Does Anyone Have The Right to Philosophy?

The cover for The Right to Sex. Courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.

“We do not yet know, let us try and see” is a seemingly Socratic phrase that one might expect to find in a modern philosophical text. Yet, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Amia Srinivasan’s collection of philosophical essays examining sex as a political and ethical phenomenon, is built upon this very acknowledgement. The text refuses philosophy’s habitual comfort in disconnected universalism, instead proposing a mode of inquiry grounded in the messy particulars of life.

Srinivasan opens with a question: “What would it look like to end the political, social, sexual, economic, psychological and physical subordination of women?… What would it take for sex really to be free?” The question’s scope is monumental; her answer is not a conclusion, rather, an invitation for readers to think alongside her. The result is an ineffable philosophical project that does philosophy rather than merely writing about it.

Read the full article on The UChicago Philosophy Review