This proposed special session—“Sex and Form”—responds to the recent intensification of debates related to the two fields invoked in its title: sexuality studies and literary formalism. By one critical account, the phrase “sexual formalism” is an oxymoron. Queer theory of this, more familiar kind sees the sexual encounter as principally about formal deterioration and positions sex as dissolvent to formal rigidity. On the other hand, queer interventions influenced by New Formalist movements and the recent debates circulating Caroline Levine’s 2015 monograph Forms, have suggested that sex, like other, to borrow from Levine, “patterns of sociopolitical experience” only operates through its formalization. Staging a dialogue about these accounts (and more), this session asks anew: how should sex be understood in relation to social and political forms?; is sex essentially resistant to formalization?; and how could “form” conceptually bridge a literary analysis of texts and a social analysis of sex? The presider, Austin Svedjan (Doctoral Student, University of Pennsylvania), will introduce the session and speakers for approximately 10 minutes with these questions in mind. The three presentations—of no more than 15 minutes each—interrogate sex by utilizing the methods of formalist literary analysis to then reflect back upon literary study’s methodological commitments. In doing so, these timely presentations bespeak the continued stakes and interdisciplinary relevance for thinking “Sex and Form.”

Tyler Bradway (Associate Professor, SUNY Cortland) will initiate the panel by focusing on contemporary queer and trans narratives of non-monogamy to reflect on how they use narrative form to render the affective and political labor required to sustain non-heteronormative kinship. Elaborating and reorienting his prior, foundational work articulated in Queer Kinship and “Queer Narrative Theory and the Relationality of Form,” Bradway employs narrative as a formal diving-rod to wade through the messiness of non-monogamy’s forms of labor and detect what keeps those relationships afloat. Such an analysis bristles against a large portion of prior sexuality studies scholarship surrounding anti-normative kinship structures by eschewing something like what Leo Bersani referred to as the efforts to “redeem” sex. Rather, Bradway’s use of formalism (and narrative in particular) suggests that what seems unformalizable about such “messiness” is, in actuality, its narrativity.

Next, Anna Kornbluh (Professor, University of Illinois Chicago) puts the aforementioned debates surrounding sex and form in proximity to an unexpected bedfellow: ecocide. Arguing that to explain contemporary ecocide as akin to a death drive is a theoretical malpractice, Kornbluh returns to the psychoanalytic death drive as, on the contrary, conducive to emancipatory, formally compositive politics. Responding to Oliver Davis and Tim Dean’s argument in 2022’s Hatred of Sex that sex is paradigmatic of the death drive—as they write, an “un-binding” energy which rages against the “coherence and stability [of] bound forms”—Kornbluh instead claims that Freud’s yoking of drive to sexuality advocates for conceiving of both ecocide and sex as repetition rather than destruction. Such a conceptualization would hence be one more available to formalist literary and political analysis.

Finally, Yao Ong (Doctoral Candidate, University of Chicago) intervenes on the tendency in queer theoretical accounts to bolster sex-as-formlessness through the recourse to individual agency by drawing lines of resonance between Vito Acconci’s 1972 masturbatory performance piece, Seedbed, with Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. Implicitly responding to the juxtaposition between the ordering logics of the panopticon and nonce sexual encounters in sexuality studies of a Foucauldian bent, Ong instead argues that the dovetailing of formal organization of space and impersonal eroticism in Seedbed illustrates that formalization is what facilitates the “sex” of the performance, even when supposedly agential individuals are unaware of the forms ordering the space. In closing the panel, Ong would therefore polemically occasion the panel and audience to consider if it is possible for sex to be conceived outside its, even if imperceptible, formal activation.

Following these presentations, Svedjan will invite the audience to engage in approximately 20 minutes of discussion.