SEX in Review

With the 2024 Spring Meeting theme of SEX, Jess Joseph and I celebrated psychoanalysis as we have come to understand it—a theory of sexual subject formation that posits a subject shaped by a repressive social order and always just past the horizon of knowability. SEX was meant to disentangle the notion of perversion from its historically violent role in regulating, pathologizing, and criminalizing desire. Moreover, we wanted not only to explore the potential of psychoanalysis to liberate gender, sexuality, and the body from repressive social inscription but also to diagnose the political formations that come to bear on our desires. The perversions are inescapably political—as described by Marcuse , they “establish libidinal relationships which society must ostracize because they threaten to reverse the process of civilization which turned the organism into an instrument of work” (p. 50).

We found this all very exciting. We received each abstract submission like a dazzling gift, agonized over choosing between them, and carefully crafted our final program. When it came time to write my opening remarks for the conference's first night, however, I found nothing to say. I persevered, trying to come up with something, anything, but my hands were empty. I embraced it, not knowing what to say, and wanted to invite it in for reflection. What I initially thought was writer's block revealed itself to be an inner resistance to saying more. It felt like an ethical stance, and finding something to say felt frivolous. What more did I have to say about genocide, about mass neglect alongside obscene accumulations of wealth, about the injustice and horrors of racial capitalism, or about the snuffing out of queer life?

I have often had quite a lot to say at Spring Meetings: “Do you want to join my reading group?” (I am afraid nobody will show up and never get around to it.) “What about this new text—have you considered it?” “Let me tell you about what I've read, my politics, and what I