Sophie Smith is finishing a book about women and the history of ideas.
Women in philosophy have always needed a special stroke of luck. Like men, they have usually had to be well-born, well-off, talented and – in the European tradition at least – white. But most women philosophers before the late 20th century needed something more: access to a man who held the uncommon view that women – or at least certain women – could be serious...
bell hooks was scathing about academic feminism’s turn towards, as she saw it, an obscurantist postmodernism. But she thought that denying the usefulness of theory tout court and denying the status of ‘theory’ to the work of Black and other marginalised women were two sides of the same anti-intellectual coin. Theory was itself a form of practice, a collective project of naming and meaning-making with liberatory potential.
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