Enfilade

From the conference website:

Politeness and Prurience: Situating Transgressive Sexualities in the Long Eighteenth Century
Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, 2–3 September 2013

A major, two-day, international, and multidisciplinary conference hosted by the History of Art department (Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh) which focuses on the cultural history of sexuality, particularly as embedded in polite culture in Britain in the long eighteenth century.

Featuring major scholars in the history of sexuality, eighteenth-century culture, and gender studies, this conference will present illicit sexuality as having a crucial, yet understated, presence in polite culture. Drawing across visual, material and literary cultures, we hope to provide a multi-faceted and challenging platform for thinking about the role of sexualities in aspects of history in which they have often seemed absent.

The conference will include keynote addresses from Professor George Haggerty (University of California Riverside) and Dr. Caroline Gonda (University of Cambridge), as well as an associated public lecture from Dr. Faramerz Dabhoiwala. Conference fees: £40 standard price, £20 students and wnwaged. Booking for the public lecture is free but essential.

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2  S E P T E M B E R  2 0 1 3

9:00  Registration

9:30  Keynote address by George Haggerty (University of California, Riverside), Penile Politeness: The Society of Dilettanti, Richard Payne Knight and Horace Walpole

10:30  Refreshments

11:00  Panel 1: Staging Sexualities: Mounting the ‘Fop’

• Matthew Kinservik (University of Delaware), Men Writing about Men in the Theatre: Male Eroticism on (and off) the Eighteenth-Century Stage

• Robert Jones (University of Leeds), Performing the Fop: Effeminacy and Performance on the Georgian Stage

12:30  Lunch

13:30  Panel 2: Interfaces: Politeness and Prurience

• Lawrence Klein (University of Cambridge), Polite Sex

• Sarah Betzer (University of Virginia), Polite, Queer, Taste

• Barrett Kalter (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Antiquarianism and Queer Time

15:30  Refreshments

16:00  Panel 3: [A]dressing the Subject: Dress, Undress, Cross-Dress

• Peter McNeil (University of Technology, Sydney), ‘Things of a peculiar species’: Macaronism and Fashion in Eighteenth-Century Theatre

• Dawn Hoskin (Victoria & Albert Museum), ‘Nature turned topsy-turvy’: Cross-dressing, Effeminacy and Sodomitical Inclinations at London Masquerades

• Liza Foley (National College of Art and Design, Ireland), ‘Soft, stretched and soiled’: Eroticizing the Glove in Eighteenth-Century England

19:00  Public lecture by Faramerz Dabhoiwala (Exeter College, Oxford; author of The Origins of Sex), The First Sexual Revolution

3  S E P T E M B E R  2 0 1 3

9:30  Keynote address by Caroline Gonda (University of Cambridge), The Epitome of Sapphism and the First Modern Lesbian: Anne Damer and Anne Lister

10:30  Refreshments

11:00  Panel 1: Scandal, Gossip and Sexual Reportage

• Katrina O’Loughlin (ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of the Emotions, University of Western Australia), ‘Strolling Roxanas’: Sexual In/continence, Travel and Scandal

• Rachel Cleves (University of Victoria), ‘Malicious Tongues’: Sex and Slander in the Early American Republic

12:30  Lunch

13:30  Panel 2: Subversive Unions – Alternative Marriages

• Helen Berry (University of Newcastle), A Queer Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England: The Castrato, His Wife, Her Child and Her Lover

• Ana Clara Santo-Santana (University of York), The Criminal Marriage Plot in Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband

• Freya Gowrley (University of Edinburgh), ‘Damned Sapphists’? Que(e)rying the Gothic at Plas Newydd, Llangollen

15:30  Refreshments

16:00  Panel 3: Peering, Leering, Ogling: Varieties of Viewing

• Jordan Mearns (University of Edinburgh), The Wandering Gaze: Perception, Prurience and the Practice of Connoisseurship in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain

• Lydia Syson (Independent Scholar), Dr. Graham’s Ocular Turn: A Look at the Origins of the Celestial Bed

17:30  Drinks Reception