Philosopher Quill R. Kukla reimagines fulfilling sex through an exploration of sexual agency, communication and pleasure
In Sex Beyond “Yes”, Quill R. Kukla explores what sexual agency is and how it can be enabled or hindered. Kukla reimagines pleasurable, ethical sex beyond the constraints of commodification, patriarchal and heterocentric social scripts, ableism, and puritanical and stigmatising attitudes toward sex.
This book addresses the complexities of desire and the importance of creating an environment that prioritises respect, communication and joy. Centring pleasure and agency, it encourages conversations and social changes that can make good sex accessible to all.
• Author experience and platform: Kukla has established themselves as a premier philosopher of ethics-they won the Humbolt Foundation Research Award for senior researchers in 2020 based on lifetime achievement and research potential. They are also an active member of various kink communities, bringing credence and personal experience to the topics they write about. They write from the perspective of a married, queer, nonbinary person who has a lifetime of experience in challenging conventional assumptions about sex and gender.
• Challenges traditional notions of consent: Kukla critiques the modern discourse around sex, which idealizes a bureaucratic notion of consent that does not make room for the messier contexts in which good sex can still be had.
• Addresses complicated topics within consent: Kukla's willingness to dive into challenging contexts in which the role of consent is not clear cut-after drinking alcohol, in the case of dementia, in sex work, in BDSM scenes-allows for a more complicated and nuanced understanding of sexual agency and support.
• Examines the equally important role of men in the cultural context of sex: Kukla demonstrates how the disdain for male bodies and the representation of male desire as predatorial is symbiotic with the more commonly discussed issue of the objectification and sexualization of female bodies.
On the 9th of October, from 7 PM at The Common Press, join us for a conversation about the book and everything around it.
About the author:
Quill R Kukla lives in Washington, DC, and Berlin. They are Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies at Georgetown University, and the Editor-in-Chief of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. They are also an amateur competitive boxer and powerlifter, the parent of a young adult, and the devoted caretaker of a corgi and two cats. This is their fourth book.
About the host:
Jens Pier is a philosopher working on subjectivity, self-consciousness, and self-alienation. He is a Humboldt Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London.