Sexuality Beyond Consent by Avgi Saketopoulou

Author:Avgi Saketopoulou [Saketopoulou, Avgi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PSY016000 PSYCHOLOGY / Human Sexuality (see also SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Sexuality)
Publisher: NYU Press

Breathless Excitement

Two years ago, I was ravished by Jeremy O. Harris’s theatrical work Slave Play.

Describing my experience this way may sound melodramatic. But my language is intentional, meant to do more than amplify how much I liked this play or felt changed by it—though both are also true. What took me over was far wilder and infinitely more bizarre: it felt absolutely exigent. The first time I saw this play I felt my whole being called to attention, rousing my senses in a way that no work of art ever has. From there on out, I was overcome with a fiery desire: to experience the play again and again. All I knew was that I wanted more. Interests that normally held my attention were overshadowed, everything else simply felt dampened. What followed was a long period that I can only describe as a possession, as if I had been taken over by a strange force. Repeatedly attending performances felt more like a path I had to follow than a decision. Only in retrospect did I connect this feeling of being possessed to Freud’s description of repetition as a demonic force, or link it to the play’s third act, which is titled “Exorcism.” What exactly the “it” to be exorcised is—and whether that “it” can be exorcised (which, I will argue, is a traumatophobic approach) or merely brought into presence so that one may make contact with it (which I see as traumatophilic) is the main theme explored in this chapter.

Strangely, the experience also felt liberating, though what I was feeling liberated from I could not tell you. I became preoccupied with reading and rereading the script, with thinking and rethinking the dialogue. Week after week I attended Sunday discussions organized by the play’s production. I went enthusiastically and enjoyed them immensely. But I was soon also quite chagrined to realize that I could not not go. Even as professional obligations and deadlines pressed for my time, I nonetheless found myself regularly heading out for these Sunday salons, eager yet also helpless to resist them.

I was fascinated but also scared by this play and by my own reactions to it. In retrospect, I was drawn to it like one who, standing over a cliff, looks down and, feeling an inexplicable draw, steps back. Only I did not take a step back: I stepped into the vertigo. For a year and a half, I watched the play again and again and again. I watched it alone, and I watched it with others. I went at planned times and I also went impulsively, as if seized by a grotesque longing. I once headed to the matinee right after the Sunday salon because the discussion stirred in me a need to experience the play right away. Over time and one repetition after another, I started observing small differences in the way the actors enunciated their lines, the way their bodies’ affective charge shifted across performances, the way different audiences laughed (or did not) at certain lines.

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