Feminist Phenomenology Futures

403 Pages·2017·18.43 MB·English

by  Helen A. Fielding and Dorothea E. Olkowski (eds.)

FEMINIST PHENOMENOLOGY FUTURES
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FEMINIST
PHENOMENOLOGY
FUTURES
Edited by HELEN A. FIELDING
and DOROTHEA E. OLKOWSKI
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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© 2017 by Indiana University Press
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ISBN 978­0­253­02962­1 (cloth)
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1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
CONTENTS
A Feminist Phenomenology Manifesto / Helen A. Fielding · vii
Introduction / Dorothea E. Olkowski and Helen A. Fielding · xxiii
Part 1. The Future Is Now
1 Using Our Intuition: Creating the Future Phenomenological
Plane of Thought / Dorothea E. Olkowski · 3
2 Just Throw Like a Bleeding Philosopher: Menstrual
Pauses and Poses, Betwixt Hypatia and Bhubaneswari,
Half Visible, Almost Illegible / Kyoo Lee · 21
3 Transformative Lines of Flight: From Deleuze to Masoch / Lyat Friedman · 47
4 Crafting Contingency / Rachel McCann · 66
Part 2. Negotiating Futures
5 Open Future, Regaining Possibility / Helen A. Fielding · 91
6 Of Women and Slaves / Debra Bergoffen · 110
7 Unhappy Speech and Hearing Well: Contributions of Feminist Speech
Act Theory to Feminist Phenomenology / Beata Stawarska · 125
Part 3. The Ontological Future
8 Adventures in the Hyperdialectic / Eva­Maria Simms · 141
9 The Murmuration of Birds: An Anishinaabe Ontology of
Mnidoo­Worlding / Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning · 154
10 Trans­subjectivity/Trans­objectivity / Christine Daigle · 183
Part 4. Our Future Body Images
11 The “Normal Abnormalities” of Disability and Aging:
Merleau­Ponty and Beauvoir / Gail Weiss · 203
12 The Transhuman Paradigm and the Meaning of Life / Christina Schües · 218
13 The Second­Person Perspective in Narrative Phenomenology /
Annemie Halsema and Jenny Slatman · 242
14 Hannah Arendt and Pregnancy in the Public Sphere / Katy Fulfer · 257
Part 5. Present and Future Selves
15 Is Direct Perception Arrogant Perception?: Toward a Critical,
Playful Intercorporeity / April N. Flakne · 277
16 Leadership in the World through an Arendtian Lens / Rita A. Gardiner · 299
17 Identity­in­Difference to Avoid Indifference / Emily S. Lee · 313
18 What Is Feminist Phenomenology? Looking Backward
and Into the Future / Silvia Stoller · 328
Index · 355
A FEMINIST PHENOMENOLOGY
MANIFESTO
Helen A. Fielding
I
n this volume we situate the future directions of feminist phenomenology
in the here and now. We contend that in this moment feminist phenomenol-
ogy is well positioned to take a leading role, not simply in terms of consolidat-
ing existing feminist methodologies but also in engaging the difficult task of
thinking through the actual in the fullness of its relational, agential, ontologi-
cal, experiential, and fleshly being, thereby opening up future possibilities. We
also think there is some urgency to this claim. For many, faith in the rational
human subject has been shattered by the events of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries’ worldwide conflicts and increasing sectarianism. The concept of the
subject as such is either obsolete or needs to be dynamically rethought. The cur-
rent options appear to include resuscitating the rational liberal subject or agent,
acknowledging limited agency in the performativity of language and gesture, or
recognizing the agency of matter. We want to argue instead for a feminist phe-
nomenological approach that begins with multiple, meaningful points of view
on relational being.
Feminist phenomenology has emerged as a coherent discipline, as Silvia
Stoller so well explains.1 Nonetheless, accounting for living experience, which is
at the heart of this methodology, is a practice central to emancipatory theoriz-
ing that both comes before and exceeds defined disciplinary borders, as Mari-
ana Ortega points out in her work on Latina feminist phenomenology.2 Thus,
significant to our claim that feminist phenomenology is the methodology of the
future is the recognition that there are multiple ways of approaching living ex-
perience, which is not to imply relativism—that is, the belief that all approaches
or ways of understanding the world are equally true or equally adequate.
vii
viii | Helen A. Fielding
Instead, our claim is that we need robust accounts of embodied subjects
that are interrelated within the world or worlds they inhabit, which is not to
revive the vestiges of a humanism that puts humans at the center. Rather, we are
reformulating the common understanding of the decentered subject as multi-
ple rather than singular. Commensurate with this, we are reformulating the de-
centered subject as a point of view that moves away from the internal perspec-
tive of a singular subject in order to resituate it on the boundary between the
inner realm of thought and feeling and the experiential and exterior world of
political, social, and ethical forces and acts.3 This means we account for human
existence in and through the social sphere with an understanding of agency as
the spontaneous capacity to begin, to set in motion what is unpredictable in its
outcome with effects we cannot anticipate in advance.4
Writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
describes liberalism as a failure because the idea of liberty is defended rather
than the actual liberty of living beings: “Western humanism . . . subordinates
empirical humanity to a certain idea of man and its supporting institutions” in
order to perpetuate the violence of imperialism and colonization.5 He proposes
that we evaluate a politics by questioning the structure of human relations
upon which it is grounded.6 We suggest that this structure of interrelational-
ity be extended to take into account an interrelationality of all beings while
recognizing that “man has no rights over the world.” The political, nonetheless,
remains a human domain, which requires that human agency be addressed.7
Although one could arguably trace feminist phenomenology back to the
early mid-twentieth century, the term itself is quite recent.8 The first texts have
been attributed variably to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, as well as to
the works of some of the early phenomenologists such as Edith Stein.9 These
initial endeavors can now be identified as the institution of a methodology that
can be recognized only after the fact, for phenomenologically it is only after
something—for example, a movement or methodology—has become estab-
lished that one can look back and identify the founding moment or impulse.10
Although many of the tenets of feminist phenomenology—a focus on embodi-
ment and the account of context, limits, and history—were central to feminist
theorizing and methodologies in the latter half of the twentieth century, some
feminists approached phenomenology with caution. The main reason for this
was that phenomenology was largely discredited for privileging a genderless,
neutral transcendental subject, and even now, as Sara Heinämaa and Lanei
Rodemeyer explain, gender is still largely “taken as a factual issue” or an “em-
pirical problem” by “most contemporary commentators,” even though Ed-
mund Husserl himself located “the problem of the sexes” as a transcendental
A Feminist Phenomenology Manifesto | ix
problem.11 As the locus of reason, however, the transcendental subject has too
often been identified as the neutral white European privileged male subject.12
Nonetheless, some feminists were reluctant to give up on phenomenology al-
together, because it was the one methodology that provided a robust account
of embodied living experience, a central starting point for many feminist
analyses.13
We are claiming that feminist phenomenology emerges from an inter-
relational ontology, that not only does it offer the account of embodied expe-
rience for which it is usually recognized, but also that embodied perception
underlies the production of knowledge and grounds politics. We can make
this claim because we understand humans to belong to what Merleau-Ponty
in his late work calls “flesh,” by which he means that humans are relationally
folded into a material and living world: they perceive because they too are per-
ceptible; sensing is sedimented through engagement with the sensible; ideas,
too, overlap and intertwine with the world that conditions them; and, finally,
agency is not limited to the “I think,” but emerges from this situated overlap-
ping of embodied praxis, ideas, and world.14 In other words, because it begins
with multiple points of view within a social, historical, and concrete sphere,
feminist phenomenology establishes itself as temporally and spatially reliant
and relevant. These multiple points of view do not result in relativism, how-
ever. On the contrary, because they are spatially and temporally intertwined,
they overlap and encroach upon one another. They emerge simultaneously,
which means they are not monads and there are possibilities for encounter.15
This claim is not modest—we are arguing that an interrelational world is also
political. Even though it displaces “man” from the center, indeed displaces any
notion of center, humans are nonetheless still subjects who are responsible
and agents.
In short, the political is about what belongs neither solely to the world
of ideas nor to that of empirical facts but is instead enacted in the realm of
unpredictable human relations, which is the intertwining of ideas, experience,
materiality, and action. This means we must learn “to confront ideas with the
social functions they claim to articulate, to compare our perspectives with
others, and to relate our ethics to our politics.”16 Not knowing the future, we
can take the historical context into account only when we think and act. It is,
of course, always risky, for “an action can produce something else than it en-
visaged”—that is, the nature of human action, which is the seat of the political;
nevertheless, politically we assume the “consequences.”17 Because we are social
and historical beings, our actions come out of the context and situation, the
backdrop of history to which they belong, and thus can be judged only from