SDS Emerging Project Grant Awarded to The Pleasure Project

The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, Queer and Trans Research Lab at the University of Toronto has granted The Pleasure Project, led by Dr. Jordache Ellapen, an Emerging Project Grant for 2023-24. Grants are awarded annually to UofT faculty members and graduate students whose scholarly and community work attends to entrenched and emerging social and political problems affecting LGBTIQ2SA+ and BIPOC lives and communities.

Primary Investigators:
Jordache A. Ellapen, Assistant Professor and Program Director of WGSS, Department of Historical Studies, UTM and WGSI
Ferdinand Lopez, Ph.D. candidate in the Women and Gender Studies Institute
M. Nicole Horsley, Assistant Professor of African Diaspora Studies. Ithaca College
Cornel Grey, Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Western University
Elliott Tilleczek, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology and Sexual Diversity Studies.

The Pleasure Project is organized around a key set of questions: How do LGBTIQ2S+ and QTBIPOC understood pleasure in the afterlives of settler colonialism, slavery, and apartheid? How is pleasure used to resist and critique but also to create social worlds that evade surveillance in the face of LGBTIQ2S+ and QTBIPOC structural violence? What is at stake when an analytic of pleasure interrogates complexities of racialized sexual subjectivities? What significance does pleasure hold for expanded understandings of freedom and politics? The Pleasure Project explores the ways in which scholars, artists, and sex workers, for instance, utilize pleasure as method and praxis, re-directing us to the messiness of the body and the sensorial regimes. We are interested in examining how an analytic of pleasure can expand and disrupt the boundaries of queerness and queer theory by moving us beyond binary frameworks. In this project, we will not only examine pleasure as a politic, a method, a praxis, or a component of ‘self-care,’ we will explore the embodied, somatic, messy and fleshy sexual practices that people engage in to access pleasure. We are interested in the relationships between pleasure and the materiality of the body and our lived experiences. The Pleasure Project argues that pleasure, erotics, sex, and joy must be central to any form of social justice work as we collectively imagine new social worlds as an urgent political project.