Talk ‘How to Bring Your Canon Up Gay'

In his talk, Dr Sam Rutherford will compare the life and work of the English classicist and historian John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) with that of the pioneering American queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009), to interrogate the history of Western gay male culture and the creation of gay male communities.

Dr Rutherford will discuss how Western gay male cultural heritage of the 19th and 20th centuries, drawing on Greek antiquity, became bound up in racism and transmisogyny, but could also become a site of transmasculine possibility. Through a trans reading of Sedgwick’s lifelong desire for belonging in gay male community, Dr Rutherford proposes a different understanding of gay cultural heritage which moves beyond narrow conceptions of individual, ‘born this way’ gay (or trans) subjectivity.

Sam Rutherford is Lecturer in LGBTQ+ History / History of Sexuality at the University of Glasgow. His first book, Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860–1939, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2025.

The event is free and open to everyone. for further details.

This event is held by OutStories Bristol in collaboration with the University of Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition (IGRCT).

Host or Publisher OutStories Bristol