Over the past two decades, queer theory has both displaced sex from its privileged center and expanded queerness to encompass everything from environmental collapse to war, domesticity to prison abolition. While its early frameworks enabled such expansion, this shift has often sidelined desire and pleasure as key objects and methods of inquiry. This lecture asks: why is everybody so afraid of being turned on? Tracing queer theory’s material and political histories in US academia and its global circulation, I contrast Anglo-American dominance with other, “hornier” geographies of queer thought. I argue that thinking through desire and pleasure is essential not only to sex and sexuality, but to understanding the wider world in the twenty-first century.

João Florêncio is Professor of Gender Studies (Sex Media & Sex Cultures) at Linköping University, Sweden. His work draws from queer studies, media studies, visual culture and cultural studies to investigate the ways in which the queer body has been produced, policed, and contested as a political site of creative and affective sexual world-making in modern and contemporary cultures. He is the author of Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig (Routledge, 2020), and, with Liz Rosenfeld, of Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising (Rutgers University Press, 2025), among several peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, op-eds, and catalogue essays.

Saluti istituzionali: Raul Calzoni (Direttore DLLCS) ed Elisabetta Consonni (Immaginare Orlando) | moderano: Stefano Mudu e Alessandra Goggio (Università di Bergamo)

Conferenza in lingua inglese

Comitato organizzatore: Martina Censi, Cristian Pallone, Giuseppe Previtali

Info–giuseppe.previtali@unibg.it - cristian.pallone@unibg.it

La prenotazione per l’evento non è necessaria

In collaborazione con: Immaginare Orlando