Being at Home

Abstract In Being at Home, the author reimagines liberal philosophy through the lens of intersectionality, showing how race, gender, and caregiving relationships reshape our understanding of autonomy. With powerful narratives drawn from her lived experience, this book exposes how societal structures intrude on personal sovereignty and elevate stress. The book evaluates the implications, prerequisites, and process of living autonomously from an intersectional social position, one that illuminates how some people are used, that is, treated as grafted subjects, within the social system, as well as how some people are excluded from the unit of belonging, and thereby given outsider status, while offering transformative skills for buoyancy, counterfactual living, and belonging. The result, intersectional liberalism, integrates implications of Asian American philosophy, Black feminist thought, Latinx feminism, and the reproductive justice framework into a new liberalism. The author forges skills for personal autonomy, for living counterfactually in hierarchical societies in ways that are not socially licensed. Further establishing that being a mother does not contradict living autonomously, she advances an account of homemaking and practices of buoyancy to protect one’s family and one’s body. Being at Home is the first book to center Asian American women in liberal political theory, which makes clear that attending to conditions of belonging and care is necessary to secure freedom, and to survive it.