Meaning, creativity and the visible differences of the body: A phenomenological reading of race (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology serves as the lens to explore a lived sense of race and sex. The prevailing view of racism as a bias or prejudice occurring in consciousness does not address Michael Omi and Howard Winant's insight that both the sign and the symbol indicating race have changed historically. To address the changes in both the part of the body serving as the symbol of race and its meaning, an account of race must theorize living every day with the visual markers of race and the multiple manifestations of racism. I compare the prevailing conceptions of perception, experience and the body with a phenomenological understanding to explain why a phenomenological re-conception facilitates a lived sense of race and sex. A phenomenological understanding of perception, experience and the body can better account for the ambiguous, multiple, immediate expressions of race and racism. Only such an account can depict the situations of women of color, who live with the markers of both race and sex. Against Joan Scott's poststructuralists disparagement of the role of experience in knowledge, I draw upon Satya Mohanty and Willard Van Orman Quine's work to argue that Scott's analysis only applies in a foundationalist conception of knowledge. In place of a correspondence theory of knowledge, to Quine's coherentism, I add the role of the body to arrive at the importance of situated knowledge. I address three prevailing feminist criticisms of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, voiced by Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler to be sure that phenomenology---although admittedly problematic in specific ways, in presuming total reversibility and depicting a general body---can, nevertheless, illuminate my analysis. I conclude by exploring phenomenology's account of freedom and creating. For although phenomenology centrally figures our situated state, we nevertheless access and achieve transcendental knowledge. I explore Merleau-Ponty's works on aesthetics to understand this act of creating, for herein lies the possibility of creating new meanings about the symbols of the body and the possibility of disrupting racism.