The Society of the Philosophy of Sex and Love is delighted to announce a call for abstracts for its session—“Love and Sex in Times of Rupture”—at the 2023 APA Pacific Division Meeting in San Francisco, CA (April 5-8, 2023).

In “Love as Political Resistance” from Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, adrienne marie brown (2019) simultaneously engages with love, pleasure, and rupture in an account of radical transformation and care.

Audre Lorde taught us that caring for ourselves is “not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”  And although we know how to meme and tweet those words, living into them is harder.  We have a deeper socialization to overcome, one that tells us that most of us don’t matter—our health, our votes, our work, our safety, our families, our lives don’t matter—not as much as those of white men.  We need to learn how to practice love such that care—for ourselves and others—is understood as political resistance and cultivating resilience.  (brown 2019, 59)

We invite abstracts for papers that take up brown’s call to practices of love, sex, pleasure, and care amidst and as rupture.  We are open to different orientations to the concept of “rupture.”  We are especially interested in non-majoritarian and intersectional engagements with the theme.  How do you, or how ought we live into practices of love, care, and pleasure in this time of COVID, war, disenfranchisement, and the spread of authoritarianism and totalitarianism?  What might living into these practices make possible under these conditions?

We invite abstracts of 300-500 words due by 11:59PM ET on August 10th. Please send abstracts to jordan.pascoe@manhattan.edu

We will alert those who have been accepted by late August/September 1st.