Sex, Love, and Gender is the first volume to present a comprehensive philosophical theory that brings together all of Kant's practical philosophy — found across his works on ethics, justice, anthropology, history, and religion — and provide a critique of emotionally healthy and morally permissible sexual, loving, gendered being. By rethinking Kant's work on human nature and making space for sex, love, and gender within his moral accounts of freedom, the book shows how, despite his austere and even (...) anti-sex, cisist, sexist, and heterosexist reputation, Kant's writings on happiness and virtue (Part I) and right (Part II) in fact yield fertile philosophical ground on which we can explore specific contemporary issues such as abortion, sexual orientation, sexual or gendered identity, marriage, trade in sexual services, and sex- or gender-based oppression. Indeed, Kant's philosophy provides us with resources to appreciate and value the diversity of human ways of loving and the existential importance of our embodied, social selves. Structured on a thematic basis, with introductions to assist those new to Kant's philosophy, this book will be a valuable resource for anyone who cares about these issues and wants to make sense of them. -/- Alternatively: Sex, Love, and Gender identifies a set of possibilities that define human beings’ sexuality. These sets come with their own concepts, which specify how the possibilities are realized and what effects they have on our lives lived together. Partly the task is descriptive. The description has to be plausible. Plausibility comes from the phenomenology (and not the other way around). Partly the task is normative. The normative content also has to be plausible. Plausibility here comes from vindicating the principles that underwrite the possibilities that define human beings’ sexualities and sexual experiences and behaviors lived by human beings and from the philosophical explanations and conclusions that follow. Overall plausibility, then, comes from discursive analysis of alternatives, from a priori argument, and, in the evaluative case, from showing how the Kantian account of a good life fits with reasonable conceptions of goodness consistent with the phenomenology of human lives. Although this exploration leads us, as we will see, to most corners of Kant’s practical philosophy, including his metaethics and metaphysics, the main focus is on an account of human sex, love, and gender explored explicitly with respect to happiness and ethics (virtue) and justice (right). It is because of this focus that the book is divided into two parts: Part 1 (“Human Sexuality and Virtue”) and Part 2 (“Human Sexuality and Right”). (shrink)

Review of: Varden, Helga, Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020, 337 p. ISBN: 978-0198812838.

Cahill addresses the ethics of sexuality, marriage, parenthood and family from a feminist Christian standpoint. She wants to reaffirm the traditional unity of sex, love and parenthood, not as an absolute norm, but a guiding framework. The book also develops the significance of New Testament models of community and of moral formation, to argue that the human values associated with sex and family should be embodied in a context of concern for society's poor and marginalized. Roman Catholicism receives special but (...) not exclusive attention. (shrink)

Helga Varden’s new book aims to demonstrate that while Kant’s own views on sex are deeply problematic and harmful, his practical philosophy nonetheless contains.

hese are replies to my critics at at Society for German Idealism and Romanticism (SGIR) Author-Meets-Critics session, Pacific APA 2021. -/- Published version of the full symposium is available on SGIR Review's homepage.

Mark Miller's innovative study argues that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales represent an extended mediation on agency, autonomy and practical reason. This philosophical aspect of Chaucer's interests can help us understand what is both sophisticated and disturbing about his explorations of love, sex and gender. Partly through fresh readings of the Consolation of Philosophy and the Romance of the Rose, Miller charts Chaucer's position in relation to the association in the Christian West between problems of autonomy and problems of sexuality and (...) reconstructs how medieval philosophers and literary writers approached psychological phenomena often thought of as distinctively modern. The literary experiments of the Canterbury Tales represent a distinctive philosophical achievement that remains vital to our own attempts to understand agency, desire and their histories. (shrink)

Focusing on three historical examples of a different understanding of Christian identity, the paper seeks to address the role of contemporary concepts of sex and gender in the creation of Christian identity. In the first case study, focused on the literary representations of the Christian martyrdom from the second and third centuries, special emphasis is placed on the demand for the?manly? or?masculine? way of witnessing faith. The second historical example relates to the creation of a wider ascetic movement in (...) the fourth-century Asia Minor, and its specific focus is on Macrina the Younger. In her Vita, Gregory of Nyssa distinguishes between Macrina?s gender identity based on her virginity on the one hand, and her social role as a widow, and?mother? and?father? of her monastic community on the other. Finally, the focus is shifted towards Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor, whose teachings about ecstasy, as a way to transcend oneself in the movement towards the loved one, provide the basis for establishing a theology of marriage and creating a Christian identity based not on sexual or gender roles, but on the uniqueness of human nature. (shrink)

The first part of this essay describes a symbiological approach to gender and sexuality; the second, a symbiological approach to world literatures and some examples of gender and sexuality in symbiological literatures. Both are intended to provide more intimate accounts of the Anthropocene than the typical big pictures of global warming and climate change. While grand and world-historical, to be sure, the Anthropocene also affects the most intimate aspects of our lives. Both sex and gender should be (...) understood as the outcomes of developmental processes more or less stabilized by a wide variety of more or less variable factors in the loop of nature, culture, and technology. Understanding the nature of these processes and their social, biological, and technological causes is essential for comprehending the nature of gender, sex, and sexuality, and the extent to which these are mutable. The essay concludes with some reflections on love in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Purpose. The paper considers the fear of social alienation of love. It is within the limits of psychoanalytic epistemology, the analysis of which will be presented in the article, the tendencies to monotony and universal solutions with an emphasis on ensuring the objectivity of the problem of gender alienation, to be more exact, the fear of love, which causes the gender process, are viewed most reliably. In view of the above the purpose of the paper is to investigate (...) the conceptual contradictions associated with the reconstruction of basic measurements of the fear of alienation of love within different ideological approaches; to reveal the most significant contradictions that manifest themselves in the differences between secular and religious frames; to determine a philosophical and fundamental foundation for the types of fear: metaphysical, transcendental and social, which to some extent have influenced the development of a gender tradition. The paper investigates the fear of alienation of love, not as an instinct or psychological experience, or as a social factor, but as a correlation between the functional types of fear and the peculiarities of social and cultural processes, and it acts as a dependence of the European societies on the various functional forms of fear of love that influence the processes of social transformations. Theoretical basis. The authors determine that in the gender approach the subject, who is cognized, has specific desires and interests. The process of cognation is local, contextual, in which physiologically and spiritually the fear of alienation of love is closely linked to the conditions of existence of people, with the arrangement of social and individual life. In modern civilization, true love with some exceptions, is fleeting. It is now hindered by the burdens of life, and ideological settings, which go only from the "I", and not from the common "I and You", contributing to frustration and alienation. Originality. The emphasis is placed on the fact that the fear of alienation of love, as a way of identifying the essential characteristics of "I", acts as an existential, which concentrates on the sense-life range of problems. The range of problem in a single topic is in the "point I", surrounded by gender boundaries, it contains as a condition for its manifestation the personality distancing – free or forced consolidation and assertion of the autonomy of the individual. Alienation of love as an existential admits in the register of the intimate, intentional for self-perception, internal state to organize and identify with the "authentic I". Conclusions. The article establishes that gender identity under the conditions of modern socio-psychological crisis is associated with forming a special "picture of fear, anxiety, loneliness" as a part of that internal and external world, generated by alienation from society. The fear of alienated love acts as the essential existential of human being, which is a necessary existential condition of the existential tension that occurs as an antipode and a characteristic of courage, asceticism, and the "beginning of wisdom". The considered phenomenon of the fear of alienation of love is interpreted as the result of the ontological and gender alienation of a person who has lost a sense of security and plunged into a continuous interindividual rivalry. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have critically analyzed the effects of sex segregation in numerous social institutions, yet sex-segregated sport often remains unchallenged. Even critics of sex-segregated sport have tended to accept the merits of women-only teams at face value. In this article, we revisit this issue by examining the underlying assumptions supporting women’s and girls’ teams and explore how they perpetuate gender inequality. Specifically, we analyze the 14 U.S. court cases wherein adolescent boys have sought to play on girls’ teams in (...) their respective high schools. The courts’ decisions reveal taken-for-granted, essentialist assumptions about girls’ innate fragility and athletic inferiority. While the courts, policy makers, and many feminist scholars see maintaining teams for girls and women as a solution to the problem of boys’ and men’s dominance in sport, the logic supporting this form of segregation further entrenches notions of women’s inferiority. (shrink)

The lack of importance traditionally ascribed to human-nonhuman animal relationships in the social sciences has meant that while commercial sex in the human realm has been well documented, very few socio-cultural studies of commercial sex involving nonhuman animals have been undertaken to date. However, the growing recognition that nonhuman, as well as human, animals are “actors” means that their role in the sex trade, becomes problematic and eminently worthy of academic attention. This article considers a very particular instance of commercial (...) animal sex—that practiced on stud farms in West Wales, where the breeding of autochthonous Welsh cobs is of immense political, social, economic, and cultural significance. This study found that in this context Welsh cobs are expected to embody specific gender ideals in what is an inherently inter-subjective relationship. Through their animals' performances, human caregivers are able to negotiate their own ideas about gender roles, and these in turn determine those individual animals used for breeding and those not. (shrink)

Writing for non-specialists and students as well as for fellow philosophers, this book explores some basic issues surrounding sex and love in today's world, among them consent, objectification, nonmonogamy, racial stereotyping, and the need to reconcile contemporary expectations about gender equality with our beliefs about how love works. Author Patricia Marino argues that we cannot fully understand these issues by focusing only on individual desires and choices. Instead, we need to examine the social contexts within which choices are made (...) and acquire their meanings. That perspective, she argues, is especially needed today, when the values of individualism, self-expression, and self-interest permeate our lives. Marino asks how we can fit these values, which govern so many areas of contemporary life, with the generosity, caring, and selflessness we expect in love and sex. Key Features ofPhilosophy of Sex and Love: An opinionated introduction Offers a contemporary, problems-based approach to the subject, helping readers better understand and address current issues and controversial questions Includes coverage of sex and love as they intersect with topics like disability, race, medicine, and economics Considers not only the ethical, but also the broadly social and political dimensions of sex and love Includes a helpful introduction and conclusion in each chapter and is written throughout in a clear and straightforward style, with examples and sign-posts to help guide the student and general reader A comprehensive and up-to-date bibliography provides a valuable tool for anyone's further research P> Offers a contemporary, problems-based approach to the subject, helping readers better understand and address current issues and controversial questions Includes coverage of sex and love as they intersect with topics like disability, race, medicine, and economics Considers not only the ethical, but also the broadly social and political dimensions of sex and love Includes a helpful introduction and conclusion in each chapter and is written throughout in a clear and straightforward style, with examples and sign-posts to help guide the student and general reader A comprehensive and up-to-date bibliography provides a valuable tool for anyone's further research. (shrink)

The Phenomenology of Sex, Love, and Intimacy presents a phenomenological exploration of love as it manifests itself through sexual desires and intimate relationships. Setting up a unique dialogue between psychology and philosophy, Susi Ferrarello offers a perspective through which clinicians can inform their practice on diverse issues of human sexuality. Drawing on Husserl's phenomenology, Ferrarello's analysis of love spans a range of disciplines including psychology, theology, biology, epistemology, and axiology, as well as areas related to gender, consent, and political (...) control. Combining Husserlian perspectives on ethics with a focus on lived-experience, this text will deepen therapists' understanding of love as the subject of interdisciplinary inquiry and enable them to locate questions of sexuality and intimacy within an academic framework. With key theoretical principles included to allow clinicians to think through and clarify their practice, this book will be a valuable tool for sex therapists, marriage and family therapists, and counselors, as well as psychology and philosophy students alike. (shrink)

The Love-Code is a continuation of The Couple to the family, whose image has changed dramatically. Sexual promiscuity, the social equality of male and female, the individual planning of biographies, all make traditional gender roles appear outdated. Whether these changes will make the living together of the sexes easier is doubtful. This book addresses the question, how can love even in the conditions of neo-liberalism keep its mysterious binding force: through the recognition of sexual identity as a way to (...) knowing the self and the other. (shrink)

In this brief excerpt from a forthcoming translation of L’Afrique et ses fantômes and Singe de Kafka, Seloua Luste Boulbina shows how French opposition to the Islamic hijab, as described by Fanon, mirrored British opposition to the Indian practice of sati by claiming to defend women while really defending the interests of European men. This made it difficult, if not impossible, for women to define and assert interests of their own, apart from the perspectives imposed by politically opposed groups of (...) men. Fanon recognized this complex silence. But Fanon also failed to read the perspective motivating the writings of fellow Martinican author, Mayotte Capécia, which prevented him from seeing any independence in women’s capacity for interracial love and prevented him from giving a more complex psychological and political meaning to mixed ancestry. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Romeo and Juliet Talking about Sex and Love Plain Sex Loving Sex between Non‐Lovers Being Embodied A Primary Emotional Awareness Back to Romeo and Juliet: A Variety of Attitudes towards Sex without Love.

In The Metaphysics of Love, however, Stella Sandford argues that an over-emphasis on ethics in the reception of Levinas's thought has concealed the basis and ...

How many sexes are there? What is the relationship between sex and gender? Is gender a product of nature, or nurture, or both? _In Beyond the Binary_, Shannon Dea addresses these questions and others while introducing readers to evidence and theoretical perspectives from a range of cultures and disciplines, and from sources spanning three millennia. Dea’s pluralistic and historically informed approach offers readers a timely background to current debates about sex and gender in the media, health sciences, (...) and public policy. (shrink)

Our amorous and erotic experiences do not simply bring us pleasure; they shape our very identities, our ways of relating to ourselves, each other and our shared world. This volume reflects on some of our most prevalent assumptions relating to identity, the body, monogamy, libido, sexual identity, seduction, fidelity, orgasm, and more.The book covers common conflicts and confusions and includes work by established scholars and innovative new thinkers. Philosophically challenging but highly readable, the volume is ideal for a wide range (...) of courses on love and sex, including those taught in philosophy and gender studies. (shrink)

This groundbreaking look at the array of styles and modes of relationships proposes a new paradigm for understanding intimate relationships, challenging the monogamy/polyamory binary and offering fresh possibilities for thinking about contemporary love, sex, gender, and sexuality.

How might the idea of recognition offer a fresh slant on contemporary women’s writing? In this essay, we bring theories of recognition into dialogue with two literary works: Chris Kraus’s widely reviewed memoir I Love Dick and The Other Woman by the well-regarded Swedish novelist Therese Bohman. Our analysis focuses on recognition within the texts as well as its relevance to relations between texts and readers. We seek to clarify how attitudes to heterosexual love, feminism and same-sex identification are entangled (...) and the broader implications of such entanglements. We are interested in how the protagonists engage the world as readers and the role of literature in shaping their identifications and attachments. Yet, a comparative analysis can also bring to light how a feminist habitus is predicated on class and education, suggesting that these two texts may invite rather different experiences of recognition. (shrink)

Sexual difference must be recognized in thought and human interactions to enable people to find their real source of jouissance. The Lacanian finding of ‘masculine phallic desire’ and ‘feminine libidinal desire’ in all human beings, irrespective of their biological sex-gender, paved the way for rethinking gender identities. It calls for reforming inter-human relations from the presently predominant utilitarian mode to the one based on love and recognition of the other. Gender is an arbitrary construct to serve the (...) interests of males in finding phallic sexual pleasure, power and recognition in their social life. Assertion of sexual difference and gender multiplicity will enable human beings to find the other human being as their actual desired object, beyond the pleasures offered by wealth, comforts and commodities. (shrink)

Despite the centrality of sexuality and love to human life, western history's great philosophers have not produced anything like a detailed and systematic approach to these matters. From Plato's emphasis upon the importance of eros, to the insistence by today's feminists on gender equality, philosophy's interpretation of eroticism and love has been as diverse and explosive as the subject itself. It is this imposing variety of approach and interpretation that makes a lucid, comprehensive anthology on the subject essential. Reflecting (...) the trend over the last twenty years to examine more thoroughly the nature of love and sexuality within a philosophical context, this eclectic anthology presents numerous perspectives on sexual roles and norms, eroticism, pornography, feminism, prostitution, perversion, friendship, and familial love. Philosophical Perspectives on Sex and Love is the most up-to-date appraisal of these central human experiences, featuring the work of thinkers from antiquity to the modern era. On the subject of erotic love, the text offers insight from Plato's Symposium, as well as the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Robert Nozick, and Robert C. Solomon. There are also reflections on sexual perversion from Thomas Nagel, Jerome Neu, and Michael Ruse. The views of Aristotle and contemporary authors on the morality of friendship and family are presented in a section wholly devoted to those issues, while David Hume and Immanuel Kant investigate the ethics of sexuality in selections from their writings. Care has been taken to present different positions on the most controversial issues, and most selections are offered in their entirety. Invaluable for courses in social philosophy, sexuality, social ethics, and feminism, no other volume can give students a more comprehensive discussion of love's countless dimensions. (shrink)

This collection of essays on Kierkegaard consists of various articles published in academic journals over the course of several decades. They address dominant and consistent themes in Kierkegaard's authorship, demonstrating the importance of these topics for understanding his authorship as a whole and for contemporary discussions of these issues. In particular, these articles seek to bring his thought into conversation with woman and gender studies in contemporary feminist philosophy and hermeneutics as well as other forms of interpretation. Many of (...) the essays appeared in the International Kierkegaard Commentary edited by fellow Kierkegaard scholar, Robert L. Perkins, and it is in his memory that they are dedicated. (shrink)

Gender staff in the World Bank -- the world's largest and most influential development institution -- have a policy problem. Having prioritised efforts to get women into paid employment as the ȁ8cure-allȁ9 for gender inequality they must deal with the work that women already do -- the unpaid labour of caring, socialisation, and human needs fulfilment. This article explores the most prominent policy solution enacted by the Bank to this tension between paid and unpaid work: the restructuring of (...) normative heterosexuality to encourage a two-partner model of love and labour wherein women work more and men care better. Through a case study of Bank gender lending in Ecuador I argue that staff are trying to (re)forge normative arrangements of intimacy, a policy preference that remains invisible unless sexuality is taken seriously as a category of analysis in development studies. Specifically, I focus on four themes that emerge from the attempt to restructure heteronormativity in the loan: (1) the definition of good gender analysis as requiring complementary sharing and dichotomous sex; (2) the Bank's attempt to inculcate limited rationality in women such that they operate as better workers while retaining altruistic attachments to loved ones; (3) the Bank's attempt to inculcate better loving in men, such that they pick up the slack of caring labour when their (partially) rational wives move into productive work, and; (4) the invocation of a racialised hierarchy resting on the extent to which communities approximate ideals of sharing monogamous partnership. Aside from providing clear evidence that the world's largest development institution is involved in micro-processes of sexuality adjustment alongside macro-processes of economic restructuring, I also critique the Bank's sexualised policy interventions and suggest that they warrant contestation. (shrink)

Physical and emotional intimacy between humans and robots may become commonplace over the next decades, as technology improves at a rapid rate. This development provides new questions pertaining to how people perceive robots designed for different kinds of intimacy, both as companions and potentially as competitors. We performed an randomized experiment where participants read of either a robot that could only perform sexual acts, or only engage in non-sexual platonic love relationships. The results of the current study show that females (...) have less positive views of robots, and especially of sex robots, compared to men. Contrary to the expectation rooted in evolutionary psychology, females expected to feel more jealousy if their partner got a sex robot, rather than a platonic love robot. The results further suggests that people project their own feelings about robots onto their partner, erroneously expecting their partner to react as they would to the thought of ones’ partner having a robot. (shrink)

My exploration of the work of Pamela Sue Anderson focuses on what she calls “a philosophical imaginary” in her article “Towards a New Philosophical Imaginary,” in which she responds to Judith Butler’s theory of relational ontology and vulnerability. Anderson’s project is to recast the term vulnerable, which is often associated with feminine weakness, as a positive energy. Critiquing Western myths that portray women as less empowered than men, as in Mary Midgley’s reference to Minerva and Owl that denigrates women as (...) other, according to the Lacanian imaginary, Anderson strikes at the root of Western patriarchy. In contrast, she adduces Michèle Le Doeuff’s contemporary myth on Dawn, adapted from the Spanish philosopher Zambrano’s figure of Dawn, and offers us a new paradigm where Dawn’s heart expresses a new framework of love that is liberated from sex/gender discrimination. Although Anderson believed in Kantian philosophy, she did not hesitate to question the limitations of it. In this context, I also discuss the modern Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo’s theory of supramental consciousness, the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s theory of intuition, and the ways in which Anderson’s theory of love is grounded in spiritual transformative practice, following Paul Fiddes. Other attractions of Anderson’s essay are the nuances of postcolonial discourse. I explore ways in which the theory of relational ontology proposed by Judith Butler intersects with the Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen’s theory of capability/justice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 341 Petrus Liu Thinking Gender in the Age of the Beijing Consensus Originally formulated to dispute biologically deterministic explanations of women’s subordination, the analytical distinction between sex and gender has developed in unexpected ways in transitions from one language to another. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from John Money’s sexological writings to Simone de (...) Beauvoir’s dictum, “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one,” Anglophone feminists in the 1970s developed the distinction between sex (understood as anatomy) and gender (understood as social identity) to argue that a woman’s biological sex ought not dictate the kind of work she should do or the kind of life she should live.1 In her landmark 1975 essay, “The Traffic in Women,” Gayle Rubin coined the phrase “sex/gender system” to examine “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.”2 In more recent years, however, the distinction 1. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Paris: Gallimard, 1949; New York: Knopf, 1993), 281. Citations refer to the Knopf edition. For an account of feminist reformulations of John Money and Robert Stoller, see Jennifer Germon, Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 2. Gayle S. Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 34. It is worth mentioning that sex in Rubin’s sex/gender system refers to sexual practice rather than the distinction between male and female. This understanding forms the basis of her theoretical disagreements with Judith Butler, who preserves the semantic ambiguity of sex (as 342 Petrus Liu between sex and gender has taken on an entirely different meaning as it comes to inform transgender movements and politics seeking to decouple a person’s sex assignment at birth from their future gender identity. At the same time, theories of intersectionality, women-of-color feminisms, and transnational feminisms have all developed their own theses of gender variability to contest the myth of the universal woman. The life of gender—in academic theory, politics, and social movements— has confounded the original intentions of its American theorists. It is clear that there is no singular or stable account of gender; rather, gender is always in a state of flux, incessantly rethought and reforged by the demands of an increasingly complex and asymmetric world.3 Gender is always a translation—from one discipline, context, or language to another—ineluctably intertwined with the geopolitical problems created by the violences of imperialism, colonialism, and transnational capitalism. The translation of gender into non-European languages, such as Chinese, raises questions about whether spaces previously resistant or exterior to world capitalism are now being assimilated and enfolded into the structure of neoliberal globalization defined by the Washington Consensus. Against this view, some critics maintain that China’s precipitous ascent presents an alternative model of development for the Global South called the Beijing Consensus. Considering how gender has entered different languages, including Chinese, to create new coinages that may at times appear as instruments of an imperial takeover, Judith Butler argues that the translation of gender actually offers a path of linguistic humility for English, a reminder that we cohabit a multilingual world in which no one ever owned the term.4 But how exactly do we describe that complex, multilingual world and how does gender both gender and sexuality) as the point of departure for a different kind of feminist inquiry. See Gayle Rubin with Judith Butler, “Interview: Sexual Traffic,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2–3 (1994): 67. 3. See Heather Love, ed. “Rethinking Sex.” Special issue, GLQ 17, no. 2 (2011): 1–221. This collection of essays conveys a sense of how Rubin’s methodological distinction between sex and gender has given rise to new ways of thinking across different disciplines about sex radicalism, crip sexuality, Black feminism, and sex trafficking. 4. Judith Butler, “Gender in Translation: Beyond Monolingualism,” philoSOPHIA 9, no. 1 (Winter 2019). Petrus Liu 343 transform it? How is the translation of gender inflected by the material conditions... (shrink)

How are ‘philosophy’ and ‘gender’ implicated? Throughout history, philosophers—mostly men, though with more women among their number than is sometimes supposed—have often sought to specify and justify the proper roles of women and men, and to explore the political consequences of sexual difference. The last forty years, however, have seen a dramatic explosion of critical thinking about how philosophy is a gendered discipline; there has also been an abundance of philosophical work that uses gender as a central analytic (...) category. In particular, feminist philosophy has become established as a major field of inquiry, and it is now complemented by related emerging areas, including the philosophy of race and the philosophy of sex and love. For those working in Philosophy and Gender dizzying questions such as the following arise: What justifications were used historically for the exclusion or inclusion of women in political life, and what is their contemporary resonance? How is what counts as knowledge shaped by gender norms? What metaphysical questions about identity are raised by sex change? How might some feminist philosophies risk reproducing racist assumptions about what it means to be a woman, while some critical philosophies of race assume a masculine subject? What does it mean to say that moral theories are gendered? Addressing the need for an authoritative and comprehensive reference work to enable users to answer these and other questions, and to make sense of—and to navigate around—an ever more complex corpus of scholarly literature, Philosophy and Gender is a new title in Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Philosophy series. Edited by Cressida J. Heyes, it is a four-volume collection of foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship. It features critical analysis of gender as it relates to philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, social and political thought, aesthetics, and philosophy of science; it is also distinctive in showing how feminist thought has been intertwined in both analytic and continental traditions. The collection reconfigures ‘gender and philosophy’ into an integrated field of inquiry while providing an invaluable resource for scholars in all disciplines who need to know how to think critically about gender. In so doing it responds to recent curriculum developments, while providing a crucial reference guide for theoretically minded scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Supplemented with a full index, and including an introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the assembled materials in their historical and intellectual context, Philosophy and Gender is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital research resource. (shrink)

Based on four years of participant-observation field research and focused interviews with men and women child care workers, the author analyzes how the marking of men workers and their experiences doing child care work show how deeply feminized the work of child care is. When men choose to do child care work, they become suspect. This suspicion manifests in restriction of men's access to children in child care centers. Restricted access of men workers to children implies men's desire for access (...) to children is pathological. In these and other ways, the organization of child care and the accountability of persons to sex category systematically push men away from nurturing responsibilities and bind these responsibilities to women workers. (shrink)

Ideas of masculinity and femininity become sharply defined in war-reliant societies, resulting in a presumed enmity between men and women. This so-called "battle of the sexes" is intensified by the use of misogyny to encourage men and boys to conform to the demands of masculinity. These are among Tom Digby's fascinating insights shared in _Love and War_, which describes the making and manipulation of gender in militaristic societies and the sweeping consequences for men and women in their personal, romantic, (...) sexual, and professional lives. Drawing on cross-cultural comparisons and examples from popular media, including sports culture, the rise of "gonzo" and "bangbus" pornography, and "internet trolls," Digby describes how the hatred of women and the suppression of empathy are used to define masculinity, thereby undermining relations between women and men--sometimes even to the extent of violence. Employing diverse philosophical methodologies, he identifies the cultural elements that contribute to heterosexual antagonism, such as an enduring faith in male force to solve problems, the glorification of violent men who suppress caring emotions, the devaluation of men's physical and emotional lives, an imaginary gender binary, male privilege premised on the subordination of women, and the use of misogyny to encourage masculine behavior. Digby tracks the "collateral damage" of this disabling misogyny in the lives of both men and women, but ends on a hopeful note. He ultimately finds the link between war and gender to be dissolving in many societies: war is becoming slowly de-gendered, and gender is becoming slowly de-militarized. (shrink)

This article elaborates the interactional freedom of friendship and its limits. It shows that friendship is marked by a normative freedom that makes it relatively resistant to reification, especially when compared to erotic love. It argues further, however, that due to friendship’s embeddedness in the contemporary gender order, this freedom is limited. Having first outlined the freedom hypothesis, the article goes on to argue that friendship’s normative freedom is made possible by its weak ‘institutional connectivity’. To clarify that point, (...) the article illustrates friendship’s resistance to the reifying tendencies of therapy culture and then draws the gendered boundary of friendship’s freedom with reference to the position of heterosexual cross-sex friendship in the heteronormative social imaginary. The article concludes by way of argument for a differentiated approach to friendship and suggests that the analysis of its freedom provides significant clues concerning the work that remains to be done towards equal gender relations. (shrink)

In spite of the fact that the term ‘sexology’ was popularized in the United States by Elizabeth Osgood Goodrich Willard and that the term ‘sexual science’—which is usually attributed to Iwan Bloch as ‘Sexualwissenschaft’—was actually coined by the American phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler in 1852, the archives of American sexology have received scant attention in the period prior to Alfred Kinsey. In my article, I explore the role of Transcendentalism and phrenology in the production and development of American sexology and (...) sexual science. In particular, I argue that shifting the origins of sexology and sexual science away from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl-Maria Kertbeny and the more familiar narratives of the German invention of sexuality furnishes a radically different account of early sexology and sexual science. Rather than the unevenly homophilic sympathies of early German activists, their American counterparts promote marital, reproductive, loving sex and vilify prostitution, polygamy, masturbation, contraception, sex for pleasure, and, if they think to mention it, sodomy. In addition to this less progressive story, however, I argue that early American sexologists provide the first theories of gender and help to provide a fuller description of the politics of sexology and sexual science. (shrink)

Explores the nature and morality of sexual desire and its connection to romantic love and to gender. It relies on the movie Elles to do so.

This article is intended as a critique of recent theorizations of sexuality and desire, which have led performative theorists to contend that gender is an effect of discourse, and sex an effect of gender. It results from informal discussions between the three authors on the mechanisms through which sexuality gets objectified in modernity. The ideas of influential Western thinkers are confronted with field data on sexuality - as lived and imagined - that the authors have been gathering in (...) Amazonian societies, Trinidad, and on the Internet. Ethnographic data and Western theories about the nature of eroticism are used to argue that the utopian definition of sexuality as sexual desire and will to identity is too divorced from the mundane - love, domesticity and reproduction in a broad sense - and based on a too limited sphere of social experience. Consequently, to apply this definition to how and why humans engage in sexual activity leads to erroneous generalizations. For when encountered ethnographically, sexuality consists of practices deeply embedded in relational contexts. The article concludes with the proposition that debates about the possibilities of human sexuality and of its political intervention will make no significant progress unless we stop repeating that `sexuality is socially constructed', and start looking at the ways in which it is lived as part of everyday social life. (shrink)

How should we react to the development of sexbot technology? Taking their cue from anti-porn feminism, several academic critics lament the development of sexbot technology, arguing that it objectifies and subordinates women, which is likely to promote misogynistic attitudes towards sex, and may need to be banned or restricted. This chapter argues for an alternative response. Taking its cue from the sex-positive ‘feminist porn’ movement, it argues that the best response to the development of ‘bad’ sexbots is to make better (...) ones. This will require changes to the content, process and context of sexbot development. Doing so will acknowledge the valuable role that technology can play in human sexuality, and allow us to challenge gendered norms and assumptions about male and female sexual desire. This will not be a panacea to the social problems that could arise from sexbot development, but it offers a more realistic and hopeful vision for the future of this technology in a pluralistic and progressive society. (shrink)

What does the study of Plato’s dialogues tell us about the modern meaning of ‘sex’? How can recent developments in the philosophy of sex and gender help us read these ancient texts anew? _Plato and Sex _addresses these questions for the first time. Each chapter demonstrates how the modern reception of Plato’s works Ð in both mainstream and feminist philosophy and psychoanalytical theory Ð has presupposed a ‘natural-biological’ conception of what sex might mean. Through a critical comparison between our (...) current understanding of sex and Plato’s notion of genos, Plato and Sex puts this presupposition into question. With its groundbreaking interpretations of the Republic, the Symposium and the Timaeus, this book opens up a new approach to sex as a philosophical concept. Including critical readings of the theories of sex and sexuation in Freud and Lacan, and relating such theories to Plato’s writings, _Plato and Sex_ both questions our assumptions about sex and explains how those assumptions have coloured our understanding of Plato. What results is not only an original reading of some of the most prominent aspects of Plato’s philosophy, but a new attempt to think through the meaning of sex today. (shrink)

Undoubtedly Romantic love has come to saturate our culture and is often considered to be a, or even the, major existential goal of our lives, capable of providing us with both our sense of worth and way of being in the world. The Radicalism of Romantic Love interrogates the purported radicalism of Romantic love from philosophical, cultural and psychoanalytic perspectives, exploring whether it is a subversive force capable of breaking down entrenched social, political and cultural norms and structures, or whether, (...) in spite of its role in the fight against certain barriers, it is in fact a highly conservative impulse. Exploring both the grounds for the central place of Romantic love in contemporary lives and the meaning, extent and nature of its supposed radicalism, this volume considers love from a variety of theoretical perspectives, with attention to matters of gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity. With authors examining a range of questions, including the role of love in the same-sex marriage debate, polyamory and the notion of love as a political force, The Radicalism of Romantic Love illuminates a fundamental but perplexing aspect of our contemporary lives and will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in the emotions and love as a social and political phenomenon. (shrink)

Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book explores the emerging topics and rapid technological developments of robotics and artificial intelligence through the lens of the evolving role of sex robots, and how they should best be designed to serve human needs. An international panel of authors provides the most up-to-date, evidence-based empirical research on the potential sexual applications of artificial intelligence. Early chapters discuss the objections to sexual activity with robots while also providing a counterargument to each objection. Subsequent chapters present (...) the implications of robot sex as well as the security and data privacy issues associated with sexual interactions with artificial intelligence. The book concludes with a chapter highlighting the importance of a scientific, multidisciplinary approach to the study of human - robot sexuality. Topics featured in this book include: The Sexual Interaction Illusion Model. The personal companion system, Harmony, designed by RealbotixTM. An exposition of the challenges of personal data control and protection when dealing with artificial intelligence. The current and future technological possibilities of projecting three-dimensional holograms. Expert discussion notes from an international workshop on the topic. AI Love You will be of interest to academic researchers in psychology, robotics, ethics, medical science, sociology, gender studies as well as clinicians, policy makers, and the business sector. (shrink)

This article identifies the dominant public narrative of AIDS in Malawi through an analysis of qualitative interview data and policy and intervention materials. The public narrative creates distinctions between “risky” and “healthy” sex that organize HIV prevention efforts around moral categories, rather than relative risk. These distinctions oppose images of backward, ignorant villagers to the protective power of “love matches”. The analysis demonstrates that the public narrative and corresponding prevention efforts only make sense in connection with the patently false assumption (...) that love, heterosexuality, and modernity effectively protect individuals from HIV. This research brings to light the unspoken assumptions of modernity in the “charmed circle” of heteronormativity, as well as the need to consider the workings of heteronormativity in studies of modernization and globalization. Furthermore, it highlights individualistic and oversimplified analytic models currently directing HIV prevention efforts and points to potentially more effective strategies. (shrink)