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288Uncomfortably Close to HumanFeminist Philosophy Quarterly 8 (3). 2022.Social robots are marketed as human tools promising us a better life. This marketing strategy commodifies not only the labor of care but the caregiver as well, conjuring a fantasy of technoliberal futurism that echoes a colonial past. Against techno-utopian fantasies of a good life as one involving engineered domestic help, I draw here on the techno-dystopian television show Humans (stylized HUMⱯNS) to suggest that we should find our desires for such help unsettling. At the core of my argument i…Read more
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527More than Skin Deep: a Response to “The Whiteness of AI”Philosophy and Technology 34 (4): 1961-1966. 2021.This commentary responds to Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal’s call for further investigations of the whiteness of AI. My response focuses on three overlapping projects needed to more fully understand racial bias in the construction of AI and its representations in pop culture: unpacking the intersections of gender and other variables with whiteness in AI’s construction, marketing, and intended functions; observing the many different ways in which whiteness is scripted, and noting how white racial f…Read more
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35Unsettling Feminist Philosophy: An Encounter with Tracey Moffatt's Night CriesHypatia 35 (1): 97-122. 2020.This essay seeks to unsettle feminist philosophy through an encounter with Aboriginal artist Tracey Moffatt, whose perspectives on intergenerational relationships between white women and Indigenous women are shaped by her experiences as the Aboriginal child of a white foster mother growing up in Brisbane, Australia during the 1960s. Moffatt's short experimental film Night Cries provides an important glimpse into the violent intersections of gender, race, and power in intimate life and, in so doi…Read more
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228Review of Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage Free State by Clare Chambers (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2018. 2018.
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229Review of Affirmation, Care Ethics, and LGBT Identity (review)Hypatia Reviews Online 2018. 2018.
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1894False Memory Syndrome: A Feminist Philosophical ApproachHypatia 12 (2). 1997.In this essay, I attempt to outline a feminist philosophical approach to the current debate concerning (allegedly) false memories of childhood sexual abuse. Bringing the voices of feminist philosophers to bear on this issue highlights the implicit and sometimes questionable epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical-political commitments of some therapists and scientists involved in these debates. It also illuminates some current debates in and about feminist philosophy
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57Trump is Gross: Taking Political Taste SeriouslyKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 27 (S2): 23-42. 2017.My 5-year-old granddaughter refers to foods, clothes, and people she does not like as “supergross.” It is a verbiage that I have found myself adopting for talking about many things Trumpian, including the man himself. The gaudy, gold-plated everything in Trump Towers; his ill-fitting suits; his poorly executed fake tan and comb-over; his red baseball cap emblazoned with “Make America Great Again;” his creepy way of talking about women ; his racist vitriol about Blacks, Muslims and Mexicans; his …Read more
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308Trump is Gross: Taking the Politics of Taste (and Distaste) SeriouslyKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 27 (2): 23-42. 2017.This paper advances the somewhat unphilosophical thesis that “Trump is gross” to draw attention to the need to take matters of taste seriously in politics. I begin by exploring the slipperiness of distinctions between aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics, subsequently suggesting that we may need to pivot toward the aesthetic to understand and respond to the historical moment we inhabit. More specically, I suggest that, in order to understand how Donald Trump was elected President of the United S…Read more
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1545Reinterpreting Ryle: A nonbehaviorist analysisJournal of the History of Philosophy 32 (2): 265-90. 1994.This paper argues that the behaviorist label yields a caricature of Ryle's position in The Concept of Mind that cannot be adequately fleshed out by reference to the larger corpus of Rylean texts. On the interpretation of Ryle that I offer here, he is best characterized as an "ontological agnostic." Ryle's aim, I believe, is to develop a nondenotational theory of meaning for mental-conduct terms--a theory of meaning which does not presuppose any metaphysical or ontological theory and, hence, doe…Read more
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47When We Handed Out the Crayolas, They Just Stared at ThemPhilosophy in the Contemporary World 23 (1): 71-90. 2016.In 2008, over 400 children living on the Yearning for Zion Ranch, a rural Texas polygamist community of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS), were forcibly removed from their mothers’ care by State troopers responding to allegations of child abuse. This essay examines the role of neoliberal ideologies and, more specifically, what some queer theorists have identified as ‘metronormativity’ in solidifying a widespread caricature of FLDS mothers as ‘bad’ mothers.…Read more
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2514Research, Teaching and Service: Why Shouldn't Women's Work Count?Journal of Higher Education 67 (1): 46-84. 1996.This article examines one way institutionalized sexism operates in the university setting by examining the gender roles and gender hierarchies implicit in (allegedly gender-neutral) university tenure and promotion policies. Current working assumptions regarding (1) what constitutes good research, teaching, and service and (2) the relative importance of each of these endeavors reflect and perpetuate masculine values and practices, thus preventing the professional advancement of female faculty bot…Read more
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Review of A Question of David: A Disabled Mother's Journey Through Adoption (review)Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering 5 (2): 202-204. 2003.
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210Review of Queering Freedom (review)Apa Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 7 (2): 18-19. 2008.
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326Nomadic Musings: Living and Thinking Queerly.APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 7:1 (2007) 7 (1): 17-20. 2007.Reflections on the importance of epistemic nomadism for women and queers in the academy.
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249Review of Confronting Postmaternal Thinking (review)Apa Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 13 (1): 21-24. 2013.
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143Review of Universitas: The Social Restructuring of American Education (review)Journal of Higher Education 71 (1): 103-105. 2000.
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139Polyamory Is to Polygamy as Queer Is to Barbaric?Radical Philosophy Review 20 (2): 297-328. 2017.This paper critically examines the ways in which dominant poly discourses position polyamorists among other queer and feminist-friendly practices while setting polygamists outside of those practices as the heteronormative and hyper-patriarchal antithesis to queer kinship. I begin by examining the interlocking liberal discourses of freedom, secularism and egalitarianism that frame the putative distinction between polyamory and polygamy. I then argue that the discursive antinomies of polyamory/pol…Read more
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Review of Naked Motherhood (review)Journal of the Association for Research on Motherhood 4 (2): 230-32. 2002.
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193Review of Blended: Writers on the Stepfamily Experience (review)Journal of the Motherhood Initiative 7 (1): 211-12. 2016.
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242Review of Philosophical Inquiries into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering: Maternal Subjects (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2012. 2012.
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521Adoptive maternal bodies: A queer paradigm for rethinking mothering?Hypatia 21 (1): 201-226. 2006.: A pronatalist perspective on maternal bodies renders the adoptive maternal body queer. In this essay, I argue that the queerness of the adoptive maternal body makes it a useful epistemic standpoint from which to critique dominant views of mothering. In particular, exploring motherhood through the lens of adoption reveals the discursive mediation and social regulation of all maternal bodies, as well as the normalizing assumptions of heteronormativity, "reprosexuality," and family homogeneity th…Read more
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3566From Sanitation to Liberation: The Modern and Postmodern Marketing of Menstrual ProductsJournal of Popular Culture 30 (2): 149-68. 1996.
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266Classic Media review of Hedwig and the Angry Inch (review)Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture 1 (1): 125-28. 2015.
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313Commentary on Nancy Nicol’s Politics of the Heart: Recogniiton of Homoparental FamiliesFlorida Philosophical Review 8 (1): 157-163. 2008.This paper comments on the strategies and goals of a politics of recognition as celebrated by Nancy Nicol’s important documentary coverage of the gay and lesbian movement for family rights in Quebec. While agreeing that ending legal discrimination against lgbt families is important, I suggest that political recognition of same-sex families and their children is a too limited goal for queer families and their allies. Moreover, it is a goal, I argue, that often trades on trades on troublesome assu…Read more
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351Multiculturalism: A Challenge to Two Myths of LiberalismRace, Gender and Class 3 (1): 27-48. 1995.This paper sketches a brief account of multiculturalism in order to distinguish it from other positions that have been under attack recently. Following this, we address two prevalent and diametrically opposed criticisms of multiculturalism, namely, that multiculturalism is relativistic, on the one hand, and that it is absolutist, on the other. Both of these criticisms, we argue, simply mask liberal democratic theory's myth- begotten attempt to resolve the tension between the one and the many. …Read more
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38Introduction: Contested TerrainsHypatia 32 (3): 477-487. 2017.Editors' introduction to a special issue of Hypatia on "Contested Terrains: Women of Color, Third World Women, Feminisms and Geopolitics
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475Real (M)othering: The Metaphysics of Maternity in Children's Literature.In Sally Haslanger & Charlotte Witt (eds.), Real (M)othering: The Metaphysics of Maternity in Children's Literature. In Sally Haslanger and Charlotte Witt, eds. Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 171-194., Cornell University Press. pp. 171-194. 2005.This paper examines the complexity and fluidity of maternal identity through an examination of narratives about "real motherhood" found in children's literature. Focusing on the multiplicity of mothers in adoption, I question standard views of maternity in which gestational, genetic and social mothering all coincide in a single person. The shortcomings of traditional notions of motherhood are overcome by developing a fluid and inclusive conception of maternal reality as authored by a child's ow…Read more
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283In Defense of Happiness: Presidential Address to the Florida Philosophical Association.Florida Philosophical Review 5 (1): 1-15. 2005.In this address, I defend happiness as a disposition conducive to, or at least compatible with, a view of the world that is both cognitively and politically valuable, that is, both conducive to truth and ethically appropriate.
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