Sex and Society
New sharing circle launches tomorrow
I recently hosted Rebecca Prentice on the Philosophy Portal podcast to discuss the new initiative. You can find our full discussion below:
The core points from our discussion include:
Trying to cultivate a space where people can think deeply about topics surrounding sex, gender, embodiment, and their relationship with broader social forces and even politics
The circle is not just abstract, academic, theory-heavy, but also trying to relate back to our actual lives, actual experiences, and the immediate world around us, based in free association and personal sharing
Finding the right balance or looping process between the personal and the intellectual, between reflecting on myself, and connecting it to deep ideas and concepts (enriching life, enriching philosophy)
Circling is important because it gives every person a place if they choose to take up that space, and it also gives a solid container for being able to allow speech to flow freely
People do need a private space to vent about social life or intimate life, a form of container that allows speech which otherwise cannot be shared out in the open, to feel out emotions that may appear socially dangerous
There is a way in which masculine and feminine identity are going off the rails today, the social is disintegrating or fragmenting, in part because of capitalism, we must rethink the question of masculine/feminine identities
Today it feels impossible to meet people or make any real connections, to establish social material that can support your own life and support relationships with others; everyone is drowning in the algorithm
How do we engage the reconstructive projects that are embodied in spaces like men’s and women’s circles without just simply reinforcing the old traditional archetypes and standards of masculinity and femininity?
Sex and Society aims to go beyond simply circling around men’s or women’s circling topics, but rather brings things to antagonisms, complications, and contradictions of identity between sex and society as such (mobius looping)
Examples of a major antagonism between sex and society can be seen in the liberal pluralistic polymorphous sexuality and the more conservative traditionalist pushback or reaction
How can we think of building more anti-fragile identities through recognition that the very core of identity itself is empty/based on a fundamental lack? (contrast: traditionalist approaches tend to cover that lack)
On the deepest level we are interested in exploring the origin of the subject, the subjects emergence in language, and the way in which sexuality is fundamentally conditioned by the discursive, but also in excess of the discursive
I also recommend checking out Rebecca Prentice’s opening article for the sharing circle, which can be a great way to prepare for our first session: