OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Recent years have seen a flourishing of scholarly and popular works about intersexualities, transformations of sex, and non-reproductive sexual behaviours in the natural world. News stories, children’s books, and LGBTQ+ initiatives in natural history museums have further amplified knowledge and appreciation of ‘evolution’s rainbow’ as never before. Yet zoological descriptions of queer bodies and behaviours have been made since antiquity. In this talk, Dr Ross Brooks (he/him) will chart the often surprising, often troubling, ways in which naturalists in the past have treated the variations of sex in oppressive intellectual environments that doggedly condemned such variations as ‘evil’ and ‘unnatural.’