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Review of Saketopoulou, A. (2023). Sexuality beyond consent: Risk, race, traumatophilia. In Sexuality Beyond Consent. New York University Press.
Sexuality Beyond Consent by Avgi Saketopoulou pushes us to work with the sexual as a probe instead of an affirmation that offers socially acceptable intelligibility. Saketopoulou carefully explores the nuances of perverse sexual practices today and the big questions of trauma and consent. By delving into traumatisms, affirmative and limit consent, sensible sadism, and exigent sadism, the author gives us ample theoretical and practical knowledge to imagine our sexuality as an experience that can produce authentic intimacies and transformation.
I read this book in a moment of continuous rupture, and there is no guarantee of generative re-translation. Beirut, the city where I lived all my life, relentlessly overwhelms and shatters with almost no intermission. The time and space from which I engage with this book is a real that always puts us in the face of the unknown, quite sadistically and nonconsensually. Belonging to a place and time that performs increasingly destructive practices on our psyches and bodies is a traumatic experience. To discuss sex in Beirut is, inevitably, to have a conversation about rape and sexual assault. Over the past five years, a number of sexual assault scandals have surfaced. Women used social media platforms to expose men who sexually assaulted them. This was always followed by an online spectacle of debating consent, justice, and punishment. With this context, I ask what it means to read Sexuality Beyond Consent today from where I stand. To me, it means that we must expand our understanding of sex and sexuality as more than a matter of feminism, gender, trauma, justice, and healing.
Sex and sexuality are heavily contested areas that compel almost everyone. A culmination of our anxieties about our histories and what they make us want to do with our bodies drives the work and thought of psychoanalys