Heidegger, Dasein, and Gender: Thinking the Unthought

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Heidegger, Dasein, and Gender takes Heidegger to task on gender by assessing his views on women as thinkers and exploring what his work offers to contemporary LGBTQ+ and womens studies. Scholars come together whose Heidegger research engages bioethics, pregnancy, motherhood and maternal Dasein; whether Dasein can be gender neutral or non-binary, and what it means when neutrality and gender are defined by patriarchy rather than the spectrum of lived genders; the question of human capacity for transcendence in the immanence of flesh; and the possibility of re-imaging Dasein as gendered, i.e., born into embodiment and bound to memory, and the capacity to create new futures by transitioning the present as it slips into history. Authors ask who and what, including animals, can be Dasein and bring Heidegger to issues of sexual abuse and violence, mens experience when thrust into womens daily (and not so daily) routine, and the intersection of queerness and death. The book aims not to provide final answers, but to open possibilities for further thinking with, on, against, through and because of Heidegger.

Reviews

Heidegger, Dasein, and Gender presents important, original arguments about Heideggers phenomenology, offering an impressive lineup of scholars and perspectives taking up pressing topics in contemporary life. Heideggers early claim that Dasein is neutral with respect to sex and gender, together with Dasein's transcendence of factual designations, opens pathways beyond reductive and binary conceptions of human identity. Highly recommended. -- Lawrence Hatab, Louis I. Jaffe Professor of Philosophy, Old Dominion University
A brilliant collection of groundbreaking studies on gender and Heidegger, featuring work by eleven current Heidegger scholars. This is a must have book for thinking through topics of gender, transness, queerness, motherhood, and race in Heidegger. -- John M. Rose, professor emeritus, Goucher College
In staging encounters between Heidegger and feminist philosophy, transgender studies, and queer theory, this excellent collection reveals new dimensions of Heideggers thought and offers new insights about gender. Critical interpretation and creative reappropriation of Heidegger unsettle binary and naturalizing thinking and generate rich meditations on pregnancy, motherhood, selfhood, and sociality. -- Jeffrey D. Gower, Wabash College
As the insightful essays of this book demonstrate, Dasein is not male or female at the core of its being. Always already thrown into a gendered world, we typically fall into binarity (along with the other oppressions reactively reinforcing their pretensions to be natural), but we can also undergo an existential death whereby we rediscover Daseins original polysexual potency and thereby disclose more authentic ways of embracing the ontological diversity of existence. Such transitions are existential rebirths that can embody and disseminate freer and more livable ways of being, helping lead us beyond the nihilistic metaphysics of late modernity. -- Iain Thomson, University of New Mexico, author of Heidegger on Ontotheology; Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity; Rethinking Death in and after Heidegger; and Heidegger on the Danger and Promise of Technology
Claxton and Glazebrook have orchestrated a timely interrogation of the unthought in Heideggers corpus with respect to gender, challenging the conception of Dasein as gender neutral. Drawing on the full range of Heideggers texts, original contributions by leading scholars make the phenomenological dimensions of gender, sexuality, transgender identities, the woman, maternal Dasein, and being-toward-birth visible in ways that illuminate new paths of questioning Daseins being-in-the-world. -- David Pettigrew, CSU Professor and chair, philosophy department, Southern Connecticut State University
Phenomenology's future is inextricably tied to its ability to engage with questions of sex, gender, sexuality and race, e.g. with issues of embodiment. For this reason, Claxton and Glazebrook have created a volume that is centrally important to the future of phenomenology. This is especially true of Chapter 4 and its engagement with transgender identities which brilliantly expands and deepens the ability of phenomenology to investigate this vital topic. We are lucky to have these timely and essential explorations. -- William Koch, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York

Author Bio

Tricia Glazebrook is professor in the School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs and affiliate professor in the Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Washington State University.

Susanne Claxton is instructor of philosophy at Southern New Hampshire University and Santa Fe Community College.