Events Archive

This paper considers problematic pleasures, those moments recorded in the sexual archive where the lines between consent and coercion are most blurred, where violence and ecstasy seem most intertwined. Using the biography, Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior, I consider how racialized gender and class inform what speaking subjects might understand as extravagant or quotidian violations of consent, and how readers grapple with forms of meaning-making. In the process, this paper considers how images and text function as complicated triggers for the attachments, identifications, desires, and traumas of our own corporeal embodiments and sexual histories.