[Gesth-l] Jeffrey Weeks at CEU

[Peto Andrea Dr]

Jeffrey Weeks

Queer History and the Politics of Sexual Justice

5:30 p.m., Thursday, 20 February 2014, Auditorium



This lecture focuses on the idea of sexual justice, which has been a key theme in LGBT history since the earliest days of the movement. The German pioneer of homosexual rights at the beginning of the 20th century, Magnus Hirschfeld, saw science as the golden road to sexual justice,  and this emphasis was immensely influential on the first generation of sexologists and sex reformers and activists. Its influence can still be seen in attempts to prove the existence of a gay brain or the gay gene in arguments for homosexual rights.  From the 1970s, however, with the rise of the new radical sexual movements, and other forms of sexual agency, a new politics of sexuality questioned the hegemony of science, and challenged the naturalism and essentialisms of existing concepts of gender, sexuality, and homosexuality. A more historical and sociological approach led to a stronger stress on the meanings of sexual justice, and increasingly a discourse of human sexual rights has become the vehicle for campaigns for sexual reform, especially LGBT rights and latterly same sex marriage globally. This is a major change in the politics of sexual justice, and signals a growing awareness of the importance of human agency in shaping the ways we live gender and sexuality.

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 Jeffrey Weeks is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at London South Bank University (LSBU).  He was involved in early gay liberation in London and was an editor of the journal Gay Left throughout the 1980s. He has written widely on homosexuality and other sexual issues and is the author of over twenty books, and more than 100 articles and papers. His books include Coming Out  (1977), Sexuality and its Discontents (1985), Against Nature (1991), Invented Moralities (1995),  Making Sexual History (2000),  Same Sex Intimacies (with Brian Heaphy and Catherine Donovan, 2001), The World We Have  Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life (2007), Sexuality, 3rd edition (2009) and The Languages of Sexuality (2011). A new, fully revised edition of Sex, Politics and Society (originally published in 1981) was published in 2012. He was the recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Simon and Gagnon Award in 2010 for outstanding contributions to the study of sexuality.   
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