Attached Paper In-person November Annual Meeting 2026

Wet Dreams and Demonic Kink: Liminal Erotics, Fluidity, and the Future of Sex

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

This paper argues that kink, understood not as sexual transgression but as an embodied practice of negotiating power, vulnerability, and pleasure, offers a critical site for theorizing "demonic possibilities": the capacity of liminal peoples to create joy, relationality, and livable worlds within and against systems designed to render them invisible. Drawing on Black studies, Indigenous thought, and queer theory, I propose that kink enacts a demonic ethics born from outside the dominant order, seeping through its fissures. The paper grounds this argument theologically, revealing how Christian moral frameworks imposed normative sexuality as a colonial project, and refuses to theorize kink as universally liberatory, instead attending to how race, gender, and coloniality shape access to erotic world-making. I offer demonic kink ethics as a framework that refuses the reproductive, marital, and national logics through which religious traditions have organized sexual meaning.