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Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia by Avgi Saketopoulou is a thorough and unique addition to the discussion on trauma and methods of what we do with the trauma we experience. Saketopoulou provides readers with a full examination of limit-consent, which encourages risk rather than protection, and explores how sexuality can be used to explore personal trauma. While the book was hard for me to understand at times because I had not heard of many of the terms and needed to research them, it opened my mind to an alternative to healing trauma that is sure to become a new area of exploration in the therapeutic field.

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Filled with case studies and examples, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia by Avgi Saketopoulou opens up the discussion on trauma and how sexuality can be a way of exploring our trauma rather than focusing on healing it. It is a risky addition to the field, but one that is so important.

While the book is deeply academic, Saketopoulou tries to make the terms and discussions accessible. It did take me a few reads to understand what Saketopoulou was trying to portray, and for that I wish that the book was easier to understand to reach a wider reader base. However, I did give this book five stars because the discussion and new ideas on how to handle trauma and how trauma can be connected to sexuality was groundbreaking. It will inform my work in the mental health field.

Academic readers interested in learning about alternative ways to handle trauma and how sexuality can be linked to handling trauma will be enlightened by Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia by Avgi Saketopoulou. It is a heavily researched tome, and one that has the power to change the mental health field.

For several years I've been telling people that Ellen Samuels' Fantasties of Identification is my favorite recent academic book, but this one is my new one. It's psychoanalysis, so surprising that I am into it, but I think I must be Laplanchean rather than Freudian. Looking forward to others of Saketopoulou's work (the co-authored one with Ann Pellegrini is up next I think) and quite sure this is going to show up referenced in my own future writing.
Major points for my reference:
-crtiique of human aspects 'affirmative consent' cannot encompass
-Laplanchean understanding of human "identity" made up of 1) enignma 2) Otherness and 3) the social milieu in which we come into being
-limit consent as an alternative
-discussion of trauma - traumatophobia, traumatophilia - as well as repetition, memory, etc

No better time to discuss these topics as we are plagued by Orientalist wellness and fascistic measures of scientism and traumatophobia, Avgi Saketopoulou seduces the reader with an examination of consent. That invisible cornerstone traverses fear and apprehension between mental health, sex, desire, and race. I've been waiting for a book like this for so long!