Avgi Saketopoulou
We are very happy to start working with author and professor Avgi Saketopoulou on her forthcoming book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia by New York University Press. Professor Saketopoulou works with a wide array of issues such as trauma, anxiety, depression, and relationship difficulties, and has extensive experience with variant genders, in both children and adults, and queer sexualities. Her practice includes a racially and ethnically diverse range of individuals.
Professor Saketopoulou trained as a clinical psychologist in New York after having moved to the United States from Greece and Cyprus. She subsequently completed training as a psychoanalyst at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.
As part of her academic work, she teaches at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is also on the faculties of several other psychoanalytic institutes such as the William Alanson White Institute, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the Stephen Mitchell Relational Center, and the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, where she offers intersectionally-informed courses on psychosexuality and gender.
Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia
Radical alternatives to consent and trauma
Contemporary discourse on sex and sexuality is fixated on consent as a means of mitigating danger and avoiding forms of sexual trauma. Sexuality Beyond Consent dares us to step into a different territory, where we do not guard the self but risk experience.
Professor Avgi Saketopoulou maintains that we are overly focused on healing trauma and need to reroute our attention to what subjects do with their trauma, in the process taking up a series of provocative questions: Why is sexuality beyond consent worth risking, and how does risk become a way of soliciting the future? Why might surrendering to the fact that your pain is not going away enable you to do things with pain? In what ways are race and racism shot through with the erotic? How can something proximal to violation become a site of flourishing? Central to the transformational possibilities of trauma is a queer form of consent, limit consent, that is not about maintaining control but risks sexuality beyond consent. Moving between clinical and cultural case studies, Professor Saketopoulou takes up theatrical and cinematic works such as Slave Play and The Night Porter, to show us how the force of the erotic surges through the aesthetic domain.
Grounding its arguments in the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche in conversation with queer of color critique, performance studies, and philosophy, Sexuality Beyond Consent proposes that enduring the rousing of the strange in ourselves, not in order to master trauma but to rub up against it, may open us up to encounters with opacity and unique forms of care.
Stay tuned for updates!
