For over thirty years now, reclamations of historical womens philosophical writing have provided us with more access to the work of women who have largely not been represented in philosophical history. Yet, within the field of reclamation, the mechanisms of womens exclusion from philosophy have not been sufficiently theorized. Without that theorization, I argue, reclamation risks contributing to the exclusion of women from philosophy. Reclamation must begin its work with the question of exclusion. In this dissertation, I show how that can be done with the work of three thinkers of womens exclusion, Luce Irigaray, Genevieve Lloyd, and Michèle Le Doeuff. I use their theories to generate models of engaging womens writing that transform philosophical practice to overcome its constitution through the exclusion of women. Then, I use the perspective gained on exclusion to engage the Seneca Falls Declaration and Sojourner Truths speech at the 1851 Ohio Womens Rights Convention.
For Irigaray, the logic of discourse makes it impossible for feminine subjectivity to speak. Yet, the logic of discourse can be changed, and Irigaray shows how attention to womens writing can be a crucial strategy for transforming it. With Lloyds approach, womens writing cannot enter philosophical history without significant revision of the concept of reason. Lloyd offers a means of reconceptualizing reason through historical critique. For Le Doeuff, womens writing did make transformative demands, and offer alternatives in light of them, but we are unlikely to know that history. We must now imagine our way into that lost history, and Le Doeuff offers a means for doing so.
By comparing the advantages, limitations, and potential collaboration of these approaches, both in abstract analysis and through concrete engagement with the Seneca Falls Declaration and Truths speech, my intent is not to declare one method the winner, but to help elucidate how the reclamation of womens writing can proceed. Through this comparative work, however, I also hope to show the stakes of how reclamation is approached. Although I do not aim to provide a single answer, I hope to show the urgency of the question: how should we reclaim womens writing?
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-06292011-085710 |
| Date | 28 July 2011 |
| Creators | Tyson, Sarah Katherine |
| Contributors | Gregg Horowitz, Lisa Guenther, Kelly Oliver |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-06292011-085710/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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