Congratulations to PhD student Pamela Tsui for receiving the 2023 Best Graduate Student Paper Award from the Sexualities section of the American Sociological Association. The winning paper, “Erotic Capabilities: A Feminist Analysis of Sexual Justice and Pleasure in Heterosexual Sex Partying,” is published online in the journal Sexualities.
In her article, Tsui considers how sexuality can act as a tool of empowerment under patriarchy. Tsui develops Nussbaum's capabilities approach to construct a critical framework of erotic capabilities for evaluating what and how social conditions give rise to possibilities of equitable, enjoyable, and empowering sex in the lived experiences of heterosexuality. Based on a 29-month ethnography of a sex party club in Hong Kong, the article sheds light on how sexual communities may – or may not – be a reflexive space of empowerment for participants in different social locations.
Read the full article here (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13634607211060507).