•  13
    The Serious World of Cis
    Puncta 6 (1): 1-18. 2023.
    Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s account of “the serious world” and her considerations of childhood in The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, this paper considers how the formal and social legislation of cis gender by adults forecloses the moral freedom of children. More specifically, Beauvoir’s account of becoming is read as a claim about how the serious world works. It is argued that her description of becoming in Volume II of The Second Sex shows us how gender is fastened to and enforced …Read more
  •  24
    Anonymous Temporality and Gender: Rereading Merleau-Ponty
    philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 3 (2): 138-157. 2013.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anonymous Temporality and Gender:Rereading Merleau-PontyMegan M. BurkeThis Essay Provides a Feminist reading of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of anonymity in order to show that it is a critical resource for a feminist account of gender. For Merleau-Ponty, anonymity is a structure of temporality that is prior to the cogito; it is a time that actualizes the reflective self. It gestures away from ontological commitments rooted in presence and …Read more
  •  15
    Life at the Edge
    Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 9 (2). 2023.
    This paper considers the temporal experience constituted by prohibitions against sleep that target individuals who are unhoused and sleep outside. More specifically, drawing on Cressida Heyes’s account of sleep and anaesthetic time in Anaesthetics of Existence, this paper develops a preliminary account of punctuated time as a form of time poverty that is acute for those who must sleep outside. It is argued that such prohibitions against sleep work to anchor an individual in a totalizing presence…Read more
  •  15
    Becoming‐Frog
    In Fritz Allhoff & Liz Stillwaggon Swan (eds.), Yoga ‐ Philosophy for Everyone, Wiley‐blackwell. 2011-10-14.
    This chapter contains sections titled: I'm an Mammal, I'm a Reptile, I'm a Tree! Asanas as Earth Democracy in Practice Yogis for the Earth.
  •  27
    Cis Sense and the Habit of Gender Assignment
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 36 (2): 206-218. 2022.
    ABSTRACT This article offers an account of cis sense in order to draw attention to the relation between meaning-making and cisnormativity. By drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of institution and phenomenological considerations of habit, it is argued that cis sense is a mode of perception that institutes and sediments an individual and social habit of the third-person conferral of gender that occludes gender variance and creates the social conditions necessary for transphobia. This consideration …Read more
  •  37
    This paper considers Linda Martín Alcoff’s discussion of sexual agency and sexual violation in Rape and Resistance. It is argued that Alcoff’s move away from ‘sexual violence’ to ‘sexual violation’ to address the harms of rape and rape culture is significant with regard to conceiving of a feminist sexual ethic more generally and to understanding the harm of rape and sexual assault in particular. More specifically, this paper focuses on Alcoff’s norm of self-making and considers the way it can in…Read more
  •  47
    This article considers Beauvoir’s gesture towards fraternité at the end of The Second Sex (1949) by focusing on her fleeting characterisation of this future as ‘an androgynous world’. Generally, either Beauvoir’s call for fraternité is dismissed as an erasure of sexual difference and is thus seen to be politically bankrupt, or fraternité is understood to realise sexual difference. This latter reading suggests that androgyny plays no role in Beauvoir’s solution to women’s oppression, while the ot…Read more
  •  22
    This article argues that Maurice Merleau-Ponty advances a queer notion of love. In particular, I argue that his notion of love as an institution, as a hollow fueled by the imaginary dimension of existence, shows that love unhinges petrified ideals of gender. I suggest that the crucial insight to be found in Merleau-Ponty's account of love is that love is a lived openness that invites us to seek out new ways of being.
  •  51
    This article argues that Maurice Merleau-Ponty advances a queer notion of love. In particular, I argue that his notion of love as an institution, as a hollow fueled by the imaginary dimension of existence, shows that love unhinges petrified ideals of gender. I suggest that the crucial insight to be found in Merleau-Ponty's account of love is that love is a lived openness that invites us to seek out new ways of being.
  •  72
    This article suggests that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex offers an important contribution to a feminist phenomenology of temporality. In contrast to readings of The Second Sex that focus on the notion of “becoming” as the main claim about the relation between “woman” and time, this article suggests that Beauvoir's discussion of temporality in volume II of The Second Sex shows that Beauvoir understands the temporality of waiting, or a passive present, to be an underlying structure of women'…Read more