ABSTRACT
While sex can serve as a tool of oppression and inequality, it can also expose hidden truths, challenge assumptions in discourse, and make public the struggles for recognizing women’s sexuality as powerful. When seen as a force of collective struggle, sexuality can rightly intervene to push, expose, and modify outdated beliefs and practices about gender, identity, and power. In this final chapter, I look at sex from a justice-based perspective, imagining how sex can become a form of resistance and can advance the cause of social justice for those too-often disempowered by it. More specifically, I envision what I term “counter-erotics,” that is, an orientation to sexuality that emphasizes its ability to counter oppressive practices and regimes, to oppose the disempowerment of women, people of color, poor people, and queer-identified people most specifically. Counter-erotics is, in essence, a mentality or a framework that wants to emphasize sexuality as a collective, political entity. To explore this, I work from four key frames, first looking at critical sexuality studies and “intimate justice,” followed by an examination of how sex might function as a form of hidden or covert resistance. I then consider the complexities of sexual power and how conceptualizing sexual agency in different ways can both reinforce and undermine people’s sexual choices. I conclude with a closer look at sex as a form of collective resistance, moving it away from individual (or couple) experiences and into a more explicitly political and sociological realm. The value of a counter-erotics mentality—one that prioritizes the positioning of sex as a social and political tool—is highlighted, along with a word of warning about our contradictory sexual futures.
