Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book primarily focuses in positive terms on the epistemological implications of an acknowledgement of bodily differences, on the effects the sexual specificity of the knower, the writer, the reader have on people understanding of knowledge and its various connections to authentification, validation, and valuation. It deals with the questions of space, spatiality and its accompanying 'arts'—architecture, urban planning, geography—and their relationship to subjectivity, corporeality, and thought. The book brings together a series of essays that explore and interrogate the domain of perverse desire, to investigate a range of sexualities, pleasures, bodies, and desires that do not commonly figure in validated representations of desire. It provides a specifically positioned disciplinary background in continental philosophy.