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.

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.

This distinctive collection explores the construction of genealogies—in both the biological sense of procreation and the metaphorical sense of heritage and cultural patrimony. Focusing specifically on the discourses that inform such genealogies, Generation and Degeneration moves from Greco-Roman times to the recent past to retrace generational fantasies and discords in a variety of related contexts, from the medical to the theological, and from the literary to the historical. The discourses on reproduction, biology, degeneration, legacy, and lineage that this book broaches not only bring to the forefront concepts of sexual identity and gender politics but also show how they were culturally constructed and reconstructed through the centuries by medicine, philosophy, the visual arts, law, religion, and literature. The contributors reflect on a wide range of topics—from what makes men “manly” to the identity of Christ’s father, from what kinds of erotic practices went on among women in sixteenth-century seraglios to how men’s hemorrhoids can be variously labeled. Essays scrutinize stories of menstruating males and early writings on the presumed inferiority of female bodily functions. Others investigate a psychomorphology of the clitoris that challenges Freud’s account of lesbianism as an infantile stage of sexual development and such topics as the geographical origins of medicine and the materialization of genealogy in the presence of Renaissance theatrical ghosts. This collection will engage those in English, comparative, Italian, Spanish, and French studies, as well as in history, history of medicine, and ancient and early modern religious studies. Contributors. Kevin Brownlee, Marina Scordilis Brownlee, Elizabeth Clark, Valeria Finucci, Dale Martin, Gianna Pomata, Maureen Quilligan, Nancy Siraisi, Peter Stallybrass,Valerie Traub

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.

Within much contemporary feminist theory there is a tendency to forget or ignore its own historicity and consider itself as primarily oriented towards the present. This book explores the historical roots of some of feminism’s central concepts and debates, examining the philosophical conditions for feminist thought and taking as its point of departure the dynamic relationship between feminist thought and the history of philosophy. With close attention to the genealogy of key concepts such as equality, sex/gender and difference, alongside discussions of contemporary gender equality policy and contextual understandings of central figures including Wollstonecraft, Beauvoir and Irigaray, The Genealogy of Modern Feminist Thinking provides an analysis of feminism from its origins in the Early Modern period to its contemporary, post-modern forms. Shedding light on feminism as a product of Modernity and establishing it as part of the canon of European intellectual development, this book thus corrects the picture of feminism as a phenomenon that lacks historical continuity, revealing a history characterized by breaks, setbacks and forgetting, in which the forgetting itself forms part of a rich genealogy. As such, it will be of interest to philosophers, sociologists, political theorists and intellectual historians alike.