With its implicit vilification of materiality, the notion of objectification has failed to produce a coherent and effective ethical analysis of heterosexual sex work. The concept of derivatization, grounded in an Irigarayan model of embodied intersubjectivity, is more effective. However, queer sex work poses new and different ethical challenges. This paper argues that although queer sex work can entail both objectification and derivatization, the former is not ethically objectionable, and the latter, although the cause for some justified ethical concern, must (...) be analyzed within the context of structural sexual injustice. (shrink)

This article considers Beauvoir’s gesture towards fraternité at the end of The Second Sex (1949) by focusing on her fleeting characterisation of this future as ‘an androgynous world’. Generally, either Beauvoir’s call for fraternité is dismissed as an erasure of sexual difference and is thus seen to be politically bankrupt, or fraternité is understood to realise sexual difference. This latter reading suggests that androgyny plays no role in Beauvoir’s solution to women’s oppression, while the other view often sees it as (...) one effect of fraternité. This article takes a different position by arguing that Beauvoir affirms sexual difference and commits to an androgynous future. The article argues that androgyny is an affective mood that is constitutive of an openness in the field of possibility for living sexual difference. Consequently, androgyny plays not only a central role in fraternité, but also gestures to a future beyond dimorphic sexual difference. (shrink)

This article examines the limitations associated with Irigaray’s concept of a culture of difference. I suggest that her concept of sexual difference depends upon a conservative fiction of sameness. I argue that a fiction of phallic sameness underpins her evangelical championing of difference, and that such a fiction retains a conservative blindness to the complexities of contemporary social relations and erases the positive effects oppositional discourses have had on the culture of modernity. I question the debt Irigaray disavows to other (...) non-difference feminism, her insistence that woman are radically marginalized and suggest that her culture of difference is prescriptive and normative. Egalitarian feminism, understood as a postmodern project, is far more strategic, insofar as it offers a multiply-situated analysis of the relationship between women and power within modernity. I replace Irigaray’s negative image of the egalitarian feminist as an unnatural woman with the figure of the cyborg who embraces ontological impurity and strategically works within culture. (shrink)

This paper addresses the relation between Luce Irigaray’s work and politics by asking what it means to read her work locally, in place. The philosophical work of Indigenous scholar, Mary Graham, on the law of obligation, serves to ground such a local reading presenting, simultaneously, a case for a uniquely Australian philosophy. By way of suggesting possible connections between the work of Irigaray and Graham, the paper places Graham’s work on obligation alongside Irigaray’s work on the importance of a symbolic (...) re-distribution of value suggested in her philosophy of horizontal transcendence. Such a reading encourages us to consider what it means to engage work, such as Irigaray’s, in a here and now that differs from the European context of her writing. (shrink)

Irigaray’s engagement with Aristotelian physics provides a specific diagnosis of women’s ontological and ethical situation under Western metaphysics: Women provide place and containership to men, but have no place of their own, rendering them uncontained and abyssal. She calls for a reconfiguration of this topological imaginary as a precondition for an ethics of sexual difference. This paper returns to Aristotelian cosmological texts to further investigate the topologies of sexual difference suggested there. In an analysis both psychoanalytic and phenomenological, the paper (...) rigorously traces a teleological and oedipal narrative implicit in the structure of the Aristotelian cosmos, in which desire for the mother is superseded by love for the father. Further, the paper argues that this narrative is complicated by certain other elements in the Aristotelian text—aporias involving the notion of boundary and the relationship between space and time, the fallenness of the feminine, and the ineliminably aleatory qualities of matter. The paper concludes that such elements may provide material for disrupting this teleology of gender, opening onto not merely an ethics of sexual difference, but providing space and place for a proliferation of non-normative, queer, transgender and intersex modes of sexed and gendered subjectivity. (shrink)

This essay undertakes a reexamination of the notion of the receptacle/chōra in Plato's Timaeus, asking what its value may be to feminists seeking to understand the topology of the feminine in Western philosophy. As the source of cosmic motion as well as a restless figurality, labile and polyvocal, the receptacle/chōra offers a fecund zone of destabilization that allows for an immanent critique of ancient metaphysics. Engaging with Derridean, Irigarayan, and Kristevan analyses, Bianchi explores whether receptacle/chōra can exceed its reduction to (...) the maternal-feminine, and remain answerable to contemporary theoretical concerns. (shrink)

This essay argues that the ambiguities of the just war tradition, sifted through a feminist critique, provides the best framework currently available for translating the ethical entitlement to human dignity into concrete feminist political practices. It offers a gendered critique of war that pursues the just war distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets of wartime violence and provides a gendered analysis of the peace which the just war tradition obliges us to preserve and pursue.

Inspired by Adriana Cavarero’s recent work on maternal inclinations as a postural term, the overall purpose of this article is to seek out a geometry of the educational relation that is alien to the masculine myth of the ‘economic man’. Drawing on Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons’s critique of the marketization of education, reading their giving ‘shape and form’ to the scholastic school through the geometry of Cavarero’s ‘maternal inclinations’, the article shows how images and metaphors associated with the posture (...) of rectitude infuse the scholastic model of the school. At the same time, we argue, it testifies to a geometry of an inclined subject and, in doing so, it offers an opening for recovering the significance of the feminine and maternal to educational theory. Affirming this opening, the paper makes a shift of emphasis from scholastic techniques to educational postures. (shrink)

A comprehensive examination of Kristeva's work from the seventies to the nineties.

This introductory essay argues that it is a mistake to represent Australian feminist philosophy as a kind of discourse theory that is “downstream” of the French post-structuralists or North American postmodernists. Starting with the local—and the specifically Australian modes of racial exclusion, in particular—and exploring some of the byways of philosophy, what we encounter is a range of ontological, ethical, and political models that allow a reconfiguration of self, community, and social change.

Kant and Kierkegaard are two philosophers who are not usually bracketed together. Yet, for one commentator, Ronald Green, in his book Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt , a deep similarity between them is seen in the centrality both accord to the notion of freedom. Kierkegaard, for example, in one of his Journal entries, expresses a ‘passion’ for human freedom. Freedom is for Kierkegaard also linked to a paradox that lies at the heart of thought. In Philosophical Fragment Kierkegaard writes (...) about the ‘paradox of thought’: ‘the paradox is the passion of thought […] the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without the passion.’. (shrink)

This article engages the concept of hospitality as it relates to the maternal. I critically evaluate the current conceptions of hospitality by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, focusing on their dematerialized definition of the feminine found at the heart of hospitality, and Derrida's aporia of hospitality that deals with ownership. The foundation of hospitality, I show, is the maternal relation and its specific acts of hospitality that encompass the notions of gift and generosity. While remaining unthought in philosophy, however, maternal (...) acts of hospitality are appropriated when hospitality is defined as interiority, habitation, expectancy, and unconditional welcoming of the other within oneself. I argue that hospitality would remain Derrida's and his proponents' “impossible” ethic as long as it undercuts its own promise, does not fully think through its foundation in the maternal, and fails to welcome the mother unconditionally. (shrink)

Julian of Norwich (b. 1342) anticipated the ontological and epistemological work on sexed embodiment pioneered in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the 20th century. Her epistemology of sensual ‘showings’ helped reconfigure women’s embodiment and speech acts (‘bodytalk’): by recognizing cognitive emotions and the knowledge-producing body; and by envisioning the intertwining of human flesh with All That Is. The paper next examines Merleau-Ponty’s somatic discourse on the chiasmic flesh, which leads to a discussion of Irigaray’s work on poetic mimesis.

While Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of alterity has been the topic of much discussion within Beauvoir scholarship, feminist theory, and social and political philosophy, it has not commonly been a reference point for those working within ethics. However, Beauvoir develops a novel view that those concerned with the ethical import of respect for others should consider seriously, especially those working within the Levinasian tradition. I claim that Beauvoir distinguishes between two forms of otherness: namely, existential alterity and sociopolitical alterity. While (...) sociopolitical alterity is a contingent and surmountable form of otherness that results from oppression of individuals and groups, existential alterity is a necessary feature of the human condition that discloses the foreignness of the other as a freedom. Out of this view of existential alterity, I argue, Beauvoir develops an ethic of asymmetrical reciprocity. In contrast with Levinas, who dismisses reciprocity as a symmetrical or reversible model of relation that minimizes difference, Beauvoir promulgates a view of reciprocity that does not fall into the problems that Levinas diagnoses. Moreover, asymmetrical reciprocity more successfully figures the ethical relation to the other than the absolute asymmetry one finds in Levinas, which becomes evident through revisiting Levinas’s account of eros and contrasting it with that of Beauvoir. (shrink)

This essay addresses the link between sex trafficking and European citizesnhip by examining several anti-trafficking campaigns launched in post-socialist Europe. In illustrating which techniques are used in the production of images, it points to the highly symbolic and stereotypical constructions of femininity (victims) and masculinity (criminals) of eastern European nationals. A close analysis of female bodies dispayed in the campaigns indicates that the use of victimizing images goes hand in hand with the erotization of women's bodies. Wounded and dead women's (...) bodies are read as attempts to stabilize the current political and social transformations in Europe by capturing women within the highly immobile boundaries of the sign ‘Woman’. The essay suggests that the representation of violence is thus violent itself since it confirms the stereotypes about eastern European women, equates the feminine with the passive object, severs the body from its materiality and from the historical context in which trafficking occurs, and finally confines women within the highly disabling symbolic register of ‘Woman’ as to maintain an imaginary social order in Europe. (shrink)

What does Husserlian phenomenology have to offer feminist theory? More specifically, can we find resources within Husserl’s account of the living body ( Leib ) for the critical feminist project of rethinking embodiment beyond the dichotomies not only of mind/body but also of subject/object and activity/passivity? This essay begins by explicating the reasons for feminist hesitation with respect to Husserlian phenomenology. I then explore the resources that Husserl’s phenomenology of touch and his account of sensings hold for feminist theory. My (...) reading of Husserl proceeds by means of a comparison between his description of touch in Ideas II and Merleau-Ponty’s early appropriation of this account in the Phenomenology of Perception, as well as through an unlikely rapprochement between Husserl and Irigaray on the question of touch. Moreover, by revisiting the limitations in Husserl’s approach to the body—limitations of which any feminist appropriation must remain cognizant—I attempt to take Husserl’s phenomenology of touch beyond its initial methodologically solipsistic frame and to ask whether and how it can contribute to thinking gendered and racialized bodies. The phenomenology of touch, I argue, can allow us to understand the interplay between subjective, felt embodiment and social-historical context. In opening up Husserl’s account of touch to other dimensions—intersubjective and affective—sociality is revealed as residing within, and structuring of, touch. Such touch can allow us to think embodiment anew. (shrink)

This chapter surveys essentialist and anti-essentialist theories of sex and gender. It does so by engaging three approaches to sex and gender: externalism, internalism, and contextualism. The chapter also draws attention to two key debates about sex and gender in the feminist literature: the debate about the sex/gender distinction (the distinction debate) and the debate about whether sex and gender have essences (the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate). In addition, it describes three problems that theories of sex and gender tend to face: the (...) Inclusion Problem, the Definition Problem, and the Exclusion Problem. Lastly, the chapter highlights why the division between essentialist and anti-essentialist accounts of sex and gender is not clear. (shrink)

_Examines how violence has been conceptually and rhetorically put to use in continental social theory._.

Examines how violence has been conceptually and rhetorically put to use in continental social theory.

Fifty Key Sociologists: The Contemporary Theorists covers the life, work, ideas and impact of some of the most important thinkers in this discipline. Concentrating on figures writing predominantly in the second half of the twentieth century, such as Zygmunt Bauman, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Claude Le;vi-Strauss, each entry includes: · full cross-referencing · a further reading section · biographical data · key works and ideas · critical assessment. Clearly presented in an easy-to-navigate A-Z format, this accessible reference (...) guide is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, cultural studies and general studies, as well as other readers interested in this fascinating field. (shrink)

In both popular and scholarly discussions, sexual consent is gaining traction as the central moral consideration in how people should treat one another in sexual encounters. However, while the concept of consent has been indispensable to oppose many forms of sexual violence, consent-based sexual ethics struggle to account for the phenomenological complexity of sexual intimacy and the social and structural pressures that often surround sexual communication and behavior. Feminist structural critique and social research on the prevalence of violation even within (...) consensual sex suggest that consent is insufficient to ground responsibility; a more fundamental orientation toward the value of sexual agency provides a better foundation for sexual ethics. Using feminist critical theory, phenomenology, and black feminist thought, this dissertation develops a socially situated and relational notion of sexual agency and diagnoses how such agency is neglected in prevailing discussions of consent in moral philosophy and legal theory. I argue that the ethical question of responsibility to another in a sexual encounter—apart from juridical considerations—should be reframed around the value of each person’s socially situated practices of agency. Preceding and extending beyond the obligation to gain valid consent for an action, responsibility demands adapting one’s intentions and behaviors in response to the wider range of another’s communicative expressions of agency. However, communicative expressions can be ambiguous or overdetermined by social context and cultural norms; they often offer only provisional traces of agency. To address this inherent uncertainty in intimacy, I propose drawing on insights from Emmanuel Levinas about the dynamic, open-ended nature of relationality, responsibility, and communication. Responsibility toward another does not depend on securing certainty about their “yes” or “no,” but requires responding continuously under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity, adapting behaviors and intentions to make room for another’s agency despite its opacity. (shrink)

In this chapter, I bring insights from the social sciences, about the role of time in exclusionary practices, into debates around the under-representation of women in philosophy. I will suggest that part of what supports the exclusionary culture of philosophy is a particular approach to time, and thus that changing this culture requires that we also change its time.

Analytic feminists are philosophers who believe that both philosophy and feminism are well served by using some of the concepts, theories and methods of analytic philosophy modified by feminist values and insights. By using ‘ analytic feminist’ to characterize their style of feminist philosophizing, these philosophers acknowledge their dual feminist and analytic roots and their intention to participate in the ongoing conversations within both traditions. In addition, the use of ‘ analytic feminist’ attempts to rebut two frequently made presumptions: that (...) feminist philosophy. (shrink)

The purpose of the thesis is to put forth and explore a notion of teaching as a practice of attention formation. Drawing on educational philosophy and the Didaktik/Pädagogik-traditions, teaching is explored as a relational and lived-though practice that can promote, form, and share attention. In the context of teaching, attention is connected to the acts of showing and observing. As such, teaching can be seen as a complex of relations that emerges through the intersection of the intentions of the one (...) who is showing and the one who is observing. This intersection creates a tension between the self-active student and the paths made possible for this self-activity. The pedagogical dimension of this tension can be expressed through the principles of the summons to self-activity and Bildsamkeit. By turning to some key-texts of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, I explore how the notion of teaching as attention formation can be understood from within a radical relational perspective on education and also how attention itself can be thought of as an educational phenomenon. From this critical relational perspective, where the relation is seen as constitutive of educational situations and where the possibility for uniqueness, difference, and freedom are regarded as central characteristics for a democratic conception of education, I interpret Rancière’s notions of intellectual emancipation and partage du sensible as political/aesthetic analogues to the summons to self-activity and Bildsamkeit, respectively. While the event of intellectual emancipation, although constituted relationally, mainly addresses the unique attentive subject, the notion of le partage du sensible draws attention to the larger and shared context in which this event takes place. In the thesis, teaching as attention formation is addressed as a relational phenomenon in which the unique and irreplaceable subject is called into being and is given space to respond to the summons of the surrounding world and to strive against the materiality of that very same world. It is suggested that attention formation might be the educational event when someone, as a unique other, is called into presence and is given room to claim and to speak for his or her interest. It is an event made possible by those teachers who have the sensibility to discover its coming, the courage to let it happen, and the strength to accept the consequences of it. (shrink)