A Phenomenology for Women of Color: Merleau-Ponty and Identity-in-Difference Emily S. Lee. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2024 (ISBN:9781666916720)

In A Phenomenology for Women of Color: Merleau-Ponty and Identity-in-Difference, Emily S. Lee aims to develop a framework for understanding the lived experiences of women of color.Importantly, she does not set out to describe these lived experiences.As she puts it, "this book does not explore a phenomenology of women of color" (8-9).Along the way, she appeals to accounts of the lived experience of members of marginalized social groups (e.g., Asian American women and Black women).Still, her primary goal is not to scrutinize them.Rather, drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, she seeks to articulate the concepts needed to examine the lives of women who have intersectional identities.Lee's book falls into five chapters.These chapters are in dialogue with one another but can be read largely independently.Each delves into different topics in the growing subfield of "critical phenomenology."This is an area of research that turns to lived experience to expand the horizons of "traditional" phenomenological inquiry of the type found in Husserl's and Merleau-Ponty's works.In a "A Phenomenology of Perception: Racisms as Bias and Multiplicitous Subjects," Lee tackles the topic of racial bias.There, she argues that the attempt to eliminate such bias as a solution to racism is misguided; indeed, following Merleau-Ponty, she contends that all perception is biased.That said, she adds that women of color, in virtue of their multiplicitous identities, are better positioned to recognize bias and envision "other possibilities of seeing and being" (20).The next chapter, "The Phenomenological Structure of Experience: The Ambiguity of Intersectionality for a Group Identity," elucidates the "epistemic value" of experience.Lee considers the post-structuralist objection that experience does not provide any epistemic insights.According to this objection, if we are caught up in the oppressive structures and linguistic frameworks that shape us, then what can we really learn from our lived experiences?Lee responds that examining the phenomenological structure of experience can still yield epistemic insights.When women of color speak about their