Serene Khader

This chapter explains three conceptions of personal autonomy through a discussion of two teen girls’ struggles for self-definition. Autonomy is the ability to live a life that is genuinely one’s own. Starr, the protagonist of Angie Thomas’s _The Hate You Give_, struggles to know herself because the demands of upward mobility seem to ask her to disavow her Blackness. Kiara, the author of a blog post on oppressive beauty standards, struggles to find self-worth in a society that devalues the way she looks. The chapter discusses how coherentist, reasons-responsiveness, and socially constitutive conceptions of autonomy illuminate the girls’ lives. It also explains why autonomy should not be conceived of as the rejection of all social influence.

Feminist, and other liberatory, moral and political philosophies are widely understood as nonideal theories. But if feminism is just a set of first-order normative commitments, it is unclear why it should produce action-guiding philosophy. I argue that feminist philosophy characteristically takes oppressive salience idealization (OSI) to undermine the means-end consistency of normative theories. OSI involves characterizing the world in ways that give undue weight to the interests and perspectives of the dominant. Our ability to respond to the normative problems our actual world faces us with is undermined by OSI, especially at the levels of problem-framing and selection.

The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics, subjects, thinkers, and debates in feminist philosophy. Fifty-six chapters, written by an international team of contributors specifically for the Companion, are organized into five sections: Engaging the Past; Mind, Body, and World; Knowledge, Language, and Science; Intersections; Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics. The volume provides a mutually enriching representation of the several philosophical traditions that contribute to feminist philosophy. It also foregrounds issues of global concern and scope; shows how feminist theory meshes with rich theoretical approaches that start from transgender identities, race and ethnicity, sexuality, disabilities, and other axes of identity and oppression; and highlights the interdisciplinarity of feminist philosophy and the ways that it both critiques and contributes to the whole range of subfields within philosophy.

ABSTRACT This symposium brings together commentaries on Serene J. Khader’s Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic from Linda Martín Alcoff, Sunaina Arya, and Olúfẹ'mi O. Táíwò with a reply from Khader. Khader’s book aims to develop a conception of feminism that is both universalist and anti-imperialist. Central to this feminism are (a) the idea that the normative core of feminism is opposition to sexist oppression and (b) the idea that the role of normative concepts in transnational feminist praxis is a justice-enhancing, or nonideal theoretical, one. Khader resists the universalism/relativism framing of debates in global feminisms and argues that opposition to sexist oppression can be detached from the values and social ontology of what she calls ‘Enlightenment liberalism’. She asks whether the values that are most often accused of being vehicles for Western imperialism, namely autonomy, individualism, and gender role eliminativism, are necessary for feminism at all.

Ich habe Decolonizing Universalism mit der Absicht geschrieben, eine große Frage zu beantworten – vielleicht die größte normative Frage, die die transnationale feministische Wissenschaft beschäftigt: Wie können wir gleichzeitig Feministinnen und Antiimperialistinnen sein? Anders ausgedrückt: Gibt es eine normative Position, die eine gründliche Kritik des Imperialismus ermöglicht, ohne in sexistischen oder patriarchalen Apologetismus zu verfallen? In diesem Buch entwickle ich eine solche Position. In dieser Antwort versuche ich, einige der von Hänel und Schuppert, Jugov, Müller und Reibold aufgeworfenen Fragen zu beantworten und meine Argumente gegen ihre kritischen Anmerkungen zu verteidigen.