“Toward an Etiological History of Modernist Sexuality”

This presentation theorizes an etiological rather than an epistemological approach to the history of sexuality. Kahan revisits two of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s axioms in Epistemology of the Closet: 1. her eschewal of etiological approaches to the history of sexuality and 2. her avoidance of the dating of the invention of homosexuality. Charting Sedgwick’s concerns and the potentialities of these terrains of inquiry, he contends that historical etiology enables us to approach the historiographical questions and impasses of the periodization of sexuality in new ways.

Also earlier on November 23 presenting
“*Ray Johnson’s Anti-Archive: Blackface, Sadomasochism, and the Racial and Sexual Imagination of Pop Art” 2:30 in 606 Clemens

This visit is co-sponsored by The Department of Art, the Queer Studies Research Workshop, the Leslie Lohman Queer Art Lecture Series, and the H.I. Modernisms Research Workshop.

Benjamin Kahan
Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University and author of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Duke University Press, 2013).