Just as children express and reveal their conscious and unconscious fantasies through imaginative play, so do adults through their sexual play. In relationships where anxiety is relatively absent and where trust, empathy, and intimacy prevail, adults play sexual games that have variety, playfulness, and flexibility, with the ultimate goal of sexual satisfaction. When such play becomes rigid, repetitive, ritualistic, and compulsory, and when the game becomes the goal, often accompanied by anxiety, intense ambivalence, and a strong predominance of aggressive feelings over tender, loving feelings, psychoanalysts talk about paraphilia (perversion). This roundtable will bring together participants from different disciplines to contribute to this subject.

Arnold Davidson is Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Comparative Literature, the Divinity School, and the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. He is also Director of the France-Chicago Center, Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry, Professor of the History of Political Philosophy at the University of Pisa, and Director of the European Network in Contemporary French Philosophy. He is the author of The Emergence of Sexuality and co-author of a book of conversations with Pierre Hadot, La philosophie comme manière de vivre. He is the co-editor of the official French anthology of the writings of Michel Foucault and series editor of the thirteen volumes of the English language edition of Foucault's courses at the Collège de France. His major writings are in Italian and French as well as in English. Next year he will give the "Venetian Lectures" at the University of Venice on philosophy, improvisation and jazz.

Otto Kernberg is Director of the Personality Disorders Institute at The New York Presbyterian Hospital, Westchester Division, and Professor of Psychiatry at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Dr. Kernberg is past President of the International Psychoanalytic Association. He is also Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He is the author of 12 books and co-author of 12 others. His most recent books are Aggressivity, Narcissism and Self-destructiveness in the Psychotherapeutic Relationship: New Developments in the Psychopathology and Psychotherapy of Severe Personality Disorders; Contemporary Controversies in Psychoanalytic Theory, Techniques and their Applications; Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality: Focusing on Object Relations (with John F Clarkin and Frank E. Yeomans); and Handbook of Dynamic Psychotherapy for Higher Level Personality Pathology (with Eve Caligor and John F. Clarkin).

Richard Krueger is a psychiatrist and Medical Director of the Sexual Behavior Clinic at New York State Psychiatric Institute. He is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is board certified in internal medicine, psychiatry, forensic psychiatry, and addiction psychiatry. He consults on individuals who have committed sexual crimes for the New York State Office of Mental Health, and his research interests and publications have focused on the psychopharmacological treatment of aggressive and compulsive sexual behavior. He was recently appointed to the Sexual Disorders workgroup for DSM-V.

Linda Williams teaches courses on popular moving-image genres (pornography, melodrama, and "body genres" of all sorts) at the University of California at Berkeley. She has recently taught courses on Oscar Micheaux and Spike Lee, eastern and western melodrama, film theory, pornography and the wider phenomenon of screening sex in mainstream American film. Her edited books include Viewing Positions, a volume on film spectatorship, Reinventing Film Studies (with Christine Gledhill), and a collection of essays on pornography, Porn Studies. In 1989 Williams published a study of pornographic film entitled Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and "the Frenzy of the Visible". In 2001 she published a book on racial melodrama, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White, from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Her latest book, Screening Sex, chronicles the revelation and concealment of sex in movies, from Edison's The Kiss to new media.

Susan Winemaker studied philopsophy at McGill University and classic French cuisine at the Rosemount Culinary Institute in Montreal. She pursued cooking professionally in Montreal, New Orleans, and finally London, where she moved in 1998. At the turn of the millennium, she traded in her chef's whites for black rubber and whips, becoming London's most dedicated professional dominatrix. Winemaker is the author of Concertina: The Life and Loves of a Dominatrix, a memoir of extreme and indulgent tastes published in 2008. Currently Susan spends time in London and Toronto, working on her second book and learning German.