A paper about cross-cultural and cross-racial loving that emphasizes the need to understand and affirm the plurality in and among women as central to feminist ontology and epistemology. Love is seen not as fusion and erasure of difference but as incompatible with them. Love reveals plurality. Unity–not to be confused with solidarity–is understood as conceptually tied to domination.

This groundbreaking collection reflects an uncompromised definition of feminism by women of color. 65,000 copies in print.

In a work with far-reaching implications, Chela Sandoval does no less than revise the genealogy of theory over the past thirty years, inserting what she terms "U.S. Third World feminism" into the narrative in a way that thoroughly alters our perspective on contemporary culture and subjectivity. What Sandoval has identified is a language, a rhetoric of resistance to postmodern cultural conditions. U.S liberation movements of the post-World War II era generated specific modes of oppositional consciousness. Out of these emerged a (...) new activity of consciousness and language Sandoval calls the "methodology of the oppressed". This methodology -- born of the strains of the cultural and identity struggles that currently mark global exchange -- holds out the possibility of a new historical moment, a new citizen-subject, and a new form of alliance consciousness and politics. Utilizing semiotics and U.S. Third World feminist criticism, Sandoval demonstrates how this methodology mobilizes love as a category of critical analysis. Rendering this approach in all its specifics, Methodology of the Oppressed gives rise to an alternative mode of criticism opening new perspectives on a theoretical, literary, aesthetic, social movement, or psychic expression. (shrink)

In this book, his major work, Alfred Schutz attempts to provide a sound philosophical basis for the sociological theories of Max Weber. Using a Husserlian phenomenology, Schutz provides a complete and original analysis of human action and its "intended meaning.".

Visible Identities critiques the critiques of identity and of identity politics and argues that identities are real but not necessarily a political problem. Moreover, the book explores the material infrastructure of gendered identity, the experimental aspects of racial subjectivity for both whites and non-whites, and in several chapters looks specifically at Latio identity.

Introduction to Phenomenology is an outstanding and comprehensive guide to an important but often little-understood movement in European philosophy. Dermot Moran lucidly examines the contributions of phenomenology's nine seminal thinkers: Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. Written in a clear and engaging style, this volume charts the course of the movement from its origins in Husserl to its transformation by Derrida. It describes the thought of Heidegger and Sartre, phenomenology's most famous thinkers, and introduces and assesses (...) the distinctive use of phenomenology by some of its lesser-known exponents, such as Levinas, Arendt and Gadamer. Throughout, the enormous influence of phenomenology on the course of twentieth-century philosophy is thoroughly explored. Clearly explaining technical terms and avoiding jargon, Introduction to Phenomenology is an indispensable introduction to the history and substance of this vital current in intellectual thought. (shrink)

This was published in Cultural Critique (Winter 1991-92), pp. 5-32; revised and reprinted in Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity edited by Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman, University of Illinois Press, 1996; and in Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds edited by Susan Weisser and Jennifer Fleischner, (New York: New York University Press, 1994); and also in Racism and Sexism: Differences and Connections eds. David Blumenfeld and Linda Bell, Rowman and Littlefield, 1995.

My Jewish Face & Other Stories chronicles the coming of age and coming out of a daughter of the Jewish left. Wandering from Brooklyn to Harlem and Berkeley in the sixties, from the intense feminist politics of the seventies to the isolation and regathering of activism in the eighties, Kaye/Kantrowitz's women struggle for lesbian community, for proud Jewish identity and always for justice steeped in compassion. As humanly warm and funny as they are serious, these stories will reach with great (...) hope and energy across generations and across cultures. I like this book a lot. It's full of history, herstories and plain stories--and in beautiful combination and variety--all bringing the truth, the angry adversarial truth, the happy love-finding truth of our women's movement years. --Grace Paley, writer and activist Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz is a lesbian writer who does not stint in these fictional explorations. Her writing sacrifices neither clarity nor depth. As she recreates the contexts of our lives she gives us back our own voices. --Judith McDaniel, poet, essayist, activist Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz's stories are urgently, often brutally honest...I came away from My Jewish Face as if from a roomful of vivid and articulate people who have discovered they have nothing left to hide. I value Kaye/Kantrowitz's voice for everything it says that comforts and everything that hurts--this is a sharp, sad, funny document of difficult times and I hope it falls into many, many hungry hands. --Rosellen Brown, novelist and poet. (shrink)

Communicology is the study of human discourse in all of its forms, ranging from human gesture and speech to art and television. Commuicology also represents the dominant qualitative research paradigm in the discipline of human communication, especially in the applied areas of mass communication, philosophy of communication, and speech communication. Lanigan's work offers the bold and original thesis that Michel Foucault's thematic study of the discourse of desire and power is an elaboration of the problematic discourse explicated in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (...) interrogation of freedom and terror. Various chapters cover such topics as art versus science, culture and communication, modernity versus postmodernity, feminism versus humanism, research methodology, and the capta versus data distinction for research validity. Actual examples of research cover the aesthetics of painting and sculpture, radio and television, rhetorical criticism of oral and written texts, and the East-West perspective on cross-cultural encounter -- all using the approach of semiotic phenomenology. Two special features of this book make it useful for both teacher and scholar alike. First, Lanigan provides an encyclopedic dictionary that illustrates and defines the theory and method of the human sciences in general and the discipline of communicology in particular. Used for several years by teachers in a number of universities, this dictionary had already become a "classic" among students before its publication here. Second, Lanigan analyzes and illustrates what has been missing for years in the study of Foucault's work: a definition (with appropriate illustrative figures and tables) of Foucault's method of archaeology and genealogy (criticism) for research in the human sciences, especially in the study of human discourse. (shrink)

Mar'a Lugones, one of the premiere figures in feminist philosophy, has at last collected some of her most famous essays, as well as some lesser-known gems, into her first book.

This work presents the first systemic account of the author's innovative theory of semiotic phenomenology and its place in the philosophy of communication and language. The creative and compelling project presented here spans more than fifteen years of systematic eidetic and empirical research into questions of human communication. Using the thematics of Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology, the author explores the concepts and practices of the human sciences that are grounded in communication theory, information theory, language, logic, linguistics, and semiotics. The hermeneutic (...) discussion ranges over contemporary theories that include Roman Jakobson's phenomenological structuralism, the semiotics of Umberto Eco, Charles Pierce, and Alfred Schutz, the theory of speech acts offered by Jurgen Habermas and John Searle, and Michel Foucault's phenomenological rhetoric of discourse. In general, this highly developed study offers the reader a fresh account of the problematic issues in the philosophy of communication. It is a work that any scholar in communication, philosophy, linguistics, or social theory would welcome for its scope and sustained research. (shrink)

How to communicate with "the other" who is culturally different from oneself is one of the greatest challenges facing North-South relations. This paper builds on existential-phenomenological and poststructuralist concepts of alterity and difference to strengthen the position of Latina and other subaltern speakers in North-South dialogue. It defends a postcolonial approach to feminist theory as a basis for negotiating culturally differentiated feminist positions in this age of accelerated globalization, migration, and displacement.

Review of Jacqueline Martinez's Phenomenology of Chicana Experience and Identity: Communication and Transformation in Praxis.

The aim of this essay is to carry out an analysis of the multi-voiced, multi-cultural self discussed by Latina feminists in light of a Heideggerian phenomenological account of persons or "Existential Analytic." In so doing, it points out similarities as well as differences between the Heideggerian description of the self and Latina feminists' phenomenological accounts of self, and critically assesses María Lugones's important notion of "world-traveling." In the end, the essay defends the view of a "multiplicitous" self which takes insights (...) from Lugones's view of the self that "travels 'worlds'" and from other Latina feminists' accounts of self as well as from Martin Heidegger's account of Dasein. (shrink)

Using narrative descriptions of the author's own lived-experience of her ethnic heritage, Martinez offers a systematic interrogation of the social and cultural norms by which certain aspects of her Mexican-American cultural heritage are both retained and lost over generations of assimilation. Combining semiotic and existential phenomenology with Chicana feminism, the author charts new terrain where anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic work may be pursued.