ESA RN23 Sexuality Midterm Conference (Web)
Time: 11.-12.09.2025
Venue: Department of Cultures and Societies, Univ. of Palermo
Proposals by – extended: 30.04.2025
The title of this Mid-Term Conference is inspired by the sociology of deviance and its surprisingly tight relationship with sexuality studies. As we know, sociological approaches to sexuality studies have found it difficult to establish themselves as a specific and autonomous field within the discipline of sociology. Attempts at doing so, paradoxically, fed into the tendency to study sexualities as ‘taboo’ and to focus on phenomena that deviate from (assumedly) ‘normal’ sexual practices. In the early days of sociological analysis, there was a strong focus on the ‘normal’ occurrence of things and the verification of social typicality. It does not seem a coincidence, then, that sociology approached sexuality by including it within the studies on deviant phenomena and conduct, with the main objective of normalising its structures, manifestations, and practices. In the sociology of deviance, the study of sexuality often meant the study of those labelled as deviants – or sinners, in the language of various conservative-religious groups objecting to sexual rights and liberties of those breaking the patriarchal and heteronormative constraints of societies. Over the last decades of sexuality studies, our field has found many ways to break free of these labels and to imbue the studies of sexuality with rebelliousness that has questioned and challenged these norms and constraints – both of the sociological discipline and societies in general. Read more … (Web)
Keynote speakers (Web)
- João Florêncio (Linköping): Pagans, Pederasts, and Fascists: Far-Right Masculinist Homosexuality in Late 20th-Century Europe—A Case Study
- Surya Monro (Loughborough): Interphobia and endoxism: Towards an understanding of structural inequalities
- Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli (Melbourne): Sexualities, Genders and Queer Kinships: Addressing Precolonial Actualities, ‘Post-Colonial’ Amnesia and Neo-Colonial Assemblages
- Massimo Prearo (Verona): Defining the Anti-Gender Moment and the Multiple Oppositions to LGBTIQ+ Equality: a Political Map
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