The notion of consciousness-raising refers to a collective process through which members of marginalised groups come to understand systems of oppression by sharing social experiences (such as experiences of abuse or violence). Central to feminist practice and common to other emancipatory movements, this notion can be expanded to account for the transition from a state of unintelligibility regarding lived experience to a form of understanding that produces a sense of liberation in the subject. To explore this hypothesis, I draw on Sarah Polley’s film Women Talking and Wittgensteinian-inspired ordinary language philosophy, proposing an interpretation of consciousness-raising that extends beyond explicitly political contexts to areas of our lives that are not immediately recognizable as such. Within this framework, unintelligibility is not simply understood as cognitive failure, so much as a state capable of generating the conditions for naming that which had previously been obscured within a realm of silence and horror.

Commentary: Fernanda Henriques (UÉVORA) | Moderator: Júlia Garraio (CES)

Bio notes

Camila Lobo holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at NOVA University Lisbon, where she undertook her doctoral research project “Perceiving Care: Situated Knowledge, Feminist Standpoints and Consciousness-Raising” under the supervision of Nuno Venturinha (IFILNOVA) and Alice Crary (NSSR) and with support from FCT- Foundation for Science and Technology. In 2023, she was a Visiting Scholar at the New School for Social Research in New York, under a Fulbright scholarship. Her work brings together different areas of interest: from social epistemology to feminist theory, philosophy of language and Wittgensteinian philosophy.

Fernanda Henriques is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Évora and coordinator of the Centre for Philosophy and Gender at the Portuguese Society of Philosophy.
 

Activity within the research projects UnCoveR 'Sexual Violence in Portuguese Mediascape' (https://doi.org/10.54499/2022.03964.PTDC) and "Dis/entangling Rape: Sexual Violence in Portuguese literature and cinema in the 21st century" (https://doi.org/10.54499/2022.05885.CEECIND/CP1754/CT0003), in partnership with GPS - Research Group on Sexualities and the Filosofia e Género Centro of the Sociedade Portuguesa de Filosofia.[Philosophy and Gender Centre].

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