Purple Brains: Feminisms at the Limits of Philosophy

Annabelle Dufourcq; Annemie Halsema; Katrine  Smiet; Karen  Vintges; María Isabel Peña Aguado; Beata Stawarska; Anya Topolski; Christina Schües; Silvia Stoller; Rose Trappes; Alex Thinius; Annelies Kleinherenbrink; Hannah Marije Altorf; Desiree Verweij; Marli Huijer; Aoife McInerney; Marieke Borren; Cris van der Hoek; Johanna Oksala

doi:10.54195/HSOV8373

Purple Brains: Feminisms at the Limits of Philosophy

Authors

Annabelle Dufourcq (ed)

Radboud University, Nijmegen

Annemie Halsema (ed)

Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam

Katrine Smiet (ed)

Radboud University, Nijmegen

Karen Vintges (ed)

University of Amsterdam

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373

Keywords:

feminist theory, feminist philosophy, gender theory, race, racism,, sexism and misogyny, oppresssion and resistance, environment, climate change, neuropsychology, brain theories

Synopsis

Feminist philosophy seems to always exceed its own limits – it is dynamic, shifting, and in dialogue with other academic disciplines. The adjective “feminist” marks not so much a specific subfield of philosophy or topic that is studied, but a political sensibility, an engagement in practicing philosophy. The playful title ‘Purple Brains’ indicates a thinking that goes beyond established binaries, notably the gender binary signified by the colors pink and blue.

As feminists, we face the challenge of finding our own place and inventing ways to understand and overcome discrimination and exclusion. Situated within a world we want to change, feminists cannot afford to reject unlikely interlocutors out of hand, but must instead engage in interdisciplinary, intergenerational and cross-fertilizing dialogues.

This volume brings together 19 articles that practice feminist philosophy through an engagement with the work of Dutch philosopher Veronica Vasterling. As one of the pioneering women philosophers active in Dutch academia since the mid-1980s, Vasterling explicitly expanded her outlook to embrace feminist themes and authors. She stands out as a prominent figure in the exploration of the boundaries of feminism through critical dialogue across multiple perspectives. Her work not only explores neuropsychology through a feminist lens but also extends into domains such as critical phenomenology of gender and race, critical hermeneutics, and subjects including sexual difference, the philosophical oeuvre of Hannah Arendt, and that of Judith Butler.

Chapters

Introduction

Annabelle Dufourcq, Annemie Halsema, Katrine Smiet, Karen Vintges

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/nx7mnt81

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Room for Thought
Symbolic Space and Narrative Experience

María Isabel Peña Aguado

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH01

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Vulnerability and Violence
Transgressing the Gender Binary

Beata Stawarska

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH02

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What Do Women Have to Do with It?
Race, Religion, and the Witch Hunts

Anya Topolski

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH03

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Power, Sex, and Myth
Beauvoir, Paglia, and Peterson

Karen Vintges

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH04

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In Praise of Ambiguity

Christina Schües

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH05

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The Gender That Is None
Some Daring Reflections on the Concept of Gender in Beauvoir, Irigaray, and Butler

Silvia Stoller

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH06

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The Easy Difference
Sex in Behavioral Ecology

Rose Trappes

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH07

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Sex-Gender in Life-Science Research
Conceptual Renegotiations and an Enactivist Vision

Alex Thinius

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH08

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His and Hers Healthcare?
(Strategic) Essentialism and Women’s Health

Annelies Kleinherenbrink

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH09

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Cis- and Transgender Identities
Beyond Habituation and the Search for Social Existence

Annemie Halsema

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH10

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Light and Dark
Intersections of Gender and Race in Butler and Lugones

Katrine Smiet

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH11

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Rereading Eichmann in Jerusalem

Hannah Marije Altorf

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH12

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‘Amor Mundi’ Threatened?
War and the ‘Darkness of the Human Heart’

Desiree Verweij

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH13

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At Home in the World
Hannah Arendt’s Transposition of Saint Augustine’s Concept of Love

Marli Huijer

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH14

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Arendtian Understanding and Feminism

Aoife McInerney

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH15

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From the Politics of Compassion to Imagination
Hannah Arendt on Collectivized Affect

Marieke Borren

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH16

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From Animal Laborans to Animal Agora
Hannah Arendt and the Political Turn in Animal Ethics

Cris van der Hoek

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH17

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Climate Change as an Existential Threat
Environmental Politics in the Shadow of Nihilism

Johanna Oksala

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH18

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Puppets’ Uprising
Passive-Active Ethics Within the Trap of Play

Annabelle Dufourcq

DOI: https://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH19

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Author Biographies

Annabelle Dufourcq, Radboud University, Nijmegen

Annabelle Dufourcq is Associate Professor of Metaphysics and Philosophical Anthropology in the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, and Socrates Special Professor of Philosophy at Wageningen University, also in the Netherlands. She studies the relation between the real and the imaginary in contemporary continental philosophy, and has a special interest in the phenomenological approach. She is currently investigating the fundamental relation between human imagination and the imaginative capacities of non-human animals in connection with the project of non-anthropocentric humanities. Her books include La dimension imaginaire du réel dans la philosophie de Husserl (Springer 2010), Merleau-Ponty: une ontologie de l’imaginaire (Springer 2012), and The Imaginary of Animals (Routledge 2021).

Annemie Halsema, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam

Annemie Halsema is Socrates Professor of Philosophical Anthropology and the Foundations of Humanism at the Institute for Philosophy of Leiden University, and an associate professor of philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. She has written two books on Luce Irigaray (1998 and 2010) and has published edited volumes on Judith Butler’s work (2000 and 2021) and on feminism and Ricoeur (2016). She has also had articles published in Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Women’s Health Reports, The American Journal of Bioethics, Hypatia, Études Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies.

Katrine Smiet, Radboud University, Nijmegen

Katrine Smiet is Assistant Professor at the faculty of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the history/historiography of feminist debates, intersectionality scholarship, and feminist pedagogies. She is the author of Sojourner Truth and Intersectionality: Travelling Truths in Feminist Scholarship (Routledge 2021) and has published in The European Journal of Women’s Studies and Postcolonial Studies.

Karen Vintges, University of Amsterdam

Karen Vintges is Associate Researcher at the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research at the University of Amsterdam. For over 40 years she was Assistant Professor in Social and Political Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Her books include Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (Indiana UP 1996), Feminism and the Final Foucault (edited by D. Taylor and K. Vintges, University of Illinois Press 2004), A New Dawn for the Second Sex: Women’s Freedom Practices in World Perspective (Amsterdam UP 2017), Beauvoir and Politics: A Toolkit (edited by L. Schoonheim and K. Vintges. Routledge 2024).

María Isabel Peña Aguado, Institute of Philosophy of the Diego Portales University, Santiago de Chile

María Isabel Peña Aguado is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the Diego Portales University, Santiago de Chile. She works on aesthetics, feminism and gender studies, as well as on political theory. Some selected publications are Das ‘schöne’ Denken: Der Ort des Weiblichen in Philosophie, Ästhetik und Literatur (2014), “Body Indeterminate: The Precariousness of the Body in Feminist Discourse” (2015), “El feminismo y sus caballos de Troya” (2016), Filósofas en con-texto (2016) and “Antígona, de mito androcéntrico a símbolo feminista. Una reflexión” (2021).

Beata Stawarska, University of Oregon

Beata Stawarska is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon, USA. She engages with thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Saussure, J. L. Austin, Beauvoir, Kristeva, Irigaray, and others. Selected publications include Between You and I: Dialogical Phenomenology (Ohio UP 2009) and Saussure’s Philosophy of Language as Phenomenology: Undoing the Doctrine of the Course in General Linguistics (Oxford UP 2014). Her research focuses on embodiment, gender and sexual difference, race and anti-racism, expression and performativity, as well as on the historiography of linguistics and the making (and re-making) of an established canon of philosophy.

Anya Topolski, Radboud University, Nijmegen

Anya Topolski is Associate Professor in Ethics and Political Philosophy at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her current research focuses on the race-religion constellations in Europe, past and present. Related publications include: “The Race-Religion Intersection: A European Contribution to the Critical Philosophy of Race” (2018), and “Good Jew, Bad Jew… ‘Managing’ Europe’s Others” (2017). Her most recent books are: Arendt, Levinas and a Politics of Relationality (Rowman and Littlefield 2015) and Is There a Judeo-Christian Tradition? A European Perspective (De Gruyter 2016). Her areas of expertise are racism, political philosophy, ethics, European identity and exclusion, antisemitism and Islamophobia, political theology, Jewish thought, Arendt, Levinas, and the myth of Judeo-Christianity.

Christina Schües, University of Lübeck

Christina Schües is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Science Studies at the University of Lübeck and she is an Honorary Professor at the Institute for Philosophy and Art Sciences at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. Her research explores the intersection between phenomenology, the life sciences and the political, and theories of peace. She is known for her work on natality and her present research explores strategies of immunization, ignorance, and indifference. Her recent publications include Genetic Responsibility in Germany and Israel (Colombia UP 2023), “Phenomenology and the Political – Injustice and Prejudges” (2018), “Vulnerability and Trust” (2020), and “La transcendance et les difficultés de l’ambiguïté” (2022).

Silvia Stoller, University of Vienna

Silvia Stoller is Assistant Professor (Universitätsdozentin) at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria, and at the Department of Educational Science at the University of Graz, Austria. She received her doctorate at the University of Vienna with a dissertation on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception (1992). She received a second PhD cum laude from Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands) with a work on feminist phenomenology (2006). Her research areas include phenomenology, feminist philosophy, gender studies, feminist phenomenology, masculinity studies, and philosophical anthropology (pain, love, age, laughter, play).

Rose Trappes, University of Exeter

Rose Trappes is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. Rose works in the philosophy of science and feminist philosophy. Broadly situated in the ontology and epistemology of biology, Rose’s work covers topics such as individuality and individualized research methods, ecological niches, sex differences and sex-based explanations, data-intensive ecology, and open science. Some of her recent publications are “Defining the Niche for Niche Construction: Evolutionary and Ecological Niches” (2021), “Individual Differences, Uniqueness, and Individuality in Behavioral Ecology” (2022), and “How Tracking Technology is Transforming Animal Ecology: Epistemic Values, Interdisciplinarity, and Technology-Driven Scientific Change” (2023).

Alex Thinius, Harvard University

Alex Thinius is a philosopher and interdisciplinary socio-cultural researcher, specializing in conceptions of sex-gender. In 2023, they are Rubicon Postdoctoral Fellow at the GenderSci Lab at Harvard University, researching “The Reconceptualization of Sexual Difference.” Alex completed a PhD titled Genders as Genres at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. They have since lectured at the Universiteit van Amsterdam in the departments of Literary and Cultural Analysis and Philosophy.

Annelies Kleinherenbrink, Radboud University, Nijmegen

Annelies Kleinherenbrink is Assistant Professor of Gender and Diversity in Artificial Intelligence at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her work engages with the interactions between science and society from a critical feminist perspective, with a specific focus on human classification and social inequality in the realms of neuroscience, psychology, biomedicine, and AI. She is currently working on an NWO-funded project titled “AI for Women’s Health? Troubling Categories of Sex and Gender in Medical Machine Learning.”

Hannah Marije Altorf, University of Chichester

Hannah Marije Altorf is a research fellow at the Iris Murdoch Research Centre, University of Chichester. She has written on the philosophical and literary works of Iris Murdoch and different forms of philosophical dialogue. She is the author of Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imagining (Continuum 2008) and, together with Mariëtte Willemsen, she translated The Sovereignty of Good into Dutch (Boom 2003). She is an experienced facilitator of Socratic dialogues in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Germany and is writing a book on public philosophy, tentatively called Thinking in Public.

Desiree Verweij, Radboud University and Netherlands Defense Academy

Desiree Verweij is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Ethics at the Netherlands Defense Academy and the Centre for International Conflict Analysis and Management at the Radboud University Nijmegen. Her research is on both fundamental and applied ethics and concerns themes like “moral judgment”, “responsibility”, “human rights”, and the Just War tradition. Some of her recent publications are: “On ‘Caritas’ and the Promise of ‘Right Intent.’ Back to the Roots of Justice in War” (2019), “Mores Fare and the Resilience Paradox. Ethics as the Terra Incognita of Hybrid Warfare,” In Violence in Extreme Conditions: Ethical Challenges in Military Practice, edited by E. Kramer and T. Molendijk. Springer 2023 (published on the occasion of her retirement as Professor of Philosophy and Ethics). The last book she co-edited and contributed to was Ethics and Military Practice, published in both Dutch (Boom 2020) and English (Brill 2022).

Marli Huijer, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Marli Huijer is Professor Emeritus of Public Philosophy at the Erasmus School of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Huijer studied Philosophy and Medicine (University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit). She obtained a doctorate in philosophy in 1996, with a dissertation on “Aids and Michel Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence.” Her research focuses on the public role of philosophy, order and time in human affairs (rhythm, discipline), the philosophy of science and technology, and gender and biomedical sciences. Her books include De toekomst van het sterven [The future of dying] (2022), Beminnen [To love] (2018); Discipline (in Dutch 2013; in German 2016), and Ritme (in Dutch 2011; in German 2017).

Aoife McInerney, Radboud University Nijmegen, University of Limerick

Aoife McInerney is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy at both the University of Limerick, Ireland, and Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research centers on the philosophy of Hannah Arendt and its intersection with the phenomenological tradition. Her project investigates the resources within Arendt’s work for the successful navigation of both the political and, more generally, the natural world, in the face of current ecological crises. Her research interests include political philosophy, phenomenology, continental philosophy, feminism, and the philosophy of culture. Her project is funded by the Irish Research Council and the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship. Her recent publications include “Reconceiving Solidarity in the Wake of Plurality” (2022).

Marieke Borren, Open University

Marieke Borren is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Open University, the Netherlands. Her research expertise lies at the intersection of continental political philosophy and phenomenology. She is particularly interested in critical feminist and postcolonial perspectives. She has widely published on Hannah Arendt’s political phenomenology, on which she wrote her dissertation under the supervision of Veronica Vasterling. She recently guest-edited the special issue ‘People on Streets. Critical Phenomenologies of Embodied Resistance’ of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (2024, with Maria Robaszkiewicz). Her most recent publications include ‘Resisting Bodies: Between the Politics of Vulnerability and “We-Can” (2024) and ‘Why Should We Care? Care for the World as Proto-Normative Commitment to Political Action and Judgment.’ (2023)

Cris van der Hoek, Utrecht University and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences

Cris van der Hoek has been teaching political philosophy and media studies at Utrecht University and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. She chairs the Society for Women in Philosophy in the Netherlands (SWIP) and is editor of the journal Wijsgerig Perspectief. She has widely published in the field of feminist philosophy and authored the monograph Een Bewuste Paria (Boom 2000), in which feminist philosophical dialogues with Hannah Arendt are staged and discussed.

Johanna Oksala, Loyola University Chicago

Johanna Oksala is Arthur J. Schmitt Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. Her areas of expertise are political philosophy, feminist philosophy, environmental philosophy, Foucault, and phenomenology. Her books include Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge UP 2005), How to Read Foucault (Granta Books 2007), Foucault, Politics, and Violence (Northwestern UP 2012), Political Philosophy: All That Matters (Hodder and Stoughton 2013), Feminist Experiences (Northwestern UP 2016) and Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology (Northwestern UP 2023).