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128Normativity and NormalizationFoucault Studies 7 45-63. 2009.This article illustrates ways in which the concepts of the norm and normativity are implicated in relations of power. Specifically, I argue that these concepts have come to function in a normalizing manner. I outline Michel Foucault’s thinking on the norm and normalization and then provide an overview of Jürgen Habermas’s thinking on the norm and normativity in order to show that Habermas’s conceptualizations of the norm and normativity are not, as he posits, necessary foundations for ethics and…Read more
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116Monstrous WomenPhaenEx 5 (2): 125-151. 2010.In this paper I argue that “monstrous” women – violators of both moral and gender norms – mark the limits of acceptable behavior through such violation and thus provide particular insight into the workings of gendered power relations within contemporary western societies. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s 1975 College de France course titled Abnormal , I begin by arguing that gendered power relations in western societies can be characterized as “normalizing.” Next, I refer to Foucault’s discussion …Read more
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103Hannah Arendt on judgement: Thinking for politicsInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 10 (2). 2002.Many of Hannah Arendt's readers argue that differences between her earlier and later work on judgment are significant enough to constitute an actual break or rupture. Of Arendt's completed works, the 'Postscriptum' to Thinking , the first volume of The Life of the Mind , and her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy are widely considered to be her definitive remarks on judgment. These texts are privileged for two primary reasons. First, they were written after Arendt's controversial text, Eich…Read more
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67Practicing politics with Foucault and Kant: Toward a critical lifePhilosophy and Social Criticism 29 (3): 259-280. 2003.This paper problematizes the claim that Michel Foucault's work is normatively lacking and therefore possesses only limited political relevance. While Foucault does not articulate a traditional normative framework for political activity, I argue that his work nonetheless reflects certain normative commitments to, for example, practicing freedom and improving the state of the world. I elucidate these commitments by sketching out Foucault's notion of critique as a mode of existence characterized by…Read more
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67Humiliation as a Harm of Sexual Violence: Feminist versus Neoliberal PerspectivesHypatia 33 (3): 434-450. 2018.This essay provides an account of humiliation as a manifestation of the relationship one has to oneself. This account elucidates two important insights: first, that all sexual violence and not only public gang rape humiliates and, second, that appeals to the neoliberal notion of resilience undermine feminist efforts to counter sexual violence. The first part of the essay provides an overview of the idea of a relation of self to self and its significance, presents humiliation specifically as a ma…Read more
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65Resisting the Subject: A Feminist-Foucauldian Approach to Countering Sexual ViolenceFoucault Studies 16 88-103. 2013.This essay makes a case for the relevance of Foucault’s critique of modern Western subjectivity for feminist efforts toward countering sexual violence against women. In his last four Collège de France courses, Foucault shows that subjectivity produces a normalizing relation of the self to itself, the effects of which extend beyond the self in equally harmful ways. As I see it, this harm is especially damaging to women who have experienced sexual violence; moreover, it inhibits effective feminist…Read more
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64Peg Birmingham: Hannah Arendt and human rights: The predicament of common responsibility (review)Continental Philosophy Review 42 (4): 591-595. 2010.
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56Butler and Arendt on Appearance, Performativity, and Collective Political ActionArendt Studies 1 171-176. 2017.
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49Non-Subjective Assemblages?: Foucault, Subjectivity, and Sexual ViolenceSubstance 46 (1): 38-54. 2017.My way of no longer being what I am is the most singular part of what I am. In his 1975 Collège de France course, Abnormal, Michel Foucault analyzes the case of Charles Jouy, a nineteenth-century farmhand who, in 1867, was accused of sexually violating a young girl by the name of Sophie Adam.1 Foucault describes Jouy as a “marginal” figure, “more or less the village idiot”. Lacking relationships with adult women, Jouy sought out sexual encounters with young girls. Two such encounters apparently …Read more
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33Rereading Foucault, Displacing Desire, Practicing Politics (review)Radical Philosophy Review 6 (1): 81-83. 2003.
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24Countering Modernity: Foucault and Arendt on Race and RacismTélos 2011 (154): 119-140. 2011.ExcerptAnalysis of a possible intellectual affinity between philosopher Michel Foucault and political theorist Hannah Arendt is valuable in its own right, given the insight it offers into the work of these two important thinkers. At the same time, certain aspects of such an affinity are especially important because of what they illustrate about the unique ways in which harm manifests itself within the context of modern societies, and about how the terrain of modernity might be negotiated such th…Read more
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17Michel Foucault: Key ConceptsRoutledge. 2010.Michel Foucault was one of the twentieth century's most influential and provocative thinkers. His work on freedom, subjectivity, and power is now central to thinking across an extraordinarily wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, history, education, psychology, politics, anthropology, sociology, and criminology. "Michel Foucault: Key Concepts" explores Foucault's central ideas, such as disciplinary power, biopower, bodies, spirituality, and practices of the self. Each essay focuses on…Read more
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16Uncertain OntologiesFoucault Studies 17 117-133. 2014.This following essay explores the meaning and implications of philosophical critique and creativity within the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. The two philosophers’ appeals to ontology, as an important site upon which their ethico-political commitments to critique and creativity simultaneously converge and diverge, frame this exploration. The first part of the essay shows how Deleuze’s and Foucault’s respective ontologies further critique and creativity. The second part of the essay …Read more
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16Sexual Violence and Humiliation: A Foucauldian-Feminist PerspectiveRoutledge. 2019.This book presents humiliation as a key harm of sexual violence against women, showing that humiliation manifests within the relation of self to itself, and that Foucault's critique of subjectivity provides resources for feminist conceptualization and countering of sexual violence and humiliation. Within feminist philosophy and theory, rape and sexual assault are often described as humiliating to victims, yet relatively few in-depth feminist philosophical accounts and analyses exist of humiliati…Read more
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16Review of Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies and The Body Problematic: Political Imagination in Kant and Foucault (review)In David Papineau (ed.), Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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16Toward a Feminist “Politics of Ourselves”In Christopher Falzon, Timothy O'Leary & Jana Sawicki (eds.), A Companion to Foucault, Wiley-blackwell. 2013.Feminists have generally found Foucault's analyses of the workings of modern power and his genealogy of sexuality useful in analyzing and critiquing gender oppression. The feminist view of subjectivity as facilitating or even as being central to emancipatory ethical and political projects goes a long way toward explaining the “tension” that continues to characterize the relationship between feminism and the work of Foucault. The chapter shows that Foucault's critique of subjectivity as such faci…Read more
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15World-building and the predicaments of our timePhilosophy and Social Criticism 47 (8): 960-973. 2021.Throughout his contributions to an expanding body of scholarship on the work of Hannah Arendt, James Bernauer has maintained that the concept of amor mundi, or love of the world, is foundational in...
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13Feminism and the Final Foucault (edited book)University of Illinois Press. 2004.Feminism and the Final Foucault is the first systematic offering of contemporary, international feminist perspectives on the later work of philosopher Michel Foucault. Rather than simply debating the merits or limitations of Foucault's later work, the essays in this collection examine women's historical self-practices, conceive of feminism as a shared ethos, and consider the political significance of this conceptualization in order to elucidate, experiment with, and put into practice the concept…Read more
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13Et Tu, Subject?Télos 2013 (162): 8-28. 2013.ExcerptIn interviews he gave during the 1970s and 80s, Michel Foucault acknowledged points of intersection between his work and that of the group of thinkers (the “Critical Theorists”) associated with the German Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School.1 While admittedly broad in nature, the shared concerns that Foucault identifies are nonetheless important; perhaps foremost among them is the extent to which the preoccupation with certainty that characterizes modern Western thought has…Read more
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12Feminist Politics: Identity, Difference, and Agency (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2007.This anthology of articles provides contemporary international feminist perspectives on issues of identity, agency, and difference as they pertain to both feminist politics in particular, and contemporary western politics more generally.
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9Michel Foucault: Key ConceptsRoutledge. 2011.Foucault's influence has waned little over recent years and the once avant-garde theorist is now mainstream for countless subjects in the humanities and social sciences. He continues to out-sell his contemporaries and there remains strong demand for books that offer readers fresh exegesis of his work.
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9Opposing the Sexual Violence of Gender OppressionSimone de Beauvoir Studies 34 (1): 79-99. 2024.Beauvoir considers counterviolence to be a necessary and ethical response to fascism and colonialism. Because gender oppression is grounded in and reproduced through sexual violence, gender oppression functions similarly to fascism and colonialism. This article therefore makes a case for feminist use of counterviolence to combat gender oppression and the sexual violence upon which it relies.
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Technologies of women's (sexual) humiliationIn Mary L. Edwards & S. Orestis Palermos (eds.), Feminist philosophy and emerging technologies, Routledge. 2023.
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Muscular revolt' : resisting gender oppression through counter- violenceIn Liesbeth Schoonheim, Julia Jansen & Karen Vintges (eds.), Simone de Beauvoir and contemporary political theory: a toolkit for the 21st century, Routledge. 2023.
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Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault: Toward a Politics of TransformationDissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton. 2001.Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault: Toward a Politics of Transformation analyzes the status of politics in the absence of a common good, shared set of values, or shared identity. I argue that the work of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault can make a valuable contribution toward such a project, given these two thinkers' commitments to thinking politically within contexts of contingency and plurality. I support my argument by drawing out the political implications of Kant's Enlightenment legacy with…Read more
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Muscular revolt' : resisting gender oppression through counter- violenceIn Liesbeth Schoonheim & Karen Vintges (eds.), Beauvoir and Politics: A Toolkit, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. 2023.