Drawing on Iris Marion Young’s essay, “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme,” Weir argues for an alternative ideal of home that involves: (1) the risk of connection, and of sustaining relationship through conflict; (2) relational identities, constituted through both relations of power and relations of mutuality, love, and flourishing; (3) relational autonomy: freedom as the capacity to be in relationships one desires, and freedom as expansion of self in relationship; and (4) connection to past and future, through reinterpretive (...) preservation and transformative identification. (shrink)

An encyclopedia entry providing an overview of the philosophical issues entailed in the theory and practice of "identity politics." Open access and online. Regularly updated.

Some language encourages essentialist thinking. While philosophers have largely focused on generics and essentialism, I argue that nouns as a category are poised to refer to kinds and to promote representational essentializing. Our psychological propensity to essentialize when nouns are used reveals a limitation for anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Even ameliorated nouns can continue to underpin essentialist thinking. I conclude by arguing that representational essentialism does not doom anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Rather it reveals that would-be ameliorators ought to attend to the (...) propensities for our representational devices to essentialize and to the complex relationship between essentialism and prejudice. (shrink)

Draws from Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory to explore the concept of selfhood. This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including immigrants, exiles, (...) and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega’s project forges new directions not only in Latina feminist thinking on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identity politics, but also connects this analysis to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and to such concepts as being-in-the-world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. The pairing of the personal and the political in Ortega’s work is illustrative of the primacy of lived experience in the development of theoretical understandings of who we are. In addition to bringing to light central metaphysical issues regarding the temporality and continuity of the self, Ortega models a practice of philosophy that draws from work in other disciplines and that recognizes the important contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of color to philosophical pursuits. Mariana Ortega is Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University and coeditor (with Linda Martín Alcoff) of Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

The article probes into tensions following in the wake of feminism’s mappings of itself as a landscape that ‘is not there’, so to speak, but which is constituted and reconstituted discursively and affectively. The author discusses these tensions in relation to the notion of feminist genealogy. The discussion is elaborated with reference to a concrete, past and perhaps disturbing political and theoretical landscape: the official, state-sanctioned ‘women’s studies’ in the GDR during the Cold War. The author argues that efforts at (...) mappings and fillings of historical gaps in the production of women’s studies knowledge with reference to inclusion and recognition of ‘women’s experiences’ and ‘women’s voices’ may render feminists unable to trace and question the political operations that have produced and reproduce ‘woman’ and ‘women’ as the significant subject of feminism. The first part of the article illustrates the challenging complexity of feminist projects of inclusion and recognition by discussing some of the feminist critiques of the so-called ‘women’s studies’ in the GDR during the Cold War. The second part locates this complexity within feminist political and theoretical landscapes and cartographies by discussing it in relation to feminist genealogy. (shrink)

Identity politics has been critiqued in various ways. One central problem—the Reinforcement Problem—claims that identity politics reinforces groups rooted in oppression thereby undermining its own liberatory aims. Here I consider two versions of the problem—one psychological and one metaphysical. I defang the first by drawing on work in social psychology. I then argue that careful consideration of the metaphysics of social groups and of the practice of identity politics provides resources to dissolve the second version. Identity politics involves the creation (...) or transformation of groups in ways that do not succumb to the metaphysical Reinforcement Problem. (shrink)