Sokthan Yeng, "Buddhist Feminism: Transforming Anger against Patriarchy" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)
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What is the central goal of Sokthan Yeng’s book *Buddhist Feminism*?
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Welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm Malcolm Keating, and today we'll be talking to Suktan Yang, author of Buddhist Feminism, published in 2020 by Paul Grave Macmillan. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy, Suktan. You're welcome. So your book takes up several different themes and interweaves them together. So you take up the topic of anger, how Western feminists in general and black feminists in particular and other feminists make use of Buddhism as a means to grapple with anger, both sort of philosophically and practically. You're looking at the relationship between the metaphysics of the self, feminist, anti-essentialist thought. And you're also looking at Buddhist practices and institutions and
How they relate to post-colonial criticisms, concerns about equality and making political change. It's quite a lot. So this is a challenging opening question for you. How would you describe your book's main goal in a nutshell? And why did you think it was an important book to write?
Well, I'll start with the second one. So the way that this book came about was I'm at a teaching institution. I think a lot of people at teaching institutions really struggle to make their research and their teaching mesh. And in this case, it sort of came up serendipitously where I taught normal things like introduction of philosophy, ethics and morality. But then I was also tasked with teaching Eastern philosophy and feminist philosophy and critical race theory. the only person of color and the only woman in my philosophy department. So anything that is other, I usually have to do. But I also wanted to introduce my students, my entry-level, introduction-level students to these ideas as well. And I noticed, particularly in the intro levels, that whenever I taught Buddhism before feminism, my students were much more keen to be sympathetic to feminism,
But if I switched it, which I think, you know, again, instructors, professors are apt to do just to keep things fresh. If I taught feminism before Buddhism, even if I drew out sort of the similarities between Buddhism and feminism in the latter section of Buddhism, students never warmed to feminism. So I thought it was really interesting. And so it made me think that if I could find some literature on Buddhist feminism to sort of frame it for my students, they would be able to be more sympathetic to feminism and see the interrelated theories and concepts, but I didn't really find anything satisfactory. So that was sort of the generation of this book. And then when I taught my upper level classes, I also teach them a feminist philosophy course and, as I said, an Eastern philosophy course.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the central goal of Sokthan Yeng’s book *Buddhist Feminism*?
0:00–6:01
2
How did the author’s teaching experience shape the need for a Buddhist‑feminist text?
6:01–12:39
3
Why does the book place anger at the heart of Buddhist‑feminist practice?
12:39–28:20
4
What can Stoic ideas about anger teach us about Buddhist approaches?
28:20–49:44
5
How does the author differentiate Theravāda and Mahāyāna traditions for feminist analysis?
49:44–1:03:52
6
In what ways does the ‘no‑self’ doctrine support anti‑essentialist feminism?
1:03:52–1:09:14
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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