Cressida J Heyes
Biographic Data
| ID | 197815 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Cressida J Heyes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Cressida J |
| FAMILY NAME | Heyes |
| SIGNATURE | HEYES C J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Alberta |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3009-2607 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 162 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Selling Sleep: A Qualitative Study of Infant Sleep Coaching in Western Canada
This article theorizes the experience of using a coach to assist with a baby or young child’s sleep “training” as occurring at the intersection of three broader phenomena: the increasing use of paid experts to advise on intimate life; the porosity of the domestic sphere; and ideologies of mothering that impact sleep. It draws on the vernacular of a growing critical literature on children’s sleep, which understands its practice and representation …
Abnormal in Alberta: The Genealogy of “Severely Normal” as a Biopolitical Dog Whistle
The phrase “severely normal” was often used by Premier Ralph Klein in 1990s’ Alberta to describe the Albertans he wished to interpellate, and it has had enduring power as a dog whistle by the political right in the province. Against commentators who see it as only a facile populist gesture, in this article the author deploys Foucault’s lectures on “racism against the abnormal,” together with Ladelle McWhorter’s interpretation, to argue that there…
The New Horizontal Worker: Privacy, Sexuality, and Professionalism in the Digital Bedroom
In this essay we examine media coverage in 2020 and 2021 of the COVID-19-related practice of “working from bed.” Although presented as a new phenomenon, working from bed has a long history. We suggest that the late modern bourgeois understanding of the bedroom as a private space has long been manipulated by artists, writers, and other celebrities, both through staged photos and more self-conscious representation. These representations play on the…
Reading Advice to Parents about Children's Sleep: The Political Psychology of a Self-Help Genre
The genre of advice to parents about children’s sleep proliferated between the mid-1980s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. This article reads that genre against itself, as symptomatic of larger political trends—the end of the privilege of the normative mid-century nuclear family and the advent of neoliberal ideology and political economy. Specifically, it argues that this wave of advice reflects an ambivalence about the autonomous in…
The Body
This chapter offers an overview of central issues and themes in feminist philosophical reflections on the body. It discusses at greater length three specific examples from recent debates in feminist philosophy: how concepts of sex and gender and their juxtaposition have been contested; how the phenomenological tradition has been reworked by critical feminist philosophers; and how feminist philosophers of disability challenge the reification of bo…
The Short and the Long of It: A Political Phenomenology of Pandemic Time
Drawing on Françoise Dastur’s suggestion that the event is a permanent possibility that shapes lived experience, but also, when it occurs, a distinctive temporal rupture, I argue that the initial weeks of the COVID-19 epidemic constitute an event, in her sense. Connecting this phenomenological point to literatures on the politics of temporality, I suggest that the distinction between event and normal experience maps to that between epidemic and e…
Situating Genealogies of Terrorism
In an article in the British newspaper The Guardian, journalist Jason Burke-who has written extensively on terrorism-frames a commentary on the 2019 Christchurch shootings with the observation that terrorism is effective because "it always seems near. It always seems new. And it always seems personal." Burke continues that "ever since the first wave of terrorist violence broke across the newly industrialized cities of the west in the late 19 th c…
Trans Surgeries and Cosmetic Surgeries
This article examines the various possibilities for making an analogy or disanalogy between cosmetic and trans surgeries, focusing on the suggestion that trans surgeries are medically necessary while cosmetic surgeries are not—a position that has a great deal of rhetorical force. The authors argue that this disanalogy both fails to understand the complexity of the justifications used by recipients of these diverse surgeries and should be seen as …
Two Kinds of Awareness: Foucault, the Will, and Freedom in Somatic Practice
Queer Phenomenology, Sexual Orientation, and Health Care Spaces: Learning From the Narratives of Queer Women and Nurses in Primary Health Care
Queer phenomenology as an interpretive framework can advance health research by illuminating why primary health care providers (HCPs) must move beyond definitions of sexuality as a set of reified identity formations indexed to normative gender, gender of partner, and sexual and reproductive practices. Our interviews with queer women participants and primary care nurses offer an implicit critique of heteronormative health care space, temporality, …
Dead to the World: Rape, Unconsciousness, and Social Media
A recent popular focus on sexual assault cases involving women who are unconscious—whether because drunk, drugged, anesthetized, in a coma, or asleep—has drawn attention to the role of social media in both exacerbating and gaining redress for the harms of rape while unconscious. This article intersectionally situates cultural anxiety about women’s unconsciousness and sexual assault while offering a phenomenological analysis of its harms. Sexual a…
Foucault Studies Special Issue: Foucault and Feminism, September 2013
Changing the Subject
Foucault once offered that The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not at the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? 2 You take up this challenge as you locate yourself in your work. It's a risky strategy. I wonder if this practice has shifted your sense of
Michel Foucault: Key Concepts
Michel Foucault's work on freedom, subjectivity and power is now central to thinking across an extraordinarily wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, history, psychology, politics, anthropology, sociology and criminology. Michel Foucault: Key Concepts explores Foucault s central ideas, such as disciplinary power, biopower, bodies, spirituality, and practices of the self. Each essay focuses on a specific concept, analyzing its meaning an…
Symposium on Cressida Heyes's Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies : Ressentiment , Agency, Freedom: Reflecting on Responses to Self-Transformations
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Diagnosing Culture: Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Cosmetic Surgery
A recent clinical literature on the psychology of cosmetic surgery patients is concerned with distinguishing good from bad candidates. Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) - a mental disorder marked by a pathological aversion to some aspect(s) of one's appearance - is typically understood in this context as a contra-indication for cosmetic surgery, as it marks those with inappropriate motivation who are unlikely to be satisfied by the surgery's outcome…
Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies
The subject of normalization and its relationship with sex/gender is a major one in feminist theory and Heyes' book takes a theoretical approach to Foucault's work in this area
Cosmetic Surgery And The Televisual Makeover: A Foucauldian feminist reading
I argue that the televisual cosmetic surgical makeover is usefully understood as a contemporary manifestation of normalization, in Foucault's sense—a process of defining a population in relation to its conformity or deviance from a norm, while simultaneously generating narratives of individual authenticity. Drawing on detailed analysis of “Extreme Makeover,” I suggest that the show erases its complicity with creating homogeneous bodies by represe…
Normalisation and the Psychic Life of Cosmetic Surgery
Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers
This article argues that commercial weight-loss organizations appropriate and debase the askeses —practices of care of the self—that Michel Foucault theorized, increasing members’ capacities at the same time as they encourage participation in ever-tightening webs of power. Weight Watchers, for example, claims to promote self-knowledge, cultivate new capacities and pleasures, foster self-care in face of gendered exploitation, and encourage wisdom …
Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers
This article argues that commercial weight-loss organizations appropriate and debase the askeses—practices of care of the self—that Michel Foucault theorized, increasing members’ capacities at the same time as they encourage participation in ever-tightening webs of power. Weight Watchers, for example, claims to promote self-knowledge, cultivate new capacities and pleasures, foster self-care in face of gendered exploitation, and encourage wisdom a…
Gender, Bodies, Freedom: Feminist Philosophy across Traditions
The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy
Ludwig Wittgenstein's work has been widely interpreted and appropriated by subsequent philosophers, as well as by scholars from areas as diverse as anthropology, cultural studies, literary theory, sociology, law, and medicine. The Grammar of Politics demonstrates the variety of ways political philosophers understand Wittgenstein's importance to their discipline and apply Wittgensteinian methods to their own projects.In her introduction, Cressida …
Feminist Solidarity after Queer Theory: The Case of Transgender
Nancy C. M. Hartsock, The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays. Boulder, Westview, 1998
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers
This article argues that commercial weight-loss organizations appropriate and debase the askeses —practices of care of the self—that Michel Foucault theorized, increasing members’ capacities at the same time as they encourage participation in ever-tightening webs of power. Weight Watchers, for example, claims to promote self-knowledge, cultivate new capacities and pleasures, foster self-care in face of gendered exploitation, and encourage wisdom …
Michel Foucault: Key Concepts
Michel Foucault's work on freedom, subjectivity and power is now central to thinking across an extraordinarily wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, history, psychology, politics, anthropology, sociology and criminology. Michel Foucault: Key Concepts explores Foucault s central ideas, such as disciplinary power, biopower, bodies, spirituality, and practices of the self. Each essay focuses on a specific concept, analyzing its meaning an…
Cosmetic Surgery And The Televisual Makeover: A Foucauldian feminist reading
I argue that the televisual cosmetic surgical makeover is usefully understood as a contemporary manifestation of normalization, in Foucault's sense—a process of defining a population in relation to its conformity or deviance from a norm, while simultaneously generating narratives of individual authenticity. Drawing on detailed analysis of “Extreme Makeover,” I suggest that the show erases its complicity with creating homogeneous bodies by represe…
Anti-Essentialism in Practice: Carol Gilligan and Feminist Philosophy
Third wave anti-essentialist critique has too often been used to dismiss second wave feminist projects. I examine chims that Carol Gilligan's work is “essentialist,” and argue that her recent research requires this criticism be rethought. Anti-essentialist feminist method should consist in attention to the relations of power that construct accounts of gendered identity in the course of different forms of empirical enquiry, not in rejecting any ge…
Trans Surgeries and Cosmetic Surgeries
This article examines the various possibilities for making an analogy or disanalogy between cosmetic and trans surgeries, focusing on the suggestion that trans surgeries are medically necessary while cosmetic surgeries are not—a position that has a great deal of rhetorical force. The authors argue that this disanalogy both fails to understand the complexity of the justifications used by recipients of these diverse surgeries and should be seen as …
Queer Phenomenology, Sexual Orientation, and Health Care Spaces: Learning From the Narratives of Queer Women and Nurses in Primary Health Care
Queer phenomenology as an interpretive framework can advance health research by illuminating why primary health care providers (HCPs) must move beyond definitions of sexuality as a set of reified identity formations indexed to normative gender, gender of partner, and sexual and reproductive practices. Our interviews with queer women participants and primary care nurses offer an implicit critique of heteronormative health care space, temporality, …
Diagnosing Culture: Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Cosmetic Surgery
A recent clinical literature on the psychology of cosmetic surgery patients is concerned with distinguishing good from bad candidates. Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) - a mental disorder marked by a pathological aversion to some aspect(s) of one's appearance - is typically understood in this context as a contra-indication for cosmetic surgery, as it marks those with inappropriate motivation who are unlikely to be satisfied by the surgery's outcome…
Normalisation and the Psychic Life of Cosmetic Surgery
Dead to the World: Rape, Unconsciousness, and Social Media
A recent popular focus on sexual assault cases involving women who are unconscious—whether because drunk, drugged, anesthetized, in a coma, or asleep—has drawn attention to the role of social media in both exacerbating and gaining redress for the harms of rape while unconscious. This article intersectionally situates cultural anxiety about women’s unconsciousness and sexual assault while offering a phenomenological analysis of its harms. Sexual a…
Reading Advice to Parents about Children's Sleep: The Political Psychology of a Self-Help Genre
The genre of advice to parents about children’s sleep proliferated between the mid-1980s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. This article reads that genre against itself, as symptomatic of larger political trends—the end of the privilege of the normative mid-century nuclear family and the advent of neoliberal ideology and political economy. Specifically, it argues that this wave of advice reflects an ambivalence about the autonomous in…
Two Kinds of Awareness: Foucault, the Will, and Freedom in Somatic Practice
Foucault Studies Special Issue: Foucault and Feminism, September 2013
Gender, Bodies, Freedom: Feminist Philosophy across Traditions
Anti-Essentialism in Practice: Carol Gilligan and Feminist Philosophy
Third wave anti-essentialist critique has too often been used to dismiss second wave feminist projects. I examine chims that Carol Gilligan's work is “essentialist,” and argue that her recent research requires this criticism be rethought. Anti-essentialist feminist method should consist in attention to the relations of power that construct accounts of gendered identity in the course of different forms of empirical enquiry, not in rejecting any ge…
Anti-Essentialism in Practice: Carol Gilligan and Feminist Philosophy
Third wave anti-essentialist critique has too often been used to dismiss second wave feminist projects. I examine chims that Carol Gilligan's work is “essentialist,” and argue that her recent research requires this criticism be rethought. Anti-essentialist feminist method should consist in attention to the relations of power that construct accounts of gendered identity in the course of different forms of empirical enquiry, not in rejecting any ge…
Reading Transgender, Rethinking Women's Studies
Representing the best popular and scholarly contributions to transgender/ sex studies, and with their mutual concern with female-to-male sex and gender crossing (among other topics), these three books mark an important shift in scholarship on gender and sexuality. Trans studies has reached a level of autonomy and sophistication that firmly establishes it as a field with its own theoretical and political questions. Of course, connections to femini…
Nancy C. M. Hartsock, The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays. Boulder, Westview, 1998
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy
Ludwig Wittgenstein's work has been widely interpreted and appropriated by subsequent philosophers, as well as by scholars from areas as diverse as anthropology, cultural studies, literary theory, sociology, law, and medicine. The Grammar of Politics demonstrates the variety of ways political philosophers understand Wittgenstein's importance to their discipline and apply Wittgensteinian methods to their own projects.In her introduction, Cressida …
Feminist Solidarity after Queer Theory: The Case of Transgender
Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers
This article argues that commercial weight-loss organizations appropriate and debase the askeses —practices of care of the self—that Michel Foucault theorized, increasing members’ capacities at the same time as they encourage participation in ever-tightening webs of power. Weight Watchers, for example, claims to promote self-knowledge, cultivate new capacities and pleasures, foster self-care in face of gendered exploitation, and encourage wisdom …
Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers
This article argues that commercial weight-loss organizations appropriate and debase the askeses—practices of care of the self—that Michel Foucault theorized, increasing members’ capacities at the same time as they encourage participation in ever-tightening webs of power. Weight Watchers, for example, claims to promote self-knowledge, cultivate new capacities and pleasures, foster self-care in face of gendered exploitation, and encourage wisdom a…
Gender, Bodies, Freedom: Feminist Philosophy across Traditions
Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies
The subject of normalization and its relationship with sex/gender is a major one in feminist theory and Heyes' book takes a theoretical approach to Foucault's work in this area
Cosmetic Surgery And The Televisual Makeover: A Foucauldian feminist reading
I argue that the televisual cosmetic surgical makeover is usefully understood as a contemporary manifestation of normalization, in Foucault's sense—a process of defining a population in relation to its conformity or deviance from a norm, while simultaneously generating narratives of individual authenticity. Drawing on detailed analysis of “Extreme Makeover,” I suggest that the show erases its complicity with creating homogeneous bodies by represe…
Normalisation and the Psychic Life of Cosmetic Surgery
Diagnosing Culture: Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Cosmetic Surgery
A recent clinical literature on the psychology of cosmetic surgery patients is concerned with distinguishing good from bad candidates. Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) - a mental disorder marked by a pathological aversion to some aspect(s) of one's appearance - is typically understood in this context as a contra-indication for cosmetic surgery, as it marks those with inappropriate motivation who are unlikely to be satisfied by the surgery's outcome…
Michel Foucault: Key Concepts
Michel Foucault's work on freedom, subjectivity and power is now central to thinking across an extraordinarily wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, history, psychology, politics, anthropology, sociology and criminology. Michel Foucault: Key Concepts explores Foucault s central ideas, such as disciplinary power, biopower, bodies, spirituality, and practices of the self. Each essay focuses on a specific concept, analyzing its meaning an…
Symposium on Cressida Heyes's Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies : Ressentiment , Agency, Freedom: Reflecting on Responses to Self-Transformations
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Changing the Subject
Foucault once offered that The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not at the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? 2 You take up this challenge as you locate yourself in your work. It's a risky strategy. I wonder if this practice has shifted your sense of
Foucault Studies Special Issue: Foucault and Feminism, September 2013
Queer Phenomenology, Sexual Orientation, and Health Care Spaces: Learning From the Narratives of Queer Women and Nurses in Primary Health Care
Queer phenomenology as an interpretive framework can advance health research by illuminating why primary health care providers (HCPs) must move beyond definitions of sexuality as a set of reified identity formations indexed to normative gender, gender of partner, and sexual and reproductive practices. Our interviews with queer women participants and primary care nurses offer an implicit critique of heteronormative health care space, temporality, …
Dead to the World: Rape, Unconsciousness, and Social Media
A recent popular focus on sexual assault cases involving women who are unconscious—whether because drunk, drugged, anesthetized, in a coma, or asleep—has drawn attention to the role of social media in both exacerbating and gaining redress for the harms of rape while unconscious. This article intersectionally situates cultural anxiety about women’s unconsciousness and sexual assault while offering a phenomenological analysis of its harms. Sexual a…
Trans Surgeries and Cosmetic Surgeries
This article examines the various possibilities for making an analogy or disanalogy between cosmetic and trans surgeries, focusing on the suggestion that trans surgeries are medically necessary while cosmetic surgeries are not—a position that has a great deal of rhetorical force. The authors argue that this disanalogy both fails to understand the complexity of the justifications used by recipients of these diverse surgeries and should be seen as …
Two Kinds of Awareness: Foucault, the Will, and Freedom in Somatic Practice
The Short and the Long of It: A Political Phenomenology of Pandemic Time
Drawing on Françoise Dastur’s suggestion that the event is a permanent possibility that shapes lived experience, but also, when it occurs, a distinctive temporal rupture, I argue that the initial weeks of the COVID-19 epidemic constitute an event, in her sense. Connecting this phenomenological point to literatures on the politics of temporality, I suggest that the distinction between event and normal experience maps to that between epidemic and e…
Situating Genealogies of Terrorism
In an article in the British newspaper The Guardian, journalist Jason Burke-who has written extensively on terrorism-frames a commentary on the 2019 Christchurch shootings with the observation that terrorism is effective because "it always seems near. It always seems new. And it always seems personal." Burke continues that "ever since the first wave of terrorist violence broke across the newly industrialized cities of the west in the late 19 th c…
The Body
This chapter offers an overview of central issues and themes in feminist philosophical reflections on the body. It discusses at greater length three specific examples from recent debates in feminist philosophy: how concepts of sex and gender and their juxtaposition have been contested; how the phenomenological tradition has been reworked by critical feminist philosophers; and how feminist philosophers of disability challenge the reification of bo…
The New Horizontal Worker: Privacy, Sexuality, and Professionalism in the Digital Bedroom
In this essay we examine media coverage in 2020 and 2021 of the COVID-19-related practice of “working from bed.” Although presented as a new phenomenon, working from bed has a long history. We suggest that the late modern bourgeois understanding of the bedroom as a private space has long been manipulated by artists, writers, and other celebrities, both through staged photos and more self-conscious representation. These representations play on the…
Sociology (22 works) · Political science (21 works) · Law (18 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works)