Toward A Feminist and Femme-nist Reconsideration of Moral Education: Levinas, Anti-Violence Education, and the Issue of Femmephobia

Abstract

How to understand violence and how to ameliorate it from early on is an urgent and highly debated question in education. This dissertation tackles the issue regarding whether we are equipped with a resilient intellectual basis to address violence within and through education. The discussion is situated in the context of contemporary education which has a crying need to understand and ameliorate the interpersonal, systematic, and organized violence in the world. In particular, it focuses on how to understand the gendered roots of violence and how to prevent it from early on.

Using the methodology of philosophical analysis, feminist analysis, and the analytic framework of femmephobia in femme theory, this dissertation project interprets Levinas’s work as a philosophical treatment of and response to the problem of violence. For Levinas, the experience of the Other interrupts the virile mastery of the ego that claims to be self-possessive, autonomous, and sovereign (Chanter, 2001a, 2001b; Guenther, 2006; Katz, 2003; Stanford, 1998; Ziarek, 2001). Ethics, as Levinas understands it, puts into question the virile subject that Western intellectual traditions stringently work to achieve.

The dissertation argues that for students of all genders, the fear and subordination of living femininities feature prominently in the subjection phase of an ethical subject. Thus, femmephobia must be foregrounded in philosophical discussion of moral development and anti-violence education in the 21st century. In addition, researchers need to examine the stubborn hermeneutic injustice regarding the feminine in philosophical interpretations. Last, the paper also clarifies some misconceptions about Levinas’s work in feminist receptions of his thoughts in the field of education.