Queer Philosophy

The book is a collection of the presentations of the Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy from 1998 to 2008. The essays are organized historically, starting in 1998. Their topics cover virtually every philosophical field, and such that each is connected to gay and lesbian studies. Topics include how we are to understand sexual orientation, whether same-sex leads to polygamy, teaching gay studies to undergraduates, promiscuity and virtue, the “war on terror” and gay oppression, the rationality of coming out, the ethics of outing, connections between being gay and being happy, and last, but not least, dignity and being gay.

This Major Reference series brings together a wide range of key international articles in law and legal theory. Many of these essays are not readily accessible, and their presentation in these volumes will provide a vital new resource for both research and teaching. Each volume is edited by leading international authorities who explain the significance and context of articles in an informative and complete introduction.

This book begins by putting gay & lesbian sexuality and politics in historical context and demonstrates how and why queer theory emerged.

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry. Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.

The pioneering work of Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768) identified a homoerotic appreciation of male beauty in classical Greek sculpture, a fascination that had endured in Western art since the Greeks. Yet after Winckelmann, the value (even the possibility) of art's queer beauty was often denied. Several theorists, notably the philosopher Immanuel Kant, broke sexual attraction and aesthetic appreciation into separate or dueling domains. In turn, sexual desire and aesthetic pleasure had to be profoundly rethought by later writers. Whitney Davis follows how such innovative thinkers as John Addington Symonds, Michel Foucault, and Richard Wollheim rejoined these two domains, reclaiming earlier insights about the mutual implication of sexuality and aesthetics. Addressing texts by Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Sigmund Freud, among many others, Davis criticizes modern approaches, such as Kantian idealism, Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and analytic aesthetics, for either reducing aesthetics to a question of sexuality or for removing sexuality from the aesthetic field altogether. Despite these schematic reductions, sexuality always returns to aesthetics, and aesthetic considerations always recur in sexuality. Davis particularly emphasizes the way in which philosophies of art since the late eighteenth century have responded to nonstandard sexuality, especially homoeroticism, and how theories of nonstandard sexuality have drawn on aesthetics in significant ways. Many imaginative and penetrating critics have wrestled productively, though often inconclusively and "against themselves," with the aesthetic making of sexual life and new forms of art made from reconstituted sexualities. Through a critique that confronts history, philosophy, science, psychology, and dominant theories of art and sexuality, Davis challenges privileged types of sexual and aesthetic creation imagined in modern culture-and assumed today.

This is a short and accessible introduction to the complex and evolving debates around queer theories, advocating for their critical role in academia and society. The book traces the roots of queer theories and argues that Foucault owed an important debt to other European authors including the feminist and homosexual liberation movements of the 1960–1970s and the anticolonial movements of the 1950s. Going beyond a simple introduction to queer theories, this book situates them firmly in a European and Italian context to offer a crucial set of arguments in defence of LGBTQI+ rights, in defence of the freedom of teaching and research, and in defence of a radical idea of democracy. The narrative of the book is divided into three short chapters which can be read independently or in sequence. The first chapter argues that queer theories are rooted in the critical philosophical tradition, the second presents a critique of heterosexism and the binary inherent to the gender-sex-sexual orientation system, and the third chapter sketches a history of the queer debate. The book offers a useful typology of queer theories by sorting them into three basic paradigms: Freudo-Marxism, radical constructivism, and antisocial and affective theories, clarifying the complexities of the nature of the debates for undergraduates. The book is both accessible and original, and is suitable for both specialist researchers and undergraduate students new to queer studies. It will be essential reading for those studying philosophy, sexuality studies and gender studies.

A 2023 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title Queering Philosophy provides a critical introduction to and engagement with current conversations and emerging themes at the nexus of queer theory and philosophy. Much more than a summary of recent work, this book presents an intersectional, thematic approach that highlights scholarship at the cutting edge of queer, feminist, disability, and critical race theories, defines the parameters of contemporary queer philosophy, and argues that a queer philosophy must aim to queer philosophy. Queering Philosophy explores the possibility of doing philosophy otherwise. In doing so, the book explores feminist, critical race, and critical disability theories to advance a queer feminist critique, and challenges the unacknowledged whiteness and other forms of marginalization that have characterized the mainstream of philosophy and queer theory’s archive. This accessible and important book is ideal for courses in philosophy and gender, sexuality, race and disability studies.

The book is a collection of the presentations of the Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy from 1998 to 2008. The essays are organized historically, starting in 1998. Their topics cover virtually every philosophical field, and such that each is connected to gay and lesbian studies. Topics include how we are to understand sexual orientation, whether same-sex leads to polygamy, teaching gay studies to undergraduates, promiscuity and virtue, the "war on terror" and gay oppression, the rationality of coming out, the ethics of outing, connections between being gay and being happy, and last, but not least, dignity and being gay.