Brighton and Sussex Sexualities Network

From 13 to 15 September 2010, a symposium will be held at the Monash Centre in Prato, Italy, on the topic "Transgression and Discipline in the History of Sexuality".

Participants in the conference will attempt a revision of modernist accounts like those of the Surrealists which place transgression at the heart of an understanding of the sexual. They will do this in twoways: by looking closely at some historical examples that may be better understood in other terms, and by critiquing elements of the modernist legacy in current thinking about queer.

The program will include the following:

• Fernanda Alfieri, "Transgressing what? The nature of 'impassable limits' in early modern narratives of sexuality"
• Marina Bollinger, "The Metaphysics of Love in Seventeenth-Century Cambridge Platonism"
• Martyn Lloyd, "Transgression, Freedom, and the Meaning of Sade"
• Peter Cryle, "Foucault's Re-Thinking of Transgression: the Figure of Sade"
• Chiara Beccalossi [On nineteenth-century psychiatry]
• Heather Wolffram, "'My only hope lies in a cure by means of hypnosis':Problems with the Psychological Model of Homosexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe"
• Lesley Hall, "Gendering Trangression"
• Heike Bauer [TBA]
• Michel Finn, "Transgression, Profanation and Sadism in Proust"
• Robert Gillett, "Overstepping the Mark with Malice Aforethought:Revalorising Transgression"
• Elizabeth Stephens, "Fixated on Fluidity: Rhetorics of Mobility in Contemporary Queer Studies"
• Lisa Downing, "Perversion, Fixity and Fluidity in the History of the Psy Disciplines and in Queer Theory"

For inquiries, please contact Peter Cryle (p.cryle@uq.edu.au) or Lisa Downing (L.M.Downing@exeter.ac.uk)