role in modern world
The ways in which sexuality has emerged into the public view and consciousness in the modern period will be the focus of an interdisciplinary conference on campus Friday and Saturday, March 31 and April 1.
Titled "Sexuality, Modernity and Social Theory," the conference is sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center, with support from the Law School and the Department of English.
The event will bring together cultural critics, social scientists, legal experts, art historians, ethnographers, religious studies scholars and historians to consider the ways in which sexuality has become an object of study (i.e., a new category of knowledge and identity) in the modern world, as well as the ways in which the emergence of sexuality is historically related to the conditions of modernity.
Topics to be addressed include legal understandings of sexual identity; the creation of "queer" identities and communities in literature, art history, and ethnography; sexuality and psychoanalysis; and sexuality, violence and the mass media.
"The conference is designed to broach a space for understanding ways in which sex is constitutively related to the social world and the conditions of modernity and mass culture," says Elizabeth Dillon, assistant director of the Whitney Humanities Center and assistant professor of English and American Studies.
"It is designed, in part, as a bid to move beyond Michel Foucault's influential paradigm in the discussion of sex," she adds. "Foucault's story of sexuality stops at the end of the 19th century, with the advent of what he calls 'sexuality.' He leaves aside the problems that most puzzled modern thinkers in the century to follow: the rise of mass culture, the splintering of knowledge into disparate areas of expertise and the globalization of the division of labor."
The conference will be divided into four panels: "Sexuality and Law" (4-6 p.m., Friday); "Histories of Sexuality" (9:45 a.m.-noon, Saturday) "Sexuality and Social Theory" (1:30-3:30 p.m., Saturday) and "Sexuality and Public Culture" (4-6 p.m., Saturday). All panels will be open for audience discussion following the papers.
"Sexuality, Modernity and Social Theory" will be held in the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St. Admission is free, and the public is welcome. For a complete program of the conference, see the Whitney Humanities Center website at www.yale.edu/whc.
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