Claire Lockard
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Mount Mary University
Straight Philosophic Habits and Queer Methodologies: Hermeneutic Purity and Kim Q. Hall’s Account of Institutional Philosophy
In this paper, I use Kim Q. Hall’s analysis of purity as a “straight habit” of philosophy to analyze how institutional philosophy responds to the impurities found within philosophy’s canon. My goal is to highlight one of the specific methodological mechanisms by which philosophy’s straight habits are produced and enforced. I suggest that in addition to being characterized by metaphysical, perceptual, and political purity that Hall describes (Hall 2022; see also Lugones 2003; Shotwell 2016), academic philosophy is also characterized by a habit of hermeneutic purity. Hermeneutic purity is a practice of reading and interpretating canonical philosophical texts in ways that (1) attempt to isolate their “problematic” elements from their “philosophically relevant” elements and (2) assume or worry that when this isolation cannot be performed, the text/author should not be engaged with at all. This purity, I suggest, is a key method by which institutional philosophy engages with canonical texts, disavows the violences embedded within them, and (when the disavowal fails) refuses to meaningfully navigate their impurities. An account of hermeneutic purity in institutional philosophy is important not only for critiquing the mainstream of the discipline, but also for transforming and engaging in feminist and queer philosophic practices.