Sexuality Beyond Consent

Published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2023, Volume 71, Number 3.

Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. By Avgi Saketopoulou. New York: NYU Press, 2023, x + 261 pp., $89.00 hardcover, $30.00 paperback.

They say one should never judge a book by its cover. Avgi Saketopoulou’s Sexuality beyond Consent is the rare exception. The cover art was created by Jee-Young Lee, a South Korean conceptual artist known for constructing surrealistic images staged in her single-room art studio. In this particular piece the artist sits on the ground, with her back to the viewer, cracking absurdly large eggs over boulder-size rocks. It is the perfect visual metaphor for this book. Saketopoulou lets us know from the outset that she too intends to break a few eggs as she challenges us to go beyond what we think we know about human sexuality, trauma, and race. “This is not only a book about ideas,” she writes in the book’s introduction;

it is a book that also wants to give you an experience. . . . You do not know what you will experience, what you will encounter, how it may disturb you, what it might set in motion in you. But if you stay with me, if you go slowly, if you linger in the interstitial spaces between reach and grasp, this book can give you more: it can demand something of you. Perhaps you will have an experience yourself. . . . there is an elsewhere in yourself to which these pages may take you. I have, in fact, written this book imagining you giving yourself over to me, which is a strange thing to say given that I do not know you [pp. 22–23].

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