Abstract

In A Feminist I: Reflections from Academia, Christine Overall undertakes a positive exploration of the idea that philosophizing arises out of personal history and social location by using her “academic life experience as the primary resource” for theorizing. Other feminist philosophers have, like Overall, broken “the taboo of [their] philosophical training”, and used their experience in and outside the academy, often eloquently, to elaborate and reflect on a feminist philosophical practice and to explore the nature of oppression, marginalization, and identity formation. Overall’s work is unique in being a sustained attempt to reflect broadly on the practice of being a feminist philosopher with a particular focus on the complexity of her identities as they are lived in the context of the university. Moreover, the book is written so as to be accessible to a wide audience, and it attempts reflexively to evaluate and justify its own methodology. A Feminist I is, thus, a complex project that offers a number of entrances to different readers to assess Overall’s analyses and to reflect on their own experience of teaching, learning, researching, and living at a university in a feminist age.