Tel Aviv University, Minerva Institute for German history, History school and the Cohn institute for History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas
Time: 15.-16.12.2019
Venue: Tel Aviv
Proposals by: 01.07.2019
- Keynote lecture: Scott Spector, Universty of Michigan
The rise of the modern discourse of sexuality, from the end of the second half of the 19th century until the mid 1930s, particularly in German speaking countries, has been studied from different perspectives over the last decades. Some of the studies followed Michel Foucault, highlighting an epistemic shift, marked by the invention of a new form of discourse of sexuality. Other readings, „after Foucault“, aim to transgress such periodic and discursive definitions, and go beyond the „marginalization paradigm“: studying not only the ways sexuality deals with othering of gender identities, but also how it functions within and against social boundaries, forms of self and moral norms.
In this workshop we wish to further explore these issues, while emphasizing the processes of „co-production“ of the discourse of sexuality: both a social matter as well as scientific subject, a field of study and observation, and a mode of subjectivity of its time. We intend to examine the close relations between the medical and psychiatric discourse of sexuality in that period, the legal discourse and courtroom sensations, media practices and their obscene nature, and it representations in literature and popular culture. It is through such juxtapositions that we hope to challenge the various dichotomies, such as homosexual/heterosexual, masculine/feminine, normative/pervert, natural/ degenerate, innocent and immoral etc.