Essays explore the significance of Julia Kristeva’s concept of intimate revolt for social and political philosophy. Over the last twenty years, French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and novelist Julia Kristeva has explored how global crises threaten people’s ability to revolt. In a context of widespread war, deepening poverty, environmental catastrophes, and rising fundamentalisms, she argues that a revival of inner psychic experience is necessary and empowering. “Intimate revolt” has become a central concept in Kristeva’s critical repertoire, framing and permeating her understanding of (...) power, meaning, and identity. New Forms of Revolt brings together ten essays on this aspect of Kristeva’s work, addressing contemporary social and political issues like immigration and cross-cultural encounters, colonial and postcolonial imaginations, racism and artistic representation, healthcare and social justice, the spectacle of global capitalism, and new media. Sarah K. Hansen is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge. Rebecca Tuvel is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rhodes College. (shrink)

Over the past decades humor studies has formed an unprecedented interdisciplinary consolidation, connected with a consolidation in philosophy of humor scholarship. In this essay, I focus specifically on feminist philosophy of humor as an area of study that highlights relationships between humor, language, subjectivity, power, embodiment, instability, affect, and resistance, introducing several of its key themes while mapping out tensions that can be productive for further research. I first cover feminist theories of humor as instability and then move to feminist (...) theories of humor as generative of social relationships. Though I diagnose several tensions between these approaches that require further elaboration and discussion, I conclude that feminist philosophy of humor is a crucial area of humor research that focuses on systematic oppression, political engagement, embodiment, and affective ties. (shrink)

This essay draws on a wide range of feminist, psychoanalytic and other anti-racist theorists to work out the specific mode of space as ‘contained’ and the ways it grounds dominant contemporary forms of racism i.e. the space of phallicized whiteness. Offering a close reading of Lacan’s primary models for ego-formation, the mirror stage and the inverted bouquet, I argue that psychoanalysis can help us to map contemporary power relations of racism because it enacts some of those very dynamics. Casting the (...) production of subjectivity on the field of the visual, Lacan performs some of the fundamental conceptions of space and embodiment that ground the dominant forms of racism in these cultural symbolics. Namely, he articulates a body that is bound by skin, structured by a logic of containment, cathected through aggression and distance, and read primarily through the way it looks – both how it appears and how it beholds the appearances of other bodies. Unraveling this nexus of power relations, I argue that a fundamental anti-racist strategy is to interrupt, interrogate and re-deploy this interpellation of images. Key Words: ego-formation • embodiment • historicity • Lacan • ontological • phallus • race/racial difference/racism • space • visual • whiteness. (shrink)

: This essay discusses the implications of Irigaray's readings of the Antigone in the construction of a feminist ethics. By focusing on the gaps and intersections between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian phenomenology as formulative of Irigaray's eventual call for an ethics of sexual difference, I emphasize the inevitability of rethinking the functions of historicity, femininity, and maternity in the formation of new models of intersubjectivity.

This article is about the theoretical life of `the abject'. It focuses on the ways in which Anglo-American and Australian feminist theoretical accounts of maternal bodies and identities have utilized Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection. Whilst the abject has proved a compelling and productive concept for feminist theory, this article cautions against the repetition of the maternal (as) abject within theoretical writing. It argues that employing a Kristevan abject paradigm risks reproducing, rather than challenging, histories of violent disgust towards maternal (...) bodies. In place of the Kristevan model of the abject, it argues for a more thoroughly social and political account of abjection. This entails a critical shift from the current feminist theoretical preoccupation with the `transgressive potentiality' of `encounters with the abject' to a consideration of consequences of being abject within specific social and political locations. (shrink)

In this article I critically re-examine Julia Kristeva's view that becoming a speaking subject requires psychical matricide: violent separation from the maternal body. I propose an alternative, non-matricidal conception of subjectivity, in part by drawing out anti-matricidal strands in Kristeva's own thought, including her view that early mother–child relations are triangular. Whereas she understands this triangle in terms of a first imaginary father, I re-interpret this triangle using Donald Winnicott's idea of potential space and Jessica Benjamin's idea of an intersubjective (...) space of thirdness. I argue that this space provides a maternal third term: a relation of connection and difference between two, a relation that inherits the affective, mobile, generative qualities of the maternal body as the infant (according to Kristeva) imagines it. This connecting space allows both mothers and children to emerge as subjects in their own right. I then suggest that potential-maternal space expands into language, so that language intrinsically allows the possibility of a speaking position of connection with the mother. Entrance into language need not entail separation or matricide: the problem is not language as such but the particular way that speech and logos have been defined historically. (shrink)

The American poet Alice Notley has described one of her goals as being to take up ‘as much literary space as any male poet’ (Notley, 2005: 6), a phrase that questions the nature of ‘literary space’, and its relationship to material and political spaces. In Disobedience (2001), as in her earlier book The Descent of Alette (1992), the city is imagined in relation to what lies beneath it. Both of these extended poem sequences set up urban underground geographies, Alette – (...) a mythical underground of caves and ghostly trains, and Disobedience – a largely subterranean Paris that shifts between the ‘real’ metro and a series of filmic dreamscapes. In challenging the scope and scale of canonical epics with feminist reconfigurations of form, her work engages with the public space of the city. This article will explore the connection between the extended poetic forms she uses in these two books, and ways in which her work conceptualizes the gendering of city space through relationships between the body and language. Through reference to readings of Michel de Certeau by Meaghan Morris and Doreen Massey, I will show how Notley's approach to problems of language and form, and their potential solutions, are not only enmeshed in certain spatial concepts but also able to offer a critique of them. (shrink)

This article engages with medical practice to develop a philosophically informed understanding of epistemic engagement in medicine, and epistemic object relations more broadly. I take my point of departure in the clinical encounter and draw on French psychoanalytical theory to develop and expand a taxonomy already proposed by Karin Knorr-Cetina. In so doing, I argue for the addition of an abject-type object relation; that is, the encounter with objects that transgress frameworks and disrupt further investigation, hence preventing dynamic engagement and (...) negatively shaping our epistemic pathways. This article is primarily theoretical, although partly grounded in qualitative fieldwork. (shrink)

My essay is framed by Hypatia's first special issue on Motherhood and Sexuality at one end, and by the most recent special issue (as of this writing) on the work of Iris Young, whose work on pregnant embodiment has become canonical, at the other. The questions driving this essay are: When we look back over the last twenty-five years, what has changed in our conceptions of pregnancy and maternity, both in feminist theory and in popular culture? What aspects of feminist (...) debates from the 1970s and 1980s are still relevant today? And, how might what appear to be radical shifts in popular perceptions of pregnancy actually continue traditional values that objectify and “abjectify” the maternal body?Here, I will focus on three central elements of the revaluation of pregnancy and maternity as they show up in feminist philosophy and in popular culture: 1. The relationship between pregnancy and sexuality, both in terms of pregnant sexuality and in terms of the pregnant body as sexual object; 2. The “choice” to become a mother as a “feminist choice”; 3. The temporality of pregnancy and birth as marking something like “women's time.”. (shrink)

Julia Kristeva is known as rejecting feminism, nonetheless her work is useful for feminist theory. I reconsider Kristeva's rejection of feminism and her theories of difference, identity, and maternity, elaborating on Kristeva's contributions to debates over the necessity of identity politics, indicating how Kristeva's theory suggests the cause of and possible solutions to women's oppression in Western culture, and, using Kristeva's theory, setting up a framework for a feminist rethinking of politics and ethics.

In this essay, I trace the development of Julia Kristeva's theory and practice of “the subject in procession trial” from her semiotic works of the 1960s to her psychoanalytic writings of the 1970s and 1980s. I read Kristeva's exploration of this “subject in procession trial” as contributing to a postmodern feminist ethics.

Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language offers a challenge to theories of the subject in psychoanalysis, linguistic theory, and in philosophy. Central to that challenge is Kristeva’s conception of negativity. In this article, I trace the development of the concept of negativity in Revolution in Poetic Language from its root in Hegel, to rejection, which Kristeva develops out of Freud. Both are crucial to the development of the material dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic that makes up Kristeva’s subject-in-process/on trial. (...) I argue that a clearer understanding of Kristeva’s conception of negativity helps us to better appreciate the force of Kristeva’s challenge, both philosophically and politically. Finally I argue that Kristevan negativity also helps us to clarify the relation between the delimited space of politics and its conditions, laying the groundwork for constitutive exclusion as political critique and opening a space for the possibility of political re-constitutions. (shrink)

I welcome the opportunity to respond to Kelly Oliver's critique of my paper published earlier in this journal for at least three reasons: out of respect for the tradition of intellectual exchange to which Oliver's invitation tacitly appeals; because the issues are of quite general importance, even far beyond feminist theory; and out of fidelity to the goals of contemporary feminist theory, central to which I take to be the unravelling of classical dichotomies. This commitment inspires me to protest the (...) current tendency among some feminist critics to tacitly reinforce (often under the name of "deconstruction") the very dichotomy between objectivism and relativism which I and others have sought to undermine. Here, as always, the tell-tale marks of such oppositional reconstructions are to be found in the collapse and obliteration of distinctions internal to the categories under questions. (shrink)

The socio-historical events and libertarian cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s shaped the Catholic mother-daughter relationship for the women in this feminist genealogical study. This study is based on interviews with 36 Anglo-Australian Catholic women – 13 sets of mothers and daughters – as well as dialogue between my mother and myself about family photographs. Women’s stories of secondary school days tell of the formation of lady-like identities circumscribed through uniform regulations, the cult of the Virgin Mary and ceremonies (...) of everyday Catholic school life. The abject maternal body resurfaces in adolescence with the flow of menstrual blood, and the heralding sexuality of young women is circumscribed through patriarchal institutions such as Catholicism. Amid their silenced and contested dialogue, although years apart, the stories between mothers and daughters in this study drew parallels. (shrink)

This article characterizes the work of Native basket weaver Mabel McKay, using some of the conceptual tools of twentiethth-century phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Specifically, McKay's baskets have often been described as "living;" Merleau-Ponty's account of the world as "living flesh" seems to suggest a way of thinking about these baskets as more than mere artifacts. I conclude that McKay's baskets are a powerful propaedeutic: they awaken a sense of ourselves as perceivers.

This article characterizes the work of Native basket weaver Mabel McKay, using some of the conceptual tools of twentiethth-century phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Specifically, McKay's baskets have often been described as "living;" Merleau-Ponty's account of the world as "living flesh" seems to suggest a way of thinking about these baskets as more than mere artifacts. I conclude that McKay's baskets are a powerful propaedeutic: they awaken a sense of ourselves as perceivers.

This essay analyzes the implications of the performative aspects of Julia Kristeva 's Powers of Horror by situating this work in the context of similar aspects of her previous work. This construction and its relationship to abjection are integral components of Kristeva 's notion of practice and as such are fundamental to her critique of Hegel and Freud.

This essay analyzes the implications of the performative aspects of Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror by situating this work in the context of similar aspects of her previous work. This construction and its relationship to abjection are integral components of Kristeva's notion of practice and as such are fundamental to her critique of Hegel and Freud.

This article offers a critical reading of what Julia Kristeva calls ‘woman’s primary homosexuality’ and discusses homophobia in Kristeva’s work. If we are to draw conclusions on the merits and limitations of Kristeva’s theories of sexuality, homophobia needs to be assessed within the aesthetic and ethical contexts that typify Kristeva’s overall oeuvre. The article shows that we can apply Kristeva’s semiotic/symbolic model of signification to sexuality and argues for the construction of ‘primary homosexuality’ as the manifestation of resistance to authorized (...) sexual identity. The article also shows why the political demands to recognize lesbianism as a valid form of sexuality and especially as an intelligible lifestyle go against Kristeva’s understanding of what resistance entails. (shrink)

Is history a category of reason, or is reason a category of history? These opposing questions have divided the structuralist from the materialist-but neither question is wrong. Analysis of the logic of oppositions challenges feminism, in particular, to find a logic-and a poetics-in which to render its values without historical or theoretical naiveté. I explore the question of the timing of feminism through Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray.

: This paper argues that the slogans "A Woman's Right to Choose" and "The Personal is the Political" typify different traditions within feminist thinking; one emphasizing rights and equality, the other the unconscious and the personal. The author responds to both traditions by bringing together mind and body, and reason and emotion, via the figure of the copula. The copula expresses an alternative model of identity which indicates that value can be produced only in relation.

This paper argues that the slogans “A Woman's Right to Choose” and “The Personal is the Political” typify different traditions within feminist thinking; one emphasizing rights and equality, the other the unconscious and the personal. The author responds to both traditions by bringing together mind and body, and reason and emotion, via the figure of the copula. The copula expresses an alternative model of identity which indicates that value can be produced only in relation.Let us say that the problem is (...) violence. At its most naive: how can the sexual relation, which is supposedly full of love, be violent?I mean the sexual relation in its resonances and ambiguity—to indicate the relation between the sexes, and the relation between lovers. In no way can the relation be confined to love, either heterosexual or homosexual, since it is often a contest. It cannot be reduced solely to a social relation, because in one of its aspects it addresses the most intimate subjectivity.In a certain feminist lifestyle advocacy, those women who are in same sex relations avoid sexual violence by avoiding men, and those who are in heterosexual relationships strive to find the “right kind”—that is, relationships of respectful and supportive love—rejecting all signs of aggression, from sexist disparagement and emotional cruelty to sexual humiliation and physical assault, as “abuse.”Strangely, this dichotomy does not explain the proximity of passion and aggression, whether in love between men and women or in same-sex relationships between feminist women. As rational counsel, it resists the important sense in which the erotic is, and is even valued as, the excess of the rational. And as an analysis of the oppression of women it defeats itself, for to insist on masculinity as violence itself, and/or on the sexual relation as properly governed by reason, seems to miss the point of both love and feminism.Stranger still, feminisms, which set out to address and redress the oppression of women, have become rivalrous themselves. Are these aggressions a legacy of the intellectual world they must take place in. Have we overlooked an aspect of the relation between sisters? Feminism has not addressed the question of aggression in feminism as anything more than contamination.Perhaps, after all, the thing that feminism has not yet successfully addressed is love. The “battle between the sexes” has not rendered the ambivalence of the heterosexual relation. As a species of theory, feminism has relished the rigor of distinction and has not found it easy to tolerate the proximity of opposites.And yet, in evoking the body, some feminisms approach closer to this difficulty. It remains to take up the relation between the body and the concept more thoroughly, in order to find out whether sexual difference could ever be philosophical. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the construction of feminist literary studies in the last twenty years and points out how we have created a literary history which is both selective and schematic. It suggests that we should be more critically aware of what we are constructing, how we are constructing it and of the political consequences of those constructs. It stresses three critical modes which might help us to complicate our history: a greater awareness of institutional contexts, a concern with (...) empirical detail, and an ongoing analysis of the cultural and political significance of feminist literary practice. This article briefly applies these critical modes in a survey of eleven introductions to feminist literary studies – introductions which feature frequently and influentially in the teaching situation. The final section focuses on the key problem of inclusion and exclusion. Considering arguments from Third World feminism and postmodernist feminism, the study concludes that white, academic feminists should confront the privilege of their own inclusion as a necessary spur to political action. (shrink)

In this essay, I trace the development of Julia Kristeva's theory and practice of "the subject in process/on trial" from her semiotic works of the 1960s to her psychoanalytic writings of the 1970s and 1980s. I read Kristeva's exploration of this "subject in process/on trial" as contributing to a postmodern feminist ethics.

Illness and trauma challenge self-narratives. Traumatized individuals, unable to speak about their experiences, suffer in isolation. In this paper, I explore Kristeva’s theories of the speaking subject and signification, with its symbolic and semiotic modalities, to understand how a person comes to speak the unspeakable. In discussing the origin of the speaking subject, Kristeva employs Plato’s chora (related to choreo , “to make room for”). The chora reflects the mother’s preparation of the child’s entry into language and forms an interior (...) darkroom, the reservoir of lived experience, from which self-narratives issue. Unable to speak of their suffering, traumatized individuals need someone to help them make room for a time of remembrance, someone who is a willing and capable listener. I call such a person a healing witness . Through the mediating presence of the healing witness, fragmented memories of trauma are recreated and incorporated into self-narratives that are sharable with others. Unfortunately, opportunities for witnessing are vanishing. In the last section, I examine the failure of modern media and communication technologies to bear (“hold,” “carry,” “transport”) acts of witnessing. I argue that they perturb the semiotic. According to Kristeva, meaning arises from the dialectical tension between the semiotic (drives and affects) and the symbolic (logic and rules) and is threatened by arid discourse, psychosomatic illnesses, and outbreaks of violence when the semiotic is not represented . Unless we open technology to the imaginary, we risk losing the capacity to bear witness to one another and to create narratives and connections that are meaningful. (shrink)

The Portable Kristeva. Edited by Kelly Oliver New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), xxix + 410 pp., $21.00, £13.95 paper. The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the Present. Edited by Timothy Unwin, xxiii + 281 pp. £37.50, $59.95 cloth £13.95, $18.95 paper. Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune. By Roger V. Gould, viii + 253 pp. $40.95, £32.75 cloth $15.95, £12.75 paper. The State of the Nation: Government and the (...) Quest for a Better Society. By Derek Bok, 493 pp. $35.00 cloth. The Darwinian Paradigm: Essays on its History, Philosophy, and Religious Implications. By Michael Ruse, 299 pp. £11.99 paper. Economic Laws and Economic History. By Charles P. Kindleberger, xi + 191 pp. £14.95, $18.95 paper £32.50, $54.95 cloth. An Introduction to the Philosophy of History. By Michael Stanford, viii + 292 pp. $54.95, £45.00 cloth $29.95, £14.99 paper. The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain. By Kevin J. H. Dettmar xv + 276 pp. £45.00 cloth £20.50 paper. The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel. By Patricia Ingham, ix + 197 pp. n.p.g. The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit. By Leo Damrosch, xiv + 384 pp. $39.95, cloth. Sovereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and Mixed Government in the English Civil Wars. By Arihiro Fukudo, xiii + 175 pp. £35.00. Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals. By Creighton E. Gilbert, xiii + 316 pp., $85.00, £76.50. Leaving the Cave: Evolutionary Naturalism in Social‐Scientific Thought. By Pat Duffy Hutcheon, xvi + 504 pp. $55.00 cloth. The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England. By M. Lindsay Kaplan Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature & Culture, xii + 137 pp. £32.50, $49.9 cloth. The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780. By Margaret R. Hunt, xiii + 353 pp.n.p.g. History Continues. By Georges Duby, translated by A. Goldhammer, xvi + 149 pp. $14.95, £ 11.95 paper. Friedrich Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations. Edited by Daniel Breazeale, translated by R.J. Hollingdale. xlvii + 276 pp. $49.95 cloth $15.95 paper. Weakness of the Will in Medieval Thought: From Augustine to Buridan. By Risto Saarinan, viii + 207 pp. $77.25, £35.00 cloth. Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034. By Richard Landes, Harvard Historical Studies, 117, xii + 404 pp. $55.00 cloth. Chronicles of the Vikings: Records, Memorials and Myths. Edited by R. I. Page., 239 pp. $50.00 cloth $17.95 paper. Ideas and Policies Under Labour 1945–1951. By Martin Francis, vi + 269 pp. £40.00 cloth. Aesthetics: The Classic Readings. Edited by David E. Cooper, vi + 276 pp. $ 54.95 cloth $ 19.95 paper. Adorno's Aesthetics of Music. By Max Paddison, xii + 378 pp. £15.95 paper. Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism. By Robert Chazan, xiii + 189 pp. $35.00 cloth. Umwelt‐Lesebuch: Green Issues in Contemporary German Writing. Edited by Axel Goodbody, ix + 197 pp. £35.00, £9.99 paper. Understanding Contemporary Germany. By Stuart Parkes, xxxii + 247 pp., £13.99 paper. Cultural‐Political Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment. Edited by Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer, 314 pp. n.p.g. Reflections of Change: Children's Literature Since 1945. Edited by Sandra L. Beckett, xi + 203 £ 43.95 cloth. The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van Eyck's Double Portrait. By Edwin Hall, xxi + 180 pp. $50.00. Nineteenth‐Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking Glass. By Katherine Kearns, X + 310 PP. £40.00, $59.95. Socrates and Aristophanes. By Leo Strauss, 332 pp. $15.95, £12.75 paper. The Clock and the Mirror. Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine. By Nancy G. Siraisi, xiv + 361 pp. cloth $49.50, £37.50 cloth. The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope. By Catherine Wilson, 280 pp., $18.95, £14.95 paper. Intelligence de l'anticommunisme: Le Congrès pour la liberté de la culture à Paris. By Pierre Grémion, 645 pp. 240 FF. A City in Conflict: Troyes During the French Wars of Religion. By Penny Roberts, Studies in Early Modern History, x + 228 pp., £40.00 cloth. Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity. By Alison Weber, xi + 183 pp., $15.95 paper. Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530. Edited by Peter Biller and Anne Hudson, xxv + 313 pp., $19.95, £13.95, paper. The Commercialization of English Society, 1000–1500. 2nd ed. By Richard H. Britnell, Manchester Medieval Studies, xvi + 281 pp. $24.95, £35.00 cloth £12.00 paper. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. By Rogers Brubaker, 202 pp. n.p.g. (shrink)

This article deals with the issue of innovation in church tradition, more specifically in Orthodoxy. Using as an example the admittedly untypical life of Mother Maria Skobtsova, an Orthodox nun living in France after the 1917 revolution in Russia, the article shows how the creative moments of her life, which shaped the church tradition in exile, can be also viewed from a psychoanalytical perspective. With the help of French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, the creative changes Mother Maria brought to church tradition (...) can be seen as the play of the semiotic and the symbolic within the Symbolic order: the maternal, imaginatively associative, less conscious and the paternal, regulated, structured and regulated. The subversive forces of the semiotic – madness, holiness and poetry – observed in Mother Maria’s life, brought new and living possibilities into the theology of Orthodox diaspora. (shrink)

Increased standardization of teacher education programs urges a reconsideration of how pre-service teacher identities are constructed/being constructed and evaluated. The purpose of my study was to examine the writings of pre-service teachers enrolled in an early field experiences course in order to identify moments in which they interacted, negotiated, and subverted the teacher-making process, which they officially enter during the semester they take this course. I approach this question from a philosophical viewpoint, and I use the theories of French post-structuralist, (...) Julia Kristeva. My analysis of pre-service teachers enrolled in an early field experience course illustrates how their language disrupts the standardized language and expectations of a teacher education program. (shrink)

The topic of the self has long been salient in feminist philosophy, for it is pivotal to questions about personhood, identity, the body, and agency that feminism must address. In some respects, Simone de Beauvoir's trenchant observation, "He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other," sums up why the self is such an important issue for feminism. To be the Other is to be the non-subject, the non-person, the non-agent — in short, the mere body. (...) In law, in customary practice, and in cultural stereotypes, women's selfhood has been systematically subordinated, diminished, and belittled, when it has not been outright denied. Since women have been cast as lesser forms of the masculine individual, the paradigm of the self that has gained ascendancy in U.S. popular culture and in Western philosophy is derived from the experience of the predominantly white and heterosexual, mostly economically advantaged men who have wielded social, economic, and political power and who have dominated the arts, literature, the media, and scholarship. Responding to this state of affairs, feminist philosophical work on the self has taken three main tacks: (1) critique of established views of the self, (2) reclamation of women's selfhood, and (3) reconceptualization of the self to incorporate women's experience. This entry will survey feminist perspectives on the self from all three of these angles. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue that an account of epistemic injustice sensitive to interlocking oppressions must take us beyond injustice to human knowers. Although several feminist epistemologists argue for the incorporation of all forms of oppression into their analyses, feminist epistemology remains for the most part an anthropocentric enterprise. Yet insofar as a reduction to animal irrationality has been central to the epistemic injustice of both humans and animals, I propose that in addition to axes of gender, race, class and (...) sex, feminist epistemology must register the animal-human dichotomy as a fundamental driving mechanism inherent in epistemic injustice. From the perspective of a truly liberatory epistemology, I thus argue for an expanded account of epistemic injustice that is both 1) sufficiently attentive to the way injustices to human knowers continue to rely on animal oppression and 2) that accommodates epistemic injustices against animal knowers. (shrink)

Real Fit: Identity, Society, and Viewer Investment in Reality TV is first and foremost a philosophical experiment in how to articulate the space between viewer and screen. Its driven by a methodological investment in bringing theories of normativity into an experiential terrain typically dominated by media studies. What does it mean to study an audience? And how does this knowledge speak to, or challenge our existing models? Its an investigation into the political dimension of seemingly innocuous entertainment, and a deep (...) consideration of how this comes to bear on invested viewers. Staying within the confines of the virtual, my dissertation studies the ways that TV exploits affect to reinforce current personalized narratives of obesity as a problem that can be managed by self-discipline. (shrink)