Today’s guest is Dr Avgi Skatepolou, author of “Sexuality Beyond Consent; Risk, Race and Traumatophilia”. 

Avgi maintains that society has become overly focused on healing trauma and needs to reroute its attention to what subjects do with their trauma. She calls attention to a series of challenging questions: Why is sexuality beyond consent worth risking, and how does risk become a way of engaging with the opaque parts of ourselves? And in what ways does eliminating risk remove the potential for erotic transformation?  

Agvi draws unexpected links between ideas that are so often seen at odd within one another; cruelty and care, sadism and ethics, trauma and expansion, and perversion and purity. Avgi writes about ideas typically relegated to the morbid, dark and unspeakable and sheds light on their potentially transformative powers, something she refers to as ‘erotic astonishment.’   

Blending philosophy, queer theory, and race theory with her extensive experience in practice as an analyst, she proposes that accepting the strange within, not to master trauma but to rub against it, may open people up to encounters with the enigmatic, astounding and unique forms of care.  

Buy ‘Sexuality Beyond Consent’ here. 

Follow Avgi here.