On July 14, the prominent feminist philosopher María Lugones died. Lugones was one of the first feminist thinkers that I ever read. Her co-authored paper with Elizabeth Spelman, “‘Have We Got a Theory for You!’ Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand for the ‘Woman’s Voice,” inspired my Master’s thesis. Some of the questions that paper raises about coalition across cultural difference still press on me. In fact, Janet and I have a project about building solidarity within heterogenous feminist communities.
Lugones on world-traveling
One of Lugones’ most influential concepts is that of “world-traveling.” For Lugones, worlds are socially constructed contexts that have particular norms and expectations. When a person inhabits different worlds, their sense of self may change, because they are interacting differently with the norms and expectations of that world. For example, who I am is not the same across worlds: when constructing a space for productive discomfort in a feminist classroom, contrasted with the collaborative space of my Dungeons & Dragons group, or at a large family meal around the holidays. I’m different not only in terms of how I feel within that world, but also because the norms of each world shape my opportunities differently.
World-traveling, for Lugones, provides someone with an opportunity to better understand another person and their situation. It enables someone to recognize how they and another are positioned within certain worlds. For people with more privilege, world-traveling can be a mechanism for recognizing this privilege. This is part of why world-traveling can be a support for building solidarity.
Arendt on visiting
I’ve been thinking about similarities between world-traveling and Arendt’s notion of “visiting.” For Arendt, visiting is an imaginative process whereby a person seeks to expand their own perspective. This process enhances our ability to make normative judgments. A person “visits” the perspective of another by trying to imagine themselves in the other’s context. It is about imagining how you might think or feel in that particular social location and circumstance. However, in visiting a person does not try to simulate another perspective, but rather, they think from it. Thus, they do not adopt or assimilate another’s point of view, but keep a sense of awareness about their own position and how it might differ from the one they visit.
Visiting allows a person to collect diverse stories about a single event or phenomenon, which challenges the idea that there is a single authoritative perspective. Lisa Disch likens visiting to a literary experience whereby a person understands a situation by encountering the perspectives of different characters. I like this metaphor because it emphasizes that visiting is not about assimilation. As a reader, I might understand a situation better, in all its complexity, by thinking from these diverse perspectives. Further, this engagement might challenge me to reflect on assumptions I have brought to the text. But, I am always conscious of myself as a reader. I notice how I, Katy, am not the same as the characters, even though I am in their point of view.
World-traveling and visiting help build solidarity
This kind of distance is important for both world-traveling and visiting. It is important for maintaining our commitment to the plurality of our communities, which is crucial for both Lugones and Arendt., as well as for building solidarity.
Further, Disch notes that there are resonances between world-traveling and Arendt’s relational notion of self-disclosure through speech and action. For Lugones and Arendt, who we are is shaped, in part, by how we interact with others and are recognized within various worlds.
Disch suggests that Arendt makes visiting sound simple, yet it isn’t. Neither is solidarity work. According to Disch, Lugones’ articulation of world-traveling helps to supplement Arendt’s notion of visiting to enhance its potential for solidarity projects. World-traveling is more interactive and not merely an act of the imagination, as visiting is for Arendt. Further, Lugones is more explicit than Arendt about how a person may feel disoriented through world-traveling. Visiting is arguably uncomfortable—we get glimpses of this from Arendt’s letters, though she does not talk about it explicitly.
Love
I’m curious about how love, another aspect of world-traveling might relate—or not—to visiting. For Lugones, world-traveling is a way to love other women. It aims to repair the mis-recognition that comes when White women fail to recognize the uniqueness of racialized women and to fail to identify with them. Lugones states:
I am particularly interested here in those cases in which White/Anglo women do one or more of the following to women of color: they ignore us, ostracize us, render us invisible, stereotype us, leave us completely alone, interpret us as crazy. All of this while we are in their midst. [. . .] Their world and their integrity do not require me at all. There is no sense of self-loss in them for my own lack of solidity. But they rob me of my solidity through indifference, an indifference they can afford and which seems sometimes studied. (p. 7, italics in original)
This identification, I think, is not about erasing differences. Instead, identification is needed to build solidarity between women in their activism against patriarchy, heteronormativity, and other forces of domination.
Arendt on love
I don’t usually think of Arendt as a thinker who often involves emotions in her philosophy. She does talk about the experience of joy and happiness that comes from acting with others in political community. (See, for example, On Revolution.) Perhaps love seems too akin to empathy, which Arendt explicitly rejects in visiting. Empathy functions as a form of assimilation. It collapses the relational distance between a person and the perspectives they visit.
I’m not sure what Arendt would say about this use of the term “love,” a term which she reserved for speaking about romantic love or the warmth between close friends. I haven’t gone back to her dissertation Love & St. Augustine, which seems clearly relevant, but I would if I want to further explore these thoughts.
Loving the world
Arendt also uses “love” to express the care she felt for the world, the space of togetherness that humans share. Her favoured title for The Human Condition was Amor Mundi, or “love of the world.”
It is in this sense that I think Lugones’ concept of love might help us understand the potential of visiting to promote solidarity. For Arendt, politics emerges when people speak and act together. This depends upon the recognition of human plurality, that each person is unique. White women’s failure to recognize, identify with, and love women of colour is a denial of relationality, and hence, a denial of plurality.
This way of thinking about love is not empathy. Based on Lugones discussion, love, as a mechanism for identification, can involve affect—her example is loving her mother. But, it doesn’t seem to me that love in this sense requires any particular emotion of liking another person. Love seems more akin to how, in Arendt’s work, political principle guide action. For Arendt, collective action may be motivated by emotional responses. But, it should be guided by principles such as freedom or equality.
Loving the other to love the world
Perhaps love functions like this: It is a principle that centers the uniqueness of the other so that visiting does not become too abstract or objectify the other. (This is another limitation of visiting, says Disch, if it only requires one’s imagination.) Love might also indicate a disposition toward the other. We love by engaging another in a way that respects their uniqueness and affirms human plurality.
I am with love in politics, probably from reading Arendt so much. Nevertheless, the centrality of love in world-traveling is prompting me to rethink Arendt’s concept of visiting. And perhaps it also helps address ways in which visiting can go wrong. When we focus too much on our own understanding, we might forget the unique subjectivities of those whose perspectives we visit.
Lugones’ work is open access until August 18
Hypatia, a journal of feminist philosophy, has made some of Lugones’ essays free to access without a subscription until August 18, including her essay on world-traveling. Check it out while you can!
Credits
Photo by Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash
My thoughts in this post have benefited from the collaborative thinking I have done with Janet Jones about visiting as a potential mechanism to build solidarity in feminist communities.