LONDON CONFERENCE IN CRITICAL THOUGHT 2025
Birkbeck, University of London
20th-21st June 2025
Join us this June at Birkbeck University for the 2025 London Conference of Critical Thought. For this years conference, we have coordernated a stream called 'Masturbatory Reading: The Erotics of Knowledge Production'. A stream is a themed programme within a wider conference, and this stream explores the liberatory erotics of feminist, queer, disabled and indigenous approaches to interdisciplinary research, forgrounding materialist and embodied processes of knowledge making.
We take this name from Kate Zambreno’s book Heroines, in which she writes “I wake up and read even though Nietzsche says that's foolish. A sort of narcotic reading, I read with my hands down the front of my pants – my mode of reading is masturbatory.” We expand outward from here with the help of Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic, “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings… having experienced the fullness of depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect, we can require no less of ourselves.” Masturbatory reading asks what power and pleasure can be accessed through attending to the erotics of knowledge production; how sites, systems and tools of knowledge making reiterate violent norms (and in turn, erase devient practices); and what the making (and unmaking) of these systems could allow us to imagine.
This stream proposal builds on our 2023 anthology Masturbatory Reader, which through 16 contributions of experimental non-fiction began to scope out this field. Building on this here we want to investigate further erotic research methodologies, as they are entangled with the architectures of public sex and private property, sovereignty and land, and subcultural media and practices. The body and book are both distributary frameworks, and what we are interested in here is how masturbatory reading enables us to access erotic architectures of knowledge.
Mark Rifkin’s essay ‘The Erotics of Sovreignty’, charactirises “the reciprocity of place. The land is both desired and desiring, is not that thing that can be priced and traded, is a feeling entity.” This also calls to mind Lyónn Wolf’s performance text ‘Sex in Public’: “Practical homonormativity and well-cared-for economic brick walls rewrite the meanings of vulnerability and receptivity and the whole field of sexual and social relations becomes a privatised ethics of fiscal ties.” Mass-media becomes a metaphor for how we understand gender technologies and the gendered body. Or, as Paul B. Preciado writes in Testo Junkie: “the body is no longer just a means of transmission, distribution, and collection of information, but the material effect of those semiotechnical exchanges.”
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