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  • Margaret Whitford (1947–2011)
  • D.K.

Margaret Whitford, who died from ovarian cancer on 18 July 2011, was a feminist scholar in the vanguard of the interdisciplinarity we now take for granted within French studies. Trained as a philosopher, she taught in the French Department at Queen Mary, University of London from 1977 until her early retirement in 2006. She became well known throughout the anglophone world as the leading interpreter of the complex system of thought of the feminist philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray. From the early 1980s, as a founding member of the Society for Women in Philosophy, she devoted extraordinary intellectual and organizational energy to its research activities; in 2000 she embraced the new challenge (both conceptual and personal) of a demanding part-time training as a psychoanalytical psychotherapist at the Lincoln Centre for Psychotherapy. She qualified in 2005 and began to take on her own patients, as well as accepting appointment to the panel of specialist translators of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Margaret was awarded a personal chair in Modern French Thought in 1994. Her inaugural lecture, which, with a forthright blend of critique and vision, addressed the difficulties of doing feminist research in the academy, took the structural shifts in the Queen Mary French syllabus — from the canonical, chronologically organized federal degree to the unit system built around conceptual or methodological pathways — as a starting point for her claim that the feminist researcher has no choice but to be interdisciplinary. In support of her argument for the importance to genuinely creative thought of making rather than destroying links (her main target was the ongoing policing of the boundaries of philosophy), Margaret took models of the mind and metaphors of communication from psychoanalysis, sociology, linguistics, and child psychology. As she put it in a throwaway joke before elaborating a parallel with attachment theory (the academy as avoidant or preoccupied mother in relation to feminist research as its toddler): ‘in a French department, almost anything one reads turns out to be relevant’. Margaret made her extraordinarily wide reading relevant to her research and teaching, but it was perhaps because she found herself in a French department that she was able to do so. French studies in the UK may well owe the privilege of Margaret’s significant presence to the institutional resistance of the country’s philosophy departments to both continental and feminist philosophy. Yet Naomi Schor’s description of Margaret as a scholar trained in philosophy but ‘housed’ in a department of French, though in its context meant to situate her important work on Irigaray, hardly does justice to Margaret’s professional and affective allegiance to the Queen Mary French Department. She played a leading role in opening up its BA and MA curricula to wider and more questioning perspectives (she was an early enthusiast of Caribbean and African francophone writing, for example, and was in demand as an examiner in this area), she enjoyed collaborative course design and joint teaching, she was a fine supervisor and mentor, and, from the moment of her arrival in the department in 1977, she forged some very close and enduring friendships.

Margaret grew up in Redruth in Cornwall and attended Cambourne County Grammar School. She was only seventeen when she began a degree in Philosophy with French at the recently founded Sussex University; presumably, she was attracted [End Page 290] even then by its innovative disciplinary structures. She was barely twenty when she graduated with a First. She then spent a year as an English language assistant in Clermont-Ferrand before embarking, in 1968, on a PhD on Merleau-Ponty and Sartre at Darwin College, Cambridge, with supervisory arrangements that allowed her to benefit from the expert guidance of Colin Smith, a leading specialist of Merleau-Ponty based at the University of Reading. Although it was only later that Margaret would come to take gender as a crucial analytical category for philosophy in general and her own research in particular, it was as a postgraduate at Cambridge that she became actively involved in the local women’s group; it was no doubt during two years spent as a lectrice in Amiens, where she taught in-service refresher courses...

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