What Is Sexual Difference

A history of feminism and women's rights in Italy. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Luce Irigaray (1932-) is the foremost thinker on sexual difference of our times. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference Irigaray speaks out against many feminists by pursuing questions of sexual difference, arguing that all thought and language is gendered and that there can therefore be no neutral thought. Examining major philosophers, such as Plato, Spinoza and Levinas, with a series of meditations on the female experience, she advocates new philosophies through which women can develop a distinctly female space and a "love of self". It is an essential feminist text and a major contribution to our thinking about language.

This critical exploration of issues of gender in psychoanalysis acknowledges and updates the complexity of theory and writing in this area, particularly the way sexual differences can only be thought about from a gendered position.

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory provides a rich overview of the analytical frameworks and theoretical concepts that feminist theorists have developed to analyze the known world. Featuring leading feminist theorists from diverse regions of the globe, this collection delves into forty-nine subject areas, demonstrating the complexity of feminist challenges to established knowledge, while also engaging areas of contestation within feminist theory. Demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of feminist theory, the chapters offer innovative analyses of topics central to social and political science, cultural studies and humanities, discourses associated with medicine and science, and issues in contemporary critical theory that have been transformed through feminist theorization. The handbook identifies limitations of key epistemic assumptions that inform traditional scholarship and shows how theorizing from women's and men's lives has profound effects on the conceptualization of central categories, whether the field of analysis is aesthetics, biology, cultural studies, development, economics, film studies, health, history, literature, politics, religion, science studies, sexualities, violence, or war.

Essays cover historical, sociological, psychological and anthropological approaches, ethics and politics, and the policy implications of the real and perceived differences between the sexes

Essays discuss feminist criticism, attitudes toward sexual difference, female identity, and the works of Eliot and Stein

Global struggles over women’s roles, rights, and dress have taken center stage in a drama that casts the secular and the religious in tense if not violent opposition. Advocates for equality speak of the issue in terms of rights and modern progress while reactionaries ground their authority in religious and scriptural appeals. Both sides presume women’s emancipation is tied to secularization. This volume upsets these certainties by blending diverse voices and traditions, both secular and religious, in studies historicizing, questioning, and testing the implicit links between secularism and expanded freedoms for women. Rather than treat secularism as the answer to conflicts over gender and sexuality, these essays show how it structures the conditions generating them.

Sex, Masculinity and God: The Trialogues is first and foremost an open exploration of the unknown and the forbidden. This exploration is navigated by three men of different existential style, belief and desire; but three men united in struggle to understand the nature of sexual energy, the difficulties of masculine identity, and connection to some other or beyond of the self. The adventure starts with a focus on the division producing what we refer to as masculine and feminine energy or identity. Instead of closing this difference up with intuitions of unification, their discourse plays in sexual difference in order to see what new territories can be discovered in the fields of science, religion and psychoanalysis. In play, what emerges include reflections on the meaning of historical identity, complexities of contemporary identification, paradoxes of new masculine movements, struggles of emotional negativity, disorientation of ethical duty and moral coherence, weird otherness of possible future technologies, and the strange unity of love and death. There are no final answers in this text, as it relates to sexual energy, masculine identity, or metaphysical meaning, but rather an invitation to open fully to even deeper levels of the unknown and the forbidden.

Alison Stone offers a feminist defence of the idea that sexual difference is natural, providing a novel interpretation of the later philosophy of Luce Irigaray. She defends Irigaray's unique form of essentialism and her rethinking of the relationship between nature and culture, showing how Irigaray's ideas can be reconciled with Judith Butler's performative conception of gender, through rethinking sexual difference in relation to German Romantic philosophies of nature. This is a sustained attempt to connect feminist conceptions of embodiment to German idealist and Romantic accounts of nature. Not merely an interpretation of Irigaray, this book also presents an original feminist perspective on nature and the body. It will encourage debate on the relations between sexual difference, essentialism, and embodiment.

Connects theories of sexual difference to race and queer theories through a focus on “in-between” bodies.