The engagement of feminist philosophy with Hegel's work has a long tradition, starting most prominently with the readings of Hegel by Simone de Beauvoir in The second sex (1949) and by Luce Irigaray in Speculum (1974). In 1996 Patricia J. Mills’ groundbreaking anthology Feminist Interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel (1996) gave a profound overview of feminist interrogations of Hegel in the 20th century. However, since then not only feminist philosophy but also feminist readings of Hegel have moved on, as Kimberly Hutchings’ and Tuija Pulkkinen's volume on Hegel's Philosophy and Feminist Thought impressively illustrates. It presents a wide range of new approaches to Hegel's philosophy, inspired by feminist and queer thought of different kinds. While the contributors to the first part, ‘Feminist Encounters with Hegel’, explore ways of using Hegel's philosophy for the further development of broad questions of feminist philosophy—such as ontology, epistemology, and ethics—the second part, ‘Re-Reading Hegel's Method’, offers interpretations of passages where Hegel explicitly addresses sex, gender, and sexuality. The contributions are written from very different points of view. Therefore, this volume fits in perfectly with the series ‘Breaking Feminist Waves’, edited by Linda Martín Alcoff and Gillian Howie, since the aim of this series is to provide ‘a forum to reassess established constructions of feminism and of feminist theory’, and to provide a ‘starting point to redefine feminism as a configuration of intersecting movements and concerns—with political commitment but, perhaps, without a singular centre or primary track’ (vii).

The first part, ‘Feminist Encounters with Hegel’, starts with Tuija Pulkkinen's entry ‘Differing Spirits—Reflections on Hegelian Inspiration in Feminist Theory’, in which she argues that the critique of Hegel put forward by feminist theorists such as Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray—influenced by Kojève's interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology—bypasses Hegel's ontology. Pulkkinen understands Hegel's philosophy as a kind of metaphysics and ontology for which the notion of spirit, considered as ‘the all inclusive ontological substance-subject’, (19) is central; she claims that Kojève misinterprets Hegel, since in his reading of the Phenomenology ‘the human serves as the ontologically relevant foundation, the channel to all being as appearence’ (19). Rejecting both Kojève's and Hegel's foundational projects, Pulkkinen argues that only by affirming Hegel's ontological claims can one understand that ‘humans in his thought are considered always already in history, in culture, in the process of absolute spirit, and in a condition of constant change’ (30). According to Pulkkinen, interpreters who take Hegel's ontology more seriously, like Nancy and Malabou, recognize that the ‘restlessness’ of spirit is also characteristic for the troubled history of gender, sex, and sexuality.

Joanna Hodge's contribution, ‘Queering Hegel: Three Incisions’, focuses on Derrida's reading of Hegel in Glas. Hodge outlines how Derrida ‘queers’ Hegel in three ways: first by insisting on animality, ‘which reveals the pas of the move from nature to spirit and underlines that which remains after or despite the relève (raising to another level) of the Aufhebung’ (56); second by ‘insisting on queer lineages and on alternate triads’ (ibid.) such as Hegel, Freud, and Genet—claiming no triad to be more queer than the Holy Trinity; and third by permanently disrupting ‘any logic founded in naming and reference by the logic of the flower, of the emblem, of the repetition that repeats the name with a difference’ (ibid.). Hodge appreciates Derrida's deconstructive reading of Hegel because it destabilizes existing patriarchal orders and breaks with the patriarchal Western philosophical tradition.

In ‘Antigone's Liminality: Hegel's Racial Purification of Tragedy and the Naturalization of Slavery’ Tina Chanter claims that Hegel trivializes slavery by justifying it as a necessary part of the development of spirit. In his admiration for Sophocles, Hegel suppresses the fact that the author of the famous tragedies was an aristocrat in a society that was based on slavery. As she sees it, not only Hegel's interpretation of ‘Antigone’, but also its feminist critique have to be refigured against this background, because feminists have overlooked how not only the feminine but also class and race are excluded in Hegel's account of the philosophy of history and the philosophy of art. Chanter argues that Antigone ‘lays claim to her status as royalty, and in doing so, she attempts to distinguish herself from a slave, from someone who has no authority to speak or do things for herself, in her own name, as a person to be accorded legal rights’ (81). Unlike the slave, she is allowed to speak in the tragic genre. Therefore, Chanter considers the figure of Antigone to consolidate the oppression of slaves and to stand for the eurocentrism and colonialism inherent in the Western political and philosophical tradition.

In ‘Knowing Thyself: Hegel, Feminism and an Ethic of Heteronomy’ Kimberly Hutchings builds on an idea from her book ‘Hegel and Feminist Philosophy’ (2003). In this book she argued that Hegel criticizes a thinking that is based on mutually exclusive oppositions like nature/culture or identity/difference. Drawing on Hegel's critique of the ‘moral point of view’ and on his interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone in the Phenomenology, Hutchings seeks to outline a kind of ethics that is not based on such oppositions and can overcome the ongoing feminist disputes as to whether an ethic of justice or an ethic of care is to be favoured. According to Hutchings, the readings of Antigone by Hegel, Irigaray and Butler imply, despite their differences, ‘an ethics that is extremely cautious about moral claims that transcend time and place’ (103). Since this ethics is not based on moral self-certainty, ‘it becomes a painful and incremental process in which reckoning with our own incapacity to know ourselves is intrinsically linked to our potential capacity to communicate with others in ways that are non-assimilative and may make it possible to forge intersubjective links in the construction of new forms of ethical life’ (103).

The first part concludes with Judith Butler's ‘Longing for recognition’, which is a chapter from her book Undoing Gender (Reference Butler2004). In this chapter, Butler confronts Jessica Benjamin's appropriation of the Hegelian notion of recognition (her dyadic model) with what Butler herself understands as Hegel's version of the self in his analysis of the process of recognition. She favours the Hegelian account, which she takes to reveal that the self ‘is beyond itself from the start, and defined by this ontological ek-stasis, (…) finds itself ambiguously installed outside itself’ (126). According to Butler, this way of thinking the self can help us ‘appreciate the triangulating echoes in heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual desire, and complicate our understanding of the relation between sexuality and gender’ (127).

The second part of the volume, ‘Re-Reading Hegel's Method’, begins with Karin de Boer's paper ‘Beyond Tragedy: Tracing the Aristophanian Subtext of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit’. De Boer states that most feminist readings of the sections on ethical life in Hegel's Phenomenology erroneously presuppose that Hegel here aims at offering an interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone and presents his own opinion on the issue of gender. This misinterpretation is due to an unawareness of the peculiar method of the Phenomenology. By a close reading of the chapter on Ethical Action De Boer shows that Hegel merely uses classical plays to understand the logic of the development and downfall of Greek ethical life, and that he wants to demonstrate the one-sidedness of Greek ethical life as it is perceived by Greek culture itself. According to De Boer ‘Hegel implicitly draws on the insight achieved in Greek comedy’—in Aristophanes’ plays, to be exact—‘to argue that Greek culture, organizing its ethical life in accordance with the natural distinction between the male and female sex, contradicts the principle of individuality it harbors’ (145). This insight, De Boer claims, could be fruitful for current feminist debates.

In ‘Reading the Same Twice Over: The Place of the Feminine in the Time of Hegelian Spirit’ Rakefet Efrat-Levkovich argues that the feminine plays a far more important role in Hegel's Phenomenology than is generally assumed. In her view, its great epistemological importance cannot be recognized by addressing only the sections in which Hegel explicitly treats gender issues. The feminine is rather a hidden subtext of the first four chapters of the Phenomenology. According to Efrat-Levkovich, Hegel in these chapters treats ahistorical ‘female’ practices—such as memory, desire, fantasy and recollection—that are conditions for the possibility of socio-historical practices and therefore fundamental for the masculine subject's agency.

Susanna Lindberg's considerations in ‘Womanlife or Lifeword and Psycho-Technique: Woman as the Figure of the Plasticity of Transcendence’ are inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy's and Christine Malabou's readings of Hegel. Lindberg argues that for Hegel ‘woman’ is a figure, not a (timeless and purely logical) idea or a real individual. As she sees it, a figure is ‘a phenomenological crystallisation of an intense complex of natural, historical, and symbolic circumstances, which is presented as an element of the process of philosophical knowing’ (178). Lindberg claims that for Hegel woman is a figure of absence in two senses: first, she has no presence on the political scene, and second, ‘she makes absence visible’ since she mediates between dichotomies such as nature and spirit, animal and man, sense and thought.

In ‘The Gender of Spirit: Hegel's Moves and Strategies’, Laura Werner examines Hegel's philosophical and conceptual construction of gender. She claims that the category ‘women’ is based on women's ‘difference from difference’. According to Werner, this ‘difference from difference’ is a ‘negation of negation’ that dialectically turns into the group identity of ‘women’ as unreflective unity and abstract identity (sameness). Thus women are excluded from the spirit's development in history—incapable of change, confined to the family unit. ‘Since their self-consciousness is not torn, they remain the ones repairing the torn socks and the torn self-consciousness returning home to find wholeness’ (206).

Alison Stone's paper ‘Matter and Form: Hegel, Organicism, and the Difference between Women and Men’ concludes the second part. Stone agrees with Lloyd and Irigaray that Hegel's system is structured by hierarchically gendered oppositions. Whereas for Lloyd the key opposition is that between self-consciousness and life and for Irigaray that between subjectivity and alterity, Stone argues that it is the opposition between concept (gendered as male) and matter (gendered as female) that structures Hegel's philosophy. According to his Philosophy of Nature, ‘the concept re-emerges from matter and progressively remodels matter in its own image’ (212). Since Hegel symbolizes matter as female and concept as male, this is at the same time a process of progressive domination of the female by the male, which—given Hegel's political organicism—culminates in the confinement of women to family life, where they embody the inferior principle of ‘immediate unity’, while men, embodying the principle of difference, enter the superior spheres of economic and political life. Stone claims that it is important to acknowledge this gendered structure of Hegel's philosophy to avoid reproducing it inadvertently in one's own thinking.

Having presented the engagements between Hegel and current feminist philosophy, the volume closes with an interesting email-debate on Hegel and contemporary feminist politics. Four distinguished scholars—Nancy Bauer, Alison Stone and the editors of this volume—discuss in several rounds the political significance and implications of Hegel's thought. This debate shows once again the variety of nowadays feminist positions and is an inspiring and rewarding read for academics working in this field and beyond.

It is somewhat regrettable that the editors state in their introduction that Hegel has ‘relatively little to say explicitly about sex, gender and sexuality’ (p. 4), considering the fact that Hegel treats these topics not only in two very prominent passages of the Phenonomenology of Spirit and of the Elements of the Philosophy of Right but in almost all of his works and lectures. In his lectures on the Philosophy of History, on the History of Philosophy, on the Philosophy of Religion and on Fine Arts as well as in all three parts of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Many passages in the transcripts of Hegel's lectures show that Hegel was quite aware of the importance of these notions. Since the contributions in this volume deal with a variety of texts where Hegel addresses sexuality, gender, and women, this statement by the editors is contradicted in their own book and proves to be untenable.

Some readers might regret the absence of a discussion of Hegel's work that traces the logic of the Hegelian text itself instead of following external approaches. Overall one learns more about Nancy's, Malabou's, Derrida's or Butler's views than about Hegel's philosophy. Readers who expect a helpful commentary to understand the often difficult passages on women, sex, and gender and their systematic context may be disappointed—although Karin de Boer's, Alison Stone's and Laura Werner's papers are an exception here. Admittedly, Hegel's theory of sex and gender is in many ways a provocation for feminist theory. But still—in view of the complexity of Hegel's philosophy—it might prove to be a prejudice that what the editors call a ‘closed reading’ of Hegel's theory of sex, gender and sexuality is ‘from a feminist point of view, uninteresting’ (p. 4). Given the predominance of poststructuralist and deconstructive readings of Hegel in this book, one might also regret the absence of feminist approaches inspired by, for example, critical theory. Nonetheless, this volume is recommended for anyone interested in current debates on feminist philosophy in general and feminist readings of Hegel in particular.