Heidegger, Dasein, and Gender presents important, original arguments about Heidegger’s phenomenology, offering an impressive lineup of scholars and perspectives taking up pressing topics in contemporary life. Heidegger’s early claim that Dasein is neutral with respect to sex and gender, together with Dasein's transcendence of factual designations, opens pathways beyond reductive and binary conceptions of human identity. Highly recommended.
— Lawrence Hatab, Louis I. Jaffe Professor of Philosophy, Old Dominion University
A brilliant collection of groundbreaking studies on gender and Heidegger, featuring work by eleven current Heidegger scholars. This is a must have book for thinking through topics of gender, transness, queerness, motherhood, and race in Heidegger.
— John M. Rose, professor emeritus, Goucher College
In staging encounters between Heidegger and feminist philosophy, transgender studies, and queer theory, this excellent collection reveals new dimensions of Heidegger’s thought and offers new insights about gender. Critical interpretation and creative reappropriation of Heidegger unsettle binary and naturalizing thinking and generate rich meditations on pregnancy, motherhood, selfhood, and sociality.
— Jeffrey D. Gower, Wabash College
As the insightful essays of this book demonstrate, Dasein is not male or female at the core of its being. Always already thrown into a gendered world, we typically fall into binarity (along with the other oppressions reactively reinforcing their pretensions to be natural), but we can also undergo an existential death whereby we rediscover Dasein’s original polysexual potency and thereby disclose more authentic ways of embracing the ontological diversity of existence. Such transitions are existential rebirths that can embody and disseminate freer and more livable ways of being, helping lead us beyond the nihilistic metaphysics of late modernity.
— Iain Thomson, University of New Mexico, author of Heidegger on Ontotheology; Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity; Rethinking Death in and after Heidegger; and Heidegger on the Danger and Promise of Technology
Claxton and Glazebrook have orchestrated a timely interrogation of the unthought in Heidegger’s corpus with respect to gender, challenging the conception of Dasein as gender neutral. Drawing on the full range of Heidegger’s texts, original contributions by leading scholars make the phenomenological dimensions of gender, sexuality, transgender identities, the woman, maternal Dasein, and being-toward-birth visible in ways that illuminate new paths of questioning Dasein’s being-in-the-world.
— David Pettigrew, CSU Professor and chair, philosophy department, Southern Connecticut State University
Phenomenology's future is inextricably tied to its ability to engage with questions of sex, gender, sexuality and race, e.g. with issues of embodiment. For this reason, Claxton and Glazebrook have created a volume that is centrally important to the future of phenomenology. This is especially true of Chapter 4 and its engagement with transgender identities which brilliantly expands and deepens the ability of phenomenology to investigate this vital topic. We are lucky to have these timely and essential explorations.
— William Koch, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York