Summary |
Following the
works of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de
Beauvoir, to name a few of the major figures in this tradition, phenomenology
operates on both the ontological and epistemological level to insist that all
contact with the world occurs through a layer of living experience. Phenomenology attends to both what is being
observed, the givenness of what is being observed, and the intentions of the
one doing the observing while conditioned as being-in-the-world. In other words, phenomenology commences with
the belief that initial contact with the world is not already clearly
distinguishable as subjective or objective. Refusing the constraints of reducing the world
to either that which exists out there or to the projections of the inner self, phenomenology
understands the lived world as an open-ended framework with meaning complexes. Because
of the open-ended nature of experience and of meaning, knowledge is always
unfinished and incomplete.
As the study of the
phenomenal constraints of living in the world, feminist phenomenology holds the
position that being-in-the-world is not an abstract condition--without sex or gender. At the most obvious level, this leads to a
focus on gendered embodiment and its impact on subjectivity. From these beginnings, feminist phenomenology clarifies
how sex and gender impacts one’s experiences and understandings of the world, broadening
to explore the social political consequences. |