Dr. Ladelle McWhorter
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Presentations
“Response to Panelists on Unbecoming Persons." Western Political Science Association, San Diego, April 3, 2026.
“The Person Trap: A Genealogical Critique of a Key Moral Concept.” University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, January 30, 2026.
“Populations as Biopower’s Targets and Agents of Resistance.” PhiloSOPHIA, Texas A&M University, April 12, 2025.
“Populations, Corporations, and Counter-Conducts.” Biopower at 50 conference, Rowan University (Glassboro, NJ), November 9, 2024.
“Questioning Ownership.” Critical Genealogies Workshop, Syracuse University, April 27, 2024.
“Neither Person Nor Individual.” Creative World-Making Conference, University of Richmond, January 25, 2024.
“Reshaping Personhood in 19th Century America.” Critical Genealogies Workshop, University of Richmond, October 23, 2022.
“Is the Person White?” Critical Genealogies III, University of Oregon, May 11, 2019.
“Moral Personhood’s Trinitarian Lineage: A Foucauldian Genealogy.” Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, State College, PA, October 18, 2018.
“Responsibility, Response-ability, Responsibilization.” American Philosophical Association Pacific Division, San Diego, CA, March 31, 2018.
“Getting a Grip on the Present: Genealogies of Race and Racism.” Grinnell College, Iowa, November 1, 2017.
“History is Not the Past.” Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Memphis, TN, October 21, 2017.
“The Incarnation/Incorporation of Personhood in the 18th and 19th Centuries.” Critical Genealogies Conference, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, September 16, 2017.
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Presentations
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Publications
Books
Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of Modern Moral Selfhood. University of Chicago Press, 2025.
Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, 2009, University of Toronto Press
Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy, 2009, Indiana University Press
Simone de Beauvoir (World of Philosophy audio book), 1996
Journal Articles“Sodomites, Witches, and Indians: Another Look at Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume One” Philosophy and Social Criticism, (September 23, 2021).
“Razzismo, eugenetica e il Concetta di specie biologica di Mayr. Liberazione: Rivista di Critica Antispecista. Vol. 39 (January, 2020): 4-18. (Italian translation of a paper published previously in English.)
“Grassroots Organizing and Medicaid Expansion in Virginia: The Lee County Chapter of Virginia Organizing and Medicaid Expansion.” Richmond Public Interest Law Review. Vol. 22, no. 1(January 4, 2019). Co-authored with Rosemary Gould and Brian Johns.
“Powerful Adversaries.” Humanities Special Issue on Possibilities and Paradoxes of Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Cultural Change, ed. Mari Lee Mifsud. (July 25, 2018).
“Persons and Sovereigns in Ethical Thought.” Genealogy, Vol. 1, no. 4 (November 20, 2017) doi:10.3390/genealogy1040021. Republished as a book chapter in Beyond Foucault: Excursions in Political Genealogy, ed. Michael Clifford, MDPI, 2018. Pp. 34-49.
“The Morality of Corporate Persons,” Southern Journal of Philosophy." Volume 55, Issue Supplement S1 (September, 2017): 126-148. DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12222.
"Pleasure in Atrocity." Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30, no. 1 (2016): 104-114. doi:10.1353/jsp.2016.0000.
“Post-Liberation Feminism and Practices of Freedom,” Foucault Studies, Vol.16 (September, 2013)
“Queer Economies,” Foucault Studies, Vol. 14 (February, 2013)
“The Next Fifty Years,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 26, no. 2 (2012): 299-307.
“Whatever is Hardest: Charles Scott’s Practice of Thinking” Epoché 17:1 (Fall, 2012): 39-54.
“Normalization and the Welfare State,” philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism, Vol. 2, no. 1 (Spring, 2012): 39-48.
“Decapitating Power” Foucault Studies, Vol. 12 (October, 2011)
“Racism, Eugenics, and Ernst Mayr’s Account of Species,” Philosophy Today, vol. 54 (SPEP Supp., 2010): 200-207.
“Darwin’s Invisible Hand: Feminism, Reprogenetics, and Foucault’s Analysis of Neoliberalism,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 48 (September, 2010): 43-63.
Book Chapters“Southern Land: Indigeneity, Genocide, and Racialization in Whitened Lineages.” In Thinking the US South: Contemporary Philosophy from Southern Perspectives. Ed. Shannon Sullivan. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2021. Pp. 35-51.
“From Masturbator to Homosexual: The Construction of the Sex Pervert.” In Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader. Eds. Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David A. Rubin, and Angela Willey. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017.
"From Scientific Racism to Neoliberal Biopolitics." In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack, 282-93. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017
Foreword to Feminist Philosophies of Life, by Hasana Sharp and Chloe Taylor, xi-xvi. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016.
“Virginia Organizing: The Action is at the State Level,” Transforming Places: Lessons from Appalachia. Stephen Fisher and Barbara Ellen Smith, eds. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, (2012), pp. 183-97. Co-authored with Joe Szakos.
“Enemies of the Species,” Queer Ecologies. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, eds. Indiana University Press, 2010, 73-101.
“Racism and Biopower” in On Race and Racism in America: Confessions in Philosophy, Roy Martinez, ed. Penn State University Press, 2010, pp. 55-85.
"Racism and Responsibility" in Difficulties of the Ethical Life. Eds. Shannon Sullivan and Dennis Schmidt. Fordham University Press, 2008, 147-161, 227-231
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