Philosophy

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex

In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most ``material'' dimensions of sex and sexuality. Deepening the inquiries she began in Gender Trouble, Butler offers an original reformulation of the materiality of bodies, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the ``matter'' of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain ``sex'' from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She offers a clarification of the notion of ``performativity'' introduced in Gender Trouble and explores the meaning of a citational politics. The text includes readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud on the formation of materiality and bodily boundaries; ``Paris is Burning,'' Nella Larsen's ``Passing,'' and short stories by Willa Cather; along with a reconsideration of ``performativity'' and politics in feminist, queer, and radical democratic theory.

Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.

Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.

The Fourteen-Minute Marcel Proust: Everyone's guide to the greatest novel ever written

Today it's called 'In Search of Lost Time'. Early in the last century it was 'Remembrance of Things Past'. Under whatever title, and whichever translator, Proust's gargantuan novel has baffled American readers for more than eighty years. Over the course of a year, Daniel Ford tackled the recent and lovely Penguin/Viking editions, blogging on the internet as he read. He devotes a short chapter to each of the novel's seven books, introducing it with a two-minute plot synoposis--thus the fourteen minutes of the title. More than that, he ruminates on one or more of its highlights, compares the Penguin/Viking translations with the classic ones based on the work of C. K. Scott Moncrieff, and--gotcha!--points to errors in the text or translation. About 7,500 words.

Queer Theory: An Introduction

"Annamarie Jagose knows that queer theory did not spring full-blown from the head of any contemporary theorist. It is the outcome of many different influences and sources, including the homophile movement, gay liberation, and lesbian feminism. In pointing to the history of queer theory—a history that all too often is ignored or elided—Jagose performs a valuable service."
—Henry Abelove, co-editor of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader

The political and academic appropriation of the term queer over the last several years has marked a shift in the study of sexuality from a focus on supposedly essential categories as gay and lesbian to more fluid or queer notions of sexual identity. Yet queer is a category still in the process of formation. In Queer Theory, Annamarie Jagose provides a clear and concise explanation of queer theory, tracing it as part of an intriguing history of same-sex love over the last century.

Blending insights from prominent theorists such as Judith Butler and David Halperin, Jagose argues that queer theory's challenge is to create new ways of thinking, not only about fixed sexual identities such as heterosexual and homosexual, but also about other supposedly essential notions such as sexuality and gender and even man and woman.

Feminism Meets Queer Theory (Books from Differences)

The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer (Great Discoveries)

A "skillful and literate" (New York Times Book Review) biography of the persecuted genius who helped create the modern computer.

To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating "treatment" that may have led to his suicide.

With a novelist's sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity—his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor—and elegantly explains his work and its implications.

No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Series Q)

In this searing polemic, Lee Edelman outlines a radically uncompromising new ethics of queer theory. His main target is the all-pervasive figure of the child, which he reads as the linchpin of our universal politics of “reproductive futurism.” Edelman argues that the child, understood as innocence in need of protection, represents the possibility of the future against which the queer is positioned as the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive. He boldly insists that the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this refusal of the social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges queers to abandon the stance of accommodation and accede to their status as figures for the force of a negativity that he links with irony, jouissance, and, ultimately, the death drive itself.

Closely engaging with literary texts, Edelman makes a compelling case for imagining Scrooge without Tiny Tim and Silas Marner without little Eppie. Looking to Alfred Hitchcock’s films, he embraces two of the director’s most notorious creations: the sadistic Leonard of North by Northwest, who steps on the hand that holds the couple precariously above the abyss, and the terrifying title figures of The Birds, with their predilection for children. Edelman enlarges the reach of contemporary psychoanalytic theory as he brings it to bear not only on works of literature and film but also on such current political flashpoints as gay marriage and gay parenting. Throwing down the theoretical gauntlet, No Future reimagines queerness with a passion certain to spark an equally impassioned debate among its readers.

The Tears of Eros

Tears of Eros is the culmination of Georges Bataille's inquiries into the relationship between violence and the sacred. Taking up such figures as Giles de Rais, Erzebet Bathory, the Marquis de Sade, El Greco, Gustave Moreau, Andre Breton, Voodoo practitioners, and Chinese torture victims, Bataille reveals their common obsession: death.

This essay, illustrated with artwork from every era, was developed out of ideas explored in Erotism: Death and Sexuality and Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or the Birth of Art. In it Bataille examines death-the ""little death"" that follows sexual climax, the proximate death in sadomasochistic practices, and death as part of religious ritual and sacrifice.

Georges Bataille was born in Billom, France, in 1897. He was a librarian by profession. Also a philosopher, novelist, and critic he was founder of the College of Sociology. In 1959, Bataille began Tears of Eros, and it was completed in 1961, his final work. Bataille died in 1962.

Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Cultural Politics, Vol 6)

A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory

"This book is a succinct, pedagogically designed introduction. As classroom text, Sullivan's work is heady with vibrant debate and slim heuristics; her intellectual clarity is stunning."
—Choice

A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory explores the ways in which sexuality, subjectivity and sociality have been discursively produced in various historical and cultural contexts.

The book begins by putting gay and lesbian sexuality and politics in historical context and demonstrates how and why queer theory emerged in the West in the late twentieth century. Sullivan goes on to provide a detailed overview of the complex ways in which queer theory has been employed, covering a diversity of key topics including: race, sadomasochism, straight sex, fetishism, community, popular culture, transgender, and performativity. Each chapter focuses on a distinct issue or topic, provides a critical analysis of the specific ways in which it has been responded to by critics (including Freud, Foucault, Derrida, Judith Butler, Jean-Luc Nancy, Adrienne Rich and Laura Mulvey), introduces key terms, and uses contemporary cinematic texts as examples.