Dear all,
The next meeting of the Queer STS Reading Group will take place on Thursday 12th March from 5pm-6pm in the Alice Farrands Room on the ground floor of the UCL STS Department (22 Gordon Square, WC1H 0AW).
This will be the last meeting of Queer STS for the forseeable future as I am going to be away from late March until June at Northwestern University. If you’ve been meaning to come to a discussion and haven’t had the opportunity — it could be your last chance!
This time, we’ll be discussing a queer classic: Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s (1998) “Sex in Public”
In “Sex in Public”, Berlant and Warner examine the place of sex in the constitution of publics and public life. Examining the ways in which sexuality may be depoliticised through the public/private divide that would relegate matters of sex to the domain of the “personal”, the authors describe how such a paradigm props up and privileges heteronormativity. Crucially, Berlant and Warner offer up queer counterpublicity as a form of world-making quite aside from the hegemony of national heterosexuality where sex and public life might coincide.
The essay can be found here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1344178?seq=1
In lieu of an abstract, here is a quote from the introduction to the essay:
The aim of this paper is to describe what we want to promote as the radical aspirations of queer culture building: not just a safe zone for queer sex but the changed possibilities of identity, intelligibility, publics, culture, and sex that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the referent or the privileged example of sexual culture. Queer social practices like sex and theory try to unsettle the garbled but powerful norms supporting that privilege — including the project of normalization that has made heterosexuality hegemonic — as well as those material practices that, though not explicitly sexual, are implicated in the hierarchies of property and propriety that we will describe as heteronormative.