Undergraduate studies in Philosophy and in Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin (B.A. 2020) including a stay at Université Paris IV – Sorbonne (2018-2019). Further studies in Intellectual History at University of Oxford (MSt. 2022) and in Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin (M.A. 2024). Recipient of scholarships by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (2017-2024) and the German Academic Exchange Service (2021-2022). Awarded with the GSA Prize for the Best Essay in German Studies by a Graduate Student 2023. Starting October 2024 doctoral research as a member of the DFG-funded research training group 2638 „Normativity, Critique, Change“.

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.

Research Interests:

• Feminist Philosophy and the History of Feminist Thought (especially Beauvoir and the so-called Second Wave)

• Sexual Ethics and the intellectual history of sexuality

• Social Philosophy from the 19th century until today

• Philosophy of History (especially Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin)

Lectures:

• „Beauvoir in the Strip Club: On Contradictions in the Construction of Womanhood“, presented at Deutscher Kongress für Philosophie 2024 on 25.09.24

• „War Beauvoir eine Gender Abolitionistin?“, presented at “Beauvoir as a Moral Philosopher - 29th International Conference of the Simone de Beauvoir Society” on 29.06.2024

Papers:

• “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).