In A Phenomenology for Women of Color: Merleau-Ponty and Identity-in-Difference, Emily S. Lee aims to develop a framework for understanding the lived experiences of women of color. Importantly, she does not set out to describe these lived experiences. As she puts it, “this book does not explore a phenomenology of women of color” (8-9). Along the way, she appeals to accounts of the lived experience of members of marginalized social groups (e.g., Asian American women and Black women). Still, her primary goal is not to scrutinize them. Rather, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, she seeks to articulate the concepts needed to examine the lives of women who have intersectional identities.

Lee’s book falls into five chapters. These chapters are in dialogue with one another but can be read largely independently. Each delves into different topics in the growing subfield of “critical phenomenology.” This is an area of research that turns to lived experience to expand the horizons of “traditional” phenomenological inquiry of the type found in Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s works.

In a “A Phenomenology of Perception: Racisms as Bias and Multiplicitous Subjects,” Lee tackles the topic of racial bias. There, she argues that the attempt to eliminate such bias as a solution to racism is misguided; indeed, following Merleau-Ponty, she contends that all perception is biased. That said, she adds that women of color, in virtue of their multiplicitous identities, are better positioned to recognize bias and envision “other possibilities of seeing and being” (20).

The next chapter, “The Phenomenological Structure of Experience: The Ambiguity of Intersectionality for a Group Identity,” elucidates the “epistemic value” of experience. Lee considers the post-structuralist objection that experience does not provide any epistemic insights. According to this objection, if we are caught up in the oppressive structures and linguistic frameworks that shape us, then what can we really learn from our lived experiences? Lee responds that examining the phenomenological structure of experience can still yield epistemic insights. When women of color speak about their lives, they can draw on what Lee calls “distances”—for example, the distance between their experiences and language—to voice the significance of their struggles.

In Chapter Three, “The Body Movement of Historico-Racial-Sexual Schema,” Lee addresses the topic of embodiment, especially the meaning of movement and racialized habits of embodiment. She draws on Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, and others to claim that different bodies “inspire specific reactions in others” and that we adjust to these reactions and features of those bodies, thus orchestrating a dance wherein bodily “significations” are created (111). Lee uses this claim to show that women of color, thanks to their intersectional identities, “are poised to develop body movements that can change existing significations” (112).

As its title indicates, the following chapter, “Three Criticisms of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology,” covers objections to Merleau-Ponty’s work. There, Lee surveys and then replies to three important feminist concerns: 1) Merleau-Ponty’s “prioritization of perception”; 2) his “notion of the anonymous body”; and 3) “the ontological status of difference” (13). Lee concludes that “the oversights in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology do not debilitate the phenomenological method from speaking to social political concerns” (148). Rather, by attending to the horizons shaped by the differences between us, we can craft phenomenologies that include women of color. It’s worth noting that this chapter, because it is primarily in dialogue with the works of Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray, will be of greatest interest to continental feminists.

In the final chapter, “In the Face of Indifference: The Phenomenological Structure of Identity-in-Difference,” Lee articulates four interpretations of the notion of “identity-in-difference” to “advocate recognizing our shared humanity, our identity” (15). This notion, which is not original to phenomenology, serves to make sense of the differences between beings, all the while acknowledging the links between them. Thus, the perennial problem of personal identity would fall under the scope of “identity-in-difference.” If I am indeed the same person at the beginning of writing this article as I am at the end of it, then there is an identity of the person, but with changes from start to finish. The most interesting form of “identity-in-difference” for Lee’s book is what she calls our “reliance upon others for both self-development and social meaning” (171). Put simply, we are different from others, but we can still relate to them. This topic is germane to the problem of race relations. We are interdependent, and yet to gloss over the differences between us risks perpetuating racial and other interlocking forms of oppression. In other words, we need to forge bonds that humanize us without forgetting our differences.

Over the course of these five chapters, Lee accomplishes the book’s twin aims. First, she vindicates the idea that race is a phenomenon—that is, something that “occupies the interstice within the natural and the sedimented social meanings…the domain of human being-in-the world” (5). Second, she marshals key concepts from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology (e.g., experience, the body schema, and identity-in-difference) to demonstrate how appropriating them can help illuminate the lived experiences of multiplicitous subjects, most notably women of color. Of the five chapters, the final one seemed the most important for Lee’s project of providing a phenomenology for women of color, since one of the main challenges in and outside of philosophy is to find common ground, all the while honoring our varying backgrounds and perspectives.

The main strength of A Phenomenology for Women of Color lies in Lee’s command of the recent literature in continental feminism. For example, in Chapter Four, the responses to Irigaray and Butler drew on important sources, such as Linda Martín Alcoff’s, Gail Weiss’s, and Shannon Sullivan’s research, to convincingly defend the continued relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas. And while the book mostly speaks to a continental audience, I appreciated Lee’s decision to address topics like implicit bias that have garnered attention in analytic philosophy.

In addition, Lee’s work is valuable for its effort to elevate the voices of women of color. While she includes authors from a range of backgrounds, Lee is careful to bring to light the research of women of color in the field. In this regard, I have in mind her frequent appeals to María Lugones, Helen Ngo, and Mariana Ortega, among others. Nevertheless, I wonder if Lee could have framed the book, including its subtitle, differently. If this is a phenomenology for women of color, could she have found a way to speak to such women without such an emphasis on Merleau-Ponty? Is there a way to honor the idea of the book—namely, to use key phenomenological insights from the early days of the movement—without a ceaseless return to its founding figures?

Although I cannot help but praise Lee’s scholarship, her proposal to offer a phenomenology for women of color did raise some concerns for feminist philosophy writ large. Naturally, a phenomenology of women of color would be too demanding a task for one book. And Lee’s own positionality might raise concerns about her authority to speak about women who do not share her intersectional identities. Therefore, the “meta-project” of developing the concepts necessary for a first-order inquiry sounds appealing.

However, precisely because she does not attempt such an inquiry, her work sometimes operates at such a level of abstraction that it is difficult to see how it is a phenomenology for women of color. I struggled through the thickets of her analyses, and I wager most others, even in the academy, would, too. Having said this, Lee is at her finest in Chapter Three because her more frequent and concrete appeals to lived experience help ground her argument. Likewise, in her conclusion, where she reflects on her personal experience as a mother in our political climate, her words speak directly to women’s concerns.

Lee’s writing style exemplifies my worries. Her prose is often hard to parse. Consider the following excerpt: “The structure of identity-in-difference becomes with [sic] changes in what constitutes the identity and what constitutes the difference by the influences from the material/natural world and social/cultural meaning, including human beings’ existential decisions” (175). This sentence opens the last section of Chapter Five, where Lee purports to highlight the “humanity of women of color.” Absent from this and similar passages are the very details that would humanize women of color. The overemphasis on the secondary literature comes at the expense of interpreting these women’s lived experiences. Overall, the book primarily reads as a work for the contemporary continental philosophers whose research she dissects, and it might have less appeal to a broader feminist audience than its title suggests.

Ultimately, the issue I raise here is not specific to Lee’s book. Her research is masterful and engages with the most important work that has been done in continental philosophy, the philosophy of race, and feminist theory in the past fifty years. Yet, the deeper we dig into this vast literature, the more we lose sight of the lived experiences of women of color, and the more we threaten to render philosophy meaningless to them.

In the end, I wonder about hers and similar projects. Is Lee’s book really for women of color? And if not, who is it for?