psychology
Southampton Stonewall Lecture, Thursday 9 February: Professor Dagmar Herzog
by John Cornwall
The 2017 Stonewall Lecture will take place in Lecture Theatre A (Avenue Campus) on Thursday 9 February 6pm. All welcome but please register with Tracy Storey: t.p.storey@soton.ac.uk. The 2017 speaker is Professor Dagmar Herzog (CUNY), one of the leading historians of sexuality and homophobia. She will be speaking about:
LOVE AND PERVERSION: THE MODERN HISTORY OF HOMOPHOBIA.
Why has same-sex desire often been associated with weak egos, strong drives, and narcissistic character disorders?
Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was never hostile to homosexuality. But post-Freudian analysts clung fiercely to a homophobic consensus, even if their reasoning changed under pressure of competing with sexuality researchers like Alfred Kinsey. This lecture will explain how homophobia and psychoanalysis evolved in tandem in the course of the sexual revolution of the 20th century. It explores how clever theory and activism finally got homosexuality removed from the official list of psychiatric illnesses – while reconceiving the connections between love and perversion for everyone.
The Southampton Stonewall Lecture is devoted to the history of homosexuality or LGBT history and is part of an annual lecture series organised by the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Southampton. The purpose of the lecture is to educate the present about the past; to showcase thinking and research about LGBT history; and to enhance the University of Southampton’s remit of promoting sexual diversity in the regional community.
Lesbian Life Stories: Stuck in the Past? On the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimonies (ALOT)
by Laurence Georgin
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
RSVP by 14 February
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.
Research: The experiences of sexually diverse individuals
by Laurence Georgin
Sarah Ella-Davies is currently studying for a Masters in Occupational Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London. For her research project she is trying to gather information on the experiences of sexually diverse people. The experiences of sexually diverse individuals is a relatively unstudied area, and she hopes that evidence such as this will draw attention to some of the issues that need to be addressed.
To provide reliable results her research requires a relatively large number of participants. You can therefore fill in her questionnaire at
https://goldpsych.eu.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_6F2HokWUPWn9rdr
You can also circulate this and encourage people to complete the questionnaire.
All research information will be kept in strictest confidence and anonymity measures ensure that participants are unidentifiable from the data they submit.
Sexual orientation and unconscious vision
by Laurence Georgin
I am Nick Hedger, a second year PhD student (I got my BSc and MSc here) at the Center for Vision and Cognition, Psychology. I am co-supervised by Dr Wendy Adams (Center for Vision and Cognition, Psychology) and Dr Matthew Garner (Clinical and Experimental Sciences, Medicine) and I will be collecting data with Stuart Hyde (MSc student). One of our research projects is focused on how our visual system prioritizes biologically relevant stimuli (stimuli that signal potential threat or reward). In particular, we are interested in the extent to which this prioritization occurs in the absence of conscious awareness. To investigate these questions, we use a range of physiological and psychophysical techniques.
The current project focuses on the processing of one class of salient stimuli- erotic images, which are prioritized by human vision as they are symbolic of reproductive success. We will be using a novel technique called continuous flash suppression (www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v8/n8/full/nn1500.html), which consists of presenting dynamic noise to one eye to prevent conscious perception of stimuli presented to the other. Using this technique, we aim to assess the extent to which unconsciously presented erotic images elicit behavioral (attention) and physiological (skin conductance) responses. Another key aim is to establish whether sexual orientation modulates these unconscious responses. To fulfill this latter aim, we hope to recruit participants via the LGBT network.
Here is a link to Dr Adam’s vision lab (includes recent papers and abstracts): www.personal.soton.ac.uk/erich/VisionLabs/Home.html
Center for Vision and Cognition page: www.southampton.ac.uk/psychology/research/groups/centre_for_vision_and_cognition.page#overview
Nick Hedger
Take part in a study on the role of sexual orientation in modulating spatial attention
by Laurence Georgin
Hi,
My name is Stuart I am an MSc Research Student from the University of Southampton psychology department, working as a research assistant for Dr Wendy Adams and PhD student Nicholas Hedger.
I am requesting your participation in a study that investigates the role of sexual orientation in modulating spatial attention. We are also investigating whether stimuli (erotic images) presented under the threshold of awareness elicit physiological responses (e.g. skin conductance responses, heart rate) .This study will require you to complete a questionnaire about your sexual orientation, before viewing a series of images presented via a mirror stereoscope. You will firstly be asked to indicate any changes in your perception by pressing buttons on a keyboard. You will then be asked to indicate your perception of briefly presented stimuli. Throughout the procedure, electrodes will be attached to your fingers, ankle and forearm to allow us to measure physiological responses to the stimuli. All data will be collected by either Stuart Hyde (an MSc student) or Nick Hedger (a psychology PhD student)
The study will last up to 80 minutes and you will receive £7.50 for your participation.
Please email me at sdh1g09@soton.ac.uk or Nick at naah1g08@soton.ac.uk if you are interested in taking part. We appreciate your time!
Stuart Hyde
MSc Research Student, Psychology, University of Southampton