Jennifer McWeeny

Although Beauvoir’s notion of becoming a woman is frequently understood as a gradual and protracted process, Beauvoir also explicitly sees it as a brutal, immediate, and definitive transition. This alternative temporality becomes clear when we attend to Beauvoir’s repeated use of the reflexive verb _se faire_ (to make oneself) throughout _The Second Sex_. In assuming the attitude of _se faire objet_ (making oneself an object), a girl transforms the structure of her prereflective consciousness from a child’s consciousness where her body is at the center of her subjectivity to a double, divided consciousness that is both her own and the conduit for another’s desires. This opens a new ontology of sexual difference. Being a woman is not about taking on a construct, set of performances, or sexual style, but assuming a secondary perspectival configuration of prereflective consciousness that makes such styles and performances possible.

In this collection of original essays, international scholars put Asian traditions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, into conversation with one or more contemporary feminist philosophies, founding a new mode of inquiry that attends to diverse voices and the complex global relationships that define our world. These cross-cultural meditations focus on the liberation of persons from suffering, oppression, illusion, harmful conventions and desires, and other impediments to full personhood by deploying a methodology that traverses multiple philosophical styles, historical texts, and frames of reference. Hailing from the discipline of philosophy in addition to Asian, gender, and religious studies, the contributors offer a fresh take on the classic concerns of free will, consciousness, knowledge, objectivity, sexual difference, embodiment, selfhood, the state, morality, and hermeneutics. One of the first anthologies to embody the practice of feminist comparative philosophy, this collection creatively and effectively engages with global, cultural, and gender differences within the realms of scholarly inquiry and theory construction. http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-16624-9/asian-and-feminist-philosophies-in-dialogue

The first in-depth analysis of the radical feminist theory and coalitional praxis of scholar-activist María Lugones. Speaking Face to Face provides an unprecedented, in-depth look at the feminist philosophy and practice of the renowned Argentinian-born scholar-activist María Lugones. Informed by her identification as “nondiasporic Latina” and US Woman of Color, as well as her long-term commitment to grassroots organizing in Chicana/o communities, Lugones’s work dovetails with, while remaining distinct from, that of other prominent transnational, decolonial, and women of color feminists. Her visionary philosophy motivates transformative modes of engaging cultural others, inviting us to create political intimacies rooted in a shared yearning for interdependence. Bringing together scholars and activists across fields, this volume charts her profound impact in and beyond the academy for the past thirty years. In so doing, it exemplifies a new method of coalitional theorizing—traversing racial, ethnic, sexual, national, gendered, political, and disciplinary borders in order to cultivate learning, embrace heterogeneity, and provide a unique framework for engaging contemporary debates about identity, oppression, and activism. Across thirteen original contributions, authors address issues of intersectionality, colonial and decolonial subjectivities, the multiplicity and the coloniality of gender, indigenous spiritualities and cosmologies, pluralist and women of color feminisms, radical multiculturalism, popular education, and resistance to multiple oppressions. The book also includes a rare interview with Lugones and an afterword by Paula Moya, ultimately offering both new critical resources for longstanding admirers of Lugones and a welcome introduction for newcomers to her groundbreaking work. “This is an important contribution to Latinx studies, Latina feminist philosophy, queer studies, and the burgeoning field of decolonial feminism, a field that Lugones almost single-handedly launched. It is interdisciplinary, but also a wonderful pedagogical resource. It provides readers who are both familiar and unfamiliar with her work a thorough and judicious point of entry.” — Eduardo Mendieta, author of Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory.

In the Editor’s Introduction to volume 30 of Simone de Beauvoir Studies, and the first standard issue of the relaunched version of the journal, Jennifer McWeeny identifies two trends in Beauvoir’s scholarship that characterize the present state of the field: the emphasis on the situated, first-person perspective and the need for a holistic method of interpretation that attends to the underexplored or misrepresented moments in Beauvoir’s oeuvre. McWeeny also argues that the events of this year, 2020, have brought us in-sight and an existentialist perception similar to those that fueled Beauvoir’s political awakenings in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

Theories about what a mind is entail views about who (or what) has a mind and vice versa. This chapter reframes the classic problem of how the mind interacts with the body in terms of the question of mental attribution: Which bodies have minds? Critical social theorists’ descriptions of mental attribution associated with the bodies of women, Black people, colonized people, laborers, and others, reveals three metaphysical components of mental attribution that are respectively associated with experiences of immanence and non-being, dehumanization, and objectification and hypermateriality: (1) the ratio component, (2) the comparison component, and (3) the constitution component. A theory’s approach to each of these components collectively forms its “attribution pattern.” Physicalist panpsychisms provide ready examples of attribution patterns that apply to the set of all bodies that exist. Russellian panpsychism illustrates a “selective” attribution pattern that attributes minds (or mentality) only to certain bodies, while Cavendishian panpsychism exhibits an “unrestricted” attribution pattern that attributes a mind to each and every body. These contrary views help to establish a taxonomy of mental attribution patterns that promises to inspire fresh theories of mind and liberatory configurations of the social.

Simone de Beauvoir's philosophical views arguably have more in common with those of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty than of any other philosopher and vice versa. And yet, resonances and dissonances between their oeuvres remain underexplored in the scholarly literature, especially in regard to the content of their respective ontologies. This chapter addresses this gap by developing an ontological interpretation of Beauvoir's concept of flesh as she employs it in The Second Sex. Following a metaphysical line of thinking from their early publications to their later work, it is suggested that Beauvoir's ontological notion of flesh is markedly akin to the one proposed by Merleau‐Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible.

"This collection is the first book to focus on the emerging field of study called feminist philosophy of mind. Each of the twenty chapters of Feminist Philosophy of Mind employs theories and methodologies from feminist philosophy to offer fresh insights and perspectives into issues raised in the contemporary literature in philosophy of mind and/or uses those from the philosophy of mind to advance feminist theory. The book delineates the content and aims of the field and demonstrates the fecundity of its approach, which is centered on the collective consideration of three questions: What is the mind? Whose mind is the model for the theory? To whom is mind attributed? Topics considered with this lens include mental content, artificial intelligence, the first-person perspective, personal identity, other minds, mental attribution, mental illness, perception, memory, attention, desire, trauma, agency, empathy, grief, love, gender, race, sexual orientation, materialism, panpsychism, and enactivism. In addition to engaging analytic and feminist philosophical traditions, essays draw from resources in phenomenology, philosophy of race, decolonial studies, disability studies, embodied cognition theory, comparative philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology"--

What it would mean for phenomenology to move in an ontological direction that would render its relevance to contemporary political movement less ambiguous while at the same time retaining those aspects of its method that are epistemologically and politically advantageous? The present study crafts the beginnings of a response to this question by examining four configurations of consciousness that seem to be respectively tied to certain oppressive contexts and certain kinds of oppressed bodies: 1. false consciousness, 2. bad faith, 3. double consciousness, and 4. se faire objet (making oneself an object). Such a comparison both promises to widen our understanding of the ontology of consciousness in general and generate a suggestive vision of what it would take to follow through, ontologically speaking, on the idea that consciousness is fundamentally and irrevocably of a bodily nature.

Because of risks of essentialism and homogenization, feminist theorists frequently avoid making precise ontological claims, especially in regard to specifying bodily connections and differences among women. However well-intentioned, this trend may actually run counter to the spirit of intersectionality by shifting feminists' attention away from embodiment, fostering oppressor-centric theories, and obscuring privilege within feminism. What feminism needs is not to turn from ontological specificity altogether, but to engage a new kind of ontological project that can account for the material complexity of social space in the twenty-first century. Taking inspiration from the phenomenological concept of flesh as well as ecofeminism and María Lugones's theory of the colonial/modern gender system, this essay argues that our own flesh is related to that of others through lines of intercorporeal relations that collectively form topographies of flesh. When we attend to those material relationships present in a particular locality at a point in time, we are able to recognize topographical aggregates of beings that can serve as a basis for this new feminist ontology. An example from Toni Morrison's Beloved involving a human woman and a nonhuman one is used as a paradigm for thinking ontological connection and difference at the same time

The idea of a philosophical Other as comparativists have often historically used it to signify radical alterity, although sometimes a remedy and correction for the erroneous generalizations which originate from a presupposition of human sameness, merely shifts the center of philosophy's unchallenged assumptions in at least two ways. First, the notion of a philosophical Other avoids an explicit characterization of how one recognizes that one is philosophizing in the sphere of this Other and of what "otherness" is philosophically interesting. Second, the notion of a philosophical Other is unable to capture and describe the dynamic, ever-changing relations that serve to demarcate philosophical traditions or spatio-temporal webs of thinkers in the first place. For the sake of the comparative project of exposing the comparativist's own culturally-embedded assumptions, comparative methodology should allow for the possibility of analyzing more than one place where similarities and differences can present themselves at the same time. In short, comparativists would serve their own interests better if they began to approach their projects in recognition of a complex, limitless, and dynamic array of sameness and difference, instead of with premature assumptions of radical alterity.