The Plenary Lecture for the 2026 Sexuality Summer School will be Professor C. Riley Snorton’s ‘An Ambiguous Heterotopia, Or Some Informal Remarks on “Biology” After Samuel Delany, Judith Butler, and Sylvia Wynter’.

No booking required, all welcome.

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 returns with the theme ‘On the Biological’, exploring contemporary political and intellectual debates about how ‘the biological’ shapes current and historical understandings of sex, gender, race and sexuality. Our public events and postgraduate workshops will examine biological discourse across a range of academic research, artistic practice and activist histories, such as work on HIV/AIDS, chemsex, motherhood, racialisation, ‘sex’ hormones and trans healthcare.

In recent years, the category of the biological has been hotly contested, resulting in polemical and polarised public debate. The SSS will provide a much-needed forum for thoughtful discussion led by intellectual curiosity. Our discussions will draw together debates in queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, and feminist technoscience studies. We will read and discuss new work, including by keynote speakers C. Riley Snorton, Kane Race and Sarah Richardson; students will have the opportunity to discuss these in depth in seminars with the authors.

Over the five days of the SSS, our seminars, workshops and public events will offer postgraduate students (MA and PhD) the opportunity to discuss the history, politics and changing registers of biological discourses of sex, race and sexuality in relation to their current research or creative practices.

For the full programme, visit the Sexuality Summer School website.