Join SPSL for the next virtual seminar on Thursday, March 30th at 1pm. Speakers Francesca Miccoli (Universita degli Studi di Milano) and Ayda Niknami (UC San Diego) explore questions Beyond Monogamy. Join us here:  https://temple.zoom.us/j/95868533928

Please join The Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love for our February Virtual Seminar, Rethinking Love with speakers Pilar Lopez-Cantero (University of Tilburg) and Joel Ballivian (UW-Madison), and our chair and organizer, Eli Benjamin Isreal (Temple). 

We’ll meet next Thursday, 2/23 at 1pm EST on Zoom, here: https://temple.zoom.us/j/95868533928

Please join us for SPSL’s Virtual Seminar, Ways of Being in the Digital Age. Wednesday, January 25th at 1pm here: https://temple.zoom.us/j/95868533928

Join us to discuss Problems of Consent with Elinor Mason, Margot Witte, and Katrina Haaksma. Zoom link here: https://temple.zoom.us/j/95868533928

Join us for the inaugural session of SPSL’s Vritual Seminar, Thursday August 25 at 1pm EST. Zoom link here.

“In this talk–“Playful Sex: A Kantian Account”–I develop ideas from my Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Account regarding the many ways in which we can engage sexuality playfully. The talk starts from an analogy I draw in Sex, Love, and Gender between playing squash and having sex. I then introduce some basic, philosophical ideas of Kant’s that we can use to better understand how we develop, transform, and integrate into a dynamic sexual, erotic whole what Kant calls our “vital forces” and our “animality,” “humanity,” and “personality” through aesthetic-teleological, associative, and conceptual means. Rather than ending up with the alienating and strangely moralizing conception of sexuality typically attributed to Kant and the Kantians, the resulting account is very useful as we try to get into view how playfulness can be productively and constructively engaged as we strive to flourish sexually.”

Join us the final Thursday of (most) month(s). See the schedule below (links to follow).

Meeting the final Thursday of each month at 1pm EST.

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.