Review by Choice Review
Oksala (Univ. of Helsinki, Finland) uses two traditions that are sometimes at odds with each other, phenomenology and Foucault's poststructuralism, as tools for understanding contemporary feminism. In the first part of the book, she examines various metaphysical issues of feminist thought. She begins by varying the Kantian question concerning the possibility of metaphysics by posing the question of feminist metaphysics as a description of the most general features of phenomenal reality. Foucault develops this Kantian metaphysics by interrogating the practices and institutions that give rise to conceptual schemes. As a result, politics gives rise to ontology. This claim sets the stage for the remaining two sections. Part 2 provides a phenomenology of birth and gender as a way of critiquing some contemporary approaches in feminist phenomenology and advocating for "postphenomenology," which parts with the natural attitude as a foundation, yielding a postfoundational phenomenology. In the final section of the book, Oksala looks at the political implications of contemporary feminist thought; this section can be read as an attempt to practice this postphenomenology through examinations of neoliberalism and feminist thought. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Corey Randall McCall, Elmira College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
