Wednesday 22 February 2017, 15.30 – 20.00, Woolf Lecture Theatre
To showcase the vast array of excellent research being done at Kent on or related to LGBT+ people and issues, we will be hosting a mini conference from 15.30-20.00 on Wednesday 22 February in Woolf Lecture Theatre, Canterbury.
The conference is open to staff, students, alumni and members of the public.
There is no need to register, but it would be helpful for catering purposes.
AGENDA (subject to change)
| 15.30 | Registration, tea & coffee | |
| 16.00 | Kasia Senyszyn, LGBT+ Staff Network Chair
Clara Lee, Vice-President (Welfare), Kent Union |
Welcome |
| 16.15 | Terry Gore (Catching Lives) and Carin Tunaker (Porchlight) | LGBT Homelessness |
| 16.30 | Dr Christin Hoene
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow School of English |
“The Origins of ‘Sodomy’ Laws in British Colonialism and their Postcolonial Repercussions”
This paper provides a critical overview of the origins of the so-called ‘sodomy’ laws in British colonies and their contemporary repercussions in postcolonial societies. In more than 40 former British colonies, including the Indian subcontinent, homosexuality remains illegal under colonial-era laws. Moreover, of the 84 countries that still criminalise homosexuality, roughly half are ex-British colonies using old British laws. I also discuss in how far these anti-homosexuality laws are part of an anti-Western discourse that, in a reversal of causality, invokes a (mythical) straight pre-colonial past now ‘contaminated’ by queer and neo-colonial Western influences. |
| 17.00 | Jessica Smith
Graduate Teaching Assistant & PhD student Kent Law School |
‘The Pregnant Man’ – Transgender and Parenting Identities
In 2008, Thomas Beatie received worldwide media attention as the ‘world’s first pregnant man’. Since then, there has been an increasing representation of transgender parents in the media from characters in the television shows Transparent and Orange Is The New Black to the public transition of Caitlyn Jenner. My research is in the field of socio-legal studies and explores the relationship between transgender and parenting identities. I am currently looking at the law surrounding parenthood and how this is expressed in the binary gendered language of ‘mother’ and ‘father’. |
| 17.30 | Networking, tea & coffee | |
| 18.00 | Graysen Hall
MA student School of English |
The ICA and Queering Curation
The ICA has curated many queer works of art throughout the seventy years since it’s foundation in 1947. This presentation will explore three in particular; Prostitution by Coney Fanny Tutti and COUM Transmission, the Gay Sweatshop Troupe and The New Queer Cinema conference in 1992. |
| 18.30 | Dr Juliette Pattinson
Head of the School of History & Reader in History
|
Rake’s Progress: clandestine operations in Occupied France
Denis Rake, codenamed Justin, Roland and Dieudonné, was a wireless operator for the French Section of the British Second World War clandestine organisation, the Special Operations Executive. Considered ‘a trifle effeminate’ by the recruiting officer, he underwent rigorous training and was deployed to occupied France in May 1942 to work with the French resistance. He published his candid autobiography Rake’s Progress in 1968, the year after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and in interview noted that his need to prove himself stemmed in part from anxieties about his sexuality, propelling him to test the limits of his bravery. This talk uses film, personal testimony and official records to reconstruct his life. |
| 19.00 | Pete Mercer | Stonewall update |
| 19.15 – 20.00 | Networking, refreshments | |
