Alexis Shotwell

Author: alexis

  • Claiming Bad Kin

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    This is the first part of a talk I’m offering today at McMaster – access copy here. Many white people I know have been sparked to reflection in the wake of the “not guilty” verdicts in the Gerald Stanley and Raymond Cormier murder cases. Some have been moved to ask what it means to be…

  • Water and Ocean

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    I was glad to have the chance to review Elspeth Probyn’s 2016 book, Eating the Ocean, alongside Astrida Neimanis’s 2017, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. This review just came out in Cultural Studies Review, and I’m pasting the text below, too. I was born in Arapahoe and Ute territory, in the arid foothills of…

  • Is it white shame?

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    Shame feels awful. It can feel like we want to crawl out of our skin, erase ourselves from the world, find someone else who’s the real problem. Feeling shame can be twisting desperately away from something that is inside us, having something on us that we can’t wash off, being something that we hate and…

  • Whiteness as method in philosophy

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    Ah, whiteness and philosophy. I spent a lot of time thinking about the racialized boundaries of the discipline a long time ago – this thing I wrote came out seven years ago and I still agree with it: “Significant occlusions structure philosophy as a discipline. They are not limited to racialized abstractions; partitioned social ontologies…

  • “Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere.”

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    I am tasked with writing a review of the book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Not feeling able to actually do that, I have written this instead. This is because of course, it is impossible for me to write a review of anything Donna Haraway writes; it would be like a jellyfish…

  • Grappling with the trouble & in the wake

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    In March, we took the ferry from Bellingham, Washington, to Haines, Alaska. Getting to Haines was the last link in a chain of intense, nourishing, lovely time with friends – a wonderful and a sad thing about this driving trip that we’ve been on from Ottawa looping around the continent is seeing the distribution of…

  • A politics of imperfection, a politics of responsibility.

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    The kind folks over at the University of Minnesota Press blog posted this short piece, and I’m reproducing it here, too. Lately it seems like every day brings a new bad thing for anyone not invested in white supremacy and capitalism. As the tweet went: “First they came for the Latinos, Muslims, women, gays, poor…

  • #Viral

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    Last week, I participated in a conversation as part of the “undisciplinary” #(HASHTAG) series organized by the mighty team of Emilie Cameron, Danielle Dinovelli-Lang, Stacy Douglas, and Ummni Khan. These have been some of my favorite events at Carleton since they started a couple of years ago, since they always bring together an interesting set…

  • Teaching the material: Trigger warnings, what it is, and the ontology-epistemology thing

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    I’ve just had some wonderful time out in BC, doing interviews for the AIDS activist oral history project I’m working on and starting to look into the history of AIDS criminalization legislation out there (did you know that BC passed legislation in 1990 to send HIV positive people to former leper colonies?). I felt really…

  • Femme identification & Stranger Things

    Femme identification & Stranger Things

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    spoilers for most of season 1. I read, and appreciated a lot of Shannon Keating’s points about femininity and Hollywood horror conventions over at Buzzfeed. Its central point is a critique of the trope in pop culture requiring unfeminine girls to be made over, feminized, and rendered desirable in order to be worthy of regard.…