## 1. Critique of Classical Approaches to Selfhood



Modern philosophy in the West championed the individual. Extending
into contemporary moral and political thought is the idea that the
self is a free, rational chooser and actor--an autonomous agent.
Two views of the self dominate this milieu: a Kantian ethical subject
and a utilitarian "homo economicus". Nevertheless, these
two views differ in their emphasis. The Kantian ethical subject uses
reason to transcend cultural norms and personal preferences in order
to discover absolute truth, whereas homo economicus uses reason to
rank desires in a coherent order and to figure out how to maximize
desire satisfaction with the instrumental rationality of the
marketplace. Both of these conceptions of the self minimize the
personal and ethical import of unchosen circumstances, interpersonal
relationships, and biosocial forces. They isolate the individual from
its relationships and environment, as well as reinforcing a modern
binary that divides the social sphere into autonomous agents and
dependents. For the Kantian ethical subject, emotional and social
bonds imperil objectivity and undermine rational commitment to duty.
For homo economicus, it makes no difference which forces shape
one's desires, provided they do not result from coercion or
fraud, and one's ties to other people are to be factored into
one's calculations along with the rest of one's desires.
For these prevailing conceptions of the self, structural domination
and subordination are thought not to penetrate the "inner
citadel" of selfhood. The multiple, sometimes fractious sources
of social identity constituted at the intersections of one's
gender, sexual orientation, race, class, age, ethnicity, ability, and
so forth, are ignored. Likewise, these conceptions deny the complexity
of the intrapsychic world of unconscious fantasies, fears, and
desires, and they overlook the ways in which such dynamics intrude
upon conscious life. The modern philosophical construct of the
rational subject projects a self that is not prey to ambivalence,
anxiety and depression, obsession, prejudice, hatred, or violence. A
disembodied mind, the body is peripheral--a source of desires for
homo economicus to weigh and a distracting temptation to the Kantian
ethical subject. Age, looks, sexuality, biological composition, and
physical competencies are considered extraneous to the self.



Yet, as valuable as rational analysis and free choice undoubtedly are,
some feminists argue that these capacities do not operate apart from
the phenomenon we call the self. As such, feminist philosophers have
charged that dominant views of the self as rational and independent
are fundamentally misleading. Although represented as genderless,
raceless, ageless, and classless, feminists argue that the Kantian
subject and homo economicus mask a white, healthy, youthfully
middle-aged, middle- or upper-class, heterosexual, cisgender male
citizen. On the Kantian view, he is an impartial judge deliberating
about applying universal principles, while on the utilitarian view, he
is a self-interested bargainer wheeling and dealing in the
marketplace.



It is no accident that law and commerce are both public domains from
which women have historically been excluded. It is no accident,
either, that the philosophers who originated these views of the self
typically endorsed this exclusion. Deeming women emotional and
unprincipled, these thinkers advocated confining women to the private
domestic sphere where their voices could be neutralized and even
transformed into virtues, in the role of empathetic, supportive wife,
vulnerable sexual partner, and nurturing mother. Associated with
bodies rather than minds, women were tasked with the maintenance of
their own bodies and those of others in a gendered division of labor
(Rawlinson 2016). The division of values along binary gendered lines
has historically been associated with the valorization of the
masculine and the stigmatization of the feminine. The masculine realm
of rational selfhood is a realm of moral decency, principled respect
for duties, and prudent good sense. However, femininity has been
associated with a sentimental attachment to loved ones that spawns
favoritism and compromises principles. Likewise, femininity is
associated with immersion in the unpredictable domestic exigencies of
the private sphere, while the masculinized self appears as a sturdy
fortress of integrity in the public domain of dutiful citizenship. The
self is essentially masculine, and the masculine self is essentially
good and wise.



Some feminist philosophers modify and defend these conceptions of the
self, taking issue only with women's historical exclusion from
them and claiming they should be extended to include women. However,
the decontextualized individualism and abstraction of reason from
other capacities inherent in these two dominant views trouble many
feminist philosophers and have led them to seek alternative
perspectives on the self. Many claim that the misogynist heritage of
the Kantian subject and homo economicus cannot be remedied simply by
advocating equal selves for women. Rather, these very conceptions of
the self are gendered. In Western culture, the mind and reason are
coded masculine, whereas the body and emotion are coded feminine
(Irigaray 1985b; Lloyd 1984). To identify the self with the rational
mind is, then, to masculinize the self according to entrenched
stereotypes. Far from being apolitical, this conception of the self
perpetuates neoliberal inequalities by teaching women to value
economic success and social independence in a way that requires the
continual exploitation of other, less privileged, women (Oksala 2016;
Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser 2019).



The philosophical preeminence of the masculine over the feminine rests
on untenable assumptions about the transparency of the self, the
immunity of the self to social influences, and the reliability of
reason to correct distorted moral judgment. People grow up in social
environments saturated with culturally normative prejudice and
implicit bias, even in communities where overt forms of bigotry are
strictly proscribed (Meyers 1994). Although official norms uphold the
values of equality and tolerance, cultures continue to transmit
camouflaged messages of the inferiority of historically subordinated
social groups through stereotypes and other imagery. These deeply
ingrained schemas commonly structure attitudes, perceptions,
behavioral habits, judgment, and compassion or empathy despite the
individual's conscious good will (Fischer 2014; Sullivan 2001
and 2015; Valian 1998; Collins 1990). As Kate Manne elaborates,
misogynist norms skew empathy in favor of men in what she calls
"himpathy" (Manne 2019). These norms also render societies more likely to believe
the testimony of those who are privileged and to diminish the
perspectives of those not considered objective, rational knowers
(Fricker 2007). As a
result, people often consider themselves objective and fair while
systematically discriminating against "different" others
(Piper 1990; Young 1990). Such prejudice cannot be dispelled through
rational reflection alone (Meyers 1994; Al-Saji 2014). In effect,
then, the conception of the unbiased rational self countenances
"innocent" wrongdoing and reinforcement of the social
stratification that privileges an elite whom this conception takes as
paradigmatic.



The nullification of women's selfhood was once explicitly
codified in Anglo-European and American law. The legal doctrine of
coverture held that a woman's personhood was absorbed into that
of her husband when she married (McDonagh 1996). Assuming her
husband's surname symbolized the denial of the wife's
separate identity. In addition, coverture deprived the wife of her
right to bodily integrity, since rape and other forms of physical
abuse within marriage were not recognized as crimes. She lost her
right to owning property, controlling her own earnings, and making
contracts in her own name. Lacking the right to vote or serve on
juries, she was a second-class citizen whose enfranchised husband
purportedly represented her politically. Although coverture has been
rescinded, vestiges of this denial of women's selfhood can be
discerned in recent legal rulings and in contemporary culture. For
example, pregnant women remain vulnerable to legally sanctioned
violations of their bodily integrity and legal autonomy, especially if
they lack race and class privilege (Bordo 1993; Brown 1998).
Selflessness remains the pregnant woman's legal status.
Moreover, the stereotype of feminine selflessness still thrives in the
popular imagination. Any self-confident, self-assertive woman is out
of step with prevalent gender norms, and a mother who is not
unstintingly devoted to her children is likely to be perceived as
selfish or even a welfare "fraud" and to face severe
social censure and deprivation of social services (Sparks, 2015).



Complementing this line of argument, a number of feminists argue that
the very ideal of an independent, rational self has invidious social
consequences. To realize this ideal, it is necessary to repress inner
conflict and to police the rigid boundaries of a purified self. Alien
desires and impulses are consigned to the unconscious, but this
unconscious material inevitably intrudes upon conscious life and
influences people's attitudes and desires. In particular, the
feared and despised Other within is projected onto "other"
social groups, and hatred and contempt are redirected at these
imagined enemies (Kristeva 1988 [1991]; McAfee 2019; Scheman 1993).
Misogyny and other forms of bigotry are thus borne of the demand that
the self be decisive, invulnerable, and unitary together with the
impossibility of meeting this demand. Worse still, these irrational
hatreds cannot be cured unless this demand for self-mastery is
repudiated, but to repudiate it is to be resigned to a degraded,
feminized self whose concerns are not taken seriously. Indeed,
all-too-often women's protests are dismissed as those of a
hysteric or killjoy (Ahmed 2017). Far from functioning as the
guarantor of moral probity, the fictive Kantian self is the condition
for the possibility of intractable animosity and injustice.



A further problem with the traditional modern views from a feminist
standpoint is that they fail to furnish an account of internalized
oppression and the process of overcoming it. It is common for women to
comport themselves in a feminine fashion, to scale down their
aspirations, and to embrace gender-compliant goals (Irigaray 1985a;
Bartky 1990; Babbitt 1993; Cudd 2006; Beauvoir 1949 [2011]). Feminists
account for this phenomenon by explaining that women internalize
patriarchal norms: these norms are integrated into the cognitive,
emotional, and conative structure of the self. Women may contribute to
their own oppression without realizing it. At times, warped norms may
even lead women to question their own sanity through a process that
Kate Abramson terms "gaslighting". A gaslighted woman may
lose her sense of self to the point where depression and grieving is
appropriate (Abramson 2014). Once embedded in a woman's psychic economy,
internalized oppression conditions her core desires. To maximize
desire-satisfaction, then, would be to collaborate in her own
oppression. Homo economicus's equation of fulfillment with
desire-satisfaction is unable to get out of this bind.



Finally, in dominant conceptions of the self, no one seems to be born
and raised, for caregivers and birth mothers are driven offstage
(Irigaray 1985b; Baier 1987; Code 1987; Held 1987; Willett 1995 and 2001; Kittay 1999; LaChance
Adams and Lundquist 2012). The self appears to materialize on its own
with a starter set of basic physical desires and rational skills. No
one's powers ever seem to deteriorate or change in different
contexts. Since dependency and vulnerability are denied, all
affiliations are assumed to be freely chosen, and all transactions
freely negotiated. The repudiation of caregiving underwrites the
voluntaristic illusion of independence that characterizes the Kantian
ethical subject and homo economicus--and it is no coincidence
here that caregiving has traditionally been women's work.
Alternative virtues, such as care, love, tenderness, spontaneity, and
interdependence are registered as defeats for the "Man with the
Plan" rather than aspects of resilient selfhood and a fluid
sense of agency (Baier 1987; Koziej 2019). The mother cultivating a
"social erotic" between herself and her infant through the
dance of affect attunements (Willett 1995 and 2001), like the lover
embracing the unexpected, transgress rigid modern norms of
selfhood.



Feminist critique exposes the partiality of the ostensibly universal
Kantian ethical subject and homo economicus. These conceptions of the
self are: (1) androcentric because they replicate masculine
stereotypes and ideals; (2) sexist because they demean anything that
smacks of the feminine; (3) masculinist because they help to
perpetuate male dominance; and (4) elitist because they perpetuate
other associated biases, including heterosexist, transphobic, racist,
ethnocentric, ableist, classist, and, arguably, speciesist biases
(Haraway 2008). While the latter dimensions of these prevalent
conceptions of the self are outside the scope of this article, these
problems cannot be disentangled from the larger critique and efforts
at reconceptualizing a self that do not duplicate the modernist
Anglo-European structures of dominance.


## 2. Reclamation of Feminine Identities and Women's Status



These oversights necessitate reconceptualizing the self in at least
two respects. To account for features of the self that have been
traditionally overlooked, such as interdependence and vulnerability,
the self must be understood as socially situated and relational. To
account for the self's ability to discern and resist ingrained
cultural norms, the moral subject must not be reduced to the capacity
for reason. For many feminists, to acknowledge the self's
dependency is not to devalue the self but rather to value
vulnerability (Code 2011), as well as to call into question the
supposed free agency of a self that implicitly corresponds to a
masculine ideal.



Yet one might worry that revaluing dependency risks perpetuating
derogatory views of women as victim and men as agents and/or
entrenching a gender binary that divides values into masculine and
feminine. A focus on dependency and care may additionally risk
conflating women with mothers and nurturers in what Patrice DiQuinzio
has called "essential motherhood" (1999). Arguing that
moral virtues truly have no gender, Mary Wollstonecraft regards
"feminine" virtues as perversions of these true virtues
and laments women's conscription into a bogus ideal
(Wollstonecraft 1792). Similarly, Simone de Beauvoir labels women
under patriarchy "mutilated" and "immanent"
(Beauvoir 1949 [2011]). Socialized to objectify themselves, women are
said to become narcissistic, small-minded, and dependent on
others' approval. Excluded from careers, waiting to be chosen by
their future husbands, taken over by natural forces during pregnancy,
and busy with tedious, repetitive housework, women never become
transcendent agents. For Beauvoir, they often resist the burden of
responsibility for their own freedom.



This portrayal of women as abject victims of the patriarchal family
has been challenged and modulated in contemporary feminist philosophy.
We shall review three major reclamation strategies: (1) revaluing the
traditionally "feminine" activities of mothering and other
modes of social bonding through the development of care ethics and
eros ethics; (2) rethinking autonomy by moving beyond the two
traditional models described above; and (3) reclaiming sexual
difference through a symbolic analysis of female identity.



Feminists argue that pregnancy, birth, and mothering reveal important
features of the self, even for humans who do not have these
experiences themselves. Two overlapping philosophical
approaches--an ethics of care and an ethics of eros--have
revalued the significance of the mother in ways that bear on the issue
of the self. Both traditions emphasize that pregnancy and/or mothering
reveal that agency is frequently co-constituted and dynamic. The care
tradition varies among those who aim to value dependency work and/or
reconceptualize autonomy so that autonomy and dependency are
compatible (Gilligan 1982 and 1987; Ruddick 1989; Kittay 1999; Held
2006; Lindemann 2014). Care ethics emphasizes the value of care work
and character virtues that reflect vulnerability. An ethics of eros
draws from traditions of "othermothering" and emancipatory
discourses of generative libidinal drives and/or cultivating a social
eros of connection (Collins 1990; Irigaray 1993; Willett 1995, 2001, 2008, 2014, 2019; Lorde 2007). Social
bonds may reflect a dynamic of kinship, political solidarity, or
community engagement outside the nuclear family paradigm (Collins
1990; Nzegwu 2006). This tradition of eros foregrounds complicated
modes of interdependency that spiral out of the autonomy/dependency
binary and emphasize thick networks of social belongings. An ethics of
eros emphasizes the revitalizing affects of preconscious energy and
connectedness, and their creative potential for political subversion
and communal practices. Here, the self is a multilayered phenomenon
with a dynamic set of roles and interconnected desires.



Historically, the relation between mother and child was either
excluded altogether from philosophical discourse or taken as mere
preparation for a full expression of ethical selfhood. Prevalent
Western views commonly invoke a tale of early dependency on the family
followed by the eventual achievement of autonomy through narratives of
separation and acquiring virtues of self-determination. In contrast,
feminists in the care ethics and eros traditions revalue the
mother-child relationship as a way of figuring the interdependency of
the self. The infant's development of creative communicative
skills through affect attunement and face-to-face play explains the
lifelong intensity of social bonds (Willett 1995, 2001, and 2014; Welsh 2013). Alternative traditions of
maturation may feature instead a multiplicity of social roles,
practices, and connections. Hilde Lindemann argues that caregiving
exhibits key features of what she calls the practice of
personhood of knowing when and how to hold and let go of parts of others identities (Lindemann 2014). Patricia Hill Collins
offers glimpses of an erotic ethics of interconnectivity in her
characterization of the fluidity of "othermothers" for
black American communities (Collins 1990). Collins cites Audre
Lorde's distinct rendering of the term "eros" as not
primarily sexual or narrowly maternal, but rather as an energetic
drive that oppressive systems attempt to appropriate, but which may be
regenerated through creative social practices. Cynthia Willett,
expanding upon critical traditions of eros, argues that the laughing
mother provides a subversive complement to the long-suffering,
self-sacrificing maternal ideal (Willett and Willett 2019), while Mary
Rawlinson advocates the generativity of mothers as an alternative to
the proprietary notion of the modern self (Rawlinson 2016). Because
all people are cared for by an adult or adults, and every individual
is shaped by this emotionally charged interaction, the self is
essentially formed in and through its relations with its caregivers
(Chodorow 1981). For Chodorow, the rigidly differentiated,
compulsively rational, and stubbornly independent self is a masculine
defensive formation--a warped form of the relational
self--that develops as a result of fathers' negligible
involvement in childcare.



Caring for a child involves a range of activities governed by a
distinct set of values: protecting and caring for a fragile existence
and expanding the sense of self while acknowledging the limits of
one's power and the unpredictability of events, being sensitive
to the other's very different viewpoint, and learning to love
while struggling against traumatic social conditions, inadequate
social services, and invasive governmental and medical interventions
(Collins 1990; Brown 1998). The practice of motherhood calls upon a
wide range of interpersonal, political, and reflective skills that go
well beyond the deliberative reasoning that dominates traditional view
of the self. For instance, the ability to empathize with others and
imaginatively reconstruct their unique viewpoints is vital to moral
wisdom, but ethics that base moral judgment on an abstract conception
of personhood marginalize this skill (Meyers 1994). Care and eros
ethicists revalue that which is traditionally deemed
feminine--feeling, intimacy, and nurturance--in order to
reclaim the venues traditionally associated with women and to open up
a broader way of conceiving of the moral self.



Some feminists seek to rebalance autonomy with care, while others do
away with autonomy altogether. For some, autonomy is an androcentric
relic of modernism (Jaggar 1983; Addelson 1994; Hekman 1995; Card
1996). Others assert women's need for autonomous
self-determination (Lugones and Spelman 1983; de Lauretis 1986; King
1988; Govier 1993). Mothering itself frequently involves the need to
carve space and time away from one's child (LaChance Adams
 and Lundquist 2012). It may also
involve a reclamation of spirited independence in the "fearless
fighter" role that women reclaim as part of a maternal ethos in
some cultures and/or oppressive conditions (Nzegwu 2006; Lorde 2007).
In this vein, a number of feminists present accounts of autonomy that
do not devalue the interpersonal capacities that are conventionally
coded feminine (Mackenzie 2014 and 2017; Nedelsky 1989; Meyers 1989
and 2000; Benhabib 1999; Benjamin, 1988; Weir 1995). In feminist accounts, autonomy is not conflated
with self-sufficiency and free will, but rather is seen to be
facilitated by supportive relationships and to be a matter of degree
(Friedman 1993). Feminist accounts also stress the autonomous
individual's need for constructive feedback and the co-creation
of selves with others (Brison 2002 and 2017; Cavarero 1997; Alcoff
2017; Ahmed 2017). A feminist view opens the space for considering
autonomy an ongoing and improvisational process of self-discovery,
self-definition, and self-direction, rather than endorsing a set of
desires and goals chosen exclusively by the individual (Meyers 1989
and 2000).



In addition to caregiving practices such as mothering, some feminists
have attended to the potential of pregnancy for reconsidering autonomy
and independence. Additionally, pregnancy draws attention to a
uniquely intimate embodiment of self-other imbrication. Iris Marion
Young argues that pregnancy is a testament to the split subject or
self. For Young, pregnancy disrupts the integrity of the body. In
pregnancy, the boundary between self and other breaks down, and one
experiences one's "insides as the space of another"
(Young 1990). In contrast with Young, Gail Weiss suggests that
pregnancy allows us to re-envision the integrity of the body: instead
of positioning the pregnant body as a breakdown of the traditional
unified self, pregnancy reveals that bodily integrity is always
already fluid and expansive (Weiss 1999). As Talia Welsh points out,
the experiences of those who are pregnant reveal that selfhood is
neither unified nor genderless (Welsh 2013). It may even be that
pregnancy offers a "metaphysically and phenomenologically
privileged" situation for investigating the interrelation
between self and other (Rodemeyer 1998).



While pregnancy affords opportunities for positively demonstrating the
multiplicity of the self, it may also shed light on the violations
that women face in patriarchal societies. Young points out that the
interventions of obstetric medicine into women's bodies alienate
women from themselves through pathologizing their conditions,
subjecting women to invasive medical technologies, and rendering women
passive in the birthing process (Young 1990). The devaluation and
surveillance of black and brown pregnant bodies, such as in
state-induced abortions, call for greater empowerment of women rather
than an automatic praise of vulnerability (Brown 1998). In the last
few decades, medical technologies, such as sonography and fetal and
neonatal surgery, have sometimes faced those who are pregnant with
wrenching choices that test their agential resilience and capacities
to care (Feder 2014; LaChance Adams and Lundquist 2012). Jennifer
Scuro suggests that all pregnancies involve a death within the self
because all end in an expulsion of the other's body from oneself
(Scuro 2017). All
pregnancy thus dislodges presumptions of the self-possessed subject.
At the same time, this expulsion of the other is not always a
birth--pregnancy sometimes ends in miscarriage, when it does not
end in abortion--and so pregnancy should be dissociated from
childbirth.



As is evident from this analysis of pregnancy, feminist theories of
selfhood frequently combine philosophical analysis with social
critique and the testimony of lived experience. The latter has an
especially long history within phenomenology, where feminist
philosophers have been describing women's experiences for the
past century. Because phenomenology as a whole strongly emphasizes the
body and first-person experience, it fits methodologically with many
of the goals of feminism. Specifically, phenomenological theories of
embodiment emphasize the agential nature of the lived body, resisting
traditional conceptions from philosophy that make the body the mere
instrument of the mind. At the same time, feminist phenomenologists
resist the abstract nature of traditional phenomenological methods.
For feminist phenomenology, different selves are differently
positioned in ways that matter, and cannot be abstracted from their
social roles into a transcendental domain of inquiry. This stands in
opposition with classical phenomenology, which tended to promulgate a
universalized notion of the ego that elided differences between
bodies. Early women phenomenologists, such as Edith Stein and Gerda
Walther, frequently analyze how traditionally feminine-coded values
such as empathy and community play a part in women's everyday
lives and moral development (Stein 1996; Walther 1923). Most
influentially, Simone de Beauvoir argues that the human condition is
ambiguous: experience involves "immanence", or
embeddedness within one's historico-cultural and interpersonal
situation, and "transcendence", or radical freedom with
respect to one's choices and future. While all humans shared
this condition according to Beauvoir, she claims that women have been
overwhelmingly associated with immanence, and thus have not been
encouraged to claim their own freedom (Beauvoir 1949 [2011]). This
means that their selves are generally overdetermined by their
situations and contexts--what biology and others claim them to
be. For Beauvoir, women should reassert their transcendence through
productive projects. Beauvoir thus puts an existentialist spin on both
phenomenology's emphasis on situation and some feminists'
reclamation of autonomy. For Beauvoir, "woman" is a
category imposed by society; women's selves, then, are also in
large part imposed on them by society, and women would do well to
fashion their own selfhood through claiming their freedom. Yet this
freedom is always co-determined in situation with others.



In recent decades, feminist phenomenologists have further investigated
the living body as a site of selfhood that both reflects cultural
norms and can provide a site of resistance to them. Taking inspiration
from Beauvoir's claims about ambiguity, feminist
phenomenologists undertake a wide range of investigations into
dimensions of women's bodily existence. Iris Marion Young, for
instance, has drawn attention to the way that women's bodily
modes of expression reflect cultural norms of immanence and
objectification (Young 1990). Sandra Bartky shows that women are
encouraged to take themselves as sexual objects, which alienates them
from their lived bodies and encourages them to see their bodies and
selves as passive (Bartky 1990). The phenomenology of embodiment is
thus not separate from nexuses of social power (Oksala 2016). At the
same time, phenomenological attention to conditions such as pregnancy
(described above) may illuminate a more positive side of the fractious
nature of women's selves: the self, here, is multiplicitous.
Conflict among roles is constitutive of the self, and it is especially
salient among women in patriarchal societies (Weiss 2008). Latina
feminist phenomenology has been particularly active in recent decades
in reconceptualizing this multiplicitous self, as we will see in
greater detail in the following section.



Feminist phenomenology also emphasizes the way that sexual violations
trade on the interdependent, vulnerable, and gendered nature of the
self. Sexual violence is taken by many feminists not merely to be one
form of physical violence among others, but rather to be a denial of
self (Cahill 2001; Brison 2002). The body for phenomenology is the
dynamic site of the self, and can only be reduced to an object under
oppressive social conditions (Beauvoir 1949 [2011]; Cahill 2001). As
such, sexual violence cuts to the very heart of the self. Rape, for
instance, alters selfhood (Cahill 2001; Brison 2002; Alcoff 2017).



Phenomenology is not the only site of feminist philosophy that
underscores the body and resists the mind/body dualism characteristic
of modern notions of autonomous selfhood. The contemporary fields of
affect theory and new materialism have pushed feminist conceptions of
embodiment and selfhood even beyond a recognition of situated
relationality, sometimes arguing for a radical rupture of the
self/other distinction. Sara Ahmed and Teresa Brennan suggest that
affects and emotions neither go from the "inside out" nor
come from the "outside in"; rather, emotions may be found
within the very atmosphere of the social (Ahmed 2004; Brennan 2004).
Ranjana Khanna sees affects as openings onto the other both
"within" the self and beyond it (Khanna 2012). For
feminist new materialisms, the body is not an individual expressive
whole (as it remains in phenomenology); rather, the body is a
"sexually preconstituted, dynamic bundle of relations"
(Braidotti 2006) that is interconnected with the environment through
intensities and flows (Grosz 1994). Feminist materialism often
positions itself in contrast to poststructuralism because of the
former's emphasis on the material body, but both of these
approaches underscore the radical heterogeneity, or even nonexistence,
of the self. And the new materialist focus on the body, following the
"cyborg" theory of Donna Haraway, suggests that biological
bodies are not set in opposition to technology; rather, they are
densely imbricated. Feminist materialism seeks to dislocate identities and
focus on becomings (Braidotti 2016).



New materialism in particular has been influenced by the work of
poststructuralist Luce Irigaray, who draws on the imagery of the
female body to offer an alternative to masculine models of autonomy.
Irigaray plays off the symbol of the vaginal lips to figure a mode of
selfhood in which the body is always already two, a self-touching
organism that is multiplicitous (Irigaray 1985b and 1993). Through this gesture,
Irigaray reclaims the association of the feminine with the body in the
face of masculine dreams of separatist autonomy. Through her strategy
of "mimesis", Irigaray utilizes the very stereotypes that
have been used against women in order to undermine them: she plays on
the traditional conception of woman as the "other", the
mere body, the passive "mirror" of the male subject. She
depicts an erotic love of self that affirms difference within oneself
and allows the self-differentiating subject to connect with others.
She also resists the very idea of identity as presuming a unified,
phallocentric model of selfhood (Irigaray 1985b).



These and other reclamations of female identities have prompted a
number of significant reconceptualizations of the self as relational
and multilayered.


## 3. Reconceptualizations of the Self


### 3.1 The Dynamic and Relational Self



As we have seen, many feminist philosophers argue that it is a mistake
to hold that rationality alone is essential to the self and that the
ideal self is transparent, unified, coherent, and independent, since
they discern misogynist subtexts in the atomistic individualism of the
Kantian ethical subject and homo economicus (see
 section 1).
 While some feminists argue for a relational model of autonomy, others
reject the narrative of separation from the maternal sphere as an
overarching framing device for maturation. Drawing upon multicultural
and global sources, they see this narrative arc as falling short of
the complex dynamics of a multilayered, interconnected self that may
grow through sustained interactions through its community rather than
in decisive breaks from them. In this section, we take up new
conceptions of the relational self. These conceptions involve novel
contributions to the philosophy of selfhood, sometimes drawing on
frameworks from traditions such as poststructuralism, psychoanalysis,
narrative theory, and local knowledges. Feminist philosophers
gravitate toward these approaches to understanding selfhood because
they do not share the drawbacks that prompt feminist critiques of the
Kantian ethical subject and homo economicus. None of these approaches
regards the self as homogeneous or transparent; none removes the self
from its cultural or interpersonal setting; none sidelines the
body.



Taking a psychoanalytic approach, Julia Kristeva maintains that
infants gradually develop autonomy from their caregivers, but
complicates this narrative by transposing the classical Freudian
conception of the self and its distinction between consciousness and
the unconscious into an explicitly gendered framework (Kristeva 1980;
Oliver 1993; McAfee 2003; Miller 2014). For Kristeva, the self is a
subject of enunciation--a speaker who can use the pronoun
"I". But speakers are neither unitary nor fully in control
of what they say because discourse is bifurcated. The symbolic
dimension of language, which is characterized by referential signs and
linear logic, corresponds to consciousness and control. The semiotic
dimension of language, which is characterized by figurative language,
cadences, and intonations, corresponds to the unruly, passion-fueled
unconscious. All discourse combines elements of both registers. This
contention connects Kristeva's account to feminist concerns
about gender and the self. Since the rational orderliness of the
symbolic is culturally coded masculine, while the affect-laden allure
of the semiotic is culturally coded feminine, it follows that no
discourse is purely masculine or purely feminine. The masculine
symbolic and the feminine semiotic are equally indispensable to the
speaking subject, whatever this individual's socially assigned
gender may be. Every self amalgamates masculine and feminine
discursive modalities.



Like the unconscious in classical psychoanalytic theory, the semiotic
decenters the self. One may try to express one's thoughts in
definite, straightforward language, yet because of the semiotic
aspects of one's utterances, what one says carries no single
meaning and is amenable to being interpreted in more than one way. In
Kristeva's view, this is all to the good, for accessing the
semiotic--that which is conveyed, often inadvertently, by the
style of an utterance--kindles social critique. The semiotic
gives expression to repressed, unconscious material. According to
Kristeva, what society systematically represses provides clues to what
is oppressive about society and how society needs to be changed. Thus,
she discerns a vital ethical potential in the semiotic (Kristeva 1983
[1987]). Since this ethical potential is explicitly linked to the
feminine, moreover, Kristeva's account of the self displaces
"masculine" adherence to principle as the prime mode of
ethical agency and recognizes the urgent need for a
"feminine" ethical approach. At the same time,
Kristeva's questionable-subject-in-process seems for some to
enshrine the very gender dichotomy that causes women so much grief.
The association of the woman/mother with the unruly and ambiguous
semiotic may obscure the rich affect attunement and preverbal
dialogues between caregivers and their socially-oriented infants
(Willett 1995). Kelly Oliver's interpretation of Kristeva
resists some of these more gendered components of Kristeva's
view and expands upon the relational self as a capacity for a loving
sense of "response-ability" to otherness and difference
(Oliver 1998). For Oliver, the self is fluidly defined by its openness
to others.



In contrast with the revaluing of motherhood and/or femininity that
Kristeva and others undertake (see
 section 2),
 poststructuralists, critical race theorists, and trans\* feminists
have been vocal about the heterosexist and binary assumptions in some
feminist conceptions of the self, as well as their inattention to
other forms of difference among women. In the face of this, many
feminists have offered accounts of the self designed to accommodate a
wider range of differences. The earlier work of poststructuralist
Judith Butler maintains that personal identity is an illusion (Butler
1990). The self is merely an unstable discursive node, and
sexed/gendered identity is a "corporeal style"--the
imitation and repeated enactment of norms, frequently ones that are
demanded by cultural contexts. For Butler, psychodynamic accounts of
the self such as Kristeva's camouflage the performative nature
of the self and collaborate in the cultural conspiracy that maintains
the illusion that one has an anchored identity derived from
one's biological nature (manifested in one's genitalia).
Such accounts perniciously conceal the ways that normalizing regimes
of the state and culture deploy power to enforce "natural"
sexed/gendered bodies together with "unnatural" bodies,
obscuring the arbitrariness of the constraints that are being imposed
in order to deflect resistance to them. The solution, in
Butler's view, is to question the categories of biological sex,
gender, and sexuality that serve as markers of personal identity. Sex,
gender, and sexuality are at the very "core" of
self-identity, because self-identity is constructed through modes of
power. Thus, resistance may be developed in enacting one's
identity differently, through unorthodox performances and parodic
identities: the construction of identity is a site of political
contestation. Butler's more recent work continues to emphasize
the relationality of the self through its dispossession by the very
discursive structures that call the self into existence (Butler 2005).



Butler is also a major contributor to feminist theories of narrative
identity, one of the most important strands of contemporary feminist
theories of the self. Feminist narrative views of the self are
prominent in both Anglo-American and Continental traditions of
philosophy. Adriana Cavarero promulgates the "narratable
self" as an alternative to the self-constituting subject of
traditional philosophy (Cavarero 1997). This self does not have a
premium on self-narration; rather, others may actually have a better
handle on one's own self. For this reason, narrating oneself
must occur within a communal, political context. Subjectivity is
necessarily inclined toward others (Cavarero 1997). Butler, in part drawing on
Cavarero's views, suggests that the self is constructed in an
ongoing fashion through giving an account of itself to others (Butler
2005). Linda Martin Alcoff combines poststructuralism with a
hermeneutic approach, declaring that social identities are
relational and core to narratives of the self (Alcoff
2006). Memory has long been seen as a locus of
self-identity, and narrating one's life story is crucially
linked with memory. Yet feminists contend that narration and memory
are relational, often involving communal social practices (Brison
2002; Campbell 2003). Rather than promulgating an ideal of
self-knowledge, which presumes a fixed self that a reliable, rational
knower discovers at the core of everyday life, feminist narrative
theorists advocate self-cultivation within contextual practices.
Here we see again that for
feminists, the ontology and metaphysics of selfhood are inseparable
from ethical, social, and political domains.



This is also the case for strands of queer and trans\* theory as they
intersect with feminist approaches. For trans\* theorists, metaphysical
questions about identity operate within dominant discourses that
frequently perpetuate violence and transphobia, as well as within
queer and transgender subcultures that redefine gender and sex
identities in a dynamic, collaborative fashion (Bettcher 2014, 2016,
2017a, 2017b). Trans feminist Talia Mae Bettcher pushes back on
narratives of trans identity that are modeled on liberal individualist
models of selfhood, such as the idea that a trans individual might
have been "trapped in the wrong body" and, after coming
out, may let their core true self come to the surface (Bettcher 2014).
Bettcher contends that the idea of a true gendered self at the core of
a person overlooks the ways that gender and sex are created by culture
(Bettcher 2014). It also tends to entrench mind-body dualism, whereas
movements such as phenomenology have shown that gendered embodiment is
a very feature of selfhood. In this vein, Bettcher argues that sexism
and transphobia trade on a presumed hierarchy where one's
"proper" appearance, or clothed appearance in public, is
taken to be subordinate to one's "intimate"
appearance when naked. For Bettcher, these two forms of appearance are
in fact on par, since both are culturally constituted.



Trans\* feminist accounts frequently underscore the relationality of
the self, including the potential that others have to define us. If
others did not have such power, internalized sources of psychic
discord such as gender dysphoria, and the desire that many trans\*
folks express for recognition or "passing", would be
difficult to explain. It would also be difficult to explain
transphobia: as Alexis Shotwell and Trevor Sangrey argue, cisgender
individuals' resistance to recognizing trans\* identities hinges
on the fact that trans\* gender expression affects cisgender identity
(Shotwell and Sangrey 2009). Shotwell and Sangrey draw on the feminist
theory of selfhood put forth by Brison to develop this argument. And,
while the relational constitution of gender identity within a given
culture is a cause of transphobia, some queer and trans\* feminists
hold that it is also the basis of self-transformation. Specifically,
Kim Q. Hall points out that queer crip communities affirm transforming
oneself through transforming one's bodies. These creative
transformations occur within "the context of communities of
support and recognition" (Hall 2009). They frequently involve
the desire for intersubjective recognition, where body modifications
may be undertaken in order to foster a relatively continuous sense of
self (Rubin 2003). This further demonstrates the way that public
identities are not removed from an interior sense of self, as liberal
individual models tended to assume. This continuity, however, need not
rely on the narrative of a "core" interior self that is
merely seeking validation from a public. Instead, intersubjective
self-fashioning may reject an interior/exterior dichotomy to begin
with, following arguments such as Bettcher's above. They also
follow feminist phenomenology in disrupting the presumed binary
between nature and culture in bodily comportment (Salamon 2010; Heyes
2007; Hale 1998). Although discussions in trans\* theory and queer
theory often do not occur within a feminist context, the emphasis on
lived embodiment, first-person authority, and the relationality of
selfhood frequently found in these discourses both draw on and
contribute to feminist discussions of selfhood in crucial ways.


### 3.2 The Intersectional and Multiplicitous Self



Over the past several decades, biosocial, intersectional, and
phenomenological layers of the relational self have increasingly
gained prominence. Intersectional theories of selfhood brought forward
by African American feminists note that stratifications of social
identities such as gender, race, and class do not operate in isolation
from one another (Williams 1991; Crenshaw 1993). Rather, these
identity modalities interact to produce compound effects. As such, the
individual is an intersectional self, or even multiple selves, where
structures of subordination but also of agency converge (Moraga and
Anzaldua 1981; King 1988; Crenshaw 1993). Intersectional theory
aims to capture those aspects of selfhood that are conditioned by
membership in subordinated or privileged social groups. Accenting the
liabilities of belonging to more than one subordinated group,
Kimberle Crenshaw likens the position of such individuals to
that of a pedestrian hit by several speeding vehicles simultaneously,
while Maria Lugones likens their position to that of a
border-dweller who is not at home anywhere (Crenshaw 1991; Lugones
1992). As a "world traveler", Lugones finds herself
shifting between Latinx and Anglo-American worlds. She offers the
image of a "curdled self" to indicate the heterogeneity of
selfhood in such conditions (Lugones 1994). For Gloria
Anzaldua, the *mestiza* is a central figure for
understanding a new kind of self with an ambiguous, fluid identity:
the *mestiza* experiences a sense of constant in-betweenness
that fosters unique modes of meaning-making. As such, intersectional
border-dwelling can be a model of positive identity that registers the
multiplicitous nature of the self (Anzaldua 1987; Ruiz
2016; Alarcon 1991 and 1996; Barvosa 2008; Ortega
2016). Border-dwelling selves are frequently ill at ease in the world,
but this need not be a disadvantage; rather, it may offer a unique
lens for interpreting the fractious nature of the self as well as the
possibilities for resistance to oppressive social norms.



Some feminists are comfortable rejecting the unity of the self
altogether and suggesting that persons are comprised of what Edwina
Barvosa calls a "wealth of selves" (Barvosa 2008).
Maria Lugones influentially argues that
"world-traveling" is a modality of moving between mutually
exclusive selves that appear within different contexts (Lugones
2003). Barvosa advocates
striving to unify these mutually exclusive selves through a
self-integrative life project (Barvosa 2008). Mariana Ortega takes
issue with both of these positions because they advocate an
ontological pluralism: one individual is comprised of multiple selves
(Ortega 2016). For Ortega, this position is untenable, because it
fails to account for the fact that a self must have some unique
identity. In order to do justice both to the uniqueness of the self
and to its multiplicity, Ortega argues that selves are ontologically
singular but existentially plural. Persons, for her, are characterized
by a singular multiplicitous self with various facets that are always
in the process of becoming. Ortega utilizes phenomenology in order to
argue that the self experiences an existential continuity over time,
even as its roles and identities may be incommensurate in various
contexts.



Theories of the multiplicitous self resonate with Lorde's
"sister outsider" and Collins'
"outsider-within", which, in contrast with W.E.B.
DuBois's well-established account of "double
consciousness", develop a multitudinous identity in connection
with others. This identity is not primarily oriented around the
black/white divide prominent in DuBois, nor in modern theories of
autonomy, but instead around multiple roles and sources of energy,
kinship, and and community. As we saw above, proponents of the
intersectional self credit multiply oppressed people with a certain
epistemic advantage in virtue of their suffering and alienation. Thus,
black women are acutely aware of racism within feminism and sexism
within the struggle for racial justice. Their intersectional
positioned selfhood makes such insight virtually unavoidable.



While intersectional theorists bring forward race, class, ability, and
other socioeconomic markers as central to psychical-historical
locations of agency, power, and connectivity, a number of feminists
are increasingly paying attention to somatic and organic factors in
selfhood. In addition to the revaluing of embodiment in affect theory
and new materialisms mentioned above
 (section 2),
 Catherine Malabou points to mental ailments such as Alzheimer's
disease to press upon poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theories of
selfhood (Malabou 2012). Diseases with a physical basis challenge any
conception of subjectivity located exclusively in the psychic
continuities of conscious and/or unconscious life as posited by
psychoanalytic theory. Malabou reinterprets Derrida's
deconstructive self as punctured by experiences of alterity through a
non-reductive neurobiology of trauma and brain injury. Injured selves
may experience radical discontinuities or lose entirely aspects of
their former selves. The resulting picture of the self is a
multilayered nexus of relations with psychic-historical and
somatic-organic strata. Her work makes clear that feminist
philosophies of the self cannot ignore the biological sciences.



Willett combines this turn to biological and psychological studies of
affect and social emotions with Africana, Latina, and other feminist
traditions of the interconnected self. As a social species, the most
basic drives and affects of the human self are prosocial, not
narcissistic or hedonistic. Maturity does not require abjection,
repression, or traumatizing discipline for social cooperation. The
capacity for love, friendship, and cooperation with social groups
characterizes humans as a biological species. One consequence of the
biosocial drives, as we have seen, is the rejection of the autonomy
narrative as the primary or exclusive goal of self-development
(Willett 1995, 2001). The self matures through enhanced
capacities and desires to form social bonds, not severance from a
source of dependence (typically portrayed as the mother, the body,
and/or the animal world).



Another consequence of this intermingling of the biological with the
social is that intersectionality theory is now extended to include
mixed-species communities (Haraway 2008; Midgley 1983). This
eco-feminist extension of eros ethics follows from the re-centering of
ethics on affects and eros rather than on the rational capacities that
mark human superiority and separation from other animal species.
Willett discerns four strata for envisioning connections across human
and nonhuman selves, corresponding to modes of social bonds: 1)
subjectless sociality, 2) affect attunement, 3) biosocial network as
livable place or home, and 4) compassion and the visceral (gut)
conscience (Willett 2014). These four layers reveal that social
affects such as laughter or panic transfer from one creature to
another, whether from an adult to an infant or within a community of
birds, as well as emphasizing that visceral feelings shared among
creatures are a key source of moral response. The biosocial layering
of selfhood reclaims maternal relationality as more than a mechanical
instinct for humans and any number of other animal species. The
affect-laden, relational self cannot transcend through reason its
social embeddedness in a complex politics of in-group/out-group
markers. As we saw above
 (section 2),
 rules appealed to by autonomous selves do not guarantee unbiased
decisions. Thanks in large part to feminist critiques of traditional
models of selfhood and ethics, views that emphasize the relational
nature of the self and its heterogeneous features are moving to the
center of ethics. At the same time, feminists offer a wide range of
methodologies and conclusions with respect to this relational self
that are sometimes in conflict, reminding us that the work of feminist
philosophy is far from finished.


## 4. Conclusion



As this article attests, there is tremendous foment and variety within
the field of feminist work on the self. Yet, in reviewing this
literature, we have been struck by a recurrent theme: namely, the
inextricability of metaphysical issues of the self from moral, social,
and political theory. Feminist critiques of regnant philosophical
theories of the self expose the normative underpinnings of supposedly
neutral metaphysics. Feminist analyses of women's agential
capacities both acknowledge traditional feminine social contributions
and provide accounts of how women can overcome oppressive norms and
practices. Feminist reconstructions of the nature of the self are
interwoven with arguments that draw out the emancipatory benefits of
conceiving the self one way rather than another. There is nothing
surprising, to be sure, about the salience of normative concerns in
feminist philosophizing Still, we mention it because we believe that
feminists' attention to sociopolitical concerns leads to fresh
questions that enrich the philosophical understanding of the self.
Moreover, we would urge that this forthrightness about the political
viewpoint that informs philosophy s a virtue, for overlooking the
political suppositions and implications of esoteric philosophical
views has led to considerable mischief. It is precisely the failure to
acknowledge that the question of the self is not narrowly metaphysical
that has led to philosophy's implicit modeling of the self on a
male subject, a tendency that feminist perspectives on the self seek
to remediate.