Jacqueline Martinez

An explication of the phenomenological sensibilities found in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and other Latina feminist philosophers offers insight into the problem of bringing philosophy into greater relevance beyond academic and scholarly worlds. This greater relevance entails clear and direct contact with the immediacy of our communicative relationships with others, both inside and outside the academy, and allows for an interrogation of the totalizing perceptions that are at work within normative processes of epistemological legitimation. As a result of this interrogation, it is possible to cultivate perceptual capacities related to culture that intervene in the normatively tacit cultural dispositions that often limit the possibilities of understanding

This essay reports on phenomenological research conducted with people who describe having been harassed, having been accused of harassment, and/or having mediated or adjudicated harassment disputes. The authors review recent legal conceptions of sexual harassment and articulate a methodology for analyzing individual narrative accounts. The analysis of six selected interviews (three alleged harassers and three declared harassees) depicts how, through discourse with others, persons in ambiguous cases of harassment come to perceive themselves as harassers or harasseesgradually, how intention is inferred from conductcontingently, and how perceptions and expressions are often reified as certainties in the effort to secure some sense of justiceinstitutionally.

The study of gender and ethnicity (or, equally, sexuality and race) is complicated by the basic ambiguity regarding the meaning and signifying capacity of each of these designations. A phenomenological approach aids in explicating the specific social, cultural and historical terms in which the designations of gender and ethnicity come to have different meanings and signifying capacities. Such an explication reveals variously contested boundaries of knowledge-production, and allows for a return to concrete world where meaning, culture, and history are embodied. The present work examines the study of gender and ethnicity as it has developed in relation to the postmodern and postcolonial challenges leveled against social science, and argues for an interdisciplinary and decolonial phenomenology that neither ignores the existential and embodied reality as experienced by those who are designated objects of scientific study, nor valorizes the experience of social objectification or dehumanization. The present work argues that an interdisciplinary and decolonial phenomenology, provides the basis for a full recognition of the intersubjective conditions in which human recognition (and non-recognition) are possible, as well as a critical approach in assessing how the relationship between experience and perspective leads to the truly insightful understanding emerging in this particular time and this particular place.