Queer Utilitarianism

Since the 2014 publication of the volume Of Sexual Irregularities and Other Writings on Sexual Morality, a range of scholarship based on Jeremy Bentham’s manuscripts on sexuality has opened up new lines of inquiry for queer history as well as for utilitarianism. The three essays in this special issue demonstrate how Bentham’s sexuality papers may be necessary for understanding fundamental questions about how we judge pleasure as individual persons (Tsin Yen Koh), about the failure of Effective Altruism (EA) to account for pleasure (Jeremias Koh), and about the experience of masochistic sexual pleasure (Heather Heckman-McKenna). Each of these provocative essays models a strategy for putting these sexuality papers to use, as a corrective to the normative models of aesthetic judgment that, according to Bentham, have for so long been used to justify oppression by those with sinister interest.

Speaker: Pr Guyonne Leduc, Université de Lille

Round table participants:

• Tsin Yen Koh, National University of Singapore
• Jeremias Koh, National University of Singapore
• Heather Heckman-McKenna, University of Missouri

Revue d'études benthamienne, Special issue, Queer Utilitarianism