radical philosophy

The gender apparatus

Feminist protest against US torture practices, including outcries over the use of sex, sexuality and sexual identity in the torture of prisoners at US detention sites from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, have understandably tended to focus on what the abuse destroys – the victim and his or her community. Here, though, I ask what the [...]

Sex: a transdisciplinary concept

What is sex? Some feminists have harboured suspicions about this form of question, given its philosophical (or ‘metaphysical’1) pedigree. But philosophy no longer has the disciplinary monopoly on it. Indeed, with regard to sex, the more interesting task today is to pose and to attempt to answer the question from within a transdisciplinary problematic. For [...]

The Question of Caster Semenya

Sex and gender issues in the case of intersex runner Caster Semenya

This is not my body

The impossibility of gender in narratives of China’s modernity

The incomplete materialism of French materialist feminism

Sexmat, revisited

Making life livable

The sword and the bridge

Feminism against ‘the feminine’

Psychoanalysis and politics

Jean Laplanche

Jean Laplanche is the most original and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day. Setting out from a critical reconstruction of Freudʼs terminology, he has developed a systematic rethinking of psychoanalytic metapsychology under the heading of a ʻgeneral theory of seductionʼ. Still best known in Britain for his early joint work with Pontalis – ʻFantasy [...]

Self help

Contingent ontologies

Cinquantenaire du Deuxième Sexe, Paris, 19–23 January 1999

Globalization is ordinary

Birth, love, politics

‘Woman’ as theatre

Drucilla Cornell

Judith Butler