Siris - Feminism and Philosophy

The charge against feminist philosophy:

Which brings us to the real sense in which it is bad for women to enter the pink-collar ghetto: It is bad for them because they are going to be encouraged to do less rigorous work than they should be doing in philosophy. It will be bad for their professionalism. Group politics will become the very stuff of their “work” and “research,” which is not good for the integrity of the work.

And a defense:

It is not possible to make sweeping claims about what women will be encouraged to do when they go into feminist philosophy. I have no doubt that there are some areas of feminist philosophy where they will, in fact, be encouraged to do less rigorous work. There are plenty of circumstances outside feminist philosophy where this is true, too; I’ve talked to more than one woman who has complained about how everyone attempted to push her into applied ethics despite the fact that she had made clear that she wanted to do something like philosophy of science. So it wouldn’t be surprising if this were the case in some parts of feminist philosophy. But there are clearly areas where this is not the case; I assure you that if you go into analytic feminism you are not going to be pushed to do less rigorous work. If you do work at the intersection of feminism and cognitive science you are not going to be pushed to do less rigorous work. And if you do work in feminist history of philosophy, for at least some areas of that very large field I can guarantee you that you are not going to be pushed to do less rigorous work.

Personally, my favorite bits of feminist philosophy are the squishy bits. The absolute best example of this is María Lugones’ Playfulness, “World”-Traveling, and Loving Perception. At first you read it and think, “Huh? Is this philosophy or just some woman talking about her mother?” But the more you think about it, the more it sinks in and really changes the way you think about epistemology. At this point, my belief is that as a haole and a man, the best thing I can do in a lot of different situations is just accept that I don’t know what I’m talking about and shut up and listen to someone (which is really hard!).

That said, when feminists want to be analytic, they can do that too. Why couldn’t they?