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Why Does pleasure Matter?
Anne Philpott and Paromita Vohra
Founder. The Pleasure Project
Founder. Agents of Ishq
argue for a radical understanding of pleasure, as a political lens and methodological approach.
Excerpts from their editorial in the first Special Collection of the SRHM Journal on sexual pleasure.
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"We believe that pleasure reconnects our work with its fundamental purpose
To make knowledge adventurous and revelatory.
To make politics meaningful. not just correct.
To dissolve hierarchies, not harden them.
To make life itself pleasurable, not just bearable."
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We cannot be truly liberatory in our aspirations for sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), or be meaningful in our engagement in body politics,
unless we engage deeply with the experiences and politics of pleasure.
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"For too long, sexual and reproductive health knowledge creation, policy and programmatic action have been overwhelmingly focused on death, danger; disease and reproducing.
When we, as torchbearers for SRHR (sexual and reproductive health rights), don't recognise or speak of pleasure, we re-inscribe the shame and stigma that surround sex and lead to so many disempowered and unsafe choices in sexual life."
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"There is a political power in pleasure.
We cannot simply add pleasure to an otherwise unquestioned frame.
We can draw upon the understandings outside this normative frame to co-create a new politics of sexuality and sexuel health which are Informed and transformed via the experiences of marginalised communities as they seek the pleasure often forbidden to them"
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"Sexual and reproductive health has long underscored the idea of heteronormativity - locating sex in peno-vaginal intercourse between a man and woman, within coupledom and preferably for producing babies.
When we look at what is often prioritised in research and interventions - 'family planning' and 'STI prevention' - we see a trauma-based, agency-less notion of reproductive health focused more on reproductive tragedy than on sexual success."
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looking at sex merely for the purpose of population and disease control leaves out those for whom sex is a part of
Intimacy,
desire.
sexual or emotional pleasure.
an exploration of their own humanness and individuality."
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Because of this silencing in mainstream conversations, in these communities' sexuality is a personal and political pleasure project with its own vital understandings.
It holds, therefore, a new political imagination which could revitalise our scholarship and activism, and re-connect it to its feminist origins, where sexuality was a field of liberation and creativity, not management."
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"The qualitative, subterranean world of pleasure poses many generative questions, et heart of which is this one:
Can we let go of a notion of power- who gets to tell whom the right way to be -
so rooted in a civilizational-colonial mindset?
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Join us for Matters of Pleasure with
Eszter Kismodi
Shereen El Feki
Paromita Vohra
Anne Philpott
Lawrence Shapiro
Zahra Stardust
on the occasion of the launch of the editorial by
The Pleasure Project and Agents of Ishq &
the first Special Collection of the SRHM Journal on Sexual Pleasure.
Thurs, 5 Sept, 2024. Register at link in Bio
