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Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex

Childrens Toy Shop > Books > Philosophy
by: Judith Butler

September 20, 1993
This book clarifies much of Foucault was saying in History of Sexuality. Butler is careful, however, to not borrow the models Foucault uses, thereby, avoids some of the mistakes and gaps that occur in his thinking, namely the silence on women. Butler, more than Foucault, is not willing to settle the debate on sexuality merely as the obtaining and disseminating of pleasures and how those bodies perform them. Rather, she takes bodies as always already gender indeterminate and destablilizes their performatives further to show how bodies are marked by gender as well as race, class, sexulaity, etc. and how these categories are also destabilized within the perfomative. I highly recommend this book to feminist and queer theorists and well ... Read More:

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The History of Sexuality: an Introduction: 001 (History of Sexuality): 1 (History of Sexuality)

Childrens Toy Shop > Books > Philosophy
by: Michel Foucault

December 31, 1990
This book clarifies much of Foucault was saying in History of Sexuality. Butler is careful, however, to not borrow the models Foucault uses, thereby, avoids some of the mistakes and gaps that occur in his thinking, namely the silence on women. Butler, more than Foucault, is not willing to settle the debate on sexuality merely as the obtaining and disseminating of pleasures and how those bodies perform them. Rather, she takes bodies as always already gender indeterminate and destablilizes their performatives further to show how bodies are marked by gender as well as race, class, sexulaity, etc. and how these categories are also destabilized within the perfomative. I highly recommend this book to feminist and queer theorists and well ... Read More:

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In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development

Childrens Toy Shop > Books > Philosophy
by: Carol Gilligan

July 01, 1990
This book is truly amazing. For any woman who feels she has lost clarity and fierceness and the ability to tell the truth about how she feels and what is going on in the world of feelings and relationships, the social world which she inhabits, read Gilligan's work (any of it). The book made me remember what it was to learn to be nice and quiet and feminine in order to become a 'woman' when as a girl it had been much more OK to be more forthright, and more myself. Interesting both in terms of looking at the psychology of the world of teenage girls and their lived experience, in terms of engaging with social and psychological research through an engaged methodology of relationship which disturbs the usual authoritarian role of researchers, and in ... Read More:

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Justice and the Politics of Difference

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by: Iris Marion Young

August 17, 1990
Iris Young makes us think about justice not as a set of debts we owe other individuals but as a set of relations between social groups. In a just society, no group is oppressed. Her chapter "Five Faces of Oppression" is a classic. She brings new insights to debates about welfare, affirmative action, and disability. This book also offers a thought-provoking discussion of community. Young argues that we have based our idea of community on the rural life of an earlier age and that city life is where we should look for ideas about how community thrives in diversity.

Young tries to write for a general audience as well as for scholars. Sometimes, she succeeds, although the parts of the book that address particular groups and their ... Read More:

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A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory

Childrens Toy Shop > Books > Philosophy
by: Nikki Sullivan

2003-09
Iris Young makes us think about justice not as a set of debts we owe other individuals but as a set of relations between social groups. In a just society, no group is oppressed. Her chapter "Five Faces of Oppression" is a classic. She brings new insights to debates about welfare, affirmative action, and disability. This book also offers a thought-provoking discussion of community. Young argues that we have based our idea of community on the rural life of an earlier age and that city life is where we should look for ideas about how community thrives in diversity.

Young tries to write for a general audience as well as for scholars. Sometimes, she succeeds, although the parts of the book that address particular groups and their ... Read More:

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Feminist Thought - 3rd Edition: A More Comprehensive Introduction: 0

Childrens Toy Shop > Books > Philosophy
by: Rosemarie Tong

August 07, 2008
Feminist Thought offers the reader a comprehensive understanding of feminist theory through the 20th century. The book is an up to date text on all strands of mainstream feminism, right up to the modern post feminist school of feminism that grew during the 1990's. Written by a professor of philosophy Tong offers an in-depth discussion and overview of feminist thought and explores its complexities and contradictions. The book also looks at feminism and its claim to empower all types of women, regardless of class sexuality or race. The book opens with a chapter on each type of mainstream feminist theory, Liberal feminism, Marxist feminism, Radical feminism and mothering, Radical feminism on gender and sexuality. Then Tong moves on to discuss psychoanalytic ... Read More:

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Excitable Speech: Politics of the Performative

Childrens Toy Shop > Books > Philosophy
by: Judith Butler

March 07, 1997
The results of Butler's attempt to tackle the very serious issue of speech rights are disappointing in the extreme. With no legal background whatsoever and a myopic philosophical vision which seems ingorant of the liberal tradition upon which the right of free speech is grounded, Butler provides an obfuscted discussion (and that's all it is, a discussion) of the issue that is at the best of times, irrelevant, and at the worst of times, offensively misleading. The book is worthwhile only as an example of what happens when a postmodern thinker in the French tradition tries to tackle a subject outside the race/power/gender/subjectivity canon outlined by the philosophers of the 1960s. If you have an appetite for reading philosophical trainwrecks, ... Read More:

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Michel Foucault (Routledge Critical Thinkers)

Childrens Toy Shop > Books > Philosophy
by: Sara Mills

May 08, 2003
Sara Mills' text on Michel Foucault is part of a recent series put out by the Routledge Press, designed under the general editorial direction of Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway, University of London), to explore the most recent and exciting ideas in intellectual development during the past century or so. To this end, figures such as Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricouer and other influential thinkers in critical thought are highlighted in the series, planned to include more than 21 volumes in all.

Mills' text, following the pattern of the others, includes background information on Foucault and his significance, the key ideas and sources, and Foucault's continuing impact on other thinkers. ... Read More:

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Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Theories of Representation & Difference)

Childrens Toy Shop > Books > Philosophy
by: Elizabeth Grosz

June 01, 1994
I enjoyed this book because of the unusual concept Grosz uses to structure it: the metaphor of the body as a Moebius strip, where the surface and interior cannot be seperated out but are intertwined and blend into each other. I like the way that she examines the body from the inside-out (eg looking at psychoanalytic theories of the body, where what's inside the body (eg. conscious mind, unconscious mind, "body image") is the focus / vantage point for analyzing the body) and then from the outside-in (looking at theorists like Foucault, reading the body in terms of its surfaces rather than assuming that the body has an "inner depth" (soul/mind/psyche etc within it) which is more crucial than its surface). Grosz's approach opens up some interesting ... Read More:

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Investigating Gender: Contemporary Perspectives in Education

Childrens Toy Shop > Books > Philosophy
by: Becky Francis, Christine Skelton

January 01, 2002
I enjoyed this book because of the unusual concept Grosz uses to structure it: the metaphor of the body as a Moebius strip, where the surface and interior cannot be seperated out but are intertwined and blend into each other. I like the way that she examines the body from the inside-out (eg looking at psychoanalytic theories of the body, where what's inside the body (eg. conscious mind, unconscious mind, "body image") is the focus / vantage point for analyzing the body) and then from the outside-in (looking at theorists like Foucault, reading the body in terms of its surfaces rather than assuming that the body has an "inner depth" (soul/mind/psyche etc within it) which is more crucial than its surface). Grosz's approach opens up some interesting ... Read More: