Sex, Love, and Gender

Helga Varden is a professor in philosophy and in gender and women studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has published on a range of classical philosophical issues-- including Kant's answer to the murderer at the door, private property, political obligations, and political legitimacy-as well as on applied issues such as terrorism, poverty, and non-human animals. With a particular interest in Kant's contributions both to the philosophical canon and to contemporary issues, Varden is one of the few Kant scholars to have brought Kant's ideas to bear also on core issues in feminist philosophy as well as in the philosophy of sex and love, including abortion and same-sex marriage.

• Preface Introduction Part I. Sex, Love, and Gender: Happiness & Virtue Introduction to Part I 1: Sexual and Affectionate Love: Happiness and Moral Responsibility 2: Kant and Women 3: Kant on Sex: Reconsidered 4: Sexual Violence & Oppression Concluding Part I: Reconciling Noumena and Embodied, Social Kantian Agents Part II. Sex, Love, and Gender: Right Introduction to Part II 5: The Innate Right to Freedom: Abortion, Sodomy, and Obscenity Laws 6: Private Right: Marriage & Trade in Sexual Services 7: Public Right: Systemic Justice Concluding Part II: Justice as Rightful, Human Freedom

Sex, Love, and Gender ... offers a non-apologetic analysis of Kant's sexist ideas that does not preclude a reconstruction of a Kantian vision of the human sexual and loving nature that is philosophically opened to the realities of polyamorous, polysexual, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, trans, and in general LGBTQIA+ people's lives ... it dismantles a narrative and dislocates mainstream readings of Kantian ethics and politics (apologetic and critical alike) with an outstanding exegetical work ... it also shows who an exclusionary comprehension of gender, sex, and love is plainly wrong even by traditional philosophical standards ... This is a book by someone who takes seriously that we, as embodied social beings, get harmed and do harm, that we are not more innocent than we are guilty ... It is a book that does not assume the innocent position, and neither does it assume a missionary one.