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14Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory (review)International Studies in Philosophy 28 (4): 138-139. 1996.
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41Conflicted LoveHypatia 15 (3): 1-18. 2000.Our stereotypes of maternity and paternity as manifest in the history of philosophy and psychoanalysis interfere with the ability to imagine loving relationships. The associations of maternity with antisocial nature and paternity with disembodied culture are inadequate to set up primary love relationships. Analyzing the conflicts in these associations, I reformulate the maternal body as social and lawful, and I reformulate the paternal function as embodied, which enables imagining our primary re…Read more
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30The Look of LoveHypatia 16 (3): 56-78. 2001.I begin to suggest an alternative to the notion of vision based in alienation and hostility put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. I diagnose this alienating vision as a result of a particular alienating notion of space presupposed by their theories. I develop lrigaray's comments about light and air to suggest an alternative notion of space that opens up the possibility that vision connects us to others rather than alienates us from them.
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22Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be HumanColumbia University Press. 2009.Introduction: The role of animals in philosophies of man -- Part I: What's wrong with animal rights? -- The right to remain silent -- Part II: Animal pedagogy -- You are what you eat : Rousseau's cat -- Say the human responded : Herder's sheep -- Part III: Difference worthy of its name -- Hair of the dog : Derrida's and Rousseau's good taste -- Sexual difference, animal difference : Derrida's sexy silkworm -- Part IV: It's our fault -- The beaver's struggle with species-being : De Beauvoir and t…Read more
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15Stopping the Anthropological Machine: Agamben with Heidegger and Merleau-PontyPhaenEx 2 (2): 1-23. 2007.Agamben maintains that Heidegger continues the work of the anthropological machine by defining Dasein as uniquely open to the closedness of the animal. Yet, Agamben’s own thinking does not so much open up the concept of animal as it attempts to save humanity from the anthropological machine that always produces the animal as the constitutive outside within the human itself. Agamben’s return to religious metaphors at best displaces the binary man-animal with the binary religion-science, and at wo…Read more
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5Living Attention: On Teresa Brennan (edited book)State University of New York Press. 2007.Interdisciplinary exploration of the scope and impact of Teresa Brennan’s lifework
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7Philosophical Feminism and Popular Culture (edited book)Lexington Books. 2012.The eight essays contained in this book explore the portrayal of women, and various philosophical responses to that portrayal in contemporary post-civil rights society. They bring feminist voices to the conversation about gender and attests to the importance of feminist critique in what is sometimes claimed to be a post-feminist era
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21Marxism and SurrogacyHypatia 4 (3). 1989.In this article, I argue that the liberal framework-its autonomous individuals with equal rights-allows judges to justify enforcing surrogacy contracts. More importantly, even where judges do not enforce surrogacy contracts, the liberal framework conceals gender and class issues which insure that the surrogate will lose custody of her child. I suggest that Marx's analysis of estranged labor can reveal the class and gender issues which the liberal framework conceals.
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15Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and CultureRoutledge. 1997.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 op…Read more
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19Between the She-Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood: The Figure of the Girl in Derrida's The Beast and The SovereignDerrida Today 4 (2): 257-280. 2011.This essay explores the important role played by the figure of the virgin girl at the centre of The Beast and The Sovereign. Derrida hints that she may offer a figure between the beast and the sovereign, between the two marionettes of Nature and Culture. Moreover, it seems that she is both what props up the fabled distinction between man and animal and at the same time that upon which man erects himself as sovereign lord and master. Taking Derrida's suggestions further, I argue that the virgin g…Read more
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The flesh become word: The body in Kristeva's theoryIn Simon Critchley (ed.), The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Blackwell. pp. 341--352. 1999.
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Between the Psyche and the Social: Psychoanalytic Social Theory (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2001.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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Nietzsche's woman: The poststructuralist attempt to do away with womenRadical Philosophy 48 25-29. 1988.
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107Keller's Gender/Science System: Is the Philosophy of Science to Science as Science is to Nature?Hypatia 3 (3): 137-148. 1988.I argue that although in “The Gender/Science System,” Keller intends to formulate a middle ground position in order to open science to feminist criticisms without forcing it into relativism, she steps back into objectivism. While she endorses the dynamic-object model for science, she endorses the static-object model for philosophy of science. I suggest that by modeling her methodology for philosophy on her methodology for science her philosophy would better serve her feminist goals.
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92Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy's Relation to the "Feminine"Routledge. 1994.In ____Womanizing Nietzsche,__ Kelly Oliver uses an analysis of the position of woman in Nietzsche's texts to open onto the larger question of philosophy's relation to the feminine and the maternal. Offering readings from Nietzsche, Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva, Freud and Lacan, Oliver builds an innovative foundation for an ontology of intersubjective relationships that suggests a new approach to ethics.
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28Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo MissionsCambridge University Press. 2015.Critically engaging the work of Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida together with her own observations on contemporary politics, environmental degradation, and the pursuit of a just and sustainable world, Kelly Oliver lays the groundwork for a politics and ethics that embraces otherness without exploiting difference. Rooted firmly in human beings' relationship to the planet and to each other, Oliver shows peace is possible only if we maintain our ties to earth and…Read more
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2The maternal operation: Circumscribing the allianceIn Ellen K. Feder, Mary C. Rawlinson & Emily Zakin (eds.), Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman, Routledge. pp. 53--68. 1997.
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17See topsy “ride the lightning”: The scopic machinery of deathSouthern Journal of Philosophy 50 (s1): 74-94. 2012.abstract: This essay explores the connections between speculation, spectacle, and the death penalty, particularly insofar as they bear on what is “proper to man” and on the man–animal distinction. Returning to a scene of death from Derrida's seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, specifically the scene of an elephant's autopsy, we see how what he calls “the globalization of the autopsic model” of sovereignty requires the death of the animal (Derrida 2009, 296). Following Derrida, we see how man's …Read more
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21Antigone's Ghost: Undoing Hegel's Phenomenology of SpiritHypatia 11 (1). 1996.This essay argues that Hegel's discussion of the family in "The Ethical Order" section of Phenomenology of Spirit undermines the entire project of that text. Hegel's project demands that every element of consciousness be conceptualizable, and yet, woman, an essential unconscious element of consciousness, is in principle unconceptualizable. The end of the essay attempts to relate Hegel's discussion of the family to contemporary discussions of family values
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977Rape as Spectator Sport and Creepshot Entertainment: Social Media and the Valorization of Lack of ConsentAmerican Studies Journal (10): 1-16. 2015.Lack of consent is valorized within popular culture to the point that sexual assault has become a spectator sport and creepshot entertainment on social media. Indeed, the valorization of nonconsensual sex has reached the extreme where sex with unconscious girls, especially accompanied by photographs as trophies, has become a goal of some boys and men.
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13Media 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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19Julia 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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4Contemporary 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.
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Continental Philosophy |