Customer Reviews

Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and

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As someone familiar with most of John Dewey's works, with a distaste for continental philosophy, and with a budding interest in theories of gender, I was very interested to see someone apply Dewey's work to feminist thought. However, I found this work disappointing as a whole. The first two chapters are fairly strong, explaining Dewey's idea of "transaction" and then applying it to Judith Butler's ideas of performativity.

But the third chapter (about communication) was, in my opinion, poorly argued and involved numerous misunderstandings of transaction and Dewey's work in general. The fourth chapter (on somaesthetics) completely diverges from the rest of the book and drops the connection with Dewey and pragmatism almost entirely to talk about Nietzsche. I have no idea why chapter four was in the book, or what I was supposed to get out of it. Chapter five is a confused effort to illustrate the problems of foundationalist epistemology, and to justify feminist standpoint theory; it does neither of these very effectively. As with chapter four, I wasn't entirely sure how it was intended to relate to the rest of the book, or to pragmatism in general.

All in all, the claims that emerge out of this work are trivial (we should listen to each other, and activism can bring about social change), irrelevant (the entire discussion of Nietzschean somaesthetics), or absurd (women's experience is epistemically prior to men's).

I first became aware of Sullivan's book when I was working on feminist standpoint theory and found it an interesting development of a framework to support and extend the epistemology.

Since then I've take to using the book in teaching to show how pragmatism can be combined with feminist philosophy fruitfully. Students (senior undergraduates and graduate students) find the book clear and convincing, although we skip the chapters on Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty. The discussion of race as well as gender fills a gap that is too common in philosophy curricula.