Deleuze And Sex

This collection of essays offers a fresh and new philosophical approach to the study of sex and sexuality as practicein the philosophy of Deleuze.

Explores the political, cultural and conceptual significance of sexual pleasure through Deleuze's philosophy. How is sexual pleasure inscribed into conceptions of the body, gender, health and the human? What is its role in the construction of these notions? And, most importantly, how can it contribute to an expansion of what they mean?Intervening into fields including posthumanist, disability, animal and feminist studies, and current critiques of capitalism and consumerism, Frida Beckman addresses these questions to recover a theory of sexuality from Deleuze's work.

A unique new study which extends Deleuze's already radical philosophy into ideas of the post-human, truth, reading, sexual difference and gender politics.

The field of 'queer theory' has long been dominated by the work of Judith Butler and the focus on performativity. This collection of work proposes a major paradigm shift in debates on sexuality.

Bringing together theory and public health practice, this interdisciplinary collection analyses three forms of nonconventional or radical sexualities: bareback sex, BDSM practices, and public sex. Drawing together the latest empirical research from Brazil, Canada, Spain, and the USA, it mobilizes queer theory and poststructuralism, engaging the work of theorists such as Bataille, Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, and Foucault, among others. While the collection contributes to current research in gender and sexuality studies, it does so distinctly in the context of empirical investigations and discourses on critical public health. Radical Sex Between Men: Assembling Desiring-Machines will be of interest to advanced undergraduate students, postgraduate students, and researchers in gender and sexuality studies, sexology, social work, anthropology, and sociology, as well as practitioners in nursing, medicine, allied health professions, and psychology.

Why sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology. Consider sublimation—conventionally understood as a substitute satisfaction for missing sexual satisfaction. But what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from sex from talking (or writing, painting, praying, or other activities)? The point is not to explain the satisfaction from talking by pointing to its sexual origin, but that the satisfaction from talking is itself sexual. The satisfaction from talking contains a key to sexual satisfaction (and not the other way around)—even a key to sexuality itself and its inherent contradictions. The Lacanian perspective would make the answer to the simple-seeming question, “What is sex?” rather more complex. In this volume in the Short Circuits series, Alenka Zupančič approaches the question from just this perspective, considering sexuality a properly philosophical problem for psychoanalysis; and by psychoanalysis, she means that of Freud and Lacan, not that of the kind of clinician practitioners called by Lacan “orthopedists of the unconscious.” Zupančič argues that sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very negativity.

Contemporary feminist and poststructuralist theories of sex and gender are explored alongside an investigation of how people make sense of such concepts as heterosexuality, orgasm, sexual dysfunction and femininity and masculinity.