The Politics and Sex and Sexuality Lecture Series, 2021-2022
This year, the Department of Women's and Gender Studies was excited to host our Politics of Sex and Sexuality Lecture Series! For this series, the Department invited distinguished guests from across the country to explore the intersection of politics, sex, and sexuality with the LMU community. Our Department was excited to welcome scholars doing cutting-edge research and field work to work campus, and to engage with the entangled politics of sex and sexuality.
Our first event featured Dr. Lorna Bracewell, a political theorist and associate professor of political science at Flagler College. Her scholarship focuses on feminist theory and the history of political thought and has been published in academic journals like Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and popular forums like The Washington Post. Her book, Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era (University of Minnesota Press, March 2021), offers a revisionist history of the feminist sexuality debates of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s foregrounding the influence of liberal concepts such as freedom of expression, the public/private divide, and the harm principle.
Our second event featured Dr. Joseph Fischel, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University and insightful and prolific theorist of social and sexual justice. His upcoming book project, which he discussed at length during the event with LMU faculty and students, is entitled Sodomitical Justice: A Solicitation (forthcoming in the Sexuality Series of Temple University Press) and examines the life and afterlife of sodomy laws in New Orleans and beyond to reconsider the centrality of sex—in contradisctinction to race, gender or sexuality—for liberal and neoliberal governance.
The Department of Women's and Gender Studies would like to thank your co-sponsors in Political Science & International Relations, LGBT Student Services, the Global Policy Institute, and the BCLA Dean's Office for their support of this lecture series.
