Situational Fuckability
Angelita Biscotti on Amia Srinivasan
circumstantial hotness.
noun.
hotness based on context rather than an intrinsic quality of attractiveness.
In season 5, episode 12 of How I Met Your Mother, femme lead Robin (Cobie Smulders) brings up the idea of circumstantial hotness in an attempt to deescalate a conversation about whether her married friends Marshall (Jason Segel) and Lily (Alyson Hannigan), find a blonde bartender hotter than each other. ‘Her hotness isn't even real,’ Robin says in exasperation, ‘it's circumstantial hotness.’ There is just something about a bar and the person behind the bar, a line between someone who wants something and the person they know who can give it to them. To someone seeking libations the bartender who can provide is always already hot. Maybe it's the act of exchanging money for intoxicants. Maybe it's the way the best bartenders know how to listen more than speak, and produce laughter and silence at all the right moments. Maybe the bartender's ability to supply (and withhold) alcohol and attention casts a seductive glow that obscures the otherwise ordinary nature of what it means to work in the service industry.
Sigmund Freud knew that when his young women patients expressed romantic or sexual interest in their analysts, it had nothing to do with their physical attributes. Unlike his colleague Josef Breuer who got swept up in a mutual, unconsummated attraction between himself and his patient Anna O., Freud suspected that desire in psychoanalytic treatment possessed a hauntological quality, and was a response to developments within the therapy, not the sort of organic attraction that arises in day-to-day life. Desire on the analytic couch is a zombie energy that announces itself through the analysand's symptoms and life struggles, loaded with baggage from past primordial loves. This is what Freud called transference, the tendency to unconsciously recreate past relationship dynamics in present relationships with different people.
Transference is commonly thought to be erotic, i.e., falling in love with one's therapist, but it can also consist of a falling into hate. Someone I know once told me they had struggled to love their analyst, and having heard them speak about their father, I resisted the urge to ask, ‘Just like your struggles to love your father?’ But transference isn't limited to the analytic encounter, for, as Freud writes, all love is always already transferential, an echo, a repetition. Transference is one way to explain why late-night libertines find bartenders captivating, why aspiring writers blog about crushes on English teachers, why some people desire and date people who remind them of their parents, why many want their political leaders to be accessible but also unattainable, accountable and beyond accounting, affable but also audacious––so they end up ultimately, always disappointed.
Sometimes a caring, attentive and ethical psychoanalysis can release and reorient this energy. The dialectical promise in the theatre of the clinic lies in a meeting of refusals: the analyst's refusal to repeat what the analysand is compelled to, and the analysand's commitment to suspend the protocols of polite conversation and speak their thoughts freely no matter how awkward, difficult or unpolished these might be. Through calling out the repetition of patterns that cause the analysand's suffering, the analyst creates space for the analysand's self-witnessing, casting light on the analysand's agency. We don't always know what we desire when we say we want something, which is why even when we appear to have gotten what we wanted, it can feel a little lacking.
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Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex (2021) offers an accessible introduction to the so-called ‘sex wars’ of the second and third-wave feminisms, at least in the English-speaking world. Srinivasan is currently Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College in Oxford, and has published extensively in scholarly and literary publications about epistemology, political philosophy, and meta-philosophy. The book is as meticulously end-noted as any academic research work is expected to be, and draws largely on primary sources and peer-reviewed journals. The tone, however, is journalistic and conversational, intended for a general audience. What is compelling about this book is the way Srinivasan brings her training as an analytic philosopher to examine topics that are not often associated with—and it should be said: often outright rejected—the privileging of detachment and lucidity: feminism and desire. While many of her feminist resources from the 1970s and 1980s use provocation, passion, and pathos in their persuasive techniques, Srinivasan persists in a philosophical approach that holds the love of a logically sound, elegantly composed argument as the highest value, and asserts that this is compatible with a commitment to social justice in the here and now. While the history of intersectional feminism has many incredible writers, scholars and activists from all over the world, Srinivasan's work is especially memorable as a space to witness her mind at work within high stakes debate and razor-sharp rhetoric, which addresses complex philosophical and feminist questions in down to earth language that non-philosophers can enjoy. Her case studies include race-based dating preferences, internet porn, incel discourse, teacher-student sex, and carceral violence––contemporary questions that extend 1970s and 1980s debates around whether erotic desire is an innate physiological response or always already filtered in ways that reproduce the white cis-heteropatriarchy, resulting in frustration for everyone except a few top players. Is sex simply a matter of bodies in heat? If so, why do we find ourselves repeating lines so familiar it's as if we're born into a world of scripts we didn't write but feel compelled to perform?
In the chapter ‘Talking To My Students About Porn’, Srinivasan observes that porn in the age of the internet has come to fulfil the function of sex education. The tepid, abstinence-centred sex education in schools pale in contrast to the ubiquitous, visceral, algorithmically-mediated, free-to-access pornography just a few clicks away; it’s almost a given why young people would gravitate towards the latter. School-based sex education for girls often emphasise the harms that can arise from sex (unwanted pregnancy, STIs) and barely address the pleasures of sex. Topics such as consent, queer and gender-non-conforming sex, safety in technologically-mediated dating, and navigating emotional dynamics beyond physical intimacy are rarely present in these programs. As such young people will learn about themselves as desiring beings through porn, and ideas about what sex should be like will ultimately come from porn; they feel let down when their bodies, sexualities and sexual partners fail to match up to a presumed-authentic produced-for-profit, styled, curated, directed filmed experience.
Having laid down this foundation, Srinivasan goes on to examine the arguments behind anti-porn legislation, the tenuous collaboration between the religious right and radical anti-porn second-wave feminists, and whether and what kinds of porn count or fail to count as protected speech. Anxieties over what kind of sex porn might teach children prevail, even as investment in developing engaging, timely sex education programs lags behind. The role of race and class cannot be ignored here: Srinivasan mentions the Howard government's moral panic over Aboriginal porn consumption in the 2007 Northern Territory intervention. She also notes that PornHub reports that Australians, a population that is only 3 per cent Aboriginal-identified, rank highest for ‘rough sex’ searches through their databases, yet white Australian porn consumption does not come under the same scrutiny. She acknowledges how independently produced porn can sometimes open up opportunities for marginalised bodies and sexualities to create their own porn and find erotic content they identify with, yet algorithms continue to weigh heavily in favour of white cis-heterosexual tastes that reference commercially produced porn tropes—for instance, ‘lesbian’, ‘MILF’, ‘Asian’ and ‘hentai’ are Australia's top 4 PornHub search results in 2023, with ‘lesbian’, ‘anal’ and ‘Japanese’ as the top categories. The question of how to learn or unlearn what conventional porn teaches about sex remains open-ended.
The titular third chapter examines the role of power and entitlement in questions of taste and dating preferences. Srinivasan’s work rejects the idea that sexual attraction is determined purely by innate biological responses. Using examples ranging from incels to inter-racial relationships, Srinivasan demonstrates how ‘hotness’ is circumstantial, how fuckability is situational. She shares a tweet she once received: ‘You wrote abt the unfuckability of a black woman as a political fact––I'm wondering on what basis this fact is defensible? seems like you're conflating fuckability, generally, with a range of differences in how society rewards you for fucking blondes v black women, specifically.’
Srinivasan goes on to assert:
There is no pre-political, pre-social desirability [...] certain women's bodies are fuckable because they are assigned that status by the dominant cultural norms. The fuckable body [...] is irreducibly a construction.
Incels’ fury with women who deny them the sex they believe they're owed is not simply the sting of someone they like not liking them back, but the humiliation of finding themselves at the bottom of the dating hierarchy. Psychoanalytic cultural critic Patrick Blanchfield argues that if notorious incel-mass murderer Elliott Rodger simply wanted sex, there were ways to obtain it—by hiring a sex worker, for instance. Rodger was born into generational wealth and could certainly afford it, the way he could afford firearms and was gifted luxury cars by his parents. Beyond merely the physical act of sex, Rodger was invested in the idea of fuckability as a masculine status symbol. For him, sex with women on top of the sexual hierarchy would enable him to transcend what he felt were the limits of his being: a half-British, half-Malaysian-Chinese man in a world where someone like him would not so much as merit a flirtatious wink. What drove his anger was the belief that he was a Chad trapped in a virgin's body, and that he deserved more.
During a module on masculinities in my Gender Studies undergraduate tutorials, I followed another tutor's example and played this VICE interview with an incel who venerated Elliott Rodger. A conversation between a young woman journalist and ‘Joey’, a self-proclaimed incel, the interview takes place in the latter's room while he shows her a chatroom he moderates. Joey talks about how he ‘feels more real’ in the incel chatroom than out in the world, but also claims that incels’ dark humour is simply venting as a way towards ‘healing’, that most incels are ‘really meek’ and the violence associated with the community is an extreme and small minority. At this, the interviewer responds: ‘Incels are dangerous––mostly to themselves. In this culture people bond over self-loathing. Joey says it's therapeutic but four of his friends have killed themselves.’
When it was time to discuss the video, many of my students were horrified by Joey's smug, self-deprecating entitlement, with some going on to questioning his commitment to identifying as a romance reject, saying, ‘Just going by looks, he wouldn't do too badly dating’. Yet the irony here, as Srinivasan writes, the ‘injury of the patriarchy’ is that men who might not be considered ‘conventionally attractive’ but have intelligence, charm, wealth or notoriety might still find success in sex and romance, while women who fall outside heteronormative standards (older, larger, non-white, disabled) are more heavily penalised. The band Goldfinger puts it more bluntly: ‘Pretty women are walking with gorillas down my street / Is she really going out with him? Is she really gonna take him home tonight?’ Sometimes she does, and Blanchfield's analysis catches something other feminist critiques miss: Rodger could have paid for sex, but chose not to. Rodger was so invested in his constructed idea of himself as unlovable and unwanted that he saw himself as nothing without this unlovability and unwantedness.
Frameworks that appeal to social justice sensibilities and call for an equitable redistribution of resources falter when applied to sexual satisfaction and intimate partnership. If you regard sex as a resource that the ‘sexy’ can easily access and that the ‘un-sexy’ can't, the redistribution of partners might be seen by some as a way for everybody, especially the un-sexy, to finally be satisfied. Everybody desires some version of the ‘supremely fuckable’—‘the hot slutty blonde’ or ‘the East Asian doll’, to use Srinivasan's words. Within this dichotomy, the ‘sexy’, secure in their top spot in a hierarchy of desirability, have no scarcity of potential suitors, while the ‘unsexy’ can minimalistically hope to be charming and/or wealthy but still risk disappointment. Yet such a redistribution scheme remains utopic and does not consider how issues surrounding sex and sexuality continue to fly in the face of not just reason but social justice. Srinivasan writes, famously, that sex is ‘not a sandwich’. The example she gives is one of a playground scenario where a student who refuses to share their sandwich with another classmate might be instructed by their teacher to be more equitable; after all everybody in class deserves their fair share of food or seats or playthings.
Sex, however, is not that kind of resource. The prospect of enforced sexual redistribution begs the question: how do you determine the kind of sex (and sexual partner) someone ‘deserves’? Even if such a redistribution scheme is successfully enforced, there are two issues. The first is consent: to claim that someone is entitled to sex regardless of the other's willingness to participate, is untenable. The second is that it would fail to provide what many people seek through sex: the thrill of being wanted. Of someone fucking them because they really, really wanted to. As Srinivasan writes, ‘No one really wants a mercy fuck’.
Desire can be weird, unruly, irrational and often not at all politically correct: Andrea Long Chu argues that ‘nothing comes from forcing desire to conform to a political principle’. Being told you can't or shouldn't makes the desired object juicier: ‘we rarely want the things we should’. Still, Srinivasan notes that ‘there is nothing [like sex], so riven with politics yet so inviolably personal. For better or worse, we must find a way to take sex on its own terms [...] everyone is entitled to what they want but personal preferences—NO DICKS, NO FEMS, NO FATS, NO BLACKS NO RICE NO SPICE, MASC-FOR-MASC—are rarely just personal’.
The fourth chapter in The Right to Sex reads like a front-row seat to the sex wars in the age of Reddit and YouTube. Titled ‘Coda: the Politics of Desire’, there are discussions of how the choice of sexual or romantic partners is read as a betrayal to one’s own race, such as when Asian women who overwhelmingly date white men are regarded as objects of contempt by Asian men who, under a white cis-heterosexual order, experience sexual rejection by women of all ethnicities. Srinivasan shares interviews and tweets where these women offer tepid explanations to account for their ‘preference’. They also share experiences of being harassed by MRAsians (Asian men's rights activists).
The queer dating scene is no better. Srinivasan describes cases from Grindr show What the Flip where one person presumably does better on Grindr than another, and they swap profile pictures to see if anything changes. The responses each person gets highlight the discrimination Asian, fat, femme, and black Grindr users experience based on their profile pictures and the many associated racist, fatphobic, and femmephobic stereotypes. There’s a moving quote from a Sri Lankan man, who has made peace with his place among the ranks of the unfuckable, in a world where black men are stereotyped as hypermasculine rapists and Asian men are deemed too effeminate to take the ‘masculine’ top role, be that in hetero- or queer sexuality.
Later, Srinivasan lists accounts of incels murdering women as a deliberate attack on a gender that they believe sexually tempts them only to inevitably reject and humiliate them. She isn't speculating: these men often announce their motivations on social media videos that outlive them. Even after their murder-suicides, their remaining online avatars persist to out-incel each other. Somehow the plotline that remains consistent throughout is men vying for limited top spots, desperate to live up to a hegemonic masculine ideal that remains eternally elusive for them. Women are treated as status symbols, trophies to be ‘won’, possessions to be acquired. They aren't intrinsically valuable in themselves, their value lies only in what they symbolise. While the unfuckable men may in some sense also be victims, at least within a status game that privileges white, athletic, successful Chads, they take out their rage on women instead of a system rigged against them.
Up until this point, Srinivasan spends more time exploring what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the homosocial character of male desire, grounded in what men extract from their relationships with women so they can score points with other men whose validation they seek. At this point Srinivasan occasionally addresses women's desire: examples of Asian women who explicitly reject Asian men and pursue white dating partners, and black women who are hypersexualised but are ultimately preferenced last compared to white blondes. However these are only brief discussions within longer, more thorough examinations of male sexual behaviour. What's missing is a deeper exploration of what women want when they want sex. This question of ‘what women want?’ haunts the history of psychoanalysis as much as it does threads on r/sex or books about ethical non-monogamy. I wish she had more to say about women's desire beyond wanting not to be raped, objectified, and subjected to racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.
Indeed, what do women want? What do I want, as someone who identifies and is received by the world as a woman, as someone who is also non-binary, in the sense of refusing what María Lugones calls the coloniality of gender. I once told a previous analyst that I desired ‘to be part of this world, in a grand sense’. When asked the same question by my current analyst, about what I desired, I said: ‘the tenderness of the quotidian’. Two years ago, on a rainy spring morning, I watched a man carry a pram with his child in it down three flights of stairs at a subway station in Berlin and wondered what it might feel like to be that child. Later, I took portraits of a currywurst vendor who reminded me of someone I sometimes had a crush on. I enjoy holding hands and catching stolen glances. Feather-light neck kisses, nerdy flirting, a spoon in my mouth from someone who cooks well. I like loves that sometimes change but always last. I love the sound of the C-sharp minor scale and the memory of being told I was a love letter to the universe. A finger trailing down the side of my bare arm. My toes tingling when I'm horizontal and Four Tet plays on Spotify. Having a complex relationship with the physical idea of home, I can't overestimate how much I love sex on an actual bed. These are sensations I know I like. These are things that had to happen first before I knew I liked them. I want more of this.
Though she demurs from the topic of what women want when they want sex, what happens after sex is something Srinivasan absolutely does not shy away from. Consent as the minimal requirement of what Srinivasan calls ‘ethically OK sex’ connects her earlier two chapters with the penultimate chapter ‘On Not Sleeping With Your Students’. Srinivasan examines U.S. legislation around sexual harassment and how sexual relationships between academics and university students are regulated, offering a carefully thought-out engagement with the reasoning behind Freud's adamant insistence that psychoanalysts do not sleep with their patients—even if there was zero abuse of power, even if there was mutual desire, even if there was consent. For Srinivasan, much of the discourse around regulating sex on campus is an exercise towards liability minimisation, a legal anxiety around the risk of what’s often described as ‘conflict of interest’, especially when grades, jobs and professional reputations are on the line. She asks: ‘Why is professor-student sex still problematic even if the relationship happens beyond a context of coercion or conflict of interest?’
Srinivasan calls on three thinkers to make her case: Freud (who insisted that sex had no place in analytic practice), Plato (who is often cited as a defence of eros in the teacher-student dynamic despite not consummating his emotionally and intellectually intense relationships with students), and bell hooks (who saw teaching as inseparable from the flesh-bound raced, gendered, desiring bodies of the teacher and the student). She also cites conversations with three different types of people: colleagues who, as students, experienced consensual sexual relationships with academics; those who have been called out for treating women students as sex objects; and those who find themselves on the receiving end of admiring attention that they are ethically bound not to reciprocate.
Students falling in love with teachers is one of the oldest tropes. Srinivasan doesn't quote the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, but what she describes is precisely what Lacan calls ‘the subject supposed to know’. There is something about the position of the master that is irresistible to newcomers. A command of one's discipline, the sole spot by the whiteboard in a packed lecture hall, brings about a googly-eyed curiosity. Srinivasan writes that this curiosity treads the line between wanting the professor and wanting to be like the professor, and that men and women are socialised to experience their admiration for a senior differently. Men admiring male professors (an admiration that can sometimes also manifest as competition) is a sign that that he has found someone to emulate (and later outshine). Women admiring male professors are caught between wondering if they wish to fuck the professor or be the professor someday. Women's admiration of male professors (or boss or senior) is almost always read as sexual while men's admiration of male professors (or boss or senior) is almost always read as not, regardless of how identification and desire are often entangled and how this dynamic is always already queer. After all, ‘I want to be like you’ is one way of saying ‘I like you’ and ‘I want to have something of you within me’.
But women also find themselves in a position where, if they've actually fucked the professor, then their esteem in the eyes of his colleagues and her classmates goes down, and her future potential in that academic discipline is derailed. I can't imagine a professor leaving his position at university so he can carry on a relationship with a current student without others around him invoking ‘conflict of interest’. I have heard of teenage undergraduate students who have changed universities so the late-thirties male lecturers they were ‘in love with’ could keep their job and good reputation. There is more to sex than simply people expressing honest desires privately, no matter how much we wish it were otherwise. Sex ruins women in a way it doesn't men—that's not a sex thing, it's a patriarchy thing.
Srinivasan suggests that professor-student sex might be an enactment of a revenge fantasy, a significantly milder version of what fuels the rage of sex-deprived incels, pointing out ‘the way that some male professors blend sexual entitlement with intellectual narcissism, seeing sex with women students as the delayed reward for suffering through an adolescence in which brawn or cool were prized more highly than brains’. When geeks and nerds get a taste of power, either in the parochial halls of academia or the helm of Silicon Valley technocracy, sex with the kinds of women who might have rejected them in high school becomes a new frontier. Srinivasan, however, doesn't comment on whether this applies to situations where the genders are switched, or when queerness is involved—the overly discussed Callard throuple is one notorious instance, as are the Jane Gallop case and the Avital Ronnell case. Lacan might say that the possession of knowledge (or even just the impression that one does, regardless of gender) casts a seductive light around the person, granting a power they might deny they possess but is no less potent. The so-called academic star system in the humanities is niche but its celebrities, despite being unknown in the world beyond it, soak up all the bandwidth within departmental gossip, its social media circuits and conferences, with clearly definable winners and a winner-take-all mentality that predictably accompanies all notions of celebrity. For those invested in the maintenance of this zeitgeist, there can be a conviction that the relational norms of non-intellectual-elite ‘normies’ do not apply, and that ‘accountability measures’ suck the avant-garde soul out of a higher education experience.
Marc Maron's character Jacob in the TV show Easy is one such example of an established academic and artist whose success has rewarded him with popularity, lucrative publishing contracts, and sex with young fans including a photographer played by Emily Ratajkowski in the first season. In the third season, his publisher tells him he is losing gigs because he was implicated in a nonfiction-graphic novel about inappropriate sexual behaviour. The author is Beth (Melanie Lynskey), a former postgraduate student with whom he had a brief affair. He confronts her over the phone, and they have a tense meeting over coffee. In a faltering, Kiwi-accented voice, Beth tells him how she travelled across the world to study with him, putting all her life savings in the hopes for a shot at the kind of literary career he has enjoyed. She was married, but her husband knew about the affair. Jacob replies that he ‘had feelings’ for her and that they only had sex once. He goes on to say that he had praised her work generously before they slept together, and then ‘things got weird’. We don’t know why the relationship eventually ends. Regardless, the life-changing career boosts she aches for—introductions to publishers, endorsements, professional and emotional support—never materialise. She wonders if all the good things he had said about her work were things he only said so he could bed her. She worries that the biggest event of her universe at the time might have simply been an insincere flirtation. Briefly, both characters got what they wanted. However, the warmth, intellectual generosity, and professional-advancement potential that initially fuelled an erotically charged but physically platonic relationship comes apart after they consummate their feelings for each other.
A similar dynamic emerges in François Ozon's film L'Amant Double (Double Lover, inspired by Joyce Carol Oates’s Lives of the Twins), where the protagonist Chloe (Marine Vacth) does exactly what Freud warns against: she enters into a romantic relationship with her analyst Paul (Jérémie Renier) and moves in with him. Although he does end the therapeutic relationship before anything physical happens, they kiss moments after he says he has to terminate the therapy because he has developed unprofessional feelings for her. The therapy was warm and supportive, and she reports improved physical and mental health. The post-therapy romance is amorous and tender but he remains a mystery to her, the analytic opacity unbreached despite months of physical intimacy. She learns he has an identical twin brother Louis, also an analyst. She secretly becomes Louis's patient and eventually starts sleeping with him. Louis's advances show a casual disregard for consent, and the sex is often laced with a cruel and forceful energy. ‘When I'm with you, I think of him,’ she says one night, ‘and when I'm with him, I think of you.’ The story ends up being about something much more than the analyst-patient relation, or an affair that pits twins against each other, but as with the relationship depicted in Easy, it illustrates how closing the gap in a forbidden romance creates new dissatisfactions and misrecognitions. Giving in to the transferential compulsion to repeat what was not been worked through did not yield the answers Chloe sought, whether it concerned these men or herself.
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The Right to Sex brings together an ambitious breadth of resources to think with: philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, popular culture, and current events, while sustaining an intellectual humility about topics that defy attempts at quick-fixes and neat syntheses. The work packs a punch that will leave any serious reader reeling. Emancipatory politics can aim to make the world fairer, but the thing that makes sex tick isn't fairness at all. Sometimes the person you want doesn't want you back. Sometimes they do want you, but for unclear reasons it doesn't work out. Sometimes gorillas walk with pretty women on your street. Sometimes the world's sexiest people, such as Jennifer Aniston or Emily Ratajkowski, get cheated on. The successes can feel flimsy, arbirtrary, undeserved. The losses can feel targeted, personal, unbearable. The philosopher Gillian Rose writes in her autobiography Love's Work that ‘There is no democracy in the love relation, only mercy. To be at someone's mercy is dialectical damage [...] Each party [...] is absolute power and absolute vulnerability’. This is another way of saying that there is no right to sex because the thing that makes sex special, elusive, impossible and enticing enough to inspire pursuit nonetheless, is not something entitlement can get you.
Frustration is probably the only inevitable consequence of desire; there are many more ways to be frustrated than to be satisfied. The possibility of satisfaction is itself frustrating—there would be no striving if we were convinced it was impossible to be satisfied. But satisfaction can lead to its own discontentment: the seductive promise of successful conquest is less enticing especially when the distance between the lover and beloved is breached. The blonde bartender might turn out to be a slob, and will most certainly have other interests besides mixing you drinks at home when you're not paying her. The hot professor may turn out to be less sexy in their mundane daily toothbrushing routine than against the backdrop of a whiteboard in a lecture hall. Even a happy long-term relationship has moments of minor, encroaching frustrations and eventually ends with a partner's death that denies love a longer future. The people in the posters on your bedroom ceiling might turn out to be a little too much like you, and that may end up being the worst turn-off of all. Fuckability is circumstantial—so is unfuckability. The relationship we have with our own desire is probably the most interesting relationship there is.
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Works cited
✷ Rachel Aviv, 'Agnes Callard's Marriage of the Minds,' New Yorker, 6 March 2023.
✷ Patrick Blanchfield, 'Why Didn't Elliot Rodger Pay For Sex?' Carte Blanchfield, 28 May 2014.
✷ Andrea Long Chu, 'On Liking Women,' n+1, Issue 30, 2018.
✷ Colleen Flaherty, 'Harassment and Power,' Inside Higher Ed, 19 August 2018.
✷ Sigmund Freud, 'Observations on Transference-Love,' The Freud Reader, trans. James Strachey, edited by Peter Gay (Vintage: 1995).
✷ Lee Konstantinou, 'Avital Ronell and the End of the Academic Star,' Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 August 2018.
✷ Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis: 1977)
✷ Gillian Rose, Love's Work, New York Review of Books, 2011.
✷ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, (Columbia University Press: 2015).
✷ Amia Srinivasan, 'Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?' London Review of Books, Vol. 40, no. 2, March 22, 2018
✷ Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex (Bloomsbury: 2021).
✷ 'This is What the Life of an Incel Looks Like,' VICE News Tonight on HBO, 2018.
✷ Slavoj Žižek, 'Why Did I Sign the Letter In Support of Avital Ronell?' The Philosophical Salon, 2018.
Angelita Biscotti is a sessional Gender Studies academic in Naarm. Angelita's long-form criticism and poetry can be read in the Sydney Review of Books, Liminal, Overland, Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal, Jacobin, and elsewhere. Angelita's photographs of the Free Palestine movement have been published in VICE and Middle East Eye. angelitabiscotti.com.au