Speaker
Maria Gurevich, Ryerson University, Toronto
Title
Affect theory, symbolic orbits and postfeminism: Young women navigate sexual desires and demands
Abstract
In this talk Dr. Gurevich will plot several intersecting theoretical coordinates, along which sexuality is usefully traced – affect scholarship, post-Lacanian feminist psychoanalysis, and feminist poststructuralism. This is followed by two elaborated examples from an ongoing research project on sexual agency and desire among young women. The analysis traverses these varied but interconnected theoretical frames, arguing for their joint usefulness in thinking about how sexual messages and ideologies permeate social and psychic spaces, with both resistance and recapitulation at work. This work joins a body of feminist scholarship directed at expanding epistemic and empirical conversations beyond sexual empowerment/oppression oppositions, by addressing the ways social meanings, symbolic representations, affects, and fantasy about sexuality cohere in subjectivities.
Bio
Maria Gurevich, PhD, is Associate Professor in Psychology at Ryerson University and Director of the SHiFT lab. Her current research examines the role of sexual technologies in reconfiguring sexual meanings, messages, and mandates with specific attention to norms about desire, agency, relationship negotiation, and performance enhancement. Adopting feminist poststructuralist, queer, psychoanalytic and affect approaches, she is studying recreational sexual enhancement medication, pornography, and sexual expert discourses.