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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