Sexuality, Subjectivity and Anxiety

Abstract

The pleasure and danger of sexuality, and more particularly of sexual relations, is a theme that suffuses contemporary society, making clear that the expression of erotic desire must always be accompanied by a certain anxiety. Whilst some of that anxiety is clearly a precautionary response to material risk — the avoidance of unwanted pregnancy, and the contemporary fear of HIV/AIDS, for example, both being concerns that break through specific cultural contexts — the problematic will be addressed in this chapter through an investigation of which psychic factors are at play in the western imaginary. Despite the ubiquity of sexual discourse, the question of who is to count as a sexual subject is contested and uncertain, not just as a matter of practical concern as was apparent in my exploration of social policy concerns, but at the psychological and ontological level too. The western discomfort with many manifestations of erotic desire — that denies or prohibits infant or childhood sexuality, or expresses disgust and attempts to efface older peoples’ desire, for instance — is most clearly invoked by forms of differential embodiment that cannot be subsumed unproblematically under the rubric of the normative body. Neither young nor old people are non-normative in their own terms, and yet their difference from the adult body, which is assumed to be the standard for sexual agency and affect — albeit with gender variations — is taken to disqualify them from discourses of pleasure associated with sexuality.