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Anaesthetics of ExistenceIn Kristin Zeiler & Lisa Folkmarson Käll (eds.), Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine, State University of New York Press. pp. 263-284. 2014.
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12Justification, Pluralism, and Disciplinary Discontents; or, Leaving PhilosophyIn Dimitrios Karmis & Jocelyn Maclure (eds.), Civic Freedom in an Age of Diversity: The Public Philosophy of James Tully, Mcgill-queen's University Press. pp. 41-63. 2023.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 holdi…Read more
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29Heyes’s Introduction to Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience on the EdgeFeminist Philosophy Quarterly 9 (2). 2023.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 unconsciou…Read more
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76Thinking through the Body: Yoga, Philosophy, and Physical EducationTeaching Philosophy 32 (3): 263-284. 2009.Philosophers sometimes hope that our discipline will be transformative for students, perhaps especially when we teach so-called philosophy of the body. To that end, this article describes an experimental upper-level undergraduate course cross-listed between Philosophy and Physical Education, entitled “Thinking Through the Body: Philosophy and Yoga.” Drawing on the perspectives of professor and students, we show how a somatic practice (here, hatha yoga) and reading texts (here, primarily contempo…Read more
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118Foucault goes to weight watchersHypatia 21 (2): 126-149. 2006.: This article argues that commercial weight-loss organizations appropriate and debase the askeses—practices of care of the self—that Michel Foucault theorized, increasing members' capacities at the same time as they encourage participation in ever-tightening webs of power. Weight Watchers, for example, claims to promote self-knowledge, cultivate new capacities and pleasures, foster self-care in face of gendered exploitation, and encourage wisdom and flexibility. The hupomnemata of these organiz…Read more
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20Reading Advice to Parents about Children’s Sleep: The Political Psychology of a Self-Help GenreCritical Inquiry 49 (2): 145-164. 2023.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 …Read more
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19Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer (edited book)Routledge. 2009.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 socia…Read more
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34Robert Nichols in Conversation with Kelly Aguirre, Phil Henderson, Cressida J. Heyes, Alana Lentin, and Corey SnelgroveJournal of World Philosophies 6 (2): 181-222. 2021.Kelly Aguirre, Phil Henderson, Cressida J. Heyes, Alana Lentin, and Corey Snelgrove engage with different aspects of Robert Nichols’ Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory. Henderson focuses on possible spaces for maneuver, agency, contradiction, or failure in subject formation available to individuals and communities interpellated through diremptive processes. Heyes homes in on the ritual of antiwill called “consent” that systematically conceals the operation of power. Aguirre for…Read more
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359The Short and the Long of It: A Political Phenomenology of Pandemic TimePhilosophy Today 64 (4): 859-863. 2020.Drawing on Françoise Dastur’s suggestion that the event is a permanent possibility that shapes lived experience, but also, when it occurs, a distinctive temporal rupture, I argue that the initial weeks of the COVID-19 epidemic constitute an event, in her sense. Connecting this phenomenological point to literatures on the politics of temporality, I suggest that the distinction between event and normal experience maps to that between epidemic and endemic. Understanding some of the political and et…Read more
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20Situating Genealogies of TerrorismFoucault Studies 1 (28): 17-24. 2020.A contribution to a symposium on the book, Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State, Violence, Empire, by Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson.
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39Foucault Goes to Weight WatchersHypatia 21 (2): 126-149. 2006.This article argues that commercial weight-loss organizations appropriate and debase the askeses—practices of care of the self—that Michel Foucault theorized, increasing members’ capacities at the same time as they encourage participation in ever-tightening webs of power. Weight Watchers, for example, claims to promote self-knowledge, cultivate new capacities and pleasures, foster self-care in face of gendered exploitation, and encourage wisdom and flexibility. The hupomnemata of these organizat…Read more
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29Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the EdgeDuke University Press. 2020.“Experience” is a thoroughly political category, a social and historical product not authored by any individual. At the same time, “the personal is political,” and one's own lived experience is an important epistemic resource. In _Anaesthetics of Existence_ Cressida J. Heyes reconciles these two positions, drawing on examples of things that happen to us but are nonetheless excluded from experience. If for Foucault an “aesthetics of existence” was a project of making one's life a work of art, Hey…Read more
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21Dislocation and Self-Certainty (review)Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 4 (2). 2018.A short critical engagement as part of a symposium on Ami Harbin's book Disorientation and Moral Life.
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48Two Kinds of Awareness: Foucault, the Will, and Freedom in Somatic PracticeHuman Studies 41 (4): 527-544. 2018.This essay identifies two kinds of awareness of one’s body that occur in a variety of literatures: awareness as psychologically or spiritually enabling or therapeutic, and awareness as undesirable self-consciousness of the body. Drawing on Foucault’s account of normalizing judgment, it argues that these two forms of awareness are impossible to separate, if that separation is into authentic versus extrinsic somatic experience. Nonetheless, awareness is an important component of embodied freedom, …Read more
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22Review of Eric Plemons, The Look of a Woman: Facial Feminization Surgery and the Aims of Trans-Medicine (review)American Journal of Bioethics 18 (6). 2018.
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67Teaching Wollstonecraft’s Maria, Or the Wrongs of WomanTeaching Philosophy 23 (2): 111-125. 2000.How should scholars and teachers of feminist philosophy understand Wollstonecraft’s work “Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman”? This paper contends that Wollstonecraft’s work has received far too little attention, that the work is her most sophisticated statement on women’s oppression, and that it can be used as a springboard for approaching contemporary feminist questions while simultaneously supplying these questions a historical context. In putting forward these positions, the paper provides four c…Read more
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43This dissertation seeks to fill two lacunae in contemporary feminist discussions of essentialism: first, a lack of critical analysis of the term "essentialism" and its cognates, and second, a paucity of feminist work that aims to develop anti-essentialist methods rather than merely presenting anti-essentialist critiques of existing feminist theories. I propose a typology of feminist essentialisms, distinguishing metaphysical, biological, linguistic, and methodological variants. I argue that meth…Read more
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12Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 21 (5): 346-349. 2001.
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24Philosophy and gender: critical concepts in philosophy (edited book)Routledge. 2012.v. 1. "Gender" and "Philosophy": contested terms -- v. 2. Gender and the history of philosophy -- v. 3. Knowledge and reality -- v. 4. Values and society.
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36Foucault Studies Special Issue: Foucault and Feminism, September 2013Foucault Studies 16 3-14. 2013.
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22Recognition, Responsibility, and Rights: Feminist Ethics and Social TheoryRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2002.This collection of papers by prominent feminist thinkers advances the positive feminist project of remapping the moral by developing theory that acknowledges the diversity of women
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Recognition, Responsibility, and Rights: Feminist Ethics and Social TheoryRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2002.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 ackn…Read more
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17Review of C. G. Prado (ed.), Foucault's Legacy (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (8). 2010.
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78Line drawings: defining women through feminist practiceCornell University Press. 2000.This is a fresh and vitally important step past stymied debate on what is arguably the most pressing issue in cross-disciplinary feminist theory.
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3150Changing Race, Changing Sex: The Ethics of Self-TransformationJournal of Social Philosophy 37 (2): 266-282. 2006."Why are there 'transsexuals' but not 'transracials'?" "Why is there an accepted way to change sex, but not to change race?" I have repeatedly heard these questions from theorists puzzled by the phenomenon of transsexuality. Feminist thinkers, in particular, often seem taken aback that in the case of category switching the possibilities appear to be so different. Behind the question is sometimes an implicit concern: Does not the (hypothetical or real) example of individual “transracialism” seem …Read more
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56A symposium on Cressida Heyes' 2007 book Self-Transformations.
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46Philosophy and Gender (edited book)Routledge. 2011.How are ‘philosophy’ and ‘gender’ implicated? Throughout history, philosophers—mostly men, though with more women among their number than is sometimes supposed—have often sought to specify and justify the proper roles of women and men, and to explore the political consequences of sexual difference. The last forty years, however, have seen a dramatic explosion of critical thinking about how philosophy is a gendered discipline; there has also been an abundance of philosophical work that uses gende…Read more
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53Gender, Bodies, Freedom: Feminist Philosophy across TraditionsConstellations 13 (4): 573-582. 2006.
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101Cosmetic Surgery and the Televisual Makeover: A Foucauldian feminist readingFeminist Media Studies 7 (1): 17-32. 2007.I argue that the televisual cosmetic surgical makeover is usefully understood as a contemporary manifestation of normalization, in Foucault’s sense—a process of defining a population in relation to its conformity or deviance from a norm, while simultaneously generating narratives of individual authenticity. Drawing on detailed analysis of “Extreme Makeover,” I suggest that the show erases its complicity with creating homogeneous bodies by representing cosmetic surgery as enabling of personal tran…Read more
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712Reading transgender, rethinking women's studiesNational Women's Studies Association Journal 12 (2): 170-180. 2000.Representing the best popular and scholarly contributions to transgender/ sex studies, and with their mutual concern with female-to-male sex and gender crossing (among other topics), these three books mark an important shift in scholarship on gender and sexuality. Trans studies has reached a level of autonomy and sophistication that firmly establishes it as a field with its own theoretical and political questions. Of course, connections to feminist and queer theory are still very apparent in the…Read more
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University of AlbertaRegular Faculty
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Social Science |