We all know that sex involves a quest for pleasure, that sexual
palates vary across people's lifespans, and that playful
experimentations play a key role in how people discover their diverse
sexual turn-ons and turn-offs. Yet little attention has been paid to
thinking through the interconnections of sex and play, sexuality and
playfulness. In Many Splendored Things from Goldsmiths Press,
Susanna Paasonen considers these interconnections. Paasonen examines the
notions of playfulness and play as they shed light on the urgency of
sexual pleasures, the engrossing appeal of sex, and the elasticity of
sexual desires, and considers their connection to categories of
identity. Drawing on a broad range of scholarship on sexuality, play,
and the media, Paasonen moves from the conceptual to the concrete,
examining advice literature on sexual play, the vernacular aesthetics of
the Fifty Shades series, girls' experiences of online sexual
role-playing, popular media coverage of age-play, and Jan Soldat's
documentary films on BDSM culture.

Paasonen argues that play in
the realm of sexuality involves experimentation with what bodies can
feel and do and what people may imagine themselves as doing, liking, and
preferring. Play involves the exploration of different bodily
capacities, appetites, orientations, and connections. Occasionally
strained, dark, and even hurtful in the forms that it takes and the
sensory intensities that it engenders, sex presses against previously
perceived and imagined horizons of embodied potentiality. Play pushes
sexual identifications into motion.