Sailee Khurjekar will present her paper Defining Obscenity: Awkward Art and Perverse Pleasures.

 Abstract:

The idea of the obscene is capacious, encompassing a range of emotions that pertain to one’s disgust, repugnance, shock, allure, and offense towards its objects. Obscenity refers to art, behaviour, or language that have the power to trigger or prompt these emotions. Obscenity appears to unite a claim about the qualities of an object and a range of appropriate felt responses. When we say an object is obscene, we tend to mean it has debased qualities that merit offense, repugnance, and disgust. I want to tease out the most perspicuous way to set out what makes something obscene and how it maps onto artworks. The first step of the philosophical project examines paradigm cases of obscenity to show what features are markers of the obscene; and the second step of the philosophical project examines the phenomenology of the obscene. I centre my discussion around two artworks: Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (1814) and Rick Gibson’s Foetus Earrings (1987).

 Trigger Warning: The themes and the content of the artworks that are discussed are unusual, sensitive, and often downright perverse. The material concerns bestiality, sexual violence, paedophilia, symphorophilia, and people’s attraction to the representations of these things. I have tried to handle these issues as sensitively as possible.