_The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy_ is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics, subjects, thinkers, and debates in feminist philosophy. Fifty-six chapters, written by an international team of contributors specifically for the _Companion_, are organized into five sections: Engaging the Past Mind, Body, and World Knowledge, Language, and Science Intersections Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics. The volume provides a mutually enriching representation of the several philosophical traditions that contribute to feminist philosophy. It also foregrounds issues of global (...) concern and scope; shows how feminist theory meshes with rich theoretical approaches that start from transgender identities, race and ethnicity, sexuality, disabilities, and other axes of identity and oppression; and highlights the interdisciplinarity of feminist philosophy and the ways that it both critiques and contributes to the whole range of subfields within philosophy. (shrink)

Colonialism and Its Legacy brings together essays by leading scholars in both the fields of political theory and the history of political thought about European colonialism and its legacies, and postcolonial social and political theory. The essays explore the ways in which European colonial projects structured and shaped much of modern political theory, how concepts from political philosophy affected and were realized in colonial and imperial practice, and how we can understand the intellectual and social world left behind by a (...) half-millennium of European empires. (shrink)

Are the “culture wars” over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world’s foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave. “We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban,” Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more responsible role for (...) the postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the “native informant” through various cultural practices—philosophy, history, literature—to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant’s analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on. A major critical work, Spivak’s book redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality. (shrink)

The fourteen essays and speeches collected in this work, several of them published for the first time, span almost a decade of this Black lesbian feminnist's work. Lorde is unflinching in her observations and is lucid and clarifying in her coverage of a range of essential topics.

This groundbreaking collection reflects an uncompromised definition of feminism by women of color. 65,000 copies in print.

Introducing the work of three French feminists - Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Michele L Doeuff - "Sexual Subversions" provides access to the work of these writers. In doing so this book raises some key issues of relevance to feminist research, addressing debates around the nature of feminist theory; the relationship between feminist thinking theory; the relationship between feminist thinking and male-dominated areas of knowledge; the strategies appropriate for developing non-patriarchal or woman-centered knowledges. No book on French feminists would be (...) complete without including the contributions of Kristeva and Irigaray. The inclusion of Le Doeuff's work, which brings a different perspective to bear on the question of sexual difference, provides a counterbalance to literary appropriations of French feminism by Anglo-American readerships. Kristeva, Irigaray and Le Doeuff are the focal points of this study, precisely because each highlights the differences of the others, revealing the frameworks to which the others are committed. Nevertheless, while these writers do not present a common political or theoretical position or form a school, each does address the question of women's autonomy from male definition, affirms the sexual specificity of women, seeks out a femininity women can use to question the patriarchal norms and ideals of femininity and rejects the preordained positions patriarchy allots to woman. This book is intended for students and researchers in women's studies, philosophy and feminism. (shrink)

Julia Kristeva est un phénomène : sa capacité de s'informer à des sources multiples (linguistique, sémiotique, littérature, philosophie, etc.) et de dominer son information, de l'intégrer dans une trame discursive (en vue d'une thèse) est admirable. Tout comme sa conviction profonde d'une compatibilité des "avant-gardes", ainsi que le note Pierre Pachet. L'objet du livre est le langage poétique comme "lieu où l'ordre symbolique est perturbé par la jouissance, où le code est travaillé de ruptures, de négativité". Mallarmé et Lautréamont sont (...) presque des "faire-valoir" : Julia Kristeva s'intéresse à leurs oeuvres dans la mesure où celles-ci manifestent, dès la fin du siècle dernier, "l'émergence du domaine sémiotique dans la poésie". Riche et discutable. Accès difficile. (shrink)

«La recherche ici entreprise implique donc le projet délibéré d’être à la fois historique et critique, dans la mesure où il s’agit, hors de toute intention prescriptive, de déterminer les conditions de possibilité de l’expérience médicale telle que l’époque moderne l’a connue. Une fois pour toutes, ce livre n’est pas écrit pour une médecine contre une autre, ou contre la médecine pour une absence de médecine. Ici comme ailleurs, il s’agit d’une étude qui essaie de dégager dans l’épaisseur du discours (...) les conditions de son histoire.» (Michel Foucault) Naissance de la clinique constitue aussi, à travers une analyse historique et critique de la constitution du sujet, le malade, tel qu’il peut devenir objet de connaissance, la naissance d’une oeuvre philosophique qui va marquer durablement la pensée contemporaine internationale. (shrink)

"El libro tiene dos grandes temas: la identidad cultural, sobre la que se expresan opiniones balanceadas entre los extremos posibles, y la 'liberacion social', entendida en general como liberacion con respecto a estructuras opresivas. El itinerario de e.

"... a work that builds a substantial bridge between Freudian psychoanalysis and radical feminist thought, particularly on the subject of lesbianism.... Presenting a complex argument about an issue vital to the psychoanalytic endeavor as well as to feminist theory, The Practice of Love should stimulate a reconsideration of 'perversion' and the construction of sexual fantasy. The illumination of the fantasies that make lesbian desire distinctive will necessarily open up our understanding of all sexuality." --Jessica Benjamin, New York Times Book Review (...) "Teresa de Lauretis has entwined three books into one: a critical history of psychoanalytic theories of female homosexuality; a bold study of how lesbians keep disappearing from popular culture, especially film; and an original speculation on the dynamics of lesbian desire." --Elisabeth Young-Bruehl "An important and original contribution not only to lesbian and gay studies, but also to psychoanalytic theory and film criticism. De Lauretis brings a unique and valuable perspective to issues of great importance today in all these areas." --Leo Bersani "De Lauretis's influential theory gets top marks from sapphic scholars who know best." --Out In an eccentric reading of Freud through Laplanche and the Lacanian and feminist revisions, Teresa de Lauretis delineates a model of "perverse" desire and a theory of lesbian sexuality. The Practice of Love discusses classic psychoanalytic narratives of female homosexuality, contemporary feminist writings on female sexuality, and the evolution of the original fantasies into cultural myths or public fantasies. (shrink)

In a work with far-reaching implications, Chela Sandoval does no less than revise the genealogy of theory over the past thirty years, inserting what she terms "U.S. Third World feminism" into the narrative in a way that thoroughly alters our perspective on contemporary culture and subjectivity. What Sandoval has identified is a language, a rhetoric of resistance to postmodern cultural conditions. U.S liberation movements of the post-World War II era generated specific modes of oppositional consciousness. Out of these emerged a (...) new activity of consciousness and language Sandoval calls the "methodology of the oppressed". This methodology -- born of the strains of the cultural and identity struggles that currently mark global exchange -- holds out the possibility of a new historical moment, a new citizen-subject, and a new form of alliance consciousness and politics. Utilizing semiotics and U.S. Third World feminist criticism, Sandoval demonstrates how this methodology mobilizes love as a category of critical analysis. Rendering this approach in all its specifics, Methodology of the Oppressed gives rise to an alternative mode of criticism opening new perspectives on a theoretical, literary, aesthetic, social movement, or psychic expression. (shrink)

"The "woman question", this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western contruction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures." "Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed in (...) old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

Do poststructuralist accounts of the self undermine the prospects for effective democratic politics? In addressing this question, Nolle McAfee brings together the theories of Jrgen Habermas and Julia Kristeva, two major figures whose work is seldom juxtaposed. She examines their respective notions of subjectivity and politics and their implicit definitions of citizenship: the extent to which someone is able to deliberate and act in community with others.. Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship begins by tracing the rise of modern and poststructural views (...) of subjectivity, and then critiques these views as they are represented in the writings of Habermas and Kristeva. McAfee argues that Habermas's theory of subjectivity is overly optimistic about the possibility for individuals to know their own interests and act autonomously. Kristeva's poststructuralism has its own problems: it seems to limit political agency, since it considers the subject to be split and at odds with itself. Nevertheless, this book shows how Kristevan conceptions of the self can contribute to Habermas's hope for a more democratic, deliberative politics. Combining an insight from poststructural theory--that identity is constituted by a web of relationships--with the theory of deliberative democracy, McAfee argues that we need not be the kinds of individuals supposed by the modern liberal tradition to be effective political agents. The more we recognize our indebtedness to and relationship with others in our midst, the more likely we are to be capable members of political communities. (shrink)

Young feminists today are becoming activists on behalf of many causes beyond the classic—and indispensable--feminist ones of reproductive rights and equal pay for equal work. In The Fire This Time, Dawn Martin, one of four founders of The Third Wave Foundation--a multiracial, multi-issue, and multicultural activist organization--and Vivien Labaton, its first executive director, offer an exciting cross section of feminist voices that express new directions in activism, identity, and thought. Ayana Bird dissects the role of black women in hip-hop; Joshua (...) Breitbart and Ana Noguiera demonstrate how Indimedia can break the hold of the corporate media over the news; and Jennifer Bleyer reviews the exhilarating power unleashed by the GirlZine movement. Anna Kirkland’s analysis of transsexual and transgendered people and the law is deeply thoughtful, and Shireen Lee's piece on women, technology, and feminism envisions empowering prospects for women.. Ranging from media and culture to politics and globalization, The Fire This Time is a call to new frontiers of activism, and helps reinvent feminism for a new generation. (shrink)

Cornell takes readers on a highly original exploration of what it would mean for women politically, legally, and culturally, if they took the ideal of freedom seriously--if, in her words, they learn to recognize that "hearts starve as well as bodies". Challenging, passionate, and powerfully argued, Cornell's book is certain to have a major impact on the course of feminist thought.

Interspecies Ethics explores animals' vast capacity for agency, justice, solidarity, humor, and communication across species. The social bonds diverse animals form provide a remarkable model for communitarian justice and cosmopolitan peace, challenging the human exceptionalism that drives modern moral theory. Situating biosocial ethics firmly within coevolutionary processes, this volume has profound implications for work in social and political thought, contemporary pragmatism, Africana thought, and continental philosophy. Interspecies Ethics develops a communitarian model for multispecies ethics, rebalancing the overemphasis on competition in (...) the original Darwinian paradigm by drawing out and stressing the cooperationist aspects of evolutionary theory through mutual aid. The book's ethical vision offers an alternative to utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics, building its argument through rich anecdotes and clear explanations of recent scientific discoveries regarding animals and their agency. Geared toward a general as well as a philosophical audience, the text illuminates a variety of theories and contrasting approaches, tracing the contours of a postmoral ethics. (shrink)

Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms represents a bold examination of previous feminist criticisms of Fanon and argues that Fanon's writings on women and resistance provide the formative kernels of a liberating praxis for women existing under colonial and neocolonial oppression. Sharpley-Whiting skillfully brings together approaches from a broad range of academic fields, including critical race theory, literary and cultural criticism, and psychoanalysis as she assesses the relevance of Fanon's theories of oppression to a feminist politics of resistance.

Through examining practices of torture, extra-judicial assassination, and first person accounts of soldiers on the ground, Bonnie Mann develops a new theory of gender.

For three decades, Angela Y. Davis has written on liberation theory and democratic praxis. Challenging the foundations of mainstream discourse, her analyses of culture, gender, capital, and race have profoundly influenced democratic theory, antiracist feminism, critical studies and political struggles. Even for readers who primarily know her as a revolutionary of the late 1960s and early 1970s she has greatly expanded the scope and range of social philosophy and political theory. Expanding critical theory, contemporary progressive theorists - engaged in justice (...) struggles - will find their thought influenced by the liberation praxis of Angela Y. Davis. _The Angela Y. Davis Reader_ presents eighteen essays from her writings and interviews which have appeared in _If They Come in the Morning, Women, Race, and Class, Women, Culture, and Politics,_ and _Black Women and the Blues_ as well as articles published in women's, ethnic/black studies and communist journals, and cultural studies anthologies. In four parts - "Prisons, Repression, and Resistance", "Marxism, Anti-Racism, and Feminism", "Aesthetics and Culture", and recent interviews - Davis examines revolutionary politics and intellectualism. Davis's discourse chronicles progressive political movements and social philosophy. It is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary political philosophy, critical race theory, social theory, ethnic studies, American studies, African American studies, cultural theory, feminist philosophy, gender studies. (shrink)

Is it time to take a break from feminism? In this pathbreaking book, Janet Halley reassesses the place of feminism in the law and politics of sexuality. She argues that sexuality involves deeply contested and clashing realities and interests, and that feminism helps us understand only some of them. To see crucial dimensions of sexuality that feminism does not reveal--the interests of gays and lesbians to be sure, but also those of men, and of constituencies and values beyond the realm (...) of sex and gender--we might need to take a break from feminism. Halley also invites feminism to abandon its uncritical relationship to its own power. Feminists are, in many areas of social and political life, partners in governance. To govern responsibly, even on behalf of women, Halley urges, feminists should try taking a break from their own presuppositions. Halley offers a genealogy of various feminisms and of gay, queer, and trans theories as they split from each other in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. All these incommensurate theories, she argues, enrich thinking on the left not despite their break from each other but because of it. She concludes by examining legal cases to show how taking a break from feminism can change your very perceptions of what's at stake in a decision and liberate you to decide it anew. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger's commitment to the idea that _Dasein_ is ultimately gender neutral, as well as several other major aspects of his thought, raises significant questions for feminist philosophers. The fourteen essays included in this volume clearly illustrate the ways in which feminist readings can deepen our understanding of his philosophy. They illuminate both the richness and the limitations of the resources his work can provide for feminist thought. This volume engages the full scope of Heidegger's writings from_ Being and Time (...) _through his latest work, from his readings of the ancient Greek poets to his critique of modern technology. At the same time, it reflects a wide range of contemporary feminist concerns: the significance of gender difference; the role of the body in philosophical thought; the relationship between philosophy and the natural world, and between philosophy and the domestic realm; and the aspiration to move forward into a new, more just, political world. Included in this volume are important new essays by Ellen Armour, Carol Bigwood, Jack Caputo, Tina Chanter, Trish Glazebrook, Jennifer Gosetti, Luce Irigaray, Dorothy Leland, Mechthild Nagel, Gail Stenstad, and the editors—as well as a valuable historical and theoretical Introduction by Patricia Huntington, the first of Jacques Derrida's "Geschlecht" articles, and an important 1997 essay by Iris Marion Young. (shrink)

Does the black struggle for civil rights make common cause with the movement to foster queer community, protest anti-queer violence or discrimination, and demand respect for the rights and sensibilities of queer people? Confronting this emotionally charged question, Ladelle McWhorter reveals how a carefully structured campaign against abnormality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries encouraged white Americans to purge society of so-called biological contaminants, people who were poor, disabled, black, or queer. Building on a legacy of savage hate (...) crimes—such as the killings of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd—McWhorter shows that racism, sexual oppression, and discrimination against the disabled, the feeble, and the poor are all aspects of the same societal distemper, and that when the civil rights of one group are challenged, so are the rights of all. (shrink)

Comedy, from social ridicule to the unruly laughter of the carnival, provides effective tools for reinforcing social patterns of domination as well as weapons for emancipation. In Irony in the Age of Empire, Cynthia Willett asks: What could embody liberation better than laughter? Why do the oppressed laugh? What vision does the comic world prescribe? For Willett, the comic trumps standard liberal accounts of freedom by drawing attention to bodies, affects, and intimate relationships, topics which are usually neglected by political (...) philosophy. Willett's philosophical reflection on comedy issues a powerful challenge to standard conceptions of freedom by proposing a new kind of freedom that is unapologetically feminist, queer, and multiracial. This book provides a wide-ranging, original, thoughtful, and expansive discussion of citizenship, social manners, and political freedom in our world today. (shrink)

If social, political, and material transformation is to have a lasting impact on individuals and society, it must be integrated within ordinary experience. Refiguring the Ordinary examines the ways in which individuals' bodies, habits, environments, and abilities function as horizons that underpin their understandings of the ordinary. These features of experience, according to Gail Weiss, are never neutral, but are always affected by gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, and perceptions of bodily normality. While no two people will experience the (...) ordinary in exactly the same way, the multiplicities, possibilities, overlaps, and limitations of day-to-day horizons are always intersubjectively constituted. Weiss turns her attention to changing the conditions and experiences of oppression from ordinary to extraordinary. This book is an impressive phenomenological, feminist reading of the complexities of human experience.M. V. Marder, University of Toronto, Feb. 2009. (shrink)

"[A] lucid discussion of race that does not sell out the black experience." —Tommy Lott, author of The Invention of Race Revealing Whiteness explores how white privilege operates as an unseen, invisible, and unquestioned norm in society today. In this personal and selfsearching book, Shannon Sullivan interrogates her own whiteness and how being white has affected her. By looking closely at the subtleties of white domination, she issues a call for other white people to own up to their unspoken privilege (...) and confront environments that condone or perpetuate it. Sullivan’s theorizing about race and privilege draws on American pragmatism, psychology, race theory, and feminist thought. As it articulates a way to live beyond the barriers that white privilege has created, this book offers readers a clear and honest confrontation with a trenchant and vexing concern. (shrink)

The essays in this volume bring to their focuses on philosophical issues the new angles of vision created by the multicultural, global, and postcolonial feminisms that have been developing around us.

Proust. and. the. Spectacle. of. the. Closet. "Vous devez vous y entendre mieux que moi, M. de Charlus, a faire marcher des petits marins. . . . Tenez, voici unlivreque j'ai recu, jepensequ'il vous interessera. . . . Letitreest joli: Parmiles hommes.

Family Values shows how the various contradictions at the heart of Western conceptions of maternity and paternity problematize our relationships with ourselves and with others. Using philosophical texts, psychoanalytic theory, studies in biology and popular culture, Kelly Oliver challenges our traditional concepts of maternity which are associated with nature, and our conceptions of paternity which are embedded in culture. Oliver's intervention calls into question the traditional image of the oppositional relationship between nature and culture, maternal and paternal. Family Values also (...) undercuts recent returns to the rhetoric of a "battle between the sexes" by analyzing the conceptual basis of these descriptions in biological research and the presuppositions of such suggestions in philosophy and psychoanalysis. By developing a reconception of maternity and paternity, Family Values offers hope for peace in the battle of the sexes. (shrink)

Demonstrates the dramatic interplay of elements that comprise the concepts of norm, bisexuality, and development.

New and classic essays on Antigone and feminist philosophy.

Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons—even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today’s supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary confinement undermines prisoners’ sense of identity and their ability to understand (...) the world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating a person for weeks, months, or years. -/- Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what happens when that structure is abused—when prisoners are deprived of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on being. (shrink)

"Radically reorienting, challenging, provocative, this book moves progressive philosophy, feminist and queer theory, critical discussions of race and racism forward. Prophetically, it calls for an interrogation of all our oppositional theory and politics, offering new and alternative visions." —bell hooks In Queering Freedom, Shannon Winnubst examines contemporary categories of difference—sexuality, race, gender, class, and nationality—and how they operate within the politics of domination. Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and others, Winnubst engages feminist theory, race theory, and (...) queer theory as she sheds light on blind spots that have characterized thinking about freedom. Winnubst turns away from the language of rights, identity politics, and liberation toward bodies and experiences to calibrate normative ideas of time and space. Her views operate at the very limits of freedom, which contain individuals within strict boundaries that they are forbidden to cross. Winnubst develops strategies of "queering freedom" to undo the more subtle spatial and temporal norms and shatter structures of domination. This thoughtful and provocative work challenges the cornerstones of contemporary philosophies about the body and its politics. (shrink)

Borderlands/La Frontera deals with the psychology of resistance to oppression. The possibility of resistance is revealed by perceiving the self in the process of being oppressed as another face of the self in the process of resisting oppression. The new mestiza consciousness is born from this interplay between oppression and resistance. Resistance is understood as social, collective activity, by adding to Anzaldúa's theory the distinction between the act and the process of resistance.

In this groundbreaking collection of articles, Dr. Guy-Sheftall has taken us from the early 1830s to contemporary times. Only since the seventies have black women used the term 'feminism.' And, yet, it is that concept that she uses to bring into the same frame the ideas and analyses of Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Frances Harper of the early nineteenth century, and the work of women such as Audre Lourde, Barbara Smith, and bell hooks, who stand on the threshold of (...) the twenty-first century. --from the epilogue by Johnnetta B. Cole, President, Spelman College. (shrink)

Contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism. Perhaps trouble need not carry such a..

In this provocative book, Susan Bordo untangles the myths, ideologies, and pathologies of the modern female body. Bordo explores our tortured fascination with food, hunger, desire, and control, and its effects on women's lives.

The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival.

Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy in dialogue.

Ellen Feder's monograph is an attempt to think about the categories of race and gender together. She explains and then employs some critical tools derived from Foucault, in order to advance her main argument: that the institution of the family is the locus of the production of gender and race, and that gender is best understood as a function of a "disciplinary" power that operates within the family, while race is the function of a "regulatory" power acting upon the family (...) from outside. Her interdisciplinary work will be of interest to feminist philosophers and theorists because it plays into a recent expansion of interest in the family, as well as to literary scholars of Foucault, to scholars of race and race theory, and to other feminist scholars in political science, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. (shrink)

The subject of normalization and its relationship to sex/gender is a major one in feminist theory; Heyes' book is unique in her masterful use of Foucault; its clarity, and its sophisticated mix of the theoretical and the anecdotal. It will appeal to feminist philosophers and theorists.

What is the norm of Americanness today, how has it changed, and how pluralistic is it in reality? from the Introduction In this volume philosophers and social ...

Leading scholars explore how different forms of ignorance are produced and sustained, and the role they play in knowledge practices.

New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the introduction, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost highlight common themes among the distinctive critical projects that comprise (...) the new materialisms. The continuities they discern include a posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency, and a reengagement with both the material realities of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures. Coole and Frost argue that contemporary economic, environmental, geopolitical, and technological developments demand new accounts of nature, agency, and social and political relationships; modes of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not adequate to the task. New materialist philosophies are needed to do justice to the complexities of twenty-first-century biopolitics and political economy, because they raise fundamental questions about the place of embodied humans in a material world and the ways that we produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment. Contributors Sara Ahmed Jane Bennett Rosi Braidotti Pheng Cheah Rey Chow William E. Connolly Diana Coole Jason Edwards Samantha Frost Elizabeth Grosz Sonia Kruks Melissa A. Orlie. (shrink)

Poor Eliza -- Pax Americana : the case of Show boat -- National brands, national body : Imitation of life -- Uncle Sam needs a wife : citizenship and denegation -- Remembering love, forgetting everything else : Now, voyager -- "It's not the tragedies that kill us, it's the messes" : femininity, formalism, and Dorothy Parker -- The compulsion to repeat femininity : Landscape for a good woman and The life and loves of a she-devil.

In ____Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities__ which includes the first extended philosophical discussion of the works of Frederick Douglass, Cynthia Willett puts forward a novel theory of ethical subjectivity that is aimed to counter prevailing pathologies of sexist, racist Eurocentric culture. Weaving together accounts of the self drawn from African-American and European philosophies, psychoanalysis, slave narratives and sociology, Willett interrogates what Hegel locates as the core of the self: the desire for.