Queer Seductions

The relationship between psychoanalysis and queer theory has been a vexed if at times inspiring one. Certainly queer theory’s insistence on studying sexuality beyond the confines of identity has found resources in Freud, Lacan, and/or Klein even as concerns about the pathologizing impulses and racialized blind spots of the psychoanalytic clinic have never been put to rest. But it has been within queer theory that some of the most contentious debates have been staged, as scholars have wrestled with what the priority psychoanalysis gives to sexuality entails for attending to and understanding race and racism. The primal scene of this contestation is the “anti-social thesis,” which has garnered a reputation for pitting the intersectional demands of queer of color critique against a race-blind view of sexuality as ontological negativity. Avgi Saketopoulou’s Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, and Traumatophilia bears the imprint of this contestation and offers a tacit resolution by deploying Jean Laplanche’s metapsychology to build a theory of sexuality as “normative perversity” without ignoring race or analogizing it to sexuality (40). The tensions that emerge are as important as the queer pleasures the text offers in configuring “aesthetic experience” as the vehicle for coming into contact with sexuality’s ego-shattering force (14). This review essay looks first at Saketopoulou’s seductive inventiveness in crafting a traumatophilic approach to both clinical and cultural work before turning toward a broader consideration of the critical consequences and conundrums of the book’s polygamous queer commitment to a theory of sexuality differentiated from and yet attentive to race.

Duke Scholars

Author Robyn Wiegman Literature