Stephanie Koziej

This article argues that through her songs and music videos Pagan Poetry, Cocoon and Hidden Place, versatile artist Björk is able to carve out a space for erotic tenderness. This erotic tenderness will be unearthed as a queer or minor sexuality, in the sense that it goes against a phallic and genital majoritarian account of sexuality. Tender sexuality might not be obviously queer, yet a detour through the early work of Freud will show how our hegemonic account of sexuality is built upon a repression of such a tender sexuality. Freud’s psychoanalysis is only able to regard this sexual tenderness in a negative vein as a pathological symptom. Supported primarily by the works of Deleuze, Guattari and Muñoz, this article will propose that Björk’s artistry is able to produce a line of flight outside of this tender-less sexuality, liberating an otherwise repressed minor tender sexuality through a visually and sonically becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-BwO and becoming-molecular.

With more than 10 million views, the TED Talks of couples therapist and author Esther Perel strike a chord with the general public. How to sustain desire in a loving relationship? she asks, while giving glimpses into the discontents couples face when navigating tender love and erotic desire. This framework comes from clinical psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell (Can Love Last?) who returns to an often forgotten Freudian text in which the split between tenderness and sensuality is positioned at the core of civilized and healthy adult sexuality. My paper complements these popular but insubstantial accounts on love and desire, recognizing their urgency, yet redressing their unexplored critical potential, by returning to the sex, gender and racial assumptions of Freud’s tender-sensual split. This paper suggests that at the heart of Freud’s work lays a crucial yet overlooked concept, tenderness. Simultaneously I claim that his theory of adult sexuality is built upon a taboo on adult erotic tenderness. I return to his “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (Freud, 1905/1973c) and “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (Freud, 1912/1957) to expose and critique the implicit imperative that healthy civilized adult sexuality requires the repression of tenderness. Methodologically, I follow Laplanche’s method of historico-structural approach, combined with a feminist-queer critique of the phallic and teleological foundations of Freud’s theory of sexuality. I suggest that Mitchell and Perel’s clinical practice goes radically against Freud’s implicit taboo. Most significantly it urges us to rethink phallic sexuality and subjectivity as tender.