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24Subjugation and Bondage: Critical Essays on Slavery and Social Philosophy (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1998.This volume addresses a wide variety of moral concerns regarding slavery as an institutionalized social practice. By considering the slave's critical appropriation of the natural rights doctrine, the ambiguous implications of various notions of consent and liberty are examined. The authors assume that, although slavery is undoubtedly an evil social practice, its moral assessment stands in need of a more nuanced treatment. They address the question of what is wrong with slavery by critically exam…Read more
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22The Comic in the Midst of Tragedy's Grief with Tig Notaro, Hannah Gadsby, and OthersJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78 (4): 535-546. 2020.ABSTRACT The function of the comic in the midst of tragedy is not clear. After all, is it simply comic relief that wounded nations, communities, or individuals seek? Tragedy has long been cast as memory and mourning while comedy offers for the masses a Nietzschean moment of joyful forgetting and for the Stoic mind a measure of transcendence from our grief. The latter view came into prominence for modern American culture with the nineteenth-century satirist Mark Twain, who wrote that “the secret …Read more
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18The Shadow of Hegel's Science of LogicProceedings of the Hegel Society of America 10 85-92. 1990.
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11Ethics for a Layered Self: Laughter, Reciprocity, Generosity, HomephiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 5 (1): 70-79. 2015.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics for a Layered SelfLaughter, Reciprocity, Generosity, HomeCynthia WillettI can imagine no better way to respond to these insightful readings than to turn the spotlight on the important books that Ann Murphy and Megan Craig have written on affect and ethics! Craig’s book, Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology, weaves radical empiricism into phenomenology as only a philosopher who is also an artist could. Her evocat…Read more
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10Philosophical 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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8Water and Wing Give Wonder: Trans-Species CosmopolitanismPhaenex: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture 8 (2). 2013.An interspecies ethics flips the claim of human exceptionalism several times on its head. Here we consider not only our own species’s animality but also the sacred experiences discovered across a range of species. The essay begins with an excursion alongside wild baboons who, as witnessed by Barbara Smuts, display a sense of wonder before a river’s still pools of water. From there we travel up and down the vertical vector of spiritual experience. The disgusting and the ridiculous at the bottom e…Read more
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26 Engage the Enemy: Cavell, Comedies of Remarriage, and the Politics of FriendshipIn Shannon Sullivan & Dennis J. Schmidt (eds.), Difficulties of ethical life, Fordham University Press. pp. 88-111. 2008.
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1Uproarious: How Feminists and Other Comic Subversives Speak TruthUniversity of Minnesota. 2019.A radical new approach to humor, where traditional targets become its agents Humor is often dismissed as cruel ridicule or harmless fun. But what if laughter is a vital force to channel rage against patriarchy, Islamophobia, mass incarceration? To create moments of empathy and dialogue between #Black Lives Matter and the police? These and other such questions are at the heart of this powerful reassessment of humor. Placing theorists in conversation with comedians, Uproarious offers a full-fron…Read more
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The Sting of Shame: Ridicule, Rape, and Social BondsIn Naomi Zack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
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Tropes of Orientation: Between Dialectic and DeconstructionDissertation, The Pennsylvania State University. 1988.The dissertation seeks to locate a post-Hegelian response to the question of orientation. Such a response would neither return to the "totalizing drive" of dialectic nor yield to the "nihilistic gestures" of deconstruction but would traverse and transfigure both modes of thought. Part 1 isolates non-dialectical tropes which implicitly orient crucial transitions in Hegel's Logic, Phenomenology, and Aesthetics. Textual analyses of these tropes suggest that dialectical movement depends paradoxicall…Read more
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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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Theorizing Backlash: Philosophical Reflections on the Resistance to Feminism (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2002.Contrary to the popular belief that feminism has gained a foothold in the many disciplines of the academy, the essays collected in Theorizing Backlash argue that feminism is still actively resisted in mainstream academia. Contributors to this volume consider the professional, philosophical, and personal backlashes against feminist thought, and reflect upon their ramifications. The conclusion is that the disdain and irrational resentment of feminism, even in higher education, amounts to a backlas…Read more
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