Queen’s University philosophy professor Christine Overall lives her feminism inside the classroom and out.

“Feminism,” she writes, “is the heart of who I am, not only as an academic, but as a citizen and an individual.” Juggling the demands of all three realms while keeping eye and mind clearly upon feminist precepts is no easy task, but it’s one Overall has apparently dedicated her life to. And in this engaging and accessible book, she talks frankly about being “other” in academia by virtue of being female and coming from a working class background. In the chapters “Role Muddles,” “Nowhere at Home,” and “Feeling Fraudulent,” Overall argues that academic women still labour under a number of outmoded expectations and stereotypes whereby they are caught struggling to serve many masters and end up harshly judging themselves because the task is just too gargantuan.

A Feminist I documents Overall’s struggle to reconcile feminism’s emphasis upon personal history with the strictures of traditional academia where one succeeds best by pretending to be a vessel of pure reason, unfettered by human needs. Arguments based on the emotional or personal have been discounted until very recently by most academic disciplines. Hence the “pariah status” of women’s issues and gender studies courses in many universities, even today.

Overall breaks the taboo of her philosophical training by using her own life as a resource for philosophy. In so doing, she joins a growing number of writers (not all women) working in the genre of theoretical autobiography.

In “Passing for Normal,” Overall explores her experience during a period when she was painfully disabled by viral arthritis. It hurt even to pick up one of her beloved philosophy books, and walking across campus became a major undertaking. Nevertheless, Overall discovered that many of her colleagues unconsciously expected her to “pass for normal,” whereby she “experienced a pressure not to be ill, not to show weaknesses, or to exhibit pain.”

The Feminist I is philosophy set in vital motion in the real world; Overall is to be lauded for her courage.