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302Pragmatist Feminism as Ecological Ontology: Reflections on Living Across and Through SkinsHypatia 17 (4): 201-217. 2002.In my response to the comments of Vincent Colapietro, Charlene Seigfried, and Gail Weiss on Living Across and Through Skins , I explain pragmatist feminism as an ecological ontology that understands bodies and environments as dynamically co-constitutive. I then discuss the relationship of pragmatist feminism to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Nietzschean genealogy, and Darwinian evolutionary theory. Some of the specific concepts I examine include the anonymous body, the bodying organism, truth as…Read more
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280Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (edited book)State Univ of New York Pr. 2007.Leading scholars explore how different forms of ignorance are produced and sustained, and the role they play in knowledge practices.
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258The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (review)Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17 (4): 303-306. 2003.
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241From the foreign to the familiar: Confronting Dewey confronting "racial prejudice"Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18 (3): 193-202. 2004.
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230Pragmatism, Psychoanalysis, and Prejudice: Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's The Anatomy of Prejudices (review)Journal of Speculative Philosophy 15 (2). 2001.
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205Introduction: Feminist epistemologies of ignoranceHypatia 21 (3): 1-19. 2006.This essay aims to clarify the value of developing systematic studies of ignorance as a component of any robust theory of knowledge. The author employs feminist efforts to recover and create knowledge of women's bodies in the contemporary women's health movement as a case study for cataloging different types of ignorance and shedding light on the nature of their production. She also helps us understand the ways resistance movements can be a helpful site for understanding how to identify, critiqu…Read more
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184Feminism and phenomenology: A reply to Silvia StollerHypatia 15 (1): 183-188. 2000.: Responding to Silvia Stoller's comments on "Domination and Dialogue in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception" (Sullivan 1997), I argue that while phenomenology has much to offer feminism, feminists should be wary of Merleau-Ponty's notion of projective intentionality because of the ethical solipsism that it tends to involve. I also take the opportunity to clarify the concept of hypothetical construction introduced in the earlier paper, in particular the transformative relationship that i…Read more
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119Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial PrivilegeIndiana University Press. 2006."[A] lucid discussion of race that does not sell out the black experience." —Tommy Lott, author of The Invention of Race Revealing Whiteness explores how white privilege operates as an unseen, invisible, and unquestioned norm in society today. In this personal and selfsearching book, Shannon Sullivan interrogates her own whiteness and how being white has affected her. By looking closely at the subtleties of white domination, she issues a call for other white people to own up to their unspoken pr…Read more
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96The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of PhilosophyLexington Books. 2010.In this collection, white women philosophers engage boldly in critical acts of exploring ways of naming and disrupting whiteness in terms of how it has defined the conceptual field of philosophy. Focuses on the whiteness of the epistemic and value-laden norms within philosophy itself, the text dares to identify the proverbial elephant in the room known as white supremacy and how that supremacy functions as the measure of reason, knowledge, and philosophical intelligibility.
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94Whiteness as wise provincialism: Royce and the rehabilitation of a racial categoryTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 44 (2). 2008.Against the backdrop of eliminitivist versus critical conservationist approaches to the racial category of whiteness, this article asks whether a rehabilitated version of whiteness can be worked out concretely. What might a non-oppressive, anti-racist whiteness look like? Turning to Josiah Royce’s “Provincialism” for help answering this question, I show that even though the essay never explicitly discusses race, it can help explain the ongoing need for the category of whiteness and implicitly of…Read more
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94Reconfiguring gender with John Dewey: Habit, bodies, and cultural changeHypatia 15 (1): 23-42. 2000.: This paper demonstrates how John Dewey's notion of habit can help us understand gender as a constitutive structure of bodily existence. Bringing Dewey's pragmatism in conjunction with Judith Butler's concept of performativity, I provide an account of how rigid binary configurations of gender might be transformed at the level of both individual habit and cultural construct
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78Domination and Dialogue in Merleau‐Ponty's Phenomenology of PerceptionHypatia 12 (1): 1-19. 1997.Merleau-Ponty's claim in Phenomenology of Perception (1962) that the anonymous body guarantees an intersubjective world is problematic because it omits the particularities of bodies. This omission produces an account of "dialogue" with another in which I solipsistically hear only myself and dominate others with my intentionality. This essay develops an alternative to projective intentionality called "hypothetical construction," in which meaning is socially constructed through an appreciation of …Read more
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77The Hearts and Guts of White PeopleJournal of Religious Ethics 42 (4): 591-611. 2014.Beginning with the experience of a white woman's stomach seizing up in fear of a black man, this essay examines some of the ethical and epistemological issues connected to white ignorance. In conversation with Charles Mills on the epistemology of ignorance, I argue that white ignorance primarily operates physiologically, not cognitively. Drawing critically from psychology, neurocardiology, and other medical sciences, I examine some of the biological effects of racism on white people's stomachs a…Read more
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68Book review: Stacy Alaimo. Feminist spaces: Undomesticated ground: Recasting nature as feminist space ithaca, N.y.: Cornell university press, 2000; Elizabeth Grosz. Architecture from the outside: Essays on virtual and real space); and radhika mohanram. Black body: Women, colonialism, and space (review)Hypatia 19 (3): 209-216. 2004.
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67Ethical slippages, shattered horizons, and the zebra striping of the unconscious: Fanon on social, bodily, and psychical spacePhilosophy and Geography 7 (1): 9-24. 2004.While Sigmund Freud and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty both acknowledge the role that spatiality plays in human life, neither pays any explicit attention to the intersections of race and space. It is Franz Fanon who uses psychoanalysis and phenomenology to provide an account of how the psychical and lived bodily existence of black people is racially constituted by a racist world. More precisely, as I argue in this paper, Fanon's work demonstrates how psychical and bodily spatiality cannot be adequately u…Read more
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61Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and FeminismIndiana University Press. 2001.According to Shannon Sullivan, thinking about the body as being in transaction with its social, political, cultural, and physical surroundings is not a new idea.
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56The Physiology of Sexist and Racist OppressionOxford University Press USA. 2015.While gender and race often are considered socially constructed, this book argues that they are physiologically constituted through the biopsychosocial effects of sexism and racism. This means that to be fully successful, critical philosophy of race and feminist philosophy need to examine not only the financial, legal, political and other forms of racist and sexism oppression, but also their physiological operations. Examining a complex tangle of affects, emotions, knowledge, and privilege, The …Read more
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51White Ignorance and Colonial OppressionIn Shannon Sullivan & Nancy Tuana (eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, . pp. 153-172. 2007.
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48Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America By Jack TurnerTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 50 (1): 170. 2014.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America by Jack TurnerShannon SullivanJack Turner Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. xv + 199pp, incl. index.Don’t let the size of this slim volume fool you: Awakening to Race is chock-full of fresh insights and original arguments regarding individualism and race in the American de…Read more
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47Remembering the Gift: W.E.B. Du Bois on the Unconscious and Economic Operations of RacismTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 39 (2). 2003.
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46On the Need for a New Ethos of White AntiracismphiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 2 (1): 21-38. 2012.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Need for a New Ethos of White AntiracismShannon SullivanWhite people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.—James Baldwin, The Fire Next TimeIn his classic manifesto on race, The Fire Next Time, James B…Read more
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41Kierkegaard, Choice, and ZentropaTeaching Philosophy 19 (1): 49-64. 1996.This paper outlines the effectiveness of films as a pedagogical tool for teaching philosophy. For the author, a film skillfully explores philosophical issues, capturing students’ attention and providing a setting for discussion. The author focuses on the use of Lars von Trier's Zentropa as a beneficial tool for discussion of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. The film adequately illustrates the two positions of the aesthete and the judge, and demonstrates the adverse affects of avoiding choice in one's li…Read more
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39Pragmatist feminism as ecological ontology: Reflections onHypatia 17 (4): 201-217. 2002.: In my response to the comments of Vincent Colapietro, Charlene Seigfried, and Gail Weiss on Living Across and Through Skins (Sullivan 2001), I explain pragmatist feminism as an ecological ontology that understands bodies and environments as dynamically co-constitutive. I then discuss the relationship of pragmatist feminism to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Nietzschean genealogy, and Darwinian evolutionary theory. Some of the specific concepts I examine include the anonymous body, the bodying o…Read more
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35Reconfiguring Gender with John Dewey: Habit, Bodies, and Cultural ChangeHypatia 15 (1): 23-42. 2000.This paper demonstrates how John Dewey's notion of habit can help us understand gender as a constitutive structure of bodily existence. Bringing Dewey's pragmatism in conjunction with Judith Butler's concept of performativity, 1 provide an account of how rigid binary configurations of gender might be transformed at the level of both individual habit and cultural construct.
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34Teaching as a PragmatistTeaching Philosophy 20 (4): 401-419. 1997.Drawing on the work of John Dewey (but addressing non-foundational epistemologies generally), the author argues that if academic philosophers take seriously the claim that theory and practice are reciprocally determined, then they should take seriously the task of intelligently experimenting with teaching practices in order to refine theories of knowledge and, on this basis, improve teaching practices. This paper explores one way of relating non-foundational epistemology to classroom practices. …Read more
Charlotte, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Continental Philosophy |
Philosophy of the Americas |