I recently posted The Ethics of Maintenance: Against the Myth of Natural Purpose. In it, I brushed – perhaps too lightly – against my debt to feminist philosophy. It’s time to acknowledge that debt more directly and explain how it spills into the mundane greasework of daily life.
[Scroll to the bottom to see Midjourney’s take on feminists. You won’t be surprised.]
I tend not to worship at the altar of names, but let’s name names anyway. Beyond the usual French suspects – your Sartres, de Beauvoirs, and Foucaults – I owe much to the feminist philosophers – Gilligan, Tronto, Butler, Bellacasa, and de Beauvoir again – and, while we’re at it, the post-colonialists, whose names I’ll not recite for fear of being pompous. Their shared heresy is a suspicion of universals. They expose the myth of neutrality, whether it parades as Reason, Progress, or Civilisation. They remind us that every “universal” is merely someone’s local story told loud enough to drown out the others.
This isn’t a matter of sex or gender, though that’s how the names have been filed. The core lesson is epistemic, not biological. Feminist philosophy re-centres care, interdependence, and the politics of maintenance, not as sentimental virtues but as systems logic. The post-colonialists do the same at a geopolitical scale: maintenance instead of conquest, relation instead of domination.
On Gender, Behaviour, and the Lazy Binary
I don’t buy into sex and gender binaries, especially regarding behaviour. Even in biology, the dichotomy frays under scrutiny. Behaviourally, it collapses entirely. The problem isn’t people; it’s the linguistic furniture we inherited.
I’m weary of the moral blackmail that calls it misogyny not to vote for a woman, or racism not to vote for a black candidate. These accusations come, paradoxically, from sexists and racists who reduce people to the colour of their skin or the contents of their underwear. Having a vagina doesn’t make one a caretaker; having a penis doesn’t preclude empathy. The category error lies in mistaking type for trait.
When I refuse to vote for a Margaret Thatcher or a Hillary Clinton, it’s not because they’re women. It’s because they operate in the same acquisitive, dominion-driven register as the men they mirror. If the game is conquest, swapping the player’s gender doesn’t change the rules.
Maintenance as Political Praxis
My interest lies in those who reject that register altogether – the ones who abandon the mythology of Progress and its testosterone-addled twin, Innovation. The ethics of maintenance I’ve written about, and the philosophy of Dis-Integration I keep harping on, both gesture toward an alternative mode of being: one that prizes endurance over expansion, care over conquest.
This isn’t new. Feminist philosophers have been saying it for decades, often unheard because they weren’t shouting in Latin or running empires. I’m merely repackaging and re-contextualising, hoping that bundling these neglected insights together might make them audible again.
Knowledge never comes in a vacuum; it circulates. It leaks, cross-pollinates, mutates. To claim “intellectual property” over an idea is to pretend ownership of the air. I’ll spare you the full rant, but suffice it to say that the moment knowledge becomes proprietary, it ceases to breathe.
Conclusion
If I have a creed – and I say this reluctantly – it’s that philosophy should serve as maintenance, not monument-building. Feminist and post-colonial thinkers model that: constant attention, critical care, resistance to the entropy of domination.
I’m just trying to keep the engine running without pretending it’s divine.
Bonus
Philosophics 