Phenomenology, post-structuralism, and feminist theory on the concept of experience

Linda Martín Alcoff

pp. 39-56

in: Linda Fisher, Lester Embree (eds), Feminist phenomenology, Berlin, Springer, 2000

Abstract

I take it as a given that phenomenology needs feminism. There has been some excellent work by feminist theorists, some of whom I will discuss briefly in this paper, showing that the body of phenomenological work in the canon has been indelibly imprinted with a masculine orientation in its development of the constitutive categories of experience. This suggests that if the phenomenological tradition is to continue in any useful way, and avoid becoming a mere artifact in the museum of philosophical history, it needs to acknowledge and explore the ways in which it has been affected by masculine and, I would also argue, racialized and Eurocentric assumptions.