WS475-009: Advanced Seminar: Feminism & Philosophy (Spring 2010)

In this course, we will consider the relationship between feminism and philosophy, or rather, a number of possible relationships between them.  Are the modern political discourses of feminism irrelevant to the traditional academic discipline of philosophy?  Or does feminism address some of the most disputed concepts of philosophy itself - identity and difference, structure and agency, or indeed, the "personal" and the "political"?  Or again, has feminism effectively dislodged philosophy from its disciplinary security, having placed all academic practices in a broader political context?  Has the recent emergence of "feminist theory" thus confirmed the "end of philosophy"?  We will approach the relationship between feminism and philosophy, then, as a complex disjunction rather than as a simple conjunction.

In this course, we will conduct close readings of selected feminist texts, focusing on the work of those French-language scholars associated with second-wave feminism - what has come to be known within English-language scholarship as "French feminism" - as well as its reception by English-language feminist scholars.  We will read selected texts by the "French feminists" Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, Michèle Le Doeuff, Christine Delphy, and Colette Guillaumin, as well as some critical responses to French feminism by Toril Moi, Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Elizabeth Grosz, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.  We will begin the course by reading selected texts by the novelist and existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and by the psychoanalyst and structural theorist Jacques Lacan - who remain the two most formative influences on French feminism - and end by assessing the continued importance of their work for feminism and philosophy.  Although our class discussions will focus on the philosophical problems that are posed in these texts, we may also draw from other intellectual fields (such as political theory, history, sociology, and literary theory) as well as from popular culture (including literature, art, music, and film).