Thank you all, bloggers and commentators.

As we announced April 23, Feminist Philosophers is shutting down. This is one of a series of posts by FP bloggers looking back on the blog and bidding it farewell

I joined the blog about 4 months after Jenny began it. It has meant a lot of different things to me. One major meaningful feature has been the gendered conference campaign, which has also been extended to other venues, such as anthologies. Of course, applying the idea that there should be adequate representation of women has involved a lot of tedious counting. ‘One anthology in Ethics, fifty entries, three by women’ can’t usually be determined to apply in one look. Still, knowing we were addressing an often scandalous situation made it worth while.

When we started the campaign we were faced with a pretty grim picture: conference after conference with men-only invited speakers, volumes in which there were at most a few women. I had to remind myself that philosophy isn’t really a men-only field.

There’s lots more to notice, but I am going to mention only a few.

First, working on Feminist Philosophers has given me many opportunities to learn a lot. Sometimes I’ve become much more aware of areas in which I knew little. Disabilty studies has been one such.

Another thing I’ve come to think as we’ve discussed things is that appeals to intentions or lack thereof veryoften can’t adequately excuse ignorance. In a real sense, intentions may not matter. I think of this every time I hear Joe Biden discuss his touchy behavior. I fear he still fails to have done the work to understand why women have a space problem with grabby men.

Other issues I have had the chance to work out over several years. Through the blog I’ve really had a chance to think a lot about the role of institutions in what can make academic life difficult for women. For example, there’s mobbing.

In the workplace or in academia mobbing is group bullying. It is very harmful to the target
mobbed and also to the group doing the mobbing. It is very tempting in considering mobbing to ask who is at fault. However, people who have studied mobbing see the underlying fault to be more with adminstrations who encourage a wild west ‘might is right’ ethos than with the individuals citizens. It is hard to foster an atmosphere of respect if one doesn’t show such respect.

Another important lesson I think most of us on this blog took to heart is: Don’t suppose you can solve problems in interacting with faculty by appealing to the administration. You could end up with a wrecked career.

As I look through the blog, there seems tobe so much that won’t become quickly date. Have a look!

Finally, let me leave you with a sample of a feature the blog used to have. The Sunday Cat was started nearly 12 years ago, and I think the boom in cute cats on the internet was only just starting. Perhaps, indeed, we were among the innovators. The example below is of Maru, a very beloved cat on the ‘net.

Critical Self-Reflection and Opening Up Philosophy

As we announced April 23, Feminist Philosophers is shutting down. This is one of a series of posts by FP bloggers looking back on the blog and bidding it farewell.

I started blogging here in the summer of 2012, four years into my Ph.D. program. When I began that program in the fall of 2008, I didn’t know much of anything about feminist philosophy, and I didn’t care to know anything about it. I thought gender was a shallow and inconsequential human category, so there was surely nothing interesting for philosophers to say about it. Furthermore, since it seemed like there weren’t many women in philosophy, I had a suspicion that any sub-field dominated by them (applied ethics, feminist philosophy) was probably not that good.

By the time this blog invited me to join, I had had some major shifts in my epistemic and ethical worldviews, and had switched from specializing in philosophy of physics to philosophy of psychology, with plans to write a dissertation on gender & race stereotypes and self-identity. I had discovered, in large part through blogs and connecting with philosophers over social media, that there was, in fact, a lot of interesting things for philosophers to say about gender (and other socially hierarchical categories.) I had also discovered that the demographics of the field were not such an obvious case of how the meritocratic chips had fallen.

Another half a decade later, I view social & feminist epistemology as my intellectual home base. One of my current interests is how phenomena like epistemic injustice and active ignorance may be playing out inside the philosophy profession, especially in terms of boundary policing and teaching practices. While there is so much work left to do, it is also striking to me what has changed since 2008. Many critiques of the profession that would have been laughed at (that I remember being laughed at about) are now taken up seriously in many places. You can even get published (in philosophy journals!) talking about them.

There is still so much work left to do, so much critical self-reflection the discipline needs to undertake. But there are people doing this work, opening up philosophy to new subfields, new methodologies, new conceptions of itself. I would like to highlight some of the work being done to help us let go of these unnecessarily rigid and hierarchical boundaries…though in some cases a more apt analogy may be that people are taking up sledgehammers to those walls and gates.

We report with sadness, We are sad to report…

As we announced April 23, Feminist Philosophers is shutting down. This is one of a series of posts by FP bloggers looking back on the blog and bidding it farewell.

I was invited to join Feminist Philosophers in December of 2007, toward the end of its first year. I had written a report to the APA Committee on the Status of Women about the numbers of women in philosophy in the United States, which seemed to be about 21% of postsecondary instructors in philosophy according to the National Center for Education Statistics (up from 1992 stats suggesting we were 13%!). Jennifer Saul emailed me and said that at FP, I could bring attention to the status of women in philosophy to a wider audience. I didn’t realize how true that was. I didn’t know that the blog was already getting 20,000 views a month, that it would eventually reach closer to 200,000 views a month.

I learned in short order that contributors to the blog were spending enormous amounts of time and emotional labor on nights, on weekends, between classes, before dawn. They were writing each other massive amounts of emails to each other about posts, about comments, about what future topics to discuss, about their responsibilities. Jennifer Saul read everything, replied to all. I engaged gradually, not publishing very regularly until a couple of years in. I entered those vast and earnest oceans of conversation.

Effort didn’t always translate into success. But the correspondence of the women and men who blogged here was an honor to witness. They demonstrated courage when I was hesitant to be so public. They demonstrated receptivity to each other’s points of view when I was still sorting out what I thought. And they kept working, raising to awareness topics that might otherwise be overlooked.

The overlooked can easily include the passing of feminist philosophers. I started volunteering to write our obituaries more often. Jean Harvey. Sara Ruddick. Claudia Card. Sandy Bartky, so soon after Claudia. Vicky Davion, who was just nine years older than me. My write-ups fell into a pattern: We report with sadness. We are sad to report.

I think it’s right to wind this blog down. Many of us are doing so much elsewhere and doing less here. I agree with Jenny Saul and Audrey Yap that the Internet has changed so much that a lot of the purposes this blog used to serve are served well in other places. Public discourse is different now. But I find with some surprise that I regret the shutdown means ceasing these recognitions of lost feminists. I don’t know if there is a better place to pause and say, to those willing to attend, that a feminist philosopher has died, that she gave us her time and labor, that she was courageous, that she was receptive, that she kept working.

And of course, those are just the tenured, well-published individuals that we notice. Feminist goals and philosophical aims are realized by prominent individuals sometimes, but far more often require the work of unknown and countless people, in solitary and collective,unrecognized effort. I realize that’s how most of the work of life gets done.

Individually, we each need some recognition, some acknowledgement that we’re here, if only to continue broad-based struggles. The nicest thing about joining a blog called Feminist Philosophers was that its very title said, with some presumption but with puckish impunity, that we’re here and that we are numerous. A blog asserting the presence of feminist philosophers is a declaration of our existence, and our commenters and contributors pushed us to more and better forms of recognition. Readers have taught me to pay attention more deliberately, even to differences, especially to differences.

I notice you, feminist philosophers who pour invisible hours into efforts. I bet that you are giving, wherever you are. I hope you take vacations. I appreciate some fraction of how much you’ve done. I know you keep working. Take turns and take breaks. Be courageous. Be receptive. Recognize each other.

We support with gladness. We are glad to support.

(Thanks, Jenny.)

These are a few of my favourite posts

As we announced April 23, Feminist Philosophers is shutting down. This is one of a series of posts by FP bloggers looking back on the blog and bidding it farewell.

I’ve never been a very active blogger here, but I’m a very grateful one. And so, inspired by Prof Manners’ wonderful post In Praise of Ceremonial Gratitude, I’m going to demonstrate my gratitude by sharing a few of my favourite posts. All of these have made me think, some have made me smile, and others – which is the greatest compliment of all – have changed my mind. More than anything, the whole blog has changed my mind about an academic field which I left 15 years ago feeling pretty despondent. I’m busy doing other things now, but I’m so happy the field I still love is in better hands.

‘Call out culture’: the case of ableist language

The Ethics of Public Shaming

Cochlear Implants, Viral Videos, and Sexism

What’s wrong with dying?

Thoughts from an assault survivor in philosophy

Social construction and gender identity

Perfect Recipe for Sustaining the Patriarchy, Compliments of God

How to discuss Searle, etc.

Doing Public Philosophy

As we announced April 23, Feminist Philosophers is shutting down. This is one of a series of posts by FP bloggers looking back on the blog and bidding it farewell.

I joined Feminist Philosophers in July 2015, after having written a pair of guest posts at Digressions & Impressions that received some attention, both positive and negative. That was one of my first forays into public philosophy. Here are Part I and Part II of that piece, and my reaction to its reception by some senior men in philosophy can be found here. Rereading those things, what I find striking is that my immediate response was to frame matters in terms of unproductive adversariality, as per Janice Moulton’s critique of the Adversary Method in philosophy. For those unfamiliar with that work, it’s not the same as a call for civility, which I don’t particularly have a lot of faith in either. But it is a criticism of our tendency in philosophy to treat discussions automatically as debates that can (and ought to) be won.

My training is in analytic philosophy, and in particular in the history and philosophy of mathematics. I was hired as our department’s logician, and I still teach a regular slate of logic courses. But at the time I started on at this blog, I was still making the transition over to thinking of feminist philosophy as my primary research area (which it certainly is now). The way I was doing it at the time was through feminist perspectives on informal logic and argumentation theory.

I have been extremely grateful for feminist philosophy, feminist philosophers, and Feminist Philosophers for helping me develop as a professional philosopher. Though I have not been at all prolific here, the connection to the larger community of feminist scholarship has helped me feel as though there is a place in philosophy for someone like me. Though I still love logic and the philosophy of mathematics, it was never a field that felt like home. Being part of this blogging community helped me to think through what a field that felt like home might be.

These days a lot of my work is centred on issues around gendered violence, and the FP post that I still think about was an attempt to work through some thoughts that didn’t yet have a more formal venue. Many of the things that I wrote in a post called Me Too: But What About You? were also part of a paper that came out the same year in Feminist Philosophy Quarterly.

But that FPQ paper was still framed in terms of how we, from the outside, might view perpetrators of gendered violence. What I think about these days has more to do with how we, as ordinary people, are ourselves contributing to violence and upholding oppression. It is really not that hard for us to hurt each other, and we need to come to terms with that without falling into either quietism or unproductive guilt.

I don’t have another regular public venue in which I write down my thoughts. And I have become a bit more pessimistic about blogging as a general way for me to bring about change. That’s not to say we shouldn’t do it – I was very happy to have written this piece for the APA blog relatively recently, for instance. But at the moment, it doesn’t feel like something I can do effectively or on a regular basis.

I think that activism requires a division of labour, and the work that I feel best about these days are smaller scale. Public philosophy is important, and I do think it’s incumbent on those of us who are relatively privileged to keep working to make the world better in whatever ways we can. But that work can take a lot of different forms. It can take the work of public writing. But it can also take the shape of working in our communities and campuses, or of supporting and amplifying the voices of others who need to be heard.

In the meantime, I’m grateful to the Feminist Philosophers community for giving me the opportunity to contribute in whatever ways I have. And I wish us all the best as we each work out the ways in which we are best suited to resist oppression.

Here at Feminist Philosophers…

As we announced April 23, Feminist Philosophers is shutting down. This is one of a series of posts by FP bloggers looking back on the blog and bidding it farewell.

 

I began my first ever post for Feminist Philosophers on June 4, 2012 with the following words: “Here at Feminist Philosophers, we love…”

It doesn’t matter how that sentence ends. What’s striking to me about it now is that in my very first post for a blog that had by then already existed for five years and had already received about four million site views (not a spitball; I just looked it up!), I was cocky enough to make myself perfectly at home in this way.

Some of that was no doubt due to my own bravado, but I think that a larger reason why I acted at home in my first Feminist Philosophers post is that by then, for me, as for countless other women philosophers, the blog really did feel like home. This is no mean feat in a discipline that often feels anything but hospitable to women.

For many women philosophers who felt isolated not only in the discipline but in their home departments, Feminist Philosophers was a crucial lifeline. It helped us to feel part of a scholarly community, but it also helped to change the community in big and small ways.

The blog shared advice, data, and analysis, called out male-only conferences, and fostered much-needed conversations about such topics as implicit bias, stereotype threat, micro-inequities, and sexism in academe. You can get a sense of the scope of the topics, by taking a look at the first page of the blog’s drop-down menu of categories available for each post:

A glimpse of some of the categories available to Feminist Philosophers bloggers.

The blog also celebrated the work of feminist philosophers, and supported feminist philosophers when they were down. (A case in point: a couple of months before I joined the blog, a conservative pundit compared me unfavorably to Stalin. Feminist Philosophers poked gentle fun at the comparison, which helped me to feel like I was sharing a chuckle with savvy women colleagues rather than just being freaked out that somebody hated me enough to write about me as the pundit had.) As well, many readers wrote to the blog for various kinds of confidential advice and support during tough times — support that  they very often received behind the scenes thanks to the wisdom, discretion,  and generosity of some of FP’s senior bloggers.

I have been the beneficiary of the improvements in the discipline wrought by Feminist Philosophers to a much greater extent than I have been a contributor to those changes. I joined five years in, and having only authored 93 posts, I am one of the blog’s less frequent posters. (Ugh! If only I had counted my contributions before today, I could have contrived to go out on my hundredth post. Alas, 94 — this post — will be my last.)

Still, I have been enormously proud to play a tiny part in a blog that has served the discipline so well. While here, I learned a lot more about the contours of the discipline, I cut my teeth on public scholarship, and I wrote some posts that I’m proud of.

I think that the post I’m proudest of writing for Feminist Philosophers was one in which I as a Canadian woman worked through some of the legal issues that were exposed by the acquittal for sexual assault of notorious Canadian broadcaster, Jian Ghomeshi. Here’s a link. I don’t know whether the post was much better than others I wrote, but I do know that other women told me afterwards that they found it a helpful perspective at a difficult time. If we philosophers can occasionally offer a helpful perspective at a difficult time, then that is not a bad thing at all.

These days, most of my public philosophy contributions occur in the realm of academic freedom and campus free expression/speech issues. If you’d like to read some of that work, then check out my Dispatches on Academic Freedom column for University Affairs.

To the creators of Feminist Philosophers, thank you for all you have done to make philosophy a place where more of us feel at home, and thank you for letting me play a small part. I was honoured to join the team, and I am grateful to be able to participate in this final celebration of Feminist Philosophers as it winds down.

 

 

Closing down FP

Feminist Philosophers will soon be ceasing to have new content, but we’ll be keeping old posts up so folks can access them. There are lots of reasons for this. On the positive side, the landscape for feminist and anti-oppression philosophers has dramatically changed during the years we’ve been blogging. There’s just so much more going on on, online and off, that this blog is not nearly so needed– there are lots of places to go to find out about this stuff and engage with like-minded folks. There’s also the general cultural shift from blogs to social media. Blogs still exist, but a lot of what they used to do is now done on social media. But it would be deceptive to say these were the only reasons. You’ve probably noticed that in recent times only a few of us have been posting– we’re all more and more busy and less able to blog. But again, that’s not the whole story. Many of us, myself included, have become increasingly pessimistic about the potential for internet-based discussions of difficult issues to help us make philosophical and real-world progress. And if I don’t think blogs are a good place to discuss stuff, it becomes a little odd to keep a blog going. Not all of us agree with this, and there may be spin-off blogs by some of our more optimistic members, which we’ll link to. But this site will soon no longer be hosting blog posts. I feel OK about this, and really good about what we’ve accomplished, but I think the time for this blog is now past and we’ve all got other projects underway.

Over the next week or so, we’ll have some posts reflecting on what we’ve done. We hope you’ll enjoy them!