ARTICLES
The Uses of Phenomenology for Latinx Feminisms: Developing a Phenomenological Approach Informed by Rupture
Philosophies 9, no. 6 (2024): 165. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9060165
Given the various shortcomings of classical phenomenological methods identified by critical and liberatory theorists, this paper considers what phenomenology has to offer theorists of multiply marginalized experience. The paper begins with an account of the major reasons for which Latinx feminists such as Linda Martín Alcoff, Jacqueline Martinez, and Mariana Ortega have found a phenomenological approach useful in their projects. This account reveals that though Latinx feminist phenomenologists have found useful resources for theorizing multiply marginalized theory and identity in the classical texts of phenomenology, experiences unique to those subjected to marginalization remain significantly underdeveloped or absent from classical accounts. Taking seriously the primacy of lived experiences of ‘rupture’, this paper argues, is therefore necessary in the development of a phenomenological approach that does justice to life in the borderlands and the lived experience of being-between-worlds. Informed by the work of Latinx feminist theorists such as Gloria Anzaldúa and María Lugones, this paper closes with a proposed critical feminist phenomenological approach that centers the moment of ‘rupture’ described in such work. Ultimately, this paper argues that the communication and documentation of these ruptures in the form of phenomenological description allows for the examination and interrogation of sedimented logics of oppression on the way to liberatory ends.
OTHER WRITING
Review of Andrea J. Pitts' Nos/Otras: Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Multiplicitous Agency, and Resistance
PhiloSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism, forthcoming (Spring 2025).
"Rather than shying away from or covering over the difficult questions posed to Anzaldúa and those who take up her work, Pitts faces such questions head-on in the text, providing thoughtful and charitable readings of the concerns over and criticisms of Anzaldúa's conceptual resources for intersectional theorizing. [...] The result is a text that both speaks to the complex encounters between works of resistance located across varying intellectual and activist traditions and inspires creative and sustained engagement with interlocutors in the development of responsible coalitional feminist theories."
Translation of Francesca Gargallo's "Philosophical Feminism in Latin America"
(CO-TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH TO ENGLISH WITH KEVIN CEDEÑO-PACHECO)
Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance edited by Andrea J. Pitts, Mariana Ortega, and José Medina, Oxford University Press (2020) pp. 97-123.
This chapter offers a critical survey of feminism in Latin America, highlighting the contributions of prominent Latin American feminists in art, politics, and philosophy. The essay begins with a discussion of the pioneering feminist ideas of Juana Inés de la Cruz and their reception in Latin American feminist thought; and it continues with an elucidation of contemporary feminist critiques of the neoliberal paradigm of “multiculturalism.” The chapter also discusses how, around 1995, Latin American feminism became split in the academy: on the one hand, there were those Latin American feminists who favored the strategy of diversifying the curriculum and including gender issues within the existing institutional and academic frameworks; and, on the other hand, there were those Latin American feminists who favored a more subversive strategy of ignoring traditional forms of academic recognition and privileging the engaged thought and action of the women’s movement.
DISSERTATION
"Linguistic Rupture, Racialization, and Resistance in Latina/x Feminisms: A Critical Phenomenological Approach"
Doctoral Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University (2023)
This dissertation offers an account of linguistic practices of Latinx people in the United States through the lens of critical feminist phenomenology. It examines how Latinx people are racialized on the basis of their language use, the normative logics that structure those processes of racialization, and the practices by which Latinx people resist and transform those logics. In this project, I develop a critical feminist phenomenological approach that locates itself within a tradition of Latina feminist phenomenology—a tradition that has prioritized the articulation of situated, embodied experiences of oppressing⇔resisting relations lived by Latinx intersubjectivities in the context of the United States. I propose the concept of “linguistic rupture” in order to name the specific kind of experience at the center of this analysis. The analysis allows for a reconceptualization of language and linguistic practices that constructs Latinx speakers as actively resistant rather than just passively oppressed. While I do argue that linguistic rupture is particularly significant in understanding the racialization of Latinx populations in the United States, the account of linguistic rupture developed in this project has potential for application across a broad range of racializing processes and events not limited to U.S. Latinx experience. It thus invites further examination and critical engagement with the various ways in which ruptures experienced by minoritized and marginalized subjects in general expose hegemonic logics operating in multiple directions, as well as the ways in which linguistic engagements specifically anchor embodied intersubjectivity existentially.
UNDERGRADUATE WORK
"On Perception and Autonomy Considered through the Phenomenological Understanding of Emotion Described by Kym Maclaren"
Res Cogitans: An Annual Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy 6 (2015): 171-178
Kym Maclaren, in her article, “Emotional Metamorphoses: The Role of Others in Becoming a Subject,” explores a phenomenological view on emotion as being-in-the-world as well as the ethical implications of understanding emotion in opposition to the moralistic view. In the first part of this paper, I provide an exegetical assessment of Maclaren’s thesis; in the second I introduce a critique of Maclaren’s argument and argue a claim of my own which explores perception and autonomy in the human body along with its implications in the context of Maclaren’s phenomenological account of emotion. I discuss the necessity of both emotion and reason in morality and argue that the traditional definition of autonomy is not plausible when considered through Maclaren’s phenomenological view of emotion. Finally, I work to creatively explore a new definition of autonomy that does cohere with this view.