Description
Book SynopsisThis book brings together leading scholars to consider the philosophical implications of Luce Irigaray’s writing on sexual difference, particularly for issues of gender and race.
Trade ReviewWhat is Sexual Difference? thinks with and against Luce Irigaray in a new and invigorating way. Posing the fundamental question as to
what sexual difference is opens up a range of possibilities for reading Irigaray beyond the oppositional attitudes of the essentialism question. Essays from a diversity of perspectives consider Irigaray in relation to colonialism, race, ecological questions, and gender identity. The inclusion of essays that read Irigaray in the context of trans philosophy and the critique of cissexism are an especially welcome contribution. -- Elaine P. Miller, author of
Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed TimesThis is a timely and impressive re-examination of Luce Irigaray's influential ontological philosophy. By explicitly placing Irigaray's thinking within our pressing contemporary concerns with new, and returning, political, social, and environmental crises, the volume examines how 'sexual difference' constructs lived experience for/by/with diverse communities in affirmative, transversal, and specific ways. Its four sections address the capacity of writing about colonial, racial, sexual, or migrational issues
through sexual difference, in order to suggest affirmative and ethical relations or subjectivities. As such, Irigaray's thinking may help enable us to re-think what it means to live together, at times and in places, so deeply constituted by societal, political, and environmental inequity and uncertainty. -- Peg Rawes, author of
Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and SubjectivityThis rich collection shows that Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference remains fruitful and important. Engaging with ontology, essentialism, the sex/gender distinction, trans identities, colonialism, critical race theory, nature and ecology, and new materialisms, the authors interpret and take forward the idea of sexual difference creatively. They bring out many generative resonances between Irigaray's work and contemporary critical thought. -- Alison Stone, author of
Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual DifferenceThe text that you hold,
What is Sexual Difference?, beautifully captures the constitutive dynamism, dialectical and conceptual generativity, and deep openness that is reflective of the ongoing work of Luce Irigaray. The engaging and critically fecund voices and discursive framings within the text precisely reflect the phenomenon of wonder as postponement vis-à-vis the meaning of sexual difference. The text embodies a conceptual excess that resists closure regarding the work of Irigaray but does not sacrifice the necessity to
think with her. Indeed, it is this process of
thinking with Irigaray that disrupts autarchic myths of univocal meaning, and interpretive hegemony regarding her work. It is clear to me that the spirit and passion of Irigarayan wonder (as a mode of mourning) imbues this text. In this way, Rawlinson and Sares have fashioned a polyvocal philosophical site that refuses (as it should) to suit us totally and functions as a critically engaging textual advent. -- George Yancy, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy, Emory University
Table of ContentsForeword, 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 Difference1. 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/Gender5. 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 Subjectivity8. 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 Anemțoaicei
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 Difference12. 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 Difference16. 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
