#oksala

[hypostaticvoid]

Johanna Oksala - Feminist Experiences This bracketing operation has two important qualifications, though: it needs to be done immanently, and it has to be transcendental in orientation for Oksala. Towards the first part, this means that the phenomenological bracketing can't be a type of thinking that somehow removes me from the situation that grounds the possibility of my thinkings (in the same way that if I bracket off a statement, such as this very parenthetic statement, I don't remove my words from the trajectory of the sentence that it's embedded in, but do create some space - immanently - that allows me to think otherwise). There is no outside of my experience that I can somehow reach and philosophize from, and to think of my philosophical work as somehow separate from the topic I'm thinking about is a grave error. We have to be dialectical: my thought and the topic I'm thinkin of co-produce and effect one another in the process of thinking. The dream of the outside (at least in the this context - let's not be too dogmatic) is a false dream. Towards the second part, this phenomenology needs to be transcendental in the Kantian sense. This means that I can't just vaguely kind of wonder "oh, why am I thinking this thing? Why am I viewing this thing in this way?" but I instead have to critically interrogate the theoretical foundations that allow me to have that very experience in the first place. The transcendental gesture isn't one of transcendence, per se - which is a fact of terminology that's admittedly very annoying - but only designates a type of thought that tries to figure out the necessary conditions for certain ways of thinking. (This can have far reaching consequences. If I think that the coffee I just got was too expensive, say, then the conditions of my experience of that relies on various forms of wage labor, commodity production, relations of exchange, etc. And if I find the coffee to be too hot, that's predicated on certain temperature norms regulated by a certain intensity threshold for heat that my tongue has, along with a biological constitution that allows for sensory perception in the first place, among many other things of course.)

[hypostaticvoid]

The question that I ask and attempt to answer in this chapter is this: how can phenomenology as a philosophical method of investigation account for gender? Although many feminists have expressed reservations about the possibility that the master's tools could ever dismantle the master's house, phenomenology as a philosophical method seems to have provided exceptionally useful tools for feminist inquiry. From Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex to recent studies on feminine corporeality, it has formed a significant part of the growing corpus of feminist philosophy. Yet it is in no way obvious how it could account for the question of gender. To what extent is it possible to study gender within the paradigm of a philosophy of a subject or of consciousness?

Johanna Oksala, Feminist Experiences: Foucauldian and Phenomenological Investigations (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2016). 97. Emphasis mine.

That last line really highlights why this is the exact wrong question to be asking. To begin from the assumption that gender can be articulated from within a philosophy of the subject or within consciousness is to already take gender to be a subject position or a particular kind of conscious experience. That is, it moves away from the actually important question of how gender becomes a subject position and how gender, as a produced subject position within a social formation, engenders a certain kind of conscious experience. In other words, it begs the question of the production of gender: it assumes that gender can be articulated in a certain way instead of asking how gender is produced in the first place. This is a weakness of phenomenology generally, and is part of the reason that I’ve been continually moving from it.