Cressida J. Heyes

In this short introduction to my monograph Anaesthetics of Existence, I explain the origin of the book in a mishearing of Foucault’s phrase “an aesthetics of existence” and outline the book’s method (a melding of genealogy and phenomenology) and its subject: the politics of experience, and especially how to think about undergoings that either are excluded from experience or happen at its edges. The book contains a chapter on Foucault and this new method; one on sexual violence against unconscious victims; two chapters on postdisciplinary temporality in twenty-first century work, and what I call “anaesthetic time”; and a closing chapter on the limit-experience of childbirth.

The genre of advice to parents about children’s sleep proliferated between the mid-1980s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. This article reads that genre against itself, as symptomatic of larger political trends—the end of the privilege of the normative mid-century nuclear family and the advent of neoliberal ideology and political economy. Specifically, it argues that this wave of advice reflects an ambivalence about the autonomous individual within neoliberalism versus the need for attachment and the dependence of kinship. Returning to Jessica Benjamin’s object-relations feminism, it shows how the oscillation between methods of sleep training that stress independent sleeping against those that align with attachment parenting reveal the same subject-object relations of power (with concomitant gender roles) that Benjamin outlined as central to domination. By embedding this analysis in its contemporary material conditions of class, race, and gender, the article argues that sleep practices try—and must necessarily fail—to create workers and family members who are both entirely autonomous and mutually supportive. It combines examination of the psychodynamics of family relationships as mutually informed by neoliberal rationality and an established critique of the politics of intensive mothering, with recognition of a post-2008 anxiety distinctive of millennial parenting, to show how children’s sleep has become a part of (gendered) work—a technology of the self—that carries the burden of forming the future citizen worker.

Leading feminist scholars have been brought together for the first time in this comprehensive volume to reveal the complexity of feminist engagements with the exponentially growing cosmetic surgery phenomenon. Offering a diversity of theoretical, methodological and political approaches Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer presents not only the latest, cutting-edge research in this field but a challenging and unique approach to the issue that will be of key interest to researchers across the social sciences and humanities.

This article reviews a slew of discriminatory and harassing events that struck the discipline of Philosophy in the 2010s, suggesting that they be understood as part of a breakdown in practices of judgement within the discipline. Drawing on the work of James Tully, Hannah Arendt, and William Connolly on pluralism and judgement, the essay shows the increasingly impoverished self-justifications used to hold back both intellectual and group pluralism within the North American discipline, while holding out hope that Arendt's claim that standards of judgement can fall away and be replaced is being redeemed.

In the words of Catharine MacKinnon, "a woman is not yet a name for a way of being human." In other words, women are still excluded, as authors and agents, from identifying what it is to be human and what therefore violates the dignity and integrity of humans. Recognition, Responsibility, and Rights is written in response to that failure. This collection of essays by prominent feminist thinkers advances the positive feminist project of remapping the moral landscape by developing theory that acknowledges the diversity of women