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Critical drug studies have developed a significant body of work that illuminates understanding of gender and drug use as well as drug pleasures. However, framing the study of women and their drug pleasures through critical drug studies presents potential limitations. The posthuman turn de-emphasises the primary goal of drug use: a particular subjective experience. Both the language and theoretical frameworks of new materialism potentially distance researchers, as interlocutors, from engaging the human experience of drug pleasures, rendering drug use abstract and unknowable.

In a historical context in which women’s intoxication has invoked shaming and criminalisation, control of their bodies, and silencing of dissent, scholarly activism by and inclusion of women who use drugs should be foundational to critical drug studies. Autoethnography offers a modality by which personal narrative becomes a convention of academic writing. It also presents a way of performing the self critically and authentically within conceptual frameworks that explore the complex, intersectional politics of women’s drug use, ways that are representationally missing in the scholarship. An ethics of care as part of one’s practice of the self proposes a radically different way of framing drug use. The recognition and normalisation of drug pleasures as the complicated, emergent, expressions of ethical self-care that they are for women (and all people who use drugs) promises fertile ground for future scholarly exploration. Research based in the lived experience of women who use drugs will help establish languages that resituate drug use in the phenomenology of their experience.

Wellness has moved beyond its original emancipatory roots to become a mechanism for self-optimisation. In this chapter, the authors examine how wellness transforms or ‘wellness washes’ pleasurable practices into rationalised and instrumentalised ones. The authors argue that one of the key drivers of ‘wellness washing’ is the entanglement of wellness with and in contemporary workplaces. In advance of this analysis, the authors examine digital pleasures, ASMR and digital drugs to examine how pleasures mediated and afforded by the screen are ‘wellness washed’ to better position them as normative cultural practices.

The United States has an uncomfortable relationship with pleasure. Cultural ambivalence is evident in discourses surrounding pleasure and the labeling and treatment of those who act on their desires. Pleasure seeking, generally understood in moral terms, is often medicalized and criminalized (as in the case of pregnancy prevention and drug use), placing questions of how to manage pleasure under the purview of medical and legal actors. At the macrolevel, institutions police pleasure via rules, patterns of action, and logics, while at the microlevel, frontline workers police pleasure via daily decisions about resource distribution. This chapter develops a sociolegal framework for understanding the social control of pleasure by analyzing how two institutions – medicine and criminal justice – police pleasure institutionally and interactionally. Conceptualizing medicine and criminal justice as paternalistic institutions acting as arbiters of morality, I demonstrate how these institutions address two cases of pleasure seeking – drug use and sex – by drawing examples from contemporary drug and reproductive health policy. Section one highlights shared institutional mechanisms of policing pleasure across medicine and criminal justice such as categorization, allocation of professional power, and the structuring of legitimate consequences for pleasure seeking. Section two demonstrates how frontline workers in each field act as moral gatekeepers as they interpret and construct institutional imperatives while exercising discretion about resource allocation in daily practice. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how understanding institutional and interactional policing of pleasure informs sociolegal scholarship about the relationships between medicine and criminal justice and the mechanisms by which institutions and frontline workers act as agents of social control.

Heightened levels of emotions, often negative, accompany the prospect and implementation of organizational changes. The failure to manage the emotions of change is cited as a reason for implementation problems and resistance to change. In this chapter, we examine the influences and consequences of emotions in the context of a large merger. Specifically, we examine the relationships between three cognitive assessments of the merger and the emotional reaction of pleasure toward the merger. With regard to consequences, we explore how pleasure with the merger relates to the length and affective tone of written suggestions for organizational improvements and postmerger attitudes of job satisfaction and turnover intention. Implications of our results are drawn for both scholars and organizational change agents.

Gabrielle Civil, a Black feminist performance artist and professor, discusses developing and teaching her “Pleasure Syllabus,” a three-lecture module for a mandatory first-year undergraduate writing course. Grounded in Black feminism, especially adrienne maree brown's call for “pleasure activism” and Audre Lorde's embrace of the erotic, this syllabus aimed to consider and activate embodied knowledge. Contemplating pleasure (“what does and does not feel good”) also became a way to confront rape culture. With this module, Civil hoped to intervene in the rampant sexual violence happening on college campuses. She acknowledges the challenges of negotiating trauma and gender-based violence in the classroom. (Teaching about desire, sexuality, violation, and consent on Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic was especially tough.) She shares specific strategies that supported her pedagogy and offers some suggestions for curricular planning while emphasizing that no one-size-fits-all approach exists to trauma-informed teaching. Her curriculum included visual art, music, graphics, and movement exercises along with critical/creative writing. Civil includes her actual “Pleasure Syllabus” and her module's signature assignment.

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to explore the experiences of male customers of escorts who provide a sexual service known as the “girlfriend experience” or GFE.

Methodology/approach – A combination of depth interviews and netnography is used to study how men experience the GFE.

Findings – Unlike most customer-prostitute encounters, the GFE involves more than the exchange of money for sex; to derive the full value of the experience, the consumer must not only pay the escort but must also provide her with sexual pleasure and emotional intimacy. The resulting encounter is more romantic and intimate than purely sexual in nature. Findings are organized around three central themes: consumption of covert (i.e., secretive) pleasure, consumer fantasies, and the ways in which consumers cocreate value in the consumption experience.

Originality/value of the chapter – This research explores how consumers engage in a form of consumption that has been largely overlooked by consumer researchers, and how consumers experience the blurring of boundaries between purely transactional service encounters and those that entail a deeper connection between provider and consumer. In addition to shedding light on this consumption context in the form of description, this research illuminates some aspects of GFE consumption that are theoretically interesting (beyond the context itself) to consumer researchers.

Past research has shown there is a relationship between body image, sexual behavior, and pleasure. However, the majority of this research has centered on heterosexual participants. In this analysis, the author considers how this relationship between body image, sexual behavior, and pleasure may look within women and genderqueer individuals who are all AFAB (assigned female at birth) with 26 out of 30 participants identifying as LGBTQIA+. The author examines perceptions of body size, body hair, and genitals to consider how intersections of social structures – specifically internalized sexism, racism, and misogyny – influence the participants’ experience of sexual interactions. Both resistance and embodiment of traditional gender norms, even as queer women and genderqueer individuals, were examined in these narratives. The majority of the moments where traditional gender norms are examined describe situations when the participants were sexually interacting with cis-gendered men.

This article seeks to recover and uncover the non-utilitarian excess (jouissance) in crime and punishment since Kant. Jouissance is sharply contrasted with Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment. The latter is analyzed as the predominant sensation of our penal system which until today structures the subjects and institutions of punishment from within. Jouissance, on the other hand, is obscured in philosophies of punishment that attempt to account for the will to punish but ultimately fail to cover over the excess that constitutes penal theories and practices. Whether it is visible in Kant’s punitive fervor, in the exploration of perversion in de Sade and E. A. Poe, in theories of deterrence and prevention or punitive convictions in our contemporary legal culture, Freud’s discovery of a realm beyond the pleasures principle remains crucial for the understanding of the motives for crime and punishment. The essay concludes with a discussion of Nietzsche and his exploration of the ramifications of recognizing the role of new affects in crime and punishment.

The notion of sexual health has become a buzzword across various spheres, including the scientific, political, and social arenas. In a similar manner, discussions about the subject of disability and sexuality are commonly articulated through the lens of sexual health and “healthy sexualities.” Greater focus has been placed on issues of protection, abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, and unplanned pregnancy. Opportunities to talk about sex, desire, and pleasure is missing in this discourse. Drawing on my experience conducting studies about disability and sexuality, I interrogate the (over)reliance and unproblematized use in terms of the language of sexual health and healthy sexuality when it comes to people labeled/with intellectual disabilities.

Literature reveals that a positive store environment is likely to be a driver to enhance buying experiences and stimulate customers purchase decision. This study further investigates the perception of restaurant environment. A field survey is conducted in the Chiayi City, Taiwan by collecting 398 usable samples. The questionnaire is based on past studies of store environment attributes, therefore, considers ambient, design, and social factors. The study finds that a high correlation exists between ambient factor and design factor. It suggests that they could be viewed as a conjunctive dimension. Furthermore, one result indicates that primary and secondary emotions create different levels of impact on planned behaviors.