Please find below:

The programme at a glance

The full programme

The abstract/bios by alphabetical order 

Information on keynotes, roundtables and events

Dublin City University, Nursing Building, Glasnevin Campus,  Collins Avenue extension

 D09 Y8VX

Keynotes

Public Health Panics!: Sex during COVID-19 

Chase Ledin, the University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Dr Chase Ledin is a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. His research explores the role of grassroots activism and community engagement in HIV and STI prevention in the UK. Specifically, he investigates how health activists and outreach workers employ ‘speculative futures’ in their intervention practices. He is also interested in the histories and visual cultures of ‘post-AIDS’ sexual health promotion. His work appears in Culture, Health and Sexuality; Sociology of Health and Illness; and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He has an edited collection forthcoming with Simon Lock and Benjamin Weil, titled Queering STS: Theories, Methods, Engagements.

[email protected]

*

The Perpetual Problem with Platformed sex

Professor Susanna Paasonen, University of Turku Finland

Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at University of Turku, Finland. With an interest in studies of sexuality, media and affect, she is the PI of the consortium “Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture” (Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland, 2019-2025) and author of e.g., Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (MIT Press 2011), Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (Goldsmiths Press 2018), NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light, MITP 2019) and Objectification: On the Difference Between Sex and Sexism (with Feona Attwood, Alan McKee, John Mercer and Clarissa Smith, Routledge 2020). She serves on the editorial boards of e.g., Sexualities, Porn Studies, New Media & Society, Social Media & Society and International Journal of Cultural Studies.

[email protected]

 Abstracts

Trans* Families in the Czech Republic

Nela Andresová, Charles University, Czech Republic

The topic of this contribution is the situation of trans* families in the Czech Republic. It examines how trans* people create and transform family and family ties. The aim of the project is the application of an interpretive approach focused directly on social actors in the concept of trans* family. For the purposes of this work, qualitative research was carried out through in-depth interviews with trans* people and trans* people's family members. The research is based on 28 such interviews. The purpose of this contribution is to provide a comprehensive view of the issue of trans* family and to connect the experience of trans* people with the experience of the situation by their family members (whereas family ties may not be ties of biological kinship). 

The contribution examines how families transforms through trans* identities. Family plays an important role in human life. However, family ties can be significantly affected by the transition of one of the family members. The purpose of this contribution is to examine how the trans* family is ""made"". Trans* people often face problems not only within institutions but also within their own families. However, the process of transition can also be difficult for close people of trans* person, as it presupposes the reconfiguration of social ties. Transition of one of the family members may destroy partnerships or, on the contrary, strengthen relationships. It may also significantly affect the family members perception of femininity and masculinity in the context of housework or raising children. 

The contribution shows how the family is perceived in normative discourse and how trans* identities are excluded from it. It examines how trans* identity is linked to the family policy and politics of the Czech Republic. Initiatives to defend the ""traditional"" family are currently topical and relevant in this Central European context.

Nela Andresová is a doctoral student in sociology at Charles University. Her research interests focus on the topic of family, gender and sexuality.

[email protected]

*

How to Subvert a Patriarchal Tradition? A Feminist Comedy by Beliz Güçbilmez     

Dr Deniz Başar, Boğaziçi University, Turkey [online]

Traditional non-religious and urban comedy performance techniques of Ottoman Istanbul (namely the performative humor of Meddah, Orta Oyunu and Karagöz - which were established as, and to this day mostly reproduced as, patriarchal traditions) had a large repertoire that was dismissed by the new establishment of the Republic of Turkey (1923) during the institutionalization phases of Turkish theatre (1920-50). Starting from 1960s many avant-garde and left-leaning male theatre makers utilized aspects of these repertoire to create important critical comedies. This repertoire was adopted by woman theatre directors and playwrights only after 2000s, but in many of such cases humor of male performers were highlighted through female-character-personifications of male performers and male homoeroticisim. Many woman playwrights defended these choices through the easiness of getting reactions from audiences if traditional comedy repertoires were remodelled for male performers. I watched a counter example to this establishement in Par Sahne, a basement blackbox theatre in Kadikoy, Istanbul; on 10th of April 2023: Othello! A Rehearsal of Revenge with Audience. The play, written by the prolific theatre scholar and playwright Beliz Güçbilmez, is a rewriting of Othello, where two women performers are rehearsing an adaptation of the play where they will be performing all of the roles. But their rehearsals are repeatedly interrupted by the screams of a woman who is being abused next door – and potentially will get killed soon – as they hesitate in confusion about what to do. Othello! A Rehearsal of Revenge with Audience consciously challenges the norm of equalling traditional comedy’s repertoire to the performativity of the male body, and utilizes male-character-personifications of female performers and female homoeroticisim to highlight both its social critique and comedy. I will analyse this intervention, and discuss why it took a century and a feminist playwright who is also an academic to challenge the status quo. 

 
Deniz Başar is a theatre researcher, puppet maker and two-time national award-winning playwright from Turkey. Deniz had her BA in Urban and Regional Planning Department of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (2008-2012), her MA in Atatürk Institute of Modern Turkish History in Boğaziçi University (2012-2014), and had a second MA in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies in University of Toronto (2014-2015). In 2021 she finished her PhD in Concordia University’s Humanities Department with her work on contemporary Turkish theatre, entitled “A Dismissed Heritage: Contemporary Performance in Turkey Defined through Karagöz”. Parts of her research on puppetry and political performativity are included in anthologies like Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations (Routledge, 2019), Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race (2021), Creative Activism: Research, Pedagogy and Practice (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022), and The European Journal of Theatre and Performance (Issue 4, May 2022). Currently she is an FRQSC post-doctoral fellow, continuing her research projects in İstanbul. Her most important academic work at the moment involves editing two volumes, tentatively titled “Imagining and Alternative Turkey: Political Performativity, Counter-Memory, Mobilizing Publics” and “Theatres of Resilience: Navigating Censorship, Gender, Intersectionality in Turkey” with her co-editors Dr. Pieter Verstraete and Dr. Eylem Ejder. She teaches dramaturgy as a part-time lecturer in Bahçeşehir University Conservatory. 
[email protected]   

*  

Playing with Slime: The Figure of the Child and the Monstrous Shadow of Paedophilia        

Dr Elin Bengtsson, Stockholm University, Sweden  

This paper draws upon my dissertation about the queer temporalities of ageplay, published in 2022. Ageplay is a term associated with BDSM which describes practices and dynamics based on performative age and age differences. These age performances can be expressed in sexual roleplay or form a part of everyday identities and relationships. The material consists of interviews with adults in Sweden identifying with littleness, a feeling emanating from assuming a position of a child or adolescent. Littleness is often acted out in a dynamic with someone assuming the position of Mommy, Daddy or another caregiving and authoritative adult figure. 

Ageplay is often socially stigmatized in a way that exceeds the general stigmatization of BDSM. This is due to how ageplay is linked to paedophilia in the cultural imagery. In this paper, I discuss how the interviewees negotiate with the monstrous shadow of paedophilia, by rejecting it as well as playing with it. Littleness can be understood as a crucible for phenomena such as childish innocence and perverse sexuality, which causes indignation even though no actual children are involved in, or affected by, the practices. In the paper, I discuss how the interviewees resist society’s moral panics by stressing that they neither wish to be actual minors, nor that others desire them for reminding of actual children. The interviewees emphasize the need to normalize ageplay and to work against prejudices. Still, the monstrosity of ageplay is meaningful not only as society’s harmful fantasy. It also fills an important role in what I, with inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s “sticky concepts”, define as a play with slime, namely how ageplayers make use of the coupling between ageplay and what is considered as sinister and morally wrong, and seek pleasure in stressing the taboo and edginess of the symbolic practices.

Elin Bengtsson has a PhD in gender studies, and works at the department of ethnology, history of religions and gender studies at Stockholm university, Sweden. Her dissertation Perversa tidsligheter: Ageplay och litenhet ur ett queertemporalt perspektiv (Perverse Temporalities: Ageplay and Littleness from a Queer Temporal Perspective), was published in 2022. Her research interests focus on queer theory, queer temporality, and BDSM. She has also published three novels which engage with issues of non-normative sexualities and relationships.

[email protected]

*

“AIDS and the Fear of it Were Chipping away at us”: Reading Sex Panic in Timothy Conigrave’s Holding the Man (1995)

Dr Giuseppe Capalbo, University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy

This paper proposes a reading of Timothy Conigrave’s Holding the Man (1995), from a theoretical perspective intersecting the methods of critical medical humanities, queer theories, and spatial literary studies. After framing the memoir in the wider stream of auto/pathography that burgeoned in the 1990s (Luckhurst 2008; Couser 2014), I will specifically consider its different representations of sex panic: indeed, Part One, whilst dealing with Conigrave’s recognition of his gender identity and sexual orientation, details the anxiety surrounding the first sexual intercourses with men; this anxiety disproportionately grows in Part Two and Three, due to the spread of a newly discovered medical condition, that is to say HIV/AIDS. Taking my cue from Susan Sontag’s seminal insights into HIV/AIDS (1989), I aim to discuss how the metaphors associated with this ‘slow disease’ affected Conigrave’s memoir writing; the ways in which the very infrastructural and environmental conditions determined an embodied vulnerability for the LGBTQ+ community (Butler 2016; Whitehead and Woods 2016; Tally 2021); the pivotal role of theatre – and theatre-making – in providing a performative space of assembly (Butler 2015)  to resist and question the marginalisation of people with HIV/AIDS.  

Giuseppe Capalbo is a Ph.D. student in English Literature at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” (Italy). In 2019, he earned a Master’s degree – cum laude – in Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Calabria (Italy). In June 2022 he received a fellowship from the Warburg Institute (University of London, UK) to attend the course Decoding the Renaissance: 500 Years of Codes and Ciphers. He has conducted research on corporeality in contemporary Anglophone fiction at the Bodleian Library (University of Oxford, UK) and presented at national and international conferences. His research interests include representations of the body, fin-de-siècle literature and culture, gender, queer, and disability studies. 

[email protected]

*

 
From Johnny Ray to the Filthy Fifteen (& Beyond): Sex Panics in Pop Music

Dr David Carroll, Dublin City University, Ireland

While the relationship between popular music and sexualities may be inherent and enduring, it is also complex. From Elvis’s gyrating hips to Donna Summer’s orgasmic disco anthems to the arrest of George Michael for solicitation in a public bathroom, sex and sexuality have been at the core of most of pop music’s most notable scandals and controversies. Efforts to censor or prohibit expressions of sexuality deemed inappropriate also litter pop’s history. In 2023, Sam Smyth joined the long line of artists to have their work judged unsuitable for the masses because of its lasciviously queer nature.

This paper traces the history of controversy related to the sexual in pop music. What do such discourses tell us? And what effect (if any) do campaigns to de-sexualise pop music have? Here, the central role played by sexuality in the representation, packaging, and performativity of pop is also explored. The paper argues that the most vociferous criticism of pop’s sexual depictions has primarily been preoccupied with the work of female, queer, and non-white artists. 

Encompassing its 1950s birth in conjunction with that of the ‘teenager’ to the infamous ‘disco demolition’ events of the late 1970s, the paper offers numerous examples of how detractors have attempted (yet often failed) to curtail such representations. Ultimately, the paper argues that the indelibly queer essence inherent in pop itself has helped to resist this. 

Dr David Carroll holds an Irish Research Council-funded PhD from Dublin City University, where his research explored the extent of influence and impact of queer identities in 1980s pop music. Previously, he worked in a variety of NGO and statutory settings in the fields of sexual health and LGBT service provision.

[email protected]

*

Gender Trouble, Trans* Panic, and the Formation of Fraternal Democracy   

Aylon Cohen, University of Chicago, United States of America

Recent years have witnessed a backlash against the increasing visibility of trans* and queer people in civil society, linking together “gender critical” feminists with far-right authoritarian movements. In the UK and North America, the drag queen has become a pivotal symbolic target. Despite this seeming novelty, this paper shows how resistance to “gender ideology” in the English-speaking world draws on a lineage of anti-drag and trans* panic dating back to the early 18th century when gender became central to the formation of new relations of political equality between men. 

In early 18th century Britain, social reformers discovered a widespread network of what contemporaries called molly-houses, meeting spaces where men could socialize and have sex with other men. As gay historians began to study these archives in the mid-1980s, they argued that molly houses provided space not only for sex but also for practices of drag, as mollies were described as men who wore women’s clothing and imitated women’s mannerisms. In contrast to much gay historiography, this paper reads the molly houses in conjunction with feminist political theory and a growing literature of trans* history. Building on feminist scholarship analyzing the development of the fraternal public sphere in the 18th century, I argue that efforts to suppress molly houses and punish ‘men’ who appeared to give up their manhood reveal how practices of gender subversion threatened the formation of new relations of fraternal equality underpinning an emerging regime of bourgeois democracy. In demonstrating how gender, sexuality and the body constituted bourgeois principles of equality, the paper presents a trans-feminist account of the emergence of what feminist political theorist Carole Pateman called fraternal democracy and shows the historical continuities and legacies of the so-called ‘crisis’ of gender and sexuality in the 21st century."

Aylon Cohen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago focusing on contemporary political theory, intellectual history, queer theory, feminist theory, and affect studies with the history of democratic thought and practice. Aylon’s research explores the ways in which normative principles structuring political society are not (simply) philosophical concepts located in our minds but are political theories immanent in everyday corporeal practices. Charts an historical arc from the hierarchical rule of the king to the egalitarian rule of the people in 17th and 18th century England, their dissertation, ‘Equality, Fraternity, Sodomy: Body Politics and the Rise of Democracy in England,’ investigates the emergence of democracy as an embodied form of life by tracking transformations in and challenges to the normative structures of bodily conduct. Aylon’s research has appeared in journals such as Contemporary Political Theory and Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry (2020) and the edited volumes, The Double Binds of Neoliberalism: Theory and Culture After 1968 and Subjectivation in Political Theory and Contemporary Practices.

[email protected]

*

Sex, Drugs, and Birth Control: An Examination of Access and Choice Following the Introduction of the Contraceptive Pill in Scotland.

Alexandra Cowie, The University of Edinburgh, Scotland

In the six decades since the introduction of the contraceptive pill, the pill has become a global symbol of the so-called 'swinging sixties.' Heralded, sometimes simultaneously, as a great liberator of women or an overstated false icon, discussions of the pill invite controversy and contention. This paper will reckon with the questions that have emerged from broader histories of the 1960s in Scotland; considering whether or not the sexual revolution extended that far north, and what it truly meant to experience liberation. Furthermore, it will undertake a complex consideration of the relationship between safety, efficacy, access, and informed choice regarding the contraceptive pill. Situating this in the Scottish context, this paper will explore regional health disparities, locating their origins in medical and governmental institutions. By expanding upon the medicalisation of sex, and the increasing encroachment of the medical sphere in women's lives, this paper will develop an analysis of gendered experiences in contraceptive practices. Thorough examinations of the degree of access to the pill afforded to Scottish women will facilitate a discussion of how practical access related to the dissemination of knowledge. Consequently, by considering the popularity of the pill in contrast with other forms of birth control, this paper will explore if demand for an effective contraceptive superseded concerns over safety and the repercussions for women's bodies on an institutional and personal scale. These discussions will be grounded in a broader exploration of Scottish religious, familial, and interpersonal relationships during this period. This paper will ultimately determine the extent to which medical measures that intervened in women's reproductive lives came to impact their lived experiences, and how we can tangibly understand and historicise these repercussions. This facilitates and encourages reflection on current considerations of the costs and benefits of the contraceptive pill experienced by women globally today.

Alexandra Cowie is a fourth-year undergraduate history student at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in July 2023. Her work focuses on the twentieth century, and primarily engages with histories of sexuality and medicine through the lens of social history. She is particularly interested in utilising the principles and practices of microhistory and feminist history within her work. Her undergraduate dissertation distils these interests through an examination of the introduction of the contraceptive pill in Scotland. By discussing access, safety, efficacy, and cultural receptions of the pill she situates her specific analysis in the broader framework of twentieth century Scottish history. She looks forward to continuing her work in this field, and expanding her historical research as she applies for postgraduate study in the coming year.

[email protected]

*

You Do Not Recognise the Dangerous Bodies: Imperialist Moral Panics in Jeanette Winterson’s Technogothic Writings

Cristina Diamant, Babes-Bolyai University, Romania

Gothic times, simultaneously cast as regressive and transgressive, show multiple threatening tipping points. Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods (2007), Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019), and 12 Bytes: How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the Way We Live and Love (2021) demand to be read in a different framework than Gut Symmetries (1997) or The Power.Book (2000) as neoliberal cosmopolitanism gives way to the much grimmer claustropolitanism (Steve Redhead). As Frankissstein and 12 Bytes reflect (on) the post-Brexit political landscape, social reproduction is also sharply called into question by the new sex wars. Meanwhile, queerness is seen as increasingly suspect and removed from the zombie concept (Ulrich Beck) of a “healthy community”. Using Stanley Cohen’s 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics in conjunction with Olivia Snow’s 2022 article “Are You Ready to be Surveilled like a Sex Worker?”, I note the backlash against trans-inclusive feminism while following the heteropessimistic gradual reduction of the “charmed circle” (Gayle Rubin) of socially acceptable expressions of desire and sexuality.

In the context of such a sex-negative moral panic, aggressive sexuality is heightened to parodic levels in the texts analysed (Captain Handsome, Manfred, Pink, Lord Ron). Conventional markers of maturity break down in an ageist society equating eternal youth with boundless innovation. The mad scientist (Victor Stein) is cast as an entrepreneurial enfant terrible who others, even pathologises his partner’s “dangerous body” (Ry). What do intimacy and vulnerability look like alongside increasing polarisation between the precariat and the tech aristocracy that dictates social priorities within the gig economy? How do queer characters (Billie, Spike, Ry) conceptualise monstrousness and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes against amatonormativity (Elizabeth Brake) and heterofatalism (Indiana Seresin)? Is the unresolved, oppressive baggage of the past violently interrupting the present or has linear progression towards a hopeful end of history simply glitched?

Cristina Diamant is a PhD candidate at Babeș-Bolyai University, a member of the EROSS@DCU research network focusing on sexuality studies and an advisor for the Metacritic Center for Advanced Literary Studies. She is currently acting as co-director of the London Science Fiction Research Community, helping organise reading groups, workshops, and conferences, while her work as a trade union representative with the Independent Workers Union enables her to represent Romanian and Moldovan immigrant workers. Her research interests include gender studies, labour rights, media studies, monster studies, pop culture, and posthuman studies, especially in the context of investigating various representations of otherness. Contact Cristina via Twitter at @MsCrisDiamant.

[email protected]

*

‘Bad Desires'?: Sex Panics as a Lens for Duncan Grant's Erotic Drawings      

Samson Dittrich, University of Sussex, United Kingdom

Although sex-negative positions have been advanced both by some feminist and queer voices, as well as misogynistic, homo- and transphobic right-wing movements, sex panics have been used to attack women and queers of all kinds socially and legally. This paper considers historical sex panics, like the feminist sex wars of the 1970s/80s and the current anti-trans moral panic, as cautionary tales highlighting how ostensibly feminist positions advocating sex-negativity and opposing bodily autonomy and sexual freedoms are easily co-opted by reactionary forces seeking to strip us of our rights. 

These sex/gender panics will be mobilised to consider the themes of racial and trans fetishisms in a collection of erotic drawings by twentieth-century British artist Duncan Grant, donated to the Charleston Trust in 2020. The collection, comprised of over 422 works, features many drawings depicting interracial sexuality between white and black men, and a smaller number of eroticised transfeminine figures. Drawn by a white, cisgender artist, these images pose crucial questions for queer communities today: how do racism/transphobia play out in queer sexuality? Is there a line between desire and fetishism, and if so, where is it located? If some of queer sexuality is implicated in racialised and anti-trans dynamics, how should we approach these works?

A sex-negative reading might lend itself to be appropriated by calls for censoring Grant’s works, much like US senator Jesse Helms’ 1989 attempt at censoring Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of Black men re-appropriated liberal rights anti-discrimination rhetoric. Wary of right-wing co-option of feminist anti-porn positions, we can instead use Grant’s drawings to explore how racism and transphobia affect and intersect with desire, and how Black/trans queers navigate, subvert, and play with these dynamics. Using sex-positivity as method lets us not foreclose but instead centre difficult conversations about desire, fetishisation and power within queer communities. 

Samson Dittrich (he/him) is an interdisciplinary researcher in trans and queer masculinity studies. His AHRC and CHASE-funded PhD is a collaborative project between the University of Sussex and the Charleston Trust, looking at 422+ erotic drawings by Duncan Grant.

[email protected]

*

“‘No Kiss’”: Hysteria and Sex Panic in the Diaries of Anne Lister (1791-1840)            

Sarah Ernst, University of Southern California, United States of America

The recent popularity of the BBC show Gentleman Jack (2019-2022), which dramatizes the relationship between Anne Lister and Ann Walker for a public audience through the use of the published diaries of Lister has thereby cemented Lister’s popularity as the “first modern lesbian.”  When looking at her companionship with Walker in academia, scholarship tends to place it in context with Anne’s other endeavours at that time.  This presentation will focus on how fears surrounding sex emerged in the relationship upon Ann Walker being diagnosed with hysteria. Specifically, it will draw upon how Anne Lister used her diaries to document her own self-doubt and panic over their sexual relationship through the years, honing in on her concerns over the impact sex had on Ann’s mental health. Additionally, this presentation will examine the additional worries Lister voices regarding how Ann’s family – and the society around them – discussed (in coded language) their worries of how the sexual relationship between Lister and Walker impeded Walker’s mental capabilities. 

In doing so, this presentation is a case study that adds to the history of hysteria in England in the 1800s. By focusing on the sexual panic of the partner who was not diagnosed with hysteria, the presentation will look at how those in same-sex relationships navigated this new part of their relationship when the medical discourse and treatments did not include a discussion of same-sex intimacy. Thus, it reveals how the panic over sex and hysteria cannot only be found in the heteronormative medical discourse, but within the individual accounts of same-sex and queer relations.

Sarah Ernst (they/them) is currently a doctoral student in the history program at the University of Southern California (USC). Their work focuses on gender, sexuality, the Holocaust and genocide studies, working with scholars such as Wolf Gruner and Paul Lerner. Their current dissertation plan, tentatively titled “Queer Stories from the Third Reich,” lies at an intersection between the Holocaust and queer history, with an intended focus on exploring the history of those who were doubly marginalized. They received a B.A. in History and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies in 2020 from Brandeis University. While there, they completed a Senior Honors Thesis under the supervision of Dr. Hannah Weiss Muller entitled, "You Mean Something Absolutely Vital to Me”: An Insight into the Lived Experiences of Female Companions to Hysterics in England in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries." This research looked at hysteria and the personal and social impacts of it for women in non-heteronormative relationships.

[email protected]

*

Consent in Crisis: The legal (Im)possibilities of Rough Sex/BDSM in Courts    

Dr Alexandra Fanghanel, University of Greenwich, UK                   

"Is consent bad for sexual justice? Is consent enough? Recent decades have seen the rise of criminal cases in which people accused of violent offences against the person occurring during a sexual encounter claim that what happened between the parties was consensual. This so-called ‘rough sex’ defence relies on tropes of kinky or sadomasochistic sexual practice to function as a coherent defence in the court room. 

This paper explores what is afoot in cases where this defence that injury or death that occurs within a sexual encounter is consensual is used. How are kink or BDSM narratives used as part of this rough sex defence? What assumption about BDSM do they rely upon? Is there, indeed, a difference between rough sex and BDSM? What is the work that consent does in these cases? 

By exploring a selection of cases where a consent defence has been raised in a sexual encounter that has led to the death or serious injury of one of the parties, I examine how consent is understood, what assumptions about consent are made here, and what the possibilities and pitfalls of these constructions of consent might be. The paper relies on thematic and discourse analyses of court transcripts to explicate how consent works, and to examine what the social and sexual justice implications of this might be.

Alexandra Fanghanel, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Greenwich, UK. She is co-lead of the Gender, Deviance and Society Research Group. She researches public space, securitisation, and sexuality. Her monograph, Disrupting Rape Culture: Public Space, Sexuality and Revolt was published in paperback in 2020.

[email protected]

*

“Protecting You”: The Role of Moral Actors and Moral Panics on Platformized Sexual Content  

Dr Rébecca Franco, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

With the documented move of sex work from offline to online spaces, platforms have become increasingly important in structuring and governing sex markets (Hardy & Barbagello, 2021). In the EU and the US, increasingly repressive and abolitionist legislation that is pushed by anti-porn and abolitionist lobbies target different forms of sex work. Still, commercial sexual webcamming is legal and not targeted by specific forms of legislation (Henry & Farvid, 2017). The governance of platforms is also affected by payment infrastructure providers: limited research has looked at the role of payment intermediaries in regulating the adult industry, arguing that these function as extra-legal transnational regulatory actors (Tusikov, 2021; Beebe, 2022). In the context of a public outcry and litigation against Mindgeek, the mother-company of Pornhub, for hosting of non-consensual content and content involving minors, Mastercard and VISA were targeted for facilitating monetization of such content on Pornhub. Consequently, Mastercard implemented policies that explicitly target adult platforms in October 2021, followed by VISA in December 2022, to 'protect' their network and to fight ‘unlawful activity’ such as (child) sexual exploitation (CSAM). Tracing the panic surrounding abuse material found on Pornhub and its effect on policies set by payment intermediaries, this paper argues that such payment intermediaries function as moral regulators of platformized adult content. Looking specifically at the effects on webcamming, this paper shows that such regulation goes beyond legislative standards and requirements set by state and supra-state actors. Doing so shows how moral panics surrounding CSAM affect moral politics concerning sex work and adult content beyond state-enforced regulation, in a context where financial actors hold power to determine what type of content can be monetized online. 

Dr Rébecca Franco is an interdisciplinary postdoctoral researcher in the project “The Platformization of the Sex Industry” at the Sociology Department of the University of Amsterdam. Her research explores how commercial webcamming is regulated and legislated, by analysing the intertwinement of platform governance and moral politics in structuring the webcam industry. Previously, she completed a PhD dissertation at the VU University on the regulation of interracialized intimacies in the context of migration and decolonization in France. She obtained her Msc degree in Social Policy and Development at the London School of Economics and Politics Sciences. Rébecca published on archival methodologies and on the saliency of race and racialization in the historical regulation of intimacy, housing and sex work. Her research focus more broadly revolves around the regulation of sex and intimacy. Next to her academic work, she produces and hosts a podcast, Kussenpraat, on sexuality sexual cultures in the Netherlands. 

[email protected]

*

Sex in UK Prisons: Cultures of Denial, Media Scandals, and Panicked Management

Lizzie Hughes, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

Co-authors: Dr Sarah Lamble, Birkbeck, University of London; Dr Tanya Serisier, Birkbeck, University of London; Dr Alex Dymock, Goldsmiths, University of London, Lizzie Hughes, Birkbeck, University of London, UK.

This paper explores how sex in prison appears in the British imaginary through registers of panic, oft fed by moralistic attitudes towards sexuality and desire and the cultural desire to punish prisoners. Drawing from queer theory, we explore the treatment of sex in prison by researchers, the media, and in prison governance, and argue it is indicative of slow, contradictory, and insidious panics about sex, sexuality, and desire that foreclose proper study of its significance. Prisons are complex sites in which large numbers of humans exist in enforced proximity; matters of sex, sexuality, and intimacy, as well as relations of power, pleasure, harm, and violence, are inevitable components of everyday social and institutional life. Yet British research on sex in prison has thus far failed to account for this, restricted by a heteronormative frame that sees sex and intimacy as anomalous, exceptional, and relatively unimportant in prison dynamics. Its importance in the public eye is attached to moments of salacious scandal when the public is made aware by news media of prisoners having sex with each other, staff having sex with prisoners, or when particular populations – namely lesbian, gay, bisexual and especially trans people – are portrayed as bringing heightened sexual risks into prison spaces through presumed sexual deviance. Our approach utilises academic research, media analysis, and first-hand accounts from prisoners to unsettle these assumptions and trace the appearance of sex across multiple prison architectures. In so doing we explore this panic, but also highlight how the regulation of sex and desire is a crucial feature of prison governance and part of the crafting of everyday lifeworlds for prisoners and staff. 

Lizzie Hughes is an ESRC funded PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London, researching the interface of surveillance, sensory embodiment, and transness from the UK gender-segregated bathroom. They work as a research assistant on a collaborative project on governing sex and intimacy in British prisons. They also run a community mental health project for LGBTIQ+ people in London, including LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers and refugees.     

[email protected]

Dr Sarah Lamble is Reader in Criminology and Queer Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. Lamble’s research addresses issues of gender, sexuality, and imprisonment as well as alternative forms of justice. Current projects include: (1) Transgender prisoner policy and the role of carceral politics in the ‘gender wars’ in Britain; (2) A collaborative project on governing sex and intimacy in British prisons. 

[email protected]

Dr Alex Dymock is a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research expertise lies principally in sexuality and gender studies with a focus on criminalised and marginalised sexual desires and practices. She is currently undertaking a project funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust exploring the use of psychedelics in the management of trauma related to sex. 

[email protected]

Dr Tanya Serisier is a Reader in Feminist Theory at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research focuses on the cultural politics of sex, sexuality and sexual violence. She has published widely in this area, including her 2018 monograph, Speaking Out: Rape, Feminism and Narrative Politics and she is currently undertaking a Leverhulme funded project: Surviving Rape in Public: The Effects and Affects of Public Survivors. 

[email protected]

*

Let's Use Sex Panics as a Fortress for our Freedom Spaces: Commoning Through Queer Socialisation, Sex and Nudity          

Dr Phevos Kallitsis, University of Portsmouth, United Kindom 

The paper explores the embodied practices of commoning, through a qualitative analysis of the ephemeral community, which forms in urban cruising areas: a community that exists thanks to sex panics that prohibit the taking over of this common space by more mainstream activities.  It uses the cases of nudist beaches in the suburbs of Athens, which become the epicentre of urban cruising during the summertime. Where the beaches usually surrender to tourism, family spare time or commercialised activities for young people, the naked and sexually active bodies disrupt this normative standardisation and the intensifying privatisation and commodification of the beach as a public space. At the same time sex acts create a common, an alternative to state and private property and a frame of belonging through resources with nonexclusive access rights. Contrary to the tendency of de-sexualisation of discourse around LGBTQ+ rights and the subsequent de-sexualisation of space, the paper argues that the cruising beach is a space with nonexclusive rights of access, where desire, sexuality, conversation, queer socialisation, and body fluids co-exist in these temporary spaces of freedom. The body is our most intimate geography (Simonsen 2003) and in a world where bodies are always limited and controlled, these cruising beaches are places where the naked bodies produce a common, which in the words of Hardt and Negri (2009: 282) means that it “exists on a different plane from the private and the public and is fundamentally autonomous to both”. Through qualitative interviews and participatory observation, the paper maps the different practices, from the large-scale movement from the city to the beach, the stroll among the bodies, to the formations that allow socialisation, sexual encounters, the crossing of gazes or discussions through apps and reveal that cultural topography of commoning through co-existence and symbiosis.

Dr Phevos Kallitsis is an architect (National Technical University of Athens) and Senior Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth. He teaches architecture and interior design. His research focuses on cinematic representation and urban spaces. His publications have explored horror films and the notion of safety in the city, gendered and queer approaches on urban space and the meaning of home for people with dementia. He has worked as an architect, cinema critic and set designer for theatre productions and TV.

[email protected]

*

“My (38-Year-Old) Girl Does Not Even Think About That”: What Sexuality for People with Intellectual Disabilities in France?          

Mr Jan Kasnik , Université Paris 8, France

The title phrase resumes well a discourse I could hear from many mothers of women with intellectual disabilities during interviews for my ongoing PhD research into affective and sexual life of people with intellectual disabilities in France. In my proposal, I base myself on the theoretical framework provided by crip (McRuer, 2006) and queer (Butler, 2011) studies. The goal is to reflect on the concrete possibilities for people with intellectual disabilities to have a free sexual life. My hypothesis is that despite legal advances, the effective liberty in that matter rests far from being attained. I depart from McRuer’s cultural normalization to argue that in our societies, the sexuality of people with intellectual disabilities is captivated by an heteronormative canon, and that it is extremely difficult to overcome it. Thus, I will first demonstrate how families and the professionals refuse to assume responsibilities to provide people with intellectual disabilities with appropriate sexual education. Then, I will argue that in many members of the entourage mindsets, there is a clear separation between affection (acceptable) and sexuality (hardly acceptable for men and unacceptable for women) and that sexuality is trapped between taboos and myths. Thus, no sexuality is accessible beyond the heteronormative ideal of monogamic couple and disabled people who want to overcome these impositions have no choice but coming up with micro-strategies of resistance. In conclusion, I will emphasize that intellectually disabled people’s sexuality is so tabooed because it constitutes an outstanding critical basis for deconstructing the heteronormative sexual stereotypes in our society. In other words, the heteronormative social order is now in panics because people with intellectual disabilities resist to the attempts of normalization, and they challenge common assumptions about couple, affective life, and sexuality. The proposal is based on fieldwork I carried out in France, including participant observations, and interviews with people with intellectual disabilities, their families, and health professionals.

Jan Kasnik is a researcher in sociology and gender studies. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science from Sciences Po Paris, a master’s degree in gender studies from the College of Mexico, and he is currently a PhD candidate in gender studies and sociology at the University Paris 8, France, in the Laboratory of Studies about Gender and Sexuality (LEGS). He published articles in several international academic journals, and he took part as speaker in several research conferences in Mexico, the United States, and Ukraine. He imparts a course of introduction to sociology in the international management bachelor’s degree of the University of Créteil, France. His fields of academic interest include disability studies, gay activism, and ethnographical approaches to digital spaces and social networks.

[email protected]

*

Sex in Video Games: Panics, Deplatforming, and Resistance

Jean Ketterling, Carleton University, Canada

Given video games’ flexible format, there is surprisingly little explicit sex to be found. Explicitly sexual games do exist, but mainstream games remain “coy” about sex (Gallagher 2012, 400). Scholars have explained this lacuna by pointing to factors such as moral panics; narrative, technological and design limitations; and the tenacious public perception that video games are for children (Gallagher 2012; Krzywinska 2012; Wysocki 2015). In addition to these elements, Gallagher (2012) draws attention to the way that the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) ratings system operates as a de facto censorship regime, wherein developers will rework their own material to avoid an “Adults Only” rating. This presentation builds on this observation and examines the intersection roles of civil society, government, law, and industrial self-regulation in shaping how and when sex (dis)appears from video games. I argue that while the mainstream industry may see self-regulation as necessary for preventing formal legal incursion into speech and expression, informal regimes are themselves shaped by sex panic, and sex- exceptionalism and negativity. In other words, they simply re-create the flaws of top-down legal regimes. However, I also point to sites of possibility and resistance – places where video games are being used to explore sexual expression or resist constraining platform governance regimes. I suggest that these spaces may allow new forms of resistance to take hold. 

Jean Ketterling (she/her) is a PhD candidate and Vanier Scholar in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, on the traditional, unceded territories of the Algonquin nation. Her interdisciplinary work on video games is rooted in legal studies, game studies, pornography and sexuality studies, and feminist and queer theories of affect and emotion. Her dissertation research is focused on sexual video games: how they make sexual meaning, their capacity to make space for experimental sexual play, and how sexual content in video games is controlled, disciplined and regulated by platforms. Most recently, her work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies. 

[email protected]

*

That Way and This Way: Eroticising Rural Landscapes in the Prose and Dramatic Works of Cathal Ó Searcaigh 

Dr Seán Mac Risteaird, Dublin City University, Ireland 

The primary aim of this paper is to analyse how landscapes, and in particular rural landscapes, are sexually-charged and queered in the prose and dramatic works of Irish language writer Cathal Ó Searcaigh (1956 - ). Celebrated as one the language’s most prolific and celebrated contemporary poets, Ó Searcaigh’s prose and drama have largely gone unnoticed by Irish language critics. Much like his poetry, Ó Searcaigh’s work navigates the dichotomy between rural and urban spaces while he questions how identity and space interact. Although it is widely accepted that urban spaces are often eroticised and seen as safe spaces for queer identities (Bell 2000: 33), Ó Searcaigh's prose and drama offer alternative zones of pleasure in the countryside setting.  As Reus and Usandizaga (2008) posit, space and time are never neutral, and thus the rural can therefore be queered. As noted by Soderling, the countryside “[…] is also a space where queer life takes place” (2016: 338), Ó Searcaigh depicts rural queerness through Gayilge. In this short paper, I will argue that the rural space in Ó Searcaigh's work functions as a distinct space and place that questions the construction of the queer Gaeltacht, and that of the queer Irish speaker, through a survey of his prose and dramatic works.

Seán Mac Risteaird completed his academic qualifications in Maynooth University. He is currently focusing on a book project focusing on the contemporary Irish writers Micheál Ó Conghaile and Cathal Ó Searcaigh where he will look at how space and queer sex interact with each other. Seán has taught Irish in various third level institutions including Maynooth University, in Mary Immaculate College (Thurles Campus), in St Thomas University (Fredericton, Canada) and in Gaelchultúr. His research interests include queer studies, in gender, and in cultural and literary criticism and theory. 

[email protected]

*

"Pretty Vicious Abuse" - Structural Analysis of Organised Homophobic Hate Speech against an Irish Minister on Twitter  

Dr Dónal Mulligan, Dublin City University, Ireland 

In mid-March 2023, Roderic O’Gorman TD (Member of the Irish Parliament) publicly discussed the nature and extent of online abuse he is subject to on The Week in Politics, a political review programme on RTÉ, the Irish broadcaster. O’Gorman is a member of government, the incumbent Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth since June 2020. A prior national news broadcast had been interrupted by a protestor who described O’Gorman as a “child groomer”, prompting the later television discussion, though O’Gorman referred to “pretty vicious abuse” on social media as a wider context for the particular abuse of the news protestor. He asserted that the tone and content of abuse directed at him was both a response to his sexuality, and was escalating:

“The kind of the abuse that I get is very much focused on being gay … Every politician has to be ready for robust criticism, absolutely, but there is a definite change in dialogue in certain parts of the public on these particular issues” (O’Gorman, The Week in Politics, 11 March 2023)

This paper uses structural and content analysis of a collected corpus from Twitter, to examine the context of abusive rhetoric used in reply to O’Gorman’s presence there. It draws on Papacharissi’s (2014) work on Affective Publics to frame and investigate the emergent community of online operators in this space, who are promulgating a narrative of O’Gorman as dangerous to children because of his homosexuality, and it tracks the traits and tools of this discourse. 

This investigation understands the reaction to O’Gorman as Minister for Children as a mediated moral panic, where tropes and slurs about gay men, as well as insinuations of deviant danger, are central to its narrative. The study draws on a collected corpus of tweets leading up to and following O’Gorman’s discussion of the abuse on television, as well as on interviews.

Dónal Mulligan is a lecturer and researcher at Dublin City University's School of Communications, where he works on interdisciplinary digital research topics, and teaches on a range of modules related to digital media analysis, design and production. He is interested in how identity and political discourse are mediated in the structured conversational spaces of social media, and how the emergent field of computational social science addresses and answers these issues with new methodologies. Especially relevant here are the application and development of ethics in digital research.  He is a member of the RIA Irish Humanities Alliance and working group on Digital Humanities. He has co-founded and is currently a committee member of DCU's Interdisciplinary Digital Research Group (IDRG), and the Chair of the Humanities & Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee at DCU. He is presently working on research projects related to technology-facilitated group-based teaching methods, as well as Higher Ed responses to the emerging use of generative AI like ChatGPT.  

[email protected]

*

Sex Panics on Screen: A Comparative Analysis of Dolce Vita (1995-1997) and Maestro in Blue (2023-) in Greek Television Texts Across Genres and Time Periods

Gregory Pritsas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

This presentation attempts to apply a comparative approach on two vastly dissimilar Greek television series: sitcom Dolce Vita (Mega TV, 1995-1997) and drama Maestro in Blue (Netflix, 2023 - ). Dolce Vita focuses on the comedic secret love affair of 50-year-old Christina and her daughter’s boyfriend Antonis while they comically attempt to hide their relationship from everyone due to fear of disapproval and marginalisation. On the other hand, Maestro in Blue encompasses a dramatic approach. Set in an idyllic Greek island, it features numerous furtive sexual affairs, including the main affair between the 50-year-old series protagonists Orestes and his 18-year-old student Klelia and the homosexual relationship between Klelia’s brother Antonis and his friend Spyros. 

As both series progress, all affairs are gradually exposed. The revelations propel a string of reactions among the series’ characters, with sexual panic being the locomotive. Panics generate a continuum where all limits are erased; indeed, after the affairs’ exposure all social boundaries are annihilated. While the clandestine couple from Dolce Vita faces panic, shock, surprise and disapproval garbed in snarky humour, the Maestro in Blue couples have to deal also with panic, discontent, ostracisation, slut shaming and homophobia. The peripheral characters in each text appear panicked against sex, prompting a discourse revolving around agency, self-determination, but also demonstrate voyeuristic tendencies towards the couples’ sexual activity. Sex panic is a shared element in both narratives, but the approaches in the respective genres are tremendously divergent.

My presentation aims to compare, point out and analyse the ways sex panics are being conveyed on screen with an emphasis on the 25 years spanning between these two series and their respective genres. Furthermore, I maintain that this particular panic reaction to “undesirable” sexual activity could be reflective of a generalised conservative stance prevailing in Greek society (Mittel, 2015). 

Gregory Pritsas is an MA student in the field of Film and Television. He has previously engaged with festival organisations such as the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, both as a volunteer and as staff. He is currently a member of the Student Union for Gender Equality in my university and in the process of shaping a proposal for PhD. His research interests include Queer Television, Queer Studies, Trash Television, Sexuality Studies and Camp.

[email protected]

*

Chasing the Chasers : Analyzing the FTM Chaser Figure, its Logics of Categorization, and its Implications in Interactions

Paul Rivest, Université d'Aix-Marseille, France

This paper aims to address the rhetoric of categorization and identification around the FTM chaser (or translover) figure – a category used to describe a person who is actively seeking to have sexual encounters with trans men – at work in transmasculine communities and how it can affect actuals sexual encounters. To do so, I will draw on an ethnographic research carried out on transmasculine sexualities that started in 2019 in France, and specifically on individual interviews that I conducted with transmasculine people and some of their partners (or people actively seeking to have them as partners). Material collected from a digital ethnography carried out on transmasculine social media and various dating and hook-up sites will also be used to complete the analysis. First, focusing on the general discourse on the figure of the FTM chaser that can be found in trans communities, I will attempt to show in what way it is constituted as an undesirable ideal-type that revolves around the moral condemnation of fetishization and objectification of the other. Then, putting them in relation to individual discourses will allow seeing how the chaser is an ambivalent figure that oscillates between danger and utility. After, I will look at the reported interactions and classification of potential sexual partners as un/desirable and the different strategies that are established to manage potential encounters, particularly regarding (non-)disclosure of transidentity. Finally, I will focus on the discourses of (potential) partners of transmasculine people to extract their own logics of categorizing their desire toward transmasculine people and how these are formed in interaction with those used by them, who may also occasionally be panic-stricken at the idea of being, themselves, FTM fetishists.

Paul Rivest is a PhD student in anthropology at Université d'Aix-Marseille. He holds a Master's degree in philosophy (Université Paris-IV - 2018) and a Master's degree in sociology (Université Lyon-II - 2019). He is currently preparing his PhD thesis on transmasculine sexualities in France (ANRS - Sidaction funding). His research interests include identities, masculinities, sexualities, and health.

[email protected]

*

Hiding/Spreading/Digitalising Cruising in the Small Town – (Homo-)sexualising Urban Spaces through ‘Klappen-culture’ in Aachen

Pepe Sánchez-Molero, PhD candidate at Dublin City University, Germany/Ireland

LGBTQ+ residents of Aachen have been complaining for decades about the lack of queer safe spaces/Third Places. Today, the few options that can be found in the city centre reflect an institutionalized landscape, mostly focusing on social work/volunteering, and far from spaces of pleasure and sexual encounter. However, numerous examples over the last 50 years point to an animated culture of cruising at so-called ‘Klappen’ – the (homo-)sexualization of spaces through informal reclaiming. Parks, public restrooms at train stations or university buildings’ toilets, dating apps, …men seeking sex with other men have been able to find/create cruising spaces despite – or perhaps even because of – the long-running catholic faith of Aachen.

The creation of these spaces, the word-of-mouth spreading of their locations, and their usage were tabooed, shamed, and endangered by heterosexist societal norms and legislation, just as in many other cities and nations. This paper reveals the world of Klappen-culture in Aachen, which has remained hidden and unknown for decades (at least for the ‘mainstream naked eye’) by implementing archival research and interviews with witnesses from different generations. The mixed methodology offers insights into the past, present and possible future(s) of queer intimate spatial productions in Aachen. The goal of this exploration is to map queer sexual desire in a city arguably outside of the German LGBTIQ+ mainstream, to make it more visible, and to reflect on its development throughout the last half century."             

Pepe Sánchez-Molero (they/he) is currently pursuing a PhD researching spatial productions by/for queer migrant communities. As a spatial researcher and designer, they collaborate internationally with grass-root associations, design studios, museums and universities, in the fields of architectural/urban planning, exhibition design, curatorial work and activism. After completing a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in Architecture in Aachen (Germany) and Portsmouth (UK) with a focus on urban development and architectural theory, Pepe joined an M.A. in Gender & Queer Studies at the University of Cologne. Pepe’s master’s thesis research ‘QUEERingAACHEN’ maps queer spatial production during 1970-2020, which set the basis for their published work, guest-lectures and conference papers in institutions such as: University of Oxford, Princeton University, Politecnico di Milano, TU Berlin, National Technical University of Athens, RWTH Aachen, Dublin City University, amongst others. Their main research interests are the production and accessibility of public space, and the social construction of space by communities, specifically the queering of space. Pepe’s first curated and designed exhibition about queer Spanish artist Ocaña took place at the Schwules Museum Berlin in May-September 2022 – sponsored by the Spanish Embassy. Born and raised on the east coast of Spain, Pepe has studied and worked in Germany, UK and Ireland for the past decade.

[email protected]

*

The Panic of "Massage Institutes": Early Berlin BDSM Brothels from 1900-1930

Sarah Scheidmantel, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Berlin is especially known for its Roaring Twenties, when it became a melting pot for science and culture, attracting people who wanted to indulge in the lust of life in various ways. Already at the turn of the last century, the city offered in many respects what from a biopolitical perspective led to a ""sex panic"": sexual debauchery repeatedly came into the focus of the morality police and law enforcers, who saw dangers in practices that shook up ""morality and order"" and thus bourgeois sexuality, and tried to limit them. At the same time, gaps and mechanisms of this system were infiltrated and utilised.

The following paper aims to explore these depths of Berlin morality around 1900-1930. At the intersection of women's studies, medical humanities, space studies and visual studies, I would like to take the audience to Berlin at the beginning of the last century and embark on a journey to so-called ""massage institutes"".

Disguised under this medical-sounding term of ""massage institute"" one could find BDSM brothels, hidden from ""normal"" society, because BDSM was punishable as abnormal and pathologised. With the trick of a medical code word, it became possible to create an underground for these needs and practices, which could move into the semi-public and thus into ""normal"" society through harmless-sounding advertisements in newspapers and the like. At the same time, massage institutes were largely a Berlin peculiarity, with a few written exceptions in other cities.

In my approach to massage institutes, I first address why ""massage"" was the perfect code/term of secrecy and how the fear of BDSM was fuelled by the prevailing sexuality ideas of the time. In a second step, I ""go"" to the massage institute: who do we meet, who works there, who is a guest? I frame these findings with accounts of the institutes and their legal foundations of early 20th century Berlin.

Sarah Scheidmantel, M.A., is a cultural scientist and medical historian. She studied media studies, cultural studies and history of science in Weimar (D), Berlin (D) and Cambridge (UK) and has been working on her doctorate at the Chair of History of Medicine at the University of Zurich (CH) since October 2019. In her dissertation, she deals with the question of how notions of femininity were shaped and changed by the invention of the so-called vibrator as a health and beauty device at the beginning of the 20th century in German-speaking countries. Furthermore, one of her concerns is to clarify the (also in popular culture) widespread scientific myth that vibrators were invented in the late 19th century to cure women of hysteria by having male physicians give them orgasms in the doctor's office. She has written about this in various German speaking media.Her areas of specialisation are gender, sexuality, medical history and consumer history around 1900, as well as cultural and feminist theory. Sarah has presented her work at several international conferences, including Vienna, Berlin, Dresden, Geneva, Hamburg and Zurich.

[email protected] 

*

Kink Pride/Kink Shame: BDSM and Homonormativity  

Dr Olivia Snow, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), United States

While the LGBTQ community in the west has made remarkable strides over the past 20 years in achieving civil rights, this progress has largely hinged on what Lisa Duggan calls homonormativity, or the replication of cisheteronormative ideals onto LGBTQ identity to present queerness as culturally palatable to the general population. Kink and BDSM, however, remain controversial even within the LGBTQ community; BDSM in particular was categorized as a mental disorder until the DSM-V and is still criminalized in much of the United States. In considering kink and BDSM as lightening rods for increasing fascist surveillance, including within the LGBTQ community, I situate my analysis in a historical moment of rapidly proliferating legislative attacks on the lives of trans people and sex workers. I interrogate how concerns over kink at pride and public sex more broadly are themselves exclusionary and the results of white supremacist efforts to make queer sexuality palatable to white cisheteropatriarchy and the state, which reproduce homophobic fascist tendencies to legislate how love, sex, and the family should look. By understanding violence and perversity as resistance against legislation policing what we can and cannot do with our bodies and where, I hope to hone solidarities that can be weaponized against the “gay pride” movement’s homonormative impulses to fight for acceptance at the expense of liberation.

Dr Olivia Snow (she/her) Dr. Olivia Snow is a dominatrix and Research Fellow at UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), where she studies sex work, technology, and policy. Her research currently centers on algorithmic surveillance of in-person sex workers, and her work has appeared in academic publications and popular media outlets including WIRED, Vice, and The Nation. She holds a PhD in American literature, and prior to joining C2i2, she was a research fellow at New York University’s AI Now Institute.
[email protected]

*

What Gay Men Can and Cannot (But Probably Should) Say About Poppers   

Prof. Jay Sosa, Bowdoin College, United States of America

Since its inception in the early 1970s, the U.S. poppers industry has operated in a regulatory grey zone. Butyl nitrite (the most common compound in commercially available ‘poppers’) is neither a scheduled drug nor an approved pharmaceutical. When inhaled out of thirty ml brown bottles, nitrite poppers relax smooth muscle and elevate the heartbeat, facilitating anal-receptive sex and giving a brief, non-psychoactive rush. Manufactured, sold, and consumed primarily by cis-gay men, poppers discourse perpetually teeters between the unsystemized routes of queer (and particularly leather/kink) worldmaking and the insider joke within masculine gay public culture. Poppers’ status as a para-pharmaceutical of counter public concern set the conditions for what can and cannot be said about them, particularly in marketing settings. Poppers’ producers are not required to list the chemical contents of bottles, and they cannot suggest proper dosing (an admission that their product is intended for human consumption). Listed in advertisements as room deodorizers, leather or VHS cleaners, or nail polish remover, producers and consumers collude in the open secret of what poppers (are intended to) do. Public health studies that employ harm reduction (but never pleasure-promotion) paradigms cite clinical cases of extreme misuse of poppers, while never mentioning that gay men largely teach one another what proper use is.   Although poppers may have adverse health consequences in specific conditions, recurring moral panics around poppers’ biochemical effects make it nearly impossible to determine what is a reasonable health concern.  In this paper, I present a polemic around the erotophobic silences that exclude considerations of sex and pleasure from public health debates around poppers. Drawing from a broader ethnographic and archival project, I focus on debates over poppers within gay male communities in the 1980s, when regulatory battles over butyl nitrite became ensnarled in both the AIDS crisis and the War on Drugs. In 1981, a diffuse network of San Francisco-based AIDS activists formed The Committee to Monitor Poppers. In the Committee’s very public disputes with gay poppers producers, AIDS activists were caricatured as prudish and poppers producers were dismissed as greedy. In a reparative reading of both sides of this dispute, I identify moral and biopolitical structures of U.S. pharmaceutical regulation that made solidarity amongst these gay men impossible. The poppers panics of the 1980s reverberate through contemporary queer and kinky worlds, as the regulatory status of butyl nitrite remains unchanged. Rather than fantasize about a responsible pharmaceutical subject who could make informed choices under different conditions, however, I ask how the very uncertainties of sex, pleasure, exposure, etc. are central to how gay men understand poppers. 

Jay Sosa is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College, and was most recently Visiting Scholar at the Leather Archive and Museum in Chicago. Jay's first book, Sex War Aesthetics: Queer Activism and Backlash Politics in Brazil is under contract at the University of Texas Press. He is currently working on a second book on the social life and biopossibility of poppers. 

[email protected]

*

Abuse: Cinematic Complications in Arthur J. Bressan’s Portrait of Gay Ephebophilia          

Prof. John Paul Stadler, North Carolina State University, United States of America

Arthur J. Bressan Jr.’s gay films are experiencing a resurgence of attention, due in no small part to Jenni Olson and Roe Bressan’s careful stewardship of the Bressan Project. Bressan died in 1987 from AIDS, and many of his films went unnoticed for decades. Much of the renewed interest in Bressan now centers on Buddies (1985), the first theatrical release feature length film about AIDS, or his early hard core films Passing Strangers (1974) and Forbidden Letters (1979), all of which have seen recent re-release on Blu-ray. Less attention has been paid to Bressan’s film Abuse (1983), which concerns the story of child abuse. The latter seems unlikely to be released on Blu-Ray any time soon, given the recent right wing panic about LGBTQ people as sexual “groomers” of children. We must recall, though, that this talking-point is not a new one. In the mid-to-late 20th century, equating queerness with paedophilia was a common refrain. In fact, Bressan was strongly motivated to make his documentary GAY USA (1977) in response to Anita Bryant’s spurious claims of the same nature. The film Abuse, then, is especially curious. Here, Bressan directly tackles both the subject of childhood abuse at the hands of parents and the storyline of a gay adult male who both mentors and engages in implied sexual intimacy with a minor. This paper seeks to grapple with the vexed portrait Bressan offers of multiple forms of abuse–parental, institutional, sexual–against the backdrop of homophobic stereotypes. 

John Paul Stadler is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at North Carolina State University. His research and teaching centres on the role of various media in shaping modern notions of gender and sexuality, particularly with regard to queer and transgender subjectivities. In his current project, Pornographesis: Sex, Media and Gay Culture, he explores the historical force, technological forms, and sexual politics of gay pornography.

[email protected]

*

Sex Ed Panic: Consent and Adolescent Sexual Desire in Normal People and Sex Education  

Dr Aneta Stepien, Maynooth University, Ireland &  Dr Máire Ní Mhórdha, Maynooth University, Ireland 

This paper critically explores the ways in which sexual consent and adolescent sexual desire are represented in two popular TV shows, Normal People (2020) and the Netflix comedy-drama Sex Education (2019). The shows cover a range of sexual scenarios rarely portrayed on screen in relation to young adults, providing close-to-real-life illustration of affirmative consent within a diversity of social and cultural settings. We argue that these post #MeToo productions give agency to adolescent voices and experiences in discovering, exploring and negotiating their sexual desire, which can have a validating and empowering effect on their young spectators’ sexual lives. While centring on on-screen portrayals of consent, our paper touches upon the implicit critique these productions convey that the lack of appropriate sex education negatively impacts young people’s sexual experiences. As media play a crucial role in shaping the narrative around healthy and fulfilling sexual encounters and consent, Sex Education and Normal People fill a gap that exists in popular cultural representations in the post-#MeToo digital age by offering examples of the communication of affirmative sexual consent.

Dr Aneta Stępień has a PhD in comparative literature and is the author of Shame, Masculinity and Desire of Belonging. Reading Contemporary Male Authors (2017), a comparative study of the literary and gendered expressions of shame. She teaches on the first-year undergraduate programme, Critical Skills, at Maynooth University. Her most recent publication is a co-authored chapter ""Consent and Adolescent Sexual Desire in Normal People and Sex Education"", In Voices from the Wreckage: Young Adult Voices in the #MeToo Movement, ed. Kimberly Karshner, Vernon Press, 2023.  

[email protected]

Dr Máire Ní Mhórdha is a lecturer in Critical Skills at Maynooth University, Ireland. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews. Her research interests include the anthropology of international development; reproductive rights, gender, the body, and feminism; social movements; and the ethnography of elites. She has co-authored “Of Trust and Mistrust: The Politics of Repeal” In After Repeal. Rethinking Abortion Politics, ed. Kath Browne and Sydney Calkin. London: Zed, 2020. 

[email protected]

*

The Feminist Sex Panic Documentary: Selling Sexual Citizenship at the NFB

Dr Rebecca Sullivan, University of Calgary, Canada

The National Film Board of Canada holds a mandate to represent the nation to its citizens. Particularly in the past two decades, it has sought to improve its historically dismal record of diversity and inclusion, including gender and sexuality. Feminist documentaries enjoy privileged stature within the NFB due to the legacy of Studio D, the women’s filmmaking unit which lasted from 1974 to 1996. However, there is problematic division between films that explore intimate, private lives and those that explore the public realms of work and politics. The fault line lies along sexuality and is most obvious in feminist documentaries on pornography and commercialized sexual services. Between 1980-2015, approximately seventeen films categorized under Sexuality and Reproduction: Pornography / Prostitution were produced by the NFB. The theme of degradation and exploitation runs starkly through them, raising questions about how sexual citizenship is framed through stigma and panic. 

Stylistically, what stands out within this corpus of prostitution / pornography films is an indebtedness to the feminist realist traditions developed by Studio D. Only one of the seventeen films considered here is produced by Studio D but its influence weighs heavily over the rest. Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography set the standard for the bleak portrayal of sex work that characterizes NFB documentaries. With their continued reliance on a “Griersonian Victim” (Winston 1988) narrative, the films exemplify “moral didactism, claim-and-counter-claim, all sewn up and closed” (Barrowclough 1982) to present an unrelenting message that sex work is oppositional to feminism and arguments otherwise promote a false sexual consciousness antithetical to Canadian values. This paper examines the panic framing of NFB documentaries on sex work and how they produce a particular brand of feminist sexual citizenship that is increasingly out of touch with contemporary feminist sexual rights and public opinion. Despite that, I question whether it has helped fuel the sex panic currently rippling through Canadian governance, with serious consequences for gender and sexual rights.

Dr Rebecca Sullivan is a professor at the University of Calgary, specializing in feminist media and cultural studies. She is the (co-)author/editor of eight books including Becoming Biosubjects: Bodies. Systems. Technologies (2011); Bonnie Sherr Klein’s Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography (2014); and Pornography: Stuctures, Agency and Performance (2015), and a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Porn Studies. Dr Sullivan is past president of the Canadian Communication Association and past Chair of the Sexuality Studies Association. She is currently working on The Legacy of Studio D for Feminist Media Arts Activism, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant Program. 

[email protected]

*

How 1930s Anxieties as to Who Qualifies as a Woman are Informing Today's Transphobic Panics around Women's Sport          

Dr Clare Tebbutt, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland     

As I write this, World Athletics have made their regulations against trans women even more stringent and the 200m runner Christine Mboma is one of a number of African cis women athletes who have been told they will have to suppress their naturally-occurring hormone levels if they wish to compete. Such incidents are sadly far from unusual. Inclusion in women’s sport is a key element of current transphobic discourse. Transphobes posit perpetual panic – the danger and uncertainty that requires strict policing of the category of ‘woman’ in sport. But this supposedly new threat has booming echoes in the discussions of women’s sport in the 1930s: fear of unfeminine women; upholding racist and misogynistic bodily ideals; acknowledgment that bodies cannot be neatly divided into binary sex categories. This paper will explore these resonances drawing on 1930s case histories, and the work of Lindsay Parks Pieper and Heath Fogg Davis.      

Dr Clare Tebbutt (they/them) is Assistant Professor in Gender and Women's Studies at Trinity College Dublin. They are a cultural historian especially interested in twentieth-century queer and trans histories. They have published on gender classification in 1930s sport and are working on a book on 'sex changeability' in 1930s Britain.

[email protected]

*

The Receptions of Risky Works      

Dr Ryan Thorneycroft, Western Sydney University, Australia

In 2021, I published the article ‘Cripping Incest Discourse(s)’ in Sexuality & Culture. In this text, I sought to suggest that some of the discourses surrounding the incest taboo are ableist, and this is in part because the prospect of disability in potential offspring is used to reinforce and justify the incest prohibition. The article stated that my exploration “may not do justice to the realities and specificities of incestuous practices” and noting that “[w]hether or not we believe in incestuous practices, it is important to think through the underlying discourses and practices through which dis/ability is constituted in its prohibition” (Thorneycroft 2021: 1912, 1925). Since this time the article has received considerable controversy, where it has been used and debated in many different (and often unintended) ways. Used by those on the extreme right as an example of “woke-culture gone mad” or used by child sexual abuse activists/scholars to suggest that I was (falsely) promoting incestuous abuse, the article has been subjected to a range of readings, (wilful) misreadings, paranoid readings, conflations, weaponisations, and in some cases, legitimate critique (Sedgwick 2003). In this presentation, I reflect on these circumstances, chart the original intentions of the paper, think through what went wrong, and meditate on where to from here—all the while everyone panics around me. I contemplate the ways that individual texts written for particular (academic/journal) audiences are taken up, used, and misused to pursue particular agendas. Central to the discussion is the very word “incest”, which conjures so much horror and disgust that it forecloses any form of thinking beyond the immediately self-evident. I also consider its over-inclusiveness as a term, explore different disciplinary perspectives, and reflexively engage with the pitfalls of early career researchers who bite off more than they can chew. Noting the increasing democratisation of knowledge—notwithstanding the heated debates about what that knowledge constitutes—this presentation shows how dangerous writing can so often lead to panicked and dangerous results.         

Ryan Thorneycroft is Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney University. He is an early career researcher (PhD in 2018), with research interests in disability studies, violence, porn studies, and the abject. 

[email protected]

*

Masc Panic & Fem Bottom Shaming in Gay Porn            

Dr Richard Vytniorgu, University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom

Bottoms, or men who engage in receptive anal sex with other men, typically experience more marginalisation than other gay, bisexual, and men who have sex with men (GBMSM). Bottoms are even more stigmatised if their gender expression does not conform to culturally dominant standards for masculinity. So-called 'fem bottoms' are routinely touted as undesirable sexual partners in the media, which is also mirrored in the gay porn industry. This paper explores how viewers of gay porn uploaded to sharing websites react in panic-mode to gay porn actors who are deemed to be 'effeminate', even if their bodies are otherwise said to be desirable. The paper traces how patterns of 'masc4masc', which privilege pairings of mutually masculine-appearing men, permeate acerbic criticism of effeminate bottoms in gay porn media. The paper argues that 'masc panic' not only demonstrates femmephobia, but actively prevents others from entering a state of belonging in their bodies by perpetuating notions of 'bottom shame'. By isolating effeminate traits such as 'gay voice' or 'gay mannerisms' in bottom porn actors, while nevertheless applauding a toned and therefore sexually desirable body, viewers inscribe a discourse of masc panic onto porn actors who fail to align their acceptable bodies with acceptable behaviour. The paper suggests that it is this specific misalignment between body and behaviour that accounts for the degree of vitriol directed against those deemed to be misaligned.     

Richard Vytniorgu is currently Research Fellow in the Centre for Research in Public Health and Community Care at the University of Hertfordshire. A cultural scholar, he is currently writing a book for Emerald Press on effeminacy, belonging, and gay bottom identities in media, visual culture, film and literature. His research has been published in the Journal of Homosexuality, Rhetoric Review, Emotion, Space & Society, and Masculinities, and has been funded by the AHRC, ESRC, and the Wellcome Trust. He has held previous research and impact positions at the University of Exeter and the University of Nottingham. 

[email protected]

*

Flagged: Adult Content Payment Processing and the Suppression of Kink      

Dr Valerie Webber, Dalhousie University, Canada

In October 2021, credit card company Mastercard released updated adult content merchant guidelines dictating the conditions under which they will process payments for porn purchases. Mastercard always had special rules for adult content, primarily to shield themselves from ‘brand-damaging’ associations, but tightened these guidelines in response to increased public panic that porn platforms are rife with non-consensual imagery. Because their guidelines are both stringent and vague, risk-averse platforms fearful of losing payment processing tend towards conservative over-moderation, flagging fetish and kink content considered particularly suspect in regard to performer consent. Black and other performers of colour, trans, queer, and fat performers, are disproportionately targeted by such moderation. As I show through survey and open-ended response data, in their attempt to prevent exploitation and ensure content only features consenting adults, Mastercard instead causes significant sexual harm in two respects: Firstly, over-broad moderation contributes to performers’ financial precarity by limiting their autonomous earning potential and putting them at greater risk of having to enter into exploitative work relations, especially when it targets those who are multiply marginalized. Secondly, an increasingly anti-kink porn landscape harms all sexual subjects, as it contributes to simplified and oppressive interpretations of sexual consent that constrain rather than protect sexual integrity. Both of these examples demonstrate that sex panics reproduce the very conditions of harm that they set out to resolve. 

Valerie Webber holds degrees in public health, sexuality studies, and medical anthropology. Their research looks at ‘health’ and ‘risk’ as sites of struggle, particularly for sex workers, queer communities, and other marginalized sexual communities. Their doctoral work explored occupational health in porn production, and they are board chair of PASS, a non-profit dedicated to adult performer health and safety. Val started camming in 2002 and has worked in several areas of the adult industry as a performer, crew, writer, and voice actor. They are an avid zine-ster, and their academic work appears in several porn studies, health, and sexuality journals.

[email protected] 

*

Artist Sex Workers and Sex Worker Artists: Mediating Sex and Moderating Content 

Dr Marissa Willcox, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Within a history of moral politics, cultural, social and legal boundaries continue to limit negotiations between sex work, content creation and art production. In the context of the platform-mediated gig economy, people who are making content are working gigs across various platforms and/or next to other employment (Ravenelle 2019). Some of these content creation gigs involve elements of sex work and/or the making of sexual content in artwork. Anti-sex content moderation policies on social media platforms affect any content marked as sexually explicit, including art. As part of the process of platformization of creative labour and sex work alike, content creators and artists thus must navigate the deplatforming of sexual content and anti-sex work policies through content moderation, whether or not they are selling sexual services. Moreover, as sex workers tend to produce content across multiple platforms (e.g. Campbell et al 2018), work both online and offline, and ‘hustle’ for gigs in both sex work and through ‘straight’ (non-sex) work, the boundaries between what is considered ‘sex work’ and what is considered ‘content creation’ and ‘art work’ becomes increasingly blurred. This project takes an intersectional feminist lens to investigate the negotiation of the contested boundaries of where sex work and erotic art and content creation begins and ends across platforms, and how this is embedded in the broader politics of platformized sex work, platform affordances and creative labour. Taking a digital ethnographic approach, in this paper we present case studies from interviews with participants who identify as sex workers and artists and show the ways they have to navigate platform infrastructures to remain visible, both as artists and sex workers. We offer a discussion which focuses on intersectional bodies, and their experiences of being moderated (whether through social stigma or algorithmic processes) problematizing the separation of sex work from artwork in a platform context.            

Dr Marissa Willcox is a Lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. She completed her PhD at RMIT University in Australia, where her research focused on how feminist and queer artists used Instagram to create belonging. Willcox's current research interests involve feminist approaches to sex work, Instagram art, feminist new materialism, digital ethnography, decolonial social media movements, and the platformisation of young bodies. She has written 4 journal articles and co published 2 books, and is working on turning her PhD into a book publication.

[email protected]

*

#MeToo as Sex Panic: Pleasure and the Negotiation of the #MeToo Sex Panic in Film and Television after #MeToo          

Polina  Zelmanova, University of Warwick, United Kingdom

#MeToo has created a new urgency for addressing sexual harassment, violence and rape culture. Whilst these issues have largely been addressed as problem of power, Heidi Matthews highlights the significance of reframing #MeToo specifically as a sex panic, which allows to talk about the moment in “explicitly sexual terms” (Matthews 2019, 268). As a sex panic, #MeToo “draw[s] firm boundaries between legitimate and deviant individuals and forms of sexuality” (Vance 1993, 295; Matthews 2019). Whilst perpetrators of sexual assault most obviously fall into #MeToo’s illegitimate sexuality category, a second boundary emerges on the flip side. This boundary relates to the newly formed popular feminist sexual ideals which emerged as a remedy to the prevalence of sexual violence, and which dictate ‘good sex’ practices. Whilst some celebrate these ideals for their direct challenge to rape culture (Wilz, 2020), some emerging scholarship problematises these ideals, such consent, for their creation of new norms (Matthews 2019; Darnell 2019) as well as their false equivocation with pleasure (Angel 2021). Reflecting on the current feminist discourses within cultural studies, and through the close textual analysis of the film Pleasure (2021), this paper explores the representation of sex in film and television in the context of the #MeToo sex panic. This paper considers the film, and popular culture in general, as a site of struggle (Hall 1981) which both reproduces and negotiates the sex panic. Whilst Pleasure reflects popular feminist ideals through an emphasis on female authorship, consent and female agency, rather than celebrating the film’s challenge to rape culture by highlighting what I term ‘positive models’ of sex (e.g. MacDonald 2021), my reading is instead driven by paradoxical moments which disrupt a straightforward analysis and make space for nuance, negotiation and challenge. By engaging with these disruptive moments and their ambiguity, whilst thinking about #MeToo as a sex panic, this paper creates space for the direct engagement with pleasure which has been side-lined within current Screen Studies discourses on #MeToo.             

 Polina Zelmanova is an AHRC Midlands4Cities funded PhD researcher in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. Her thesis is titled Sex in Contemporary Film and TV: Power and Pleasure after #MeToo. She is interested in the representation and politics of sex and sexuality in popular culture, the #MeToo context, as well as broader frameworks of queer and feminist screen studies. She is currently organising an AHRC funded conference titled Sex in Contemporary Media. Outside of her research, Polina has worked in film festival project management and as an audio-visual practitioner including for projects funded by IATL Warwick and Coventry City of Culture.

[email protected]

*

Other Events

Roundtable: Unravelling Sex Panics: A Roundtable on HIV Empowerment, Stigma, and Community Resilience in Ireland

This roundtable will bring together academics, activists, community outreach workers and nurses working in the area of HIV and Sexual Health in Ireland, delving into the complex issue of Sex Panics. It will explore four crucial aspects: fostering community empowerment and sex positivity, breaking free from the chains of infectiousness and HIV stigma, addressing medical indifference towards women and HIV, and the urgent need for community mobilisation in the face of looming pandemics.

Robbie Lawlor, PhD researcher, Dublin City University, Ireland

Robbie Lawlor became active within the HIV community since his diagnosis in 2012. Robbie is a member of the European AIDS Treatment Group, co-host of the PozVibe Podcast, and co-founder of Access to Medicines Ireland. Robbie is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Dublin City University and has a particular interest in grassroots activism and the access to medicines movement in Eastern Europe. His research explores HIV/HEP C treatment activism in Ukraine.

[email protected]

Dr John Gilmore, University College Dublin, Ireland

Dr John P Gilmore (he/they) is a Nurse and Assistant Professor in Nursing at University College Dublin School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health Systems. John is also a Fulbright HRB Health Impact Scholar who was a visiting researcher at the University of California San Francisco Center for Gender and Sexual Minority Health in 2023. John’s work broadly focusses on intersecting themes on inclusion health, social justice and gender and sexual minority healthcare, he is also a visiting research fellow at the University of Huddersfield UK.

[email protected]

Aoife Commins, Registered Nurse, Galway, Ireland

Aoife Commins is a registered nurse from Galway, Ireland, who has dedicated her advocacy to enhancing sexual health education, especially in healthcare settings. Aoife utilises her personal experience and health background to promote accurate and empathetic dialogue in Irish media and the healthcare sector to achieve her goal of reducing HIV-related stigma.

[email protected]

* 

Screening and interview: Growing (short, 2021)

Agata Wieczorek, IRC Scholar, Dublin City University, Ireland

Ewa is a young woman at caregiving early-stage career. She is taking up training in a medical simulation unit, where she participates in lifelike role-plays and impersonates medical mannequins within simulated procedures. The uniformed model of reality Ewa functions in is designed to prepare her for fulfilling her future functions in a seamless manner. Ewa gradually loses recognition between the simulation and reality what yields a conflict between the model she is trained to exist in and herself. In between lucidity and dream, she eventually acts on her own.

Agata Wieczorek’s practice combines film and photography, while moving between constructed documentary and documented fiction. In her work, she observes how the human body exists and performs in situations that are deeply intimate and radically political at the very same time. Gender, reproduction rights and motherhood confronted with governmental restrictions and institutionalized healthcare are frequent subjects in her practice.

[email protected]

 
*

Spoken Word Performance: TABOO

Siobhán “Shiv” Hickey is a Dublin-based poet, actor, sometime comedian and Artistic Director of After Midnight Theatre. In 2018,  Shiv developed and performed her one woman comedy show ‘Dear Diary… and other notions of a romantic nature’ which was also performed at Dublin’s FRAYED fringe Festival in 2019. Shiv wrote ‘Voices’ and ‘Dear Death’ both of which were performed as part of the Smock Allies Scene+Heard Festival in Smock Alley, 2020 and 2022 respectively.  Shiv has published two collections of poetry ‘After Midnight’ (2020) and ‘Scribbles from an Anxious Mind’ (2022) – some of which she has performed in venues around Dublin and made her Electric Picnic debut in 2022. In January of 2023, Shiv performed at L'Hirondelle as the featured guest poet at Spoken Word Paris. Shiv counts among her influences Leonard Cohen, Audre Lorde, Jim Morrison, and Emily Dickinson, as well as by various Irish spoken word and musical artists. With her work coming from real life experiences, her poetry has been described as "vulnerable" and "a gut-punch" but is always partnered with a pinch of comedy.

[email protected]

*
Exhibition:  Unshrinking Violets: 50 Years of Lesbian Activism

An exhibition with activist/ protest ephemera and photographs drawn from the private collections donated by participants from this era exploring the archival and social history of Lesbian activism curated by Han Tiernan and Cara Holmes.