Knocking Down the Gates: Reconsidering the Myopias and Borders of Continental Feminist Philosophy

Abstract

Knocking Down the Gates:Reconsidering the Myopias and Borders of Continental Feminist Philosophy Falguni A. Sheth My thanks to Shannon Winnubst and Lynne Huffer for provoking and inviting me to consider this issue. I will be honest: although I attended one of the central institutions that educates graduate students in continental philosophy, and I consider my work to be decisively "feminist" in its implications, I do not consider myself a continental feminist philosopher. I think the same questions that plague the issue of the limits and stakes of continental philosophy extend to the question regarding continental feminist philosophy: where does nonanalytic philosophy that is concerned with race, gender, sexuality, and class fall in relation to the conventional confines of continental philosophy? The works of most non-European, non-white philosophers have not necessarily, at least in North America, been conventionally/ traditionally considered within the ranks of continental philosophers. Frantz Fanon appears to have been one of the exceptions. Yet, the notion of non-European, non-white, non-male philosophers of long standing, such as . . . whom? They are difficult even to name because they have been so persistently neglected within the ranks of continental feminism, whose foci have been typically upon French feminist philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig. As well, there appears to be a particular emphasis on phenomenology and psychoanalysis that many [End Page 141] white/European/North American feminist philosophers share, but which does not seem to appeal more generally to women philosophers of color. I think two crucial questions arise here: what makes continental feminism continental? And what makes continental feminism feminist? Is it an intrinsic commitment to European philosophers or European feminist philosophers? I suspect that most readers sympathetic to continental feminist philosophy will immediately respond in the negative: of course, continental feminist philosophy has neither an intrinsic commitment to European philosophy nor to European feminist philosophy! And many counterexamples will immediately be raised. But as practice reveals, whether we look at the works of Judith Butler, Kelly Oliver, or women philosophers of color, in fact, continental philosophy is often concerned with European philosophers. Curiously, Elaine Miller and Jami Weinstein concur that "questions of earth, territory, and the related concepts of blood, kinship, nation, and race are concepts that, predominating in Western philosophy as a whole, also mark continental philosophy, although it prides itself in subjecting the history of metaphysics and all its stable categories and concepts to critique." Here, I would suggest that these are questions that emanate from certain philosophers during a certain period of time (late nineteenth to twentieth century), and which mark categories such as blood, kinship, nation, and race in ways that are superior to ways in which those very same notions are understood in a contemporary context. Thus, for example, when Hannah Arendt discusses race-thinking in the Origins of Totalitarianism, it is considered to be a rich and fruitful philosophical discussion (1966, chap. 6). By contrast, race in the American context, as discussed by Lucius Outlaw or contemporary philosophers of race, has been—until the events of the last several years—a philosophically muted discussion. Although I understand myself as a "continental philosopher," that is, as someone who draws from European thinkers and believes that history, hermeneutics, ethics, and moral-political-social ontologies matter, I consider myself a philosopher of race or race theorist, much more so than I do a "feminist philosopher" or a "continental feminist philosopher." Perhaps the reasons are analogous as for those who consider themselves continental feminist philosophers: because I prioritize the category of race, believing it to be capacious enough to encompass issues pertaining to feminist theory, gender, and sexuality. However, I do so—I hope—not by attending to the category of race, but rather by attending to conceptual mechanisms and bridges that enact the production of racialization of various populations. My point in raising these questions (and answering them personally, if obliquely) is not to muck around in the obvious, but rather to raise the question of method: if continental feminism does not need to reference or address European thinkers—if it is capacious enough to include scholars and methods from other...