Philosophy | Feminist Making, Doing, & Sensing - 17th Meeting of philoSOPHIA

Publisher description of collection: Although feminist phenomenology is traditionally rooted in philosophy, the issues with which it engages sit at the margins of philosophy and a number of other disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. This interdisciplinarity is emphasised in the present collection. Rethinking Feminist Phenomenology focuses on emerging trends in feminist phenomenology from a range of both established and new scholars. It covers foundational feminist issues in phenomenology, feminist phenomenological methods, and applied phenomenological work in politics, ethics, and on the body. The book is divided into three parts, starting with new methodological approaches to feminist phenomenology and moving on to address popular discourses in feminist phenomenology that explore ethical and political, embodied, and performative perspectives.

Publisher description: The advent of photography revolutionized perception, making visible what was once impossible to see with the human eye. In At the Edge of Sight, Shawn Michelle Smith engages these dynamics of seeing and not seeing, focusing attention as much on absence as presence, on the invisible as the visible. Exploring the limits of photography and vision, she asks: What fails to register photographically, and what remains beyond the frame? What is hidden by design, and what is obscured by cultural blindness? Smith studies manifestations of photography's brush with the unseen in her own photographic work and across the wide-ranging images of early American photographers, including F. Holland Day, Eadweard Muybridge, Andrew J. Russell, Chansonetta Stanley Emmons, and Augustus Washington. She concludes by showing how concerns raised in the nineteenth century remain pertinent today in the photographs of Abu Ghraib. Ultimately, Smith explores the capacity of photography to reveal what remains beyond the edge of sight.

Publisher description: In Beyond the Gender Binary, poet, artist, and LGBTQIA+ rights advocate Alok Vaid-Menon deconstructs, demystifies, and reimagines the gender binary.

Publisher description: Black Art and Aesthetics comprises essays, poems, interviews, and over 50 images from artists and writers: GerShun Avilez, Angela Y. Davis, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Theaster Gates, Aracelis Girmay, Jeremy Matthew Glick, Deborah Goffe, James B. Haile III, Vijay Iyer, Isaac Julien, Benjamin Krusling, Daphne Lamothe, George E. Lewis, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Meleko Mokgosi, Wangechi Mutu, Fumi Okiji, Nell Painter, Mickaella Perina, Kevin Quashie, Claudia Rankine, Claudia Schmuckli, Evie Shockley, Paul C. Taylor, Kara Walker, Simone White, and Mabel O. Wilson. The stellar contributors practice Black aesthetics by engaging intersectionally with class, queer sexuality, female embodiment, dance vocabularies, coloniality, Afrodiasporic music, Black post-soul art, Afropessimism, and more. Black aesthetics thus restores aesthetics to its full potential by encompassing all forms of sensation and imagination in art, culture, design, everyday life, and nature and by creating new ways of reckoning with experience, identity, and resistance. Highlighting wide-ranging forms of Black aesthetics across the arts, culture, and theory, Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings provides an unprecedented view of a field enjoying a global resurgence. Black aesthetics materializes in communities of artists, activists, theorists, and others who critique racial inequities, create new forms of interiority and relationality, uncover affective histories, and develop strategies for social justice.

Publisher description: In Breathing Aesthetics Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay shows how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied and experienced through respiration. They identify responses to the crisis in breathing in aesthetic practices ranging from the film work of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta to the disability diaries of Bob Flanagan, to the Black queer speculative fiction of Renee Gladman. In readings of these and other minoritarian works of experimental film, endurance performance, ecopoetics, and cinema-vérité, Tremblay contends that articulations of survival now depend on the management and dispersal of respiratory hazards. In so doing, they reveal how an aesthetic attention to breathing generates historically, culturally, and environmentally situated tactics and strategies for living under precarity.

Publisher description: A secret history of craft told through lost and overlooked texts that illuminate our understanding of current art practice. "Craft" is a contested concept in art history and a vital category through which to understand contemporary art. Through craft, materials, techniques, and tools are investigated and their histories explored in order to reflect on the politics of labor and on the extraordinary complexity of the made world around us. This anthology offers an ethnography of craft, surveying its shape-shifting identities in the context of progressive art and design through writings by artists and makers as well as poetry, fiction, anthropology, and sociology. It maps a secret history of craft through lost and overlooked texts that consider pedagogy, design, folk art, the factory, and new media in ways that illuminate our understanding of current art practice. Recently, the idea of craft has been employed strategically- to confront issues of gender or global development, to make a stand against artistic academicism, or to engage with making processes-some distinctly archaic-employed to suggest the abject and the everyday. Craft activism, or craftivism, suggests a new political purpose for the handmade. Deep anxieties drive today's technophilia, and artists, designers, and makers turn such anxieties into a variety of dynamic engagements. The contributors' reflections on new technologies and materials, lost and found worlds of handwork, and the politics of work all throw light on craft as process, product, and ideology. Craft will serve as a vital resource for understanding technologies, materials, techniques, and tools through the lens of craft in contemporary art.

Publisher description: When the body is foregrounded in artwork - as in much contemporary performance, sculptural installation and video work - so is gendered and sexualised difference. Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes looks to interactions between art history, theory, curation, and studio-based practices to theorise the phenomenological import of this embodied gender difference in contemporary art. The essays in this collection are rooted in a wide variety of disciplines, including art-making, curating, and art history and criticism, with many of the authors combining roles of curator, artist and writer. This interdisciplinary approach enables the book to bridge the theory-practice divide and highlight new perspectives emerging from creative arts research. Fresh insights are offered on feminist aesthetics, women's embodied experience, curatorial and art historical method, art world equity, and intersectional concerns. It engages with epistemological assertions of 'how the body feels', how the land has creative agency in Indigenous art, and how the use of emotional or affective registers may form one's curatorial method. This anthology represents a significant contribution to a broader resurgence of feminist thought, methodology, and action in contemporary art, particularly in creative practice research. It will be of particular value to students and researchers in art history, visual culture, cultural studies, and gender studies, in addition to museum and gallery professionals specialising in contemporary art.

Publisher description: A trans artist explores how masculinity was imposed on her as a boy and continues to haunt her as a girl--and how we might reimagine gender for the twenty-first century. Vivek Shraya has reason to be afraid. Throughout her life she's endured acts of cruelty and aggression for being too feminine as a boy and not feminine enough as a girl. In order to survive childhood, she had to learn to convincingly perform masculinity. As an adult, she makes daily compromises to steel herself against everything from verbal attacks to heartbreak. Now, with raw honesty, Shraya delivers an important record of the cumulative damage caused by misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, releasing trauma from a body that has always refused to assimilate. I'm Afraid of Men is a journey from camouflage to a riot of colour and a blueprint for how we might cherish all that makes us different and conquer all that makes us afraid.

Publisher description: A meditation in the spirit of John Berger and bell hooks on art as protest, contemplation, and beauty in politically perilous times As people consider how to respond to a resurgence of racist, xenophobic populism, A Mouth Is Always Muzzled tells an extraordinary story of the ways art brings hope in perilous times. Weaving disparate topics from sugar and British colonialism to attacks on free speech and Facebook activism and traveling a jagged path across the Americas, Africa, India, and Europe, Natalie Hopkinson, former culture writer for the Washington Post and The Root, argues that art is where the future is negotiated. Part post-colonial manifesto, part history of British Caribbean, part exploration of art in the modern world, A Mouth Is Always Muzzled is a dazzling analysis of the insistent role of art in contemporary politics and life. In crafted, well-honed prose, Hopkinson knits narratives of culture warriors: painter Bernadette Persaud, poet Ruel Johnson, historian Walter Rodney, novelist John Berger, and provocative African American artist Kara Walker, whose homage to the sugar trade Sugar Sphinx electrified American audiences. A Mouth Is Always Muzzled is a moving meditation documenting the artistic legacy generated in response to white supremacy, brutality, domination, and oppression. In the tradition of Paul Gilroy, it is a cri de coeur for the significance of politically bold--even dangerous--art to all people and nations.

Publisher Description of collection: Through its impact on students in their lives in and beyond college, and recognizing the porous boundary between the classroom and the "real world," SoTL can offer insights into broader societal issues, offer evidence of activities that facilitate everyday learning, promote intrinsic motivation, better support people from underrepresented communities, or uncover the ripple effects of changing educational environments.

Publisher description: Ivan Coyote is one of North America's preeminent storytellers and performers. In their latest, Ivan takes on the patriarchy and the political, as well as the intimate and the personal in these beguiling and revealing stories of what it means to be trans and non-binary today, at a time in their life when they must carry the burden of heartbreaking history with them, while combatting those who would misgender them or deny their very existence. Rebent Sinner is the work of an accomplished artist whose plain truths about their experience will astound readers with their utter, breathtaking humanity.

Publisher description: Indigenous researchers are knowledge seekers who work to progress Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing in a modern and constantly evolving context. This book describes a research paradigm shared by Indigenous scholars in Canada and Australia, and demonstrates how this paradigm can be put into practice. Relationships don't just shape Indigenous reality, they are our reality. Indigenous researchers develop relationships with ideas in order to achieve enlightenment in the ceremony that is Indigenous research. Indigenous research is the ceremony of maintaining accountability to these relationships. For researchers to be accountable to all our relations, we must make careful choices in our selection of topics, methods of data collection, forms of analysis and finally in the way we present information. I'm an Opaskwayak Cree from northern Manitoba currently living in the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales, Australia. I'm also a father of three boys, a researcher, son, uncle, teacher, world traveller, knowledge keeper and knowledge seeker. As an educated Indian, I've spent much of my life straddling the Indigenous and academic worlds. Most of my time these days is spent teaching other Indigenous knowledge seekers (and my kids) how to accomplish this balancing act while still keeping both feet on the ground.

Publisher description: The senses are made, not given. This revolutionary realization has come as of late to inform research across the social sciences and humanities, and is currently inspiring groundbreaking experimentation in the world of art and design, where the focus is now on mixing and manipulating the senses. The Sensory Studies Manifesto tracks these transformations and opens multiple lines of investigation into the diverse ways in which human beings sense and make sense of the world. This unique volume treats the human sensorium as a dynamic whole, which is best approached from historical, anthropological, geographic, and sociological perspectives. In doing so, it has altered our understanding of sense perception by directing attention to the sociality of sensation and the cultural mediation of sense experience and expression. David Howes challenges the assumptions of mainstream Western psychology by foregrounding the agency, interactivity, creativity, and wisdom of the senses as shaped by culture. The Sensory Studies Manifesto sets the stage for a radical reorientation of research in the human sciences and artistic practice.

Publisher description: Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound is a World is an invitation to 'cut a hole in the sky to world inside.' Billy-Ray Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder sadness and pain like theirs without giving up on the future. His poems and essays upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where 'everyone is at least a little gay.

Publisher description: This zine covers several topics on feminism, politics, rape culture, and women in the media with handwritten entries, art, web reprints, lists, poems, photographs and comics. Contributors also address DIY projects, organic food, bicycling, yoga, popular culture and menstruation. Yes Ma'am also regularly hosts a feminist discussion event in Austin, Texas.

Publisher Description: The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability is a revolutionary collection encompassing the most innovative and insurgent work in philosophy of disability. Edited and anthologized by disabled philosopher Shelley Lynn Tremain, this book challenges how disability has historically been represented and understood in philosophy: it critically undermines the detrimental assumptions that various subfields of philosophy produce; resists the institutionalized ableism of academia to which these assumptions contribute; and boldly articulates new anti-ableist, anti-sexist, anti-racist, queer, anti-capitalist, anti-carceral, and decolonial insights and perspectives that counter these assumptions. This rebellious and groundbreaking book's chapters-most of which have been written by disabled philosophers-are wide-ranging in scope and invite a broad readership. The chapters underscore the eugenic impetus at the heart of bioethics; talk back to the whiteness of work on philosophy and disability with which philosophy of disability is often conflated; and elaborate phenomenological, poststructuralist, and materialist approaches to a variety of phenomena.

Publisher Description: In a revolutionary departure from everything we've been told about body-positivity, The Body Is Not an Apology founder Sonya Renee Taylor explicitly makes the connection between radical self-acceptance and social justice. Systems of oppression thrive off of our inability to make peace with bodies and difference. When we develop the ability to honor difference and radically accept ourselves, we have the capacity and desire to apply those skills to the larger world. Radical self love not only dismantles shame and self loathing in us, but has the power to dismantle global systems of injustice, because when we make true peace with our bodies, only then do we have the capacity to truly make peace with the bodies of the others. The purpose of this book is to get us to stop treating our bodies like cars, to stop acting as if our minds are not part of our bodies. Reading this book will move us beyond these fraught and compartmentalized lives, where we easily forget that we are whole humans having whole human experiences in our bodies.

Publisher Description: Lambda Literary Award winning poet and essayist and long-time disability justice advocate Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha writes passionately and personally about disability justice in her latest book of essays. Discussing subjects such as the creation of care webs, collective access, and radically accessible spaces, she also imparts her own survivor skills and wisdom based on her years of activist work, empowering the disabled - in particular, those in queer and/or BIPOC communities - and granting them the necessary tools by which they can imagine a future where no one is left behind.

Publisher Description: Practices of cosmetic surgery have grown exponentially in recent years in both over-developed and developing worlds. What comprises cosmetic surgery has also changed, with a plethora of new procedures and an extraordinary rise of non-surgical operations. As the practices of cosmetic surgery have multiplied and diversified, so have feminist approaches to understanding them. For the first time leading feminist scholars including Susan Bordo, Kathy Davis, Vivian Sobchack and Kathryn Pauly Morgan, have been brought together in this comprehensive volume to reveal the complexity of feminist engagements with the phenomenon that still remains vastly more popular among women. Offering a diversity of theoretical, methodological and political approaches Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer presents not only the latest, cutting-edge research in this field but a challenging and unique approach to the issue that will be of key interest to researchers across the social sciences and humanities.

Publisher Description: Drawing on the work of Foucault and Western confessional writings, this book challenges the transhistorical and commonsense views of confession as an innate impulse resulting in the psychological liberation of the confessing subject. Instead, confessional desire is argued to be contingent and constraining, and alternatives to confessional subjectivity are explored.

Publisher Description: The fields of Critical Disability Studies and Critical Animal Studies are growing rapidly, but how do the implications of these endeavours intersect? Disability and Animality: Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies explores some of the ways that the oppression of more-than-human animals and disabled humans are interconnected. Composed of thirteen chapters by an international team of specialists plus a Foreword by Lori Gruen, the book is divided into four themes: Intersections of Ableism and Speciesism Thinking Animality and Disability together in Political and Moral Theory Neurodiversity and Critical Animals Studies Melancholy, Madness, and Misfits. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral scholars, interested in Animal Studies, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, philosophy, and literary analysis. It will also appeal to those interested in the relationships between speciesism, ableism, saneism, and racism in animal agriculture, culture, built environments, and ethics.

Publisher Description: Dissonant Methods is an innovative collection that probes how, by approaching teaching creatively, postsecondary instructors can resist the constrictions of neoliberalism. Based on the foundations of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, whereby educators are asked to explore teaching as scholarship, these essays offer concrete and practical meditations on resistant and sustainable teaching. The contributors seek to undermine forms of oppression frequently found in higher education, and instead advance a vision of the university that upholds ideals such as critical thinking, creativity, and inclusivity.

Publisher Description: In Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader, Keilty and Dean put the field of Information Studies into critical conversation with studies of gender, sexuality, race, and technology. In classic and original essays, renowned scholars from a range of disciplines think through a broad array of information and technology philosophies and practices. Conceiving of "information" in a broad sense, the contributors reevaluate conventional methods and topics within Information Studies to examine encounters with information phenomena and technology that do not lend themselves easily to the scientific and behaviorist modes of description that have long dominated the field. A Foreword, Introduction, and Afterword provide helpful context to the reader's 27 essays, arranged around topics that include information as gendered labor, cyborgs and cyberfeminism, online environments, information organization, information extraction and flow, archives, and performance.

Publisher Description: Disability, like questions of race, gender, and class, is one of the most provocative topics among theorists and philosophers today. This volume, situated at the intersection of feminist theory and disability studies, addresses questions about the nature of embodiment, the meaning of disability, the impact of public policy on those who have been labeled disabled, and how we define the norms of mental and physical ability. The essays here bridge the gap between theory and activism by illuminating structures of power and showing how historical and cultural perceptions of the human body have been informed by and contributed to the oppression of women and disabled people.

Publisher description of collection: Over the past decade, a climate of polarization and hyper-partisanship has swept Saskatchewan into a near-perpetual state of anger and social division. Embers of discontent have been fanned into flames by opportunistic politicians and their industry cronies, who have together sought to rebrand the province into a materialistic, macho alter-ego called the New Saskatchewan. These actions are not without consequences. In Divided, diverse voices describe the impact on their lives and communities when simmering wedge issues burst open on social media and in public spaces. The collection dives deep into the long set-up to this moment, from the colonial past to the four decades of neoliberal economics that have widened social and economic gaps across all sectors. Divided positions Saskatchewan as a fascinating and unexpected case study of the global trends of division and provides testament to the resiliency of a vision of social solidarity against all odds.

Publisher description: Queering Philosophy provides a critical introduction to and engagement with current conversations and emerging themes at the nexus of queer theory and philosophy. Much more than a summary of recent work, this book presents an intersectional, thematic approach that highlights scholarship at the cutting edge of queer, feminist, disability, and critical race theories, defines the parameters of contemporary queer philosophy, and argues that a queer philosophy must aim to queer philosophy. Queering Philosophy explores the possibility of doing philosophy otherwise. In doing so, the book explores feminist, critical race, and critical disability theories to advance a queer feminist critique, and challenges the unacknowledged whiteness and other forms of marginalization that have characterized the mainstream of philosophy and queer theory's archive. This accessible and important book is ideal for courses in philosophy and gender, sexuality, race and disability studies.

Publisher description of collection: Phenomenology, the philosophical method that seeks to uncover the taken-for-granted presuppositions, habits, and norms that structure everyday experience, is increasingly framed by ethical and political concerns. Critical phenomenology foregrounds experiences of marginalization, oppression, and power in order to identify and transform common experiences of injustice that render “the familiar” a site of oppression for many. In Fifty Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, leading scholars present fresh readings of classic phenomenological topics and introduce newer concepts developed by feminist theorists, critical race theorists, disability theorists, and queer and trans theorists that capture aspects of lived experience that have traditionally been neglected. By centering historically marginalized perspectives, the chapters in this book breathe new life into the phenomenological tradition and reveal its ethical, social, and political promise. This volume will be an invaluable resource for teaching and research in continental philosophy; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; critical race theory; disability studies; cultural studies; and critical theory more generally.

Publisher description: Heyes' monograph in feminist philosophy is on the connection between the idea of "normalization"--which per Foucault is a mode or force of control that homogenizes a population--and the gendered body. Drawing on Foucault and Wittgenstein, she argues that the predominant picture of the self--a picture that presupposes an "inner" core of the self that is expressed, accurately or not, by the outer body--obscures the connection between contemporary discourses and practices of self-transformation and the forces of normalization. In other words, pictures of the self can hold us captive when they are being read from the outer self--the body--rather than the inner self, and we can express our inner self by working on our outer body to conform. Articulating this idea with a mix of the theoretical and the practical, she looks at case studies involving transgender people, weight-loss dieting, and cosmetic surgery. Her concluding chapters look at the difficult issue of how to distinguish non-normalizing practices of the self from normalizing ones, and makes suggestions about how feminists might conceive of subjects as embodied and enmeshed in power relations yet also capable of self-transformation. The subject of normalization and its relationship to sex/gender is a major one in feminist theory; Heyes' book is unique in her masterful use of Foucault; its clarity, and its sophisticated mix of the theoretical and the anecdotal. It will appeal to feminist philosophers and theorists.

Publisher description: In this pathbreaking work, Jasbir K. Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. These incorporations have shifted many queers from their construction as figures of death (via the AIDS epidemic) to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity (gay marriage and reproductive kinship). Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. These "homonationalisms" are deployed to distinguish upright "properly hetero," and now "properly homo," U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes--especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs--who are cordoned off for detention and deportation. Puar combines transnational feminist and queer theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian philosophy, and technoscience criticism, and draws from an extraordinary range of sources, including governmental texts, legal decisions, films, television, ethnographic data, queer media, and activist organizing materials and manifestos. Looking at various cultural events and phenomena, she highlights troublesome links between terrorism and sexuality: in feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, in the triumphal responses to the Supreme Court's Lawrence decision repealing anti-sodomy laws, in the measures Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers take to avoid being profiled as terrorists, and in what Puar argues is a growing Islamophobia within global queer organizing.

Publisher description: Thinking with Irigaray takes up Irigaray's challenge to think beyond the androcentric, one-subject culture, identifying much that is useful and illuminative in Irigaray's work while also questioning some of her assumptions and claims. Some contributors reject outright her prescriptions for changing our culture, others suggest that her prescriptions are inconsistent with the basic ethical concerns of her project, and still others attempt to identify blind spots in her work. By confronting and challenging the mechanisms of masculine domination Irigaray has identified and applying these insights to a wide range of practical and contemporary concerns, including popular media representations of women's sexuality, feminist practice in the arts, political resistance, and yoga, the contributors demonstrate the unique potential of Irigaray's thought within feminist philosophy and gender studies.

Publisher description: Undoing Gender constitutes Judith Butler's recent reflections on gender and sexuality, focusing on new kinship, psychoanalysis and the incest taboo, transgender, intersex, diagnostic categories, social violence, and the tasks of social transformation. In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern--and fail to govern--gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival. And to "do" one's gender in certain ways sometimes implies "undoing" dominant notions of personhood. She writes about the "New Gender Politics" that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory.

Publisher description of collection: Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social Justice seeks to explore the multiple, variable, and embodied experiences of fat oppression and fat activisms. Moving beyond an analysis of fat oppression as singular, this book will aim to unpack the volatility of fat--the mutability of fat embodiments as they correlate with other embodied subjectivities, and the threshold where fat begins to be reviled, celebrated, or amended. In addition, Thickening Fat explores the full range of intersectional and liminal analyses that push beyond the simple addition of two or more subjectivities, looking instead at the complex alchemy of layered and unstable markers of difference and privilege. Cognizant that the concept of intersectionality has been filled out in a plurality of ways, Thickening Fat poses critical questions around how to render analysis of fatness intersectional and to thicken up intersectionality, where intersectionality is attenuated to the shifting and composite and material dimensions to identity, rather than reduced to an "add difference and stir" approach.