Proposal for the Centre for Theory and Criticism for 2017-2018

Proposal for the Centre for Theory and Criticism for 2017-2018 For a course to be taught in the Winter semester January 2018.

Feminist Phenomenology Helen Fielding (Women’s Studies/Philosophy)

Although feminist phenomenology has roots going back to the first half of the twentieth century it has only relatively recently been identified as a body of thinking as such. Although many of the tenets of feminist phenomenology—a focus on embodiment 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 since it was discredited for privileging the transcendental subject and ego understood as cognition that surpasses the sensible world, the world of experience. As the locus of reason, the transcendental subject was also identified as the neutral white European privileged male subject. Nonetheless, some feminists were reluctant to give up on phenomenology altogether because it was the one methodology that provided a robust account of embodied living experience, which was a central starting point for many feminist analyses. In this course we will trace some of the earlier roots of feminist phenomenology such as the work of Beauvoir, and even Arendt who did not consider herself a feminist as such, as well as place the movement within its contemporary dynamic emerging—with a number of new publications in this area which we will draw upon. This will mean situating this intellectual movement in relation to the poststructuralist feminist tradition with which it is allied (Irigaray, Butler), and material feminism with which it critically intersects (Barad, Bennet). We will also consider its intersections with sexuality, race and disability. Ultimately, we will critically explore how Feminist phenomenology can open up an interrelational ontology, offering not only the account of embodied experience for which it is usually recognized, but also the ways in which embodied perception underlies the production of knowledge and grounds politics and ethics.

Some Potential Readings

Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (Duke 2006) Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (Oxford, 2006) Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) Beauvoir, The Second Sex (2012) Kruks, Retrieving Experience (Cornell, 2001) Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indiana, 2014). Heinämaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, (Landham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). Olkowski, Postmodern Philosophy and the Scientific Turn (Indiana 2012) Ortega, In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity and the Self (SUNY 2016). Tichkovsky, The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning (U of T, 2011) Weiss, Refiguring the Ordinary, (Indiana, 2008) Yancy, Black Bodies/White Bodies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008)

Readings from the following Collections: Allen and Young, The Thinking Muse (Indiana 1989. Fielding and Olkowski (eds.) Feminist Phenomenology Futures, (Indiana, forthcoming 2017). Fisher and Embree, Feminist Phenomenology (Springer 2000) Heinämaa and Rodemeyer (eds.) Special edition on Feminist Phenomenology, Continental Philosophy Review, 2010. Holland and Hungtinton, Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger (Penn State 2010). Lee, Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment and Race (Suny 2014). Oksala, Feminist Experiences: Foucauldian and Phenomenological Investigations (Northwestern 2016). Olkowski and Weiss, Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Penn State 2006) Schües, Olkowski and Fielding (eds.) Time in Feminist Phenomenology, (Indiana, 2011). Stawarska and Simms (ed), Feminist Phenomenology, JanusHead 2013 Zeiler and Käll, Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine (Suny 2014).