Touching Thought Ontology and Sexual Difference

by Mortensen, Ellen

• ISBN13: 9780739105153
• ISBN10: 0739105159
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-04-14
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

The blindness to ontological questioning in feminist theory has left a lacuna in scholarly study that Touching Thought--a study at the intersection of ontological meditation and feminist theorizing on sexual difference--seeks to fill. Ellen Mortensen's new work critiques the language and theoretical pathways of contemporary feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Theresa de Lauretis, and Donna Haraway to reveal a problematic predilection for technological language at the expense of ontological inquiry. The volume ranges across feminist epistemology and ethics, the politics of performativity, the aesthetics of body/power, and the question of sexual difference and concludes with an examination of the different philosophical and theoretical attempts at undertaking an ontological questioning of sexual difference. This foundational work will serve as preparation for scholars of feminist and queer theory and continental philosophy seeking alternative pathways of feminist thought that encourage fundamental thinking on the subject of individual freedom.

Author Biography

Ellen Mortensen (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989) is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction	1	(6)
Butches and Nomads: The Dynamic Imperative in Feminist Theory	7	(14)
Performative Agency and the Question of Being	21	(26)
``Becoming-Lesbian'' and the Aesthetics of Body and Power	47	(24)
Does Dasein Have a Sex? Derrida on Heidegger's Geschlecht	71	(16)
A Difference of Air: Irigaray with Heidegger	87	(12)
Touched by Thought? Technology and Sexual Difference	99	(24)
Bibliography	123	(4)
Index	127	(6)
About the Author	133