Session 9: Erotic Ideas

5th Global Conference

Friday 6th November – Sunday 8th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Consuming Sex: Georg Simmel on Sex, Money and Personal Worth
Tom Claes
Ghent University, Belgium

The title of this paper is deliberately ambiguous. It refers to what happens when sex is consumed as well as to what happens when sex consumes. The first option focuses attention on the impact of sex as a consumer good—sex as a commodity. When sex can be bought and sold it becomes detached from those who sell and buy. The second way of reading the title draws attention to sex as a commodifying force. Sex as a commodity is probably as old as the economy itself. But when sex enters the money-driven market-place of modernity it takes on another dimension. Money mediated sexual interactions become the paradigmatic type of all social interactions in modernity and the uses of sex become one of the strongest motors of modernisation.
I will critically reconstruct and reflect upon Simmel’s basic insights concerning money, personal worth and sex. Simmel denounces prostitution, sex for money, for it leads to a degradation of the personal value of both participants. He also notices an ominous analogy between prostitution and money: objectification, indifference, lack of attachment. Simmel had a rather troublesome attitude towards the types of sex that become more and more widespread in the metropolis. It will become clear that his analysis of these issues, coupled with his insights on how the money economy structures life and the experience of life (modernity as project and as experience) notably in the metropolis, brilliantly capture the changing nature of sex and its personal and societal meanings during the late 19th century transition to modernity.

Reading Eroticism: Truth, Method, and the Future of Queer Studies
Donald Hall
Department of English, West Virginia University, USA

No abstract is presently available

Can Marxism be Erotic?
Paul Reynolds
Department of Social and Psychological Sciences, Edge Hill University, United Kingdom

No abstract is presently available