CLAS: Colby Liberal Arts Symposium

Pleasurescapes: How Pleasure is Shaped Through Space at Colby College

Diamond 342

I was interested in studying the factors that shape the social construction of pleasure at Colby College as a matter of local interpretive practice. Based primarily on the methods and strategies of ethnographic research, my research focuses on the mediating impacts of Colbys local culture on students understandings of pleasure, examining the local material, cultural, and institutional factors that shape the landscape of pleasurebased discourses at Colby. It asks: In what ways does Colby College mediate between the dominant cultural discourses of pleasure and the landscape of locally shared meanings and practices that students must negotiate as part of their Colby experience? To address this question, I conducted indepth semistructured interviews with Colby students as a means of exploring the shared meanings of pleasure at Colby through the voices of those most directly impacted by them. Through inductive analysis of interviews and other available texts, my research traces the local student use of sexual pleasure discourses circulating in dominant culture, including those concerning hook ups and masturbation, as well as discourses of shame, desire, deviance, agency, and liberation. Drawing on theoretical insights from Foucault and contemporary Marxist feminisms, I focus on the conditions under which gender and space becomes a more or less salient factor shaping students understandings and experiences of Colbys pleasure culture at the intersection of sexuality, race, class, and other categorizations of difference. My research project also addresses the ways that power operates to normalize some constructions of pleasure and marginalize others, and to configure the meanings of sex in relation to alternate sources of pleasure.

https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/clas/2015/program/263