•  129
    Joy in Community Study (Review of Border & Rule) (review)
    Riverwise Magazine 1 (19). 2022.
    In gloomy and despairing times, we who work for liberation generate light and joy. We experience this every time we work together to defend our communities, when we fight to win collective victories, when we build something new. Much of the time these experiences are in marches and meetings – really important spaces for movement work. But here we want to amplify the usefulness of collective study, and share some thoughts about why Harsha Walia’s new book Border and Rule would be a great place to…Read more
  •  14
    Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times
    University of Minnesota Press. 2016.
    In Against Purity, Alexis Shotwell proposes a powerful new conception of social movements as custodians for the past and incubators for liberated futures. Against Purity undertakes an analysis that draws on theories of race, disability, gender, and animal ethics as a foundation for an innovative approach to the politics and ethics of responding to systemic problems.
  •  62
    "Draws on philosophers, political theorists, activists, and poets to explain how unspoken and unspeakable knowledge is important to racial and gender formation; offers a usable conception of implicit understanding"--Provided by publishers.
  •  13
    Water and Ocean (review)
    Cultural Studies Review 23 (2): 183-189. 2017.
    A review of Elspeth Probyn. 2016, 'Eating the Ocean'. Durham: Duke University Press and Astrida Neimanis. 2017, 'Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology'. London: Bloomsbury.
  •  46
    A knowing that resided in my bones : Sensuous embodiment and trans social movement
    In Sue Campbell, Letitia Meynell & Susan Sherwin (eds.), Embodiment and Agency, Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 58--75. 2009.
  •  9
    Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway
    philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 8 (1): 145-150. 2018.
  •  48
    In this paper, I examine activist group ACT UP's campaign to change the US Centers for Disease Control surveillance case definition of HIV and AIDS. This campaign's effects included a profound shift in how AIDS is understood, and thus in some real way in what it is. I argue that classification should be understood as a political formation with material effects, attending to the words of activists, most of them women, who contested the way AIDS was defined in a moment when no one else thought tha…Read more
  •  84
    In this collection, white women philosophers engage boldly in critical acts of exploring ways of naming and disrupting whiteness in terms of how it has defined the conceptual field of philosophy. Focuses on the whiteness of the epistemic and value-laden norms within philosophy itself, the text dares to identify the proverbial elephant in the room known as white supremacy and how that supremacy functions as the measure of reason, knowledge, and philosophical intelligibility.
  •  45
    The Problem with Loving Whiteness
    Philosophy Today 60 (4): 1003-1013. 2016.
  •  131
    This paper argues that trans and genderqueer people affect the gender formation and identity of non-trans people. We explore three instances of this relationship between trans and non-trans genders: an allegiance to inadequate liberal-individualist models of selfhood; tropes through which trans people are made to stand as theoretical objects with which to think about gender broadly; and a narrow focus on gender and evasion of an intersectional understanding of gender formation
  •  66
    Aspirational Solidarity as Bioethical Norm: The Case of Reproductive Justice
    International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 6 (1): 103-120. 2013.
    It is foundational to ethics and bioethics that individuals will have to make hard decisions, frequently in challenging circumstances. But the scenarios and standard modes of theorizing in bioethics may fail to address important ethical questions, in part because of a paradigmatic focus on individual rights and freedoms in the context of decision making. There is a growing conviction that theorists of ethics and bioethics must reframe our core units of analysis to attend to health in public, col…Read more
  •  29
    Relational Understanding and White Antiracist Praxis
    with Pamela Perry
    Sociological Theory 27 (1). 2009.
    In this article, we argue that, in order for white racial consciousness and practice to shift toward an antiracist praxis, a relational understanding of racism, the "self, "and society is necessary We find that such understanding arises from a confluence of propositional, affective, and tacit forms of knowledge about racism and one's own situatedness within it. We consider the claims sociologists have made about transformations in racial consciousness, bringing sociological theories of racism in…Read more
  •  30
    Aspirational solidarity as bioethical norm: The case of reproductive justice
    International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 6 (1): 103-120. 2013.
    In this paper, I attend to a current strand in bioethics that forwards solidarity as a promising direction for bioethics theory and health-promoting practices. Drawing on resources from social and political philosophy, I argue that we can gain useful insight in bioethics if we understand solidarity as a political relation grounded not on shared social location but rather on shared visions for the sorts of worlds in which collective health and dignity proliferate. I consider what traction this co…Read more
  •  26
    This is the fourth paper in the invited collection. Shotwell examines the work of direct-action activists as forms of medical activism that express a non-reductionist and complex intersectional science and technology practice, bridging lay and professional medical contexts. Shotwell draws on Lorraine Code’s generative theory of the importance of “ecological thinking” as one way to practice what she calls “epistemic responsibility,” and to think about the varied and complex early responses of act…Read more
  •  1
    Race and Bioethics
    with Ami Harbin
    In John Arras, Rebecca Kukla & Elizabeth Fenton (eds.), Routledge Companion to Bioethics, Routledge. pp. 543-556. 2015.
  •  64
    Implicit Knowledge: How it is Understood and Used in Feminist Theory
    Philosophy Compass 9 (5): 315-324. 2014.
    Feminist theorists have crafted diverse accounts of implicit knowing that exceed the purview of epistemology conventionally understood. I characterize this field as through examining thematic clusters of feminist work on implicit knowledge: phenomenological and foucauldian theories of embodiment; theories of affect and emotion; other forms of implicit knowledge. Within these areas, the umbrella concept of implicit knowledge (or understanding, depending on how it's framed) names either contingent…Read more