"We will have this cut out": The Making and Unmaking of Queer Zoology
This is a joint event with the LGBTQ+ History Faculty Network on Friday 5 May
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.’
Date: 5 May 2023, 16:00 (Friday, 2nd week, Trinity 2023)
Venue: History Faculty, George Street OX1 2RL
Venue Details: Lecture Theatre
Speaker: Dr Ross Brooks (Oxford Brookes University)
Organising department: Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology
Organiser: Faculty of History
Organiser contact email address: alexander.aylward@history.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Centre for the History of Science Medicine and Technology (OCHSMT) Seminars and Events
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Belinda Clark