I'm a writer, philosopher and feminist theorist. My new book, Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop (Beacon 2024), sets out to explain what makes white feminism wrong, why it's so easy to end up supporting it, and what feminists might believe in instead. I argue, using philosophical arguments and examples from popular culture and social movements, that faux feminisms are rooted in the misunderstanding that feminism is about individual freedom, rather than opposition to group-based hierarchy. It has been called "a page-turner" by "Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "well-researched, compellingly written, and passionately argued,"by Kirkus reviews, and "a marvelous and essential read" by Rafia Zakaria. It is available for pre-order here and here.
As you can see, I think a lot about the values that orient feminist politics. Much of my work begins from questions that arise in the lives of women of color and women in the global South.
My last book, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic (Oxford University Press 2018) asked what values should guide transnational feminist solidarity. I argue there that feminism respect cultural and religious differences and acknowledge the legacy of imperialism without surrendering its core ethical commitment to opposing oppression. Some of the arguments I develop in the book are condensed for a popular audience in this piece I wrote for The New York Times. You can also read a review of the book in the Australian Review of Books here.
My work on adaptive preferences, including my first book Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment (Oxford University Press 2011) is about women's autonomy and agency in cross-cultural contexts and under conditions of coloniality. It develops a framework for responding to choices made by oppressed and deprived people that perpetuate their own oppression and deprivation. You can read more about the practical implications of this work for gender and development practice here and here.
I also work in moral and political philosophy more generally. Philosophers can read more about the theory of autonomy underlying my work on adaptive preferences here. I have also developed a distinctive view of how oppression wrongs its victims that includes the view that oppression is not a dimunition of freedom, that oppression requires agents to choose between the interests of their group and their individual interests, and that oppression faces agents with collective action problems.
My areas of research within philosophy include ethics and moral psychology, political philosophy, and feminist philosophy. I also work in the interdisciplinary fields of development ethics and global, decolonial and postcolonial feminisms. Some of the transnational practices I have analyzed include microcredit, household divisions of labor, and commercial gestational surrogacy.
I hold the Jay Newman Chair in Philosophy of Culture at Brooklyn College and am Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.
My pronouns are she/her, and I pronounce my last name [KAW]-der.
You can download my cv here.
As you can see, I think a lot about the values that orient feminist politics. Much of my work begins from questions that arise in the lives of women of color and women in the global South.
My last book, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic (Oxford University Press 2018) asked what values should guide transnational feminist solidarity. I argue there that feminism respect cultural and religious differences and acknowledge the legacy of imperialism without surrendering its core ethical commitment to opposing oppression. Some of the arguments I develop in the book are condensed for a popular audience in this piece I wrote for The New York Times. You can also read a review of the book in the Australian Review of Books here.
My work on adaptive preferences, including my first book Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment (Oxford University Press 2011) is about women's autonomy and agency in cross-cultural contexts and under conditions of coloniality. It develops a framework for responding to choices made by oppressed and deprived people that perpetuate their own oppression and deprivation. You can read more about the practical implications of this work for gender and development practice here and here.
I also work in moral and political philosophy more generally. Philosophers can read more about the theory of autonomy underlying my work on adaptive preferences here. I have also developed a distinctive view of how oppression wrongs its victims that includes the view that oppression is not a dimunition of freedom, that oppression requires agents to choose between the interests of their group and their individual interests, and that oppression faces agents with collective action problems.
My areas of research within philosophy include ethics and moral psychology, political philosophy, and feminist philosophy. I also work in the interdisciplinary fields of development ethics and global, decolonial and postcolonial feminisms. Some of the transnational practices I have analyzed include microcredit, household divisions of labor, and commercial gestational surrogacy.
I hold the Jay Newman Chair in Philosophy of Culture at Brooklyn College and am Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.
My pronouns are she/her, and I pronounce my last name [KAW]-der.
You can download my cv here.