Gail Weiss

In Telling Flesh, Vicki Kirby addresses a major theoretical issue at the intersection of the social sciences and feminist theory -- the separation of nature from culture. Kirby focuses particularly on postmodern approaches to corporeality, and explores how these approaches confine the body within questions about meaning and interpretation. Kirby explores the implications of this containment in the work of Jane Gallop, Judith Butler, and Drucilla Cornell, as well as in recent cyber-criticism. By analysing the inadvertent repetition of the nature/culture division in this work, Kirby offers a powerful reassessment of dualism itself

This chapter offers a brief historical overview of the gendered mind/body dualism associated with the rationalist tradition, according to which women’s bodies have been viewed as a threat to reason and to ethics. Taking up critiques of this model offered by Beauvoir and Fanon, I maintain that the body of the Other makes an ethical claim upon us in the form of “bodily imperatives.” I conclude with a critical analysis of contemporary feminist ethics that seeks to move beyond the false dichotomies of mind/body, reason/emotions, transcendence/immanence, and male/female dualisms. Assuming as their starting point the universality of human dependency and the debilitating reality of embodied oppression, contemporary feminist ethicists seek to overturn the sexist, racist, and ableist effects of a philosophical tradition that has always privileged some minds and bodies over others.

The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were selected from revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the fifty-ninth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in September 2021. This virtual conference took place on September 17–18 and 23–26 after the cancellation of the 2020 conference due to the COVID-19 pandemic.Bonnie Honig and Mel Y. Chen gave the SPEP 2021 Plenary Addresses and we are grateful to be able to include Honig's plenary, "Taking Back the Camera: Race and Agonism in Mr. Deeds and The Fits" in this special issue. Thinking both with and against Stanley Cavell's and Giorgio Agamben's respective readings of...

ABSTRACT Drawing upon Edmund Husserl’s concept of the natural attitude, our taken-for-granted understandings of what is normal, natural, and what should be the case, I argue that when one’s everyday routines are radically disrupted in a sustained way, as has happened with the COVID-19 global pandemic, adjustments are also needed in our natural attitudes so that the latter accurately reflect our actual situation. And yet, the tendency to resist altering one’s natural attitude in response to major changes in one’s life is very strong, as we see with Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Vashti in E. M. Forster’s story, “The Machine Stops.” Both characters, I suggest, offer important cautionary tales as we assess the impact of the “new normal” that has come to characterize daily existence during a global pandemic as well as nostalgic appeals to return, as quickly as possible, to the “old normal” of our pre-pandemic lives. This critical analysis is an especially urgent task given the fact that this pre-pandemic normal was clearly not as positive an experience for some people as for others.

The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were originally presented at the fifty-eighth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 31 to November 2, 2019. The meeting was hosted by Duquesne University. It featured two outstanding plenary presentations that bear mentioning even though they are not reproduced in these pages: Susan Stryker's "How Being Trans Made Me a Philosopher!" and Robert Brandom's "Magnanimity, Heroism, and Agency: Recognition as Recollection." Stryker explained in her talk how she came to recognize and enact her identity as a trans woman, and to publish her pathbreaking paper, "My Words...

This special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy offers a wonderful sample of the innovative scholarship that was presented at the fifty-seventh annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, which was hosted by Pennsylvania State University, October 18–20, 2018. We have chosen the title "Critical Phenomenologies: Past, Present, and Future" for this volume because the essays included within it pay close critical attention to temporally thick features of our everyday lived experience. While some of the essays would more readily be identified as "phenomenological" than others, all of them offer valuable contributions to the project of a critical phenomenology as Lisa...

Phenomenology, the philosophical method that seeks to uncover the taken-for-granted presuppositions, habits, and norms that structure everyday experience, is increasingly framed by ethical and political concerns. Critical phenomenology foregrounds experiences of marginalization, oppression, and power in order to identify and transform common experiences of injustice that render “the familiar” a site of oppression for many. In Fifty Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, leading scholars present fresh readings of classic phenomenological topics and introduce newer concepts developed by feminist theorists, critical race theorists, disability theorists, and queer and trans theorists that capture aspects of lived experience that have traditionally been neglected. By centering historically marginalized perspectives, the chapters in this book breathe new life into the phenomenological tradition and reveal its ethical, social, and political promise. This volume will be an invaluable resource for teaching and research in continental philosophy; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; critical race theory; disability studies; cultural studies; and critical theory more generally.

An important question that is often raised, whether directly or indirectly, in philosophical discussions of shame‐inducing behavior concerns whether the experience of shame has unique moral value. Despite the fact that shame is strongly associated with negative affective responses, many people have argued that the experience of being ashamed plays an important motivating role, rather than being an obstacle, in living a moral life. These discussions, however, tend to take for granted two interrelated assumptions that I will be problematizing: 1) that the subject's shame is warranted; 2) that the shame is directly attributable to the subject's own actions. I challenge these assumptions by turning to a phenomenon I call secondhand shame, namely, shame that is induced by another person's shameless behavior. This essay examines the gender and racial dynamics that so frequently intensify secondhand shame, and suggests that this troubling phenomenon, when shared as a group experience, can be morally transformative, particularly when it leads to unified public resistance to shameless conduct.

Though Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl” has been praised for pre-senting the “I can” body as more of an aspiration than a reality for many women in the world today, she has also been criticized for claiming that women’s typical modes of bodily comportment are contradictory, and thus that their experience of the “I can” body is compromised. From her critics’ perspective, Young’s account seems to imply that women’s experiences of embodied agency are inferior or deficient in comparison to men who have been encouraged to maximize their physical capabilities. The question this essay addresses is whether the “I can” body is itself a suspect notion that should be rejected altogether, or whether the problem lies in its sexist, racist, and ableist history that has failed to acknowledge the di-verse experiences of embodied agency it was originally intended to describe. Quoique « Lancer comme une fille » ait reçu des éloges pour sa pré-sentation du « je peux » corporel non comme la description d’un état de fait, mais plutôt comme une aspiration pour beaucoup de femmes dans le monde contemporain, certains critiquent la présentation des modalités typiques du comportement corporel féminin comme « contradictoire », car il en découle que l’expérience par les femmes du « je peux » corporel est compromise. Selon ces critiques, l’approche de Young semble impliquer que l’expérience féminine de l’agentivité corporelle est inférieure ou déficiente par rapport à celle des hommes, ces derniers ayant été encouragés à cultiver au maximum leurs capacités physiques. Dans cet article, nous poserons la question suivante : le « je peux » corporel est-il un concept sus-pect que l’on doit rejeter, ou doit-on plutôt dire que le problème gît dans l’histoire sexiste, raciste et capacitiste de ce concept, une histoire qui n’est pas parvenue à rendre compte des diverses expériences de l’agentivité corporelle que le « je peux » visait décrire initialement.

This work provides a phenomenological description of gesture, and its significance for the perceptual process. Defining gesture as a social response to a situation that evokes a response from that situation, I examine the different types of social relations that make possible communication through gesture. Next, I consider the significance of bodily intentionality for the development of individual gestures. Specifically, I offer an account of how a bodily style emerges through specific gestures, and I discuss the reciprocal relationship that exists between an individual's style, and his or her body image. ;Through an exploration of the anonymous and personal aspects of the body image, I describe how gender associations can lead to a more anonymous or a more personal way of viewing one's body, and one's bodily capabilities. This leads to a "contextual" account of communication through gesture that employs a Gestaltist, "figure-ground" framework for understanding how gestures are interpreted from a particular perspective that emerges within a more general context of significance. The phenomena of misunderstanding, creativity, conventionality, and repetition, are specifically addressed in relation to one another, and I assess the impact each makes upon communication through gesture. ;Misunderstanding is proposed as a primary impetus for the development of creative gestures, and misunderstanding is discussed as a function of the different social contexts that individuals bring to a given situation. Determining the meaning of a specific gesture or series of gestures is understood to be an ongoing social project that cannot be reduced to the intentions or responses of a single individual. The failure to define the meaning of a given gesture once and for all is attributed to the ambiguity and indeterminacy that attend all communication through gesture. These latter are discussed, moreover, as a positive, rather than a negative, feature of perceptual experience

Over the last decade, the international media has devoted increasing attention to operations that separate conjoined twins. Despite the fairly low odds that a child or adult will survive the operation with all of their vital organs intact, most people fail to question the urgency of being physically separated from one’s identical twin. The drive to surgically tear asunder that which was originally joined, I suggest, is motivated in part by a refusal to acknowledge intercorporeality as a basic condition of human existence that doesn’t undermine identity but makes it possible in the first place

This essay argues that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment can be an extremely helpful ally for contemporary feminist theorists, critical race theorists, and disability studies scholars because his work suggests that the gender, race, and ability of bodies are not innate or fixed features of those bodies, much less corporeal indicators of physical, social, psychic, and even moral inferiority, but are themselves dynamic phenomena that have the potential to overturn accepted notions of normalcy, naturalness, and normativity. Taking seriously Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that our bodies are the means by which we directly engage with the world, I suggest, encourages us to be attentive to how an individual’s or group’s gender, race, and bodily abilities differentially affect how their bodies are responded to by other bodies. The responses of others, in turn, directly influences the significance of an individual’s actions within that situation. This essay provides a critical examination of specific feminist philosophers, critical race scholars, and disability theorists who creatively utilize Merleau-Pontian insights to illustrate, and ultimately combat, the insidious ways in which sexism, racism, and “compulsory able-bodiedness”, impoverish the lived experience of both oppressors and the oppressed, largely by predetermining the meaning of their bodily interactions in accordance with institutionalized cultural expectations and norms