AHA Session 142
Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History 4
Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History 4
Saturday, January 7, 2023: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Regency Ballroom C1 (Loews Philadelphia Hotel, 2nd Foor Mezzanine)
Chair:
Chris Waters, Williams College
Papers:
Session Abstract
This panel seeks to situate intellectual frameworks for apprehending gender and sexual difference in the institutional contexts in which scholars developed them. Intellectual historians and literary scholars have recently developed studies of a wide range of scholarly disciplines that served as primary modes of understanding gender and sexual diversity but that predate the modern disciplines of queer theory, gender studies, and sexology: ethics, literature, natural history, and more. In turn, such institution-driven approaches can illuminate the origins of late twentieth-century epistemologies of gender and sexuality. The contributions to this panel uncover the ways institutional constraints, especially within the university, shaped those disciplines. With papers ranging across European and American history from the medieval university to modern British colleges and the contemporary American university, the panel sheds light on the deep history behind recent formal accounts, such as that of Amia Srinivasan, that chart the sometimes pernicious ways sexuality haunts higher learning as well as on the history of debates over whether the liberal arts can or should serves as a vector of ethical authority.
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