•  12
    Abstract:Jessica Elkayam asks Mariana Ortega about the influence both Latina feminisms and Martin Heidegger have had on the development of Ortega's mestiza theory.
  •  20
    Agency in a Plural Register
    Radical Philosophy Review 26 (1): 151-157. 2023.
  •  22
    Informed by María Lugones’s understanding of the “logic of purity,” this essay analyzes the race for critical phenomenology. It suggests how Lugones’s analysis of such a logic may guide us in developing phenomenological analyses of complex social identities such as race. It also shows how traces of the logic of purity remain even in critical phenomenological analyses of race. Specifically, the essay analyzes the methodological call for a reduction of quasi-transcendental structures. Ultimately a…Read more
  •  2
    Review of Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. By Taylor, Paul C.. Malden. MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2016.
  •  15
    Photographic Representation of Racialized Bodies
    Critical Philosophy of Race 1 (2): 163-189. 2013.
    This paper examines photographic representations of the racialized body, more specifically, photographic representation of Afro-Mexicans, a group that has been previously made invisible from Mexican national identity but that has reemerged as the “Third Root of Mexico.” The question guiding the discussion is whether such racialized bodies can be represented in such a way that does not perpetuate racist, colonialist desires and impulses. First, I analyze the indexical nature of photographs and it…Read more
  •  2
    Cámara Queer: Longing, the Photograph, and Queer Latinidad
    In Andrea Pitts, Mariana Ortega & José Medina (eds.), Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance, Oxford University Press. pp. 264-280. 2020.
    This essay examines photographic representations of queer Latinidad. A longing to discover a photographic history of Latina lesbian desire prompts a discussion of queerness in the context of Latinx love, sexuality, and desire. By way of examples of photographic representations, queer Latinidad is presented as complex and capable of encompassing paradoxical but expansive, nondichotomous understandings of sexuality and of gender presentation. Such photographic representations also allow for diside…Read more
  •  19
    Review of Arts of Address, Being Alive to Language and the World by Monique Roelofs
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (1): 112-116. 2022.
  •  13
    Queer Autoarte
    Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 41 (1): 207-232. 2020.
  •  53
    In-Between-Worlds and Re-membering
    Philosophy Today 65 (2): 449-458. 2021.
  •  58
    This article discusses sorrow in terms of its resistant possibilities. It describes bodies of color as ontological sites of sorrow in the context of racism and xenophobia. This sorrow, however, does not condemn these bodies to hopelessness and erasure. Rather, it may constitute a rupture with a present that fails to acknowledge racist and xenophobic practices. In addition, it connects sorrow to the kind of melancholia that bodies of color experience given their being-in-worlds that consider them…Read more
  •  21
    The Incandescence of Photography: On Abjection, Fulguration, and the Corpse
    philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 9 (2): 68-87. 2019.
  •  18
    The Incandescence of Photography
    philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 9 (2): 68-87. 2019.
    Inspired by the Kristevan notion of abjection and her view of the corpse as the “most sickening of wastes,” I propose a notion of photographic incandescence—the affective and carnal possibility of a photograph to undo the self. I first discuss the notion of abjection and its relation to incandescence and explore how this incandescence is connected to Kristeva’s view of the corpse. Second, I discuss the notion of photographic incandescence in light of an analysis of Susan Meiselas’s photograph, C…Read more
  •  19
    Carving Our Own Bones
    The Philosophers' Magazine 87 69-73. 2019.
  •  39
    Spectral Perception and Ghostly Subjectivity at the Colonial Gender/Race/Sex Nexus
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77 (4): 401-409. 2019.
    This article calls for an examination of the spectral operations of the perceptual architecture of colonization in conjunction with the enactment of a decolonial feminism as proposed by María Lugones. The first section discusses both the notion of ghostly subjectivity from Lugones's early work as well as the echoes of this notion in her recent work on the coloniality of gender that emphasizes the gender/race/sex nexus. Subsequently, through a photographic example, the article presents an analysi…Read more
  •  135
    Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance (edited book)
    with Andrea J. Pitts and José Medina
    Oxford University Press. 2020.
    This volume brings together many prominent philosophical voices today focusing on issues of U. S. Latinx and Latin American identities and feminist theory. As such, the essays collected here highlight the varied and multidimensional aspects of gender, racial, cultural, and sexual questions impacting U.S. Latinx and Latin American communities today. The collection also highlights a number of important threads of analysis from fields as diverse as disability studies,aesthetics, literary theory, an…Read more
  •  3
    The Difference that Art Makes
    Contemporary Aesthetics 14. 2016.
    In the following essay I discuss Monique Roelofs’s The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic. I show that Roelofs’s rich and complex notion of the aesthetic, informed by promises, modes of address, and aesthetic relationality, offers an important and novel way of understanding the aesthetic within a context attuned to questions of difference. I point out that Roelofs’s analysis may be enhanced by notions theorized by Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and María Lugones. Moreover, I raise a question regar…Read more
  •  60
    Decolonial Woes and Practices of Un-knowing
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 31 (3): 504-516. 2017.
    It matters that we learn to walk our brave decolonizing talks. … Coalitions that are productive are based on principled associations of mutual understanding and respect, not just declarations of solidarity that mean well but because of privileges of class, "race" or ethnicity, gender, and sexuality do not engage the work of transforming such subjectivity.Silences, when heard, become the negotiating spaces for the decolonizing subject.In this article I reflect about "decolonial woes"—not the misf…Read more
  •  13
    Sophia Is Still White... So Is Knowledge
    philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 7 (1): 157-164. 2017.
  •  3
    The overall aim of this project is to provide an explanation of Dasein that takes into account both Dasein's social and individual characters as well as both Division I and II of Being and Time. Chapter 1 provides an exposition of the existentialia of Dasein which illustrate the difference between Heidegger's characterization of human beings as Dasein and the traditional Cartesian epistemic subject. Chapter 2 analyzes the roles of das Man and Mitsein, the existential structures that are key in e…Read more
  •  50
    This essay is an introduction to the cluster on Latina feminism published in Hypatia (Spring 2016), Vo. 31 (2), which features essays on various areas of Latina feminisms as well as discussions on the intersection of Latina feminisms and the work of thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Simone de Beauvoir, Enrique Dussell, Immanuel Kant, Édouard Glissant, Walter Mignolo, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Contributors to the cluster include Stephanie Rivera Berruz, Cynthia M. Paccacerqua, Andrea J. Pitts, M…Read more
  •  67
    Multiplicity, Inbetweeness, and the Question of Assimilation
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 46 (S1): 65-80. 2008.
  •  135
    The aim of this essay is to analyze the notion of “loving, knowing ignorance,” a type of “arrogant perception” that produces ignorance about women of color and their work at the same time that it proclaims to have both knowledge about and loving perception toward them. The first part discusses Marilyn Frye's accounts of “arrogant” as well as of “loving” perception and presents an explanation of “loving, knowing ignorance.” The second part discusses the work of Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Spelman, and…Read more
  •  39
    Phenomenological Encuentros
    Radical Philosophy Review 9 (1): 45-64. 2006.
    Heideggerian existential phenomenology remains largely ignored by Latin American feminists due to their preference for more Marxist and Sartrean philosophies. But its influence on Latin American feminism can be felt through the work of thinkers such as Beauvoir and Irigaray, who have had a great impact on Latin American feminists’ involvement in political movements and developmentof theories. The aim of this essay is to discuss ways in which Latin American and U.S. Latina feminists have been inf…Read more
  •  32
    Heidegger’s Atheism (review)
    International Philosophical Quarterly 43 (3): 381-382. 2003.
  •  117
    In Between P
    SUNY. 2016.
    This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including immigr…Read more
  •  111
    How does everyday, inauthentic Dasein dominated by das Man become authentic? The aim of this article is to answer this and other questions about Dasein's authenticity by carrying out an analysis of the 'call of conscience'. This analysis, in turn, provides insights about Dasein's possibility for ethical existence. We will see that even though there are some puzzling issues in Heidegger's explanation of Dasein in its everydayness and its authenticity, the Heideggerian Existential Analytic is not …Read more
  •  40
    The aim of this essay is to carry out an analysis of the multi-voiced, multi-cultural self discussed by Latina feminists in light of a Heideggerian phenomenological account of persons or “Existential Analytic.” In so doing, it points out similarities as well as differences between the Heideggerian description of the self and Latina feminists' phenomenological accounts of self, and critically assesses María Lugones's important notion of “world-traveling.” In the end, the essay defends the view of…Read more
  •  80
    What is the norm of Americanness today, how has it changed, and how pluralistic is it in reality? from the Introduction In this volume philosophers and social ...