Sexuality Summer School

The Sexuality Summer School has been held annually by the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture (CSSC) at the University of Manchester since 2008, and welcomes postgraduate students from Manchester and beyond to discuss current debates within queer studies. Themes included in programmes over the past 5 years have included queering culture, performing queerness, feeling queer and queer temporalities. This year the conference turns towards the idea of Homophobia and Other Aversions, bringing together researchers from diverse fields to discuss and critique representations and understandings of gender, sexuality and queerness as they relate to aversion.

Accompanying the Summer School will be three public events, free and open to all with no booking required (all to take place at 5pm in the John Casken Lecture Theatre, Martin Harris Centre, Bridgeford Street, Manchester M13 9PL).

We are delighted to welcome academic Ann Cvetkovich, performance artist Lois Weaver (of Split Britches fame) and literary non-fiction writer Mary Cappello.

For more information please contact Clara Bradbury-Rance or visit the website.

Tuesday 22nd May: Ann Cvetkovich (Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, University of Texas):

"To Be Able to Stand Not Knowing": Depression, Creativity and Self-Aversion

Drawing from her forthcoming book, Depression: A Public Feeling, Cvetkovich will address the summer school theme by considering the prevalence of self-hatred within everyday life and creative practices that address it, as well as ongoing debates within queer theory about the politics of positive and negative affects.

Wednesday 23rd May: Lois Weaver (Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice, Queen Mary, University of London):

A Long Table on Senses of Aversion

A Long Table is a performance installation that uses the form of a dinner party as a structure for public debate to encourage informal conversation on serious subjects and to experiment with formats that inspire public engagement.

Thursday 24th May: Mary Cappello (Professor of English, University of Rhode Island):

Vice Viscera: The (Dis)gustatory Implications of Aversion

Mary Cappello recently won a Guggenheim Fellowship for her literary non-fiction, which explores forms of disruptive beauty, figuring memory in a postmodern age, bringing incompatible knowledges into the same space, and working at the borders of literary genres.

By Clara Bradbury-Rance