The Sexuality Summer School presents the Opening Academic Plenary Lecture: ‘Between Desire and Dissociation: ‘Queer Magical Thinking in Hetero-Authoritarian Times’. Featuring Tavia’ Nyong’o, William Lampson Professor of Theater and Performance Studies and Professor of American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University).

This event is 4pm–6pm. No booking required, all welcome.

The Sexuality Summer School 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, spaces and resources in particular times and contexts. Our public events and postgraduate workshops will examine how 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, consent and regulation.