The best books on sex, love, and gender

I fell in love with The Second Sex almost 30 years ago after an inspiring philosophy teacher introduced me to it. I learn something every time I read it, and of all the books I have students read, it is the one that most thank me for assigning.

It revolutionized philosophy by presenting a deeply compelling feminist theory that engaged with many questions in the philosophy of sex and love. It also helped me tremendously as I was finding my own way as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community. And though I now believe that The Second Sex is limited in some ways—it cannot, for instance, capture what it means to be trans or gay or even straight—it remains insightful and full of philosophical puzzles that I want to solve in my own work.

In her groundbreaking Gender Trouble, Judith Butler develops the idea that we today call gender fluidity. Butler knows queer life intimately, and Gender Trouble speaks to much of the difficulty queer people, myself included, face in the world. It is thus not only brilliant but also generous and caring.

Butler set the stage for a philosophical problem I address in my book, namely that her type of position cannot fully explain (philosophically) why some people identify as gay, straight, lesbian, or bisexual – just as they cannot explain why it’s existentially important for some trans people to transition.

The “Doctrine of Right” in The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant’s main philosophical writing on legal and political philosophy, offers a spectacular ideal theory of freedom. Despite serious heterosexism and sexism, it offers a systematic, ideal theory of freedom that I love working on to address its shortcomings to make it a stronger and better theory.

For example, I bring his theory into conversation with Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, and Anna J. Cooper to develop it in the ways that Kant encourages us to do, to arrive at a more complete theory of human freedom that is suitable for actual societies with their complex and complicated histories (non-ideal theory). Sex, Love, and Gender is my first book-length attempt to do this.

I am very much in (philosophical) love with Hannah Arendt, in whose texts I find a safe home to think about the modern world, alienation, breaking boundaries, and owning what you are all about.

One of my favorite Arendt books is The Human Condition. Like all her works, it is a tremendous theoretical resource for thinking about how to write about difficult topics and how to engage with the work of others generously, even if also (sometimes) critically. Her writing radiates a love for humanity despite the fact that, in so many regards, we are not a very likable species. Arendt is a fantastic role model with regard to tackling issues we care about head on but with humility so that you do your very best with them. I am grateful that she walked the planet before me.

I only recently discovered the work of Anna J. Cooper, but I find myself reading and thinking about and with her a lot. She’s not an obvious philosophical love for me in that she never writes about LGBTQIA life and does write about men and women from a relatively conservative, Christian, cis, and straight point of view. However, Cooper gives voice to and insight into the struggles of Black women, and her work helps me, as someone who is both racialized as white and an immigrant to the US, perceive and feel important dimensions of the reality in which I now live.

Thus, in her writings about the things she knows about, I find a friend and a colleague as I’m trying to think about intersectional issues that go beyond the life I know first-personally.