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45Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood FilmsColumbia University Press. 2012.No longer is pregnancy a repulsive or shameful condition in Hollywood films, but an attractive attribute, often enhancing the romantic or comedic storyline of a female character. Kelly Oliver investigates this curious shift and its reflection of changing attitudes toward women's roles in reproduction and the family. Not all representations signify progress. Oliver finds that in many pregnancy films, our anxieties over modern reproductive practices and technologies are made manifest, and in some …Read more
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21The Morality of American Manhood, Responsibility, and VirilityIn Ann Cahill & Jennifer Hansen (eds.), The Continental Feminism Reader, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 43--4. 2003.
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The liberal frameworkIn Helen B. Holmes & Laura Martha Purdy (eds.), Feminist Perspectives in Medical Ethics, Indiana University Press. pp. 695--266. 1992.
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The depressed motherIn Kelly Oliver & Steve Edwin (eds.), Between the psyche and the social: psychoanalytic social theory, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 49. 2002.
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20Little Hans's Little SisterphiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 1 (1): 9-28. 2011.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Little Hans’s Little SisterKelly OliverIn an important sense, Freud’s metapsychology is built on the back of animal phobias, which he repeatedly trots out whenever he needs to substantiate his theories of the castration complex, anxiety, and even the foundational Oedipal complex.1 From a feminist perspective, it is fascinating that behind the animal phobias that define Freud’s work—Little Hans’s horse, the Rat Man, the Wolf Man—there…Read more
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50Love Bites! Or Taking Ethics to Heart: Response to Critics on Animal Lessons (review)Environmental Philosophy 9 (2): 187-199. 2012.
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32Strange KinshipEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 13 (1): 101-120. 2008.The development of the emerging science of ecology influenced the later work of both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Both use zoology, biology, and ecology intheir attempts to navigate between mechanism and vitalism, but their interpretations and use of the life sciences take them on divergent paths and lead them to radically different conclusions regarding the relationship between man and animal. This essay takes up the problematic of kinship with animals in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Beyond the…Read more
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56Tropho Ethics: Derrida’s Homeophatic PurityThe Harvard Review of Philosophy 15 (1): 37-57. 2007.
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68Subjectivity and Subject Position: The Double Meaning of WitnessingStudies in Practical Philosophy 3 (2): 132-143. 2003.
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104Enhancing evolution:Whose body? Whose choice?Southern Journal of Philosophy 48 (s1): 74-96. 2010.This essay critically engages the work of John Harris and Jürgen Habermas on the issue of genetic engineering. It does so from the standpoint of women's embodied experience of pregnancy and parenting, challenging the choice–chance binary at work in these accounts
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3Between the psyche and the social: psychoanalytic social theory (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield. 2002.Between the Psyche and the Social is the first collection that specifically features the field of psychoanalytic social theory emerging in and between psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, and across the disciplines of philosophy, literary, film, and cultural studies. This collection of essays takes the psychoanalytic study of social oppression in some new directions by engaging—indeed, stirring up—unconscious fantasies and ethical tensions at the heart of social subj…Read more
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27Alterity within bergman'spersona: Face to face with the other (review)Journal of Value Inquiry 29 (4): 521-532. 1995.
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117Media Representations of Women and the “Iraq War”Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry 5 (12): 14-22. 2010.This essay examines media images of women in recent conflicts in the Middle East. From the Abu Ghraib prison abuses to protests in Iran, women have become the public face of violence, carried out and suffered. Women’s bodies are figured as sexual and violent, a potent combination that stirs public imagination and feeds into stereotypes of women as femme fatales or “bombshells.”
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142Julia Kristeva's Feminist RevolutionsHypatia 8 (3): 94-114. 1993.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 poli…Read more
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Tracing the signifier behind the scenes of desire: Kristeva's challenge to Lacan's analysisIn Hugh J. Silverman (ed.), Cultural semiosis: tracing the signifier, Routledge. pp. 83--128. 1998.
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33Contemporary French Feminism (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2004.Have we entered a historical moment of 'post-feminism'? This volume presents a timely and convincing 'no'. These essays demonstrate that there is a new generation of French women who take up questions of equality and difference from a position distinct from either first or second wave feminism, a position that often attempts to move beyond the binary of equality and/or difference to a new form of the individual.
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8Repetition to Working-ThroughIn Ann Cahill & Jennifer Hansen (eds.), The Continental Feminism Reader, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 168. 2003.
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50French FeminismIn Robert C. Solomon & David L. Sherman (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2003.This chapter contains sections titled: Simone de Beauvoir Luce Irigaray Colette Guillaumin Hélène Cixous Julia Kristeva Monique Wittig Sarah Kofman Michèle Le Doeuff Christine Delphy Conclusion.
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6Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva (edited book)State University of New York Press. 2009.Considers the social and political significance of Kristeva’s oeuvre
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25Kristeva's ReformationJournal of French and Francophone Philosophy 22 (2): 20-25. 2014.In my brief remarks, I consider what it means to return and rebind—that is to say, the significance of the re for Kristeva’s thought. Kristeva does not just talk about binding or birth, or unbinding or death, but rather rebinding and rebirth, suggesting that it is a retrospective return rather than an original moment that is crucial. The most significant moment, then, is not the moment of imaginary plenitude, nor the moment of originary loss, but rather the moment of rebirth that comes through r…Read more
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618Women: The secret weapon of modern warfare?Hypatia 23 (2). 2008.The images from wars in the Middle East that haunt us are those of young women killing and torturing. Their media circulated stories share a sense of shock. They have both galvanized and confounded debates over feminism and women's equality. And, as Oliver argues in this essay, they share, perhaps subliminally, the problematic notion of women as both offensive and defensive weapons of war, a notion that is symptomatic of fears of women's "mysterious" powers.
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11Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writing (edited book)Routledge. 1993.First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
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22The Poetic Axis of EthicsDerrida Today 7 (2): 121-136. 2014.In The Poetic Axis of Ethics, Kelly Oliver argues that in Derrida's The Beast and the Sovereign Volume II, a line of poetry from Celan becomes the axis around which Derrida's analysis of world, death, and ethics revolves: ‘Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen’ [The world is far away, I must carry you]. Oliver maintains that the Celan fragment, which is repeated in nearly every session, is not only the axis around which Derrida binds the unlikely duo Robinson-Heidegger, but also it is a perform…Read more
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70Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring MothersRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1998.In Subjectivity without Subjects, well-known philosopher and feminist theorist Kelly Oliver looks at aspects of popular culture, film, science, and law to examine contemporary notions of paternity and maternity. Oliver studies the roles of paternal responsibility, virility, and race in such events as the Million Man March and the Promise Keeper's movement and suggests alternative ways to conceive of self-other relations and the subjective identity at stake in them. In addition she offers a detai…Read more
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5BandagesJournal of French and Francophone Philosophy 22 (2): 70-83. 2014.“The bandages signify death,” says Derrida, “the condemnation to death; when they fall away, out of use, undone, untied, untying, they signify, like a detached signifier, that the dead one is resuscitated." Like a detached signifier, indicating a metaphorical relationship between signification and the bandages. But, when we follow the metonymy of bandages in Derrida’s Death Penalty seminar volume one, the bandages appear as the figure for figuration itself. More specifically, they are a sign tha…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Continental Philosophy |