Decentering the Center

A considerable amount of feminist thinking today works across borders in ways that unsettle familiar philosophical and political frameworks. It cuts across the borders of traditional disciplinary configurations, borrowing, incorporating, and transforming the methodological approaches as well as the concrete concerns of the disciplines. Moreover, feminist work is increasingly attentive to factors such as class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion that configure the lives of different groups of women and men in multiple ways within contemporary cultures and nation-states. This work also crosses regional, national, and continental boundaries, as feminists find they must think globally, act locally, as the popular slogan has it.This kind of feminist work is committed to articulating a political vision that is responsive to the difference such interconnections make both in the perspectives of feminist theorists and in the interests of women. The essays in this volume bring to their focuses on philosophical issues the new angles of vision created by the multicultural, global, and postcolonial feminisms that have been developing around us.
These multicultural, global, and postcolonial feminist concerns transform mainstream notions of experience, human rights, the origins of philosophic issues, philosophic uses of metaphors of the family, white antiracism, human progress, scientific progress, modernity, the unity of scientific method, the desirability of universal knowledge claims, and other ideas central to philosophy.