Abstract
This article engages the contested question of feminist critique, suggesting that reflecting on how we ‘do’ critique as feminist scholars is integral to the work of examining the broader politics of feminist worldmaking and knowledge production. Building on the work of Rosalyn Diprose and Audre Lorde, I suggest that the concept of ‘epistemic generosity’ opens space for the development of a lexicon in which the nuances of an open and receptive attitude to feminist critique can be explored. As a stance of open receptivity, epistemic generosity is associated with waiting, slowness and listening, rather than pursuit, suspicion, vigilance and self-affirmation. Furthermore, as a non-directive mode of relating, epistemic generosity does not presume to know. Open to surprise, wonder and connection, it is fundamentally an orientation to thinking and knowing rooted in hopefulness. At the same time, epistemic generosity is not without risks. What thinking generously means, its risks and its costs, differs according to social positioning. For those located in privileged positions, epistemic generosity is only possible in conjunction with constant practices of self-critique that involve attending to friction, discomfort, difference and difficulty.
For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but also the truth of that language by which we speak it (Lorde, 1984: 99).
I have recently been engaged in a reading project on feminist theories of sexual violence. As part of this project, I read ‘Theorizing Feminist Antirape Praxis and the Problem of Resistance’ (Russell, 2020). This article examines recent feminist theoretical work on rape (in particular, the writings of Gavey, Cahill and Alcoff) to see whether the disjuncture between theory-based work and activist-engaged feminist antirape practice is still in play today. 1 I had an unexpected visceral response to the piece and found myself unsettled by its adversarial tone. While not questioning the broader merit of the article, I was uncomfortable with the reading it offered of Alcoff's (2018) book Rape and Resistance. In the article, there was much mention of ‘interrogating’ and the ‘failures’, ‘limitations’, ‘flaws’ and ‘stymied … logic’ of the work of the feminist writers. Having just read Alcoff's (2018) book, this reading jarred uncomfortably with my own. I had found Rape and Resistance to be a generative piece of scholarship that offered balanced critiques of the work of several feminist theorists (e.g. Rubin) and opened several fruitful questions for exploration. This discordance made me think. I wondered about the language of interrogation and its violent connotations. 2 As I engaged with the article, I realised that there was something about my visceral response, and my discomfort, that merited further unpacking and reflection. What was I upset about? What exactly was the problem here? As I explored my responses, I began to ask a series of questions. These questions were not about feminist theories of sexual violence or antirape praxis, but about feminist critique itself.
My encounter with Russell's (2020) article was thus a catalyst that opened space to think about feminist practices of critique. I asked: What is feminist critique? What are we doing when we ‘do’ feminist critique? How does it differ (if it does) from other modes of critique? How have I practised critique in the past? Have my own reading and writing practices been feminist? These kinds of questions lie at the heart of reflexive feminist theoretical praxis. It is well-recognised that as feminist scholars we should not be content with merely ‘adding women in’ to existing frameworks or providing criticisms of androcentric knowledge production (Harding, 1987). As Audre Lorde (1984) notes in the above epigraph, we also need to examine the language (i.e. discursive and practical tools, strategies and broader epistemic frames) that we use to articulate, critique, imagine, resist and reproduce the world. This is a crucial (but arguably less-developed) aspect of feminist praxis. Questioning and reflecting upon how we do critique as feminist scholars is integral to the work of examining the effects and implications of our theoretical and world-making practices. Motivated by my discomfort with the performance of militaristic, adversarial and combative gestures as marks of critical rigour, and dissatisfied with many of my own efforts, in this article I reflect on the praxis of feminist critique. I use my own discomfort as a scaffold to explore what it means to read and to write, as well as critique, as a feminist scholar.
There might well be some raised eyebrows at this point. Locating the origin of a scholarly piece of writing in an unexpected textual encounter and in visceral feelings could stretch the credulity of those who prefer straight lines and coherent and linear sets of ‘aims and objectives’. However, taking inspiration from alternative feminist approaches that advocate the densification of writing practices in which ‘feminist thinking webs’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012: 201) are gathered as the ‘collective webs one thinks with’, I purposefully begin by acknowledging its starting point in a relational encounter. In the article, I also do not try to advance a universal or decontextualised definition of ‘feminist critique’ but rather think with differing feminist voices and my own experiences of peer review and feminist reading and writing practices to consider what we are doing when we ‘do’ critique, and how we might frame feminist critique differently, according to specific contexts and political demands. While critique is highly contested and has plural meanings, negative renderings often assume it to be a negative, antagonistic and uncaring practice. Some feminist theorists (e.g. Davis, 2010; Fernando, 2019) have challenged this assumption, and argued that careful and/or generous critique is potentially a mode of care (for others and the world).
In the interests of expanding and contributing to feminist modes of engagement, I build on this work and, drawing on the writings of Diprose (2002) and Lorde (1977), outline ‘epistemic generosity’ as a critical feminist orientation. The idea of ‘epistemic generosity’ opens space for the development of a lexicon in which the nuances of an open and receptive attitude to critique can be explored. I suggest that epistemic generosity is an ‘open receptivity’ to other ideas, persons, perspectives, non-human worlds and texts. As a stance of openness, it is associated with waiting, slowness and listening, rather than pursuit, vigilance and self-affirmation. Furthermore, as a non-directive mode of relating (i.e. not concerned with sharply defined objectives or goals), epistemic generosity does not presume to know. Open to surprise, wonder and connection, it is fundamentally an orientation to thinking and knowing rooted in hopefulness. However, epistemic generosity is not without substantial risks. As an open receptivity, a hermeneutics of generosity is inevitably vulnerable. Furthermore, the work of Lorde (1979b/2007) shows that the costs of generosity differ for those located in historically and socially marginalised positions. I explore some of the limitations and challenges of epistemic generosity via a discussion of fraught feminist encounters, using, in particular, the encounter between Lorde and Daly in 1979 as a critical example.
What is critique? Dissenting voices
Negative renderings
The question of what critique is remains contested across a range of disciplines (Butler, 2001; Latour, 2004; Anker and Felski, 2017). Since the publication of Latour's (2004) influential piece in which he asked if critique had, in his words, ‘run out of steam’, there has been talk of a ‘postcritical turn’ (Anker and Felski, 2017) in which the salience of critique for the present moment is under debate. For Latour (2004), critique is synonymous with distancing, destruction and militarised rhetoric (e.g. interrogation) and is, in its normative understanding, antithetical to practices of caring and collaborative world-making. In this interpretation, critique and care become mutually exclusive practices. A similarly negative reading of critique is shared by some feminist theorists who regard critique predominantly as a destructive practice that should be repudiated or transcended. For example, Barad writes: ‘I am not interested in critique. In my opinion, critique is over-rated, over-emphasized, and over-utilized, to the detriment of feminism’ (2012: 49). Later she describes critique as no longer associated with ‘reading with care’ but all too often ‘a destructive practice meant to dismiss, to turn aside, to put something or someone down’ (Barad, 2012: 49)
A negative reading of critique as fundamentally reactive and as not producing anything new is shared by Grosz (1990) in her meditation on the practice of feminist theory. Feminist theory, for Grosz, always works in at least two directions, namely: ‘a negative or reactive project – the project of challenging what currently exists, or criticizing social, political, and theoretical relations’ and a ‘positive, constructive project: creating alternatives, producing feminist, not simply anti-sexist, theory’ (1990: 59). Critique, in this rendering, is a mode of reading that produces nothing new; it is not creative or constructive but merely repudiates its object. It does not offer a new line of inquiry or imaginative intervention. As a result, according to Grosz, critique is not transcendent – it remains stuck in the same place as the repudiated object; it doesn’t take us anywhere new. She writes: ‘But if it remains simply reactive, simply a critique, it ultimately affirms the very theories it may wish to move beyond … It necessarily remains on the very ground it aims to contest’ (Grosz, 1990: 59). Grosz (1990) goes on to write that feminist theory must involve both critique and the creation of new concepts. While she insists on these practices as complementary and mutually necessary, the formulation she offers seems, at the same time, to conceptualise them as separable practices.
Responding to Grosz's (1990) formulation, Ahmed notes that in this rendering, creative construction is valorised over critique which emerges as a ‘work-horse: something dreary and dogged; necessary but not really quite as sparky or imaginative’ (2014: para. 7). Ahmed (2014) suggests that for Grosz, critique emerges as boring and necessary feminist work that is stuck (in the past or present) and is excluded from the possibility of creativity, futurity and innovation, and attempts to recover critique for feminist theory. She questions a purely negative interpretation of critique and is disturbed by (what she sees as) the waning of feminist critique, particularly in relation to structural analyses of sexism and structural oppression. Ahmed takes issue with the view that critique is ‘a bad feminist habit’ (2014: para. 10) and insists that we need ‘a less loving embrace’ (2014: para. 13) and more (not less) critique in feminist theory. Other feminist writers (e.g. Ziarek, 2019) have similarly foregrounded the necessity and importance of continuing to apply the tools of negative critique, particularly in calling out injustices, violent systemic inequality and ongoing oppressions.
Critique is thus often rendered as a negative, stationary and static process. But is critique synonymous only with negativity, fault-finding and judgement? Or is it possible to think more expansively and creatively about critique as a multidimensional process?
Critique as a multidimensional process
According to Woolf (1926), reading, an activity that is intimately close to the practice of critique, is not a singular, coherent or unidirectional process but involves multiple possible activities and relationalities, e.g. immersion, receptivity, listening, empathy, judgement and evaluation. In her essay ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, Woolf (1926) delicately traces the shifting positions and multiple labours required of the reader. ‘Reading is not merely sympathizing or understanding; it is also criticizing and judging’ (Woolf, 1926: para. 15). At first, the reader must be receptive and open; they must not play the judge but instead immerse themselves in the other's perspective (the writer, the protagonist). Judgements must be postponed and avoided: ‘… a good reader will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his [sic] imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as he [sic] can. In the next place, he [sic] will judge with the utmost severity’ (Woolf, 1926: para. 17). Woolf (1926) reminds us that the labour of careful reading requires a range of shifting orientations towards the text or the object of critique. The work of reading is not simply a negative, passive or destructive process, but in its most robust form involves empathy, creativity and the potential construction of an alternative or something new. It is a fundamentally relational and attentive practice involving a range of shifting epistemic and affective orientations. We can think of critique similarly as a practice that involves multiple forms of relationality and as a dialectical movement towards new understanding and/or the transformation of the status quo (frameworks, debates, discursive realities, material conditions). Critique is thus not a singular technique or method but encompasses a range of responses and affective modes. These can be contradictory and shift in new directions as the slow and attentive work of reading unfolds.
Sedgwick's (2003) influential work on modes of reading resonates with some of the broader impulses of Woolf's (1926) ideas. Drawing on the Kleinian notion of fluid and shifting psychic ‘positions’ rather than stable dispositions, Sedgwick (2003) distinguishes between two different orientations, namely: paranoid and reparative reading. These are not seen as mutually exclusive or as a binary pair. Instead, they are conceptualised ‘as changing and heterogeneous relational stances’ (Sedgwick, 2003: 128) that often infuse the same project. The dominance of what Sedgwick (2003) calls paranoid orientations to knowledge, in which suspicion and scepticism predominate, and in which the goal of exposure galvanises and shapes inquiry, has, in her view, resulted in the muting of alternative practices of reading which operate (sometimes alongside) according to a different logic (e.g. pleasure, wonder, connection). While Sedgwick (2003) does not dismiss or deny the importance of the paranoid mode for naming and exposure in relation to certain issues and events, she insists that it is just one kind of epistemic practice. Furthermore, engaging in other, alternative kinds of practices of reading does not, in and of itself, ‘entail a denial of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression’ (Sedgwick, 2003: 128). What is, in my view, most useful about Sedgwick's (2003) framework is the insistence that these reading practices are oscillating and shifting orientations rather than stable ‘things’. Her work invites us to consider that practices of critique are not only about ‘a drama of exposure’ (Sedgwick, 2003: 8) and are not limited to attempts to get beneath, beyond or behind; instead, she notes that critique can also be a practice of being beside, in which we walk and read alongside, considering and responding to our object with a stance of respect, openness and hope.
A multidimensional approach to critique recognises many possible orientations to the texts, worlds and others that we read and respond to. Rather than critique being automatically synonymous with interrogation, scepticism and the goals of unveiling or contestation, it acknowledges there are other possible modes. This does not mean that deconstructive critique is a ‘bad habit’ (Ahmed, 2014) or a practice that should be abandoned in feminist politics. On the contrary, it is an indispensable and necessary mode of response to the continuing injustices of our social, political and epistemic worlds. However, it is limiting, particularly for feminist scholars, to conceptualise and understand critique only as an interrogatory mode of response.
Reading and writing as a feminist
Being a feminist scholar means inhabiting a particular orientation towards the world, injustices and gendered oppression. Inhabiting a feminist mode of being, becoming and/or acting also suggests the possibility of engaging in different reading and writing practices. As Ahmed (2017) notes, being a feminist is not something we only do in the classroom or in the ivory tower; being a feminist means living a feminist life – in everyday spaces and encounters, at home and on the streets. As an extension, ‘living a feminist life’ surely also means reading, and writing, as a feminist, and responding to the work of others in ways informed by the epistemic, political and ethical principles of feminist praxis. While these principles are, of course, deeply contested and not singular, writing, reading and doing critique as a feminist must mean, at the very least, being willing to reflect on our responsive practices and the epistemic and rhetorical tools we deploy.
For example, I read and respond to the world (texts and evidence) as a person with a specific psychic, embodied and material history but I also carry the pedagogical traces of my training in a discipline (Psychology) that is historically largely androcentric, Eurocentric, positivist and individualist. As a student of this discipline in the 1990s and 2000s, I learnt that being critical (always valued over being affirming) meant finding the limitations, the insufficiencies and the gaps in bodies of literature. It meant ‘reading for a purpose’, i.e. with pre-determined goals and objectives in place. It did not mean reading carefully with an attitude of openness and non-directionality, ‘dwelling-with’ texts and ideas in the spirit of what Boulous-Walker (2017) describes as ‘slow reading’. It is also worth noting that I was trained in a Psychology department that (at that time) had a relatively strong critical orientation and was involved in teaching poststructuralist modes of critique. At the same time, undergraduates were taught heavy doses of positivist methodologies. My academic sensibility was thus formed in a departmental context that taught both standard positivist approaches and poststructuralist approaches that advanced the work of exposure, debunking and unveiling as core critical imperatives.
For the most part, I was trained (shaped) via male, white and Euro-American voices, writing styles and assumptions about knowledge. As a postgraduate student, I gravitated towards the scholars in the department teaching social constructionist approaches to race, gender and subjectivity. In these pedagogical spaces, the voices of feminists, decolonial theorists and critical race theorists were engaged. I became passionate about unearthing assumptions and questioning singular notions of reality. At the time, I attended an interview for a research assistant position. When asked what kind of psychologist I was, I immediately responded: ‘A critical psychologist!’. The interviewer roared with laughter (I didn’t get the job). Trained to criticality in this specific time and context meant embodying and living a sceptical and suspicious stance towards the world. I do not mean to suggest that this was a ‘bad thing’. On the contrary, being exposed to deconstructive methods and social constructionism was central to my journey of becoming a critical feminist researcher who was engaged in ‘troubling’ the status quo and active in sexual violence outreach work.
In addition to being shaped by theoretical currents of social constructionism and methods of deconstructive discourse analysis, I was also schooled in the styles and habits of conventional social science academic reading and writing. This process was not intentional or direct, but subtle and insidious. As I progressed through the university, lessons in territoriality, argumentation, fault-finding, militaristic academic language and extractive reading were not communicated directly to me but via hundreds of pedagogical micro-interactions over many years (e.g. in remarks on essays, grades, comments in seminars and lectures and reading and internalising the rhetoric of the predominantly white, male writers and theorists on undergraduate course syllabi). I remember the feelings of disappointment and shame I experienced on reading the single-line response from my lecturer – ‘So what?’ – to my Honours essay that tried (probably not very successfully) to make sense of a large amount of reading I had done on French feminist ideas about sexual difference. In retrospect, I can see why I was upset. The curt, flippant and dismissive response did not acknowledge or value my efforts to make sense of, read and grapple with difficult material. Because I did not have a clear answer, my attempt was dismissed as a waste of time.
Slowly but surely (as I advanced through postgraduate study), I internalised the idea that to be successful I needed to stake a unique claim, have a clear answer or advance an original research idea. Rather than engaging in a generative conversation with other scholars that respected ambiguity, context, difficulty, difference and ‘not knowing’, I came to believe that the aim of scholarship was to certify my status as an individual academic by proving that others had somehow got things wrong, misunderstood or failed to make certain connections. For the most part, I was thus not trained in hermeneutical generosity (i.e. acknowledging debts, building knowledge as a collective project, valuing deep and difficult reading, listening to others or questioning my own convictions) but internalised a rhetoric that foregrounded epistemic acts of claiming, declaring, arguing, interrogating, deconstructing and countering. Even in the instruction I received about plagiarism, I was taught that citation was a matter of being transparent about who ideas ‘belonged to’ rather than an ethical practice of engagement, dialogue and collective knowledge production.
As a feminist scholar, I have come to believe that the valorisation of territorial and militaristic rhetoric as a hallmark of intellectual rigour is deeply problematic and entangled with imperialist and androcentric approaches to knowledge production. I did not always think along these lines or recognise my own collusion with problematic critical languages and tactics. In fact, my current discomfort with territorial and militaristic critical rhetoric has only been achieved via a slow process of coming to (unevenly) unlearn patriarchal reading and writing practices via feminist pedagogies of critique. The process of unlearning was facilitated by a sense of ambivalence about my own writing fuelled by generous feminist peer engagement with my work. The process of trying to unlearn masculinist tools (of reading, writing and critique) started in earnest when I began to submit my work to feminist journals such as Feminist Theory, Feminist Review and Signs. I am grateful to the many feminist peer reviewers who generously provided their feedback, sometimes alerting me to problematic framings and encouraging me to reposition my work in dialogue with rather than against others. I was encouraged to explore nuance, difference and complexity, and to reframe my theoretical interventions in a more collaborative and generous mode. Slowly I began to learn that there were other ways of writing and doing feminist theory.
While the process of peer review can be brutal and alienating, I am grateful to the many feminist scholars who generously gave their time to engage with my work in a nurturing and feminist pedagogical spirit. This does not mean that these reviews were not critical, demanding or uncompromising. They were all of these things. At their best, these reviews were however also generative and generous, and born out of a careful reading of my work. They have collectively offered me lessons in what it means to read and write as a feminist. In addition, the generative writings of certain feminist scholars (e.g. Haraway, 2016; Bhandar and Ziadah, 2020; Nicholas and Budgeon, 2021) taught me that ‘staking an original claim’ was not the only way of writing or doing feminist theory. We can instead ‘think-with’ others; knowledge-making is a collective and collaborative process rather than the act of a disconnected individual (Haraway, 2016). Ideas, concepts and theories do not belong to (or originate in) individuals; they are joint constructions. Furthermore, we can go against the grain of phallocentric, individualist and colonising epistemic practices by valuing the work of making feminist memory as a necessary and critical endeavour (see: Bhandar and Ziadah, 2020). We do not have to partake uncritically in the cult of the ‘original’ and enact predatory practices of reading and critique in the interests of staking claim to newness (Bhandar and Ziadah, 2020).
A student once told me that reading my work was like hearing a series of bombs going off. I laughed (being not quite sure what to make of the comment). Somehow the remark stuck in my head. For a long time, I was not able to see my own complicity with adversarial structures of writing and critique. Reflecting on my own practices, I slowly came to realise that ‘the Master's tools’ (Lorde, [1979a] 2007) of critique were deeply lodged in my own reading and writing practices. My whiteness undoubtedly has also shaped my readiness to accept extractivist and territorial tools as markers of ‘critical thinking’ and to be comfortable with laying claim to epistemic authority via rhetorical tools of territoriality and debunking. 3 My working-class background however complicates matters somewhat (neither of my parents completed high school). As a result of these class-based roots, as a student I experienced a deep sense of anxiety in the university context 4 that resulted in a drive to ‘fit in’ and learn/perform the rhetoric of academic language (probably at an exaggerated level as a compensatory mechanism). Being trained in a university context which was dominated by white scholars and professors also meant that I undoubtedly internalised white-centric epistemic tools and ways of seeing, reading and writing. These tools can be deeply lodged, ‘as unconscious racial schemes shaping one's own theorizing’ (Bottici, 2022: 12). Although for a long time deeply invested in feminist praxis, I was not necessarily reading and writing as a feminist. While there can be no singular way of reading and writing as a feminist, or doing feminist critique, we must nonetheless question the intellectual models, strategies and rhetoric that we use, as well as the relational orientations we assume towards the work of others, other feminist scholars especially.
Thinking generously
I am certainly not the first to propose the idea of ‘generous critique’ (e.g. see: Fernando, 2019; Davis, 2010). Writing about the intellectual inheritances of the scholarly work of Mahmood, Fernando notes that Mahmood refused an ‘ungenerous understanding of critique’ as negative, destructive and uncaring, and insisted instead on critique as a ‘practice of care for others and the world’ (2019: 14). Caring and careful critique emerges here as akin to slow practices of dwelling in which complexity is embraced and in which ‘one's own analytical and political certitudes’ (Fernando, 2019: 15) are open to scrutiny. In a similar vein, Davis (2010) questions tendencies to pit critique against practices of care, generosity and slow attentiveness. Davis (2010) calls into question the assumed contradiction between critique and care and gestures towards ‘generous critique’ as an alternative mode of doing critique. Using the example of peer review, Davis (2010) argues that being critical and being generous are not mutually exclusive and that, in fact, generosity is a hallmark of good-quality reviews. Generous reviews are open to the specific projects and objectives of others. They read work on its own terms and are empathic. A generous reviewer ‘will try and place herself in the shoes of the person reading the critique’ (Davis 2010: 189). Feminist writers have thus been instrumental in beginning to rethink critique as a practice of care and a mode of generosity. There are also many feminist peer reviewers (as well as teachers, mentors and editors) that are already collectively practising generous modes of critique and encouraging others to adopt a more collaborative and collective approach to theory-making, peer review and research.
However, what precisely generosity means in relation to feminist praxis still requires some development. I contribute to this endeavour here but do not claim to do so in any exhaustive way. This effort should be read as an invitation for others to continue, redirect, build on and reflect more fully on the implications, limitations and resonances of what it means to ‘think generously’ from different contexts, political vantage points and perspectives. I build on the writing of Diprose (2002) and Lorde (1979b, 1984) to suggest that a generous orientation is fundamental to careful, attentive and robust feminist critique and knowledge production practices. Furthermore, reading Diprose (2002) and Lorde (1979b, 1984) alongside each other creates generative friction with which to think about some of the challenges and limitations of this development. It is worth noting upfront that endeavouring to enact careful and generous modes of feminist critique does not mean being mushy, uniformly loving, flowery or overly tolerant. Generous critique is not incompatible with feminist outrage. In its fullest sense (and as we have seen from the work of Woolf), critique is a multidimensional practice that encompasses a range of relational orientations and affective registers (e.g. including empathy, immersion, listening, anger, rage, frustration, reflection, evaluation, judgement and receptivity). This includes anger as an energetic force that mobilises collective resistance and vitalises social critique and material transformation (see: Lorde, 1981).
Epistemic generosity
What does it mean to postulate generosity as an epistemic mode? We are used to thinking of ‘generosity’ as an individual character trait describing persons that give to others regularly and habitually. At first glance, this seems to have nothing to do with knowledge production practices. An act of generosity from a reviewer or a colleague is nice to experience, but typically we think of this as the result of individual predilections rather than implicated in a specific epistemic paradigm. At the same time, we are comfortable with thinking about other kinds of relational orientations as epistemic modes. For example, we easily understand rigour, objectivity and detachment as core epistemic stances. These terms all describe or imply a certain kind of relationship towards the object of scrutiny or research: a sharply edged relationship of distance, disembodiment, constraint and purposefulness. They also describe a relationship in which the stable boundaries between self and other are clearly and unambiguously delineated. Feminist scholars have challenged these kinds of epistemic orientations and rewritten our understandings of concepts such as ‘objectivity’ (e.g. see: Harding, 1987; Haraway, 1988). Feminists have also written substantially on alternative epistemic stances towards research / the researched, including, for example, on empathy and rapport (e.g. Reinharz, 1993; Ellingson, 1998).
In a similar vein, we can think of ‘generosity’ as an epistemic stance. When I speak of generosity in the context of knowledge production, I predominantly mean an orientation of open receptivity. Ultimately, to expand our knowledge in new directions, we must be receptive to others. Knowledge production is almost inevitably concerned with outside others – whether in the form of human persons, texts, material objects, more-than-human animals or modes of life. Solipsistic knowledge production is, as outlined by Arendt (1977: 46), a ‘fallacy of philosophy’. To know, we are obliged to enter into relationships with others. 5 These relations are, as we have already seen, not stable or singular: multiple movements, moments and orientations are possible. While a ‘paranoid’ epistemic position (Sedgwick, 2003) is a stance of suspicion and negative anticipation, epistemic generosity is a mode of response open to surprise, wonderment and the difficulty of friction. It is open to not-knowing (i.e. not having the answers). It is associated with an enlarging responsiveness (as in generous largesse), which does not seek to foreclose or re-entrench solid boundaries or categories. This receptiveness to unpredictability results in inevitable risk: a hermeneutics of generosity is inherently vulnerable. 6 Like the reparative mode of reading, which Sedgwick (2003) describes as driven by pleasure rather than suspicion, epistemic generosity can include moments of loss, estrangement, disappointment, violence and trauma. It is the open hopefulness of generosity (that things can be different, that new understandings are possible, that the unexpected can be enriching and transformative) that can result in what Sedgwick (2003: 146) refers to as ‘a fracturing’ or traumatic experience. In epistemic communities which value adversarial, masculinist and individualist modes of relation, and in which knowing, and having ‘the answers’, is prized, the open receptivity and attentive stance of epistemic generosity is at risk of being devalued, dismissed and marginalised. For example, Stone-Mediatore (2013) notes how university students often associate epistemic authority with those who exhibit intellectual arrogance, selfishness and lack of attention and care. 7
In understanding epistemic generosity as a stance of open receptivity, I draw centrally on Diprose's (2002: 2) conceptualisation of generosity as ‘an openness to others that is fundamental to human existence, sociality, and social formation’. For Diprose, generosity is ‘the intersubjective and carnal basis of life’ (2002: 101). My understanding of ‘epistemic generosity’ as an open receptivity is thus grounded in a broader conceptualisation of subjectivity and sociality as intercorporeal, embodied and emergent. In this vein, the work of thinking, doing critique and making concepts is not understood as simply a cognitive exercise but is thoroughly enfleshed, emplaced and affective; thinking is ‘a process that takes place not in isolation but within the field of the other’ (Diprose, 2002: 126). This might feel somewhat self-evident; however, most conceptualisations of critique are grounded in assumptions that it is the autonomous self-contained individual that theorises, knows, critiques and writes. As noted by Diprose (2002: 134), the ‘self-reflexive autonomous self … dominates thinking about thinking’.
Feminist scholars such as Haraway (2016) and Anzaldúa (2009) have, however, long been actively enacting the entangled aspects of thinking, feeling and knowing. As described by Puig de la Bellacasa (2012), Haraway's work performs these epistemic entanglements via her writing practices, for example through thickening modes of ‘writing-with’ that add layers, stage encounters and build density. According to Puig de la Bellacasa, such writing styles are technologies that resist the inscription of the singular and decontextualised knower/theorist and refuse the disaggregation of the writer from their inevitably relational (but not always conflict-free) ‘thinking webs’ (2012: 201). The writing of Chicana feminist writer Anzaldúa also refuses the separation of writing and knowing from the matters of fleshy bodies, geopolitical landscapes and concrete material conditions – ‘there is no separation between life and writing’ (2009: 30). Anzaldúa thinks and writes experimentally, mixing genres, the personal, the bodily, the discursive, the geopolitical, inventing a new mode of theorising that has been called ‘theory in the flesh’ (Moraga and Anzaldúa, 1981: 23). In this rendering, knowing develops as a situated and embodied practice that endeavours ‘to bridge the contradictions in our experiences’ (Moraga and Anzaldúa, 1981: 23). The relationship between experience and feminist theory thus emerges here as a dialectic; critique emerges from a critical consciousness rooted in oppositional embodied and collective experiences (Gunew, 1990).
As an affective and embodied orientation that is open and non-purposeful, epistemic generosity is a hopeful and respectful movement towards other ideas, positions, persons, problems and material worlds. As such, it involves a certain evacuation of self (as far as this is possible). One has to be willing to let go of one's own concepts and truths (even if temporarily) to listen and learn. Diprose (2002) describes this as a kind of dispossession of self, which she terms ‘radical generosity’. This kind of generous orientation does not necessarily mean accepting, condoning or agreeing with everything that the other says or believes; it does however mean being willing to listen, critically reflect and reassess; it means being teachable and open to thinking differently. This kind of dispossession of self can be linked to what Woolf (1926) describes as the ‘immersion’ characteristic of the practice of reading. Careful reading requires a certain suspension of self and an openness to the vision, perspective and imagination of another. A dispossession of self and an open orientation towards the world is thus one ingredient of epistemic generosity. As such, this concept resonates with the Weilian concept of attentiveness (see: Weil, 1970, 2002; Stone-Mediatore, 2013). As opposed to typical understandings of attention as a kind of forced and clenched muscular focus, Weil (1970) postulates attention as an expansive mode of waiting that refuses hasty judgements, predetermined expectations and assertions of mastery in order to ‘contemplate attentively and slowly’ the phenomena before us (Stone-Mediatore, 2013: 82). Weilian attentiveness is not driven by a specific objective; it is involved in establishing connections with others and the world and is characterised by epistemic humility (Stone-Mediatore, 2013: 82). Thus, for Weil, ‘humility is above all one of the qualities of attention’ (1970: 351). A Weilian kind of attentiveness is akin to epistemic generosity; as epistemic stances, both are characterised by waiting rather than pursuing, openness rather than prediction and receptivity to difference and difficulty rather than self-assertion.
As a mode of open receptivity, enacting epistemic generosity involves the challenging work of remaining open to difference, difficulty, friction and alterity. It involves attending to difference and alterity, rather than dismissing, avoiding or minimising it. This kind of open attentiveness to friction and discomfort has been described as integral to critical thinking (Diprose, 2002; Stone-Mediatore, 2013). New concepts, new thinking and new imaginative visions are made possible via engagements and encounters with diverse others. If there is no encounter with difference, no disturbance and no collision with alterity, ‘there is no teaching or learning, no production of new ideas’ (Diprose, 2002: 135). It is, in fact, the alterity of the other that ‘opens me to think beyond myself and therefore beyond what I already know’ (Diprose 2002: 137). We can respond to alterity in various ways, e.g. via violent disavowal, repudiation, suspicion, avoidance, refusal to recognise, practices of colonisation or via generosity. Practising epistemic generosity entails being open, being willing to recognise and attend to difference and complexity and to listen without imposing your own certitudes. Ultimately it means a commitment to thinking (Arendt, 1977) rather than the hasty, lazy and empty invocation of normative ideas (which often reproduce privilege) or the stubborn and defensive clinging to (unexamined) attachments and assumptions. Unfortunately, socio-politically privileged persons are often prone to the latter. Comfortable social positions (and the desire to maintain them) often breed what philosophers have termed ‘willful ignorance’ (Pohlhaus, 2012). This can be thought of as a kind of epistemic refusal to engage, recognise and attend to the oppression and injustice we inevitably encounter and contribute towards. 8 For those of us shaped by experiences of privilege (especially whiteness), it might be the case that we need to simultaneously practise both constant suspicion (as far as possible) towards our own motives, assumptions and feelings and epistemic generosity towards others.
Lorde's (1977) writing on the importance of the exploration of feelings for radical and transformative epistemic practices provides us with a different perspective on the ‘open receptivity’ that is epistemic generosity. While Diprose (2002) stresses that we are moved (by dissonance, outrage, pain, difference) to think in alternative and new ways, she does not explore what it is that prompts us to reflect on or attend to discomfort. While those in marginalised positions often have little choice but to confront the feelings of rage, injustice and pain that accompany living in oppressive situations, it is less clear why those who are generally more comfortable would attend to difference and discomfort. In the case of privileged persons, ignoring or blunting feelings of discomfort can become a habitual pattern that blocks thinking (Panizza, 2022). For example, in the South African context, it is impossible to move within one's social landscape without encountering poverty and suffering. As a result, many citizens (including myself) become numb and unresponsive to these sights. As Weil (1970) reminds us, it is difficult to truly pay attention to the suffering of others; this is often because paying attention would mean that we would be called to do something (Panizza, 2022). We have to make a constant commitment to noticing and exploring discomfort and the prickling feelings (of guilt, shame, anger, doubt) that call us to think and act. Thus, while epistemic generosity involves what Diprose (2002) describes as a kind of dispossession of self, it paradoxically also requires constant reflexivity. Given the centrality of feelings of discomfort and disturbance for critical thinking, epistemic generosity demands that we remain highly attuned to our affective and sensate bodies and actively work to engage and think-with friction and difficulty. Attention to the work of Lorde (1977) helps to illuminate this point. For Lorde, knowing cannot be limited to rational cognition but is deeply rooted in feeling and sensory experience: ‘feeling births idea’ (1977: 84). According to Lorde, engaging and exploring difficult and often confronting feelings results in ‘the most radical and daring of ideas’ (1977: 87). This suggests that the ‘open receptivity’ of epistemic generosity is not only an orientation towards others but involves critical attentiveness to our visceral feelings, struggles, dilemmas and perplexities. For those that experience marginalisation, this process can be painful (see: hooks, 1991) given that it often arises from a disjunctive experience of violent misfitting (with the world, others, dominant narratives). According to Anzaldúa, ‘Knowing is painful because after “it” happens I can’t stay in the same place and be comfortable. I am no longer the same person I was before’ (1987: 48). For those in privileged positions, critical thinking demands a constant commitment to self-critique and the ‘honest exploration’ (Lorde, 1977: 87) of feelings. This enables and nurtures epistemic generosity: the open (and non-defensive) receptivity to the ideas, experiences and teachings of others.
Feminist modalities of critique thus require both reflexivity 9 and ‘corporeal generosity, a generosity central to teaching, learning and thinking’ (Diprose, 2002: 127). The responsiveness (reactivity according to some) that defines critique is central to its transformative potential. Of course, the responsiveness inherent in a critique can be an ungenerous and hasty judgement or repudiation; this often does not lead us anywhere different in terms of critical knowledge. Hasty and unthinking critiques rooted in privilege and efforts to maintain or cling to positions of social power can be polarising and damaging.
Fraught feminist encounters
It is well known that encounters between racially diverse feminists have often been characterised by tension. Black feminists have often described (and still describe) feeling as if they were not being seen, heard or taken seriously by white feminists. Many write about feeling alienated and silenced by mainstream white feminist theories (e.g. Lugones and Spelman, 1983). In addition to often being rendered invisible, Black feminist writers have also pointed to the problematic ways in which they are, at times, made visible by white feminist theory and research (Carby, 1982), e.g. being granted visibility only as victims or being represented via othering tropes (e.g. ‘Third world women’) that minimise and flatten differences (Mohanty, 1988). In efforts to centre gender as the central feminist analytic, white feminists have all too often claimed a universal sisterhood with all ‘women’ that does not sufficiently engage differences. Furthermore, in efforts to shore up the universal coherence of ‘women's oppression’ (typically interpreted through white, middle-class experiences) and avoid dealing with discomforting differences, the work of women of colour has often been ignored, compartmentalised and not substantively engaged with.
As an attempt to consider how the concept of epistemic generosity might play out in relation to this kind of feminist friction, I turn now to a brief discussion of the fraught encounter that occurred between Lorde and Daly in 1979. 10 I consider how Lorde offers us an example of generous feminist thinking which also illustrates some of the concept's limitations and challenges. Furthermore, foregrounding the example provided by Lorde helps to contextualise Diprose's (2002) often quite universalist conceptualisation of generosity. Reading Lorde, who is writing from a Black feminist position, with and against Diprose (2002) (a white feminist philosopher), creates generative friction with which to explore the idea with more complexity and depth. As a white feminist myself, grappling with the living example of Lorde's generosity enabled me to question some of my own assumptions about ‘epistemic generosity’ and to see that the meaning of generosity (and the consequences of its enactment) varies substantially for persons located differently (e.g. in relation to racial privilege).
At an address at the ‘Second Sex Conference’ in New York on 29 September 1979, Lorde declared that ‘To read this program is to assume that lesbian and Black women have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic, women's culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power’ (1979a: 244). In her speech, Lorde implored her fellow feminists to adopt an attitude of openness, dialogue and receptivity towards others and to recognise the productive and creative potential of difference, ‘as that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged’ (1979a: 246). In her writing, Lorde (1979a) powerfully theorised difference as a resource to be engaged rather than something to be avoided, minimised, ignored or merely tolerated. She recognised the productive possibilities of difference as a frictional relational mode that can engender critical thinking and positive social change. She enacted and cultivated an ethic of epistemic generosity in her feminist work and encounters. Writing to Daly in 1979 11 after the publication of Daly’s (1979) book Gyn/Ecology, Lorde wrote of her disappointment with the long history of white feminists’ inability to ‘hear Black women's words, to maintain dialogue with us’ (1979b: 151). Dismayed by Daly's (1979) failure to engage Black women as active agents and theory-makers in her book and her tendency to portray them ‘only as victims and preyers upon each other’ (Lorde, 1979b: 153), the letter witnesses Lorde's sense of betrayal at Daly's exclusions and distortions.
Lorde notes that by writing the letter she was breaking an earlier promise to herself: ‘I had decided never again to speak to white women about racism’ (1979b: 159). However, instead of withdrawing from dialogue or responding only in dismissive anger, Lorde continues to try to engage with Daly and to keep the intersubjective space of epistemic exchange open between them. She does so for two reasons. First, she recognises Daly as a fellow feminist from whom she has learnt in the past. Second, she is reluctant to adopt a pessimistic (suspicious) orientation that assumes that Daly will not be able to hear or critically engage with her. She writes: ‘But for me to assume you will not hear me represents not only history, perhaps, but an old pattern of relating, sometimes protective and sometimes dysfunctional, that we, as women shaping our future, are in the process of shattering and passing beyond, I hope’ (Lorde, 1979b: 153).
The telling phrase here is ‘I hope’. Lorde (1979b) chooses to respond to Daly with hope; she remains open to the possibility that Daly will hear her, that she will reflect, that they will be able to communicate with one another and find common ground, a position of joint understanding. This is the ‘open receptivity’ of epistemic generosity that moves towards the other with hopefulness, believing that good things and change are possible. The enactment of this kind of generosity comes at a cost to Lorde; it opens her up to another disappointment and betrayal from a white feminist. Epistemic generosity clearly does not carry the same costs for those in marginalised versus privileged positions; it is thus not a universal orientation that has a singular meaning. The use, consequences and import of generosity will differ depending on specific contexts and interlocutions. It is also instructive that Lorde's (1979b) enactment of generosity is in no way sappy or flowery or soft; instead, she directly confronts, calls out and critiques Daly's distortions in her letter. At the same time, she writes in a spirit of profound generosity, with the clear intention of opening (rather than closing) dialogue. She thus opens the letter by saying, ‘It is because of what you have given to me in the past work that I write this letter to you now, hoping to share the benefits of my insights as you have shared the benefits of yours with me’ (Lorde, 1979b: 151).
Lorde (1979b) invites Daly to engage in a difficult and reciprocal dialogue with her about white women's inability (or wilful failure) to respond reciprocally to the words, realities and experiences of Black women. 12 She asks: ‘So the question arises in my mind, Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us. This is not a rhetorical question’ (Lorde, 1979b: 155). Via this discomforting and challenging question, Lorde (1979b) invites Daly to think about her reading and writing practices, and to reflect on the ethics of her engagement (or lack thereof) with the work, writing and critiques of Black feminists. Recognising knowledge production as deeply relational and as embedded in responsibility towards others, Lorde (1979b) asks Daly to listen and to critically reflect on her practices. Lorde thus practises and lives feminist epistemic generosity in her response and asks that Daly similarly commit to working through their differences in a spirit of reciprocal openness. She writes: ‘In this spirit, I invite you to a joint clarification of some of the differences which lie between us, a Black and a white woman’ (Lorde, 1979b: 152).
Unfortunately, the hopefulness that Lorde chose to enact in her generous invitation to Daly to think with her about difficult matters was not reciprocated. While Lorde claimed that Daly never responded to her, this was factually shown to be untrue after her death when a note from Daly, dated 22 September 1979, was found in her papers. My own reading is that Lorde was not in fact being untruthful because in her interpretation Daly had not responded in any meaningful sense of the word. That is certainly my sense after reading Daly's (1979) letter. The letter is very brief (in comparison with Lorde's) and starts off with a number of excuses for the long delay in replying. Daly does not directly or reflexively engage with Lorde's questions or critique; instead, she writes: Clearly there is no simple response possible to the matters you raise in your letter. I wrote Gyn/Ecology out of the insights and materials most accessible to me at the time … I could speculate on how Gyn/Ecology would have been affected had we corresponded about this before the manuscript went to press, but it doesn’t seem creativity-conducing to look backwards (1979: 575–576).
In comparison with Lorde's (1979b) ‘open receptivity’, Daly's (1979) letter sounds defensive, thin and clipped. It would seem that Daly (1979) was unable to subject herself to enough critical scrutiny to be able to think-with Lorde generously about a very difficult matter. Unfortunately, the history of encounters between racially diverse feminists is littered with examples of Black and Indigenous feminists asking for difficult reciprocal dialogue about material and geopolitical differences and white feminists’ failures to open their ears, listen and hear, practise self-critique and embody and enact modes of ‘epistemic generosity’. Those of us who inhabit positions of privilege (especially whiteness) need to work at practising modes of self-critique, 13 pay attention to feelings of friction and discomfort and cultivate an orientation of open receptivity towards others.
Closing
Provoked by a discomforting encounter with a feminist text, this article explored what it means to read, write and do critique as a feminist. Foregrounding heterogeneous feminist conceptualisations of critique and reflecting on my own struggles to unlearn masculinist and imperialist writing practices, the matter of critique was shown to be multidimensional and irreducible to negative fault-finding. Building on the work of feminist theorists (e.g. Diprose, Lorde, Haraway and Ahmed), I suggested that the matter of critique – that is, the ways we read, write and respond to others and to the social world – is a fundamentally situated, embodied and relational practice. While feminists are not in easy agreement regarding the meaning, definition or value of critique, the stakes of the debate are high given that the matter of critique, and the struggle for its meaning and remaking, are fundamental to feminist efforts to reconceptualise practices of knowing and collectively create more egalitarian feminist worlds.
Writing with multiple and sometimes dissenting ‘feminist thinking webs’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012), I explored the complexities of what it means to do feminist critique. Drawing specifically on the writings of Diprose (2002) and Lorde (1979a, 1979b, 1984), I suggested that thinking about feminist critical praxis through the lexicon of ‘epistemic generosity’ is a productive means of expanding our understanding (and practice) of critique beyond narrow fault-finding and/or critical habits of naming and unveiling. Reading Diprose and Lorde alongside each other generated creative friction which enabled an engagement with some of the limitations and challenges of the concept. In particular, thinking with Lorde reminds us that we do not come to the matter of reading, writing and doing critique as decontextualised persons. What thinking generously means, its risks and its costs, differs according to social positioning. For those located in privileged positions, epistemic generosity is only possible in conjunction with constant practices of self-critique in which we/they attend to friction, discomfort, difference and difficulty.
