Transnational Histories of Sexuality
Inaugural Symposium of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities
Yale University
Saturday, April 7, 2007
Hall of Graduate Studies, Room 211
320 York Street
Free and open to the public
Most histories of sexuality have assumed the nation as backdrop or used it as a framework. This one-day symposium explores how thinking transnationally would change our understanding of the history of sexuality and, conversely, how engaging with the history of sexuality would reshape our understanding of transnational studies. Each of our distinguished speakers will address these questions for approximately 35 minutes, with another half hour of discussion from the floor to follow. We have asked our speakers to draw on their own research and extensive knowledge of their diverse regional specializations, but also to reflect on larger methodological and theoretical issues. The symposium will conclude with an hour-long roundtable discussion.
9:30-10 Registration (coffee and bagels available)
10-12:15 Morning Session
Welcome and Introduction
Joanne Meyerowitz, Professor of History and American Studies, Co-Director, YRIHS
Biosecurity and Bodily Exposures: Historical Perspectives on the Sexual Politics of Defense
Ann Laura Stoler, The New School for Social Research
Introduced by Laura Wexler, Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Chair, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Biosecurity calls attention to the constellation of practices and technologies that are designed to secure borders from 'penetration,' police populations from infiltration, and prepare national and transnational macropolitical territories for defense. Strikingly absent from analyses of the new security measures in Europe and the U.S. is the history of sexual politics by which security has been assured and "bios" framed in the longue durée of empire. Discourses about 'the white slave trade,' sexual violence against "enemy combatants" in detention centers, strip-searches at "vulnerable borders," and the sexual abuse of women in refugee camps are points of blockage, violence, perversion, and penetration where bodies have long been deployed, exposed, and assaulted in the name of security, preparedness, and peace.
Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research. She has long addressed why matters of the intimate have mattered so little to historians of empire but so much to imperial states. Her books, Race and the Education of Desire (1995), Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (2002) and Haunted by Empire (2006) as well as her forthcoming Along the Archival Grain provide the grounding for her recent work on the politics of comparison and imperial formations today.
Sex in Change: Configurations of Sexuality and Gender in Iran
Afsaneh Najmabadi, Harvard University
Introduced by Hazel Carby, Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and American Studies, Director, Initiative on Race, Gender, and Globalization
How have legality and illegality shaped sexual subjectivities? How have state-codified notions of proper public manhood and womanhood constituted sexualities? This talk will look at the legality of transsexuality and the illegality of homosexuality in Iran. It addresses the confluence of classical Islamic and western psycho-medical discourses. In Iran, the Islamic conception of the “true sex” of every human body met the psycho-medicalized notion of the “truth of sex” -- that a natural biological sex determines one’s gender behavior and sexual desire. Together the discourses gave powerful impetus to the “curing” of transsexuality through sex-change medical interventions while sustaining homosexuality as an unacceptable criminalized deviation. Paradoxically, the critical investment of legal, medical and jurisprudential authorities in separating the transsexual from the homosexual has opened up more fluid possibilities for sexual subjectivity and new spaces of public sociality for gays and lesbians. This recent history in Iran invites us to reflect on the global circulations, local reworkings, and (unintended) consequences of modern sexual discourse.
Afsaneh Najmabadi teaches History and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her most recent book, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (University of California Press, 2005), received the 2005 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association. She is an associate editor of the six-volume Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (Brill, 2004-2008), and is currently working on Sex in Change: Configurations of Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Iran.
12:15-1:15 Lunch (provided)
1:15-3:15 Afternoon Session
Sexual Migration, Globalization, and Change: Mexican Gay and Bisexual Men
Héctor Carrillo, San Francisco State University
Introduced by Stephen Pitti, Professor of History and American Studies, Director, Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration
How has sexuality influenced emigration to the United States? How have sexualities and identities changed upon arrival? This talk questions models that classify voluntary sexual migration as an “escape” from tradition into modernity. Using results from the Trayectos Study, a large ethnographic study of gay and bisexual Mexican immigrant men in California, it challenges the common assumption that homosexuality in countries such as Mexico remains statically trapped in a kind of “tradition” that prevents the pursuit of gay rights. Instead, Carrillo calls attention to the complex factors that propel sexual migrants to cross international borders and construct sexual lives in their adopted countries. To bring greater clarity to the general concept of sexual migration, he proposes that we analyze sexually motivated transnational movement simultaneously through two lenses: international inequalities; and globalization, understood as a two-way flow between rich and poor countries. He also argues that to fully understand contemporary sexual migration we need careful consideration of historical processes of cultural hybridization and change that have shaped sexualities in the immigrants' home countries.
Héctor Carrillo, DrPH, is Assistant Professor of Human Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University. He is the author of The Night Is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of AIDS, which received the 2002 Ruth Benedict Prize from the American Anthropological Association.
Syncopated Sex: Toward a Transnational History of Sexuality in Europe
Dagmar Herzog, CUNY Graduate Center
Introduced by Laura Engelstein, Henry S. McNeil Professor of History, Chair, European Studies Council
What drives historical change in the realm of sexuality? Do shifting popular values lead to pressure for legal change, or is it vice versa? How important are individual activists? social movements? market forces? religious traditions or innovations? scandals? The talk will address these questions through transnational comparisons within Europe and then focus in on two interpretive puzzles. One involves the traffic in bodies (and especially the search for abortions) across the German-Swiss border in the 1930s, before and during the Third Reich; the other involves the social movements for gay rights in the 1970s-1980s in France, West Germany, the Netherlands, and Ireland.Dagmar Herzog is Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author, most recently, of Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, 2005), as well as the editor of Sexuality in Austria (Transaction, 2007). She is currently writing a history of sexuality in twentieth-century Europe (Cambridge), as well as editing a volume on war and sexual violence.
3:30-4:30 Roundtable
Héctor Carrillo, Dagmar Herzog, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Ann Laura Stoler
Introduced and moderated by George Chauncey, Professor of History and American Studies, Co-Director, YRIHS
