Could you tell us more about yourself? What do you think our readers should know about you?
About myself? I am a daughter, sister, friend, spouse, scholar, artist, educator, activist, fitness enthusiast, traveler, plant parent, and reality TV consumer, among many other things. In this context, I would introduce myself as a South African-born and raised Black woman philosopher. I earned my undergraduate degree as a dual major in Political Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) as an Allan Gray Fellow in 2014, my honors (dual in Philosophy and Politics) in 2015, and my master’s (in Philosophy) degree at the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS) as a Mandela Rhodes Scholar in 2017. I completed my Ph.D. (dual-title in Philosophy and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) at Penn State in 2024, and I now hold a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southwestern University, where I teach undergraduate courses such as Critical Philosophy of Race, Feminist Philosophy, Philosophy of Love and Sex, and Critical Thinking. I also hold a research affiliation with the Nelson Mandela University Center for Women and Gender Studies, and I coordinate and moderate the African Feminist Initiative’s Virtual Dialogues at Pennsylvania State University. Moreover, I have curated an A-Z Philosophy BlackList and am currently writing my first monograph, which reads South African Black women’s Apartheid-era autobiographies as philosophical and political texts and builds an intersectional account of Apartheid from them.
Beyond that, readers should know that I stay intellectually curious and I enjoy learning from others and immersing myself in unfamiliar contexts. I speak five languages, and I am actively learning a sixth. I have taught at four universities across the United States and South Africa, lived in four cities between the two countries, visited 15 U.S. states, and traveled to more than 10 countries since I received my first passport in 2018.
What brought you to philosophy?
Like most people, I did not know what philosophy was when I arrived at university. Because of Apartheid’s harms, I am the first person in my family to attend university, let alone earn a doctorate. So I came to philosophy by chance. It was a mandatory elective in my undergraduate pathway, which at the time was a B.A. in Law. I changed majors along the way to Political Science and kept philosophy as a second major because I enjoyed the content and because my professors at the University of Johannesburg were fantastic educators who took a keen interest in my intellectual curiosity.
What kinds of philosophical questions interest you?
These have shifted over the years, and my context has shaped them. As an undergraduate, I was curious about justice and race, again a result of growing up in Apartheid’s immediate afterlives. I recall sitting among roughly six hundred first-year students in an ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ lecture at the University of Johannesburg, reading Jostein Gaarder’s novel Sophie’s World. The novel follows a Norwegian teenager who receives anonymous letters from a philosophy tutor and, through that correspondence, walks the reader through the history of so-called ‘Western philosophy’ from the pre-Socratics onward. The professor’s teaching of the text (not surprisingly—see Mabogo More’s interview on South African philosophy) was far removed from the South African context. Granted, that is not the text’s job; the book introduces so-called Western philosophy in ways that present that tradition as universalizable. If my memory is correct, at one point, Sophie asks what justice is, and the answer serves to introduce theories of justice.
It matters, though, to situate Sophie’s World in the society it was taught: within Apartheid’s afterlives where most of the students in that lecture hall, like me, were the first in our families to attend university. We traveled at least an hour each way to sit in those seats. That same year, a Black mother, Gloria Sekwena, died outside the gates at UJ. She was 47, a nurse, and she had come to UJ with her son to compete for one of the few first-year places left; sadly, she was trampled to death, and 22 others were injured. The university had received 85,000 applications for 11,000 places, and roughly 6,000 late applicants were queuing for about 800 remaining spots. Where is the justice for that woman? How do we define justice in a context marked by such severe racial and gender stratification?
Those questions show up differently in my work now, because I have found the philosophical language to articulate them. I am interested in systems of oppression and in how we might best reveal their intersectional nature. These extend to epistemologies of resistance, ignorance, and refusal.
Why do you think this work of public-facing philosophy, addressing the work and concerns of identity, sexuality, gender, and women philosophers, is important?
For several reasons. Such work demonstrates how little has changed, while also providing a platform that highlights the labor of challenging the erasure and misperception of women philosophers. I also believe this work belongs in the public domain, because higher education is public-facing work and does not operate outside the public it serves. One of my earliest pieces in public philosophy was an essay I co-wrote with Zinhle Mncube on the importance of identity and race in South African philosophy, published in the Mail & Guardian. We wrote it after Mpho Tshivhase received her doctorate at the University of Johannesburg in 2018, and the press celebrated her as the first Black or African woman in South Africa to do so, a description that drew immediate contention because other Black South African women had earned that degree before her. Rather than settle the question of who came first, we argued that the racial distinctions within Blackness matter, and that homogenizing Blackness obscures the very different conditions Apartheid produced for Black African, Colored, and Indian people. We closed with the numbers on who actually staffs South African philosophy departments (which, to date, remain very white and male) and with our own accounts of why we stayed. Since then, Zinhle and I have completed our doctorates and are currently employed in the U.S. That piece offered insight to many readers who assume that our visibility equals change, when it often does not.
My recent essay, “But, Is She (bell hooks) a Philosopher?,” does similar work. The essay moves through a series of (re)memories, among them the moment a philosopher responded to my dissertation research on Black South African women’s autobiographies by asking where the philosophy was. In there, I also call out the various forms of sexism and sexual harassment within the field. Various folks who work outside of academia expressed their shock. People often expect better and assume that our visibility means change, but these experiences run deeper than our profession. That is precisely why we should keep writing about them: to draw awareness. Addressing this work on this platform also lets people identify their allies in the profession.
What are some ideas that you have for the series? What would you like to see the series doing in the future?
I want more contributors based outside North America. I would also like the series to make room for other forms of philosophizing: creative essays, poetry, and photography, for example. Doing philosophy takes many forms, and we should embrace that.
What kinds of things do you do outside of philosophy?
A lot. I think of philosophy as a job and a profession, not as who I am, but as a part of me. So I read creative literature by African and Black women, and I indulge in television: 90 Day Fiancé, Married at First Sight (both the U.S. and South African versions), Love Is Blind, and Bravo content like The Real Housewives and Below Deck. I cook, and I spend time with family and friends. I also belong to that odd tribe who enjoy intense workouts at 5 a.m., which for me means cycling, road running (I am a half-marathoner), and yoga (I hold a 200-hour certification).
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?
That one is tough. I sit on the fence about the label “feminist,” given feminism’s exclusions and contentions. I simply look forward to working in a profession that is intellectually curious, respectful, and humble.
The Gender, Sexuality, and Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender, gender identity, and sexuality, issues of gender and sexuality injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender and sexuality 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 co-Editors Elisabeth Paquette or Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse.
Elisabeth Paquette is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She works at the intersection of social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, queer theory, and decolonial theory. Her book, 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. She is also the Assistant Director of philoSOPHIA: A Society for Transcontinental Feminism, co-director of The Kristeva Circle, Series Editor of the American Philosophical Associations Women in Philosophy Blog, co-editor of the journal Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, and the founder and director of A Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop.
Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse
Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southwestern University and is affiliated with the SARChI Chair in African Feminist Imagination at Nelson Mandela University. They also serve as coordinator and moderator of the African Feminist Initiative’s virtual dialogues and co-editor of the, Gender, Sexuality, and Women in Philosophy series. Zinhle has published in various academic journals, including Critical Philosophy of Race and Feminist Formations, and has written several public-facing essays published in Caliban’s Blog, AfricaIsNotACountry, and the APA Blog of Philosophy.
