Pleasure is both slippery and ephemeral, known and unknown. It circulates between bodies and objects, bodies and technologies; it manifests as form and formlessness; it defies easy definition and/or capture within the ‘order of things.’ Pleasure re-organizes the senses, bodies, and archives. Pleasure is intimately related to yet extends beyond sexuality and sex acts. Pleasure manifests within the quotidian and the mundane; the spectacular and the dramatic. Pleasure is embodied and felt, engaging and disrupting the senses. Pleasure is often positioned as excessive, abject, and dangerous particularly in relationship to LGBTIQ2S+ and QTBIPOC folk. However, pleasure and its ongoing quest can reveal something about bodily autonomy and practices of freedom in an anti-queer-trans-Black-Brown-Indigenous world.

 

This project brings together inquiries into the relationships between the aesthetic and questions of pleasure: the erotic, the sonic, and the racialized body, attending to the sensuous dimensions and emancipatory potentials of such encounter. We will investigate the complexities of sexual desires, sexual behavior or practices, sexual identities and subjectivities as it relates to LGBTIQ2S+ and QTBIPOC folk, with a particular focus on Toronto.