Used to it

I am a postgraduate student in philosophy: and I am used to it.

Going to events when academics (including women even, including feminists even) cite all dead or nearly dead white men. I am used to it, surely that’s what I am there for. But it is not: I chose philosophy because I love philosophizing, not because I love philosophers. But being in philosophy seems to mean that you have to give your love to philosophers, which means giving your love to white men (even feminist philosophers routinely do this, I recently heard a feminist philosopher refer to Deleuze as her beloved). I am used to going to conferences, and only white men are cited, and I am glad it still makes me hot and bothered.

So at one event, I was looking forward to a panel that had been set up on philosophy of difference having encountered this problem, again and again. At last, something feminists had written about! And then: all of the papers cite only dead white men. Only. Lonely.

And I am realizing that to become a feminist philosopher, I am going to have to leave philosophy. Like most feminist philosophers. We leave, philosophy stays the same.

Cultural Studies?

Cultural Studies MA. I open the course outline for my first core module. I find: Foucault, Deleuze, Benjamin, Heidegger, Agamben, Badiou. White men, every one. Mostly dead.

Surely this is a mistake, I think.

I turn to the course outline for my second core module. I find: Kant, Marx, Husserl, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Freud.

Cultural Studies in 2014: a field populated by white, male continental philosophers? You’re sure no one else has anything to say?