Introduction to the Roundtable

In an effort to provide a space for critical reflection on the meanings, limits, and stakes of "continental feminism," we invited five scholars to reflect on this question: are there problems attendant to the "continental feminism" category itself or is the category capacious enough to generate the kind of field-transforming work many of us have tried to bring to the discipline of philosophy and beyond? To solicit a diverse array of responses, we invited two of our new advisory board members, Mariana Ortega and Falguni Sheth, and the recent chairs of the standing committees on diversity in the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), the largest society of continental philosophy in the world: the LGBTQ Advocacy Committee (Jami Weinstein), the Race and Ethnic Diversity Committee (Kris Sealey), and the Committee on the Status of Women (Elaine Miller, also a founding coeditor of this journal). Each contributor drafted an initial response to our question, which was then circulated among the authors in the hopes of creating a dialogic exchange. The following roundtable is the result of that exchange. We are grateful to the participants for their serious and incisive engagement with the fraught category, "continental feminism," and its equally fraught relation to this journal's distinctive identity.

There are many issues at stake here, and we hope our readers will be attentive to the places of tension that animate these responses; those tensions mark potential beginnings of what Mariana Ortega calls "difficult conversations." Falguni Sheth, for example, focuses her response on the question of method, explicitly prioritizing the category of race in describing herself as a philosopher of race and not necessarily as a continental feminist philosopher. Sheth's questioning of feminist continental philosophical methods includes, importantly, attention to concerns often seen as outside the purview of continental feminism: institutions, history, political boundaries, laws, contracts, and structures. Are continental feminists ready to take on the truly interdisciplinary methodological challenges put forward by Sheth?

Elaine Miller's comments resonate with these questions of method and context: she holds out hope for continental feminism becoming a capacious field that interrogates "the historicity of philosophical concepts, including the sometimes uncomfortable contexts of their production." Through a meditation on a classic figure of the Western canon, Kant, Miller demonstrates how this transforming of philosophical praxis must include "the constant reinterrogation and reconfiguration" of any such canon, exhorting continental feminists not to become complacent about our own habitual omissions and exclusions.

Indeed, one might say that this exchange on continental feminism approaches the field in ways that demand the kind of "constant reinterrogation and reconfiguration" Miller seeks for philosophy in general. In Ortega's essay, such questioning brings out tensions within continental feminism itself, some of them implicating the society of philoSOPHIA out of which this journal originated and, implicitly, this journal's cover. In the visual register, Ortega points to the representation of wisdom as white in the figure of Philosophy that illustrates the society's website. Ortega offers, as a counterexample, a less individualized, plural image of "difficult conversation" in the sculptural project Profiled, by Ken Gonzales-Day.

Ortega's question—What happens when you introduce race and racialization into continental feminism?—is taken up in slightly different ways in Sealy's essay. Sealy attends to the many ways in which white feminist resistance to gender oppression has not been attentive to racialization; in the case of continental feminist philosophy, she draws on Donna-Dale Marcano's work to examine how widely accepted social constructionist views can have produced the nonreality of race or racial spectrality. With George Yancy, she argues for practices of un-suturing whiteness and "white ally-ship" through dispossession and acceptance of the always-present possibility of failure.

Finally, Jami Weinstein focuses on the lingering shadow that the analytic-continental divide casts upon continental feminism and thereby meditates on the shoring up of dynamics other than the scientific or logical methods championed by analytic philosophy. In so doing, she uses a particularly loaded trope, the figure of the "dark continent," a move directly contested by Ortega in her essay. Although Weinstein hopes to "stay with...