ESPF Colloquium, Anthony Vincent Fernandez (University of Southern Denmark)

'Feminist Phenomenology and Essentialism: Steps Toward a Phenomenology of Particularity'

Phenomenology is often characterized as a study of the essential or universal structures of subjectivity and the lived world, such as selfhood, affectivity, and temporality. Today, those who follow in this philosophical tradition devote themselves to rigorously describing and explicating these essential structures, distinguishing, for instance, the minimal from the normative self; various kinds of affective states, such as moods, feelings, and emotions; and the myriad components of temporal experience. Almost since phenomenology’s inception, however, we find a parallel research program concerned with human particularity and difference, applying insights from phenomenology to better understand particular ways of being in the world. Today, this research continues with studies of racial oppression, feminine styles of embodiment, infancy and childhood, and life with a chronic illness or disability, among several other topics.

However, despite the popularity of these kinds of studies, there’s no established account of the relationship between classical studies of the essence of subjectivity, on the one hand, and studies of particular subjects, on the other. In this presentation, I resolve some existing confusions over the nature of this relationship and introduce a framework that reconciles the two projects in a mutually complementary way. To do so, I engage primarily with field of feminist phenomenology, which has cultivated a sophisticated and sustained debate over how—and even whether—phenomenology should be used to study particular subjects.