5th Stonewall Lecture
by Laurence Georgin
A record 100 people registered for the annual Stonewall Lecture which was given on 18 February by Professor Elise Chenier of Simon Fraser University (British Columbia). Prof Chenier is a leading historian of sexuality, migration and discrimination, and also of oral history and archives, having created her own lesbian archive website (ALOT). Her lively lecture, which was recorded, was entitled ‘Lesbian Voices: Stuck in the Past?’. It assessed the position of lesbianism and women’s sexuality over the past forty years, drawing on her own life as well as her digital archive in order to show both continuities and breaks with the present. The Q&A was particularly lively, in pressing the audience to question their own sexual stereotypes. The audience was highly diverse, composed of academic staff, administrators and students, with a spectrum of sexual preferences also on display! A collection after the lecture raised £80 for the Stonewall charity. The feedback (on Twitter and other social media) has shown the major success of the event, and the value of this lecture as a forum for highlighting LGBT history and disseminating it to a wider audience at Southampton. The President (Vice-Chancellor) also sent a special message of support for the lecture as a key display of the university’s commitment to Equality and Diversity.
The recorded lecture is now available at http://www.southampton.ac.uk/humanities/news/events/2016/02/18-stonewall-lecture.page
Stonewall Lecture this Thursday – Register NOW to ensure a place!
by Laurence Georgin
Make sure you register NOW to get a place!
Lesbian Life Stories: Stuck in the Past? On the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimonies (ALOT)
Thursday 18 February 2016 – 6:00pm
The 2016 Southampton Stonewall Lecture will be given this year by Professor Elise Chenier, Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. All welcome.
This 2016 Stonewall lecture from a leading historian of sexuality and gender will explore and explain lesbian experience as captured in three decades of oral histories. In the 1990s the discipline of history, once a leader in LGBT studies, was overtaken by literary and cultural studies, and ‘life experience’ fell out of academic fashion. Professor Chenier will show that “lesbian” remains a useful category of analysis and that life stories continue to have a transformative effect, playing a key role in constructing the LGBT community.
This lecture will be chaired by Professor Mark Cornwall, Professor of Modern Europe History at University of Southampton.
Speaker information
Elise Chenier is Professor of History at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, and an expert in the history of sexuality and oral history. Her first book, Strangers In Our Midst: Sexual Deviancy in Postwar Ontario (Toronto, 2008) was awarded an honourable mention for the Canadian Law & Society Book Prize. She has published widely in journals such as the Radical History Review, the Journal of Women’s History, and Left History, and is the founder of the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony (alotarchives.org), an open-access digital archives, and interracialintimacies.org, a digital visualization of the research process and learning tool. She is currently writing a book on ‘Same Sex Marriage in the USA, 1950-1987’.
Event Information
Venue
Avenue Campus
University of Southampton
SO17 1BF
Register
This event is free however you must register to attend and receive joining instructions. To register for a place please visit the Online Store website.
The inaugural Stonewall Lecture was given in March 2012 by Angela Mason CBE, former executive director of the Stonewall charity. Her lecture, drawing a large audience, was entitled: ‘Twenty-Five Years On: The Fight for LGBT Rights in the UK’. The 2013 lecture ‘Gay Culture in Postwar New York: Community Creation and Conflict‘ was given by Professor George Chauncey (Yale), 2014 was provided by Professor Laura Doan speaking about ‘On the Entanglements of Queer Memory and History: The case of Alan Turing‘ and last year we welcomed Professor Richard B Parkinson from the University of Oxford with his lecture entitled ‘Glimpses of a Gay World History: From Ancient Egypt to the Modern Museum‘. You will find recordings and interviews of these lectures by following the links above.
If you wish to attend this very popular lecture please register by 14 February for a place via the Online Store. Ensure you book soon to avoid disappointment!
There will be a charity collection on behalf of Stonewall at the end of the lecture.