Event details

Full title: Event | ‘We Have Never Had Sex’ – Seminar Series (Fall 2024/Spring 2025)

When (dates, time): September 2024 – May 2025, details below

Where (city, university, venue, room):  University of Amsterdam, details below

Open to (please indicate): ReMa students, PhD candidates and Academic Staff

For registration and readings: catrinelradoi@gmail.com
Credits: 1, 2 or 6 ECTS

Organized by members of the ASCA Research Group Sex Negativity

Collective debates on sex among feminists in the late 1960s and 1970s elicited two polarizing views: sex positivists and those deemed “anti-sex”. This dyad unleashed a prolific energy of discussion, argument, and analysis — driven as it was by the hope that either bookend would one day complete the daunting task of articulating the essence of “woman” in its unabating subordination to “man”, that is, of pinpointing the essence of woman on the terms of sexual difference. Yet, as Andrea Long Chu remarks à propos this history, “the stronger feminist theories of sex got, the less effective they became” (“The Impossibility of Feminism,” 63). Ushering in a third wave of feminist thinking, the focus of critical inquiry shifted with the emergence of queer theory in the North-American academic context in the 80s and early 90s. Rather than foregrounding sexual difference as the very grounds from which sprang a well-reasoned landscape of social identities, “queer” halted that considerable faith in identitarian intelligiblity. Historically analyzing the usage of the word by field-defining figures such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and David M. Halperin, theorist and linguist Mel Y. Chen concludes that “[queer theory] departs from dominant feminisms in the United States…in its refusal…to advocate or politically favor any particular category other than the (sexually) nonnormative” (Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, 69). However, if sedimentation best describes the social temporality in which bodies materialize, antinormativity is itself regulated and constrained by that which it denounces. In line with Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson’s “invitation to think queer theory without assuming a position of antinormativity from the outset” (in the introduction to the special issue of differences, Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions) we ask, How to approach normativity on something other than dyadic terms?

We Have Never Had Sex is an attempt to think a more contradictory site than the norm/anti-norm topology still present in queer theory today. Asserting that sex is (the) non-relation, Jacques Lacan’s “There is no sexual relation” is an essential precursor. Importantly, Lacan’s statement in the negative never aimed to ontologize this constitutive non-relation that sex is into intelligible (non)relationships. However, this didn’t prevent it from being canalized in precisely that way: from “relationships are impossible” to “true love doesn’t exist”. Such truisms vis-à-vis relationality misconstrue sex’s confrontation with (the) non-relation as “the cause of the oddities and difficulties within all concrete relationships” (Zupančič, What is Sex?, 23). To falsely decode the non-relation as an obstacle is to think it can be overcome. But for Lacan it wasn’t an obstacle to but the (il)logical condition of relational possibility. So sex names a structural antagonism without the optimism of ontological completeness: “We have never had sex,” declares philosopher Oxana Timofeeva.

Prone to installing a logic that exploits difference for the sake of unimaginative sameness, negativity cannot be rendered politically coherent. Negativity is relentless, unnatural, contrived. However, the We Have Never Had Sex seminar series does not seek to reduce sex to — nor celebrate sex as — negativity as if it were a bad thing, or, “antisocial”. Sex will have meant work, work in and on the social to which we stay committed and with which we enjoy, too. Heeding the circumlocutionary mode that speaking of sex demands, this seminar series will think sex in its ontological relevance (Lacan, Butler, Zupančič); its relation to negativity and nonsovereignty (Berlant & Edelman 2014, Bersani 2018, Chu 2019); the relatedness of transness and Blackness (Bey 2017); its figuration in cultural objects (Troyan 2014, 2020; Elagoz 2021). An experiment in forms of speculation, the seminar gathers poets, philosophers, artists, performers, and scholars to grapple with questions of foundation, logic and limit, asking how sex is a site of or an encounter with negativity that troubles totality, a “relentless force that unsettles the fantasy of sovereignty” (Berlant & Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable, viii).

Provisional Schedule

Spring 2025

Sex Negativity presents Sessions 4 and 5 of the We Have Never Had Sex seminar:

Session 4, An Introduction To Hermaphrodite Logic    

Lecture by Dr Juliana Gleeson    

Date and time: February 6th, 15-18h | Location: OMHP C 2.17    

In most European and North American nations, by the mid-20th century visibly intersex children were routinely subjected to nonconsensual surgeries, hormonal injections, and invasive examinations including medical photography featuring ‘forced stripping’. These procedures were hidden from intersex people themselves, and intended to hide their physiques from those around them. By convention (not by birth), sex as a twofold split could accept no exceptions. How did this become controversial?

The intersex movement began at the latest possible moment in the 20th century counterculture: emerging through private channels (especially emails) between 1990-1994, building as a clandestine community through the mid-1990s, then finally erupting as a political force in 1996. This historical moment was both rich in renewed prospects for international community building (through then-nascent internet channels and other breakthroughs in cheap publication technologies), while barren for truly internationalist policial prospects. True to this moment, the intersex movement was profoundly edgy, while enjoying much more constrained horizons than earlier movements had enjoyed around depathologisation (especially 70s GayLib). The result was what Hermaphrodite Logic terms the aesthetics of “90s edgy”—quick to demonstrate a fluency in previously authoritative clinical language, while favouring a certain dispassionate coldness over more obvious appeals to public displays of pathos, or appeals to popular sympathy.

This lecture will examine two artifacts from the intersex liberation movement’s unlikely birth during the 1990s—the ‘mutilated Rudolph’ that appeared in the first issue of Hermaphrodites With Attitude magazine (Winter 1994), and the The Murk Manual: How to Understand Medical Writing on Intersex (published in the Chysalis special issue on Intersex in 1997). These two glimpses of intersex satire (from before and after the movement’s first public appearance, in 1996) will provide an entry point to the argument made throughout Juliana’s debut book Hermaphrodite Logic. The book’s history of the intersex movement advances a fully responsive philosophy of sex (which Juliana argues the movement reveals to be labile and expressive, while those outside its dyadic strictures are left hidden away, by circumstance of birth and conditioning of upbringing). These two movement artifacts provide a glimpse of each moment.

Session 5, From “Unnamed Blanks” To Self-Consciousness — From Critical Intersex Studies to a new Movement History    

Date and time: February 7th, 11-13h | Location: OMHP C 1.17  

Following directly from the introductory lecture, this seminar is focused around the intersex movement’s rhetoric: the techniques used to challenge clinical (sexological) authority, in both satirical and theoretical registers. Satire was deployed primarily as a tool to establish intersex self-consciousness: allowing intersex people to come to terms with the (traumatic) ways in which they’d been apprehended by clinical observers. (I call these the terms used to know over them.) Theoretically, intersex writers have attempted to disrupt conventional outlooks on sex (revealing themselves after decades being hidden away, as the underbelly of sex’s fabricated bifurcation), while pulling useful frameworks from existing radical traditions. These registers—political and intellectual, satirical and theoretical, trolling and analytic—have seldom been read together (until now!)

The first part of this seminar will preview and discuss two extracts from Juliana’s forthcoming book Hermaphrodite Logic. The book aims to provide a history of the intersex movement, furthering a fully responsive philosophy of sex (which Juliana argues the movement reveals to be labile and expressive, while those outside its dyadic strictures are left hidden away and thus left needing to reveal or unveil themselves). The two extracts are intended to give glimpses of each of these twin faces (historical and philosophical, political and intellectual). The key point is that intersex people are known over through frameworks applied to them: but have proven able to master a fluency in these clinical ‘terms of art’ more quickly than clinicians can keep track of. (Far from the last word, the outlooks of medics came to serve as a movement punchline.)

The first extract recounts the first public appearance of the Intersex Society of North America (represented by just two members: Max Beck and Morgan Holmes), who together with allies picketed the American Academy of Pediatrician’s annual event, in Boston. The second extract provides an overview of two intersex theorists who provide quite divergent accounts of sex: Christopher Breu and Iain Morland, despite closely shared personal experiences with intersex variations (and the mis/treatments routinely meted out to those born with them). As well as a political challenge to clinical authority, the intersex movement elaborated on fully elaborated theoretical challenges to conventional understandings of sex. This means a fully fledged history of intersex liberation must also be an intellectual history.

The closing hour of the session will open the floor to existing intersex scholarship, discussing specifically David Rubin’s essay on John Money: “An Unnamed Blank that Craved a Name”: A Genealogy of Intersex as Gender. Here Rubin outlines the limitations of “gender” as a means of understanding intersex (as opposed to intersex mis/treatments as the origin of gender—as sexologists faced down the limitations of their efforts to comprehensively “map” sex between two developmental buckets, M/F). Gender is the cart, and intersex the horse.

Throughout, Hermaphrodite Logic is methodologically critical of scholarship which reduces our scope to “critical histories of sexology” (rather than fully integrating the intersex movement which most challenged clinical authority around sex). Concepts are always rewritten by struggle (both for future generations, and retroactively). Nevertheless, the work of Rubin and many other historians of sex(ology) provides a “condition of possibility” for the argument made throughout Hermaphrodite Logic. A critical history of sex is the ladder which a dedicated view of intersex struggle must kick away beneath it, as we climb. Between us, this animating contradiction will be fully teased out as we close.

Juliana Gleeson is a writer. Raised in west London—based in east Berlin—she’s known for exploring lesbianism, comparative religion, leather culture, and communism. Her debut Hermaphrodite Logic is out with Verso Books in June 2025—providing a new history of the intersex movement (just in time for Pride). She was an editor of groundbreaking anthology Transgender Marxism (2021), with Elle O’Rouke. Juliana’s many essays, reviews and dialogues have been published in both high and low presses. Since 2017 she’s performed with queer comedy troupes, hosted salons for subversives, and lectured for pay worldwide.

(No pdfs of readings will be circulated in advance but print outs will be distributed at the lecture on February 6.)

For registration: catrinelradoi@gmail.com
Credits: 1, 2 or 6 ECTS

Organized by the ASCA Research Group Sex Negativity

Fall 2024

Session 1, Capital Owes You Nothing. On Lacan, Pascal, and Pure Love

Masterclass by Dr. Dominiek Hoens, Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound

Date and time: September 18th, 15-18h

Location: Doelenzaal, Universiteitsbibliotheek

Readings: email catrinelradoi@gmail.com for readings

In this talk an analysis of Jacques Lacan’s game-theoretical reading of Pascal’s wager is presented, and the novelty of his approach to this well-known pensée highlighted. To situate the latter, the reception of Pascal’s work in fifties and sixties France is outlined, with particular attention to Lucien Goldmann’s Marxian reading of Pascal presented in The Hidden God (1955) and Eric Rohmer’s film My Night at Maud’s (1969). In both the book and the film, to choose and to act play a crucial role, but the latter remains closer to Pascal’s emphasis on a ‘renunciation of pleasure’ involved in preferring one option over the other. Lacan’s analysis helps us here to detail this renunciation – one loses ‘nothing’ yet one clings to it as if it were ‘something’ – and to understand that pleasure is not only something one has or experiences, but something one virtually is and which can be put at stake to provoke the Other’s desire (c.q. divine grace). In a second part, the Pascalian wager will be brought into a dialogue with another, contemporaneous theological discussion, known as the ‘doctrine of pure love’ developed by François Fénelon. The latter is considered as making the one additional step, Pascal recoils from taking, namely that divine grace is not only a matter of being saved by God, but an active affirming of the divine will even if it wills our own demise. This ‘logical’ moment, hidden in Pascal’s argument yet underlined by Fénelon, allows for an understanding of the present moment, that is how neoliberal subjectivity is characterized by a love for Capital, although it treats and positions the subject as superfluous waste.

Dominiek Hoens, PhD (Ghent  University), teaches philosophy at the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound (RITCS, Brussels), where he also does research under the heading of “Capital owes you nothing”. Recent publications include an edited collection on Marguerite Duras  (www.lineofbeauty.org),  a chapter on Jacques Lacan in Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory (2020), and several articles on Blaise Pascal.

Session 2, The State of Union: Sex and Recognition in Robert Glück and Obergefell    

Masterclass by Dr. Wendy Lotterman, University of Oslo

Date and time: November 1st, 12-15h    

Location: OMHP room C 1.17    

Readings: None    

This paper examines the determinate negation of the liberal individual as the de facto subject of queer life writing in the work of Robert Glück. About Ed, his erotic memoir once-removed, melancholically fuses its subjects and foregoes the convenience of individual sexuality that bolstered gay and lesbian discourse after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This legislation explicitly disavows its capacity to recognize the group; social difference is forced to be expressed as identity, and collective struggle as personal injury. This discursive constraint was fortified – intentionally or incidentally – by the rise of queer memoir and autofiction in the late 20th century. Glück’s writing, which belongs to the New Narrative movement, dynamically refuses both the reproduction of a liberal subject, and the supersession of the subject tout court that obtained in late 20th century postmodern poetry and was part of his milieu. The indivisibly social subject of New Narrative is read against the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, which reiterates the priority of individual liberty at the precise moment that the state expands its recognition of legally valid intimacy. Using Hegel’s definition of the marriage contract – “a contract that transcends the standpoint of contract” by negating the requisite autonomy of its parties – I read this not only as an assimilation of difference into a rights-based framework, but as a reaction against the threat posed by intimacy to liberalism’s inviolable subject.

Wendy Lotterman's first book of poetry, A Reaction to Someone Coming In, was published by Futurepoem in 2023. They are an associate editor of Parapraxis, a magazine of psychoanalysis and politics, as well as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo. Their postdoctoral research project, titled “Lyric Privacy: Possessive-Individualism in US Case Law and Contemporary Poetry,” investigates the genealogical parallel between lyric and liberal subjectivity, arguing that the post-Romantic lyric subject is built upon the same presupposition of individuation that underwrites the Western citizen-subject.

Session 3, Freud's Papers on Technique    

Date and time: December 11th, 16 -18 hrs.
Location: PCHooft, room 3.08    
Readings: email catrinelradoi@gmail.com for readings

Reading Group for The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud's Papers on Technique (Book I ).

Spring 2025

Session 4, Carceral Capital

Masterclass by Dr Jackie Wang, University of Southern California

Date and time: February 21st, 2025, 12-15h

Location: TBA

Jackie Wang is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism (2018), a book on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the U.S. carceral state. Her forthcoming book manuscript, tentatively titled Vectors of Control, examines how, during the postwar period, calls to reform the U.S. criminal legal system catalyzed experimentation in the realm of criminal procedure and led to the development of new technologies of control. Rather than focusing exclusively on the role of the state in pursuing the policy path now known as ‘mass incarceration,’ her recent research looks at the role of reformers, nonprofits, the Cold War university, and financiers in shaping the development of the carceral state.

Session 5, …Or Worse

Date and time: March 21st, 2025, 12-15h

Location: TBA

Reading Group for The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: …or Worse (Book XX).

Session 6, to be announced

April-May 2025

Conditions for obtaining ECTS

• Students will be able to obtain 1 EC from NICA for doing the preparatory reading and actively participating in two of the six seminars. As an additional requirement, students must write a 100-word question based on the readings for the seminar for two of the six sessions (pass/fail)
• Students will be able to obtain 2 EC from NICA for doing the preparatory reading and actively participating in four of the six seminars. As an additional requirement, students must write a 100-word question based on the readings for the seminar for two of the six sessions (pass/fail)
• Students will be able to obtain 6 EC from NICA for attendance and submission of six 100-word questions pertaining to each seminar’s readings. Additionally, in order to obtain 6 EC, students must produce a 1500-word research paper that engages with the themes and readings of the seminars. The final paper deadline is May 31, 2025, and the paper should be emailed to Dr. Marija Cetinic (m.cetinic@uva.nl). (graded, 40% research questions/60% final paper)