2007-2008 Events

2007-2008 Events

Most events take place in the Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS), 320 York Street.
All events are free and open to the public.

Spring 2008

Wednesday, February 6, 5 p.m.  HGS 211

Margot Canaday, Princeton University
Finding the Lesbian in the State

How can something be policed when it cannot be defined?  In the early Cold War, the U.S. military turned its attention to lesbians and debated how to identify them.  This talk describes the state’s methods and examines how and why it attempted to regulate the sexual behavior of women.

Margot Canaday is a historian and postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University.  Her book The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America will be published by Princeton University Press.

Wednesday, March 26, 5 p.m.  HGS 211

Martin F. Manalansan IV , University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
What is To Be Done? Affecting Queer Futures

Looking at a broad landscape of recent queer activism, this presentation addresses neoliberal gay and lesbian political agendas and various paths to transcend them.  Through ethnography, history, and cultural analysis, Manalansan focuses on the pivotal role of race and class analysis in the creation of an ethical and productive framework for social transformation.

Martin F. Manalansan IV is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He is the author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora, a critical ethnography of Filipino gay immigrants living in New York City.

Thursday, April 17, 5 p.m.  HGS 211

Eric Fassin, Ecole normale supérieure
Love of the Same, Love of the Other: Gay Marriage, Race, and Nation in France and the United States

The debate over gay marriage has spread across the globe, but it has taken different forms and had varying outcomes in different national contexts.  This talk analyzes the role that race has played in recent French and American debates to show how national histories and national identities have shaped the conflicts over same-sex marriage.

Eric Fassin is a sociologist, a professeur agrégé at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, and a researcher at the Institut de recherche interdisciplinaire sur les enjeux sociaux (CNRS / EHESS).  In the coming months he will publish two new books, Marriage, partenariat et concubinage dans neuf pays européens (co-authored with Kees Waaldijk) and an expanded version of L’inversion de la question homosexuelle.

Fall 2007

Monday, September 24, 5 p.m.   HGS 211

Stephen Robertson, History, University of Sydney
Shifting the Scene of the Crime: Sodomy and the History of Rape

Historians who study sodomy laws have paid surprisingly little attention to coercion and consent.  But, as Justice Kennedy noted in Lawrence v Texas (2003), “a substantial number of sodomy prosecutions and convictions” in the past “were for predatory acts against those who could not or did not consent.”  This paper examines why historians have not analyzed sodomy in the context of the history of rape and then attempts to rewrite that narrative as a history of sexual violence.

Stephen Robertson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Sydney and the author of Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960 (UNC, 2005). 

Wednesday, October 31, 5 p.m.   HGS 211

Joan W. Scott, Institute for Advanced Study
Cover-up: Sexuality and the French Controversy over the Islamic Headscarf

The talk examines the ways in which French arguments about the inassimilability of Muslims gained force through comparisons between French and Islamic organizations of gender and sexuality.

Joan W. Scott is the Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and the author of numerous influential books and essays, including Gender and the Politics of History (1988), Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996), and Parité! Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (2005).  Her new book, The Politics of the Veil, will be published by Princeton University Press at the end of October.