Uncommon sense : Jeremy Bentham, queer aesthetics, and the politics of taste / Carrie D. Shanafelt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shanafelt, Carrie D., 1979- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pleasure.

Great Britain.

Bentham, Jeremy, 1748-1832.

Bentham, Jeremy.

Pleasure--Political aspects.

Aesthetics--Political aspects.

Aesthetics.

Liberty.

Common sense.

Law and aesthetics.

Philosophers--Great Britain--Biography.

Philosophers.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

viii, 184 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2022.

Summary:

"In his extensive private manuscripts, Jeremy Bentham used same-sex male intimacy as a philosophical test-case for the full political and social enfranchisement of women, colonized and enslaved persons, and sexual nonconformists. Bentham argued that oppression in law, philosophy, religion, and literature were all based on aesthetic hierarchies that refused to acknowledge differences of taste in sensory pleasure, including sexual pleasure. In Uncommon Sense, Carrie Shanafelt reads Bentham's sexual nonconformity papers as an argument for the toleration of aesthetic difference as the foundation for egalitarian liberty. Shanafelt challenges the common image of Bentham as a dehumanizing calculator or an eccentric projector, instead showing Bentham at his most intimate, outraged by injustice and desperate for the end of discriminatory violence"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The trouble with Bentham

Aesthetics of pleasure, ethics of happiness

Against rights

Bentham's queer Christ

Politics and poetics of liberty.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Shanafelt, Carrie D., 1979- Uncommon sense

ISBN:

9780813946863

0813946867

9780813946870

0813946875

OCLC:

1249800528