Lily Martinez Evangelista, you are an adjunct professor of translation at the University of Brasília and you teach a variety of language, culture, and translation courses. You are also a member of the USA Society for the Philosophy of sex + love (SPSL). Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, your study and why did you decide to invite some SPSL members and some authors outside SPSL to contribute articles for the book Erotism, Feminism, and Empowerment (Erotismo, Feminismo e Empoderamento)? What were the invitation criteria?
I was born and raised in the United States from Mexican parents. As a consequence of my experience within the Latino community in the U.S. and as a daughter of immigrants, I consider myself a feminist Chicana who strongly believes in equality for all genders. Growing up in a conservative and religious community I found the erotic in graduate school to be quite powerful at the personal and intellectual level. I owe my ability to connect heart with mind to my advisor, Dara E. Goldman, who also focused on eroticism and guided me on the topic throughout my doctorate degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a result, I dedicate all of my research, may it be in works of literature or translation to the erotic as a source of self-consciousness and empowerment. The idea of the book arose from living in Brazil and seeing how the erotic does not have much visibility in the book stores or in our translation conferences. Furthermore, since we have a press in the university (Editora UnB) I found myself thinking about how an erotic book could capture all the talent within the university which goes invisible to many. First, I began to invite academics from all over the world to consider submitting a chapter on the erotic, with a central focus on analyzing it within a feminist framework, one where the erotic can challenge normative views in order to expand and be more inclusive. After I received enough submissions through colleagues teaching in academia and through more specialized circles I met in conferences or by interest, I began to invite students from our Spanish translation program to translate each chapter, originally written in English, into Portuguese. Once I had all the chapters translated, I set up another committee of student editors to review and discuss the translations with me. Lastly, I invited my colleagues from our program, to revise the translations one more time. Before and during submission process I also read each chapter to make sure nothing was lost in the translation process, including formatting the texts in the style the UnB Press required. In my mind, I wanted to showcase the ideas of international thinkers on the erotic and make it available for Portuguese readers, who already have to deal with the limitations of books printed in Portuguese, as well as bring to the forefront the talent of our students in our Spanish translation program, and the collaboration from my colleagues. This book project is one I am very proud of because it was made by a collective effort from beginning to end. This book, Erotismo, Feminismo e Empoderamento belongs to all of us. How do you think the audience will respond to different topics presented in the book? Brazil is dealing with extreme political divisions and although some will disagree with our central focus on equality and inclusion, we have the privilege to already have our first academic review, which will be included in the back of the book when published. M. Emilia Barbosa from the Missouri University of Science and Technology has written that our book brings the necessary discussion of the erotic and pleasure, within a current feminist theory and movement of sexual subjects into conversation. Barbosa states that each chapter critically discuss various examples or possible alternatives of current normative values on gender and sexuality. As the compiler of this book, I believe in the erotic potential, and the need to make desire and inclusion visible and available for all. Sophia Kanaouti, you are an Adjunct Lecturer to the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, in the field of Social Exclusion, and adjunct lecturer for the Hellenic Open University, in the field of Political Science. Can you tell a bit about yourself, your background, your study and why did you decide to participate in the book? I am an adjunct lecturer for the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where I teach about social exclusion and a researcher about sexual harassment and cyber harassment, as well as for women in politics, and for the University of Crete, where I now teach Gender and Politics - and lastly, for the Hellenic University, where I teach Political Science. I come from a media and politics background, and I am concerned with the exclusions we face in the political terrain that the media form for us, a ubiquitous and universal terrain. In your paper »Feminism and Emotion in Female Heterosexual Desire: media stories ...« you propose the view of emotion as engagement in the political sense, and propose that feminism uses emotion the way it is socially »allowed« to femininities as something that can change the political. Can you tell us what you wish to achieve with your paper and does this change involve a singular and universal, and if so, how? In my work I use Cornelius Castoriadis and Hannah Arendt, Castoriadis being a psychoanalyst as well as a political philosopher - Arendt we all know as a political theorist. Thus, through the links of psychoanalysis with politics, it is my contention that, as our creativity, so our political action and speech are linked with our subconscious - and therefore with our freedom to express (and sublimate/ transform) our desires. Therefore the media use of our desires is of central concern for the politics we want - and for the politics we will be allowed to express in the public sphere: inclusive, free, or excluding and elitist in the most negative sense if the word. Lily's book gave me an opportunity to address the issue of emotions and the ways in which women are socially "crowned" the guardians of feelings for the rest of the species. Juxtaposed to the more valued "logic" (Arendt would call it, I think, logicality, as extreme stress on logic at the expense of everything else), feelings are seen as less valid, less 'political', and yet they are what makes it possible to care for each other in the public space. All democratic politics involve both the singular and the universal; we cannot be fit to elect others and to be elected ourselves if we are not singularly standing on our own two feet, as we say in Greek - if we are not autonomous, expressive individuals, free in our speech and action. And we cannot be autonomous if the environment doesn't allow us to be so - it is no accident that no artist can create in authoritarian regimes - as artists are when they work on their art, the most autonomous of individuals, and the most creative. I think that feminism has moved on from taking for granted the validity of the male narrative that sees emotion as weakness, and logicality as strength; my own article adds, I hope, to that move, towards a fuller autonomy for women and all genders, allies in the fight for equality/democracy. It is time we claim the political space for emotions, which was previously granted merely to cries and whispers - time to shout #MeToo, time to laugh and be happy with justice, time to defend democracy and peace, as feminists did with the most recent war in Ukraine. And time to be heard and seen, clearly, politically, with the full emotion that determination involves. Irune del Rio Gabiola, you are a professor of Spanish, and Race, Gender and Sexuality Studies Butler University, USA. You were also director of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the same university. Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, study, and reason to participate in the book? I grew up in the Basque Country and I discovered my passion for literature and history when I was in high school. After studying English at the University, I decided to pursue grad school in Latin American and Caribbean cultures in the US at the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana, where I wrote a thesis on women's cultural productions in the Caribbean. Back then, I familiarized myself with gender studies, feminism and postcolonial studies developing a deep interest in queer studies, and blackness in Latin America. As I professor, I diversified my interests to include Central America and Spain. In recent years, I published one book on queerness and gender in the Caribbean and a second one on social movements and activism in Honduras. In the essay »The Color Of Seduction ...« you examine the visual representations of racialized and fetishized black female bodies ensuring white supremacy through the film Palm Trees in the Snow directed by Fernando González Molina (2015). Can you tell us more about that, how the director aims to achieve it and what is your criticism of that? Similarly, I had the change to teach a course on afroconciencia and blackness in Spain and this is how my interest in critically analyzing the film Palmeras en la nieve grew. Disturbed by the visual representations in this film, I felt the urge to write about the deficiencies, stereotypes and limitations at constructing racialized bodies. The film perpetuates colonialism by depriving African bodies of histories and subjectivities and reinforcing hypersexualization and colorism: the blacker the bodies of the African women are, the more objectified and sexualized they are. A similar representation occurs when depicting the African male body. The visual representations constructed by the director fail to convey the complexity of blackness, black subjectivities, and black bodies. Sebnem Nazli Karali, you are a literary critic, writer, actress, and currently a Ph.D. Candidate/Researcher at the School of Arts and Humanities, Australia. Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, versatile study, and reason to participate in the book? Katarina, firstly, thank you very much for inviting me to interview for LL Passion. It is a great pleasure to be interviewed by you. I was born in 1990 into a multi-cultural family that has always put education before everything else. I readily admit that their open-minded attitude towards life has fed my passions and talents lying in critical and creative thinking, often addressing »high-risk« areas which require a level of bravery and diligence in thinking and analysis. I count myself very fortunate that I did my BA in English Language and Literature, with a certificate in Linguistics, at Bogazici University, Istanbul, in a culturally diverse campus environment that promotes free expression and inclusion at all levels. Planning to become a linguist, I attended Uppsala University, Sweden on a student exchange programme. In my senior year, however, I changed my mind about what I wanted to do. I did a master’s degree in Acting, composed of a research thesis and stage performance – in a nutshell, centered on the presence of transgender/transsexual on the Turkish stage. My professional life as a performer permeated all aspects of my life, as an enriching and informative experience that was exciting and intellectually adventurous. After my master’s degree, I resolved to benefit from my professional and academic experiences by doing a PhD in a topic where I could bring theatre and literature together as a theatre scholar-performer. Currently, I am a final year PhD student at Edith Cowan University, completing a thesis on the dramatic and theatrical representations of genocide in the works of post-generational female playwrights with a focus on Brecht’s dramatic theory. My long-lasting interest in gender, sexuality and feminist studies goes back to my undergraduate years. My master’s thesis and theatre performances only enhanced my knowledge in the field. During my PhD studies, at an international conference – Exploring the Erotic: Bodies, Desires, Practices – I met Lily Martinez, the editor the upcoming book, Erotismo, Feminismo e Empoderamento, to which I contributed with a chapter on the sexuality and erotic in Toni Morrison’s Sula. In the article »The Color Of Erotic Potential: Sula, By Toni Morrison ...« you address the eponymous protagonist’s escape from the black heteropatriarchy through the power of the erotic. What is the argument for that and how are gender, race, erotic, and art intertwined to achieve that? In my chapter on Morrison’s Sula, I address Sula’s escape from the heteropatriarchy through the power of the erotic. I shy away from using the word »lesbian« to describe the characters, or the novel, for fear of being reductive in approach. I also know that Morrison dismissed Barbara Smith’s labeling of the novel as »a lesbian novel«. Once we closely look at how Sula perceives herself and is perceived by her surroundings, Sula’s body constitutes at least a »triple non-entity«, in whom black, female, and lower-class identity co-exist. And these attributes are highlighted by her friendship with Nel, set against the then hegemony of the »straight white middle-to-upper class male«. The ‘black’ erotics – hence the title »the colour of the erotic potential« – in Sula’s and her ‘bestie’ Nel’s »female friendship« serves to empower Sula against an exclusive European-American male model of power, aka »stale, pale, male, and straight«, which has long prescribed the relations we all have with ourselves and others. It is thus a big deal that Sula’s tough yet inspiring journey of self-discovery via the power of the erotic leads Sula to practice self-agency and self-affirmation, in a society dominated by the rotten politics of hegemonic masculinities. I say »masculinities«, since it is not only the dominant form of white masculinity that Sula subverts(!) through the erotic as a »source of power«, to use Audre Lorde’s words. Sula leaves its signature on the underrepresentation of race and social class by the »second wave of feminism«. And it brings into discussion the misogynistic bent of the Black Arts and Black Power movements, as Morrison states »conventional black society«. The erotic imagery in the novel is conveyed in Morrison’s erotically charged language, underscoring the inevitable triumph of the unruly and irresistible erotic. The erotic flows on the level of writing, brought about by Morrison’s exceptionally powerful writing style. Set against the troubled history of its time, the novel explores the »black erotic potential« at the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality, juxtaposed with oppressive male systems of power and domination, firmly rooted in the long history of tradition. Robert Scott Stewart, you are a Canadian professor of philosophy and former chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Cape Breton University, Nova Scotia. You are also the author of several books on love and sex. Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, study, and reason to participate in the book? I grew up in a small town in Nova Scotia on the east coast of Canada. I was very uncertain what I wanted to do for a career though I had a vague notion of becoming a lawyer. But I loved my first year philosophy class and ended up eventually completing a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Waterloo (Canada) in 1991. My dissertation was on the influence of Romantic poetry and aesthetics on the social, political, and ethical thought of John Stuart Mill. I started teaching at Cape Breton University 32 years ago. It has turned out to be a good place for me. It's a small university so you have to teach a wide variety of courses not all of which are in your particular areas of expertise. That's how I came by my interest in the philosophy of love and sex. We were looking for courses that would attract students so on a sabbatical in the later 1990s, I did some research in the philosophy of love and sex, and since roughly 2010, it has become my main research focus. I gave a talk on friends with benefits at a conference in Prague in 2016. It was a great conference and I met some wonderful people, many of whom are working on this book project. In your paper Is »Feminist Porn Possible?« you explore what such porn looks like and how it represents sexuality in ways that feminists should find less problematic than typical, heterosexual, mainstream porn. Can you tell us more about how you achieved this argument and how does such porn actually looks like, can you attach a picture? The main feminist arguments against pornography are either that it leads to harm against women or, as a speech act, actually constitutes harm in its very utterance. These arguments certainly have some plausibility when one considers typical mainstream pornography, which all too often objectifies women in a way that also degrades and humiliates not just the women particpating in the film but, by extension, to all women. I wondered, though, whether one could distinguish between such pornography and a different pornography that is slowly emerging. In such alternative and feminist porn, women's pleasure is central as is women's agency. So, for example, the 'money shot', where a man ejaculates on a women, is no longer the focal point and culmination of the scene. Women thus become subjects as well as objects in such representations, and there is a partiular focus on their pleasure. Lawrence Buttigieg, you are a Maltese artist, architect, and freelance researcher. Can you tell a bit about yourself, your background, your study and why did you decide to participate in the book? Besides pursuing a career in architecture, I am also an artist and freelance researcher. In 2014 I was awarded a PhD from Loughborough University in the United Kingdom. Consequent to a practice-led doctoral research, I started creating box assemblages—three-dimensional, body-themed, artifacts––through which my association with the female subject is taken to an acutely intense level. While for more than two decades the recurrent theme of my studio work and research has essentially been the representation of womanhood, over the past two years I’ve been experimenting with film, doing research through this medium <www.aboutlawrence.eu>. In your paper »The box assemblage and Luce Irigaray’s écriture feminine« you, as an artist and Idoia, as your model wanted to create a particular kind of artifact, an exclusive space where libidinal desires are freed from societal inhibitions. Can you tell us more about the artifact-space and have you achieved what you aimed for? Prior to answering your question, I wish to say a few words about my studio and the resultant artifacts. This workplace doubles into a realm that seductively invites us to detach ourselves from the mundane world, and our own private lives; and to direct our complete attention onto ourselves, maturate our trust in each other, and concentrate on the project in hand. While shielding us from the inquisitiveness and prying eyes of others, it provides us with an intimate space, both physical and metaphorical, where we may share things such as feelings, disclose ideas to each other, and give free rein to our creativity. All this works well because the traditional dichotomy of male artist as creator and female model as object has long been dismantled in our rapport. To return to your question, maybe I can answer it by making a direct reference to Tabernacle for Alakazam, an artifact whose title is inspired by the enigmatic protagonist in Dandy Warhols’ 1995 song Just Try. Its interior features body-parts of Idoia and myself that in turn are sheltered inside a fragment of Stéphanie’s maternal body.* Employed as a spatial metonymy of my studio, this mother’s abdomen provides us with a secure space wherein we ‘celebrate’ our propinquity. However, while tantalizingly close to each other, the ultimate erotic touch between us will not happen—our convergence is arrested in space and immortalized in time. Nonetheless, Stéphanie links us and nurtures us through her flesh. I am mindful that Idoia’s assimilability is finite and her allurement is forever coupled by the elusiveness of her alterity; this knowledge on one hand frustratingly increases my sense of lack, on the other hand, it makes me more zealous for her. The box assemblage is a perpetual reminder of that which is other, that which is transient and enticingly real at the same time. While Idoia’s simulacra, real body-part relics, and memorabilia collectively catalyze the box assemblage’s powerfulness, its modus operandi is dependent on the sequence of covert spaces that contribute to its versatile and contradictory nature––from one point of view implying confinement and control, from another permitting the grouping of unrelated objects. In the aforementioned physically defined areas, contrariety, such as that between the antipodal concepts of the sacred and the irreverent, is addressed. * Stéphanie is a friend; I produced a cast of her tummy when she was pregnant with her second child. As far as my contribution to the book. I have been an independent researcher for a long time and haven't been part of academia except for a brief period at the beginning of my academic path as a research assistant at the Educational Research Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Afterward, all my work and achievements were done through my own work, will, and persistence. I responded to the call for submissions by Lily E. Martinez on the list of Society for the Philosophy of Sex + Love and sent my article in December 2018 therefore it has been a long wait for the publication of this book. In the paper Diotima And The Platonic Concept Of Love/Diótima E O Conceito Platônico Do Amor I write that ancient Greek society praised male homosexual love as the highest and divine form of love. Alongside that, I am offering the possibility of divine love also between women in the example of Plato who says through Socrates that his concept of love was offered by a woman named Diotima. If we believe Socrates's words that he merely repeats what he was told by Diotima then this is the only (philosophical) concept of love in the world that was created by a woman. And if someone would argue that we can’t know exactly whether Diotima was a real or a figurative person, the paper can still serve as an intellectual exercise into the possibility of accepting Diotima's concept of divine love as a possibility of love between women.
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