Pleasure Can Hurt: The Erotic Politics of Sexual Coercion

Abstract

Sexual coercion is an unstable practice, often performed nervously on the boundary between flirtation and violation, flattery and coercion. While it is true that sexuality may sometimes be lived on a liminal fourth dimension, where it is immunized from morality by the press of (mutual) desire, it is also true that desire can be commandeered by all manner of malignancies which coopt the erotic into a traumatic register. This essay takes sexual coercion on its face, and explores many of its grim varietals, while also seeking to deconstruct the alchemy of sexuality, awash in its painful pleasures.

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Notes on contributors

Virginia Goldner

Virginia Goldner, Ph.D., is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and is the Founding Editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. She is Faculty at the NYU Post-Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and has taught and supervised at the Stephen A. Mitchell Center for Relational Studies, the doctoral program in clinical psychology at CUNY, as well as in many venues nationally and internationally. Her theoretical publications have focused on the relational foundations of gender and sexuality, and in particular on relational violence. She is the co-editor of two volumes of papers addressing these topics, and is completing a book collecting her major papers.