Saskia Vogel on taboos and the importance of uncovering them.
What are peoples personal taboos and how are they created? Through her talk on TABOO Saskia Vogel challenges us to explore our fantasies in order to understand ourselves fully. Video by Roscoe Lee.
About the speaker
“I am going to look at how allowing ourselves to explore our fantasies can help unlock insight into ourselves and our relationship to the world, the connection between creativity and the erotic, and the power of permission.”
Saskia Vogel is a Berlin based writer who has written on the themes of gender, power, and sexuality for publications such as Granta, The White Review, The Offing, and The Quietus. Her translations include work by leading female authors. On the last Friday of March she will be talking about the invisible TABOOs that we carry with us: ideas and knowledge that we don't know are there or have never thought to question. These TABOOs might be a hurdle in how we express ourselves creatively or how we are able to communicate with others and how receptive we are to the world.
–I am curious about the stories that shape our lives: stories we're told or stories we tell about ourselves.
Favorite quotes from this talk See all
By investigating our taboos rather than turning away from them, we might find keys to parts of ourselves we didn't know were locked. We don't have to fling the doors open, but it's good to know what's inside.
When something is taboo there is a lot of baggage to contend with before we can start asking the really interesting questions. Taboo is, in the way we are talking about it today, a hurdle and apprehension, something that keeps us from communicating honestly and openly. And it can lead to us censuring ourselves.
Now days, I think most of us consume our porn all by our selves, with the rare exception of a festival like this or Cinekink in the States or the Porn Film Fest in Berlin - places that ask of the audience to consider the art of the sex film, not just it's utility.
So what does this solitary, anti social experience mean for our fantasy lives? I think, how we consume porn has changed our relationship to it. And because it's ubiquity it's much easier to treat it purely as a tool, a trigger and not much more. And as triggers, I don't think we really... If you are just going to something as a trigger, I don't think it needs to be of a particularly good quality. I think you just need a provocative framework that kind of does it for you... And I'm just talking from a personal experience.
In addition to the provocative framework, the trigger, I now look at this fantasy as a way for me to sort of take my temperature. How I fantasize tells me about how I'm feeling about myself and how I feel in the world at any given point. And I think this kind of increase sits alongside things like dream interpretation or psycho analysis, you know, places where you go in your life to discover new things about yourself.
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