The Pleasure Project Launch Party

Join us on December 15th at 9PM for the launch party of The Pleasure Project, one of the emerging projects funded by the QTRL this year!

Register at uoft.me/pleasure-project-launch

More about The Pleasure Project:
The Pleasure Project is organized around a key set of questions: How do LGBTIQ2S+ and QTBIPOC understood pleasure in the afterlives of settler colonialism, slavery, and apartheid? How is pleasure used to resist and critique but also to create social worlds that evade surveillance in the face of LGBTIQ2S+ and QTBIPOC structural violence? What is at stake when an analytic of pleasure interrogates complexities of racialized sexual subjectivities? What significance does pleasure hold for expanded understandings of freedom and politics? The Pleasure Project explores the ways in which scholars, artists, and sex workers, for instance, utilize pleasure as method and praxis, re-directing us to the messiness of the body and the sensorial regimes. We are interested in examining how an analytic of pleasure can expand and disrupt the boundaries of queerness and queer theory by moving us beyond binary frameworks. In this project, we will not only examine pleasure as a politic, a method, a praxis, or a component of ‘self-care,’ we will explore the embodied, somatic, messy and fleshy sexual practices that people engage in to access pleasure. We are interested in the relationships between pleasure and the materiality of the body and our lived experiences. The Pleasure Project argues that pleasure, erotics, sex, and joy must be central to any form of social justice work as we collectively imagine new social worlds as an urgent political project.