TY - JOUR TI - A world of difference DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T34T6N9S PY - 2017 AB - This dissertation is an exploration of the co-imbrications of Being, life, and sex: of the sexuate dimensions of Being (or, perhaps better put: of living) and of the ontological (or, perhaps better put: vital) dimensions of sex. It asks: What is the relationship between Being and living? Does Being, or life, have (a) sex? What is the, often implicit, ontology of life and sex that prevails in feminist and queer theory and politics? And what questions and practices might another thinking of Being, life, and sex enable? Its goal is to outline a feminist and queer theory of sexuation as a mode of individuation and relation that moves beyond the ontology of the individual that dominates Euro-American philosophy (and therefore most feminist and queer theory): rather than taking the individual as a starting point and analyzing sexuality as a form of identity, subjectivity, or interaction between individuals, it thinks sexuation as a vital ontological process of individuation and relation at work at a number of “levels” from the physico-chemical to the ecological, technological, artistic, and political. Its central argument is that, as a mode of individuation, sexuation consists simultaneously of differentiation and relation and that this is a process given by Being, or life, “itself.” As such, it thinks Being, or life, as always already more-than-one. This theory of sexuation, then, is a theory of life’s Being, or becoming, that insists on sexual difference as an ineradicable and ontological force while also insisting on its open-endedness. We do not know what forms of sexuation life may bring, or what modes of life sexuation may bring, but the becomings of life and sex take place in and through one another. Understanding sexuation this way, it suggests, cuts across many ongoing debates in feminist, queer, and trans theory and highlights unexplored areas of transdisciplinary research and feminist inquiry. If there is no dimension of Being, or life, at which the isolated individual exists and if there is no dimension of Being, or life, at which sexuation is not at play, then there is no dimension that does not call for feminist and queer analysis. KW - Women's and Gender Studies KW - Feminist theory--Political aspects LA - eng ER -