Salamon, Gayle. "Review of Dorothea Olkowski, et al., eds. FEMINIST INTERPRETATIONS OF MERLEAU-PONTY." NDPR (September 2008).

Olkowski, Dorothea, and Gail Weiss, eds. Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2006. There are few philosophers more deserving of a feminist reconsideration than Merleau-Ponty, as this excellent volume demonstrates. Nancy Tuana describes the motivation of the 'Re-Reading the Canon' series in a general preface:

Feminist philosophers have begun to look critically at the canonized texts of philosophy and have concluded that the discourses of philosophy are not gender-neutral. Philosophical narratives do not offer a universal perspective, but rather privilege some experiences and beliefs over others.

Phenomenology presents itself as an unusually suitable partner in this endeavor, for like feminism, phenomenology also understands its project to be an unsettling of the fantasy of a universal perspective, and the means by which it accomplishes this unsettling is careful and close attention to the perspectival nature of experience and of the world. Co-editor Dorothea Olkowski provides a concise and useful introduction of phenomenology's place in philosophy, Merleau-Ponty's place in phenomenology, and prior feminist engagements with Merleau-Ponty, beginning (as so many feminist origins stories do) with Beauvoir. This volume is not an introduction to Merleau-Ponty, or to feminist philosophy, and each of the essays assumes some familiarity with Merleau-Ponty and early feminist responses to him, though Olkowski's introduction and the first essay by Sonia Kruks provide helpful orientation through the history of these engagements for less-familiar readers. It is instead a guided tour through the current state of feminist Merleau-Ponty criticism, and the result is a strong and impressively expansive collection. Merleau-Ponty's insights about the centrality of embodiment to subjectivity make him a particularly apposite interlocutor for feminists, though he has been an underutilized resource for feminist philosophy, with a few notable exceptions. This dearth of feminist attention may be in part due to the arguably masculinist readings of his theories of body and perception offered by some of his more prominent readers. One might think, for instance, of Hubert Dreyfus's contention that the Phenomenology of Perception describes the relation between self and world as one of maximal grip, a description confuted by the rather more delicate and ambiguous metaphors -- a soap bubble, or an intertwining -- that Merleau-Ponty himself relied upon, particularly in his later work, to describe the intricate styles of being that we are. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14206.