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Unsettling Feminist Philosophy: An Encounter with Tracey Moffatt's Night Cries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2020

Shelley M. Park Open the ORCID record for Shelley M. Park [Opens in a new window]
Shelley M. Park*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Central Florida, PSY 269, Orlando, Florida, 32816
*
Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This essay seeks to unsettle feminist philosophy through an encounter with Aboriginal artist Tracey Moffatt, whose perspectives on intergenerational relationships between (older) white women and (younger) Indigenous women are shaped by her experiences as the Aboriginal child of a white foster mother growing up in Brisbane, Australia during the 1960s. Moffatt's short experimental film Night Cries provides an important glimpse into the violent intersections of gender, race, and power in intimate life and, in so doing, invites us to see how colonial and neocolonial policies are carried out through women's domestic labor. Seeing cross-generational and cross-racial intimacy through Moffatt's lens, I suggest, helps us to unsettle both feminist theories of motherhood and feminist practices of mentoring.

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Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 35 , Special Issue 1: Indigenizing and Decolonizing Feminist Philosophy , Winter 2020 , pp. 97 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © by Hypatia, Inc. 2020

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