Texas A&M's 3rd Annual International Virtual Conference of Philosophy (Published Proceedings)

Response to Olivia Leroux Hunter Roy Texas A&M University Present in the feminist movement is a contradiction between its nominal expression and its intentions. Mapping out the development of feminism through post-colonial discourse and contemporary discourse, as well as through their own experiences as a feminist, Olivia Leroux presents a compelling argument as to why the word feminism is no longer beneficial. The central argument of this paper relies on two essential premises: that feminism’s eurocentrism is inherently exclusionary, and that feminism’s exclusivity fails to address the issues of gender-oppressed groups. In this response I will focus on summarizing the essential claims of the paper while exploring the implications of laying blame on the nominal for issues relating to a lack of humanism in feminism.

The first section of the paper intends to demonstrate the exclusionary nature of the word feminism. An important observation the author makes is that language presents to us a unique difficulty that arises not from the words available to us but instead from the meanings that are assigned to our words. By illustrating that the meaning of political language—such as feminism—can be manipulated to benefit specific groups, the author prepares us for a critique. An example that further demonstrates the failures of words to serve their original purpose is emergence of intersectional theory in feminist thought. In intersectional theory, key identities such as race, gender, and class are argued to affect one’s day-to-day lived experience.

The conflict described in the text revolves around the failure of a Western feminist to perceive other key aspects of a Muslim woman’s identity, such as religion, culture, and political circumstances. As a result, the woman’s choice to wear a veil is misunderstood as oppression and not an expression of religious agency. If womanhood as agency is a definition limited to European forms of expression, then certainly there are internal issues in feminist thought that need attention. Yet, I hesitate to cast blame on language. The manner in which feminism is characterized in the text seems to refer to feminism in the West and not in other parts of the world. If the chief concern is the Eurocentric influence on Western feminism, it appears that this feminism should be our area of focus and not feminism globally. In the text 65