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Dialogues On Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Ladelle Mcwhorter, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

Shelley Tremain, of the blog Dialogues on Disability, interviews Ladelle McWhorter about her career, upbringing, and life experiences.

Why Life Now?, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

As we struggle to understand and prepare ourselves for climate change, the effects of globalized neoliberal capitalism, and violence (both govenmental and extra-governmental) on a planetary scale, we also struggle to name what it is that we cherish and hope to foster and protect as well as what it is that, of itself opposes the forces that may well destroy us. One of the words that has emerged in this context is life.

Philosophers do well to pay close attention to any concept that attains such centrality and exercises such power in our thinking, which is one reason to be …

The Next Fifty Years, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

Continental philosophy tends to be very textual, defined not so much by a set of problems as by a set of interpretive practices. We read Levinas or Irigaray and write interpretations of those texts. Of course, we do more than issue commentary; we think through texts, grappling with problems, concepts, and historical and cultural phenomena. Still, most of our work remains closely tied to texts. Consequently, it often reproduces a distinction between primary and secondary philosophical work that we might question. Nobody would deny the creativity of John Sallis’ or David Wood’s work or that of Debra Bergoffen or Kelly …

Queer Economies, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Queer defies categorization and resists preset developmental trajectories. Practices of queering identities emerged near the end of the twentieth century as ways of resisting normalizing networks of power/knowledge. But how effective are queer practices at resisting networks of power/knowledge (including disciplines) that are not primarily normalizing in their functioning? This essay raises that question in light of expanding neoliberal discourses and institutions which, in some quarters at least, themselves undermine normalized identities in favor of a proliferation of personal styles susceptible to governance through market forces. Special attention is given to Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics in …

Book Panel Response: Symposium On Ladelle Mcwhorter's Racism And Sexual Oppression In Anglo-America: A Genealogy, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Unfortunately I do not have space to address individually each issue these four papers raise. Instead, I will first situate my work in relation to identity politics and address fears that my approach is reductive. Then, building on comments from Professors Wilkerson and Al-Saji, I will offer some remarks about aims, methods, and shortcomings.

[Introduction To] Racism And Sexual Oppression In Anglo-America: A Genealogy, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Bookshelf

Does the black struggle for civil rights make common cause with the movement to foster queer community, protest anti-queer violence or discrimination, and demand respect for the rights and sensibilities of queer people? Confronting this emotionally charged question, Ladelle McWhorter reveals how a carefully structured campaign against abnormality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries encouraged white Americans to purge society of so-called biological contaminants, people who were poor, disabled, black, or queer. Building on a legacy of savage hate crimes—such as the killings of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd—McWhorter shows that racism, sexual oppression, and discrimination against the …

Practicing Practicing, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

"There is something ludicrous in philosophical discourse," Michel Foucault writes, "when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it... " (Foucault 1985, 9). In our age of moral relativism and multiculturalism, it is easy to hear in this sentence a simple condemnation of intellectuals who pose as authorities on questions of belief, and it is all too easy to agree; yes, of course, we ought not tell other people what to think. But given the issues, directions, and investments of Foucault's work, especially in The Use of …

Rites Of Passing: Foucault, Power, And Same-Sex Commitment Ceremonies, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

According to Catherine Bell, "The popular contention that ritual and religion decline in proportion to modernization has been something of a sociological truism since the mid-19th century". Conventional wisdom maintains that ritual practices just don't hold central importance in the lives of those raised in the industrialized world as compared with the importance such things had for our distant ancestors or for our contemporaries in non-industrial societies. Some have contended that this is because ritual tends to be strongly correlated with pre-scientific cosmological beliefs that our society has for the most part outgrown. But for whatever reason, " [c]omparatively speaking," …

Feminist Interpretations Of David Hume By Anne Jaap Jacobson (Book Review), Miriam S. Mccormick

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In this latest addition to the Re-reading the Canon series (a series of collections each devoted to feminist interpretations of a single philosopher), we are offered thirteen essays on Hume's philosophy, covering his views on metaphysics, epistemology, moral philosophy, religion, aesthetics politics, and history. They address all of his main works and many of his less discussed essays. This diverse collection is bound together by the theme of feminism, but how this theme works itself in varies considerably from essay to essay. There are, broadly, four different ways that feminism enters into the interpretations.

[Introduction To] Bodies And Pleasures: Foucault And The Politics Of Sexual Normalization, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Bookshelf

Sexual identities are dangerous, Michel Foucault tells us. Categories of desire harden into stereotypes by which the forces of normalization hold us and judge us. In Bodies and Pleasures, Ladelle McWhorter reads Foucault from an original and personal angle, motivated by the differences this experience has made in her life. At the same time, her analysis advances discussion of key issues in Foucault scholarship: the genealogical critique, the status of the subject and humanism, essentialism versus social construction, and the relationships between identity, community, and political action. Weaving her own experience of coming to grips with her lesbian sexual …

Beyond Pluralism: Foucault's Strategic Counter To Heterosexist Categories, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Most nonheterosexuals want to be guaranteed civil rights without regard to sexual practices; nevertheless, quite often, gay and lesbian activists formulate demands in ways that de-emphasize practice and emphasize identity. For example, instead of saying, "My having sex with women is irrelevant to the question of whether I should have custody of my child," a lesbian activist might say, "My lesbian identity is as moral and healthy as heterosexual identity and therefore should not prevent me from having custody of my child." The general claim is that lesbian or gay personhood is as good as heterosexual personhood, so lesbians and …

Absolute Margaret: Margaret More Roper And "Well Learned" Men, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

This article suggests that Margaret More Roper's 1534 letter to Alice Alington is an important witness to Tudor ideas of patriarchy and the history of gender identity. In 1557 William Ras tell was the first of many to question not only Margaret's authorship of the letter, but also her acquiescence to authorities and opposition to her father. Evidence suggests, however, that Margaret was a part of Erasmus's humanist network of friendship, remained so after More's refusal to swear the oath and his imprisonment, and that her appeals to her father were genuine. By the time Margaret and More debated conformity, …