Naomi Scheman

Naomi Scheman was born in Brooklyn, grew up on Long Island, and graduated from Barnard in 1968. Since 1975 she has been part of the NY-Jewish diaspora, living first in Ottawa and then in Minneapolis/St. Paul, where she is Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies. A collection of her essays, Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege, was published in 1993. She thinks, teaches, and writes on a wide range of topics, all of which end up puzzling over the same set of fundamental questions: how can we understand the concepts we use to construct and explain ourselves and each other, taking into account differences of social location, especially concerning inequalities of power and privilege, which destabilize both the “we” that does the constructing and explaining and the critical, reflective “we” that tries to understand it all. Her particular interest in social locations that are, in normative terms, impossible or unintelligible has led her to reflect on her own identity as a secular, non-Zionist, strongly Jewish-identified, morally committed atheist. She has explored her Jewish identity most directly in two essays (which will appear in her second collection, tentatively titled, Shifting Ground: Margins, Diasporas, and the Reading of Wittgenstein, “Terminal Moraine,” and “Queering the Center by Centering the Queer: Reflections on Transsexuals and Secular Jews.”