Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Feminist Transformations

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jspecphil.26.2.0200

1527-9383

Sharon M. Meagher,

Philosophy, Science, and History

The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) and I became feminists at the same time; this is hardly a coincidence, as the events of SPEP more than twenty-five years ago shaped my understanding of philosophy, feminism, and myself as a feminist philosopher and activist. I am most grateful to the members of SPEP's Committee on the Status of Women (CSW) who organized the “Women and Feminist Scholarship in SPEP and Philosophy: Assessing the Past and Imagining the Future” panel and even more grateful to the women and men of SPEP who organized and initiated the changes that helped make SPEP what it is today. The occasion of SPEP's fiftieth anniversary is a time to both celebrate SPEP's history and analyze how it has transformed and grown over time; it is also a time for us to take stock and envision what SPEP should and could be in the future. While SPEP and I became feminists at the same time, my own transformation has been more thoroughgoing than that of SPEP. There remain issues that still require our attention, and the best way to honor and recognize the work of those who transformed SPEP into a more gender-equitable and feminist-supportive organization is to continue their work by interrogating the ways that Continental philosophy can become more open to the transformative possibilities of feminist philosophy.We now often take SPEP for granted as a good place to do feminist philosophy and as a relatively welcoming place for women philosophers, but some of us on the panel and others in the audience remember when this was not the case. And we must credit the formal, institutional changes that were accomplished some twenty-five years ago (and often referred to as “the coup”) for establishing the necessary conditions that made this transformation of SPEP possible. But these were necessary and not sufficient conditions. Changes in attitudes, habits of thinking, and behaviors cannot be legislated as motions or bylaw amendments. Many of these changes have also taken place at SPEP, but there is continued work to be done on this score.During the CSW panel held in honor of SPEP's fiftieth anniversary, Nancy Fraser spoke of having a sense that the work that they were doing in democratizing SPEP to be more inclusive and respectful of both women and feminist philosophy was “history making.” I felt that too, and I was honored to share the dais with Nancy Fraser, Nancy Holland, Mary Rawlinson, and Linda Bell; they, together with Iris Marion Young and several other women, were important role models for me. Each fought battles for equality and recognition in her own way, and I learned from them all.It is therefore important that the Committee on the Status of Women organized a panel on the occasion of SPEP's fiftieth anniversary to reflect on the status of women at SPEP, past and present. Although we did not read each other's comments beforehand, we decided that those of us who had been present before, during, and immediately after the formation of SPEP's CSW more than twenty-five years ago would offer our perspectives on those events. But this panel would have been incomplete if we did not also offer our reflections on the current status of women and feminist philosophy at SPEP. For this reason, I am grateful to Donna-Dale Marcano and Namita Goswami for agreeing to offer their own critical insights.Let me begin with my account of the formation of the Committee on the Status of Women and related changes that were made to SPEP some twenty-five years ago. I have been a very faithful SPEP attendee since 1984. That was the meeting at Georgia State in Atlanta where SPEP's CSW was formed. The 1984 business minutes meeting simply read: A Committee on the Status of Women in the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy was formed. This Committee is an ad hoc advisory committee with the following tasks: (a) expand membership of women in the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and reach out to former members who no longer attend the meetings; (b) encourage proposals from, and a more active level of participation by, women in the Society; (c) express concern if the final program does not have an adequate level of participation by women; and (d) study any problems concerning the status of women in the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and report to the general membership meeting during the 1985 conference. (SPEP 1985)The minutes do not reflect how monumental this was. These changes were formative for me as a philosopher; I daresay I likely would not have completed my graduate degree and likely would not be working as a philosopher if I had not witnessed and participated in those activities.At the 1984 SPEP meeting in Atlanta, I was a second-year doctoral student, attending SPEP for the first time. I drove down in a van with eight or nine other graduate students—all male. When I arrived at SPEP, women seemed quite invisible. Linda Bell noted to me before our plenary session that women DID attend SPEP, but they were invisible because they often met off-premises rather than subjecting themselves to the hostile environment of SPEP's receptions and social events. I understood why. My fellow graduate students invited me to a SPEP reception that year, but when I opened the door to the reception room I received puzzled looks as if I had just entered the men's locker room by mistake, and I quickly left. On the formal program that year, there were only three women listed as speakers on the entire SPEP program: Eleanore Shapiro, Nancy Fraser, and Irene Harvey (SPEP 1984).1All those years ago, one session at the meeting still stands out to me: Nancy Fraser was a speaker at the book session on Dominick LaCapra's Rethinking Intellectual History, and she really held her ground under considerable fire during the discussion. I was incredibly impressed. So I was practically shaking when the next day Nancy approached me and asked if I was a voting member of SPEP. I said that I did not know. And she asked, “Did you pay your dues as a graduate student member?” When I replied yes, she replied, “Well, then, you can vote,” and she asked that I attend the business meeting later. I attended the meeting and helped pass a motion that forever changed SPEP. I have not missed a SPEP business meeting since, as it became clear to me how important they were and could be. But that year, few attended the business meeting except those who were currently officers and those who were encouraged by Nancy Fraser, Sandra Bartky, Bill McBride, Iris Young, and their co-conspirators. The move was brilliant; they took advantage of the bylaws and made a motion from the floor to establish a committee on the status of women; given how the room was packed, the motion passed.Although some of us refer to the establishment of the Committee of the Status of Women as the “coup,” the reality of the coup is that there were actually three successive blows. The first blow was the establishment of CSW in 1984. The second blow occurred the following year at the 1985 meeting at Loyola University of Chicago, where a motion made by the newly formed CSW recommended a new executive structure whereby a male and female would serve as co-directors of SPEP. The motion passed, and the Executive Committee agreed to a new leadership structure that would include male and female co-directors, to go into effect at the next meeting, in 1986 in Toronto (SPEP 1986).At SPEP's 1986 meeting in Toronto, on its twenty-fifth anniversary, Arleen Dallery was elected the first female director of SPEP, co-directing with Charles Scott. But the CSW was ready with yet another motion, what we might call the third “blow”: the committee members argued that SPEP needed to move to a system of blind reviewing of papers, that SPEP needed to widen the call for papers to cast a wider net for potential speakers and participants, and that at least two-thirds of the papers should be selected through the blind submission and review process rather than invitation (SPEP 1987).These three blows had immediate institutional effects on SPEP. There was an increase in SPEP's membership, as the program appealed more broadly and there was a greater sense of inclusion among its members. The programs immediately began to reflect some diversification of subject matter, of what “counted” as Continental philosophy, with a particular push to include French feminism as a recognized subfield. The diversification of the conference program, particularly with regard to increasing the number of women speakers, was dramatic from the start.In 1985, the year immediately following the establishment of the Committee on the Status of Women, SPEP had a very different-looking program: the program featured a book session on Ofelia Shutte's work; a feminist panel, “Writing Women's Body,” featuring Linda Singer, Iris Young, and Dorothy Leland; a second panel on French feminism featuring Barbara Freeman, Craig Vasey, and Judith Butler; five other women speakers on panels in concurrent sessions; and a keynote by Julia Kristeva (SPEP 1986). Many people attended that SPEP meeting at Loyola Chicago, drawn to hear Kristeva and others.Few of the new members realized that the conference program was the result of a “revolution”; they simply thought that SPEP was a great new organization that supported their work, especially in French feminism. But having attended the Atlanta meeting, I realized that I was witnessing a major change at SPEP, and in philosophy, and new possibilities for me as a young, female philosopher. The minutes of the 1985 meeting cannot possibly mark the importance of this meeting for so many of us, simply noting that the “Society is flourishing and the number of new members is growing” (SPEP 1986). Further, the minutes do not document the anxiety that some other members had at the sudden growth changes.The Loyola conference center had a closed-circuit video system, and it was possible to watch sessions from the lobby area. I witnessed several of SPEP's “founding fathers” commenting (often uncomfortably) on how many women seemed to be in attendance; others commented on female participants' dress and appearance—all from a comfortable distance, as if watching television with buddies at home.While the reality is that there were more women in attendance, men still clearly made up the majority of conference participants. But I thought that we women had a real opportunity to capitalize on our newfound visibility. Employing something akin to the strategy that we are taught to use when facing a bear in the wilderness, namely, to try to make ourselves appear larger than we actually are, I started my own informal campaign to make ourselves seen. I approached women at the meeting, urging them to abandon their conservative conference attire (dark, conservative business skirt suits were the norm and expectation) in favor of clothes that they brought to go out in the evenings. I also encouraged women to take up as much physical space in conference rooms as possible. Many of us sprawled across chairs, putting our feet up. We asked lots of questions. Instinctually, we knew that we needed to resist the pressures to remain invisible. We all became the movement. And I became a feminist: I saw the power of social change and its importance. I learned what l'écriture feminine (Holland 1990) meant in practice—we were all writing our bodies.What I also learned from this experience is that while formal, institutional changes can and do play critical roles in the transformation of an organization, they are necessary but not sufficient conditions for ensuring that social democracy takes place. We needed to work to counter the various behaviors that continued to “keep women in their place.” Control was still exerted through sexual harassment, through the tokenization of women, through gender segregation in sessions, and by the placement of burdens on women to have to “translate their work,” explaining how and why it was relevant to malestream Continental philosophy projects.When Kelly Oliver in her SPEP plenary talk (October 20, 2011) shared stories of both sexual harassing and denigrating behavior to which she was subjected as a graduate student, there was nervous laughter in response. That is in many ways a hopeful sign that these stories are now history. But it is nevertheless important to recognize that we were not all laughing for the same reasons; others in the room shared similar traumatic experiences with Oliver, and their laughter expressed knowing recognition.2 And still others were absent from the room, not having managed to survive or having chosen to leave a discipline and a profession that was too personally damaging.Many women have gone missing from the profession and from Continental philosophy and are no longer here to celebrate SPEP's fiftieth anniversary. The tokenization of women further contributed to this issue. While a few women in Continental philosophy suddenly received a great deal of attention and were promoted to “star” status, most women were marginalized and not recognized for their accomplishments. Women who specialized in subfields of Continental philosophy other than feminism felt especially pushed aside, and these situations caused divisions among women that hurt our ability to form alliances and work in solidarity with one another.Relatedly, there remained tremendous gender segregation in sessions; few men attended feminist sessions at SPEP in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Women who tried to present papers in nonfeminist fields often felt unwelcome in those sessions, and so there was increased pressure placed on women who wished to present at SPEP to self-censor and restrict their paper submissions to a topic in feminism.When men did attend feminist sessions, or in the rare instance when a feminist paper was integrated into a “mainstream” Continental session, women faced the burden of having to translate their work, frequently facing questions like the following: “That was a lovely paper, but I'm wondering if you could explain what this has to do with my concern with X in [fill in a male Continental philosopher].” Many of us experienced this phenomenon in our undergraduate and graduate training; we knew that we needed to demonstrate full command of the canon AND then do our work in feminism if we were to be respected or even if we were to survive in the profession. We therefore did not notice the extraordinary and unfair expectations that were being placed on us; there was an utter lack of reciprocity—no sense that all philosophers shared a responsibility to learn feminist philosophy.But what helped me recognize these questions as an unjust burden was the way that Barbara Freeman, on the 1985 program, responded to what I started to call thereafter “the Hegel boy” question. After Freeman gave her paper, a man sitting close to the front raised his hand and said that he thought that Freeman had delivered a good paper but wanted to know how it was relevant to his research on Hegel. Freeman and her panelists were seated at a table on a dais. Freeman got up from her chair, walked around the table to the very edge of the stage, and, leaning hard toward the questioner, screamed, “WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH HEGEL? WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH HEGEL? F***ING NOTHING!” Freeman then calmly returned to her seat, took the microphone, and answered the man's question in tremendous detail, proving that she could pass his test while at the same time exposing the absurdity of having to engage in such a translation project.These sorts of informal interventions and forms of resistance were only made possible by the passage of the formal motions. Freeman, new to SPEP and an outsider, was invited to speak because the CSW was monitoring the diversity and fairness of the program. As an outsider with no dependencies on SPEP's members for job security, Freeman was free to expose the problem to all of us. But we have not completely eliminated this problem; the lack of reciprocity continues in some ways, although we certainly now witness many more men participating in sessions on feminist philosophy in knowledgeable and respectful ways.Taken together, informal acts of resistance and the formal passage of motions that demanded transparency, fairness, and representation worked effectively to change the culture at SPEP significantly but not completely. Some fifteen years after the “coup,” I was chair of SPEP's CSW, and the committee felt that it was time to reassess the status of women and of feminist philosophy in the society. In 1999, we did a survey of SPEP members on perceptions about gender and feminist philosophy within SPEP. The survey results indicated that members generally thought that men and women were treated fairly at SPEP and that SPEP provided both important and supportive forums for women philosophers and for philosophers who do feminism. Yet the survey also revealed something else: that among tenured respondents, males outnumbered females two to one. Women at the senior level, at the level of tenure, seem to disappear. While this phenomenon is not restricted to Continental philosophy, it is something that we at SPEP should pay attention to. Many of our best and brightest female members are in political science, women's studies, rhetoric, cultural studies, and other departments if they managed to remain in the academy at all. Many others of us have fought hard to hold on to our appointments in philosophy while also holding other appointments (and often finding ourselves more welcomed) in other departments. How is it that philosophy “disappears” its women when they are most successful, that is, when they are doing philosophy rather than studying or commenting upon it?The issue is that women philosophers, including women who do Continental philosophy, are often told that they do not really do philosophy. All of SPEP's members got a taste of what women philosophers face on an almost daily basis in the recurrent attacks by Brian Leiter against SPEP and its membership. For example, in the flap over the new Pluralist's Guide to Philosophy, Brian Leiter and others dismissed it as the work of SPEP and its members: “The quality of philosophy and scholarship at the recommended SPEP Guide programs in continental philosophy is generally inferior to that at programs either ignored or not recommended that have offerings in the same areas. This is a judgment on the merits of work, a judgment based on considerations like argumentative and dialectical sophistication and perspicuousnes [sic], historical and cultural erudition, and knowledge of the history of philosophy” (Leiter 2011). We all were rightly outraged by Leiter's remarks, but such accusations are regularly hurled at female philosophers, even within what Leiter calls “SPEP departments.” That is, false sweeping generalizations are made and justified on the basis of their being arguments based on merit, when no actual argument is made.The revolutions at SPEP demonstrate the importance of formal protections and clear policies; we simply take for granted a level of democratic fairness at SPEP and have for many years now. But while these formal protections as well as the social and institutional changes affected by feminism have made some things easier for women in philosophy, barriers remain. The key barrier that women philosophers face is the constant challenge of whether what they are doing is really philosophy. While young men are often applauded for creative thinking that pushes the boundaries of the discipline, women are often told that they are not doing philosophy. While feminist philosophy, particularly French feminist philosophy, is now well accepted as Continental philosophy, it is thought of as a subfield that one can either do or not. Feminist philosophers who engage other canonical figures and/or integrate other disciplines into their work are often counted out (Meagher 2010).Certainly some of SPEP's members and former members have made choices to “leave” philosophy and have accepted positions in literature, rhetoric, women's studies, political science, and other academic departments, departments that value their work. Judith Butler, whom I met in my early years at SPEP, is one such example, and she addresses some of these questions in an essay, “Can the ‘Other’ of Philosophy Speak?” (2004). She notes that when she looks at the names of the first anthologies of feminist philosophy in which she published, almost all of those women: Drucilla Cornell, Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, Linda Nicholson, and Iris Marion Young have had appointments in departments other than philosophy in the last ten years (Butler 2004, 245). The result is that “philosophy as practiced by these individuals remains to some extent outside the discipline of philosophy, creating once again the specter of ‘philosophy outside philosophy.’” Yet these are the philosophers who have done the most to bring philosophy into important contact and dialogue with other disciplines (Butler 2004, 246). In some sense, then, feminist philosophy remains at the margins of Continental philosophy and might be said to have more transformative impacts on other disciplines with which it has contact than in Continental philosophy itself.The issues of whether we can do philosophy and how we do it are shaped by the way philosophy represents itself and institutionalizes itself. Working through the complexities of theory and practice starts in the very institutions closest to us. I learned that at SPEP, and I have carried those lessons into my feminist work on and off campus, at and away from conferences. It is work that we can and must continue. Just as the revolutionary moves of Nancy Fraser, Iris Young, Bill McBride, and many other SPEP members opened up the SPEP program in terms of both its content and the diversity of its participants, we must continue to push the boundaries of philosophy, refusing a view of Continental philosophy that restricts it to a rereading of a canon. As Michéle Le Doeuff asks, “Is it possible to transform the relationship of the subject to the philosophical enterprise? For until today, the subject of philosophical research has always presented itself as a person: Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel” (1989, 126). But a full feminist transformation of Continental philosophy requires that we take up Le Doeuff's second challenge, raising questions about the way that “woman” has figured in philosophy: “Is it possible to make philosophy, or philosophical work, abandon its wish to be a speculation which leaves no room for lack of knowledge, to make it accept its intrinsic incompleteness and create a non-hegemonic rationalism, so that philosophy will no longer need a defense mechanism involving the exclusion of women—and children?” (1989, 126).Linda Martín Alcoff and Eva Feder Kittay argue that feminist philosophy has the power to answer these questions and to transform philosophy: “In expanding the scope, method, and vision of philosophy, in allowing for a permeability of disciplinary boundaries, and in the active engagement of reflexive critique, the work of feminist philosophers has begun to overhaul our understanding of philosophy, even as it remains undeniably philosophical” (2007, 12). But for whom does the claim to philosophy remain undeniable? Alcoff and Kittay end their introduction to feminist philosophy with this claim because it has been denied; it is a claim that we are repeatedly called to reaffirm. It is at once a philosophical and a political task for us to take up these questions.At SPEP today, the supposedly “undeniable” claim of feminist philosophy as philosophy is sometimes affirmed and sometimes denied. There remains stubborn resistance to feminist philosophy—particularly in being open to its potential to transform Continental philosophy itself. Those of us who are SPEP regulars can all cite examples of work that has been transformed by feminist philosophy and where those transformations also have impacted the institutional practices of SPEP. But there are also times, perhaps because we Continental philosophers feel so often besieged by others who claim that we do not do philosophy, when we draw strict boundaries ourselves, boundaries that sometimes restrict our best thinking and our best thinkers. The future of SPEP and of Continental philosophy lies in our ability and willingness to take up these challenges, to keep our work open to the world and to Others. It is important that we all honor the women and men who fought to transform SPEP. It required a move that philosophers often fail to do, which is to apply their ideas to the very institutions of which they are members.