Feminism as critique

Comments on Johanna Oksala's Feminist experiences

Amy Allen

pp. 115-123

in: Continental Philosophy Review 52 (1), 2019.

Abstract

Johanna Oksala’s sharp and incisive new book offers a defense of the ongoing importance, richness, and vitality of feminist philosophy on two fronts. Her defense offers a compelling response both to conservative critics who maintain that feminist philosophy is a contradiction in terms—because feminism is a partisan political movement whereas philosophy is allegedly a disinterested search for timeless, universal truths—and to colleagues in gender and cultural studies who see philosophy as too conservative a discipline to facilitate cutting edge feminist research. Oksala defines feminist philosophy as a form of immanent social critique whose main goal is “to expose, analyze, criticize, and ultimately change the power relations that produce and organize society, or more fundamentally reality, in a way that makes it unequal or unjust for beings who are constructed and classified as women.”1To my mind, perhaps the most interesting feature of this definition—though it remains mostly...

Cited authors

Oksala Johanna