Conference: Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis- Johnny Golding

Prof. Johnny Golding is Professor of Philosophy & Fine Art at the RCA where she leads the PhD Research Group ‘Entanglement’. Internationally renowned for her philosophy-poetic enactments and sound-scape exhibitions, her research covers the entangled dimensionalities of Radical Matter, an intra-disciplinary arena of art, philosophy and the wild sciences.

Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis is a day-long conference to accompany Solitary Pleasures, a group exhibition at the Freud Museum.

The conference, like the exhibition, reveals masturbation as a topic that can transform our understanding of human subjectivity and sexuality. Perhaps the most common form of human eroticism, it is also one of the least theorised. The conference will explore our complex sexual, erotic, and intimate encounters with ourselves and one another by viewing masturbation as an all-inclusive practice – gay, lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, trans, queer, +, offering possibilities of a shared exchange and an intimate encounter between couples, lovers and strangers in ways that redefine desires and eroticism’s possibilities.

Conference themes:

History – the cultural history of masturbation
Talking – masturbation in clinical practice and literature
Educating – masturbation in sexual health and wellbeing
Making – masturbation in creativity and art practice