Past Events 2011/12
Seminar on LBGT Youth, Policing and Risk
Wednesday May 2 6:30-8:00pm 12 Gower Street, Room G02, Birkbeck College
Speaker: Dr. Angela Dwyer (Queensland University of Technology) - ‘We’re not like these weird feather boa–covered AIDS-spreading monsters’: how discourses of risk inform LGBT young people’s accounts of interactions with police in public spaces. Discussants: Les Moran (School of Law) and Daniel Monk (School of Law)
LGBTQ Resistance in Lebanon: A Conversation with Ghassan Makarem
Monday March 5th 8:00pm - 9:30pm, Room B04, Malet Street, Birkbeck College
Ghassan Makarem is a leading gay rights activist in Lebanon. He has been described as one of the bravest voices in the Arab world involved in queer resistance. He is also involved in democracy movements in the Middle East and has been at the forefront of defending Palestinian rights in Lebanon. Makarem is a founding member of HELEM, an LGBTQ rights group in Lebanon, which approaches LGBTQ issues from a local cultural-political perspective. Makarem has published widely in a range of popular and academic forums including Middle East Sexualities, The Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Left Turn and ZNet.
Colloquium: Thinking Through Time and History in Feminism
Friday 23rd March 2012 9am-7.30pm.Birkbeck College, 30 Russell Sq, Room 101.
Keynote Speakers: Rebecca Coleman (Sociology, Lancaster University) & Lynne Segal (Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck)
Birkbeck Film Season: June 2012 Birkbeck Cinema 43 Gordon Square
Screenings start promptly at 6pm no booking, first come first seated.From the Oresteia to The Godfather, the family has been a primary unit of drama and the site of tragedy. In Hollywood the family remains the preferred site of redemption as well as the ideal object to threaten with malevolent external forces. The family, it seems, must be protected at all costs but it is also persecuted by the relentless gaze and eaves-dropping of documentaries and reality TV. The extent and intensity of representations and observations of thefamily in contemporary visual culture testify to the psychic and social anxiety it evokes.
Screenings and Panel Discussions:
Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki 2002) Wednesday June 13th 6pm-9pm
Panel: Professor Mandy Merck (Royal Holloway, University of London), Dr Alisa Lebow (Brunel University) Chair: Dr Amber Jacobs (Birkbeck)
Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette 2003) Wednesday 20th June 6-9pm
Panel: Dr Catherine Grant (Sussex University), Dr Michael Lawrence (SussexUniversity) Chair: Gordon Hon (Winchester School of Art)
Sexology and Translation: Scientific and Cultural Encounters in the Modern World 1860-1930 - Symposium
14th - 15th June 2012 Keynes Library, School of Arts, Birkbeck.
This symposium turns attention to the evidence of global scientific and cultural exchange during the first phase of sexology, c1860-1930, and its significance. It is well known that sexology was fashioned across cultural as well as scientific contexts, mostly within Europe but notably also by establishing networks of scholarly exchange in and with, for example, the U.S.. Less attention has been paid to a distinguishing feature of many sexological texts: the fact that they are highly intertextual, and were translated quickly into other languages or indeed read in the original language by non-native speakers. International reader responses in turn fed back into revised editions of the texts, producing a unique textual archive that allows us both to chart the transnational development of the discipline and to trace how individual lives unfolded in relation to broader scientific and political debates over a period of seventy years.
Sexology and Translation brings into dialogue an international group of experts from literature, history, translation studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology and politics who will map, compare and examine alongside each other a diverse range of nationally-specific discourses of sex and explore their transnational connections. Specifically, the symposium will cover discussions of the traditional centres of sexological research (UK, Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands) and their exchange with less frequently studied but equally important areas in and on the borders of Europe and beyond, including Switzerland, Finland, Russia, China, Japan, the US and the Middle East. By rethinking the relationship between the hubs of sexological research and its margins, the symposium aims to gain fresh insights into the flow of information between culture and science, and between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ around the turn of the last century.
Confirmed speakers include:
Heike Bauer (Birkbeck), Brian James Baer (Kent State University) Chiara Beccalossi (Birkbeck), Kirsti Bohata (Swansea), Sean Brady (Birkbeck), Howard Chiang (Princeton), Peter Cryle (Queensland), Jana Funke (Exeter), Natalia Gerodotti (Leeds Metropolitan), Gert Hekma (Amsterdam), Liat Kozma (Hebrew University), Birgit Lang (Melbourne), Sally Newman (Monash), Ofer Nur (Tel Aviv University), Anna Katharina Schaffner (University of Kent), Antu Soreinen (Helsinki University), Elizabeth Stephens (Queensland), Michiko Suzuki (Indiana University), Katie Sutton (Melbourne), James Wilper (Birkbeck).
For more information please contact the organizer: Dr Heike Bauer
A Queer Orientalism: Sex, Power and Cultural Difference in the 'Memoirs' of Sir Edmund Backhouse
20th June 18:00 - 20.00 Room B06 Birkbeck Main Building
Speaker: Morris Kaplan (BIH Visiting Fellow)
"A Queer Orientalism" traces the intersections among sex, power and cultural difference in the memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse. Born in 1873, Backhouse lived in China from 1898 until his death in 1944; he co-authored two important, controversial studies of Chinese politics during and after the Boxer Rebellion. His two book-length manuscripts, “The Dead Past” and “Manchu Decadence,” tell the story of erotic and political adventures in fin du siecle Europe and in Beijing during the last decade of the Manchu dynasty. He places himself near the center of the court of the Dowager Empress during the years 1989-1908 and claims extensive interaction with her and with her most important advisors. Backhouse is virulently anti-British and positions himself as an anti-imperialist. Very learned in Chinese history and culture, he attempts to appropriate an indigenous tradition of same-sex love while holding onto a certain erotic privilege as a “foreign devil”. More fantasy than history, Backhouse’s “memoirs” display vicissitudes of desire and cultural interaction in a distinctively queer and oriental(ist) context.
