Amia Srinivasan: “Feminism is a political practice, not just a set of ideas”

At one point in The Right to Sex, a collection of essays in feminist theory, the philosopher Amia Srinivasan writes that women “have never been free.” The problem she circles around from the opening pages is what it might take to liberate women from all forms of subordination. Her book is an attempt to think toward that ideal: “let us try and see.”

The result is an inviting, accessible, and powerful read. As I moved through the work, I felt as if Srinivasan was situating me on a map so I could proceed more effectively and intelligently as an advocate for all women. I shared this with her one day this summer over Zoom. “Yes, I’m not trying to give answers,” she told me, “but help people get a better sense of the possibility space, the conceptual and political terrain.”

Part of this orientation involves identifying some of feminism’s hazards. The sexual revolution, she writes, did not give women more freedom so much as lead to the ubiquity of unequal sex between men and women. Liberal feminism focused mostly on women’s choice and consent, which led, paradoxically, to the preservation of hierarchies of power, including those based on race and class. Srinivasan argues that progress requires us to acknowledge how our desires are profoundly shaped by political forces in an unfair world, to notice “what forces lie behind a woman’s yes.” She insists that feminists look to the most powerless for direction: women of color in racially and economically stratified countries, who tend to be poor. Only then can women as a class begin to approach liberation.

Few living philosophers have had the same reach outside the academy as Srinivasan, who has written for the , and the about topics as wide ranging as animal consciousness, surfing, sex, and suicide. Born in Bahrain and raised in Taiwan, New Jersey, New York, Singapore, and London, she received her BA from Yale and her PhD in philosophy from Oxford, where she says she was rarely taught by a woman. “Feminist