What Is Sexual Difference?
Description
This book brings together leading scholars to consider the philosophical implications of Irigaray's writing on sexual difference, particularly for issues of gender and race. Their essays directly confront the charge of essentialism, exploring how Irigaray's thought opens new possibilities for understanding the complexity of gender identities, including nonbinary and trans experiences as well as alternative configurations of masculinity and femininity. Though Irigaray is sometimes accused of a failure to appreciate racial difference, contributors show the productive role of her work in thinking race. This book also illuminates how Irigaray's work provides creative practices that help realign human experience and our relations with nature and each other.
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Persons
James Sares is affiliated faculty in philosophy at Emerson College and holds a PhD in philosophy from Stony Brook University. He is the recipient of the 2018 Karen Burke Memorial Prize, awarded by the Irigaray Circle.
Content
Foreword, by Elizabeth Grosz
List of Abbreviations (Works by Irigaray)
Introduction: Irigaray and the Question of Sexual Difference, by James Sares and Mary C. Rawlinson
Part I: The Ontology of Sexual Difference
1. The Ontological Negativity of Sexual Difference, by James Sares
2. Opening Hegel's Autological Circle: Irigaray and the Metaphysics of Sexual Difference, by Mary C. Rawlinson
3. One, Two, Many? Sexual Difference and the Problem of Universals, by Stephen D. Seely
4. Returning to Irigaray's Radical Materialism: Sexuate Difference, Ontology, and Bodies of Water, by Laura Roberts
Part II: Sexual Difference Beyond Sex/Gender
5. Life Itself and Sexual Difference: Nature and Culture, by Ruthanne Crapo Kim
6. Sexuation as a Frame for Human Becoming: Reading a "Plastic" Essence in Irigaray's Philosophy, by Belinda Eslick
7. Looking Back at "This Sex Which Is Not One": Post-deconstructive New Materialisms and Their (Sexual) Difference, by Penelope Deutscher
Part III: Sexuate Nature and Subjectivity
8. An Uncontainable Subject: Thinking Feminine Sexuate Subjectivity with Irigaray, by Jennifer Carter
9. Male Re-imaginings: From the Ontology of the Anal Toward a Phenomenology of Fluidity, by Ovidiu Anem¿oaicei
10. Sexual Difference as Qualitative Becoming: Irigaray Beyond Cissexism?, by Oli Stephano
11. An Onto-ethics of Transsexual Difference, by Mitchell Damian Murtagh
Part IV: Placing Sexual Difference
12. Sexuate Difference in the Black Atlantic: Reading Irigaray with Hartman, by Rachel Jones
13. Bloodshed: Kinship as a Site of Violence in Irigaray and Spillers, by Sabrina L. Hom
14. Toward a Sexuate Jurisprudence and on the "Second Rape" of Law, by Yvette Russell
15. Place Thinking with Irigaray and Neidjie, by Rebecca Hill
Part V: Back to the Future of Sexual Difference
16. Reading Speculum Again: Narrative, Optics, Time, by Emanuela Bianchi
17. Indebtedness: A Sexuate Malaise, by Iván Hofman
18. Mysterics: Extinction and Emptiness, by Lynne Huffer
List of Contributors
Index
