This book develops a performative and relational approach to gendered and sexualised bodies conceived as distinct from the more limited individualistic idea of sexual identity and orientation that is at play within notions of progress in contemporary transnational sexual politics. Focusing on the psychosocial dimension of sexual life, Sabsay challenges accepted ideas of increased emancipation, and the steady extension of rights, offering instead a critique of the liberal imaginary that is at the base of the sexual rights-bearing subject. The book offers a notion of sexual embodiment that provides an alternative to individualism, one that is social, radically relational and psychically divided, and that implies a different conception of democratic sexual politics for our time.This book brings together political and cultural analysis of sexual rights discourse with a strong theory of the relational subject whose political investments and articulations depend on a political imaginary. This is a highly original and methodical text which will be of particular interest to academics and scholars of gender and sexuality studies, sociology, politics and psychology.

Vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the assumption that vulnerability requires protection and the strengthening of paternalistic power at the expense of collective resistance. Focusing on political movements and cultural practices in different global locations, including Turkey, Palestine, France, and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors to Vulnerability in Resistance articulate an understanding of the role of vulnerability in practices of resistance. They consider how vulnerability is constructed, invoked, and mobilized within neoliberal discourse, the politics of war, resistance to authoritarian and securitarian power, in LGBTQI struggles, and in the resistance to occupation and colonial violence. The essays offer a feminist account of political agency by exploring occupy movements and street politics, informal groups at checkpoints and barricades, practices of self-defense, hunger strikes, transgressive enactments of solidarity and mourning, infrastructural mobilizations, and aesthetic and erotic interventions into public space that mobilize memory and expose forms of power. Pointing to possible strategies for a feminist politics of transversal engagements and suggesting a politics of bodily resistance that does not disavow forms of vulnerability, the contributors develop a new conception of embodiment and sociality within fields of contemporary power. Contributors. Meltem Ahiska, Athena Athanasiou, Sarah Bracke, Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Basak Ertur, Zeynep Gambetti, Rema Hammami, Marianne Hirsch, Elena Loizidou, Leticia Sabsay, Nukhet Sirman, Elena Tzelepis

Vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the assumption that vulnerability requires protection and the strengthening of paternalistic power at the expense of collective resistance. Focusing on political movements and cultural practices in different global locations, including Turkey, Palestine, France, and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors to Vulnerability in Resistance articulate an understanding of the role of vulnerability in practices of resistance. They consider how vulnerability is constructed, invoked, and mobilized within neoliberal discourse, the politics of war, resistance to authoritarian and securitarian power, in LGBTQI struggles, and in the resistance to occupation and colonial violence. The essays offer a feminist account of political agency by exploring occupy movements and street politics, informal groups at checkpoints and barricades, practices of self-defense, hunger strikes, transgressive enactments of solidarity and mourning, infrastructural mobilizations, and aesthetic and erotic interventions into public space that mobilize memory and expose forms of power. Pointing to possible strategies for a feminist politics of transversal engagements and suggesting a politics of bodily resistance that does not disavow forms of vulnerability, the contributors develop a new conception of embodiment and sociality within fields of contemporary power. Contributors. Meltem Ahiska, Athena Athanasiou, Sarah Bracke, Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Basak Ertur, Zeynep Gambetti, Rema Hammami, Marianne Hirsch, Elena Loizidou, Leticia Sabsay, Nukhet Sirman, Elena Tzelepis

This book develops a performative and relational approach to gendered and sexualised bodies conceived as distinct from the more limited individualistic idea of sexual identity and orientation that is at play within notions of progress in contemporary transnational sexual politics. Focusing on the psychosocial dimension of sexual life, Sabsay challenges accepted ideas of increased emancipation, and the steady extension of rights, offering instead a critique of the liberal imaginary that is at the base of the sexual rights-bearing subject. The book offers a notion of sexual embodiment that provides an alternative to individualism, one that is social, radically relational and psychically divided, and that implies a different conception of democratic sexual politics for our time.This book brings together political and cultural analysis of sexual rights discourse with a strong theory of the relational subject whose political investments and articulations depend on a political imaginary. This is a highly original and methodical text which will be of particular interest to academics and scholars of gender and sexuality studies, sociology, politics and psychology.