Ontologies of Sex

Zeynep Direk obtained her Ph. D from the University of Memphis in 1998. She is professor at Koç University, Department of Philosophy in Istanbul, Turkey. She publishes on contemporary French philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, feminism, and the history of Turkish philosophy. Her research on feminism focuses on feminist thinkers’ interpretations of the fundamental problems and concepts of Western philosophy. She has co-edited, with Leonard Lawlor, A Companion to Derrida (2014), and is the author of three books in Turkish.

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.

• IntroductionChapter 1: Simone de Beauvoir: An Ontology and Ethics of FreedomChapter 2: Georges Bataille: Erotic Experience Chapter 3: The Problem of Phallocentrism Chapter 4: Different Ontologies in Queer TheoryChapter 5: Jean Luc-Nancy: An Ontology of Sex Chapter 6: Subjects of Rights: From Vulnerability to AutonomyConclusion