“Feminist Philosophy: Where do we go from here?” by Alexandra Newton Rios
I now teach students who are learning Spanish the word desafio. A challenge in English. I have them
reach beyond themselves. I try to teach them with firmness and tenderness …
It is a desafio to think that my experience of overcoming machismo gives me the necessary depth to
write an answer about feminist philosophy’s future. The desafio is realizing there is a problem. The
challenge is deciding to overcome the problem. To gather strength. To look to other women before me …
How a word or phrase by each woman … might be boulders from which to take power over my life.
This is how power is taken. A word summons you to be more than you are, gives you a new beginning, a
new way of being in the world. You take the word and act with it …
There is a tribe of women. One woman builds on the questions of the other. We want to know how to
live in the world. How to care for the world, our stance not global but el mundo, the whole in all its
variety … We hope the tribe, the they will help each other. We proceed anyway.
Excerpted from her essay about how a mother of five found her voice to join other women philosophers, took courage from a Roman sculpture of a young girl in the Metropolitan Museum, and made her voice count.
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Alexandra Newton Rios Artist Statement: I am from the woods of Vermont, the smell of pine, the deep blanket of leaves, the distant Sugarbush mountain that surprised me in the morning. I am from movement and the way I never ran until I turned 54 and suddenly began to run from 81street down to 59th Street and back every morning on hexagon shaped tile streets, from San Miguel de Tucuman, Argentina where I have been living since 1993. I am from the contrast of North and South, New York City and Central Park and northwestern Argentina’s mountains, the Diaguita up in Amaicha, poet and teacher.
