Beschreibung:
Since the fifth of Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, the encounter with the Other has been a central locus of phenomenological research. This centrality is nowhere as clear as in the phenomenological study of gender and sexuality. Just as the erasure of alterity is understood to render ethics impossible, so too is the erasure of sexual difference taken to render genuine erotic love impossible. Employing the recent work of Emmanuel Falque, this investigation aims to interrogate the way in which this rhetoric of sexual alterity has often served to maintain and reinforce a logic of homophobia and queer erasure. If every major phenomenologist of the past century has agreed with Emmanuel Falque, that there is a “heteros in eros, or an other in difference”, I will here ask the question: might there not also be a homos in eros?