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2Toward a Feminist Theory of PowerDissertation, Northwestern University. 1996.My dissertation formulates a conception of power adequate for feminist theory. I begin by reconstructing competing conceptions of power implicit in various feminist theories. I isolate two predominant conceptions presupposed by feminists: the first understands power primarily as domination, while the second views power in terms of empowerment. Although these conceptions have been criticized by feminists, critics have failed to address a crucial problem with each of them, namely, their one-sidedn…Read more
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85The Unforced Force of the Better Argument: Reason and Power in Habermas’ Political TheoryConstellations 19 (3): 353-368. 2012.The tension between reason and power has a long and illustrious history in political theory. In his magnum opus of legal and political theory, "Between Facts and Norms," Jürgen Habermas presents his most complex, sophisticated, and ambitious attempt to confront this tension. My thesis in this article is that though Habermas’s political theory thematizes the tension between reason and power in a way that is initially quite promising, he ultimately forecloses that tension in the direction of a rat…Read more
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53The Public SpherePolitical Theory 40 (6): 822-829. 2012.In his "Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere," Habermas is notoriously and selectively blind to gender subordination – most centrally, the ways in which the bourgeois public sphere was founded upon the exclusion of women. Nancy Fraser articulated four specific assumptions involving the bourgeois public sphere that need to be recast in order to make the concept of the public sphere serviceable for feminist critical theory. However, subsequent historical, political and theoretical develo…Read more
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55The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical TheoryCambridge University Press. 2016.While post- and decolonial theorists have thoroughly debunked the idea of historical progress as a Eurocentric, imperialist, and neocolonialist fallacy, many of the most prominent contemporary thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School--Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst--have persistently defended ideas of progress, development, and modernity and have even made such ideas central to their normative claims. Can the Frankfurt School's goal of radical social change survive this cri…Read more
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45Allison Weir. Identities and Freedom: Feminist Theory between Power and Connection (review)philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 4 (2): 250-255. 2014.
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36Review of Thomas Flynn, Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason, Volume 2: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (2). 2006.
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62Psychoanalysis and the Methodology of CritiqueConstellations 23 (2): 244-254. 2016.In his account of critical theory as diagnosing social pathologies of reason, Axel Honneth has rehabilitated the analogy between critical theory and psychoanalysis – according to which the critical theorist stands in relation to the pathological social order as the analyst stands in relation to the analysand, and the aim of critical theory is to effect the diagnosis and, ultimately, the cure of social disorders or pathologies. In this article, I show that Honneth, like Habermas before him, has a…Read more
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39IntroductionJournal of Speculative Philosophy 27 (3): 217-219. 2013.This is an introduction to a volume of essays bringing together some of the highlights from the fifty-first annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Nazareth College from November 1-3, 2012. Our keynote speakers for the 2012 meeting were Adriana Cavarero and László Tengelyi, and we lead off this issue with their essays.
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560The power of feminist theory: domination, resistance, solidarityWestview Press. 1999.Power is clearly a crucial concept for feminist theory. Insofar as feminists are interested in analyzing power, it is because they have an interest in understanding, critiquing, and ultimately challenging the multiple array of unjust power relations affecting women in contemporary Western societies, including sexism, racism, heterosexism, and class oppression. In "The Power of Feminist Theory," Amy Allen diagnoses the inadequacies of previous feminist conceptions of power, and draws on the work …Read more
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197Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical ReappraisalConstellations 10 (2): 180-198. 2003.In a late discussion of Kant’s essay, “Was ist Aufklärung?,” Foucault credits Kant with posing “the question of his own present” and positions himself as an inheritor of this Kantian legacy.1 Foucault has high praise for the critical tradition that emerges from Kant’s historical-political reflections on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; Kant’s concern in these writings with “an ontology of the present, an ontology of ourselves” is, he says, characteristic of “a form of philosophy, fro…Read more
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167Systematically distorted subjectivity?: Habermas and the critique of powerPhilosophy and Social Criticism 33 (5): 641-650. 2007.
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60Race, Empire and the Idea of Human Development by Thomas McCarthyConstellations 18 (3): 487-492. 2011.
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356Pornography and powerJournal of Social Philosophy 32 (4). 2001.When it was at its height, the feminist pornography debate tended to generate more heat than light. Only now that there has been a cease fire in the sex war does it seem possible to reflect on the debate in a more productive way and to address some of the questions that were left unresolved by it. In this paper, I shall argue that one of the major unresolved questions is that of how feminists should conceptualize power. The antipornography feminists and the feminist sex radicals presuppose radic…Read more
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168Feminism, Foucault, and the Critique of Reason: Re-reading the History of MadnessFoucault Studies 16 15-31. 2013.This paper situates Lynne Huffer’s recent queer-feminist Foucaultian critique of reason within the context of earlier feminist debates about reason and critically assesses Huffer’s work from the point of view of its faithfulness to Foucault’s work and its implications for feminism. I argue that Huffer’s characterization of Enlightenment reason as despotic not only departs from Foucault’s account of the relationship between power and reason, it also leaves her stuck in the same double binds that …Read more
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40The entanglement of power and validity : Foucault and critical theoryIn Christopher Falzon (ed.), Foucault and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 78--98. 2010.This chapter contains sections titled: Subjection and Autonomy: Foucault contra Habermas What Is Fallacious About the Genetic Fallacy? Conclusion References.
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577Discourse, power, and subjectivation: The foucault/habermas debate reconsideredPhilosophical Forum 40 (1): 1-28. 2009.In this article, I take up one strand – arguably the central one – of the Foucault/Habermas debate: their respective accounts of subjectivation. Against those who hold that Foucault and Habermas occupy such drastically different theoretical perspectives as to preclude the integration of their views into a common framework, I begin to lay the groundwork for an account of subjectivation that draws on the conceptual insights to be found on each side of the debate. While both Foucault and Habermas o…Read more
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266Rethinking PowerHypatia 13 (1). 1998.This paper argues that feminists have yet to develop a satisfactory account of power. Existing feminist accounts of power tend to have a one-sided emphasis either on power as domination or on power as empowerment. This conceptual one-sided-ness must be overcome if feminists are to develop an account complex enough to illuminate women's diverse experiences with power. Such an account is sketched here.
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101Progress, Normativity, and the Dynamics of Social ChangeGraduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 37 (2): 225-251. 2016.
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31IntroductionJournal of Speculative Philosophy 28 (3): 213-218. 2014.This is an introduction to a volume of articles containing highlights from the fifty-second annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) at the University of Oregon from October 24–26, 2013. All three of the plenary sessions for this conference constituted reflections on limits of various kinds: the limits of conceptual thinking, the limits of continental philosophy understood as a kind of post-Kantian quasi-transcendental enterprise, and the idea that SPEP’…Read more
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Feminism and the subject of politicsIn Boudewijn de Bruin & Christopher F. Zurn (eds.), New waves in political philosophy, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.
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104Scholar’s Symposium: The Work of Angela Y. Davis: Justice and Reconciliation: The Death of the Prison? (review)Human Studies 30 (4): 311-321. 2007.
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37Reconstruction or deconstruction?: A reply to Johanna MeehanPhilosophy and Social Criticism 26 (3): 53-60. 2000.I argue that Johanna Meehan's call to examine the extra-linguistic psychic, affective and biological dimensions of gender identity is extremely important both for feminist theory in particular and for contemporary Continental philosophy in general. However, I suspect that such an examination might necessitate more than a mere expansion or reconstruction of Habermas' views; on the contrary, I suggest that Meehan's line of argument might lead instead toward a radical deconstruction of Habermasian …Read more
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254Power and the politics of difference: Oppression, empowerment, and transnational justiceHypatia 23 (3). 2008.This paper examines Young’s conception of power, arguing that it is incomplete, in at least two ways. First, Young tends to equate the term power with the narrower notions of ‘ oppression ’ and ‘domination’. Thus, Young lacks a satisfactory analysis of individual and collective empowerment. Second, as Young herself admits, it is not obvious that her analysis of power can be useful in the context of thinking about transnational justice. Allen concludes by considering one way in which Young’s anal…Read more
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48The power of disclosure: Comments on Nikolas Kompridis' Critique and DisclosurePhilosophy and Social Criticism 37 (9): 1025-1031. 2011.This article discusses the relationship between power and reflective disclosure in Nikolas Kompridis' book "Critique and Disclosure." Although the concept of power is not explicitly theorized in great detail in this book, I argue that power is highly relevant for Kompridis' account of reflective disclosure. I offer a few ways in which a thematization of power relations might complicate and enrich Kompridis' understanding of disclosure.
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241Dependency, subordination, and recognition: On Judith Butler's theory of subjection (review)Continental Philosophy Review 38 (3-4): 199-222. 2005.Judith Butler's recent work expands the Foucaultian notion of subjection to encompass an analysis of the ways in which subordinated individuals becomes passionately attached to, and thus come to be psychically invested in, their own subordination. I argue that Butler's psychoanalytically grounded account of subjection offers a compelling diagnosis of how and why an attachment to oppressive norms – of femininity, for example – can persist in the face of rational critique of those norms. However, …Read more
University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Continental Philosophy |