This book provides an overview of the events of intimacy, a chronicle of the erogenous events that occur in a woman's body. It discusses the concept of psychoanalysis keeping very close to the body—a body that feels, vibrates, and is repressed, a body that depends on its fellow beings.
Michèle Le Doeuff is a leading French philosopher, and one of the most important feminist thinkers writing today. The Sex of Knowing , Le Doeuff's most significant work to date, provides a comprehensive account of her views. This is the first English translation of her inspiring book. Le Doeuff's target is the continuing tendency to think that men are more rational, more analytic than women, a tendency that persists in spite of our thinking we know better. She argues that the conceptual links between masculinity and rationality are deeply rooted in the public imagination and institutions of learning, and continue to have devastating effects on what women are able to achieve. To shed light on the depth and persistence of the problem, Le Doeuff leads us on provocative archeological journey through the great texts and authors of the past and present from Plato and Descartes to Evelyn Fox Keller and Kate Millett in search of the origins and extent of a set of contemporary reflexes that hold misogynistic thinking in place both in the larger society, and within science and philosophy. An ambitious and highly persuasive book, The Sex of Knowing received widespread critical attention in the French press. Lorraine Code and Kathryn Hamer's superb translation is sure to have a similar impact on English speaking audiences everywhere.
This book was first published in 2003: Developing a reading of some of Beauvoir's and Sartre's most influential writings in philosophy, Max Deutscher explores contemporary philosophy in the light of the phenomenological tradition within which Being and Nothingness and The Second Sex occurred as striking events operating on the border of the modern and the post-modern. Deutscher traces the shifts of genre that produce their gendered philosophies, and responds in terms of contemporary experience to the mood and the arguments of their works. Drawing upon the writings of two contemporary critics in particular - Michele Le Dœuff and Luce Irigaray - Deutscher reworks this part of philosophy's history in order to advance thinking in contemporary philosophy, generate renewed philosophical reflection on consciousness, freedom and one's relation to others, and to return a look still cast in our direction from an earlier time.
Body Narratives deals with the configurations in the literature and culture of sixteenth-century England. It investigates the relationship between disciplinary discourses of the human body and political body imagery in the texts of courtly writers like Spenser, Sidney, Ralegh and others, and traces its interdependence in their narratives of national identity, imperial expansion and gender difference.
For the most part, the women portrayed have speak to us through intermediaries. Hildegard of Bingen, Christine de Pisan, and Ann Hutchinson's 'recusant nuns' may present themselves in their own words - though even here there are veils of concealment, dissimulation, assumption and presumption to be removed - but Chaucer's women, Chretien's patrons, Milton's Eve, the conflation of saints which comprises Wilgefortis, Ste Foy, and the imperious Theodora are presented in the words, works and social milieux of men. Where they are, ostensibly, given their own voices it is by male authors.
Emmanuel Levinas is best known for having reintroduced the question of ethics into the Continental philosophical tradition. In The Metaphysics of Love, however, Stella Sandford argues that an over-emphasis on ethics in the reception of Levinas's thought has covered over both the basis and the details of his philosophical project--a metaphysics which affirms the necessity to think of an unqualified transcendence as a first principle. Sandford's book is at the same time a powerful feminist critique of both Levinas's gendered philosophical categories and the attempt to reclaim aspects of this philosophy for feminist theory.
Any visitor to Belgium or the Netherlands is immediately struck by the number of convents and beguinages (begijnhoven) in both major cities and small towns. Their number and location in urban centres suggests that the women who inhabited them once held a prominent role. Despite leaving a visible mark on cities in Europe, much of the story of these women - known variously as beguines, tertiaries, klopjes, recluses, and anchoresses--remains to be told. Instead of aspiring to live as traditional religious, they transcended normative assumptions about religion and gender and had a very real impact on their religious and secular worlds. The sources for their tale are often fragmentary and difficult to interpret. However, careful scrutiny allows their voices to be heard. Drawing on an array of sources including religious rules, sermons, hagiographic vitae, and rapiaria, Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities traces the story of pious laywomen between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. It both emphasizes the innovative roles of women who transcended established forms of institutional religious life and reveals the ways in which historiographical habits have obscured the dynamic and fluid nature of their histories. By highlighting the development of irregular and extraregular communities and tracing the threads of monasticisation that wove their way around pious laywomen, this book draws attention to the vibrant and dynamic culture of feminine lay piety that persisted from the later middle ages onwards.
This volume reproduces nineteen chapters and articles published between 1991 through 2008, on Manichaeism, and its contacts with Augustine of Hippo, its most famous convert and also best-known adversary. The contents are divided into four parts: perceptions of Mani within the Roman Empire, select aspects of Manichaean thought, women in Manichaeism, and Manichaeism and Augustine. Though these chapters and articles reproduce their originals, adjustments have been made to include cross-referencing, newer editions, and the like, all with the aim of rendering them more accessible to a new readership among those who follow the fortunes of Mani s religion in the Roman Empire and/or the Manichaean aspects of Augustine of Hippo.
Nicole Loraux has devoted much of her writing to charting the paths of the Greek "imaginary," revealing a collective masculine psyche fraught with ambivalence as it tries to grasp the differences between nature and culture, body and soul, woman and man. The Experiences of Tiresias, its title referring to the shepherd struck blind after glimpsing Athena's naked body, captures this ambivalence in exploring how the Greek male defines himself in relationship to the feminine. In these essays, Loraux disturbs the idea of virile men and feminine women, a distinction found in official discourse and aimed at protecting the ideals of male identity from any taint of the feminine. Turning to epic and to Socrates, however, she insists on a logic of an inclusiveness between the genders, which casts a shadow over their clear, officially defined borders. The emphasis falls on the body, often associated with feminine vulnerability and weakness, and often dissociated from the ideal of the brave, self-sacrificing male warrior. But heroes such as the Homeric Achilles, who fears yet fights bravely, and Socrates, who speaks of the soul through the language of the body, challenge these representations. The anatomy of pain, the heroics of childbirth, the sorrows of tears, the warrior's wounds, and the madness of the soul: all these experiences are shown to engage with both the masculine and the feminine in ways that do not denigrate the experiences for either gender. Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.