Studium der Philosophie und der Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft an der FU Berlin (B.A. 2020) mit Aufenthalt an der Université Paris IV – Sorbonne (2018-2019). Daran anschließend Masterabschlüsse in Intellectual History an der University of Oxford (MSt. 2022) und Philosophie an der FU Berlin (M.A. 2024). Von 2017 bis 2024 Stipendiat der Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes sowie 2021-2022 Empfänger des DAAD-Stipendiums für einen Masterabschluss im Ausland. Empfänger des GSA Prize for the Best Essay in German Studies by a Graduate Student 2023. Ab Oktober 2024 wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (Doktorand) in Philosophie am DFG-Graduiertenkolleg 2638 „Normativität, Kritik, Wandel“.

Sexual Freedom and Feminism: A Critique of Gendered Desire

In light of recent feminist challenges to liberal concepts of sexual freedom, this project proposes to treat the question what an emancipatory social critique of sexual desire could look like. I trace a genealogy of sexual freedom during the feminist debates about sexuality from the 1970s through to the 1990s that are often called the sex wars. Some feminist critics of liberalism have drawn on the antipornography side of these debates to make their case for a critique of desire. Diverging from them, I argue that the sex-radical side of the sex wars, too, was operating a critique of desire – one that is better suited to an emancipatory social project. As current sex positive feminism is, often correctly, reproached with having a liberal concept of sexual freedom, the second wave sex-radicals can show us a path not taken in the critique of desire. While the current feminist mainstream treatment of sexuality and gender as relatively independent from each other inhibits the pursuit of a critique of desire as a critique of gender oppression, antipornography feminists and sex-radicals alike suggested thinking about sexual desire and sexual freedom through a close social ontological connection between gender and sexuality. The formation of desire under patriarchal domination is a crucial part of gender acquisition and oppression. Sex-radical feminists drew important conclusions from this diagnosis: they developed prefigurative practices of decoupling desire from real-political power as a way to institute a critique of desire as a critique of gender. My project claims that this strategy of critique as a social practice that targets sexuality as part of gender and gender as part of sexuality can constitute an urgently necessary intervention into contemporary discussions of sexual freedom. Finally, I supplement this intervention with insights from contemporary trans* feminist philosophers on the connection between gender and sexuality.

Forschungsinteressen

• Feministische Philosophie und die Geschichte Feministischen Denkens (insbesondere Beauvoir und die sog. Zweite Welle)

• Sexualethik und die Ideengeschichte der Sexualität

• Sozialphilosophie vom 19. Jahrhundert in die Gegenwart

• Geschichtsphilosophie (insbesondere Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin)

Vorträge:

• „Beauvoir in the Strip Club: On Contradictions in the Construction of Womanhood“, präsentiert auf dem Deutschen Kongress für Philosophie 2024 am 25.09.24

• „War Beauvoir eine Gender Abolitionistin?“, präsentiert auf der Konferenz Beauvoir as a Moral Philosopher - 29th International Conference of the Simone de Beauvoir Society am 29.06.2024

Ausätze

• “The Reception of Homoeroticism in the Works of Karl May: A Case Study in the Intellectual History of Sexuality in Post-War Germany”, German Studies Review, (forthcoming).

• “Wenn der Preis der Revolution die Revolution ist” – Illegitime Gewalt in Heiner Müllers Mauser, in: Wolfram Ette u. Falk Strehlow (eds.): Klassengesellschaft reloaded und das Ende der Gattung. Fragen an Heiner Müller. Berlin: Verlag Theater der Zeit 2021.

• Kierkegaards Verführer – Amoralische Ästhetik und Ästhetik der Amoral, in: Allirand, Lise et al. (Hg.): Literatur und das Böse. Beiträge des 10. Studierendenkongress Komparatistik. Berlin: Ch. A. Bachmann Verlag 2021.

• Cato. Der Widerstand der Cato Bontjes van Beek. Bildungspaket für das Niedersächsische Landesinstitut für schulische Qualitätsentwicklung, 2018 (co-authored with Florian Buschermöhle, Hanne Kläne-Terfrüchte and Birgit Schoedel).