Queering Philosophy III
This is part of a series of posts: Queering Philosophy I, Queering Philosophy II.
Old News
Hall (2022) notes the tendency of some people to see certain ideas in queer theory as “old.” The ideas of foundational queer theorists like Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Eve Sedgwick are sometimes seen as ideas that people have learned from but ultimately moved on from. Early debates are considered outdated.
Hall points out that this attitude toward queer and feminist philosophy is strikingly different from the ordinary attitude toward historical philosophy. She says:
For example, in philosophy, historical figures (like Kant, Plato, Locke, Derrida) are never dismissed in philosophy classrooms because their ideas were written in the past and are thus irrelevant for thinking about contemporary issues. By contrast, feminist essays written ten years ago are quickly dismissed as passé. (p. 5)
This insight strikes me as incredibly important for understanding the reaction to much of contemporary analytic feminist philosophy. It is common for people to criticize analytic feminists as reinventing the wheel, for not having simply cited past feminist thinkers as opposed to writing new books. These criticisms are sometimes fair, but I believe they often fail to treat feminist philosophy as a field that has depth. I have a few examples.
Example 1. I remember when Kate Manne published Down Girl: the Logic of Misogyny (2017). In the book, she laid out her case for thinking of misogyny as a kind of disciplining mechanism, a way to enforce patriarchy. I loved the book, but I heard the criticism from some corners that the concept of misogyny was old hat; feminists in the past have already discussed this. Indeed feminists have talked about misogyny prior to the publication of her book. Quite a bit, in fact! If Manne were simply arguing there is thing called misogyny that is bad for women, I would have understood the criticisms. However, that is not what she does. She gives a very specific account of the nature and logic of misogyny. Even if you think the account is a bad one, it does not follow that the account is bad because feminists have already discussed the concept of misogyny. I believe that those criticizing Down Girl for the concept of misogyny being familiar implicitly have the view that progress in feminist philosophy is made by discussing new topics as opposed to rigorously investigating old ones. And I say “old” loosely, here. Feminist theory, as an academic pursuit, is not old relative to other academic disciplines. There is also a very small number of feminist theorists working in academia, relative to those working in other fields.
Example 2. I have heard similar criticisms of the work of my mentor and former advisor Sally Haslanger. Sally has papers at the intersection of philosophy of language (conceptual engineering), metaphysics (social ontology), and feminist philosophy. She comes up with new theses about the interaction between these three fields, yet sometimes her work is summarized as: gender is a social position that necessarily requires being in a network of oppressive relations. The latter thesis is not original to her, as she acknowledges. What is original is (for instance) the way she uses semantic externalism, a thesis in philosophy language, to support certain theses in social theory. But this externalism is often glossed over or ignored entirely by many readers.
Example 3. My colleague Ásta gives a distinctive account of social construction: the conferralist account. I once had a conversation with someone that criticized, not just Ásta’s conferralism, but all contemporary theories of social construction. They said, “It’s not original.” I was confused. What could they possibly mean? I asked for clarification, and they responded: “At this point, everyone knows that gender is socially constructed.” Of course, this is not what Ásta was arguing for. She gives a specific account of the metaphysics of social construction. The details were completely lost on the person. They didn’t know anything about the metaphysics of social construction, and they didn’t care. They had not considered the possibility that there was a deep discussion to be had solely about the nature of social construction, not its existence.
Example 4. My book The End of Binaries gives a theory of how gender and sexuality comes in degrees. Prior to the acceptance of my book to Oxford University Press, I submitted my book proposal for a research fellowship. The feedback was: my book wasn’t original. I was initially confused. I had done quite a bit of searching, but I had not found anyone who give a metaphysical account of degrees of gender and sexuality. Ultimately, I realized that the perceived lack of originality concerned my thesis, not my theory. When I say that I am giving a theory of how gender and sexuality comes in degrees, I think the standard assumption is that I am arguing that gender and sexuality come in degrees. But I am not. This would be like arguing that language is vague. What is interesting is not that there is vagueness, but the underlying theory of vagueness.
The Difference
Social philosophy, including queer philosophy, is often assumed to be of superficial explanatory depth. Perhaps the best comparison I can give is using number theory.
Imagine a mathematician comes along and says, “I work on number theory.” Would anyone dare say that they were unoriginal because “well, numbers exist”? No. The assumption is that number theorists can engage in a deep study of numbers. Social philosophers, in contrast, cannot engage in a deep study of queerness, misogyny, gender oppression, and so on.
Unfortunately, I think this assumption of superficiality makes social philosophy more attractive to some students. I get the impression that some students do not want to theorize about the social world as much as they want to give “takes” — short opinions on complex issues that are usually justified entirely on moral grounds, regardless of whether it makes sense. In conditions where queer philosophy is seen to necessarily lack depth due to its subject matter, it is hard to do queer philosophy.