In her essay, Feminism is Sensational, Sara Ahmed argues for understanding Feminism in terms of sensation: sensation as sense-perception (feeling), as sense-making (understanding), and as sense-inducing (communicating). On first pass, these meanings seem distinct and separable, that any one can be had without another. Yet, Ahmed argues, they are always intertwined: sense-perception asks to be made sense of, just as sense-making prepares the body for ‘a different way of encountering the world’ (23); to not make sense to another’s ears causes a sensation—a provocation of excitement—and this sensation is always perceived sensually. By understanding feminist experience, action and thought in this way, Ahmed complicates the picture some analytic philosophers draw of experience, action and thought in general.
T. S. Gendler is one such philosopher. She takes up an understanding of experience, action and thought as centred around physical mental states such as beliefs and desires, and behaviours as arising causally from these mental states. (637n11, 638) However, she points out some examples of belief-behaviour mismatch, motivating a departure from this simple view to include a new cognitive category, alief, so-called because it is automatic, arational and associative. With this distinction, Gendler aims at capturing all experiences (at least all belief-behaviour mismatched experiences) with one theory.
Ahmed, however, is interested in particular experiences: feminist experiences—those relating to and derived from gender and racial difference. She recounts personal experiences which range in affect from embodening to frustrating to harrowing. She describes how these experiences often do not make sense at the time—they are ‘too overwhelming to process’ (23)—suggesting something akin to Gendler’s belief-discordant cases. Indeed, on the level of experience, Gendler and Ahmed are describing a similar thing: a behavioural response we have which we cannot make sense of—that is to say, which does not accord with our beliefs at the time. But whereas Gendler takes the perspective of an outsider (clinician, scientist) looking in, hypothesising about mental states and gathering data regarding the subject’s behaviour and speech, Ahmed takes the perspective of the subject herself, focussing on perception, introspection, memory, and that interface between theory and experience which we call sense.
On Gendler’s approach, that object closest to sense-making, belief, is demoted almost to mere tag-along. She says:
if alief drives behavior in belief-discordant cases, it is likely that it drives behavior in belief-concordant cases as well … [Belief] plays a far smaller role in moment-by-moment management than philosophical tradition has tended to stress. (663)
The sense-making, then, comes from the outside, and there is no account—let alone a promise—of the subject integrating this sense with subsequent experiences. But for Ahmed, sense is front and centre. Feminism is a rational activity, a political activity, and a personal activity that has its (initial and continuing) ground in sensation. Its final cause is the making-sense of these sensations, its formal cause the sensation it provokes.
Gendler’s alief/belief schema cannot account for Ahmed’s understanding of feminist knowledges and practices. Gendler artificially severs the complex links between the different meanings of sense, divorcing the subject from their agency and restricting their possible ways of engaging with and being in the world.
Ahmed, Sara. “Feminism is Sensational.” Living a Feminist Life, Duke UP, 2017, pp. 21-42. JSTOR https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11g9836.6.
Gendler, Tamar Szabó. “Alief and Belief.” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 105, no. 10, Oct. 2018, pp. 634-663. JSTOR https://www.jstor.org/stable/20620132.