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"The Sexuality of History”
Professor Susan S. Lanser

This spring’s Distinguished Women’s and Gender Studies Faculty Lecture focused on “The Sexuality of History.” Sue Lanser, former chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and Director of the WGS Board, explored some of the ways in which her current research links early modern Europe’s surge of cultural interest in relations between women to the larger challenges of an emergent modernity. Much as debates about same-sex marriage today get tapped for political purposes extending beyond sex or marriage, Lanser argued, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century engagements with same-sex affiliations became flashpoints for grappling with questions of nature and difference, gender and power particularly in countries invested in colonial conquest. Exploring examples from medical treatises, travel narratives, political pamphlets, poems, plays, novels, and case histories in locations ranging from seventeenth-century Spain to eighteenth-century England and Revolutionary France, Lanser showed how relations between women challenged the social organization of early modern Europe, and paved the way for the democratic order of the modern age.

Early modern Europe saw a surge of interest in "lesbian" desires and relationships.  In genres as diverse as poems, plays, scientific treatises and travelers' tales, female relations became a flashpoint in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe for grappling with challenges to social structures and beliefs.  Lanser's talk will ask not only what history can tell us about sexuality and gender, but what sexuality and gender can tell us about history.

Susan S. Lanser is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Women's and Gender Studies at Brandeis University.  A scholar of narrative, gender, sexuality, and eighteenth century culture, she chaired the Women's and Gender Studies Program from 2001 until 2007.

This event is free and open to the public.
For further information: 781-736-3045 or http://www.brandeis.edu/wgs/