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Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader, and Alison Stone
Aims of this Companion
Feminist philosophy is a substantial and vibrant area of contemporary philosophy. Feminist philosophers critique and also contribute to traditional areas of philosophy such as philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. One notable feature of feminist philosophy is its interdisciplinarity. Dialogues between feminist philosophy and other disciplines concern not only gender but also the various forms of oppression and identity that surround race and ethnicity, sexuality, disability, class and economic inequities, and the relations between humanity and non-human animals and the natural environment.
Insofar as it originated in feminist politics, feminist philosophy included from the start discussion of feminist political issues and positions—such as the influential taxonomy and evaluation of liberal, Marxist, radical, and socialist feminism in Alison Jaggar’s Feminist Politics and Human Nature (1983). Feminist philosophers began to expose sexist biases running through the various branches of philosophy, including its historical canon, as we discuss in more detail below. Feminists then began work to construct new positions and approaches to combat the sexist assumptions they had identified. Initially moral and political philosophy drew much of the critical and reconstructive attention, but kindred feminist projects have unfolded in almost every area of philosophy: epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and history of philosophy. However, non-feminist philosophers were often slow to recognize the philosophical character of what feminists were doing. For instance, there have long been feminists including women of color working on identity, such as María Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa, but it has not always been recognized that in doing this work they were making important contributions to philosophy of mind (see Chapter 17).
A multi-faceted dilemma arises, though, when we seek as in this volume to trace how feminist philosophical debates have evolved into their current forms. The voices of white, Western feminists, often those working in “analytic” or Anglo-American philosophy, have prevailed within these debates. Often debates have taken shape around these women’s contributions rather than those of women of color, from outside the West, or working in more marginalized traditions. For example, there has been extensive discussion over the years of Catharine MacKinnon’s theory of gendered power relations, according to which women are subordinated to men through their social construction as sexual objects against men as sexual agents. But the focus of this theory is the subordination of women in general, a focus that directs our attention away from power differences among women, and the different ways in which women experience their gender in concert with their race, class, or other social divisions. That said, there have long been feminists who have argued that gender cannot rightly be considered in isolation from other social divisions, such as the Combahee River Collective in the 1970s and their nineteenth-century foremothers such as Anna Julia Cooper, Maria Stewart, and Sojourner Truth (see Chapters 10, 28, and 29). Yet these arguments have far too rarely been fully integrated into feminist philosophy.
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The dilemma, then, is that in tracing the development of feminist debates one may remain focused on those more privileged or powerful voices that have particularly influenced these debates. Although there is no single solution to this dilemma, different contributors to this volume address it in a range of ways: re-inserting relatively neglected voices into these debates; introducing new debates and challenging the terms of existing debates; critiquing the power relations to which feminist thought has been subject despite itself; and reflecting on the concept of intersectionality itself, that is, the idea that gender is always intersected by other social power relations and that women are never simply women but always, inextricably, white women or women of color, middle- or working-class women, and so on. We have also endeavored as editors to design this volume in a way that responds to these dilemmas, as we will now explain.
We have divided this volume into five sections: (1) Engaging the Past; (2) Mind, Body, and World; (3) Knowledge, Language, and Science; (4) Intersections; (5) Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics. This organization is designed to facilitate several different kinds of diversity. First, we wish to ensure a mutually enriching representation of both the Anglo-American (or analytic) and continental European philosophical traditions. We have therefore designed each section to include chapters on both “continental” and “analytic” themes and to put distinct approaches into dialogue (for example, by pairing chapters on analytic and continental feminist approaches to philosophy of language). This said, some chapters have a more analytic and others a more continental orientation while others fall in between or take different stances altogether, ones that are more interdisciplinary or are guided by non-Western traditions. To facilitate discussion between continental and analytic traditions we have organized all chapters thematically. An effect of this topic-based organization is that some figures, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Iris Marion Young come up across many sections—which evidences the breadth and impact of their thought.
Our second aim is to foreground issues of global concern and scope. Particularly in “Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics,” we have centralized global issues and asked authors to address general themes in a global setting. For instance, in discussing care ethics (Chapter 43) Jean Keller and Eva Kittay address global concerns such as the transnational migration of care workers and the global “chains of care” whereby care flows overall from the global south to the north and from the disempowered to the more powerful. Nonetheless, the focus of this companion remains feminist philosophy as it exists today in the Western world, in critical interaction with Western philosophical and related intellectual traditions. By and large, then, Western approaches provide the framework through which global issues will be addressed. This returns us to one of the dilemmas noted earlier: that tracing how feminist debates in ethics and politics have developed entails focusing largely on the West, even though the predominance of Western voices is a product of the unequal global power relations of which many feminists are critical.
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While we focus largely on the West, we have included chapters on non-Western philosophical approaches—Daoism, African feminism, and Confucianism—and approaches that might be classed as “Western” in purely geographical terms—namely Native American and Latin American traditions—although these are not “Western” taking “the West” to be a political rather than narrowly geographical entity. While very far from comprising an exhaustive treatment of non-Western traditions, these chapters are designed to enable readers to identify points of connection and contrast with other essays in the volume. This helps to counter narrower views that non-Western traditions such as Daoism or Confucianism are not properly philosophical at all (e.g., for those who believe that philosophy began in ancient Greece). Such views are problematic, partly in presuming that we all know what is and isn’t philosophy. We do not want to follow mainstream Western philosophy in restricting philosophy to the West. Nonetheless, due to space constraints we have had to cover a small selection of non-Western approaches, which are intended to be indicative rather than representative.
Third, the “Intersections” section includes several kinds of diversity. We focus on the ways in which feminist theory meshes with rich theoretical approaches that start from transgender identities, race and ethnicity, sexuality, and disabilities. In addition, chapters cover some of feminist philosophy’s disciplinary intersections with development studies, religious diversity, and ecological and environmental studies. We have deliberately avoided treating intersectional work as an afterthought or as something separate from the rest of feminist philosophy. Instead we have designed this volume so that, throughout, there is space for our authors to attend to intersecting nodes among power relations—for example, in the ways that the aesthetic tradition has tended to be exclusive not only of white women’s artistic and cultural contributions but equally those of people of color.
Finally, reflecting the variety of approaches to feminist philosophy, there is diversity in the styles of writing adopted by different chapter authors, and in the extent to which they provide original interpretations or arguments regarding their topic or, alternatively, explain the positions already taken by others on this topic. Having explained how we conceive the overall purpose and organization of this volume, we now want to introduce the aims and structure of each of its five sections.
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Engaging the Past
Early work in feminist history of philosophy concentrated on criticizing the philosophical canon, not only targeting the explicit sexism of many of the figures in this canon but also arguing that more pervasive sexist biases often shape entire philosophical frameworks. For example, Genevieve Lloyd (1984) argued that Descartes’s mind/body dualism implicitly ranks the “female” body below the “male” mind even though Descartes himself does not associate women with the body, because in Western thought the body has ingrained historical associations with the female. In this context, dividing mind from body works to the detriment of “the female” and by extension actual women. One conclusion drawn by some feminist historians of philosophy was that a whole series of hierarchical or “binary” oppositions runs through the history of philosophy and Western culture more broadly: mind/body, reason/emotion, culture/nature, action/passion, self/other, and so on—generally with these contrasts lined up with male/female. But must such concepts as mind and reason be necessarily linked to maleness, or are these associations merely contingent, so that these concepts in themselves pose no problems for feminists? Among the range of feminist answers to this question, one possible answer is this: the links are not exactly necessary, but the associations have been made so deeply and pervasively across history that we cannot just set them aside, but instead need to rethink the concepts mind, reason, etc. Thus, critiques of the canon helped to motivate the positive feminist projects of re-thinking ethics, epistemology, and other fields in a feminist light.
Since those critiques of the canon were articulated, though, there have been considerable shifts in orientation within feminist history of philosophy—shifts to move beyond the established canon and rediscover previously forgotten or neglected women philosophers and philosophers of color, or to recognize them as contributing to philosophy and not only, e.g., to politics. For instance, there has been a rediscovery of historical philosophers who used Descartes’s ideas in a feminist or proto-feminist way (see Chapter 6). So, as Moira Gatens puts it (in Chapter 1), building on Eileen O’Neill’s work, it is not so much that there were no women in philosophy in the past but rather that we have insufficient memory of the women who were in it. The problem may be not so much philosophy’s actual history but our selective narratives of that history. Another development is to remain with canonical figures but re-read their work positively or as containing positive elements despite their authors’ overt wishes (for example, in Chapter 2 Adriana Cavarero takes this kind of approach to Plato).
We hope that this volume shows some ways in which feminist discussions of the history of philosophy intersect with work that has a more contemporary focus. For example, feminist re-thinkings of fields such as aesthetics and embodiment are often informed by critical appreciation of the work of past figures such as Descartes and Kant (as with Chapters 15 and 37, among others). And such historical traditions as phenomenology, pragmatism and Black feminist thought all run forward from nineteenth-century roots into the present day, again indicating that there is no sharp divide between past and present (see Chapters 10–12).
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Mind, Body, and World
From its outset feminist philosophy has addressed issues in philosophy of mind and metaphysics, particularly concerning the relations between body and mind, between selves and others, and the nature of identity. Thinking about the sex/gender distinction has been central to the first of those issues. Early on in English-speaking second-wave feminist thought, the distinction was drawn between the biological body and social gender in order to make the point that the ways men and women are understood and expected to behave, and the ways they come to experience and identify themselves in light of these expectations, are matters of social norms and pressures rather than direct causal effects of biology. However, this early discussion did not take into account biological variations of sexual development such as intersex or the full spectrum of genders, including trans.
There are other problems with the sex/gender distinction too. First, what about our bodies as we experience and live them, in light of cultural meanings? This seems to belong neither with sex nor gender. This aspect of the body—as lived and not merely biological—has been explored by phenomenologists and psychoanalytic theorists (see Chapters 12 and 15). Second, perhaps gender norms and the expectation that everyone should be either masculine or feminine shape our categorization of bodies into two sexes all along, where alternative ways of categorizing human bodies are equally possible and might be preferable. Further questions arise about what it means for gender to be socially constructed (see Chapter 13), and in what way, if any, all women count as women, especially if there are no common properties or experiences that all women share (the question of “essentialism,” discussed in Chapter 14). In turn, feminist thinking about the body has led to broader reflection on matter and materiality (Chapter 16).
There has also been much feminist attention to identity and the self, especially in light of debates about identity politics. But these discussions have not always been recognized as contributing to philosophy of mind, partly because feminists tend to eschew the highly abstract and de-contextualized approach to personal identity and the mind which is common in contemporary Anglophone philosophy. Attention among feminist philosophers has been more to identities in the plural, in different contexts, and with more attention to actual experiences (for instance, of undergoing sexual assault), in contrast to traditional philosophy’s preoccupation with the unity of the self and to the focus on thought experiments in much Anglophone philosophy of mind (see Chapter 18). Feminists have considered how relations with individual others, and social situations, figure into our identities such that selves are not self-contained—as with hybrid, including mestiza, identities, in which different social locations and related senses of self co-exist, perhaps antagonistically, within a single person (see Chapter 17). Some feminist philosophers have also turned to psychoanalysis to analyse how external social relations become internalized into our mental processes and how these processes, in turn, shape the social realm (see Chapter 19).
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Knowledge, Language, and Science
Both the practices of science and our everyday lives lead us to converging insights about the value of feminist philosophy concerning topics of objectivity, reason, trust, knowledge, meaning and their connections to values, power, and gender. Most feminist philosophers have little desire to reject key concepts in theory of knowledge and philosophy of science such as reason, knowledge, truth, and objectivity. Instead they want to reconstruct them in ways that are more reflective of our actual epistemic situations, which are more richly conducive to social justice, and that better enable us to avoid past errors such as power-laden, gender-linked dichotomies (the hierarchical, binary oppositions discussed above: male = rational versus female = emotional) (see Chapter 20). Feminist philosophers attest that knowledge is “situated”; they try to provide complex analyses of the patterns and systems that structure the way we come to know what we do. This means that purely abstract analyses of knowledge or allegedly value-free analyses are not adequate to the tasks at hand. Instead, most feminists use forms of “social epistemology” that incorporate concrete facts about knowers and institutional (power-filled) structures. This means that we can discuss whose word (“testimony”) is likely to be under- or overvalued on the basis of prejudice or implicit bias, or what groups may not even have adequate concepts to describe their own experience authoritatively; we can also look into what it means to have the virtue of being epistemically trustworthy both as a speaker and as a listener (see Chapters 21 and 22). Traditional philosophers, including those working in non-feminist social epistemology or virtue epistemology, have come very late to discovering the importance of discussing epistemic injustice, ignorance, and their relation to trust.
Feminist philosophers of science have found many opportunities for analysis both of the practices of science and in the philosophy of science. Over the decades feminist philosophers, along with feminists in other disciplines, have exposed sexism and androcentric biases in the conduct of scientific research, the topics chosen for study, misunderstandings of the roles of values in science, and ways that power is unjustly manifested in science—to name a few. One of the most important insights to emerge from feminist philosophers of science—whether they focus on the physical, biological or social sciences—is that standards of scientific rationality and objectivity in fact become more stringent when feminist or egalitarian values are at their base (see Chapters 25, 26, and 27). Related to the high standard for objectivity is “standpoint epistemology,” the view that favors starting research from the lives/positions of those who are marginalized rather than dominant. Although this approach was originally adapted from Marx’s views, it has been broadened in the past few decades so that one of its core insights—that the position of the knower/investigator matters to the reliability of the knowledge produced—has been incorporated by feminist philosophers from many methodological backgrounds (see Intemann 2010; Wylie, Chapter 27).
Both continental and analytic feminist philosophers have critically analyzed language for several decades. The two strands have developed in different directions although they share concerns—initially about sexism in language, which leads to women’s invisibility and reinforces unjust imbalances of power (consider “Man bears his young”), and more recently in their use of “speech act theory” (for example, Judith Butler’s (1990) performative analysis of gender and analytic feminists’ discussion of unjust silencing of women). From continental, specifically “French feminist,” perspectives, language is seen as a symbolic system embodying various kinds of gender biases that can be built into grammar as well as concrete forms of language use. Gertrude Postl explores this in Chapter 24: continental feminists’ concern with feminine writing (écriture féminine) and their analyses at a psychoanalytic level. Ishani Maitra, in Chapter 23, illustrates analytic feminists’ use of speech act theory as she analyzes various kinds of linguistic injustices in terms of the ways women are silenced, even as they are speaking.
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Intersections
As noted earlier, one of our aims is to foreground the importance of intersectional analysis for feminist philosophy. By “intersectional analyses” we mean approaches to issues that reflect the complex interactions among multiple structures and axes of oppression and privilege that are salient in our social identities, for example, race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, and ability differences. Although many authors throughout the entire volume utilize intersectional thinking, this section begins by providing historical and critical analysis of the concept of intersectionality itself, especially as it has developed out of critical race theory, since the intersections between gender and race have been a particular focus of thinking about intersectionality (see Chapters 28 and 29).
Understanding intersecting axes of oppression in social reality requires both attending to the details of people’s lives and drawing upon distinct bodies of theory that have arisen around each of the axes. Several chapters in this section focus upon the interactions among these bodies of theory (Chapters 29, 30, 31, 32, and 33). For instance, in critical response to the oppression of people such as lesbians and gay men on the basis of their sexuality, queer theory and critical sexuality studies have formed. Thinking about the close relations between gender and sexuality-based oppression has often involved cooperation between feminist philosophy and these areas of thought (and has contributed to the development of both). The chapters in this section highlight some salient cases where these theoretical intersections—for example, with critical race theory, queer theory, trans theory, disability studies, and Native American metaphysics—shed light on the multiple intersecting social structures that manifest themselves in our everyday lives. Also included here are chapters on global development, ecological thought and environmentalism, and feminist engagement with religious diversity, which pertain to further problematic sets of power relations—those of the global economic system, human exploitation and degradation of the natural world, and intolerance of religious diversity (Chapters 34, 35, and 36).
Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics
As we have seen, feminists both argue that oppressive values have shaped the content and methods of academic philosophy and advocate for philosophy informed by feminist values. Engagement with values is thus not limited to the subfields of philosophy traditionally described as “value theory,” i.e., moral and political philosophy and aesthetics. Part of the feminist contribution to philosophy has been to reveal the importance of value inquiry across philosophical domains. For instance, some feminist philosophers of science argue that prevalent ideals of objectivity arbitrarily value intellectual virtues that are culturally coded as masculine. They claim that value-laden approaches that recover a broader range of intellectual virtues may produce better science. Feminist epistemologists also emphasize that just political contexts, and partly political virtues, such as epistemic justice, are important to knowledge acquisition and legitimation.
Within ethics and aesthetics—two traditional philosophical subfields explicitly focused on values—feminist philosophers argue for shifts in what we valorize and in methods of evaluative justification. Early feminist interventions in value theory revealed how notions of the good, the just, and the beautiful served the interests of men and other dominant groups. One way traditional conceptions of value served the dominant, according to feminist philosophers, was by arbitrarily assigning positive value to masculine traits. For example, autonomy has historically been assigned a high value in Western moral and political thought. Kant argues that moral action is defined by autonomy of the will, and many contemporary liberal thinkers claim that respect-worthy conceptions of the good must be autonomously chosen. Early feminist moral philosophers claimed that Western philosophy downgraded culturally feminine traits, such as interdependence and empathy. The ultimate aim of these early feminist arguments was normative; they did not merely claim that women had been socialized to value differently from men, but also that androcentric bias had produced a distorted view of which ends in human life were worth pursuing.
In addition to claiming that traditional philosophical approaches had wrongly preferred “masculine” to “feminine” traits, goals, and values, early feminist ethics and aesthetics argued that androcentrism had problematically narrowed the scope of worthy evaluative questions. In both aesthetics and ethics, questions that seemed salient from the perspectives of people in dominant groups had eclipsed other important questions. To give some examples: Aesthetic theories focused on analyzing beauty in “fine art” rather than craft practices such as weaving, quilting, and cooking that have been pursued in the domestic sphere. Despite the fact that all human beings are born dependent and the result that human societies are inevitably faced with allocating caring labor, most moral and political philosophies were silent on topics such as dependency work, interpersonal trust, and relations of vulnerability. Although liberal political philosophy had devoted significant attention to analyzing economic inequality, it had fewer tools for diagnosing other forms of marginalization, such as sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism—and intersections among these forms.
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Feminism has always integrated such critical projects with positive ones, but positive projects in moral and political philosophy and aesthetics have flourished in the last fifteen years. Care ethics, initially discussed primarily in terms of its contrast to more mainstream approaches, has now developed into a distinct family of moral approaches. In the 1990s, care ethics was described primarily in contrast to ethics of justice and rights, and a debate emerged as to whether feminists should eschew justice altogether (see Chapter 43). Today, some care ethicists hold that care is a comprehensive moral perspective from within which the value of concepts like rights can be explained. Others attempt to subsume care into a virtue ethics, and still others argue that care ethics and Confucianism can be incorporated into a single perspective (see Chapter 44). Similarly, the body of feminist scholarship criticizing the philosophical tendency to treat the self as atomistic and downplay the effects of social construction has now produced a rich feminist literature on autonomy. Relational accounts, discussed at length by Wendy Rogers (Chapter 46) and Catriona Mackenzie (Chapter 41), define autonomy in ways that highlight the autonomy-enhancing qualities of the right types of relationships and social conditions. They also emphasize the role social structures play in both limiting and enabling autonomy. For instance, some accounts define autonomy so that oppressive socialization is a paradigmatic case of autonomy restriction. Other accounts, especially within bioethics, are constitutively relational—suggesting that an agent cannot be fully autonomous if she lacks certain opportunities. As Mackenzie notes, the question of whether oppressive socialization is incompatible with autonomy has provoked decades of debate about whether feminist ethicists should take the content of agents’ beliefs and values as central to determining the autonomy of their choices.
More broadly, many positive ethical and aesthetic projects develop tools for evaluating the impacts of social structures on our individual and collective lives. Liberalism has been the dominant tradition in Western political philosophy for decades, and liberals have tended to focus on injustices perpetrated by identifiable agents, such as individuals and governments. Even as issues about sexism and racism have become more mainstream within philosophy, a number of feminists have noted the disproportionate tendency to focus on the implicit biases of individual actors, rather than the networks of material forces that reward and implant these biases. A significant contribution of feminist philosophy in the last two decades has been to develop theoretical tools for identifying and responding to injustices that occur because of habits and patterns of action that cannot be easily said to originate in an actor. A number of feminists have criticized the current philosophical preoccupation with attributing sexism and racism to implicit bias. As Serena Parekh notes here, such structural injustices raise particularly vexing questions about responsibility, both because their consequences are often invisible to those involved in them, and because it is difficult to attribute causation to any individual agent. Feminist philosophers, such as Iris Marion Young, have developed forward-looking models of political responsibility that address difficulties attributing responsibility for structural injustice. Similarly, as the chapters by Sandra Harding and Anna Malavisi (Chapter 34), Serene Khader (Chapter 48), and Serena Parekh (Chapter 49) all note, feminists are renewing attention to the concept of exploitation, especially to analyse the use of women’s unpaid and undervalued labor to subsidize “development.”
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Feminist philosophy, as we have noted earlier, has always been shaped by an engagement with political movements. Non-ideal theory has gained much attention in mainstream moral and political philosophy in recent years, but feminists have emphasized non-ideal approaches for at least the last thirty years. Non-ideal approaches suggest that, rather than imagining just social institutions, political thought should focus on identifying existing injustices and developing normative principles and concepts that help us to move beyond them. Nearly all of the essays in ethics and political philosophy take this as a methodological starting point; for example, Wendy Rogers’s essay on bioethics begins from attention to existing healthcare disparities (Chapter 46), and Clare Chambers assumes that responsiveness to sexist oppression is a desideratum of liberalism (Chapter 52). Drawing on Onora O’Neill’s work, Charles Mills (2005) argues that non-ideal approaches are attentive to the dangers of idealizing the agents who make normative judgments and the contexts in which they are made. An insistence that agents charged with making evaluative judgments are shaped by, and operate within, unjust social contexts cuts across the majority of essays on ethics, politics, and aesthetics in this volume. As Margaret Urban Walker famously put this point, “philosophers are in the plane of morality, not hovering above or perched outside it” (2007: 28). Alison Jaggar and Theresa Tobin argue in Chapter 40 that the pervasiveness of epistemic injustice, that is, conditions of knowledge production that harm marginalized people, offers a reason to reject the ideal of a single, universalizable method of moral justification. Allison Weir (Chapter 53) states that conceptions of freedom from colonized peoples reach beyond some key impasses in Western political thought, which connects with Shay Welch’s chapter on indigenous metaphysics (Chapter 30). Although the ideal/non-ideal distinction is not a topic in aesthetics, Tina Chanter’s essay in this volume (Chapter 37) shows how racial aperspectivalism infects not only moral judgments but also judgments about beauty.
Engagement with political movements has also caused the subject matter of feminist philosophy to shift along with changes in real-world political landscapes. It is unsurprising, then, that this volume is more transnational in scope than earlier compilations on feminist philosophy. Monica Mookherjee’s essay on postcolonialism and multiculturalism (Chapter 47) raises concerns about ethnic and religious minority communities within Western liberal states. Amy Oliver’s essay on Latin American feminist ethics (Chapter 50) highlights the role of women’s philosophical inquiry in responding to political violence in Latin America. Tanella Boni’s essay (Chapter 4) discusses political challenges particular to the sub-Saharan African context, such as navigating worldviews that attach women’s worth to their capacity to biologically procreate and acknowledging the intersectional effects of gender and age in determining social status. The essays on transnational feminisms, care ethics, and bioethics all emphasize the increasing importance of developing theoretical responses to gender and racial impacts of neoliberalism. Trish Glazebrook’s essay on ecofeminism (Chapter 35) addresses issues such as climate change and the privatization of the global food supply.
In conclusion, we hope that this volume showcases the breadth and depth of feminist thinking across a wide range of philosophical traditions and topics, while featuring feminist perspectives that challenge and reconsider the history and contours of feminist thinking on these topics up to the present day. In this way we hope both to introduce the reader to the shape of feminist philosophy so far and also to provide a new set of original interventions with which current and future scholars and students will want to engage.
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Some Thanks and a Note about Usage
A number of people deserve our deepest thanks. Routledge Philosophy Editor, Andrew Beck, who commissioned the volume; Routledge Production Editor Sarah Adams and Editorial Assistant Vera Jane Lochtefeld as well as Swales & Willis Production Editor Laura Christopher and Copy Editor Kelly Derrick; anonymous reviewers who improved its structure; and Alyssa Colby who contributed careful editing as well as general advice and support, funded by the Jay Newman Fund at Brooklyn College. Lancaster University provided Alison Stone with a term of sabbatical leave to expedite her editorial work. Finally, sixty-two authors made time in their densely packed and sometimes trauma-filled lives to write and revise the wonderful chapters you read here. We have enjoyed working with them and with each other.
Note: We left it to the discretion of individual authors whether or not to capitalize “Black” when referring to people with African ancestry.
References
Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble, New York: Routledge.
Intemann, Kristen (2010) “25 Years of Feminist Empiricism and Standpoint Theory: Where Are We Now?” Hypatia 25(4): 778–796.
Jaggar, Alison (1983) Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Lloyd, Genevieve (1984) The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy, London: Routledge.
Mills, Charles (2005) “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Hypatia 20(3): 165–184.
Walker, Margaret Urban (2007) Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics, New York: Oxford University Press.