18 Nov Thinking sex and play | Open lecture by Susanna Paasonen
Coalition Margins and LGBTI Support Center enabled a public lecture by Susanna Paasonen: Thinking Sex and Play, within the School of Gender, Sexuality, Culture and Politics.
*** Abstract: “Who knows what sex could be if people were encouraged to enjoy it as play rather than
as a drama”, Lauren Berlant once asked. Taking on this question, this talk examines sexuality through the notion of play and argues for the importance of foregrounding the complexities of pleasure in critical inquiry. Play in the realm of sexuality involves experimentations with what bodies can feel and do: it is autotelic in not necessary involving any other pursuits or purposes than the pleasure of the activity itself. The pleasures that sex yields can be strained, dark and hurtful as we become, and become undone, in encounters with other bodies, moving in and out of zones of comfort. As the exploration of different possibilities, appetites and connections, sex allows for pushing previously imagined horizons of embodied potentiality in terms of sexual routines and identifications. Play sets things in motion and animates bodies, offering productive avenues for theorizing the contingency and urgency of sexual pleasures, desires, orientations and their congealment in categories of identity. ***
Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland. With an interest in studies of sexuality, networked media, and affect, she is the PI of the Academy of Finland research project, Sexuality and Play in Media Culture and the Strategic Research Council consortium, Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture. She is most recently the author of Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media (MITP, 2021), Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (MITP 2020, with Jenny Sundén), Objectification: On the Difference Between Sex and Sexism (Routledge 2020, with Feona Attwood, Alan McKee, John Mercer and Clarissa Smith), NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (MITP 2019, with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light) and Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (Goldsmiths Press 2018).
The School on Gender, Sexualities, Culture and Politics is part of the “Project for LGBTI inclusion – The Digital Edition,” financially supported by ILGA-Europe.