Podcasts & Videos Series

Podcast: Interview with Dr Astrida Neimanis, Senior Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies, at the Sex and Nature conference (Exeter, 2019)

An interview with Dr Astrida Neimanis, Senior Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies, in conversation with Dr Sarah Bezan

Astrida Neimanis discusses her book Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2017, and her keynote ‘Toxic Erotics and Bad Ecosex’, which she gave at the ‘Sex and Nature: 1800-2018’ conference in Exeter in June 2019. You can find out more about the Sex and Nature conference here.

You can listen to more podcasts from the Sex and Nature conference by clicking on the Podcasts and Videos series tab above.

Podcast: Artist Q&A with Artist-in-residence Dr Amy Cutler at the Sex and Nature conference (Exeter, 2019)

Artist Q&A with Sex and Nature Artist-in-residence, Dr Amy Cutler, in conversation with Dr Sarah Bezan and Dr Ina Linge

This artist Q&A explores histories of zoö-curious sex discourse in semi-domesticated spaces, such as the beehive, the aquarium, and the television set. Cutler discusses nonhuman influences on her sound, film, and live performance work, from the sexual foibles of Victorian insect writing (with the hive itself seen as a female super-organism, with an insatiable mouth and an insatiable oviduct), to the heteronormativity of the birds nest in Disney’s nature documentaries about “mother Nature” and in the use of the “birds and the bees” idiom by the Eugenics movement. Discussing her work with live cinema for film festivals and with radio for the BBC, Cutler also explores the collapsing scales of “love” as a matter of both public and private work. From animal betrothals to cross-species femme fatales, how can we artistically intervene in the public stories of nature and the ways they police our private lives? Can we, after Negarestani, find ways of becoming-vermin in these pedagogies – opening up plot holes and desires, rather than the “wholesome plots” which cover them up?

This Q&A was part of the Sex and Nature conference. You can find our more about the conference here.

You can listen to more podcasts from the Sex and Nature conference by clicking on the Podcasts and Videos series tab above.

Podcast: Interview with Associate Professor Greta LaFleur at the Sex and Nature conference (Exeter, 2019)

An interview with Associate Professor Greta LaFleur, in conversation with Dr Ina Linge

Greta LaFleur discusses her new book The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2018, and her keynote ‘Sex, Outside’, which she gave at the Sex and Nature: 1800-2018 conference in Exeter in June 2019. You can find out more about the Sex and Nature conference here.

You can listen to more podcasts from the Sex and Nature conference by clicking on the Podcasts and Videos series tab above.

Podcast: Ina Linge (University of Cambridge) ‘Sexology and the Department Store’

 

Ina Linge (University of Cambridge) discusses her research on the performance of queer identities in German sexological and psychoanalytic life writings.

Abstract:

Dori and Nora, the protagonists of The Diary of a Male Bride (1907) and A Man’s Maiden Years (1907), respectively, leave their small-town relatives behind to become shop girls in the German metropolis. They appear to be members of a generation of ordinary working class girls populating the department store – except that, in the eyes of their contemporaries, they are not ordinary, because they are not girls. This talk traces the textual representation of the queer body in early twentieth-century sexological life writings as it becomes an object of display, both during sexological examination and as queer commodity on the shop floor.

Watch a video of Ina talking to us about more of her research here.

This event was part of the Centre for Medical History seminar series, University of Exeter.

Video: Ina Linge (University of Cambridge) on queer identities in sexological life writings

Ina Linge, PhD candidate at University of Cambridge visited us in November 2015. Here she talks to Dr Jen Grove about her research including the performance of queer identities in German sexological and psychoanalytic life writings; the links between the classification of animals in zoology and human sexual behaviour in German psychoanalysis and sexual science; and the plans for the Museum of Passion project in Berlin.

Listen to a recording of Ina’s paper “‘Something different’: Sexology and the Department Store”.

Watch other videos we have made on the history of sexual science.