## 1. The Quests for Certainty and Purity



One of philosophy's responses to the presence of flux and change in
the world has been to seek stability in the fixed and unchanging.
Another has been to try to rigidly order and compartmentalize that
which is ambiguous or indeterminate. These quests for certainty and
purity have been the concern of pragmatist and continental feminists
because of their endorsement of traits seen as masculine and their
corresponding rejection of those viewed as feminine. Given western
culture's association of women with the impure, ambiguous, and
disorderly, the quest to free philosophy from those characteristics
has been a simultaneous attempt to flee from everything associated
with the feminine.



In *The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and
Culture*, Susan Bordo criticizes the "'flight from the
feminine'" that has resulted from philosophy's quests for
certainty and purity (1987, 118). She argues that in the wake of work
by Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, and feminist historians and
philosophers of science such as Evelyn Fox Keller and Sandra Harding,
philosophy cannot easily sustain its anti-cultural and non-historical
accounts of the world. Adopting Rorty's metaphor of "the mirror
of nature" (1979) to criticize philosophy's self-conception as a
neutral reflection of what is given in the
 world,[2]
 Bordo provides a psychocultural analysis of the development of that
mirror in the work of Rene Descartes. Rorty's Nietzschean and
Deweyan approach to philosophy understands it as a form of cultural
therapy, that is, as a way to improve or "cure" the
"illnesses" of contemporary society. Similarly, *The
Flight to Objectivity* brings together feminist concerns and
psychoanalytic tools to identify western culture's Cartesian
"disease." Bordo's diagnosis is that Cartesian anxiety in
the face of epistemological doubt is in fact an anxiety due to
separation from an organic universe conceived of as female.



Taking seriously the experiential bases of Descartes's skepticism,
Bordo identifies the epistemological problem over which Descartes
obsessed to be that of psychological corruption, which threatens to
make it impossible to know how and when to trust one's felt sense of
conviction when one believes something to be true. Drawing on Dewey's
analysis in *The Quest for Certainty* (1988) and the
anthropological work of Mary Douglas, Bordo argues that an absolutist
quest for purity is a common response to anxiety over the messiness
and ambiguity of the world. Moreover, she explains that the quest for
purity during times of high cultural anxiety is correlated with an
increase in male social domination. As anthropologist Peggy Reeves
Sanday's cross-cultural findings demonstrate, male domination within a
culture tends to be at its most extreme when that culture experiences
itself as being in too much flux (Bordo 1987, 111). For Bordo,
Descartes's response to historical changes such as the cultural and
scientific revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
such as Martin Luther's reformation movement and Copernicus's
heliocentricism, was to attempt to establish a firm division between
confusion and order, the impure and the pure, the ambiguous and the
certain, the body and the mind, and the "dirty" from the
"clean." Descartes thus can be thought of as the
quintessential "dirt-rejecter" of Western philosophy
(1987, 82). As Bordo argues, the mark of Cartesianism is not so much
its claims to neutral objectivity as it is its "passion for
intellectual separation, demarcation, and *order*" (1987,
77). Given western culture's long-standing
association between reason, the orderly mind, and masculinity, on the
one hand, and emotions, the messy body, and femininity, on the other,
Descartes' rejection of flux for order was at the same time a
privileging of the (culturally constituted) masculine over the
(culturally constituted) feminine.



Dewey once claimed that a felt sense of "insecurity generates
the quest for certainty" (Dewey 1988, 203). Following up on that
claim, Bordo argues that the problematic genius of Descartes was to
find a way to convert his anxiety in the face of the impure and
ambiguous into the confidence and certitude of objectivity. As Bordo
explains, "Where there is anxiety, there will almost certainly
be found a mechanism against that anxiety" (Bordo 1987, 75).
Descartes took that which produced dread--the perceived
barrenness of a mechanistic world--and turned it into an
advantage, into that which makes objectivity, and thus also certainty,
possible. In defense against the painful anxiety he felt about the
process of separating from the organic whole of the universe,
Descartes effectively declared that he willed and welcomed such a
separation. His defense, in other words, can be seen as a
reaction-formation to a painful loss. Tracing the historical and
cultural masculinization of thought and the corresponding reconception
of nature as dead and mechanical rather than organic and alive, Bordo
demonstrates how what was lost was the previous cultural conception of
a "female cosmos and 'feminine' orientation towards
the world" (1987, 100). Descartes's method of achieving absolute
certainty thus is as much a "flight from the feminine"
historically and culturally associated with the organic and fluid, as
it is the creation of a new epistemological criterion of and method
for objectivity.


## 2. The Evolutionary Becoming of Spatiality and Materiality



Space is often thought of as relatively static in comparison with the
dynamism of time. Time moves forward, we often say, while space is
commonly conceived as merely an empty gap that passively rests
between, for example, the walls of a house or the beams of a bridge.
What would it mean, however, to question this dualistic opposition of
space and time? What if space were also thought of as dynamic and
moving? And what impact would this revised conception of space have on
philosophical ideas about the bodies that inhabit space? As some
feminists have argued, rethinking spatiality as becoming, rather than
as static being, can help philosophy rethink bodily life and
materiality in dynamic ways as well. Given the long-association of
women with bodies and materiality, moreover, the reconceptualization
of the latter has important implications for women and feminism.



In *Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real
Space* (2001), Elizabeth Grosz explores these conceptual questions
about space, time, and materiality by working in the intersections of
architecture and philosophy. Engaging in "conceptual or
philosophical [rather than concretely architectural]
experiments," she forces architecture to examine the importance
of temporality and sexuality for practices of building and making and
attempts to render both architecture's and philosophy's concepts of
space more dynamic and fluid (2001, xviii). Grosz argues that
architecture is problematic from a feminist perspective because it
largely has ignored questions of sexual and racial differences. Not
putting enough women's bathrooms, relative to men's, in concert halls,
auditoriums, and other public buildings that draw large numbers of
people is one simple example of this neglect. Yet it also can be seen
in the more complex ways that spaces are gendered and raced. How, for
example, does architecture contribute to raced and racist urban spaces
by aiding the gentrified rebuilding of inner cities, a process that
tends to displace poor, non-white populations for the benefit of
middle class white people? Architecture's neglect of questions such as
these is a serious matter for Grosz. Nonetheless, she argues that as a
kind of liminal point between culture and nature, the field of
architecture also presents an ideal opportunity for feminists to
trouble many of the absolutized binary categories that often plague
philosophy: inside and outside, self and other, and subject and
object, to name just a few. It might also help philosophy "think
of itself more humbly as a mode of producing rather than as a mode of
knowing or intellectually grasping or mastering concepts, moving
[philosophy] closer to everyday life and its concerns, which would be
good for [it]" (2001, 6). As a self-proclaimed
"outsider" to architecture--a term used playfully
given that she will smudge the lines between inside and
outside--Grosz thus traverses the boundaries between architecture
and philosophy to address questions of materiality and becoming that
might produce changes in the lived experience of spatiality.



Grosz is interested in a philosophy that would integrate dynamic and
productive notions of change and time into that of space. On her view,
such integration would help both architects and philosophers think of
space in dynamic and creative, rather than static and worn-out ways.
According to Grosz, such a philosophy requires above all
"pragmatic models" (2001, 120). With the term
"pragmatic," Grosz includes thinkers in both the
traditions of American and continental philosophy who operate with a
"self-consciously evolutionary orientation" (2001, 169).
This "philosophical pragmatism meanders from Darwin, through
Nietzsche, to the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Henri
Bergson, and eventually through various lines of descent, into the
diverging positions of Richard Rorty, on the one hand, and Gilles
Deleuze on the other" (2001, 169). Positioning herself within
this lineage, Grosz affirms "pragmatist philosophers who put the
questions of action, practice, and movement at the center of
ontology" (2001, 169). Doing so allows them, for example, to
"understand[d] the [inorganic] *thing as question*, as
provocation" for organic life (2001, 169).
This would be to take becoming and an evolutionary openness to the
future various seriously for it would dare to think of the so-called
inanimate, static thing as continuous with animate, dynamic,
organic--including human--life. Doing so would operate with
the distinction between animate and inanimate in order to show their
interactions. It would acknowledge that the animate and the inanimate
exist as poles on a continuum, where differences shade into one
another rather than stand starkly apart.



In questioning conventional boundaries between thing and non-thing,
Grosz's goal is not to completely collapse all distinctions between
binary categories, but rather to complicate their relationships so
that new possibilities might open up. Likewise, the purpose of her
work is not to urge the attempt to live in a world of total
flux--as if such a thing were possible. Following James, Grosz
instead insists that the "teeming flux of the real" must
be rendered into discrete objects and that human beings are not able
to choose not to do so (2001, 179). What she adds, however, is that
philosophy and architecture need to recognize that categories for
objectifying the world do not fully capture it in all its complex
multiplicity and that there is a residue that remains. This residual
excess is not in rigid opposition to objects and categories; rather it
and the world of flux are continuous with the world of discrete
objects, in dialogue and movement with them. To think the relationship
between flux and object as Grosz would have philosophers do is to
think the thing as she has described it: as a fluid "point of
crossing" rather than as a static fixity (2001, 171).



Grosz does not often provide explicit details about how such a
"philosophical pragmatism" might benefit feminism. Indeed,
as she says of herself in an interview that composes chapter one of
the book, "I feel sure that in order to keep my feminist work
alive I have to keep it at bay, at a bit of a distance" (2001,
26). In the context of the entire book, however, one can understand
her distanced feminism as another functional "outsider" to
both philosophy and architecture that, like all outsides, forces those
positioned within the inside to really "*think*"
(2001, 64). In the example of her own work,
Grosz claims that she had to move away from her earlier work on the
body (Grosz 1994) because she had "worked to death" the
topic. Moving to the field of architecture has allowed her to approach
the question of materiality in a fresh way (2001, 26). Making that
move, Grosz offers feminists an example of how to get some distance
from and thus gain a new perspective on familiar feminist concepts so
that fresh insight into them is possible. Grosz thus provisionally
preserves the distinctions between continental and pragmatist
philosophy, architecture, and feminism in order to enable the
"infection by one side of the border of the other [and] a
becoming otherwise of each of the terms thus bounded" (2001,
65).


## 3. Technoscientific Hybridity and Fetishism



Technology and science have had and continue to have an enormous
impact on the contemporary world. The weapons, medicines, automobiles,
electronics, and other goods they produce have been both beneficial to
and problematic for human and non-human animal life. Important to
understanding the particular impact of technology and science is to
focus not just on their products, however, but also on the processes
by which those products come into existence--and, moreover, not
only the mechanical, but also the social processes as well. The
products of contemporary technoscience are hybrid compilations of
material goods, human labor, and social relations that often are
oppressive. As such, they cannot be understood if they are conceived
of as mere things, abstracted away from their social contexts. Doing
so interferes with the ability to ask questions about whom
technoscience benefits and whom it exploits or otherwise harms.



Much of Donna Haraway's work stresses the importance of asking these
questions. In *Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature* (1991), Donna Haraway introduces the figure of the cyborg,
an "impure" creature who scrambles orderly divisions
between the natural and artificial/technical, and the human and the
non-human/animal. Continuing her exploration of "ontological
confusing bodies" in
*Modest\_Witness@Second\_Millennium.FemaleMan(c)\_Meets\_

OncoMouseTM: Feminism and
Technoscience* (1997, 186), Haraway speaks as a cyborgian
"modest witness" to contemporary technoscience, at once
both implicated in and suspicious of its processes and products.
Extending her earlier insights into how humans "polish an animal
mirror to look for ourselves" (1991, 22), Haraway criticizes the
way that science takes nature as a static given, congealing and
obscuring social relations such that they can be taken as
decontextualized things-in-themselves. (It should be noted, however,
that other feminists have taken issue with Haraway's characterization
of science. Mary Magada-Ward (2014) in particular has argued from a
pragmatic feminist perspective that Haraway's willingness to criticize
science as one narrative among others is irresponsible, and endangers
the very liberatory projects with which feminists are aligned.) 



For Haraway, Western culture is extremely fetishistic, mistaking
"a fixed thing for the doings of power-differentiated lively
beings" (1997, 135). To analyze the web of economic,
psychological, and philosophical threads that compose this fetishism,
Haraway appeals to the work of Marx, Freud, and Whitehead.
Economically, socio-technological relations often are taken to be
commodities whose value is intrinsic rather than the product of the
labor and practices of organic life. Hand-in-hand with this
politico-economic fetishism goes a psychological denial of this
substitution that makes the "mistake" of taking things for
processes very difficult to recognize. Finally, wound up with these
two strands is the philosophical error that misunderstands concrete,
relational processes as fixed, simple abstractions (1997, 147). All
three threads of this fetishism are bound up in, for example, the
computer chip, which is incredibly valuable and necessary to late
capitalist, technological society. Locating its value in pieces of
metal and plastic and electronic codes, however, we lose sight of the
historical and labor processes that produce and sustain the computer's
existence. A product of World War II, the computer was developed to
help calculate artillery trajectories so that bombs would be more
effective (read: destroy more property and kill more people). Today,
computer chips and mother boards often are produced by Asian women in
the U.S. and various third-world countries, who are seen as especially
appropriate for such jobs because of their "Oriental"
nimble finger work and attentiveness to small details (1991, 154,
177). When we fetishize the chip, we are incapable of seeing this
"final appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of
war" (1991, 154). That is to say, we render ourselves incapable
of understanding how the materials, processes, and concerns of a
highly militarized, technoscientific culture shape the world and our
very selves.



The process philosophy of Whitehead subtly provides crucial support
for Haraway's analysis of fetishism and, indeed, much of her critique
of technoscience. As Haraway explains in a footnote to
*Modest\_Witness* (1997, 297n21), Whitehead has been important
to her work since at least her days as a graduate student, and she
believes that the general thrust of his ideas can be discerned in a
great deal of feminist science studies and philosophy of science. For
Whitehead, everything in the world is a "concrescence of
prehensions," prehensions being the grasping or feeling of one
thing by another in their on-going relations of becoming (1997, 47). A
concrescence of prehensions, then, is a growing together of processes
of becoming that allows some relations to function as a unified,
distinct thing, or "actual entity." What Whitehead calls
the fallacy of misplaced concreteness occurs when abstract logical
constructions--such as the notion of a thing's primary qualities
or of its simple location in space-time--are (mis)taken for the
concreteness of processual, actual entities. The effect of this
mistake, in Haraway's terms, is the fetishization of things. Allying
herself with Whitehead, Haraway emphasizes the prehensional
"reachings into each other in the tissues of the world"
(1997, 147)--for example, genes, computer chips, fetuses,
OncoMouseTM--that are the concrete, actual materials of
Western technoscience.



Although she argues against fetishism, it would be misleading to
conclude that Haraway is thus also arguing "for" the
ontologically messy hybridity that results when one gives fetishism
up. Neither, however, is Haraway "against" hybridity. Both
of these positions are too categorical for the issue at hand. In
Haraway's view, hybridity presents possible dangers and potential
benefits alike and thus must be examined in its various
particularities. Haraway's task, thus, is to pragmatically ask,
"for whom and how [do] these hybrids work?" (1997, 280 n1)
Who benefits, for example, from OncoMouseTM, the mouse with human
genes for developing breast cancer that has been developed and
trademarked by DuPont? This question not only points to the issue of
human beings' taking "noninnocent responsibility" for the
use of non-human animals as research tools (1997, 82). It also points
to questions about environmental toxins, environmental racism, and the
availability and affordability of health care for African American
women in light of their increasing death rates from cancer while those
of white women remain the same (1997, 113). Asking questions such as
these would help enable contemporary technoscience to engage in
practices of "witnessing," that is to "stan[d]
publicly accountable for, and psychically vulnerable to [its]
visions and representations" (1997, 267). For Haraway, such
accountability would open up the possibility that technosciences
"knowledge products" might at the same time be
"freedom projects" as well (1997, 269).


## 4. The Semiotic Construction of Sexual Subjects



In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that "[o]ne is not
born, but rather becomes, a woman" (Beauvoir 1989, 267).
Contemporary pragmatist feminist and continental feminist philosophers
generally agree with this claim, rejecting the notion that the
category of woman (and man) and the conception of femininity (and
masculinity) are simply given in nature. As a result, some have
explored the role of social institutions--such as the media, the
work place, and education--in creating the particular type of
gendered, sexual subject called "woman." Others have
focused on the inner mechanisms of this process, so to speak, asking
how the unconscious desires of women are constituted such that their
psychical lives contribute to their gender and sexuality. These two
approaches need not be seen as antithetical, however. An understanding
of how women are constituted as sexual subjects is perhaps best
achieved by exploring the intersection of the social
"outside" and the psychical "inside" in the
formation of subjectivity.



Teresa De Lauretis's work takes this intersectional approach, allying
feminism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and film criticism to explore the
formation of women's subjectivity and desire in relation to social and
material reality. In *Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics,
Cinema* (1984), de Lauretis develops the concept of experience as
a process by which the subject is semiotically and historically
constructed, arguing that one becomes a woman in and through the
practice of signs in which women live. In *The Practice of Love:
Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire* (1994), she continues her
exploration of these issues by focusing specifically on
"perverse" formations of sexuality, by which she means
forms of sexuality that challenge normative heterosexuality and
especially lesbian sexuality. In each of these books, de Lauretis
draws on the pragmatist semiosis of Peirce to explore the dynamic
juncture between "inner" and "outer" worlds,
private and public fantasies, and individual experience and social
meaning, especially as they construct sexual subjects.



Semiotics is a term created by Peirce to "designate[s] the
process by which a culture produces signs and/or attributes meanings
of signs" (de Lauretis 1984, 167). Semiotics thus is a theory of
how meaning is created through processes of interpretation. These
processes are so important to Peirce that he goes so far as to claim,
"my language is the sum total of myself; for the man [sic] is
the thought" (Peirce 2000a, 67). This is not a reduction of the
human to a narrowly construed language, however. Rather, the claim is
that to understand who or what a person is, one must understand the
processes of interpretation in which she and her various communities
are engaged. This last point helps brings out the particularly
pragmatist aspect of Peirce's semiotics. For Peirce, the semiotic
processes that constitute the individual are always grounded in
community, history, and materiality. To understand the interpretative
constitution of the self, one must understand the various
"external" environments that contribute to it.



According to de Lauretis, an important reason to turn to Peirce is
precisely that his theory returns body and history to the subject of
 semiosis.[3]
 For Peirce, semiosis is an unlimited process, but that does not mean
that it is an infinite regression of signs merely circulating back on
themselves. Rather, as de Lauretis explains, in their address to
someone--and for Peirce, because they are inherently communal,
signs always address someone--signs create other signs that are
the "significate effects" of the first signs. Peirce calls
these sign-effects "interpretants," and the particular
type of interpretant that interests de Lauretis is the one that Peirce
calls "logical" because it takes up or makes sense of the
emotion and energy of the other type of interpretants. The logical
interpretant is a modification of a person's habits,
"habit" used pragmatically by Peirce to mean a tendency or
disposition to a certain manner or style of acting. Thus for Peirce,
although unlimited, semiosis nevertheless always results in the
temporary "resting places" of one's habits of acting and
thinking--"temporary" because a person's modified
habits will contribute to the production of new signs, which will then
feed into the on-going process of meaning-creation that will yet again
modify subjects by producing additional habit changes. Thus on
Peirce's account--and this is of utmost importance to de
Lauretis--signs have their effect in historical, bodily matter
and are not narrowly linguistic.



De Lauretis faults Julia Kristeva for operating with just such a
narrow (mis)understanding of the semiotic subject (1984,
 171).[4]
 Representing one trend of poststructuralist semiotic theory for de
Lauretis, Kristeva's approach is at once valuable because of its
psychoanalytic appreciation of the body and the unconscious, and
problematic because of its narrow understanding of linguistics and
thus its neglect of the social aspects of meaning-creation. The other
trend of postructuralist semiotic theory, represented by Umberto Eco,
appreciates the social side of semiosis but omits exactly what
psychoanalysis includes: the non-conscious elements of human
existence. A similar division, and thus a similar set of problems, can
be found between the work of Freud and Foucault, according to de
Lauretis. In his focus on sexuality, Freud offers a "privatized
view of the internal world of the psyche" while Foucault's
account of sexuality is "eminently social" (1994,
xix-xx). Thus, for de Lauretis, feminists who seek to understand
the semiotic creation of sexual subjects are presented with a
problematic choice built on an exclusive binary: either the sexual
subject is socially constituted but lacks a psychic interior (Eco and
Foucault) or the sexual subject has psychic depth but lacks rich
connections with the world external to it (Kristeva and Freud).



Peirce's advantage is that he attends to both sides of the
internal-external divide, furnishing "the link between semiosis
and reality, between signification and concrete action" (1984,
175). And yet, for de Lauretis, Peirce's work is not sufficient by
itself because it lacks a well-developed notion of the unconscious.
Thus de Lauretis's self-appointed task is to negotiate the problems
and promises of all these approaches by means of a pragmatist
semiotics, creating a "theoretical overlap" (1984, 168)
between Kristeva's internalist and Eco's externalist semiotics, as
well as between Freud's privatized and Foucault's social sexual
subject. Put another way, de Lauretis joins Freud with
Peirce--admittedly "even stranger bedfellows than Marx and
Freud" (1984, 215 n31)--to explore how the semiotic
junction between psychic interior and social exterior produces the
unconscious habits that create sexual subjects.



In some of her most recent work (2000), de Lauretis makes clear that
although semiosis is ongoing and although the habits it produces are
always open to future changes, habit-change is not necessarily or
always for the better nor can it easily (if at all) be controlled. In
dialogue with Vincent Colapietro (2000) on how to understand Peirce's
logical interpretant, de Lauretis argues that it is very difficult, if
not impossible, to deliberately direct the significate effects of
semiosis. In her view here--which appears to diverge somewhat
from her earlier emphasis on Foucault's concepts of self-analysis and
self-exercise as Peircean "'deliberately formed,
self-analyzing habit[s]'" (Peirce quoted in de Lauretis
1994, 312)--the juncture of psyche and social that takes root in
unconscious habits is not amenable to conscious efforts to transform
it. Rather than being deliberate and reflective, changes to habit tend
to be random (at least from the point of rational consciousness) and
are relentlessly subject to all sorts of deformations, compulsions,
and other neurotic symptoms (2000, 172-73). The semiotic
construction of sexual subjects thus can be seen as perverse not only
in that it can defy heterosexual conventions but also in that it
resists the efforts of self-knowledge and self-directed
transformation.


## 5. The Reality of Racial Identities



Like gender and sexuality, race is a social-material category that is
not simply given in nature. Scholars continue to debate precisely when
modern notions of race were created, but since at least the late
eighteenth century, general patterns of white privilege and supremacy
and the domination of non-white people have existed. Given the
oppressive origins of the concept of race and of whiteness in
particular, it might seem that racial identity should be eliminated in
the name of eliminating racism. And given that no definitive
biological or genetic basis for dividing the human population into
discreet racial groups exists, it might seem easy to eliminate racial
identity since it is not real in the ways that it popularly is thought
to be. But racial identities have a lived reality to them that is not
dependent on scientific categorizations. Their lived reality not only
makes it difficult to eliminate racial identities; it also makes it
problematic to unequivocally call for their abolition since their
elimination could mean the loss of an important source of meaning in
one's life.



Linda Martin Alcoff warns feminists and others of this
potential loss, arguing that the reasons for eliminating class and
status differences do not necessarily apply to racial and other social
identities. In *Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self*
(2006), she examines race and gender as historical-material formations
that are fundamental, rather than peripheral to the self. Analyzing
philosophical and political critiques of identity politics, Alcoff
explains how identity claims have become suspect because they are seen
as necessarily divisive, exclusionary, and alienating. Appeals to
racial and/or gender identities by Latinas, for example, allegedly are
politically problematic because they intensify conflict between groups
and thus are destructive to larger communities or nations (2006, 36).
And they allegedly are philosophically problematic because they
alienate a person from herself by means of an oppressive and
artificially imposed category or set of categories (2006, 80). Genuine
freedom and authenticity thus would seem to require the abandonment of
social identities.



According to Alcoff, however, hidden behind these attacks on identity
is a closet individualism that mistrusts any form of sociality or
community and fears any influence of the Other on the self. "Why
assume that if I am culturally, ethnically, sexually identifiable that
this is a process akin to Kafka's nightmarish torture machines in the
penal colony?" asks Alcoff (2006, 81). The answer is that
"identity in any form [is seen by its critics as] foisted on the
self from the outside by the Other" (2006, 81). For the
individual who insists on his or her absolute independence, social
identities represent a loss of control and power through ontological
dependency upon someone other than oneself. This loss of power is to
be feared, and so too then are racial and other social identities to
be resisted.



Alcoff's responds to this fear by situating it as a very particular,
rather than universal need to deflect the Other, one felt by
colonizers and other dominant groups who do not want to see themselves
reflected in their victims' eyes (2006, 81). Antagonism and resistance
are not the only forms that relationships between self and other can
take. The interdependency of self and other can be recognized in such
a way that "the Other's view of me--that is, my identity in
the Other's presence--is internalized and thus is constitutive of
my self" (2006, 82). Drawing on the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg
Gadamer and the pragmatism of George Herbert Mead, Alcoff develops a
concept of social identity that constitutively situates the individual
in a communal world. Social identities are not forced onto atomistic
individuals who then necessarily become alien to themselves. Racial
and other identities are, borrowing from Gadamer, "hermeneutic
horizons comprised of experiences, basic beliefs, and communal values,
all of which influence our orientation toward and responses to future
experiences" (2006, 287). Or in Mead's terms, the self is formed
in and through the context of the "generalized other,"
which is a communal perspective by and through which an individual
develops self-consciousness and thereby learns to perceive both
herself and others (2006, 117). The hermeneutic notion of horizon
allows feminists and others to appreciate how race and gender are real
in that they are lived positions in which individual meaning is
created in relationship to history and experience. An individual
always operates within specific horizons, but because horizons open
out to indeterminacy, a range of interpretative meaning is available
from within those horizons (2006, 43). And Mead's account of the
social self enhances the notion of horizon by emphasizing its social
dimensions (2006, 121). The horizon in and through which individual
meaning is created is always a world of shared meaning that helps
constitute an individual's self-consciousness and experience.



For Alcoff, raced, gendered, and other social identities can be
oppressive, but they are not inherently or necessarily so. The
ultimate question, in her view, "is not how to overcome
identity, but how to transform our current interpretations and
understandings of [it]" (Alcoff 2006, 287). Shannon Sullivan
asks a similar question about whiteness in *Revealing Whiteness:
The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege* (2006). According to
Sullivan, white privilege increasingly operates in the form of
unconscious habit, able to thrive in a world that generally frowns on
overt racism because that racism seems non-existent. With pragmatists
W.E.B. Du Bois and John Dewey, Sullivan develops an account of
whiteness as a raced and racist habit that is constitutive of the self
and formed through transaction with a raced and racist world. Habit as
such is not a problem to be solved although some habits, such as white
privilege and domination, can be very harmful. For Sullivan, as a
style or predisposition for engaging with/in the world, habit is
simultaneously malleable and durable, which means that habits can be
transformed but that such transformation tends to take a long
time.



This especially true in the case of habits of white privilege, given
their increasingly unconscious operations. Developing a pragmatized
notion of the unconscious--one that is sympathetic to de
Lauretis's work on Peirce and Freud--Sullivan explains the
unconscious as formed through transaction with its various social,
political, material and other environments (2006, 47). Drawing on the
psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche, Sullivan also modifies the
pragmatist concept of habit to account for the ways that habits of
whiteness "often are deviously obstructionist, actively blocking
the self's attempts to transform itself for the better" (2006,
44). Racist habits of whiteness can be changed, but only indirectly,
through changes to the environments that help constitute those habits.
As Sullivan (2006, 10) argues, "relocating out of geographical,
literary, political, and other environments that encourage the white
solipsism of living as if only white people existed or mattered can be
a powerful way of disrupting and transforming unconscious habits of
white privilege." And yet even here a word of warning is in
order, according to Sullivan. Habits of white privilege can and often
continue to operate in the midst of the best intentions to undermine
them through control of one's environments. Since habits of white
privilege tend to be characterized by "ontological
expansiveness," in which white people treat all spaces as
rightfully inhabited by them, attempts to master one's environment in
the name of anti-racist struggle simultaneously can be a reinforcement
of that privilege (2006, 144). Sullivan thus cautions that although
struggles to eliminate white privilege must continue, habits of racial
privilege will not quickly or easily be eliminated.


## 6. Recent Scholarship and Future Directions



Compared to continental feminism, pragmatist feminism is a small
 field.[5]
 It is growing, however, and as it does so, the chances that more work
on the intersections of feminism, pragmatism, and continental
philosophy will be produced also increase. To date, one common thread
that loosely unites feminist cross-fertilizations of continental and
pragmatist philosophy is its criticism of oppositional, exclusionary
binaries; another is a commitment to philosophical work that engages
with lived experience and everyday life. In this closing section, we
outline possible avenues for future work in pragmatist and continental
feminism, and highlight recent developments in the field.


### 6.1 Bodies and Embodiment



For over two decades, understanding the relationship between
embodiment and gender, race, and sexuality has been an important topic
for continental feminists, especially Susan Bordo (1993), Judith
Butler (1990 and 1994), Elizabeth Grosz (1994), and Gail Weiss (1999).
In *Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies,
Pragmatism and Feminism* (2001), Shannon Sullivan engages Butler's
and (to a lesser degree) Bordo's work, along with that of
Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, and Dewey, to argue for a feminist
conception of bodily life as transactional. Sullivan presents bodies
as dynamically constituted in and through relationships with their
political, social, material, and other environments, and she does so
for the purpose of exploring which bodies transactional processes
benefit and harm and thus whether those processes should be embraced
or transformed by feminists and others.



Ladelle McWhorter's *Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the
Politics of Sexual Normalization* (1999) does not explicitly
appeal to pragmatist philosophy, but its affinities with pragmatist
methods and concerns can be drawn out. McWhorter argues that the value
of Foucault's philosophy should not be judged by the truth (or
falsity) of what it says, a method of evaluation that relies upon what
Rorty (1979) calls "the mirror of nature." In its place,
McWhorter asks feminist and other readers of Foucault to pragmatically
judge his work on what it does, that is, on the transformative impact
that it has on their lives. Using her own life as a text, McWhorter
"takes an experience of reading Foucault's works as [her] point
of analysis" (1999, xix) and demonstrates the feminist-friendly
effects of Foucault's particular account of bodies, pleasures, and the
formation of sexual subjects.



Foucault also is the focal point of Cressida J. Heyes's
*Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies*(2007). As Heyes asks with Foucault how growth in a
person's capacities can be separated from increased docility
within power relations, she draws on Richard Shusterman's
pragmatist somaesthetics. A bodily discipline that both critically
studies and uses sensory-aesthetic appreciation to improve lived
experience, somaesthetics can be a point of
"counterattack" (2007, 123) that helps a person care for
her embodied self in ways that increase her freedom. It does this by
teaching non-normative ways of experiencing and evaluating one's
bodily experiences, increasing the capacity of what one can think and
do. Through her concrete examples of yoga and other bodily practices,
Heyes draws on continental and pragmatist philosophy to take "a
first step toward creating grander feminist projects from existing
somaesthetic practices" (2007, 136).



Marjorie Jolles, in contrast, doubts that Shusterman's
pragmatism can provide the critical counterpoint to bodily
normalization that both Foucault and feminist philosophy need. This is
because bodily experience is shaped by the very normalizing forces
that it is supposed to challenge. Responding to Heyes in "Between
Embodied Subjects and Objects: Narrative Somaesthetics" (2012), Jolles
argues that "Shusterman does not go far enough in establishing
somaesthetics' suitability of Foucauldian feminist efforts to
shape one's life" in anti- and non-normative ways (2012,
307). Proposing an alternative to Shusterman's somaesthetics,
Jolles develops what she calls narrative somaesthetics. Modeled on
feminist consciousness-raising, narrative somaesthetics incorporates
into somatic practices narrative work that helps disrupt
normalization. On Jolles's view, by combining discursive and bodily
practices, feminist philosophy will have a better shot at countering
the harmful somatic effects of sexist oppression.



Pragmatist resources for thinking about embodiment also is the subject
of Maurice Hamington's (2004) *Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, and Feminist Ethics.* In that book, Hamington
argues that human bodies are built for care and that care can only be
understood properly in conjunction with its embodied dimensions.
Distinguishing care--a contextual, corporeal, interdependent way
of being in the world--from the theory of care ethics, Hamington
intersects Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of bodily habits with
American pragmatist Jane Addams' embodied practices of democracy and
citizenship to demonstrate the body's centrality to feminist ethics.
Developing the concepts of caring habits, caring knowledge, and caring
imagination, Hamington affirms Jane Addams' "simple yet powerful
mandate that we boldly experience one another" through our
embodied practices of care (2004, 145).



Finally, some feminists emphasize the practical value of
phenomenological and pragmatic accounts of embodiment and the self for
solving specific problems in the real world. Jennifer Hansen, for
example, in her contributions to the philosophy of psychiatry, has
emphasized the therapeutic value of a conception of the habitual body
and the narrative self for the treatment of individuals with bipolar
disorder. Though such individuals may experience self-distrust as a
result of difficulty with seeing themselves "as *consistent*
agents" (2013, 69) brought on by challenges with identifying with
their past actions in either manic or depressive states, Hansen argues
that clinicians can assist patients build a coherent sense of self by
incorporating insights about habitual embodiment. Drawing on Grosz and
Iris M. Young's (2005) feminist phenomenology, as well as James's
account of habit as central to embodied selfhood, Hansen suggests that
the habitual body's capacity to engage with the world in consistent,
goal-directed ways, despite doing so unconsciously, provides an
inroad to a self-concept that is coherent. Although such habitual
moments (of, for example, opening familiar doors or performing special
learned skills like CPR) are often performed unconsciously, we can
begin to notice and appreciate them "if others, such as a clinician,
points them out to us" (2013, 72.) Although such recognition may seem
a small step, they could be useful as patients begin to cultivate
self-trust. Clinicians, moreover, may assist patients in recognizing
that even seemingly rudimentary habits have significance in creating a
sense of self: "Although the habitual body of a bipolar patient *may
not* have a habitual moral character, she may, for example, have a
habit of recycling" (72). The recognition of such habits could be
beneficial in beginning to build self-trust. Traditional views of
psychiatry may view individuals with bipolar disorder as incapable of
"coherent" selfhood in the ordinary sense of the word, but Hansen
shows that feminist phenomenological and pragmatic "accounts of
embodiment show another way in which bipolar selves can be coherent:
they cohere in habitual bodies" (73).


###  6.2 The Concept of the Other



The concept of the Other offers a potential site for productive
discussion and disagreement between feminist, pragmatist, and
continental philosophers. As Charlene Haddock Seigfried notes,
"[p]ragmatists tend to celebrate otherness by seeking out and
welcoming difference as an expression of creative subjectivity"
(1996, 267). The optimistic tone that pragmatism often takes toward
alterity is markedly different from that of Julia Kristeva's claim
that one is always other to oneself: "Foreigner: a choked up
rage deep down in my throat. By recognizing him within ourselves, we
are spared detesting him in himself" (1991, 1). Contemporary
pragmatist feminists have tended to be more skeptical than most
canonical pragmatists of the category of the Other because they
recognize it as a means of domination. Yet, influenced by pragmatism,
those feminists tend not to construe the Other in as alienating and
foreboding way as Kristeva does. Pragmatist and continental philosophy
thus presents feminists with a variety of resources for thinking
through the benefits and dangers of different conceptions of the
Other, including the role of the Other in the constitution of both
self and community.



Cynthia Gayman (2011) and Erin C. Tarver (2013), for example, have
argued that women's constitution as subjects in a social milieu of
oppressive gender relations ironically opens the possibility for
change and subversion. Tarver's argument proceeds by bringing a
Deweyan account of habit to bear on Judith Butler's theory of gender
as performative, whereas Gayman puts Dewey in dialog with Foucault.
Specifically, Gayman combines a Foucaultian account of the gendered
subject with a Deweyan insistence that critical investigation happens
"by recognition of a problem, which in turn provokes the kind of
reflexive activity leading to recognition that what is, does not have
to be" (2011, 67). Because the individual is constituted through her
interactions and transactions with others in the world, the
recognition of problems necessarily occurs through everyday
experiences and interactions. It is not that others are themselves
problems; rather, the encounters in our world that cause us to stumble
provoke us to ask questions about how to proceed. They, as Gayman puts
it following Foucault and Colin Koopman (2011), provoke a
"problematization" (67). Thus, for Gayman, although patterns of gender
subordination that women encounter as they become subjects in and
through interaction with others in the social world must be resisted,
"to be resisted they must be seen, that is, recognized in the first
place, which means they must be  *experienced* , as well as *problematized*" (75). Encounter with the other, which happens
necessarily through experience, is therefore necessary for the
development of feminist consciousness. 


###  6.3 Refiguring the Future: The Unconscious Imaginary



In psychoanalytic terms, the imaginary is the collection of (largely)
unconscious fantasies and images that shapes both individual subjects
and their worlds. In different ways, the work of both Donna Haraway
and Luce Irigaray seeks to reveal the male privilege and domination
contained within the current imaginary so that a space for a different
sort of imaginary might be opened for the future. Although Irigaray is
the better known for it, both she and Haraway appropriate the image of
the speculum in this process, appealing to the gynecological mirror as
an "instrument for rendering a part accessible to
observation" (Haraway 1997, 197) and revealing how the feminine
instrument is not itself reflected in its work of mirroring others
(Irigaray 1985). While Haraway "excavate[s] something like a
technoscientific unconscious" (1997, 151), Irigaray investigates
the psychoanalytic "science that still cannot make up its
mind" about "woman, science's unknown" (1985, 15,
13). Their work thus offers interesting resources for uncovering a
patriarchal culture's blind spots and transforming its unconscious
imaginary, as well as raises important questions about the role that
science can or should play in feminist theorizing of the
 future.[6]



Noelle McAfee also draws on psychoanalytic theory to analyze the
unconscious operations of democratic societies. In *Democracy and
the Political Unconscious* (2008), McAfee blends poststructural
psychoanalysis, feminist philosophy, and semiotics with Deweyan,
Rawlsian, and Habermasian democratic theories. The result is a
sophisticated argument that when some members of a society are denied
the ability to participate in the public sphere, that society will
tend to develop a political unconscious. As McAfee explains, the
political unconscious is not a thing or a place, but rather "an
*effect* of processes: failures to sublimate well, desires
unarticulated, voices kept silent, repressions reenacted without
acknowledgement of their origins" (2008, 12). Understanding with Dewey that the public is called into
being by particular problems and that it can have difficulty finding
itself when those problems are immense, McAfee develops democratic
strategies for public processes of mourning so that age-old traumas of
repression and exclusion no longer are compulsively repeated.


###  6.4 The Epistemology of Resistance



Like McAfee, Jose Medina draws on several thinkers in both the
continental and pragmatist traditions to argue for a feminist response
to oppressive socio-political conditions. Unlike McAfee, however,
Medina conceives the project of resistance to oppression as
fundamentally epistemological in nature. The reason for this is that,
as he argues in *The Epistemology of Resistance* (2013), while
democratic practice requires collective engagement, "in contexts of
sexual and racial oppression there are cognitive-affective deficits
that amount to specific forms of epistemic insensitivity: the
inability to listen to and learn from others, the inability to call
into question one's perspective and to process epistemic friction
exerted from significantly different perspectives" (2013, 17-18). Such
deficits undermine the possibility of genuine democratic engagement
and prevent the privileged in particular of recognizing the
socio-political injustices in which they are complicit. However,
Medina's epistemological project is both critical and constructive.
Drawing especially on the work of Foucault and James, he articulates a
vision of the epistemological practices we must take up in order to
resist oppression, for "*epistemic and sociopolitical melioration
go hand in hand*" (301). 



Medina argues that knowers have a "shared responsibility with respect
to epistemic justice for the correction of blind spots and social
insensitivities associated with racism and (hetero)sexism" (2013, 25),
suggesting that those subjects whose privilege prevents them from
developing knowledge of or sensitivity to experiences beyond their own
have an obligation to unsettle their epistemic ease by seeking out
"epistemic friction" and "cultivat[ing] a resistant imagination" (26) that
would sensitize them to the experiences of marginalized and
stigmatized subjects. The prescription that Medina offers for
accomplishing such cultivation, which he terms "guerilla pluralism"
(284), is inspired by a combination of insights from Foucault and
James. Both Foucault and James conceive truth and knowledge as plural
and as the product of particular interests and purposes. One of the
key ways in which they differ, however, is in the implications of this
view of knowledge that they emphasize: whereas James offers a
"melioristic pluralism," in which epistemic contestations and
negotiations are directed toward improving the objectivity of the
different standpoints available, toward correcting their biases and
mistakes, and toward "maintain[ing] their truth alive" (283),
Foucault's genealogical approach offers a less rosy view of the
possibilities of epistemic melioration, and aims less at learning than
unlearning received ways of viewing the world. Foucault, then, would
have us "resurrect counter-memories, not just for the sake of joint
cooperation, but for the sake of reactivating struggles and energizing
forms of resistance" (284). Drawing from Foucault the importance of
specific mechanisms to break down settled regimes of power/knowledge
and from James the imperative to find a way to move forward in
improving the social conditions in which we live, Medina advocates the
formation of a resistant social imagination through genealogical
investigations: "genealogical investigations constitute critical
interventions in the social imagination that can help us make our
sense of a shared past more pluralistic and open to diversity" (292).
This is not to say, however, that the end point of such investigations
will be the total overcoming of oppression or even of culpable shared
ignorance. Rather, in a pragmatic vein, Medina emphasizes a
fallibilist approach to investigation that remains open to correction
and critique through "*radical solidarity*: the cultivation of an
ever-expanding accountability and responsiveness to indefinitely many
others, which is required by a resistant epistemic agency" (302). Such
fallibilism, unlike radical relativism in which "any way of framing
and interpreting is as good as any other," is committed to producing a
resistant imagination characterized by its exertion of "beneficial
epistemic friction" (303) that is aimed at continual self-correction
and resistance to oppression and the ignorance that necessarily
accompanies it.



Celia T. Bardwell-Jones (2018) makes use of Medina's epistemology of
resistance to theorize the conflict between hospital administrators
and Native Hawaiian mothers in policies regarding the treatment of the
placenta after hospital births in Hawai'i. Before 2006, as
Bardwell-Jones explains, hospitals regarded the placenta as hazardous
human waste, which needed to be disposed of as a threat to public
health. This put hospital policy in direct conflict with Native
Hawaiian practice, which required burying the placenta in a ceremony
after birth, as a means of affirming the connection of the infant with
the environment and community from which they came. Because of the
lasting legacy of colonialism in Hawai'i, this conflict was
unhelpfully framed as a conflict between "modern" and
"traditional" views of health (which, as Bardwell points
out, ignores the fact that many Native Hawaiian mothers do in fact
value modern hospitals and choose to give birth in them). The dominant
biomedical view that barred taking home the placenta, moreover, relied
"on an assumption of epistemological superiority"
(106). Following Medina, Bardwell-Jones argues that this biomedical
approach's privileged position left it epistemically insensitive to
Native Hawaiian knowledges about the moral value of a sense of place
and community. To overcome such insensitivities, she suggests,
hospital administrators should do as Medina says and aim to cultivate
epistemic friction--or, as she puts its, "perplexity"
(107)--by seeking out genuine engagement with differentially
situated others. Doing so is useful not only for the purpose of
adequately serving the community in which the hospital is located, but
also for beginning to recognize when existing health care policy is in
fact "informed by a state of moral panic" (110) that can
surround public health discussions, but of which the medical
establishment may very well be unaware.


### 6.5 Expanding the Canon



The expansion of the canon of "classical" American
philosophy to include more than white men opens up new possibilities
for feminist intersections of continental and pragmatist philosophy.
Cynthia Willett's *The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial
Hubris* (2001) is a good example of one such possibility. In this
book, Willett critically intersects G.W.F. Hegel and Luce Irigaray
(among others) with the "visionary pragmatism" (2001, 175)
of African-American thinkers such as Toni Morrison and Patricia Hill
Collins to present an account of freedom based in social bonds.
Rejecting modernity's and psychoanalysis's account of separation as
crucial to the formation of subjectivity, Willet draws on accounts of
slavery to show how the destruction of erotic connections through the
violence of separation results in social death. With this account,
Willett suggests how an expanded understanding of American pragmatism
that includes black women can combine with continental philosophy to
produce a feminist and anti-racist liberatory theory that appreciates
the constitutive role that desire plays in social relationships. In
recent years, additionally, Collins (2012; 2019) herself has written
on the value of an explicit dialogue between intersectionality theory
founded by women of color and classical pragmatist conceptions of
community, writing that "each discourse speaks to gaps in the other"
(2012, 444). Collins specifically argues that pragmatism offers
intersectionality a means of forming a robust conceptualization of the
relation between individuals and broader social structures, as well as
a potential site of political action, whereas intersectionality offers
pragmatists a framework for conceptualizing actually existing power
relations, an explicit analytic of which pragmatism has historically
lacked. The insights that emerge from this dialogue are of crucial
significance to the anti-oppressive project: "to grow,
intersectionality must become an intellectual leader. It is compelled
to build something anew, drawing from knowledge projects such as Black
feminist thought and American pragmatism without defining itself in
opposition to them...commit[ting] to an open-ended process of creative
social action, incorporating the ideas and actions of these and other
knowledge projects into its own praxis" (2019, 188). 



Willett continues to intersect continental, pragmatist, and feminist
work in *Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on
Democracy and Freedom* (2008). Willett's ongoing interest in
questions of freedom lead her to examine how it can be supported and
encouraged by comedy, including social ridicule, satire, and
carnivalesque laughter. As Willett ranges widely from philosophy to
film and television to political tragedies, she draws on the
tragicomic philosophy of Cornel West to develop an "augmented
pragmatism, inflected fully by the comic spirit," in order to
"provid[e] the philosophical basis for reconceptualizing
freedom" (2008, 16). Willett also puts Jean-Paul Sartre and
Henri Bergson in conversation with Ralph Ellison and filmmaker Spike
Lee to explore how satire can help nurture an emancipatory political
ethics. The result is a feminist-infused account of democracy and
freedom that appreciates the politically transformative possibilities
of comedy.



In "How is This Paper Philosophy?" Kristie Dotson (2012) takes this
expansion further. Dotson considers professional philosophy and its
persistent failure to recruit women of color and other "diverse
practitioners" (5), arguing that this failure is symptomatic of a
"*culture of justification*" (6) in the discipline, which
emphasizes legitimation and presumes the norms of that legitimation
are univocal amongst all subjects. Dotson considers the testimony of
black feminists and phenomenologists, including Donna-Dale Marcano
(2010) and Gayle Salamon (2009) to highlight the feelings of
"incongruence" (Dotson 2012, 13) that many diverse practitioners
experience when confronted with these supposedly univocal norms, which
often conflict with their lived experiences. In response, Dotson
argues for the cultivation of "a culture of praxis," in the discipline
of philosophy, in which we value investigation of "issues and
circumstances pertinent to our living," recognizing that this will
vary considerably depending on populations, as well as "recognition
and encouragement of multiple canons and multiple ways of
understanding disciplinary validation" (17). In so doing, Dotson
argues, philosophy would thereby admit a diversity of concerns,
methods, and canons, not for the sake of rendering all contributions
equal, but for the sake of investigating which contributions might be
"useful for some projects and irrelevant for others." The upshot of
such a cultivation would not only be to allow philosophy as a
discipline to benefit from the ideas of diverse practitioners, but to
make philosophy itself better able to present "livable options" (26)
to those practitioners, and to black women in particular. 


###  6.6 The Limits of Feminist Intersections of Pragmatist and Continental Philosophy



One of the effects of Nancy Fraser's work in social and political
philosophy and critical theory has been to raise questions about the
benefit to feminists of drawing upon certain strands of continental
philosophy. For example, Fraser finds value in the theories of
thinkers such as Foucault, Bourdieu, and Habermas (among others)
because their notions of discourse include a rich array of
historically embedded social practices (1997, 151-152). By
contrast, Fraser claims that "feminists should have no truck
with the versions of discourse theory that they attribute to [Jacques]
Lacan [and] only the most minimal truck with related theories
attributed to Julia Kristeva" (1997, 151). This is because
Fraser views Lacan and Kristeva as reducing the variety of forms of
human communication to language narrowly understood as a symbolic
system. Given the variety of continental theories that feminists might
engage, Fraser argues that what is needed is a "pragmatics
model" (1997, 155). Also called "neo-pragmatism" by
Fraser (in Benhabib, et al. 1995, 167), such a model would allow
feminists to separate the wheat from the chaff in continental
philosophy and incorporate the best it has to offer into feminist
theory (1997, 208). Fraser thus uses pragmatism as a method by which
to discriminate between different continental theories, and in so
doing, raises the broader question of the relative advantages and
disadvantages for feminism of intersecting pragmatist and continental
philosophy.



Similarly, Erin C. Tarver has argued that pragmatists should be wary
of importing James's views wholesale, and on the contrary, that
elements of James's philosophy that presuppose a masculine subject or
a too-robust vision of individual autonomy must be "recognized and
rejected" (2015, 99). The reason for this is that such presuppositions
are often not merely sexist, but have profound ontological and ethical
implications that would further entrench anti-feminist social
hierarchies. Yet, Tarver frames this willingness to revise or
selectively draw from certain elements of James's thought as
consistent with pragmatic fallibilism. She writes, "We must be willing
to take James's fallibilism and deference to new evidence seriously
enough to apply it to his own works" (100) rather than dismissing
masculine language and assumptions as regrettable instances of sexism
that can be overlooked as the product of another time. Thus, according
to Tarver, feminist philosophical engagement with pragmatism must be
willing to critique and reject, even when engaging with thinkers whose
ideas can be useful for feminist aims. 



This list of possible topics in the area of feminist intersections of
pragmatist and continental philosophy certainly is not comprehensive,
nor are the possibilities contained within it fully fleshed out. That
work awaits others interested in this new field. The forms that it
will take remain to be seen and are eagerly awaited.