## 1. Defining Women



For feminists, the question of who or what women are has never been
easily answered and the situation has only become more complicated
over time. Both analytic and Continental traditions find a clear
articulation of the problem in Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 book,
*The Second Sex* where she famously claims that "One is
not born, but rather becomes a woman" (1953, 281). Elizabeth
Spelman's consideration of this claim (1988) can serve as a
starting basis for the analytic tradition's reflections on the
question of who or what women are meant to be while Judith
Butler's analysis (1990) can do the same for the Continental
tradition.


### 1.1 The Analytic Tradition



The claim that "One is not born, but rather becomes a
woman" signals a distinction between sex, comprising physical
and biological aspects of bodies, and gender, comprising learned
behaviors, attitudes and aspirations. While this distinction is
complex and controversial enough (see the entry on
 feminist perspectives on sex and gender)
 Beauvoir's claim also raises what are now termed intersectional
issues. Spelman notes that in parts of *The Second Sex*
Beauvoir recognizes that if one is not born but rather becomes a
woman, it is not the same to become a white woman as it is to become a
Black one and not the same to become a bourgeois woman as it is to
become a proletarian one. Indeed, Beauvoir bemoans the effect this
difference has for women's struggles for freedom and equality.
Women "live dispersed among the males," she writes,
"attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and
social standing to certain men - fathers or husbands -
more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the
bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with
proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white
men, not to Negro women" (1953, xix). Not only are women's
allegiances bound to class and race but their classes and races can
lead to tensions and conflicts with other women. Among other
observations Beauvoir makes, Spelman notes, are that bourgeois women
can be hostile to their working class male and female servants; that
upper-class girls are brought up to believe in their superiority to
working class men and that during the American Civil War some white
Southern women defended slavery even more fiercely than their male
counterparts.



In other parts of *The Second Sex*, however, Beauvoir ignores
the consequences of intersections of gender with class and race, and
talks about women in general. Spelman points to her contrast between
women, on the one hand, and proletarians, aborigines, Blacks and Jews,
on the other, as well as to her ascription of women's failure
historically to reject their subordinate social position to the
advantages they gain from their alliance with "a superior
caste." Here Beauvoir seems to forget that many women are
proletarians, aborigines, Blacks and Jews and she writes as if all
women shared the same relation to the white bourgeois men she calls
the "superior caste"(1953, xxi). Spelman also notes the
contrast Beauvoir sets up between men defined as citizens and women
depicted as wives "shut up in the home;" the way she
refers appreciatively to August Bebel's comparison of women and
the proletariat in his *Women under Socialism*; the use she
makes of Hegel's discussion of the relationship between master
and slave to describe the relationship between men and women; and her
comparison of "Negro slavery" with female slavery (Spelman
1988, 64-5).



Beauvoir's work thus contains a contradiction in its thinking
about women: Sometimes it conceives of women as a homogenous group,
uniformly subordinate to men, and sometimes it conceives of women as
"dispersed," with different relations of solidarity with,
and subordination to, different groups of men. Both conceptions have
problems. In conceiving of women as dispersed according to race and
class Beauvoir's work raises the question of what similarities
in experience, interest or concern might underwrite feminist
struggles. Sally Haslanger calls this the commonality problem (2000,
37). What experiences does a black Sudanese Muslim woman displaced by
ethnic cleansing in Dafur share with the late Queen of England
(Mikkola 2007, 363)? What connects white middle-class women pursuing
professional careers with, say, poorer women or women of color who may
take over their domestic chores (Ehrenreich 2002)? Might interests in
a living wage by female childcare workers not oppose interests of more
privileged women in affordable day care (Collins 1998, 223)? Moreover,
in conceiving of women as a homogeneous group and contrasting them to
proletarians, aborigines, Blacks and Jews Beauvoir betrays her
identification of women in general with a certain group of women,
namely those that are not proletarian, aboriginal, Black or Jewish.
Haslanger calls this the normativity problem (2000, 37). Talk of women
as a single group falsely generalizes the interests, characteristics
and concerns of specific women - mainly those that are
middle-class, European, white and heterosexual - and makes them
the norm for all.



Kimberle Crenshaw draws the consequences of this false
generalization for anti-discrimination law (1989), which has the
resources to deal with discrimination against Blacks or women but not
discrimination against Black women, and for the issue of violence
against Black women (1991). Civil rights groups often downplay
statistics about domestic violence in Black neighborhoods because they
do not want to feed stereotypes about the violence of Black men.
Feminists often downplay the same statistics because they do not want
domestic violence to appear to be simply a crime against women of
color. Black men thus serve as the norm for civil rights advocates and
white women as the norm for women's rights advocates. The
peculiar vulnerability of women of color at the intersection of racism
and sexism disappears from view.



Crenshaw's work on intersectionality underscores concerns about
exclusion already voiced by the Combahee River Collective, founded in
1974, as well as by writers such as bell hooks (1981, 7), Aida
Hurtado (1989, 849-50) and the contributors to such influential
anthologies as *This Bridge Called My Back* (Moraga and
Anzaldua 1981) and *All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are
Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies* (Hull,
Scott and Smith 1982). Recognition of the myriad intersections that
complicate the identity of women also continues to develop,
encompassing intersections with not only class, race, sexuality and
nationality but disability, cisgender and so on. (See Bettcher and
Garry 2009; Hall 2015, Bettcher 2021 and *Hypatia's*
special issue on decolonial feminism. 2020). Indeed, some scholars
worry that putative intersectional analyses have wandered too far from
their roots in Black feminist theory. (See Nash 2018).



Those analytic feminists interested in preserving some notion of women
as a common identity pursue various strategies. Ann Garry (2011) looks
to a Wittgensteinian family resemblance analysis. We can give up on
the existence of some property, experience, or interest that all women
share without giving up on overlapping and crisscrossing
characteristics that become clear within specific social contexts. For
her part, Haslanger proposes an "ameliorative" concept of
women, one that can help with attempts to end sexist oppression. If
gender cannot be defined in terms of characteristics or concerns
common to members of a particular gender, she thinks it can
nonetheless be defined "in terms of how one is socially
positioned, where this is a function of, e.g., how one is viewed, how
one is treated, and how one's life is structured socially,
legally, and economically." On this account, gender categories
represent hierarchical relations in which one group maintains a
subordinate relation to another and the difference between the two
groups is marked by "sexual difference" (2000, 38).
Thus:



> 
> *S* is a woman iff*df* *S* is
> systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, legal,
> political, social, etc.) and *S* is "marked" as a
> target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features
> presumed to be evidence of a female's biological role in
> reproduction (2000, 39).
> 



Haslanger acknowledges that this definition excludes some we might
intuitively think of as women such as women of inordinate privilege
whose observed or imagined bodily features do not mark them for
subordination. Nevertheless, she thinks that if we tailor our
definition to the feminist purposes of overcoming subordination these
"women" are not the ones who matter (2000, 46).



Yet Mari Mikkola claims that the confusion Haslanger's terms
would create by excluding many commonly defined as women "is
unlikely to help in the task of challenging existing social
conditions" (2009, 84). Worse, Katharine Jenkins (2016) thinks
the definition excludes some trans women and probably includes only
those trans women whose gender presentation is respected because they
are perceived as possessing bodily features associated with a
female's role in reproduction; consequently they are perceived
as either cisgender or as having undergone medical interventions that
have altered some of their bodily features so that they now are
understood as the same sort of features cis women possess (400).
Jenkins thinks Haslanger's ameliorative project can be rescued
by considering gender not only in terms of class, as Haslanger does in
talking about gender, but also in terms of identity, as Haslanger does
in talking about race, where racial identities involve navigating the
norms associated with them. Hence, both class as a woman and
possession of a female gender identity need to be the focus of an
ameliorative inquiry. (415-6).



In a later article (which refers to Judith Butler and Monique Wittig
and thus indicates the artificial character of any strict separation
of analytic and Continental schools in feminist philosophy), Haslanger
concedes Jenkins' point. Although she reiterates that her
concern in her earlier essay was social function: "a theoretical
analysis of the social factors that produced...gendered
identities" (2020, 235) she now claims that her earlier account
of gender did not offer an adequate replacement for identity.


### 1.2 The Continental Tradition



Continental feminists are often as concerned as Haslanger is with
commonality and normativity problems. Debra Bergoffen takes up
Beauvoir's comparison of women and Black people in "Of
Women and Slaves" (2017) while Chandra Mohanty criticizes the
"add and stir" approach (2003, 518), which tries to
counter the exclusion of many women but still takes the experiences of
white European heterosexual women as the base while mixing in the
experiences of others, say, Indonesian Nike workers, as if they were
mere seasoning. Nor can the concerns be accommodated by taking
Indonesian Nike workers as normative for non-Western women any more
than the concerns of mid-twentieth century Parisian women can be taken
as normative for Western ones (2003, 34). Indeed, as Catherine Homan
writes, "Pursuing inclusion through the attempt to 'add
women' or add people of color or any other traditionally
marginalized identity 'and stir' is bound to fail because
it does not question the norms of the tradition in the first
place" (2022).



In her 1990 and now-classic book, *Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity*, Judith Butler pushes such concerns
further by questioning the relation between construction and
representation. As a political movement, feminism supposes that it
represents a set of pre-existing subjects, namely women, who are
uniformly oppressed by a uniform patriarchy. Yet if we follow
Foucault, we have to ask who these pre-existing subjects are. More
specifically, if we return to Beauvoir's claim that "One
is not born, but rather becomes a women" we have to ask who or
what it is that becomes a woman. It is misleading to think of
oppression in terms of structures of power over against the subjects
that precede them because subjects, as the particular subjects they
are, are first constituted through specific authorizations
"through the forms of power that regulate, control, represent
and protect them." Hence, "the juridical formation of
language and politics that represents women as 'the
subject' of feminism is itself a discursive formation and effect
of a given version of representational politics" (1990, 2).
While Beauvoir's claim assumes a pre-existing female sexed
person who acquires the attitudes, behaviors and aspirations of a
feminine gender through socialization, Butler maintains that it is
through regimes of gender that we first conceive of bodies as sexed.
"Gender is ... the discursive/cultural means by which
'sexed nature' or 'a natural sex' is produced
and established as 'prediscursive'" (1990, 7). This
discursive formation of both gender and sex is not only inevitably
exclusionary and not only "the mark imposed by the
oppressor" (Wittig 1992, 11) but also inconsistent and
incoherent both across different historical contexts (see Riley 1988)
and in relation to race, class, sexual identities and so on.



As Butler points out, Luce Irigaray (1985) complicates matters
further. Here Irigaray's reference is Beauvoir's claim
that a woman "is defined and differentiated with reference to
man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the
inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the
Absolute - she is the Other" (1953, 13). Beauvoir insists
that there is no time in history in which women were not the Other:
men are always the One and women are always the Other. Moreover, as
the Other, they live only in relation to the One and have no free
human existence or subjectivity on their own. They occupy space in a
man's world only as relative and inessential aspects of it. Yet
Irigaray explains that if women are the Other to men they cannot be
defined independently of a definition of men. To define women as the
Other of men is to articulate their identity within a vocabulary that
takes men as its norm. But if they cannot be defined independently of
men, how are they Other from them? If women can be articulated only
within a male-normed language, then language cannot get at their
otherness at all. They are always, instead, part of a language system
expressing the One. The "exclusion" of women, Irigaray
writes, "is internal to an order from which nothing escapes: the
order of (man's) discourse. To the objection that this discourse
is perhaps not all there is, the response will be that it is women who
are 'not-all'" (1985, 88). Julia Kristeva agrees.
"A woman cannot be," she writes. "It is something
which does not even belong in the order of being" (1981, 137).
Thus, if women risk disappearing into various nodes of
intersectionality in the analytic tradition, in the Continental they
risk being unable to be thought at all.



Is there any way to rescue them? Butler is not wedded to the idea that
we need a stable conception of women. Rather, she wonders whether we
should entertain "a radical critique that seeks to free feminist
theory from the necessity of having to construct a single or abiding
ground," and she asks whether "the construction of the
category of women as a coherent and stable subject" is "an
unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations" (1990,
5).



Some other feminists making use of Continental sources are unsure
about this conclusion. Iris Marion Young (1994) turns to Jean-Paul
Sartre's distinction between a series and a group. For Sartre, a
group is a collection of people who consciously undertake a common
project together where the project typically is one best taken up by
this sort of group (1994, 724). Storming the Bastille is an example.
In contrast, a series is less organized and not at all self-conscious;
here the example is people waiting for a bus. These individuals
possess a common interest in traveling along a certain route, but they
have, or need have, no direct relation to one another. This series
could become a group were individuals within it to start complaining
about the length of time they wait for the bus, and they could
undertake together some sort of collective protest. Nonetheless,
without this move toward collective action, they remain isolated from
one another and focused on the bus, which Sartre and Young call a
practico-inert reality, rather than on each other.



Women, for Young, are a series, where one practico-inert reality is an
effect of a compulsory heterosexuality that focuses on the features of
a body connected to sexual reproduction. Other practico-inert
realities include pronouns, verbal and visual representations,
clothes, cosmetics, social spaces, and spaces associated with the
sexual division of work and other activities. In each case, these
realities describe structures or objects to which individuals relate
themselves serially, as bus-riders relate themselves to a bus.
Conceiving of women as a series thus allows for the sense in which
they share certain features but in which they can also possess
striking differences in their relation to the realities that make them
part of that series. Women are "a serial collective defined
neither by any common identity nor by a common set of attributes that
all individual in the series share" (1994, 737). At the same
time, they can always become a group through collective action.



In another broadly phenomenological attempt to rescue the common
identity of women, Linda Martin Alcoff (2005) appeals to the
phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to anchor women's
identity in embodiment. Bodies and bodily experiences differ for men
and women. These differences can stem from cultural practices that
promote different ways of moving, siting, standing, running, speaking,
and throwing a ball, for instance. Moreover, because of differences in
physical strength, men and women also approach the same task
differently, using different parts of their bodies to do the same
things. Finally, in distinction from men, women's bodily
experiences include the "experience of breasts, menses,
lactation and pregnancy" (2005, 106). For Alcoff, these
differences lead to differences in women's orientations or what,
following the hermeneutic philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer, she calls
horizons on themselves and their world. She does not deny that these
horizons vary according to the traditions and cultures to which
various women belong; nor does she deny that horizons also vary
according to intersections with other factors, such as race and class.
At the same time, she argues, "The possibility of pregnancy,
childbirth, nursing, and in many societies, rape are parts of
females' horizons ... and they exist there because of the
ways they are embodied" (2005, 176). Yet here again, the specter
of false generalizations looms. Stephanie Julia Kapusta (2016)
questions Alcoff's emphasis on biological differences and
pregnancy given the way in which it can marginalize and inflict
psychological, moral, or political harms on certain individuals,
including trans people.



Other hermeneutic approaches to women's identity include Georgia
Warnke's *After Identity: Rethinking Race, Sex and
Gender* (2007) and Lauren Barthold's *A Hermeneutic
Approach to Gender and Other Social Identities* (2016). Warnke
claims identities are interpretations of, or ways of understanding,
who we and others are. As such they necessarily comply with the
conditions of understanding: they are culturally and historically
situated, motivated by particular concerns and interests and
inevitably partial. We can thus understand people as women only in
particular contexts and ought not suppose their identities or
commonalities to extend beyond those contexts. For her part, while
also conceiving of women's identity in hermeneutic terms,
Barthold questions both Alcoff's and Warnke's work. In her
view a hermeneutic approach to identities must include an account of an
individual's various social identities and possibilities for
negotiating among them, an account of the individual's identity
formation and an ability to assess the adequacy of particular social
identities in socio-political terms.


### 1.3 Conclusion



In Beauvoir's work, both broadly analytic and broadly
Continental feminist approaches find resources for raising questions
about who women are, how they might be defined and for what purposes.
Both approaches are interested in developing a definition of women
that is inclusive, sensitive to intersecting oppressions and useful to
feminist struggles. There are affinities in some of the ways theorists
in each tradition try to accomplish these goals: for example between
Garry's appeal to family resemblances and Young's appeal
to series that can become groups. Critics within each tradition also
overlap in questioning the exclusions that the proffered definitions
involve.


## 2. Freedom and Domination



With regard to questions of freedom and domination, the distinction
between Continental feminists in the (French) post-structuralist
tradition and those in the (German) tradition of critical theory is
perhaps more pronounced than that between the latter and those in the
analytic tradition.


### 2.1 The Continental Tradition



Butler begins her analysis in *Gender Trouble* (1990) by
returning to Irigaray and Kristeva's criticism of Beauvoir and
arguing that their insights into the closed nature of a gendered
linguistic system raise issues about a substance-accident metaphysics
as a whole. According to this metaphysics, both sex and gender are
meant to be accidental attributes attached to a substantial subject.
One is essentially a subject and only accidentally a male or female,
masculine or feminine one. Yet, if women can be defined only in terms
of men, as the Other of men, then sex and gender are not as much
accidents as they are relations - not attributes a subject
possesses but oppositions between linguistic terms: male versus female
and masculine versus feminine. Furthermore, if sex and gender are not
attributes, perhaps we should rethink the subject or substance to
which they are meant to attach. Perhaps there is only language which,
in articulating a relation between male and female, masculine and
feminine, posits a substance on which to erect those terms. Butler
quotes Michel Haar's commentary on Nietzsche:



> 
> All psychological categories (the ego, the individual, the person)
> derive from the illusion of substantial identity. But this illusion
> goes back basically to a superstition that deceives not only common
> sense but also philosophers - namely, the belief in language
> and, more precisely, in the truth of grammatical categories (1977,
> 17-8).
> 



In other words, language inspires us to add substantial identities to
actions because verbs need subjects. Turning from Nietzsche to J.L.
Austin, Butler conceives of women (and men) as
"performatives." Performative speech acts for Austin are
utterances such as "the meeting is now open" or "I
now pronounce you husband and wife" in which, uttered under
appropriate circumstances, the speech act does something by saying
something. The speech act thus brings a state of affairs into
existence. Likewise, according to Butler, the language of sex and
gender, appropriately institutionalized, creates men and women.



What is meant by appropriately institutionalized? For Foucault (1978)
the most important sites of power lie in everyday social practices
such as social work, medicine and psychiatry, in scientific and social
scientific disciplines that type individuals and create categories of
identity, and in institutions such as prisons, schools and hospitals.
Such power is productive: social institutions and practices create
modern identities such as gays, Blacks and manic-depressives. For
Butler and others, the construction of men and women takes a similar
path as the result of compulsory heterosexuality. As a form of power,
compulsory heterosexuality imposes a set of norms about how and whom
we should desire and establishes a set of sanctions from this set. By
doing so, it divides human populations into two genders that are in
turn supposed to be connected to two sexes with two directions of
sexual desire. Thus, one is a man with a male body and a desire for
women or one is a woman with a female body and a desire for men.
"The heterosexualization of desire," Butler writes,
"requires and institutes the production of discrete and
asymmetrical oppositions between 'feminine' and
'masculine,' where these are understood as expressive
attributes of 'male' and 'female'"
(1990, 17).



This account of identities as effects of power obviously raises the
question of what happens to our capacities for critical agency and
rational reflection, capacities to which Marxists and other social
critics have traditionally appealed for a purchase on relations of
power and subordination. If the subject, as a woman or gay person for
example, is an effect of power, the structure of oppression is already
built into the identity. How can women or gay people be agents for the
emancipation of, or equal justice for, women or gay people if their
identity is itself an effect of unequal power relations? Indeed, if we
become subjects at all only within everyday disciplinary practices,
then subjects are always already effects of power. To emancipate
ourselves from power would be to emancipate ourselves from ourselves.
How then how are we to address issues of freedom and autonomy?



Butler looks to resignification. Power not only produces but
reproduces itself. This constant production and reproduction opens
possibilities for "resignification, redeployment, subversive
citation from within, and interruption and inadvertent convergences
with other [power/discourse] networks" (1995, 135). Yet other
Continental feminists find this approach unsatisfying. Nancy Fraser
finds the positive connotations that Butler associates with
resignification "puzzling." "Why," she asks,
"is resignification good? Can't there be bad (oppressive,
reactionary) resignifications?"(1995, 67-8). If all
subjectivity is a construction of power/discourse networks, why should
we not simply be content with the subjects that our current
disciplinary practices enforce? Or, if some resignifications are good,
which ones? How do we determine which sort we should endorse?



In general, Fraser thinks feminists too eagerly turned to
poststructuralist theories in the 1990s and that this turn has
consequences: not only does it leave women with no prospects for
change other than resignification but it also reduces gender
inequality to a matter of language and culture. Here her criticism is
directed at what she calls Lacanianism in feminism (2013). The work of
Lacanian feminists has some merit, she says, in that it shows gender
to be a discursive construction. Sexual identity is based on the
process of identification, language, and socialization in which the
child enters into the symbolic order, governed by the incest taboo or
what Lacan calls "the law of the Father." Subjugation to
that law and becoming a subject are thus one and the same. Given the
law's phallocentric tilt, women are pretty much condemned.
Nevertheless this analysis remains too historically unspecific for
Fraser. What we need from discourse theory, she maintains, are
insights into how our social identities are formed and altered over
time, how social groups form and disintegrate, how dominant groups
retain their cultural dominance and what the prospects are for
emancipatory change.



Moreover, we need to balance cultural with economic analysis. For
Fraser (2007), gender is a two-dimensional identity. It organizes a
status hierarchy, one on which what she calls cultural feminism
focuses, that permeates popular culture and everyday interactions in
ways that demean women. But gender also structures a material and
economic division between paid productive work and unpaid domestic
work, and within paid productive work, it largely structures the
division between higher-paid manufacturing and professional
occupations and lower-paid, "pink collar" ones. An
adequate feminist theory, she claims, must therefore allow for two
independent, cultural and material analytic perspectives. In another
work (2009), she adds a third political perspective to deal with
issues of representation. *Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto*
(2019), written with Cinzia Arruzza and Tithi Bhattacharya, takes up
these tasks, focusing on the need to fight for affordable housing,
decent paying jobs, universal healthcare, and the like in order to win
for women and working people in general the freedom to determine the
course of their own lives.



Seyla Benhabib (1995), Amy Allen (2008) and Allison Weir (2013) also
question Butlerian equations between identity, law and power that seem
to deprive women of agency. Benhabib distinguishes between a stronger
and a weaker version of the claim that identities such as women and
gay people are constructions of power (1995, 20). The stronger version
insists that subjects are entirely the effects of power, particularly
of a compulsory heterosexuality, and that as effects they can only
accept their mode of being a subject or try to subvert it from within.
A weaker version of the claim, however, would simply emphasize that
infants are born into a world of existing gendered relations,
hierarchies and distributions of power and are acculturated into this
world by parents, teachers and the like. To say that infants are born
into prevailing structures of power, however, is not to say that they
are already entirely constituted by them. Hence, Benhabib claims,
there remain capacities for reflection and accountability that are not
simply themselves effects of power.



While more sympathetic to Foucault and Butler, Allen uses Jessica
Benjamin's (1988) account of recognition to make a similar
point. There may be "no outside to power, in the sense that
there is no possible human social world from which power has been
completely eliminated." Nevertheless, we need not deny
"moments of mutual recognition...within ongoing,
dynamically unfolding, social relationships" that can provide
for both the constitution of autonomous selves and a reference point
for social and political critique (2008, 91). Weir likewise stresses
relations of recognition, as well as of "identification, of
flourishing, of meaning, of love, of different kinds of power,
including empowerment and solidarity" (2013, 91). Again,
resistance to domination is not just a matter of resignifying within
oppressive structures. Rather it is a matter of transforming women.
Indeed, Weir asks "What have we been doing in our women's
studies programs, associations of feminist philosophers and academics,
feminist movements, lesbian communities, women's cooperative,
and culture building and other alternative communities if we
haven't been ...producing women as something other than
subjected?" (2013, 94).


### 2.1 The Analytic Tradition



Working from an Anglo-American liberal tradition, Martha Nussbaum
raises questions similar to those that Allen, Benhabib, Fraser and
Weir raise about a post-structuralist feminism. Indeed, she thinks the
latter is irretrievably self-involved and needs to be rejected in
favor of the kind of theoretical and practical work that can end
oppressive practices and institutions (1999a). Her own starting point
is what she calls the "capabilities approach," an approach
that is rooted in "respect for the dignity of persons as
choosers" (2000, 71-2) and that asks what individuals
within a given society are able to do and to be - what their
capabilities or freedoms are. Following John Rawls here Nussbaum
focuses on the distribution of resources and opportunities within a
country or political entity. Like Amartya Sen, she adds to
Rawls' view, first, the question of what individuals'
needs for resources are and, second, the question of how they are able
to convert these resources into human functionings (1999, 34). By
human functionings, Nussbaum means the realization of one or more
capability - the enjoyment of good health, for example. She is
interested in both the basic functionings, without which we would not
regard a life as human or fully human, and the less basic
functionings, without which we would not regard a human life as
flourishing.



The "we" here is not meant to be ethnocentric. The claim
is, rather, that a just society provides individuals with capabilities
for human functionings where the idea of the important capabilities
is one to which people from different traditions with different
conceptions of the good could agree as necessary to the pursuit of
their particular conception. This idea provides a checklist of
capabilities against which to measure forms of oppression and
discrimination in particular countries. Thus, inequalities based on
gender hierarchies as well as practices such as female genital
mutilation will be precluded and a defense of such practices as part
of the cultural tradition will not work. If cultural tradition
confines women to the house, even if widowed and without means of
support, then such practices are to be condemned as violating
capabilities for even basic functioning. Indeed, while practices such
as female genital mutilation and female confinement violate
capabilities for life, nutrition and bodily integrity, all
inequalities based on gender hierarchies, in Nussbaum's view,
undermine capabilities for self-respect and emotional development that
are part of human functioning. Ultimately, Nussbaum's concerns
are the same as Fraser's: that a focus on genealogy and
resignification cannot do the work of undoing the social, political
and economic discrimination that women suffer in far too many cultures
and countries and that it is this discrimination that feminism must
try to combat.



Other feminists have concerns about Nussbaum's approach,
however. Susan Moller Okin objects to the narrative approach that
Nussbaum introduces in *Women and Human Development* insofar as
it relies on retelling the experiences of two poor Indian women,
Vasanti and Jayamma. Okin points out that despite the sort of
cross-cultural dialogue in which Nussbaum thinks feminists should
engage (Nussbaum 2000, 7), she rarely quotes these women directly and
refracts their views through her own (Okin 2003, 295). From where,
then, does Nussbaum's checklist of capabilities come? Okin calls
her idea of a fully human life "highly intellectualized"
and maintains that the capacities central to it "seem to derive
far more from an Aristotelian ideal than from any deep or broad
familiarity with the lives of women in the less developed world"
(2003, 296). Likewise, while Alison Jaggar thinks the narrative
approach may be anodyne as long as it is meant simply heuristically,
she argues that there is little evidence that Nussbaum's list of
capabilities reflects anything like a consensus or even overlapping
consensus of "people across the world who are reasonably
well-informed and uncoerced" (2006, 313). Rather, in spite of a
long list of interlocutors, Jagger thinks Nussbaum pays insufficient
attention to questions of inclusiveness and representation.


### 2.3 Conclusion



Feminists in both the analytic and Continental traditions raise
concerns about a post-structuralist identification of the subject,
including the feminist subject, with power. If women, like gay people
and others, are the effects of discourses of power how can they also
be the agents of their own emancipation? Some feminists find this
question to be so removed from the horrific lives many women live as
to be farcical. For example, Nussbaum asks that we attend to
capacities and functionings and Fraser likewise insists that we move
away from what she sees as purely cultural concerns to include
socio-economic ones. Others try to secure theoretical grounds for
agency and autonomy outside of power.


## 3. Epistemic Injustice



Feminism has an obvious relation to epistemology insofar as it must
justify the legitimacy of its claims and the credibility of those
making them. Miranda Fricker's book, *Epistemic Injustice:
Power and Ethics of Knowing* (2007) has grounded much of the
current discussion in the analytic tradition, which has largely
focused on cataloging and categorizing instances of epistemic
injustice. The Continental tradition traces this issue back to
concerns with ideology and power/knowledge regimes that have long been
a part of emancipatory discussions.


### 3.1 The Analytic Tradition



Fricker takes up two varieties of epistemic injustice: testimonial and
hermeneutical. Her account of the former can be seen as a development
of claims Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton (1998) made about silencing
with reference to Catharine MacKinnon's claim that pornography
interferes with women's freedom of speech (1993). Freedom of
speech involves not simply the ability to make claims but, more
importantly, the ability to have illocutionary effects in which
one's audience takes up those claims. MacKinnon focuses on the
ability to refuse sex by saying no. Under the influence of pornography
one's audience may not recognize what one is trying to do with
one's words and may fail to take this no as a refusal. For
Fricker, structural identity prejudices in general affect one's
credibility as a speaker and conveyor of knowledge. Her example is the
way, in the screenplay of "The Talented Mr. Ripley," Marge
Sherwood is unable to communicate her suspicions about Ripley to her
father-in-law, Herbert Greenleaf, because of the identity prejudices
he holds about women. Assuming that women tend to respond emotionally
instead of rationally to a situation, he downgrades her credibility
and effectively silences her. The testimonial injustice here excludes
Sherwood from the social practice of pooling information.



Kristie Dotson (2011) distinguishes two different kinds of silencing
practices: testimonial quieting and testimonial smothering. While
testimonial quieting characterizes a failure to recognize the speaker
as a knower and thus to offer the speaker appropriate uptake, Dotson
describes testimonial smothering as a coerced truncation by speakers
of their own testimony. Speakers recognize that their audiences are
unwilling or unable to offer appropriate uptake to their testimony,
and in response, limit and shape their testimony in order to
"insure that the testimony contains only content for which
one's audience demonstrates testimonial competence" (2011,
244). Dotson characterizes both of these silencing practices as forms
of epistemic violence, and both have dramatic effects for the
epistemic pursuits of individuals and communities alike.



Dotson (2017) extends this analysis by offering an epistemological
reading of Pauli Murray's (1947) conception of a Jane Crow
system of subordination, one that both targets Black women, making
them hypervisible, and ignores them, making them invisible. Dotston
is interested in the production of knowledge that facilitates this
kind of subordination and identifies three conditions for it. First,
shared assumptions and other epistemic resources can highlight certain
subjects for study and render others uninteresting or irrelevant. From
this point of view, Black women occupy "negative socio-epistemic
space." Second, this negative-epistemic space means that Black women
lack credibility precisely in trying to articulate it. Finally, in
what Dotson calls epistemic backgrounding, Black women serve as the
backdrop for some other subjects of study - for example, in
claims that Black boys are the most endangered U.S. population, as if
the factors that cause this endangerment (poverty, poor schools and
the character of policing) do not apply to Black girls as well.



With regard to hermeneutical injustice, Fricker focuses on gaps in the
collective hermeneutical resources that make it difficult for members
of particular groups, including women, to make sense out of and
articulate important areas of their experience. The available
resources are either not adequate for expressing these areas of
experience or they are misleading. Where this failure or inadequacy
affects people differentially it is unjust, Fricker argues. As an
example she points to the damage done to many women's lives and
careers after they suffered unwanted sexual advances on the job before
sexual harassment was a hermeneutical resource available to make sense
out of their experience (2007, 152). Fricker thinks it would be a
mistake to see this gap in the collective hermeneutic resources as
merely bad timing, as might be the case if one suffered from a disease
that had not yet been diagnosed or understood. Rather, to the extent
that the gap affected women and their sexual harassers differentially
it led to an injustice. It also derived from one. Fricker argues that
the hermeneutical gap was the result of "unequal hermeneutical
participation" in which women were left out of or barred from
engaging in the formation of the relevant collective understandings
(Fricker 2007: 152). This marginalization, she argues, results from a
combination of two forms of power: identity power that downgrades a
speaker's credibility and material power. In a social world in
which men have more power than women, men also have more say over
defining what experiences mean and the result is to render "the
collective hermeneutical resource structurally prejudiced"
(2007, 154-5).



Shelley Tremain (2017) finds a problem with Fricker's
distinction between hermeneutical gaps due to diseases not yet
diagnosed and hermeneutical gaps that reflect hermeneutical injustice.
While Fricker wants to see the former as a case of mere bad luck,
Tremain points to the lack of hermeneutical resources many disabled
people suffer because of social, cultural and political norms that are
as inadequate and misleading as those distorting attempts to
articulate the experience of sexual harassment. As she writes,
"Until the relatively recent formation and rise of 'the
mad pride movement' and related social movements, the
hermeneutical resources that such disabled people required in order to
collectively understand the political character of their situation
were unavailable to them" (178).



Other feminists add to Fricker's account of hermeneutical
injustice just as they do to her account of testimonial injustice.
Following up on Charles Mills' account of white ignorance
(1998), Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr., for example, conceives of the consequence
of this structural prejudice as a willful hermeneutical ignorance in
which "dominantly situated knowers...continue to
misunderstand and misinterpret the world" (2012, 716). Dotson
uses this idea of willful hermeneutical ignorance to identify a third
feature of epistemic injustice along with testimonial and
hermeneutical injustice: namely contributory injustice in which
willful hermeneutical ignorance compromises a speaker's
epistemic agency and obstructs the capacity to contribute to a
community's collective hermeneutical resources (2012, 31).



Fricker's solution to testimonial injustice relies on the
virtuous sensibility that allows one, when necessary, to neutralize
one's identity prejudices and negative credibility judgments
about speakers while her solution to hermeneutical injustice relies on
an awareness of possible gaps in the hermeneutical resources available
to them. In responding to her critics, Fricker also distinguishes
between "in-group intelligibility" within marginalized
groups and their "frustratingly failed attempts to
communicate" (2016, 167) with dominant groups. Together with
Jenkins she also underscores the relation between testimonial
injustice and ignorance, especially with regard to trans experiences
(2017).


### 3.2 The Continental Tradition



Feminists in the Continental tradition are also interested in
Fricker's work. Warnke (2014) as well as Cynthia Nielsen and
David Utsler (2023) note its affinities with Gadamer's
hermeneutics, although they note that unlike Gadamer, Fricker supposes
the possibility of neutralizing one's identity prejudices where
identity is not relevant. For Gadamer, because prejudices are
ineradicable as anticipatory orientations, we cannot neutralize them.
We can, however, reveal them to ourselves - and thereby question
them - by always according an initial credibility to our
interlocutors, not, as Fricker supposes, only when we have reason to
suspect identity prejudice. 



Other feminists in the Continental tradition are concerned with
Fricker's reliance on virtue ethics and they stress the need to
go beyond the dyadic instances of epistemic injustice on which she
focuses. Axel Honneth (2023) argues for the necessity of embedding
questions of epistemic injustice in normative social theory and, in
particular, in a theory of social struggles for recognition. Alcoff
(2017) makes three recommendations. First, we can look at what
Jose Medina calls "complex histories and chains of social
interactions that go beyond particular pairs and clusters of
subjects" (Medina 2013, 60). Second, we can look at
Foucault's account of power/knowledge regimes for a robust
account of collective hermeneutical resources and the exclusions they
enforce as well of the institutional mechanisms that determine what is
and is not to count as knowledge and who is and who is not to count as
a knower. Finally, we can look at Foucault's development of
genealogy as a form of critique that allows for the disruption of
epistemic hierarchies that may be inherited but that are nonetheless
contingent.



In addition to Gadamer and Foucault, feminists in the Continental
tradition look to the Marxist tradition and, in particular, to the
work of Jurgen Habermas. What Fricker conceives of as structural
prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resources, they see as the
sort of ideological obfuscation that undermines a society's
capacity to understand its own creations. Thus, Habermas points to the
power-relations our hermeneutical resources include and asks us not to
forget that "the background consensus of established traditions
... can be a consciousness forged of compulsions." (1977,
358-9). (Also see Mills 2017.) Habermas's early work
focused on psychoanalysis as a model for a critical social theory but
he later turns to a reconstructive science of communicative competence
and to the possibilities of deliberative forms of democracy.
Deliberative democratic theory looks to non-coercive exchanges of
arguments among free and equal citizens who justify their claims and
proposals by appealing to considerations that can be accepted by all
those affected (1998, 458). Accordingly, Benhabib (1996) maintains
that only those norms are valid that are agreed to in deliberations
that have the following features:



> 
> 1) participation in such deliberation is governed by norms of equality
> and symmetry; all have the same chances to initiate speech acts, to
> question, to interrogate, and to open debate; 2) all have the right to
> question the assigned topics of conversation; and 3) all have the
> right to initiate reflexive arguments about the very rules of the
> discourse procedure and the way in which they are applied or carried
> out (70).
> 



Other feminists have sought an expanded version of deliberative theory
that recognizes impediments to the participation of women and other
marginalized groups. Fraser insists that critical theory needs to
"render visible the ways in which societal inequality infects formally
inclusive public spheres and taints discursive interaction within
them" (1992, 121). She thus calls for a principle of participatory
parity where all members of a society participate as peers. Social
policies and actions must thus acknowledge the legitimacy of claims to
recognition, achieve fairness in distributing resources and assure
political representation (2005). For her part, Young (1996) questions
the exclusionary function of rational argumentation. She thus
substitutes communicative for deliberative democracy in order to
expand the scope of considerations beyond the exchange of reasons to
include story-telling as well as argumentation on grounds close to
Fricker's and Dotson's concerns: namely that power
relations can stifle speech (1996). Likewise Simone Chambers looks to
a melding of deliberative and diversity theory (2003) while Noelle
McAfee (2008) looks beyond a Habermasian proceduralism to an
integrative model of public deliberation that respects the importance
of multiple, partial views.


### 3.3 Conclusion



The concept of epistemic injustice has proved a fruitful one for
feminists, as for critical race theorists, disability theorists and
others. Those in the analytic tradition have focused on mapping its
contours, nailing down the precise form of injustice it involves and
exposing forms of socially positioned ignorance in which dominant
groups continue to misapprehend the world. Those in the Continental
tradition conceive of such ignorance as ideology and, like those in
the analytic tradition, understand it as a mechanism of both
distortion and silencing. They have also probed the conditions for
forms of public communication and discourse free of coercion. Moving
on from Fricker's work, feminists in both analytic and
Continental traditions remain interested in expanding the concept of
epistemic injustice beyond dyadic relations to examine its systemic
reach and consequences.


## 4. General Conclusion



Analytic and Continental feminists share interests in avoiding
exclusion in attempts to define women, in overcoming patriarchal forms
of oppression and in securing the claims of women to know and to
participate in epistemic projects. Analytic and continental feminists
sometimes pursue these interests in different ways, sometimes in
similar ways and sometimes in conversation with one another.
Collectively they take up and further develop a rich history of
liberal, Marxist, post-structuralist, hermeneutic and linguistic
thought.