Concepts as Shelter: Toward a Feminist Theory of Philosophical Concepts

Eve Tuck’s reflection on a “breakup with Deleuze” and her critical feminist relationship toward Deleuze’s philosophical position leads to my exploration of a feminist approach to a theory of concepts. I argue that in order to be applicable and useful for feminist philosophical scholarship, concepts assume a sheltering function for experiences that have lacked adequate forms of representation in the past. Feminist thinkers like Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant support the idea of concepts as shelter through their methodological employment of affect as a resource of knowledge. Gayatri Spivak and bell hooks reckon with the structural necessity for sheltering concepts through their respective notions of the subaltern and homemaking. Finally, Eve Meltzer’s study of the relevance of affect for conceptual art underscores the general importance of thinking through the connections between these seemingly opposed categories in order to arrive at a better understanding of what philosophical concepts can do.