Existential Eroticism: A Feminist Approach to Understanding Women's Oppression-Perpetuating Choices

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Existential Eroticism: A Feminist Approach to Understanding Women's Oppression-Perpetuating Choices offer a unique lens aimed at the underbelly of the lady through which feminists can reorient discourses on rationality and moral responsibility related to womens oppression-perpetuating choices. Shay Welch utilizes feminist ethics, broadly construed as feminist philosophy concerned with the ethical commitment to eliminate oppression, to scrutinize how women regard and judge one another and to offer a more representative account of restriction, rationality, and responsibility to begin the healing process between diverse and divergent women. The book aims not only to construct an analysis of self-perpetuated oppression that will broaden feminist understandings of experiences that motivate many women to choose as they do, it serves as a means of understanding the marginalized.

Reviews

This is no small achievement. As I read the book, these insights are important because they apply more generally than just to the experience of marginal women. . . I think it achieves something. . . remarkable, which is to show that reflecting on invisible, marginal lives illuminates the experience of the privileged. * American Philosophical Association *
Throughout Existential Eroticism, Welch draws subtle distinctions and makes forceful arguments concerning staggeringly difficult issues. . . .[The book] is a resolute philosophical inquiry into the suffering she herself, her family members, and her friends endured (and that so many women like them continue to endure), and it is a sustained reclamation of their dignity as agents. * Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy *
Existential Eroticism is a compelling and original contribution to feminist philosophy. It raises and attempts to resolve important issues about complicity under systemic conditions of disadvantage under patriarchy and grapples with the uncomfortable territory of intra-group blame and resentment, while providing a constructive way forward in intra-group forgiveness. Most of all, Welch successfully achieves her goal of providing a nuanced account in which women living in some of the most desperate scenarios of existential eroticism are not simply to be understood as victims or dupes, but in fact as agents, sometimes blameworthy sometimes not, sometimes fighters, and sometimes employing highly sophisticated forms of desperate rationality. * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *

Author Bio

Shay Welch is assistant professor of philosophy at Spelman College.