Broadly speaking, my research is in feminist philosophy and modern and contemporary continental philosophy. Probably because of my many years working as an activist in the women’s movement, I am concerned with how gendered power is lived socially and politically: in the body, in language, in the imaginary life of communities, and in the capitalist nation-state. My work in feminist philosophy draws on phenomenology, poststructuralism and feminist materialism, as I think a viable account of gendered experience and gendered power must address multiple structures of human existence. I consider my work to be part of the emergent field of "critical phenomenology". I teach and am especially engaged with the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, and Judith Butler. Other figures, however, are also central to my research, including Merleau-Ponty, Marx, and Hegel.
Selected Publications (for a complete list see my C.V.)
Op-Eds/Popular Press
2019. “Marie Yovanovitch’s Moral Courage.” The Stone. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/19/opinion/marie-yovanovitchs-moral-courage.html
2018. “Trump’s New Taunt, Kavanaugh’s Defense and How Misogyny Rules. The Stone. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/opinion/kavanaugh-misogyny-epistemic-worlds.html.
Books
2014. Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror. Oxford University Press.
2006. Women’s Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment. Oxford University Press.
Edited Volumes
2017. Oxford University Press. “On ne naît pas femme : on le devient”: The Life of a Sentence. Co-edited with Martina Ferrari.
Academic Journal Articles
2021. “Rape and Social Death,” Feminist Theory. 0(0) 1-21. DOI: 10.1177/14647001211012940
2019. (Editorial) Mann, Bonnie, Erin McKenna, Camisha Russell, and Rocío Zambrana. “The Promise of Feminist Philosophy.” Hypatia, vol. 34, no. 3, 2019, pp. 394–400., doi:10.1111/hypa.12490.
2018. “Feminist Phenomenology and the Politics of Wonder.” AVANT: The Journal of the Philosophical Interdisciplinary Vanguard. vol. IX, No. 2, 2018. Published by the Centre for Philosophical Research, Warsaw, Poland.
2018. “Femininity, Shame and Redemption,” in Gender and the Politics of Shame, a special issue of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, edited by Clara Fischer. Vol. 33, No. 3.
2013. “Three White Men Walk into a Bar: Philosophy’s Pluralism,” in Radical Philosophy Review 16(3), pp.
2012. “Creepers, Flirts, Heroes and Allies: Four Theses on Men and Sexual Harassment,” in The American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, issue on Sexual Harassment, edited by Margaret Crouch.
2011. “Gender Apparatus: Torture and National Manhood in the U.S. War on Terror,” in Radical Philosophy: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Philosophy, v. 168, July/August 2011; translated into German by Regine Othmer as “Ein Geschlechterapparat: Folter und nationale Männlichkeit im „Krieg gegen den Terror“ der USA,” published in Feministische Studien 30. Jahrgang, Nov. 2012, No. 2.
2010. “What Should Feminists do About Nature?” in Konturen: Online German Studies Journal. http://konturen.uoregon.edu/.
2008. “Beauvoir and the Question of a Women’s Point of View.” Philosophy Today. Summer.
2007. “The Lesbian June Cleaver: Heterosexism and Lesbian Mothering,” in Against Heterosexualism: Overcoming Heterosexual Normativity and Defeating Heterosexist Bigotry, a special issue of Hypatia, edited by Joan Callahan, Sara Ruddick and Bonnie Mann. Volume 22, number 1 (Winter 2007).
Invited Articles, Book Chapters and Nonacademic Journals and Magazines
2017. “Beauvoir Against Objectivism: The Operation of the Norm in Beauvoir and Butler” in “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient”: The Life of a Sentence. Edited by Bonnie Mann and Martina Ferrari. New York: Oxford University Press (pp. 37-53).
2017. “Adoption, Race and Rescue: Transracial Adoption and Lesbian/Gay Ascendency to Whiteness” in special issue of Philosophy in the Contemporary World. Co-edited with Amrita Banerjee. 23:1. Spring, 2017 (pp. 56-70).
2014. “American Exceptionalism: The Gender Factor.” E-International Relations. http://www.e-ir.info/2014/03/23/american-exceptionalism-the-gender-factor/.
2009 “Vampire Love: The Second Sex Negotiates the 21st Century,” in Twilight and Philosophy: Vampires, Vegetarians, and the Pursuit of Immortality, edited by Rebecca Housel and JeremyWisnewski. Blackwell Press. Philosophy and Popular Culture Series. Excerpted in The Philosopher’s Magazine, Issue 47, 4th Quarter, 2009. Reprinted in Introducing Philosophy through Popular Culture, ed. by William Irwin and David Kyle Johnson, Wiley-Blackwell 2010.