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Chloe Taylor

University of Alberta, Women's and Gender Studies, Faculty Member

University of Alberta, Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies, Faculty Member

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Chloë Taylor is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta. She is trained as a philosopher and her research interests include Critical Animal Studies, food politics, Anthropocene Studies, prison abolitionism, twentieth-century French philosophy, the philosophy of gender and sexuality, Critical Disability Studies, and Mad Studies. She is the author of three monographs and the co-editor of five books.

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Books by Chloe Taylor

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO GENDER AND ANIMALS

by Chloe Taylor, Greta Gaard, Lauren Corman, and Darren Chang

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals, 2024

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals is a diverse and intersectional collection which ex... more The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals is a diverse and intersectional collection which examines human and more-than-human animal relations, as well as the interconnectedness of human and animal oppressions through various lenses. Comprising fifty chapters, the book explores a range of debates and scholarship within important contemporary topics such as companion animals, hunting, agriculture, and animal activist strategies. It also offers timely analyses of zoonotic disease pandemics, mass extinction, and the climate catastrophe, using perspectives including feminist, critical race, anti-colonial, critical disability, and masculinities studies. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals is an essential reference for students in gender studies, sexuality studies, human-animal studies, cultural studies, sociology, and environmental studies.

Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice

Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice, 2021

Prison abolition is at once about the institution of the prison, and a broad, intersectional poli... more Prison abolition is at once about the institution of the prison, and a broad, intersectional political project calling for the end of the social structured by settler colonialism, anti-black racism, and related oppressions. Beyond this, prison abolition is a constructive project that imagines and strives for a transformed world in which justice is not equated with punishment, and accountability is not equated with caging. Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice explores the intersections of the carceral in projects of oppression, while at the same time providing intellectual, pragmatic, and undetermined paths toward abolition.

Composed of sixteen chapters by an international team of scholars and activists, with a Foreword by Perry Zurn and an Afterword by Justin Piché, the book is divided into four themes:
• Prisons and Racism
• Prisons and Settler Colonialism
• Anti-Carceral Feminisms
• Multispecies Carceralities.
This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, activists, and scholars working in the areas of Critical Prison Studies, Critical Criminology, Native Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Black Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Critical Animal Studies, with particular chapters being of interest to scholars and students in other fields, such as, Feminist Legal Studies, Animal Law, Critical Disability Studies, Queer Theory, and Transnational Feminisms.

Disability and Animality: Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies

Disability and Animality: Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies, 2020

The fields of critical disability studies and critical animal studies are growing rapidly, but ho... more The fields of critical disability studies and critical animal studies are growing rapidly, but how do the implications of these endeavors 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 13 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 animal 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.

Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies

Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies, 2020

Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes: An Anti-Carceral Analysis

Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes: An Anti-Carceral Analysis, 2018

This book brings together Foucault's writings on crime and delinquency, on the one hand, and sexu... more This book brings together Foucault's writings on crime and delinquency, on the one hand, and sexuality, on the other, to argue for an anti-carceral feminist Foucauldian approach to sex crimes. The author expands on Foucault’s writings through intersectional explorations of the critical race, decolonial, critical disability, queer and critical trans studies literatures on the prison that have emerged since the publication of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality.
Drawing on Foucault’s insights from his genealogical period, the book argues that those labeled as sex offenders will today be constructed to re-offend twice over, once in virtue of the delinquency with which they are inculcated through criminological discourses and in the criminal punishment system, and second in virtue of the manners in which their sexual offense is taken up as an identity through psychological and sexological discourses. The book includes a discussion of non-retributive responses to crime, including preventative, redistributive, restorative, and transformative justice. It concludes with two appendixes: the original 19th-century medico-legal report on Charles Jouy and its English translation by the author.
Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes will be of interest to feminist philosophers, Continental philosophers, Women’s and Gender Studies scholars, social and political theorists, as well as social scientists and social justice activists.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction

Part I: “Bucolic Pleasures”? Feminist Readings of Foucault
1. The Case of Charles Jouy and Sophie Adam
2. Revising Sex Crime Law
3. Infamous Men and Dangerous Individuals

Part II: Disciplining and Punishing Sex Offenders
4. Feminism, Crime, and Punishment
5. Foucault’s Prison Abolitionism
6. Criminal Queers

Part III: Perverse Implantations
7. The Perverse Implantation and Sex Work
8. Zoosexuality and Interspecies Sexual Assault
9. The Social Construction of the Serial Sex Killer

Conclusion: Transforming Justice
Appendix

Routledge Guidebook to Foucault's The History of Sexuality

Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality is one of the most influential philosophical works of ... more Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality is one of the most influential philosophical works of the twentieth century and has been instrumental in shaping the study of Gender, Feminist Theory and Queer Theory. But Foucault’s writing can be a difficult book to grasp as Foucault assumes a familiarity with the intellectually dominant theories of his time which renders many passages obscure for newcomers to his work.

The Routledge Guidebook to Foucault’s History of Sexuality offers a clear and comprehensive guide to this groundbreaking work, examining:

The historical context in which Foucault wrote

A critical discussion of the text, which examines the relationship between The History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of The Self

The reception and ongoing influence of History of Sexuality

Offering a close reading of the text, this is essential reading for anyone studying this enormously influential work.

Feminist Philosophies of Life, co-edited with Hasana Sharp (August 2016, McGill-Queens University Press)

Much of the history of western ethical thought has revolved around debates about what constitutes... more Much of the history of western ethical thought has revolved around debates about what constitutes a good life, and claims that a good life is achievable only by certain human beings. In Feminist Philosophies of Life, feminist, new materialist, posthumanist, and ecofeminist philosophers challenge this tendency, approaching the question of life from alternative perspectives.

Signalling the importance of distinctively feminist reflections on matters of shared concern, Feminist Philosophies of Life not only exposes the propensity of discourses to normalize and exclude differently abled, racialized, feminized, and gender nonconforming people, it also asks questions about how life is constituted and understood without limiting itself to the human. A collection of articles that focuses on life as an organizing principle for ontology, ethics, and politics, chapters of this study display responses to feminist thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Søren Kierkegaard. Divided into three parts, the book debates the question of life in and against the emerging school of new feminist materialism, provides feminist phenomenological and existentialist accounts of life, and focuses on lives marked by a particular precarity such as disability, incarceration, as well as life in the face of a changing climate.

Calling for a broader account of lived experience, Feminist Philosophies of Life contains persuasive, original, and diverse analyses that address some of the most crucial feminist issues.

Contributors include Christine Daigle (Brock University), Shannon Dea (University of Waterloo), Lindsay Eales (University of Alberta), Elizabeth Grosz (Duke University), Lisa Guenther (Vanderbilt University), Lynne Huffer (Emory University), Ada Jaarsma (Mount Royal University), Stephanie Jenkins (Oregon State University), Ladelle McWhorter (University of Richmond), Jane Barter Moulaison (University of Winnipeg), Astrida Neimanis (University of Sydney), Danielle Peers (University of Alberta), Stephen Seely (Rutgers University), Hasana Sharp (McGill University), Chloë Taylor (University of Alberta), Florentien Verhage (Washington and Lee University), Rachel Loewen Walker (Out Saskatoon), and Cynthia Willett (Emory University).

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

Drawing on the work of Foucault and Western confessional writings, this book challenges the trans... more 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.

Asian Perspectives on Animal Ethics, co-edited with Neil Dalal

To date, philosophical discussions of animal ethics and Critical Animal Studies have been dominat... more To date, philosophical discussions of animal ethics and Critical Animal Studies have been dominated by Western perspectives and Western thinkers. This book makes a novel contribution to animal ethics in showing the range and richness of ideas offered to these fields by diverse Asian traditions.

Asian Perspectives on Animal Ethics is the first of its kind to include the intersection of Asian and European traditions with respect to human and nonhuman relations. Presenting a series of studies focusing on specific Asian traditions, as well as studies that put those traditions in dialogue with Western thinkers, this book looks at Asian philosophical doctrines concerning compassion and nonviolence as these apply to nonhuman animals, as well as the moral rights and status of nonhuman animals in Asian traditions. Using Asian perspectives to explore ontological, ethical and political questions, contributors analyze humanism and post-humanism in Asian and comparative traditions and offer insight into the special ethical relations between humans and other particular species of animals.

Papers by Chloe Taylor

Anti-Carceral Feminism and Sexual Assault—A Defense A Critique of the Critique of the Critique of Carceral Feminism

Most mainstream feminist anti-rape scholarship and activism may be described as carceral feminism... more Most mainstream feminist anti-rape scholarship and activism may be described as carceral feminism, insofar as it fails to engage with critiques of the criminal punishment system and endorses law-and-order responses to sexual and gendered violence. Mainstream feminist anti-rape scholars and activists often view increased conviction rates and longer sentences as a political goal—or, at the very least, are willing to collaborate with police and lament cases where perpetrators of sexual violence are given

Female Sexual Dysfunction, Feminist Psychology, and the Psychiatry of the Normal, in Feminist Studies no. 41, vol. 2 (2015)

Appetiti anormali: Foucault, Atwood e la normalizzazione della dieta carnea (Abnormal Appetites: Foucault, Atwood and the normalization of an animal-based diet Italian translation), in LIBERAZIONI n. 21 Estate 2015

Italian translation of "Abnormal Appetites: Foucault, Atwood, and the Normalization of an Animal-... more

"Foucault e 'l'etica del cibo'" (Foucault and the Ethics of Eating Italian translation) in LIBERAZIONI Rivista di Critica Antispecista Anno V · n. 19 · Inverno 2014

Hommes infâmes, individus dangereux et la violence envers les femmes: relectures féministes de Foucault

Par ses nombreuses études sur l’institutionnalisation psychiatrique et ses travaux sur la prison,... more Par ses nombreuses études sur l’institutionnalisation psychiatrique et ses travaux sur la prison, Michel Foucault fournit une critique durable et influente des pratiques médicales et pénales d’incarcération involontaire. Bien que les académiciens foucaldiens aient été plutôt réceptifs à cette critique, son analyse de cas psychiatriques et pénaux impliquant de la violence envers des filles et des femmes a été jugée problématique dans la littérature féministe. Dans son traitement de ces cas, Foucault est intéressé par les conséquences légo-pénales d’une telle violence pour les protagonistes masculins en ne montrant cependant que peu d’intérêt pour leurs victimes, scrutant les relations de pouvoir entre des hommes violents, la médecine et la loi tout en laissant les relations de pouvoir entre les hommes violents et leurs victimes de côté. Les exemples les plus connus sont les passages où Foucault discute du cas de Charles Jouy et de Sophie Adam dans La volonté de savoir et Les Anormaux, et ses commentaires sur le viol et le détournement de mineur dans « Enfermement, Psychiatrie, Prison, » et « La Loi de la pudeur ». Ces textes ont immédiatement suscités une fervente critique féministe, critique qui s’est perpétuée pendant plus de trente ans. En se concentrant sur les « hommes infâmes » et les « individus dangereux », cet essai argumentera qu’il y a d’autres passages dans l’œuvre de Foucault où il se montre similairement insensible à la violence envers les femmes, bien que ces cas aient attiré moins d’attention critique. Le double objectif de cet essai sera d’examiner, dans un premier temps, ce qui est en jeu pour Foucault dans ses écrits sur les hommes infâmes et les individus dangereux, et dans un second temps, de problématiser l’échec de Foucault en ce qui concerne le traitement des relations de pouvoir entre les sexes dans ces textes.

Abnormal Appetites: Foucault, Atwood, and the Normalization of an Animal-Based Diet

In his lecture series Abnormal, Michel Foucault argues that the abnormal individual is the descen... more In his lecture series Abnormal, Michel Foucault argues that the abnormal individual is the descendant of the monster, and that the monster came in two types: sexual and alimentary. While Foucault traces the genealogy of the sexual monster into the sexually abnormal individual, the alimentary monster is forgotten. This paper thus takes up Foucault‘s work on normalization in order to consider the genealogy of that other monstrous heir, the alimentarily abnormal individual, and pursues it into the twenty-first century. In particular, this paper examines the pathologization of vegetarianism and veganism in the writings of Margaret Atwood and in the invention of a new mental illness, orthorexia nervosa.

Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes

In 1977 Michel Foucault contemplated the idea of punishing rape only as a crime of violence, whil... more In 1977 Michel Foucault contemplated the idea of punishing rape only as a crime of violence, while in 1978 he argued that non-coercive sex between adults and minors should be decriminalized entirely. Feminists have consistently criticized these suggestions by Foucault. This paper argues that these feminist responses have failed to sufficiently understand the theoretical motivations behind Foucault's statements on sex-crime legislation reform, and will offer a new feminist appraisal of Foucault's suggestions.

Disciplinary Relations/Sexual Relations: Feminist and Foucauldian Reflections on Professor-Student Sex

Birth of the Suicidal Subject: Nelly Arcan, Michel Foucault, and Voluntary Death

Michel Foucault argues that it is not sex but death that is the true taboo in the modern, biopol... more Michel Foucault argues that it is not sex but death that is the true
taboo in the modern, biopolitical era. The result is that regular death has been privatised and institutionalised, wars are waged in the name of life, capital punishment has become a scandal, and suicide has become a problem for sociological and psychiatric analysis rather than law. In contrast to the dominant view,
Foucault portrays suicide not as a mark of pathology but as a form of resistance (tragic or pleasurable) to disciplinary power, and argues for an aestheticisation of voluntary death as part of a beautiful life. Through a reading of the writings of Quebecoise author Nelly Arcan, this essay presents but also critiques and
expands upon Foucault’s accounts of suicide, exploring the thesis that the pathological model of suicide produces the subjects that it intends to treat.

The Precarious Lives of Animals: Butler, Coetzee, and Animal Ethics

Foucault and Familial Power

This paper provides an overview of Michel Foucault’s continually changing observations on familia... more This paper provides an overview of Michel Foucault’s continually changing observations on familial power, as well as the feminist-Foucauldian literature on the family. It suggests that these accounts offer fragments of a genealogy of the family that undermine any all-encompassing or transhistorical account of the institution. Approaching the family genealogically, rather than seeking a single model of power that can explain it, shows that far from this institution being a quasi-natural formation or a bedrock of unassailable values, it is in fact a continually contested fiction that masks its own histories of becoming.

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO GENDER AND ANIMALS

by Chloe Taylor, Greta Gaard, Lauren Corman, and Darren Chang

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals, 2024

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals is a diverse and intersectional collection which ex... more The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals is a diverse and intersectional collection which examines human and more-than-human animal relations, as well as the interconnectedness of human and animal oppressions through various lenses. Comprising fifty chapters, the book explores a range of debates and scholarship within important contemporary topics such as companion animals, hunting, agriculture, and animal activist strategies. It also offers timely analyses of zoonotic disease pandemics, mass extinction, and the climate catastrophe, using perspectives including feminist, critical race, anti-colonial, critical disability, and masculinities studies. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals is an essential reference for students in gender studies, sexuality studies, human-animal studies, cultural studies, sociology, and environmental studies.

Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice

Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice, 2021

Prison abolition is at once about the institution of the prison, and a broad, intersectional poli... more Prison abolition is at once about the institution of the prison, and a broad, intersectional political project calling for the end of the social structured by settler colonialism, anti-black racism, and related oppressions. Beyond this, prison abolition is a constructive project that imagines and strives for a transformed world in which justice is not equated with punishment, and accountability is not equated with caging. Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice explores the intersections of the carceral in projects of oppression, while at the same time providing intellectual, pragmatic, and undetermined paths toward abolition.

Composed of sixteen chapters by an international team of scholars and activists, with a Foreword by Perry Zurn and an Afterword by Justin Piché, the book is divided into four themes:
• Prisons and Racism
• Prisons and Settler Colonialism
• Anti-Carceral Feminisms
• Multispecies Carceralities.
This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, activists, and scholars working in the areas of Critical Prison Studies, Critical Criminology, Native Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Black Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Critical Animal Studies, with particular chapters being of interest to scholars and students in other fields, such as, Feminist Legal Studies, Animal Law, Critical Disability Studies, Queer Theory, and Transnational Feminisms.

Disability and Animality: Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies

Disability and Animality: Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies, 2020

The fields of critical disability studies and critical animal studies are growing rapidly, but ho... more The fields of critical disability studies and critical animal studies are growing rapidly, but how do the implications of these endeavors 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 13 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 animal 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.

Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies

Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies, 2020

Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes: An Anti-Carceral Analysis

Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes: An Anti-Carceral Analysis, 2018

This book brings together Foucault's writings on crime and delinquency, on the one hand, and sexu... more This book brings together Foucault's writings on crime and delinquency, on the one hand, and sexuality, on the other, to argue for an anti-carceral feminist Foucauldian approach to sex crimes. The author expands on Foucault’s writings through intersectional explorations of the critical race, decolonial, critical disability, queer and critical trans studies literatures on the prison that have emerged since the publication of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality.
Drawing on Foucault’s insights from his genealogical period, the book argues that those labeled as sex offenders will today be constructed to re-offend twice over, once in virtue of the delinquency with which they are inculcated through criminological discourses and in the criminal punishment system, and second in virtue of the manners in which their sexual offense is taken up as an identity through psychological and sexological discourses. The book includes a discussion of non-retributive responses to crime, including preventative, redistributive, restorative, and transformative justice. It concludes with two appendixes: the original 19th-century medico-legal report on Charles Jouy and its English translation by the author.
Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes will be of interest to feminist philosophers, Continental philosophers, Women’s and Gender Studies scholars, social and political theorists, as well as social scientists and social justice activists.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction

Part I: “Bucolic Pleasures”? Feminist Readings of Foucault
1. The Case of Charles Jouy and Sophie Adam
2. Revising Sex Crime Law
3. Infamous Men and Dangerous Individuals

Part II: Disciplining and Punishing Sex Offenders
4. Feminism, Crime, and Punishment
5. Foucault’s Prison Abolitionism
6. Criminal Queers

Part III: Perverse Implantations
7. The Perverse Implantation and Sex Work
8. Zoosexuality and Interspecies Sexual Assault
9. The Social Construction of the Serial Sex Killer

Conclusion: Transforming Justice
Appendix

Routledge Guidebook to Foucault's The History of Sexuality

Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality is one of the most influential philosophical works of ... more Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality is one of the most influential philosophical works of the twentieth century and has been instrumental in shaping the study of Gender, Feminist Theory and Queer Theory. But Foucault’s writing can be a difficult book to grasp as Foucault assumes a familiarity with the intellectually dominant theories of his time which renders many passages obscure for newcomers to his work.

The Routledge Guidebook to Foucault’s History of Sexuality offers a clear and comprehensive guide to this groundbreaking work, examining:

The historical context in which Foucault wrote

A critical discussion of the text, which examines the relationship between The History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of The Self

The reception and ongoing influence of History of Sexuality

Offering a close reading of the text, this is essential reading for anyone studying this enormously influential work.

Feminist Philosophies of Life, co-edited with Hasana Sharp (August 2016, McGill-Queens University Press)

Much of the history of western ethical thought has revolved around debates about what constitutes... more Much of the history of western ethical thought has revolved around debates about what constitutes a good life, and claims that a good life is achievable only by certain human beings. In Feminist Philosophies of Life, feminist, new materialist, posthumanist, and ecofeminist philosophers challenge this tendency, approaching the question of life from alternative perspectives.

Signalling the importance of distinctively feminist reflections on matters of shared concern, Feminist Philosophies of Life not only exposes the propensity of discourses to normalize and exclude differently abled, racialized, feminized, and gender nonconforming people, it also asks questions about how life is constituted and understood without limiting itself to the human. A collection of articles that focuses on life as an organizing principle for ontology, ethics, and politics, chapters of this study display responses to feminist thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Søren Kierkegaard. Divided into three parts, the book debates the question of life in and against the emerging school of new feminist materialism, provides feminist phenomenological and existentialist accounts of life, and focuses on lives marked by a particular precarity such as disability, incarceration, as well as life in the face of a changing climate.

Calling for a broader account of lived experience, Feminist Philosophies of Life contains persuasive, original, and diverse analyses that address some of the most crucial feminist issues.

Contributors include Christine Daigle (Brock University), Shannon Dea (University of Waterloo), Lindsay Eales (University of Alberta), Elizabeth Grosz (Duke University), Lisa Guenther (Vanderbilt University), Lynne Huffer (Emory University), Ada Jaarsma (Mount Royal University), Stephanie Jenkins (Oregon State University), Ladelle McWhorter (University of Richmond), Jane Barter Moulaison (University of Winnipeg), Astrida Neimanis (University of Sydney), Danielle Peers (University of Alberta), Stephen Seely (Rutgers University), Hasana Sharp (McGill University), Chloë Taylor (University of Alberta), Florentien Verhage (Washington and Lee University), Rachel Loewen Walker (Out Saskatoon), and Cynthia Willett (Emory University).

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

Drawing on the work of Foucault and Western confessional writings, this book challenges the trans... more 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.

Asian Perspectives on Animal Ethics, co-edited with Neil Dalal

To date, philosophical discussions of animal ethics and Critical Animal Studies have been dominat... more To date, philosophical discussions of animal ethics and Critical Animal Studies have been dominated by Western perspectives and Western thinkers. This book makes a novel contribution to animal ethics in showing the range and richness of ideas offered to these fields by diverse Asian traditions.

Asian Perspectives on Animal Ethics is the first of its kind to include the intersection of Asian and European traditions with respect to human and nonhuman relations. Presenting a series of studies focusing on specific Asian traditions, as well as studies that put those traditions in dialogue with Western thinkers, this book looks at Asian philosophical doctrines concerning compassion and nonviolence as these apply to nonhuman animals, as well as the moral rights and status of nonhuman animals in Asian traditions. Using Asian perspectives to explore ontological, ethical and political questions, contributors analyze humanism and post-humanism in Asian and comparative traditions and offer insight into the special ethical relations between humans and other particular species of animals.

Anti-Carceral Feminism and Sexual Assault—A Defense A Critique of the Critique of the Critique of Carceral Feminism

Most mainstream feminist anti-rape scholarship and activism may be described as carceral feminism... more Most mainstream feminist anti-rape scholarship and activism may be described as carceral feminism, insofar as it fails to engage with critiques of the criminal punishment system and endorses law-and-order responses to sexual and gendered violence. Mainstream feminist anti-rape scholars and activists often view increased conviction rates and longer sentences as a political goal—or, at the very least, are willing to collaborate with police and lament cases where perpetrators of sexual violence are given

Female Sexual Dysfunction, Feminist Psychology, and the Psychiatry of the Normal, in Feminist Studies no. 41, vol. 2 (2015)

Appetiti anormali: Foucault, Atwood e la normalizzazione della dieta carnea (Abnormal Appetites: Foucault, Atwood and the normalization of an animal-based diet Italian translation), in LIBERAZIONI n. 21 Estate 2015

Italian translation of "Abnormal Appetites: Foucault, Atwood, and the Normalization of an Animal-... more

"Foucault e 'l'etica del cibo'" (Foucault and the Ethics of Eating Italian translation) in LIBERAZIONI Rivista di Critica Antispecista Anno V · n. 19 · Inverno 2014

Hommes infâmes, individus dangereux et la violence envers les femmes: relectures féministes de Foucault

Par ses nombreuses études sur l’institutionnalisation psychiatrique et ses travaux sur la prison,... more Par ses nombreuses études sur l’institutionnalisation psychiatrique et ses travaux sur la prison, Michel Foucault fournit une critique durable et influente des pratiques médicales et pénales d’incarcération involontaire. Bien que les académiciens foucaldiens aient été plutôt réceptifs à cette critique, son analyse de cas psychiatriques et pénaux impliquant de la violence envers des filles et des femmes a été jugée problématique dans la littérature féministe. Dans son traitement de ces cas, Foucault est intéressé par les conséquences légo-pénales d’une telle violence pour les protagonistes masculins en ne montrant cependant que peu d’intérêt pour leurs victimes, scrutant les relations de pouvoir entre des hommes violents, la médecine et la loi tout en laissant les relations de pouvoir entre les hommes violents et leurs victimes de côté. Les exemples les plus connus sont les passages où Foucault discute du cas de Charles Jouy et de Sophie Adam dans La volonté de savoir et Les Anormaux, et ses commentaires sur le viol et le détournement de mineur dans « Enfermement, Psychiatrie, Prison, » et « La Loi de la pudeur ». Ces textes ont immédiatement suscités une fervente critique féministe, critique qui s’est perpétuée pendant plus de trente ans. En se concentrant sur les « hommes infâmes » et les « individus dangereux », cet essai argumentera qu’il y a d’autres passages dans l’œuvre de Foucault où il se montre similairement insensible à la violence envers les femmes, bien que ces cas aient attiré moins d’attention critique. Le double objectif de cet essai sera d’examiner, dans un premier temps, ce qui est en jeu pour Foucault dans ses écrits sur les hommes infâmes et les individus dangereux, et dans un second temps, de problématiser l’échec de Foucault en ce qui concerne le traitement des relations de pouvoir entre les sexes dans ces textes.

Abnormal Appetites: Foucault, Atwood, and the Normalization of an Animal-Based Diet

In his lecture series Abnormal, Michel Foucault argues that the abnormal individual is the descen... more In his lecture series Abnormal, Michel Foucault argues that the abnormal individual is the descendant of the monster, and that the monster came in two types: sexual and alimentary. While Foucault traces the genealogy of the sexual monster into the sexually abnormal individual, the alimentary monster is forgotten. This paper thus takes up Foucault‘s work on normalization in order to consider the genealogy of that other monstrous heir, the alimentarily abnormal individual, and pursues it into the twenty-first century. In particular, this paper examines the pathologization of vegetarianism and veganism in the writings of Margaret Atwood and in the invention of a new mental illness, orthorexia nervosa.

Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes

In 1977 Michel Foucault contemplated the idea of punishing rape only as a crime of violence, whil... more In 1977 Michel Foucault contemplated the idea of punishing rape only as a crime of violence, while in 1978 he argued that non-coercive sex between adults and minors should be decriminalized entirely. Feminists have consistently criticized these suggestions by Foucault. This paper argues that these feminist responses have failed to sufficiently understand the theoretical motivations behind Foucault's statements on sex-crime legislation reform, and will offer a new feminist appraisal of Foucault's suggestions.

Disciplinary Relations/Sexual Relations: Feminist and Foucauldian Reflections on Professor-Student Sex

Birth of the Suicidal Subject: Nelly Arcan, Michel Foucault, and Voluntary Death

Michel Foucault argues that it is not sex but death that is the true taboo in the modern, biopol... more Michel Foucault argues that it is not sex but death that is the true
taboo in the modern, biopolitical era. The result is that regular death has been privatised and institutionalised, wars are waged in the name of life, capital punishment has become a scandal, and suicide has become a problem for sociological and psychiatric analysis rather than law. In contrast to the dominant view,
Foucault portrays suicide not as a mark of pathology but as a form of resistance (tragic or pleasurable) to disciplinary power, and argues for an aestheticisation of voluntary death as part of a beautiful life. Through a reading of the writings of Quebecoise author Nelly Arcan, this essay presents but also critiques and
expands upon Foucault’s accounts of suicide, exploring the thesis that the pathological model of suicide produces the subjects that it intends to treat.

The Precarious Lives of Animals: Butler, Coetzee, and Animal Ethics

Foucault and Familial Power

This paper provides an overview of Michel Foucault’s continually changing observations on familia... more This paper provides an overview of Michel Foucault’s continually changing observations on familial power, as well as the feminist-Foucauldian literature on the family. It suggests that these accounts offer fragments of a genealogy of the family that undermine any all-encompassing or transhistorical account of the institution. Approaching the family genealogically, rather than seeking a single model of power that can explain it, shows that far from this institution being a quasi-natural formation or a bedrock of unassailable values, it is in fact a continually contested fiction that masks its own histories of becoming.

Race and Racism in Foucault’s College de France Lectures

While Michel Foucault’s writings have been taken up extensively to explore gender and sexuality, ... more While Michel Foucault’s writings have been taken up extensively to explore gender and sexuality, until recently there was little work drawing on Foucault’s writings to discuss race. In part, this
was because Foucault seemed to have said almost nothing about race, aside from some comments on Nazism and eugenics in the final pages of Part V of The History of Sexuality, volume 1. With
the 1997 and 1999 publication of two series of lectures that Foucault delivered at the Colle`ge de France between 1974 and 1976, Abnormal and ‘‘Society Must Be Defended’’ (both appearing in English translation in 2003), Foucault scholars have, however, become aware that he made more extensive and provocative observations about race than had previously been believed. Both of these lecture series gives a genealogical account of the ways in which modern, biological forms of racism emerged at a certain point in history, stressing the contingency of this emergence and its enmeshment in power struggles and modern forms of power. This paper provides an account of what Foucault argues about race and racism in the Colle`ge de France lectures, and, more briefly, presents two of the most extended treatments of race coming from Foucauldian perspectives that have appeared in the wake of these texts.

Foucault and Critical Animal Studies: Genealogies of Agricultural Power

Michel Foucault is well known as a theorist of power who provided forceful critiques of instituti... more Michel Foucault is well known as a theorist of power who provided forceful critiques of institutions of confinement such as the psychiatric asylum and the prison. Although the invention of factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses, like prisons and psychiatric hospitals, can be considered emblematic moments in a history of modernity, and although the modern farm is an institution of confinement comparable to the prison, Foucault never addressed these institutions, the politics of animal agriculture, or power relationships between humans and other animals more generally. The few times that Foucault discussed animality or human–animal relations, animals and animality remained metaphors for humans and human experiences. Despite Foucault’s failure to analyze human–nonhuman animal
relations, a significant body of Critical Animal Studies literature has mobilized Foucault’s work over the last decade. In particular, a number of scholars have taken up Foucault’s writings to consider
how relations between humans and nonhuman animals in agriculture might be conceptualized as instances of sovereign power, biopower, disciplinary power, and pastoral power, as well as why we may not think that these are power relations at all. This essay provides an overview of Foucault’s accounts of power and of the Foucauldian scholarship that applies these accounts to human– nonhuman animal relations in animal agriculture.

Bodies, Genders and Causation in Aristotle's Biological and Political Theory

Foucault and the Ethics of Eating

In a 1983 interview, Michel Foucault contrasts our contemporary interest in se-xual identity with... more In a 1983 interview, Michel Foucault contrasts our contemporary interest in se-xual identity with the ancient Greek preoccupation with diet, arguing that sex has replaced food as the privileged medium of self-constitution in the modern West. In the same interview, Foucault argues that modern liberation movements should return to the ancient model of ethics, of which diet was a prime example, as aesthetics or self-transformative practice. In this paper I take up Foucault's argument with respect to the Animal Liberation Movement and the dietetics of ethical vegetarianism. Contra Foucault, I suggest that diet has not been replaced by sexuality in the modern West, and that food choices, along with and intertwined with sexu-ality, continue to function as practices of self-constitution in both disciplinary and aesthetic fashions. I then consider the implications of this argument for the Animal Liberation Move-ment, exploring ways in which it might (and to some degree already does) take on aesthetic rather than moral strategies in order to pursue what Foucault once described as ‚an ethics of acts and their pleasures which would be able to take into account the pleasure of the other.‛

Pornographic Confessions? Sex Work and Scientia Sexualis in Foucault and Linda Williams

In the first volume of the History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault states in passing that prostitut... more In the first volume of the History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault states in passing that prostitution and pornography, like the sexual sciences of medicine and psychiatry, are involved in the proliferation of sexualities and the perverse implantation. Against an influential misinterpretation of this passage on the part of film studies scholar Linda Williams, this paper takes up Foucault’s claim and attempts to explain the mechanism through which the sex industry, and pornography in particular, functions analogously to the sexual sciences in terms of the normalizing form of power that Foucault describes. Whereas Williams sets the question of prostitution aside, and argues that pornography must be a confessional discourse for Foucault, this paper argues that consumption rather than confession is the mechanism through which both prostitution and pornography deploy sexualities within a disciplinary system of power.

Hard, Dry Eyes and Eyes that Weep: Vision and Ethics in Levinas and Derrida

Introduction to the Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals, 2024

This Introduction to The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals explores the question: What do... more

The History of Sexuality chapter in Understanding Foucault Understanding Modernism

" Sex without All the Politics " ? Pets and People: The Ethics of Companion Animals " Sex without All the Politics " ? Sexual Ethics and Human-Canine Relations

terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a m... more terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Abstract and Keywords Unlike most species of animals, dogs appear to be potentially consenting and enthusiastic participants in human-animal sexual relations. This has led utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer to argue that some forms of bestiality do not involve cruelty and are morally acceptable. This chapter builds on feminist critical animal studies critiques of utilitarian approaches to animal ethics to show the inadequacy of a utilitarian analysis of human-canine sexual relations, and of zoophilia more generally. Highlighting the power relations involved in domesticating dogs, as well as the gendered (male) and racialized (white) nature of the zoophile phenomenon, this chapter argues that a more nuanced and intersectionalist understanding of the forms of coercion involved in human-canine sexual relations is needed. Such an analysis suggests that zoophilia—most often manifested in human-canine relations today—is not so much a sexual identity or a paraphilia, but part of what feminists have described as a rape culture.

The History of Sexuality and Queer Theory

Chapter 6 of The Routledge Guidebook to The History of Sexuality

The History of Sexuality and Feminist Theory

Chapter 5 of The Routledge Guidebook to The History of Sexuality

"Biopower," in Michel Foucault: Key Concepts, edited by Dianna Taylor

"Psychiatry," in The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, edited by Leonard Lawlor

"Respect for the (Animal) Dead," in Animal Death, edited by Jay Johnston and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey

"Infamous Men, Dangerous Individuals, and Violence against Women," in The Blackwell Companion to Foucault, edited by Jana Sawicki and Timothy O'Leary

"Fanon, Foucault, and the Politics of Psychiatry," in Fanon and the Decolonization of Philosophy, edited by Tracey Nicholls and Elizabeth Hoppe

Animaladies: Gender, Animals, and Madness

by Chloe Taylor and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey

Hypatia, 2021

Emerging from a conference and exhibit with the same name, Animaladies collects the writing of an... more Emerging from a conference and exhibit with the same name, Animaladies collects the writing of an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars and artists, each doing exemplary intersectional work at some of the crossroads of gender, species, ability, race, and sexuality. The title, Animaladies, is a neologism coined by co-editor Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, which can be pronounced either "animal-ladies" or "ani-maladies." This single word thus invokes the three main threads of the volume, listed in the subtitle: gender, animals, and madness. In the editors' introduction, "Distillations," Lori Gruen and Probyn-Rapsey write of the "dis-ease of current human-animal relationships" and the fact that these relationships are "damaged" (1). Ironically, those who try to heal, escape, or transform these relationships are not only feminized but are themselves viewed as ill within a speciesist society. As they observe, the pathologization and feminization of animal activists not only discourages people from expressing care for animals, but also "distracts attention from broader social disorder regarding human exploitation of animal life" (2). Rather than attending to the harm to which animal activists are objecting, attention is diverted toward the activists themselves in the form of pathologization. As Gruen and Probyn-Rapsey also emphasize in their introduction, the simultaneous pathologization and feminization of animal activists is but one manifestation of the longstanding hystericizing of women, and activists who embrace the madness of caring for animals are part of a feminist tradition of taking up hysteria as resistance to patriarchal and speciesist power. Gruen and Probyn-Rapsey argue that the pathologization and feminization of concern for animals has not only served to dismiss, trivialize, and pathologize animal activists but also critical animal studies (CAS) scholars within the academy. As they aptly write, the animal liberation movement is not so much the "orphan of the left," as Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka have described it, as it is the left's "crazy aunt" (4-5). Animaladies is divided into three sections-"Dismember," "Disability," and "Dysfunction"-and in their introduction the editors reflect on the resonances of each word. Most interestingly, they observe that "dismember" speaks not only to the ways the bodies of animals are rent to become our food, but also to how animals are separated from one another-and particularly from their offspring-and their suffering is not remembered. More often than not, animal oppression is invisibilized, forgotten, or never born witness to at all. As Probyn-Rapsey and Gruen argue, animal activists and CAS scholars resist this dismembering not only by struggling to prevent the deaths and divisions of animals, but also by remembering the lives and deaths of animals; in so

REVIEW OF Eli Clare BRILLIANT IMPERFECTON: Grappling with Cure

Eli Clare. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017, 240 ... more

Review of Sunaura Taylor's Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

Animal Liberation Currents , 2017

CRITICAL REVIEW ESSAY of LADELLE McWHORTER's RACISM AND SEXUAL OPPRESSION IN ANGLO-AMERICA: A GENEALOGY, co-authored by ROBERT NICHOLS, Foucault Studies no. 9 (September 2010): 165-184

Inter-Species Relations: A Review of Clare Palmer’s Animal Ethics in Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)

Review Essay C. G. Prado's Searle and Foucault on Truth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006; 184 pages.

Feral Theory SPECIAL TOPICS ISSUE of Feral Feminisms issue 6 (2016)

philoSOPHIA 6.1 Queer, Trans, and Feminist Responses to the Prison Nation SPECIAL ISSUE (2016)

by Chloe Taylor and Nancy McHugh

philoSOPHIA: a journal of continental feminism, 2016

PhaenEx Special Topics Issue: Animal and Food Ethics (vol. 8, no. 2, 2013), co-edited with Christiane Bailey

Journal for Critical Animal Studies Special Topics Issue: Continental Philosophical Perspectives on Non-Human Animals (vol. IX, issue 1-2, 2011)

by Chloe Taylor, Matthew Cole, and Richard J White

PhaenEx (vol. 6, no 1, 2011), co-edited with Tracey Nicholls

PhaenEx Special Topics Issue: Foucault and the Sciences of the Soul (vol. 5, no. 2, 2010), co-edited with Bettina Bergo

Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 10th Anniversary Issue: Feminist Perspectives on Eros (vol. 11, no. 2, Fall 2007), co-edited with Hasana Sharp

PhaenEx Special Topics Issue: Other Animals (vol. 2, no. 2, 2007), co-edited with Lisa Guenther

VIDEO on Ecofeminism and Food Politics for Feminism and Food course

VIDEO on Farms, Zoonotic Disease Pandemics, and Racism for Feminism and Food course produced by Gender and Social Justice program graduate and documentary film maker Anthony Goertz

Pandemics and Agribusiness, 2021

This video was written by me and created by a graduate of the M.A. program in Gender and Social J... more

VIDEO on Pandemics, Agribusiness, and Capitalist Realism for Feminism and Food course produced by Gender and Social Justice program graduate and documentary film maker Anthony Goertz

Potential Fixes and Capitalist Realism, 2021

This video was written by me and created by a graduate of the M.A. program in Gender and Social J... more

VIDEO on Indigenous Perspectives on Food Politics for Feminism and Food course produced by Gender and Social Justice program graduate and documentary film maker Anthony Goertz

Indigenous Perspectives on Food Politics, 2021

This film was written by me and created by recent graduate of the MA program in Gender and Social... more

VIDEO on Black Feminisms, Racism, and Speciesism for Feminism and Food course produced by Gender and Social Justice program graduate and documentary film maker Anthony Goertz

Racism and/as Speciesism, 2021

This video was written by me and produced by Gender and Social Justice program graduate and docum... more

VIDEO lecture on Dairy for Feminism and Food course produced by Gender and Social Justice program graduate and documentary film maker Anthony Goertz

Dairy Tales, 2021

This lecture was written by me and produced by Gender and Social Justice program graduate and doc... more