An Infernal Grove Study Group
Appetite, Euphoria & The Inevitability of Coming Down

Thursday Dec 1, 4:30-6:00pm Eastern

Online via ZOOM or in person in NYC:

The Fisher Center 
DANCE STUDIO 2, 2nd Floor
19 E 31st St, NYC

DIRECTIONS

Moderators: Michelle Lhooq,   MikikiLiz Roberts,  Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke.

Please RSVP as soon as possible. Space is limited.


Readings: 
Kane Race, (pdf), “Exceptional Sex: How Drugs Have Come to Mediate Sex in Gay Discourse”, from Pleasure Consuming Medicine , 2009

Amia Srinivasan, (pdf), “Watching Porn with my Students”, The Right to Sex, 2021

Infernal Grove Study Groups bring together artists and writers with lived experience of drug use who have a range of relationships to sobriety and its alternatives. We started the groups out of thirst for rigorous, emotionally dense discussion of drugs and drug use, where entry isn’t conditional on abstinence.  The groups are founded on curiosity and care.

This session was built around Infernal Grove member Mikiki’s screening at the Whitney Museum  – Being & Belonging for the Day With(out) Art. We will discuss excerpts from Kane Race’s Pleasure Consuming Medicine and Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex. WE DON’T CARE IF YOU DO THE READING. WE WANT YOU JUST AS YOU ARE.  

Race’s text examines the relationship between drug-taking and sex in queer communities, positing that in certain contexts drugs open a space of “exceptional sex” where participants experience liberated disinhibition.


“For those of us who study drugs and drug use, the power of official discourse can seem inescapable…Race’s book demonstrates the critical importance of examining that framework.”
–Wendy Chapkis, Contemporary Sociology

Srinivasan’s book describes the effects of misogyny and white supremacy on women’s desire, and delineates the relationship between epistemology and sex.  We were drawn in particular to her measured discourse on the ways pornography imprints sexual subjectivity; and to her constant insistence on the central role of capitalism in these matters. 

“Amia Srinivasan is an unparalleled and extraordinary writer―no one X-rays an argument, a desire, a contradiction, a defense mechanism quite like her. The Right to Sex is a bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing.” 
–Jia Tolentino, Staff Writer, The New Yorker



Michelle Lhooq is a journalist writing about drugs.

ig: @the_infernal_grove

 The Infernal Grove  Always Against Professionalism

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Sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Mellon Foundation.

This project is made possible, in part, with funds from the Media Arts AssistanceFund, a regrant partnership of NYSCA and Wave Farm, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.