SUNY in Gender Theory

Brings together wide-ranging, interdisciplinary analyses of Luce Irigaray's rethinking of space with respect to sexual difference and the visual arts. A rethinking of space is central to Luce Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference. Topologies of Sexual Difference is the first edited collection to focus on this task through a sustained consideration of both Irigaray's critique of the Western tradition's systematic conflation of femininity and space and her transvaluative topological redeployment of space in theorizing sexual difference. Across thirteen chapters, Irigarayan space is thematized as porous, fluid, continuous, and self-differentiating. Contributors engage with the origins of life, affect, the aesthetics of the maternal and placental, an Irigarayan morphology inclusive of trans embodiment, and-in a rare focus-the expression of sexuate specificity in creative practice. Topologies of Sexual Difference thus demonstrates the fundamental importance of Irigaray's rethinking of space for Western philosophy and the visual arts.

Originating in a 1938 play, the term gaslighting has become part of our everyday vocabulary. But do we truly know what it means? This collection of new and foundational essays explores concepts and experiences of gaslighting from philosophical perspectives. Contributors build on longstanding feminist analyses of the relations among knowledge, affect, and power to consider how gaslighting can work at not only individual but also structural levels to undermine its targets. In examining racial, epistemological, medical, affective, political, and other forms of gaslighting, the book helps illuminate contemporary power relations and provides urgently needed tools for further research in and beyond the field of philosophy.

Arguing for a radical return to desire in Luce Irigaray's thought, this book decisively intervenes in impasses around questions of identity that continue to confound contemporary discourse and politics. By prioritizing the disruptive potential of desire rather than sexual difference, Wesley N. Barker extends Irigaray's relational theory of becoming into new territory, opening generative, often surprising pathways for conversation with philosophies of race, queer theory, political theology, decolonial theory, and posthuman thought. As a source for reimagining materiality, desire is pulled free of a phallocentric, white, colonial framework and mobilized toward a philosophy of living capable of addressing the twenty-first century's multifaceted crises of identity, representation, and embodiment.