Sex Negativity presents
Lamentations of a Top Shortage

Sex Negativity invites you to Lamentations of a Top Shortage, a discussion session devoted to Freud's "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love" (1912) and Belcourt, Dust, Gabriel's "Top or Bottom: How do we Desire?" (The New Inquiry, 2018). Freud's essay is written almost exclusively from the standpoint of what he characterizes as men. Lamenting the psychical impotence brought on by a particular divide—that between the overvaluation of the maternal figure and the debasement of the sexual object—Freud sums up his argument this way: "Where they love they donot desire and where they desire they cannot love." We will map this problematic onto the contemporary logic of tops and bottoms wherein bottoming tends to get privileged as a political posture detached from social domination. Critical of this tendency, Kay Gabriel counters: "bottoming is the sexual correlative of the dissimulation of complicity with dominant structures that marks certain urban upwardly-mobile queer social scenes, whereby sounding off (say) anarchist principles can act as a fig-leaf disguising a de facto complicity with capital, real estate developers, and cops."
Both short texts, we ask that you attempt to read them in advance of the session.

Sex Negativity, a research group founded by Persis Bekkering, Marija Cetinic, Stefa Govaart and Tessel Veneboer, aims to think (through) the negativity of sex as an ontological antagonism underlying recent and historical debates between political anti-sex and sex positive positions. This research finds its grounding in psychoanalytic theory, queer and trans studies, Marxist-feminism, among other fields.