Irigaray's Sexual Difference: The Question of Our Age
An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993) The essay I'll be talking about is called "Sexual Difference." It begins: "Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our...
On Not Writing About Irigaray
I have learned to be suspicious of myself, of my motives and my desires, psychoanalysis taught us as much. But now I think we should rather interrogate the desires and motives we do not feel as well....
The Pleasures of Excess
One of the big ideas in Linda Williams’s piece on “body genres” in film theory is that perversion should not be used as a pejorative term to condemn some sexualities over others, i.e., to condemn any...
Touching On Care
--- Below is a set of feminist philosophy books (and one article) that are related to the study of care and human vulnerability. At the end, there is also a section listing the classic works in...
How Masculinity Works
In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis argues that we’re witnessing a power struggle between traditional industrial capitalists and a new elite of tech oligarchs who accumulate...
Rich Lesbians
--- Imagine you are sitting in a hotel conference room and all of a sudden the lights go out. You feel a lot of movement around you, maybe someone brushes past you quickly with a whoosh. When the...
The Meaning of Life? Care.
--- “Cura (Care) was crossing a river and saw some clay. Thoughtfully, she took it up and began to shape it. Jupiter came along, and she asked him to give it spirit, which he granted. Then they...
We Are Now Reading Revolutionary Theory, Not Self-Help
--- The modern self-help movement emerged in the late 60’s and early 70’s as a part of the feminist movement. Activists like Audre Lorde framed self-care as political resistence, essential to...
“The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” by Audre Lorde
I’ve scheduled a live for this Wednesday, April 2 at 1pm EST, on Audre Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” You can easily find a copy of this text online, and above I’ve...
She Will Be Known by the Hole She Leaves
“Across nations and cultures, entire words and ideas are missing or deprived of the weight they deserve. The presence of absence is just as powerful as the spread of misinformation or false news....
Friendship As A Way of Knowing
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An Ethics of Sexual Difference
"Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our 'salvation' if we thought it through." — Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference In An Ethics of Sexual Difference...
The Radical Future of Women's Friendships
It is 1792. Mary Wollstonecraft has just published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a precursor text for a first wave of feminism that will not begin for at least another fifty years.1 Her...
A Failure of Identification
> “Then I want to take up the practice [of world-traveling] as a horizontal practice of resistance to two related injunctions: the injunction for the oppressed to have our gazes fixed on the...
The Politicization of Our Differences
Everywhere we look, women are divided. The perception that a majority of Anglo-American women voted for the Trump ticket in the recent elections has created a rift between white and other women, a...
Feminist Transformations
Jumping in where Becoming-Feminist leaves off, I want to convince you, dear reader, to join us in reading and discussing feminist philosophy by showing you all the wonderful things that will come...
Would You Still Be You if You Were Born as a Boy Instead of a Girl, or as a Girl Instead of a Boy?
Would you still be you if you were born as a boy instead of a girl, or as a girl instead of a boy? That is, if your sex assignment were different that it was when you were born, would that change the...
Becoming-Feminist
Sandra Lee Bartky would have been 90 years old this year, were she still alive. She passed away in 2016 at the age of 81 in her Michigan home. Her essay, "Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist...
My Most Favorite, Totally Idiosyncratic, Feminist Philosophy Books
Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. Continuum, 1990. Adams explores the intersections of feminism, vegetarianism, and animal rights, arguing that...
The Gender of Space
In her classic “Hairy Cobblers and Philosopher Queens,” Elizabeth Spellman shows us how Plato argues for the education of women alongside men, and for the inclusion of women in all social classes...
On Female Body Experience: Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays by Iris Marion Young
The essays collected under the title On Female Body Experience represent twenty years of work in feminist phenomenology by one of its chief practitioners, Iris Marion Young. These essays showcase...
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Exegesis)
A foundational text for feminist philosophy and queer theory, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity offers a collection of essays that develop a post-structuralist analysis of the...
What Queer Has Been
Queer has the bad reputation of being undefinable, but we will nonetheless offer three or four ways of understanding “queer,” here organized from the most general to the most narrow.1 The most...
How This Latina-American Became A French Feminist
In the early 1990s, I became infatuated with something called French Feminism. Toril Moi's book Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Ty (1985) had introduced Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and...