The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan
The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan
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The Right to Sex
Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

Author: Amia Srinivasan

Narrator: Andia Winslow

Unabridged: 6 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/21/2021


Synopsis

“Laser-cut writing and a stunning intellect. If only every writer made this much beautiful sense.”
—Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women

“Amia Srinivasan is an unparalleled and extraordinary writer—no one X-rays an argument, a desire, a contradiction, a defense mechanism quite like her. In stripping the new politics of sex and power down to its fundamental and sometimes clashing principles, The Right to Sex is a bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing: Srinivasan is daring, compassionate, and in relentless search of a new frame.”
—Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion

Thrilling, sharp, and deeply humane, philosopher Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century upends the way we discuss—or avoid discussing—the problems and politics of sex.

How should we think about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart.

How should we talk about sex? Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity—its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power—we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted.

We do not know the future of sex—but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope of a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships—between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation.

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century is a provocation and a promise, transforming many of our most urgent political debates and asking what it might mean to be free.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About Amia Srinivasan

Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford, where she works on and teaches political philosophy, feminist theory and epistemology. She is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books. Her essays and criticism—on animals, incels, death, the university, technology, political anger and other topics—have also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Nation and TANK.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Adam

THIS BOOK. It's a special kind of criticism, for me, that has one actively thinking alongside an essay, and sometimes outside it, about one's own experiences and observations. I don't know that I agree with every single assertion made throughout, but I do know that I hugely enjoyed Srinivasan's const......more

wow. i feel like my brain has physically expanded after reading this.......more


Awards

  • Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year
  • National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee
  • Orwell Prize Finalists
  • Orwell Prize Shortlist
  • Boston Globe Best Books of the Year