Rosenlee, Li-Hsiang Lisa
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ItemConfucianism and the Lives of Women(Oxford Academic, 2023-01-26)The connections between Confucianism and the lives of women have been a subject of interest since the turn of the 19th century, taken up, first, by missionaries and travelers as part of their anthropological observations of the “natives”; then by the Reform Movement and the May Fourth Movement, culminating in the Cultural Revolution as part of the nationalistic discourse; and lastly by the contemporary feminists as part of their “outreach” effort to form a global sisterhood. In all these three approaches, Confucianism is portrayed as a negative force in the lives of women. Up to the mid-1990s, the notion of universal victimhood of women overshadowed the notion of female agency in Chinese gender studies. Now with the rise of the field of comparative feminist philosophy exploring positive feminist space within Confucianism, the theoretical construction of Confucian feminism emerges as the latest attempt to reconceptualize the complex connections between Confucianism and the lives of women.
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ItemConfucian Authority and the Politics of Caring(Routledge, 2021-09-06)It is inarguable that Confucianism is the most prominent intellectual tradition in Chinese civilization, whose earliest dynastic records stretch back to the Xia dynasty founded by three sage-kings: Yao, Shun, and Yu. Confucius was born in the state of Lu to a minor knight who in his old age took in a young maiden as his concubine. As a political philosophy, the teaching of Confucianism hinges on actualizing benevolent governance, which starts with the self-cultivation of a moral personhood at home; one’s sphere of moral influences is then concentrically radiated from one’s own family, community, state, to the world at large. This chapter offers a Confucian take on what constitutes a legitimate political authority and its accompanying obligations to care for its political constituents, especially the vulnerable—the young, the old, the sick, and the disabled—as a mitigating measure in shifting our attitude toward caring for others.
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ItemConfucianism Re-imagined: A Feminist Project(University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021-03)
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ItemSymposium: Why Historicize the Canon?(Indiana University, 2020-06-16)In her anchor-piece on historicizing the canon, Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee appeals to professional philosophers to develop several tools that can be implemented in historicizing the canon. Amy Donahue, David H. Kim, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and Kris Sealey tessellate different aspects of this call. Donahue augments Rosenlee’s argument by braiding together Dharmakīrti’s “anyāpoha” theory and Charles Mills’ ruminations about “white ignorance”; Kim explores some of the nuances of Rosenlee’s account for a post-Eurocentric philosophy; Maldonado-Torres ruminates about the larger social context in which thinking can be decolonized; and Sealey uses the work of Kristie Dotson to acknowledge the possibility of multiple canons.
In putting on the table a number of questions, concepts, and approaches to canon-building, the symposium aims to contribute to what is by now a large array of similar reflections and engagements in different parts of the world.
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ItemA Comparative Feminist Reflection on Race and Gender(University of Hawai'i Press, 2019-04)Bryan W. Van Norden's Taking Back Philosophy is a long-awaited and much-needed manifesto on multicultural curricula in the academic discipline of philosophy, which has up to now been stubbornly persistent in its monolithic approach to the teaching of its own self-defined genealogy, its origin, its methodology, and its very essence. As Van Norden points out, philosophy has a serious diversity problem. Only a handful of graduate programs have full-time faculty teaching non-Western philosophy.1 No other discipline in the humanities or social sciences, other than those specifically designated as Anglo-European area studies, has been so lopsided in its curricula and student makeup as the resolutely and decisively Anglo-Europecentered discipline of philosophy. Eighty-six percent of its Ph.D.s are granted to non-Hispanic whites.2 Compounding this Anglo-European identity is philosophy's phallic-centrism: among all the Humanities disciplines, philosophy has the lowest percentage of female doctoral students. Philosophy manages to graduate even fewer female Ph.D.s than math, chemistry, or economics—a stunning revelation that the academic discipline of philosophy has a problem not only of cultural inclusion but also of gender inclusion to a much greater degree than other academic disciplines that are perceived as inherently "masculine."
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ItemHow do we beat this bitch?(ABC-CLIO, LLC., 2010)
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ItemConfucian Care: A Hybrid Feminist Ethics(Columbia University Press, 2014-04-01)
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ItemMulticulturalism and Feminism Revisited: A Hybridized Confucian Care Ethics(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016-04-21)
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ItemFemininity and Feminism: Chinese and Contemporary(Wiley, 2012)
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ItemWhy Care? A Feminist Re-appropriation of Confucian Xiao 孝(Springer, Dordrecht, 2014)This chapter concerns the contemporary debate on the intersectionality of Confucianism with feminism in general and its compatibility with care ethics in particular. My intent here is to propose a hybrid feminist care ethics that is grounded in Confucianism by, on the one hand, integrating specifically the concepts of xiao 孝 and ren 仁 into existing care ethics so as to strengthen and broaden its theoretical horizon and, on the other, revising Confucian gender requirements in light of feminist demands for gender equity. It is my take that Confucian xiao 孝, as the root of ren 仁, is a moral vision that sees human inter-dependency as a strength in, and not a distraction from, human flourishing. In the same way, care ethics also starts with meeting the caring needs of one’s intimate loved ones, and caring relations in the personal realm for care ethicists have an ontological primacy. Morality for Confucius as well as for care ethicists, unlike the Kantian, liberal model that emphasizes detachment and personal autonomy, simply cannot bypass one’s affective ties in the familial realm. In the following, I will provide a hybrid account of care ethics and Confucianism – Confucian care – in which caring for the socially dependent and vulnerable starting with one’s loved ones is viewed as constitutive of the substance of one’s sense of the self; it forms part of one’s life’s journey to self-realization, not only in the realm of morality, but also in the realm of feminism as well.