Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Philosophy

Advisor

Linda Martín Alcoff

Committee Members

Serene J Khader

Matthew Lindauer

Rachel Sherman

Subject Categories

Chicana/o Studies | Continental Philosophy | Epistemology | Ethics and Political Philosophy | Feminist Philosophy | Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Philosophy of Science | Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies

Keywords

qualitative methods; white allies; male allies; emotion; double binds; allyship

Abstract

Allies have faced several critiques in feminist philosophy. Some have argued that they lack the requisite political interests to be motivated to dismantle the social structures from which they stand to benefit. Others have argued that the epistemic limitations resulting from their social privilege are insurmountable. Yet others have argued that allyship is too individualistic a concept, preferring a more collectivist concept like solidarity. However, there remain privileged individuals who understand themselves as complicit in perpetuating oppressive forms of life, and who wish to transform themselves and work in coalition across difference to dismantle structural oppression. How ought these individuals participate in social movements while maneuvering the potential pitfalls just outlined? This dissertation investigates the role of allies in social transformation, drawing on original qualitative research I conducted between 2023 and 2025. Drawing on nineteen in-depth interviews with social justice actors and using white allyship and male allyship as case studies, I examine the affective lives and political psychology of anti-racist white women and feminist men. I theorize how allies may transform themselves and the socially oppressive systems that they are complicit in perpetuating, while still navigating the serious critiques enumerated at the outset.

Chapter 1 presents a metaphilosophical argument for the importance of empirically supported normative philosophy using qualitative methods, vis-à-vis experimental philosophy (“x-phi”), which tends to use quantitative methods. I make this case by appealing to a social epistemology grounded in care ethics and defending the methodological value of what I term the care epistemological attitude. Ultimately, I justify the epistemic payoff of using qualitative methods in philosophy by arguing that they enable philosophers to develop as caring knowers, marking an affective-ethical-epistemological shift.

Chapter 2 examines the promises and perils of white women’s affect in anti-racist social movement building. I coin the term personal affective transformation to describe a solidary method used by the white women I interviewed to transform their affective orientations toward their values and life choices, sustaining their participation in social movements. This is exemplified, for instance, in the self-conscious decision of a white anti-racist to stop valuing middle-class goods like having a heterosexual marriage with children in order to focus her energies on what she sees as more revolutionary goals. In valuing individuals’ experiences, emotions, and desires in social movement-building contexts, I go against the grain of traditional political philosophy, which has denigrated affect as private, biased, and irrational. I also go against the grain of some feminist philosophy, which has rightly been suspicious of the ways in which white women’s emotions have been weaponized against people of color. I argue that despite the potential pitfalls of privileged persons’ affect, we cannot fall into ways of thinking about politics that exclude the affective or personal. This is because individual affect and resulting affective dynamics can inadvertently reify oppressive perspectives and dynamics in what would otherwise be liberatory spaces. Emotions must be faced and addressed, and, further, are necessary sites of liberation in politics.

Chapter 3 makes two contributions. First, conceptually, I draw on feminist narrative hermeneutics to offer a new way of understanding oppressive double binds and the agency of those who face them. I argue that we may loosen oppressive double binds through counter narratives. This is because counter narratives have the potential to displace cultural master narratives that feed the norms that structure oppressive double binds. Second, concretely, I weigh in on a conversation about whether men can have interests in feminist movement-building, taking issue with gender essentialist feminism’s inheritance of the oppressed/oppressor binary. I argue that gender essentialist feminism creates oppressive double binds for feminist men. Experiencing and reckoning with this double bind can lead feminist men to have genuine interests not just in the dismantling of patriarchy, but also in trans-inclusive and third-wave feminism. To illustrate my claims, I draw on interviews with people who were assigned-male-at-birth who have been involved in feminist social justice movement-building and identify as feminists. I discuss some of my participants’ desires for queerness (both bisexuality and non-binariness), reading these disclosures as desires for counter narratives to frame themselves as gendered beings.

Chapter 4 answers questions posed in Chapters 2 and 3, which respectively stake out the liberatory potential of personal affective transformation and of counter narratives. When one shifts one’s affective orientation toward the world to better align with one’s political ideals, how are they to know that they are transforming themselves in a liberatory way? And what kinds of counter narratives should social movements prioritize? I address these questions by developing a notion of resistant subjectivity which must be affectively oriented towards communal reciprocity and publics of difference. I begin the chapter with María Lugones’s problematization of the white feminist tendency to rely on the oppressor/oppressed binary, given its role in a problematic logic of purity. She theorizes, in conjunction with other Latinx feminist thinkers, a theory of the multiple self. I use this theory of subjectivity to reframe the question of allyship in terms of developing a resistant subjectivity, showing how the contradictions and tensions among one’s various identities can be politically fruitful. According to this picture, an ally can develop a resistant self by drawing on and integrating the friction between their selves. Appealing to facts about her political activism and evidence from her textual corpus, I argue that, on Lugones’s view, resistant subjectivity must be guided by an affective turn to communal reciprocity and publics of difference.

Download

Share

COinS