For much of philosophy’s past, the canon has been exclusively favorable to those whom society privileged. Think of any philosopher whose name you may hear in a philosophy 101 course—Kant, Hegel, Socrates, Sartre—and you’ll quickly come to find that they all share a particular kind of availability to the works of masters’ past. Recently, philosophy as a discipline has worked very hard (in part thanks to the work of feminist scholars) to include women, people of color, queer authors, and other such marginalized voices. However, this is just a start—data shows us that only around a quarter of all philosophy professors are women, and these numbers only get grimmer when intersectional identities come into play; Many philosophy departments across the world don’t have a single disabled or queer professor with tenure (or the prospects of tenure).
What can PhD holding professors of philosophy do to help offset the lack of marginalized voices in the canon? And how can philosophers of marginalized identities make sure our voices are heard despite the power structures that function to silence us? In asking this question, I look to the past, to those marginalized voices which have somehow pierced through the haze of academic philosophy to deliver their thoughts with resounding clarity––Clarity which I have often struggled to achieve in my own career.
One such way that I have seen these problems navigated took place in a Social Philosophy course, which specifically explored sex and gender. The professor of said course, Dr. Jamie Lindsay, utilized storytelling as a philosophical tool, argumentatively and communally, as a means of offsetting the strict canon. In the course, we explored such work as Linda Alcoff’s Rape and Resistance, Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?, an bell hooks’ “Killing Rage: Militant Resistance.”
Linda Alcoff’s Rape and Resistance begins by clearly highlighting her motive for writing the book: she has been the victim of sexual assault and she wants to clearly and definitively articulate the harms that she has experienced. She describes the assault through her own eyes—describing the violative act as a fresh wound, ripe for the analysis. Alongside her recitation, she also brings in the stories of other survivors of sexual assault. Her wanting to understand their stories, and her own personal history, brings Alcoff to a unique insight regarding the complexities of consent. Many of the stories retold involve the victim giving a “Yes” to invitations of sex, but Alcoff postulates that this model of consent leaves victims who do not see themselves as being assaulted behind.
In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis describes her own experiences of the prison system. Davis, who was arrested while protesting alongside the Black Panthers, harnesses the fear and anger which looms ever-present in black communities to write a striking takedown of the prison-industrial complex. Her simmering prose, brimming with distaste and righteous fury, places the conversation in stark terms. In spite of the title, Davis, never for a single moment, allows the reader to forget her anger, her fear, her anxiety, to have any doubt about the importance of prison abolition. In describing the murder of a young, white activist in Africa, Davis moves the topic away from the theoretical and into the deeply personal. Two parents forgive three murderers of their daughter, choosing to adopt and financially support them. It is here that the reader is forced into the shoes of the victim, outside of their comfortable pondering, and they must reckon with the question immediately presented: “Well, if they could forgive, then why couldn’t I?”.
In a similar vein, bell hooks writes in “Killing Rage: Militant Resistance” about her particular experience of anti-black racism. Her forthright writing style throws the reader into hooks’ shoes, retelling the story of a plane. hooks frames her entire work around this story, utilizing a seemingly innocuous interaction to build a sophisticated analysis on the importance of black rage in prompting political action. She allows us to see the interaction as she does, granting the reader a glimpse of how first-person accounts of anti-blackness should impact how we understand moral psychology.
Storytelling, pathos, personal experience––this is the through line. Without these elements, Alcoff’s book would not have been so meaningful, Davis’ cause so urgent, or hooks’ anger so real. So often in academic philosophy, students are encouraged (by accident or by instruction) to separate themselves, their egos, from the currency of their ideas. All well and good, I suppose, when one is studying Logic or Phil of Science or another discipline which requires the author to remain strictly detached. But an impossibility if one is to have any thoughtful discussion of gender, the Realness of discrimination, or the phenomenology of race. These topics demand a personal outlook, a relation of experience, and a vulnerability of self from students and educators alike. Students must relay their own experiences, compare them to their classmates and those described by the author. And educators must recognize that the exercise of students sharing and relating is itself the point, the education taking place, philosophy happening before their very eyes; not simply a device to make the learning environment more friendly, or (worse) a pause from learning, a reward for good behavior, or sugar to help the medicine go down.
While working on my first master’s degree, I got the opportunity to work under some brilliant professors who specialized in education. One such professor, Dr. Zachary Casey, assigned us to read a chapter called “Queering Black History and Getting Free” nestled in a book titled Teaching for Black Lives. In this chapter, author Dominique Hazzard argues the importance of recentering LGBTQ+ voices in the classroom and in society, whilst also “queering” the system itself. By this, Hazzard means that it is not enough to just add in a black queer person into a lesson plan haphazardly, rather the system that upholds white-supremacist heteropatriarchy should be actively worked against. Many queer icons have been lost to the years, whether intentionally or unintentionally, so much of this work involves simply discovering and centering their voices. It also must involve teaching students that many black queer narratives are just ‘everyday’—most of these people were not charismatic leaders or pioneers, they were simply people living their own truth day-to-day. As a suggestion, a great example of this ‘everyday-ness’ that I have read recently (and hope to integrate into my courses in the future) is Lou Sullivan’s diary, titled We Both Laughed in Pleasure. I would highly recommend all philosophers engage with such works.
We must be cognizant of the fact that simply including the works of marginalized authors isn’t enough—we must also be active and reflective philosophers who work to deconstruct our own biases. The philosophical canon is important, insofar as it acts as a baseline by which all philosophy happens, but it is also well-deserving of scrutiny. Opening our classrooms to marginalized voices must be more than simply assigning our students to read Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Andrea Dworkin, Audre Lorde, and Hannah Arendt; It must involve the difficult and vulnerable work of listening to their stories and understanding them as philosophers.
Calvin Anderson
Calvin Anderson is a second year M.A. student in philosophy at San Francisco State University. His work explores how social conceptions of consent impact the ethics of sex, death, and dying. Likewise, his areas of interest are applied ethics, social philosophy, and queer theory. Calvin received a B.A. in philosophy and an M.A. in education from Rhodes College.
