Georgetown philosophy professor Quill R Kukla’s most recent book Sex Beyond “Yes”: Pleasure and Agency for Everyone is a much needed treatise on sexual pleasure. Sex, for many sexual subjects, is afflicted with a variety of contemporary concerns. Specifically, trauma, abuse, guilt, shame, and moral confusion are part and parcel of many a sex life. The attainment and quality of sexual pleasure consequently consistently falls to the back burner for many sexual subjects who are grappling with the damaging circumstances of their sexualities. Kukla wonders what the primacy of notions of consent within discourses of sexual ethics does or does not do for the topic of sexual pleasure. Her project aims to prove that sexual subjects often find themselves in situations in which sexual agency and sexual pleasure are much more nuanced than what the framework of consent suggests. In other words, the procuring of good sex requires more than just the ability to consent. Since the book was just published, reviews are still percolating, but we’ve linked you to a couple of early ones below. And a heads up that Kukla will be discussing her book on September 29 at a free ZOOM event. You can register for that HERE!
Fresh off the press: Sex Beyond “Yes”
