Ontologies of Sex

Ontologies of Sex provides a dense but rewarding overview of Continental philosophy’s engagement with gender and sexual difference, starting with Simone de Beauvoir. Designed to serve as a survey, the text provides an introduction to a range of figures, including expected feminist and queer theorists like Luce Irigaray and Octavia Butler, but also a range of unusual suspects like Bataille, Nancy, Derrida, and Ricoeur. The text is timely as a growing interest in transgender rights has reinvigorated arguments about the nature of sexual identity, debates over nature and social construction, and, importantly, ethical and political struggles over sex. Direk (philosophy, Koç Univ., Turkey) argues that these issues require ontological inquiry into erotic experience and sexual identity. In focusing on political subjectivity, Direk draws attention to the stakes of ontological conflict in seeking an existential understanding of human life as autonomous—or capable of exercising freedom—in spite of vulnerability, or the relationships of power that confine and shape erotic existence. Rich in theoretical detail, this text provides a foundation for understanding philosophical engagements with gender, sex, and erotic entanglement and will be useful for teaching purposes and for introducing key debates. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

* Choi