Irigaray covers major issues in religion, the law, psychoanalysis, and literature, such as: the continued neglect by psychoanalysts of the sexual and gender dimensions of therapy, the urgency of female divinity for contemporary feminist movements, and a reconsideration of women's relation to the market economy. "Sexes and Genealogies" also includes Irigaray's dazzling reading of the "Oresteia, "Body Against Body: In Relation to the Mother,"" now acknowledged as a feminist classic.
In the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray is one of France's most versatile feminist critics. Sexes and Genealogies, a collection of lectures delivered throughout Canada and Europe, introduces her writing to a wider American audience. Irigaray's most famous work, Speculum of the Other Woman, prompted her expulsion from the Lacanin Ecole Freudienne because of its searing depiction of Platonic and Freudian representations of women. Now Sexes and Genealogies analyzes sexual difference according to what she terms the double dimension of gender and ideology. Irigaray covers major issues in religion, the law, psychoanalysis, and literature, such as: the continued neglect by psychoanalysts of the sexual and gender dimensions of therapy, the urgency of female divinity for contemporary feminist movements, and a reconsideration of women's relation to the market economy. Sexes and Genealogies also includes Irigaray's dazzling reading of the Oresteia, "Body Against Body: In Relation to the Mother," now acknowleged as a feminist classic.
Preliminary Material --List of Figures --Preface /Margaret Sönser Breen --History, Sex, and Nation --Kertbeny's "Homosexuality" and the Language of Nationalism /Robert D. Tobin --Prostitution, Sexuality, and Gender Roles in Imperial Germany: Hamburg, A Case Study /Julia Bruggemann --Cultural Clash on Prostitution: Debates on Prostitution in Germany and Sweden in the 1990s /Susanne Dodillet --"Staying Bush" - The Influence of Place and Isolation in the Decision by Gay Men to Live in Rural Areas in Australia /Ed Green --Literature: Re-writing Desire --Whoring, Incest, Duplicity, or the "Self-Polluting" Erotics of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders /Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou --Catastrophic Sexualities in Howard Baker's Theatre of Transgression /Karoline Gritzner --Un-sacred Cows and Protean Beings: Suniti Namjoshi's Re-writing of Postcolonial Lesbian Bodies /Shalmalee Palekar --Desire-less-ness /Fiona Peters --Bodies: Representations of Gender Identities --Underneath the Clothes - Transvestites without Vests: A Consideration in Art /Barbara Wagner --Of Swords and Rings: Genital Representation as Defining Sexual Identity and Sexual Liberation in Some Old French Fabliaux and Lais /Tovi Bibring --Only with You - Maybe - If You Make Me Happy: A Genealogy of Serial Monogamy as Governance Self-Governance /Serena Petrella --Legality, Bureaucracy, Religion, and Sexuality --A Project for Sexual Rights: Sexuality, Power, and Human Rights /Alejandro Cervantes-Carson and Tracy Citeroni --International Law, Children's Rights, and Queer Youth /Valerie D. Lehr --Acting Like a Professional: Identity Dilemmas for Gay Men /Nick Rumens --How Big is Your God? Queer Christian Social Movements /Jodi O'Brien --Notes on Contributors.
Taking recent German debates of diversity terminology as a case example for scrutinizing enactments of genealogy that assume a linear image of progressive generation, this book engages with performative effects of genealogical stories in academic texts that negotiate conceptual belonging. While supporters of the developing Diversity Studies in Germany cherish diversity’s potential for multi-category investigations, Gender and Women’s Studies critics reject the term for its neoliberal, managerial rationale, allegedly holding profit above social justice. Genealogies and Conceptual Belonging intervenes in this oppositional debate by turning one’s attention to narrations of the origins of "gender" and "diversity" that suggest their proper place in the present. Presenting a story about dis/continuous genealogies and highlighting complicated interferences between gender and diversity, Marten forges novel future connections between questions of gender, sexual difference, and diversity. This pioneering volume will be of particular interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers interested in the fields of genealogy, Gender Studies, feminist theory, feminist science studies and critical race / diversity / intersectionality studies.
Feminist and critical race theorists alike have long acknowledged the "intersection" of gender and race difference; it is by now a truism that the ways we become boys and girls, men and women, cannot be disentangled from the ways we become white or Black men and women, Asian or Latino boys and girls. And yet, even as many have sought to attend to this intersection of difference, most critical treatments focus finally either on the production of gender or the production of race. Family Bonds proposes a new way to think about the categories of gender and race together. It first explicates and then puts to work Foucault's archaeological and genealogical methods to advance the main argument of the book: Gender is best understood primarily as a function of "disciplinary" power operating within the family, while race is primarily a function of a "regulatory" power acting upon the family. Each of the book's central chapters is an individual story, or history - the founding of Levittown, the definitive suburb after the Second World War (1950s and 60s); the development of the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder (1970s and 1980s); and the federal coordination of scientific research on violence (1980s and 1990s). Together they make up a larger story about the construction of race and gender in the U.S. in the second half of the twentieth century and demonstrate the centrality of the family in these constructions. Rather than a formal study of Foucault's own work, Family Bonds is an effort to produce genealogies of the sort that Foucault himself hoped his work would prompt.
Genealogies of Identity examines issues of sex and sexuality across a range of critical and cultural perspectives. The volume considers historically specific discourses of sex and sexuality, their effect within public contexts such as the church and the workplace, and the link of those discourses to understandings of individual identity, citizenship, nation, and human rights. As well, the volume analyses representations of sexuality and desire in art, literature, theatre, and theory – representations that serve both to codify and to subvert social norms and aesthetic and theoretical traditions. Finally and more broadly, the volume attests to the critical importance of inter- and multidisciplinary approaches to understanding constructions of gender, sex, and sexuality. Genealogies of Identity consists of fifteen essays, versions of which were presented at the First Global Conference on Critical Issues in Sexuality, held in Salzburg, Austria, in October 2004.
Barbara Spackman here examines the ways in which decadent writers adopted the language of physiological illness and alteration as a figure for psychic otherness. By means of an ideological and rhetorical analysis of scientific as well as literary texts, she shows how the rhetoric of sickness provided the male decadent writer with an alibi for the occupation and appropriation of the female body.
Establishing a connection to the past while at the sametime releasing us into the present is crucial to recalling atraumatic past. Tapping into the Book of Chronicles'genealogies as a memory space, Trauma Begets Genealogyfacilitates the transformation of the act of looking back into a key for the present. Using a gender studies perspective, it combines a nuanced analysis of the gendered references in 1 Chronicles 1-9 with an interdisciplinary approach that conceptualizes genealogies as memory performances and investigates them in diverse media. The genealogies of Chronicles are here read by Ingeborg Lowisch alongside the post-Holocaust documentary My Life Part 2, in which Berlin film-maker Angelika Levi performs her 'gynealogy' at the intersection of her family archive and of discourses that belong to public memory. While Lowisch's close reading of the gendered fragments in Chronicles attest to fissures in the patrilinear succession, the parallel perception of the film deepens our understanding of gendered genealogies in response to trauma by contributing a full female lineage. The resulting reassessment of an obscure set of biblical texts leads into the heart of the genealogical tissue and its fascinating ability to respond to a fractured past."
Published in France in 1980, Marine Lover is the first in a trilogy in which Luce Irigaray links the interrogation of the feminine in post-Hegelian philosophy with a pre-Socratic investigation of the elements. Irigaray undertakes to interrogate Nietzche, the grandfather of poststructuralist philosophy, from the point of view of water. According to Irigaray, water is the element Nietzsche fears most. She uses this element in her narrative because for her there is a complex relationship between the feminine and the fluid. Irigaray's method is to engage in an amorous dialogue with the male philosopher. In this dialogue, she ruptures conventional discourse and writes in a lyrical style that defies distinction between theory, fiction, and philosophy.
Genealogies of Emotions, Intimacies and Desire excavates epistemologies which attempt to explain changes in emotional regimes from medieval society to late modernity. Key in this debate is the concept of intimacy. The book shows that different historical periods are characterized by emotional regimes where intimacy in the form of desire, sex, passion, and sex largely exist outside marriage, and that marriage and traditional normative values and structures are fundamentally incompatible with the expression of intimacy in the history of emotional regimes. The book draws on the work of a number of theorists who assess change in emotional regimes by drawing on intimacy including Michel Foucault, Eva Illouz, Lauren Berlant, Anthony Giddens, Laura Ann Stoler, Anne McClintock, Niklas Luhmann and David Shumway. Some of the areas covered by the book include: Foucault, sex and sexuality; romantic and courtly love; intimacy in late modernity; Imperial power, gender and intimacy, intimacy and feminist interventions; and the commercialization of intimacy. This book will appeal to students and scholars in the social sciences and humanities, including sociology, gender studies, cultural studies, and literary studies.
