Emanuela Bianchi

  • New York University
  • Department of Comparative Literature
  • Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

Emanuela Bianchi is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, with affiliations in the Department of Classics and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

She is the author of The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos (Fordham University Press, 2014), which explores how Aristotle’s ideas about sex and gender in his biological writings permeate his physics, metaphysics, and cosmology, and argues that the traditional understanding of the female as allied with passive matter should be supplanted by an understanding of the feminine as what disrupts the teleological system. The analysis connects with recent biological and materialist political thinking, and makes the case for a new, antiessentialist politics of aleatory feminism. She has published numerous articles on sex and gender in ancient metaphysics, and her interests encompass a genealogical approach to matter and bodies, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, queer theory and feminism. Her current work engages the thought of Reiner Schürmann to help think through the complex inceptions and destructions of patriarchal kinship, and its relationship to the natural, in classical Greek literature and philosophy.