To effectively communicate to students how social position informs knowledge production, acquisition, and epistemic relations to others, I must recognize the ways my social position produces and perpetuates ignorance, remains affectively indifferent to certain experiences, and engages in epistemically asymmetrical relations. For the course I designed and taught, Topics in Feminist Philosophy: Feminist Epistemologies of Ignorance, my lecture prep regularly included reflecting on ways that I am implicated in the structures of ignorance, domination, and privilege. I’ll offer an example to help explain what I mean. It is the vulnerable nature of this pedagogy that makes the classroom a place where students can look inwards and apply theories to their own worlds without judgment. As well as communicating the content of the readings, the philosophy classroom is where I shine a bright light on the cracks in my habits of knowing, such that the class becomes a brighter place for students to see themselves. While I may use examples from my life in explicating Sartre’s existential dread (what can I say, it’s a relatable concept), it does not require the same degree of self implication as feminist theory. This process is more revealing, more compromising, than teaching other kinds of philosophy. Not as if I am accused or compelled to do so by my students, but as a pedagogical process that opens up the possibility for learners to implicate themselves too. In feminist philosophy, I find myself implicating myself in what I read and teach. Outside of a legal context, we might also call this self implication, or the act or state of being involved in something, of not being beyond or outside of its reach. It describes the act of voluntarily accusing oneself of an offense, thereby exposing oneself to judgment against one’s own legal interests. Self-incrimination is a concept often reserved to the court room or law class. ![]() In teaching courses on feminist and race-critical theory, at least one difference became clear: to do, and teach, feminist philosophy, I must be willing to incriminate myself in the process. ![]() While I disagree with these underlying assumptions about feminist philosophy, I agree that there is something different about it. It has been magnified and perpetuated by the relegation of feminist works to the end of syllabi, made into political footnotes to the Real philosophical questions. I have encountered this opinion in explicit and implicit forms since my first exposure to philosophy. I’m all too familiar with the widespread (mistaken) belief that feminist philosophy is less philosophical or should be treated as such.
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