The Women in Philosophy series at the APA blog would like to thank Adriel Trott for serving as Editor of the series from 2018 to 2023. During her five years as Editor, Adriel developed the mini-series “Ask a Senior Woman Philosopher” and worked to circulate and publicize the work of many contemporary and historical feminist philosophers.
The current Associate Editor, Alida Liberman, is now taking on the Editor role. We are delighted to announce that Elisabeth Paquette will be the new Associate Editor of the series. In this post, Alida interviews Elisabeth.
Welcome, Elisabeth, and thanks for joining the Blog! Could you tell us more about yourself? What do you think our readers should know about you?
One of my favorite courses to teach these past few years at UNC Charlotte focused on the relations between space, time, and identity. We read amazing texts, like Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds, C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides, and Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals. With the help of these texts, we named the ways in which identity and place are co-constituted. I have students pause throughout the semester, and reflect on different ways in which their becoming is shaped.
Your question reminds me of this prompt: who are you, and how is your becoming (as a philosopher) shaped.
I am a queer femme, trained in Continental Philosophy at Canadian universities, or more specifically Ontario universities. I am a philosopher who studies decolonial theory.
I am a Canadian philosopher who lives in the American South. As a Canadian, my knowledge of the South was extremely limited, and problematically rooted in mainstream movie portrayals. So, when I moved to North Carolina, I sought to learn about the history of the U.S. broadly, and the history of the South in particular. I started reading about its history, narratives surrounding slavery, colonization, and Black and Indigenous resistance movements in the 1960s and 1970s. I read literature, often texts that students would have read in high school, but for various reasons didn’t make their way up to Canadian high schools.
I really appreciated this education, and also all those who recommended texts and aided me in that journey. However, doing so taught me not only about the South, but also gave me language and context to come to a different understanding of the places where I grew up in Canada, and of Canada as a national context.
I am an Anglo and French Canadian. I grew up in a bilingual city, with an Anglo-Canadian mom and a French Canadian dad. An English household, a French name, and a French-centered school, where the clashing of language, culture, religion, food, and customs created a space of multiplicity for me. And I love to dwell in the messiness of this kind of multiplicity, and uphold the ways that it can leave space for difference.
What brought you to philosophy?
I took a somewhat unconventional path to get to studying philosophy. In undergrad, I was a biology major for years. Fortunately, at the small liberal arts school I attended, Trent University, there were only a handful of first-year courses, so I took a year-long philosophy course. I was intrigued by the content and the constant questioning, and of course, being consistently called in by my instructor Dr. Costas Boundas. Not long after, I took a feminist philosophy course with Dr. Emilia Angelova, and I instantly fell in love with the writing of Simone de Beauvoir. At that point, I was hooked. I left the next year for the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (where the Edmund Husserl archives are located) to study phenomenology for a year, and just kept with it.
But I think my upbringing also had a lot to do with my love of philosophy. My parents impressed on me the importance of understanding where things come from, and how things work. So, from a young age, my mom taught me how to grow food. At the age of seven, I was growing turnips in my own garden in the backyard. Similarly, my father taught me how to build a fence; I helped build chicken coops and other kinds of buildings when I was a teen with my dad. These are skills that taught me how to think about origins, process, growth, and function, all of which served to encourage me to be curious and ask why things are the way they are, and how they could be different.
What kinds of philosophical questions interest you?
I think I have always been interested in questions about justice. I have a vague memory of writing an undergraduate paper on Socrates and justice, which I think was one of my first attempts at writing philosophy. While my interests have swayed pretty far from Socrates these days, the centering of justice remains. In particular, I am interested in both the conceptual framing of justice, and the messiness of its praxis or application. This interest led me to social and political philosophy first and foremost, then to feminist theory, Marxism, and then ultimately to decolonial theory. In my effort to engage in decolonial theory, I have also begun studying Indigenous theory, Caribbean theory, queer theory, and trans studies.
Why do you think this work of public-facing philosophy addressing the work and concerns of women philosophers is important?
My interest in philosophy has always been guided by a concern about how philosophy can aid us in understanding our current situation(s), and how it can help us to think through difficult questions, questions that are muddied by lived experiences. And I mean muddied in the best possible way. An implication of this is that I don’t believe philosophy should be done behind closed doors, but that it should be public-facing. It’s in this way that new ideas become possible, and it makes it a more collaborative process, which is a value of philosophy. Having a public-facing space where the work of women in philosophy, and philosophy broadly, is done is a way to partake in a more collaborative process.
There are also various figures in the discipline of philosophy who don’t get a considerable amount of attention, but whose work is equally (or perhaps even more) important for the discipline. Personally, while I enjoyed many of the courses that I took throughout my education, very rarely did I read any people of color and women of color in particular. And I get the impression that this continues to be the case for many philosophy programs across the U.S. and Canada. So, part of the benefit of a public-facing interface like this Blog is a sharing of knowledge of undertheorized philosophers who don’t appear in mainstream spaces.
Third, there is a lot that many marginalized folks don’t talk about when it comes to the profession of philosophy, such as how to negotiate salary, what to look for in a job, how to prepare for your first job, and how to protect your research time (should you be fortunate enough to have it). A lot of this is intergenerational knowledge that doesn’t necessarily get passed on, and a public-facing interface can be a space where some of that knowledge can be made explicit.
What are some ideas that you have for the series? What would you like to see the series doing in the future?
When I talk with my students about what they think philosophy is about, or about what they think a philosopher looks like, many of them bring up the dead white guy stereotype. In other words, that philosophy has only been associated with cis-gender, able-bodied, white, straight men. I try to push against that idea. And I think that this series is a great place to do that kind of work.
For the past eight years, I have been fortunate to work with a series of philosophers through organizing the Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop. Each year, we read a different marginalized philosopher, as much of their corpus as possible, and collectively work towards understanding their work. We have read the works of Sylvia Wynter, Audra Simpson, Gloria Anzaldúa, Christina Sharpe, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Sara Ahmed, Saidiya Hartman, and of course, in 2023 we are reading the work of Angela Davis. In addition to expanding my understanding of theorizations by femmes of colour, part of what I have learned in this process is the value of collaborative thinking.
So, first and foremost, I would like to see the series offer an expansive interpretation of philosophy and philosophers, both historical and present-day figures. Second, I would like to foster a space to share ideas about how to make the practice of philosophy more inclusive. Here I’m thinking of how we approach, write, research, and teach philosophy. Third, I’m interested in the sharing of intergenerational knowledge about how to be in philosophy.
What kinds of things do you do outside of philosophy?
Prior to the pandemic, I was an avid rock climber. Rock climbing taught me many things. It taught me to attend to my body in space. Climbing also taught me different ways of thinking of space and my relation to it, moving beyond a horizontal framework to thinking about my body movement in vertical space.
Second, in order to be a successful climber, you can’t be thinking about the issues that came up at work, or think through texts, and instead you must focus on your body. Focus on small movements your body can make, the way these small moves cause your balance to change, and also focus on your breathing. Everything else falls away. So, it gives me a space to practice focus.
Third, rock climbing (especially indoors) is all about puzzle-solving. You don’t have to have a strong upper body, and in fact, this can actually work against climbers. But instead, small changes in how you hold your body, where and how you balance, and how you move between holds can completely change whether you are able to ascend a rock face.
In a future feminist utopia, what do you think academic philosophy would look like? How would it be different from what it is like today?
I really appreciate this question, and it’s also one that I struggle with in certain regards. As far as what a utopia looks like, I’m not sure that I have a good answer to that question. In part, it is because a feminist utopia would require such a gestalt switch that it seems unimaginable, and yet perhaps also the thing that I am continuously working towards.
That said, feminist futures within academic philosophy is certainly something that I actively think about. The short answer is that a feminist future in academic philosophy would be one that theorizes from lived experiences, but in a way that sits with, or wades through, the messiness of difference that is integral to lived experiences. Of course, historically and today, we might say that philosophers generally theorize about lived experiences: Husserl’s epoché, Hobbes’s description of life as nasty, brutish, and short, and even Plato’s descriptions of love. While difficult in their own right, they don’t yet attend to, or make space for, positions outside of their own, or that may conflict with their own.
For me, a benefit of philosophy, and what I would like to see brought to the forefront of academic philosophy, is how it provides us with tools to think with, alongside, or through conflict.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Alida Liberman is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her research interests include practical ethics, normative ethics, and the space in between, as well as feminist philosophy. She is also interested in philosophical pedagogy and how to make philosophy classrooms more inclusive. You can find out more about her work at www.alidaliberman.com.
Elisabeth Paquette is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at University of Buffalo (SUNY). She works at the intersection of social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and decolonial theory. Her book, titled Universal Emancipation: Race beyond Badiou (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), engages French political theorist Alain Badiou’s discussion of Négritude and the Haitian Revolution to develop a nuanced critique of his theory of emancipation. Currently, she is working on a monograph on the writings of decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter. Her publications can be found in the following journals: Badiou Studies; Philosophy Today; Radical Philosophy Review; Hypatia; philoSOPHIA; and Philosophy Compass. She is the founder of the Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop. She enjoys rock climbing, camping, knitting, and walking the dogs!
