Kelly Oliver

Kelly Oliver (born July 28, 1958) is an American philosopher specializing in feminism, political philosophy and ethics.

She is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

She is also a founder of the feminist philosophy journal philoSOPHIA.

Oliver is the author of 16 scholarly books, 12 edited volumes, and scores of scholarly articles.

She received her BA in philosophy and communications from Gonzaga University in 1979 and her PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University in 1987.

In The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (University of Minnesota, 2004), engaging with work by Fanon, Kristeva and others, Oliver develops a psychoanalytic social theory of oppression, particularly racist and sexist oppression.

Before moving to Vanderbilt in 2005, she taught in the philosophy departments of West Virginia University, the University of Texas at Austin and SUNY Stony Brook.

In Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media (Columbia University 2007), Oliver analyzes media images of women involved in violence in the Middle East and the Iraq War.

From the women involved in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay prisons, to rescued Pfc.

Jessica Lynch, to Palestinian women suicide bombers, recent media coverage has turned them into "weapons" of war; their very bodies are imagined as dangerous.

Oliver links these images of what some reporters have called "equal opportunity killers more dangerous than the males" with older images of dangerous women from Hollywood films, literature, and religious traditions.

She argues that these latest examples of women figured as weapons are in an important sense a continuation of stereotypes of dangerous women who use their sexuality as a deadly weapon to deceive and trap men.

In Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (Columbia University Press, 2009), Oliver argues that in the work of thinkers as diverse as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Agamben, Freud, Lacan and Kristeva, animals play a key theoretical role in defining what it means to be human.

While philosophers have historically been interested in maintaining a strong distinction between the animal and the human (often on the basis of reason), Oliver's analysis suggests that much philosophical discourse about humanity and ethics depends on lessons learned from animal behavior.

While she questions the viability of a strict animal/human dichotomy, Animal Lessons does not follow the typical trajectory of ethical work on animal rights.

In fact, Oliver is critical of rights-based ethical discourse that would simply expand its scope to include animals, since such a strategy would leave unquestioned assumptions about the nature of humanity on which rights depend.

Oliver writes: "The man-animal binary is not just any opposition; it is the one used most often to justify violence, not only man's violence to animals, but also man's violence to other people deemed like animals. Until we interrogate the history of this opposition with its exclusionary values, considering animals (or particular animals) like us or recognizing that we are also a species of animal does very little to change "how we eat the other", as Jacques Derrida might say."

In Knock me up, Knock me down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Film (Columbia University Press, 2010), Oliver analyses recent films produced in the US dealing with pregnancy, including Junebug and Quinceañera.

She examines the tensions between progressive and conservative elements in these films.

Specifically, Oliver examines the ways in which these films redeploy the rhetoric of choice in the service of family values.

In addition, she discusses apparent anxieties about new reproductive technologies that uncouple sex and reproduction.

She argues that what she calls "momcom" is a new subgenre of romcom.

And she examines images of pregnancy in horror and science fiction films, particularly in terms of fears of miscegenation.

Overall, Oliver argues that the pregnant belly has become a screen for fears and desires associated with sex, race, gender and sexuality.

In Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment (Fordham 2013), Oliver analyzes the extremes of birth and death insofar as they are mediated by technologies of life and death.

First, with an eye to reproductive technologies, Oliver considers how the terms of debates over genetic engineering and cloning change if we challenge the assumption of liberal individualism at their heart.

In this book, she shows how the very terms of contemporary debates over technologies of life and death, from cloning to capital punishment change if we unseat the notion of an autonomous liberal individual.

She argues that the central aim of this book is to approach contemporary problems raised by technologies of life and death as ethical issues that call for a more nuanced approach than mainstream philosophy can provide.

She maintains that the ethical stakes in these debates are never far from political concerns such as enfranchisement, citizenship, oppression, racism, sexism, and the public policies that normalize them.

Oliver disarticulates a tension between ethics and politics that runs through these issues in order to suggest a more ethical politics by turning the force of sovereign violence back against itself.

In the end, Oliver proposes a corrective for moral codes and political clichés that turn us into mere answering machines, namely, following Derrida, what she comes to call Response Ethics.

In Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions (Columbia University Press, 2015), Oliver explores the reactions to the first pictures of Earth, including Earthrise and The Blue Marble, taken during the Apollo missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Examining the rhetoric surrounding these photographs, she identifies a tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism that sets the tone for this book.

Starting with Immanuel Kant, Oliver follows a path of thinking our relations to each other through our relation to the Earth, from Kant's politics based on the fact that we share the limited surface of the Earth, through Hannah Arendt's and Martin Heidegger's warnings that by leaving the surface of the Earth, we endanger not only politics but also our very being as human beings, to Jacques Derrida's last meditations on the singular world of each human being.

The guiding question that motivates Oliver's book is: How can we share the Earth with those with whom we do not even share a world?

Her books include Response Ethics (2019), Carceral Humanitarianism: The Logic of Refugee Detention (2017), Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape (2016), and Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions (2015) and her most recognized work, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (2001).

She is also a novelist and the author of three mystery series: The Jessica James Mysteries, The Pet Detective Mysteries, and The Fiona Figg Mysteries.

Oliver was raised in Montana, Idaho, and Spokane, Washington, the oldest of four children (three girls and a boy).

Her father was a lumberjack and engineer.

On both sides of the family, her ancestors were among the first to settle in Northern Idaho.