Artwork by kd diamond // Photos from Efrain Gonzalez, Julia Moses, & Leather Archives & Museum
We are collaborating with CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at CUNY on Power of Leather, a series running from October 2024 to May 2025 that features many members of the Kink Out extended family. Highlights:
Thur 10/17/24: Racialized Erotics of Pleasure in Leather
Tue 11/12/24: The Abject: A Performance by Empress Wu
Thur 1/30/25: Exigent Sadism
Thur 3/27/25: Fantasies Identity Can't Hold: Leathersex and Trans Experience
Spring 2025: KINK OUT: INCARNATE
Power of Leather is a series of in-person dialogues, interactive performances, and community events exploring leathersex, sadomasochism, and leather culture.
Leathersex is public; transpiring in dungeons and alleyways, transforming them into queer counterpublics. Leathersex facilitates experiences at the edge (of ourselves, identity, consent), inviting us to discover what lies on the other side. Leathersex eroticizes power relations, often through scripts of racialized and gendered desire. While such scripts are inseparable from their violent histories and institutions, by staging them in leathersex, we can open up space for experimentation and transformation. Leather culture is profoundly communal, imagining and practicing queer kinship, queer temporalities, and queer desires in subcultural, and often subterranean, spaces.
Leather knowledge is stored in boots, slings, cans of crisco, and the hallowed halls of dungeons. As such, each event joins leather community members, academics and artists, opening up space for embodied, erotic and object-oriented knowledge. The series foregrounds leatherdykes, trans leatherpeople, and sex workers whose histories intersect with but depart significantly from those of cis-gay leathermen and straight BDSM players.
Power of Leather explores leather imaginaries through performance, dialogue, sculpture, film, discussions, and play.
The series ends with KINK OUT: INCARNATE, our interactive art installation and party that will invite you all to embody what you’ve learned along the way.
SPEAKERS:
KING COBRA, Ariane Cruz, Mama Vi Johnson, Yin Q, Ze R., Ignacio Rivera, Avgi Saketopoulou, Kassandra Sparks, Susan Stryker, Laura Westengard and Empress Wu.
Find the full schedule with individual events at linktr.ee/clagspowerofleather