Feminist Philosophies of Life ed. by Hasana Sharp and Chloë Taylor (review)

Ah life, you are well served by today's tensions in feminist continental thought as they are articulated in the fourteen articles that comprise Feminist Philosophies of Life, edited and introduced by Hasana Sharp and Chloe Taylor. The collection is original and engaging in the disparate questions its articles raise about life as thought, embodiment, a work, an ethical project, or a material reality. It is novel also in the unlikely philosophers some of the articles feminize, if you will, such as Baruch Spinoza and S0ren Kierkegaard, and with respect to a sincere return to Simone de Beauvoir in other articles, especially pleasing because Beauvoir today tends to be treated as a footnote within much of gender, sexuality, and women's studies. Indeed, gender and sexuality are not the book's primary topics at all, even as sex is, or certain philosophies of sex, such as Luce Irigaray's, which is enlisted in aid of an ecofeminism. On many fronts, the book signals that feminist continental philosophy is changing course, especially as its references to Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and the subject, although discussed in the introduction as a point of departure, and mentioned only in some essays, do not dominate the collection as a whole.

Like all good philosophy, the text enlivens head nodding and shaking, in that, no matter the kind of feminist your are, you will desire to rebut, enlist, or build upon its renaturalizations, genealogical meditations, assemblages, and phenomenable dances as well as its post-human postulates. It also treats feminist realities and concerns as the epicentre of philosophy rather than as a sidebar into practical ethics. It does so in its latter articles. One takes up feminist Indigenous narrative practice as a life-affirming politic that realizes missing and murdered Indigenous women, while another addresses the life barred to racialized woman who, disproportionately, are subject to North American systems of eugenic incarceration. Three other articles expose medical and social disability paradigms as discursive forces that elicit physical and mental impairments, interrupt the life/choice polemic through a recasting of abortion as harm reduction, and look past the human to ponder life's possibilities within what might become the anthropocene outback.

One of the collection's strengths is that it is neither a primer nor a rehashing of all-too-familiar feminist debates. It is a refreshing traversal of new feminist topics squarely within the discipline of philosophy, as opposed to the inter-disciplines, which nevertheless proves it to be a useful text for feminists in cultural studies, critical race studies, sociology, social and political sciences, and, of course, gender, sexuality, and women's studies, all of which frequently borrow from philosophy. More specifically, it does not dilute, or dismiss as too abstract, the significance of philosophical questions about alterity, difference, being, meaning, and existence as feminist questions; it enlists them for the reader as methodological approaches to the politics of experience, social justice, and everyday life. Contributors to the collection are prominent and accomplished feminist philosophers, such as Elisabeth Grosz, Lynne Huffer, Cynthia Willett, and Christine Daigle, or are ones likely to be soon, such as Hasana Sharp, Ada S. Jaarsma, Stephanie C. Jenkins, Lisa Guenther, Shannon Dea, and Jane Barter, to name but a few. The collection's weaknesses turn ultimately on the limit of your interests as readers of feminist philosophies in that the book's topic of life is very broadly understood in light of the different foci of the articles overall. The reader, undeniably, is likely to find fault with some articles, but doing so will turn mainly on one's own philosophical allegiances and interests. In other words, the articles are clear, concise, well reasoned, and accessible, even if they tend to assume the reader already shares a solid foundational knowledge of feminist continental philosophies. And, yet, this assumption, as a basis of the book, is a part of what makes Feminist Philosophies of Life so lively and fresh!