We often hear of experiences that are \u201cbetter than sex,\u201d e.g. chocolate or jumping out of a plane. But what\u2019s weirder than sex? What human (or beyond human) experiences make us question how pleasure, desire, and fantasy structure our social world. Queer theory has often turned to study sex as an important cultural practice where people elaborate both their desires and their sense of self. Sex is an important site to study because of the many incoherent narratives that people construct around it. By looking at why each one of us has the pleasures, desires, and fantasies that we do, free of a moral structure around those dispositions, we better understand the human condition. Sex can be exciting, scary, affirming, harmful, unexpected or monotonous. But it is above all else weird\u2014a space where alternative ways of encountering our own bodies and the world can be explored (or avoided). Yet sex is not the only site to explore the weirdness of human experience. We use the language of pleasure, desire, and fantasy to narrate our relationships to food, consumerism, \u201cthe good life,\u201d activist politics, and fan fiction. What do these experiences tell us about the ambivalent, overwhelming, or incoherent character around desire (+pleasure + fantasy)?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We often hear of experiences that are \u201cbetter than sex,\u201d e.g. chocolate or jumping out of a plane. But what\u2019s weirder than sex? What human (or beyond human) experiences make us question how pleasure, desire, and fantasy structure our social world. Queer theory has often turned to study sex as an important cultural practice where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1408,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desire-pleasure-fantasy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/gender-sexuality-womens-studies-2001-spring-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/gender-sexuality-womens-studies-2001-spring-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/gender-sexuality-womens-studies-2001-spring-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/gender-sexuality-womens-studies-2001-spring-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1408"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/gender-sexuality-womens-studies-2001-spring-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/gender-sexuality-womens-studies-2001-spring-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/gender-sexuality-womens-studies-2001-spring-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/gender-sexuality-womens-studies-2001-spring-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/gender-sexuality-womens-studies-2001-spring-2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}