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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black">Dear all,</span><span style="color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black"> </span><span style="color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black">This week at the Critical Antiquities workshop, we are delighted to host Giulia Sissa (UCLA) for her paper, ‘Forget Sexuality! Sensuality in Ancient Erotic Cultures.’ The event will be held on <b>Wednesday,
May 4 10-11:30am (Sydney time)</b>. That translates to the following times elsewhere:</span><span style="color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black"> </span><span style="color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black">Singapore: Wednesday, April 20 8-9:30am</span><span style="color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black">Tokyo: Wednesday, April 20 9-10:30am</span><span style="color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black">Los Angeles: Tuesday, April 19 5-6:30pm</span><span style="color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black">Mexico City: Tuesday, April 19 7-8:30pm</span><span style="color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black">Chicago: Tuesday, April 19 7-8:30pm</span><span style="color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black">New York City: Tuesday, April 19 8-9:30pm<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt"><span style="color:black"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black">Here is the abstract:</span><span style="color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black">In all societies, a love life is complicated. It is shaped by ideas, norms, mores, emotions, sensations and manners of living the body. All this is a matter of concern, inquiry, regulations and representations
across a variety of discourses (most of them normative, some of them performative), of domains of knowledge, of social practices and of inexhaustible aesthetic creativity. </span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:-webkit-standard;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black">Ancient societies are no less complex. The erotic is a matter of desire, pleasure, bodies, institutions. By focusing on these aspects of the erotic experience as, precisely, an experience, we resolutely
go beyond a pragmatic of the sexual acts; beyond the controversial notion of “sexuality”; beyond sex as power and, above all, beyond the dogma of a premodern “before” – before an interpretive approach to what is felt, before the emergence of an erotic lifestyle,
before the notion of erotic inclinations. This is not the quest for an “already”. Quite the opposite, we should bring to the fore what was truly relevant in the erotic cultures of the ancient world: sensuality. </span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:-webkit-standard;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black">In ancient societies, sensuality is far more important than sex. To be sensual, or sensuous, means to pursue the pleasure of the senses. Now, among the senses, there is touch, and touch is the essence
of sex, as the congress of bodies. Think of Aristotle! Sensuality includes contact of the skin and the flesh, of course, but also the pleasures of all the other sense organs. A capacious attitude that encompasses all kinds of perceptions, sensuality is the
overarching erotic experience. While it may well include coition, which is merely a kind of haptic interaction among others, it cannot be reduced to the execution of one particular sexual act. Sensuality involves caresses, embraces, kisses, gazes and any other
wishful, mnemonic or imaginary, aesthetic approach to another person. It is about actual sensations, and about their possibilities. It vastly exceeds, therefore, the mechanics of penetration, an act that, although over-interpreted and overrated in contemporary
scholarship, is seldom mentioned in ancient literary sources, and for a very good reason. Except in medical contexts, in comedy and in otherwise chastising genres of discourse, genital or anal penetration was irrelevant. Sensuality, on the contrary, captures
the actual concerns of ancient thinkers and writers about <i>eros</i> and <i>amor</i>. Far from opposing love and sex, Homeric characters, Sappho and her Greek and Roman successors, Plato and Ovid understand the erotic / amorous life inseparably from a quest
for the pleasure of all the senses. They offer either a sorrowful, hyper-realistic phenomenology of its failure, or a confident art of taking pleasure, or multihued -- comic, ironic, brutal, nuanced -- manners of praise and blame. </span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:-webkit-standard;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black">We hope to see you there,</span><span style="color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black">Tristan and Ben</span><span style="color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><b><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:black">Tristan Bradshaw</span></b><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:black"><br>
Lecturer, School of Liberal Arts | Co-director, Critical Antiquities Network<br>
Faculty of the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities | Building 19 Room 1085</span><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:red"><br>
</span><b><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:black">University of Wollongong</span></b><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:black"> NSW 2522 Australia<br>
<b>T </b>+61 2 4221 3850</span><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:red"><br>
</span><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:#0028C9">uow.edu.au</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:black">Honorary Associate</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:black">The University of Sydney<br>
</span></b><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:black">School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:black"><br>
University of Wollongong CRICOS: 00102E</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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