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943Rape as Spectator Sport and Creepshot Entertainment: Social Media and the Valorization of Lack of ConsentAmerican Studies Journal (10): 1-16. 2015.Lack of consent is valorized within popular culture to the point that sexual assault has become a spectator sport and creepshot entertainment on social media. Indeed, the valorization of nonconsensual sex has reached the extreme where sex with unconscious girls, especially accompanied by photographs as trophies, has become a goal of some boys and men.
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603Women: The secret weapon of modern warfare?Hypatia 23 (2). 2008.The images from wars in the Middle East that haunt us are those of young women killing and torturing. Their media circulated stories share a sense of shock. They have both galvanized and confounded debates over feminism and women's equality. And, as Oliver argues in this essay, they share, perhaps subliminally, the problematic notion of women as both offensive and defensive weapons of war, a notion that is symptomatic of fears of women's "mysterious" powers.
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235Animal Ethics: Toward an Ethics of ResponsivenessResearch in Phenomenology 40 (2): 267-280. 2010.The concepts of animal, human, and rights are all part of a philosophical tradition that trades on foreclosing the animal, animality, and animals. Rather than looking to qualities or capacities that make animals the same as or different from humans, I investigate the relationship between the human and the animal. To insist, as animal rights and welfare advocates do, that our ethical obligations to animals are based on their similarities to us reinforces the type of humanism that leads to treatin…Read more
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156Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the MediaColumbia University Press. 2007.Ever since Eve tempted Adam with her apple, women have been regarded as a corrupting and destructive force. The very idea that women can be used as interrogation tools, as evidenced in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos, plays on age-old fears of women as sexually threatening weapons, and therefore the literal explosion of women onto the war scene should come as no surprise. From the female soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib to Palestinian women suicide bombers, women and their bodies have beco…Read more
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147Motherhood, Sexuality, and Pregnant Embodiment: Twenty-Five Years of GestationHypatia 25 (4): 760-777. 2010.My essay is framed by Hypatia's first special issue on Motherhood and Sexuality at one end, and by the most recent special issue (as of this writing) on the work of Iris Young, whose work on pregnant embodiment has become canonical, at the other. The questions driving this essay are: When we look back over the last twenty-five years, what has changed in our conceptions of pregnancy and maternity, both in feminist theory and in popular culture? What aspects of feminist debates from the 1970s and …Read more
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140Julia Kristeva's Feminist RevolutionsHypatia 8 (3): 94-114. 1993.Julia Kristeva is known as rejecting feminism, nonetheless her work is useful for feminist theory. I reconsider Kristeva's rejection of feminism and her theories of difference, identity, and maternity, elaborating on Kristeva's contributions to debates over the necessity of identity politics, indicating how Kristeva's theory suggests the cause of and possible solutions to women's oppression in Western culture, and, using Kristeva's theory, setting up a framework for a feminist rethinking of poli…Read more
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135Julia Kristeva’s Maternal PassionsJournal of French and Francophone Philosophy 18 (1): 1-8. 2010.This article critically engages Julia Kristeva’s latest work on maternal passion as an antidote to what she calls “feminine fatigue.” Oliver elaborates, criticizes, and expands Kristeva’s view that maternity can be a model for thinking about passion and its relation to creativity and even to ethics. She relates Kristeva’s thinking about feminine fatigue to contemporary feminism in the United States.&nbsp
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128Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be HumanColumbia University Press. 2009.Introduction: The role of animals in philosophies of man -- Part I: What's wrong with animal rights? -- The right to remain silent -- Part II: Animal pedagogy -- You are what you eat : Rousseau's cat -- Say the human responded : Herder's sheep -- Part III: Difference worthy of its name -- Hair of the dog : Derrida's and Rousseau's good taste -- Sexual difference, animal difference : Derrida's sexy silkworm -- Part IV: It's our fault -- The beaver's struggle with species-being : De Beauvoir and t…Read more
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116Media Representations of Women and the “Iraq War”Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry 5 (12): 14-22. 2010.This essay examines media images of women in recent conflicts in the Middle East. From the Abu Ghraib prison abuses to protests in Iran, women have become the public face of violence, carried out and suffered. Women’s bodies are figured as sexual and violent, a potent combination that stirs public imagination and feeds into stereotypes of women as femme fatales or “bombshells.”
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107Stopping the Anthropological Machine: Agamben with Heidegger and Merleau-PontyPhaenEx 2 (2): 1-23. 2007.Agamben maintains that Heidegger continues the work of the anthropological machine by defining Dasein as uniquely open to the closedness of the animal. Yet, Agamben’s own thinking does not so much open up the concept of animal as it attempts to save humanity from the anthropological machine that always produces the animal as the constitutive outside within the human itself. Agamben’s return to religious metaphors at best displaces the binary man-animal with the binary religion-science, and at wo…Read more
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106Keller's Gender/Science System: Is the Philosophy of Science to Science as Science is to Nature?Hypatia 3 (3): 137-148. 1988.I argue that although in “The Gender/Science System,” Keller intends to formulate a middle ground position in order to open science to feminist criticisms without forcing it into relativism, she steps back into objectivism. While she endorses the dynamic-object model for science, she endorses the static-object model for philosophy of science. I suggest that by modeling her methodology for philosophy on her methodology for science her philosophy would better serve her feminist goals.
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97Conflicted loveHypatia 15 (3): 1-18. 2000.: Our stereotypes of maternity and paternity as manifest in the history of philosophy and psychoanalysis interfere with the ability to imagine loving relationships. The associations of maternity with antisocial nature and paternity with disembodied cul-ture are inadequate to set up primary love relationships. Analyzing the conflicts in these associations, I reformulate the maternal body as social and lawful, and I re-formulate the paternal function as embodied, which enables imagining our primar…Read more
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94Marxism and SurrogacyHypatia 4 (3). 1989.In this article, I argue that the liberal framework-its autonomous individuals with equal rights-allows judges to justify enforcing surrogacy contracts. More importantly, even where judges do not enforce surrogacy contracts, the liberal framework conceals gender and class issues which insure that the surrogate will lose custody of her child. I suggest that Marx's analysis of estranged labor can reveal the class and gender issues which the liberal framework conceals.
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92Enhancing evolution:Whose body? Whose choice?Southern Journal of Philosophy 48 (s1): 74-96. 2010.This essay critically engages the work of John Harris and Jürgen Habermas on the issue of genetic engineering. It does so from the standpoint of women's embodied experience of pregnancy and parenting, challenging the choice–chance binary at work in these accounts
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89Kristeva’s Sadomasochistic Subject and the Sublimation of ViolenceJournal of French and Francophone Philosophy 21 (1): 13-26. 2013.Do representations of violence incite or quell violent desires and actions? This question--the question of the relation between mimesis and catharsis--is as old as Western Philosophy itself. In this essay, I attempt to think through how Kristeva might describe the difference between representations of violence that perpetuate violent desires and actions versus representations of violence that sublimate violent desires and thereby prevent violent actions
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87Sexual Difference, Animal Difference: Derrida and Difference “Worthy of Its Name”Hypatia 24 (2): 54-76. 2009.I challenge the age-old binary opposition between human and animal, not as philosophers sometimes do by claiming that humans are also animals, or that animals are capable of suffering or intelligence, but rather by questioning the very category of “the animal” itself. This category groups a nearly infinite variety of living beings into one concept measured in terms of humans—animals are those creatures that are not human. In addition, I argue that the binary opposition between human and animal i…Read more
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83Antigone's Ghost: Undoing Hegel's Phenomenology of SpiritHypatia 11 (1). 1996.This essay argues that Hegel's discussion of the family in "The Ethical Order" section of Phenomenology of Spirit undermines the entire project of that text. Hegel's project demands that every element of consciousness be conceptualizable, and yet, woman, an essential unconscious element of consciousness, is in principle unconceptualizable. The end of the essay attempts to relate Hegel's discussion of the family to contemporary discussions of family values
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82Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy's Relation to the "Feminine"Routledge. 1994.In ____Womanizing Nietzsche,__ Kelly Oliver uses an analysis of the position of woman in Nietzsche's texts to open onto the larger question of philosophy's relation to the feminine and the maternal. Offering readings from Nietzsche, Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva, Freud and Lacan, Oliver builds an innovative foundation for an ontology of intersubjective relationships that suggests a new approach to ethics.
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79The look of loveHypatia 16 (3): 56-78. 2001.: I begin to suggest an alternative to the notion of vision based in alienation and hostility put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. I diagnose this alienating vision as a result of a particular alienating notion of space presupposed by their theories. I develop Irigaray's comments about light and air to suggest an alternative notion of space that opens up the possibility that vision connects us to others rather than alienates us from them.
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74Language and Liberation: Feminism, Philosophy, and Language (edited book)SUNY Press. 1999.Gathers authors with different backgrounds and methods to advance feminist discussions of the relation between language and women's oppression, suggesting promising new directions for further research
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72Bodies against the law: Abu ghraib and the war on terror (review)Continental Philosophy Review 42 (1): 63-80. 2009.In this essay, I argue that the contemporary notion of law has been reduced to regulations and disciplinary codes that do not and cannot give meaning to our emotional lives and moral sensibilities. As a result, we have increasing numbers of what I call “abysmal individuals” who suffer from a split between law—broadly conceived as that which gives form and structure to social life—and personal embodied sensations of pain and pleasure. My attempt to understand the place of Abu Ghraib within Americ…Read more
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68Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-BindIndiana University Press. 1993."... both an excellent introduction and a thoroughgoing analysis of Kristeva’s writing." —Signs "The book is a brilliant combination of a recuperative and a critical reading of Kristeva’s work." —Changes: An International Journal of Psychology & Psychotherapy "... a thorough, detailed, and critical analysis of the writings of Julia Kristeva." —Elizabeth Grosz "... the most involved and engaging study of Julia Kristeva’s work to date..." —The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory This first…Read more
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68Subjectivity and Subject Position: The Double Meaning of WitnessingStudies in Practical Philosophy 3 (2): 132-143. 2003.
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62Shame, Depression, and Social MelancholySophia 59 (1): 31-38. 2020.The pathologization of women’s depression covers over the social and institutional causes of that symptomology. Insofar as patriarchal values continue to devalue and debase women and mothers in ways that colonize psychic space, and depression becomes a cover for what I call ‘social melancholy.’ This is not the melancholy of traditional psychoanalysis, but a form of melancholy that results from oppression, domination, and the colonization of psychic space. Social melancholy differs from both Freu…Read more
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60Between the She-Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood: The Figure of the Girl in Derrida's The Beast and The SovereignDerrida Today 4 (2): 257-280. 2011.This essay explores the important role played by the figure of the virgin girl at the centre of The Beast and The Sovereign. Derrida hints that she may offer a figure between the beast and the sovereign, between the two marionettes of Nature and Culture. Moreover, it seems that she is both what props up the fabled distinction between man and animal and at the same time that upon which man erects himself as sovereign lord and master. Taking Derrida's suggestions further, I argue that the virgin g…Read more
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56Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring MothersRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1998.In Subjectivity without Subjects, well-known philosopher and feminist theorist Kelly Oliver looks at aspects of popular culture, film, science, and law to examine contemporary notions of paternity and maternity. Oliver studies the roles of paternal responsibility, virility, and race in such events as the Million Man March and the Promise Keeper's movement and suggests alternative ways to conceive of self-other relations and the subjective identity at stake in them. In addition she offers a detai…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Continental Philosophy |