This course is an especialised seminar focusing on political and cultural history of pleasure through objects and matters. We think and read about how matters of pleasures recofigure body and life-worlds. Please, be advised, students joining this seminar must be able to talk, engage and think about sexualities, gender expressions and sexual conducts (such as orgasm, penetration and masturbation amongst others)

Matters of 

Pleasure

Matters are not topical concepts but physicalities and objects with social life that shape everyday live. These matters interfere and contribute pleasures and sexual practices. Sex toys, foods, condoms, IUDs and pill and beding are matters that shape sexual expreinces and sensations of pleasure. These matters and objects are integrated into social lives and they hold histories. These seminars tap into these histories by exploring the matters of pleasure.  
These books are discussed during this seminar and students can select in consultation with the teacher:
  1. Wootton (2018), Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison.
  2. Laurence (2009), Roman Passions: A History of Pleasure in Imperial Rome.
  3. Plotnick (2018), Power Button: History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing.
  4. Muchembled (2008), Orgasm and the West: A History of Pleasure from the 16th Century to the Present.
  5. Wynn and Foster (2022), Sex in the Middle East and North Africa
  6. Williams (2004), Porn Studies.
  7. Matthee (2009), The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500-1900.