Introduction -- By way of nomadism -- Context and generations -- Sexual difference theory -- On the female feminist subject : from "she-self" to "she-other" -- Sexual difference as a nomadic political project -- Organs without bodies -- Images without imagination -- Mothers, monsters, and machines -- Discontinuous becomings : Deleuze and the becoming-woman of philosophy -- Envy and ingratitude: men in feminism -- Conclusion. Geometries of passion : a conversation.

Derrida states at the beginning of Geschlecht III that at stake is the question of sexual difference, one that is referred in Heidegger’s 1953 essay on Trakl to a twofoldness that precedes the opposition of sexual duality, a duality which, according to Derrida, neutralizes sexual difference. I follow the development of what Derrida also called the “dream” of “another sexual difference,” one that would not be ruled by the opposition of the two. Derrida’s (...) guiding interpretation in Geschlecht III is that Heidegger privileges “gathering” and the reference to the “one” in this thinking of difference, and of sexual difference, thereby neutralizing difference. Drawing a contrast between difference as polysemy and difference as dissemination, I attempt in what follows to discuss Derrida’s interpretation, raising questions concerning some of his readings with respect to the motifs of dispersion, dissemination, polysemy, and gathering. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sexual Difference as Model: An Ethics for the Global FutureGail SchwabIn Éthique de la différence sexuelle (1984), Luce Irigaray targeted language and love—for her, inseparable from each other—as the two areas of focus for the elaboration of an ethics of sexual difference. The heterosexual couple seemed to have taken on a new, and somehow inappropriately central, importance in Irigaray’s thought in the early eighties; however, (...) the projected mutations in language and love theorized in Éthique did not exclusively concern the heterosexual relationship, even though many readers of Irigaray expressed just such reservations about the book. Éthique foregrounded the couple in the love relationship in order to rethink the philosophical basis of ethics in general, to develop new paradigms, beyond or outside of Western totalizing phallo- and logocentrism, for human relations—not only relations between women and men, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, relations among women and relations among men. Irigaray carried on this project in subsequent works, in Sexes et parentés (1987), which as the title explicitly indicates, opens up the ethical debate to familial and genealogical issues and broadens her focus to include children and the ethical basis of their relationships to parents and more generally to adults of both sexes, and in Sexes et genres à travers les langues (1990), a cross-cultural report on her empirical studies of gender differences in language usage, which sheds new light on the linguistic and communicational issues she had presented in Éthique and even before, in several seldom read and even more rarely analyzed works of the late seventies and early eighties. J’aime à toi (I Love to You) (1992) returns specifically to the more traditionally philosophical approach to the problems of language and love and their intertwining, and carries on the work projected in Éthique, but it goes much further in both the theoretical and the practical development of the concept of sexual difference as the foundation for a new ethics, a new culture of universal validity. J’aime à toi can be read as a follow-up to Éthique and as a founding text for the construction of an ethics of difference modeled on sexual difference, an ethics for the future of humanity in all of its diversity.Western Feminism and the Global FutureIrigaray is very much aware of the limits of the various Western political and academic feminisms, of the need to broaden their scope, both horizontally across cultures and vertically within specific cultures, before they can serve as the basis for a new ethics. Irigaray expresses the concern that Western feminists, rather than represent the exploited women of the world, may exploit them ideologically for their own personal or political purposes, at the risk of preventing them from coming to a feminism of their own making, appropriate to their own cultures and historical moments. “Certain women do implement power strategies—including the power of the media—but not solely for the benefit of the exploited women they use as an alibi. They thus run the risk of clouding the issues and [End Page 76] preventing their consciousness from being raised” [Irigaray, J’aime à toi 15]. 1 Irigaray calls this “egological” feminism (Dare I invent a new term here? Now we have “egofeminists” as well as “ecofeminists”...) and demonstrates its totally undemocratic orientation, despite its representative claims.Certain militants..., practicing direct democracy or an egological feminism, based on their own real, or imagined, needs and desires, rather than on those of all women, leave women subject to existing legislation. Indifferent to the rights necessary for all women—including the little girls of the present and the future, and the women of other cultures—they make decisions that perpetuate, and even aggravate, through unnecessary misunderstandings, the injustices done the female gender.[J’aime à toi 13]As a feminist, in general, it always pains me to read criticisms of feminism, even cogent and theoretically valid criticisms, and I am even now painfully aware of the political dangers of criticizing feminism myself in a public forum such as this one. However, if I have managed to learn anything from the works of Western feminists of color and from Third World feminists, it is... (shrink)

This article engages with Adriana Cavarero's framing of sexual difference, specifically in terms of how this displaces “bodies that queer”. For Cavarero, the narratable self is inescapably relational and characterized by vulnerability, which is how ethics arises in the form of a decision between caring and wounding. At the same time, Cavarero's deconstructive method of appropriating stereotypes restricts the scope of sexual difference to dimorphism. In examining the implications of this, I build on the work of (...) Michel Foucault and Judith Butler by looking to the intersexed life of Adélaïde Herculine Barbin, whose suicide in 1868 at the age of twenty‐nine was precipitated not through malice or cruelty, but through concerted care. This mode of care is anchored in the apparent self‐evidence of how we see and how we think with and through narratives that sediment in orders of power/knowledge. While agreeing with Cavarero's critique of the autonomous “I,” the article nevertheless argues for authorial audacity—the courage to name oneself—as a way of subverting asymmetrical power relations, including those that make it possible to inadvertently generate suffering through care. (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century, psychoanalysis and feminism were the practico-intellectual fields most systematic and subversive in demonstrating that humanity is sexually fissured. More recently, further advances in the philosophy of difference and renewed emphases on embodiment, materiality and life offer possibilities for attending to dimensions of gender and sexuality that were previously underdeveloped. This collection examines these possibilities insofar as they can either deepen or displace the traditional centrality of psychoanalysis in matters sexual. The authors come from a (...) wide range of backgrounds and defend their approaches to the problem of sexual difference in a variety of idioms, drawing on key thinkers such as Lacan, Irigaray, Deleuze, Foucault and Badiou. It is rare to come across these thinkers together; but sex is too crucial a site for critical thought not to mobilize every conceptual power available. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Angelaki: The Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century, psychoanalysis and feminism were the practico-intellectual fields most systematic and subversive in demonstrating that humanity is sexually fissured. More recently, further advances in the philosophy of difference and renewed emphases on embodiment, materiality and life offer possibilities for attending to dimensions of gender and sexuality that were previously underdeveloped. This collection examines these possibilities insofar as they can either deepen or displace the traditional centrality of psychoanalysis in matters sexual. The authors come from a (...) wide range of backgrounds and defend their approaches to the problem of sexual difference in a variety of idioms, drawing on key thinkers such as Lacan, Irigaray, Deleuze, Foucault and Badiou. It is rare to come across these thinkers together; but sex is too crucial a site for critical thought not to mobilize every conceptual power available. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal _Angelaki: The Journal of the Theoretical Humanities._. (shrink)

This article deals with sexual difference as a philosophy of subjectivity which, however inspired by poststructuralism, was further developed by feminists. The main features of this philosophy are outlined both in terms of its style and of its vision of woman as subject. The notion of 'difference' is analyzed in details, as the central concept that sustains the feminist nomadic philosophy of a subject that is both complex and situated, politically empowered and epistemologically legitimate.

This chapter develops an argument for the ontological significance of sexual difference through Irigaray’s account of “the negative.” Reading Irigaray with Hegel’s logical analysis of finitude as a negative self-reference, or in terms of the dependence of identity on difference, I consider how this ontological negativity functions in two senses: first, in terms of a generational negativity, whereby sexuate beings rely on this difference as their own copulative condition of possibility; and second, in terms of a (...) more general negative self-relation to sexuate others as incarnated in the determinate limits of one’s own sexuate body. Against skeptical challenges to the reality of these two senses of ontological negativity, this chapter thus develops an account of sexual difference in terms of the irreducible reference to otherness in oneself, subverting the idea that there could be sexuate identity without difference. (shrink)

This essay argues that despite of the feminist critique of Merleau-Ponty his phenomenology can be positively appropriated to the theory of sexual difference. It focuses on three issues: the first one is closely linked to the Phenomenology of Perception and introduces a concept of "difference as differentiation". The second one is concerned with the intersubjective dimension of sexuality and will be called a "sexual syncretism". Finally, I’m referring to Merleau-Ponty's notion of "chiasm" in his late work (...) The Visible and the Invisible in order to apply it to the theory of sexual difference. At this point, the difference between sexual beings will be conceptualized as "chiasmatic intertwining". In doing so, I hope to show that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is a helpful resource for philosophical research that is mainly concerned with the questions of sexuality and sexual difference. (shrink)

This collection consists of lectures given at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. They were delivered under the provisions of the Jan Tin- bergen Chair, ...

_Nomadic Subjects_ argues for a new kind of philosophical thinking, one that would include the insights of feminism and abandon the hegemonic mode that is conventionally adopted in high theory. Braidotti's personal, surprising, and lively prose insists on an integration of feminism in mainstream discourse. The essays explore problems that are central to current feminist debates including Western epistemology's relation to the "woman question," feminism and biomedical ethics, European feminism, and how American feminists might relate to European movements.

What kind of rhetoric frames French reproductive policy debate? Who does such policies exclude? Through an examination of the “American import” of gender studies, along with an analysis of France’s Catholic heritage and secular politics, I argue that an unwavering belief in sexual difference as the foundation of French society defines the productive reproductive citizen. Sylviane Agacinski is perhaps the most vocal public philosopher who has framed the terms of reproductive policy debate in France, building an oppositional platform (...) to reproductive technology around anthropological assertions of sexual difference. This paper engages with Agacinski to examine rhetorical claims of sexual difference and how such claims delayed passage of France’s revised bioethics legislation that extends access of assisted reproductive technology (ART) to “all women.” Though the “PMA pour toutes” [ART for all women] legislation was eventually passed, such rhetoric motivated the explicit exclusion of all trans person from its extension, thus hardly permitting ART to all women. (shrink)

For Nietzsche, a phenomenon, a belief, a mode of knowledge, or of subjectivity, confronts us with the possibility of creating, rather than presupposing, the criteria for its evaluation. In his Untimely Meditations, he widened the parameters of criticizability in just this way, proposing that history might be evaluated from the criterion of whether it is good or bad for life. Nietzsche provokes us to ask what the right question is to bring to history. Stepping back to formulate a response might (...) allow us to appreciate the difference between interrogating the accuracy of historical accounts and assessing their effects. (shrink)

This article revisits Irigaray's theory of sexual difference in the light of more contemporary developments in terms of nomadic becomings and non-unitary subjectivity, especially in Deleuze. It defends the notion of embodied materiality on philosophical grounds, by linking it to the issues of power, access, hegemony and exclusion, which are central to post-structuralism. Through a detailed analysis of the sexual politics of difference feminism, the author argues for a non-reactive redefinition of the feminine as a project (...) of becoming, and connects it firmly to feminist discussions about gender and queer theory. (shrink)

"In this groundbreaking book Jean Walton subjects psychoanalysis to a sustained and highly illuminating ethnographic critique.

Sexual difference theory can best be explained with reference to French post‐structuralism, more specifically its critique of the humanist vision of subjectivity. The “post” in poststructuralism does not denote only a chronological break from the structuralists' generation of the 1940s and 1950s, but also an epistemological and theoretical revision of the emancipatory programme of structuralism itself, especially of Marxist feminist political theory. The focus of poststructuralism is the complex and manifold structure of power and the diverse, fragmented, but (...) highly effective ways in which power, knowledge, and the constitution of subjectivity combine. Poststructuralism questions the usefulness of the notion of “ideology,” especially in the sense developed by Louis Althusser, as the imaginary relation of the Subject to his/her real conditions of existence. In a feminist version, ideology refers to the patriarchal system of representation of gender and, more specifically, to the myths and images that construct femininity. Subjectivity is conceptualized therefore as a process (assujettissement) which encompasses simultaneously the material (“reality”) and the symbolic (“language”) instances which structure it. Psychoanalytic notions of identity, language, and sexuality – especially in the work of Jacques Lacan – play a central role in the redefinition of the subject as a process, rather than in the more traditional sense of a rational agent. The notion of difference emerges as a central concept in the poststructuralists' critique of both classical humanism and of the humanist legacy of Marxist‐inspired structuralist social theory. It includes both differences within each subject (between conscious and unconscious processes), as well as differences between the Subject and his/her Others. (shrink)

I challenge the age-old binary opposition between human and animal, not as philosophers sometimes do by claiming that humans are also animals, or that animals are capable of suffering or intelligence, but rather by questioning the very category of “the animal” itself. This category groups a nearly infinite variety of living beings into one concept measured in terms of humans—animals are those creatures that are not human. In addition, I argue that the binary opposition between human and animal is intimately (...) linked to the binary opposition between man and woman. Furthermore, I suggest that thinking through animal differences or differences among various living creatures opens up the possibility of thinking beyond the dualist notion of sexual difference and enables thinking toward a multiplicity of sexual differences. (shrink)

In this article we aim to show the potential of cross-continental dialogues for a decolonizing feminism. We relate the work of one of the major critics of the Western metaphysical patriarchal order, Luce Irigaray, to the critique of the colonial/modern gender system by the Nigerian feminist scholar Oyĕrónké Oyĕwùmí. Oyĕwùmí's work is often rejected based on the argument that it is empirically wrong. We start by problematizing this line of thinking by providing an epistemological interpretation of Oyĕwùmí's claims. We then (...) draw Irigaray and Oyĕwùmí into conversation, and show how this bolsters and helps to further illuminate and contextualize Oyĕwùmí's critique of gender. But the dialogue between these thinkers also reveals significant limitations of Irigaray's philosophy, namely her presumption of the priority of sexual difference, its rigid duality, and her failure to take into account the inextricable intertwinement of gender and race in the Western patriarchal order. Relating Irigaray's critique of Western culture's forgetting of sexual difference to Oyĕwùmí's critique hence demonstrates to what extent Irigaray's philosophy remains typically Western and how she therefore fails to escape the paradigm that she is so critical of. (shrink)

In this article I will argue that the feminist theoretical paradigm in approaching the issue of sexual difference should be adjusted. Feminism at present mainly relies on phenomenology of the other and pays much attention to the significant ambiguity of the human body. But I will explain that the phenomenological argument for the sexual asymmetry is invalid. All human beings with gender are bodily conditioned. Gender issues must be integrated into the universal human impulse of liberation which (...) is based on a self-understanding. The gendered self is culturally shaped. An intercultural comparative perspective can allow us to obtain a wider horizon to explore the relationship between a person’s sexually conditioned being and his self-understanding. In my discussion of gender and self, the contrast between China and the West is exemplary. Despite different self-understandings with regard to sex, the pursuit of freedom can be universally noticed. Notwithstanding the sexually embodied existence, human beings in both the West and East have generally theorized and practiced the spiritualization of self in metaphysics and religions. In order to make this point clear I take early Indian Buddhism as an example. My argumentation may seem intercultural and comparative, but fundamentally I am problem-oriented and point to the dimension beyond cultural comparison. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The role of philosophy in the problem of sexual differences is considered, in the light of what sexual differences can be seen as (i) purely contingent or (ii) logically tied to (non‐negotiable) sexual features. Some candidates for causes of sexual difference are reviewed, including evolution, physical make‐up, and social conditioning. The problem of initial descriptions of sexual interaction is highlighted, and the need for a clearer set of categories for possible causes demonstrated. The (...) argument in general is that, because of lack of clarity about which issues are empirical and which conceptual, and because of uncertainty about what evidence is relevant, we cannot as yet be clear about what apparent differences are (even in principle) alterable, and what are given. (shrink)

The author analyzes the origin and meaning of the expression ‘Ethics of Sexual Difference’ (ESD), contextualising it in the paradigm ‘thought of Sexual Difference’, in which the potentiality and aporias arising from the debate within the feminist movement are highlighted. Possible interpretations of these ethics, developed in the Italian philosophical context, are illustrated and evaluated. The author proposes a critical comparison with other models, for example, the queer theories, and attempts to show how the ‘Thought of (...) Sexual Difference’ (TSD) opens itself to destabilization produced by the emergence of new subjects (gay and lesbian, transgender, intersex) and their corresponding scientific knowledge. The author therefore proposes an update to the plural, ‘Ethics of Sexual Differences’ (ESDs), listing the possible methodological and content assumptions (including the development of a relational model in all scientific disciplines) and the disciplinary implications (also in the psychoanalytic field) of an ethics so defined. A reference is made to the discussion of socalled "gender ideology", in which the protagonists have often showed a certain difficulty in implementing an ESDs. (shrink)

Aristotle's remarks about the differences between the sexes have become infamous for their implications for the social status of women. In his observations on female biology, Aristotle claims that "the female nature is, as it were, a deformity." In describing women's role in the public sphere, he claims that women are naturally subordinate because, while they possess a deliberative faculty, that capacity is "without authority." While both claims express the "inferiority" of female bodies/women relative to male bodies/men, it is not (...) self-evident that the defects Aristotle identifies in female biology have cognitive or moral manifestations that would justify the rule of men over women in political life. Marguerite Deslauriers here aims to construct a coherent picture of Aristotle's views on sexual and gender-based difference from these remarks and to show the extent to which his views on female biology and women's role in politics are causally connected. Without exculpating Aristotle from charges of misogyny, Deslauriers contextualizes his explanations of the role and origin of female animals in his biology and the role of women in his political philosophy; she shows how Aristotle developed these views and the importance they hold for his wider philosophical commitments. She then explores how Aristotle might have seen the link between the physiology of sex and the bearing it has on political life. She ultimately argues that in Aristotle's conception of sexual difference in biology and politics, there is a tension between his view of the inferiority of female bodies and women and his commitment to the idea that females and women are valuable both for generation and for the political life characteristic of human beings. In this tension she finds a difference between Aristotle and his predecessors: while previous accounts associate sexual difference with affliction, Aristotle sees sexual difference as a benefit, both to a species and a political community. This volume will be of interest to philosophers and students interested in ancient philosophy, feminist philosophy, as well as those studying moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

A reading of Luce Irigaray suggests the possibility of tracing sexual difference in philosophical accounts of personal identity. In particular, I argue that Irigaray raises the possibility of moving beyond the aporia of the other which lies at the heart of Paul Ricoeur's account of self-identity. My contention is that the self conceived in Ricoeur's Oneself as Another is male insofar as it is dependent upon the patriarchal monotheism which has shaped Western culture both socially and economically. Nevertheless (...) there remains the possibility of developing Ricoeur's reference to 'the trace of the Other' in order to give a non-essential meaning to sexual difference. Such meaning will emerge when both men and women have identities as subjects, and the difference between them can be expressed. I aim to elucidate both conditions by appropriating Irigaray's 'Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love.'. (shrink)

Most governments worldwide recognize marriage as the union only of man and woman. Especially in Europe and North America, however, there is growing support for legalization of same-sex marriages. The impending shift in marriage policy posits the supposed insignificance of sexual difference. There is thus a need for comprehensive reflection on the essential substance of sexual differences, and on the legal and social relevance of sexual complementarity. Defendersof traditional marriage must be prepared to offer reasons why (...) society must continue to recognize sexual difference as a fundamental attribute of marriage,argued in terms that carry authority and meaning in today’s post-Christian ethos. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 9.3 (Autumn 2009): 441–446. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray has written that “sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age.” Spanning metaphysics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, her work examines how sexual difference structures being and subjectivity, organizes our experience of the world, and affects the images and discourses involved in knowledge production and practical action. No other philosopher has paid such careful attention to the consequences of the elision of sexual difference in philosophical thought. (...) However, at a time when notions of sexual and gender difference are hotly contested, Irigaray’s thought has often been dismissed as essentialist or reductively binary. 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. (shrink)

The blindness to ontological questioning in feminist theory has left a lacuna in scholarly study that Touching Thought—a study at the intersection of ontological meditation and feminist theorizing on sexual difference—seeks to fill. Ellen Mortensen's new work critiques the language and theoretical pathways of contemporary feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Theresa de Lauretis, and Donna Haraway to reveal a problematic predilection for technological language at the expense of ontological inquiry. The volume (...) ranges across feminist epistemology and ethics, the politics of performativity, the aesthetics of body/power, and the question of sexual difference and concludes with an examination of the different philosophical and theoretical attempts at undertaking an ontological questioning of sexual difference. This foundational work will serve as preparation for scholars of feminist and queer theory and continental philosophy seeking alternative pathways of feminist thought that encourage fundamental thinking on the subject of individual freedom. (shrink)

This contribution unfolds an existential-ontological response to the question of sexual difference in the context of Heidegger’s formally indicative concept of “Dasein.” The question of Dasein’s “neutrality” concerns how formal indication formalizes, empties, and neutralizes the givenness of factical human existence. Ostensibly “given” biological and anthropological facts, such as sexual difference, are interpreted from an emptied and neutralized perspective that appears abstract and fictional to Heidegger’s critics. How, then, is the “neutrality” of formalizing emptying related to (...) the “facticity” of in each case factically existing as a sexual and gendered being? The answer lies in Heidegger’s elucidation of the existential-ontological structure of Dasein: Dasein is always relationally instituted in its factical entangled life through “being-with.” The sexual difference of human existence is not merely biologically or anthropologically given, but disclosed and enacted according to one’s relations with others, the environment, and oneself. The formally indicating concept “Dasein” indicates, accordingly, the concrete diversity and plurality of individuated sexual and gendered ways of being. (shrink)

Henri Bergson's philosophy has attracted increasing feminist attention in recent years as a fruitful locus for re-theorizing temporality. Drawing on Luce Irigaray's well-known critical description of metaphysics as phallocentrism, Hill argues that Bergson's deduction of duration is predicated upon the disavowal of a sexed hierarchy. She concludes the article by proposing a way to move beyond Bergson's phallocentrism to articulate duration as a sensible and transcendental difference that articulates a nonhierarchical qualitative relation between the sexes.

The ArgumentThis essay examines Freud's construction of a mythical moment during early childhood, in which differences between male and female sexual identities are said to originate. It focuses on the way in which Freud divides fear and envy between the sexes, allocating the emotion of fear to men, and that of envy to women. On the one hand, the problems of this construction are pointed out, but on the other hand, it is shown that even a much-maligned myth may (...) still provide food for thought.Then, four critiques of Freud which have been articulated by prominent feminist psychoanalysts – Karen Horney, Nancy Chodorow, Luce Irigaray, and Jessica Benjamin – are presented, as well as the alternative visions of sexual identities which these thinkers have developed. The basic metaphors or economies guiding these visions of sexual difference are appraised in terms of their breadth and depth, with particular reference to their ability to acknowledge and integrate the presence of fear and envy as passions which are evoked but also repressed in the face of sexual difference.From this angle, the contributions of Nancy Chodorow and Luce Irigaray are found to be more limited than those of Karen Horney and Jessica Benjamin, since the former two theorists allocate fear primarily or exclusively to men, as Freud has done, while they remain completely silent on envy. Differences in the scope or reach of the four feminist approaches are explained as a result of the theorists' differing perceptions of the social, political, and cultural position of women in patriarchal society. (shrink)

This collection of essays provides a reassessment of the question of sexual difference, taking into account important shifts in feminist thought, post-humanist theories, and queer studies. The contributors offer new and refreshing insights into the complex question of sexual difference from a post-feminist perspective, and how it is reformulated in various related areas of study, such as ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, biology, technology, and mass-media.

: Henri Bergson's philosophy has attracted increasing feminist attention in recent years as a fruitful locus for re-theorizing temporality. Drawing on Luce Irigaray's well-known critical description of metaphysics as phallocentrism, Hill argues that Bergson's deduction of duration is predicated upon the disavowal of a sexed hierarchy. She concludes the article by proposing a way to move beyond Bergson's phallocentrism to articulate duration as a sensible and transcendental difference that articulates a nonhierarchical qualitative relation between the sexes.

This article illuminates a tension internal to Elizabeth Grosz's provocative theory of the irreducibility of sexual difference: while it establishes sexual difference as an ontological force of differentiation, it simultaneously delimits the forms sexual difference can take as fixed and uncrossable. This model thus privileges cissexual difference while invalidating trans modes of embodiment and identification, a move that perpetuates antitrans logic and practices while impoverishing feminist conceptions of the generativity of sexual (...) class='Hi'>difference. This article examines the uses of transsexuality throughout Grosz's work on sexual difference, evaluating her claim that sexual difference is irreducible alongside her insistence that transsexuality is an impossible attempt to assume a bodily sex other than that assigned at birth. Illustrating how Grosz's account narrows the generativity of sexual difference down to unchangeable dimorphic sex, this article argues that fixed dimorphic sex is not simply irreducibly given but is the effect of normative schemas. If the power of sexual difference lies in its capacity to generate difference, it need not be constrained to an immobile binary of sexually specific bodies whose morphological possibilities are fixed. This article thus argues for the capacity of sexual difference itself to become otherwise than solely cisgender. (shrink)

In a unique rethinking of political transformation, Drucilla Cornell argues for the crucial role of psychoanalysis in social theory in voicing connection between our constitution as gendered subjects and social and political change.

This meticulously researched and philosophically sophisticated book provides a comprehensive reassessment of sexual difference in Aristotle, covering metaphysic.

The blindness to ontological questioning in feminist theory has left a lacuna in scholarly study that Touching Thought—a study at the intersection of ontological meditation and feminist theorizing on sexual difference—seeks to fill. Ellen Mortensen's new work critiques the language and theoretical pathways of contemporary feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Theresa de Lauretis, and Donna Haraway to reveal a problematic predilection for technological language at the expense of ontological inquiry. The volume (...) ranges across feminist epistemology and ethics, the politics of performativity, the aesthetics of body/power, and the question of sexual difference and concludes with an examination of the different philosophical and theoretical attempts at undertaking an ontological questioning of sexual difference. This foundational work will serve as preparation for scholars of feminist and queer theory and continental philosophy seeking alternative pathways of feminist thought that encourage fundamental thinking on the subject of individual freedom. (shrink)

In his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing proposed that we can determine whether a machine thinks by considering whether it can win at a simple imitation game. A neutral questioner communicates with two different systems – one a machine and a human being – without knowing which is which. If after some reasonable amount of time the machine is able to fool the questioner into identifying it as the human, the machine wins the game, and we should (...) conclude that it thinks. This imitation game, now known as the Turing Test, has been much discussed by philosophers of mind, and for more than half a century now there has been considerable debate about whether it is an adequate test for thinking. But what has not been much discussed are the sexed presuppositions underlying the test. Too often forgotten in the philosophical discussion is the fact that Turing’s imitation game is modeled on an imitation game in which a neutral questioner communicates with two different humans – one a man and one a woman – without knowing which is which. In this original imitation game, the man wins the game if he is able to fool the questioner into identifying him as the woman. In this paper, I explore the implications of this set-up. As I argue, the fact that the Turing test was modeled on a man/woman imitation game seems to have led us astray in various ways in our attempt to conduct an effective investigation and assessment of computer intelligence. (shrink)

Sara HeinSmaa rediscovers neglected passages of Le Duexi_me Sexe in her quest to follow Simone de Beauvoir's line of thinking. She finds the masterpiece to be grounded in the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.