Touching Thought Ontology and Sexual Difference

The blindness to ontological questioning in feminist theory has left a lacuna in scholarly study that Touching Thought--a study at the intersection of ontological meditation and feminist theorizing on sexual difference--seeks to fill. Ellen Mortensen's new work critiques the language and theoretical pathways of contemporary feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Theresa de Lauretis, and Donna Haraway to reveal a problematic predilection for technological language at the expense of ontological inquiry. The volume ranges across feminist epistemology and ethics, the politics of performativity, the aesthetics of body/power, and the question of sexual difference and concludes with an examination of the different philosophical and theoretical attempts at undertaking an ontological questioning of sexual difference. This foundational work will serve as preparation for scholars of feminist and queer theory and continental philosophy seeking alternative pathways of feminist thought that encourage fundamental thinking on the subject of individual freedom.

Ellen Mortensen (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989) is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Bergen, Norway.