Questioning Sexuality: From Psychoanalysis to Gender Theory and Beyond

Western thinking on sexuality has historically affirmed not only a binary division between two sexes, each of which is defined by unique fixed attributes that delineate its essence, but also a privileging of the masculine over the feminine and heteronormative relations over alternatives. By engaging with psychoanalytic theory, phenomenology, feminist and gender theory, and the new materialisms, Gavin Rae shows how this model came under sustained and heterogeneous attack in the twentieth century. Rather than affirm one of these critical trajectories, Rae rethinks the problematic by turning to Walter Benjamin's notion of concepts as constellations to develop an alternative model called sexuality as constellation.

Gavin Rae is Associate Professor in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. His research interests lie in nineteenth and twentieth century European philosophy, where he works at the intersection of socio-political philosophy, ontology, and ethics. Besides over fifty published articles and book chapters, he is the author of six monographs, the most recent of which are Poststructuralist Agency (Edinburgh University Press, 2020); Critiquing Sovereign Violence (Edinburgh University Press, 2019); Evil in the Western Philosophical Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 2019); and the co-editor of six edited collections, the most recent of which are Transformation in Contemporary French Theory, edited with Emma Ingala and Cillian Ó Fathaigh (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming), Philosophy across Borders, with Cillian Ó Fathaigh (Routledge, forthcoming), and Subjective Agency and Poststructuralism, with Cillian Ó Fathaigh (Routledge, forthcoming). He is currently the Principal Investigator for a major four-year project funded by the Spanish Government titled "The Politics of Reason."