Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing
The keynote address engages with the fields of queer ecology, animal studies, and environmental humanities to focus on the role of animals as well as concepts of nature and naturalness in the development of modern concepts of sex, gender and sexuality in Britain and the German-speaking world. The talk will investigate medico-scientific texts, as well as cultural, literary and visual sources, in order to explore how non-human animal bodies, behaviours and metaphors are used to develop and challenge changing ideas about the nature of sex, gender and sexuality in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Europe. The keynote aims to show that attempts to naturalise sexuality through animal research do not necessarily incorporate sexuality into a normalising and normative system of reproduction, purity and health, but into more complex ecological systems of desire, fluidity and dissolving boundaries (e.g. nature/culture, human/animal).