Zeitgeisters

AMIA SRINIVASAN

Philosopher

Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls, Oxford. She is the youngest person, the first woman, and the first person of colour, to have ever held this prestigious position (Isiah Berlin was a previous incumbent).

In a recent Vogue profile, she characterised her approach to philosophy as embracing “discomfort, ambivalence, and truth-telling”. A philosopher, she believes, is someone who explores anxiety and “finds meditation on that form of anxiety itself therapeutic and takes comfort in that ambivalence”.

Where to Start

Her first book, The Right to Sex, was published in 2021 and is full of anxiety and ambivalence. It comprises five essays exploring consent, pornography, sex work, student-teacher relationships, and the history of feminism. An instant bestseller, it was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.

Some of this success can be linked to its ambition, as Srinivasan writes in her introduction: “These essays seek to remake the political critique of sex for the 21st Century: to take seriously the complex relationship of sex to race, class, disability, nationality, and caste; to think about what sex has become in the age of the internet; to ask what it means to invoke the power of the capitalist and carceral state to address the problems of sex.”