Ontologies of Sex: Philosophy in Sexual Politics

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

This book examines feminist philosophical analyses of sexual oppression of women by men, and brings them into conversation with phenomenological, ontological, and psychoanalytical accounts of erotic experience and sexual difference. Erotic relation with the other is about a corporeal, affective encounter in which people are revealed to themselves and to each other in who they are. In eroticism, law, prohibitions, paradoxes, death, abjection, subjectivity, sovereignty, commitment, engagement, freedom, and intimate, affective relations with other human beings are at stake. This book examines different accounts of erotic experience and invites the reader to deepen their existential reflection on the significance of Eros for human life.

Reviews

"Ontologies of Sex provides a dense but rewarding overview of Continental philosophy's engagement with gender and sexual difference, starting with Simone de Beauvoir. Designed to serve as a survey, the text provides an introduction to a range of figures, including expected feminist and queer theorists like Luce Irigaray and Octavia Butler, but also a range of unusual suspects like Bataille, Nancy, Derrida, and Ricoeur. The text is timely as a growing interest in transgender rights has reinvigorated arguments about the nature of sexual identity, debates over nature and social construction, and, importantly, ethical and political struggles over sex. Direk (philosophy, Ko Univ., Turkey) argues that these issues require ontological inquiry into erotic experience and sexual identity. In focusing on political subjectivity, Direk draws attention to the stakes of ontological conflict in seeking an existential understanding of human life as autonomous--or capable of exercising freedom--in spite of vulnerability, or the relationships of power that confine and shape erotic existence. Rich in theoretical detail, this text provides a foundation for understanding philosophical engagements with gender, sex, and erotic entanglement and will be useful for teaching purposes and for introducing key debates. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." --Choice Reviews

Ontologies of Sex provides a dense but rewarding overview of Continental philosophy's engagement with gender and sexual difference, starting with Simone de Beauvoir. Designed to serve as a survey, the text provides an introduction to a range of figures, including expected feminist and queer theorists like Luce Irigaray and Octavia Butler, but also a range of unusual suspects like Bataille, Nancy, Derrida, and Ricoeur. The text is timely as a growing interest in transgender rights has reinvigorated arguments about the nature of sexual identity, debates over nature and social construction, and, importantly, ethical and political struggles over sex. Direk (philosophy, Ko Univ., Turkey) argues that these issues require ontological inquiry into erotic experience and sexual identity. In focusing on political subjectivity, Direk draws attention to the stakes of ontological conflict in seeking an existential understanding of human life as autonomous--or capable of exercising freedom--in spite of vulnerability, or the relationships of power that confine and shape erotic existence. Rich in theoretical detail, this text provides a foundation for understanding philosophical engagements with gender, sex, and erotic entanglement and will be useful for teaching purposes and for introducing key debates. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Author Bio

Zeynep Direk obtained her Ph. D from the University of Memphis in 1998. She is professor at Ko University, Department of Philosophy in Istanbul, Turkey. She publishes on contemporary French philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, feminism, and the history of Turkish philosophy. Her research on feminism focuses on feminist thinkers interpretations of the fundamental problems and concepts of Western philosophy. She has co-edited, with Leonard Lawlor, A Companion to Derrida (2014), and is the author of three books in Turkish.