Table of Contents

Contents
Complexity and Complicity: An Introduction to Constitutive Impurity
1. Remembering for the Future: Reckoning with an Unjust Past
2. "Women Don't Get AIDS, They Just Die From It": Memory, Classification, and the Campaign to Change the Definition of AIDS
3. Shimmering Presences: Frog, Toad, and Toxic Interdependencies
4. Consuming Suffering: Eating, Energy, and Embodied Ethics
5. Practicing Freedom: Disability and Gender Transformation
6. Worlds to Come: Imagining Speculative Disability Futures
Conclusion: The Point, However, is to Change It
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Alexis Shotwell is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, and the Department of Philosophy, at Carleton University. She is the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding.

Reviews

"Exciting, original, and intellectually stimulating, Against Purity makes a clear and compelling argument for a politics of relationality that resists the demand for 'purity'. Even as Alexis Shotwell challenges the basic assumptions of ethical and political philosophy, she also builds pathways for more conventional thinkers to find their way into her discourse."-Lisa Guenther, author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives

"Readers will find Against Purity to be timely and important, drawing together distinct but nonetheless congruent strains of theorizing that enable and facilitate new modes of collective action."-PhaenEx, Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture"On a planet overtaken by the problems and figure of man, this perspective is crucial to keep in mind for both scholarly and worldly work."-Journal of Cultural Economy"Shotwell's clearly ordered prose makes a wide citational range easily accessible. ...Against Purity is an informative and exciting text."-Enculturation, A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing and Culture