Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), explores the problem of how we might bear witness and respond to unjust histories and complex presents with an eye toward creating different futures.
Against Purity aims to show the usefulness of thinking about complicity and compromise as a starting point for action, as the constitutive situation of our lives, rather than as things we should avoid. To say that we live in compromised times is to say that although most people aim to not cause suffering, destruction, and death, simply by living, buying things, throwing things away, we implicate ourselves in terrible effects on ecosystems and beings around us. We are inescapably entwined and entangled with others, even when we cannot track or directly perceive this entanglement. This book examines our connection with unbearable pasts, with which we might reckon better, our implication in impossibly complex presents, through which we might craft different modes of response, and our aspirations for different futures, toward which we might shape different worlds-yet-to-come. I was interviewed about the book in The Atlantic (“The Folly Of Purity Politics”), for Bitch Magazine, on KPFA’s program Against The Grain, on the podcast This is Not a Pipe, and in the newspaper la Repubblica. It’s been reviewed in PhaenEx, the Journal of Cultural Economy, Disability & Society, enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture, and in a special issue of Feminist Formations on The Biosocial Politics of Queer/Crip Contagions. Against Purity was also the subject of a generative discussion in the online symposium project Syndicate Network, and in the Fall 2018 issue of the APA’s Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy. The Blog of the APA also interviewed the people who kindly participated in a book panel at the Central meetings in 2018.
My first book, Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding (Penn State Press, 2011) makes the case that unspoken and unspeakable knowledge is important to racial and gender formation. Words do not encompass our racialised and gendered understanding of our social worlds, and so we need a fuller account of implicit aspects of our political understanding. Drawing on philosophers, political theorists, activists, and poets, Knowing Otherwise offers this. The book has been reviewed in NDPR, PhaenEx, and Hypatia. It was also the subject of a book symposium.