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Professor Mary C. Rawlinson has been an Honorary Research Fellow at the IAS since 2021.
Mary C. Rawlinson is Honorary Research Fellow at the IAS and Professor Emerita of Philosophy, Stony Brook University in New York, where she was Chair and Director of Graduate Studies.
Rawlinson's publications include What Is Sexual Difference: Thinking After Irigaray (Columbia University Press, 2024), The Betrayal of Substance: death, literature, and sexual difference in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Columbia University Press, 2021), Just Life: bioethics and the future of sexual difference (Columbia University Press, 2016), Engaging the World: Thinking After Irigaray (SUNY, 2016), The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics (Routledge, 2016), Labor and Global Justice (Lexington, 2014), Global Food, Global Justice (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015), Thinking with Irigaray (SUNY, 2011), The Voice of Breast Cancer in Medicine and Bioethics (Springer, 2006) and Derrida and Feminism (Routledge, 1997). She has edited five issues of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, including Foucault and the Philosophy of Medicine, The Future of Psychiatry and Feminist Bioethics. She has also published numerous articles on Hegel, Proust, literature and ethics, bioethics, food ethics, and contemporary French philosophy.
Rawlinson was the founding editor of IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (2006-2016) and Co-founder and Co-director of The Irigaray Circle (2007-2017). She currently serves on the Editorial Board of Mean Streets: a journal of crime fiction, as well as the Advisory Boards of the Feminist Bioethics Network and the Irigaray Circle. In 2023 she organized the Symposium on Structural Injustice for the IAS.
Currently, Professor Rawlinson is completing a philosophical analysis of crime fiction for Bloomsbury Press, arguing that crime fiction offers a more adequate concept of justice than does philosophy. Rawlinson's hypothesis is that crime fiction deploys concepts of agency, judgment, and sociality that more adequately address contemporary ethical urgencies than those of conventional moral and political philosophy. Philosophical theories of justice regularly rely on concepts of reciprocity, equality, or the mutual recognition of equals, while representing the moral agent as a generic rational subject freely deliberating toward the right end. Rawlinson’s projected book Liminal Ethics will follow crime fiction in resituating agency in a world that is both unjust and absurd, where infrastructures of race, gender, and economic inequity concentrate wealth and security in the hands of a few. If, as Raymond Chandler argues, "ours is not a fragrant world", what kind of agency will be effective against this structural injustice, when the very institutions charged to protect the vulnerable are indifferent or hostile? Can an agent navigate these "mean streets" without becoming mean? What is the role of violence in justice? This genre challenges philosophy to show a path from structural inequity to a genuinely shared culture of possibilities without a detour through violence and transgression.
