SEXUALITY BEYOND CONSENT: RISK, RACE, TRAUMATOPHILIA - AVGI SAKETOPOULOU

I read this one because a podcast I like is doing a series on it. The title itself is quite provocative and I’m, generally, interested in, if skeptical of, psychoanalytic stuff, so it seemed like this book would be a good quick read. The book is by a practicing psychoanalysis named Saketoploulou who works in NYC with diverse (tho it seems mostly queer) clients and has built up a number of theories and ideas based on actual experiences she’s had in therapy sessions. Her argument, at its most broad, concerns our current cultural concern (in mainstream, liberal spaces) over “informed consent” and the idea of boundaries and safety. Saketopoulou points out that this way of framing human sexuality isn’t in line with the way that real life works, and that the most transcendent and interesting experiences one can have in these realms are ones that overwhelm and touch something deep and, by definition, can’t be totally consented to since you don’t know what they will entail before they happen. The first two main examples in the book are pretty pedestrian, both involve gay men, in the first scenerio, a sort of bougie upper-class guy is in a sex club in another country and gets fucked hard by some smelly ugly guy, the second guy is at a piss-party where he only intended to be pissing on people but someone else pisses in his mouth without his consent. In both cases something that wasn’t necessarily agreed to ends up being really amazing and boundary pushing, in both cases these men have their world’s rocked and reevaluate what it is they want and think they can get out of sex. This line of thinking seems to grow out of the Bataille’s notion of “sovereign experience” and Foucault’s idea of a “limit experiment” both of whom she draws from directly. Basically, you agree to push past the point you can really agree to, into an actual unknown. The last half of the book is a little more gnarly. It concerns race-play in sex as well as a literal play called “Race Play” that ran in New York a few years ago and with which Saketopoulou became obsessed. She saw the play dozens of times, went to discussion groups about the play, read everything about it and generally spent tons of time thinking and considering it. The play itself, which I haven’t seen nor had I heard of before reading this book, is about a group of interracial couples that have moved to a real plantation in the south to get sex-therapy that involves acting out slavery-based sex scenes. Obviously, this would tap into a trauma, which Saketopulou thinks allows the sex to access something deep and fundamental in a person. This is a interesting line of thinking, I would personally not do this, I can’t imagine any desire to cross the wires of sexual desire and (in my case as a YT man descended from Confederates) profound historical shame, and I wonder if Saketopoulou, as a non-American (Greek Immigrant) YT, really gets the impact of slavery on those of us with that in our history. Her theories about trauma, how it imparts an enigma within us that can only be understood through a “translation” which will, by definition, be incomplete  and these engagements with the trauma, through things like sexual play allow us to retranslate and monkey around with this trauma. Not to solve it, the enigma of trauma can’t really be solved, but to translate it in different ways. I think that’s pretty fascinating, especially given how popular the idea of “trauma” has become. Once, not 10 years ago, this word was reserved for combat veterans and the victims of the most horrible sorts of sexual assaults. I think this expansion is, overall, good and useful but it does mean we all have to think about ways to deal with, transform and move past our traumas, wallowing is not great. I’m skeptical and think it’s sort of theory-brained to think that one can undo the trauma of slavery with individual sex-play, that seems pretty neo-liberal and silly to me.