•  128
    In what follows, I offer some friendly amendments to Potter’s psychotherapeutic model—‘the hinge narrative’ (HN)—designed to help bipolar patients cultivate self-trust. My primary contribution is to suggest an alliance between narrative theory and feminist phenomenological theories of embodiment. I argue that these projects are mutually supporting in both the metaphysical and therapeutic project of constituting a rich moral self, that is, a self who has self-trust and thereby satisfying relation…Read more
  •  66
    Is Prozac a Feminist Drug?
    International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 4 (1): 89-120. 2011.
    There is a sense in which antidepressants are feminist drugs, liberating and empowering …A lot of things have been said about Prozac.1 We have been instructed both to "listen" and to "talk back" to Prozac (Kramer 1993; Breggin 1994), Prozac has been called a wonder drug (Schumer 1989; Cowley 1990), it has been described as capable of dramatically changing selves and dramatically changing our conception of what a self is (Kramer 1993), it has been accused of dulling our artistic drive (Berlin 200…Read more
  •  51
    What's so great about nature?
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 22 (3). 2008.
  •  44
    Prozac or Prosaic Diaries?: The Gendering of Psychiatric Disability in Depression Memoirs
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 24 (4): 285-298. 2017.
    The stories we tell of psychiatric disability1 and gender play a crucial role not only in the experience of psychiatric disorders, but in who disordered individuals are in the most literal sense. Recent theories of the self—so-called narrative self-constitution views, or “narrative theories”—contend that the self is, fundamentally, constituted by a narrative one tells about oneself. Furthermore, this narrative almost certainly absorbs elements from surrounding cultural scripts. Thus, narrative s…Read more
  •  39
    A primary intention of our original manuscript was to provide examples of both harmful and helpful influences of one cultural artifact—depression memoirs—on who female readers take their selves to be, and who they may actually end up being. Bradley Lewis beautifully articulated our strategy as “chart[ing] out … conflicting vectors” : that is, delineating select examples of how certain outer narratives conveyed in depression memoirs may kindle sexist and sanist modes of being. Our hope was that m…Read more
  •  38
    The Continental Feminism Reader (edited book)
    with Ann Cahill
    Rowman & Littlefield. 2003.
  •  32
    Truth and Discursive Activism: The Promise and Perils of Hashtag Feminism
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 35 (2): 117-129. 2021.
    I explore both the potential and the perils of Twitter as a space for constituting a Deweyan public aimed at transforming how "we" (here, I mean not only citizens of the United States but global citizens) affectively receive and thereby respond to and resist sexual violation. In the course of this brief exploration, I operate with a pragmatic notion of "truth," namely, as democratically formulating a hypothesis concerning the nature of a social problem that enables fruitful amelioration of the p…Read more
  •  30
    Continental feminism
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2013.
  •  25
    Is Prozac a feminist drug?
    with Ginger A. Hoffman
    International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 4 (1): 89-120. 2011.
    Prozac has been lauded by Peter Kramer for instilling potentially “liberating” personality traits in women such as assertiveness, resilience, and confidence. Witnessing these effects, Kramer declares that there is a sense in which antidepressants like Prozac are “feminist.” In this paper, we scrutinize Kramer’s claim from myriad angles. We evaluate putatively “feminist” uses of antidepressants in both women who are diagnosed with clinical depression and women thought to use them instead for “enh…Read more
  •  14
    Roundtable on Narrative Naturalism
    Overheard in Seville 35 (35): 93-119. 2017.
  •  3
    French Feminists (edited book)
    with Ann Cahill
    Routledge. 2007.
    Although at times criticized for its philosophical density, French cultural theory remains a flourishing, if highly contested, area of academic study. Four feminist thinkers in this tradition continue to be especially prominent: Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. This new collection from Routledge gathers together the very best secondary literature on these thinkers to provide an indispensable conspectus of their works. Each of the four thinkers is represented …Read more
  •  2
    A Pluralist Hope: Or, Against Optimizing Neurochemistry on Some Moonlit Dream-Visited Planet
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 37 (4): 479-502. 2023.
    ABSTRACT In considering the hopeful rhetoric that pervades the “nothing but” psychopharmacological approaches to depression—a contemporary version of what William James calls medical materialism—this article argues that only a thorough-going pluralist account of hope is a hope worth wanting. Medical materialist hope is better conceptualized as a variation of optimism, which assumes a single universe that is already the best of all possible universes, and thereby only promotes optimization of the…Read more