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Radically reorienting, challenging, provocative, this book moves progressive philosophy, feminist and queer theory, critical discussions of race and racism forward. Prophetically, it calls for an interrogation of all our oppositional theory and politics, offering new and alternative visions. -- bell hooks In Queering Freedom, Shannon Winnubst examines contemporary categories of difference -- sexuality, race, gender, class, and nationality -- and how they operate within the politics of domination. Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and others, Winnubst engages feminist theory, race theory, and queer theory as she sheds light on blind spots that have characterized thinking about freedom. Winnubst turns away from the language of rights, identity politics, and liberation toward bodies and experiences to calibrate normative ideas of time and space. Her views operate at the very limits of freedom, which contain individuals within strict boundaries that they are forbidden to cross. Winnubst develops strategies of queering freedom to undo the more subtle spatial and temporal norms and shatter structures of domination. This thoughtful and provocative work challenges the cornerstones of contemporary philosophies about the body and its politics.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of cool have informed the American ethos since at least the 1970s. Whether we strive for it in politics or fashion, cool is big business for those who can sell it across a range of markets and media. Yet the concept wasn't always a popular commodity. Cool began as a potent aesthetic of post-World War II black culture, embodying a very specific, highly charged method of resistance to white supremacy and the globalized exploitation of capital. Way Too Cool follows the hollowing-out of \"coolness\" in modern American culture and its reflection of a larger evasion of race, racism, and ethics now common in neoliberal society. It revisits such watershed events as the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, second-wave feminism, the emergence of identity politics, 1980s multiculturalism, 1990s rhetorics of diversity and colorblindness, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina, as well as the contemporaneous developments of rising mass incarceration and legalized same-sex marriage. It pairs the perversion of cool with the slow erasure of racial and ethical issues from our social consciousness, which effectively quashes our desire to act ethically and resist abuses of power. The cooler we become, the more indifferent we grow to the question of values, particularly inquiry that spurs protest and conflict. This book sounds an alarm for those who care about preserving our ties to an American tradition of resistance.

This essay explores the method of close reading as a critical strategy for feminist classrooms, especially when focused on the foundational violence of anti-Blackness and coloniality. Through a personal reflection on my own efforts to break away from my formal education in “the Western canon” (sic.), I argue that radical learning requires vulnerability and an attentiveness to unconscious habits, motivations, and defenses. I focus on the method of close reading as a pedagogical strategy that cultivates these kinds of sensibilities, while also undercutting the informatics-diversity machine of the neoliberal university. I describe my experiences with this radical learning through three meditations that build upon one another: the methodology of close reading; the effects of reading Black feminists as canonical texts; and the strategic, limited use of canonical European theories as methods for the construction of syllabi, rather than objects of analysis. The essay concludes with an examination of a recent course I designed and taught with psychoanalytic heuristic devices. Throughout the essay, I argue for grounding our feminist classrooms in prolonged discussions of the ongoing impact of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism, in all its forms.

I originally wrote this essay for a session on the book at the National Women's Studies Association in November 2014. At that time, the Black Lives Matter movement was just coming to national and international attention, and I began the essay with the urgency of the epidemic of violence against young black bodies that continues to ravage the United States. Writing now just before the inauguration of Donald Trump as the President of the United States, my concerns in 2014 about systemic state violence against persons of color seem anemic. I am more convinced than ever that we all must theorize, write, read, and live through this singular touchstone of systemic violence against vulnerable populations, especially as those are racialized. The violence of this dying empire is unnerving, and only poised to become more so.And so I come to this book, this remarkable book on the possibilities and meanings of a queer feminist ethics, filled with the urgency of stopping this violence, of uprooting the ignorance and deep-seated fear, shame, and malice that fuel it through the pernicious rhetoric of color-blindness. As Huffer tells us explicitly, she understands \"the dual burden of ethics as, first, the acknowledgment of harms and, second, the active elaboration of alternatives to these harms\" (2013, 31). But the book, as a whole, stops me in my tracks. The classic responses of feminism—namely, to stop this epidemic of violence through education, consciousness-raising, and a good intersectional analysis—do not track along the lines of ethics that Lynne Huffer so meticulously charts. Following Huffer's lead, rather, we have to work back through the rationalist roots of such responses. If we are to find an ethical response to this epidemic and to so much violence that fills our contemporary world, we have to work back through the fundamentally Enlightenment notion of a subject that tethers such responses—and then unmoor ourselves from it. This kind of work is not easy or fast. It is not uniform, tethered differentially as we all are. This work takes courage and patience and an appreciation of fine distinctions and complex histories—intellectual histories as well as institutional and social ones. It is as much an aesthetic undertaking as an ethical one—to unweave these deep, old habits and weave fresh ones anew. Responding to the zigzag of such an oblique, nonrational process, I offer here a sounding, much as a whale sounds and surfaces and sounds again, of Huffer's book to provoke us toward the lyrical ethics of erotic freedom that she articulates.

Regarding Lee's trenchant questions about the friction between race and class, particularly the Marxist tradition of reducing race to class, I am even more profoundly convinced that Marx and Marxist analysis cannot possibly capture the ethical contours of race and racism.[...]given research I have undertaken in radical Black studies (sometimes troublingly lumped under \"Afropessimism\") since the completion of Way Too Cool, I am also profoundly convinced that race and racism are the primary, foundational, ontological axes of the modern capitalist world (and its latest iteration, neoliberalism).[...]when Lee claims that \"we have outsourced class to race\" (Lee 2017: 1091), I could not disagree more adamantly: class is but a modern capitalist modulation, albeit a complex and multivariegated one, of the ontological schematic of race and racism that founds the pre-modern colonial world in the fifteenth century.[...]if we are to understand the complexity of race, racialization, and racism, we cannot rely on post-sixteenth century European sources to do so; most especially, we cannot rely on Marxism and its parasitic derivation from post-sixteenth century capitalism to do so.[...]bringing this canon fixation and the systematic undertheorizing of the ego together, I worry a great deal about the methods of reading practiced in continental philosophy.

Reviled and fetishized, the work of Georges Bataille (1897--1962) has been most often reduced to his outrageous, erotic, and libertine fiction and essays. But increasingly, readers are finding his insights into politics, economics, sexuality, and performance revealing and timely. Focusing on Bataille's most extensive work, The Accursed Share, Shannon Winnubst and the contributors to this volume present contemporary interpretations that read Bataille in a new light. These essays situate Bataille in French and European intellectual traditions, bring forward key concepts for understanding the challenges posed by his important work, and draw out his philosophy. Established voices and younger scholars cover a range of topics and themes, including ethics, politics, economy, psychology, and performance so readers can think with and through Bataille. While focusing attention on Bataille and his provocative work, this book offers a sympathetic, yet critical, reappraisal and rehabilitation. Contributors are Alison Leigh Brown, Andrew Cutrofello, Zeynep Direk, Jesse Goldhammer, Dorothy Holland, Pierre Lamarche, Richard A. Lee, Jr., Alphonso Lingis, Ladelle McWhorter, Lucio A. Privitello, Allan Stoekl, Amy Wendling, and Shannon Winnubst.

A review symposium on a book by Cressida J. Heyes, A Review of Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (New York: Oxford U Press, 2007). Adapted from the source document.

As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century on the Western, Christian calendar, a new kind of rationality is fully taking root in U.S. culture. Despite ideological or political differences, we are all speaking the same language, drinking the same Kool-Aid, breathing the same air: we are all neoliberals, whether we even know what that might mean. Neoliberalism, which functions as a particular kind of rationality that is internalized by subjects and externalized by governmental practices, pervades our educational systems, saturates youth culture, dominates political discourse (despite one’s party allegiances), and helps structure such intimate decisions as the