Martina Ferrari | Villanova University (original) (raw)

Papers by Martina Ferrari

Puncta

Starting with the acknowledgment of the necessity of radical imagination for social change, and w... more Starting with the acknowledgment of the necessity of radical imagination for social change, and with the threat that neoliberal capitalism poses to radical imagination, our hope is that this themed issue offers the time and space to cultivate radical imagination as it takes up questions of racial justice. Moreover, our intent is to solicit critical phenomenology toward robust investigations of radical imagination, what it makes possible, and the ways in which current social, economic, and political arrangements sustain or foreclose the space and time for its cultivation. What the past few years have made clear is that individuals and institutions continue to be complicit in the perpetuation of structural inequality and racial violence in our society. For us, the editors of Puncta, acknowledging this complicity means at a minimum to use our platform to amplify the voices of scholars of color and establish a forum devoted to critical conversations about racial justice. In sum, we hope...

Philosophy East and West, 2022

Book review of Leah Kalmanson’s Cross-Cultural Existentialism.

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2020

abstract:This article is one in a series of attempts on my part to think (from) the in-between of... more abstract:This article is one in a series of attempts on my part to think (from) the in-between of traditionally juxtaposed claims of voice versus silence. It takes seriously both claims that voice is lived as liberatory by many, on the one hand, and that the deployment of voice may not only reify colonial power dynamics that continue to oppress many, but also that words may be inadequate to convey or remember the humiliation, pain, and systematic degradation of trauma and violence, on the other. Thus situated, this paper turns to silence to locate resources for the renewal of sense. Specifically, I turn to Gloria Anzaldúa's iterations of the myth of la Llorona in "My Black Angelos" and Prietita and the Ghost Woman and propose that her deployment of silences is such that the past is remembered in its absence, as loss. As such, I suggest, the deployment of deep silences is key to a decolonizing aesthetics; it bears witness to experiences of coloniality by upholding, rather than eliding, opacity, thus inaugurating decolonizing sensibilities attuned to silences rather than speech and transparency.

Chiasmi International, 2017

Hypatia, 2019

Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 2018

We are happy to feature four invited submissions by Lisa Guenther, Kym Maclaren, Bonnie Mann, and... more We are happy to feature four invited submissions by Lisa Guenther, Kym Maclaren, Bonnie Mann, and Gayle Salamon, all of whom respond to the questions motivating our inaugural issue. Both Salamon and Maclaren offer a response to the question “What is critical phenomenology?” by exploring the productive relationship between critical theory and phenomenology. Salamon does this by tracing the history of the term critical phenomenology. Maclaren further explores the productive relationship between critical theory and phenomenology en route to her analysis of intimacy. Focusing on the phenomena of shame and long-term solitary confinement, Mann and Guenther take up that question by performing the work of critical phenomenology. Mann also offers suggestions regarding critical or, as she calls it, feminist phenomenology’s relation to the tradition—both of classical phenomenology and feminist philosophy. Guenther shows how the work of critical phenomenology is already at play in the practices...

Contemporary Political Theory, 2018

Yes, this book is based upon a single sentence: Beauvoir's renowned sentence: 'one is not born: o... more Yes, this book is based upon a single sentence: Beauvoir's renowned sentence: 'one is not born: one becomes (a) woman.' Yet it manages to spawn nineteen articles that cover multiple themes from numerous perspectives and disciplinary interests. Its four sections, Intellectual History; History of Scandal; the Philosopher's Debate; the Labor of Translation, include interventions on the sex/gender debates (Karen Offen, Judith Butler, Bonnie Mann, Meagan Burke), diverse philosophical interpretations of Beauvoir, as well as concrete and convincing demonstrations of how poorly translated passages promote misunderstandings (Toril Moi, Margaret Simons, Nancy Bauer). Since it is impossible to do justice to the breadth and wealth of this text in a short review, I have chosen to focus upon a few of the articles that I found particularly interesting. The brilliance of the collection lies in its interdisciplinary and meticulous analysis of this single sentence. Needless to say, its multiple interpretations don't fit together, but provide compelling arguments that can't be easily dismissed. The new translation of The Second Sex in 2011 initiated a fervent debate amongst feminists. In dropping the article 'a' from Parshley's original English translation, Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier believed they were honoring Beauvoir's feminist legacy. They reasoned 'this best captures women as an institution, a construct, a concept; femininity determined and defined by society, culture and history' (p. 281). The presence of the 'a' stresses the existential tradition that one is free to choose irrespective of one's situation. Bonnie Mann's 'Beauvoir against Objectivism' provides an excellent introduction to the volume by offering a concise summary of Beauvoir's philosophic concerns, which furthers the project of thinking philosophically about the tensions arising from the translation of this sentence. Unlike Butler, whose discursive theory swings towards objectivism, Beauvoir's notion of embodied engagement avoids subjectivism and rationalism, without lapsing into objectivism or materialism. Mann brings Butler's performative theory of gender into conversation with

Chiasmi International, 2018

IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, 2015

In this article, I illustrate ways in which the concepts of the norm and normativity, as well as ... more In this article, I illustrate ways in which the concepts of the norm and normativity, as well as discourses about normality and the good life, are implicated in relations of power that inform individuals’ values. By analyzing the separation of conjoined twins as a paradigmatic example of practices of overmedicalization, I consider the implications of taking the “goodness” of normality for granted. I argue that overmedicalization procedures establish an interpretative framework that does not leave room for recognizing the contingency of societal suppositions about normality and the good life. It is this kind of ethical reflection (or lack thereof) that I problematize as being symptomatic of individuals’ “normalized” ethical reflection.

Southwest Philosophy Review, 2016

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

Chiasmi International, 2016

BEARING WITNESS BEYOND COLONIAL EPISTEMOLOGIES: SILVIA RIVERA CUSICANQUI’S CRITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY OF DEEP SILENCE, 2021

This paper is one in a series of attempts on my part to think through one of the central challeng... more This paper is one in a series of attempts on my part to think through one of the central challenges left to us by Merleau-Ponty’s sudden death in 1961: if we understand the turn, in his later writings, toward an ontology of the flesh as “a radical rethinking of the experience of belonging from within, [as] a phenomenology of being-of-the-world” (Landes 2020, 141), how are we to bear witness to such an experience? What modalities are called forth to do justice to this belonging? The task accrues existential and ethical weight when, at stake in our analyses, are historical and social structures like coloniality that normalize experience, perception, and sense-making while marginalizing others. It is my contention, in this article, that when the phenomenological inquiry becomes critical the question of modality becomes ethically central; how we bear witness to experiences of marginalization and the operations of power that produce them matters in that it risks reifying the same normative structures that predicate the oppression of many. With these questions and considerations in mind, in this article, I return to silence and propose that the mobilization of what I call “deep silences” can be a powerful tool for a critical phenomenology that bears witness without capitulating to the imperative of transparency norming the modern/colonial world system. Deep silence, in fact, designates signifying practices that do not primarily operate within the bounds of logocentrism and speech as the foundational principles of meaning, or that rely upon conceptual, analytical, and instrumental thinking, mobilizing instead the somatic, affective, and sensual dimensions of existence. In this article, I am primary concerned with the sense-making effected by the aesthetic as an instance of deep silence. Specifically, I focus on the image- and ritual-centered photographic documentaries of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, which, I suggest, challenge the hegemonic normativity of modern/colonial aesthetics, introducing the reader to other sensibilities wherein the distinction between theory and practice has no purchase and the multiplicity of creative expressions is recognized.

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2020

This article is one in a series of attempts on my part to think (from) the in-between of traditio... more This article is one in a series of attempts on my part to think (from) the
in-between of traditionally juxtaposed claims of voice versus silence. It takes seriously
both claims that voice is lived as liberatory by many, on the one hand, and that
the deployment of voice may not only reify colonial power dynamics that continue
to oppress many, but also that words may be inadequate to convey or remember the
humiliation, pain, and systematic degradation of trauma and violence, on the other.
Thus situated, this paper turns to silence to locate resources for the renewal of sense.
Specifically, I turn to Gloria Anzaldúa’s iterations of the myth of la Llorona in “My
Black Angelos” and Prietita and the Ghost Woman and propose that her deployment of
silences is such that the past is remembered in its absence, as loss. As such, I suggest,
the deployment of deep silences is key to a decolonizing aesthetics; it bears witness to
experiences of coloniality by upholding, rather than eliding, opacity, thus inaugurating
decolonizing sensibilities attuned to silences rather than speech and transparency.

Hypatia, 2020

This article begins at a (historical) crossroads; it straddles the difficult ground between the r... more This article begins at a (historical) crossroads; it straddles the difficult ground between the recent public outcry against sexual violence (a protest that, as championed by the #MeToo movement, seeks to break the "culture of silence" surrounding sexual violence) and concerns about the coloniality of voice made visible by the recent decolonial turn within feminist theory (Ruiz 2006; Lugones 2007; Lugones 2010; Veronelli 2016). Wary of concepts such as "visibility" or "transparency"-principles that continue to inform the call to "break the silence" by "speaking up" central to Western liberatory movements-in this article, I return to silence, laying the groundwork for the exploration of what a revised concept of silence could mean for the development of practices of cross-cultural communication that do not play into coloniality. The Decolonial Turn is about making visible the invisible and analyzing the mechanisms that produce such invisibility or distorted visibility in light of a large stock of ideas that must necessarily include the critical reflections of the "invisible" people themselves.-Nelson Maldonado-Torres, "On the Coloniality of Being" We must, however, take a moratorium on naming too soon, if we manage to penetrate there. There is no other way for you and me to penetrate there.-Gayatri C. Spivak, in conversation with Jenny Sharp In a New York Times article, American author and long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad recounts her experiences of sexual assault, perpetrated in 1964 by her swimming coach, who, it turned out, was a serial sexual predator (Nyad 2017). Like many testimonies before and after hers, Nyad's places great emphasis on finding one's voice, on speaking up vis-à-vis sexual violence as a means to regain power in the wake of shame and humiliation. "We need to prepare coming generations to speak up in the moment, rather than being coerced into years of mute helplessness," she states. As the #MeToo campaign forefronts, speaking up "takes something that women had long kept quiet about and transforms it into a movement" aimed at revealing the pervasiveness and systemic nature of sexual

Editors Introduction Reflections on the First Issue, 2018

The institution of official platforms that call for, collect, and publish works in burgeoning fie... more The institution of official platforms that call for, collect, and publish works in burgeoning fields of inquiry is a crucial step in the legitimization and promotion of research in those areas. To this day there is not a platform explicitly devoted to the publication of pieces that engage the critical turn in phenomenology. We decided to found what we are now proud to call Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology. The journey of its founding and the publication of its first issue required numerous conversations about the scope of the journal, its target audience, the kinds of publications that we hoped to solicit, and, perhaps most importantly, what we took "critical phenomenology" to be and to be doing. This introduction explores these issues.

The goal of this class is to think critically about the idea of cultural diversity and the comple... more The goal of this class is to think critically about the idea of cultural diversity and the complex theoretical and practical tensions involved in this topic, and the challenges it poses to liberal democracies. It seems that in today's European and U.S. context, cultural diversity is taken as both a fact (i.e. there are a lot of cultures) and as a moral value (i.e. different cultures have a right to exist and to be respected). Yet, by attending to what critics call racial liberalism, we will see that the current US political system and the mainstream approach to political theory-which takes the form of ideal theory-may not be equipped to concretely take into account and respect cultural diversity. After a brief introduction in which we will contextualize the history of our modern concept of cultural diversity, as well as notions such as culture, difference, race, racism, and (white) privilege, in the first part of the course we will focus on structural problems tied to cultural diversity. Additionally, we will reflect on the ways in which recognition or misrecognition of one's cultural identity/difference can have deleterious effects-in terms of both material welfare and the development of positive conceptions of self-identity. We will conclude the first part by engaging with current literature on epistemic oppression and ignorance, which will position us well to ask, in the second part of the course, questions about how cultural difference matters-to personal identity, political arrangements, and philosophical inquiry. We begin part two by grappling with what scholars call standpoint epistemology, paying attention to the ways in which one social positionality matters when it comes to the development of knowledge (both in terms of content and processes of knowledge validation). At this juncture, we will read several first-person accounts about life at the margins. We will read non-Eurocentric philosophies, like Latinx American, Native American, and decolonial philosophy. Through these testimonials we will make sense of concepts like "diversity," "identity," or "recognition" anew, leaving behind some of the problematic norms (autonomy, abstract rationality, justification, transparency, separation, etc.) grounding cultural diversity as a value. Course Objectives: Because philosophy can be quite difficult and challenging, a few critical tools and intellectual virtues are needed to aid the thinker. Our critical toolkit will include questions that call for clarification, examples, counterexamples , reasons and justifications, and implications of what we are discussing. Intellectual virtues include generosity and openness, thoroughness and rigor, curiosity, courage, and responsive listening. It is hoped that by the end of this course, the student will incorporate these critical tools and virtues in addition to demonstrating: • Critical thinking, reading, and writing skills through use of a wide range of research methods, including written reflections, collaborative discussions, and scholarly essays. • An understanding of authors and concepts from various philosophical traditions and historical periods. • An engagement with philosophical inquiry on a variety of topics related to the theme of the course, including identity, power, ethics, knowledge, and community. • An ability to present and evaluate views that differ your own, especially as these relate to gender, race, class, and culture, with the aim of creating an inclusive classroom environment.

Puncta

Philosophy East and West, 2022

Book review of Leah Kalmanson’s Cross-Cultural Existentialism.

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2020

Chiasmi International, 2017

Hypatia, 2019

Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 2018

Contemporary Political Theory, 2018

Chiasmi International, 2018

IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, 2015

Southwest Philosophy Review, 2016

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

Chiasmi International, 2016

BEARING WITNESS BEYOND COLONIAL EPISTEMOLOGIES: SILVIA RIVERA CUSICANQUI’S CRITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY OF DEEP SILENCE, 2021

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2020

Hypatia, 2020

Editors Introduction Reflections on the First Issue, 2018

The course begins by contextualizing the recent feminist turn toward decoloniality. Our initial e... more The course begins by contextualizing the recent feminist turn toward decoloniality. Our initial encounter with Sojourner Truth and Audre Lorde helps us understand the exclusions performed by feminism, the challenges endemic to any project that seeks to redefine the disciple, and what decolonial feminism has to offer to such endeavors. In the first part of the course, we begin to make sense of what decoloniality entails by learning more about coloniality, as articulated by exponents of the Modernity/Coloniality Research Program. As we will see, coloniality has repercussions that exceed theory and academia; coloniality structures all aspects of people's lives, from their ways of thinking and being to how they organize labor and reproduction. The writings of Gloria Anzaldúa will reveal the tensions, ambiguity, and existential confusion that living in a colonial context entails. In the second part of the course we will engage thinkers like María Lugones and Mariana Ortega who, while theorizing the oppressive structures of coloniality, situate their thinking in what Anzaldúa calls " herida abierta " to theorize and live practices of resistance.

1 P HIL 309: G LOBAL J USTICE Fall 2017 TR 10-11:50 Room: GER 303 Instructor: Ma... more 1
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2:00 & by appt. Office: 232 Susan Campbell Hall email: mferrar2@uoregon.edu Course Description: The topic of global justice has become the topic of philosophical reflection only recently. The acceleration of global trade and investment, aided by free-market economic policies that have opened economies domestically and internationally and technological advancement of the past few decades, has intensified the centuries-old process of integration and interaction called globalization. Economic and financial integration, global migration, and the establishment of international organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund has called into question state sovereignty, especially its role in prosecuting international wars, securing rights to citizens, identifying and treating prisoners of war, suspending civil liberties, and suppressing political dissent. In the first two thirds of the course, we will investigate different responses to the paradox at the heart of sovereignty. With Schmitt, we will consider the ethical implications of and presuppositions for the demarcation of “friends” and “enemies” in the international context. We will grapple with questions as: What is the role of the state/sovereign in identifying the “enemy”? Who comes to get defined as the “enemy” and what does such a labelling entail? With Agamben, we will reflect on the “state of exception” as the nomos of modern Western democracies and how this biopolitical paradigm relies upon the designation of lives worth living and lives that are not. Butler will help us answer the questions of how we come to apprehend life as life and what is the role of this framing in legitimizing the West’s prosecution of its wars or in the justification of torture? In the last third, we will focus on the relationship between liberalism—what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism”—international wars, and climate change.

Love and sex are so central to human life that many would argue that our intimate relationships a... more Love and sex are so central to human life that many would argue that our intimate relationships are the key to self-esteem, fulfillment, even happiness itself; in fact, our intimate relationships are probably more important to our sense of well-being than our careers. Yet we spend remarkably little time thinking about love and sex, even as we spend years preparing ourselves for the world of work. In this course we will reflect on the most intimate sphere of human existence. We will draw on historical, sociological, feminist, and philosophical work to shed critical light on a variety of questions, including: What is love exactly? Why do we continually associate love and sex with happiness and pleasure when they often make us so utterly miserable? Is there, or should there be, an ethics of love and sex? What is moral, what is normal, and who gets to decide? What happens to sex when it is associated with "scoring" (the conquest model of sex)? How are our understandings of masculinity and femininity tied in with what we believe about love and sex?

Course Description: What is human nature? What does it mean to be human? And is there a human nat... more Course Description: What is human nature? What does it mean to be human? And is there a human nature? Much of the history of philosophy wrestles with these questions in one way or another. From Plato and Aristotle through Rousseau and Hobbes, philosophers have thought that answers to these questions are not only central to understanding ourselves, but also to stipulating good political, social, and ethical arrangements. In this course, we will explore notions of human nature from a variety of philosophical traditions and contexts, with attention to how some of the answers to these questions have resulted in legacies of sexism, racism, and speciesism with which we still live today. The course is divided in five sections, beginning from a conception of human nature that understands it as fixed, created, and finite, and concluding with thinkers who contest the existence of a human nature. In the interim, in section II, we will explore views that take human nature to be essentially linked with their rational capacity at the expense of bodily desires and emotions. We will problematize what counts as " reason " and who " gets to be " rational. In Section III, we will turn to theories that cast the human being essentially as a zoon politikon (a political animal), as Aristotle put it. We will reflect upon how theories of human nature matter when it comes to the institution and organization of our political and moral communities, paying particular attention to the exploitative norms that underlie our political institutions. In section IV, we will turn to phenomenology as a resource to theorize human nature beyond the mind/ body dualism. This move will invite us to reflect on the difference that embodiment makes when thinking about human nature. Is there a gendered nature? Is there a racialized one? Is sexuality innate? This course will be an opportunity for deep and pluralistic reflection upon a central philosophical concept. You will be asked to explore your assumptions about yourself and others and, hopefully, you will find some tools for the transformation of those same assumptions.

This course introduces some key concepts, ideas, and frameworks commonly used in feminist philoso... more This course introduces some key concepts, ideas, and frameworks commonly used in feminist philosophy. By providing a brief historical overview of feminism’s historical trajectory, the first part of this course deals with the difficult question of the place of women in the history of philosophy. The second part of this course ventures where the history of philosophy has not dared: searching for an answer to Beauvoir’s question, “What is a Woman?” In the third part, this continued examination of the question shows how differences in race, class, and sexual orientation defy efforts to assert a single story of women, thereby revealing the dilemma at the heart of Beauvoir’s question. The last part of the course considers feminism in a global context and seeks possibilities for alliances across difference. Throughout the term, we will grapple with broad philosophical questions such as: What does it mean to do philosophy as a woman and/or feminist? What can philosophy do for feminism and vice versa? What is the relation between feminist theory and praxis? Ideally, students will come out of this course with a strong background in feminist philosophy and a nuanced understanding of what it has to offer.

Philosophy East and West, 2022

Book review of Leah Kalmanson’s Cross-Cultural Existentialism.

Chiasmi International , 2017

Spanning nearly twenty years, the essays in Judith Butler’s Senses of the Subject investigate the... more Spanning nearly twenty years, the essays in Judith Butler’s Senses of the Subject investigate the processes of subject formation. Via an engagement with canonical philosophical figures like Descartes, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Spinoza, Irigaray, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Fanon, Butler develops the thesis that a radical “susceptibility” or “impressionability” vis-à-vis social and linguistic powers is constitutive of the “I.” This claim, as I suggest in the review, has two implications. First, any attempt to account for this process of initial formation is inherently paradoxical; it seeks to put into words a moment that is temporally and structurally prior to the emergence and development of the “I” and the ability to recount such an emergence. Second, the subject, and also the process of subject’s formation, is structurally and temporally open, incessantly relying upon that which is “external” to the subject for its emergence. This collection, which is exclusively devoted to Butler’s engagement with the philosophical tradition, is an invaluable contribution not only to the understanding of Butler’s philosophy and her relationship with the canon. It also opens the space for an investigation of Butler’s philosophical commitments to query why the body seems to dematerialize from her work, even, it seems, when she makes the materiality of the body an explicit focus of her inquiry.

Oxford University Press, 2017

This collection of essays takes up the most famous feminist sentence ever written, Simone de Beau... more This collection of essays takes up the most famous feminist sentence ever written, Simone de Beauvoir's "On ne na t pas femme: on le devient," finding in it a flashpoint that galvanizes feminist thinking and action in multiple dimensions. Since its publication, the sentence has inspired feminist thinking and action in many different cultural and linguistic contexts. Two entangled controversies emerge in the life of this sentence: a controversy over the practice of translation and a controversy over the nature and status of sexual difference. Variously translated into English as "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman" (Parshley, 1953), "one is not born but rather becomes woman" (Borde and Malovany-Chevallier, 2010), and "women are made, not born" (in popular parlance), the conflict over the translation crystallizes the feminist debate over the possibilities and limitations of social construction as a theory of sexual difference. When Sheila Malovany-Chevallier and Constance Borde (contributors to this volume), translated Le Deuxi me Sexe into English in 2010, their decision to alter the translation of the famous sentence by omitting the "a" ignited debate that has not yet exhausted itself. The controversy over the English translation has opened a conversation about translation practices and their relation to meaning more generally, and broadens, in this volume, into an examination of the life of Beauvoir's key sentence in other languages and political and cultural contexts as well.
The philosophers, translators, literary scholars and historian who author these essays take decidedly different positions on the meaning of the sentence in French, and thus on its correct translation in a variety of languages--but also on the meaning and salience of the question of sexual difference as it travels between languages, cultures, and political worlds.