The College of Arts and Sciences

"Sex and Power" Overview

At a time when the humanities is struggling to demonstrate its relevance, the occluded history of Queer sexuality, both as a discrete identity and in relation to normative sexualities, could not be more urgent. The focus of "Sex and Power" is on Queer work from art history, literature, history, and musicology, with the idea that the sometimes less restrictive understandings of sexual identity found in the past have an immediate relevance to current issues, such as the Tyler Clementi case and recent ruling on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” We believe that the debate over legal and theoretical issues surrounding gender, sexuality, and identity can be clarified by examining the Queer history of sexual identity and gender assignment before the advent of modernity.

"Sex and Power" asks how power variously shapes and distorts, produces, and represses sexual identities, and examines the history of sexual subcultures, which have been marginalized, and have been symbolically central at particular historical junctures through the Enlightenment. The symposium also explores the systematic erasure of the history of sexual identity that has occurred since the inception of modernity, and investigates the proposition that sexual practices were not invariably aligned with sexual identities until the advent of capitalism. "Sex and Power" aims to show that while the European past has seen periods of brutal repression, our own time is not necessarily the most liberal with regard to same-sex practices and identities.