Why I Call Myself a Female Philosopher - Happy International Women's Day

Identity is a funny thing. Something both given by society and chosen by the individual--depending on whether you think a choice is determined by the world or not, of course. @beanz opened up a can of worms when she asked Steemians to reflect on the topic of 'What it means to me to be a woman'. My answer to this is still under development. Can I be a woman and a (Western) philosopher at the same time?

Hi, I'm a philosopher

After I finished my master in philosophy, I quickly tired of applying to jobs where philosophy was considered worthless. I had to explain that philosophy is actually useful and that having read and thought about heaps of systems of thought actually helps understanding life and reality and the world. So, I decided to start my own company. I became a freelance philosopher in January 2014.

It took quite a bit of courage to start calling myself a philosopher. Getting my PhD in the summer of 2015 in contemporary continental philosophy should perhaps have helped toward making me feel more certain about that label. But funny enough, it didn't. 'Imposter Syndrome' is something real, but I worked on it steadily. Got myself business cards. Got more and more practice just telling people 'Hi, I'm a philosopher'. Eventually the message started to rub off on me.
Flash forward... next week my first book is published by a renowned Dutch philosophy publisher. And on the back it even says I'm a female philosopher!

Even though I worked on many different things and projects outside of the philosophical academic world, I did continue reading. But now I could read and think about what I thought was most important, and I didn't have to already know how it would fit into my dissertation. Although it is all connection in the end, anyway. When I reread my dissertation now (and I do, because I'm editing it and it will be published later this year, in English), I can see a lot of what I'm thinking about now, already there. Even though I didn't know it then.

I had thought and written about 'The Necessity of the Impossible', about how human becoming is grounded in the longing for something that has no ontological status. About radical change and how it is both impossible and necessary. About thinking what cannot be thought, about what Simone Weil calls 'conversion'. About what my dissertation advisor, who suddenly died last year and whom I still miss every day, Anne Dufourmantelle called the moment of risk that is the beginning of human life.

The road towards being a female philosopher

When I got a position for six months at the University of Maryland (USA) to research whatever I felt was important, things took flight. I had a big library at my disposal, and I read a lot. About the sociology of philosophers, what it means to think. The more I read about thinking, the more it connected to what I had always dismissed as something that didn't really concern me... feminism.

But by reading more, I started to connect some dots that had remained unconnected before. Thinking, and Western thinking specifically, is a very specific activity. It is something that women cannot do--at least when we listen to pretty much most of the great names that make up the history of Western philosophy. We listen to them for most things, so why should we simply dismiss this one idea and continue accepting their other thoughts?

Thought is a connected and interlinked web. We cannot take out one of them and pretend we leave the rest intact. But instead of trying to 'fix' the Western philosophical canon, I'm much more interested in taking up the challenge that it leaves open... can we think as women? What does that even mean? Is there something called 'female' thought? If there is such a thing, it cannot copy the mechanics and structures of what is 'male thought'. Then how to define something, if we cannot use the mechanics of difference, for instance?

These is an extremely interesting topic. And something I find very important in this world, in which being a woman is approached from the perspective of a difference, whereas this is not an inherently female attitude. I gave a lecture about this toward the end of my stay in Maryland, under the title 'Can Women Think?' 39 minutes on Youtube. Spoiler alert: women cannot think. But it is not a topic I'm done with. There is still a lot to be thought about. A lot to read. I am still immersing myself in the thought of Bracha Ettinger, Luce Irigaray, Genevieve Lloyd, to name but a few.

What it did lead to, is that I've started calling myself a female philosopher.
Many people tell me I shouldn't do that, for many different reasons.

What I celebrate?

So, on this International Women's Day 2018, I will celebrate that I am able to still learn and grow about finding out what it means for me to be a woman in a male-dominated profession, in philosophy that still fundamentally excludes the question of what it means to be a woman thinking.

^{Here is an overview of more fiction/short stories and poetry by @nobyeni.
All images by @nobyeni, with the help of Canva.}