Sex Salon: On Spaces Beneath and Within: A Talk About Erotic Scholarship/Artistic Practices

You are invited to The Sex Salon’s upcoming virtual event!

“On Spaces Beneath and Within: A Talk About Erotic Scholarship/Artistic Practices” is a scholar-artist talk drawn from aspects of Helen Abbot’s dissertation on Anaïs Nin’s intermedia novel Cities of the Interior in relation to Abbot’s art practice as an emergent scholar-artist. Cities of the Interior revolves around three women and their respective processes of sexual becomings. I argue that a significant aspect of each woman’s narrative concerns their relationships with (sonic) porntopic tenors and spaces, and the way they often harness sonic fabrics to strategically initiate tactics of dislocation (Migone 2012), or, unmoorings. A porntopia is a term coined by Stephen Marcus that describes “the utopian fantasy implicit in pornography” (Hunt 1993: 39), in which reality is reduced to bodies in movement outside of a symbolic order and politics of difference. Abbot will introduce her recent erotic artworks, specifically in relation to (implicitly and explicitly) themes of sonic porntopia, unmooring, acoustemology and labial politics.

Helen Abbot is a sonic intimacies scholar, multidisciplinary artist and musician, fifth-year doctoral candidate at Western University’s Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism and part-time professor at the University of Ottawa where she teaches a wide range of classes in the School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies and the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies. Abbot’s doctoral thesis is an exploration of the philosophical implications of writer Anaïs Nin’s self-proclaimed feminine musical writing style in her experimental novel (1959) Cities of the Interior. Abbot’s artistic practices include Fluxus event scores, poetry, creative non-fiction, illustrations and xerox art in addition to her musical practice as a free musics musician.

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The Sex Salon is a monthly speakers series organized and hosted by graduate students from the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, and meets on the last Wednesday of every month from 5:00 – 7:00 PM EST. Each month, Sex Salon invites scholars, both graduate students and faculty, to present new and in-process work and engage in discussion with guests and colleagues. Participants come from both the University of Toronto and the wider academic community across Canada and the US. Each month features two to four presentations around a central theme that relates to sexual diversity studies, followed by a Q&A based discussion lead by a member of the Sex Salon programming committee. The event is free to attend and typically held on the last Thursday of the month in University College. Calls for participants go out over the summer.