Over the past two years, “sex” has become a legal term with a very precise definition. A federal executive order now defines a female as a person “belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” and states like Texas and Tennessee have written similar definitions into their own laws. Meanwhile, the biologists who study sex most closely keep reporting that bodies do not sort so neatly. Philosophy has been having its own version of this argument for decades, between those who hold that sexual difference is real and irreducible and those who hold that it is produced by the very norms that name it.

This week, we’re joined by Matt Lovett, Associate Professor in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh and a candidate analyst with the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis. His new book, Deleuze, Lacan, and the Becoming of Sexuation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Sexual Difference (Routledge, 2027) brings together Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, two thinkers widely considered to be incommensurable, in order to reconcile two positions also often considered to be incommensurable: sexual difference theory and gender theory.

If sexual difference is real, does that lock any of us into what we were assigned at birth? What would it mean to say that we become sexed, and keep becoming sexed, over the course of a whole life? Can an account of sex take bodies seriously without telling anyone who they are allowed to be? And what does a psychoanalyst hear in the consulting room that a philosopher reading Lacan might miss?

Grab a drink and join us as we ask whether sexual difference is something we are born with or something we never stop becoming.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/lesserevil
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We recorded this episode of Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on the eve of the midterm elections, so the ballot is never far from the conversation and these questions reach well past any single election. However, we did not know how dramatic November 2, 2026 would turn out to be.

Well done, American voters!

Every election season brings the same advice: hold your nose and choose the lesser of two evils. We reach for it to explain why we stay on platforms we can’t stand, and why decent people sign on to serve leaders they fear. Over time, settling for the less bad option started to look like moral maturity.

If you pick the less bad of two bad options, have you done something good? Is there a real line between the very bad and the evil, and can evil come in smaller and larger portions? When the best available choice still causes harm, what do we owe the people who pay for it? And does the habit of settling for the lesser evil keep us from ever getting better options?

Grab a drink and join us as we try to figure out whether the lesser evil is still an evil, and what to do with the regret either way.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/lesserevil
---------------------

SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)
BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.

Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!

In July 2024, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. United States that a president cannot be prosecuted for official acts, and it drew the boundaries of “official” wide enough that the federal cases against Donald Trump were simply dropped after the election. Two years later, federal agents are seizing a sitting congresswoman’s phone, and the administration the ruling protected is the one conducting the investigation. Meanwhile, close to two million people sleep in American jails and prisons on any given night, and exactly one Wall Street executive went to prison for the financial crisis that cost millions of families their homes. “Equal Justice Under Law” is carved above the Supreme Court’s front door. It has never described what happens inside.

What if the problem runs deeper than a few bad rulings or timid prosecutors? If treating everyone the same in a country this unequal is one of the ways the powerful slip free, what should we want instead? Can we ask for harsher punishment of elites without feeding the machinery that built mass incarceration? And who gets to decide which crimes count as attacks on democracy itself, when the people doing the deciding are elites too?

Our guest is Jacob Abolafia, Leigh’s colleague in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University. Jacob studies the history of political thought from ancient Athens to the present and is the author of The Prison before the Panopticon: Incarceration in Ancient and Modern Political Philosophy (Harvard UP, 2024). We dig into his Yale Law Journal Forum essay on Trump v. United States, which argues that democracies once understood that the powerful need watching, and that a democratic criminal law would go easier on ordinary people and harder on the few whose crimes threaten self-government.

Grab a drink and join us as we ask who gets to stand above the law, and what it would take to haul them back down.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/elite-impunity
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SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)
BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.

Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!