I’m all too familiar with the widespread (mistaken) belief that feminist philosophy is less philosophical or should be treated as such. I have encountered this opinion in explicit and implicit forms since my first exposure to philosophy. It has been magnified and perpetuated by the relegation of feminist works to the end of syllabi, made into political footnotes to the Real philosophical questions. While I disagree with these underlying assumptions about feminist philosophy, I agree that there is something different about it. In teaching courses on feminist and race-critical theory, at least one difference became clear: to do, and teach, feminist philosophy, I must be willing to incriminate myself in the process.
Self-incrimination is a concept often reserved to the court room or law class. It describes the act of voluntarily accusing oneself of an offense, thereby exposing oneself to judgment against one’s own legal interests. Outside of a legal context, we might also call this self implication, or the act or state of being involved in something, of not being beyond or outside of its reach. In feminist philosophy, I find myself implicating myself in what I read and teach. Not as if I am accused or compelled to do so by my students, but as a pedagogical process that opens up the possibility for learners to implicate themselves too. This process is more revealing, more compromising, than teaching other kinds of philosophy. While I may use examples from my life in explicating Sartre’s existential dread (what can I say, it’s a relatable concept), it does not require the same degree of self implication as feminist theory. As well as communicating the content of the readings, the philosophy classroom is where I shine a bright light on the cracks in my habits of knowing, such that the class becomes a brighter place for students to see themselves. It is the vulnerable nature of this pedagogy that makes the classroom a place where students can look inwards and apply theories to their own worlds without judgment.
I’ll offer an example to help explain what I mean. For the course I designed and taught, Topics in Feminist Philosophy: Feminist Epistemologies of Ignorance, my lecture prep regularly included reflecting on ways that I am implicated in the structures of ignorance, domination, and privilege. To effectively communicate to students how social position informs knowledge production, acquisition, and epistemic relations to others, I must recognize the ways my social position produces and perpetuates ignorance, remains affectively indifferent to certain experiences, and engages in epistemically asymmetrical relations. This is never obvious. I research and teach this material because I care deeply about contributing to a more equitable and just world. Admitting, even to myself, that I engage in the forms of ignorance I teach about is not comfortable.
As philosophers, our tools are conceptual, but this doesn’t mean we have to remain at a distance
But it is necessary, not just for the students to better understand the reach of these systems that maintain oppression, but for myself. It makes philosophy risky and drags me from the armchair to the real world. In teaching an article by José Medina, entitled “Racial Violence, Emotional Friction, and Epistemic Activism” (2019), my class was discussing the ‘affective numbness’ that is socialized into dominant groups. This numbness serves the purpose of obscuring the reality of oppression such that it is not noticed, or such that dominantly situated people do not affectively dwell on it long enough to take action. While we discussed this in theoretical terms, an example from my own experience came to my mind. It was not a flattering example; in fact, it exemplifies the way my experience is structured by a white/settler ignorance I actively try to undermine in my work. But this is precisely the point of teaching these works – I don’t do feminist philosophy to come up with abstract thought experiments. I do it because it attempts to make sense of the non-ideal world and find ways of countering it. As philosophers, our tools are conceptual, but this doesn’t mean we have to remain at a distance.
To return to my example, I told the class about a book I’d read recently, Black Racialization and Resistance at an Elite University (2020) by Rosalind Hampton. In one part, Hampton describes a tapestry in the library on my campus. The tapestry depicts a larger-than-life representation of university founder James McGill, a ship signifying his journey from Scotland to Quebec, and three stacked images to his right to illustrate key events in his life. The middle of those stacked images shows what appears to be two British soldiers, and an Indigenous man with brown skin, a strip of dark hair down the middle of his head and sandals on his feet. A soldier’s rifle is aimed at the man’s head. Especially given that James McGill himself enslaved African and Indigenous peoples, this tapestry is not a harmless depiction of university history. It provides and embeds a narrative about McGill (the man and the institution) and sends messages about who is meant to belong within the McGill community. When I read this portion of Hampton’s text, I could immediately imagine the tapestry. I had walked under it countless times as I went to pick up books. I had stopped to catch up with colleagues in its shadow. I never stopped to look closely, but I knew what it depicted, and it never made me feel less comfortable entering that space. Reflecting on the tapestry now, I can use the conceptual tools at my disposal (thanks to Medina, Hampton, and others) to explain why I was affectively numb to it, despite knowing on a cognitive level that it was wrong. Had the tapestry depicted stereotypical images of Jews, who have ourselves had a complicated relationship with the university, I likely would have felt its presence as I moved under its prominent placement at the entrance to a centre of student life. As a settler, though, my affective reaction has been shaped by a need not-to-know, to take for granted the campus built on unceded land.
After a moment of hesitation, I told my class about this tapestry and my experience coming to consciousness about the message it sends, as well as my affective numbness to it. There was a pregnant pause in the classroom. Slowly, hands raised to tell of their own experiences with the tapestry. As it turns out, several students had also noticed it but hadn’t stopped to engage with its imagery. We expanded the discussion to other narratives, objects, places that had differentially activated their affective responses, or failed to do so. Through sharing our vulnerabilities, the concept of ‘affective numbness’ became real to us, something to take with us as we leave the classroom and move through the world. We are taught to be numb to the violence of the commonplace. I am not immune to this desensitization. While I do not want to claim that this is the only way to teach feminist philosophy, it is the way I have found goes the furthest, or registers the deepest, when engaging with concepts that challenge us. We are all implicated in systems of oppression, whether or not we agree with them. Feminist philosophy has taught me that, unintuitive as it may sound, liberation involves self-incrimination.
Celia Edell
Celia Edell is a Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQSC) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of British Columbia. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from McGill University. Edell's research lies at the intersection of feminist theory, social epistemology, and ethics with a special focus on guilt, blame, and group oppression.
