Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxi_me Sexe has been studied extensively since its appearance in 1949. Through the years, certain passages have taken on prestige; others are seen as unimportant to understanding Beauvoir's argument. In Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference, Sara HeinSmaa rediscovers those neglected passages in her quest to follow Beauvoir's line of thinking. HeinSmaa, like some other recent philosophers, finds that Le Duexi_me Sexe is a philosophical inquiry, not the empirical study it is commonly thought to be. Others who view Beauvoir's masterpiece as a work of philosophy argue it is a criticism not only of Sartrean phenomenology, but of phenomenology as a whole. HeinSmaa thinks differently. She finds that Beauvoir's starting point is the Husserlian idea of the living body that she found developed in Merleau-Ponty's PhZnomZnologie de la perception. So when Beavoir wrote Le Duexi_me Sexe, she was writing not as Sartre's pupil, but as a scholar in the tradition of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.

The contributors to this international volume take up questions about a phenomenology of time that begins with and attunes to gender issues. Themes such as feminist conceptions of time, change and becoming, the body and identity, memory and modes of experience, and the relevance of time as a moral and political question, shape Time in Feminist Phenomenology and allow readers to explore connections between feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and time. With its insistence on the importance of gender experience to the experience of time, this volume is a welcome opening to new and critical thinking about being, knowledge, aesthetics, and ethics.

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.

'...a fascinating analysis of the status of the obscene and its representation in pornography in modern culture.... Caputi's thesis is masterfully argued....'-James Glass, University of Maryland

Buddhist philosophy of Anicca (impermanence), Dukkha (suffering), and

This volume is composed chiefly of papers first presented and discussed at the Research Symposium on Feminist Phenomenology held November 18-19, 1994 in Delray Beach, Florida. Those papers have been revised and expanded for publication in the present volume and several essays have been added. We would like to thank very much all the participants in the symposium, including the session chairs and others in attendance, whose interest and enthusiasm contributed greatly. The symposium and this volume, including the name for it, were conceived of by Lester Embree, who also arranged sponsorship, local arrangements, and publication through the William F. Dietrich Eminent Scholar Chair at Florida Atlantic University and the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc. The invitees were decided upon jointly. Linda Fisher has been chiefly responsible for the editing and the preparation of the camera-ready copy. Linda Fisher Lester Embree Acknowledgments The editing and preparation of this volume has spanned several cities and two continents and I am indebted to many people from each place.

Connects Merleau-Ponty’s thought to themes and issues central to continental philosophy today.