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Are the Lips a Grave?

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Lynne Huffer's ambitious inquiry redresses the rift between feminist and queer theory, traversing the space of a new, post-moral sexual ethics that includes pleasure, desire, connection, and betray...
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  • 15 October 2013
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Lynne Huffer's ambitious inquiry redresses the rift between feminist and queer theory, traversing the space of a new, post-moral sexual ethics that includes pleasure, desire, connection, and betrayal. She begins by balancing queer theorists' politics of sexual freedoms with a moralizing feminist politics that views sexuality as harm. Drawing on the best insights from both traditions, she builds an ethics centered on eros, following Michel Foucault's ethics as a practice of freedom and Luce Irigaray's lyrical articulation of an ethics of sexual difference.

Through this theoretical lens, Huffer examines everyday experiences of ethical connection and failure connected to sex, including queer sexual practices, sodomy laws, interracial love, pornography, and work-life balance. Her approach complicates sexual identities while challenging the epistemological foundations of subjectivity. She rethinks ethics "beyond good and evil" without underestimating, as some queer theorists have done, the persistence of what Foucault calls the "catastrophe" of morality. Elaborating a thinking-feeling ethics of the other, Huffer encourages contemporary intellectuals to reshape sexual morality from within, defining an ethical space that is both poetically suggestive and politically relevant, both conceptually daring and grounded in common sexual experience.

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Price: $130.00
Pages: 264
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Publication Date: 15 October 2013
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780231164160
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: LITERARY CRITICISM / LGBTQ+, PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Deconstruction, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory, PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Post-Structuralism, SOCIAL SCIENCE / LGBTQ+ Studies / Gay Studies, PHILOSOPHY / Ethics & Moral Philosophy
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This book is an important and timely intervention into current debates within queer and feminist theory on the respective limits of these scholarly fields. By recuperating a rich sense of 'ethics,' Lynne Huffer argues we must rethink the false boundaries between these two fields to arrive at a more robust understanding of the ethics of sexuality, sexual difference, and gender.
Lynne Huffer is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University and author of Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory; Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference; and Another Colette: The Question of Gendered Writing.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Claiming a Queer Feminism
1. Are the Lips a Grave?
2. There Is No Gomorrah: Narrative Ethics in Feminist and Queer Theory
3. Foucault's Fist
4. Queer Victory, Feminist Defeat? Sodomy and Rape in Lawrence v. Texas
5. One-Handed Reading
6. Queer Lesbian Silence: Colette Reads Proust
7. What If Hagar and Sarah Were Lovers?
8. After Sex
Afterword: Queer Lives in the Balance
Notes
Bibliography
Index