Fin de Sexe? A Symposium on Sexuality
In brief
Date - 27 June 2024
Venue - Lecture Theatre G.03, 50 George Square and online
Keynote speaker - Professor Heike Bauer (Birkbeck, University of London)
About the event
‘Fin de Sexe?’ is a one-day symposium that explores how sex, broadly construed, was theorised at the turn of the twentieth century. In doing so, it will place particular emphasis on how sexual types and practices emerged from, and between, scientific and ‘non-scientific’ disciplines. Panels will explore the diverse feelings and representations these modes of thinking about sex invited from such writers, those being written about, and their inevitable intersections.
This symposium was organised by two English Literature PhD candidates, Ash Jayamohan and Claudia Sterbini. It is supported by The University of Edinburgh’s Student Experiences Grant and sponsored by the Victorian Popular Fiction Association.
The keynote, delivered by Professor Heike Bauer (Birkbeck, University of London), will explore the intersections between animal history and the modern history of sexuality.
Keynote speaker
Heike Bauer is Professor of Modern Literature and Cultural History, and Head of Research, Innovation and Knowledge Exchange of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London.
She has published widely on literature and the modern history of sexuality, the intersections between queer and animal histories, and the rise of queer and feminist graphic novels. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, member of the AHRC Peer Review College, advisory group member of Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Studies (BiGS), co-convenor of the History of Sexuality Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, and member of the editorial boards of Australian Feminist Studies, History of the Human Sciences, and Gender & History.
Programme
8:30am to 9am - Registration
9am to 10:30am - Panel 1 - Fin de Siècle Pornography
Chair: Dr Fraser Riddell (Durham University)
| Claudio Monopoli | University of Padua, University Ca’ Foscari of Venice and University of Verona | From Sickness to Pleasure: Representations of Sexuality between Sexology and Pornographic Photography in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Italy |
| Jo Brydon-Dickenson | Birkbeck, University of London | Pornography and Sexology in the Fashioning of Percy Grainger's Queer Identities |
| Lea Felicitas Döding | Reading Cruelty: Sadomasochism and Literary Culture in Fin de Siècle Germany |
11am to 12pm - Panel 2 - Studying Desire
Chair: Ash Jayamohan (University of Edinburgh)
| Rebecca Boyd | University of Oxford | Lesbian Bed (Un)Death: Renée Vivien’s Poetic Necromances |
| Sheelalipi Sahana | University of Edinburgh | Queering the Girls’ School: Being “Crooked” in the 1920-30s |
12pm to 1pm - Networking lunch
1pm to 2:30pm - Panel 3 - Sexological Archive
Chair: Dr Michael Shaw (University of Stirling)
| Charlie Gough | University of Birmingham | George Ives, The Order of Chaeronea, and Homosexual Community at the Fin de Siècle |
| Domenico Di Rosa | University of Glasgow | Queer Pederasty in John Henry Mackay’s Sagitta’s Books of the Nameless Love |
| Dr Ryan Helterbrand | Ohio State University | Hands, Mouths, Bodies: Becoming Queer in France, 1925-1926 |
2:45pm to 3:45pm - Panel 4 - Constructing and Questioning
Chair: Claudia Sterbini (University of Edinburgh)
| Ciara Hervás | University of Cambridge | Unruly Forms: Magnus Hirschfeld’s Photographic Reimagination of Sexual Difference |
| Piers Haslam | University of Cambridge | ‘The Moods of an Epicene’: Bachelorhood and Trans Feelings in Edwardian England |
4:15pm to 5:45pm - Keynote speaker - Professor Heike Bauer (Birkbeck, University of London), 'Animal Lovers'
How to attend
This event is open to all, and free to attend. Tickets are available via Eventbrite.
Book your free ticket on Eventbrite
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Fin de Sexe? A Symposium on Sexuality
Lecture Theatre G.03
50 George Square
University of Edinburgh
EH8 9LH
and online