Lexington Books
Pages: 234
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9
978-1-4985-0541-3 • Hardback • August 2015 • $121.00 • (£93.00)
978-1-4985-0543-7 • Paperback • July 2017 • $57.99 • (£45.00)
978-1-4985-0542-0 • eBook • August 2015 • $55.00 • (£40.00)
Shay Welch is assistant professor of philosophy at Spelman College.
Chapter One: Setting the “Stage”
Chapter Two: Existential Eroticism and Autonomy
Chapter Three: Forms of Restriction and Systemic Patriarchy
Chapter Four: Duress and Necessity under Existential Eroticism
Chapter Five: Trauma as Desperation
Chapter Six: Desperate Rationality
Chapter Seven: Self-Perpetuated Oppression: Individuated Acts, Complicity, and Moral Responsibility
Chapter Eight: Blaming and Forgiving Each Other
This is no small achievement. As I read the book, these insights are important because they apply more generally than just to the experience of marginal women. . . I think it achieves something. . . remarkable, which is to show that reflecting on invisible, marginal lives illuminates the experience of the privileged.
— American Philosophical Association
Throughout Existential Eroticism, Welch draws subtle distinctions and makes forceful arguments concerning staggeringly difficult issues. . . .[The book] is a resolute philosophical inquiry into the suffering she herself, her family members, and her friends endured (and that so many women like them continue to endure), and it is a sustained reclamation of their dignity as agents.— Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy
Existential Eroticism is a compelling and original contribution to feminist philosophy. It raises and attempts to resolve important issues about complicity under systemic conditions of disadvantage under patriarchy and grapples with the uncomfortable territory of intra-group blame and resentment, while providing a constructive way forward in intra-group forgiveness. Most of all, Welch successfully achieves her goal of providing a nuanced account in which women living in some of the most desperate scenarios of existential eroticism are not simply to be understood as victims or dupes, but in fact as agents, sometimes blameworthy sometimes not, sometimes fighters, and sometimes employing highly sophisticated forms of desperate rationality.— Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews