Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: “Materialism” is today an essentially contested concept, and its usage in a variety of neo-Marxist, feminist, and gender theories is radically discrepant. Similarly its cognates, such as material, materiality, or materialization, carry diverse and often apparently incommensurate meanings. In what follows I bring into engagement, through a discussion of the work of Simone de Beauvoir, several genres of theory that focus on materialism and its cognates. One is a set of Marxist-inflected, structuralist, discourses in which “materialism” refers to the production of social structures (widely conceived to include large-scale social institutions, norms, and so forth, as well as those structures that organize economic production) as effects of human practices. These discourses are also “realist” in approach, insofar as they presuppose the existence of the material world, and of ourselves as material organisms, irrespective of the conceptual lenses through which we describe them; but they are also “social constructionist” insofar as consciousness is seen as the effect of the organization of practices to meet material needs.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In recent years interpreters of Beauvoir are increasingly insisting that to read Beauvoir in terms of either a philosophy of gender or a philosophy of sexual difference is to fail to do justice to her work. These interpreters urge us to read with the multiple ambiguities of Beauvoir's analysis rather than to evade them. In this paper, I argue that reading with the ambiguities in Beauvoir's arguments opens up the relevance of her ethics to contemporary debates in feminist philosophy and, specifically to the task of formulating a satisfactory feminist theory of moral agancy.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In the course of this paper, I am going to deal with Simone de Beauvoir’s ambivalent relationship with psychoanalysis, she uses it to understand how women become subjects, yet, is wary of its theoretical assumptions and political implications. This leads her to re- invent a theory of subjectivity that is indebted to psychoanalysis, but gives much more space to our social and political worlds in structuring the self. Her theory of the subject is very different from the Lacanian inclined French Feminists ( Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixous) who she encountered in the 60’s and 70’s. They see the social as structured by a psycho-symbolic order and thereby diminish the transformative effects of the social and politics worlds.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: In this paper, I ask if Giorgio Agamben has provided any solutions to the problems he has posed. The two key issues I identify in his work are the increasing predominance of bio-power (including neo-liberal politics, the growth of the global economy) and the growing permanence of the state of exception--that is, prerogative power. I extend his notions of power as well as democratic agency by drawing on Foucault's notions of power's dispersal, bio-power, and resistance as well as Simone de Beauvoir's critique of exploitative relations and her solution--authentic love. Finally, I apply these ideas to power dynamics--both economic and politica--on the U.S. southern border.