Join queer and feminist psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou on Wednesday, Feb. 8th at 7:00pm (ET) for the launch of her new book, SEXUALITY BEYOND CONSENT. Avgi Saketopoulou will be in conversation with professor Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson. The event will consist of a reading, discussion, Q&A, and signing, followed by a short reception with food and drink.

About SEXUALITY BEYOND CONSENT:

Arguing that we have become culturally obsessed with healing trauma, Sexuality Beyond Consent calls attention to what traumatized subjects do with their pain. The erotics of racism offers a paradigmatic example of how what is proximal to violation may become an unexpected site of flourishing. Central to the transformational possibilities of trauma is a queer form of consent, limit consent, that is not about guarding the self but about risking experience. Saketopoulou thereby shows why sexualities beyond consent may be worth risking-and how risk can solicit the future.

Moving between clinical and cultural case studies, Saketopoulou takes up theatrical and cinematic works such as Slave Play and The Night Porter, to chart how trauma and sexuality join forces to surge through the aesthetic domain. Putting the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche in conversation with queer of color critique, performance studies, and philosophy, Sexuality Beyond Consent proposes that enduring the strange in ourselves, not to master trauma but to rub up against it, can open us up to encounters with opacity. The book concludes by theorizing currents of sadism that, when pursued ethically, can animate unique forms of interpersonal and social care.

Copies of Sexuality Beyond Consent  will be available for purchase at the event.

You can also pre-order the book from our online store:

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, on the second floor (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

Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.

All are welcome to attend, with or without 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.

Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou (she/her) is an award-winning psychoanalyst living and working in NYC. She is a member of the faculty of NYU’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Her interview on relational psychoanalysis is part of the permanent collection of the Freud Museum in Vienna and in 2021, she co-chaired the first US-based conference dedicated to the work of Jean Laplanche.

Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson (he/him) is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University, author of “After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life” (2018), and co-editor of the “Sexual Cultures Series,” NYU Press.