Ann Garry: November 2013

Ann Garry

California State University, Los Angeles

Ann Garry is Professor of Philosophy Emerita at California State University, Los Angeles, where she was founding director of the Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities and served several terms as Philosophy Department Chair. In the past decade she has also taught at UCLA, as Humphrey Chair of Feminist Philosophy at the University of Waterloo, and on two Fulbright fellowships, the first at the University of Tokyo and, in fall 2013, at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

Garry’s work in feminist philosophy and on behalf of women and other underrepresented groups in philosophy spans a broad range of activities over four decades. There was much work to do in the early days of feminist philosophy. Garry was on the ground floor, participating in much of it. She developed early courses in feminist philosophy and gave workshops on integrating feminism into other courses. She was one of the founders of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy and of the Society for Women in Philosophy, Pacific Division. She served on the APA Committee on Women in the 1970s and another term later. Through the decades she has kept up this pace in many projects, most recently by becoming one of the editors of feminist philosophy for The Stanford Encyclopediaof Philosophy and of the Feminist Philosophy category of PhilPapers.

Although Garry’s education was in mainstream analytic epistemology and philosophy of mind, she claimed feminist philosophy as her specialty in the 1970s and has pursued it ever since. In her current work she pursues themes of intersectionality, earlier versions of which can be seen in, for example, “Intersectionality, Metaphors, and the Multiplicity of Gender” (Hypatia 2011). She is also working with Serene Khader and Alison Stone on a Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy. Over the decades she has written on a wide range of topics ranging from pornography, abortion, and feminist bioethics to feminist epistemology and philosophical methods, especially in relation to analytic philosophy (see, for example, “A Minimally Decent Philosophical Method? Analytic Philosophy and Feminism” [Hypatia 2005]). She also co-edited Women, Knowledge and Reality (Routledge 1996) and a special issue of Hypatia in 2009: Transgender Studies and Feminism: Theory, Politics, and Gendered Realities.