The Right to Sex, which Dr. Amia Srinivasan published in 2021, is a set of feminist essays about the politics of sex and sexual justice. As a whole, the book attempts to resurrect a feminist tradition that saw sex as a phenomenon squarely within the bounds of political critique, while remaking that critique for the twenty-first century. The reception of the book by fellow feminists has prompted Srinivasan to reflect on a number of issues raised, but not resolved, by the book: What are the politics of respectful engagement, even partial rehabilitation, of feminists with whom one does not only disagree, but whom one thinks are part of a reactionary political programme? How do we negotiate the fraught intergenerational politics of contemporary feminism? What obligations do older and younger feminists have toward each other? And finally, how should we view the growing interest of analytic philosophers in feminism? What possibilities and dangers lie in this tendency?
Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford, UK. She completed her BPhil and DPhil in Philosophy at Oxford, and she works on topics in political philosophy, epistemology, the history and theory of feminism, and metaphilosophy. Her first book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-first Century, was published in 2021. It was an instant Sunday Timesbestseller, winner of the Blackwell’s Book of the Year, and has been shortlisted for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Orwell Prize. Srinivasan is currently finishing a second book, on the practice of critical genealogy, entitled The Contingent World: Genealogy, Epistemology, Politics. She is also thinking about the place of identity-based movements in the Left, the philosophy of history, and animals. Her academic work has been published in The Philosophical Review, Journal of Political Philosophy, Yale Law Journal, The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, among other places. She is a contributing editor of the London Review of Books. Her essays and criticism – on sex, animals, death, the university, technology, anger, politics and other topics – have also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, The New York Times, The Financial Times, New York Magazine and TANK.
.jpg)