The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity

by Christine Battersby

Overview

This original book enters the undeveloped territory of feminist metaphysics and offers a bold and unusual contribution to debates about identity, essence and self. Using a diverse range of theories - from Kant to chaos theory, from Kierkegaard to Deleuze, Irigaray, Butler and Oliver Sachs - this book challenges the assumption that metaphysics can remain unchanged by issues of sexual difference.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745695822
Publisher:	Polity Press
Publication date:	03/21/2016
Sold by:	JOHN WILEY & SONS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	820 KB

About the Author

Christine Battersby is Reader Emerita in Philosophy and Associate Fellow of the Centre for Philosophy, Literature and the Arts at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Fleshy Metaphysics.

2. Essentialisms, Feminisms and Metaphysics.

3. Her Body/Her Boundaries.

4. Kantian Metaphysics and the Sexed Self.

5. Feminist Postmodernism and the Metaphysics of Absence.

6. Antigones of Gender.

7. Flesh with Trimmings: Adorno and Difference.

8. Kierkegaard, Woman and the Workshop of Possibilities.

9. Scoring the Subject of Feminist Theory: Kierkegaard and Deleuze.

10. Coda.

Notes.

Bibliography.

Index .

Editorial Reviews

"...clever and imaginative..." — Karen Struening, Signs
"...Battersby's construction in the book is a model of detail and clarity." — Philosophy in Review/Comptes Rendus Philosophiques
"The Phenomenal Woman is a startlingly original work of philosophy. In her construction of a new metaphysics, which takes the woman as norm in definitions of self, personhood and identity, Christine Battersby contests the conceptualization of the Kantian subject. Taking the risk of (re)constructive philosophy, she offers a challenge to postmodernist feminisms and their reliance on what'she describes as the 'despairing epistemology' of deconstructive postmodernism." — Margaret Whitford, University of London

From the Publisher