Sexuality Summer School 2025: Intergenerationality

10 Dec 2024

Monday 26th – Friday 30th May

Audience members watching a presentation at Sexuality Summer School 2024

The Sexuality Summer School (SSS) is a week-long event consisting of seminars and workshops for 40 postgraduate students, alongside a public events programme open to all. This year, the SSS will focus on the theme of ‘Intergenerationality’, exploring debates about how generations are constituted and distinguished one from another in the context of feminist, queer and trans theories and practices.

Our discussions will draw together debates in gender, sexuality and critical race studies about how generationality has marked and regulated certain bodies - and relations between and across bodies - in particular times and contexts. Our public events and postgraduate workshops will examine how academic knowledge, creative practice and activism in the past has shaped current intellectual and political agendas, as well as artistic forms and collaborations.

Exploring memory work, archives and oral histories, we will consider theories and methods for conceptualising past-present relations in terms of debates about desire, violence, antagonism, nostalgia, resources, consent and regulation. Over the five days of the SSS, our seminars, workshops and public events will offer postgraduate students (MA and PhD) the opportunity to discuss intergenerationality in relation to their current research or creative practices.

The SSS 2025 year’s programme will include:

Keynote by Tavia Nyong’o (William Lampson Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, Professor of American Studies and African American Studies, Yale University)
Screenings of early 2nd-wave feminist films in partnership with the ‘Women in Revolt!’ exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery
Roundtable discussion with authors of Desi Queers: LBGTQ+ South Asians and Cultural Belonging in Britain (2025 forthcoming), Churnjeet Mahn, Rohit K. Dasgupta, DJ Ritu
George House Trust 40th Anniversary Public Lecture: Marc Thompson (Pioneering HIV/AIDS activist) (tbc)
Workshop at the John Rylands Library exhibition on Jon Savage’s 2024 book: The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979)

A full programme will be announced shortly. Please email sexualitysummerschool@gmail.com with any questions.

This event is organised by the SSS 2025 Team: Professor Jackie Stacey, Dr Millie Lovelock, Tasha Pick (PhD student) and Dr Eleanor Green