RELIEF OCEAN
Studies in Gender and Sexuality July 3, 2025 Vishal Jugdeo
The essay explores the spiritual and mystical dimensions of affective states experienced during depression, sickness, psychedelia, art, queer love, friendship, and grief. It begins with a reflection on the writer's artistic collaboration with his late ex-boyfriend Billy, who died in December 2024 after a multiyear battle with cancer. Drawing on Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet and Jackie Wang's Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect, the essay connects threads through the writer's recent filmic collaborations with intimate interlocutors and communities in India and Guyana, sites of his ancestral lineage. It asks how the oceanic might open new conceptions of collective and personal resistance on a vast scale.