Review of Shannon Sullivan's “Living Across and Through Skins. Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001)

Abstract

Sullivan's Living Across and Through Skins is dedicated to an investigation of Dewey's concept of transactional bodies and the implications this concept has in various philosophical fields (such as ethics and epistemology) as well as in the cultural, social, and political realms. In her reading of pragmatist, phenomenological, feminist and poststructuralist philosophers such as Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Harding and Butler, Sullivan presents us with an intricate analysis "of corporeal existence as transactional" (1), emphasizing the benefits as well as some of the dangers of this concept for theories concerned with gender, race, and the subject.