Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman. Sex, or, the Unbearable. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. [Book Review]

<div>Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman’s Sex, or the unbearable is an experimental work of queer-theory-inflected psychoanalytic cultural criticism, a collaborative dialogue “in which theory, politics, and close textual analysis encounter the pedagogical necessity of responding to the provocations of otherness” (ix). The text forms a dialogic exploration of multimedia representations of sex, loosely understood as a scene of relationality—the experiences and events by which we encounter otherness and experience ourselves,</div><div>including processes of negotiation, the unbearable, hopes, anxieties, the abject, etc. (viii). The authors ask and explore how “sex in the absence of optimism” could be thought, desired, or conceptualised."</div>