Dangerous Sex & The Empire of Trauma

Drunk Church

For our grand finale to this four part series on "Hatred of Sex" we investigate the ways that attempts to subsume sex into neat and tidy identiy categories inevitably tighten bureaucracies of risk. These administrative processes police sex at the margins, while simultaneously letting sexual abuse run rampant as long as it happens within appropriately normative forms. The hypocrisy of this fragrant abuse of power should come as no surprise! The fact that right wing pundits gleefully argue that the age of consent should be dramatically lowered and rape should be taken less seriously while at the same time inciting violence against trans and queer people by equating them to groomers for the mere fact of their existence is not a result in a lapse of logic. None of this is a mistake—it is fundamentally rooted in the logic of a hatred of sex.

Following Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, we lay Attachment Theory bare, exposing it as as a thinly veiled attempt to make the messiness of inner experience and sex administrable to produce the proper white middle class subject. Attachment Theory's commitment to producing docile bourgeois subjects has led into the entire field of traumatology which equates all conflict to abuse, thus reducing abuse as a category and further obscuring the very experiences it initially sought to render less opaque. "Hatred of Sex" rests on the bold claim that "there is no escaping sexual inappropriateness, even when sex is pleasurable and consensual, and thus no escaping our inclination to hate it". What matters then is what we do with sex from here—keep trying to hide the mess, or get filthy and shattered by its unbinding potential?

Show notes:

"Hatred of Sex" by Oliver Davis and Tim Dean

"Governmentality" by Tania Murray Li

"Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy" by Jessica Fern

"Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalities and the Sciences of Memory" by Ian Hacking

"Trauma and Recovery" by Judith Herman

"Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975" by Michel Foucault

"Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes: An Anti-Carceral Analysis" by Chloë Taylor

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