This talk features two new books on sex, sexuality, race and embodiment from Fordham University Press: Christopher Breu’s In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire (Fall 2024) and Kirin Wachter-Grene‘s Black Kenosis: The Erotic Undoing of African American Literature (Fall 2025). Breu, Professor of English at Illinois State University, theorizes sex as both a nonbinary form of embodiment (one that can complement recent trans conceptions of gender as multiple and nonbinary) and as a crucial form of social desire. It also theorizes the relationship between sex and the concept of flesh as it has been articulated within contemporary Black studies. Wachter Grene, Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, considers the contradiction of Black kenosis—an act of self-emptying and self-determined sexual submission—in transgressive African American literature of the post-Civil Rights era. Hosting the event and serving as interlocutors will be Ann Pelligrini, psychoanalyst, queer theorist, and Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, and Avgi Saketopoulou, a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC and a member of the faculty of NYU’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. In addition to many other titles, Pelligrini and Saketopoulou are authors of the award-winning Gender without Identity (Unconscious in Translation, 2023). Breu and Wachter-Grene will share brief overviews of their respective books before opening up into a four-way conversation with the moderators, which will engage and theorize questions of gender, race, sex, sexuality, kink, and embodiment. There will be time for questions and discussion with the audience. Books will be for sale and light refreshments will be served.

To reserve a copy of any of the books listed above, please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve book for November 6 event” in the subject line. And please let us know which title you’d like us to hold.

Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, room 210 of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:

youtube.com/@bgsqd

Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.

All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.

We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @BGSQD

Christopher Breu is Professor English at Illinois State University where he teaches classes in contemporary literature and culture, critical and cultural theory, and gender and sexuality. In addition to the featured book tonight, In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire (Fordham, 2024), he is the author of Hard-Boiled Masculinities (Minnesota, 2005), Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (Minnesota, 2014), coeditor of Noir Affect (Fordham, 2020). He is also the author of multiple articles theorizing intersex and his own history of medicalized embodiment.

Kirin Wachter-Grene

Ann Pelligrini is Professor of Performance Studies & Social and Cultural Analysis and Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. They are also a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. Their most recent book is Gender Without Identity (co-authored with Avgi Saketopoulou).

Avgi Saketopoulou  is a practicing psychoanalyst and a faculty member at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023) and co-author of Gender Without Identity (Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023). She is at work on a new book manuscript provisionally titled Sadisms.