Feminist Phenomenology and the Politics of Wonder

Abstract

The philosophers agree that philosophy begins in wonder. How wonder is understood, however, is not at all clear and has implications for contemporary work in feminist phenomenology. Luce Irigaray, for example, has insisted on wonder as the passion that will renew relationships between women and men, provide a foundation for democracy, and launch a new era in history. She calls on women to enact practices of wonder in relation to men. In what follows I briefly review the most significant claims about wonder in the history of philosophy generally, and as related to the phenomenological practice of the epoché particularly. I consider Irigaray's claims about wonder as they arise out of this tradition, and try to spell out both what is promised to women and what is asked of them through affirmations of wonder. I suggest that this prescriptive notion is at the heart of a new conservatism in "feminist" thought that turns on nostalgia for age-old beliefs about women's proper mode of relation toward men and their accomplishments, and is deeply homophobic. I urge readers to adopt a more critical attitude toward wonder as related to sexual difference by historicizing the inquiry in keeping with the phenomenological practice of Simone de Beauvoir. Drawing on Kant, Beauvoir, and contemporary work by Sara Ahmed, I suggest that there is a politics of wonder at work here which feminists have every reason to question. Reflecting on the politics of wonder also discloses some key features of critical feminist phenomenological practice.

Something is happening: encountering silence in disability research

“…Our thoughts here reflect what Titchkosky (2011) named a “politics of wonder” toward disability: “a wondering about that which organizes bodies and social spaces and their worlds of meaning” (p. 15). With the understanding that wonder is an ontological ambition commonly affirmed as a beginning point for thought in feminist traditions and philosophy (Mann, 2018; Rubenstein, 2009), we take up Titchkosky’s offer to “nurture a desire to wonder about the everyday politics of disability” (p. 6). We wonder not only how to attend to silence, but what to do with it when it surfaces in data collection.…”

‘Be Here Now’: feminist futures as present

“…also recognises that wonder has its dangers, including the potential for exoticising others or as a ‘kind of prurient curiosity’ that ‘convert[s] the openness of wonder into a dominative desire to know and master the other person’. Bonnie Mann (2018, p. 54, quoting Sara Ahmed) also raises questions about uncritical acceptance of Irigaray’s sense of wonder, suggesting that its promise of happiness fails to acknowledge the ways in which it is also linked to ‘feelings of pain, anger or rage’. Yet Ahmed and Young both recognise the potential for wonder to yield transformation.…”