.
Though, these were exterior observations. To really understand the ontology of the cold, Cavendish lets her reason pierce
deeper into the causes of natural effects. She argues that the mostprobable and rational opinion is connected to the fact thatnature in its totality consists of rational matter, sensitive matter,and inanimate matter. Thus: “Matter, self-motion, and selfknowledge, are inseparable from each other, and make nature
one material self-moving, and self-knowing body.”58 Mattermoves in various ways, but it is never mechanically determined
as Descartes claimed. Rather, nature has the freedom to move as
she pleases, though not beyond her own nature. Since matter bydefinition is divisible, nature is bound to divide and compose
experiences, such as the “Preservation and Destruction of (Eggs, Apples, and other)
Bodies by Cold”. Compare Cavendish, Observations, p. 118.
56
René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, plus la dioptrique, les météores et la géométrie
(Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1987 [1637]), Les météores, sixth discourse “de laneige, de la pluie, et de la gresle”, pp. 268–279.
57
Cavendish, Observations, “Of the Measures, Degrees, and Different Sorts of Heat andCold”, p. 102.
58
Cavendish, Observations, “Of Knowledge and Perception in General”, p. 137.

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her several parts into several particular figures, and dissolve andchange those figures again in infinite ways, which explains themultitude of forms and actions in the world. Leibniz’s philosophy comes to mind when Cavendish asserts that this variety is
so great, “that even in one and the same species, none of theparticulars resemble one another so much, as not to be discerned
from each other.”59 Since matter is a commixture of rational andsensitive parts, the fundamental actions of nature are knowledge
and perception. Nature’s self-movement is thus self-regulating,it keeps nature in order, and all actions “whatsoever in nature,[such] as respiration, digestion, sympathy, antipathy, division,
composition, pressure, reaction, etc. are all particular perceptive
and knowing actions.”60 Consequently, the idea of passive
matter, like the Cartesian res extensa, is not probable. All of
nature’s constituent parts are perceptive and this perception
consists of ordering – or, in Cavendish’s words “patterning” –exterior objects. This constant preceptive activity implies that indifferent ways nature is self-knowing. The consequences arethrilling. She writes:[…] it is absurd to confine all perceptions of nature, either topressure and reaction, or to the animal kind of perception;
since even in one and the same animal sense, (as for example
seeing) there are numerous perceptions: for, every motion of
the eye, were it no more than a hairsbreadth, causes several
perceptions: besides, it is not only the five organs in an animal,
but every part and particle of his body, that has a peculiar
knowledge and perception, because it consists of self-moving
matter [and] a piece of wood, stone, or metal, may have aperceptive knowledge of man, yet it hath not a man’s perception |…] no more than the eye patterning out a tree orstone, can be said to have a vegetable or mineral perception.61

59

Cavendish, Observations, “Of Knowledge and Perception in General”, p. 139.
Cavendish, Observations, “Of Knowledge and Perception in General”, p. 139.
61
Cavendish, Observations, “Of Knowledge and Perception in General”, p. 140f.
60

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5. SUPPOSE A MAN BE IN A DEEP CONTEMPLATIVE STUDY

Cavendish is thus challenging prevailing notions of humansuperiority and the objectification of the natural world by refusing to accept that knowledge about nature can be derived froma fundamental, privileged position. It is a radical critique of the
Cartesian cogito, and the distinct separation between body andsoul, mechanistic necessity and free thinking: “Some learned
conceive, that all knowledge is in the mind, and none in thesenses: For the senses, say they, present only exterior objects tothe mind; which sits as a judge in the kernel, or fourth ventricleof the brain […] which in my apprehension, is a very odd
opinion.”62 Meaning, she cannot understand how the senses caninform the mind of things they do not know themselves. Since
knowledge and perception are the fundamental actions ofmatter, thought is active in all parts of nature.
Secondly, Cavendish’s statement implies that the perceiver isalso perceived and patterned: A man perceives the trunk he isleaning on to rest, but the trunk also perceives the man. Every
perception entails a new perspective, and therefore a new
possibility for knowledge. This implies a certain amount ofagency in every part of nature. But is this thinking per se? Cavendish does not talk about laws of nature, but she emphasizes
regularities and stabilities. She compares nature to a wise andprovident lady, a good housewife that keeps her home in goodand orderly shape.63 So, the world does not move randomly, nor
mechanically either. Every part of it has both rational andsensitive forms of perception – and thereby forms of knowledge– which must cooperate in order to function.

Opinions are Free
It is worth noting that Observations upon experimental philosophy (1666) was published as a companion piece to a fantastic
story of a kidnapped young woman who ends up becoming an
62

Cavendish, Observations, “Of the Different Perceptions of Sense and Reason”, p. 153.
Cavendish, Observations, “Of the Measures, Degrees, and Different Sorts of Heat andCold”, p. 105. For an argument that order is an overarching motif in the philosophy ofCavendish, see Boyle, The Well-Ordered Universe.

63

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

empress in a utopian world inhabited by strange talking creatures (A Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World,
1666). In the preface to this book, Cavendish writes:
If you wonder, that I join a work of fancy to my serious philosophical contemplations; think not that it is out of a disparagement to philosophy […] The end of reason, is truth; theend of fancy, is fiction; but mistake me not, when I distinguishfancy from reason; I mean not as if fancy were not made by
the rational parts of matter; but by reason I understand arational search and enquiry into the causes of natural effects;
and by fancy a voluntary creation or production of the mind,
both being effects, or rather actions of the rational parts ofmatter.64

While human beings are a commixture of rational, sensitive andinanimate matter, they are also fundamentally creative beings,
with the capacity to imagine, to fancy, to figure, and to set theiropinions free.65 The rational parts of human nature are “morefree and at liberty than the sensitive, which are more encumbered with working on, and with inanimate parts of matter; andtherefore it may very well be, that a man in a deep contemplative
study, doth not always feel when he is pinched or touched;because all the rational motions of his body concur or join to theconception of his musing thoughts.”66 Is this voluntary creationof the mind like a quasi-divine power that can create andtransform worlds? Lisa Walters has argued for this radical
dimension in Cavendish’s thought, not least in relation to The
Blazing World, which she sees as advancing an anti-hierarchicalview of humanity.67 Jay Stevenson, however, claims that Caven64

Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World(1666), in Margaret Cavendish, Political Writings, James, Susan (Ed.), (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), “To the Reader”, p. 5f.
65
Cavendish, Observations, “Of the Different Perceptions of Sense and Reason”, p. 150.
66
Cavendish, Observations, “Of the Different Perceptions of Sense and Reason”, p. 152.
67
Lisa Walters, Margaret Cavendish. Gender, Science and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 168.

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5. SUPPOSE A MAN BE IN A DEEP CONTEMPLATIVE STUDY

dish’s philosophy “offers little reassurance to those who wish tobelieve in a stable and permanent cosmic order.”68 Meaning,
Cavendish can be interpreted in both a conservative and radical
direction. Different perceptions of matter shape the order ofthings, but ideas in the mind can also take the form of external
objects irrespective of the influence of sensory organs, asconceptions. What can be conceived is also something created,something new.
Cavendish’s philosophy supposedly did not openly aim at“the liberation of women from the constraints of patriarchy”,
instead in many ways she paradoxically benefited from thepatriarchal order.69 But her published opinions on the material
mind and mindful matter nevertheless prove the idea that,
following Sarah Hutton, to “be free to philosophize meant overcoming deep-seated customs and prejudices about female
mental capacities and social destiny.”70 The frequent play
between different registers in her work makes it hard to pin
down a consistent voice. Further attention to aspects such as theuses of satirical elements, various genres and rhetorical techniques would allow for a more coherent understanding of her
contradictory views on gender. Regardless of these differences,
my contention has been that Cavendish’s natural philosophy
articulates a feminist ethos. In making public her philosophicalpresence, she served as an example for other women. She thus

68

Jay Stevenson, “The Mechanist-Vitalist Soul of Margaret Cavendish”, Studies inEnglish Literature, 36:3 (1996), p. 537.
69
Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, p. 181. Martine van Elk, Early Modern Women’s
Writing, convincingly shows how women philosophers in the seventeenth century,
regardless of their social, cultural, and religious background, frequently represented
themselves and other women writers along the lines of a traditional model of absolutist
power and publicity. This model authorized women to write and counter the newbourgeois ideals of the household, which did not allow for female agency in the public
realm.
70
Hutton, “Liberty of Mind”, p. 126; See also David Cunning, “Margaret Cavendish on
Metaphysic of Imagination and the Dramatic Force of the Imaginary World”, in Emily
Thomas (Ed.), Early Modern Women on Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), for an argument about Cavendish’s works provide a vision of “howthings could be different”, p. 210.

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represents an important figure in the history and developmentof feminist philosophy today.

106Chapter 6
Hannah Arendt– To Think “Without Banisters”

Helgard Mahrdt

Hannah Arendt insisted repeatedly on the novelty of the phenomenon of totalitarianism, its unprecedentedness. She thought,“Few guides [are] left through the labyrinth of inarticulate facts
if opinions are discarded and tradition is no longer accepted as
unquestionable”.1 If there can be no return to tradition, if wehave permanently lost “the Ariadne thread of common sense,”“we can no longer rely on traditional categories, concepts andstandards to comprehend what has happened”, is there thennevertheless a way for thinking to illuminate the darkness of ourtimes? Can we reconcile ourselves to the past? If we are to follow
Arendt, then “we have to learn ‘to think without banisters’(Denken ohne Geländer).
Favoring storytelling over theories is one of the conclusions
Arendt draws from the loss of tradition. Storytelling is a nonHegelian way of reconciling with reality. It also is an adequate
way of taking human plurality seriously. The openness inherent
in the notion of plurality is relevant for a conception of history
that differs from the tradition. In this article, I will address thequestion whether there is a way of thinking without being
tyrannical. To try to answer this question I will first sketch theconditions of the activity of thought after 1945 that Arendt
describes by turning to literature. I will then ask whether there
is a way to face reality and to reconcile us with the past. I conclude that non-tyrannical thinking remains related to experience, is expressed in ‘concrete’ words, it uses metaphors, andallows for thinking the particular without subordinating it.
Arendt’s way of writing opens possibilities in the search for non1

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism New Edition with Added Prefaces (San
Diego/New York/London: Harcourt, Inc., 1994), p. 9.

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tyrannical thought, and it is worth considering for feminist philosophy.

Navigating Without an Anchored Tradition
Arendt viewed being “unburdened and unguided by any tradition” as our chance “to dispose of a tremendous wealth of raw
experiences without being bound by any prescriptions as to how
to deal with these treasures”.2 In 1974, she gave a lecture course
on “Thinking” at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for
Social Research in New York. She told her listeners that she“wish(ed) to stress only one thing, namely, that this course of
lectures will be organized by a question concerning the natureand experience of thinking. […] What are we doing when we arethinking, that is, when we are active without doing anything at
all?”3 She thought when one raises such questions, “it would bereckless to rely only on one’s own experience and fail to consult
those whom Kant called Denker von Gewerbe, ‘professional
thinkers’.”4 She did not only consult ‘professional thinkers’, but“poets and scientists as well as philosophers”.5 In addition, “shefelt entirely free of Tradition and chronological order, and also
liberated from any so-called field of expertise.”6 She told her
students that “she put the books ‘in alphabetical order, insteadof chronological, to indicate that we shall leap freely over the
centuries, without paying attention to the suspicions of thehistorians of ideas who assume that ideas, handed down fromgeneration to generation, develop according to their own
intrinsic nature.”7

2

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, One-volume Edition, M. McCarthy (Ed.) (NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 12.
3
Hannah Arendt, “Preliminary Remarks about the Life of the Mind”, in Thinking
Without A Banister. Essays in Understanding 1953–1975 – Hannah Arendt, Jerome
Kohn (Ed.) (New York: Schocken Books, 2018), p. 515.
4
Arendt, “Preliminary Remarks about the Life of the Mind”.
5
Arendt, “Preliminary Remarks about the Life of the Mind”.
6
Arendt, “Preliminary Remarks about the Life of the Mind”.
7
Arendt, “Preliminary Remarks about the Life of the Mind”, p. 514.

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After 1945, thought found itself in a situation that she wishedto describe in exact terms. To do this, she turned to literature
with Franz Kafka.8 “Kafka”, she argues, “by sheer force of intelligence and spiritual imagination, created out of a bare, ‘abstract’minimum of experience a kind of thought-landscape which,without losing precision, harbors all the riches, varieties, anddramatic elements characteristic of ‘real’ life”.9 “The story”, sherefers to, “records a mental phenomenon, something which one
may call a thought-event. The scene is a battleground on which
the forces of past and future clash with each other; between
them, we find the man whom Kafka calls ‘he,’ who, if he wants
to stand his ground at all, must give battle to both forces. Hence,
there are two or even three fights going on simultaneously: thefight between ‘his’ antagonists and the fight of the man in
between each of them”.10 Arendt emphasizes that the “forces ofthe past and the future clash with each other”,11 because “he” isalready there. “‘His’ standpoint is not the present as we usually
understand it but rather a gap in time, which ‘his’ constantfighting, ‘his’ making a stand against past and future, keeps inexistence.”12
For Arendt Kafka’s “he” on the battlefield between past andfuture is “the perfect metaphor for the activity of thought.”
Accordingly, “the path paved by thinking, this small track of
non-time which the activity of thought beats within the timespace of mortal men and into which the trains of thought, ofremembrance and anticipation, save whatever they touch fromthe ruin of historical and biographical time, […] cannot be
inherited and handed down from the past”.13 Instead, “each new
generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself
between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover
8

Edle, “Dis/Placing Thought: Franz Kafka and Hannah Arendt”.
Hannah Arendt, “Preface”, in Between Past and Future, Eight Exercises in PoliticalThought (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 10.
10
Arendt, “Preface”, in Between Past and Future.
11
Arendt, “Preface”, in Between Past and Future.
12
Arendt, “Preface”, in Between Past and Future, p. 11.
13
Arendt, “Preface”, in Between Past and Future, p. 13.
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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

and ploddingly pave it anew”.14 Roger Berkowitz emphasizes thispermanent struggle to think and understand the world. He
writes, “Thinking today […] demands that we continually
recommit ourselves to the loss of a knowable and hospitableworld and instead commit ourselves to the struggle of thinking
and acting in a world without banisters.”15 If we cannot mend
the broken thread of tradition, can we nevertheless comprehend
what has happened?

Relating to the Past – But a Fragmented Past
In 1971, Arendt gave a seminar entitled “The History of theWill”. After she had spoken about Nietzsche and Heidegger, shedrew the attention of her listeners to the fact that these “thinkers[…] had set it as their main task not to destroy […], but todismantle metaphysics and philosophy with all its categories, as
we have known it from the pre-Socratics to today. This dismantling was possible only after the past, or rather the traditionof the past, had lost its authority.” What is important is that “thedismantling process does not destroy the past, it only draws theconsequences of this loss, which is a fact, and it destroys thecontinuity of the past which consisted in its being handed downin its own consistency”. “What we then are being left with”, shegoes on, “is still the past but a fragmented past.”16
How, then, do we relate to a fragmented past, which has lostits certainty of evaluation? We may find an answer in Walter
Benjamin’s “Concept of History” which supplied a frame forArendt’s work. Benjamin’s answer to the irreparable loss of
tradition was to salvage a fragmented past. He believed that the14

Arendt, “Preface”, in Between Past and Future.
Roger Berkowitz, “Reconciling Oneself to the Impossibility of Reconciliation: Judgment and Worldliness in Hannah Arendt’s Politics”, Roger Berkowitz & Ian Storey(Eds.), Artifacts of Thinking. Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2017), p. 27.
16
Image 26 and 27 of Hannah Arendt Papers: Addition I, 1966–67; Speeches andWritings; Essays and Lectures; “The History of the Will”, Seminar, New School for
Social Research, New York, N.Y., 1971,. For Arendt’s treating of tradition as a kind ofcollage see Eva von Redecker, Gravitation zum Guten. Hannah Arendts Moralphilosophie (Berlin: Lukas Verlag 2013), p. 73ff.
15

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6. HANNAH ARENDT

historian had to break fragments out of the fossilized past to put
them together in a new way, so as to testify to the subterranean
stream of history.
In the prefix to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt precisely uses this language: “The subterranean
stream of Western history has finally come to the surface andusurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which
we live. And therefore all efforts to escape from the grimness ofthe present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into theanticipated oblivion of a better future, are in vain”.17 As Peg
Birmingham notes, “For both Benjamin and Arendt, the site ofhistory is the site of the present, the moment of discontinuity
that requires the activity of collecting and assembling”.18
For Arendt relating to the past despite its fragmentation aims
at comprehending what has happened. The importance ofcomprehension is beautifully expressed in a passage of the prefix
to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism:
Comprehension does not mean denying the outrages, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact ofreality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means,rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden, which
our century has placed on us – neither denying its existence
nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, inshort, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, andresisting of, reality – whatever it may be.19

Arendt’s request of attentively “facing up to and resisting reality”
is not at all an easy task. It requires a way of thinking thatremains related to experience and avoids losing one’s connection to reality.

17

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, “Preface to the first Edition”, ix.
Peg Birmingham, “Why Are We So Matter of Fact about the Facts?” in HA–The
Journal of the Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, 2012, p. 77.
19
Arendt, “Preface to the First Edition”, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, viii.
18

111

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHYThe Relevance of Experience and the
Tyranny of Reason
According to Arendt, “the philosophers [are] in love with Being(thaumadzein), the natural scientists […] in love with theuniverse, the philologist […] in love with the printed word,[and] the political scientist: in love with the world, mundus[kosmos], something the Greeks called polis, what men do. This
includes: Worry for the world, we are afraid something may
happen to the mundus hominum”.20
Something happened to the world, totalitarianism broke thecontinuity of Occidental history. However, despite this new
situation, political philosophy, Arendt argues, “so far as [it] still
exists, it is being taught by traditionalists – Voegelin, a Platonist,
Strauss an Aristotelian, Kojève a Hegelian. Each of them,believes that tradition is valid (…)”.21 Contrary to them, Arendt
believed that a return to tradition is no longer possible because“we have lost the thread which safely guided us through the vast
realms of the past”.22 The loss means a challenge since “History[…] is the sine qua non for political sciences”. She argues,“Without historical knowledge we don’t know what we do andwhat we are talking about. [Consequently], Political theory
between History and Philosophy: Its experiences are all historical, but its terms are all terms, which at one time have beencoined by philosophy”.23

20

Image 6 of Hannah Arendt Papers: Subject File, 1949–1975; Courses; University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, Calif.; “History of Political Theory”, lectures 1955; Introduction;
The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
21
Image 6 of Hannah Arendt Papers: Subject File, 1949–1975; Courses; New School for
Social Research, New York, N.Y.; “Philosophy and Politics: What Is Political Philosophy?” Lectures and Seminars, 1969 (1 of 2 folders) Blatt 024420; The Hannah Arendt
Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; see also Wolfgang Heuer, Citizen. Persönliche Integrität und politisches Handeln Eine Rekonstruktion des politischen Humanismus Hannah Arendts, Berlin Akademie Verlag 1992, p. 240.
22
Hannah Arendt, “What is Authority?”, in Between Past and Future, p. 94.
23
Image 5 of Hannah Arendt Papers: Subject File, 1949–1975; Courses; University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, Calif.; History of Political Theory”, Lectures 195; The Hannah
Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

112

6. HANNAH ARENDTThe crucial point Arendt makes is that “the end of a tradition
does not necessarily mean that traditional concepts have losttheir power over the minds of men. On the contrary, it sometimes seems that this power of well-worn notions and categories
becomes more tyrannical as the tradition loses its living force
and as the memory of its beginning recedes; it may even reveal
its full coercive force only after its end has come and men nolonger even rebel against it”.24 How, then, can the human mind
properly understand events and things in the realm of humanaffairs?
Here, Arendt insists that thinking must take over tradition’s
former task of finding the meaning of the past. However, to beable to do this, thinking must differ from the tradition of political and philosophical thought. “[T]his kind of thinking”, shewrites, “is different from such mental processes as deducing,
inducing, and drawing conclusions whose logical rules of noncontradiction and inner consistency can be learned once and for
all and then need only to be applied”.25 It is also different from“the tradition of political thought [that] degrades political action
into the category of means and ends”.26 The tradition “began
when the death of Socrates made Plato despair of polis life”.27“After Socrates’ death”, Arendt writes, “Plato began to discountpersuasion as insufficient for the guidance of man and to seek
for something liable to compel them without using externalmeans of violence”.28 He discovered “that truth, namely thetruths we call self-evident, compels the mind, and that this coercion, though it needs no violence to be effective, is stronger thanpersuasion and argument. […] This is the central predicamentof Plato’s political philosophy and has remained a predicamentof all attempts to establish a tyranny of reason”.29 Additionally,
24

Hannah Arendt, “Tradition and the Modern Age”, in Between Past and Future, p. 26.
Hannah Arendt, “Preface”, in Between Past and Future, p. 14.
26
Jerome Kohn, “Introduction” in Jerome Kohn (Ed.), The Promise of Politics. Hannah
Arendt (New York: Schocken Books 2005), xxvii.
27
Hannah Arendt, “Socrates”, in The Promise of Politics, 6f.
28
Arendt, “What is Authority?”, 107.
29
Arendt, “What is Authority?”, 107f.
25

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

it “matters for the tradition […] that Plato introduced theconcept of rulership into the political realm, despite the fact thatit originated in the thoroughly apolitical rule over household
slaves”.30
The tradition saw “action as the means necessary to achieve
an end higher than itself”.31 It subjugated reality to thought andit ended with Marx, who “made possible the kind of processthinking so characteristic of nineteenth-century ideologies,
ending in the devastating logic of those totalitarian regimes
whose apparatus of violence is subject to no constraints of reality”.32 It is well known that Arendt rejected the idea that Nazism
could be explained by reference to German and European
traditions. In March 1951, she wrote to Karl Jaspers that “[o]necompelling reason why I took such trouble to isolate the elements of totalitarian governments was to show that Western
tradition from Plato up to and including Nietzsche is above any
such suspicion.”33 Yet, she “suspects(s) that philosophy is notaltogether innocent”.34 Consequently, Arendt sets out on a journey to discover a way of thinking that does not subordinate reality to thought, to discover a way of thinking that is non-traditional and not tyrannical.
Arendt emphasizes that “[a]ll thought arises out of experience”.35 This means that “understanding, as distinguished fromhaving correct information and scientific knowledge”,36 grasps
the sense and meaning of experience. Arendt does not deny thatthe sciences can illuminate our preliminary understanding, butthey can “neither prove nor disprove [that] from which they30

Kohn, “Introduction” in Jerome Kohn (Ed.), The Promise of Politics, p. xxvi.
Kohn, “Introduction” in Jerome Kohn (Ed.), The Promise of Politics, p. xxvii.
32
Arendt, “Socrates”, in The Promise of Politics,74.
33
Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, March 4, 1951, in Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (Eds.),
Hannah Arendt – Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926–1969, San Diego/New York/
London: Harcourt Brace & Company 1992, 166.
34
Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, March 4, 1951.
35
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, p. 87.
36
Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics”, in Essays in Understanding 1930–
1954, p. 307.
31

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6. HANNAH ARENDT

start”.37 The complete sentence from The Life of the Mind reads,“All thought arises of experience, but no experience yields any
meaning or even coherence without undergoing the operationof imagination and thinking”.38
In a spring and summer 1968 seminar at the New School,
entitled “Political Experience in the Twentieth Century”, Arendt
wished for her students “to experience for [them] selves
experiences that were not [their] own, to experience them not
immediately but […] mediated through works [they] would bereading […], fiction as well as nonfiction”.39 Jerome Kohn,
Arendt’s former assistant, writes that she “might also have called
the seminar ‘Exercises in Imagination‘, indicating that [thestudents’] success in this common enterprise would depend on
the most mysterious of [their] mental faculties”.40 How, then, are
we to understand the faculty of imagination? Jerome Kohn
explains, “by exercising imagination she did not mean remembering what [the students had] seen with [their] own eyes orheard with [their] ears, nor recognizing what [they had]
touched, tasted, or smelled – in all of which […] the imagination
also plays a role. She meant, firstly, the ability of human beings
to form images of things never given to their senses and, secondly, their submission of those images to the process of thought”.41
For her, “the activity of thinking issues not in truths of any kindbut in a plurality of meanings, and that distinction was essential
for her in comprehending experience […]”.42 Consequently, shefavors storytelling as a form that allows reflecting experiences
properly. This entails encounters with the poetics of narrative.
37

Arendt, “Understanding and Politics”, p. 311.
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, p. 87; see also the Preface of Between Past andFuture: “[…] thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remainbound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings”. Hannah Arendt,“Preface” in: Between Past and Future, p. 14.
39
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl & Jerome Kohn, “Truth, Lies, and Politics: A Conversation”,
in Social Research, Vol. 74, No. 4, Winter 2007, p. 1047.
40
Young-Bruehl & Kohn, “Truth, Lies, and Politics: A Conversation”, p. 1048.
41
Young-Bruehl & Kohn, “Truth, Lies, and Politics: A Conversation”.
42
Young-Bruehl & Kohn, “Truth, Lies, and Politics: A Conversation”.
38

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Storytelling: reconciliation with reality
Arendt was convinced that “we can no more master the pastthen we can undo it”, and “narration […] solves no problems
and assuages no suffering”.43 But she believed, “even in thedarkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination,and that such illumination may well come less from theories andconcepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak
light that some men and women, in their lives and their works,
will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over thetime span that was given to them on earth”.44
To return to my opening question: is there a way of thinking
that enables us to reconcile with the past? Arendt suggests, notturning to theories but to storytelling. Storytelling is not a naïve
exercise. The storyteller does not rely on theories or concepts,
but on imagination; with the help of imagination he brings
particular experiences to light, thus providing examples for ourconsideration. Stories may help to find a reasonable attitude towhat has happened. “The best that can be achieved,” Arendt
writes, “is to know precisely what it was, and to endure thisknowledge, and then to wait and see what comes of knowing andenduring”.45 Arendt shares William Faulkner’s understandingthat “the past is never dead, it’s not even past”. The simple
reason for this is that “the world we live in at any moment is theworld of the past.” In other words, “the facts [of the world] arealways what has become.” In this sense, Arendt remarks, “it istrue that the past haunts us.”
Stories are “the results of action and speech,” “every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as astory with beginning and end.”46 “Each human life,” Arendt
writes, “tells its story and […] history ultimately becomes the43

Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing”, in Men in
Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.), p. 21.
44
Hannah Arendt, “Preface”, in Men in Dark Times, p. ix.
45Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing”, in Men in
Dark Times, p. 20.
46
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 184.

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storybook of mankind, with many actors and speakers and yet
without any tangible authors”.47 Both, stories and history are theoutcome of action. Since action takes place in “an alreadyexisting web of human relationships, with its innumerable conflicting wills and intentions,” it “almost never achieves its purpose”.48 Moreover, action is unpredictable; it has a start but noend. Therefore, nobody can ever know “with certainty the outcome” of one’s actions. Arendt emphasizes this aspect in The
Human Condition and writes, “The process of a single deed canquite literally endure throughout time until mankind itself hascome to an end”.49 Therefore, it can sometimes take a long time
before action becomes “a story susceptible to narration”, and themeaning of a committed act is revealed. In other words, “a clear
perception of experience requires the passage of time”.50
In the case of the First World War, “nearly thirty years wereto pass before a work of art appeared which so transparently
displayed the inner truth of the event that it became possible tosay: Yes, this is how it was”.51 William Faulkner's novel A Fableis for Arendt such a work of art. “Very little is described, still lessexplained and nothing at all ‘mastered’; its end is tears, which
the reader also weeps, and what remains beyond that is the‘tragic effect’ or the ‘tragic pleasure,’ the shattering emotion
which makes one able to accept the fact that something like thiswar could have happened at all”.52
The process of reconciling with the past is represented in theliterary form of tragedy. The tragic hero re-experiences “whathas been done in the way of suffering and in this pathos, in resuffering the past, the network of individual acts is transformed

47

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 184.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 184.
49
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 233.
50
Ari Hyvönen, “The Janus Face of Political Experience”, in Arendt Studies, Vol. 2, 2018,p. 138.
51
Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing”, Men in
Dark Times, p. 20.
52
Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times”.
48

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

into an event, a significant whole”.53 The tragedy has a dramatic
climax, and this climax “occurs when the actor turns into asufferer; therein lies its peripeteia”.54 Whether the plots are tragic
or non-tragic, they “become genuine events only […] [when]memory operates retrospectively and perceptively. Such memory can speak only when indignation and just anger, which
impel us to action, have been silenced – and that needs time”.55
What then is established is the meaning of committed acts.
However, this does not mean that “any ‘mastering’ of the past is
possible”, but by such narration we can reconcile ourselves to it.
The form for it is the lament”.56 Arendt illustrates this by quoting
Goethe in the dedication to Faust
Der Schmerz wird neu, es wiederholt die Klage
Des Lebens labyrinthisch irren Lauf.
(Pain arises anew, lament repeatsLife’s labyrinthine, erring course.)

To Arendt, who was convinced of the relevance of philosophy,
it was characteristic that philosophers had refused to analyze inphilosophical terms the background of the horrible experiencesof her own time. She therefore concluded, “crucial for a newpolitical philosophy will be an inquiry into the political significance of thought; that is, into the meaningfulness and theconditions of thinking for a being that never exists in the
singular”.57
Of course, tradition has several meanings. In Hegel’s philosophy of history the contingency of all action is replaced bypredetermined necessity.58 According to him, it is possible to53

Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times”.
Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times”.
55
Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times”, pp. 20–21.
56
Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times”, p. 21.
57
Hannah Arendt, “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought”,
p. 445.
58
Jerome Kohn, “Tradition”, in Wolfgang Heuer, Bernd Heiter & Stefanie Rosenmüller
(Eds.), Arendt Handbuch. Leben – Werk-Wirkung (Stuttgart: Metzler 2011), pp. 320–
54

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6. HANNAH ARENDT

select events that correspond to the process of progress. For
Arendt, history is not one progressive process but a multitude ofindependent events.59 To gain access, to name and reflect onthem, we need a way of thinking that is able to make distinctions
instead of subsuming things and events under one concept. In
other words, we would need a way of thinking that is nontraditional, which is to say, not tyrannical.
Following Arendt, language and thought are interconnected,
but “no language has a ready-made vocabulary for the needs ofmental activity”.60 Therefore, I turn to language, in particular to
the metaphor, which is language’s greatest gift for thinking.

Thinking, poetry, and ‘concrete’ thoughts
Best known is a way of thinking that is “the solitary and soundless dialogue between me and myself, the inner ‘two-in-one’.”
Arendt links this way of thinking especially to Socrates who“engaged into friendly dialogues on the essence of concepts likejustice, courage etc.”61 What also comes into our mind is anactivity of thinking which she calls “representative thinking”,
i.e., a mode of thinking that is linked to Kant and his notion of“enlarged mentality” (erweiterte Denkungsart). In this activity ofthinking a “plurality of perspectives is present in and constitutethe public realm, in order to prepare the formation of opinions
and judgments future projects and past events”.62
What interests me particularly is a third form of thinking
which Arendt relates to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin, I said
earlier, was important for Arendt’s effort to understand a pastthat is fragmented. He is also important for a thinking that is
poetical. In her essay on Benjamin (1968), she writes, “[w]hat is
so hard to understand about Benjamin, is that without being a
21.
59
Kohn, “Tradition”.
60
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, p. 102.
61
Wout Cornelissen, “Thinking in Metaphors” in Roger Berkowitz & Ian Storey (Eds.),
Artifacts of Thinking. Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (Fordham: Fordham
University 2017), p. 76.
62
Cornelissen, “Thinking in Metaphors”.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

poet he thought poetically and therefore was bound to regard themetaphor as the greatest gift of language”.63 In the Thought
Notebook (Denktagebuch) from April 1970, an entry titled “On
the difficulties I have with my English Readers”, Arendt defends
Benjamin’s (and, I might add, her own way) against the Anglolinguistic philosophy or what she characterizes as “Thesaurus
philosophy”. When she raises “the question of what is a metaphor … and what does a metaphor achieve […], [then] these
considerations, according to our English friend, have nothing to
do with a profile of Benjamin”.64 Instead the “Times Literary
Supplement reviewer complains of [her] ‘ideology’”. She imagines, “what he means is my thinking that transcends mere description. Or similes and metaphors”, and she concludes, “Whatthis adds up to is that the whole notion of thinking a matter
through is alien to English ‘philosophy’”.65
Arendt explicitly speaks of a correspondence between the useof concepts and of metaphors, “what connects thinking andpoetry [Dichtung] is metaphor. In philosophy one calls concept
what in poetry [Dichtkunst] is called metaphor. Thinking createsits ‘concepts’ out of the visible, in order to designate the invisible” (D XXVI.30.728).66 Metaphors are the greatest gift oflanguage because they are “securing the access of humans to andtheir relationship with the world”.67 Arendt states that “no language has a ready-made vocabulary for the needs of mental
63

Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 166.
U. Ludz & I. Nordmann (Eds.), Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch II, 1950 bis 1973
(München/ Zürich: Piper 2002), XXVII: 45, p. 771.
65
Ludz & Nordmann (Eds.), Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch II, see Martin BlumenthalBarby, “The Odium of Doubtfulness”: Or, the Vicissitudes of Metaphorical Thinking”,
in New German Critique, no. 106, winter 2009, p. 64.
66
Quoted from Wout Cornelissen, “Thinking in Metaphors”, in Artifacts of Thinking.
Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch, p. 84. Similarly Sigrid Weigel, “For Arendt
thinking […] maintains a proximity to poetry, to the language of metaphor, to perception in analogies and to experience”. Sigrid Weigel, “Poetics as a Presupposition ofPhilosophy: Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch”, in Telos 146, 2009, p. 98.
67
Hannes Bajohr, “The Unity of the World: Arendt and Blumenberg on the Anthropology of Metaphor”, in The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, Vol. 90, No.
1, 2015, p. 56.
64120

6. HANNAH ARENDT

activity; they all borrow their vocabulary from words originallymeant to correspond either to sense experience or to otherexperiences of ordinary life”.68
At this point Arendt makes an important distinction; she
distinguishes “common-sense reasoning” from thinking andremarks, “what we need for common-sense thinking are examples to illustrate our concepts”. It is quite clear to Arendt, however, that “if reason’s need transcends the boundaries of thegiven world and leads us on to the uncertain sea of speculation,”then “it is altogether different.” Then we do not need examples
but metaphors. “The metaphor,” she explains, “achieves the
carrying over’ – metapherein – of a genuine and seemingly impossible metabasis eis allo genos, the transition from one existential state, that of thinking, to another, that of being an appearance among other appearances, and this can be done only byanalogies.”69 “Analogies, metaphors, and emblems,” she adds,“are the threads by which the mind holds on to the world even
when, absent-mindedly, it has lost direct contact with it, andthey guarantee the unity of human experience.”70
To recall my earlier question if there is a way of thinking thatenables us to face the “shock of reality” and to reconcile with thepast, what Thomas Wild describes as “to face and to come toterms with what really happened”71, Arendt started all her think68

Arendt, The Life of the Mind, p. 102. “According to Kant”, she writes, “speaking inanalogies, in metaphorical language […] is the only way through which speculative
reason, which we here call thinking, can manifest itself. The metaphor,” she goes on,“provides the ‘abstract’, imageless thought with an intuition drawn from the world ofappearances whose function it is ‘to establish the reality of our concepts’, and thus, undo,
as it were, the withdrawal from the world of appearances that is the precondition ofmental activities”.
69
Arendt, The Life of the Mind.
70
Arendt, The Life of the Mind, p. 109; see also Cornelissen, “… Arendt praises thecapability of metaphor to turn a phrase back into a word again, and thus to (re)establisha ‘correspondence’ between our inner mind and the outer world”, in: “Thinking in
Metaphors”, p. 85; see Martin Blumenthal-Barby, “The Odium of Doubtfulness”: Or,
the Vicissitudes of Metaphorical Thinking”, in New German Critique, Vol. 36, No. 106,
winter 2009, p. 65.
71
Thomas Wild, “By Relating It”: On Modes of Writing and Judgment in the
Denktagebuch” in Artifacts of Thinking. Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch, p. 54.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

ing from the fact that God created both Adam and Eve as theoriginal plurality. Already one of the first lines in The Human
Condition is fascinating in this regard. Here we read the wellknown line, “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit theworld”.72 This leads Arendt to state, “plurality is specifically thecondition – not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio
per quam – of all political life”.73 Plurality becomes a key concept,“radically different from our liberal understanding of plurality”.74 It is a kind of “qualitative pluralism [that] emerges in thecourse of intersubjectivity, of in between people and [this] isutterly different from the modern age subjectivism so familiar tous”.75
Thomas Wild supplements this “qualitative pluralism” witha “plurality of languages.” These languages “differ in vocabulary
and grammar, and therefore in their ‘mode of thinking’ (Denkweise), and all are learnable”.76 Consequently, “we, who are manyand various, and more than simply descendants of one ‘animal
rationale’ or ‘zoon logikon’, we are beings gifted not with reason
or language, but with languages and with the faculty of speaking
to one another”.77

The Capacity of Judging
I began this article with the question whether we can reconcile
ourselves to the past, whether there is a way of thinking that isThomas Wild points out that Arendt does “not arrange the two activities ‘to face’ and‘to come to terms with’ in a chronological, intentional, or causal order. Instead, thesentence expresses a mode: to look reality in the face, to confront what happened and tofind words for what one thus discovers, to bring it into language. An oscillating ‘and’
that joins and creates distance. A break and a space between” (italic added).
72
Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 7.
73
Arendt, The Human Condition for the notion of plurality see Helgard Mahrdt, “TheJoy of Thinking” in Filosofisk Supplement (3–4), 2019, pp. 9–11; Sophie Loidolt, Phenomenology of Plurality. Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity (New York: Routledge, 2018).
74
Wolfgang Heuer, “Plurality”, in Arendt Studies, Vol. 2, 2018, p. 51.
75
Heuer, “Plurality”, p. 53.
76
Wild, “By Relating It”.
77
Wild, “By Relating It”.

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6. HANNAH ARENDT

not tyrannical and remains related to reality. If the past is nolonger handed down from generation to generation, if we havelost the continuity of the past, if, what we are left with is but afragmented past, and if, nevertheless, we are in need of finding
meaning and reconciling with events, how can thinking contribute to understanding the past? This seems particularly
difficult since the “path paved by thinking […] cannot be
inherited and handed down by tradition. Each new generation,
every new human being, as he becomes conscious of being
inserted between an infinite past and an infinite future, must
discover and ploddingly pave anew the path of thought”.78
Here Arendt brings in another faculty of the mind, i.e.,
judging. Judgment as a capacity for dealing with the past has “itsown modus operandi, its own way of proceeding”.79 According
to Arendt, the life of the human mind is not the life of one
faculty, but of three basic mental activities, of “thinking, willing,
and judging […]; they cannot be derived from each other and,though they have certain common characteristics, they cannot
be reduced to a common denominator”.80 How, then, does thecapacity for judgment, “which one may call with some reason
the most political of man’s mental abilities”,81 proceed? What is
its own modus operandi?
Arendt argues that “thinking results in conscience as its byproduct,” and that “judging, the by-product of the liberating
effect of thinking, realizes thinking, makes it manifest in theworld of appearances, where I am never alone and always muchtoo busy to be able to think”.82 Thinking and judging are inter78

Arendt, The Life of the Mind, p. 210.
Arendt, The Life of the Mind, p. 216.
80
Arendt, The Life of the Mind, p. 69; see also Jerome Kohn: “The ability to judge, […]is an autonomous faculty of the human mind and by no means a readily applicable‘middle term’.” Jerome Kohn, “Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Experience. Thinking, Acting,Judging”, in Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz & Thomas Keenan (Eds.), Thinking in Dark
Times. Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (New York: Fordham University Press
2010), p. 193.
81
Kohn, “Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Experience”, p. 192.
82
Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations”, in Jerome Kohn (Ed.),
Hannah Arendt – Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), p.
79

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

related. However, we cannot derive “the faculty to judge particulars” from the activity of thinking because “thinking deals withinvisibles, with representations of things that are absent; judging
always concerns particulars and things close at hand”.83 Arendt
claims that it is Kant’s third critique, the Critique of Judgment,
which offers the greatest insight into the process of judgment. In
her Kant lectures, she writes, “the chief difficulty in judgment isthat it is ‘the faculty of thinking the particular’; but to thinkmeans to generalize, hence it is the faculty of mysteriously
combining the particular and the general.”84
In the Postscript to Thinking in The Life of the Mind, Arendt
writes, “If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, thehistorian is the inquiring man, who by relating it sits in judgment over it.”85 Thomas Wild suggests that “this emphatic ‘byrelating it’ “ could be read as the particular capacity of judging,
namely “to think the particular by relating it”.86 He explains,“The English expression ‘by relating it’ has a double meaning
here: the process of telling, and a way of relating things, of putting them in relation to each other”.87 That is what historians doin their process of telling; they put things in relation to eachother.
However, in Arendt’s view, the tradition of political thought
failed in telling and relating things. To counteract a concept ofhistory as progress, she refers to Herodotus who “never would
have doubted that each thing that is or was carries its meaning
within itself and needs only the word to make it manifest”.88 She
writes in the same passage, “Everything that was done or happened contained and disclosed its share of ‘general’ meaning
within the confines of the individual shape and did not need a
189.
83
Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations”.
84
Ronald Beiner (Ed.), Hannah Arendt – Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy(Chicago: The University Press of Chicago, 1989), p. 76.
85
Arendt, The Life of the Mind, p. 216.
86
Wild, “By Relating It”, p. 60.
87
Wild, “By Relating It”, p. 60.
88
Arendt, “On the Concept of History p. 64.

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6. HANNAH ARENDTdeveloping process to become significant”.89 Wild reads Arendt’s
sentence, “[t]he flux of his narrative is sufficiently loose to leaveroom for many stories, but there is nothing in this flux indicativethat the general bestows meaning and significance on theparticular”,90 as her answer to a tradition that failed to shed lightover the past. “Herodotus’ writing style, the presentation of his
Histories, is what makes the difference”. It makes the differencein what “an understanding of history as a universal meaningcreating process is”.91 “This way of writing,” Wild suggests,“makes distinctions that open possibilities; it creates relationships without subordinating. It is able to think the particular byrelating it, which characterizes the capacity of judging, according to Arendt and Kant”.92

Conclusion
So, is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical? Yes, it is athinking that remains related to experience, that is expressed inconcrete words, that uses metaphors, that carries a nonHegelian way to reconcile us with the past, and that can think
the particular without subordinating it. We realize it in the“attempts to think our ability ‘of mysteriously combining theparticular and the general’ to judge, for example, or to present‘by relating it’”.93 We may now better understand why “illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than fromthe uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men
and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle underalmost all circumstances and shed over the time span that wasgiven to them on earth.”94

89

Arendt, “On the Concept of History.
Arendt, “On the Concept of History, p. 64.
91
Wild, “By Relating It”, p. 62.
92
Wild, “By Relating It”, p. 62f.
93
Wild, “By Relating It”, p. 69.
94
Hannah Arendt, “Preface”, in Men in Dark Times, p. ix.
90

125FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

126

Chapter 7
Reflections on the Feminist Archive– The Case of the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand

Marta-Laura Cenedese*

When I was a doctoral student, I spent several months in France
conducting archival research. Although I was based in Paris,
most of my research material was kept at the IMEC, the Institut
Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, which is located justoutside of Caen in Normandy. But one day, as I was browsing
the Paris National Library (BnF) catalogue, I found out there
were some resources available at the Bibliothèque Marguerite
Durand (BMD), a specialized city library located in the thirteenth arrondissement. I had already lived in Paris years before
then, but I had never been to that particular library. My curiosity
was piqued when I read that it was the only library in France
dedicated to the history of women and feminism, and that it was
founded in 1932. The webpage of the City of Paris informs the
public that the library, called after the feminist activist
Marguerite Durand, keeps a rich documentation on the historyof women and feminism, including the quasi-totality of Frenchfeminist texts of the 19th and 20th centuries.1 A few years havegone by since I registered and accessed the documents I needed.
Today, the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand is open and fully
operational, however, for some time between 2016 and 2019, its
existence as an “independent” feminist archive was in peril.
Indeed, as the library closed for renovations in 2016, the mayorof Paris, Anne Hidalgo, announced a new project that provoked
the public outcry of the academic world, unions, and citizens,both in France and internationally. Eventually, the mairie* Many thanks to Giselle Bernard for her gentle (proof)reading of this text.
1
https://www.paris.fr/equipements/bibliotheque-marguerite-durand-bmd-1756

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

revoked the project and the library reopened to the public in
January 2020.2
In this contribution I want to address the specific case of thisFrench library, which speaks to us all about time, memory, andthe transmission of knowledge. The ‘BMD affair’ is symptomaticof the place of women and feminism in twenty-first century
society, and brings to the fore issues of enduring structural inequalities, power imbalances, and social justice. What happenedin the case of the BMD is, in fact, a display of the vulnerable andprecarious position of women as political subjects with agency
and presence in public life. My intervention approaches these
events by considering the notion of the archive within the legacyof feminist history and knowledge – thus addressing its transformations and transmissions in time. I contend that the
projected plan for the library foregrounds the logics of domination and the production of certain kinds of episteme at theexpense of, or by officially manipulating, others. I then turn tothe issue of the BMD’s lack of storage space and the impossibilityof enlarging its collections, which concerns which ‘histories’ the
BMD keeps and hands down to the future. Building on feminist
critical theory, I highlight the importance of embodied andsensory knowledges that are acquired through physical encounters (with both people and objects), and therefore I insist
on the necessity of having physical spaces for feminist ‘contact
zones’, such as the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand.

Marguerite Durand and the Birth of the Library
Marguerite Durand (1864–1936) was a woman of extraordinary
talents and charisma: a former actress of the Comédie française,
she was also a journalist, a collector, the founder and owner of2Anaïs Moran, “À Paris, la bibliothèque Marguerite Durand restera finalement dans ses
locaux”, Libération, 10/12/2017. https://www.liberation.fr/france/2017/12/10/a-parisla-bibliotheque-marguerite-durand-restera-finalement-dans-ses-locaux_1615708. See
also https://www.archivesdufeminisme.fr/actualites/reouverture-de-la-bibliothequemarguerite-durand-3/; https://information.tv5monde.com/terriennes/bibliothequemarguerite-durand-paris-rouverture-d-un-lieu-de-memoire-des-femmes-et-du128

7. REFLECTIONS ON THE FEMINIST ARCHIVE

the feminist daily newspaper La Fronde (1897–1903) and acandidate at the 1910 municipal elections.3 In 1886, as staff
writer at Le Figaro, she was asked to cover the International
Feminist Congress with the commission to write a humorous
piece. Instead, she was seduced by the speeches and convincedby the debates, to the point that not only did she become aconvert but an outspoken feminist and front-line activist. She
then founded the “major daily newspaper” La Fronde, whichwas “political and literary. Managed, administered, and compiled exclusively BY WOMEN. […] [T]hey [women] claim theright to be allowed to voice their opinion on all questions
affecting society and humanity, of which they are members on apar with men” (from La Fronde’s first issue).4 Durand was anactivist of the so-called ‘first’ feminist wave, for which thepressing matter was to open the public sphere to women, that is,
to respond to women’s political demands for education, workoutside of the house, equal pay, the right to vote and to beelected: in sum, the righteous request to be fully-fledged equal
participating citizens. According to Julia Kristeva, this was apolitical project turned toward “the rejection, when necessary,of the attributes traditionally considered feminine or maternal”
as a way of affirming oneself equal to men by likeness, unlike forthe second generation of feminists, who will be “interested in thespecificity of female psychology and its symbolic realizations.”5
An example of this ‘unessentialising’, yet individualistic,
approach to women’s emancipation is to be found in Madeleine
Pelletier, who argued that women needed economic and legal
independence from patriarchal control as well as to be liberated
from “socially imposed roles” (La Femme en lutte pour ses droits,

3
Maggie Allison, “Marguerite Durand and La Fronde: Voicing Women of the Belle
Époque” in Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr (Eds.), A ‘Belle Époque’? Women in FrenchSociety and Culture 1890–1914 (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), pp. 37–50(p. 41).
4
Quoted in Allison, “Marguerite Durand and La Fronde”, p. 38.
5
Julia Kristeva (1979), “Women’s Time” in Toril Moi (Ed.), The Kristeva Reader (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 187–213 (p. 193, 194).

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY1908).6 However, Pelletier’s model was a minority. As shown byhistorian Karen Offen (1988), well into the twentieth century“sexual dimorphism” and the family were paramount to the
French vision of social and political order and, therefore, despite
their critique of male/female relationships and patriarchal
family structures, most feminist groups insisted on sexual difference, complementarity and interdependence.7 Indeed, Marguerite Durand’s ultra-feminine and charming appearance did notresemble the Pelettier-like image of a first-wave feminist.
However, as Mary Louise Roberts has argued (1996) her feminist aesthetics mimicked traditional notions of femininity in asubversive and destabilizing way so that, while she seemed to be
reinforcing gender ideologies, she was instead transgressing
conventions “without appearing to do so”, and therefore “securing both social acceptance and power”.8 Using ‘seduction’ as‘power’, Marguerite Durand was able to challenge a maleconstructed feminine identity and to defend the interests ofwomen workers.9 With La Fronde, she gave “unprecedented
visibility to the feminist movement and had a cultural impact inall of France”.10 Finally, with her library and feminist archive,
Durand was able to to add to the (masculine) linear temporality
what Jeffrey Wallen (2009) calls “droplets of time” or, in Arlette
Farge’s (1989) words, “tear[s] in the fabric of time”.11 For me,talking of archival documents as “droplets of” and “tears in”
6

Karen Offen, “Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach” in Signs, Vol.
14, No. 1, 1988, pp. 119–157 (pp. 144–145).
7
Offen, “Defining Feminism”, pp. 145–146.
8
Mary Louise Roberts, “Acting Up: The Feminist Theatrics of Marguerite Durand” inFrench Historical Studies 19 (4), 1996, pp. 1103–1138 (p. 1128). For an early influential
study of “womanliness” as something “assumed and worn as a mask”, see Joan Riviere(1929), “Womanliness as a Masquerade” in Russell Grigg, Dominique Hecq, Craig
Smith (Eds.), Female Sexuality: The Early Psychoanalytic Controversies (London and
New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 172–182.
9
Roberts, “Acting Up”, p. 1114.
10
Roberts, “Acting Up”, p. 1131.
11
Jeffrey Wallen, “Narrative Tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness” in Partial
Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 7 (2), 2006, pp. 261–278 (p. 261);
Arlette Farge, Allure of the Archives, transl. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven andLondon: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 6.

1307. REFLECTIONS ON THE FEMINIST ARCHIVE

time conveys the painstakingly slow and painful process endured by women to access the stage.
The BMD library, originally Marguerite’s own, resided at
first in the premises of La Fronde in rue Saint Georges,12 andconsisted in works that related to women and the fight for
women’s rights. In 1931 Durand decided to lease her collection
to the city of Paris with the promise that it would be kept in aplace open to any member of the public, where documents could
be easily and freely accessed by anyone who was interested inwomen’s history and in the fight for equality.13 As a public
institution, the library was initially located on the fifth floor of
the Town Hall of the fifth arrondissement, opposite the Panthéon. Anecdotal history tells us that Marguerite, then volunteering director, died in the library itself in March 1936. Closed
between 1940–42, we know very little about its life until the late1960s, when librarian Yolande Léautey was appointed to classify
and update the library, followed in 1983 by curator Simone
Blanc, “who managed to obtain more staff and a larger budget.”14
In 1989 the library was moved to a new address at 79 rue
Nationale in the thirteenth arrondissement, and since then it has
shared the building with the Médiathèque Jean-Pierre Melville.
Caroline Verdier points out how this move, although wellintentioned for it was meant to provide the library with more
space, could be seen from a political standpoint as a desire to
give less prominence to the library: not only did its relocation
bring the library from the center to the south-eastern area of
Paris, but ironically it also made it share locales with an insti-

12

Allison, “Marguerite Durand and La Fronde”, pp. 47–48.
The choice to donate her library and archives was taken after having witnessed thedisappearance of “another important series of archives on women at the death of[Durand’s] close friend Eliska Vincent, and not wanting the same thing to happen toher collection.” Caroline Verdier, “Trajectories of Two Women’s Libraries: A Comparative Study of the Bibliothèque Léonie La Fontaine and the Bibliothèque Marguerite
Durand” in Maggie Allison and Angela Kershaw (Eds.), Parcours de femmes: Twenty
Years of Women in French (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 23–37 (p. 25).
14
Verdier, “Trajectories of Two Women’s Libraries,” p. 28.
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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

tution named after Jean-Pierre Melville, who was well known forhis misogyny.15
As I previously mentioned, the Bibliothèque Marguerite
Durand is the only feminist library in France. It contains morethan sixty thousand documents, among which one can find:French and foreign books on feminism; feminism and the arts;
history; politics and science; militants’ biographies; doctoral
theses defended by women since the 19th century; periodicals,letters (e.g. by Mme de Staël and Colette); literary works; postcards; posters – the most precious one being a placard of
Olympe de Gouge dating from 1792. The library’s collection
goes back to the 17th century.16 Scholars and the public alikehave immediate, free access to the entirety of the collections,which are kept in the small space of the reading room, andmostly in the building’s underground storage, where they cover
two linear kilometers. Unfortunately, the storage space has been
completely full for the past fifteen years and, since then, thelibrary has therefore been unable to accept new donations, savefor rare pieces. Since the year 2000, thanks to a co-operation
with the BMD, it is the Centre des archives du féminisme at the
University of Angers that provides this essential archiving
service.

The BMD Affair
In 2016 it was announced that the site of the Médiathèque
Melville and the BMD would close for renovations from June
2018. On the occasion, the mayor of Paris also announced thatthe BMD (and its permanent personnel) would be transferred to
the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris (BHVP) in the
fourth arrondissement. The project was advertized as the creation of a space solely dedicated to feminist literature and related
activities: since “this library manages important archival docu15

Verdier, “Trajectories of Two Women’s Libraries,” p. 29.
For more information on the archival collections see Christine Bard, Annie Metz andValérie Neveu (Eds.), Guide des sources de l’histoire du féminisme (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006).

16

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7. REFLECTIONS ON THE FEMINIST ARCHIVE

ments […] that, unfortunately, are not clearly identified” thenew location would allow them to be better identified and,especially, to have better visibility. Finally, the new planning
would allow to “bring the documents to life and to feed contemporary debates on these fundamental issues” (i.e. the history of
women and feminism).17
This sounds all very good. But then, why did the unions,feminist associations, scholars and private citizens mobilize
around the collective Sauvons la BMD, sign petitions, organize
sit-ins and demonstrations against this project?18
The association Archives du féminisme wrote a column forthe daily newspaper Libération on October 5, 2016, in which
they expressed their concern for a “dangerously vague project”.
They suggested that the inclusion in the BHVP might be a covert
way to eliminate the BMD, given that the new location would beinadequate in space and conservation resources, both for thecurrent personnel (seven of them to be housed in one room) andfor the archival documents themselves. Indeed, these would beallocated only 500 linear meters – compared to the current two
kilometers – in an already-saturated library, which implies thatthe majority of the documents would have to be moved intostorage to the outskirts of Paris, which is in stark contrast to the
BMD’s present-day direct availability. The association is notagainst a move per se, but they stress that for such a move tooccur, there needs to be an ambitious project that would upgrade both the personnel’s working conditions and the public’s
access to the documents.19 Therefore, in their opinion “the new17“Pour une bibliothèque des femmes et du féminisme”. Budget participatif, projet N.
7.
https://budgetparticipatif.paris.fr/bp/jsp/site/Portal.jsp?document_id=2691&portlet_id=158. Unless otherwise stated all translations from French are my own.
18
For the collective Sauvons la BMD see https://www.facebook.com/Collectifsauvon
slaBMD/ and https://www.instagram.com/collectif.sauvonslabmd/?hl=en; “Sauvons labibliothèque Marguerite Durand!”, Archives du féminisme. http://www.archives
dufeminisme.fr/actualites/sauvons-bibliotheque-marguerite-durand/
19
Historian of feminism Bibia Pavard has also echoed the necessity of a more ambitious
project for the BMD. See La Poudre, épisode 81 – Le point sur la révolution avec Bibia
Pavard, 22/10/2020. https://open.spotify.com/show/1WgrGarkpE3efj57f8uvzo

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library must, firstly, keep in a single place in central Paris thestaff, the reading rooms and the archival documents. Then, it
must be housed in premises larger than those of the current
library, in order to permit the enrichment of the collections andto ensure good conditions for conservation. Lastly, in order tocontinue to better guarantee its mission of research and heritage
valorization, it must preserve its autonomy in relation to any
other library of the city of Paris”.20
Militants are not only preoccupied that the library will beswallowed by the BHVP, but that it will also lose its visibility andautonomy because of the out-of-city storage and ensuing accessdelays. In fact, the lack of space means that the collections will
not increase, and therefore, in the future, feminists will not feelencouraged to donate their archives to the library. This is a
crucial point because, as historian of feminism Christine Bardsays, “we need to think about the safeguard of present-day
archives, of today’s feminism”. In conversations with feministactivist and journalist Lauren Bastide, Bard and Bibia Pavard
affirmed that the issue with the inclusion of the BMD into the
BHVP catalogue is the erasure of the library’s specificity and theloss of its identity – an identity built on the will to be a lasting
place of generational transmission.21 The fight against thisproject shows “our attachment to a library that is more than alibrary, it is a place of history, of memory, a place of culture thatis fundamental for the struggles of yesterday, today, and tomor20

Association Archives du féminisme, “Pour un projet ambitieux de bibliothèqued’histoire des femmes et du féminisme à Paris”, Libération, 5/10/2016. https://www.
liberation.fr/debats/2016/10/05/pour-un-projet-ambitieux-de-bibliotheque-dhistoire-des-femmes-et-du-feminisme-a-paris_1519505. See also: Commissaire, Claire,“Féminisme: pourquoi le transfert de la bibliothèque Durand inquiète les syndicats”,
Libération, 3/8/2017.https://www.liberation.fr/france/2017/08/03/feminisme-pourquoi-le-transfert-de-la-bibliotheque-durand-inquiete-les-syndicats_1587909; “La seule bibliothèque féministe de Paris va-t-elle disparaître?”. Télérama, 22/08/2017. https://www.
telerama.fr/sortir/la-seule-bibliotheque-feministe-de-paris-va-t-elle-disparaitre,n515
2844.php21
La Poudre, Épisode Bonus – Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, 2/11/2017 and La
Poudre, épisode 81 – Le point sur la révolution avec Bibia Pavard, 22/10/2020. Both episodes are available at https://open.spotify.com/show/1WgrGarkpE3efj57f8uvzo

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7. REFLECTIONS ON THE FEMINIST ARCHIVE

row”.22 In another interview Bard reiterated that the library is “asite of memory, of culture and citizenship” and that the
documents kept at the BMD are “the archives of the future”.23
All in all, to many activists the proposed new project for the
BMD seemed to be an attempt at erasing women’s voices, atdenying the existence of feminism and its specificity, and a way
to keep subsuming women to patriarchal structures that makethem inaudible – hence insignificant. Thus, it is not only atechnical issue but also, and most importantly, a symbolic one.

The Archive
Having laid out the vicissitudes surrounding the BMD, I would
like to turn to the meaning of the presence of a feminist libraryand feminist archive as a tangible space. I would like to reflect
on the role that archives play in preserving and accessing thepast of feminism, in decoding the present, and in fostering
feminist visions of the future. How do they create the possibilityof (and potential for) feminist encounters? What are the limits
and possibilities of the archive as a site – both in the physical andsymbolic sense – of production of feminist knowledge? Myquestions echo those raised by Marianne Hirsch (2018) in her
fantasy for 2027: “How do feminist archives, and feminist theoryarchives, in particular, shift our structures of knowledge andintelligibility? […] How do particular archival practices enhance
the generation and transmission of this knowledge and theimagining of new feminist theoretical futures?”24
The notion of archive illuminates the forces at work in theaffair in question while it also provides a terrain for highlighting,challenging, and resisting the economies of desire that subtend
archival encounters. An archive is, literally speaking, a physical
22

Christine Bard in La Poudre, Épisode Bonus – Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand.
Arièle Bonte, “Pourquoi faut-il sauver la bibliothèque Marguerite Durand?”,
RTLGirls, 17/11/2017. https://www.rtl.fr/actu/debats-societe/pourquoi-faut-il-sauverla-bibliotheque-marguerite-durand-7790978068#
24
Marianne Hirsch, “Feminist Archives of Possibility” in differences: A Journal of
Feminist Cultural Studies 29:1, 2018, pp. 173–188 (pp. 174–175).
23

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place that collects material, documents, objects.25 Jacques Derrida reminds us that “the meaning of ‘archive,’ it’s only meaning,comes to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, thearchons, those who commanded.”26 For Derrida this domiciliation (i.e. the archive) marks a passage from the private to the
public, whereby what he calls an “archontic power” is applied –a power that gathers, unifies, identifies and classifies “by virtueof a privileged topology.”27 Behind the initial perception of thearchive as a material site, i.e. an archival institution, the conditions and circumstances that create and preserve the archive
emerge: the relations of power that underpin the rules ofinclusion and exclusion.28 Michel Foucault’s engagement withthe archive as rules of practice underlines the dynamic relation
between knowledge production and power.29 Addressing thisprocess of production – inclusion, exclusion, dispossession,
appropriation, regulation – has been fundamental for feminist,
queer, and postcolonial studies and theory in order to challenge
the technologies of imperial/patriarchal/heteronormative hegemony. In the words of postcolonial philosopher and public intellectual Achille Mbembe, “the archive is primarily the product ofa judgment, the result of the exercise of a specific power andauthority, which involves placing certain documents in anarchive at the same time as others are discarded. The archive,25

See e.g. Jens Brockmeier, Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 71; Ernst van Alphen,“The Politics of Exclusion, or Reanimating the Archive” in The Nordic Journal of
Aesthetics 49–50, 2015, pp. 118–137 (p. 118); Wallen, “Narrative Tensions”, pp. 261–
262.
26
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression, transl. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 2. See also Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The
Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
27
Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 3.
28
Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris and Graeme Reid, “Introduction” in Hamilton,
Carolyn et al. (Eds.), Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 2002), pp. 7–18 (p. 9).
29
Cf. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, transl. A. M. Sheridan Smith(London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), pp. 89–143.

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therefore, is fundamentally a matter of discrimination and selection, which, in the end, results in the granting of a privileged
status to certain written documents, and the refusal of the same
status to others, thereby judged ‘unarchivable’.”30 Through theserules of discrimination and selection, a power legitimates certain
memories over others, and thus maintains specific themes,
norms and values to be carried on through time.
By overlooking certain practices and enabling a judgment ofvalue that categorizes them as unimportant, the archive cantherefore become a site of violence: assembling the archive
involves the application of particular forms of censorship andmanipulation – the devaluation, repression and rejection of the‘other’ within the archive.31 Against the persistence of patriarchal
societies, it is therefore essential to build, nurture and, as is thecase with the BMD, maintain archives of women and feminism,
which tell the alternative story (or one of the many stories) ofthat ‘other’ that has been rejected from the ‘official’ preservationof time. However, a feminist archive is not without its own logics
of power and its own privileged “mechanism for shaping thenarratives of history”.32 Indeed, Hamilton, Harris and Reidremind us that marginal archives, those preserving materials“excluded from the mainstream repositories” are “no less constructed than mainstream archives and are likewise the productof processes of both preservation and exclusion”. They argue
that “Collections compiled in opposition to a particular hegemonic discourse are equally shaped by the kind of material
collected, and the way it is arranged and described, as well as by30

Achille Mbembe, “The Powers of the Archive and its Limits” in Hamilton, Carolyn etal. (Eds.), Refiguring the Archive, pp. 19–26 (p. 20).
31
See Ariella Azoulay, “Potential History: Thinking through Violence”, in Critical
Inquiry 39:3, 2013, pp. 548–574; Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019), in particular ch. 3, “Archives: The Commons, Not the
Past”.
32
Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories” in Antoinette
Burton (Ed.), Archive Stories. Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham andLondon: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 2. See also Hirsch, “Feminist Archives ofPossibility”.

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what is excluded from an alternative recording of history”.33
Within the issue of the logics of power inscribed into the archive– which account for specific “political, cultural, and socioeconomic pressures” – some considerations need to be made.34
First of all, if we return to the practicalities of the projectedmove of the Marguerite Durand Library we notice that, were the
BMD subsumed under the BHVP, the rules of inclusion andexclusion proper of the latter would: (a) contribute to theerasure of certain feminist memories deemed unimportant by ahegemonic power; and (b) manipulate certain others by including them within a catalogue that follows specific (non-feminist)labels and/or classifying norms that might end up changing or
distorting their meaning and epistemic import. As an active
producer of content (rather than a passive and uncritical receiver), the archive “gathers together signs” and thus brings together singular objects into a collective that gives them meaning.35
The cry for help for the BMD is thus justified. If objects areincluded in function of a whole, then, whether they are integrated into a pre-existing historical library or a feminist library
dramatically changes their semantics (i.e. their meaning-endowing to and -endowed within the collection). Thus, the move
implies the inscription within a different episteme – that which“governs the principles according to which archival organizations are structured in such a way that archives can be seen as
emblematic examples of the nature of an episteme”.36 Submitting
to these other organizational principles will also change the rules
selecting what is archivable and what is not archivable, what isdeemed important and what irrelevant, what is part of history
and what can be silenced. Hence, the result will be a different
episteme. This does not even take into account the impossibilityof accepting new documents for lack of space, which reveals the(un)conscious desire to relegate women’s struggles to a buried
past (one that does not need to be revived). On the contrary, the33

Hamilton et al., Refiguring the Archive, pp. 11–12.
Burton, Archive Stories, p. 6.
35
Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 3.
36
van Alphen, “The Politics of Exclusion, or Reanimating the Archive”, pp. 75–76.
34

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7. REFLECTIONS ON THE FEMINIST ARCHIVE

struggle is ongoing, feminist documents are ever-increasing,and an independent institution that collects and archives
women’s and feminist memories has not only the power to“shape and produce the identities of those it registers”, but also
to serve as a place of encounter that shapes and nurtures feminist
identities, and that produces, shares, and transforms feminist
epistemologies.37
Indeed, an alarming consequence of the move of the BMD
would be the de facto end of any expansion of its archive. As the
only institutional library of women and feminism, the BMD
plays an important part in how the narrative is told andremembered. Moreover, the fact that it is a closed archive seems
to relay the message that the narrative of feminism is finished,accomplished, rather than incomplete, constituted of stories(still)-in-the-making. This means that the current closed archive
will stand as the legitimate memorial narrative of feminism, onethat is mostly told by white, privileged women – “a formation
specifically of [first- and] second-wave feminism”.38 However,
the history of oppression recorded by white women is not thesame history of oppressions experienced by black women,
women of colour, lesbians, and trans-women. The point I am
trying to make here is far away from undermining the BMD and
its importance; on the contrary, I want to underline the essential
value of its material presence. The archive needs to grow andinclude more and new resources – be they books, letters, photographs, artworks, documents, videos, recordings, podcasts, etc.–that notwithstanding their format (digital/material) will increase the BMD archive and thus add new tassels to the storyin-the-making. Here ‘story-in-the-making’ means not only thedevelopment of feminism as a (her)story that can be told, butalso foregrounds the hermeneutic value of the archive, whereby
its interpretation is not fixed but instead an ever-evolving
narrative in itself: a story-in-the-making.39 But whereas nowa37

Wallen, “Narrative Tensions”, p. 269.
Hirsch, “Feminist Archives of Possibility”, p. 174.
39
Brian Schiff, “The Hermeneutics of Crisis and the Crisis of Interpretation”, Keynote
38

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days and in the future it might be (and will be) easier to createand sustain digital archives of intersectional, decolonial feminism that will counteract (if not erase) symbolic restrictions, the“paradigm shift from a culture of scarcity to a culture ofabundance” does not, in my opinion, resolve the issue of thefundamental importance of the library/archive as a physical site
for encounter.40 The archive needs to be a physical space, where
human and non-human (textual) bodies can meet and interact.
In this sense, I am inspired by theorizations of embodied experience as the basis for knowledge and by “how affective experiencecan provide the basis for new cultures”.41 I consider here in particular the ‘bodily’ and ‘sensory’ contact that happens in a library– interacting with the personnel, holding books, touching
documents, entering into material contact with them, breathing
their “eternal dust” in.42
Christine Bard, who is the founder and director of theArchives du féminisme in Angers, evokes the fundamental roleof books along the feminist quest: according to her, a feminist
conscience often emerges out of the encounter between readingand experiencing. Facilitating this encounter with feminist
ideas, the book encourages awareness, situates knowledge,
inspires a ‘conversion’, and stimulates activism, as it happened
to be the case with Marguerite Durand herself. Sara Ahmed(2017) also stresses how books make communities: hers is a very
“sense’itive” description of the encounter between books andbodies.43 Reading groups have been historically important foraddress “The Psychology of Global Crises: State Surveillance, Solidarity and Everyday
Life”, American University of Paris, 20 May 2020. Available online: https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=jZ3RD0Q1BuI40
Françoise Vergès, Un féminisme decolonial (Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 2019); Roy
Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era” in American
Historical Review 108:3, 2003, pp. 735–62 (p. 739).
41
Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public
Cultures (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 7.
42
Steedman, Dust, p. 157.
43
I adopt here the term used by Kay Anderson and Susan J. Smith’s (2001), whichconveys the idea of sensitivity while also giving legitimacy to research and writing
attuned to the senses and to corporeal experiences. See Anderson, Kay and Susan J.

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women and the articulation of feminist communities, and stillplay a pivotal role, as Ahmed’s experience highlights: “Participating in the group with books made me aware of how feminist
community is shaped by passing books around; the sociality of
their lives is part of the sociality of ours. There are so many waysthat feminist books change hands; in passing between us, theychange each of us”.44 The words she employs foreground thesensory, bodily, material encounters afforded by the “fragilearchive” of feminism. Indeed, in an earlier book, Ahmed proposed a model of archive as a “contact zone” where, among
multiple forms of contact, she also includes “institutional formsof contact”, such as, among many others, libraries and books.45
My understanding of the archive as a contact zone builds on
Ahmed’s ‘personal archive’ but also includes the concrete spacethat fosters close encounters (physical, emotional, intellectual,and political). Therefore, I also read this contact zone as “a sitewhere past and present converge in the architecture of the space
itself, whose very materiality is linked to regime changes past,present, and future”.46 The archive is a contact zone between pastand present, both symbolically and as a physical space, and assuch it can shape the future and the transmission of knowledge.
In such a lieu de mémoire, strong affective (and affecting)encounters are able to influence, change, and shape a whole
existence. In the encounters between past and present affordedby the feminist library, present-day engagements and future
possibilities are envisioned in multidirectional and intersectional perspectives. Going knee-deep into the feminist archive
Smith, “Editorial: Emotional Geographies” in Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2001, pp. 7–10 (p. 9). Many thanks to Samira Saramo forsharing this idea with me.
44
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
2017), p. 17. For a long-term sociological study of women and book clubs, see e.g. Elizabeth Long, Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003).
45
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press: 2004), p. 14.
46
Burton, Archive Stories, p. 10.

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creates for the reader an epistemic and affective map of women––what Griselda Pollock calls “contexts populated by many
women”.47 Each one of these many women is “a singular intellect, shaped by her own double axis within generation and geography and hence different in their particularities.” Yet, in thearchive “the collective history of many women allows to recover
the complex created worlds of women engaging critically,
aesthetically and politically with the challenges of femininity,
modernity and representation.”48 It is on the basis of this context
of histories of women and history made by women that I see theempowering strength of the feminist archive as a space of(collective) memory. Thus the archive offers the hope for “thepossible encounter not only with the traces of memory” but alsowith other memories that narrate alternative, non-normative
experiences.49 In this way the archive fosters critical awareness,creates the condition of transformation of the self and of society,shapes new political and ethical models and challenges ourhistorical imagination.

Conclusions
Months of rallying against a short-sighted project have saved the
Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand from being literally effaced
from the geography of France. Its founder’s desire to awaken
and educate future generations of feminists has prevailed over
and against a myopic logic that was about to silence her will. The
troubles with the BMD are emblematic of how the cultural
memory of women and feminism is still under the rule ofpatriarchy, and therefore considered readily dismissible. It is foreverybody to see on an everyday basis that the agency of women
is still under siege, and that their position within our societies isstill, to varying degrees depending on geography and context,
mostly relegated to the margins and almost to a state of exclu47

Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space, and theArchive (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 163.
48
Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum, p. 163.
49
Wallen, “Narrative Tensions”, p. 276.

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sion. The decision to keep the library in its current location,
however, does not signify that the struggle is over. Indeed, as thecollective Sauvons la BMD has made apparent, the libraryshould be the object of serious discussions about a move toreorganize its space and collections with the aim of expanding
their capacities. The BMD needs more resources – from personnel, to space, to storage for increasing its archives. Indeed,
whereas the transmission of the past may seem to be safe, thecreation of new memories and knowledges, their evolution andfuture development depend on unconditionally available andaccessible encounters, as well as on the political will to allow andencourage them.
In this chapter, I have addressed the case of the BibliothèqueMarguerite Durand through the lens of what it may tell us about
the history of feminism, its evolution and transmission to future
generations. My approach started from the notion of thearchive, which has been amply theorized as enacting forms ofsystemic violence: this means that the archive functions on thebasis of specific, socially-sanctioned power structures. Fromthese premises, my reading of what I called ‘the BMD affair’ is
twofold: on the one hand, I located a form of hegemonic patriarchal power in the project of moving the BMD library underthe BHVP, whose system would be responsible for reassembling
the archive according to its rules of exclusion and inclusion. On
the other hand, I also pointed out how the impossibility for the
BMD to enlarge its archive is in itself a form of structural violence, given that the feminist memory contained therein doesnot (equally) speak for women of different class, race, and generations – among them, white women, black women, women ofcolour, lesbians, and trans-women. Therefore, I contend that the
expansion of the BMD archive is fundamental in fostering anintersectional transmission of the feminist project. Finally,
guided by feminist notions of embodied and affective knowledge I have also explored the notion of archive as a physicalspace for encounters. I have argued that, not only do we need
the feminist archive to be a physical space for the sake of upholding its narrative in-the-making as an inclusive (i.e. inter143

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

sectional) one, but also because it is by leafing books, feelingdocuments, and liaising with people that we can build a community that can touch us – physically, emotionally, and intellectually – and move us into action.

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PART 3
Transformations in Art

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146

Chapter 8
Possessing the Past
– Revisiting (a Feminist) Swedish 19th Century
in Contemporary Fiction

Claudia Lindén

What does the historical novel have to do with history? History
and fiction – are they not opposites? Today we experience awave of historical novels, films, and TV series, both internationally and in Sweden. Since these fictions often attract large audiences, they contribute to and shape our contemporary historicalconsciousness and national self-image. At a time when there is apolitically charged struggle over Sweden’s history and national
identity and museums and institutions are looking for new ways
to represent cultural heritage, it is particularly interesting to lookat how Swedish history is depicted in contemporary historicalfiction.
Our image of nineteenth-century Sweden has in fact been
shaped by literature. The impact of Vilhelm Moberg’s emigrantepos and Per-Anders Fogelström’s Stockholm series cannot bemeasured.1 With numerous editions and adaptations in film, aTV series, a musical, and in theater continuing to be made,shaping our historical consciousness, the work of Moberg andFogelström constitute our cultural memory of that epoch.2
Nineteenth century Sweden appears as poor, dirty and miser1

Vilhelm Moberg, The Emigrants, Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul, 1995,
the first part in Moberg’s tetralogy written between 1949–59, is a story of a group poor
peasants leaving starvation and oppression behind for a better life in the U.S. Per Anders
Fogelström, City of my dreams: A Novel, Penfield Press, Iowa City, Iowa, 2000 is the firstof a pentalogy written 1960–68. The series takes place between 1860 and 1968 and is an
epic tale of a family’s and a city’s joint development from poor and miserable to a life
with much better circumstances in a modern Stockholm, in the Swedish welfare state.
2
In 2017 Stadsteatern in Stockholm staged City of my dreams as a play spanning over
the whole pentology, directed by Linus Tunström, and a new TV-series adaptation of
The Emigrants started filming in 2020.

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able, and the present becomes a positive development awayfrom the past, especially for women. The legacy of Moberg,
Fogelström and the project of modernization can be discerned
through an ambivalence toward the past in Swedish fictions
situated in the nineteenth-century.
How then, does the image of Sweden’s history and our relationship to the past appear in contemporary historical fiction
with their female protagonists and stories from the margins
about unmarried mothers, prostitutes, oppressed Sami or forbidden same-sex desire? In some stories, especially those dealing
with prostitution and sexual harassment, the past is not past, butvery much alive and haunts the present. Historical fictions
provide other models for understanding the past and for criticizing how the past is constructed. Temporality creates a relation to history and therefore shapes historical consciousness, aswell as an understanding of the feminist task in the present.
In England, the historical novel is an established genre and afield of research, in its own right. However, in the Nordic
countries, there is virtually no research at all on the historicalnovel as such, despite our long tradition of this genre. I will
therefore situate this article in the context of British research.
Taking as my starting point William Godwin’s defense of fiction, as the best genre for history writing, I will argue that historical fictions, with their ability to transgress the borders
between past and present and between fiction and facts, engineer what Ethan Kleinberg has labeled “deconstructive history”.
Through a reading of a few contemporary historical fictions,especially the TV series Fröken Frimans krig (Miss Friman’sWar), I will show how these historical fictions establish a temporality, which transgresses past and present, and which in turnshape our historical consciousness. In this way, these historicalfictions serve as both the history of feminism and as critical
historiography, creating new knowledge, not only about the
women of the past but our ongoing relationship with them.

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Women, History, and the Historical Novel
The historical novel’s regained influence coincided with theoretical developments within historiography and theory ofhistory after it began to reflect on the relation between history
and literature.3 What could be labeled the ‘narrative turn inhistory’ had its equivalent in a ‘historical turn in narrative’. New
theoretical developments within literary theory, such as Hayden
White’s metahistory, Linda Hutcheon’s ‘historiographic metafiction, and Amy Elias ‘meta-historical romance’ a “postmodernist historical fiction which is obsessed with historiographical questions in a self-reflexive mode”, all contributed to thedevelopment of the historical novel.4 Inspired by critical discourses like postcolonialism and feminism the metahistoricalfiction was grappling with the meaning of history, in the mannerof realist historiography.
According to Alan Robinson, criticism of historical novels is
still dominated by a now outdated model of historiographic
metafiction: “it is also inadequately narrow in reducing historiography to epistemological issues and in neglecting the crucial
importance of temporality in the interplay between past present
and past future and present past.”5 The issue of temporality runs
as an undercurrent in both history and historical fiction. Derrida
has been an important influence on the fields of both history andliterature. Inspired by Derrida, a few historians have developed
the concept of history as haunting especially when it comes tounresolved political traumas but also as a deconstructive ap3
See Frank Ankersmit, Meaning, truth, and reference in historical representation, (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2012); Michel de Certau, The writing of history, (Columbia
Univ. Press, New York, 1988); Hayden White, Metahistory: the historical imagination in
nineteenth-century Europe, [New ed.]., (Johns Hopkins U.P., Baltimore, Md., 1979), andHayden White, “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical
Reality” Rethinking History, Vol. 9, No. 2/3 (2005).
4
Compare Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989),
Ch. 3, and Amy J Elias, “Metahistorical Romance, the Historical Sublime, and Dialogic
History”, Rethinking History, 9:2–3, (2005), p. 159.
5
Alan Robinson, Narrating the past: Historiography, Memory and the Contemporary
Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. xiii.

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proach, as “haunting history”.6 Another discussion of temporality is rooted in German history and cultural memory studies
with, among others, Reinhart Koselleck and Aleida Assman, andpost-colonial studies where history’s hauntings of the present is
described as a kind of “entanglement” of time dimensions.7
For centuries, the historical novel has been the only genre ofhistory open to women. Women have been excluded fromrecorded history both as subjects, writers, and readers before
they were admitted to the universities around 1900. A historicalsetting has frequently been used by women (and male) writers“as a way of writing about subjects which would otherwise betaboo, or of offering a critique of the present through their treatment of the past” as Dina Wallace has pointed out. She continues: “It is not surprising that in women’s hands the historicalnovel has often become a political tool. Perhaps even more
important for women writers has been the way that the historicalnovel has allowed them to invent or ‘re-imagine’ […] the unrecorded lives of marginalized and subordinated people”.8 In
historical fiction, the time that separates the present from thepast can be transgressed and we, as modern readers, can for a
moment situate ourselves in another historical room.
Women’s reading and writing of historical fiction have often
been regarded as escapism. These two uses of history – escapism
and the political – are connected, according to Wallace, since
escapism indicates dissatisfaction with what is available.
Marginality or exclusion breeds skepticism toward the grandnarratives of history and makes women into “resisting readers”
as Judith Fetterly once coined it. Wallace continues: “But theunderstanding that much of history is ‘invention’ as Austen puts
6

For history as trauma see Berber Bevernage, History, memory, and state-sponsoredviolence: time and justice, Routledge, New York, 2012; For history as haunting history
see Ethan Kleinberg, Haunting history: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past
(California: Stanford University Press, 2017).
7
Joseph-Achille Mbembe, On the postcolony, (University of California Press, Berkeley,
Calif., 2001).
8
Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers 1900–2000(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2004), p. 2.

150

8. POSSESSING THE PASTit, ‘narrative’ or ‘fiction’ as a postmodernist theorist such as
Hayden White might argue, may also bring certain freedoms.”9
If history has traditionally excluded women, the historical novel,on the other hand, has “offered women readers the imaginative
space to create different, more inclusive versions of ‘history’”,
Wallace concludes.10
The contemporary interest in transgressing the borders
between history and literature, is often perceived as an exclusively postmodern discourse (White, Ankersmit, Kleinberg etc.)with no historical precedent. But the debate between the historian and the writer of fiction can be traced to the inception of
the modern era. Before Walter Scott’s immensely popular historical novels and Ranke’s criticism of them in 1824, the philosopher and writer William Godwin (1756–1826) argued in “OfHistory and Romance” that “[t]he writer of romance is to beconsidered as the writer of real history.”11 According to Godwin,a novel is a superior form of history-writing because it relates
human action to character and circumstance. My point is that
Godwin from his 18th-century pre-Ranke perspective could
express a very similar idea as the contemporary deconstructive
historian does. He could do that because he built his argument
on romance or the gothic novel, an early form of the historicalnovel. The genre that Austen’s heroine Catherine Morland in
Northanger Abbey prefers is “history, real solemn history”.12
However, contemporary philosophy of history is not aware thatthe gothic historical novel theorized the relationship between
history writing and literature already at the formation of thescience of history. I will start with recapitulating Derrida’s reflections on the ghost in Spectres of Marx, and then turn to Ethan
Kleinberg’s idea of haunting history that builds upon Derrida.

9

Wallace 2004, p. 3.
Wallace 2004, p. 3.
11
William Godwin “Of History and Romance” 1797, https://web.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/godwin.history.htmln
12Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1803) ch. 14 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/
121/121-h/121-h.htm
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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

From there I will move to a closer analysis of Godwin’s text,
before offering a reading of Fröken Frimans krig.

Derrida’s Spectres
In his very influential book Spectres of Marx (1993), Jacques
Derrida develops a theory, or rather a metaphor, for understanding history. Starting from the first sentence of Marx’s
Manifesto “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism”, in combination with the famous line from the opening scene where Hamlet speaks with his father’s ghost and utters“The time is out of joint: Oh cursed spite/That ever I was bornto set it right”, Derrida creates the neologism hauntology, aword-mix of haunting and ontology. Haunting is repetition anda first time, it is a ghost, something that is both present andabsent at the same time. “After the end of history,” Derrida
writes, “the spirit comes by coming back [revenant], it figuresboth a dead man who comes back and a ghost whose expected
return repeats itself, again and again.”13 That which repeats itself
is of course something that cannot be confined to a single given
space and time.
What is important for Derrida’s argument, concerning Marxand Marxism, is how the image of the ghost, the spectre, helps
to deconstruct the notion of historical time as an irreversible
linear succession of events. To understand the history and legacyof Marxism and how it has haunted not only history and ourpresent but also threatens to haunt the future, it is necessary totalk of both history, something contemporary and a possible
future and to be able to do so from different historical viewpoints. Derrida emphasizes an idea of history where the relation
between past, present, and future are both looser than traditionally understood, and yet are connected at the same time.
Even though Derrida primarily discusses the legacy of Marxand Marxism his ideas have gained relevance for historians
interested in another way of understanding and writing history.
13

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the
New International (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 10.

1528. POSSESSING THE PASTThe notion of history as a ghost that returns to haunt the present, as something not necessarily confined to a given time andplace, opens up for seeing how the past is not only stuck in thepast but continues to live on and affect us in the present. Historyof oppression often works in this ghost-like way, as a revenant.
Holocaust and antisemitism, slavery and racism as well as centuries of legal and moral differences between men and womenare all examples of oppression in history that continue to haunt
the present.

Haunting History
In his book Haunting History, the American historian Ethan
Kleinberg, following Derrida, argues for an understanding of thepast as polysemic, conflicting, and as both present and absent at
the same time. This understanding sets itself against the current
trend toward a fetishization of lived experience, materialism andthe “real” (ontological realism). The main reasons why deconstruction never has gained influence on the practice of history,
Kleinberg argues, “is a commitment to history as an endeavor
concerned with events assigned to a specific location in space
and time that are in principle observable and as such are
regarded as fixed and immutable.”14 This leads to the wrong
assumption that there can be something like a permanently enduring past. Getting the past right becomes a question of historical method.
History, Kleinberg argues, is a replacement where the past
event or figure is silently determined by the retelling that
replaces it.15 He embraces Hayden White’s emphasis on language and constructivism in the historical endeavor, and helooks to Derrida for a hauntological approach to history that
“accounts for the entangled and unstable relation of presence
and absence without privileging one over the other.”16 Kleinberg

14

Kleinberg, Haunting history, p. 1.
Kleinberg, Haunting history, p. 2.
16
Kleinberg, Haunting history, p. 3.
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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

calls this a “past that is” to emphasize something that is at thesame time both present and absent.17
As Derrida did, Kleinberg turns to literature when he tries tomap out a deconstructive history. The example he chooses is
Washington Irving’s gothic novel The Legend of Sleepy Hollow(1820) about the headless horseman. The story is set in 1790
where the schoolteacher Ichabod Crane comes to a small, former Dutch, settlement called Sleepy Hollow, a place renowned forits ghosts and the haunting atmosphere that pervades theimaginations of its inhabitants and visitors. To Kleinberg Sleepy
Hollow:
is a story of a past that haunts history – a past of American
Indian dispossession, of the revolutionary war, of the unspoken atrocity that took place at Major André’s tree /…/Sleepy Hollow is laden with the ghosts of a past half-remembered if remembered at all. This is the latent past beneath theghosts that haunt the inhabitants. /…/ It is a past that wecannot touch but that nonetheless touches us. The histories,
the tales, the haunted spots are all partial configurations, likea headless horseman.18

History is, according to Kleinberg, the presence of absence, ofthings hidden, buried and forgotten. “And when what is latentappears returns, history is haunted, and we are confronted withthe possibility that our understanding of the past is polysemic
and contradictory.”19 Haunting history is a past that comes again
with the possibility to still affect, disturb or even hurt us. Kleinberg argues: “Insofar as history serves to make the past legible in
the present, it should be seen as a writing whose function it is tomake present what is absent, to render legible that which would
otherwise be illegible”.20 (my italics).

17

Kleinberg, Haunting history, p. 12.
Kleinberg, Haunting history, p. 136.
19
Kleinberg, Haunting history, p. 138.
20
Kleinberg, Haunting history, p. 143.
18

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8. POSSESSING THE PAST

When Kleinberg needed an example of how a haunting
history may function, he turned to the gothic – the genre thatinvented the writing of the haunted, to begin with. Gothic, orromance as it is called in the 18th-century, was not only
literature of terror and haunting – it was historical fiction. Not
with exact dates and places, as Walter Scott would later practiceit, but history with a vague sense of pastness that often hides
secrets that affect and haunt the protagonists in their present. Asa fiction with multi-layered temporality, it is a genre that alreadyfrom the beginning destabilized the relation between past andpresent.
Despite Kleinberg’s reference to Sleepy Hollow it is just an
example or at best a metaphor (the headless horseman) of how
a deconstructive history should be understood. Literature,fiction, is never allowed to be a method. Even though he notices
that Derrida’s interest in transgressing the border between“‘fiction’ and ‘fact’ as well as between the living and the dead, thepast and the present, presence, and absence” Kleinberg neverhimself crosses that line.21
Fiction is – in fact – the ghost that haunts history writing. The
historical scholar Michel de Certeau has said that “fiction is therepressed other of historical discourse.”22 In commenting on thisquote, Hayden White asks “Why? Because historical discourse
wages everything on the true, while fictional discourse isinterested in the real – which it approaches by way of an effort
to fill out the domain of the possible or imaginable.”23 To think
the possible, also opens up for the fictional, for the invented.
And, as we have seen from Kleinberg, it is what we are willing toaccept as ‘past possibilities’ that also “conditions what we arewilling to accept as possible pasts”.24

21

Kleinberg, Haunting history, p. 8.
Quoted from Hayden White, “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, andHistorical”, Rethinking History, Vol. 9, No. 2/3 2005, p. 147.
23
White “Introduction” 2005, p. 147.
24
Kleinberg, Haunting history, p. 137.
22

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Why the Writer of Novels is the Better Historian
If we now move to William Godwin’s 1797 essay “Of history andRomance” we can see that thinking about the relation between
past possibilities and possible pasts is a key question for him
concerning writing on history. The Godwinian scholar Pamela
Clemit has pointed out that Godwin in this essay extends his
claims for the educative power of fiction into the realm ofhistory, “arguing that the imaginative study of the past liberates
the mind from prescription and prejudice and stimulates ethicalenquiry.”25
Godwin was a leading radical political philosopher, novelist,
and social thinker of the British Enlightenment.26 The same year
he wrote “Of History and Romance” his wife Mary Wollstonecraft worked on a gothic novel Maria: or the Wrongs of Woman
perceived as the sequel to Vindication of the Rights of Women.27
In the same way as Godwin, Wollstonecraft had moved toward
a greater reliance on the mainstays of fiction: emotion andimagination. As Deborah Weiss has pointed out, the novel“illustrates how female experience and female feeling can be

25

Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden
Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), p. 79.
26
Godwin had written both a famous philosophical book An Enquiry Concerning
Political Justice (1793) and a novel dealing with the same themes: Things as They are: or,
The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) and had a new book set for press: The
Enquirer. Reflections On Education, Manners, And Literature. In A Series Of Essays(1797). Godwin had met Mary Wollstonecraft the year before and during 1797 she was
expecting their child. A pregnancy that ended in her tragic death in September the same
year, and left Godwin alone with Fanny, Wollstonecraft’s daughter from her former
relationship, and the baby who was to become Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.
27
The Wollstonecraft research differs over how to interpret the unfinished novel. Even
though many scholars see Maria… as a sequel to Vindication, there are others interpreting it more as a betrayal of Vindication than a continuation. The latter tradition
regards the novel’s investigation of Maria’s emotions, especially her love for Darnford,
as proof that Wollstonecraft did not believe anymore in the development in women’s
rationality. For a summary of the different traditions see Deborah Weiss, The Female
Philosopher and Her Afterlives Mary Wollstonecraft, the British Novel, and the Transformations of Feminism, 1796–1811. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 81.

156

8. POSSESSING THE PAST

used to generate social theory.”28 In this sense Maria… was aforerunner to a long tradition, leading up to today’s feminist
literature.
Wollstonecraft and Godwin both used the novel as a tool for
their progressive political agendas and theorized the relationship between history, politics and fiction almost two centuries
before the postmodern critique of history writing. Godwin
provides an early argument for how historical writing can andshould serve the transformation for a different future. But mostof all it acknowledges that the border between fact and fiction
are always already transgressed when it comes to historical
writing.
In “Of history and Romance” Godwin makes a distinction
between “two principal branches of history; the study of mankind in a mass, of the progress, the fluctuations, the interests andthe vices of society; and the study of the individual.”29 The
former looks for facts, but even if that history comes closest to
the truth, a mere chronicle of facts, places, and dates is, in reality,
no history, writes Godwin. Godwin criticizes a history that only
gives bits and pieces of facts but does not talk of individuals andtheir motives. Those who disdain the records of individuals but
find this fact-history the only kind deserving serious attention,
they think, Godwin writes: “To interest our passions, or employ
our thoughts about personal events, be they of patriots, ofauthors, of heroes or kinds, they regard as a symptom of effeminacy.”30 What Godwin here points out is that the difference
between history and romance is what we today would callgender-coded, where fiction is perceived as feminine. Later in
the article, he also highlighted how this genre paradoxically sells
well but is assumed to be read only by “women and boys”. Diana
Wallace has also pointed out how “Godwin summarizes critics’reactions to historical romances in fascinatingly sexualized

28

Weiss, The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives, p. 77.
Godwin, “Of History and Romance” 1797.
30
Godwin “Of History and Romance” 1797.
29

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

terms” when he writes that history in romance fiction is“debauched and corrupted.”31
In the same way as Derrida and Kleinberg, Godwin connects
the study of the history of individuals to a possible story of
power, and above all, that knowledge of the past has implications
for the future: “It is thus, and thus only, that we shall be enabled
to add, to the knowledge of the past, a sagacity that can penetrate
into the depths of futurity”, Godwin writes.32 Godwin takes as
his example the study of Antiquity and how we regard thosemen as intellectual giants. Still, this knowledge is more like afable. “Let us take it for granted that it is a fable. Are all fables
unworthy of regard?”33 Such fables have, according to Godwin“a moral perfectly adapted to the human heart. I ask not, as aprincipal point, whether it be true or false? My first inquiry is,‘[c]an I derive instruction from it?” If so, he continues, is it not
better to be profoundly versed in such a fable, “than in all thegenuine histories that ever existed. It must be admitted indeed
that all history bears too near a resemblance to fable. Nothing ismore uncertain, more contradictory, more unsatisfactory thanthe evidence of facts.”34 (my Italics) So, all history is like a fable,according to Godwin.
It is remarkable, I think, to find that Godwin, before theadvent of conventional history, with its methods, and long
before Hayden White, Derrida and Kleinberg, saw that thewriting of history always resembles a fable, but foremost that‘facts’ can never be mere facts but are also uncertain and contradictory. This leads Godwin to conclude that if “history be
little better than romance under a graver name,” we might aswell enquire into “that species of literature, which bears theexpress stamp of invention, and calls itself romance or novel.”35
31

Diana Wallace, “Difficulties, discontinuities and differences: Reading Women’s historical fiction”, The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, Katherine
Cooper & Emma Short (Eds.) (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 208. William
Godwin, “Of History and Romance” 1797.
32
Godwin, “Of History and Romance” 1797.
33
Godwin, “Of History and Romance” 1797.
34
Godwin, “Of History and Romance” 1797.
35
Godwin, “Of History and Romance” 1797.

158

8. POSSESSING THE PAST

Romance, or the gothic historical novel, transgress the border
between past or present.
Romance then, strictly considered, may be pronounced to be
one of the species of history./…/ The historian is confided toindividual incident and individual man, and must hang uponthat his invention or conjecture as he can. The writer collects
his materials from all sources, experience, report, and therecords of human affairs/.../ The writer of romance is to beconsidered as the writer of real history; while he who wasformerly called the historian, must be contended to step down
into the place of his rival, with the disadvantage, that he is aromance writer, without the arduous, the enthusiastic and thesublime license of imagination, that belong to the species ofcomposition.36 (my italics)

If we follow Godwin’s argument, we can see how he opens up
similar questions, pointing to the same problems that Kleinberg
identifies: Facts without a story are not really history, they are
just facts bound in time and fixed to a certain place. In this,Godwin echoes Aristotle’s distinction from the Poetics between
history and poetry, namely a difference between the particularand the universal, making poetry the more philosophical andelevated form of the two.

Fact, Fiction, and Temporality
Literature can mix fiction and facts in all imaginable constellations and allow for a transgression of past and present. But literature does not offer only examples, or metaphors for a haunting
history. It is a method in itself. Godwin had deconstructed thedemand for ontological realism in history writing even before it
was truly invented. Long before Derrida, before the advent of thescience of history with Ranke, Godwin showed that fiction canbe a better form of history because it not only deals with facts,
but also can stage affection and thus be open to moral reflection.
36

Godwin, “Of History and Romance” 1797.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

The fact that literature creates affective links between thereader and the protagonist is of course nothing new. So how
does this have a bearing on the more philosophical debate about
temporality in relation to history, and on feminism? Fiction’s
ability to awaken emotions, to make the reader feel lust and fear,
can make the reader experience the effect of past events or what
previous generations may have felt. The difference in reading as,
not only about, puts the reader in an affective connection withthe past, which also opens for an ethical commitment to the past.
Godwin would later use the first-person perspective in his historical novels just as a way to create affective links between thereader and the protagonist in the past. Such an identification
with the protagonist allows the modern reader/viewer to identify with a person from another time. It opens up an anachronistic relationship to history in a positive way.
For Kleinberg, the important thing is to get away from ontological realism and its way of regarding people and events asbound up in specific times and places, in order to create a thingof the past that allows for a simultaneous presence and absence.
But the question of presence and absence is still bound to thenotion of the real. A truly deconstructive history needs to movebeyond the absence/presence dichotomy to the question of
temporality. A true hauntology must destabilize time as well. In
fact, by putting his emphasis on the fact/fiction dichotomy
Godwin comes closer to destabilizing the dichotomy between
past and present than Kleinberg. That is because the fact/fiction
dichotomy opens up to the question of temporality.
“History” creates versions of the past, a textual substitute forsomething that is not there, which is absent, empty and without
content. History is a replacement, a way to put something inplace namely the missing absent other – the past. The conditions
for the discipline of history are, however, that the past in afundamental way is cut off from us. The historical novel, on theother hand, perverts history or our perception of the difference
between past and present, between fact and fiction, since it lures
the reader to take it not as a substitute, but as the thing itself.
Jerome de Groot has pointed out that historical fiction “forces160

8. POSSESSING THE PAST

the reader into a temporal distortion. The historical fiction
requires a changing and fickle relation to time and perhaps mostobvious, the temporal otherness.”37 By transgressing the gap
between then and now, historical fiction creates alternative temporalities.

Feminist Re-negotiation of Sweden’s Past
The ability of historical fiction to cross both the line between fact
and fiction, and between then and now, gives it unique opportunities to (re)interpret, (re)discover and (re)write history.38 As
Wallace pointed out, contemporary historical fiction often has
politico-critical ambitions. They question established history
writing at the same time as they bring previously concealed horrors to light. As Alan Robson claims, “historical fiction resembles historiography in that its interpretive employment constructs a subjective present past; this differs from a wholly invented spatiotemporal world, as it is modeled on and anchoredin a former actuality.”39
Renegotiations of the past are important for today’s understanding of history and identity, especially in a national context.
The established success story of folkhemmet’s path from “dirtSweden” (“lort-Sverige”), as the critic Ludvig Nordström labeled
it in a radio program 1938, to the welfare state and a successful
industrial nation with equality between men and women, is bothproblematized and confirmed in the novels by Ola Larsmo, Lena
Kallenberg, Anneli Jordahl, or in the TV series Fröken Frimans
krig (Miss Friman’s War). The role of women in the transformation of society, and the relevance of feminism and women’semancipation for the modernization project are still, to a large
extent, underground knowledge shared between gender scho37
Jerome De Groot, Remaking history: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions(London: Routledge, 2016), p. 15.
38
This is Heilmann’s and Llewellyn’s definition of Neo-Victorianism, but it could besaid of most historical fiction. Ann Heilmann & Mark Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism: theVictorians in the Twenty First Century, 1999–2009 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), p. 12.
39
Robinson, Narrating the past, p. 28.

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lars, but not present in mainstream history writing. In contemporary historical fiction, on the other hand, women are often at
the center and the emancipation of women is made part of themodernization project. Women’s sexual vulnerability throughunwanted pregnancies, death of puerperal fever, syphilis andprostitution, as well as sexual liberation and resistance to the
19th-century gender norms are all central concerns in contemporary historical fictions. Such stories from the margins create
alternative stories about the past that allows for multifaceted
identities and different versions of history. These fictions thus
function as new history writing and at the same time as critical
historiography.

(Re-)writings of the Past. Prostitution and Syphilis,
the Ghosts that Haunt the Story of Modernity
History becomes a haunting history especially in historical fiction that deals with prostitution because we still have prostitution and dangerous, even lethal, venereal diseases in the same
way as in the nineteenth century. Even though we have a varietyof laws and women’s situation in society is very different, storiesof the horrors of prostitution and trafficking are still part of ourpopular culture, such as Jens Lapidus’ books Snabba Cash(2006) and Livet deluxe (2011), and the movie trilogy based
upon them.
Many women were forced into prostitution in the 19th century driven by poverty when the emerging industrialization led
to quick urbanization. As a result, this development led to rampant syphilis and other venereal diseases in the cities. There weresignificantly more men than women who were infected withvenereal disease, which was taken as proof that women were themain source of infection. Women were made responsible for the
spread of sexually transmitted diseases and regulations of prostituted women were introduced in Sweden, according to themodel that already existed in Paris and other European cities.
Between 1847 and 1918, women, who the police considered tolive an “immoral life”, were registered at the Prostitution Bureau162

8. POSSESSING THE PAST

or Inspection Bureau, as it was also called. There were about
seven thousand women who at some point during the period
1856–1918 had their names printed in the rolls of the inspection
office.40
The enrolled women were required to follow strict rules intheir behavior and to go for health examinations twice a week. Ifthey were found to be sick they were sent to special hospitals,
and if they did not show up for the checkup, or in any other way
broke the regulations, they were sentenced to a fine or penal
servitude up to one year.41 Stockholm grew explosively as a cityduring this time, and the work of creating a functioning sewage
system was an ongoing project that was referred to on ametaphorical level. As Lennartsson writes: “Through a metaphorical language, the sex trade, and indirectly also the women
within it, were equated with sewers and drain pipes”.42
The women’s movement protested intensely at the timeagainst the treatment of prostitutes and regulation. But, whenregulation ceased in 1918, and Swedish women finally got theright to vote in 1919, the memory of the state’s atrocities against
women was forgotten. It would take almost a hundred years
before feminist researchers began to examine the deeply problematic regulation and its far-reaching consequences for theview of gender difference and sexuality well into the 20th century. Dissertations by the historian Yvonne Svanström Policing
Public Women: The Regulation of Prostitution in Stockholm
1812–1880 (2000) and the historian of ideas Rebecka Lennartsson’s Malaria Urbana. Om byråflickan Anna Johannesdotter och
prostitutionen i Stockholm kring 1900 (2001) paved the way fordeeper knowledge about regulation of prostitutes in 19th century Sweden.43 Lennartsson’s book also contains large quotes
40
Rebecka Lennartsson, Malaria Urbana. Om byråflickan Anna Johannesdotter och
prostitutionen i Stockholm kring 1900 (Eslöv: Symposion, 2002).
41
Lennartsson, Malaria urbana, pp. 57–59.
42
Lennartsson, Malaria urbana, pp. 58–59 (my transl.)
43
Yvonne Svanström, Policing Public Women: The Regulation of Prostitution in Stockholm 1812–1880 (Stockholm: Atlas, 2000). A few years later came a second part: Yvonne
Svanström, Offentliga kvinnor. Prostitution i Sverige 1812–1918 (Stockholm: Ordfront,

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from the authentic diary of the prostitute, Anna
Johannesdotter.44
The prostitute, or the issue of prostitution, was definitely
present in nineteenth century literature, but usually in the periphery of the plot.45 A rare exception is Anne Charlotte Leffler’s
daring, socialist drama Hur man gör godt (“How to do good”
1885) where the prostitute actually is one of the main characters.
In contemporary historical fiction, on the other hand, both theprostitute herself and the question of prostitution is at the very
center of the story. Amy Elias has pointed out that one important feature of the postmodern historical imagination, is that it isa post-traumatic imaginary, that rather confronts than represses
the historical knowledge.46 The Swedish historical fictions testify
to this especially in the stories about prostitution.
Lena Kallenberg’s Apelsinflickan (The Orange-Girl 1997)
and the sequel Stockholmskärlek (Stockholm love 1999) portrays poor women who are driven into prostitution (“Orangegirl” was an epithet for prostitutes). Prostitution is also portrayed from the inside in Henning Mankell’s Minnet av ensmutsig ängel (Memory of a Dirty Angel 2011) in the story of a
Swedish woman who becomes the owner of a brothel in East
Africa around 1900. In Ola Larsmo’s Jag vill inte tjäna (I Do
Not Want to Serve 2012), the regulation of prostitution is2006). Lennartsson also wrote another book on the same theme going into more detailon the brothels and clients in 19th century Stockholm: Rebecka Lennartsson, Den sköna
synderskan. Sekelskiftets Stockholm: betraktelser från undersidan (Stockholm: Norstedt,
2007).
44
Johannesdotter’s diary was edited and published by Klara Johansson in 1907. The
original is lost, but Johansson claimed that she had only made corrections for spelling
errors and such. Johansson, Anna Mathilda Cecilia Johannesdotter, Den undre världen.
En lifshistoria (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1907).
45
Arvid, the protagonist in August Strindberg’s The Red Room (1879) goes to a brothelwith his friends. In Gustaf af Geijerstam’s Erik Grane (1885) as well as Hjalmar
Söderberg’s The Serious Game (1912) and Anne-Charlotte Leffler’s Sanna kvinnor(True women 1883) the men pick up ‘a girl’ in the street. In Leffler’s drama it is William,
Bertha’s brother-in-law, who has brought home a prostitute, thereby causing a crisis in
his marriage. In Elin Wägner’s Pen Woman (1910) the protagonist’s old friend Klara
earns her living by selling sex.
46
Elias, “Metahistorical Romance…” (2005), p. 165.

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8. POSSESSING THE PAST

depicted from a doctor’s perspective through his contact witha young woman who chooses prostitution over life as a maid.
Although medical science as an institution of power, is
problematized in the novel, the protagonist in Larsmo’s novel
becomes a representative of the “good” doctors when heperforms a forbidden abortion and thereby saves the woman’slife. The book can be read not only as a defense of the right toabortion, but a deeper reading of the complex relation between
science and women’s emancipation. The doctor in the novel
has problems with his career and he is assigned the post as a
medical examiner of those prostituting women who come infor the required examination. Through his work the reader
comes in contact with what seems as authentic excerpts fromnineteenth century medical records. Retroactively these quotes
from medical records tell us something about the individual
women’s fates. In this sense, Larsmo’s novel is given a double
function as fiction and facts about the women that were forced
to register at the Inspection Bureau. Syphilis as an effect of
prostitution also appears in Annelie Jordahl’s Augustenbad ensommar (Augustenbad: A Summer 2011). In Fröken Frimans
krig (Miss Friman’s War 2016) season 3, the topic is the regulation of prostitution and the women’s movement’s fightagainst it.
Our present historical fiction has often taken part of feminist
research. Contemporary historical fiction, therefore, functions
as a way of spreading this feminist research of historical knowledge to a wider audience. This is especially true in the case of
Fröken Frimans krig (Miss Friman’s War) a mini-TV series
inspired by the life of educator and women’s rights activist Anna
Whitlock, produced by Swedish television in three episodeinstallments across four seasons 2013–2017. The series aired
during the Christmas holidays every year and therefore attracted
large audiences. To many people this was the first time theyencountered the history of feminism and the conditions of
women in 19th century Sweden when women did not have theright to vote, and husbands were women’s guardians. The series
built on a lot of previous feminist research, both the story of165

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Svenska hem and the women’s movement pictured in season
two, as well as the story of prostitution and regulation in season
three, a fact that was not fully acknowledged.47 When the
producers after the last season made a separate program with thehistory “behind” Miss Friman’s War they were severely
criticized for not crediting all the feminist research they had
built upon.48
In season one, the women’s rights activist Dagmar Friman
and her friends decide to open the cooperative grocery store in
Stockholm Svenska hem (Swedish home). They worked withwomen in all chains of the food production to sell good food atreasonable prices, and where customers received a refund on
their purchases. Friman and her friends face a lot of resistancefrom the established retailers. The cooperative store Svenska
hem did exist and was very successful in Stockholm for ten years
between 1905–1916. In 1915, the number of members was 3,134.
In 1916, Svenska Hem merged with the then newly started
cooperative Konsum in Stockholm and was subsequently shut
down. All stores then changed their names or were closed. The
female managers were replaced by male ones.
In season three of Fröken Frimans krig, the sister of Lottie
Friman’s maid is unwillingly forced into prostitution by amember of parliament. She is just a young, poor, woman fromthe countryside, who gets seduced by a rich man. While leaving
her to sleep in the hotel room, he goes directly to the regulation
bureau and reports her as a prostitute, to make her go to thecheckups that will mean she is “safe” for him. The police thencome and pick her up in the morning. They find money on her
and refuse to listen to her protestations about being a prostitute.
The result is that Miss Britta becomes registered as a “byråflicka”, that is, a prostitute. She then faces three months in prison
if she does not report herself regularly to the bureau as someone
practicing as a prostitute. With the help from Dagmar and Lottie
47
See for example Monika Björk & Eva Kaijser, Svenska hem. En passionerad affär(Stockholm: Stockholmia, 2005).
48
https://www.svd.se/fyra-forslag-efter-froken-friman-debaclet published 170116.

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8. POSSESSING THE PAST

Friman and their friends, and with some unexpected help fromthe real women of the trade, Miss Britta is finally released fromthe regulation bureau.
Through the story of Miss Britta, the series manages to givethe viewers a glimpse of the history of prostitution in Sweden,
regulation and the women’s movement’s fight against regulation, as well as their ambivalence toward prostitutes. Engaging
in the question of prostitution could be a sensitive issue for the
women’s movement who wanted to be taken seriously in theirdemand for the vote. In the series, Dagmar is afraid of letting
Swedish homes address the issue and its regulation while hermore radical friend Kinna disagrees. They argue, and Kinna
shouts at her: “Food controls, there you dare to fight, but when
women are controlled as goods, then it is not as important”.49
Kinna’s words echo the wording in Svanström’s book: “Thereexisted two examples of inspection bureaux in the nineteenth
century: the inspection bureau for public women, and theinspection bureau for meat. Both usages of the word indicating
merchandises, which needed to be inspected and found healthy
before being put on the market.”50
In the following episode one of those critical of regulation is
upset by the way prostituted women are described, she mocks
the ineffective system and wonders why men stick to defending
regulation: “‘Infectious material in the population’ – as if they
were not even human! They know that the system is ineffective,
they know that it is wrong to hold women solely responsible,
morally, and medically. Why hold on?” Dagmar then respondsby connecting the support of regulation to the resistance against
women’s demands for the right to vote: “Because they can. It
benefits them and they can. The right to vote, prostitution, there
is no difference. A woman is less worthy, that’s just the way it is.
Nobody has ever told them anything else.”51 When Dagmar
Freeman makes this connection between the demand for the49

Fröken Frimans krig, Episode 1, min. 34.33–34.39.
Svanström, Policing women 2000, p. 41.
51
Fröken Frimans krig, Episode 2, min. 01.35–01.49.
50

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

vote and the critique of legalized prostitution, she echoes the real
nineteenth-century women’s movement and again the connection to feminist history. Here, the research about the connection
is made explicit. In this way, Fröken Frimans krig serves as botha history of feminism and as critical historiography. Since it
creates new knowledge of women’s conditions in Sweden ahundred years ago for a mainstream audience. It thus serves asa critique of the previous silence about regulation, prostitution
and syphilis.
The regulation is a forgotten trauma in the general historicalconsciousness, in the same way that sterilization was for a longtime. It was legislation whose consequences for gender difference and sexuality still affects us. In this respect, historical fictions about prostitution and regulation become a critique of
conventional history writing, where the usual history teachingin schools, for example, have not related these facts and events.
Contemporary popular historical fictions like Fröken Frimans
krig, therefore, function as a (feminist) history for a wider audience. It often builds on feminist research but reaches far outside
the research community. Since, to a large degree, it is a former
unknown history, historical fictions, like Fröken Frimans krig,
help to shape our historical consciousness.
Fröken Frimans krig’s gender-critical perspective on prostitution, different sexual morals for men and women, men who
exploit women, sexual harassment and feminism’s fight against
all this, establish affective links to the women of the past thatobliterate the difference between then and now. Stories of afeminist engagement with nineteenth-century misogyny in historical fictions like Fröken Frimans krig, establish a temporality
where the past is still active, a haunted history. Nineteenth-century misogyny is a spectre that, to paraphrase Derrida, we would
like to believe belongs to the past, but which returns and haunts
us even today.

168Chapter 9
Fantastic Antigones– The Tragic Legacy of Trans Grief

Fanny Söderbäck

As Trans folks we know there are so many different types ofGrief that go unrecognized within a cis framework.
For trans people know

Grief

There is Grieffor the people who will neveraccept us

There is Grieffor our chosen family that we may
outlive

There is Grieffor those we see in newspapers
who look like us

There is Grieffor the lies told about our bodies

and Griefthat is held within our flesh

For trans people who know Grief, let this be a moment tobreathe out all the grief you are carrying. The Grief you did/do
not deserve. The Grief you are a master at forgetting.
– J Mase III1

1

J Mase III, And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer’s Reflections on Grief, Unemployment& Inappropriate Jokes About Death (Lulu: 2019), pp. 29–30.

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It is a challenge to one’s stamina to follow the traces of this
2,500-year-young Theban princess, who looks younger everyday. She is indefatigable, as all the undead seem to be. […] By
the nineteenth century, she had made numerous transoceanic
voyages to visit places she had never heard of or dreamt ofvisiting, where she shared the drama of the political theft that
had incited her own anger back home. Her geographic range
expanded dramatically in the twentieth century, especiallyafter the great European wars, and the invitations she received
around the world enticed her to new dialogues, taught her
new ideas, offered her new outfits, opened new ways of linking her ancient drama to the modern undead.
– Moira Fradinger, “Nomadic Antigone”2

The Timeliness of an Ancient Drama:
Resurrected Antigones
The ancient Greek figure of Antigone is stubbornly reborn.
Fueling stories and narratives across the globe, she rises from thedead, time and again, and appears in times of oppression andinjustice wherever the need arises for dissidence and resistance.
In their volume The Returns of Antigone, Tina Chanter and Sean
D. Kirkland succinctly ask: “What, then, are we to make of theostensible death of tragedy on the one hand, and Antigone’s
refusal to attend her own funeral on the other?”3 They speak ofher “persisting capacity to illuminate our world,” which has
spurred a “continued appeal today for thinkers, poets, and activists of every stripe.”4 As the title of George Steiner’s now classic
book suggests: there is not one, but many Antigones, and while
she may have first appeared on the ancient Greek stage, her
journey by no means ends there.5
2
Moira Fradinger, “Prologue: Nomadic Antigone,” in Fanny Söderbäck (Ed.), Feminist
Readings of Antigone (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), p. 15.
3
Tina Chanter & Sean D. Kirkland, The Returns of Antigone: Interdisciplinary Essays(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), p. 1.
4
Chanter & Kirkland, The Returns of Antigone, p. 2.
5
George Steiner, Antigones: How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western
Literature, Art, and Thought (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 1996).

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9. FANTASTIC ANTIGONES

From Argentina to Turkey, via Australia, Brazil, Colombia,
Cuba, Egypt, Ghana, Greece, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Mexico,
Nigeria, Palestine, Poland, Puerto Rico, South Africa, Spain, andbeyond – is there any country in the world she has not visited in
one of her many guises? Whenever and wherever civil liberties
are endangered, when the rights or existence of indigenous
peoples are threatened, when revolutions are underway, when
injustices take place – wherever she is needed, Antigone appears.
A shapeshifter of sorts, her name varies depending on where she
emerges on the modern stage: Antígona Vélez, Mariana, Antígona Pérez, Akwele, Odale, Clara Luz, Antígona Furiosa, Sofia,
Melissa, Anita, Tègònni…
Antigone is, in other words, a figure from the past who helps
us grapple with the tragic conditions of our present. Indeed,
despite her coming to us from an ancient Greek context marked
by misogyny and authoritarian power, she has been viewed,
especially by feminist scholars and activists, as someone who caninspire transformation in our own time. Throughout my work
– and most systematically in my book Revolutionary Time – I
have insisted on the need for continuous return to the past to
make possible a more dynamic-embodied present as well as a
future that avoids both repetition and teleological closure.6 But
it is essential of course that our return to the past – including
past figures and texts – not serve to determine the present or the
future, but rather open them up to new and unforeseen imaginaries and possibilities. As Catherine A. Holland cautions in an
essay that examines the historical legacy of Antigone for feminist
thought:
whenever we mine past texts as resources for evaluating contemporary concerns, the danger is that the ‘persistent andcontemporaneous influence’ of those texts can limit our political vision and thus narrow our political horizons, a danger

6

See Fanny Söderbäck, Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva andIrigaray (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019).

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that the past will overfill the present, shrinking rather than
expanding the space of political possibility.7

To be sure, if we are to productively engage Antigone in ourpresent, we need to do so by insisting not only on similarities but
also on the distance between our times and hers. If Antigone
herself has been firmly situated as a European cis woman celebrated by male philosophers and cis feminists alike, her global
journey and her shape-shifting capacities demand that we
reimagine her story in terms that are irreducible to – indeed thatmight fundamentally challenge – her original context.
Antigone appeared in 2018 at the Classical Theater inHarlem, in a performance directed by Carl Cofield, where thewalls of the stage were chalked with graffiti and covered withplacards: “RIP Eteocles,” “Say His Name,” “Black Lives Matter.”
In a cultural context where Black lives are marked as ungrievable, and where Black folks are navigating grief (and the anticipation of grief through an acute awareness of imminent deathand loss) as the ongoing condition of life, the figure of Antigone
offers a cultural imaginary for framing that experience. Consider, for example, the response that the author Claudia Rankine
received when asking a friend what it is like being the mother ofa Black son: “‘The condition of black life is one of mourning’,
she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her
and her son’s reality: At any moment she might lose her reason
for living.”8 It is easy to see how this experience finds a voice in
Antigone, whose demand that she be allowed to publicly mournher dead brother, Polyneices, is rejected by royal decree, andwhose own life is marked by looming death and foreclosed
dreams. As Creon buries Antigone alive on stage, we hear echoes
7

Catherine A. Holland, “After Antigone: Women, the Past, and the Future of Feminist
Political Thought,” in Söderbäck, (Ed.), Feminist Readings of Antigone, p. 27. Holland
cites Sheldon Wolin’s work on theoretical imagination here.
8
Claudia Rankine, “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” The New YorkTimes Magazine, June 22, 2015. Accessed at https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/
magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html on July 7, 2020.

172

9. FANTASTIC ANTIGONES

of the “I can’t breathe” of our own times, the tragic condition ofBlack life, or what Denise Ferreira da Silva has described as akind of temporal suspension that haunts our political present:“That moment […] between the release of the trigger and the fallof another black body, of another brown body, and another.”9And yet, of course there is also a distance here, an immense
distance, between the Black mothers of our own times whose
lives are conditioned by perpetual mourning, and the work ofgrief that marked the life of Antigone, a Theban princess, forwhom slavery was a present reality relegated to the subtext of theplay, or, as Tina Chanter has argued, for whom the very insistence on burying her brother is symptomatic of the need to makea distinction between free cultured individuals and barbarian
non-Athenian slaves. Consequently, Chanter notes, “the Oedipal model, as inflected through Freud and Lacan, cannot betaken up and applied to colonial issues, as if it constituted anadequate hermeneutical tool that operates independently of
those very issues its dominance has helped to eclipse.”10
In an article from The Atlantic, Antigone’s story was used asa foil to illustrate the practice of separating children from theirparents at the U.S.–Mexico border: “In the family separation
described by Sophocles, the brother is not just exiled but dead;the king, Creon, has left his body to rot outside the city walls
without a burial,” Quinta Jurecic notes, and she goes on tosuggest that when the Trump administration “justifies pulling
migrant parents away from their children at the U.S. border, it
is speaking Creon’s language.”11 Here, Antigone is called in as a
figure whose story speaks volumes to the cruelty of a legal systemthat – in the name of security and state power – upholds contingent distinctions between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ (even when this9

Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: The Universityof Minnesota Press, 2007), p. xi.
10
Tina Chanter, Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2011), p. x.
11
Quinta Jurecic, “A Choice Between Cruelty and Mercy: A 2,500-year-old play illustrates the emptiness of the administration’s arguments about enforcing the law,” The
Atlantic, June 18, 2018. Accessed at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/06/border-policies-antigone/563126/ on July 7, 2020.

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entails tearing families apart) so as to set an example and deter
others from trying to cross the borders of the United States. If
Creon, by refusing Polyneices’ proper burial and by decreeingthat he be left to rot outside the city walls, sought to reaffirm “thedistinction between whom he wants in his city and whom hedoesn’t, defining the boundaries of his community,” the Trumpadministration repeated this violent gesture in an attempt tomore narrowly restrict who belongs here, and who belongs
together. Reading Antigone today, Jurecic suggests, might thus
serve as “a reminder both of the visceral wrongness of what ishappening at the border and of the emptiness of the administration’s arguments about law enforcement.”12
And yet, while Antigone might have served as the constitutive outside of a political order bound to ultimately exclude her,she inevitably also inhabits a vantage point of privilege – she is,after all, King Creon’s niece, and he tries his best to makeexceptions for her, even as he runs into her stubborn refusal tobe saved. Her agency, as much as it is used in the spirit ofresistance to the law, is embodied by someone whose kinshipties situate her at the very center of political power (she is, as Sina
Kramer puts it, excluded within).13 Her crime is that she ventures
outside of the city to bury her brother – not that she desperately
tries to make it into a city that refuses her entry.
It nevertheless remains the case that the actions of Antigone,
who stubbornly and courageously opposed state law and patriarchal power, come to life in circulating images of contemporary
protests and stand-offs between daring women and the malepowers that be: Whether in the now famous image of Tess
Asplund, who stood up to uniformed demonstrators in a Nazi
demonstration in Borlänge, Sweden, in May 2015; or that of
Ieshia Evans, protesting the death of Alton Sterling near theheadquarters of the Police Department in Baton Rouge, in July
12

Quinta Jurecic, “A Choice Between Cruelty and Mercy.”
For a rich analysis of Antigone’s situatedness as illustrative of the kind of exclusionthat occurs within a political body, according to the logic of constitutive exclusion, seeSina Kramer, Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of Radical Political Actors (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2017), especially pp. 133–144.
13

174

9. FANTASTIC ANTIGONES

2016 (later detained by law enforcement); or, finally, that of an
unnamed young demonstrator facing down a riot policeman
during a pro-democracy protest in Santiago, Chile, in September 2016. Notably, these are all women of color standing up not
only to patriarchy but to a racist state apparatus and a police
force that has rendered Black and Brown lives criminal bydecree.
It is to Chile that I want to turn in this essay, and more
specifically, to Sebastián Lelio’s 2017 film A Fantastic Woman(Una mujer fantástica), which won an Academy Award for Best
Foreign Language Film in 2018. The film tells the story of a transwoman, Marina, grappling with a double loss: that of her loverand that of her right to grieve. It was well received and muchcelebrated within the queer community for offering a richaccount of trans experience, and for casting a trans actress,
Daniela Vega, in the role as Marina. In what follows, I want tosuggest that we read Marina as echoing the fate of Antigone, as
their lives and stories intersect in myriad ways, the most obviousof which is their shared experience of being refused to publicly
mourn and partake in the burial of their loved ones. I will offera reading of the film through the lens of Antigone, as I think
about the tragic elements of our own culture as well as the specific ways in which trans experience might activate but also complicate themes from the original Sophoclean drama. Throughthe figure of Marina, I hope to offer a queer imaginary that both
returns us to and moves us beyond the one Antigone herself
provided.

A Fantastic Woman, A Fantastic Antigone:
On Trans Grief
When Marina’s partner Orlando suddenly dies from an aneurism, she finds herself rejected by his family and banned from his
funeral. The two have just celebrated her birthday, dining anddancing, and their relationship is presented as one of deep andmutual love. When Orlando wakes up not feeling well, Marina
rushes him to the hospital, where he dies within hours, and that175

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

event sets into motion a series of unpleasant encounters with
doctors, police officers, Orlando’s ex-wife and adult son, andmore broadly a social fabric that, unlike Orlando, fails to see
Marina for what she is – a truly fantastic woman.
If Antigone was fighting state power embodied in a patriarchal tyrant (Creon), Marina is instead faced with a cascade of
micro aggressions and everyday individual and institutional
prejudice that serve to question her very existence. The doctor
in the hospital insists on using male pronouns, and casts suspicion on Marina because of the bruises and wounds found on
Orlando’s dead body (resulting from him falling down the stairs
as they rushed to the hospital). A police officer called into thehospital demands that she show her ID and refuses to record herchosen name in the report. Another police officer shows up at
the restaurant where she works and wants to know if Orlando
was paying her for sex. The officer proceeds to require that she
come to the police station the following day, without warning
her in advance that the purpose of that visit is an intrusive
medical examination, where Marina is forced to undress to be
photographed (a scene in which the director, thankfully, resists
the temptation to make us into complicit voyeurists, by ensuringthat the camera remains on her face when she strips naked). Andof course, there is the ongoing abuse directed at her from
Orlando’s family. His son, Bruno, repeatedly trespasses into herhome, steals her dog, compares her to an animal, tells her hedoes not know what she is (while stubbornly failing to get her
name right), and ultimately gangs up with two friends to force
Marina into their car, taping her face tight, and leaving her in analley, trembling, as she catches a glimpse of herself in a windowthat reflects the disfigured monster that they have been seeing all
along.14 And then there is Sonia, the ex-wife, whose ice-cold
penetrating gaze and sharp tongue are aimed at undoing hervery existence.
Taken together, these experiences pile up, and the infamousglass ceiling that has prevented women from taking to the sky is
14

Una Mujer Fantástica, directed by Sebastián Lelio (2017), 1.07.15–1.10.20.

176

9. FANTASTIC ANTIGONES

here metaphorized through the mighty wind that Marina struggles to tackle as she navigates her way through narrow-mindedbigotry and never-ending discrimination.15 She is simultaneously pathologized and criminalized: her very existence is on
trial. And, as Judith Butler remarks about Antigone in the final
chapter of Antigone’s Claim: “She is one for whom open grieving
is itself a crime.”16 To be sure, trans folk have a particularlycomplex relationship with grief, not only because of this societal
refusal to acknowledge their relations as legitimate ones, but also
because of the manifold ways in which the very process oftransitioning tends to be overshadowed by cis-grief (whether itbe that of parents ‘losing’ the child they once had, or partners
grieving the ‘loss’ of the lover they first met).17 And while
important work in trans studies has been undertaken to attend
to and complicate our collective response to the loss of translives – especially trans of color lives that have been lost to acts ofviolence – less has been said about what it means to take up thework of grief as a trans person.18
15

Lelio, Una Mujer Fantástica, 1.00.28–1.01.15.
Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 79.
17
Sly Sarkisova explains: “Our social spheres online and in real time are deluged withaccounts and experiences of parental grief at a transgender child coming out, at apartner’s ‘loss’ of their loved one in the gender they preferred… with accounts of
strangers’ unsavoury reactions and unsolicited observations that ‘so-and-so used to be
so…pretty/handsome before…it’s such a shame’” (Sly Sarkisova, “On Transgender
Grief,” November 7, 2014, accessed at https://www.slysarkisovacounselling.com/singlepost/2014/11/07/On-Transgender-Grief on July 14, 2020). For an example of a scholarly study of the grief experienced by parents of trans children whose transition isviewed as loss, see Ines Testoni & Manuela Anna Pinducciu, “Grieving those Who Still
Live: Loss Experienced by Parents of Transgender Children,” Gender Studies, Vol. 18,
No. 1 (2019), pp. 142–162.
18
For important discussions of our response to and understanding of the loss of translives, with particular emphasis on violence against trans women of color, see, for example, Viviane Namaste, “Undoing Theory: The ‘Transgender Question’ and the Epistemic Violence of Anglo-American Feminist Theory,” in McCann, Carole R. & Kim,
Seung-Kyung (Eds.), Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (New York:
Routledge: 2017), pp. 608–621; C. Riley Snorton & Jin Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color
Afterlife,” in Stryker, Susan & Aizura, Aren Z. (Eds.), The Transgender Studies Reader 216

177

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHYThis underscores the need to establish trans spaces formourning, for engaging the past and the losses one has experienced on one’s own terms. The trans social worker Sly Sarkisova
speaks to this need:
We need our own space to mourn our losses. We need tocreate that space. A space unknown to people with cis privilege. A space individual to our needs and experiences, andcollectively respectful of the common experiences of transphobic erasure. […] For transgender wholeness and realness,maybe we owe it to ourselves to create rituals that honour ourgrief and uniqueness, that restore and resist and fortify against
any other narrative than our own.19

Basil Soper echoes these sentiments in a piece on his own grief
as a trans person: “Today, I wish for my entire beautiful, resilienttrans family throughout the country – and around the world –to be open to the grief we are feeling. Our mourning may wellhelp illuminate the path home, to a place that is safe and peacefuland our own amidst the exhausting work of putting our lives on
the line to enact change.”20 The most explicit attempt to offer a(New York and London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 66–76; and Sarah Lamble, “Retelling
Racialized Violence, Remaking White Innocence: The Politics of Interlocking Oppressions in Transgender Day of Remembrance,” Sexuality Research & Social Policy, Vol. 5,
No. 1 (2008), pp. 24–42. For important analysis of collective loss and mourning within
the trans community, see Che Gossett, “Silhouettes of Defiance: Memorializing Historical Sites of Queer and Transgender Resistance in an Age of Neoliberal Inclusivity,”in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, pp. 580–590. Gossett, who draws from Jacques
Derrida’s work on mourning and the archive for examining our memorialization of
events such as the Stonewall Riots in New York City in 1969 and the Compton’s
Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco in 1966, asks: “What is the relationship between thememorialization of sites of queer and trans resistance and the politics of loss andmourning?” (588). Gossett’s worry is that much historiography and memory work has
served to erase the trauma and violence that queer and trans folk experience in thepresent, by relegating it to the past. They appeal to the concept of “impossible mourning” (588) to describe the condition under which we might grieve trans life in the wakeof media’s and the state’s perpetuation of transphobic deaths.
19
Sarkisova, “On Transgender Grief.”
20
Basil Soper, “I Am Trans, and Today My Grief Is Visible,” The Advocate, March 31,
2016. Accessed at https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2016/3/31/i-am-trans-and-178

9. FANTASTIC ANTIGONES

space for collective grief is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, which is celebrated every year on November 20 tomemorialize all those who have lost their lives to transphobic
violence. But A Fantastic Woman offers a welcome alternative
imaginary that frames grief in trans terms, while exposing the
tragic legacy of trans grief – the societal denial of one’s right tomourn as a trans person.
Butler’s interest in the figure of Antigone stems in part fromtheir own reactions to a cultural moment in which the public
ungrievability of certain losses – queer losses – became acutely
tangible, namely the AIDS epidemic and the kinship crisis that
arose in its wake. Butler asks: “which social arrangements can berecognized as legitimate love, and which human losses can be
explicitly grieved as real and consequential losses?”21 Who getsto grieve and bury whom, and under what conditions? What oflife-long partners and lovers who in the eyes of society and theblood kin of those who have died – kin who may have neverrecognized or approved of their bonds of love and desire in thefirst place – can have no legitimate or even intelligible claim tosorrow?
For Butler, Antigone embodies pressing contemporary concerns about loss and mourning – ones that reverberate throughmuch of their later work: What lives matter? What lives aregrievable? What lives count as properly human? As Marina
herself notes, after she has attempted to enter the church during
Orlando’s wake only to be thrown out by his family: “Saying
goodbye to a loved one when he dies is a basic human right, isn’tit?”22 And what do the boundaries we draw when responding tothese questions tell us about normativity and the frames forintelligibility? Antigone’s – and Marina’s – “trespass on thenorms of kinship and gender” ultimately “exposes the precarious character of those norms, their sudden and disturbing
transferability, and their capacity to be reiterated in contexts andtoday-my-grief-visible on July 16, 2020.
21
Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 24.
22
Lelio, Una Mujer Fantástica, 1.06.40–1.06.44.

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in ways that are not fully to be anticipated.”23 As Chanter andKirkland put it, Antigone is “an aberrant, itinerant, queer,
queered, and queering figure.”24 And this marks both our heroines as threats to the social order. They represent “not kinship in
its ideal form but its deformation and displacement,” which inturn puts “the reigning regimes of representation into crisis” andforces upon us questions that for some might be ground shaking: “What new schemas of intelligibility make our loves legitimate and recognizable, our losses true losses?”25
In our present, these questions were again activated in thecontext of those, mostly queer and trans people of color, wholost their loved ones in the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in
Orlando, Florida. Here, the relation between desire and grief –and the capacity of each to both connect us and to displace us –came to the forefront. As Butler, again, reminds us, this time in
Precarious Life: “We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not,we’re missing something. This seems so clearly the case withgrief, but it can be so only because it was already the case withdesire.”26 What this means is that “we are not only constituted byour relations but also dispossessed by them.”27 And for queer andtrans folk – especially queer and trans folk of color – dispossession is an acutely felt lived reality. In queer communities, thenightclub comes to represent a place where dispossession can be
felt in the more positive way that Butler appeals to in their work.
As Che Gossett remarks in a 2016 blog post about the Orlando
shooting: “Queer and/or trans nightlife has always been about
survival and creating temporary autonomous and temporary
fabulous zones that are as much affective – a structure of queer
and trans feeling – as material in its electric choreography ofbodies.”28
23

Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 24.
Chanter & Kirkland, The Returns of Antigone, p. 6.
25
Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 24.
26
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York:
Verso Books, 2006), p. 23.
27
Butler, Precarious Life, p. 24.
28
Che Gossett, “Pulse, Beat, Rhythm, Cry: Orlando and the Queer and Trans Necro24

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9. FANTASTIC ANTIGONES

And so, Marina too seeks out the pulsating rhythms on thedance floor, in the most explicitly campy scene of the film. Here,desire and grief overlap, in the shared figure of the pulsating
body, and in the figural sharing of pulsating bodies. Amidst
glitter, eyelashes, and sweat, there is the fist in the air, the Antigonean defiance, here staged not in the blazing light outside thecity walls, but under the strobe lights of a queer nightclub. And
on the dance floor Marina reunites with her Orlando, whoseghost-like appearance reminds us that he, like Polyneices, is undead – not quite living but nevertheless not yet at peace underground. His ghost ultimately helps Marina find his soon-to-becremated body, allowing her, at last, to bid her final farewell.

The Tragic Legacy of Sexual Difference:
Woman Outsider
It is worth noting that whatever group or interest Antigone isbrought in to defend – religious, cultural, or racial minorities;
guerilla fighters; spiritual leaders; war-torn people; the economically oppressed – it is always as a woman that she appears
on stage. Even, as in some contemporary examples (and ofcourse already on the ancient Greek stage), where the cast is all
male. In Athol Fugar’s The Island, set in an unnamed prison
based on the one in which Nelson Mandela was held on Robben
Island, John and Winston are cellmates who spend their days
doing back-breaking labor, and their nights rehearsing Sophocles’ Antigone to present to their fellow inmates. For Winston,
who is cast to play Antigone, the prospect of having to wear
female attire (wig and breasts) provokes intense anxiety about
his sexual identity, and of having his fellow inmates make him
into a laughingstock. “Despite his vociferous protests,” Chanternotes, he “ends up playing the role of Antigone after all,” and to
his relief nobody laughs.29 While homophobia is rampant in thepolitics of Loss and Mourning,” Verso Blog (July 5, 2016), Accessed at https://www.
versobooks.com/blogs/2747-pulse-beat-rhythm-cry-orlando-and-the-queer-andtrans-necropolitics-of-loss-and-mourning on July 7, 2020.
29
Chanter, Whose Antigone?, p. 92.

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prison, Winston and John are ultimately willing to put theirheteronormative attachments aside, since they can relate so
deeply to Antigone’s quest for justice. They, like she, are “being
punished for what they know to be right,” and so they need
Antigone to tell their own story.30
Sexual difference stood at the center of the original Sophoclean drama, and sexual difference continues to mark Antigone’s story as she is stubbornly resurrected. It is as a womanthat Antigone has a moral duty to bury her kin, and yet it is also
as a woman that she is barred from a political landscape that
seems unable to make sense of her agency on the public scene.
Ismene, her sister, tries to prevent her from breaking Creon’s
law precisely by appealing to their sexual identity: “You ought torealize we are only women / not meant in nature to fight against
men.”31 And Creon reveals his own misogynistic anxieties when
it dawns on him that it is a woman who has disobeyed his decree.
Like Winston, he fears emasculation, and the subsequent risk ofbeing made into a laughingstock. Antigone’s transgression, hercourageous act, and the heroic death it anticipates, puts his
masculinity into question: “We cannot give victory to a woman,”Creon exclaims, and “we must not let people say that a woman
beat us.”32
As Cecilia Sjöholm has argued, Antigone, both through her
deed and through her death, challenges our most basic presuppositions about masculinity and femininity. She observes themutuality of this reversal: “It has often been pointed out that
Antigone does not act like a woman. It has less often been
observed that Creon does not act like a man.”33 We are remindedthat binary gender roles are co-dependent – masculinity needs
femininity to uphold its own dominant status of active man30

Chanter, Whose Antigone?, p. 93.
Sophocles, Antigone, in The Complete Greek Tragedies: Sophocles I, transl. David
Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), ll.
61–62.
32
Sophocles, Antigone, ll. 678 and 680.
33
Cecilia Sjöholm, The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 44.
31

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9. FANTASTIC ANTIGONES

hood, and femininity needs masculinity to maintain any of its
current meaning of passive submission. In an effort to protect
and maintain his masculine identity, Creon thus insists on
viewing and treating Antigone as a woman, and she is repeatedly
reminded that she must respect the limitations imposed on her
due to her sex – despite the fact that she herself never evinces it.
Elsewhere, I have suggested that the many scattered comments about sexual difference in the text do not, as has commonly been suggested, simply point to the well-known tension
between an old (matriarchal) society and a new (patriarchal)
one.34 They point, rather, to something paradoxical about thepolitical order that is being inaugurated within the text, namely
Greek democracy. At its very foundation is a feminine subject
who is its condition of possibility, and yet, who ultimately must
be excluded in order for it to exist at all. In acting, as one who
has no right to act, Antigone, in Butler’s words, “speaks within
the language of entitlement from which she is excluded.”35 She
is, indeed, an “everlasting irony” or an “internal enemy,” asHegel famously suggested.36 She figures as someone who cannot
be contained within the boundaries of the polis. Butler draws
attention to “the way in which the boundaries of the public andthe political spheres were secured through the production of aconstitutive outside.”37 Woman – indeed Antigone – is this outside. But as a constitutive outside she simultaneously finds herself at the very heart of what remains inside. The polis would notexist without her. And yet the polis can only exist without her.
For Antigone, the question is not – as for one of our modern
tragic heroes – whether she should be or not be. What is at stake,for her, is the possibility of belonging or not belonging – to be
one of them or not be one of them. And insofar as she does notbelong, insofar as she is not one of them, she cannot be at all.
34

Fanny Söderbäck, “Impossible Mourning: Sophocles Reversed,” in Feminist Readingsof Antigone, pp. 65–82.
35
Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 82.
36
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977), p. 288, §475.
37
Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 82. See also Kramer, Excluded Within.

183

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHYThe Tragic Legacy of Trans Exclusion:
On Being Recognized as a Woman
Where then does this leave us in terms of Marina? As the title ofthe film suggests, she is not just a woman, she is a fantastic
woman. There is something extraordinary about her persistence, her strength, her grace, and, in the final scene, her voice.
She is a force of nature who defies forces of nature, such as in thescene when she leans into the mighty wind. And yet, herpredicament is that others fail to recognize her as, precisely, awoman. Aretha Franklin’s words on the soundtrack notwithstanding (“You make me feel like a natural woman”), Orlando’s
family fundamentally fails to recognize her as the woman – thefantastic woman – that she is, and this is the seemingly irreconcilable conflict (the tragic tension) that organizes the film.
It is important to note that the decree that Marina stay awayfrom Orlando’s wake and funeral – that she be excluded fromthe rites of burial like Antigone before her had been banned
from burying her brother – is pronounced not by a male tyrant,
but by Orlando’s ex-wife, Sonia, a cis woman who refuses torecognize Marina as a fellow woman. Meeting in a parking garage, to which Marina has been summoned to return Orlando’s
car, the two women face each other for the first time. In the only
scene in the film where Marina is subjected to deadnaming,
Sonia forcefully denies her the right to grieve in public. In fact,
she denies her the right to be at all. “When I look at you, I don’tknow what I’m seeing. A chimera, that’s what I see,” she notes
with disdain in her voice.38
We hear echoes here of generations of trans exclusionary
feminists who – oftentimes under the pretext of protecting
women only spaces – have accused trans women of deception.
Janice G. Raymond, whose infamous book The Transsexual
Empire is paradigmatic (although by no means unique) in thisregard, charged trans women with engaging in the constant actof raping women’s bodies, “by reducing the female form to an
38

Lelio, Una Mujer Fantástica, 0.47.45–0.47.59.

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9. FANTASTIC ANTIGONES

artifact, appropriating the body for themselves” since, she insisted, rape can “be accomplished by deception.”39 The accusation –perhaps most violently articulated by Raymond but still common within and beyond feminist discourse on trans women –tends to be that they have benefited from male privilege prior totheir transition, and therefore have no right to claim the category ‘woman’ (since one’s capacity to embody this categoryauthentically, so the argument goes, results from one’s particular
position within structures of privilege and oppression).40 Thisview has been echoed in our own present by women ranging
from J. K. Rowling to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. When, in aninterview, the latter was asked if trans women are women, sheinsisted on the fact that trans women are trans women, offering
an explanation:
I think if you’ve lived in the world as a man with the privileges
the world accords to men and then sort of change, switch,
gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate
your experience with the experience of a woman who has
lived from the beginning in the world as a woman, and who
has not been accorded those privileges that men are.41

39
Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1979), p. 104. In “The Empire Strikes Back” (oftentimes described as thefounding text of trans theory), Sandy Stone – who was the explicit target of Raymond’s
attack – rebukes these transphobic claims and describes Raymond’s project as premised
upon the assumption that “transsexuals are constructs of an evil phallocratic empire andwere designed to invade women’s spaces and appropriate women’s power.” See Sandy
Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in Paula Treichler,
Cartwright, Lisa; & Penley, Constance (Eds.), The Invisible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender and Science (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 288.
40
Talia Mae Bettcher labels this position “the radical feminist argument” in her historical overview of transgender and intersex theory and politics. See Talia Mae Bettcher,“Intersexuality, Transgender, and Transsexuality,” in Disch, Lisa & Hawkesworth, Mary
(Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (New York: Oxford University Press,
2016), p. 411.
41
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in an interview on Britain’s Channel 4 News, March 4,
2017. Accessed at https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/3/15/14910900/chimamandangozi-adichie-transgender-women-comments-apology on July 9, 2020.

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The view presented here is flawed not only because it is transexclusionary, but also because it assumes that feminist solidarity
is grounded in a monolithically shared experience of womanhood, and therefore fails to account for the complex manner inwhich each individual woman’s experience of oppression must
be understood at the intersection between race, class, geographic
location, gender presentation, sexuality, and so on. And whiletrans feminists like Emi Koyama may be right in suggesting thatmale privilege in this context should not be entirely ignored –trans experience, she argues, must be framed in terms of “adynamic interaction between male privilege and the disadvantage of being trans” – it seems to me obvious, if we take Marina
as an example, that the disadvantages of her being trans far
outweighs any potential privileges she might have enjoyed byvirtue of her sex assigned at birth.42 Trans actress Laverne Cox
articulates the crux of the matter succinctly: “The irony of mylife is that prior to transition I was called a girl and after I am
often called a man.”43
Talia Mae Bettcher has offered the perhaps most systematic
analysis of the lived reality – and inherent violence – that resultsfrom this view of trans folks as engaging in an act of pretense.
She describes trans people as being forced to navigate a double
bind between make-believe (through masquerading) and deception (through passing), where the two options available only
lead to further marginalization and increased vulnerability toviolence. Either “disclose ‘who one is’ and come out as a pretender or masquerader, or refuse to disclose (be a deceiver) and42

Emi Koyama, “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” in McCann, Carole R. & Kim, SeungKyung (Eds.), Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (New York:
Routledge: 2017), p. 152. Julia Serano introduced the term trans-misogyny to describe
forms of discrimination aimed specifically at trans women. See Julia Serano, Whipping
Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Emeryville,
CA: Seal Press, 2007), p. 13. She also speaks of the devaluation of feminine males as“effemimania” (129, 287).
43
Laverne Cox responding to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Twitter, March 12, 2017.
Accessed at https://twitter.com/lavernecox/status/840714224183652354?lang=en on
July 10, 2020.

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9. FANTASTIC ANTIGONES

run the risk of forced disclosure, the effect of which is exposure
as a liar.”44 She is careful to point out that this “deceiver/pretender bind is part of a larger system of oppression” – one thatinvolves sexual violence against women as well as racial oppression.45
The charge of deception, articulated by Raymond and others,
reverberates through Sonia’s observations when she describes
Marina as a chimera, and repeats Bruno’s dehumanizing statement: “When I look at you, I don’t know what I’m seeing.” Bothof them consciously use “what” rather than “who” to nameMarina, robbing her of her uniqueness and reducing her to a
non-human object, a chimera, a monstrous illusion.46 She is at
one and the same time too much of a woman and not enough ofa woman, and therefore fails to be recognized as, exactly, awoman. In Koyama’s formulation, “every time a group of women previously silenced begins to speak out,” other women “arechallenged to rethink their idea of who they represent and what
they stand for.”47 We are reminded of Sojourner Truth’s pressing
question, articulated already in 1851 from the vantage point of aBlack woman: “Ain’t I a Woman?”48
If women have always been defined by the male gaze – and as
Luce Irigaray has forcefully argued, woman as we know it isnothing but an inferior mirror image of man, not a subject inher own right – then it seems evident that this predicament is
44

Talia Mae Bettcher, “Evil-Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence
and the Politics of Illusion,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Vol. 22, No. 3(2007), p. 50.
45
Bettcher, “Evil-Deceivers and Make-Believers,” p. 56.
46
The distinction I am making here between the ‘what’ and the ‘who’ originates in
Hannah Arendt’s discussion of uniqueness in The Human Condition (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 179. It is developed at length in the work of
Adriana Cavarero, for whom concrete singularity is embodied in the ‘who’ while
abstract universality is marked by whatness. See, for example, Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, transl. Paul A. Kottman (London and New
York: Routledge, 2000), p. 9.
47
Koyama, “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” p. 150.
48
Sojourner Truth in a speech delivered at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio,on May 29, 1851. A transcript of the speech was published in the Anti-Slavery Bugle on
June 21, 1851.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

even more acute for trans women, like Marina, whose being in
the world is constantly subjected to scrutiny and examination,from cis women and men who frame them as always alreadyoutside the very category of the human. This notion is reflected,
literally, through the use of mirrors in the film. Time and again,
Marina finds herself framed by a mirror, forced to look at herself
through the eyes of those around her. We see this as she walks
down the street and encounters two men moving a large mirror.
As they pass by Marina her flickering image appears in theframe, only to disappear as they continue on their way, leaving
nothing but the wall behind the mirror for us to see.
Remember also the monstrous image of Marina’s taped facereflected in a window, bearing witness to the extreme forms ofviolence that trans folk – and especially trans women of color –are subjected to on a regular basis. Or the fear in her eyes as her
body parts are reflected in the lens of a camera meant to document her anatomy, reducing it to a genital schema that canregister but two options: ‘naturally’ male or ‘naturally’ female.
And we know, of course, that the approval (or not) of that medical penetrating gaze – and the gatekeeping that ensues – is far
from inconsequential for trans folk who are seeking to transition, whether this entails gender affirming surgeries, a namechange, access to public bathrooms, or correct use of pronouns.
Dean Spade describes this predicament powerfully: “Eventhough I don’t believe in real, it matters if other people see me as
real. If not, I’m a mutilator, an imitator, and worst of all, I can’t
access surgery.”49
In a scene toward the very end of the film, however, we arepresented with a different kind of image, one where, perhaps forthe first time, we see Marina, reflected through a mirror,
through her own eyes. Lying naked on her bed, a round mirror
placed between her legs, Marina lingers on her own reflection.
Here the mirror covers over the very body parts that were
subject to scrutiny in the medical exam. They no longer matter.
49

Dean Spade, “Resisting Medicine, Re/modeling Gender,” Berkeley Women’s Law
Journal 15 (2003), p. 20.

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9. FANTASTIC ANTIGONES

What we see is a woman looking back at us, returning the gaze,and a nudity that signals pleasure and ease rather than objectification and medicalization. The image represents the beginningof another resurrection: Marina refuses to let the gaze of others
define her. And she refuses to let others mandate her mourning
process.
As we saw earlier, on the dance floor, fist in air, Marina
gathers the strength she needs to make her journey to the graveyard, her final journey with and for Orlando before she canmove on with her life. Here she comes across his family again,as they are driving home from the cemetery, and her rage ischanneled in a forceful stroke of exalted defiance. Marina climbs
up on the roof of their car, and proceeds to jump up and down
while demanding that Bruno return Diablo – the dog she had
shared with Orlando – to her. Hunching inside the car, both
Bruno and Sonia begin to crumble, and again we see a glimpseof the final scene in Antigone, where Creon stands alone on thebattlefield, hunched under the weight of his own hubris, grappling with the losses he has suffered as a result of his failure torecognize Antigone’s right to grieve. Except here, in the film, nosuch moral maturation takes place. While Orlando’s family
members drive off in fear, the experience has not changed them
one bit. They will go on with their prejudiced lives. They will
never be able to see Marina as someone worthy of their respect,or as someone Orlando could have actually loved. They will
never see her as a woman, as someone whose grief matters. For
them, Orlando and Marina’s love will always be a perversion, on
par with the incestual legacy of Antigone.
But if the Creons of the film fail to accomplish moral emancipation, its Antigone enters upon a more hopeful path than her
ancient predecessor. Marina may not be recognized by Orlando’s family, but she is not buried alive. She goes on living, in allof her fantasticness. And we are again reminded that, while
Antigone might offer a helpful framework for broaching ourown political present, she is also at a distance from us, and evenmore so at a distance from Marina, who is no Theban-European
princess but a working-class trans woman in contemporary189

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Chile. An Antigone-figure of sorts, Marina is also much morethan that, and her being trans as well as concretely situatedwithin a Latin-American context renders her irreducible to thelegacy of Antigone. The latter, after all, offers only a limited
political imaginary, one that can take us only so far as we travel
beyond Europe and beyond cis-feminist assumptions about
privilege, grief, and what it means to be a “woman.” Marina
reminds us of the pressing need for queer and trans imaginaries
that not only confirm but also resist the Sophoclean politicalframework, pointing toward a political future where Antigone
need not be buried alive but can go on living, despite her transgression.
And if Antigone looks on in silence as her story is reborn,time and again, across the globe, Marina leaves us singing, hervoice lifting towards the ceiling, a voice she has worked hard tocultivate in a culture that does all it can to keep her silent. A voicethat expresses her singular uniqueness, as a woman, but always
also as so much more than just a woman.50 Creon might say, as
he did to Antigone in a famous line from the play: “There is toomuch of you!”51 For Creon, Antigone will always be too muchwoman – a figure of excess. For Sonia, Marina is not woman
enough. Perhaps the emphasis on “woman,” in both cases, isultimately misleading. Perhaps what is at stake, in the end, isMarina’s capacity to vocalize her singular embodied uniqueness.
One inevitably shaped by the mourning process we have witnessed (in all of its complexity and impossibility), but one that is
ultimately also irreducible to that process, always in excess of it.
Marina, center stage, singing. A voice. A life. A fantastic woman.

50

Cavarero has offered the most systematic examination of the human voice as a vehicle
for uniqueness. See Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophyof Vocal Expression, transl. Paul A. Kottman (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,
2005).
51
Sophokles, Antigone, l. 573.

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Chapter 10
Haunting Histories– Regarding the Political Unconscious in the Television
Series Stranger Things and the Film Ghostbusters

Erik Poulsen

History is the subject of a construction whose site consists notof homogeneous, empty time, but of time filled by the presence of the now.
Walter Benjamin,
Theses on the Philosophy of History, XIV1

Anyone who has watched the second season of Stranger Things
can probably recall the scene where Mike, Lucas, Will andDustin come dressed up to school. The series takes place in the
1980s in a small American town where “nothing ever happens”,
and the second season – released on Netflix in the fall of 2017 –begins in the middle of the Halloween festivities. To celebrate
the approaching holiday, the four boys have decided to dress up
for school, wearing the same beige costumes and accompanying
technical equipment as the ghost hunters of their favorite movie,
the blockbuster film Ghostbusters.
However, just as the nerdy gang are about to enter the schoolbuilding, Mike and Lucas suddenly begin to quarrel. It turns outthat both boys have dressed up as the main character in Ghostbusters, namely the scientist Dr Venkman. Mike seems used togetting his way and cannot accept that someone has stolen his
part. He insists that Lucas should be acting as another ghost
hunter from the same film: Winston. However, Lucas is not convinced: “No one wants to be Winston, man.” – “What’s wrong
with Winston?” Mike retorts, whereupon Lucas answers:
1

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Illuminations, trans. Harry
Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 252–253.

191

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY“What’s wrong with Winston? He joined the team super late,he’s not funny, he’s not even a scientist!” But Mike will not givein that easily, and the quarrel eventually ends with the following
exchange of replies:
Lucas says: “If he [Winston] is cool, then you be Winston.”Mike: “I can’t!”
Lucas: “Why not?”Mike (starts to stammer): “Be… because…”
Lucas (mockingly imitates his stammering): “Be-be-because
you are not black?”
Mike: “I didn’t say that!”
Lucas: “You thought it.”2

However interesting this little intermezzo might be since both
Lucas and the ghost hunter Winston happen to be black characters in screenplays where basically every other character is white,
it adds little to the plot development. It is obvious that the scene
is a metacommentary on how people of color are represented onfilm, but it does not lead to anything. The children do not
manage to settle the issue before the bell and the shifting into thenext scene – which is perfectly in order in this case. After all, it
would be an exaggeration to call Stranger Things a politicalseries. The plot does not exactly revolve around expressions ofracist discrimination and prejudices in Western culture. Nor are
the protagonists struggling with any economic inequality orsocial injustice, at least not explicitly. Instead, just as one might
expect from an American science fiction horror series, theprotagonists are busy struggling against supernatural evil creatures from another dimension who want to take over the humanworld.
However, in this essay I will argue that Stranger Things canbe interpreted politically and that it is especially fruitful to2

See film clip in Stranger Things, Season 2, Episode 2, 10:20–12:25.

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10. HAUNTING HISTORIES

analyze it from a feminist point of view. Contrary to what theplot seems to suggest, I am suggesting that Stranger Things andother aesthetic artifacts offered by online streaming services
such as Netflix and HBO, reveal something interesting about theconditions for contemporary film production. In the following
text, I will take the issue addressed by Lucas seriously and consider how class, race, gender, and sexuality are represented. I willshow that seemingly redundant scenes like the one just mentioned, have a social and political meaning that exceeds the
explicit message of the series (that is: entertainment).
Nevertheless, the point is not to say that a certain fictive
character is a representation of a certain marginalized group in
the real world. I am not claiming that Stranger Things is anallegory over the subaltern subject in the 21st century, or that itbears evidence of the impact that social critique and politicalactivism – as for example the MeToo movement – have had on
the film industry and its products. Rather, I am proposing thatevery work of fiction is imbued with ideology which manifests
itself in the forms of the aesthetic object per se. In this case, myobject of investigation is a film sequence, and since film is a
visual medium, it is crucial to be attentive to semblance. As will
become evident later, it is only through appearances that theviewer can achieve a deeper understanding of film; by regarding
what is allowed to be seen and to be heard.
However, before presenting my analysis, I will be saying a few
words about my theoretical inspirations and formulate a thesis.
Let me begin by returning to the supposition that aesthetic artifacts can say something of political interest. The idea that worksof fiction are conditioned by social relations or modes of production stems from Marxist literary theory. The proposition
above – that all artworks are imbued with ideology – has alreadybeen argued by the American literary critic and Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson whose works, as hinted in the title ofthis essay, will serve as a theoretical frame for this investigation.
According to Jameson, a work of fiction is always something
more than an utterance by an individual artist. In his view, an
artwork is, first and foremost, a product of a historical situation.
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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

The narrative structure found in a novel or a film will inevitablyreflect a socio-political context, not in terms of an imitation ormimesis of any external reality, but in the form of a paraphrase
which, to a certain degree, distorts the represented. The act ofwriting a novel or creating a film may therefore be regarded as atranslation or circumlocution of an ideological subtext. The
ideological subtexts that impregnate and organize works offiction do not exist anywhere in terms of a “pure” text. However,according to Jameson, they can be deciphered or disclosed retroactively in an act of interpretation. This ideological subtext iswhat Jameson refers to as the political unconscious.3
Now to return to my object of investigation. As alreadystressed by way of an introduction, it would be inaccurate to saythat Stranger Things is a realistic imitation of actual politicalevents, or that certain characters are representatives for specificdemographic groups in real society. In line with Jameson, I havesuggested that works of fiction are like derivatives of history, andthat they may represent reality by distorting and twisting it.
However, I have also claimed that it is crucial to be attentive toappearances when interpreting film. Being attentive to appearances means taking note of what the film is trying to imitate
realistically and to what it explicitly is referring. In the case ofStranger Things, it should be noted that history is not just a
subject but also an object. The second season takes place in the
1980s – to be more precise, in the year 1984 – and it is obviousthat the filmmakers have made an effort to create an authentic
historic environment by infusing attributes, fashion and music
usually associated with the late post-war period (arcade video
games, backcombed hair, a post-punk aesthetic, etc.). Judging
from the series’ aesthetics, a historical past has been turned into
an object of desire. A suitable description here would be to saythat it is nostalgic, since it connotates longing for the past, a wish
to revive old memories, or to feel what it used to feel like back inthe days.
3

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act(London: Routledge, 1989), p. 80.

19410. HAUNTING HISTORIES

However, on a closer look, the nostalgic aesthetics that permeates Stranger Things is not concerned with history in general
as much as it concerns film history in particular. The explicit
reference of the series is not any actual historic event – not theCold war, not Ronald Reagan, for example. Instead, the seriesrefers to another work of fiction in the history of film, namely
Ghostbusters. The intertextual conversation that Stranger Things
is having with Ghostbusters is important in my view, not only
because it is the subject of the dispute between Mike and Lucas,
but also because the influences from Ghostbusters concern thescience fiction adventure at the most basic level. In both cases,
there are portals leading into other dimensions, characters who
become possessed by demons, and several four-legged dog-likebeasts who haunt and strike terror into their surroundings – justto mention a few examples. In this regard, Stranger Things seems
to confirm the assumption made by many art historians thatmodern works of fiction are essentially self-referential; they
represent nothing apart from themselves, and they reveal
nothing apart from a fascination for their own medium.4 The
conclusion could be that the series refers to the same oldfashioned science fiction adventure, and it amounts to nothing
more.
However, if this is the case, then a question immediately
arises: If it is true that Stranger Things reflects a tendency tofetishize film history, then why would anyone want to look at a
reproduction of the desired object rather than the object itself?
If actual times are forever lost, the same cannot be said about
film history, which, due to new digital technology, is moreavailable than ever. If film nostalgia is symptomatic of a longing
for a certain moment in film history, would it not be fair toassume that the original Ghostbusters from 1984 is a moreauthentic representation of that moment than a Netflix production that is trying to imitate its “historic” style? Considering the4

The notion that modern art is self-referential is typically emphasized in readings ofmodernist poetry. For an example, see Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900,
trans. Michael Metteer & Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp.
212–225.

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commercial success of Stranger Things, why is it so that the contemporary audience seems to prefer a reference rather than thereferred?
My answer to this question is that the ideological subtext ofStranger Things is radically different from its equivalent, Ghostbusters. The political unconscious structuring the narratives ofthe series and the film respectively has altered over time, meaning that a film consumer who finds pleasure in watching theformer is most likely going to find the aesthetic experience ofwatching the latter unbearable. In fact, I would like to go further
and claim that the discrepancies between Stranger Things andGhostbusters are just as significant as their similarities. The
ideological subtext of the series is revealed, not in the identities
but in the discords between present and past, memory andamnesia, desire and aversion, pleasure and discontent. As I see
it, nostalgia is not a major aesthetic feature, it is just a component, and this is where my thesis comes in: Stranger Things
can be interpreted as a symptom of ambivalence towards a
historic past. To explore this, I shall undertake a comparative
study between Stranger Things and Ghostbusters with the intention to investigate the political unconscious structuring eachnarrative respectively. By contrasting my objects of investigation, I hope to show that the contemporary series is principally a story about present time rather than the 1980s.
Thus far, I have presented my objects of investigation, atheoretical frame, a methodology, and have advanced my central
thesis. However, considering that Jameson’s work focuses on thehistory of literature, my use of his theory might still seem vague.
Moreover, I have not explained how appearances, desire andpleasure are interrelated with the experience of watching film.
The concept of the unconscious, of course, does not stem from
Marxist theory but psychoanalysis. I will therefore expand on
my theory by turning to the British film theorist Laura Mulvey
and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Hence, the disposition of the investigation is divided into three parts: first, atheoretical part where I explore Jameson’s theory of the politicalunconscious from a psychoanalytical perspective; second, the19610. HAUNTING HISTORIES

analysis of Ghostbusters; and third, the comparative analysis ofStranger Things.
To explain how Jameson’s theory of the political unconscious
can apply to film, it will be necessary to remind the reader ofsome basic ideas from psychoanalytic theory and method. Even
though the primary aim of psychoanalysis is to interpret symptoms of psychical illness, it has often been defined in terms of a
critique of the human subject rather than as a science.5
Regarding the benefits that psychoanalysis and art criticism
have derived from one another during the last hundred years, it
is safe to say that film occupies a place apart compared to otherart forms. It has often been highlighted that the founder ofpsychoanalysis Sigmund Freud elaborated The Interpretation ofDreams (1900) in the same historical period as the film medium
was invented.6 In the same book, Freud famously asserted thatdreams are the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious. He
equated the dream with a wish fulfillment (Wunscherfüllung), a
manifestation of an inner wish, and suggested that interpretations of dreams could give insight into the unconscious desiresthat structure and govern the actions and speeches of the humansubject.
Similarly, film can – and has – been considered a form ofwish fulfillment. Film is usually associated with desire and notleast with pleasure because it accentuates sight. In the essay
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), Laura Mulvey
writes, with reference to Freud, that the gaze may constitute asource of pleasure in itself.7 However, as she also mentions inpassing, it is not only the gaze of the actors and the gaze of theaudience that is at stake in film. In each and every film, there isalways a third eye which mediates and thus controls the gaze,
5cf. Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan. A feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990),
pp. 1–19.
6
cf. Kittler, pp. 277–278. See also Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction”, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999),
pp. 228–230.
7
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Visual and Other Pleasures(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 16–17.

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namely the eye of the camera. What differentiates the camera
eye from the eyes of the actors and the audience is that thecamera consists of a completely mechanized gaze. The camera
has no consciousness; it is a machine which sees. It takes nohuman subject for a camera to register things – a film can berecorded without anyone being aware of it.
Here it is important to underscore that Mulvey’s essay is not
actually about the eye of the camera. Her essay has become
required reading within feminist film theory and Gender studies
because it efficaciously discloses a patriarchal unconscious thatorganized most films produced in the palmy days of Hollywood.
According to Mulvey, the patriarchal unconscious causes asexual imbalance that has tangible effects on casting. It equates
masculinity with narration by constantly portraying men as
agents who direct the gaze and make things happen. On theother hand, the feminine does not even play a minor part in his
narrative structure; she is just a visual image or a passive object
whose sole purpose is to strengthen the ego of the subject –which is always male. If a female character is allowed to appear(which is not always the case in patriarchal film production), it
is because the male subject needs an object upon which he canproject his desires, fantasies, and anxieties.
Nevertheless, an ego may not only be strengthened throughprojection; a strengthening may also occur through identification. According to Mulvey, a viewer may occasionally identify
with film characters in two different ways: either by mirroringhimself or herself in the image of the actor according to the same
principles as in Jacques Lacan’s theory of subject formation
during the mirror stage; or, the viewer may perceive the film
entirely through the eyes of the actor and thereby turn the malegaze into his or her own gaze. Mulvey writes that the identification process, which may occur during a visit to the cinema,tends to become so strong that the viewers momentarily lose
themselves. The film medium, therefore, seems to be able toestablish a paradoxical double movement, an oscillation where
the ego of the viewer, on the one hand, is strengthened, while on

19810. HAUNTING HISTORIES

the other, is dissolved with the result that the cinema audience
momentarily forgets who they are and where they came from.8
Interestingly, Lacan describes something similar in one of his
early seminars. Commenting on Freud’s Interpretation ofDreams, Lacan notes that since the subject is shaped throughmirroring and projections, the ego can be comprehended as thesum of all identifications of the subject. At stake, though, whensomeone is dreaming is not the ego but the unconscious.
Dreams, therefore, seem to establish an inversion of the logic ofsubject formation, namely a state of dissolution in which thesubject is decomposed into minor parts. Lacan claims that if one
image could represent Freud’s idea of the unconscious, it would
be the image of a headless subject – a body without ego. The
method of dream interpretation is to try to locate the subject’s
ego, which tends to get lost in the dream.9
Now, for a brief moment, I am going to suppose that Lacan
was right. Suppose dreams tend to decompose and dissolve thesubject. In that case, there seem to be many similarities between
dreams and some of the experiences that Mulvey claims that theaudience momentarily may have at the cinema. It could then besuggested that both dreams and films are a form of headlessseeing in the sense that a subject who is dreaming is just as unable
to control what appears in the dream as the cinema audience isunable to control the movements of the camera directing ourattention in the diegetic world of the film. Metaphorically speaking, one could say that when we are dreaming, a film is playing
inside of us. However, this metaphor works equally well whenreversed. Mulvey is neither the first nor the last writer who has
alluded to the image of the Hollywood industry as one grandfactory which manufactures dreams. If dreams are like films andfilms are like dreams, then it should not be too far-fetched tointerpret films the same way Freud interpreted dreams – that is,
as manifestations of collective unconscious structures of desire.
8

Mulvey, p. 18.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and
the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge:
Norton & Company, 1988), pp. 167–172.

9

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I hope to have made it clear now how the theory of a politicalunconscious can apply to film, and why it is crucial to be attentive to appearances when interpreting them.
So far, I have discussed the elementary mechanisms behindfilm production and the makings of fictive narrative structures.
In the following section, I will turn to my first object of investigation, Ghostbusters. There are, of course, several different versions of this incredibly popular franchise. Still, it is the very firstversion from 1984 that interests me here since its original releasein the United States is the same year as the second season ofStranger Things is set. Let me begin by simply asking: Whatkinds of collective unconscious structures of desire are put intoplay in Ghostbusters? For starters it should be said that Freud’s
theory of the unconscious is something more than a possible
perspective in this case. Just as history is both a subject andobject in Stranger Things, the unconscious is both latent andmanifest in Ghostbusters, meaning that interpretation becomesalmost superfluous. In principle, it is not necessary to analyze
Ghostbusters to understand what it is about. It is perfectly
sufficient just to watch and observe everything there is to be seen
and to be heard. I will try to explain what I mean by this without
going into too intricate details about the film.
In the leading role, starring Bill Murray, the viewer encounters the scientist Dr Peter Venkman. The film begins with Venkman and his two colleagues, Raymond Stantz and Egon Spengler, losing their grant funding because the management at theuniversity has realized that their research project is pure quackery. It is worth mentioning here that their field of research iswithin parapsychology – the study of paranormal or supersensual phenomena. In order to survive economically, the threescientists decide to start their own business that would allow
them to combine their research on supersensual phenomena
with social protection. The trio’s business idea is to offer services
to anyone afflicted by supernatural disturbances in the environment. Initially, business is slow, but it is not long until they are
inundated with calls; New York City seems to be crawling withghosts and lost souls. And so, the ghost hunt begins. The scient200

10. HAUNTING HISTORIES

ists eventually become successful enough to hire a fourth collaborator named Winston Zeddemore – the character that noneof the nerd boys in Stranger Things wants to be. The fact that
Winston is not an interesting character in the eyes of the boys isunderstandable since he is not introduced until about halfway
through the film and plays a peripheral role in relation to theother three ghost hunters.
Needless to say, the viewer does not need to be a certified
parapsychologist to be able to understand that the ghosts in
Ghostbusters are not just any ghosts. It is important to underscore that the scientists are not catching the ghosts in order tokill them. They are only interested in locking them up for safe
keeping in the business office’s cellar, perhaps for future
observations. The motif around which the film pivots is, thus, a
pseudo-scientific ability to control and master something thatconventional science has never been able to explain. Unconscious desire is part and parcel of the film’s content as far as
ghostbusting is tantamount to achieving a knowledge of theunknown. Dr Venkman and his colleagues are explorers of thelatent; their job is to catch and lock up ghosts in the same way as
the psychoanalyst’s job is to interpret and remedy symptoms
whose causes are unexplainable and irrational.
As I suggested initially, distinctions between manifest andlatent tend to collapse in Ghostbusters. The fact that the film
deliberately mediates between the visible and invisible is especially evident in a scene where the scientists are commissioned tocatch a ghost which haunts an old hotel. Judging from theinteriors, the hotel is a typical upper middle-class environment
with cut-glass chandeliers in the ceiling, heavy draperies alongwith everything else that goes with it. As the scientists enter the
hotel lobby, they encounter a rather stiff company from which
they receive plenty of looks in askance. It becomes clear that thehotel’s prudish guests and staff are not in command of theirghosts. No wonder, then, that a particularly nasty ghost haunts
the hotel in the shape of a green, gluttonous slime ball whichguzzles down all the food it comes across. The reason why theghost has been allowed to ravage the hotel for a considerable
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time is because the hotel manager has suppressed the situation
to maintain the hotel’s elegant façade instead of dealing with the
problem – anything not to lose face.
In other words, the animated ghosts in the film – the transparent slime balls, the strange four-legged creatures, etc. – aremetonymies for the middle classes’ unconscious desires. The
guests and staff at the hotel cannot or do not want to deal with
their ghosts which has the reverse effect: The more suppressed aghost is, the more annoying it becomes. The green slime ball ofa ghost teases and haunts the hotel in accordance with the logic
of “the return of the repressed”. The Ghostbusters team aredepicted as heroes in the film because they are the only ones who
know how to tackle unconscious desires and meddle with whatis latent. In the scene at the hotel, Dr Venkman and hiscolleagues – literally – break the stiff, upper middle-class façade
by shooting down the cut-glass chandeliers in the ceiling andfacing the nasty slime ball rather than shying away from it. By
taking the slime ball down and catching it, the ghost huntersmanage to clean out the hotel’s elegant rooms both literally andfiguratively. By contrasting the skeptical looks that the
Ghostbusters team receive at the beginning of the scene with theastonished looks shown at the end, it becomes obvious that theghost hunters have faced down and disclosed the hypocrisy withwhich the walls of the hotel drip. In this regard, the film could
be viewed as a sly dig at bourgeois culture.
However, catching a ghost or cleaning out the lurking stenchof hypocrisy remains just a motif in the film. The purpose of myanalysis, however, is not to identify motifs but to trace out apolitical unconscious. To catch a glimpse of the political unconscious, the viewer must look closer, and with a closer look, it isobvious that the ghostbusting business is full of contradictions.
As I have already stressed, the Ghostbusters team is never after
the ghosts in order to kill them; they just want to put a lid onthem once and for all. Their aim is not to liberate, rather the
opposite: Dr Venkman and his associates want to control theghosts even more efficaciously than the reactionary bourgeoisie
are capable. As clearly as the ghost hunters are aware of the202

10. HAUNTING HISTORIES

effects of displacement, they are, however, acutely unaware oftransference. In fact, I would like to suggest that the scientists’obsession with chasing animated ghosts and exploring the latentrealm has made them blind to their own desires and the actual
world under their noses.
As an illustrative example, I would like to bring out anincident that takes place during the above-mentioned scene at
the hotel. Minutes before they catch the nasty slime ball, thescientists accidentally shoot at a cleaning carriage that suddenly
comes out through a door of one of the corridors. After the laserguns have been fired, a cleaning woman cautiously peeps out of
the cleaning carriage, wondering what the heck they are doing.
If the viewer looks extra carefully at the scene, he or she willrealize that this cleaning woman – who is pictured as completely
insignificant since she just flickers by very quickly – is, in fact,
the only real ghost throughout the whole film. The incident is
depicted as a witty joke, or a crazy mistake. However, as every
true psychoanalyst knows, jokes and slips of the tongue can havespecial relations to the unconscious. The fact that three men(Winston is not present in the scene) are accidentally shooting
at a woman who is – literally speaking – cleaning up the hotel,
might seem ironic at first sight, given that the scientists’ mission
is to clear away the slimy ghost. However, as far as I can see, this“Freudian slip shot” is by no means an accident. On the contrary, the incident with the cleaning woman is a distinctive trait
in the narrative structure of the film.
The most obvious contradiction that impregnates the narrative of Ghostbusters is that the more ghosts Dr Venkman andhis friends manage to catch, the more aggressive the supernatural forces seem to become in the latent sphere. As alreadystated, the animated ghosts in the film are metonymies forrepressed, unconscious desires. Towards the end of the film,
dark forces have awoken and take the shape of a dangerous,
unrestrained desire threatening not only the city of New Yorkbut the whole of Western civilisation. In this case, the filmmakers have not bothered to spare the effects and tone down asense of doom with biblical connotations and references to203

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY“judgment day”. Interestingly, the dangerous uncontrolled
desire often takes the expression of a dangerous sexuality, to be
more precise, the sexuality of women and LGBTQ people. To
give an example: one of the first customers assisted by Dr Venkman – who also happens to be one of the few female charactersin the film – is Miss Dana Barret who has a problem with somestrange creatures who seem to have occupied the refrigerator in
the kitchen of her apartment. During the film, the viewer gets toknow that the strange creatures in miss Barret’s refrigerator are
guardians who protect a portal which leads into anotherdimension governed by an evil Sumerian god from ancient
Mesopotamia. These creatures – who incidentally, are very similar to the creatures in Stranger Things – eventually break out of
the kitchen and attack Miss Barret by possessing her body. As
possessed, Miss Barret is transformed into an “exotic seducer”
who does not want anything else but to get laid with “the key
master” – for whom she mistakes Dr Venkman.
As the film gradually reaches its climax, the portal into theother dimension is opened wide. The oriental evil god steps
forward and appears in the shape of something apparently
meant to represent a being in-between a man and a woman; an
androgynous or non-binary person (incidentally, suspiciously
similar to David Bowie). Thus, the most terrifying monster the
makers of the 1984 Ghostbusters film could conjure up is a beingthat transgresses the male–female binary. The androgynous
person untethers on the Ghostbusters team one last ghost that
goes by the name of “The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man”; a white,
giant marshmallow figure which crushes yellow taxi cabs under
its feet like another Godzilla. However, the dudes in the Ghostbuster team manage to save the world by crossing the streams
from their laser guns and thereby turning them into one superstrong stream, which they then direct against the portal. Finally,in the moment of dramatic closure, everything explodes, including the marshmallow-Godzilla, resulting in a white sticky
stuff literally raining over the whole of New York City. The
threat from the unconscious desire is defeated, the dangerous
sexuality is once more under control, and order is restored.
20410. HAUNTING HISTORIES

Needless to say, the film ends with Dr Venkman and Miss Barretkissing and then driving away together in the Ghostbuster car tolive happily ever after. It is, in other words, hard to tell whether
Ghostbusters from 1984 is a comedy or a thriller. I am not surewhether I should laugh or cry out loud.
With all that said, the interpretation of my first object ofinvestigation is complete. I have interpreted Ghostbusters withrespect to the theory of a political unconscious and reached theconclusion that its narrative structure pleases a stereotypicalwhite male heterosexual desire. Interestingly, representations ofclass, race, gender, and sexuality in the film are conflated with a
psychoanalytic history of reproducing sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia. Although there is no explicit reference
to Freud or any other psychoanalytic theoretician in the film, I
have suggested that the ghost hunting enterprise amounts to a
psychoanalytical conception of achieving a knowledge of unconscious desire. The fact that oppositions between the latentand the manifest are interwoven with the film’s motifs makes
interpretation challenging, but not impossible. I am aware thatit might seem contradictory to scrutinize and criticize Ghostbusters by using the same theoretical and methodological tool as
I am criticizing. Considering that I have charged Dr Venkman
and his associates with being ignorant of transference, how can
I know for sure that I am not repeating the same analytical fallacy in my interpretation and that I am not disregarding my own
unconscious desires?
To avoid the pitfall of transference, I have tried to focus on
the manifest realm instead of the latent. I have tried to look at
the aesthetic object just like Oscar Wilde’s novel character Lord
Henry looked at Dorian Gray: “It is only shallow people who do
not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is thevisible, not the invisible.”10 In other words, the biggest mystery is
not what Ghostbusters “really” is about but rather why one of themost popular Netflix productions of the 21st century is trying to
reproduce it, which brings me back to my initial question: What
10

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 24.

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exactly does the reference to Ghostbusters in Stranger Thingsentail?
I have now reached the third and last part of my investigation
where I intend to contrast the film with the series. It is noteworthy that my first object of investigation is an analogous film
while my second object is a digital television series. As alreadynoted in the theoretical part of my discussion, the technologicalmedium itself can have effects on the message of the aesthetic
object. It is interesting to keep that in mind when considering
how television series as an artform has evolved in the 21st
century. When the first television series started to appear in the
post-war era, they were mostly viewed as a kind of schlock or
pulp fiction for housewives and second-rate actors. However, in
recent years, due to new digital technology and the commercial
success of online streaming services, the television series as a
specific genre has transformed and achieved a completely different cultural status. Not only has the digital medium affected
the film content; it has also changed the way the cinema audience consumes film.
I am now going to look at my second object of investigation.
Despite all the similarities and intertexture, some of the motifs
in Stranger Things seem to be inversions of those in Ghostbusters. In the television series, it is the scientists who have lost
control over the evil forces and the androgynous character
Eleven who, thanks to her supernatural powers, manages toclose the portal leading to the other dimension and thereby saves
the world. The four nerdy boys mentioned in the introduction
are not the only ones who know how to meddle with the latent.
They are surrounded by several female characters who often are
depicted as bolder than most of the male heroes. For example,
Lucas has a little sister named Erica who not only is intelligent,
she also has the coolest and bitchiest attitude in the whole series.
Then there is Mike’s big sister Nancy, a high school student who
at first sight appears to be a typical “good girl” who does her
homework on time. However, as the series proceeds, it turns outthat Nancy not only knows how to study; she also knows perfectly well how to swing a baseball bat and aim with a shotgun.
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These female characters are allowed to be seen and heard; they
have their own agencies in ways that would have been unthinkable in the Hollywood film productions scrutinized by Laura
Mulvey in her essay. As I see it, the presence of these new characters has nothing to do with film nostalgia, it is not a resurrectionof a historic past that has been lost with the passing of time. On
the contrary, the presence of strong feminine characters seems
to me rather like a historical revenge.
As I have argued initially, history reveals itself in the discrepancies between past and present. In the case of Stranger Things,
a historic past has turned into an object of desire. If the series
pleases contemporary viewers, it does so not by realisticallyimitating film history as it actually was, but by retelling andmodifying the past as the viewer wish it would have been. The
same can be said about many contemporary television series
that tend to fetishize different historical moments in the 20th
century. Mad Men is another striking example of film aesthetics
that is pervaded with nostalgia. In a series such as Mad Men, thesecretaries, the cleaners, and the homosexuals are for sure still as
oppressed as they actually were in the 1960s, but with an essential difference: the camera has become more moveable, moremobile, so to speak. The camera has started to show things
through the eyes of the oppressed and not exclusively from theperspectives of white heterosexual middle-class men.
Television series as an art form is especially sufficient forthese kinds of shifts of perspectives. Since the duration time is somuch longer compared to a single film, the camera is allowed toroam the settings and therefore has the time to delineate morecharacters and more life stories within the frame of the samenarrative. And precisely this is exactly what the quarrel mentioned initially between Mike and Lucas is all about: Who is toplay the most important role? Whose perspective is most important in the stories of our time? It is obvious that many contemporary remakes of older film productions reveal a demandfor other perspectives and voices that have been silenced earlier
in history. It is not for nothing that a contemporary remake of
Ghostbusters (from 2016) starred three female actors as the207

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

scientists, just to mention one example. However, in many television series, the question of perspective is even more intricatecompared to most long feature films, since it is not always obvious who plays the main character anyway.
The fact that the camera eye is prone to see more than it used
to is in my opinion a positive outcome of technological development. However, in the case of Stranger Things, the positive sidesof the development come at a price. Since such fundamental
parts of the film narrative in Ghostbusters have been repressed,
the past has now returned and manifested itself in the shape ofthe evil forces from the other side of the portal, in the so-called“upside-down world”. The uncanny, indefinable creatures fromthe other dimension are condensations of the dark parts ofhistory – all those memories that most viewers most likely want
to forget.
To support my suggestion that the evil forces in the series aremetaphors for the past, I would like to dwell on a scene in thethird episode of the second season which involves one of thenerd boys, Will. Just like Miss Barrett in Ghostbusters, Will’sbody is possessed by the visitors from the “upside-down word”.
The scientists try to explain his unpleasant experiences of being
possessed by saying that Will is probably suffering from posttraumatic stress. In the scene in the third episode, Will is accidentally trapped in the “upside down world” and tries to escapein a panic. He runs over a schoolyard, but then, all of a sudden,
he stops, as if thinking that the scientists might be right. Maybe
he is just imagining things, maybe he is just hallucinating. He
turns around and sees a dark cloud towering up in the shape ofa terrifying spider-like evil demon. He tries to shout, “Go away,
GO AWAY”, but that will certainly not do any good since theheritage of film history is no figment of imagination – it is real.
The dark side of the historical past is a force that produces themonsters of our time. Alternatively, to quote a famous line fromJames Joyce’s Ulysses: “History is a nightmare from which I am
trying to awake”.

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PART 4
Transforming Knowledge Regimes

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210

Chapter 11
Paradox of Stubbornness– The Epistemology of Stereotypes Regarding Women

Sagy Watemberg Izraeli1

1. The Paradox of Stubbornness“Women are too empathetic to be engineers”2“[W]omen aren’t up to the job of running an airline”3“Women are less spatial and logical thinkers than men”4“[T]he complicated whirlwind of politics is not the arena for
the female role”5

The above statements are but a few of the numerous stereotypes
regarding women. They are generalized traits attributed as
intrinsic to the group of women as a whole. Indeed, many
women fulfill at least some stereotypic claims ascribed to theirgroup. Yet, no woman fulfills them all. The discrepancy between
individual women and the stereotypes ascribed to the group has
become progressively greater and more explicit over the course
1
Foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Michal Gleitman, whose guidance encouragingly
and relentlessly pushed forward the work and insights that see light in this article.
Gratitude is owed to Dr. Ittay Nissan-Rozen for welcoming me through the doors of
epistemology, and for his prophetic claim that in the future I will return to Quine’s “TwoDogmas”.
2
Vicki May, “Are Women Too Empathetic to Be Engineers?”, The Huffington Post, 24
June 2014 updated 24 August 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/are-women-tooempathetic-_b_5522153
3
David Koenig, “In airline-business rarity, Air France picks a woman CEO”, The
Associated Press, 13 December 2018, https://apnews.com/article/b56ea6cb019c44d6
b2bda75b9eaa35ec
4
Michelle G. ’18, “Picture Yourself as a Stereotypical Male”, MIT Admissions, 3 September 2015, https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-stereotypicalmale/
5
Tamar Beeri, “Responding to rabbi’s sexist remarks, Shaked says women can do anything”, The Jerusalem Post, 6 July 2019, https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/ayeletshaked-women-can-be-heads-of-state-594699

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of history in alignment with changes in women’s social andpolitical situations. For, despite the developments in the traits
women have opportunity to express, stereotypes regarding
women remain the same age-old allegations. Furthermore, constituting 50% of society, women are encountered on a regularbasis. Thus, evidence which refutes stereotypical knowledge6 isrendered inevitable – deeming stereotypes regarding women avaluable edge-case for the epistemic inquiry of stereotypes ingeneral. For, despite the contrary evidence, it appears thatsociety and individuals within it continue to hold these stereotypes as true. This conflict between evidence and stereotypes
constitutes an epistemic paradox.
The epistemic paradox following from the conflict between
evidence and stereotypes is the retention of the stereotypicalknowledge despite contrary evidence. Ordinarily, when a person
encounters evidence conflicting with previously attained knowledge, that knowledge is updated in light of the evidence so thatone’s knowledge will be true. However, it seems that stereotypes
negate such revision. Even numerous encounters with contraryevidence do not cause one to abandon the stereotype nor to
replace it with knowledge better correlated with the empiricalevidence arising from experience.
Such a lack of revision of stereotypical knowledge in light of
new evidence causes two epistemic sub-conflicts. One is theconflict between knowledge and the empirical evidence withwhich it comes in contact. Second is the conflict that emerges
within the body of knowledge itself. For, experience generates
the creation of a new knowledge in one’s body of knowledge. In
the case of evidence contrary to stereotypes, the new knowledge
formed is one contrary to the previously existing stereotypicalknowledge. Hence, the abstention of stereotypes from revisionin light of new contrary evidence is a cause for conflict between

6
Knowledge is referred to in this paper as that which is believed to be a justifiable true
belief. Therefore, even if a stereotype may be false empirically, it constitutes knowledge
in as much as it is believed to be justifiably true.

21211. PARADOX OF STUBBORNNESS

knowledges7 within the aggregate body of knowledge itself. The
latter is thus rendered incoherent, consisting of two contrary
knowledges both held to be true. These two conflicts – between
the stereotype and the evidence, and between the stereotype andother knowledges – give rise to the epistemic paradox of theretention of the stereotype despite contrary evidence. This paradox will be termed here the paradox of stubbornness.
The epistemic distortion entailed in the paradox of stubbornness, though, is revealed to be more severe than only stereotypes’lack of revision. The latter could be the sole epistemic difficulty
if initial experience of women would produce evidence in linewith such stereotypical deductions, to be challenged only bylater contrary evidence. Yet, encounters with women provide
diverse evidence from the outset, not the generalized andsimplified version entailed in stereotypes. It is found, then, thatstereotypical knowledge does not stem from empirical evidence,as previously assumed. For, if knowledges regarding women asa group were founded upon experience, more diverse andcomplex knowledges would have formed – in correlation withthe empirical evidence. Therefore, it seems that people’s personal experiences are not the epistemic source of stereotypicalknowledge.
To summarize this preliminary analysis, three epistemic
questions arise regarding women stereotypes. One, what are theepistemic mechanisms that enable stubbornness of stereotypicalknowledge in light of contrary evidence? Two, what are theepistemic mechanisms that enable conflict between the stereotype and the evidence, and between the stereotype and otherknowledges, respectively? Three, what is the epistemic source ofstereotypical knowledge, if it is not empirical evidence? This
paper will explicate the epistemic paradox of stubbornness. In sodoing, it aims to answer the above questions, showing the epistemic mechanisms and characteristics that enable such stub7
I use the term “knowledges” as the plural for “knowledge” so as to retain the use of thelatter for individual units of knowledge, seeing as such distinction proves central in thispaper.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

bornness of stereotypes regarding women in light of contraryevidence. Specifically, it will highlight the centrality of epistemic
heritage passed down to individuals throughout history by theirsocieties, shaped both collectively and individually. For thispurpose, it will concentrate on Quine’s theory of knowledge.

Quine’s Theory of Knowledge
As an empiricist, Quine deems experience the solitary source ofknowledge. The novelty in his account, though, is that despite
his foundation in empiricism and reliance on evidence for theconstitution of knowledge, Quine transfers the judgment ofknowledges’ truth to a new realm. Traditional empiricists examine the adequacy of knowledges’ correlation with empiricalevidence to determine their truth value. Quine, though, turns hisgaze from the connection between knowledge and evidence tothat between the different knowledges themselves. He demands
coherence among one’s various knowledges, so that there is noconflict between them. To do so, Quine broadens his scope ofvalidation by converting the unit of epistemic significance.
Previously, the standard for validation of truth was individual
knowledges, judged independently according to the correlationof each knowledge to empirical evidence external to the body ofknowledge. Quine replaces this standard with the entirety of the
body of knowledge; a corporate whole to be verified in light of
its internal coherence.
Quine’s endorsement of coherence as validation ensues fromhis refutation of the analytic-synthetic distinction,8 negating thepossibility of verifying knowledges either as true by virtue of
meaning alone or as entirely dependent on personal experience.
He contends that every form of knowledge, even the most rudimentary observation statements, inherently entails previous
knowledge.9 It is therefore impossible to judge the truth of8

Due to the scope of this paper, I will not delve here into this analysis, see Quine, “Main
Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. The Philosophical Review
60(1), (1951).
9
Willard Van Orman Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized”, Reprinted from Willard Van

21411. PARADOX OF STUBBORNNESS

knowledges solely in accordance with their empirical adequacy.
For, people do not have direct access to viewing knowledge in its
rudimentary foundation of empirical evidence. Instead, the criterion of coherency shifts the focal point of epistemic inquiry to
the intra-knowledge relationships themselves, examining theirinteractions and the overarching coherence of the body ofknowledge as a holistic unit.
Quine’s theory is thus utile in my analysis of stereotypes
regarding women. For, what renders stereotypes epistemicallypuzzling is the very relationship between stereotypical knowledge regarding women as a group and one’s experience-founded knowledges of particular women conflicting with the said
stereotype. Such prevalent incoherence in people’s corporate
knowledge begs an inquiry into the mechanisms enabling it.
Additionally, according to Quine’s theory of knowledge, theconnection between empirical evidence and knowledge is suchthat they are considered mutually relevant yet not directly
correlated. The loose ties between knowledges and empiricalevidence makes way for the influence of other mechanisms on
epistemic processes. Such mechanisms, for which Quine creates
place in his account, may provide for the epistemic incongruences of stubbornness and the conflict found between stereotypical knowledges and empirical evidence.
Furthermore, not all knowledges are equally close to empirical evidence. Quine describes a typology of the body of knowledge in which the knowledges are scaled according to theirproximity or distance from experience. The further away knowledge is from experience, the less exposed it is to revision in lightof contrary evidence. Yet, these distances and the organizationof the knowledges within the corporate body which dictate theknowledges’ sensitivity to experience, are not inherent to theknowledges themselves. There is no logical necessity for certain
knowledges to be of closer proximity to empirical evidence andOrman Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969) in Kornblith, Hilary (Ed.), Naturalizing Epistemology (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1994), pp. 27–28.

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others farther away. Rather, Quine describes this typology ofknowledges within the body of knowledge as a “conceptual
scheme”.10
A conceptual scheme, according to Quine, is an arrangement
into which are fitted “disordered fragments of raw experience”,11
empirical evidence prior to its coming into relation with thesocial element of previous knowledge entailed in the conceptual
scheme. This arrangement of knowledges is that which determines one’s “ontology”,12 the perception through which one
interprets experience.13 Therefore, a conceptual scheme is themanner in which empirical evidence is formed into knowledges
and positioned relative one to another. This typology is a tool, aframework, which prescribes the perspective through whichpeople view and interpret sensory input.14 The conceptual
scheme, thus, dictates the connections and interactions between
knowledges.
Quine describes the conceptual scheme as a “fabric”.15 Thisfabric is composed of numerous knowledges, the peripheral ofwhich touch upon experience. Though no specific knowledge iscorrelated to any specific experience, the peripheral knowledges
are those more prone to revision in light of new evidence forthey are the knowledges of greatest proximity to experience.16
Quine depicts a causal link between experience and a knowledge, which makes the knowledge susceptible to empirical evidence. Thus, the experience of contrary evidence operates thecausal link so that the relevant knowledge can be revised. Quine,
therefore, describes the mechanism of revision as a readjustment

10

Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, pp. 41, 43;
Willard Van Orman Quine, “On What There Is”, From a Logical Point of View (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 11.
11
Quine, “On What There Is”, p. 16.
12
Quine, “On What There Is”, pp. 16–17.
13
Quine, “On What There Is”, p. 10.
14
Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, pp. 41, 43.
15
Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 39.
16
Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized”, p. 26.

216

11. PARADOX OF STUBBORNNESSof the fabric of knowledge.17 When new evidence arises, theknowledges in the fabric are rearranged to incorporate theevidence, the newly formed knowledge, into the body of knowledge. The objective of this readjustment is to maintain maximum coherence within the fabric, thus validating the truth ofthe corporate body. It first entails the revision of a knowledge inthe periphery of the fabric. The process of revision then spreads
in a causal chain to certain additional knowledges connected tothat knowledge originally revised to prevent conflict and thusincoherence among knowledges.18
Quine furthers his explication of the revision of the corporatebody of knowledge in light of new evidence. He maintains that
not only the knowledges themselves are subject to revision, but
so are the connections between them. These connections are theepistemic rules of the conceptual scheme that dictate the relationships between the knowledges. The connections may bethose ordained by the rules of logic or affiliations between
knowledges deemed associable in the perception implemented
by the conceptual scheme. 19 Therefore, the very organization of
the knowledges within the corporate body may be altered inlight of contrary evidence, the connections between knowledges
shifted or morphed into different forms of connections.
The various forms of connections between knowledges produce alternative conceptual schemes. As the framework whichprescribes the relationships between the knowledges and theinteractions between them, conceptual schemes are undetermined. The fabric which organizes knowledge is not confined in
its optional typologies of knowledges but for its internal necessitation of coherence. Not only in processes of revision, but also
from the onset conceptual schemes are alternatives chosen
between by social groups.20

17

Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 39.
Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, pp. 39–
41.
19
Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 39.
20
Quine, “On What There Is”, p. 1, 17; Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized”, p. 28.
18217

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Quine contends that multiple conceptual schemes may beequally coherent in their formation and arrangement of thesame knowledges. Consequently, criteria are needed for choosing between different yet equally coherent conceptual schemes.
Such criteria, though, are offered by Quine in point form alone.
He notes that the scheme to be implemented is the one most“simple”, “conservative”, “convenient”, “pragmatic”, and “elegant”.21 Quine himself admits that these criteria are ambiguous
and capable of entailing multiple standards,22 with no “realistic
standard of correspondence to reality”.23 Yet, the details entailed
in these qualities of conceptual schemes and processes ofrevision, and the justification as to the reason they are ascribedsuch status as epistemic criteria, are not provided by Quine.
Neither does he found his claims that these criteria are inherent
human tendencies regarding conceptual schemes.24 In thismanner, Quine relinquishes the criteria of conceptual schemes,
and thus the question of choice between them remains unclarified. These unelucidated criteria, though constituting a theoretical obstacle in Quine’s account, expedite the epistemic analysis of stereotypes regarding women. It is rather through thispatchwork in Quine’s theory of knowledge that a window may
be opened to explicate the paradox of stubbornness.

Quine’s Theory of Knowledgeand “Recalcitrant” Stereotypes
Stereotypes, being the stubborn form of knowledge they are,may be explained as such due to their location far from theperiphery of Quine’s fabric of knowledge. For, as situated distant21

Respectively: Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, pp. 42–43; Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of
Empiricism”, pp. 42–43 and Quine, “On What There Is”, p. 16; Quine, “On What ThereIs”, p. 16; Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p.
43; Willard Van Orman Quine, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis”, From a Logical
Point of View (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 79; Quine, “Identity, Ostension,and Hypostasis”, p. 79.
22
Quine, “On What There Is”, p. 17.
23
Quine, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis”, p. 79.
24
Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 44.

218

11. PARADOX OF STUBBORNNESS

from the periphery, stereotypes may be hard to reach by thecausal chain of revision. The dictation of the location of stereotypes – as that of all knowledges – is decreed by the conceptual
scheme in employment. It may thus seem that stereotypicalknowledges regarding social groups are located within the farinterior of conceptual schemes. According to this explanation,
the stubbornness of stereotypes does not differ from those ofother knowledges which share the same distance from theperiphery of the fabric of knowledge.
Yet, the intriguing quality of stereotypes regarding women is
not only that they are stubborn knowledges in conceptual
schemes, but moreover that this is the case in dissimilar conceptual schemes pertaining to different societies. Therefore, perhaps there is an additional mechanism at work which perpetuates stubbornness among stereotypes. A mechanism thatascribes – or reveals – additional characteristics to stereotypicalknowledges, differentiating them from simply ‘distant knowledges’ and accounting for their specific stubbornness. The
question to be posed in this regard is whether the distance ofstereotypes from the knowledge fabric’s periphery is the solecause of the great difficulty in revising them despite contraryevidence. Or, whether additional mechanisms are at work. The
implications of the former may be that stereotypes are not, in
actuality, a stubborn form of knowledge. Rather, if distance isthe only cause, perhaps all that is needed to change stereotypes
is sufficiently strong and sufficiently numerous contrary evidence. Alternatively, a change in conceptual scheme may bringthese stereotypical knowledges closer to the periphery for
greater ease of revision. If, on the other hand, an additional
internal mechanism of the conceptual scheme is at work, it may
provide insight about what form of knowledge stereotypes ofwomen truly are and what deems this particular form of knowledge so stubborn and epistemically paradoxical.
In order to explicate the paradox of stubbornness, the following chapter will investigate the mechanisms that enforce theimplementation of a certain conceptual scheme over another, as
well as the mechanisms of the inner workings of the conceptual219

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

scheme. For the former, a significant focus will be the criteria
which Quine lists for the championing of one conceptual
scheme over another but upon which he does not expound nor
offer justification. As to the inner workings of the conceptual
scheme, to be explored is what, besides distance, constitutes the
specific mechanism within the conceptual schemes that accounts for the stubbornness of stereotypes of women.
This examination of conceptual schemes and the typology ofstereotypical knowledge aims to illuminate the paradox of stubbornness. Required here is to answer the two additional epistemic questions raised earlier in this paper regarding: one, theepistemic mechanisms which enable conflicts between thestereotype and contrary evidence and between the stereotype
and other knowledges; and two, the epistemic source of stereotypical knowledge.

2. Quine’s Conceptual Schemes and Other Myths
Conceptual schemes, Quine contends, are human-made.25 Thereexists no empirical necessity for the construction of the fabric ofknowledges in any particular arrangement. Rather, conceptual
schemes are a tool created by people to organize and simplify thelarge quantities of sensory data input to which we are exposed.26
This pragmatic element is inseparable from knowledge itself due
to Quine’s refutation of the analytic-synthetic distinction. The
conceptual scheme is a pragmatic tool among various alternative
schemes, chosen for its convenience in working with knowledge.27 The pragmatism that Quine thus espouses enables him
to account for the indeterminism of knowledge in relation toempirical evidence.
Conceptual schemes are both social and individual. They are
constructed by and pertain to a community,28 alongside entailing
25

Quine, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis”, pp. 77–79; Quine, “Main Trends in
Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 41.
26
Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 41.
27
Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 43.
28
Quine, “On What There Is”, pp. 1, 17; Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized”, p. 27.

220

11. PARADOX OF STUBBORNNESS

internal individual variations.29 There are diverse manners inwhich people can perceive the world – alternative formulationsof the fabric of knowledge, the placement of knowledges within
the fabric, and the construction of the logical connectors between them. Yet, these separate and conflicting individual conceptual schemes must be accommodated together into a broader, overarching communal conceptual scheme.30 For, the body ofknowledge that each person holds is part of the collective
knowledge of the community at large.
Given such a wide array of equally coherent conceptual
schemes, what are the criteria surrounding which scheme isimplemented by respective communities? Quine describes theguiding principle as the convenience entailed by people’s “pragmatic inclination” toward conservatism and simplicity.31 Suchpragmatism overtakes any standard of correspondence withreality,32 consistent with Quine’s appraisal of coherence within abody of knowledge rather than the adequacy of individual
knowledges to particular empirical evidence. For, as knowledge
is irreducible to experience, so too is the framework of knowledge. In lieu of correspondence with reality, the objective ofconceptual schemes is the simplicity of their laws33 by which theysort experiences and the ongoing input of empirical evidence.34
Furthermore, that people prefer to minimize the changes madein the fabric in the process. The pragmatic inclination toward
conservatism aims to adjust the existing fabric, the conceptual
scheme, as slightly as possible in light of new evidence, includingthat which is contrary to previous knowledge.35
Minor adjustments to the knowledge fabric, therefore, aremaintained to those peripheral knowledges deemed by the conceptual scheme most relevant to the particular experience. Yet,
29

Quine, “On What There Is”, p. 10.
Quine, “On What There Is”, pp. 16–17.
31
Quine, “On What There Is” pp. 16–17.
32
Quine, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis”, p. 79.
33
Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 42.
34
Quine, “On What There Is”, p. 16.
35
Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 42.
30

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

even conservatism must allow for a ‘ripple effect’ of readjustments to ensue. No particular knowledge is determined to partake in this causal chain of revision, for none is reducible to any
particular empirical evidence. Rather, though any and all variations of readjustments are possible within the conceptual
scheme, it is the propensity to simplicity and conservatism that
dictates which path of knowledges and connectors the revision
will take.36 This propensity maintains the changes wrought upon
the fabric of knowledge at a pragmatic minimum.
As aforementioned, it may be contended that stereotypes arelocated in the interior of the field of knowledge, distant from theperiphery. In such a manner, they would necessitate a great tidal
wave of revision for the causal chain to reach and revise them.
However, if the paradox of stubbornness is derived solely fromthe location of stereotypical knowledges within the conceptual
scheme, then in accordance with Quine, numerous alternative
conceptual schemes could just as well have placed the stereotypes peripherally. Alternatively, the vast extent of contraryevidence would seem sufficient to reach the distant interior of
the field of knowledge where stereotypes are situated. Moreover,so much contrary evidence relevant to stereotypical knowledge
might appear to indicate stereotypes’ peripheral, rather thaninternal, location. For, Quine’s own definition of peripheral
knowledges are those deemed most relevant to certain experiences.37
That stereotypes conflict with experience is because they do
not originate from it; people’s personal experiences are not theepistemic source of stereotypical knowledge. Furthermore,
stereotypes are generalizations and simplifications of socialgroups as a whole rather than knowledge respective of a particular experience. And, as Quine contends, it is the conceptual
scheme and not raw empirical evidence that associates various
experiences into a generalized whole, a convenient simplicity.38
36

Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 40.
Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized”, p. 27.
38
Quine, “On What There Is”, p. 17; Quine, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis”, p.
70.
37

222

11. PARADOX OF STUBBORNNESS

The irreducibility of stereotypes to empirical evidence gives theimpression of greater severity than ‘regular’ knowledge; bothdue to stereotypes’ conflict-causing stubbornness, as well as tothe question of their origination. This leads to the understandingthat stereotypes did not receive their paradoxical characteristics
due to placement, rather their placement might be caused bytheir very stubbornness. Stereotypes themselves are perhaps nota knowledge but rather a mechanism of the inner workings ofthe conceptual scheme.

PositsThe mechanism within the conceptual scheme that may help to
explicate the paradox of stubbornness is what Quine terms“posits”. Posits are human-made tools incorporated into conceptual schemes as “convenient intermediaries”.39 They are implemented for the organization of empirical evidence derived
from experience. Thus, posits are condensed, locally applied,‘mini’ conceptual schemes operating within the broader framework of the conceptual scheme itself. As human-made, posits do
not originate from, nor are they reducible to experience.40
Rather, they are “myths”41 that are used within the conceptual
scheme as convenient tools for conceptually managing theempirical evidence arising from a situation.
These fictitious entities may differ in degree as to their efficiency in ordering extents of empirical evidence. This pragmatic
value of posits as a conceptual, epistemically irreducible mechanism, is exemplified by Quine by the variance in degree, though
not in kind, between the posit of the existence of physical objects
and the existence of the gods of antiquity.42 Quine contends that
empirically there is no knowledge regarding any such complete
object that retains identity over time and space, nor in being
39

Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 41.
Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, pp. 41–42.
41
Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 41.
42
Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 41;
Quine, “On What There Is”, p. 19.
40

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

distinguishable in terms of borders separating it from otherobjects. Rather, human perception of the existence of suchphysical objects is but the pragmatic typology of the vast empirical evidence into categorized beings, for our more convenient use of the knowledge and conduct in the world. Quine
thus categorizes physical objects as the same form of epistemic
mechanism as ancient gods. Both are empirically-irreducible
myths which are implemented pragmatically by conceptual
schemes to organize and process experience.43
Not only do posits serve as devices for the simplification of
the input of empirical evidence, they simplify epistemic operations too. They do so by simplifying the movement between
knowledges, creating jumps that, for the sake of convenience,
skip over the logical connectors of the conceptual scheme itself.44
While logical connectors detail every single relationshipbetween the empirical knowledges, posits exist as a mechanism
within the conceptual scheme which is manually “imported”45
and executed upon knowledge to conveniently sort between themass of empirical evidence – categorize, organize, and thus utilize the knowledge.
Posits are integral to the understanding and analysis ofexperience and empirical evidence. Additionally, they appear toprovide an adequate candidate to explain the stubborn form ofknowledge that stereotypes comprise. In viewing stereotypes as
posits, they are understood as internal mechanisms of the conceptual scheme that simplify empirical evidence through generalization and facilitate the conceptual movement between
knowledges in manners that pass over the fabric’s logical connectors. Indeed, stereotypical knowledge about women causes
conceptual leaps between the various knowledges of women inmanners not consistent with the logical connectors between
them. As posits, stereotypes are undetermined and irreducible
43

Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 41.
Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, pp.
41–42.
45
Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, pp.
41–42.
44

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11. PARADOX OF STUBBORNNESS

to experience. Their relationship to experience is how they act
upon the evidence and not in originating from it.
This irreducibility has further significance for stereotypes
regarding women and the paradox of stubbornness. Lacking
empiric origin renders stereotypes, like all posits, distinct fromother forms of knowledge. Whereas other knowledges stemfrom empirical evidence, differing only in degree of proximity
and thus propensity to revision, stereotypes are not situated onthat scale. Posits are fictitious myths46 that are not positioned inline with the empirical knowledges in the conceptual scheme.
Stereotypes, as posits, are not woven into the fabric of knowledge as empirical knowledges are. Instead, stereotypes are amechanism of the very organization of the body of knowledge.
Stereotypes, as posits, are not connected with the otherknowledges of the fabric but rather are epistemic mechanismsthat act upon it. This explains their absence from causal chainsof revision and their invisibility in verifications of coherence.
The causal chain of revision operates along the connecting
relations within the fabric, revising those knowledges and logicalconnectors associated with the initially revised knowledge. The
verification of coherence, as well, runs along those same pathways to validate the coherence of the fabric. Stereotypes, hence,
go unnoticed in both epistemic processes. In this manner,stereotypes regarding women remain stubbornly unrevised inlight of contrary evidence, nor does this stubbornness raise a flagof incoherence despite the stereotype’s conflict with the newly
formed knowledge.

Heritage
Having explicated the paradox of stubbornness and the difficulty of epistemic conflict, the question remains as to the epistemic source of stereotypes regarding women. It may be asked,
then, what is the epistemic source of posits in general? Quine
46

Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, pp. 44–
45.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

dubs this irreducible, simplifying mechanism of posits as “cultural”,47 explicitly revealing their collective, social trait. Similar tothe conceptual schemes themselves, of which posits are in asense a ‘condensed’ form, the latter too are collective entities
formed and held socially. If so, what are the cultural roots ofposits and of conceptual schemes themselves?
Quine briefly mentions the source of conceptual schemes
and of their entailed posits – “heritage”.48 According to Quine,
people are bestowed with an eclectic framework of knowledge
with which they pragmatically work to merge between theinherited conceptual scheme and the personally experienced
empirical evidence.49 The socially shared body of knowledge ispassed down generation to generation, a priori framing individuals’ experiences and formulation of knowledge throughout
life. This epistemic heritage, though not expounded upon by
Quine, is helpful in examining stereotypes regarding women.
The conceptual scheme rests upon aggregated shared experiences and empirical knowledge held collectively in a social bodyof knowledge.50 The shared knowledges structure the conceptual
scheme through which empirical knowledge is perceived byindividuals. Thus, every individual receives previous knowledge
shared by their community as a heritage that entails within it thecommunal conceptual scheme and posits.
Among the posits held collectively and inherited by individuals are stereotypes regarding women. These stereotypes do
not stem from personal experience, for one’s experience wouldin most cases found a more complex and non-stereotypicalknowledge about women. Rather, such stereotypical knowledge
is entrenched as a posit in one’s heritage. An individual knows
47

Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 41.
Quine, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis”, p. 77; Quine, “Main Trends in Recent
Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 43.
49
Quine, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis”, p. 77; Quine, “Main Trends in Recent
Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 43.
50
It is the community’s use of language that deems as true those knowledges not susceptible to differences of experience within the speech community – a foundation ofQuine’s theory which is beyond the scope of this article and therefore not incorporated
in my writing here. See Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized”, p. 28.
48

226

11. PARADOX OF STUBBORNNESS

the stereotype before meeting women to the extent necessitated
for the formulation of such a generalized knowledge. People
empirically experience women once preconditioned with thestereotype inherited as a posit of the respective society’s historical conceptual scheme.
To summarize, posits are integral to the shared body ofknowledge of the community; being a socially shared, historic,
intersubjective reference aimed at simplifying knowledge at theexpense of reality.51 As posits, stereotypes regarding women partake in this collectivity and irreducibility to personal experience.
Quine’s theory of knowledge thus provides an epistemic source
for stereotypes in the form of social heritage.

3. The Recalcitrance of Stereotypes
Quine’s theory of knowledge, with its holistic empirical approach endorsing conceptual schemes, provided fertile groundfor this paper’s analysis. The conceptual scheme and its internalmechanism of posits accounted for the stubbornness of stereotypical knowledge. This was done by revealing stereotypes as
fictitious human-made posits implemented as a mechanism of
simplification within conceptual schemes. As posits, stereotypes
are not woven into the fabric of knowledge nor connected toempirical knowledge by logical connectors. Thereby, they are
not subject to any causal chain of revision, nor are they scrutinized for validation of coherence within the body of knowledge.
Thus, the paradox of stubbornness and its entailed epistemic
conflicts have been explicated.
Lastly, the epistemic source of stereotypes has been provided
for in Quine’s conceptualisation of epistemic heritage. Quine
claims that conceptual schemes and their entailed posits are heldcollectively as shared, social knowledge which is inherited byindividuals. Thus, knowledge that precedes personal experienceis accounted for within Quine’s empirical theory. Stereotypes ofwomen are found to originate not in personal experience, but

51

Quine, “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 42.

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rather to be hereditary components of conceptual schemes
pertaining to society over time.
Having explicated the paradox of stubbornness, the conflicts
between stereotypical knowledge regarding women and both
empirical evidence and other knowledge, and their epistemic
source; one final question remains. As the closing thought to thispaper, the question begged relates to the ability to change stereotypes about women. As previously detailed, extensive contraryevidence does not appear to cause revision of these posits, thatis, stereotypes, to which empirical knowledges are subject.
Perhaps, then, they may only be revised by the changing of theconceptual scheme itself, i.e. a paradigm shift.
Quine describes the changing of conceptual schemes as slow,
conscious, and voluntary processes.52 It is a simultaneous act ofreconstruction amidst dependence on the evolving conceptual
scheme itself as the body of knowledge, like “a mariner who
must rebuild his ship on the open sea”.53 It is unclear whether the“we”54 that Quine alleges capable of changing the conceptual
scheme denotes a multiplicity of individuals or a community as
a whole. This question is particularly consequential for the paradox of stubbornness entailed in stereotypes. The conservatism
and the pragmatism that Quine invokes in his theory inhibit asocially instigated change to the community’s own convenient
conceptual scheme. Therefore, it would rather seem, also if not
Quine’s intentional denotation, that the catalysts of such a
voluntary change in the conceptual scheme would rather need
to be individuals whose own personal conceptual schemes have,in that respect, differed substantially enough from the community’s.
However, Quine does hint at the volatility of the collective
conceptual scheme despite its reiterating inheritance as preexisting knowledge for every individual member of the community throughout history. He writes: “The conceptual
52

Quine, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis”, pp. 78–79.
Quine, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis”, p. 79.
54
Quine, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis”, pp. 78–79.
53

228

11. PARADOX OF STUBBORNNESS

scheme in which we grew up is an eclectic heritage, and theforces which conditioned its evolution from the days of Javaman onward are a matter of conjecture.”55 The existence ofindividually varied conceptual schemes within the collective
body of knowledge opens the opportunity for such epistemic
evolution. This offers an alternative idea as to the ways inwhich stereotypes regarding women may indeed be dismantled. Perhaps, a sufficient number of voluntary, conscious
changes in individual conceptual schemes can cause the buildup of ample pressure on the socially held fabric of knowledge.
This pressure will then seep into the interior of enough ruptures may form in the epistemic mechanisms framing theknowledges. If a critical mass of pressure is attained, enoughruptures may form in the epistemic mechanisms framing theknowledges, so that the existing posits will not be able to holdout any longer against the amounting readjustment.
The crumbling of the fabric may eventually lead to a crash, atipping point in which the individually volunteered changes
succeed the ontology of the inherited social conceptual scheme.
Such a succession may readjust the very construct of the fabricand thus let loose the existing posits from among its epistemic
mechanisms. At such a point, stereotypes regarding women will
be revealed as the posits they are: fictitious myths lacking empiric foundation. This stereotypical knowledge of women willthen be cast away from the utilized posits of the conceptual
scheme, allowed to be recognized as the myth it is, as is the casewith the gods of antiquity.

55

Quine, “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis”, p. 77.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

230

Chapter 12
The Child as the Other– Some Epistemological Considerations

Zlatana Knezevic

Critical childhood studies has drawn attention to and criticallyexamined common conceptualizations of childhood in a wide
range of scholarly works.1 These works discuss how in various
fields and theoretical outlets, childhood is often described as astage of formation and children as becoming-adults, and how
this, in turn, produces a generic and a largely ahistorical, depoliticized and decontextualized child figure. The pre-subjectal
generic infant has been pivotal in representations of human
ontology yet is usually dehumanized. As a prefix to subjectivity,
the child figure stands for the pre-modern, that which is perceived as beyond history, yet paradoxically, prior to, and in theprocess of becoming civilized.2 A universal childhood biography
1Some common subfields go under the name of new sociology of childhood and anthropology of childhood. See, for example, Chris Jenks, Childhood (London & New York:
Routledge, 2005); Alan Prout & Allison James (Eds.) Constructing and ReconstructingChildhood (London: Falmer Press, 1990); Jens Qvortrup, William A. Corsaro &Michael-Sebastian Honig (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies(Houndmills & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Andrea Szulc & Clarice Cohn,“Anthropology and Childhood in South America: Perspectives from Brazil andArgentina.” AnthropoChildren, Vol. 1, 2012, ff. 1–17; David F. Lancy, The Anthropology
of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2022).
2
Erica Burman, Developments: Child, Image, Nation (London & New York: Routledge,2008); Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (London & New York: Routledge,2017); Claudia Castañeda, “The Child as a Feminist Figuration: Toward a Politics ofPrivilege”, Feminist Theory, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2001, ff. 29–53; Figurations: Child, Bodies,
Worlds (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2002); Jenks, Childhood; Nick Lee,
Childhood and Society: Growing up in an Age of Uncertainty (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001); Alan Prout & Allison James, “A New Paradigm for the Sociology ofChildhood? Provenance, Promise and Problems” in Alan Prout & Allison James (Eds.)
Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (London: Falmer Press, 1990); Jens
Qvortrup, William A. Corsaro, & Michael-Sebastian Honig, “Why Social Studies of231

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

has therefore come to stand for more than the core and formation of the individual under development and becoming. It
has come to stand for that very process of becoming a civilized
human being in general. In myriad scholarly attempts to show
how these meanings are ascribed to childhood, other genericconcepts have emerged. Common terms of reference for thesymbolic figure of ‘the child’ is the child as a figuration, idea,
category, metaphor, temporality, and the Other.
Similar concerns and critiques once directed at philosophy,
developmental theory, anthropology and social theory, to namea few, have been addressed in relation to feminism. While somefeminist works address children and childhoods,3 and more
recently girlhood,4 children and childhoods have remained on
the margins. A vast majority of feminist works are oriented
toward adults, privileging the perspectives of adults and, at best,
providing adult-centric objectifications of childhoods. This is
how the debate about the child as the adult Other becomes inevitable also in relation to feminist theorizing.5
In this chapter, I present some epistemological advantages
and dangers of conceptualizing Otherness in relation to children
and childhoods. The chapter distinguishes between the child as
the Other – a figure mirroring the dominant image of childrenChildhood? An Introduction to the Handbook” in Jens Qvortrup, William A. Corsaro& Michael-Sebastian Honig (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies(Houndmills & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Jo-Ann Wallace, “Technologiesof the Child: Towards a Theory of the Child Subject”, Textual Practice, Vol. 9, 1995, ff.
283–302.
3
de Beauvoir, The second sex, Vol. II, Part I; Shulamit Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex:
The case for feminist revolution (New York: Bantam Books, 1972); Barrie Thorne, “ReVisioning Women and Social Change: Where Are the Children?” Gender and Society,Vol. 1, No. 1, 1987, ff. 85–109; Valerie Walkerdine, Daddy’s Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture (London: Macmillan Press, 1997); Wallace, “Technologies of the Child”; Seealso Burman, Developments; Deconstructing Developmental Psychology; Castañeda,“The Child as a Feminist Figuration”; Figurations.
4
In more recent girlhood studies, the at times gender-neutral childhood and youth havebeen replaced with the notion of girlhood. See the journal Girlhood Studies – An Interdisciplinary Journal, published by Berghahn Journals; Claudia Mitchell & Carrie
Rentschler (Eds.) Girlhood and the Politics of Place (New York & Oxford: BerghahnBooks, 2016). See also FlickForsk! Nordic Network for Girlhood Studies.
5
Castañeda, “The Child as a Feminist Figuration”; Figurations.

23212. THE CHILD AS THE OTHER

as incomplete unfinished projections of adults – and the childhood Other as those children’s childhoods that are othered bydominant ideas about childhood. I use this distinction to critically discuss a simplified analogy between the child and the(adult) Other and, in turn, the epistemological danger of using
the notion of the Other in relation to the child as a figuration.
Using this distinction, I argue that inscriptions of Otherness
come with a risk of limiting the theorizing of multiple relationsof power and, thus, fail to account for the pluralistic character ofchildhoods. At the same time, I discuss the epistemologicaladvantage of opening up for inscriptions and contestations of
the notion of Otherness in relation to childhoods.
I briefly introduce the chapter by discussing the notion of the
Other in different critical schools of thought. Then, drawing on
perspectives from intersectional, postcolonial feminist and critical childhood studies, I discuss how the debates surrounding
the child as the Other share parallels with feminist scholarly
debates. Such a debate concerns the attempts to de-centre thenormative image of Woman. This includes the issues that comewith the problematic use of this figuration as if it applies to all
women while considering only a few.6 Furthermore, I argue how
the tools offered by postcolonial feminism and critical childhood studies are necessary to deconstruct the idea of a universal
childhood and simplistic notions of Otherness. Such a bridging
poses critical questions about why childhoods should be thesubject of feminism and why postcolonial feminism should be
relevant for studying childhoods.

The Other and Othering in Postcolonial
Feminist Thought
In philosophy, the first introduction to the concept of the Otheris perhaps mostly associated with the philosopher Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who, in the early 19th century, used
6

Avtar Brah & Ann Phoenix, “Ain’t I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality”, Journalof International Women’s Studies, Vol. 5, 2004, ff. 75–86.

233

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

the Other in contrastive manners in relation to the Self.7 From
thereon, Edmund Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre provided theirown approaches to the Other.8 Finally, a well-known point ofreference for feminists is the work of Simone de Beauvoir. In The
Second Sex, de Beauvoir used the notion of the Other to articulate dominant views of women’s inferiority to men.9
Postcolonial scholars have introduced additional notions: thecolonial Other and the subaltern.10 Scholars discuss how race iscentral for the conception of humanity in modernity. Consequently, those who fall outside these narrow definitions ofhumanity are also constituted by race but racially othered.11
However, the Other and othering also link to axes of powerother than race. Processes of othering may be applied broadly todenote anyone oppressed, discriminated, dehumanised, anddeprived of subjectivity, which historically has been ascribed to
the White enlightened heterosexual bourgeois European malesubject. In this vein, othering could also apply to white heterosexual women in the colonial settler communities who had beenin the shadows of the White colonizer. Yet, the status of these
women differed from the subaltern in the so-called Third
World. The postcolonial feminist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
7
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. Peter Fuss &John Dobbins. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2019).
8
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian meditations: an introduction to phenomenology, transl.
Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960); Jean-Paul Sartre, Being andNothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, transl. Hazel Barnes (London:
Routledge, 1969[1958]).
9
Simone de Beauvoir, The second sex [Le deuxième sexe], transl. Constance Borde &Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, 2011[1949]).
10
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, transl. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove
Press, 2004[1961]) Edward W Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978);Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Lawrence Grossberg & Cary
Nelson (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1988).
11
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest (New York, London: Routledge, 1995); María Lugones, “Heterosexualism andthe Colonial / Modern Gender System”, Hypatia, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2007, ff. 186–209; Toby
Rollo, “The Color of Childhood: The Role of the Child/Human Binary in the
Production of Anti-Black Racism”, Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 49, No. 4, 2018, ff. 307–
329.

234

12. THE CHILD AS THE OTHER(re)used the notion of the subaltern to describe what it means to
be located outside hegemonic discourse, subjectivity, lacking
voice and representation altogether.12
Where in all this are childhoods to be located? Analogically,a line of continuity has often been drawn between children as
the adult Others and colonial Others, and vice versa.13 As I will
discuss below, the child as the adult Other has been useful in
discussions about the asymmetric power relations between
children and adults. In this broader conception, children are
acknowledged as having lower status than adults because of thedominant conceptualizations of children as different or simply
a lesser and not fully accomplished adult version. Some scholars
instead turn their attention to constructions of the childlike,childish and processes of infantilization when reflecting on the
logic of power and domination in contexts that are notnecessarily or primarily linked to child subjects but address
processes of othering in general. However, the childhood Other
I discuss in this chapter is also the subaltern of childhood itself.

Childhood as Temporality, Power and Otherness
In 1962, in Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family
Life, Philippe Ariès argued that childhood, as ‘we’ know it inmodern times and as a distinct phase of human existence, was
not accessible to our understanding until the seventeenth century.14 This modern and European conception of childhood
shifted from the child as a smaller version of the adult to childhood as distinctively different from our conception of adulthood. For instance, childhood today is thought of as a temporary
life phase that transitions into adulthood. In social theory, childhood as temporality appears in relation to what is often referred
to as socialization. Socialization is represented as a temporality
during which individuals undergo practices and rituals that
12

Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”.
McClintock, Imperial Leather; Rollo, “The Color of Childhood”.
14
Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, transl. Robert
Baldick. (New York: Knopf, 1962).
13

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

introduce the young person to normative adulthood but also tothat which constitutes manhood and womanhood in different
contexts.15 In developmental psychology, the temporality ofchildhood is more intelligible as a phase consisting of specificlife stages or ‘timings’ against which development can bemeasured. What transpires during these stages determines how
and if the individual will develop.16
As Ashis Nandy notes, the modern conception of childhood
implied a distinctiveness in terms of inferiority. Children are theorigin of adulthood and simultaneously
a blank slate on which adults must write their moral codes –an inferior version of maturity, less productive and ethical,
and badly contaminated by the playful, irresponsible andspontaneous aspects of human nature’17

The idea of children as inferior to and more formative thanadults has been a central object of critique in critical childhood
studies. Critical childhood studies summarize long-standing
critical scholarly debates and historical analyses of the emergence of childhood. While childhoods and children have been
the object of research in many disciplines and bodies of knowledge, such as developmental psychology and anthropology,
critical studies of childhood provide new approaches to childhood as a historically contingent and social construction.
Childhood, on the other hand, has biological and cognitive
connotations in theories of socialization and development, as
Erica Burman points out. References to chronological age areharder to interpret as social constructions and point more
readily to essentialism. Therefore, biological age and cognitive
15

See Danny Hoffman, “Like Beasts in the Bush: Synonyms of Childhood and Youth in
Sierra Leone”, Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2003, ff. 295–308; Walkerdine, Daddy’s
Girl.
16
Burman, Developments; Deconstructing Developmental Psychology; Castañeda, Figurations.
17
Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy. Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1983), f. 15.

236

12. THE CHILD AS THE OTHER

development are used to deprive children of voice rather than toaddress age-related power relations. For instance, within theframework of children’s rights, biological age and maturity serve
as benchmarks in assessing a child’s right to be heard. Put differently, age may be depicted as a ground for discrimination andat the same time can be stated as the very ground which legitimately allows adults to exclude children from participation, if
children are assessed as not old and mature enough.18
Yet, unlike gender, sexuality and race, age as an axis of poweris sometimes viewed as a more flexible category that can be moreeasily transgressed, of course, in due time.19 To be more precise,the meaning of age on a power axis shifts throughout a person’slife-course. For instance, age helps to raise issues about adultism,that is, adult-centrism, adult power and misopaedic attitudes ata certain point in time.20 Yet, at another point in an individual’slife, age may help in identifying the consequences of ageist
societies and disadvantages for older people, or gerontocraticsocieties that privilege the elderly. Both children and old people
are frequently associated with their ‘deviant’ category in contexts where the ‘productive’ life phase is associated with adultwork life as the norm. However, being granted a socially lower
rank due to young age does not apply to all children, at all times
and circumstances.21 Therefore, being a child of young age does
not necessarily entail Otherness nor subalternity if used alone.
Thus, age in interplay with other axes of power needs to beconsidered.
However, I argue that while older people are also associatedwith a (temporary) life phase that can only be inhabited at a
specific point in the life cycle, this temporality cannot berevisited. Yet, the very idea that childhood is a phase that can be
re-appropriated is what makes it distinct as a temporality, seem18

Burman, Developments; Lee, “The Challenge of Childhood”; Karen Wells, “ThePolitics of Life: Governing Childhood”, Global Studies of Childhood, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2011,
ff. 15–25.
19
Burman, Developments.
20
Rollo, “The Color of Childhood”.
21
Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

ingly timeless and susceptible to colonization. There are multiple ways of appropriating childhood, one among which is,according to Claudia Castañeda:the turn back to one’s childhood to repair the adult or toreclaim “the child within” (as in many psychotherapeutic
regimes and in wider popular discourse. Once the adult’s
temporal distance from childhood has been secured, the adultdraws on the past as a resource for the present. The adultreturns to childhood to reappropriate the child he or she once
was in order to establish a more stable adult self. Here, thechild is primarily valuable insofar as the condition of childhood can be revisited in order to be left behind once again.22

The ideas of a decontextualized childhood and disembodied
child contribute to the colonizing of childhoods, i.e., a posteriori
knowledge claims to children’s lives make it possible to haveepistemic access to (others’) childhood retrospectively in thesense that ‘I have been there, thus I know’.23 In addition, colonizing practices include the forming and predicting of futures bymaking claims on a priori knowledge about children’s (future)
best.24 From an epistemic perspective, the decontextualized
childhood never entirely belongs to children themselves. The
idea of the disembodied ‘inner child’ or ‘the child within’ is very
telling. So is the idea of childhood trauma as shaping adult life,
and in more drastic ways than it ‘otherwise’ would have done.
There is, in fact, in these medicalized and psychologized approaches to childhoods and adulthoods a distinct understandingof time as something concealing issues rather than healing them.
Childhood, in this sense, stands for the wound. And yet, if therapy enables a ‘traveling’ in time, it seems less effective on thosebound to their childhoods instead of mastering the time that has
a hold on them. For those who are considered chronically fixed
22

Castañeda, Figurations, f. 5.
Castañeda, “The Child as a Feminist Figuration”; Figurations.
24
Zlatana Knezevic, Child (Bio)Welfare and Beyond: Intersecting Injustices in Childhoods and Swedish Child Welfare (Västerås, Mälardalen University Press, 2020).
23238

12. THE CHILD AS THE OTHER

in a deteriorated maturity level, childhoods are non-reclaimable,
yet colonisable (i.e. knowable). Epistemic access to childhood asa temporality does not necessarily imply othering in purely
negative terms. These accounts nonetheless highlight how
adults and adulthood serve as the backdrop in theorizing andimagining children and childhoods. ‘The child’ and a genericchildhood become theoretical resources in both mainstream
and critical theories, as I will discuss below.

The Child as the Adult Other
The feminist critical childhood scholar Claudia Castañeda has
insightfully analyzed how ‘the child’ figures in poststructuralistand feminist philosophical scholarship. Castañeda shows how
children, as figurations, lack subjectivity in some central poststructuralist and feminist works and theories on the subject.25
According to Castañeda, the presumed subject in the works ofGilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, JeanFrançois Lyotard, Judith Butler, Valerie Walkerdine, and Teresade Laurentis is the adult, according to which the child figures as
the Other. She discusses how the child in some of these philosophical works stand for other ways of being and becoming andalternative spaces for the possibility of thought and for the disruption of normative orders that are open to the male philosopher to occupy. Otherness, in these accounts, is not automatically linked to inferiority per se. It is rather associated withdesired spaces, times and states, albeit devoid of subjectivity.
Castañeda writes how
the desire for possibility – or what might otherwise be called‘resistance’ or ‘agency’ – is not in itself problematic. Rather, itis the embodiment of possibility in and through an Other thatis the problem. So, too, to identify with and think throughone’s own childhood […]26

25
26Castañeda, “The Child as a Feminist Figuration”; Figurations.
Castañeda, “The Child as a Feminist Figuration”, f. 60.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

As creative and analytical feminist uses of Woman, the Blacksubject, the Cyborg, etc. demonstrate, figurations play animportant role in whose stories are heard and what kind of
yearnings for transformation are expressed. Thus, despite notbeing used to primarily or directly depict actual people, figurations as ‘conceptual personae’ nevertheless imply some material
embeddedness in the sense that they emerge from ‘embodied
accounts of one’s power relations’.27 However, as Castañeda
shows, the figuration of the child lacks material embeddedness
and the accounts that inscribe the child into theories of subjectivity are accounts by which the scholar’s power is reproduced. For instance, she explicates how the feminist Valerie
Walkerdine, in her analysis of young working-class girls, does
not reflexively position herself as an adult researcher. Instead,
Walkerdine draws on her own childhood experiences that are
not even in situ but are retrospectively merged with those of thechild subjects under analysis.
Psychoanalysis, even in its feminist guises, emerges as a technology of childhood that figures the child as the adult’s ontological origin, and as such an origin that the adult theorist canclaim to know by way of psychoanalysis itself.28

Castañeda’s answer to her own question ‘Who or what counts asa feminist subject?’ points thus to adult subjectivity, and hence
foregrounds age. Her analysis prompts me to ask: If the childfigure is the subject’s Other, what conceptualisations of Otherness does this leave us with? Theories of subjectivity and subjugation, apart from being adultist, are also racialized andgendered, as postcolonial theorists have demonstrated.29 Such an
27
Brah & Phoenix, “Ain’t I a Woman?”; Rosi Braidotti, “Dympna and the Figuration of
the Woman Warrior” in Rosemarie Buikema & Iris van der Tuin, (Eds.), Doing Genderin Media, Art, and Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 2009), ff. 243–244; Spivak,“Can the Subaltern Speak?”.
Braidotti, “Dympna and the Figuration of the Woman Warrior”, ff. 243–244.
28
Castañeda, “The Child as a Feminist Figuration”, f. 29.
29
Rollo, “The Color of Childhood”; Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”.

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12. THE CHILD AS THE OTHER

analysis is central in theorizations on Otherness in childhoods,
and consequently also in acknowledging how the child as theadult Other renders other processes of othering invisible.
While what it means to be a child is vastly different across theworld, children inhabit a world in which specific geopolitical
ideals shape what can be claimed as their rights, what is regarded
to be in their best interest, and what it means to be a normalchild. In addition, children’s own views of their childhoods
interlink with the various meanings associated with childhoodin the public discourse.30 For example, children may stand forthat which is desired, such as purity and innocence, as well as
the undesired, such as danger, irrationality and disobedience.31
Furthermore, children may be linked to other time-spaces, philosophically, as discussed above, to otherworldly spirit worlds inregions of the world where spirit belief is widespread, or in termsof better and progressive futures.32 Because of the multiple andcontradictory meanings ascribed to children, they evoke identifications but also disidentifications. I argue that the ambivalences and contradictions that permeate portrayals of children
help to analytically distinguish the child as the adult Other fromother ‘Others’ in, and beyond childhood.
For instance, the figuration of the child frequently appears in
critical studies as representing the future.33 However, as José
Esteban Muñoz has pointed out, this figuration does not seemto apply to all children. Queer and Black kids are left out of these30
Tatek Abebe & Yaw Ofosu-Kusi, “Beyond Pluralizing African Childhoods: Introduction”, Childhood, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2016, ff. 303–316; Lucia Rabello de Castro, “WhyGlobal? Children and Childhood from a Decolonial Perspective”, Childhood, Vol. 27,
No. 1, 2020, ff. 48–62; Hoffman, “Like Beasts in the Bush:”; Walter Omar Kohan, “A
conversation with children about children …”, Journal of Philosophy in Schools, Vol. 5,
No. 2, 2018.
31
Steven Angelides, The Fear of Child Sexuality. Young People, Sex and Agency (Chicago& London: University of Chicago Press, 2019); Hoffman, “Like Beasts in the Bush”;
Lancy, The Anthropology of Childhood; Anneke Meyer, “The Moral Rhetoric of Childhood”, Childhood, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2007, ff. 85–104.
32
Lee Edelman, No Future. Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham & London:
Duke University Press, 2004); Hoffman, “Like Beasts in the Bush”.
33
Edelman, No Future.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

futuristic imaginaries, according to Muñoz.34 Following
Muñoz’s lines of thought, racialized, queer and class-situatedchildhoods that do not fit into the normative script of whatchildhood should be, are disregarded. For instance, the lifestylesof child (sex) workers, the child soldiers, street children or achild living in what is considered to be a dysfunctional family do
not seem to qualify as the childhood with a capital C.35 What canbe learned from intersectionality is that figurations, including
the notion of the Other, are adult re-inscriptions of some childhoods, while others are left out. A lesson from incorporating thegendered and queer Others into mainstream politics suggeststhat ‘some versions’ of Otherness become normalized, mainstreamed, and finally used for Euro-American nationalist andimperialist ends.36 The child as the adult Other seems predominately to be associated with the asexual and seemingly
genderless child who inhabits a world without racialization andclassism.

34
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia. The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NewYork: New York University Press, 2009).
35
Sarada Balagopalan, “Constructing Indigenous Childhoods: Colonialism, Vocational
Education and the Working Child”, Childhood, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2002, ff. 19–34; Elisabeth
Chin, “Ethnically Correct Dolls: Toying with the Race Industry”, American Anthropologist, Vol. 101, No. 2, 1999, ff. 305–321; Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American
Consumer Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Hoffman, “Like
Beasts in the Bush”; Knezevic, Child (Bio)Welfare and Beyond; Lee, Childhood andSociety; Conrad John Masabo, “Should Children Work? Dilemmas of Children’s Educational Rights in the Global South”, Southern African Journal of Policy and Development,
Vol. 3, No. 1, 2016, Article 5; Muñoz, Cruising Utopia; Oishik Sircar & Debolina Dutta,“Beyond Compassion: Children of Sex Workers in Kolkata’s Sonagachi”, Childhood,Vol. 18, No. 3, 2011, ff. 333–349.
36
Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist assemblages. Homonationalism in queer times (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2007); Leticia Sabsay, “The Emergence of the Other Sexual
Citizen: Orientalism and the Modernisation of Sexuality”, Citizenship Studies, Vol. 16,
No. 5–6, 2012, ff. 605–623, f. 605.

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The Child as the Other or the Othered Childhoods?
Bridging Postcolonial Feminism andCritical Childhood Studies
In this chapter, I argue that the conceptual tools postcolonial
theory and theory of intersectionality have to offer to childhoods
are invaluable, although, as some commentators claim, postcolonial readings of childhoods are downplayed compared toother schools of thought.37 Axes of power such as race, migration
status and gender in intersection with age emphasize childhoods, not as singular but plural.38 From such a perspective,
childhoods are a great concern for feminist scholarship, and it isequally important to stress that postcolonial feminism is fruitfulfor studies of childhoods.
The idea of the colonial Other has not only had negative
effects on the lives of colonized adults and adults facing the effects of colonial legacies but also on children.39 Some scholars
actually highlight that the conceptualization of the Other, while
predominantly being linked to the Oriental, the Barbarian, andthe Foreign (adult) in postcolonial school of thought, fails to beadequately addressed without an analysis of how children andchildhoods figure in processes of othering.40 To understand thechild from a postcolonial feminist perspective, it is necessary toconsider the interplay between the naturalization of colonialism,
the nuclear family, and patriarchy. They all imply exclusions and37

Viruru, Radhika, “The impact of postcolonial theory on early childhood education.”
Journal of Education, Vol. 35, 2005, ff. 7–29.
38
Abebe & Ofosu-Kusi, “Beyond Pluralizing African Childhoods”; Hoffman, “Like
Beasts in the Bush”; Knezevic, Child (Bio)Welfare and Beyond; Olga Nieuwenhuys,“Theorizing Childhood(s): Why We Need Postcolonial Perspectives”, Childhood, Vol.
20, No. 1, 2013, ff. 3–8; Prout & James “A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood?”; Qvortrup, Corsaro & Honig, “Why Social Studies of Childhood?; Sircar &Dutta, “Beyond Compassion”; Szulc & Cohn, “Anthropology and Childhood in SouthAmerica”; Viruru, “The impact of postcolonial theory on early childhood education”.
39
Balagopalan, “Constructing Indigenous Childhoods”; Liz Conor, “The ‘Piccaninny’:
Racialized Childhood, Disinheritance, Acquisition and Child Beauty”, Postcolonial
Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2012, ff. 45–68; Hoffman, “Like Beasts in the Bush”; Nieuwenhuys, “Theorizing Childhood(s)”; Rollo, “The Color of Childhood”.
40
McClintock, Imperial Leather; Rollo, “The Color of Childhood”.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

oppositional logics, and they all have created and made hierarchies seem natural.41 Children have been central in this processof the naturalization of power. As Anne McClintock points out,
the White ‘family man’ occupied the dominant image of the‘civilized’ colonizer to whom women, children, and the colonized were inferior. The colonial hierarchy is clearly heteronormative and patriarchal. Power is exercised over the unruly
and immature sub-human children and adults whose path
toward maturity and progress were to be accomplished only by
guidance by “superior White male Europeans”.42
McClintock’s work, as well as the work by Ashis Nandy, suggests parallels between the child and the savage. Nandy distinguishes between the ‘childlike Indian’ and the ‘childish Indian’.
While the former was reformed, the latter was repressed. The‘corrigible’ but childlike, loyal, masculine, innocent and ignorant, yet willing to learn, differed from the childish, who instead
was unable to learn, was savage, disloyal, ignorant and unpredictably violent – the incorrigible.43 Both the childlike and thechildish were ascribed to the colonized, albeit in different geopolitical contexts and in relation to the level of a perceived threatof the people’s resistance toward colonial ‘civilizing’ missions.
This helps to understand complex processes of infantilizationof the colonized and othered adults. At the center of this polemic
is an image of the European bourgeois boy-child while thesavage stands for the childlike or childish unaccomplished adult.
Unlike the developing white boy, the savage is fixed in terms ofunderdevelopment and permanent childishness. In addition,
the white male child is closer to civilization than the whitefemale child.44 And yet, nowhere in the polemic that shaped andstill shapes the modern notion of childhood as a stage of41

Braidotti, “Dympna and the Figuration of the Woman Warrior”; Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System”; McClintock, Imperial Leather.
42
Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System”; McClintock,
Imperial Leather; Rollo, “The Color of Childhood”.
43
Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, f. 16.
44
Castañeda, Figurations; McClintock, Imperial Leather; Rollo, “The Color of Childhood”; Nandy, The Intimate Enemy.

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12. THE CHILD AS THE OTHER

development, irrationality, unruly passions, and problematic
resistance is the child of the colonial Other – the Other of childhood per se – represented. In this context, the child as the Other
is not merely othered but can be viewed as a subaltern, the figure
lacking a figuration altogether.45 Sandrina de Finney makes asimilar remark concerning an absent indigenous analysis in girlhood studies.46 Similarly, Sarada Balagopalan notes how ‘indigenous’ childhoods, which are often displayed as ‘discrete categories’, are rendered invisible in a univocal and hegemonic idealof a western model of childhood.47 (Girl)children who do notdisplay or are assumed as unable to display the ‘right’ sense ofagency and knowledge – which in western societies are thosechildren who are in schools and part of peer cultures – become
the very pre-modern childhoods. Such differentiations of childhoods, according to Balagopalan,continues to serve the project of modernity as constructed in
the European imaginary, that we will be able to invoke boththe premodern and the history of the modern in the Third
World, to critique the global circulation of a modern westernchildhood as the hegemonic ideal.48

The childhood Other, then, is not to be conflated with a common
conceptualization of the child as the (adult) Other. The childhood Other is not adulthood but marginalized, othered childhoods themselves that remain absent in critical discussions
about the child as the adult Other or infantilized adults.
Only in the encounter between postcolonial feminist scholarship and critical childhood studies is such an analysis of otherness possible. In this vein, using the Other to say something45

For example, see Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”.
de Finney, “Under the Shadow of Empire”.
47
Balagopalan, “Constructing Indigenous Childhoods”; See also Sandrina de Finney,“Under the Shadow of Empire: Indigenous Girls’ Presencing as Decolonizing Force”, inClaudia Mitchell & Carrie Rentschler (Eds.), Girlhood and the Politics of Place (NewYork & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016), ff. 19–37.
48
Balagopalan, “Constructing Indigenous Childhoods”, ff. 32–33.
46

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

about the child as a figuration or actual children and childhoods
becomes, to paraphrase Keith Pringle, both an epistemologicaladvantage and an epistemological danger.49 The epistemologicaladvantage, as discussed above, lies in highlighting children as asocially disadvantaged group in adult-centric societies andknowledge production, including critical schools of thought.50
Feminist and postcolonial school of thought reminds us of the
myriad of epistemological disadvantages resulting from simplistic conceptualizations of power. Besides including only somechildhoods, non-normative childhoods are thought of in rather
static ways and without acknowledging how colonialism andmodernity have transformative power over them too.51

Discussion: Analogy in Dissonance?
This chapter has discussed some epistemological advantages
and dangers of using the notion of Otherness in relation to thechild as a figure (the child Other) and childhoods that are
excluded from dominant ideas about childhood (childhood
Other). I have argued that the child, as the Other, occupies acentral place in some postcolonial and critical analyses. Yet, evenwith this centrality of the child in analyses of power, the genericconceptualization of children it reproduces renders many relations of power invisible. By deconstructing the colonial imaginary, not only is White supremacy disturbed as natural, but also
the subordinate position of children. However, elaborations on
the latter leave many chapters yet to be written. As discussed,
critical childhood studies have challenged the idea of childhoods
representing the ontological origin of the adult human or thepath toward civilization and maturity. Yet, childhoods still
figure as theoretical resources in philosophical, feminist and49

Keith Pringle, “Epilogue: On Developing Empowering Child Welfare Systems and the
Welfare Research Needed to Create them” in Hannele Forsberg & Teppo Kröger (Eds.),
Social Work and Child Welfare Politics: Through Nordic Lenses. (Bristol: The Policy
Press, 2011).
50
Castañeda, “The Child as a Feminist Figuration”; Figurations; Rollo, “The Color ofChildhood”.
51
Balagopalan, “Constructing Indigenous Childhoods”.

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12. THE CHILD AS THE OTHER

poststructuralist conceptualizations of the pre-subjectal, thealternative and modern power itself.52 Moreover, using words
such as ‘infantilized’, ‘childish’, or ‘childlike’ imply epistemological dangers. These words and the ways in which they areused not only describe processes of othering and degradation of
adults but also of anything related to children and childhoods.
Consequently, the childlike continues to be viewed as something
less vis-à-vis the adultlike. As pointed out by Toby Rollo, toaddress childhoods without reproducing the idea of children as
inferior, postcolonial feminists are forced to abandon themodernist project of imagining equality for whatever andwhoever fulfils the status of the rational, mature adult Human.53
Thus, while contesting adult power, the child as the Other still
portrays a generic and decontextualized childhood. The issue of
why axes of power other than age become invisible even in many
feminist analyses, I argue, has to do just as much with conceptualizations of children and childhoods as much as it doeswith feminism and, to paraphrase Castañeda, the subject offeminism.54 The child as the Other of feminism gives theimpression of feminism as adult-centric but also as white.
In contemporary feminist theory, the analogy of the Other isheavily inspired by postcolonial scholarship and other scholarship of the margin, which have decentered dominant ideas of
Woman, and which yet looms largely absent in discussions
about childhoods. This may be because critical theory lacks
interest and insight into children’s lives and the tools for analysis
that are not easily applied to child subjects. Thus, it is worth
considering how conceptual tools such as gender, sexuality, raceand class, which are used to analyze power have historicallyenabled conceptualizations of certain forms of othering overothers. The question is less which analytic tools we use, butrather which associations they evoke or how we use them. The
52

Castañeda, “The Child as a Feminist Figuration”; Figurations; Rollo, “The Color ofChildhood”.
53
Rollo, “The Color of Childhood”.
54
Castañeda, “The Child as a Feminist Figuration”.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

notion of the Other seems to bear the tendency of ending up
with, to borrow Sara Ahmed’s55 term, ‘sticky’ biases and categories like those encountered in other intersectional theorizing.
Queer theory has made visible stereotypes of othering where ‘thehomosexual other is White, the racial other is straight’.56 In asimilar manner, I have argued that the racialized Other is assumed to be adult and the child as the adult Other is assumed tobe white, middle-class and as feminists and girlhood studies
scholars have noted, possibly a boy-child. In this chapter, I haveargued that the analogies, both when considered separately andin relation to each other, fail to give justice to othered adults andchildren alike. Instead, they imply the vanishing of certain subjectivities, paradoxically even in advanced analyses of the Otherof the subject. This chapter adds racialized children and their‘disappearance […] from theoretical and political considerations’.57 As I have tried to show, childhoods bring new contexts
into this picture, opening up for alternative combinations oftools other than age for analyses of power. They also show thesetools being unstable, albeit ‘sticky’. Axes of power such as
gender, sexuality, class and race are heavily interconnected withadult worlds. An epistemological advantage of bridging feminist
scholarship with critical childhood studies lies in their possibility to transform these categories to understand what sexuality means in a 5-year-old child’s life or what class and livelihood
is for a 10-year-old, beyond mere analyses of parents’ educational backgrounds and statuses.58
Children and Otherness, moreover, are constituted throughrepresentations of agency or lack thereof.59 Children resist not
55

Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004).
Puar, Terrorist assemblages, f. 32; see also Sabsay, “The Emergence of the Other Sexual
Citizen”.
57
Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues”, Postcolonial
Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2014, ff. 115–121, f. 119; see also Lugones, “Heterosexualism andthe Colonial / Modern Gender System”; Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”.
58
For example, see Abebe & Ofosu-Kusi, “Beyond Pluralizing African Childhoods”;
Angelides, The Fear of Child Sexuality.
59
Angelides, The Fear of Child Sexuality; see also McClintock, Imperial Leather; Meyer,“The Moral Rhetoric of Childhood”; Rollo, “The Color of Childhood”.
56

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12. THE CHILD AS THE OTHER

only the adult world but also ideas about childhood, peer cultures and gender, sexuality and class stereotypes. In these resistances or the threat of these resistances, othered childhoods
become visible. From such a perspective, childhoods should beof great concern for feminist scholarship dedicated to analysesof multiple and intersecting axes of power, including resistance.
Critical childhood studies, girlhood- and boyhood studies
have made significant contributions in this regard, including to
the world of theories that influence views on children and childhoods.60 Despite these contributions, developmental psychology
still holds a very important place in the theoretical landscape ofchildhood. Following this, it becomes an epistemological obligation to ask how postcolonial feminism can contribute to childhoods after having excluded them for decades and how toreclaim childhoods from developmental psychology and life
sciences or age-based universalist rights discourses. The disciplinary distinctions produce theoretical divisions between what
appears to be the societal world of adults and the psychologizedde-politicized child world, even though the concerns they face
are the same.61 From this point of view, epistemological advantages and dangers relate to the location of childhood in certain
disciplines and the epistemological limitations of certain knowledge production that continue to naturalize relations of powerin childhoods while addressing the same as “inequalities” inadulthoods. The proposed bridging urges a prompt answer as towhether feminism is invested in women – however, multiple
and contradictory constructed – or if the subject of inquiry ismore acutely related to intersecting power relations. If the latteris the case, how come feminism remains adult centered?
Critical childhood studies and postcolonial feminist studies
share the same interdisciplinary faith that requires bridging with60

Balagopalan, “Constructing Indigenous Childhoods”; Mitchell & Rentschler (Eds.)
Girlhood and the Politics of Place.
61
Burman, Developments; Deconstructing Developmental Psychology; Firestone, The
Dialectic of Sex; Knezevic, Child (Bio)Welfare and Beyond; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,“How to Bring Your Kids up Gay”, Social Text, Vol. 29, 1991, ff. 18–27; Thorne, “ReVisioning Women and Social Change”.

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other schools of thought.62 Only by bridging critical childhood
studies and postcolonial feminism can ‘undutiful daughters’63
become a designation in the full sense of the phrase.

62

Joanne Faulkner & Magdalena Zolkos, Critical Childhood Studies, and the Practice ofInterdisciplinarity: Disciplining the Child (Children and Youth in Popular Culture)(Lanham, Boulder & London: Lexington Books, 2016); Viruru, “The impact of postcolonial theory on early childhood education”; Gloria Wekker, “The Arena of Disciplines: Gloria Anzaldúa and Interdisciplinarity” in Rosemarie Buikema & Iris van derTuin (Eds.), Doing Gender in Media, Art, and Culture (London & New York: Routledge,2009).
63
Braidotti, “Dympna and the Figuration of the Woman Warrior”, f. 244.

250

Chapter 13
The Emotionalization of Burnout in the
Health Care Sector
Ylva Gustafsson

During the last forty years, the healthcare sector has gone
through several major changes. An important positive change
has been the introduction of patient-centered care. The increasing interest in the patient’s perspective was part of a significant
societal shift toward acknowledging structural patterns of injustice and oppression in society. However, it was also a specificreaction against the strongly authoritative and cold attitude
toward patients, which was still influential among medical professionals in the 1950s. At that time, doctors and nurses were
supposed not to get too emotionally involved in their patient’s
suffering. In the 1970s, this approach was beginning to bequestioned. There was widespread public discussion concerning
injustice, cruelty, and callousness in health care, and there was a
growing awareness of the importance of understanding andrespecting the individual patient’s perspective and opinions
concerning medical treatments. As a result, patient-centeredcare is today a central feature of nursing ethics.
However, in the 1990s, many countries were struck by a deep
economic depression and consequently, there were large-scale
cutbacks in staffing numbers. So-called New Public Management was also implemented in the healthcare sector. The mainfeature of New Public Management was that it adopted perspectives from the private business world and implemented these in
the public sector. New Public Management is often described asa rationalization of institutions with cutbacks on staff, tighter
working schedules, and stricter control of the production ofservice. However, New Public Management did not only lead toa rationalization but also a new kind of emotionalization ofhealth care. While nurse work had previously primarily been251

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

described in ethical terms, nurse work was increasingly described in emotional terms.
Because of the large-scale rationalizations in the healthcare
sector, an increasing number of nurses suffer from stress andburnout. Though it is generally acknowledged that structural
cutbacks cause these syndromes, burnout is today often described as an emotional reaction. It is also suggested that nurses
should be trained in resilience to tackle the increasingly stressful
working conditions in the healthcare sector. My aim in thispaper is to discuss the meaning of burnout in the healthcare
sector and what I will call an emotionalization of both nurse
work and burnout.
The chapter proceeds in the following order: I begin by questioning the tendency to describe burnout among nurses as anemotional reaction. I argue that the stress that nurses describe
often is ethical. Furthermore, I argue that one can see a tendency
to “emotionalize” ethical situations in care work, which reflects
the influence of emotional intelligence theory. Furthermore, I
argue that the stress nurses experience, specifically in Nordic
elderly care, deeply reflects structural changes due to New Public
Management. These structural changes have led to a disintegration of the whole meaning of patient-centered care. The
experience of stress and burnout among workers in Nordic
elderly care is then not a mere emotional reaction but ought tobe understood as an experience of the disintegration of ethicalspace in their work.
In the second part of the paper, I argue that one can see agendered pattern in how nurses’ stress and burnout are described as emotional. I compare how nurses working in thehealthcare sector were affected by New Public Management in
the 1990s with Sari Charpentier’s1 (2007) description of how
middle-aged women in the banking sector were affected by New
Public Management in the 1990s. In both cases, one can see a
1Sari Charpentier, “Ilska som klimakteriesymtom i arbetslivet” [“Anger as a symptomof menopause in working life”] in Kvinnor, kropp och hälsa, Elina Oinas and Jutta
Ahlbeck-Rehn (Eds.) (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2007).

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13. THE EMOTIONALIZATION OF BURNOUT

tendency to emotionalize women’s experiences of stress andexhaustion.
In the last part of the paper, I discuss Elianne Riska’s2 researchon the historical development of stress research on male business executives. Riska suggests that one can today see a shift
toward a neoliberal conception of “hardiness” that normalizes acertain male type that should be able to handle stress. I compare
this normalizing of a male ability to cope with stress with theclaim that nurses should be trained to be resilient and to be able
to handle stress. I argue that one can see a gender and classpattern in how the ability to handle stress is described. The
neoliberal concepts of hardiness and stress uphold a gendereddivision of labor where women are expected to endure stress inworking conditions that lead neither to a career nor a well-paidjob, while middle-class men are expected to endure stress inorder to achieve both a career and a secure income.

Burnout – An Occupational Problem oran Emotional Reaction?
The concept of burnout was originally coined by Christina
Maslach in the 1980s. According to Maslach, people-work withcustomers, clients, and patients puts workers at greater risk ofburnout. Maslach interviewed people working in various customer or patient occupations. Based on these interviews,
Maslach wrote the book Burnout, the Cost of Caring.3 She describes how people working in the social sector tend to sufferfrom a certain kind of exhaustion caused by too much intensive
work with customers, clients, and patients. Maslach argues thata major reason people become burned out is due to problematic
structural patterns at work, such as a too high workload andreductions in staff numbers. Maslach also defined burnout asconsisting of three syndromes: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and de-professionalization. These syndromes are,2
Elianne Riska, “From Type A man to the hardy man: masculinity and health”, inSociology of Health and Illness, Vol. 24, No. 3, 2002, pp. 347–358.
3
Christina Maslach, Burnout, The Cost of Caring (Los Altos: Malor, 1982).

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

according to Maslach, not expressive of personality traits but arecaused by structural problems at work. In a later book, Maslachand Michael P. Leiter4 conclude: “Burnout does not result froma genetic predisposition to grumpiness, a depressive personality,
or general weakness. It is not caused by a failure of character ora lack of ambition. It is not a personality defect or a clinicalsyndrome. It is an occupational problem.”5
However, even though Maslach emphasized structural problems at work as the major causes for burnout, burnout is today
often described as an emotional problem expressive of personal
weakness indicating a lack of emotional intelligence. For
instance, Dorota Daniela Szczygiel and Moïra Mikolajczak6
write: “Importantly, our findings show that NE [negative emotions] do not always lead to burnout, but that they particularly
do for nurses who lack EI [Emotional Intelligence].”7 According
to Szczygiel and Mikolajczak, burnout in health care is caused
by “negative emotions”, “emotional exhaustion”, and “emotional dissonance”. Furthermore, they write: “…experiencing
NE enhances one’s level of physiological and psychologicalarousal, which, if long-drawn, can have a deleterious effect on
affective and cognitive functioning. […]”8 As a solution to thisproblem, Szczygiel and Mikolajczak argue that nurses should
become more resilient and be trained in emotional intelligence.
This description may sound fine. One may assume that
nurses who feel “negative emotions” or “emotional exhaustion”
may also become burnout. However, if one looks at how nurses
themselves describe situations that are difficult to bear, it is not
4

Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter, The Truth about Burnout: How organizations cause personal stress and what to do about it (San Francisco: Jossey Bass. 1997).
5
Maslach and Leiter, The Truth about Burnout, p. 34
6Dorota Daniela Szczygiel and Moïra Mikolajczak, “Emotional intelligence buffers theeffects of negative emotions on job burnout in nursing” in Frontiers in Psychology, 9,
Article 2649, 2018, pp. 1–10.
7
Szczygiel and Mikolajczak, “Emotional intelligence buffers the effects of negative
emotions on job burnout in nursing”, p. 6.
8
Szczygiel and Mikolajczak, “Emotional intelligence buffers the effects of negative
emotions on job burnout in nursing”, p. 6.

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13. THE EMOTIONALIZATION OF BURNOUT

clear that they can be defined generally as experiences of “negative emotions” or “emotional exhaustion”. For example, consider the following description by Ericson-Lidman et al.,9 wherea nurse working in municipal elderly care tells of situations thatshe finds especially difficult to bear.
It is about pain relief at the end of life//I failed to persuade thedoctor to give the large amounts of pain relief that the resident
needed// It is our job. At the end of life, they should not haveto sit in bed and scream out of pain, fear, and anxiety. We are
obliged to provide relief. It is the law.10

In the case above, the nurse describes how a dying patient was
mistreated by not being administered enough pain relief. This
was a situation the nurse experienced as very difficult. From theperspective of EI, this might be defined as a “negative emotion”
that eventually causes “emotional exhaustion”. However, I think
it would be problematic to describe this case in emotional terms.
The nurse is not talking about emotions but describing asituation of injustice in health care. By talking about “negative
emotions” or “emotional exhaustion”, the ethical criticism in thenurse’s words is ignored.
One thing I am trying to suggest so far is that there is atendency to emotionalize ethical situations in nurse work. Thistendency does not originate from nurses’ own descriptions but
from how researchers on emotional intelligence tend to describe
nurse work. This tendency also obscures the essentially ethicalmeaning of care work, turning it into any kind of customer
work. Instead of assuming that burnout among nurses essentially is an emotional problem, it would be important to acknowledge that nurses describe various ethical situations as exhaust9

Eva Ericson-Lidman, Astrid Nordberg, Birgitta Persson, Gunilla Strandberg, “Healthcare personnel’s experiences of situations in municipal elderly care that generate
troubled conscience”, in Scandinavian Journal of Caring Science, June; 27(2), 2013, pp.
215–23.
10
Ericson-Lidman et al., “Healthcare personnel’s experiences of situations in municipal
elderly care that generate troubled conscience”, p. 220.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

ing. These kinds of experiences seem to be on the increase. AnnLouise Glasberg writes about an increasing number of cases ofwhat she calls “stress of conscience” among nurses, explaining
that, due to New Public Management, this has to do with a shift
in responsibility: “People are burdened by having to makedifficult prioritizations, sometimes in conflict with integrated
principles.11 The responsibility for prioritization has been transferred from the organizational level onto the individual staff
member.”12 My suggestion so far is that when Szczygiel and
Mikolajczak tend to claim that burnout is centrally an emotional
problem, they tend to disregard that what nurses often describe
as exhausting are ethical experiences. By defining nurses’
responses as emotional, they are assumed to be irrational overreactions rather than critical ethical appraisals. The concept ofstress of conscience differs from the concept of emotional exhaustion in that the ethical aspect of the experience is acknowledged.

Emotional Dissonance or Emotional Labor?
Another emotional syndrome that, according to researchers on
emotional intelligence, causes burnout among nurses is that
nurses are often forced to hide their true feelings from patientsand colleagues. Nurses are then often forced to be kind and calmin situations where they might be upset, feel grief or anger etc.
These kinds of situations are described as causing “emotional
dissonance”. Szczygiel and Mikolajczak write:[…] experiencing NE (negative emotions) creates a specificburden upon nurses who, despite their true feelings, must
maintain professional and supportive demeanours. […] Thus,
in many job situations nurses must conceal their true emotional reactions and express emotions that they do not feel.

11

Ann-Louise Glasberg, Stress of Conscience and Burnout in Healthcare (Umeå: UmeåUniversity, 2007.)
12
Glasberg, Stress of Conscience and Burnout in Healthcare, p. 12.

25613. THE EMOTIONALIZATION OF BURNOUT

Which leads to emotional dissonance and feelings ofinauthenticity […]13

Szczygiel and Mikolajczak suggest that the problem of emotional dissonance is similar to what Arlie Russell Hochschild, inher book The Managed Heart,14 calls emotional labour.15
Hochschild interviewed flight attendants who described how
they constantly had to keep a polite and kind appearance eventhough the mainly male customers were often rude and drunk.
Hochschild describes how the demand for a certain kind of
emotional behavior for flight attendants creates a system where
people must accept being treated in unfair and suppressive ways.
These repertoire of emotions upon which flight attendants mustdraw are classical “female” emotions such as kindness, warmth,
empathy, and tolerance. Classically “male” emotions such asanger, courage or pride are not allowed. Emotional labor expresses a standardizing of classical female behavior at work. An
emotional behavior that implies a constant acceptance of unequal and suppressive relationships prevails. This demand for acertain kind of emotional appearance is also often an integral
part of low-status jobs, jobs that may be part-time and that areoften poorly paid, i.e., in dominantly female working sectors.
Even though the concepts of emotional dissonance andemotional labor may seem similar, there are, I think, importantdifferences between them. When Hochschild talks about emotional labor, her point is not to describe an inner psychologicalconflict where flight attendants are not able to express theirinnermost feelings to customers or passengers. Instead, she
describes how the demand for a certain emotional appearanceof constant politeness simultaneously means that flight attendants must accept demeaning and sexist working conditions.
According to Hochschild, this is a gendered problem. When
13

Szczygiel and Mikolajczak, “Emotional intelligence buffers the effects of negative
emotions on job burnout in nursing”, p. 6.
14Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart, Commercialization of Human Feeling(California: University of California Press, 1985).
15
Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

researchers on emotional intelligence suggest that Hochschild’sconcept of emotional labor is similar to the concept of emotional
dissonance, they misunderstand Hochschild’s point. Hochschild is not arguing that flight attendants ought or want to beable to express their innermost feelings all the time. Rather, herpoint is that there is a systemic requirement for the use of certain
emotional behavior that is integral to patterns of gender discrimination and injustice at work. The EI researchers use
Hochschild’s concept in a way that does not acknowledge
sexism or oppression at work. Neither does their concept ofemotional dissonance acknowledge how the experience of emotional labor may be an experience of injustice towards patients.
Sharon Bolton16 quotes a nurse who describes the situation in thefollowing way:
On fraught days when the ward or clinic is really busy and we
get the ‘complainers’ going at it hammer and tongs I walkaround with this stupid grin plastered on my face. This is what
we have to do now, smile at customers and try not to let themgo home unsatisfied. Well, if I was them I’d be unsatisfied.
They are getting less than they used to. They used to get mytime and attention. Even if we were a bit stern with the‘complainers’ at least they knew where they stood and weremade to understand that health service can only do so much.
But now? We go around smiling at them like everything is
alright when it isn’t. And what is that smile worth? Nothing.
I’m seething inside and can’t wait to finish my shift.17

What the nurses are critical of here is not the need for care andattention toward patients. Neither are they saying that the
problem is that they cannot reveal their negative emotions to thepatients. Nor, for that matter, are they critical of the need tobehave kindly and politely toward patients. Rather, they are
criticizing a conception of patient-centered care that is being
16
Sharon Bolton, “Changing faces: nurses as emotional jugglers”, in Sociology of Healthand Illness, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2001, pp. 85–100.
17
Bolton, “Changing faces: nurses as emotional jugglers”, p. 94.

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hollowed out, where there is an increasing demand for superficial politeness, with less time to really talk with, listen to andcare for patients.
Bolton’s description reveals how there has been a systematic
reduction of the meaning of patient-centered care since the1990s, with less time to seriously attend to patients while asurface impression of good care is still being kept up. The problem that the nurses describe is not that they experience emotional dissonance. Rather they describe how they must be dishonest toward the patients about the bad quality of the care.
Again, this is not essentially a personal emotional problem but
an ethical problem reflecting how the fragmentation of work
leads to a loss of space for honesty.

The Corrosion of Elderly Care
In his book The Corrosion of Character,18 Richard Sennett describes how working life has changed during the late 20th century
because of the tightening of neoliberalism’s grip. According toSennett, one great change concerns the meaning of time and anincreasingly “flexible” working life. Today’s working life has
become more “flexible”, meaning that people often are employed on short-term contracts and are also expected to be open
to many job changes throughout their lives. However, according
to Sennett, this increasingly flexible working life also profoundly
affects who we are: “Perhaps the most confusing aspect of flexibility is its impact on personal character”.19 According toSennett, character entails a capacity to see life, including workand personal relationships, as long-term commitments. The
concept of character is thereby connected with trust and reliability. I think one can see a fragmentation of trust and reliability
in the nurses’ description in the quote from Bolton above. With
today’s working life emphasizing adaptability to a fast pace andconstant change, there is no room for long-term commitments
18
Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, the Personal Consequences of Work in
the New Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.)
19
Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, p. 10.

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and trustful relationships. In this sense, the fragmentation oftime in today’s working life leads to a fragmentation character.
Sennett further argues that the concept of character gains its
meaning through certain kinds of concrete patterns of living
where time is itself narratively significant. When working life is
cut up into pieces, our life narratives become fragmented. “Theconditions of time in the new capitalism have created a conflict
between character and experience, the experience of disjointed
time threatening the ability of people to form their characters
into sustained narratives.”20 Sennett describes this fragmentationof narrative as mainly affecting an individual’s conception of life.
However, I think a fragmentation of narrative also can be seen
on an interpersonal level in elderly care provisions in the Nordic
countries. A big change here is that the time to work withindividual patients has been cut up into tiny parcels. These
structural changes in the healthcare sector have been studied byMarta Szebehely,21 professor in social work at Stockholm university, with specific focus on elderly care in the Nordic countries. She describes how work in elderly care has changed withrespect to time. The change has not only to do with large-scale
reductions of staff numbers, but also with the fragmentation ofworking time. The structure of care has changed so that carework has been cut up into small pockets of time. This means thatcare workers have to take care of more elderly persons per day,meaning they have less time for each visit. Szebehely describes
this as “an assembly line mentality” influenced by work at hospitals that has now been introduced into elderly care. While care
workers in what Szebehely calls the ‘traditional home care
district’ cared for three elderly people per day, care workers at
the more modern ‘service house’ cared for nine each day. Whilecare workers in the traditional district had about 1.37 hours per
patient, the care workers in the ‘service house’ generally had six
20

Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, p. 31.
Marta Szebehely, “Vårdbiträdets vardags vid traditionell hemtjänst och vid servicehus”, in Rosmari Eliasson (Ed.), Egenheter och allmänheter, en antologi om omsorg och
omsorgens villkor (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1992.)

21

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13. THE EMOTIONALIZATION OF BURNOUT

minutes per elderly client. This fragmentation in working time
per client affects both the practical work as well as the relationship between the care worker and the elderly client. In a Finnish
report on elderly care by Teppo Kröger et al.,22 the authors notethat between 2005 and 2015, the number of home care workers
who go to the shop for their clients decreased from 20% to 4%,
while the number of home care workers who cook food for theirclients has decreased from 17% to 12%. What is more, thenumber of home care workers having time to drink a cup ofcoffee with their elderly clients has decreased from 25% in 2005
to 5% in 2015. That is, when time has been cut up into tiny
parcels, there is no more time to do things in a way that createsroom for social ways of being together. There is a big difference
between cooking food for a person and bringing them a readymade meal. When you cook food, there is room for talking withthe client about daily matters. Likewise, the fact that there is notime to drink coffee with their elderly clients means less roomfor having a conversation with them. This is a fragmentation of
narrative time in an interpersonal sense, in that there is no timeto create personal bonds between client and care worker.
Some of the erosion of the caring profession also shows in the
introduction of new forms of control. Today, home care workers
are obliged to register the times of visits on their mobile phones
once they have made their house call. Here one could assume
that the increased control is a way of protecting the client’s
rights. However, strict control seems to be more about cost savings than safeguarding the rights of the client. As the Norwegian
researcher Mia Vabö points out, this system results in the care
worker not being able to stay and chat for a few minutes at thedoor with the elderly when leaving.23 An important gesture ofordinary respect and concern is thus undermined. At the sametime, as control is increasing, the care workers say they have22

Teppo Kröger, Lina van Aerschot, Jiby Mathew Puthemparambil, Hoivatyö muutoksessa, Suomalainen vanhustyö pohjoismaisessa vertailussa (Jyväskylän Yliopisto,
YFI julkaisuja 6, 2018.)
23
Mia Vabø. “Mellan traditioner och trender”, in Marta Szebehely (Ed.), Hemhjälp i
Norden -illustrationer och reflektioner (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2003).

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fewer possibilities for contact and communication with colleagues and foremen.
It is evident that homecare workers have ever diminishingtime for social support and interpersonal relationships with theelderly. These changes in working time and increased control
can be described, in Sennett’s terms, as a corrosion of character,consisting of a loss of time for personal contact with the patientsand a loss of narrative space. From the description above, one
can also see that it is not “too much emotion” or too close contact with suffering patients that is the main problem here. The
problem is rather that, there is no room left for any kind of personal relationship with clients in elderly care, nor is there any
room left for treating elderly clients with respect and dignity.

De-professionalization of Women’s Labor andEmotionalization of Women’s Tiredness
In her article “Ilska som klimakteriesymtom i arbetslivet”24[“Anger as a symptom of menopause in working life”] Sari
Charpentier discusses how middle-aged women working in the
Finnish bank sector in the 1990s were affected by substantial
cutbacks and structural changes. According to Charpentier,these women were subjected to increased pressure, stress, andinsecure working conditions. While the women working in thebanking sector before the 1990s had stable working conditions,many now had been placed on one-year contracts that were up
for periodic renewal. This meant that the workers always felt
pressured to work as effectively as possible. It also became
increasingly difficult for the women to advance in their careers,with many experiencing a de-professionalization of their jobs,
by having to work with tasks that were below their education.
Charpentier notes that while also men working in the banking
sector were placed under more insecure conditions, they still
often tended to get an opportunity to advance in their careers.
In this sense, there was a difference between how increased insecurity affected men and women.
24

Charpentier, “Ilska som klimakteriesymtom i arbetslivet”.

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13. THE EMOTIONALIZATION OF BURNOUT

Despite women’s working conditions becoming less secure,with a concomitant de-professionalization of their jobs, women’s experiences of being tired and angry were explained away
as emotional reactions related to the menopause. According toCharpentier, explaining tiredness as emotional and as having to
do with the women’s ageing and menopause individualized theirexperiences and ignored the fact that their working conditions
had changed.
One can see a similarity between Charpentier’s description of
how women in the banking sector were described as emotionaland how nurses who become tired at work are described asemotional. When women working in the banking sector became
tired and angry because of increasingly insecure and stressful
working conditions, their tiredness and anger were attributed tothe onset of menopause. Somewhat similarly, when nurses are
tired and angry because of significant cutbacks in staffing anddue to a fragmentation in the available time to care for patients,
these responses are defined as “emotional exhaustion”, “negative emotions”, or “emotional dissonance”. Both in Charpentier’s description of the banking sector and today’s nurse work,
one can also see a de-professionalization of their work. Charpentier describes a pattern of de-professionalization in thebanking sector where the middle-aged women were put to workwith fewer qualifying tasks than before. Similarly, nurses working in the elderly care in Finland describe how they now must
work with tasks that are below their professional education.
Since basic staffing has been reduced to a minimum at elderly
care facilities, nurses now take care of cleaning, cooking, andlaundry alongside caring for the elderly. A systematic degradation of the caring profession is ongoing. In both cases, one cansee a pattern where tiredness and stress are defined as emotional
reactions and thus as mere personal problems. Structuralchanges in workplaces are left unacknowledged.

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Resilience and the Emotional Blurringof the Ethical Meaning of Care WorkAt the beginning of this paper, I noted that researchers on emotional intelligence, such as Szczygiel and Moïra Mikolajczak,
argue that nurses ought to be trained in emotional intelligencein order to become more resilient and cope better with stress. I
have also suggested that there is a tendency to emotionalize themeaning of patient-centered care and to reduce and ignore theethical meaning of nurse work. Talk about the need for resilience is part of this tendency to emotionalize ethical problems at
work. For instance, one of the major figures in Emotional
Intelligence research, Peter Salovey, writes:
What distinguishes the resilient person from the person who
seldom copes effectively? The answer, we believe, has to dowith emotional competencies – individuals differ in how wellthey perceive, express, understand, and manage emotional
phenomena. These emotional competencies are components
of a broader construct we have termed emotional intelligence.
[…] emotional intelligence influences responses to emotionalarousal and, as a result, plays a significant role in the coping
process.25

Coping or being resilient is, according to Salovey, a matter ofbeing able to handle one’s own or other people’s emotions. Also,
consider the following description by Mary Harper and Jon
Schenk26:
Given the overall positive correlations established between EI
and performance in nurses, knowledge of the EI of successful
staff nurses may have widespread potential. First of all, establishing an EI profile of successful staff nurses provides a25Peter Salovey, Brian T. Bedell, Jerusha B. Detweiler, John D. Mayer (1999). “Coping
intelligently, emotional intelligence and the coping process”, in Coping, the psychologyof what works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.) p. 141.
26
Mary G. Harper and Jan Jones Schenk (2012). “The Emotional Intelligence Profile ofSuccessful Staff Nurses” in The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, Aug 43 (8),2012, p. 354–362.

26413. THE EMOTIONALIZATION OF BURNOUT

descriptive profile that may support the creation of a predictive model of characteristics that are essential for successin nursing practice. This EI profile may form an organizing
framework for employment selection and professional
development throughout a nurse’s career. In addition to employee selection, an EI profile of successful staff nurses may
provide a basis for comparison that can be useful for nursing
school selection.27

The above descriptions by Salovey and by Harper et al. maysound reasonable. Of course, one may assume it would be good
if staff nurses were resilient and emotionally intelligent. But
what does this mean? The problem is that by suggesting that
nurses need to be emotionally intelligent and resilient, thesystematic dismantling of the healthcare sector, which has been
going on since the 1990s, is ignored. Ignored is also how thedismantling of the healthcare sector has seriously affected themeaning and possibilities of providing good care. When Harper
et al. suggest that staff nurses should be trained in emotional
intelligence and resilience in order to handle the increasing
exhaustion and burnout among staff, they ignore that staff’s
experiences of exhaustion reflect serious ethical reactions suchas, for instance, having to mistreat patients because of cutbacks
in staffing. Instead, these experiences are seen as “emotional”.

The Hardy Man and the Resilient Nurse
However, the problem is not only that the concept of resilienceblurs an essentially ethical meaning of care work. There is also a
problematic gendered dimension in the meaning of resilience.
In her paper “From Type A man to the hardy man: masculinity
and health,”28 Elianne Riska discusses research on stress among
middle-class male executives, from the 1950s up to the 1990s.
According to Riska, during the 1950s, there existed a descriptionof a certain type of stressed middle-class man working in the27
28

Harper et al., “The Emotional Intelligence Profile of Successful Staff Nurses”, p. 355.
Riska, “From Type A man to the hardy man: masculinity and health”.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

business sector described as the type A man. While the type A
man was described as someone constantly working, they werealso prone to having serious heart conditions. The type A man
was considered as having a seriously problematic personality,
running the risk of a premature death.
However, in the 1970s, a new, more positive description of
the middle-class business executive appeared, namely the hardy
man, a concept coined by Suzanne Kobasa29 in 1979. Riska
writes:A new generation of middle-class men can look forward to a
new relation between their social position and health: men
can be real men, succeed and still be healthy. In contrast toType A man, who was driven by a seemingly irrational passion to reach extrinsic goals and rewards, the hardy man isconstructed as one who is driven by intrinsic motivation.30

According to Kobasa, hardiness reflected a new healthy malepersonality trait that could endure stress better than before andthat differed from the Type A man who tended to become illfrom stress. Riska quotes Kobasa: “persons who experience highdegrees of stress without falling ill have a personality structure
differentiating them from persons who become sick understress.”31
However, Riska questions this rosy picture of the new hardy
man. She points out that the fact that heart attacks are currently
not as common among men than in the 1950s is on account of
their healthier lifestyles. Middle-class men are today much moreaware of the importance of eating well and exercising than
middle-class men were in the 1950s, with the consequence thattoday’s business executives do not die as much of heart attacks
when compared to the 1950s. Furthermore, Riska argues thatthe concept of the hardy man normalizes a modern male ideal
29

Suzanne Kobasa, “Stressful life events, personality, and health: an inquiry into hardiness”, Journal of Personality and social Psychology, 37, 1979, pp. 1–11.
30
Riska, “From Type A man to the hardy man: masculinity and health”, p. 350.
31
Kobasa, “Stressful life events, personality, and health: an inquiry into hardiness”, p. 3.

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13. THE EMOTIONALIZATION OF BURNOUT

type of neoliberal manhood where it is expected that men should
see the constant pressure at work as a positive challenge and as
a possible career move while they should also exercise and think
about their health. Riska writes:
The constitution of hardiness not only demedicalizes malebehaviour but, more importantly, legitimizes traditional masculinity. Men can now have a comfortable sense of mastery of
their stress level, or may reason that stress might even be goodfor them. Yet what the new construct of hardiness also did wasto confirm that hard work, competitiveness, and self-control
were core values of heterosexual masculinity. […] The concept of hardiness diffuses the social character of masculinity:
masculine behaviour is captured as an individual characteristic and personality disposition rather than as an institution and a set of structures that privilege a certain type ofwhite middle-class male behaviour.32

There are similarities between the research on hardiness and theresearch on emotional intelligence. Both research fields originally focused on a dominantly male, middle-class working sector.
In a similar way, just as hardiness was described as defining
especially modern male business executives and leading to agood career and healthy life, emotional intelligence was described in positive terms as leading to a good career and a happylife for businessmen. Central figures in the research on emotional intelligence were Daniel Goleman, Peter Salovey and John
D. Mayer. Emotional intelligence was claimed to offer a fresh
perspective on intelligence that contrasted with classical conceptions, such as IQ. In contrast to IQ, which was considered too
rationalistic and racist, emotional intelligence was claimed tooffer a more socially aware and democratic perspective on emotions. It was claimed that everyone could learn to be emotionallyintelligent. However, even if researchers on emotional intelligence tended to claim that it was a democratic field of research,
they primarily focused on business leadership in the private
32

Riska, “From Type A man to the hardy man: masculinity and health”, p. 355.

267

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

sector. Like hardiness, a central aspect of the definition of emotional intelligence was an emphasis on emotions as a personal
strength connected with personal virtues in combination withhealth and getting rich. Peter Salovey33 writes: “[…] the appropriate regulation of emotions is an important predictor of good
health and a key to investing money wisely.”34
However, as New Public Management began to affect healthcare in the 1990s, researchers on emotional intelligence shifted
their focus from the business world to the public sector, specifically health care. Even though the concept remained the same,
researchers shifted tone in how they described the connection
between emotional intelligence and personality. The businessvocabulary of ‘emotions leading to success and wealth’, which
had been a central part of the theory of emotional intelligencewhen directed to business leadership, did not fit so well withworking life at hospitals. Suggesting that nurses will become richand healthy if they are emotionally intelligent would not
persuade those in the public health sector of the importance ofthe theory of emotional intelligence. Instead, the most important words connected with emotional intelligence were not“wealth”, “success”, or “personal health” but “resilience”. Thus,
one can see a shift in the meaning of emotional intelligencewhen researchers on emotional intelligence shift their focus
from the business world to health care. When emotional intelligence researchers shift their focus to health care, EI is no longer
defined as having to do with one’s capacity to live an economically secure life or to strive for promotion and eventually
become a business leader because such aspects are generally
non-existent for women working in the health care sector.
The concept of hardiness and the concepts of emotional
intelligence, and resilience normalize a picture of the goodworker as someone open for a modern working life that is fast33

Peter Salovey, “Applied emotional intelligence: regulating emotions to become healthy, wealthy and wise” in J. Ciarrochi, J. P. Forgas & J. D. Mayer (Eds.), Emotional intelligence in everyday life (New York: Psychology Press, 2006.)
34
Salovey, “Applied emotional intelligence: regulating emotions to become healthy,
wealthy and wise”, p. 229.

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13. THE EMOTIONALIZATION OF BURNOUT

paced and shifting; a working life where one is constantly open
for “challenges” at work. That these “challenges” for some mean
opportunities for promotion while for others they are a productof continuously poorly paid short-term contracts is not acknowledged. From the 1990s onwards, with neoliberalism increasing
its influence over society, these concepts have become increasingly popular. One can see a gender and class pattern in how
these concepts are used to describe the personality of the goodworker. The hardy man is a middle-class business executive,
while the emotionally intelligent, resilient nurse has a low-paidjob. The concepts of resilience, emotional intelligence andhardiness normalize a gendered division of labor, according towhich women are expected to endure stress and uncertain working conditions that do not lead to a career or a well-paid job,
while men are expected to endure stress in order to achieve botha career, a secure job and a good income.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I have critically discussed the tendency todescribe burnout and exhaustion among care workers in thehealthcare sector as an emotional reaction. One can see such atendency, especially among researchers on emotional intelligence, where ethical situations in care work are described byemotionalized scientific concepts such as “emotional exhaustion”, “negative emotions”, and “emotional dissonance”. In contrast, I have claimed that the stress and exhaustion nurses describe is often an ethical response. By coining these experiences
as emotional, the ethical criticism expressed by the nurses isignored. Furthermore, by discussing Sennett’s notion of corrosion of character and Szebehely’s description of the disintegration of time in Nordic elderly care, I have suggested that thestress and burnout among care workers reflect a disintegrationof ethical and narrative space in care work.
The emotionalization of stress and burnout in the healthcare
sector reflects a broader pattern of gendered fragmentation ofwork and tendencies to describe women’s experiences of stress269

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

and exhaustion in emotional terms. This can be seen if one compares how care work in Nordic elderly care has been restructured and fragmented from the 1990s until the present with
Charpentier’s description of the restructuring and fragmentation of the working conditions for middle-aged women working in the Finnish banking sector in the 1990s. By describing
women’s experiences of stress as emotional, the structural disintegration, uncertainty and de-professionalization of women’s
work are ignored.
As Charpentier suggests, even though neoliberal policies
have affected both male and female working sectors throughincreasingly insecure working conditions, one can see differences in what this insecurity means for women and men.
Furthermore, stress research individualizes stress differently
depending on whether it is directed toward female or maleworking sectors. As Riska notes, stress research connected withthe development of concepts like the A type man and the hardy
man tended to focus on male business leadership, connecting
stress with economic stability and positive career development.
A similar male focus can be seen in how researchers on emotional intelligence have focused on business leadership.
Furthermore, I have suggested that when researchers on EI in
the 1990s started to take an interest in the female healthcare
sector, the tone in how EI was described shifted. Health andwealth disappeared from the descriptions of EI, and instead, EI
became a psychological strength connected with “resilience”,
implying an acceptance of working conditions that will notprovide career opportunities or economic stability. In this sense,
the neoliberal concepts of hardiness, emotional intelligence andresilience maintain a gendered division of labor where womenare expected to endure stress under insecure working conditions
that do not lead to a career or a well-paid job, while male business leaders are expected to endure stress in order to achieve a
career and a secure income.35
35

This article is a result of two projects: “Critical perspectives on empathy in medicine:the rise of cognitive science and the loss of narrative medicine” funded by the Kone270

13. THE EMOTIONALIZATION OF BURNOUT

foundation, and the project “On justice and the shifting meaning of person-centeredcare” funded by the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth foundation. I want to thank the external
reviewers for valuable comments. I also want to thank the editors for their helpfulcomments.

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272

Chapter 14
Emancipatory Engagement with Oppression– The Perils of Identity in Feminist and Anti-Racist Politics

Oda K. S. Davanger

You never change anything by fighting the existing.
To change something, build a new model and make theexisting obsolete!
– Buckminster Fuller
Am I that name?
– Denise Riley

bell hooks has written extensively about feminism in the U.S.
and its lip service inclusion of black women and non-white
women in both classist and racist ways. hooks has also criticized
the black power movement for a non-revolutionary vision of
emancipation that imitates the power structure of white patriarchy.1 She articulates the interplay of axes of oppression withher concept imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
Here, axes of oppression follow identity category lines such as
gender or race. In this chapter, I will engage with and evaluate
arguments for and against basing emancipatory politics on identity qualifiers such as race and gender. I will argue that thinking
about oppression as operating along the axes of identity signifiers makes it difficult to overcome racism and sexism – even
within emancipatory movements themselves. The difficultyarises when emancipatory movements attempt to change society
while tacitly accepting so much of its structure, even as part ofits emancipatory endeavor, and by reproducing oppressive
1bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press,
1990), pp. 15–16.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

mechanisms (sexist anti-racism and racist feminism). Why rely
on identity categories for emancipatory politics at all? Can
reinforcing the identity given to you in society liberate you fromthe oppression you experience as a consequence of that identity?
I will provide a reading of bell hooks that both invokes andchallenges the axis theory of oppression. I engage hooks poststructurally, where the production of a subject norm necessitates
the production of peripheral deviants to uphold it and wherelanguage plays a vital role in cognition and, by extension, emancipatory politics. This reading justifies a solidarity that does notbase itself on identity signifiers. Next, I respond to objections to
my stance against founding a politics of emancipation on identity. Lastly, I look toward a post-structurally inspired politics ofalienated desire beyond well-established identity-based solidarity. I conclude that to radically dismantle feminist and racist
systems of oppression, any emancipatory politics must go
beyond mechanisms of resistance that engage with the very conceptual premises that uphold the same systems of oppression
they oppose.

Differentiated and Devalued Identities
We tend to think of oppression as restrictive social structuresthat unjustly inhibit people’s freedom.2 However, we also separate forms of oppression conceptually into different axes of
oppression, such as sexism, racism, imperialism, capitalism andclass struggle, and even ageism, discrimination against disability, sexuality, and so forth. Judith Butler denoted the embarrassing “etc.” at the end of the list.3 But this conceptual separationis helpful to see how oppression takes many forms and affects
people differently (see Figure 1).

2

See: Marilyn Frye, “Oppression” in Ann E. Cudd & Robin O. Andreasen (Eds.),
Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp.
84–90.
3
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 2007 [1990]), p. 143.

274

14. EMANCIPATORY ENGAGEMENT

Figure 1: Intersecting Axes of Privilige, Domination, and Oppression.4

However, it may also preclude us from seeing the shared origins
of oppression. As Butler argues, accepting the premises that havebeen used to oppress women perpetuates foundational principles of patriarchy:
If there is a fear that, by no longer being able to take for
granted the subject, its gender, its sex, or its materiality, feminism will founder, it might be wise to consider the politicalconsequences of keeping in their place the very premises thathave tried to secure our subordination from the start.5

4Kathryn Pauly Morgan, “Describing the Emperor’s New Clothes: Three Myths of
Educational (In-)Equity” in Ann Diller, et. al. (eds.), The Gender Question in Education: Theory, Pedagogy, And Politics (New York: Routledge; 2018), p. 107.
5
Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations” in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical
Exchange (New York: Routledge; 1995), p. 54.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Thus, we do not come very far by adopting the same conceptions
used in the oppression we are trying to resist. Like Audrey Lordewrote, it is “an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the
oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.”6
In post-structuralist theory, the fixity of meaning is constantly evaded by the presence of the absence of its others.
Meaning is dependent upon its network of denials and its others
and thus cannot be fixed or fully present. By including thoseothers it excludes, the meaning of the sign can never exist independently of its others.7 Positive understanding is impossible
because the negation of the other is always implied therein. The
separation of the axes of oppression is made possible bydifferences from the norm – which is the white male of means –such as woman and non-white. Sabina Lovibond argues that thisdifferentiation is marked in a lower hierarchical relation tosameness and to the male (see Figure 2).8 Although feminism haslong been critical of this devaluation of difference, hooks is notconvinced that feminism has managed to overcome this philosophical heritage.9 Feminism generally opposes the devaluationof feminine difference vis-à-vis the norm. To a lesser degree, italso opposes the devaluation of other forms of identity categories against the norm of the white male or devaluation of difference itself.

6

Audre Lorde, “‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’” inReina Lewis & Sara Mills (Eds.), Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (New York:
Routledge, (2003 [1983]), p. 27.
7
Lena Petrović, “Remembering and Dismembering: Derrida’s Reading of Levi-Strauss”,
Linguistics and Literature 3:1 (2004), p. 89.
8
Sabina Lovibond, “An Ancient Theory of Gender: Plato and the Pythagorean Table”
in L. J. Archer, et al. (Eds.) Women in Ancient Societies (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
1994), p. 97.
9bell hooks, Feminist Theory, From Margin to Center, 2nd ed., (London: Pluto Press, 2000
[1984]), p. 33.

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14. EMANCIPATORY ENGAGEMENT

Limit (πέρας)Odd (περιττόν)Unity (ἕν)
Right (δεξιόν)Male (ἄρρεν)Rest (ἠρεμοῦν)Straight (εὐθύ)Light (φῶς)
Good (ἀγαθόν)Square (τετράγωνον)Unlimited (ἄπειρον)
Even (ἄρτιον)Plurality (πλῆθος)
Left (ἀριστερόν)Female (θῆλυ)
Motion (κινούμενον)
Crooked (καμπύλον)Darkness (σκότος)Evil (κακόν)Oblong (ἑτερόμηκες)Figure 2: Pythagorean Table of Opposites10

In my reading of hooks, the conceptual separation into separate
axes of oppression is a dangerous master’s tool that obscures theinterlocking structure of these axes under the “ideology ofdomination.”11 Each axis of oppression is a devalued difference
from the norm, much like in Pythagoras’ table of opposites.
One of hooks’ main and recurring arguments is that conceptually dividing oppression into axes mistakenly leads to thethought that they can or should be treated separately. She writes,“[…] challenging patriarchy will not bring an end to dominator
culture as long as the other interlocking systems remain inplace”.12 In my reading of hooks, the metaphysical division of theaxes affects how we think of oppression in ways that do not serve
the purposes of feminism. For example, although feminism isconcerned with sexism as a form of oppression, hooks argues
that this understanding of feminism as primarily concernedwith sexist oppression is ethnocentric. It is ethnocentric because
it first and foremost pertains to the experiences of white women,
10

Aristoteles, Metaphysics in Hugh Tredennick (trans.), Aristotle in 23 Volumes,
Vols.17, 18, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1989 [1933]), 1.988a23–27.
11bell hooks, Ain’t I a woman, Black Women and Feminism (London: Pluto Press, 1981),
pp. 194–195.
12bell hooks, Writing Beyond Race, Living Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge,2013), p. 36.

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who can more easily isolate gender as a singular axis of oppression. According to hooks, “ethnocentric white values” haveconstructed within feminism a “priority of sexism over racism,”
which does not reflect the reality of lived experience for women
suffering from racist and sexist oppression.13 As such, the language that separates racism from sexism is misleading to mostof the women feminism fights for. The uncritical conceptual
acceptance of different axes of oppression inhibits an understanding of the overall interlocking oppressive structure, making it more difficult to dismantle, since conception and language
precede and inform political and strategic efforts.

Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy
by Divide and Conquer
The ‘system of domination’ is based on upholding the norm and,by extension, the othering of those who differ from the norm.
Therefore, any feminist struggle to eradicate sexism will belimited as long as this basic structure is maintained. Firstly, thenorm cannot be dismantled by achieving gender or racialequality alone. Secondly, as long as the ideal of freedom aspired
to by feminism is provided by the freedom currently enjoyed by
the norm, this freedom will also be built upon the differentiationand devaluation of others, which is inconsistent with feminist
values such as ‘equality for all’.14 In this section, I will account forthese two aspects in more detail.
For the first point, I want to emphasize hooks’ term imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that she coins to
describe the ‘ideology of domination’. Encompassing multiple
axes of oppression in this concept is an attempt to provide “away to think about the interlocking systems that work together
to uphold and maintain cultures of domination”.15 The crux of
my argument is the following: Emancipation strategies that conceptually separate the axes will support the status quo of supre13

hooks, Feminist Theory, p. 53.
hooks, Writing Beyond Race, p. 36.
15
hooks, Writing Beyond Race, p. 4.
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14. EMANCIPATORY ENGAGEMENT

macy. These axes of domination – including, but not limited to,imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy –depend on and sustain one another to uphold the norm. hooks
argues that imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy
benefits from the division of axes of oppression and seeks to
obscure the mechanisms of oppression by letting aspects of thesystem be challenged separately, conceptually and temporally,
but never all at once.16 She writes,
Since dominator culture relies on interlocking systems […] tosustain itself, it seeks to cover up the connections between
these systems. Or it allows for only one aspect of the system
to be challenged at a time: for example, allowing anti-racist
critiques while silencing anti-capitalist or anti-sexist voices.17

I find it helpful to think of this ideology of domination as a
many-legged stool. Imagine a stool with the ability to regrow
new legs, each leg represents an axis of oppression, and thestool’s seat represents the established norm. If this stool had
three legs, attacking one sole leg – say, sexism, would be enoughto topple the stool for good. Since the stool has as many legs as
there are axes of oppression, the stool will have many other legs
to stand on while the one is under siege. Because the language ofthis epistemological framework takes these axes as given, it
shapes our conception and affects the formation of emancipation politics, instead of simply articulating our understanding.
This feminism plays by rules of hierarchy and domination,
striking only one leg of the many-legged stool. But to think andact differently, we need to speak and conceive differently.
The second point is that feminist ideology looks to the statusof the norm for an idea of what liberation is. If feminism takes
the norm – white men (of means) – as the standard for freedom
or equality, then feminism’s vision of emancipation is oppressive. The difference-identity dyad upholds one identity as the1617

hooks, Writing Beyond Race, p. 24.
hooks, Writing Beyond Race, p. 34.

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norm over and above others. Therefore, having the norm inform
visions of emancipation, freedom, and equality for feminism
and anti-racism complicates matters. According to hooks, it is a
mistake to think that sexism can be eradicated by a “movementthat aims to make women the social equals of men”18 because
men are not equal either. There is no ‘liberation’ for black
women to become the equals of black men because black men
are also oppressed. If feminism is about making women equal to(white) men, feminists have made a goal for themselves thatinvolves the domination of others. Instead, emancipation without domination requires the production of a new epistemological framework that is not reliant on the master’s tools.
Finally, it is important to differentiate between resistancestruggle, on the one hand, which may be subversive and destabilizing, and actual substantive change, on the other, which dismantles and supersedes an overarching system. Resistance canbe done within the confines of the mechanisms of oppression.
In contrast, substantive change entails risking what you have(identity qualifiers of difference) for what you do not (politicalequality). Therefore, I suggest that political identity signifiers
should not be the foundation of emancipation movements. In
the next section, I explore and respond to objections to abandoning political strategies based on identity qualifiers.19

Objections to Discarding Identities(1) Several feminist theorists argue that coming together aroundthe lived experience of being gendered or racialized is necessary
for political agency. This position fears, according to hooks, thatwithout a common, unified notion of identity – blackness foranti-racist struggle or womanhood for feminist struggle – theground for organized resistance is unstable.20 For example, Lois
18

hooks, Feminist Theory, p. 19.
By ‘identity qualifiers,’ I am referring to ‘forced’ political identities of difference thatpeople are immediately categorized as, such as sex or race, rather than personal identities.
20
hooks, Yearning, p. 249.
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14. EMANCIPATORY ENGAGEMENT

McNay argues that the phenomenology of gender is central tofeminism’s ability to analyze oppression, which is necessary forbuilding political consciousness and agency.21 Phenomenological accounts of similar experiences of oppression lead McNay tohold that the “critique of identity is overstated”.22 Instead, myposition risks what McNay calls “social weightlessness”23, where
theory fails to reflect the phenomenological and material realityof the oppressed.
Granted, it is the collective experience of oppression that
leads to its coordinated resistance. It does not, however, followthat resistance must tread the path laid out for it by the systemof that oppression. One might as well say that oppression is whatis necessary for a politics of emancipation. But not all politicalagency is equally effective. Although consciousness-raising andfinding collective oppression along identity lines is useful forunderstanding mechanisms of oppression, it does not followthat emancipatory politics should be based on those identity
axes. As Chandra Mohanty argues, one of the problems withbasing an emancipatory politics on political identity qualifiers isthat it binds a group together by a “sociological notion of the‘sameness’ of their oppression”.24 Shared phenomenology also
becomes a way of “characterizing and defining groups in termsof their victim status”.25
But identity politics as coordinated resistance can also assert
forced or oppressive identities. The celebration of difference asa valuable political principle requires categorizing identity into
groups that suppress internal differences, reproducing the
epistemological models that justified identity-based oppression
in the first place. For example, the homogenization of cultures
justified colonialism, and the homogenization and dichotomiza21

Lois McNay, “Feminism and Post-Identity Politics: The Problem of Agency”, Constellations 17:4 (2010), pp. 522–523.
22
McNay, “Feminism and Post-Identity Politics”, p. 512.
23
See: Lois McNay, The Misguided Search for The Political: Social Weightlessness in
Radical Democratic Theory (Malden: Polity Press, 2014).
24
Chandra T. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses”, Feminist Review 30 (1988), p. 65.
25
Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes”, p. 67.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

tion of gendered identities are similarly used to justify sexism.
We also see these mechanisms at work within anti-racism andsexism, where anti-racist movements can be sexist and feminist
movements racist because the resistance is centered around one
identity axis. Raewyn Connell articulates this homogenizationin the following way: “the problem here is that a claim to identity, instead of simply being a liberatory act, may be buying intoa system of social control”.26 Whether it is the dominators or the
resistors that do so, a homogenizing identity is not without grave
risk of oppression. The use of identities inherited from systemsof oppression continues to be implicated in those very systems.
Writing on racial embodiment, Sekimoto argues that ‘racial
identity’ exists within an ideology that subjectifies and subjectivizes the subject as raced (or, I add, as sexed), here exemplified
by Louis Althusser’s idea of interpellation:
For racialized subjects, there are specific moments that
require them to turn around – both literally and figuratively –and acknowledge the ideologies that mark their bodies as illegal, illicit, or inferior. In this case, racialization is not simply
about significations of bodies of color, but more fundamentally, it is about how the body is co-opted – or recruited– into a particular ideology.27

Assertion by reclaiming one’s devalued identity is undoubtedly
an important remedy for the racialized subject. But the point is,
as Mohanty articulates, that our “analytic strategies and principles carry political implications.”28 When using these identity
categories of difference for solidarity in emancipatory politics,
one neglects that this subjectivation is the enactment of an
oppressive paradigm more so than a shared identity and can,26

Raewyn Connell, “Identity” in Catharine R. Stimpson & Gilbert Herdt (Eds.), CriticalTerms for the Study of Gender (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 167.
27
Sachi Sekimoto, “A Multimodal Approach to Identity: Theorizing the Self throughEmbodiment, Spatiality, and Temporality”, Journal of International and Intercultural
Communication 5:3 (2012), p. 234.
28
Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes”, p. 64.

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14. EMANCIPATORY ENGAGEMENT

unfortunately, impede political agency because it does not separate from the subjectivizing ideology.
(2) The second objection to dismissing emancipatory politics
based on identity qualifiers emphasizes the risk that emancipatory strategies might become irrelevant to those it aims to
help. According to this position, political identity frames embodied experiences of oppression. Therefore, a political strategy
that prematurely seeks to overcome the identity that frames
those experiences is futile.29 For example, this position holds thatthe fact of the matter is that women are already divided into
groups based on identity qualifiers such as race and visible classmarkers. Not acknowledging this fact perpetuates the harmthese divisions make possible. Ignoring the problem does notmake it go away.
Kathryn T. Gines has argued that there is value in “race andethnic based communities–even in the absence of racism andethnocentrism”, and that it is not necessarily pathological tohave a willful attachment to racial identities.30 Shared identity
qualifiers form these communities, and theory should be
relevant to these experiences. Critical race theorists like Gines
are often skeptical of denouncing subjecthood when it seems
integral to justice claims from racial minorities. On this view,
eliminating identity qualifiers obscures the analysis of oppression rather than removing it. Gines distinguishes between postracialism and post-racism to reject the thought that “the longterm goal must be the end of the concept of race” in the struggle
against institutional racism.31 Criticizing what she regards as the
racial eliminativism underlying postracialism, she argues,
Denying that races exist on a physical, metaphysical, and/or
ontological level disempowers people who are targets of systematic institutional racism by denying them not only a29

McNay, “Feminism and Post-Identity Politics”, p. 520.
Kathryn T. Gines, “Conserving Race and Complicating Blackness Beyond the Blackwhite Binary”, Du Bois Review 11:1 (2014), p. 84.
31
Gines, “Conserving Race”, p. 76.
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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

framework in which to articulate the experience of oppression, but also a means to express solidarity to defend against
such oppression. […] [Racism is] thriving unchecked because
many have bought into the false assumption that there can be
no racism without races.32

The same argument can be made for the sexist axis of oppression
and other political identity qualifiers. Gines’ concern is that the
rubric of supposed neutral humanism includes “political structures that continue to disenfranchise under the guise of inclusion,” and that the road to post-racism involves “identifying anddismantling systems of racial oppression, especially institutionalised racism.”33 For Gines, politics that seek to overcome
identity will not only risk the irrelevance of theory but will also
further enable oppression by leaving it unchecked.
My response to this objection is not to dispute that community and shared experiences are empowering, nor that theory
should acknowledge these important features. However, although one may find empowerment from willful attachment to
one’s forced identity, an emancipatory politics should not hingeon the fact that one does. Otherwise, one accepts that thesegroups are, in Mohanty’s words, “somehow socially constituted
as a homogenous group identifiable prior to the process ofanalysis”.34 Organizing emancipatory politics around identity
means accepting and not resisting the identities created to uphold an oppressive system. This is so even for ‘take-back’ initiatives such as affirming and revaluating traditionally feminine
qualities or the non-exoticizing aesthetic revaluation of nonwhite bodies. These initiatives are undoubtedly importantmeasures in resisting racist and sexist values. However, theseattempts to counter the devaluation of differentiation are notenough to dismantle imperialist white supremacist capitalist
patriarchy. A re-valuation of devalued feminized traits and
32

Gines, “Conserving Race”, p. 83.
Gines, “Conserving Race”, p. 79.
34
Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes”, p. 65.
33284

14. EMANCIPATORY ENGAGEMENT

values, for example, care work or emotional labor, does little tochallenge the very gendering of these values. Even the positive
acclamation of one’s designed identity is still an acceptance of
the identity that fortifies the norm. This is so even if accepting
and celebrating one’s forced identity brings moments ofpersonal relief from oppression and permits one to live a life thatis not solely about resistance.
Even when these identities are experienced in empoweringways, basing an emancipatory politics on identity reproduces
the very political logic it resists. Political logic is inherited fromthe previous political system. For instance, Uma Narayan argues
that in India, the colonial discourse has become part of whatshapes nationalist agendas:
The position of ‘the Indian woman’ as someone to be ‘spoken
for,’ in both British feminist and Indian nationalist discourse,
provides a clear example of how challenges to the politicalstatus quo often repeat and replicate aspects of its political
logic.35

When Indian nationalism reiterates colonial discourse, it partakes in the system of domination it sets out to resist. Elementsof the inherited political logic resound in the obsessive focus on
homogeneous national identity, which is based on an antiwestern attitude that results in a reinforcement of patriarchy.
hooks likewise writes that when black liberation is defined bymeasuring access to opportunities and privileges that many
white people enjoy – as it was defined by much of the civil rights
movement – this vision of equality conflated black liberation
with the imitation of white subject positions. Even the moreradical 1960s Black Power movement, which disagreed with thisvision of liberation, was not particularly “distinctive or revolutionary” in so far as they connoted authority and power withmasculinity.36
35
Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, And Third World Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 19.
36
hooks, Yearning, pp. 15–16.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Gines’ concern about political logic is evident in her skepticism toward universal humanism. In feminist and anti-racist
scholarship, the humanist genderless, race-less, ageless, classless,body-less subject is revealed to be a masculinized and whitesubject under the guise of neutrality. I share Gines’ concern
about humanism and her aims to “identif[y] and dismantl[e]systems of racial oppression”.37 However, contrary to Gines, I am
concerned about the cost of using political identity qualifiers as
grounds for solidarity in emancipatory politics. In poststructuralism, the idea is not to assert a neutral subject ‘beneath’
identity qualifiers, but to seriously question and disturb theidentity markers that are imposed upon the subject, in order tolessen their political and societal significance. If the goal of
emancipation is dismantling oppression, it is actually in thebusiness of making something new. Suppose the concern is thata politics of emancipation without a focus on identity willcommit the same errors as universal humanism. In that case, it
is important to note that experiences of oppression are still vitalto any emancipatory politics. Different oppressions give rise todifferent needs, wherein lies the politics. Gines seems either toconflate the idea of eliminating racial categories with ignoring
racism or that the former necessitates the latter. It must be
acknowledged, however, that identity in emancipatory politics
is suitable for measuring and calling out manifestations of
oppression. But I maintain that these efforts can only go so far.
They express resistance in the form of mitigation to increase thevaluation of an identity, but do not dismantle the system of
domination that works along axes upholding a norm. Emancipatory movements would do well to recognize this.
(3) The third objection holds that the identity categories usedin sexism and racism can serve as tools to improve the life
condition of gendered and racialized people. This objection
holds that identity can be used to give political rights to marginalized groups. For example, groups resist oppression by
37

Gines, “Conserving Race”, p. 79.

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14. EMANCIPATORY ENGAGEMENT

embracing their allocated identity qualifiers while asserting
dignity, pride, and demanding respect.38 As such, identity can beat one and the same time emancipatory and empowering, on the
one hand, and constraining and oppressive, on the other. Michel
Foucault, for instance, argued that power is not only repressive
but also available to the marginalized – that the naming of the
oppressed, such as black and woman, gave them a place fromwhich to resist.39 Judith Butler similarly argues that the term
‘lesbian’ can be both oppressive and a form of resistance against
hegemony due to the plurality of the signifier, which may
suggest that although power is oppressive, it can also (perhaps
simultaneously) be subversive.40
To respond to this third objection, I want to elaborate on an
example of identity politics in the legal framework of rights.
Although identity may be a place from which to resist and has
provided marginalized groups tools with which to claim rights,
the politics based on identity are limited in scope. The price topay, so to speak, for identity-based rights is that the claimant ofequality must assert itself qua subordinated. Elizabeth Kiss findsthat instead of dismantling structures of domination, identitybased rights have simply altered them.41 She writes, “ours is an
age less of rights triumphant than of continuing and massive
wrongs”.42 Issues with gaining formal rights are that they leave“underlying social inequalities intact” and “obscure[s] women’s
continuing subordination by appearing to grant women a dramatic moral victory”.43 The feminist appeals to rights are a wayof using the masters’ tools to do their own bidding with mixed

38

Connell, “Identity”, pp. 162–164.
Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, Critical Inquiry 8:4 (1982) pp. 777–795.
40
Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” in Henry Abelove, et al. (Eds.),
The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 307.
41
Elizabeth Kiss, “Alchemy or Fool’s Gold? Assessing Feminist Doubts About Rights”
in Uma Narayan & Mary Lyndon Shanley (Eds.), Reconstructing Political Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1997), p. 19 n1.
42Kiss, “Alchemy or Fool’s Gold?”, p. 1.
43Kiss, “Alchemy or Fool’s Gold?”, p. 14.
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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

successes. Feminists have most often succeeded in mitigating
rather than dismantling.
Likewise, Wendy Brown argues that identity-specific rights
presume a priori subordinated identities, paradoxically necessitating a perpetuation of subordination to claim equal rights.44
The subjectivated may have the same rights as the subject-norm,
but far from the same access to those rights. That is not to saythat Brown invalidates the importance of rights, but she concludes that rights do not serve as a resolution: They “vanquish
neither the regime nor its mechanisms of oppression”.45 The
validation of the feminized or the racialized identity is an altogether different project from dismantling entirely these otheredand peripheral categories that function to uphold a standard
norm. Is it possible to do both at once? Perhaps not – perhaps
we are at a crossroads between ideal and non-ideal theory.
(4) The final objection to relying on identity signifiers inemancipatory politics concerns intersectionality as a feminist
solution to the essentializing risks of identity politics. Even whenidentity signifiers such as ‘woman’ and ‘black’ are used to end
sexist oppression, hooks argues that black women fail to beadequately represented in this language.46 Feminism can be
ethnocentric and anti-racism can be misogynistic. Intersectionality provides feminist analysis a way to recognize how oppression may take different forms along different axes, even simultaneously. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term, thinks
intersectionality as a provisional concept. She admits that her
theory employs a model where race and gender are separate
categories but hopes that the categories will be destabilized byfocusing on the intersections of these axes.47 By taking issue withhomogenizing views on identity, intersectionality has been a
44
Wendy Brown, “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes”, Constellations 7:2 (2000), pp. 208–
229.
45
Brown, “Suffering Rights”, p. 231.
46
hooks, Ain’t I a woman, p. 8.
47
Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Intersectionality and Identity Politics: Learning from Violence
Against Women of Color” in Uma Narayan & Mary Lyndon Shanley (Eds.), Reconstructing Political Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1997 [1995]), pp. 178–180.

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14. EMANCIPATORY ENGAGEMENT

remedy for identity politics by emphasizing that many kinds of
oppression are not adequately represented in the false categorization of multifaceted identities.
Despite these improvements, intersectionality does not strayfar from identity politics. Rather than seriously challenge theaxes of oppression, queer-theorist Jasbir Puar argues that intersectionality’s reverse effects revert the focus back onto white
women: “Despite the decades of feminist theorising on the question of difference, difference continues to be a ‘difference from’,that is, the difference from ‘white woman.’”48 The focus on varieties of difference implies a center from which there is a difference and that the center is reinforced as the ‘neutral’ white
woman, similarly to how the female may be construed as a variant to the ‘neutral’ male. Because of this, an other is unintentionally (re)produced. Puar argues that this other is the womanof color, which is ironic because intersectionality is “meant toalleviate such othering.”49 Unfortunately, intersectional theory
does not delve into how these identity categories mutuallyconstruct one another. Intersectionality falters as a cure forfeminism’s racism issues because it is an attempt to include
women of color in an epistemological system that is alreadyethnocentric without serious attempts to change the system thatbases itself on exclusions of the other. Neither does it replace any
emancipatory politics’ focus on identity. As such, intersectionality attempts to include women of color in a mechanismthat devalues the non-norm (whether the norm is whiteness ormaleness), without serious challenges to that system.
These four objections reveal an underlying tension in apolitics of emancipation. On the one hand, we can assert ouridentity as something to be respected and represented on equalpar with the norm-identity, i.e., the revaluation of difference. On
the other hand, we can abandon the identity that is tied up insystems of oppression, i.e., rejecting the differential and axio48

Jasbir Puar, “‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’ Intersectionality, Assemblage,
and Affective Politics”, Meritum 8:2 (2013), p. 375.
49
Puar, “I would rather be a cyborg,” p. 388.

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matic system of valuation altogether. The former option risks
buying into the structure of the hegemonic norm, which may
end up perpetuating one’s identity as other to the norm. In
addition, this option risks subjugating its others to an internal
norm. The latter risks relinquishing claims to respect and representation in a way that must look elsewhere than the Foucauldian place from where to resist. My point is that resistancecan either bring about substantive change or bring about somechange without actually dismantling the system of domination.
In this way, imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is
still intact but comes to fruition in alternative ways that we thenwork to identify and analyze anew.50 My argument is notdirected against affirmative action, reparations, or movements
such as Black Lives Matter or #MeToo, which are justified
reactions and counter-initiatives to oppression along identity
axes. But what I fear are inverse politics that do not go further inbuilding the society we do want but stop at providing a counterforce to oppressions. hooks articulates this aspiration when
she writes that it is “one of the most significant forms of power
held by the weak” to deny the identity that one receives from theoppressor.51

The Risk of Mirroring: “The Pin Game”
Like a pin game, resistance movements risk mirroring and reaffirming the oppressive power they oppose. Gender scholar
Jorunn Økland has observed that feminists,[…] make ourselves dependent on the same foundation that
we criticize. But exactly this shows that women – feminists
included – do not have a different language and other thought

50

For the racial axis, Ibram X. Kendi coins the term ‘racist progress’ to denote thisalternative fruition in Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas
in America (New York: Bold Type Books, 2017), p. xi.
51
hooks, Feminist Theory, p. 92.

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structures to speak in and from than those given us by contemporary discourse.52

Herein exists an inevitable bind: The discourse that challenges
imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy depends, inpart, on that framework to make the same criticism. The pin
game works by pressing your hand or another object into theframe so the pins that are pressed out form an imprint of theobject. The force of the hand leaves an inverted imprint of thepreceding force. In this case, the hand is anti-oppression resistance, and the pins are the imperialist white supremacist capitalist
patriarchy. When using identity qualifiers in resistance, emancipation movements change the image, but ultimately remain amirror-image that does nothing to change the box or the rulesof the game. A liberation movement that accepts the terms laid
down by the forces of oppression is limited because its counterforce depends on the primary force itself and can only ever doresistance (subversion), not substantial change (dismantling).
The metaphysical presumptions of the division of the axes of
oppression into sexism, racism, etc., affect how we think ofoppression and, thereby, how feminist political efforts areorganized in ways that do not serve feminist purposes. Because
the system in its entirety is based on upholding the norm, as longas that basic structure is maintained, any feminist struggle for
eradicating sexism will be limited. In the words of Gloria
Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera:[…] it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank,shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and52

Jorunn Økland, “Feminist Reception of the New Testament: A Critical Reception” inMogens Müller & Henrik Tronier (Eds.), The New Testament as Reception (Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), p. 153.

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oppressed; locked in mortal combat […] All reaction islimited by, and dependent on, what it is reaching against.53

I have argued that although identity is crucial for phenomenologically understanding one another’s lived experiences
and analyzing how oppression inherent in imperialist white
supremacist capitalist patriarchy takes different forms, it does
not follow that identity should be the rubric for an emancipatory
politics. On the contrary, to avoid the oppositional lockage
illustrated by Anzaldúa and to prevent the reproduction of
oppression within (typically racist feminism and sexist antiracism), emancipatory politics should strive to remove thecondition – not only the symptoms – of the structure of the axesof oppression. In the next section, I venture ‘another route’ ofthe numerous possibilities Anzaldúa promises “once we decideto act and not react.”54

Alienated Desire
Some may find my caution toward identity-based solidarity an
attack on something personal and dear, but it is not. Like hooks,
I hold that feminism needs to be “based on a recognition of theneed to eradicate the underlying cultural basis and causes ofsexism and other forms of group oppression.” Otherwise, “nofeminist reforms will have long-range impact.”55 My stance is not
an insensitivity toward racism or sexism, but rather, in the nameof an emancipatory politics, it is an injunction to forge solidaristic ties on shared desires rather than shared identifications.
Although hooks is skeptical about “forgetting identity”, she
is not particularly loyal to the preconceived notions of identitythat exist in the system of domination either.56 Political solidarity, she finds, cannot be achieved by adhering to the terms set
53
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco:Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), p. 78.
54
Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 78.
55
hooks, Feminist Theory, p. 33.
56
hooks, Yearning, p. 15.

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14. EMANCIPATORY ENGAGEMENTby the ideology of domination.57 Sara Edenheim has alreadyargued that feminism should shift its focus away from identity
and create a politics of desire. Feminist politics of desire asks thequestion, “what do we want rather than who we are” and findsolidarity on those grounds.58 A politics of desire does not takeself-interest as its objective, but a common desire for a common
world without oppression. This desire must be an abstract andalienated desire. By that, I mean firstly a desire abstract enoughthat no matter one’s personal experience with oppression, one
can partake in the desire for a world without oppression systematized along the axes of identity signifiers. However, it cannot be so general that feminism can easily be co-opted by otherpolitical agendas, whether neo-liberal, capitalist, racist or evensexist.59 Second, by alienation, I agree with Slavoj Žižek that theright kind of alienation can be a good thing.60 For feminist
solidarity, alienated solidarity is not based on a community ofsimilar experiences of oppression, nor identity or allyship, butrather on the shared idea that we seek to replace the imperialist
white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and its axis model. This
desire should be alienated because we do not rely on a feeling ofshared identity or experience, but a recognition of a common
desire. Remember: “Eyes on the Prize”. When Ibram X. Kendi
argues that altruism, exceptionalism, and education will not
resolve racism,61 he articulates something like my vision ofalienated desire: We need policies as a basis for emancipatory
solidarity.
What is, then, the role of identity? I propose to use identity
as a tool to measure whether emancipatory politics have been
substantially impactful enough to dismantle or thoroughlychange structures of domination, but not as what unites or pro57

bell hooks, “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women”, Feminist Review 23(1986), p. 129.
58
Sara Edenheim, “Performativity as a Symptom, The Trembling Body in the Works of
Butler”, lambda nordica 2:3 (2015), p. 143.
59
hooks, Feminist Theory, p. 25.
60
Slavoj Žižek, Holberg Lecture 2019, University of Bergen.
61
Kendi, “Epilogue” in Stamped, pp. 497–511.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

vides the foundation for an emancipatory project. A unifying
factor here is a general desire to eliminate not just one’s own
oppression, but also the possibility of one’s oppression. What werelinquish are identities given to us by an oppressive system thathas used these identities in our subjugation. For these identities
are, we do well to remember, forced upon us. We desire tochange that.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I hope to have shown that emancipation movements risk becoming ‘mere’ counter-movements that mirror
oppression inward and become stuck in an inverse counterforce against societal oppression. An emancipatory politics that
employs identities of difference as the basis for solidarity risks
reaffirming the very differenced functions of those identities.
Alienated desire as the common basis for solidarity can address
two problems for emancipatory politics. First, the problem of
the many-legged stool (the external enemy of a politics of emancipation) illustrates the issue of resistance not acquiring substantive change. Second, the problem of the pin game (the internal
enemy of an emancipatory politics) illustrates the issue of stalemate that happens when accepting conditions of axis oppression
while simultaneously trying to dismantle it. These two issues
together often lead to an emancipatory politics that bases thevision of freedom on a norm that oppresses its others, resulting
in ethnocentric feminism and misogynistic anti-racism.
Therefore, feminism and anti-racism should ask not who you
are but what you desire. This can be a foundation for solidarity
that, in lesser terms, risks reproducing the same identity signifiers that uphold an identity norm used in identity-based oppression. Stuart Hall argues that because race must be seen in a
Eurocentric context, de-racifying identity is to decolonize thinking.62 Similarly, I find solidarity not in the personal connection
to our imposed political identities, or similarities in experiences,62

Stuart Hall, et al., The Fateful Triangle: Race Ethnicity Nation (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press 2017).

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but rather by finding freedom in the expression of what we
desire, not what we are told that we are. Through politics basedon this abstract and alienated desire, we can form solidarity withthe potential to dismantle beyond resistance. It is based not on
feeling solidarity but on a vision toward the new around which
solidarity can form.
There is, however, cause for caution. My argument does notsupport post-racial or colorblind approaches to racism, nor agender equality primarily based on masculinist values. Upholding the phenomenological experiences of those with identity
signifiers such as non-white skin, gendered bodies, etc., is vitalfor resistance movements. But I wish to distinguish between
movements of resistance and those that eliminate the historicopolitical significance of the identity sign. Serene Khader convincingly argues that reaching an ideal situation from non-ideal
conditions requires the use of non-ideal tools, even tools that are
useful for racist or sexist practices.63 While I wholeheartedly
agree with her analysis on negotiating oppression in life andcontext, her argument concerns resistance. Dismantling-oriented solidarity, however, must build on premises that do not resist
and fortify imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
My argument may indicate a more significant contention
between phenomenological and post-structuralist philosophiesof emancipation.

63

Serene Khader, “Transnational Feminisms, Nonideal Theory, and “Other” Women’sPower”, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 3:1 (2017), pp. 1–23.

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296

Part 5Openings of Understanding

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298

Chapter 15
Private, Public, Sacred Space– Why gender studies in Particular Should Consider
Sacred Space a Third Spatial Category∗

Jorunn Økland

In this chapter I will show how and why it is helpful to triangulate, or supplement, the private-public binary with a third spatial
category, the sacred, if we want to understand the space offemale speech, agency and activity in the past. In particular,
Graeco-Roman Antiquity had more fine-masked categories ofgender and space than our modern period. Sacred space was not
identical to public space nor any part or subfield of public space,but had its own specific meaning, structure, and position in thesocio-cultural order. This argument troubles and undermines
the received opposition between public male space and private
female space.
I will use ‘private-public’ as the main designation of thebinary in question. In my own work, I have often preferred more
pragmatic categories (‘domestic’ space instead of ‘private’), justas Joan Scott does (‘familial’ instead of ‘private’). But the degreeof semantic overlap with the much more frequently used terms
for these spaces, ‘private’ and ‘public’, means that deviating
terms are more variations of a theme than genuinely new categories.

Theoretical Approaches to Gender and Spatial
Categories in Ancient and Modern History
The feminist thinkers presented in this chapter, mainly Mary
Beard (Classics), Doreen Massey (Geography), Yvonne Hird∗

The chapter was initially the opening lecture of the conference “Rethinking Public
Space” 8–10 March 2018 at the University of Oslo, organized by the network Feminist
Philosophy: Time, History and the Transformation of Thought.

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man and Joan Wallach Scott (both History), all take standard
distinctions between public and private as their points ofdeparture for further reflections on gender and space.
For theorists coming out of the radical British geography
tradition, such as Doreen Massey (and David Harvey), space andtime are not static axes along which things take place, rather,
space and time are mutually dependent modes of relation. For
Massey, “‘place’ is formed out of the particular set of social
relations which interact at a particular location.”1 The set ofsocial relationships constructs and structures the activities
taking place there as male or female gendered, and this way the
spaces themselves become perceived as gendered. But the activity is not the only thing that genders a space. Doreen Massey
states:Space and place, spaces and places, and our senses of them(and such related things as our degrees of mobility) are gendered through and through. Moreover, they are gendered in a
myriad different ways, which vary between cultures over time.
And this gendering of space and place both reflects and has
effects back on the ways in which gender is constructed andunderstood in the societies in which we live.2

The Swedish modern historian Yvonne Hirdman has also written on the interrelation between space, activity and gender. She
is concerned with how the “gender system”, the structure of therelations between different genders, is used as a foundation forother social orders and structures.3 The gender system operates
according to two dynamics. First, the dynamics of dichotomy orseparation, that is the taboo against gender blending: masculine
1
Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1994), 168.
2
Doreen Massey, “17. Space, Place and Gender” in Rendell, Jane, Barbara Penner & Iain
Borden (Eds.), Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (London:
Routledge, 2000: 128–133), p. 129.
3
B: Yvonne Hirdman, Rapport 23. Genussystemet – teoretiska funderingar kring kvinnors sociala underordning (Uppsala: Maktutredningen, 1988).

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15. PRIVATE, PUBLIC, SACRED SPACE

and feminine should be kept strictly separated. The second
dynamic is hierarchy: the masculine is norm. This second dynamic is dependent on and legitimated through the first.4 Hirdman
states: “We know that the “law” of segregation exists everywherewith regard to physical and psychic order. It structures actions,places and characters.”5With her background in historical materialism (= Marxism),
Hirdman finds that the fundamental expression of the law ofsegregation is found in the gendered division of labor and innotions of masculine and feminine. She shows how character,action and place are intimately linked to one another and “standin a legitimizing, reinforcing, dialectic relationship with eachother: sort 1 performs action 1 on place 1; sort 2 performs action
2 on place 2; since sort 1 performs action 1, sort 1 becomes sort
1. If one is located on place 2, one performs action 2 and is sort
2 etc.”6 In my own work, this insight has been particularly
helpful to illuminate how the distribution of ritual patterns ofactions (roles) between men and women serves to represent thesacred space in question as gendered in a particular way. But put
the other way around, her theory also helps us see how theplacing of people in different gendered spaces is an important
way of inscribing gender upon them.
Hirdman does not ask where these dynamics of segregationand hierarchy “come from”, but she does underscore theirunique structuring abilities (Hirdman actually calls them thetwo logics of the gender system). Dichotomies and hierarchies
are tools that always nourish and reward logical thought byordering the world and leaving an impression of understandingor controlling it. They make sense. But referring to Simone deBeauvoir who stated that one cannot be an A without suppressing a B, Hirdman also finds that the two logics or dynamics

4

Hirdman, Rapport, pp. 7–9 and 13.
A: Yvonne Hirdman, “Genussystemet – reflexioner kring kvinnors sociala underordning,” (Kvinnovetenskapelig tidsskrift 1988 3: 49–63), p. 52. my translation.
6
Hirdman, “Genussystemet – reflexioner,” p. 52.
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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

make power structures: what sort 1 does is legitimated byconstructing a contrast with sort 2.7
While inspired by the scholars just mentioned, the current
chapter takes its special cue from Sex and Secularism by Joan
Wallach Scott.8 Scott uses historical evidence to do several things
with the public-private distinction, which she labels ‘politics andeconomics’ (male) and ‘familial’ (female), respectively: First,
Scott presents historical data from the long 19th century when anew, secular realm of society emerged with the separation ofchurch/sacred space from the state. The secular realm wasdivided further into politico-economic and familial spaces.
Thus, secondly, Scott shows (even down to her choice of labels)
that what we perceive to be standard in the public-private distinction is in fact historically contingent. Third, she deconstructs
the public-private distinction as a clear-cut, spatial distinction
relating to historical, material physical spaces (e.g. town halls
and market places versus houses people owned or rented, slept
and stayed in). Especially when it comes to gender, no suchmaterial distinction is stable over time. Instead, she sees thedistinction as a sort of spatialized discourse, a classification ofconcepts and ideas that were associated with each of theirmaterial spaces and in turn linked to different forms of(dis-)empowerment. Scott is far from the first to make thisargument; Hirdman, mentioned above, argued the same basedon social systems theory many years earlier. Fourth, Scottchallenges the false notion that secularism is a guarantee ofgender equality, arguing instead that this notion has served todivert attention from a persistent set of difficulties related togender difference. She also suggests that gender equality becamea primary feature of the discourse of secularism only in the latter
half of the 20th century, with the arrival of Muslim immigrants
in Europe.9
7
For a fuller summary of what I see as the significance of Hirdman’s theory, see overview in Jorunn Økland, Women in Their Place: Paul and the Corinthian Discourse of
Gender and Sanctuary Space (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), pp. 59–60.
8
Joan Wallach Scott, Sex and Secularism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
9
Scott, Sex and Secularism, p. 10 and 17.

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15. PRIVATE, PUBLIC, SACRED SPACE

Thus, Scott demonstrates that gender equality, invoked today
as a fundamental and enduring principle of modern, secularsocieties and their public space in particular, was not originallyassociated with the term “secularism” when it first entered thelexicon in the nineteenth century. Inequality of the sexes waspresupposed also in the spatial articulation of the separation ofchurch and state that inaugurated Western modernity, or inother words: when religious authority yielded from spaces
beyond the walls of churches, religious schools and meeting
places, etc., non-sacred spaces were left in a vacuum. In theory,
they might have become “neutral” and open to full participationby all people.10 In historical practice, it was clear that “secular” at
the time had little to do with changing religious habits, practices
or beliefs among the population, and more to do with changes
in arbitration, authorization, and power.
Western nation-states found it necessary to construct a new
ground for women’s subordination when it could no longer be
grounded in the religious authority emanating from ‘sacred’
spaces (at this time mostly Christian churches). Hence thesecular sphere was further subdivided into private and public,
and women were assigned to the “private”, familial spheremeant to complement the rational masculine realms of “public”
politics, economics, institutions of learning, etc. While Scottdoes not pay attention to important details especially regarding
historical religion and how Christianity was embedded historically in Europe (as opposed to Christianity’s function in the10This optimism has never fared well in practice. In his 1999 article “Secularization,
R.I.P.”, sociologist Rodney Stark argues that the “secularisation theory” is out-dated,old-fashioned and, as the title suggests, the theory is dead and should be left to rest. To
Stark the secularization thesis has failed to be an accurate prediction due to six reasons.
Firstly, it is a myth that there has been a decline in religious belief and participation
because “there has been no demonstrable long-term decline in European religious
participation” and in Europe “levels of subjective religiousness remain high.” Next, heargues that there has never been an “Age of Faith,” as most Europeans did not attend
church during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In fact, Stark highlights that manyclergy were incomepetent and often absent from their parishes. Finally, while there were“periodic explosions of mass religious enthusiasm” (cf. below on the Quakers), theseoffer even stronger evidence against involvement in organized religion. See Rodney
Stark, “Secularization, R.I.P.” (Sociology of Religion, 1999 Autumn: 249–273).

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U.S.), she nevertheless constructs a strong argument for an
important point.
Secularism – the term itself derives from saeculum, saeculare,
meaning age, time, generation – as opposed to what is eternal,
beyond finite time and space, that is, an order of being associatedwith the gods. Humans inhabit the finite world, which is often
subdivided into further spaces roughly equivalent to Western
categories of public, private – and “sacred”. While I still believethat in the present, secularism is the best guarantee of genderequality we have (it is much harder to argue with gods or findhearing among their human representatives….), it is importantto understand secularism as a contingent value of public spacein modern Western societies, an ideology excluding gods ortheir representatives as the final arbiters of matters relating to
public space. Secularism is neither a material, objective featureof it, nor a future prediction.11 Further, the autonomy andauthority that women have held historically in what I here andelsewhere have labelled “sacred” space – while being excluded
from public space – should warn us further from concludingthat female agency and authority is necessarily linked to a secularpublic space. It depends on how the religion in question isconstrued – and how gender is construed in relation to it. It is
this latter point that this article will continue to explore throughexamples from historical societies we refer to as our heritage. I
will make the point that sacred spaces have, to a larger extent
than both private and public spaces, accommodated female
agency and authority.

11

i.e. my opinion is that Stark, mentioned in the previous footnote, partly misses thepoint in his otherwise important critique of the secularisation theory. We have to study
value theory, not sociology, to get a grasp of secularism’s relationship to social andmaterial realities. Further, after multiculturalism, pluralism, etc., it has become clearer
that state-endorsed and -implemented values cannot be imposed on domestic space
without becoming totalitarian.

304

15. PRIVATE, PUBLIC, SACRED SPACEThe Distinction Between Public,
Domestic and Sacred Spaces
Gendering the Public/Private/Sacred Distinctionin the Ancient WorldIn scholarship on women’s lives in Antiquity, women’s ritualroles are often discussed as if they were regular public roles. The
rationale is that religion is an inseparable part of culture andsociety, and such holistic approaches can illuminate e.g., howancient women’s ritual roles were related to their sexual andsocial status. However, the identification of the ritual/sacredwith the public, in the case of women’s roles does not explain
why, if they could have “public” roles in the cult, women could
not have various other public roles. Further, this reductionist
identification of religion with public life, render invisible many
women’s ritual roles.
In ancient public discourse we frequently find genderingdefinitions of space: the authors state which spaces are “forwomen”, and which spaces are “for men”. One example by Philo
must suffice:Market-places and council-halls and law-courts and gatherings and meetings where a large number of people are assembled, and open-air life with full scope for discussion andaction – all these are suitable to men both in war and in peace.
The women are best suited to the indoor life which neverstrays from the house.12

Philo’s quote should not be taken as objective description of
space, or as descriptions of what actually happens in the spaces
in question, as if women were not present in marketplaces and
12

Philo, De specialibus legibus 3.169 (in F. H. Colson, G. H. Whitaker, et al. [trans.] Philoin ten volumes [Loeb Classical library; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1927–1953]). Cf. the striking similarities with approximately contemporary Columella,
De re rustica: 12, Preface 4–5 (in H. B. Ash, E. S. Forster, et al. [trans.] Columella, On
Agriculture: in three volumes [Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1941–1955]).

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gatherings and meetings.13 Different values are attached to different spaces according to what gender they are mostly associated with.
Read within Hirdman’s frame of reference, one could say that
Philo confers importance and power on one space over the otherspace. One cannot at the outset just assume that society functioned according to these rules. It is exactly because the distinctions were not so clear that it was continually important to reinforce them through discourse.14 By representing public space asmale space, ancient public men legitimized the exclusion of
women from power positions, public discourse and processes ofdecision-making. Women were never forbidden to enter public
space even if it was discursively constructed as male.15
While it is not un-common to see the public and domestic as
distinct, binary spatial discourses, it is rare to consider sacredspace as a third spatial category, equally discursively constructed
through speech and ritual action. Is the reason that our cognitive
preference is for binary thought, so that we overlook additional,
distinct spaces? Ritual constructs and structures space by drawing on a gendered, divine cosmology that can often be different
from the rules governing human interaction in public and domestic spaces. 16
13

Among scholars who discuss working women or women who in other ways are present in public space, see especially Susan Treggiari, “Lower Class Women in the Roman
Economy,” Florilegium 1979 1: 65–86; Mary Lefkowitz, Maureen Fant (Eds.), Women’sLife in Greece & Rome. A Source Book in Translation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992): 208–224.
14
John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire. The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in
Ancient Greece (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 6: “to know when any such male lawgivers – medical, moral, or marital, whether smart or stupid – are (to put it bluntly)
bluffing or spinning fantasies or justifying their ‘druthers’ is so hard that most historiansof ideas – Foucault, for all that he is exceptional, is no exception here.” For a more recent,nuanced discussion, see Kate Cooper, “Closely Watched Households: Visiblity, Exposure and Private Power in the Roman domus,” Past and Present 2007, 197: 3–33.
15
See e.g. Ville Vuolanto, “Public Agency of Women in the Late Roman World, in Jussi
Rantala (Ed.), Gender, Memory, and Identity in the Roman World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019: 41–62 (DOI: 10.5117/9789462988057_CH01).
16
Ritual space is just the space that is constructed through ritual, whether it is conceivedof as sacred or not.

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15. PRIVATE, PUBLIC, SACRED SPACE

An important function of certain sacred/ritual spaces wasexactly to transgress the boundaries of proper behavior in publicand domestic spaces.17 With regard to women, this difference ingendered expectations between public and sacred spaces is telling. It is particularly evident in material from ancient Greece:
while the deme (commune) in its political aspect necessarily
remained an all-male preserve, the deme in its religious aspect
operated under a different set of imperatives. As John Gould
states:In the sacred and ritual activities of the community the active
presence of women in the public world (was) not merely
tolerated but required. As priestesses in many of the major
cults of the polis (priestesses of gods as well as of goddesses),… the participation of women is indispensable to the sacral
continuity, the ordering of society.18

In addition to their priesthoods, Gould also lists a range of otherofficial ritual roles for women: in the great religious processions
through the public spaces of the city, as “temple servants” of thecity goddess Athena (tending her statue and weaving her
clothes) and of Artemis at Brauron nearby; as raisers of theritual, sacrificial scream; their “song” in mourning, at funerals,
in the rituals of marriage, and much more. Further, the exclusively female festival Thesmophoria took place at Pnyx, the location where the council of (male) Athenian citizens usuallygathered. This festival was a rite of reversal, in which women didand said many things that could not be expressed by themoutside of the sacred space.19
We note that among Gould’s examples, women’s loud usesof their voice dominate: In her recent book Women and Power,
Classicist Mary Beard expands on how authors in Greek and17

Winkler, Constraints, chapter 7.
John P. Gould, “Law, Custom and Myth: Aspects of the Social Position of Women inClassical Athens,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 100, 1980: 38–59 (p. 50f).
19
Cf. Winkler, Constraints of Desire, p. 193–196; Gould, “Law, Custom,” p. 51.
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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Roman Antiquity meant that the sound of the female voice
disqualifies its owner from opening her mouth in public space.20
Beard gives several examples of how the female voice is
described as equal to the sound of cows, dogs’ barking, or otheranimal sounds. Beard presents these ancient examples of perceptions of women’s voices in public to point out that we alsofind traces of them in modern times, mentioning the habit offemale top politicians (e.g. Margaret Thatcher) attending voiceeducation to make her voice stronger, deeper – and moreauthoritative. But as we have seen, in the ancient world there wasanother conceptual space (sacred) taking place in the samematerial environment (e.g. Pnyx) where women could use theirdifferent voice, and this was seen as vital to the survival of thecommunity.

Women’s Religious Offices
The fact that women could hold sacred offices as priestesses,
servants, patronesses etc.,21 even if public offices were not open
to them, has led many scholars to believe that ritual activity
constituted the primary exception to the rule of “seclusion andexclusion” of ancient women from the public sphere.22 Yet, theseparation between public and sacred space has functioned
differently through history: Compared to ancient Greece, in the
Roman period sacred spaces were less liminal with regard to
women’s place and presence. The female priesthood of Ceres/
Demeter at Rome was characterized as a public office. Such a
priesthood seems to have represented the greatest public honour

20

Mary Beard, Women and Power: A Manifesto (London: Profile Books, 2017), especially pp. 25–34.
21
For further examples of women’s religious offices, see e.g. Lefkowitz and Fant,
Women’s Life, section 10.
22
Cf. Helene Foley, “The Conception of Women in Athenian Drama,” in Helene P.
Foley (Ed.), Reflections of Women in Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 1981): 127–68,“Women in drama do not confine themselves to the domestic and religious spheres towhich they were relegated in reality” (p. 151).

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to which a woman could aspire.23 Even “respectable” matrons24
had to attend rituals in public space to fulfil their sacred obligations. Respectable wives could participate in the festival Thesmophoria, but not go shopping in the marketplace.25 Ancientauthors could therefore mention even women they considered“respectable” in ritual contexts without bringing shame uponthese women or their husbands. Taking place both in sanctuaries and in open, public spaces of the city, the cult activities
of women are not all about “seclusion and exclusion” since in a
way they took place in some kind of sacred “third space” in thesame material environment as “public space”.26 We must therefore reformulate the axiom and say that what women were
thought to represent, was considered vital in sacred space,whether these spaces were constructed as liminal or in directcontinuation with other public spaces – or more conventionally,
inside dedicated sanctuaries.
Summing up, there are significant differences in the ways
gender categories worked in sacred spaces and in the public anddomestic spaces of daily life in the ancient world. Therefore,
sacred space should be considered as a separate space in the
study of gender, and not be conflated with the public – ordomestic – spaces. Surely, ritual is also a place for (social) value
reinforcement, ritual hierarchies can reflect social hierarchies,
but neither in Greek, Roman or Judaean religious cultures were
23

Plutarch, Bravery of Women, 262D (in F. C. Babbitt, et al. [trans.]
Plutarch, Moralia: in sixteen volumes (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1927–1976).
24
Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 13.574B-C (in C. B. Gulick [trans], Deipnosophists Book 6[Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009]): “But thatthe prostitutes also celebrate their own festival of Aphrodite at Corinth is shown by
Alexis in ‘the girl in love’: ‘The city celebrated a festival of Aphrodite for the prostitutes,
but it is a different one from that held separately for freeborn women’.”25
E.g., this “rule” applies only to representation of “respectable” women: there musthave been lots of women out of doors in Greece before Hellenistic times, too. For a very
nuanced presentation, see Gould, “Law, Custom.”26
I have not drawn further on Soya’s influential work to discuss the spatiality of thesacred as a kind of “thirdspace” due to its lack of attention to gender. For other purposes,
his “thirdspace” can be illuminating. Edward Soya, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles
and Other Real-and-Imagined-Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

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women discursively excluded from sacred space even though
they were mostly discursively excluded from public spaces.
In this section I have talked about sanctuary, cultic, ritual,sacred as if they were synonymous. Sacred is the most common
term, which I use as the overarching category. Sanctuary, cultic
or ritual space, on the other hand, are more precise subcategories. Sacred space can be discursively constructed througheither speech, ritual action, or through architecture.

Second Period: Post-Reformation Europe
Although Ancient Greece may be the most pertinent case inpoint, I will present one more recent example from Europe, inorder to show that in spite of constant change, there is still goodreason to consider sacred space a separate category when we
study the space for women’s speech and agency in history.
But first an interlude.
We saw that in the ancient world, women’s agency in sacredspace often took place within the material environment of public
city spaces. In Medieval Europe on the other hand, it was thematerial provision of a women’s monastery that provided theinfrastructure for women-dominated sacred spaces – although
they, too, were ultimately under male-clerical supervision. Running a post-Reformation vicarage or stately home on behalf of ahusband, and with children around one’s legs, gave less space
and time than the nuns had for reading, visions, letter writing
between nuns and between nuns and church authorities, church
politics, etc. In other words, the differences in conditions for
women’s agency in the mentioned three spaces, meant thattimes changed: It has often been lamented that Protestantism,
exemplified by Martin Luther in the 16th century, who marrieda former nun (Katharina von Bora), practically destroyed thespace for female autonomy, power, agency, and literacy when hediscursively obliterated the sacred space of the monasteries as a
distinct spatial category. Instead, he described society as divided

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into precisely private and public spheres (and limiting the spaceof women to the ‘private’, familial sphere). Aligning the monasteries with the public sphere, was his way of getting rid of the“sacred space” of the monasteries altogether. The side effect wasthat the realm of the sacred as a more autonomous space forwomen disappeared, too – for a while.27
The post-Reformation period saw an eruption of sects, andwomen preachers emerged in their “sacred spaces”. The early
period from 1650 is probably more dynamic in Britain, while as
we gradually move toward the French Revolution, other European countries began to take the lead. I have previously presented English Quakerwomen Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole,
who were imprisoned for “prophecy” in 1655 after they extended their preaching activity to public spaces,28 here I will present
Margaret Fell (1614–1702), founder of Quakerism.
The Quaker movement represented the radical end of the
Puritan movement. They believed in the “inner light”, that thelight of/or God resides inside each individual; that therefore
every Christian, man and woman, can speak prophecy, speak for
Christ. George Fox, Margaret Fell’s second husband, is often
credited as the movement’s founder, but in practice his wife
Margaret Fell Fox should be considered the movement’s
founder and George Fox its inspiration and earliest advocate:
She was 10 years his senior, but survived him by 11 years. They
first met when he visited the stately home Swarthmoor Hall,
which Margaret shared with her first husband, the lawyer. She
had opened up the home for religious gatherings – in our terms,
she created a sacred space within the walls of a domestic space.
After her first husband died and Fell married Fox, “it was
27

See Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg(Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). But see also Katharina Schütz Zell, Church Mother: The
Writings of a Protestant Reformer in Sixteenth-Century Germany, edited and translated
by Elsie McKee. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006.
28
See Jorunn Økland, “4. Donne interpreti della Bibbia nella tradizione protestante”, in
Adriana Valerio and Guiseppe Barbaglio (Eds.), Donne e Bibbia: Storia ed esegesi(Bologna: Dehoniane, 2006): 99–116. From prison the two wrote the pamphlet To thePriests and People of England.

311

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHYMargaret who administered the finances, indeed donated her
own fortune, kept track of correspondence at her home at
Swarthmore, visited meetings, and spoke out publicly in defenseof Quakers. Even after the death of George in 1691 she continued with her vigilant activities.”29
In 1666, Margaret Fell Fox published the tractate Women’s
Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures,30
which she had written during one of her many imprisonments(for, among other things, using her home as a space for religious
meetings). The text was based on what was practiced within the“sacred space” in her home, where also husband George supported women’s preaching,31 and was also based on the preaching practices of other Quaker women during a time when priesthoods were public offices and reserved for men. The argument
was built on quotes from Paul’s letters. Paul the Apostle took for
granted that women prophesy and pray in the ritual gatherings(i.e., sacred space) taking place in private homes, but he also told
them to be quiet in some instances. In Fell’s own time, thechurch was a more integrated part of public space. Hence Paul’ssilencing of women during some parts of the ritual were read asa general silencing of women’s speech, by conflating the sacredspace of the gathering into which they were spoken with the
public space of the 17th century. Fell shows how such a readingis wrong and inconsistent. Quakerism quickly grew into asubversive movement protesting that the authority of both thechurch and the Bible had been abused and corrupted. The
Quaker practice of having women preachers and leaders wereconsidered by the establishment as a “monstrous” practice,“condemned as against nature”.32
29

Fulltext in e.g. Moira Ferguson (Ed.), First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578–
1799 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985): 114–127. For more on Fell, see
Jacqueline Broad, “Margaret Fell,” in Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy Spring 2020: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/margaretfell/
30
Selvidge, Notorious Voices, p. 36.
31
See more on Paul’s texts in Økland, Women Place, chapter 6.
32
Barry Reay, The Quakers, and the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1985),

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15. PRIVATE, PUBLIC, SACRED SPACE

This history was repeated several times over the next centuries. It was a recurring post-Reformation phenomenon that
sects tended to be more open toward the spiritual equality of
men and women than mainstream churches. Such sects
gathered in homes or outdoors and often ended up in conflict
when they ventured into “public space”, its establishment andinstitutions33 – until the arrival of universal suffrage and womenpriests. Other sects were quicker to move in a mainstream direction. As they became more institutionalized, integrated into thegeneral public, their radical gender agenda was often discarded.

Space, History, and the Transformation of Thought
As stated above, the way Scott describes the new, 19th century
gendered spheres of the ‘familial’ on the one hand, vs. thespheres of ‘politics and economics’ on the other, overlaps largely
with the standard designations “private” and “public”. In someform, this distinction can be found in pre-modern societies too,
but the configuration of it, which much gender research seems
to presuppose, is definitely a product of the Enlightenment: In
the modern context, the principal focus for Scott, both private
and public are in fact located within the new, autonomous
secular sphere. Within the church’s sacred space, gender divisions continued to be based on a divinely sanctioned genderhierarchy. Hence Scott’s discussion illustrates how the private/public distinction, so fundamental in much gender research, is ahistorically conditioned distinction, just like male/female. And
like the male/female distinction, many historical societies haveoperated with further categories alongside these two sets ofbinaries. It is, I propose, as a third category that we should
understand sacred space, just like some gender models haveoperated with a third gender.
When a secular sphere emerged as independent of the religious sphere, private and public spaces became subdivisions, but
p. 58, quoting from Antichrist in Man by Rev. Joshua Miller (1655).
33
For a selection, see Andrew Bradstock and Christopher Rowland (Eds.), Radical
Christian Writings (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002).

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the religious spheres continued (as many do still) to follow theirinherited sacred space configuration. This is important to point
out, because the history toward women’s equality has often been
written as the history of women conquering public roles inpublic spaces. Thereby it is overlooked how some sacred spaces
in earlier times had women exerting relative power andleadership, as illustrated with the examples given above, andfurther one could add how women’s speech, initiative andknowledge production was facilitated in monasteries in the
Middle Ages, and how the first recognized professions for
women in the early 19th century were within religious hospitals
and schools, where women worked as nurses/deaconesses,
teachers and missionaries. The oversight is regrettable from thepoint of view of historical detail, but it also produces a false
narrative. The very powerful female abbesses or prioresses of theHigh Middle Ages (e.g., Hildegard of Bingen), or the earliest
post-Reformation founders of new religious communities (e.g.,Margaret Fell), put the progress made in the long 19th century
regarding women in public space, into a different perspective. In
much of this long century, gender equality progress was mostly
about catching up with whatever women had been able to do
centuries earlier, in sacred space.
I have tried to show through argument and examples that in
the modern world, the public/private distinction pertains to thesecular realm, and that if we want to understand gender dynamics in historical perspective we also have to take into accountsacred/ritually constructed spaces as a third category. This third
category also deconstructs the binary as such, something which
is not achieved by just changing names (e.g., from private todomestic, familial, etc.). Thus, when feminist thinkers havetaken the private/public binary as a point of departure for
criticism and reflection – as if it covered the whole of humanactivity, they have effaced an ancient space of huge importancefor women’s agency, for ancient societies – and for our understanding of ancient women in particular.
Before the 19th century that is Scott’s focus, women found acertain place for their agency, speech, action and initiative in314

15. PRIVATE, PUBLIC, SACRED SPACE

sacred spaces, although it was never unrestricted. Neither
should it be denied that even the sacred spaces that functioned
according to their own rules, were still sub-divisions of a larger
whole of general patriarchal society. In periods when sacredspace has been more aligned with public space, sacred spaces
have still been gendered, but in other ways: seating men andwomen in separate aisles, balconies, or separate rooms forworship (or even gender-specific rituals); or putting items on
display in the worship space that all allude to only one gender.

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316

Chapter 16
The Inner Landscape of the Body
– Phenomenology of Thinking

Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir

In many languages, we name specific landscape features after
body parts. In Icelandic, for example, we speak about shoulder,neck, forehead, thigh, and nose in a landscape, and this can beseen in many Icelandic place names.1 This connection between
the concepts of landscape and body is interesting, not least in
how it can shed light on the role of what Icelandic philosopher
Páll Skúlason has called “the feeling of situatedness” in an environment2, in the creation of knowledge. The feeling of situatedness refers, generally speaking, to our relations to the world; to
how the base of our existence always already involves feeling andsensing our situation.3 The feeling of situatedness, which I
discuss here, refers specifically to the embodied experience ofenvironment of situated knowers.4 Feminist philosophies ofsituated knowing emphasize primarily the socio-political conditions that shape and determine knowledge. Taking feminist
1

According to Valgarður Egilsson these place names can be found in Icelandic: Head,neck, forehead, eyes, nose, ear, cheek, mouth, tongue, back, shoulder, spine, chest,
breast, nipples, fingers, elbows, hips, ass, crouch, testicles, thighs, knees, heel, toe, foot,man. See Valgarður Egilsson, “Örnefni við Eyjafjörð [Place names in Eyjafjörður]”,
Nefnir-vefrit Nafnfræðifélagsins [Nefnir – The online journal of the Onomastics Society].
https://www.arnastofnun.is/is/utgafa-og-gagnasofn/pistlar/ornefni-vid-eyjafjord. Thistendency to name landscape features after body parts can be found in many otherlanguages.
2
Páll Skúlason, Merking og tilgangur [Meaning and Purpose], (Reykjavík: University of
Iceland Press, 2015), p. 52.
3
Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuziéme sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949); Maurice MerleauPonty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945).
4
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and thePrivilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies Vol. 14, 1988, pp. 575–599; Sandra
Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1991).

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phenomenologies of embodiment on board, I pay attention to
how embodiment is part of situatedness and how bodies arealways embedded in landscapes and environments.
When examining the body-environment/landscape continuum, I notice a surprising connection between landscape andbody in the earliest examples of the Icelandic word for landscape. Landslag, for instance, in the Icelandic Sagas, is written
landsleg. “Leg” in Icelandic refers to a place where something
can lie and has been used both to refer to a woman’s uterus andto a final resting place (leg-staður means resting place). Thislinguistic resemblance brings to mind a comparison between thefetus’ being in the womb and our being in a landscape, as well as
between the phenomenology of pregnancy5 and the phenomenology of landscape.6 As I will examine further in this paper,
this comparison can shed light on a relational understanding of
the human being, which, as I will argue, should be the basis of
our understanding of knowledge creation. My goal is not to go
into a detailed etymological analysis of the connections between
the words landscape and body. Instead, I aim to use this interesting use of words as a starting point for examining an understanding of the human being as a relational knowledge-creating
being. The basis for this examination is a phenomenologicalunderstanding of landscape and body. I aim to deepen thisunderstanding by exploring the connection between these concepts that appear in the aforementioned use of words.
I start by sketching out shortly how these concepts areunderstood through the lens of phenomenology. Then, I go on
to explore the understanding of landscape that appears in theword landsleg in the Sagas and its connection to the phenomenology of pregnancy. Finally, I show how connecting thesetwo perspectives allows for a deeper understanding of the role of
the aesthetic in our sensing and thinking. The underlying aim of
5
Jonna Bornemark, “Life Beyond Individuality: A-subjective Experience in Pregnancy”
in Jonna Bornemark, & Nicholas Smith, (Eds.), Phenomenology of Pregnancy (Huddinge: Södertörn Philosophical Studies 18, 2016).
6Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir, Icelandic Landscapes: Beauty and the Aesthetic in Environmental Decision-making (Reykjavík: University of Iceland, 2015).

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16. THE INNER LANDSCAPE OF THE BODY

the approach presented here is to re-evaluate some of thequalities of human thinking and being that have been rejected in
the past as being feminine. As feminist philosophers have pointed out, the Western philosophical tradition has neglected inunderstandings of the human being the aesthetic, sensuous, andbodily dimensions of our being and thinking.7 Shining a newlight on these dimensions can thus be seen as an essential part of
the feminist epistemological project of challenging limited
notions of rationality and knowledge creation.

Landscape and Body:
A Phenomenological Perspective
Looking at landscape from a phenomenological perspective andacknowledging the relationship between the concepts of beautyand landscape leads to a relational understanding of landscape.
Accordingly, landscape is an environment perceived aesthetically and thus includes the relation between subject and object,human and environment.8 Landscape refers to our perception ofland or space as a whole (whether it is a physical or mental space)and how all its qualities, visible and invisible, come together in
one’s perception of it. As I have written about elsewhere, thistype of perceiving is aesthetic perception – when we perceive
only to perceive. We use the word landscape when we are referring to the aesthetic values or qualities of the land; when we are
grazing our horses, we call it pasture; when we are building afactory, we call it a construction site, when we perceive only toperceive we call it landscape.9
At the core of a phenomenological account of the body is
Husserl’s differentiation between the body as Leib and Körper.
7

Richard Shusterman, Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012); Peggy Zeglin Brand & Carolyn Korsmeyer (Eds.),
Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2010).
8
Jóhannesdóttir, Icelandic Landscapes, p. 154. See also Joachim Ritter, “Landschaft. Zur
Funktion des Ästhetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft”, in Subjektivität, pp. 141–163(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989).
9Jóhannesdóttir, Icelandic Landscapes.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

While Körper refers to the objectified body that can be measured
and evaluated by scientific methods, Leib refers to the lived
body, the lived experience of an embodied being.10 This lived
body has often been forgotten in philosophical thought, as many
feminist philosophers have emphasized and, for their part,feminist phenomenologists have thus elaborated on embodied
and embedded being in their research.11 From the point of viewof feminist phenomenology, the body is central to our understanding and practice of philosophical thought, since the bodyis precisely what allows us to experience, perceive and think
about the world in the first place.12 My agenda in discussing
landscape and the body is, among other things, to direct ourattention to the importance of not forgetting that we are bodies;
just like plants and other animals, we are living organisms thatare constantly interacting with different environments.13 I aim tobring out and explore why it is vital to speak about the fact that
we are always already bodies in landscapes when we try tounderstand what characterizes human sensing and thinking. To
shed light on the interaction between inner and outer landscapesand further examine the connection between the sensing and
10

See Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir, “Heimspeki líkamans og heimspeki í líkamanum og hvers
vegna hugsun er ekki kynlaus” [Philosophy of the Body and Philosophy in the Body and
Why Thought is not Gender-free], Hugur, Vol. 27, 2015, pp. 65–80; Gústav Adolf Bergmann Sigurbjörnsson, “Líkamlegar hugverur: Líkaminn og líkamleiki í fyrirbærafræði
Edmunds Husserl” [Embodied Mind-Beings: The Body and Embodiment in Edmund
Husserl's Phenomenology], Hugur, Vol. 27, 2015, pp. 48–64.
11
Sara Heinämaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, MerleauPonty, Beauvoir (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
12
Sigridur Thorgeirsdóttir, “The Torn Robe of Philosophy: Philosophy as a Woman in
The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius“, in Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir and Ruth
Hagengruber (Eds.), Methodological Reflections on Women’s Contribution and Influencein the History of Philosophy (London/New York: Springer, 2020), pp. 83–96; Antonio
Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: G.P.
Putnam‘s sons, 1994); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The
Embodied Mind and its Challenges to Western Thought (Michigan: Basic Books, 1999);
Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007).
13
Eugene Gendlin, “Arakawa and Gins: The Organism-Person-Environment Process”
in Donata Schoeller and Edward Casey (Eds.), Saying What We Mean: Implicit Precisionand the Responsive Order (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017).

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16. THE INNER LANDSCAPE OF THE BODY

thinking involved in this interaction, I start by looking at how
the word landscape/landslag or landsleg was used in early
Icelandic manuscripts.

Landslag or Landsleg
The earliest examples of the Icelandic word for landscape, landslag, appear in the sagas from the 12–13th century, where it is
written landsleg, i.e., with leg instead of lag.14 This ancient way ofspelling landscape also occurs in later examples from the 17th–
19th century. From this etymological observation, we canconclude that landscape, in Icelandic, refers to how everything“lies” or connects as a whole in a certain place or a certain situation and to how we can, as bodies, “lie” within this whole orconnect to it. As can be seen from the following quotes from
Eiríks saga rauða (Saga of Erik the Red) and Vatnsdæla saga
(Saga of the people of Lake valley), the landsleg, its beauty, andother qualities are examined in the context of exploring thesituation that the land offers the settlers to dwell (or lie) within:
The Finns’ prophecy must be coming true, for I now recognise
the landsleg from their account of it, hither we are being
directed, and things are now getting much better; I see now
extensive land and if it is accompanied by resources, thenperhaps this is a good site to build. (Vatnsdæla saga)
They called it Straumfjord. They carried their things from theship and settled. They had all kinds of livestock. There wasbeautiful landsleg; they paid attention to nothing other than
exploring the land. (Eiríks saga)15

A few examples of the word landsleg can be found from the17th–19th century, but after that, landscape is always written
landslag. In these examples, landsleg always seems to refer to
14
Edda R. H. Waage, The Concept of Landslag: Meaning and Value for Nature Conservation (Reykjavík: University of Iceland, 2013), p.100.
15
Waage, The Concept of Landslag, p. 113 and 115.

321

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY“how things are – how they are arranged”.16 From this, we cansee that landsleg is something that one can explore and examine;
one knows how it is and can compare it with something else.
The word leg can also be found in examples from the 17th
century onwards, where it is always used to refer to a place where
something can lie – leg is the place where the fetus can lie in themother’s womb, and it is also a place where one can have a final
resting place – legstaður, as well as a place where for example aboat can lie on the beach or a machine part can lie within themachine. However, it also seems to refer, like landsleg, to how
things are, how they lie.
By referring to how things lie, landsleg refers to how everything lies together and connects as a whole. It also relates to ahuman’s possibilities of connecting to the landscape. In otherwords: What possibilities do we have to make it our home? In
the examples from the Icelandic sagas above, the word landsleg
is used to describe, for example, what happens when you sail toa new place and sense the land ahead. You see the land in frontof you that lies before your feet, and you perceive it as if for the
first time because it is the first time. As we saw in the example
from Eiríks saga, it is suggested that when you are “paying attention to nothing other than exploring the land,” you perceive its
beauty or its aesthetic qualities: “There was beautiful landsleg;they paid attention to nothing other than exploring the land”.
This is what you do when you experience a place for the firsttime; you perceive just to perceive, to feel how you feel there,
whether you find the landscape beautiful, whether you canimagine yourself dwelling there, making it your home. In her
writings on the importance of landscape beauty, the German
philosopher Angelika Krebs, discusses the German concept of
Heimat,17 which is an equivalent to heima in Icelandic but has
16

Ritmálssafn Orðabókar HÍ [The University of Iceland Written Language Archive]:
https://ritmalssafn.arnastofnun.is/daemi/283716
17
Roger Scruton uses the Greek word oikos for the same purpose. See Roger Scruton,
Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet (London: Atlantic Books
Ltd, 2014).

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16. THE INNER LANDSCAPE OF THE BODY

no exact match in English.18 Krebs claims that being able toexperience beautiful landscapes is an “essential part of the good
human life. We humans cannot fare well without it. The reason
for this is that the experience of beautiful landscapes makes us
feel at home in the world. Their great and irreplaceable value lies
therein”.19 This is the value of landscape beauty, according to
Krebs. And why is it so important to be able to feel at home in
the world? For her, beautiful landscapes and the feeling of being
at home teach us to dwell on the earth with respect and care forit. A beautiful landscape calls for us to put our roots down andfeel that we care for the landscape as our special home.20
This connection between landscape beauty and feeling at
home is interesting in light of how the concept of landsleg is usedin these early examples from the Icelandic sagas. In these medieval texts, landsleg is almost always accompanied by judgmentsof beauty and judgments of whether one can imagine making
the landsleg one’s home, as is evident in this example from
Vatnsdæla saga:
Then the team moved up the valley and saw that there weregood resources from the land with regard to grass and wood;
18

The word heimat in German has two meanings according to dictionaries, it can havethe historically problematic meaning of home as in hometown, homeland, motherland,
native land and it can mean home as in living somewhere/having a home and being at
home. The Icelandic word heima has only the second meaning of being at home orliving somewhere, it does not refer to homeland without adding to it, heimaland. WhenI say that heimat and the Icelandic heima are not exact equivalents of home in English
I’m referring to how the words are used in the context of being at home/living somewhere. In Icelandic we can say: Ég er heima/ég á heima where heima does not have theconnotation of only the space/object you are at or have like it is in English: I am at
home/I live in/have a home in. The only occasion you would say I’m home in English
is when you are arriving, as in I’m here. Where home in English seems to refer to an
object/a space, heima seems to include both the space and the being in the space as one
whole contained in one word. To translate home as an object/space into Icelandic wewould use the word heimili, but heima includes more than the objective space heimili, it
includes the act of being in space as well. As Krebs also points out, heimat means “‘being
at home’ or living in a ‘place’ as opposed to a space”, see: Angelika Krebs, “Why Landscape Beauty Matters”, Land, 3(4), 2014, p. 1257
19
Angelika Krebs, “Why Landscape Beauty Matters”, Land, 3(4), 2014, p. 1251.
20
Krebs, “Why Landscape Beauty Matters”, p. 1262.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

there was beautiful to look around; people then felt in a muchbetter mood. ... Ingimundr chose his dwelling in a very beautiful hollow and established a farm. (Vatnsdæla saga)

When we speak of a beautiful landscape, we are describing thatmoment when we perceive just to perceive, which is like asking
oneself: “Could I live here? Does this phenomenon pull me
towards it? Am I attracted to it? Can I relate to it?” This
experience of choosing a heima is also going on when we areexperiencing art. For example, when we go to concerts or otherart events; then we choose to “live in” or “have our home in” thisartwork; pay attention to it in the same way as we pay attention
to a place we are considering as a future home. When we choosea home, we sense inside ourselves to see how we feel there andask ourselves: How do I feel in this space/this situation? Whatpossibilities of relating to it can I imagine? Can I lie here withinthese walls? What qualities does it have that make me attracted
to it or not?
What all this reveals is that landscape (or landsleg) does not
only refer to what is there: it does not only involve listing theobjects or phenomena that create the whole of the landscape;mountains, valleys, fjords, buildings – it also refers to how you
sense this whole, whether you could see yourself living there; inother words, it relates to how you could lie within this landscape.
So perhaps the gap we are used to seeing between beauty andutility is not as big as is often implied. Let us leave that question
open for now. The understanding of landscape that can bederived from this examination of word use is the following:Landscape (landslag/landsleg) refers to our perception of how
everything lies together as a whole within a particular situation
or a space that you can perceive as a whole, and how you sense
in your body your relation to this situation or space and theprocesses that create it.
We use the word landscape to describe our being in touchwith the world when we sense how we connect to it as a possible
home. This is the touching of the world that we sense and direct324

16. THE INNER LANDSCAPE OF THE BODY

our attention to in aesthetic perception; when we perceive only
to perceive – to receive how that perception makes us feel. As
Merleau-Ponty repeats after the painter Paul Klee, he sometimes
felt that he was receiving meaning from the forest:
That is why so many painters have said that things look atthem. As André Marchand says after Klee: “In a forest, I havefelt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest.
Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, werespeaking to me... I was there, listening... I think the paintermust be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrateit... I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried. Perhaps I paintto break out”. We speak of “inspiration”, and the word should
be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration ofBeing [...] it becomes impossible to distinguish between whatsees and what is seen, what paints and what is painted.21

This is an excellent example of this type of being in touch withthe world, where we receive meaning rather than project it onto
the world. It is important to keep this touching of the world inmind when we speak about philosophical thinking and knowledge creation. Merleau-Ponty used the word flesh (fr. chair) to
describe this pre-discursive level of being, and it is in my mind
no coincidence that he chose to use a word that has such a strong
connection to the body as nature.
So, what happens if we move beyond the flesh, further into
the body, and use the word leg (uterus) or landsleg to describe
this relation to the world, and which Merleau-Ponty used theword flesh to describe? Can we use the meaning of the wordlandsleg as an encouragement to think about the commonalities
between our being as bodies in landscapes and the being of the
fetus in the womb? As feminist philosophers have pointed out,
pregnancy and birth have been neglected within philosophy,
and paying attention to these fundamental aspects of life can21
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind”, in Galen A. Johnson (Ed.), The Merleau‐
Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1961/1993), p. 167.

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help us understand our situatedness and relationality more
profoundly. The pregnant body, as a body nurturing and sharing life with another one within it, with its own intentionality,
has more than anything else challenged traditional, disembodied philosophical conceptions of subjectivity that do notinclude how the self is always multiple, interdependent, andinterrelational.22 The phenomenologist Jonna Bornemark has
written about the phenomenology of pregnancy,23 and herunderstanding of our being in the womb and my understandingof our being in landscape share a common core. Björn
Þorsteinsson has also discussed how the human condition is,from a phenomenological perspective, like being in water – ourmovements in the world create currents and waves that
influence others at the same time as we are influenced by thecurrents and waves that others make.24 What can we learn fromthis metaphor? To be a sensing and thinking being always
involves already being a part of all the others with whom weshare the world. Being in the world is like being in water –splashing onto others and being splashed at by others. As
mentioned above, Jonna Bornemark has written about a related
metaphor in her chapter in the book Phenomenology of Pregnancy, where she examines the experience of pregnancy bothfrom the perspective of the mother and the perspective of the
fetus to shed light on our being and sensing in the world. What
was it like to be in the womb? In just a few weeks, we havealready started perceiving. Hearing is the first sense to kick inaround the 26th–28th week, but as Bornemark remarks, “perception is of another character in the womb”:
22

See for example, Alison Stone, Being Born: Birth and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Johanna Oksala, “The Birth of Man”, in Dan Zahavi, Sara
Heinamaa and Hans Ruin (Eds.), Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation: Phenomenology
in the Nordic Countries (Dordrecht: Springer, 2003), pp. 139–153; Robin-May Schott(Ed.), Birth, Death and Femininity: Philosophies of Embodiment (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010).
23
Bornemark, “Life Beyond Individuality”.
24
Kristján Guðjónsson, “Þurfum meiri hugsun og færri skoðanir” [We need morethought and less opinion], DV, February 26, 2017, https://www.dv.is/fokus/menning/2017/02/26/thurfum-meiri-hugsun-og-faerri-skodanir/326

16. THE INNER LANDSCAPE OF THE BODY

Vision is less important, and hearing takes precedence. Thereis taste and smell (of the amniotic fluid) – but not connectedto feelings of hunger.
There are no objects in the sense of autonomous and thematized “things” that are identified as one and the same in thestream of perceptions. The perceptions are thus not understood as belonging to objects, but flow in a stream, intertwined with other perceptions. These perceptions also linger,in what Husserl calls retention: i.e. non-thematized memories. As retentions they linger and affect the following experiences. The layers of perception are still few, and each moment
is more filled by its presence than by earlier perceptions or
expected later perceptions. Patterns are formed through what
Husserl called passive synthesis, in which layers of experiences through retention are put on top of each other and form
patterns. Some of these patterns are continually there: therhythm of the mother breathing, of her heartbeats, of the
foetus’s heartbeats, and more sporadically of the mother’s
intestines. These rhythms are felt and heard in a perception
where touching and hearing are not separated. Every soundor pulsation is also magnified through the amniotic fluid. The
kinaesthetic feeling of movement is not yet connected to
movement in a world, and there are no bodies experienced as
entities that would be held together, neither of the self nor ofothers. Instead there are a lot of motions going on, thoughthese are not yet separated into inner and outer.25

So, what can this description of what it is like for the fetus to bein the womb/leg tell me about the concept of landscape/landsleg?
As our use of the words neck, shoulder, foot to describe featuresof the landscape suggests, we can perceive the landscape and ourbodies as one and the same flesh, just as the fetus perceives thewomb and itself as the same flesh. Imagining what it was like to
be in the womb gives us a feeling for what is involved in aphenomenological understanding of how we are sensing andthinking beings in the world: we sense the world as whole
25

Bornemark, “Life Beyond Individuality”, p. 255.

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bodies, not as separated sense organs. The field of perceptionthat is awakened first, where sound and touch are not yet separated, is the field of perception that is the basis of all perception– the field of perception that never stops being there. However,
we might forget to pay attention to it. This is the basis for all ourmore complex perceptions – and that is why it is so importantto remember this field of perception and pay attention to it. This
field of perception is at play in the aesthetic perception ofenvironment, which is what we are referring to when we use theword landscape. This is the perception of how we take everything in that we are immersed in – whether it makes us feel athome, whether it makes us feel connected.
It is now time to return to the questions with which I started
this paper: Why is it important to connect the concepts oflandscape and body? How does the meaning of these concepts
affect our understanding of philosophical thinking and knowledge creation?

The Body and Landscape as the Zero Pointof Sensing and Thinking
As sensing and thinking beings, we are bodies in landscapes; asbodies we are always already in an environment. We are always
already as if swimming in water out of which we have no way
out. We are always situated; we are always “heima”, always in alandscape we are immersed in. As sensing and thinking beings,
we are constantly experiencing the world through the field ofperception that is first awakened in the womb, which I choose
to describe with the word landscape. To examine this relationship between landscape and body further, it is useful to look into
what characterizes the body as Leib. For Husserl, Leib refers tomovement and action; it is the site of perceiving the whole ofwhat is around us; the lived body is a kind of “zero point”, as
Husserl called it, which refers to the fact that the body always hasa specific “here”.26 If we try to fit these qualities with the conceptof landscape, we see that they are very applicable to what I have26

Sigurbjörnsson, “Líkamlegar hugverur”, p. 56–57.

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said so far about landsleg. The landscape is characterized by
movement and action; when we speak about landscapes, we
speak of being in the landscape, moving in it, and letting it move
us. The landscape is the site of perceiving the whole of what isaround us; when we speak of landscapes, we are speaking ofperceiving environments aesthetically, which involves sensing
how the landscape as a whole affects our senses and how it
moves us and makes us feel. The landscape is a type of “zeropoint”, which refers to the fact that the landscape always has a
specific “here”. The landscape is always somebody’s “heima” –just like there is no “heima” without a body in, there is no landscape without a body – in the same way that there is no bodywithout a landscape.
When we come into the world from the mother’s womb orleg, we are born into the womb or leg of the land – landsleg. This
characterizes us as embodied beings – the basis for all our
perceptions is this synaesthetic field of perception that is always
active, though we do not always pay attention to it. We arealways already situated, always already swimming around in alandsleg. As Páll Skúlason describes, being has “always-alreadyfelt-itself”: “[…] being feels (good or bad) among things, feels its
situation […] the feeling of situatedness is […] the backgroundof our existence, it symbolizes one of the basic dimensions ofhuman existence”.27 In my mind, the feeling of situatedness is the
body’s inner landscape – it refers to how the outer landscape weperceive resonates within us in the body’s inner landscape. Mostof the time, we don’t notice this feeling of situatedness or
synaesthetic field of perception. Still, in these moments that I
refer to as aesthetic moments, we pay attention to this field ofperception that is always there – which is why they are so
important. These aesthetic moments can, I argue, give us adeeper understanding of the human being (more profound thana dualistic understanding of the human being), which is verymuch needed.

27

Skúlason, Merking og tilgangur, p. 52.

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According to this new understanding of the human being(which is perhaps, after all, an old one), we are relational embodied beings, just like plants and animals. This relational
understanding of the human being is fundamental when it
comes to understanding how we gain knowledge of the world.
We are sensing and thinking bodies; we feel-know, as Jonna
Bornemark remarked about how the fetus knows the world. We
feel-know everything that the landscape/landsleg has made into
the patterns that are always there – these patterns are the sediments of everything we have sensed and known through ourjourney in the world. Aesthetic perception allows us to open into
these patterns or inner sediments of the body.28 The following
examples of the emergence of an artist’s or a scientist’s new ideas
help to explain this further.
An artist once told me how she got the idea for a new artwork
while sitting outside sketching the landscape during her travels
around the Icelandic countryside. During the act of drawing, weare tuned into an aesthetic perception of our environment, of
our outer and inner landscapes; we are tuned into perceiving
only to perceive. When the artist tunes into this type of perception, a new thought is often born, a new idea, or a new connection. In a lecture given by an expert from NASA at a conference on the protection of the Icelandic highlands (where he
regularly dwells with his team doing research), he showed us
photos of the team of scientists sitting in the middle of a lava
field or on top of a mountain in the highlands with their sketchbooks or diaries, seemingly very deep in thought and inspired.
While showing these photos, he told us how they always madesome discoveries and managed to think so well together during
the weeks spent in the highlands doing their research.
These two examples captured my attention owing to theircommon thread. In my mind, the highland landscapes bring usvery easily into aesthetic perception, perceiving only to perceive;28

Just as the sediments of earth are the geological foundation of the landscape, we could
say that the inner sediments/patterns of the body are the biophysical and phenomenological layers of the lived body.

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in the highlands, there are so many things that create a strong
sense of wonder, so many things that draw our attention to oursenses. In such situations, many of us are automatically tuned
into this type of perception for which drawing calls and in which
artists are trained. When we let all our attention go into oursenses, an opening occurs into the body’s inner landscape – weautomatically tune our focus into the body. When we experiencea beautiful or even sublime landscape, we start paying attention
to what we are sensing and feeling because the outer landscapebrings out such strong reactions. This scanning of the body’s
inner landscape begins with us focusing on what the outerlandscape makes us sense or feel. However, when we stop focusing on the details we are perceiving, we still hold our attention
on what we are sensing. Then we start scanning the innerlandscape of what we are feeling, what we sense and what weknow at this moment, and perhaps what is important to us at
this moment. What happens in this scanning is that when the
inner landscape opens up (all everyday thoughts disappear, andthe mind is emptied for a while), then thoughts, memories,
visions, and ideas start popping into mind. We can see all thesethoughts, memories, and visions (rooted in the retentions oflived experience) as sediment after sediment, layer upon layer,
thread upon thread, that are woven together and lie within the
body. And what is in these sediments? Everything we haveperceived before, even since the very beginning, in our mothers’
wombs.29 When we are given the space to scan the body’s innerlandscape, we are afforded an opportunity to look separately ateach thread and layer and how they are related. Just like when
we are walking in a landscape, and we name what we see aroundus or try to speculate about what it is, what story it tells, we dothe same when we examine the inner landscape of the body –perhaps we recognize some things that we find there im29
Studies have shown that a trauma that a mother experiences during pregnancy canaffect the baby after birth. See for example: Sarah R. Brand, Stephanie M. Engel, Richard
L. Canfield, and Rachel Yehuda, “The Effect of Maternal PTSD Following in Utero
Trauma Exposure on Behavior and Temperament in the 9-Month Old Infant”, Annalsof the New York Academy of Sciences 1071:1 (2006), pp. 454–458.

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mediately, but others we have to examine more closely and listen
to their story.
Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and otherphilosophers have emphasized how dwelling alone in nature, or
hiking and walking, supports independent, critical, philosophical thinking. In recent years the philosophy of walking has
gained greater attention,30 where stories are told of how philosophers such as Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Kant often did theirphilosophizing while walking. In my view, it is not only thewalking, the movement itself, that creates this connection
between thinking and walking. Instead, it is what happens when
we are walking: that we direct our attention to the landscape weare walking in and let our senses be in the foreground rather
than our analytical thinking. In other words, we connect to theinner landscape of the body, the wisdom, and knowledge that
resides in the sediments and threads of our lived bodily experience, and let our thinking rise freely from there. We need to pay
more serious attention to this in the context of thinking inphilosophy. We do not think as detached brains but as bodies.
We need a phenomenology of thinking, and this is my suggestion: As sensing and thinking beings, we are made in such a
way that thoughts, memories, visions, and ideas pop up in our
minds when our attention is focused on the inner landscape ofthe body. These are reactions that we sometimes express when
we say out loud how something makes us feel or we write down
what we are thinking at such moments, but if not, they just settle
in the body and become one of the layers or threads that creates
the whole of the being I am and knowing what I know. Just as
the sediments and layers of stories, events, and human structures generate the whole of what it is to be the landscape of a
specific place, the landscape that is somebody’s “heima”.
To acknowledge the body as the source of thinking is essential for philosophy because philosophy has the role of thinking what it is to think, and it has the role of helping us get ourheads around the emerging new understanding of the human30

Frédéric A. Gros, Philosophy of Walking (New York: Verso Books, 2014).

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being. Philosophy’s role is to think about the world and to help
us think about ourselves in relation to the world. This acknowledgment is also important in the context of education
systems based on a dualistic understanding of the human being
where reasoning and sensing, reason and emotion, mind andbody, and human and nature are seen as separate.31 Furthermore, these systems have mostly ignored the bodily source ofknowledge, emphasizing more what is called rational thinking
while neglecting intuitive, sensuous, embodied thinking. This
neglect of the dimensions associated with the senses, emotions,the body, and nature is a reflection of how the systems on which
our societies are built are based on deeply ingrained genderhierarchies, where the qualities associated with the feminine areseen as inferior to the qualities associated with the masculine.
However, there are some signs of changes on the horizon, notthe least because of the advances in cognitive science research.
The interplay of body and mind cannot be ignored in education
systems for too much longer, for the time has come to direct ourattention toward the deep roots of all our knowledge and values
in natural sciences, humanities, and the arts. The scientist’s bodyis, as Claire Petitmengin writes, “at the source of meaning.”32
Similarly, Susan Stuart writes that verbalized ideas and notions
are just the tip of an iceberg that hides the embodied conditions
from which they emerge.33 This change is, therefore, crucial for
research in general because, like elsewhere in our education
systems, universities have neglected this kind of sensuous know-

31

Genevieve Loyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy(Abingdon: Routledge, 2002).
32
Claire Petitmengin, “The Scientists’s Body at the Source of Meaning”, in Donata
Schoeller & Vera Saller (Eds.), Thinking thinking: Practicing radical reflection (Freiburg/
München: Karl Alber, 2016), pp. 28–49. Petitmengin’s research illuminates the dimension of creativity at the level of the body, “inter-action between people as well as within
oneself, navigating between discursive, pre-discursive, trans-modal and gestural dimensions of experience” as “capacities involved in the maturation of an idea – as well as in
its inquiry”, p. 18.
33
Susan A. J. Stuart, “Enkinaesthesia and Reid’s natural kind of magic”, in Schoeller &Saller (Eds.), Thinking thinking, pp. 92–111.

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ledge and prioritized the “objective” natural sciences much
more than, for example, research in the arts and humanities.
The knowledge that the arts and humanities provide is one of
the most important types of knowledge societies create – theknowledge that the arts create, for example, is knowledge towhich other areas should pay much more attention, especially intheir trans-, inter-, or multidisciplinary projects. In such projects, the arts should not be seen as an add-on or a tool tomediate the knowledge that other fields create but rather as anactive participant in creating and mediating knowledge.
In recent years, the crisis of philosophy, or even the crisis of
the humanities as such, has been much discussed, suggestingthat we have somehow lost sight of the importance of thesefields. Among the criticisms of philosophy that feminist philosophers and phenomenologists have emphasized is the lack ofattention and acknowledgment of the feeling of situatedness, alack of acknowledgment that as thinking beings, we are always
already situated in time and space as diverse bodies in complex
relations. This criticism points to the need to strengthen philosophical thinking as embodied thinking. What does it mean
for the practice of philosophical thinking and the teaching of thispractice to take this relational understanding of the humanbeing seriously?34 There are methods available, in the arts, as wellas in philosophy and the sciences, for example Petitmengin’s
microphenomenological interview method35 and Gendlin and
Hendrick’s Thinking at the Edge method.36 These methods allow
us to closely examine the body’s inner landscape and engage inconversation with and about what we find there. This innerlandscape has been shaped by what we have felt and, what weknow, what we feel-know. Traveling around this inner land34

This is one of the questions asked in the research project Embodied Critical Thinking.
For further information, see: http//www.ect.hi.is. This chapter was partly written as partof ECT.
35
Claire Petitmengin, “Describing one’s Subjective Experience in the Second Person:
An Interview Method for the Science of Consciousness”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 5 (2006), pp. 229–269.
36
Eugene Gendlin, “Introduction to Thinking at the Edge”, The Folio 19:1 (2004),
pp. 1–8.

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scape, for example, while walking, is probably familiar to manyof us, although we might not be aware of it. But we can also do
this consciously by directing our focused and open attention to
our thoughts and feelings of situatedness.
Directing our attention toward our feeling of situatedness,
how we at each moment sense our situation in a bodily way, is a
key aspect of embodied critical thinking. However, this does notmean that practicing such thinking involves unconditionallytrusting one’s own emotions, sensations, and intuitions.
Directing our attention to the bodily dimensions of thinking
does not imply that we use the feelings and sensations that occur,for example, while hearing an argument or reading a philosophical text, as a basis for critical thinking without any filters.
If, for example, I’m reading a philosophical text and my bodily
reactions, the feeling of situatedness that I sense, is characterized
by a feeling of agreement, I do not stop there and simply accept
the argument in the text. Rather I go further, engage with thisfeeling of agreement, and ask what it is about this text thatcreates this particular sense of the situation, then analyze thisfeeling further and then build my argument about the text on
this basis. In this process, I might find out that what creates thisinitial feeling of agreement is some experience that colors myopinion in an unacceptable way. If I then read another paperthat brings out a strong bodily response of resistance, I also do
not stop there but instead ask, what is it that creates thisresistance, what it is in my experience and perception that causes
me to disagree with what I am reading? The answers to thesequestions then form the basis of my criticism of the paper. In
this manner, we can critically reflect on our feelings and bodily
responses to what we are working with instead of ignoring themas dimensions of thought. Critical thinking is this movement
between embodied sensing and thinking with words, a process
of examining and analyzing our responses to the situations wefind ourselves in at each moment. The linguistic turn needs to335

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be supported by a turn toward lived experience.37 Practicing
critical thinking is an experience of using words and sensing
how they fit our experience of reality.38 Contemporary cognitive
science shows us how close the interaction is between language
and feeling and how vital the role of our bodies, sensations, andexperiences is in our thinking processes.39
In our contemporary technological environment, where it isundoubtedly easy to manipulate our feelings and perceptions ofreality, it is even more important than ever that we acknowledge
the part that feelings and sensations play in our thinking andbuild our critical thinking on this fact rather than imagining that
we can separate our logical thinking from our sensing of theworld, or in some way put our feelings aside and apply some sortof pure rationality that has nothing to do with our feelings,
sensations, and experiences. There is no such rationality. On thecontrary, rationality is closely connected to sensation, as the
Icelandic word for rationality, skynsemi, implies, where skyn,
refers to sensing. Using our rationality or skynsemi means paying attention to one’s sensing, examining, and analyzing it. In
that way, we can distinguish between those moments where oursensing is shaped by outside forces, in contrast to when it is built
on our independent analysis of all sides of the matter in light ofthe most trustworthy and detailed information we obtain. It istime to direct our attention to the bodily roots of knowledge andvalues. Doing so enables us to see the potential of feminist
philosophy that includes and celebrates the body, the senses, andemotions to transform philosophy.40 Signs of more balance
between logical and intuitive thinking in the future can also be
37

Donata Schoeller & Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, “Embodied Critical Thinking: The
Experiential Turn and its Transformative Aspects”, PhiloSOPHIA 9:1 (2019), pp. 92–
109.
38
Donata Schoeller, “Somatic-semantic Shifting: Articulating Embodied Cultures”, in
Schoeller & Saller (Eds.), Thinking Thinking; Donata Schoeller, Close Talking: Erleben
zur Sprache bringen (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2019).
39
Damasio, Descartes’ Error.
40
Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir and Ruth Hagengruber (Eds.), Methodological Reflections on
Women’s Contribution and Influence in the History of Philosophy (London/New York:
Springer, 2020).

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seen in emerging discussions about the value of art education in
our education systems in recent years. Many national school
curriculums now put more emphasis on the role of creative
thinking, and discussions of the implications of the fourthindustrial revolution suggest that there is a transformative era
ahead, where our education systems may be adjusting to a new
way of thinking about their role. Their role is no longer only topass information, to fill our minds with pregiven ideas that we
can learn by heart, but rather to educate us in a way that makes
us more human; more able to sense our environment with full
attention and respond to it in a responsible and reasonable
manner, find our own solutions and find our own voice.

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Chapter 17
Philosophical Compassion and Active Hesitation– A Non-Critical Approach to Understanding

Nicole des Bouvrie1

Posing the Question of TruthLong before we entered the time of post-truth, in which having
an opinion is valued above all else, we had already lost thefoundation of what it means to be. Truth either no longer existed
or was already reduced to simply be a justified belief. Nietzsche’s
death of God heralded a time in which we understood that achurch is empty of meaning except for the one we ourselves put
in it. Life is the meaning we create. And although most people
are successful imposters, the core of human life has become
utterly devoid of meaning. But instead of trying to find one moreexistentialism, one more method of justifying our existence
through a dependency on something that lies outside of ourselves, I will argue that we need to return to truth itself.
The question of truth is fundamentally an ontological question, aiming for a grounding of what is, rather than delineating
what we can know. But it is simultaneously an ethical question,
as ontology should always be understood ethically2 – it is me,
human, asking for the being of things, and therefore the question of truth is always being asked from within the relationshipof the human with the thing. In other words, we will have to take1
The ideas presented in this essay have been developed over time and alongside fellow
thinkers. With special thanks to Peter Tamas and Gabriel Yoran. Part of this research
was supported by Fudan University and the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace at the
University of Maryland. None of this would have happened without the support, conversations and warmth presented by the people involved in the feminist philosophy
study circle at the Nordic Summer University: Synne, Vala, Johanna, Milka, Suzy, Laura,
Eret, Anne, Petra, Karolina, Erik, Sara, Helgard, Oda, among others.
2
Emmanuel Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” (1951) in Entre Nous. On Thinkingof-the-Other (London: Athlone Press, 1998).

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up the Heideggerian endeavor of returning to the question of
being, without reducing everything to a fundamental thingness.3 But as always we are already trapped in the Shakespearian
illusion of being versus not-being: as if there is such a space fromwhich we can think being that is not already being, we ask thequestion of truth as if we are an outsider even though we cannever be unless we are already within some truth. And so life
continues and the dualistic illusion persists in insisting on a dualistic question to which only one answer exists. As we breathe,and even beyond, there is a rudimentary ‘always already’ – thatphilosophical nightmare that ends all conversations. (For how
can we create, how can we have a convers(at)ion, how can wethink one moment different from another, when there is nobefore and no after?).
Framing this question of truth already brings up enoughproblems. For who is this ‘we’ that needs to take up this question? How can I talk about something more than myself, how
am I appropriating the other that I don’t know, the other that is
not-me, in this search for a truth? How is the one I address not
rigorously refusing to be included in my thinking?4 Am I notalready making a claim by saying this is a concern of me as ahuman being – who am I including and who am I excluding inand through this question? Why should I understand this to be
an ethical problem, why not leave it as a metaphysical questionthat can be solved outside of language and human perception?
Why not be a speculative realist, and deal with each relationshipbetween things equally, not relying on the assumption of humansuperiority? Yet performing the Husserlian epoché on myself asa self, bracketing the mouth that speaks, the body that lives, is
not possible after Heidegger. We are thrown into life not just as
an exercise in boredom, but as the foundation of being. Taking
3

Although it would go too far to go into this here, it must be made clear that reducing
the human to one more thing as is proposed by object oriented ontologists, is not possible when understanding Heidegger in this way, in which being is always already fromwithin a human relationship.
4
Avital Ronell, personal conversation, August 12, 2018.

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up this question of being thus muddies the water we call rationality. Pretending reality can be addressed outside of language, as something other than a well-crafted inherited construction of reality, outside of being-alive, is dangerous. For thispretense of a complete objectivity leaves out the lived history
that is concurrent with every being.
Yet despite all these problems of even asking the question,
there is an urgency to this question of truth. For without taking
it up, my own understanding trumps anything else. If there is noroad map that establishes the relationship between myself andthe other, there are only different versions of me. My past, present and future merge into one. What remains is a continuous
rehashing of things and the throwing up of whatever does not
fit, relying only on what I already know, which equals that which
was always already. It would make everything correct, every
opinion just as valid and valuable as the next. This is multiculturalism that has triumphed in its death. This is the danger
that contemporary democracy forces upon us, equating equality
and justice, thereby foregoing all claims on the singularity oftruth. Presenting truth as something that excludes others, thatconsiders vulnerability and not-knowing as a denial of one’s self
instead of it being its fundamental possibility. This kind of truthclaiming foregoes the possibility of being loyal to a singular truth
instead of accepting the constant fragmentation that leaves one
groundless. What remains is a reality which consists of (paraphrasing Derrida) being completely inside the text, a reality(with Foucault) that functions only as long as we believe in it.
But philosophers are more than chroniclers of the present. Whatis needed is a philosophy that allows for a future that is as of yet
unknown and impossible. A future that is not a mere extractionof past and present, that goes further than a simple linearity ofthought. A future that is not a “not-yet” that is reduced to an“always-already”.5 A future that allows for a truth that is definedin- and for-itself, not as a negation or an absence of the past and5

See: Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (Austin: University ofTexas Press), p. 53.

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present that had come before it.6 A truth that does not impose aviolent inclusion upon that which it has itself excluded.

Understanding Understanding
Truth is the moment of openness, the aletheia, the not-beingshrouded by knowledge and justified beliefs. That space in the
middle of the forest where there is a clearing, an openness thatis contained within each tree without exhausting the possibility
that is necessarily left as an empty space. Picture Heidegger
walking along the path in his beloved Wald,7 but then as if hedidn’t already know where he was going, where he was and who
he was. Because that is the openness that is required, the foundation of any being-toward-truth that is more than a collision withwhat you already are.
So, what then does it mean to understand anything, when any
claim on knowledge would destroy the possibility of truth and istherefore to be avoided? Whenever we say or think or feel,
whenever something is, it puts forward a claim of being, ending
endless amounts of possibilities. Thus, we are drawing back,performing the ancient epoché on ourselves; a suspension ofknowledge that allows for a not-knowing. Yet by searching for a
possibility of not-knowing, are we not simply conjuring up an
illusion of singularity, of otherness that simply reinstates thestatus quo? Is the opening in the forest really creating a newness
out of the old, or is it an experience that deludes us to think weare clear of the trees? Is the sky not already thought while wewalk through the forest? Is the blueness of the sky something we
get from the world or project upon the world?8 And if at least
some of our knowledge is, in the Kantian sense, a priori,9 are we6
See Fanny Söderbäck, Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva andIrigaray (Albany: State University of New York, 2019), p. 46.
7
Cf. Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann 2003).
8
Some studies suggest that sky has only been blue since modern times, noting that inancient Greek texts, no single mention of the blueness of the sky is made. Cf. Guy
Deutscher and William Gladstone.
9
See: Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,1974).

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then doomed to understand the world as we do, foregoing any
possibility of the openness required for truth?
In any crisis we can hear people voicing the longing forchange. Whether it is the climate crisis, the Arab spring, or the
Covid-19 pandemic; the words people use are the same – butwhat is it that is asked for in the cries of ‘we don’t want to go
back to the old normal’, ‘we want things to change’. We see therupture of the prevailing norms as a possibility for radical
change, a possibility to finally work on fighting climate change,
on changing the economic system, on re-evaluating the notionof care. And it is not as if everything stays completely the same.
The United Nations was formed, universal basic income
schemes are being introduced. But, fundamentally, our outlook
on life, on order, on how things work, does not change. As
Cornel West explains:
The system cannot reform itself. We've tried black faces inhigh places. Too often our black politicians, professional class,
middle class become too accommodated to the capitalist
economy, too accommodated to a militarized nation-state,
too accommodated to the market-driven culture of celebrities, status, power, fame, all that superficial stuff that means
so much to so many fellow citizens. And what happens is (…)
they really don't know what to do because all they want to do
is show more black faces – show more black faces. But often
times those black faces are losing legitimacy too…10

And while we protest that which puts us down, that which we
dismiss as backward, that which systematically undermines our
dreams, and while we look forward, the more we look at theworld around us, the more our eyes are getting accustomed tothe patterns, to the possibilities of which our present systemallows us to think. This is what Foucault meant when he introduced the panopticon – it is not us who actively decide on what
truth is, what reality is, this is decided for us by the space that is
10

CNN live news, hosted by Anderson Cooper, 29 May 2020.

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never empty. And if a shift were to happen, we can only observe
this from the position of the victors, understanding truth fromthe power of the present corrupts, and when we want tounderstand the unknown future, we bring in the past as there isnothing else we can use to make sense of the world around us.
So even when we are in the position to think the future anew, we
fundamentally sabotage ourselves.
In other words, by living in the world we have internalized its(male) gaze.11 We ourselves have become the object we mustfight. When we understand truth as that radical opening, wemust lose our minds. We follow in the footsteps of Nietzsche,whose life project to re-evaluate values after he had eliminatedthe horizon by which we understand the world around us, madehim lose touch with reality. It is no surprise that philosophersand scientists are so much more capable of criticizing thepresent than presenting a critical alternative of the future. For
truth and the future are negated by the present. And it is thisdualism, this either/or thinking, that presupposes everything as
being-in-being and does not allow for anything that is notalready to be thought, that kills all possibility. A system that sets
up an order of things can soften the borders but can never takethe divisions between things away. Once men and women, mind
and body, human and animal, were divided, their divisionbecame the backbone of the system itself. It is this dualism, this‘othering’ of what is actually connected, that creates the panopticon, the prison of the present.

Non-Critical Approach
The critical approach to understanding posits the subject in
opposition to the object, where the subject is a unified wholelooking out at something that is essentially foreign to the subject.
This means that in a critical approach to understanding there isa directionality to understanding, and an essential distance
between subject and the object.
11

See: Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2006).

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The relation between the subject and the object in such a
critical scenario can be delineated by its two extremes. Criticalunderstanding at its worst is a projection of the subject who
posits his own world on that which he seeks to understand,resulting in a knowledge limited to what can be seen and what isalready known. The limits of one’s own world, the limits of thesubject, are the limits of the understanding of the other. Categories of thought, language and previous experience are the kindof projections that the subject takes with him. It is in this sensethat philosophers like Derrida and Foucault speak of the impossibility of change12 and the panopticon13 – of us being stuck in
the present that recreates itself in a continuous loop.
At the other end of the spectrum, critical can be seen as being
more in line with Levinas, who realizes that the subject isdependent on the other being looked at. In this case there is a
projection of the object upon the subject. Here the subject isdependent upon the object. In this case the subject conforms to
the object, and we could say that the subject is being destroyedin favor of the truth of the object. While this movement is in facta reversal of the destruction happening in the other approach of
critical understanding, the result is the same, namely the continuation of the either/or dichotomy between object and subject.
Even the more neutral Hegelian option of sublimation ofboth subject and object, where each is overcome by a third term,
is still tied to this essential dichotomy. It simply substitutes athird reality and continues to allow the object and the subject toexist through their difference. True, the critical relationship of
the subject outside of the object is overcome, but it is still a
critical approach towards understanding where both self andother are destroyed and the difference between the two remains
essential.
In this chapter I propose to look at understanding in a noncritical manner. This entails that subject and object are never in
12

Jacques Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event”, Critical
Inquiry, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 441–461.
13
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge 2002).

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opposition, which is not to say that this approach demands that
subject and object are the same, which would be another formof violence to the uniqueness of either one. This also means thatneither object nor subject ‘wins’ in favor of the other. Instead,the non-critical approach to understanding argues for a method
in which the idea of winning and destroying is relinquished.
This also means that there can be no directionality, there is nolooking from the subject to the other, because in this (male) gazealready lies the primal element of destruction. The search for a
non-critical approach to understanding therefore aims for anunderstanding without destruction, an approach which allows
for truth without violence.

Presenting the OtherTo understand what lies outside of the realm of what can beunderstood, to understand in a way that does not rely on presupposed knowledge and categories of thought, to understandin a non-critical way, we need to leave behind the dualism
inherent in the subject that thinks. We need to find a method ofthinking that does not allow difference to divide us, but that lets
us work with difference, in line with the project of Luce Irigaray.14 Irigaray worked to banish the dichotomy that “stands at
the heart of a logic incapable of thinking difference (sexual,
racial/colonial, and other forms of difference) beyond hierarchical dichotomies.”15 We need a change that does not undo
being, that does not force sameness or equality on things that are
not the same, and which does not presuppose that the one canbe substituted by the other if only we try hard enough. Together
with Irigaray this chapter endeavors “to criticize the metaphysical tradition of presence not by escaping presence altogether, but by establishing that said tradition never has beenable to think presence other than as absence, and that a proper
critique of such tradition therefore depends on our rethinking
14
See for instance: Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later
Work of Luce Irigaray (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2002).
15
Söderbäck, Revolutionary Time, p. 121.

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17. PHILOSOPHICAL COMPASSION

the relation between presence and absence in non-oppositionalterms.”16 To think truth without succumbing to the thinking thatis in charge, we need a radical movement that does not present
an alternative, that does not consider things in terms of linear
progress, nor as something that presents the feminine as taking
over or on the side of male logic. What we are looking for issomething that does not simply repeat the Hegelian dialectic.
But even language is making this understanding of truth as
not-the-other-as-the-same impossible. We talk about rupture,
about change, about otherness, but all these terms plot to divide
us, to have the one facing the other. Whether it is time or spacethat stands between the two, we always approach reality from anouter-space, from the future or the past, looking at the one
present of which we know only one thing: that it is not us.17
Although the initiative of Levinas to ground the subject in therelationship to the Other is worthwhile, laying the foundation ofan ethics as preceding ontology,18 as Bracha Ettinger explains, hecontinues the logic inherent in the male gaze – thereby perpetuating the linear logic of progress that I will call a critical maleapproach to difference. By presenting ourselves as starting fromthe other, we take the removal of ourselves from that which weare not as a starting point for ourselves. Defining something
through a lack, the not-being-male, the non-white, non-Western, non-rational. The other is then reduced and limited to being
not-me. The o-ther is over-there, and the distance between the I
and the other as the beginning of knowledge reinforces theinability to understand truth except through this lack that forms
the basis of the critical male approach. The more we think wemove closer to what is, the Levinasian self, the more fundamental the difference between the I and the other – which results
in a violence either way. By trying to understand the Other/Self
we immediately become violent: we either reinstate the duality
16

Söderbäck, Revolutionary Time, p. 121.
Cf. The problem that Immanuel Kant outlined in Kritik der reinen Vernunft but only
solved by enforcing the distinction of a prior and a posteriori knowledge – imposing
another division to make up for the inaccessibility of truth as an experience.
18
Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?”.
17

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

by Othering the Other, or we reduce the otherness to a samenessand thereby destroy the singularity that is presented in each andevery Other. Even by asking the other to tell the subject what isrequired, what is the right way to behave to allow the otherness
to exist, we violate the other – since there remains a ‘we’ thatneeds to ask and an ‘other’ that is burdened with defending itself
due to its otherness. As long as there is a ‘we’, there must be another. And as long as there is an other, there is a gaze, there is aminority, there is a power structure that prevents understanding.
Instead of the critical approach that violates, let us look for akind of understanding that is to be open toward all possibilities.
If understanding invokes a structure of any kind, truth remains
enslaved to the powers that be. Whether it is called the malegaze, or biopower, whether it presents itself as racism, sexism,
ableism – the result of a structure of understanding that does notallow for the Other is a totalitarian worldview that encompasses
all possibilities and thereby excludes truth.
Are we then to conclude that a non-critical manner of understanding is impossible? When we think of understanding interms of object–subject relations, when we consider the otheralways outside of the self, there is no other way than to label thequestion of an understanding as one that is based on difference– and the question of truth continues to be an impossible
question.

The I and the non-I
Instead of presenting the Other as other, invoking the dualitythat kills any possibility of truth not already drowned in thepresent, let me accept myself as not part of such a duality. I am
not on one side of any equation. I am just as much self as nonself. The border that links me to any perceived other is theborder that is within me, that presents myself to myself. When
there is a distinction made, this is a distinction that is contained
within, not as a limit of the outside-of-me. If there is an-other,
then I relate to myself as this other. Which is destructive when I

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consider everything to be (a) given, when limiting the I to a
notion of the self that presupposes a set world and a set understanding of what it means to be human. But the opposite is justas problematic: to consider the self an endless realm of possibilities that has no borders. For without borders there is no self,
but with borders there is always an other that lies outside of theself which is excluded. So the way forward is neither a contained
understanding of truth/self, nor an empty realm of nothingness/possibility.
The problem lies not in the self, but in the frame that is used,
the understanding of duality in the sense of a dichotomy that is
an either/or, a with me or against me. By lining up difference as
the starting point for the self, as the source of understanding, as
the fixation within a struggle for survival in which the weaker
one will perish. But duality does not necessarily entail power inthe sense of power-over. There is also the possibility of a powerwith, a power-to. Presenting a self, an I, is already a power-move,but this power does not need to be understood as a power-over,a power that is based on a degradation of an other.19 There is adifference between macht and kracht, the first one being a
power-over that creates a hierarchy of the one over the other andfixes positions. The latter, power as kracht, is the potential to act,
that remains inside even though it needs things outside of it.
This is how we can understand the distinction that Bracha
Ettinger raises when she talks about the I and the non-I.20 It is
not a distinction through which a power-over-structure emerges. It provides a framework to help us use the words we have torelocate the essence of what we are after. When searching forunderstanding there remains the limit of the I that understands,
but within the framework of Ettinger this limit is not a line that
excludes. This border can be understood as a space, one in which
we can dwell, as a borderspace that allows for a blurring of limits
without denying or framing the I and/or the non-I.

19
20

Cf. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2005).
Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

The borderspace is matrixial, the place in the womb where
the difference between the child and the mother is not clear,
where both merge without losing their respective places. They
combine and work together, fragilizing themselves as they bothallow the other to come so close that it may threaten their own
life, yet this matrixial borderspace also gives them life. Without
the child, there would be no mother, and without the mother,
there would be no child. But we could take this metaphor evenfurther and say that there is not just dependency between the I
and the non-I, there is also an instantaneousness that Ettinger
indicates with (m)Other. The existence of the mother and thechild takes place in an in-between, a non-place that cannot be
indicated in a way that understanding in the phallic meaning of
the word would require. There is no distance between the I andthe non-I, no gaze is possible, no violence against the one
without destroying the other.
As a result, there is no language for this in-between space.
One is not-yet, not-yet-child and not-yet-mother. This can beseen from the fact that it remains impossible to talk about
miscarriage, that there are no words for what is lost that adequately describe what Alison Reiheld speaks of as a ‘liminal
event’.21 An event that takes place on a threshold, in a space inwhich one social status no longer applies but neither does thenew one (yet). It is an event that remains outside of understanding, as defining it as anything except for this liminality
would destroy the essence of this experience. But this still
doesn’t explain what understanding in this liminal space means,as without the possibility of an understanding that allows for a
not-knowing, a hesitation of being, the liminal space would be“a place of ambiguity and anxiety”,22 as Ronald Carson defines
the liminal space. But we need to be careful, as this anxiety only
exists because of the need for an understanding that is fixed, that
21
Alison Reiheld, “The Event That Was Nothing: Miscarriage as a Liminal Event”, Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 46, No. 1, Spring 2015, 9–26.
22
Ronald Carson, “The Hyphenated Space: Liminality in the Doctor-Patient Relationship.” In Rita Charon & Martha Montello (Eds.), Stories Matter: The Role of Narrativein Medical Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 180.

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is either/or instead of a place where the I and the non-I can entera state of borderlinking. This anxiety is not part of the inbetweenness of the liminal event, it is simply due to not being
able to let go of the need for the security and definiteness that is
associated with a critical approach to understanding.

Compassion as an Active Hesitation
Within the borderspace there is a manner of understanding thepossible that does not rely on propositional knowledge. An
understanding that is not based on a critical approach. But how
to define a type of understanding that defies all defining? How
to defend what is defenseless? How to evaluate what is beyond
value, what is more fundamental to all values?23
What is needed is a kind of understanding which I would liketo call a kind of philosophical compassion, or active hesitation.
Hesitation is normally understood as a pulling back, a passive
attitude. A withholding of something, not engaging with something head-on, but waiting, observing, reflecting. What is meant
here is a reluctance to judge, not a reluctance to engage.
Hesitation in this sense is a process, an act. It is not the sameas Husserl's epoché, which is a bracketing of everything thatmakes up the self and thereby reducing the subject to an open
object that has no presuppositions. Epoché denies the sources
and branches of what one is and one’s context and background,
history. In this, it is violent as it begins the process of understanding with a purge of what is individual in order to hold on
to the illusion of objectivity. Active hesitation is the opposite.
Instead of denying one’s problematic past and present thatmuddies the water and makes it impossible to see anything but
with one’s own eyes, the process of active hesitation takes in andaccepts all those contexts and manners of being all at once. The
messiness of life, being all opposites at the same time, being
more than any one definition, more than the name you give
23

This is how I understand Nietzsche’s fundamental question of the ‘Revaluation of All
Values’ that he posited in his planned publication just before the onset of his madness.

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yourself and that is given to you – all of this forms the foundation for a place from which one can start the process of noncritical understanding.
Take for instance the case of racism. Many approaches to the
problem of racism are critical in nature, they continue topromote and are based on and act within difference. Because,
any course of action that denies the fundamental difference
upon which racism is founded, as well as actions that try to overcome these differences by giving out a new paradigm in which
the difference simply does not or no longer exists, perform aviolence to those suffering from and living with the consequences of racism. Reality cannot be rethought or made anew bychanging words, by erasing concepts. And trauma that is repressed in this way only grows in new and more devastating ways.
An act of active hesitation on the other hand would require
us to live with these differences, with the fact of all the pain andthe troublesome positions that exist whether I want them to or
not, both the positions and attitudes that are mine and the ones
that can never be mine. Active hesitation is hard work, it isneither a denial nor a sugarcoating,24 it is a withdrawal in thesense of not allowing the system that one knows as reality to be
the only possibility. In the case of injustice there cannot bejustice by taking away the root of the experienced trauma. It isbeing with the history of oppression, being with the color of myown skin and the consequences of that fact, being with thesystem as it is and being with the responsibility that lies on myown shoulders as a participant in these systems, being with theactions that are necessary. This is what it means to engage within
the borderspace... to refuse the definitions that are thrown upon
us by means of the world, to take away the verdict of what is thelimit, of not having to take a decision between things even if they
contradict one another. In the borderspace it is possible to learn
to live with and within contradictions.
24
See: Layla F. Saad, Me, and White Supremacy: How to Recognise Your Privilege, Combat Racism and Change the World (London: Quercus Editions, 2020).

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The hesitation does not mean that we hesitate to call something by its name. The hesitation lies in the fact that we don’t
limit something to the name we have given something, not limit
anything to the judgment I’ve passed onto it due to my upbringing, experiences, education, etc. We open up those judgments
and accept that there are more sides and that my own take,although valid, is not more or less valid than any other judgment. Within the borderspace, what is mine and what is not,fades. I am not becoming other people; the I cannot appropriate
the non-I that resides with the I in the borderspace. But thisbeing-with is what is key. Understanding then becomes a slow
process of being in conversation within the borderspace, where
I become as alien to myself as the non-I that together with the I
makes up the borderspace. The limits of the I and the non-I do
not disappear or become meaningless, but these limits are nolonger the essence of what exists. As Ettinger explains, in thematrixial borderspace there is a transsubjective relationality
which is a “relations-without-relating to the other based on reattuning of distances-in-proximity”.25 As such the human subject is not a subjugation but should be understood as a carrying,as a carried-cared-for being.26
In this respect the difference between empathy and compassion as noted by Ettinger is important.27 Empathy is the capability of someone to feel what another is feeling, which isentirely based on the notions that reside in the empathic person.
What is presented in the other somehow relates to something inme, a recognition, which makes it possible for me to feel what
the other feels. Yet this is entirely based on my notions, my wayof looking at things. I can have empathy without the other being
involved. Empathy is thus a selfish mechanism, doubling one's
own experience and reliving one's own trauma.
25

Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p. 65.
Birgit M. Kaiser & Kathrin Thiele, “If You Do Well, Carry! The Difference of the
Humane: An Interview with Bracha L. Ettinger”, philoSOPHIA, Vol. 8, No. 1, Winter2018, p. 114.
27
Bracha Ettinger, “(M)Other Re-spect: Maternal Subjectivity, the Ready-mademother-monster and The Ethics of Respecting”, in Studies in the Maternal, 2 (1) 2010.
26

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Compassion is different. Compassion does not require theperson to understand the other, in the sense of definite knowing
what is going on with the other person. I can show compassion
without pretending to know, without presupposing that I caneven understand what is going on with the other person, without
presupposing that my own experience that relates to what I see
in the other person is even somehow related. Compassion leaves
the other person as is, and accepts the experience of the otherperson without imposing (violently) one's own world upon theother. Compassion is thus a hesitation of judgment, a way to not
yet say that in order for me to do anything the other needs to fit
in a box of my choosing.
While Levinas gives ethical priority to Cain as a subject
always having a responsibility toward the guilt one carries withrespect to the other, Ettinger invokes the example of Eve as a
figure we are much more indebted to as an ethical archetype.
The difficult path to compassion begins with Eve’s com-passion. If the other can never be your total Other, there is an
Other of the Other – in the feminine. Transcendence is therefore translucence – in the feminine. The sorrow, shame, andguilt of carrying the living and the dead can be sublimated.
The conditions for the ethical attitude do not depend only
upon recognizing that you are already a Cain, but also uponrecognizing that you are also already an Eve as well as that you
are indebted to Eve, to her birthing and her lamentation.28

Conclusion: Possible Practices
This type of compassion, this ethics of active hesitation, requires
a certain type of madness. It requires a looking toward parts ofour self that have been denied due to their incongruence withthe world as it is presented to us. And even though we arethrown into the world, as Heidegger puts it, that does not meanthat we must be victims to the systems of knowledge that are
28

Kaiser & Thiele, “If You Do Well, Carry! The Difference of the Humane: An Interview
with Bracha L. Ettinger”, p. 120.

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forced upon us. Anne Dufourmantelle notices that this kind ofrisk-taking is essential to life, the foundation of what it means to
be human.29 Simone Weil referred to it as a conversion, becoming what we cannot behold.30 This kind of madness can be foundin some practices of understanding that are non-critical in its
nature. They each contain a durability with the simultaneousinconsistencies of the I and the non-I, the being-with whatcannot be known. As Ettinger explains:
I insist on the duration of dwelling and wit(h)nessing to achieve compassion, on the process of co/in-habit(u)ation and on
the awareness to this process. To carry is also to en-dure: tosustain and support. We are here, hence we have been carried.
Each one of us.31

To conclude I would like to offer some possibilities of engaging
with this type of non-critical understanding. These examples
serve only as openings for further research.
We could relate to philosophical compassion as a non-criticalway of understanding as a kind of circumlocution.32 The walking
around something to understand it – not in order to approach it
directly, since it is fundamentally impossible to approach. Circumlocution is the maximal kind of approaching of that whichcannot be approached but neither can be left alone. A direct
approach would mean a destruction, a decision on what remains
at the limit of oneself; it would ask us to impose a decision.
Circumlocution is a way of giving it time, of staying with it eventhough it remains just beyond our definite reach. It gives us
understanding in the sense of a relationality, without reducing
the non-I to the terms of the self.
29
Anne Dufourmantelle, In Praise of Risk, translated by Stephen Miller (New York:
Fordham University Press 2019).
30
Nicole des Bouvrie, The Necessity of the Impossible (Nuenen: Exilic Press, 2019) p. 199.
31
Kaiser & Thiele, “If You Do Well, Carry! The Difference of the Humane: An Interview
with Bracha L. Ettinger”, p. 106.
32
Circumlocution can be practiced in writing, see for instance the work of Shoghi
Effendi. Personal conversation with Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, Winter 2004.

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Another way to make sense of philosophical compassion as aform of active hesitation is to think of it through the body itself.
There is a kind of knowing while staying with the body, aknowing that cannot be approached in definite terms. The embodiment practices of dancing for instance, of prayer, of meditation are sources of understanding by staying with a concept,
lingering without decision. In these embodied processes there
might be a kind of active hesitation present. It is the eating that
Simone Weil was referring to, that sustains being which simultaneously is and is not linked to the physicality of the body.
Alain Badiou gives some examples of experiences in which
what he calls an event, can take place.33 An event is a rare thing,
it is a radical moment that lies outside of time, where the subject
is only loyal to the outcome. Willing to give up every way ofrelating to the world, we can only recognize the event afterwards, since in that moment there is nothing but the change
taking place. A new reality takes root in us, even though afterwards it will be impossible to think back to what the old world
was like. Once we know one plus one is two, we can no longer
imagine a world or a time in which this was not the case for us.
Besides this kind of mathematical understanding, Badiou
mentions how love can also be such an event. Love as a momentof connection that cannot be sustained, in which you lose theself without becoming the other. In the practice of love the limitof the other is easily digressed, as love is easily conflated withownership and sacrifice, yet in essence the moment of love isnothing like that. It is a letting go of the self, regardless of the
future, without presupposing what comes after. And it is at sucha moment that understanding through compassion and active
hesitation can come about.
Truth, then, is not a matter of decision, of claiming a groundfor ourselves and defending it. Truth is that moment in which
reality presents itself through borderlinking, through an opening toward that which is not me, while fragilizing the concept ofwhat is and what is not part of me. This is the truth that can be33

Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds (New York: Continuum, 2009).

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17. PHILOSOPHICAL COMPASSION

experienced through circumlocution, through embodiment andthrough acts of love. It exists outside of language and otherpower structures, ready to be understood whenever and wherever we are.

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358

Configuring Feminist Philosophy in the Context
of the Nordic Summer University
Synne Myrebøe, Valgerður Pálmadóttir & Johanna Sjöstedt

While feminist philosophy has had a place at Western universities for several decades, the question of how to understand therelationship between feminism and philosophy is still a disputed
territory. Moreover, the concept of “feminist philosophy” iscontested in several camps.1 From the perspective of philosophy, feminist philosophy might seem compromised from its
commitment to political change, thereby opening up for the
charge of being dogmatic; from the perspective of feminism, thepractice of philosophy might seem too far removed from thepressing concerns of injustice in ordinary life. Thus, when outlining the themes and activities of the study circle Feminist
Philosophy: time, history, and the transformation of thought, ourproject description was oriented around exploring these tensions. Having backgrounds both in philosophy and the discipline of the history of ideas, we wanted to discuss the bearingsof these concerns within the frames of history. Among the circle’s aims was to organize a transdisciplinary space to reflect on
feminist philosophy while also discussing the abovementioned
tensions on their own terms. Initially, however, starting thiscircle within the framework of the Nordic Summer University(hereafter NSU), we had little knowledge of the institutional
history of NSU and its connection to the emergence of women’sstudies.
This chapter briefly introduces NSU as an institution that has
generated both personal and scholarly values for decades andconstituted the organizational home for Feminist Philosophy:
Time, History and the Transformation of Thought. Taking ourpoint of departure from what we perceived as the marginalization of feminist philosophy within the institution of philosophy, on the one hand, and the growth of feminist philoso-

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phizing in several fields of research, on the other, we place thescholarly interests of this study circle against the background of
previous scholarly engagements with feminist issues at NSU.
Lastly, we describe and analyze some significant experiencesfrom the Feminist Philosophy Circle, with the purpose of discerning the forms of knowledge that emanated from our work
during these years of relational and educational tours.1

The Nordic Summer University– A Democratic Space for Thought and Practice
NSU is an independent, migratory network for cultivation andresearch founded in 1950 by a group of scientists and scholars
from the Nordic region. The initiative was formed in the imageof the Internationale Hochschulwochen, which had been activein Austria from the end of the second world war onward, andhad close connections to the Vienna circle.2 Thus, NSU is part of1
In the fall of 2015, we initiated the sketch for a new study circle within the Nordic
Summer University (NSU), which then received support to organize an ad-hoc conference to attract future participants. Thus, what would become the circle Feminist
Philosophy: Time, History, and the Transformation of Thought, had its first wintersymposium in Umeå in Sweden in March 2016. Invited keynote speakers were Kristina
Fjelkestam and Claudia Lindén from Stockholm, Sara Edenheim from Umeå, and Tuija
Pulkkinen from Helsinki. The same year at NSU’s summer session in Orivesi, Finland,
the circle was accepted for a three-year program within the framework of NSU’s activities. Since then, the circle has attracted more than 200 scholars from more than 20
countries. Invited keynote speakers at the circle’s symposiums during the time of its
activities (four years) were Kristie Dotson (U.S.), Nancy Bauer (U.S.), Alison Jaggar(U.S./U.K.), Willow Ververk (CA/U.K.), Jorunn Økland (NO), Line Cecilie Engh (NO),
Cecilia Rosengren (SWE), Sigríður Thorgeirsdóttir (IS), Naomi Scheman (U.S.), Fanny
Söderbäck (SWE/U.S.), Cecilia Sjöholm (SWE) and Ingvild Torsen (NO). In addition
to the collaboration with Umeå University, the circle has held a large international
conference in collaboration with the University of Iceland and the network Feminist
Philosophy: Transforming Philosophy based there in 2017; and symposiums in collaboration with Oslo University in 2018 and lastly with Södertörn University in 2019. Afterthe circle’s program had come to an end, a new feminist philosophy circle was formedby members of the former circle and accepted into the study program of the NSU for
the following three years. Hence, the work that started in 2015 continues along newpaths, and the network prevails, expands and continues to expand.
2
Karolina Enquist Källgren, “Fristående akademiskt nätverk som har haft story inflytande,” Respons (no. 5, 2020) available online at http://tidskriftenrespons.se/artikel/
fristaende-akademiskt-natverk-som-har-haft-stort-inflytande/360

CONFIGURING FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

a European tradition of academically independent, international
forums for scholars and researchers that started in the interwar
and post-war era and aimed at creating academic and intellectual arenas to contribute to the development of international
cooperation within the sciences and promote peace. An additional aim was to give researchers and students the possibilities
to understand and exchange ideas with actors from civil society
and the cultural sector.3
The context for the establishment of NSU was, among otherthings, a felt crisis of the Universities and the sciences in theaftermath of World War II.4 As explained by Troels Degn
Johansson, former chair of NSU, the organization was initiallyestablished as an elite “task force” to promote much-needed
cooperation between various academic disciplines and different
countries. The aim was to increase understanding between thetheoretical and applied sciences and to discuss pressing social
issues that needed perspectives from various research fields. A
democratic organizational form has been a trademark of NSU
from the beginning. It is based on several study circles that are
active for some time, three years at a minimum – accepted
through a democratic process informed by scholarly reviews.
Today, each circle organizes one symposium or a workshop
during the winter, and then all circles gather for a summer
session for at least one week, where each circle has its own
program open for all. NSU’s activities are held in different placesin the Nordic and the Baltic region, often in collaboration withsome local academic or artistic institutions or networks. Around
200 people annually gather at the summer sessions to discuss,
study and socialize. The summer university facilitates scholarly
advancement for researchers and students with children, sinceeven children are invited, with the Children’s Circle arranging
activities during the daily study program.

3

Poul Hermansen, “NSU – et kort historisk tilbageblik”, Kritik og Krise, (NSU Press,
2000).
4
Troels Degn Johansen, “Af Nordisk Sommaruniversitets nyeste historie”, Kritik og
Krise, (NSU Press, 2000).

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The summer session’s time frame of one week, where participants interact across study circles and seminars with topics
that are followed up during the winter, facilitates unexpected
meetings, critical discussions, and a rare opportunity to expand
horizons of thought. NSU strives to create a room free of competition, where the formulation of problems are foregrounded
and where performance and reflection meet. It has been a sourceof innovative intellectual interchange for several decades,
resulting in many publications and cross-border collaboration
between academics and actors in practical and artistic activities.
NSU offers a place to present issues and ideas and to work acrosstheoretical and practical experiences, academic disciplines, andhierarchies. These boundary transgressions constitute a very
valuable – yet often underrated – aspect of research. The themes
dealt with within the different study circles are formulated basedon issues presented by the participants. Lecturers from all over
the world also provide a basis for the conversation as invited
keynote speakers. The freedom of innovative research andcollaboration that NSU facilitates have, among other things,
created opportunities for the development of research fields in
the Nordic and Baltic countries, such as human ecology, peaceand conflict research, gender studies, and research into artistic
practice.
Participating in NSU is a democratic experience rarely accommodated within today’s academic institutional structures.
Degn Johansson wrote in 2000 that NSU is, “despite its age as a
research organization within the framework of Nordic cooperation, still characterized as an ongoing project and experiment: adream of an organization [...] in which the work is driven bydesire and idealism.”5 As we are writing this chapter twenty years
later, Degn Johansson’s description seems to be as relevant as
ever. The organization proved to be a fitting platform for atransdisciplinary exploration of feminist philosophy. Sadly, as
we write this in 2022, NSU now stands at a crossroads and might
have reached the end of its history in the form that has
5Troels Degn Johansson, “Förord,” Kritik og Krise (NSU Press, 2000), p. 1.

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CONFIGURING FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

characterized it over the last 70 years since the main sponsor,
The Nordic Council of Ministers, has decided to withdraw its
funding. Nevertheless, we hope that the organization finds a way
to survive. As we will discuss further in this chapter, the organizational structures and the egalitarian ethos of NSU enabled
fruitful intellectual exchanges and lasting networks that continue within traditional universities and expand outside academic contexts.

The history of feminist scholarship within NSU
NSU was greatly affected by the expansion of higher educationand the accompanying student uproar in the late sixties that,among other things, resulted in more egalitarian organizational
structures and the entrance of Marxist perspectives in many
circles.6 Consequently, in the 1970s, the organization became aprominent forum for critical studies, and a number of new
interdisciplinary subjects and research fields in the Nordic
region had an early start in NSU.7 It was in this context that thecircle “Kvindesituationens specifikke karakter under kapitalismen” [The specific character of women’s situation undercapitalism] – with close connections to the new radical women’s
movements in the Nordic countries – was established in 1971
and accepted in NSU’s program in 1973.8 As the circle’s nameindicates, the analytical perspectives were Marxist feminist. This
circle, which soon came to be referred to simply as the ‘women’s

6

Arne Overrein, “Vitenskap, kritikk og krise. Om Nordisk Sommeruniversitetets utvikling og idegrunnlag i et vitenskaps- og utdanningshistorisk perspektiv” in Johansen,
Overrein & Rendtorff (Eds.), Kritik og Krise – Nordisk Sommeruniversitet i 50 år (Århus:
NSU Press, 2000).
7Alexander Ekelund, Kampen om vetenskapen: Politisk och vetenskaplig formering
under den svenska vänsterradikaliseringens era (Gothenburg: Daidalos, 2017).
8
Signe Arnfred & Karen Syberg, Kvindesituation & kvindebevægelse under kapitalismen(København: Nordisk Sommaruniverstets skriftserie 1974).

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circle,’9 marked the beginning of a strong and longstanding
presence of feminist scholarly work within NSU.10
In historiographical accounts of gender- and feminist
research in the Nordic region, international cooperation istypically highlighted and described as essential for the development of the field. In that context, NSU is frequently mentioned
as an important context for the early development of Nordic
academic feminism.11 Hence, when the circle Feminist Philosophy: Time, History and the Transformation of Thought applied
for its first ad-hoc symposia in 2016 in the aspiration to becomea study circle within NSU’s program, it connected with a tradition where feminist activism was entangled with scholarship andintellectual curiosity.
9

Signe Arnfred, “Fortrinsvis historisk beretning om ‘Kvindekredsen’s udvikling i NSU,
og herunder om sammenhæng og manglende sammenhæng mellem kvindebevægelse,fagkritisk arbejde og ventrefløjspolitik”, Nordisk Forum: Tidskrift för universitets- ochforskningspolitik, Vol. 4, No. 12 (Nordisk Sommaruniversitet: Roskilde Universitetsforlag: 1976.)
10
Subsequent ‘women’s circles’ include “Familjen som institution för social reproduktion” [The family as an institution for social reproduction] (1975–1977), “Kvinnorörelse
och kvinnoforskning” [Women’s movement and women’s research] (1979–1891);“Kvinnokultur och kvinnokamp” [Women’s culture and women’s struggle] (1982–
1983), “Æstetik, køn og kultur” [Aestetics, gender, and culture] (1987–1989) and“Feminism och kunskapsutveckling” [Feminism and knowledge development] (1991–
1993). Feminist perspectives were also higly present in other circles such as and“Socialisationsteori” [Socialization theory] (1978–1981); “Mellan män och maskuliniteter” [Between men and masculinities] (1995–1997); “Køn i Norden” [Gender andSex in the Nordic countries] (2010–2012); “Exploring Affect” (2013–2015). See
Valgerður Pálmadottiŕ och Johanna Sjöstedt, “Nordic Feminism Reconsidered: Activism, scholarly endeavours, and women’s research networks at the Nordic Summer
University 1971–1990” (Nora: Nordic Journal on Feminist and Gender research, 30 (1)2022).
11
See for example Nina Lykke, “Rethinking socialist and Marxist legacies in feminist
imaginaries of protest from postsocialist perspectives,” Social Identities, Vol. 24, No. 2,
2017, pp. 173–188; Britt-Marie Thurén, Genusforskning – Frågor, villkor och utmaningar (Stockholm: Vetenskapsrådet, 2003); Bente Rosenbeck, “Nordic women’sstudies and gender research,” in von de Fehr et al. (Eds.), Is there a Nordic Feminism?
(UCL Press, 1998); Drude Dahlerup, Rødstrømperne. Den danske Rødstrømpebevægelses udvikling, nytænkning og gennemslag 1970–1985, Lindhardt og Ringhof,
1998; Ulla Manns, “En ros är en ros är en ros. Konstruktionen av Nordisk kvinno- ochgenusforskning,” (Lychnos, 2009).

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CONFIGURING FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

An important document from the early engagements withfeminist questions within NSU is Kvindesituation & kvindebevægelse under kapitalismen [Women’s Situation and Women’s
Movement under Capitalism], a collection of essays reflecting
the activities of the first ‘women’s circle’ edited by thecoordinators Karen Syberg and Signe Arnfred and published in
1974. In the introduction to the anthology, Syberg and Arnfred
write about the potential risks involved when feminist activities
and initiatives take shape in academic settings:
The pitfalls with the connections to the university is […] thatthe need for theoretical insights does not spring from politicalproblems but on the contrary from that which is sociallysanctioned in a narrow university environment.12

The risk with this, the authors further write, is that “the theory
that is not created in an attempt to understand and further
develop a practice” will lead to “depoliticization as an effect in
the final instance.”13 What is suggested, and which also reappears
in today’s feminist discussions, is whether a theoretical academicization tends to be alienated from the everyday life that takes
place in homes and workplaces, where higher education is no
exception. Rather than underlining arbitrary gaps between
practice and theory, the circle Feminist Philosophy has strived
to understand the implications of theory as practice and practiceas theory.
Regarding the practices demanded by the authors of theanthology from 1974, there is reason to ask whether this still
constitutes an underdeveloped and neglected area of higher
education. Much indicates that current academic structures andcultures do not mirror the vast knowledge produced by feminist
12“Det farlige ved universitetsanknytningen er […] at behovet for teoretisk indsigt ikke
udspringer af politiske problemstillinger, men at det derimod bliver hvad der er socialt
sanctioneret i et snævert universitetsmiljø der kommer til at styre arbejdet.” Arnfred &Syberg, Kvindesituation & kvindebevægelse under kapitalismen, p. 7.
13
Arnfred & Syberg, Kvindesituation & kvindebevægelse under kapitalismen (København: Nordisk Sommaruniverstets skriftserie 1974).

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scholarly work in the last decades. Instead, at times it seems thatthe academic world has developed more in accordance with thelast words of the anthology’s title, “Women’s Situation and
Women’s Movements under Capitalism”, i.e., along withmarket rationality. For instance, the current meritocratic apparatus does not acknowledge so-called ‘academic housework’ thatis more often in the hands of women, resulting, e.g., in unequal
possibilities for employment, which is based on publications andcitations. An early study of the effects of pandemics also showedthat women’s research production internationally decreased
radically compared to their male colleagues when schools closed
and children were made to stay at home.14 Furthermore, sexism
thrives within universities, just as within other social institutions. Signs of that are found in the countless examples of sexual
violation, harassment, belittlement, and exclusion based on
gender expressed in stories that were publicly voiced during#metoo.15 Intertwined with this pervasive inequality are theracist and ableist structures maintained through educational
institutions’ hierarchization of knowledge and bodies.
At the same time as discriminating structures prevail, newconservatives claim that the rise of feminism has meant a politicization of universities.16 In countries governed by nationalist
and conservative parties, this claim is advanced at the same thatgovernments seek to ban knowledge on sexuality and gender.
Hence, if the interest in feminist theory was described as adanger of depoliticization half a century ago, this is now turned
14

Eunji Kim and Shawn Patterson, “The Pandemic and Gender Inequality in Academia,” (July 20, 2020) Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?
abstract_id=3666587
15
Thamar Melanie Heijstra, Finnborg Salome Steinthorsdóttir, & Thorgerdur
Einarsdóttir, “Academic career making and the double-edged role of academic
housework”, Gender and Education, (Vol 29, No 6, 2017), pp. 764–780.; “Gender Biasin Academe: An Annotated Bibliography of Important Recent Studies, Danica
Svavonick & Cathy N. Davidson, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/03/08/gender-bias-in-academe-an-annotated-bibliography/#new
16
Ivar Arpi & Anna-Karin Wyndhamn, Genusdoktrinen (Stockholm: Fri tanke, 2020);
Mikko Lagerspetz, “’The Grievance studies affair’” Project: Reconstructing and Assessing the Experimental Design”, Science, Technology, & Human Values, (Vol. 46, No 2,2021), 402–424.

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upside down. Feminist theory, in the understanding of theory aspractice – as different ways of reading, writing, speaking, andperceiving the world, is indeed political in the understandingthat it strives to dissolve oppressive structures.
During the early 1970s, when the aforementioned anthology
Kvindesituation & kvinnbevægelse was published, far fewer
people could pursue academic education than today. Furthermore, the women who wrote and read the anthology in reading
circles in Iceland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden were part of
the first generation to combine caretaking of young children
with higher education, i.e., family life and academic life. Today,questions on who gets access to and influence higher education
are still pressing, and feminist networks engage internationallyin multiple ways to gather and transform higher education into
more democratic institutions. Despite the differences in scopeand scholarly interests between the initial feminist study earlycircles of feminists at NSU and our circle on feminist philosophy, our shared goal is to try to understand and further
develop a practice. Yet, putting emphasis on historical analysis,
the circle Feminist Philosophy wanted to restrain from moralizing in favor of a broader and contextual understanding ofcontemporary practice.

Outlining the Circle
In the aptly named text “Is feminist philosophy a contradictionin terms?” the philosopher Nancy Bauer discusses the relationship between the two enterprises in detail and notes the “curious
lack of serious work on the question of how philosophy andfeminism are supposed to go together.17 Rather than assemblingarguments “in favor” of feminist philosophy – however that
notion is defined – Bauer wants to open up a space for doing
scholarly work regarding the possible tensions in the project of
combining feminism and philosophy. Such a project does not
subscribe to the patriarchal notion that feminism and philo17

Nancy Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2001), pp. 20–21.

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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

sophy mix as oil and water; instead, it is the starting point forserious work on thinking about these tensions. However, Bauer
does not discuss questions about the institutional norms ofphilosophy or the role of history in conceptualizing the relationship between feminism and philosophy.
As a matter of fact, women compose a smaller portion of thestudent body and faculty in philosophy compared to otherdisciplines.18 This lack of women (including trans and nonbinary people) in philosophy can be viewed from a larger historical perspective: Already in the early 15th century, Christinede Pizan noted that the path for women to philosophize wasthrough literature.19 There seems to be much truth in Pizan’s
remarks. According to Mary Ellen Waithe, a precursor for
research on women philosophers, women’s philosophical works
throughout history have been classified as belonging to disciplines other than philosophy, and they have thus been omitted
from what we understand as the Western philosophical tradition, i.e., the philosophical canon.20 Hence, as literary scholar
Claudia Lindén has argued, philosophers have discussed gendersince the birth of philosophy, but the modern construction ofphilosophy does not allow for the inclusion of questions ofgender and/or feminism.21 In this analysis, feminist philosophy
would appear to be a contradiction in terms because gender andfeminism do not count as subjects of philosophy.22 This exclu18
Inga Bostad & Tove Pettersen, “Kjønn og feminisme i norsk filosofi – Noen betraktninger”, Norsk filosofisk tidsskrift, No. 03–04 / 2015; Martina Reuter, “Varför så få kvinnor? Könsfördelningen inom den akademiska filosofin”, Tidskrift för politisk filosofi,
No. 3, 2015; Thompson, Morgan et al. “Why Do Women Leave Philosophy? Surveying
Students at the Introductory Level”, Vol. 16, No. 6, pp. 1–36.
19
Christine de Pisan, The book of the city of ladies (New York: Persea Books, 1998).
20
Mary Ellen Waithe, “Sex, Lies, and Bigotry: The Canon of Philosophy” in Sigridur
Thorgeirsdottir & Ruth E. Hagengruber (eds.), Methodological Reflections on
Women’s Contribution and Influence in the History of Philosophy (Springer, 2020).
21
Claudia Lindén, “Mary Wollstonecraft och filosofin som feminism”, Glänta 2001,(Vol. 9, No. 1–2), pp. 130–140.
22
Lindén, 2001: Mary Wollstonecraft and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are cases in point.
While Rousseau, with his Emile, or on education, is counted among the philosophers,
Wollstonecraft’s critique of his treatment of Sophie in the same text is classified as literature.

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sion highlights how the genre is a gendered practice and how
certain topics are excluded from philosophy proper.
It’s important to stress that the processes of definition thathave eliminated women philosophers from the history ofphilosophy, either by relegating them to other disciplines or byforgetting about them altogether, still operate today. In the past
two decades, several prominent feminist philosophers havereflected on the relationship between philosophy, feminism, andtheir position as women in philosophy.23 In the essay “Can theother of philosophy speak?”, Judith Butler tells the story of her
way into philosophy and how she, propelled by her writing on
feminist philosophy, came to occupy a place outside the institutions of philosophy.24 She also notes how she shares thisdestiny with several feminist philosophers in the United States.
Her discussion of the place of philosophy on the border of social
critique is both institutional and methodological. Describing thework of French philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray,
Butler writes: “This work cannot be read without philosophy, forthat is its text, and yet including it in the canon is not possible
for most philosophy departments”.25
Butler’s remark also has implications for how to readfeminist theory. As noted in the introduction, feminist theory
has a somewhat paradoxical relationship to time and history.
While, on the one hand, emphasizing the situatedness of boththe knowing subject and of the claims of knowledge, there has
been less interest in the historicity of the philosophical concepts
used to make these claims. Hence, Ingeborg Owesen argues that
23

Rosi Braidotti, La philosophie là où on ne l’attend pas (Paris: Larousse, 2009); Michèlele Dœuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An essay concerning women, philosophy, trans. Trista
Selous, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Catherine Malabou, Changing difference: The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy, trans. Carolyn Shread, (Cambridge: Polity Press,2011); Naomi Scheman, “Vad är en kvinna? Från fakta till erkännande”, trans. Ellen
Söderblom Saarela, in (eds.). Evelina Johansson Wilén & Johanna Sjöstedt, Vad är en
kvinna Språk, materialitet, situation, (Gothenburg: Daidalos, 2021).
24
Judith Butler, “Can the other of philosophy speak”, Undoing gender (New York:
Routledge, 2004).
25
Butler, 2004, p. 245.

369

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY“contemporary feminist theory is largely oriented towards thepresent” and that the philosophical history of modern feminism
has received insufficient scholarly attention.26 This is noticeable
not least in gender studies as a discipline, which increasingly hasturned toward the social sciences. Intertwined with the epistemological and ontological framework of social sciences, thephilosophical knowledge of diverse peoples is marginalized andthus withdrawn from both philosophy and the social sciences.
Currently, the practice of such pervasive epistemological violence is one of the central concerns within higher education. In
her article “How is this Paper Philosophy”, Kristie Dotson
recounts her younger sister Alexis’ conversation with her Guidance Counselor when she was a college student:Counselor: Why don’t you major in Social Work?
Alexis: Social Work sounds good, but I am interested in Philosophy.
Counselor: (Snorts) Philosophy is not for black women.
That’s a white man’s game.
Alexis: My older sister is a philosophy professor.
Counselor: Well, she’s probably the only one, and that shouldtell you something. (2009)27

Dotson’s article does not only point to the practices of injustice
but also to the need for philosophical work that can transgress a
moralizing demand for homogeneity. Furthermore, Dotsonsuggests engaging in a culture of practice that values “contribution, multiple canons, and multiple forms of disciplinary validation”.28 This definition of a curious and inclusive culture of practices is aligned with the scrutiny of epistemological and peda-

26

Owesen, 2021, p. 1.
Kristie Dotson, “How is this Paper Philosophy?”, Comparative Philosophy (Vol. 3, No.
1, 2012), p. 3.
28
Dotson, “How is this Paper Philosophy?”, p. 26.
27

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CONFIGURING FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

gogical norms within higher education that have been important for the community of Feminist Philosophy.

Reading Together – Or: Philosophy Embodied
Starting the interdisciplinary feminist philosophy circle, we did
not know who would apply. Over the years, the circle hasgathered over 200 scholars from more than 20 countries and fivecontinents. Many participants have chosen to return year afteryear, and we have been able to follow each other’s work andinterests. Although the circle has had a historical-philosophicalfocus, it has been an interdisciplinary meeting place. The participants have been students, artists, doctoral students, and senioracademics from philosophy, history of ideas, literary studies,gender studies, sociology, law, and the educational sciences.
This heterogeneity in age, career, and academic culture has
placed great demands on the individual participants and thepedagogical approaches adopted. A question that arose quite
quickly was what it would mean also to explore feminist philosophy in pedagogical practice, that is, in a relational learning
context of which we were all part. Although pedagogical practice
was not manifestly a part of our focus when we started the circle,
it proved to be highly important at our individual meetings andduring the entire period the circle ran. Four aspects of ourexperience that could, with advantage, be developed as an asset
to higher education pedagogy, and gender equality issues inhigher education will here be exposed. We call the four aspects
time, history, dissonance, and voice. Together, these aspects
point to a practice of embodied philosophy.

Time
We enter the pedagogical space in time, but also with different
expectations and experiences of time. This became clear at ourvery first seminar in Orivesi, Finland. On a beautiful but very
hot day in July, we gathered in one of the smaller seminar rooms.
The topic for the seminar was “Empowerment and vulner-371

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

ability”.29 What became apparent during the seminar was how
the theme itself went beyond the texts read and could also be
registered in our own practice. The participants’ respective preunderstandings of the overarching project of Feminist Philosophy were clearly asymmetrical. Some of us had earlier
experience and knowledge of feminist activism where questionsof space for speech were highly important. Others were trainedin philosophy but were new to feminist thought. For some, thehistorical perspective was elemental, while for others, it was
something to be left behind. Hence, setting out on a collective
journey of thought is inevitably also a vulnerable practice. The
pedagogical challenge is thus to navigate between different
orientations in the unknown territories with a direction ofindividual and common empowerment in sight.30

History
As mentioned in the introduction to this anthology, feminist
history can be translated in different ways: as lamenting theviolence and suppression in the past, as a women’s history that
presents the neglected voices, or as a critical re-writing of a
canon of white-male-supremacy. The circle “Feminist Philosophy” has engaged with all these perspectives. The most prominent pedagogical challenge has been the translation of ideas,
where so-called canonical texts have been read next to feminist
philosophy and theory. Rather than an orientation toward
injustice, our pursuit has been to open history as a poetic practice. Philosophy understood as the love of wisdom, cannot be
29

The texts we discussed in this seminar were Claire Colebrook, “Norm Wars” in
Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze, Braidotti and Patricia Pisters (eds.) (Bloomsbury,2012) Rosi Braidotti “The ethics of becoming imperceptible” in Constantin Boundas(ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh university press 2006); Carolyn
Culbertson, “The ethics of relationality: Judith Butler and social critique” (Continental
Philosophy Review 2013); Judith Butler and William E. Connolly, “Politics, Power andEthics: A Discussion Between Judith Butler and William Connolly”, Theory & Event(Vol. 4, no. 2, 2000).
30
Throughout her academic work, Sarah Ahmed has conceptualized feminist practicein academic settings: Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Sara Ahmed, Living a feminist life (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2017).

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CONFIGURING FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

reduced to the institutional practice of a few in modern
European universities. As Claudia Lindén emphasizes in her
chapter in this anthology, literature is not only the path intellectual women have chosen or assigned throughout history.
What feminist critique has exposed is also how the disciplines ofHistory and Philosophy are inevitably gendered narratives.
Reading history and philosophy as literary narratives, andliterary narratives as history and philosophy, became a central
consideration for understanding the temporal rhythms constituted by and through the circle. Besides reading canonized texts
by Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche in dialogue
with now more recognized texts by women philosophers like
Arendt, Butler, Cavarero, Irigaray, and Lorde, the participants
have presented their own work.

Dissonance
Driven by passions to transform thought and practice, feminist
philosophy is inevitably political and thereby also pluralistic. In
contrast to feminist theory as a way of seeing, feminist philosophy can be understood as questions of what we see, including
what is not immediately visible. In a seminar with participantsfrom different academic cultures, our ways of seeing, reading,and sensing are not the same. When reading the same texts, theasymmetry mentioned above results in dissonances. Conceptions we take for granted are suddenly put at risk in a seminarroom where the participants’ voices are equal but different.
Although this dissonance might be one of the core conditions
for critical work, it is not without friction. Nevertheless, we haveappreciated the space for disagreement upheld by the study
circle. A prominent example of this dissonance was a seminarannounced as
How do we read concepts in context? Departing from ourreading of Aristophanes Lysistrata, Aristotle, Irigaray, and373

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Burke, we will discuss how ideas on sex, passivity, and activity
can be read and formulated.31

The sore point of the seminar turned out to be Irigaray’s text
“When our Lips Speak Together”.32 From the ensuing discussion, the difficulties recognizable as central to feminist work
were unveiled. For some of the participants, Irigaray’s philosophy of difference had been a game-changer in their academic
life, giving them access to philosophy. For others, her purported
essentialism symbolized the threat of alienation from a common
ground that has been central for post-colonial theory to overcome. A challenge for everyone, and in particular for us asmoderators, was to draw out and embrace these tensions.
From this experience, several questions can be discerned thatput philosophy to the test: are we supposed to keep up a supposedly rational and disinterested attitude when conflicting
emotions play out in the room, i.e., reject emotional and bodily
engagement as misplaced and alienated from rationality? How
can we discern the difference between text and bodies, between
theories and the persons theorizing (what is there to be seen andhow is this affected by the persons seeing)? And what are theimplications of exposing vulnerability – what does it mean for
how voices are distributed and heard? The reflection to which
many women and persons identifying themselves within
LGBT+ return is whether experiences from life are welcome
within institutional philosophy. However, a relevant concern isalso where the limits and restrictions begin and end for personaland bodily experiences. For what is the moral and epistemological position of oppressed groups? What is the role – ethicallyand epistemologically – of the intellectual who wants to produce
critical knowledge? The precarious balancing act is to maintaina space for bodily and emotional engagement and presence to
31

From the invitation sent out to the participants before the summer session at Fårö,Sweden, 2019.
32
Luce Irigaray & Carolyn Burke, “When Our Lips Speak Together” Signs (Vol. 6, No.
1, 1980), pp. 69–79.

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CONFIGURING FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

the texts we read while at the same time keeping an awareness ofthe tipping point of emotional stickiness and vacuity. Obviously,
no general didactics can be drawn from this experience except
for the fact that every time a seminar room gathers, mood andatmosphere will play an important role. Without reaching a final
conclusion about the specific difficulties that appeared during
this seminar (among others), the risk of being together on
unstable ground can also be seen as important food for thoughtfor those who are in love with wisdom.

Voice
The interaction and shared interest, understood as inter-est –being together – has been possible only through the patience andhard work of the participants. With feminist philosophical texts
at our disposal, we have had the possibility to discuss important
feminist philosophers who, throughout history, have sought tomake the unspeakable speak and the absent present. Just to mention a few, Judith Butler has described the common experienceof alienation with the concept of disidentification: “this experience of misrecognition, this uneasy sense of standing under asign to which one does and does not belong”.33 Drawing on
Lauren Berlant she writes that “indeed, it may be precisely
through practices which underscore disidentification with thoseregulatory norms by which sexual difference is materialized thatboth feminist and queer politics are mobilized”.34 However, thepolitics mobilized can also generate new regulatory norms.
Thus, another approach to the phenomenon of disidentification
can be found in a philosophical gesture that resigns fromidentifications and seizes the nonidentical as “an open existence”.35 Joan Scott and Joan Copjec have both written about how
33
Judith Butler, Bodies that matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Abingdon: Routledge, Oxon, 2011[1993]), p. 219.
34
Butler, Bodies that matter, p. 4 and Lauren Berlant, “The Female Complaint,” Social
Text (No. 19 Vol. 20, Fall, 1988), pp. 237–59.
35
Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, “Exilens språk”, Exilens språk. Texter. (Gothenburg:
GFFP, 2016), p. 48. Bracha Ettinger, The matrixial borderspace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

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the non-sense or nonknowledge has been a condition forwestern epistemology and philosophy.36 Further, Adriana Cavarero has emphasized how inclinations have been regarded as apervasive threat to a philosophical and political tradition thathas been characterized by desires for rectitude.37 The feminine
voice has thus been regarded as a threat to the progress ofrationality.38 This politics of interpretation has facilitated themale-coded philosophy to maintain its sovereignty by ignoring
the voice in the understanding of logos: “from the perspective of
language as a system […] what is not heard is, paradoxically, theuniqueness of the sound”, Cavarero writes.39 Against this background, Feminist Philosophy has created a space for philosophical polyphony. In this spirit, we have read classical plays
together. During our four years, Plato’s Symposium, Sophocles’
Antigone, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Euripides’ Hippolytos,
were all discussed. These sessions were opportunities to converse at night in the company with other circles of the Nordic
Summer University. The seminar room was also exchanged forthe beach with wine, snacks, and blankets. Passing the text
between participants, we read aloud the whole plays as the sunset. This way of sharing voices has also been important forthinking about the practice of feminist philosophy, and thereby
actualizing the poetic tradition of philosophy, subordinate to the19th century historiographical construction of institutional
philosophy. In the end, as we pose the question on how tounderstand feminist philosophy, what appears is first and foremost what can be characterized as philosophy’s Other.
*36

Joan Copjec, Read my desire – Lacan Against the Historicists (Verso Books, 2015), p.
17; Joan Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
37
Adriana Cavarero, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude, trans. Amanda Minervini andAdam Sitze (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2016).
38
Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013); Adriana Cavarero, For More than
One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, translation Paul Kottman Stanford(California: Stanford University Press, 2005).
39
Cavarero, For More than One Voice, p. 9.

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CONFIGURING FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

If the discipline of philosophy has been greatly influenced by the
analytical tradition after WWII, both internationally and in
Sweden, the history of ideas in Sweden has come to occupy a
disciplinary space where the history of philosophy has been
scrutinized from critical perspectives, for example, feminism
and postcolonial theory. In starting the project “Feminist Philosophy: Time, history, and the transformation of thought,” wewanted to create a platform where philosophy and feminism
appear dialogically, both in historical as well as contemporary
perspectives, and where tensions between the different terms areinterrogated and used as a starting point for productive academic work.
As already mentioned, working with feminist history of philosophy requires a move toward literature. Our point of departure and our way of approaching philosophy thus arises in asituation where philosophy is already and historically outsideitself. Still, we wanted to maintain a relationship with the word
“philosophy,” since the love of wisdom does not fit unproblematically with any disciplinary borders. In retrospect, this also
turned out to be important in terms of the response to our callfor papers. We discovered that the word philosophy bore a
special attraction not only for philosophers in a narrow sense
but also for scholars outside of philosophy departments.
The relevance of the discourse of philosophy and the historyof ideas for feminist interdisciplinary work should not be underestimated. What was exposed throughout the work of “Feminist
Philosophy: Time, History, and the Transformation ofThought”, was an international and transdisciplinary desire to
be given a space for thought, wonder, and discussion that transgress feminism as theory and practice. Our hope is that feminist
philosophy as a productive culture of practice can carve out
further spaces within more academic institutions and thus contribute to critical inquiry and transgression of the contemporary
logic of profit, self-assertion, and competition.

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378

The Authors
Nicole des Bouvrie freelance philosopher, epistemologist,
art/ACT therapist, teacher, and fiction writer. She holds a PhD
in Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought from the European
Graduate School. Her dissertation on ‘The Necessity of the
Impossible’ was supervised by Anne Dufourmantelle. Des Bouvrie is interested in art, theater, books and life, as well as theconcepts of feminism, motherhood, democracy and equality
and their meaning in the 21st century.
Marta-Laura Cenedese works as a researcher at the Universityof Turku and at the Centre Marc Bloch Berlin. She holds a PhD
in French and Comparative Literature from the University ofCambridge. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research
focuses on 20th- and 21st-century postcolonial literatures, theinterlacing of literature, history and politics, cultural memory
studies, critical theory, critical medical humanities, deathstudies, and feminist writing methodologies. She edited the volume Written on the Body: Narrative (Re)constructions of Violence(s) (2023) and is the author of Irène Némirovsky’s Russian
Influences: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov (2021).
Oda K. S. Davanger is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). She
has a BA from Earlham College and an MPhil from the University of Oslo. Her research interests include phenomenology,
political philosophy, continental philosophy and feminist epistemology. The working title of her doctoral thesis is “The Politics of Being Seen”, a phenomenological critique of democratic
citizenship. Liberal democracy both presumes and promises
freedom and equality, which she argues is a paradox that comesto the fore in feminist and woke political philosophy.

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Sara Edenheim is Docent in History and senior lecturer atUmeå Centre for Gender Studies at Umeå University. She
conducts research at the intersection between feminist theory
and philosophy of history with a focus on Swedish 20th century
history. She has previously analyzed how normative and deviant
gendered and sexual identities are constructed in Swedish legislation and public reports and is currently focused on questions
about how ideas about the family are reproduced within contemporary feminist politics and research.
Kristina Fjelkestam is a Professor in Gender Studies at Stockholm University and has a PhD in Comparative Literature. Her
research profile is based in feminist cultural theory with a historical focus. She is currently interested in the research field ofqueer temporality studies, which combines queer theory withcritical historiography and theory of history.
Ylva Gustafsson is a Postdoctoral Researcher and teacher in
Philosophy at Åbo Academy university. Her research focuseson philosophical questions related to healthcare, psychology,
emotions and interpersonal understanding. She is currently
working on the project “On justice and the shifting meaning of
person-centered care”, funded by the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth foundation.
Guðbjörg Rannveig Jóhannesdóttir is an Associate Professor
at the Iceland University of the Arts. She holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Iceland. Her thesis Icelandic
Landscapes: Beauty and the Aesthetic in Environmental Decision-making discusses the meaning and values that are derived
from aesthetic experiences of landscapes and the role of suchvalues in environmental decision-making. Her research centerson environmental ethics, phenomenology and aesthetics. Her
current research focuses on human-environment/body-landscape relations and processes, and their role in human thinking
and understanding.

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AUTHORS

Zlatana Knezevic is an Assistant Professor at Dalarna University in Sweden. Her background is in Gender Studies and she
holds a PhD in social work. Her research interests link to childwelfare and intersecting injustices in childhoods as well as young
people’s health activism. Her research crosses disciplinary
boundaries in the social sciences and humanities, typically byusing postcolonial feminist theory, critical childhood studies
and anthropology as inspiration.
Helgard Mahrdt holds a PhD. in German Literature from the
University of Tromsø and a cand.philol. in Philosophy from the
University of Oslo. Currently she is a guest researcher at theCentre of Gender Research at the University of Oslo. Hannah
Arendt is in the center of her research, publications and lectures.
She co-edited several books on Hannah Arendt, among thelatest are “The Indispensability of Complete Openness for the
Future of Humanitas: Hannah Arendt & Karl Jaspers in and on
Free Communication, Conversation and Correspondence”(2018), “Hannah Arendt and the Notion of Plurality” (2018),“Responding to wrong doing” (2022) and “Hannah Arendt omkjærlighet, vennskap og politikk” (2022).
Synne Myrebøe works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center
for Foundations of Education at the University of Vienna with aproject on the configurations of Intellectual History and Historyof Ideas in the UK, Norway and Sweden since 1989. She holds a
PhD in History and Education from Umeå University and her
research interest concerns philosophy of education, political/
feminist philosophy and the intellectual history of higher education.
Cecilia Rosengren is Associate Professor in History of Ideas andScience at the University of Gothenburg. Her research comprises Early Modern intellectual and cultural history, with a
special interest in women philosophers. She has written on Anne
Conway, Margaret Cavendish and Emelie du Châtelet. Among
her latest publications are “The wilderness of Allaert van Ever381

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

dingen – experience and representation of the north in the ageof the baroque” (2020) and the anthology Changing Satire.
Transformation and Continuities in Europe, 1600–1830 (2022).
Claudia Lindén is Professor in Comparative Literature atSödertorn
̈ University in Stockholm, Sweden. Her researchinterests include 19th-century Scandinavian literature, Gothic
literature, animal studies, gender studies, queer theory, theory ofhistory. Lindén is currently working on the animal studiesproject “Bear traces: A study of the bear in national romantic
literature around the Baltic Sea.”
Tuija Pulkkinen is a Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research is in the area of feminist theory andphilosophy, political theory, and the history of concepts including work on German idealism, on the 20th-century Frenchthought (Derrida, Foucault), and on the politics of philosophy
in contemporary feminist theory. She is the author of several
books, among the latest is the special issue ‘Vulnerability’ within
Contemporary Feminist Politics and Theory (2020), and the
Palgrave Handbook on German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy (2022). She is also the editor-in-chief of the journal Redescriptions. Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist
Theory.
Valgerður Pálmadóttir holds a PhD in History of Ideas fromUmeå University. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at
the Institute of History at the University of Iceland. Her researchinterests include the relationship between political activism andideas about power, identities and liberation in a historical context, and the relationship between social movements and historical change. Pálmadóttir’s current research project is about
women’s strikes as a political strategy.
Erik Poulsen holds an MA in Aesthetics from Södertörn University. He is currently an independent researcher and literary
critic and specialises in German literature. For several years, he
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AUTHORS

has been working as an editor for tydningen, a Swedish literary
journal on Scandinavian poetry and art criticism. He is currently
writing a book about psychoanalysis and queer theory.
Naomi Scheman is a Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. She has held visiting positions at the University ofGothenburg and Umeå University. She has published work in
feminist epistemology, among the co-edited Feminist Interpretations of Wittgenstein. Her more recent work brings feminist
and relational epistemology and metaphysics into conversation
with issues of political concern, including police and prison abolition, and with efforts to fundamentally rethink research universities to be focused less on generic “excellence” and more on
the problems and challenges that arise from the particular local
and global relationships in which they are embedded.
Johanna Sjöstedt holds double MA-degrees in History of Ideas
and Gender Studies from the University of Gothenburg.
Specializing in the history of feminist philosophy and theory,
she is interested in how notions of gender, time, and history
intersect in feminist theory and how feminist theory transforms
modern notions of temporality and change. Her work has
appeared in NORA, Slagmark, and Ideas in history. She is also
the editor of the anthology Vad är en kvinna? Språk, materialitet,
situation (Daidalos, 2021).
Fanny Söderbäck is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at
Södertörn University and the co-founder and co-director of the
Kristeva Circle. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the New
School for Social Research and has held positions at Siena
College and DePaul University. She is the author of Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva and Irigaray(SUNY Press, 2019). She has edited Feminist Readings of Antigone (SUNY Press, 2010) and is a co-editor of the volume
Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought andPractice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She is currently working
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FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

on a book project on Italian feminist philosopher Adriana
Cavarero (forthcoming with SUNY Press).
Sagy Watemberg Izraeli is a cotutelle Doctoral Researcher in
the Faculty of Law at Bar-Ilan University and in the Study ofReligions at Åbo Akademi University, having received her BA
in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her doctoral research asks what defines
membership in religious communities in multicultural legislation, from the internal perspective of the communities themselves? Her additional interests include social epistemology,socio-legal studies, theories of gender, Jewish law, religious hermeneutics, and inter-religious feminism.
Jorunn Økland is a Professor of Gender Studies at the Humanities, and a Professor II, Faculty of Theology, U. of Oslo (2016–2021). Director at the Norwegian Institute at Athens (2000–
2008); Director, Centre for Gender Research, U. of Oslo; SeniorLecturer, Faculty of Arts, U. of Sheffield. Author/editor of 9
books, among them Marxist Feminist Criticism of the Bible(2008). Latest publication: “Women’s Bravery: Jane Dieulafoy,
Queen Parysatis, and the Reception of the Persian Empire in
19th Century France,” in The Hunt for Ancient Israel: Essays in
Honour of Diana V. Edelman Ed.C. Shafer-Elliott et al.

384

SÖDERTÖRN STUDIES IN INTELLECTUAL
AND CULTURAL HISTORY
2. Anders Burman & Shamal Kaveh (eds.),
Demokratin och det politiska. Essäer om samtidens
politiska tillstånd, 2020.
3. Anders Burman & Tore Lund (eds.), Efter
Viktor Rydberg. Receptions historiska studier,2020.
4. Anders Burman & Joakim Landahl (eds.), 1968
och pedagogiken, 2020.
5. Anders Burman, Marcia Sá CavalcanteSchuback & Synne Myrebøe (eds.), En plats för
tänkande. Essäer om universitetet och filosofin,2020.
6. Crister Skoglund, Kreativitet, fantasi ochbildning. Idéhistoriska essäer, 2021.
7. Anders Burman & Sven-Olov Wallenstein(eds.), Benjamin Höijer. Metafysik, estetik,
historia, 2021.
8. Anders Burman, Joakim Landahl & Daniel
Lövheim (eds.), Moderna pedagogiska utopier,2021.

9. Hjalmar Falk, My Klockar Linder & Petter
Tistedt (eds.), Perspektiv på politisk idéhistoria,
2023.
10. Synne Myrebøe, Valgerður Pálmadóttir &Johanna Sjöstedt (eds.) Feminist Philosophy – Time,
History and the Transformation of Thought, 2023.
Series editors are Anders Burman and Leif
Runefelt.

Södertörns högskola | publications@sh.seWhat is the relationship between feminism and philosophy today?
Although feminist philosophy is now a recognized feld in theinstitution of philosophy, a tension between the terms feminism
and philosophy persists. From the perspective of philosophy,
feminist philosophy may seem too committed to political change.
From the perspective of feminism, the practice of philosophy may
seem too far removed from the pressing concerns of injustice inordinary life.
Tis volume is an interdisciplinary initiative at the intersectionof philosophy, the history of ideas, and feminist theory, where
philosophy is scrutinized from a feminist perspective and asks
questions about what philosophy has to ofer feminism.