Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-m8qmq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T12:31:53.324Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

In Defense of Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Johanna Oksala
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article studies our philosophical understanding of experience in order to question the current political and theoretical dismissal of experiential accounts in feminist theory. The focus is on Joan Scott's critique of experience, but the philosophical issues animating the discussion go beyond Scott's work and concern the future of feminist theory and politics more generally. I ask what it means for feminist theory to redefine experience as a linguistic event the way Scott suggests. I attempt to demonstrate that the consequences that she draws from such a theoretical move are both philosophically and politically problematic. A critical study of the evidence of experience does not have to imply metaphysical or epistemological foundationalism, as Scott claims, but on the contrary, such a study is indispensable for challenging them. We must hold onto experience as an important resource for contesting sexist discourses and oppressive conceptual schemas.

Type
Open Issue Content
Information
Hypatia , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , Spring 2014 , pp. 388 - 403
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alcoff, Linda, and Gray, Laura. 1993. Survivor discourse: Transgression or recuperation? Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18 (2): 260–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alcoff, Linda. 2000. Phenomenology, post‐structuralism, and feminist theory on the concept of experience. In Feminist phenomenology, ed. Fisher, Linda and Embree, Lester. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.Google Scholar
Bartky, Sandra Lee. 2002. “Sympathy and solidarity” and other essays. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Little field.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing gender. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cahill, Ann. 2001. Rethinking rape. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Davidson, Donald. 1986. A coherence theory of truth and knowledge. In Truth and interpretation: Perspectives on the philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. LePore, Ernest. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2005. Overcoming the myth of the mental: How philosophers can profit from the phenomenology of everyday expertise. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 79 (2): 47–65.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1991. Polemics, politics, and problematizations. In Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, Paul. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the “postsocialist” condition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hacking, Ian. 2002. Historical ontology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, Angela. 1990. Race and essentialism in feminist legal theory. Stanford Law Review 42 (3): 581–616.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heyes, Cressida. 2007. Self‐transformations: Foucault, ethics, and normalized bodies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kruks, Sonia. 2001. Retrieving experience. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Marcuse, Herbert. 2002. One‐dimensional man. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Merleau‐Ponty, Maurice. 1994. Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and world. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Schear, J., ed. 2012. Mind, reason and being‐in‐the‐world: The McDowell–Dreyfus debate. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Scott, Joan. 1991. The evidence of experience. Critical inquiry 17 (4): 773–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, Joan. 1992. Experience. In Feminists theorize the political, ed. Butler, Judith and Scott, Joan W.London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sellars, Wilfrid. 1997. Empiricism and the philosophy of mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Steinbock, Anthony. 1995. Home and beyond: Generative phenomenology after Husserl. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Zahavi, Dan. 2001. Husserl and transcendental intersubjectivity. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar