Amia Srinivasan

Amia Srinivasan is a philosopher born in Bahrain to Indian parents, and since 2020 the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford. She works in epistemology, political philosophy and feminist theory, and writes regularly for the London Review of Books. Her essay collection The Right to Sex (2021) examines consent, pornography, desire, sex work and the politics of who is found attractive, asking how feminism can think about sex without either moralising or ignoring power. It drew wide public attention beyond academic philosophy.

Key ideas

• No one has a right to sex, yet who is desired is shaped by politics, including race, class and disability.
• Feminism should attend to women who are not served by solutions that rely on policing and prisons.
• Anger at injustice can be apt, a fitting response, even when expressing it is not prudent.
• In epistemology she questions the idea that we always have privileged access to our own minds.

Major works

• The Right to Sex (2021)
• Radical Externalism (2020)
• Are We Luminous? (2015)

In the Book corner

• The Right to Sex 2021 · Beginner
  A collection of six essays, subtitled Feminism in the Twenty-First Century; the title essay first appeared in the London Review of Books…

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