(Un)Box the Soap Podcast Ep.8: Uses of Absence: Sex Negativity
Jan 16, 2026
Tessel Vaeneboer, a PhD researcher bridging sexology and literary form, and Marija Cetinić, an assistant professor studying negativity and feminization, discuss sex negativity through feminist theory and psychoanalysis. They explore second-wave celibacy as political refusal, filmic abstraction in Melancholia, and how absence shapes politics, form, and critical thought.
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Sex As Inherent Contradiction
- Sex negativity treats sexuality as an irreducible contradiction embedded in knowledge gaps and the unconscious.
- This reframes sexual politics away from moral judgment toward interrogating mediation and limits of knowledge.
Threefold Role Of Negativity
- The group frames negativity threefold: as a method, a formalism, and a modifier that destabilizes sexual identity.
- Negativity exposes incommensurability rather than reducing it to nothing or an identity category.
Double Valence Of Negativity
- Negativity has a double valence: it fuels resistance but also complicates organization and formal political commitment.
- Bodies become sites where negativity is negated through determination, exploitation, and identity formation.
