UW Department of Philosophy

The University of Waterloo Humphrey Professor in Feminist Philosophy 2004

Dr. Marilyn Frye Michigan State University

Dr. Frye is teaching two courses:

PHIL 402: Feminist Philosophy

PHIL 673: Graduate Reading course: This course will be devoted to the work of Rosi Braidotti.

For more information on either course please contact Dr. Frye at mfrye@uwaterloo.ca.

Dr. Frye is also giving two public lectures:

Lecture 1: Wednesday, June 2, 3:00 in HH 373

Topic: "Ignorant Agency: On Not Knowing What You're Doing"

Among race theorists and feminist theorists attention has recently been focused on “epistemologies of ignorance,” a notion introduced by the philosopher Charles Mills in The Racial Contract. Epistemologies of ignorance are processes, strategies and norms that produce and maintain ignorance. Much of this work attends to examples such as ignorance of the health hazards associated with many consumer products, ignorance of the fact that agents of the U.S. government deliberately spread smallpox among the Indians. But my attention in this paper is on another zone of not-knowing, viz., that of not-knowing what one is doing. The construction of ignorance seems typically to involve the ignorant subject’s collusion; in the case of not knowing what one is doing, that collusion becomes even more puzzling. My exemplary case involves white feminist women stealing a discussion from a woman of color, and not knowing they are doing it. (There are also examples of men’s similar “ignorant” enactments of sexism.) I distinguish this example from other cases of not knowing what one is doing, and I introduce a particular notion of the multiplicity of the self (drawn from the work of María Lugones) to help make sense of the construction of ignorance is such a case.

Lecture 2: Wednesday, June 23, 3:00 in HH 373

Topic: "Category trouble: helping feminist theory of a bind"

Feminist theory has been troubled by concerns about its key analytic category, women. It has seemed that any definition of it would commit the theory to one form or other of what is deplored as "essentialism," and that constant reflexive suspicion of it would devastatingly weaken both theory and political practice. But most of the discourse in which the feminist category women has been acutely problematized works with an obsolete and blunt conception of what categories are (dovetailed with a wrong theory of meaning), a conception whose genealogy goes as far back as Aristotle. In this paper I address some questions about what categories are, and the implications of this for social categories, gender categories, and what the category women might be. This takes me through some ideas about species, sets, meaning and "strategic essentialism." I suggest that there is not one thing that is "what categories are," and that it is useful to think of categories simultaneously through a number of different metaphors and models.