How to Bring Your Canon Up Gay: John Addington Symonds, Eve Sedgwick, and the Intellectual History of Male Homosexuality
The Old Council Chamber, Wills Memorial Building, Queens Road, Bristol, BS8 1RJ
Hosted by the Faculty of Arts
In his talk, Dr Sam Rutherford will compare the life and work of the English classicist and historian John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) with that of the pioneering American queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedwick (1950-2009), to interrogate the history of Western gay male culture and the creation of gay male communities. Dr Rutherford will discuss how Western gay male cultural heritage of the 19th and 20th centuries, drawing on Greek antiquity, became bound up in racism and transmisogyny, but could also become a site of transmasculine possibility. Through a trans reading of Sedgwick’s lifelong desire for belonging in gay male community, Dr Rutherford proposes a different understanding of gay cultural heritage which moves beyond narrow conceptions of individual, ‘born this way' gay (or trans) subjectivity.
All are welcome!
This is also an opportunity to chat with members of OutStories Bristol about their activities.