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50French FeminismIn Robert C. Solomon & David Sherman (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy, 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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49Love Bites! Or Taking Ethics to Heart: Response to Critics on Animal Lessons (review)Environmental Philosophy 9 (2): 187-199. 2012.
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45Witnessing, Recognition, and Response EthicsPhilosophy and Rhetoric 48 (4): 473-493. 2015.For at least the last twenty years, philosophers have attempted various strategies for reviving the Hegelian notion of recognition and redeploying it in discourses centered around social justice, including multiculturalism, feminism, race theory, and queer theory. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic may seem like an obvious place to start to analyze the oppression of one group by another. Given that Hegel is not literally talking about slaves, however, but a stage of consciousness, indeed the onset o…Read more
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45Ecological Subjectivity: Merleau-Ponty and a Vision of EthicsStudies in Practical Philosophy 4 (1): 102-125. 2004.
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43Witnessing: Beyond RecognitionUniv of Minnesota Press. 2001.Challenging the fundamental tenet of the multicultural movement -- that social struggles turning upon race, gender, and sexuality are struggles for recognition -- this work offers a powerful critique of current conceptions of identity and ...
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43Tropho Ethics: Derrida’s Homeophatic PurityThe Harvard Review of Philosophy 15 (1): 37-57. 2007.
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42Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction, A Love StoryJournal of French and Francophone Philosophy 23 (2): 35-44. 2015.In The Right to Narcissism: A Case for Im-Possible Self-Love, Pleshette DeArmitt opens the space for an alternative to origin story so popular with political philosophers, namely, the social contract, which assumes a rational and self-identical subject. She does this obliquely by deconstructing narcissism as love of the self-same, or, love of what Kristeva might call “the clean and proper self.” Like Echo interrupting Narcissus’s soliloquy of deadly self-absorbed pleasure and his solitary auto-a…Read more
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40Service Dogs: Between Animal Studies and Disability StudiesphiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 6 (2): 241-258. 2016.
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35Sex, Breath, and Force: Sexual Difference in a Post-Feminist EraLexington Books. 2006.This collection of essays provides a reassessment of the question of sexual difference, taking into account important shifts in feminist thought, post-humanist theories, and queer studies. The contributors offer new and refreshing insights into the complex question of sexual difference from a post-feminist perspective, and how it is reformulated in various related areas of study, such as ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, biology, technology, and mass-media
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35Family 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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33Knock 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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32Deconstructing “Grown versus Made”Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry 7 (16): 42-52. 2011.In this essay, I consider what happens to debates over genetic enhancement when we “deconstruct” the opposition between “grown and made” and the notion of freedom of choice that comes with it. Along with the binary grown and made comes other such oppositions at the center of these debates: chance and choice, accident and deliberation, nature and culture. By deconstructing the oppositions between grown versus made (chance versus choice, or accident versus deliberate), and free versus determined, …Read more
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32Contemporary 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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31Rethinking Response EthicsPhilosophy Today 62 (2): 619-626. 2018.Working against both Hegelian recognition and ethics based on vulnerability, I argue for response ethics or an ethics of ambivalence. While the ideal of mutual recognition is admirable, in practice, recognition is experienced as conferred by the very groups and institutions responsible for withholding it in the first place. In other words, recognition is distributed according to an axis of power that is part and parcel of systems of dominance and oppression. I both challenge the concept of vulne…Read more
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31Strange 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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30Conflicted 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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27Refugees Now: Rethinking Borders, Hospitality and Citizenship (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield International. 2019.This important new book explores the contemporary refugee crisis and the untold realities and experiences of refugees themselves. A team of top scholars offer a critical and necessary diagnosis of the challenges, complexities, and contradictions impacting our philosophical approaches to the contemporary figure of the refugee.
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25Death as a Penalty and the Fantasy of Instant DeathLaw and Critique 27 (2): 137-149. 2016.In this essay I take up the question of how death can be a penalty, given that each of us will eventually die. I argue that capital punishment in the United States rests on contradictory demands for painless death delivered humanely through pharmaceuticals and yet denies the accused the possibility of natural death. The death penalty must be at once humane and punishing. Analyzing what we mean by ‘botched’ executions, along with the language of the Supreme Court in upholding lethal injection as …Read more
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25Alterity within bergman'spersona: Face to face with the other (review)Journal of Value Inquiry 29 (4): 521-532. 1995.
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25See 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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24On Sharing a World with Other AnimalsEnvironmental Philosophy 16 (1): 35-56. 2019.Challenging Heidegger’s thesis that animals are poor in world while humans are world-building, in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, Jacques Derrida claims that each singular living being inhabits its own solitary world, its own desert island. There, he claims both, on the one hand, that animals share our world and may be world-building and, on the other, that we cannot be certain that human beings share a world or are world-building. In this article, I trace the ethical implications of Der…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Continental Philosophy |