Borders of desire takes a novel approach to the study of borders: rather than seeing them only as obstacles to the fulfillment of human desires, this collection focuses on how borders can also be productive of desire. Based on long-term ethnographic engagement with sites along the eastern borders of Europe, particularly in the Baltics and the Balkans, the studies in this volume illuminate how gendered and sexualized desires are generated by the existence of borders and how they are imagined. As the chapters show, borders can create new desires expressed as aspirations, resentments, and actions including physical movements across borders for pleasure or work, or collective enactments of political ideals or resistance. The collection also shows how the persistent east/west symbolic border continues to act as a source of these desires in European political and social life. -- .

Although Hegel and feminism seem an unlikely couple, Hegelian philosophy played a prominent part in the thinking of groundbreaking feminist philosophers from Simone de Beauvoir to Luce Irigaray. This book offers a new generation of feminist readings of Hegel from leading scholars in the both fields. Through close readings and innovative arguments, this book makes a significant contribution to the debate on gender and provides insight into philosophical method.

This book gives a comprehensive overview of the ways in which the relation between German Idealism and feminist philosophy has been explored. It demonstrates the significance of German Idealism for feminist philosophy, and simultaneously brings out the relevance of feminist readings and interpretations for a critical understanding of German Idealism. Key Features: * Presents original work on the German Idealists and considers their legacy within feminist thought from different philosophical perspectives. * Incorporates perspectives from queer theory, new materialism and critical philosophy of race, and so explores German Idealism through the subversion and transformation of meanings and conceptual arrangements. * Challenges the epistemic boundaries of philosophy by engaging the thought of women contemporary with the German Idealists such as Bettina von Arnim and Karoline von Gunderrode. * Places the work of the German Idealists on gender, sexuality, marriage and family within the wider contexts of colonialism and European nation building. * Considers how several key concepts of German Idealism (such as subject, reason, enlightenment, autonomy and the sublime) have been central targets of feminist theory. * Includes a Black feminist critique of Kantian universalism. Fully reflecting the diversity that characterizes feminist thinking today, The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy is essential reading for scholars and graduate students of German idealism, feminist philosophy and feminist theory.

Although Hegel and feminism seem an unlikely couple, Hegelian philosophy played a prominent part in the thinking of groundbreaking feminist philosophers from Simone de Beauvoir to Luce Irigaray. This book offers a new generation of feminist readings of Hegel from leading scholars in the both fields. Through close readings and innovative arguments, this book makes a significant contribution to the debate on gender and provides insight into philosophical method.

'Democratization' is a concept often used in academic book titles, yet not many of them deal with the initial breakthrough of democratization. This research companion presents an alternative view to the widespread assumption that Western democracies should be the normative reference for the study of democratization elsewhere. Rather, it questions the universal validity of such an assumption by searching the history of European politics and by paying specific attention to the struggles of democratization accomplished outside Western Europe. The authors apply a comparative approach to analyzing debates in the primary sources in a number of countries and languages and situate the results into a broader European context. Focusing on European democratization from different historical and analytical perspectives, they discuss the politics, concepts and histories involved in democratization as a complex of changes that has altered the conditions of political action and debate in the continent for the past two centuries.