Brings together wide-ranging, interdisciplinary analyses of Luce Irigaray's rethinking of space with respect to sexual difference and the visual arts.

A rethinking of space is central to Luce Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference. Topologies of Sexual Difference is the first edited collection to focus on this task through a sustained consideration of both Irigaray's critique of the Western tradition's systematic conflation of femininity and space and her transvaluative topological redeployment of space in theorizing sexual difference. Across thirteen chapters, Irigarayan space is thematized as porous, fluid, continuous, and self-differentiating. Contributors engage with the origins of life, affect, the aesthetics of the maternal and placental, an Irigarayan morphology inclusive of trans embodiment, and—in a rare focus—the expression of sexuate specificity in creative practice. Topologies of Sexual Difference thus demonstrates the fundamental importance of Irigaray's rethinking of space for Western philosophy and the visual arts.

"Topologies of Sexual Difference is certain to make a major contribution to scholarship on Irigaray and continental feminist theory more generally. The essays helpfully elucidate Irigaray's most important spatial concepts—interval, threshold, sensible transcendental, between-us, chôra. Drawing from the full range of Irigaray's works, the volume demonstrates the immense significance of her spatial thinking not only to all branches of philosophy (ontology, epistemology, and ethics) but also to politics, the physical and life sciences, and art. After this volume, no reader could be left wondering about Irigaray's relevance as a thinker of space." — Yvette Russell, Professor of Law and Feminist Theory, University of Bristol

Louise Burchill is an independent scholar and a former Honorary Fellow at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. Rebecca Hill is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. She is the author of The Interval: Relation and Becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle, and Bergson and coeditor, with Ryan S. Gustafsson and Helen Ngo, of Philosophies of Difference: Nature, Racism and Sexuate Difference. James Sares is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky. He is coeditor, with Mary C. Rawlinson, of What Is Sexual Difference? Thinking with Irigaray.