Sex, Labor, and Play in Imaginary Futures: Re/Structuring Pleasure Beyond the Neoliberal Now

Critical Feminist & Queer Studies Panel

Sex, Labor, and Play in Imaginary Futures: Re/Structuring Pleasure Beyond the Neoliberal Now

Chair: Caitlin Graziani
University of California, Davis

This session brings together critical feminist, queer, and crip perspectives to explore how sex, labor, and pleasure might be reimagined in speculative and future-oriented contexts. In line with this year’s theme, “Imaginary Futures: Utopias, Dystopias, and Protopias of Cultural Studies,” panelists consider the affective and political stakes of restructuring desire, embodiment, and intimacy beyond the confines of neoliberal rationality and normative science.

Presentations by Carissa Newsome, Ginger Mueller-Testerman, and Roshan Roymon of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Cristina de la Riva of Widener University/University of Houston offer interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches that interrogate dominant cultural narratives while envisioning alternative possibilities. This panel opens up space for critical dialogue about speculative futures grounded in pleasure, risk, healing, and queer world-making.