Feminist philosophy
Asking philosophy what its concepts owe to the exclusion of women, and what becomes of them once that exclusion is undone.
1792 – …
A family of philosophies that make the condition of women and gender both an object and an instrument of critique. They had forerunners (Christine de Pizan, ); the landmark taken here is (1792), in which turns the principles of the against . 's (1949) ranks among its major works. From the 1970s the field diversified: , materialist feminism (Christine Delphy) and Black feminism (bell hooks), the ethics of stemming from , 's theory of gender . The disagreements bear on equality, on the place of the body and on sexual difference, which thinks of as a difference to be brought into existence rather than erased: the movement is a field of controversies more than a doctrine.
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Justification
Feminist philosophy is critical in the strong sense: by showing that a hierarchy passes itself off as natural, it is already working to undo it. starts from the question of what a woman is in order to describe how man has posited himself as the subject and the absolute, and woman as the . draw a thesis about knowledge from this: a critical standpoint, worked out from a dominated position, can see what the dominant position conceals; occupying that position is not enough to confer it. The share of conceptual clarification (of sex, gender, equality) is real, but it serves this critical project.
Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), introduction · Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (1991)
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Justification
The argument goes back to : without denying bodily differences, she disputes treating as natural the traits that education has produced. shows that woman has been constituted as man's , without biology or psychology imposing it. , for her part, argues that gender expresses no : it is produced through the repetition of acts governed by norms, which are not freely chosen. Materialist and Black feminisms insist on the social reality of these categories, which structure relations of domination, hence the share of social realism; conceives sexual difference as an ontological difference rather than a mere .
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female assumes within society.The Second Sex, vol. II
Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), ch. II · Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), vol. II, part 1 · Butler, Gender Trouble (1990) · Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) · bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman? (1981)