Feminist Philosophy in Foucault Discourse Analysis

2003

What I want to look at is how feminism, conceived broadly as the consciousness of sexism and other hierarchical systems of oppression, whether coming out of analytic or continental traditions, has revised philosophical discourse. 1 Feminism questions, criticizes, and subverts the main fields of philosophy. Philosophical feminism is now itself a field—there are courses, textbooks, and job ads that go by its name—but it is a field rather on analogy with existentialism, not philosophy of science or ethics.

European Journal of Women's Studies, 2005

Hypatia, 2010

Thanks in large part to the record of scholarship fostered by Hypatia, feminist philosophers are now positioned not just as critics of the canon, but as innovators advancing uniquely feminist perspectives for theorizing about the world. As relatively junior feminist scholars, the five of us were called upon to provide some reflections on emerging trends in feminist philosophy and to comment on its future. Despite the fact that we come from diverse subfields and philosophical traditions, four common aims emerged in our collaboration as central to the future of feminist philosophies. We seek to: 1) challenge universalist and essentialist frameworks without ceding to relativism; 2) center coloniality and embodiment in our analyses of the intermeshed realities of race and gender by shifting from oppression in the abstract to concrete cosmologies and struggles, particularly those of women of color and women of colonized communities across the globe; 3) elaborate the materialities of thought, being, and community that must succeed atomistic conceptions of persons as disembodied, individually constituted, and autonomous; 4) demonstrate what is distinctive and valuable about feminist philosophy, while fighting persistent marginalization within the discipline. In our joint musings here, we attempt to articulate how future feminist philosophies might advance these aims, as well as some of the challenges we face.

gcu.edu.pk

This paper looks at the history of the idea of "feminism". How it emerges with the liberal construction of individuality that was the basis of Enlightenment, and social contract theories of that period. Women were the deprived minority of this Enlightenment along with other minorities, as they were deemed insufficient to be included in the idea of a complete individual, and hence, a citizen. Early feminist movement demands equality for women in this respect. In the second wave of the feminist movement, this demand for equality changes proportions towards attacks on the construction of female inferiority and subordination. But soon, it turns into disillusionment with Enlightenment and a realization that the Enlightenment itself is as gendered as the earliest constructions were. As a result, the thematics of Enlightenment become problematic with this critique. Post-feminism emerges, as somewhat, coeval to post-modernism, out of feminism and modernity's dissolution. As three logics of this disintegration, I read Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, and conclude on that.

Sapere Aude Revista De Filosofia, 2014

2007

Pre-print, pre-copy edited version of the first three chapters.

Feminism & Psychology, 2006

In this paper we map the traces of power and knowledge as we read them at play in our own memories and as we make sense of them from a Foucauldian perspective. Our question here is twofold: how might we use Foucault to read our embodied memories of power and knowledge; and how might we use the analysis of those stories to enable us better to see the implications of Foucault's writing for the analysis of subjects' enmeshment in power/knowledge relations? We use as the ground of our analysis our own embodied memories of achieving ourselves as appropriate(d) subjects (as girls and women, in relation to men-fathers, lovers, and husbands). Our trajectory in this paper is double. First, it has been towards uncovering the ways in which girls and women might be said to be powerful, even when they are complicit in their own subjection. Second, it has been to show that when Foucault defines all acts of power to involve the possibility of resistance and freedom, and he takes the opposite, a state of domination, to arise from 'economic, political, or military means', he has not fully acknowledged the extent to which the repeated, minute accretions of everyday practices can generate sedimentations of lines of force that may also be understood as a state of domination.

Journal of Gender Studies, 2007