Sex & Gender Archives - Public Seminar

Feminism

“Normal” Sex?

An excerpt from The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report

July 1, 2026 • by Rosa Campbell

What do Shere’s correspondents mean when they write, over and over, ‘I feel normal’? The ‘normal’ is a powerful idea. It can seem like it has always been with us, like perhaps there has always been a broad, overarching scheme of normality to compare ourselves to and wonder how we ...

Feminism

Re-Revolutionizing the Female Orgasm

A conversation with Rosa Campbell on Shere Hite’s fight for feminist sexuality

July 1, 2026 • by Rosa Campbell and Rachel Potter

Shere Hite’s goal was to bring feminism to the women in the suburbs she grew up in. To her conservative Christian grandmother who raised her; to her mother who fell pregnant with Hite as a teenager and was forced out of school; and to herself—an aspiring feminist academic who, without ...

Interviews

Minigolf, Watercolors, and Other Opportunities for “Doing Reproductive Justice Queerly”

An interview with Carly Thomsen about her forthcoming book, Reproductive Justice, Queerly, out this August

June 30, 2026 • by Gil Bittner and Carly Thomsen

In her forthcoming book Reproductive Justice, Queerly (University of California Press, 2026), Carly Thomsen, a feminist and queer studies scholar, looks at how language deployed in the name of queerness and reproductive justice can end up reinforcing the very structures it is meant to challenge. She warns of “conservative outcomes” ...

Minigolf, Watercolors, and Other Opportunities for “Doing Reproductive Justice Queerly”

Film & Performing Arts

Everyone Loves the Straight-Passing Gay Man

What Heated Rivalry tells us about queer acceptability

May 5, 2026 • by Tanmay Pandya

Over a phone call a few weeks ago, a childhood friend told me she had found among her possessions a long-forgotten, black-and-gold diary that had once belonged to me—that had now, so many years later, mysteriously appeared in her custody. Curious to hear its contents, I asked her to recite ...

Everyone Loves the Straight-Passing Gay Man

Music

Hold Onto This

Why young queer artists and music lovers are turning again to physical media like zines and tapes

March 25, 2026 • by Eva Szilardi-Tierney

For Rox Eckroth and August Simon, the idea of putting together a tape compilation of songs from trans artists came as much from their interest in the history of cassettes as it did from a desire to collate trans art. “You put a tape in the machine, you hit play. It ...

Sex & Gender

A League of Their Own

From Rio’s local pitches to the Gay Games, queer athletes challenge the presumed heterosexuality of Brazil’s national sport

February 18, 2026 • by C. K. Snyder

One of the teams that created the LiGay [the amateur Brazilian “Gay League”] was the BeesCats Soccer Boys from Rio de Janeiro. Organizers formed the team in 2017 with a triple aim: to demonstrate that gay men are indeed futebolistas, to help players overcome personal trauma, and to assert their ...

Reviews

Untranslating Lemebel

A Last Supper of Queer Apostles refuses to domesticate the Chilean author’s queer vernacular

February 18, 2026 • by Mariana Giacobbe Goldberg

The cover of A Last Supper of Queer Apostles (Penguin Classics, 2024) features a collage centered around an edited photograph of a man dressed as a saint, crowned with a halo of syringes, each one filled with a watery red substance that looks like blood. This punk Virgin Mary impersonator ...

Sex & Gender

Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

An excerpt from The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence

December 17, 2025 • by Benjamin Mangrum

Slavoj Žižek argues that gaming and virtual reality programs figure the computer as “a consistent other, stepping into the structural position of an intersubjective partner.” This claim follows on the heels of a reference to Jacques Lacan’s diagnosis in an infamous koan about the impossibility of sexual relations. For Lacan, ...

Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

Genocide

Attacks on Women’s Bodies Reveal the Logic of Genocide in Sudan

Sexual violence and the destruction of medical infrastructure are not separate catastrophes

December 2, 2025 • by Ayotunde Giwa

On October 28, 2025, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) overran the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher. Satellite images show what Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab identified as bodies scattered across the hospital grounds. Videos filmed by RSF fighters themselves show militia walking through ransacked wards, stepping over piles of dead ...

Attacks on Women’s Bodies Reveal the Logic of Genocide in Sudan

Europe & Central Asia

The Gospel According to Queer Russians

Sergey Khazov-Cassia’s newly translated novel reimagines Christ’s story as a parable of queer suffering and resistance in Putin’s Russia

October 22, 2025 • by Katherine Kelaidis

For more than a decade, Russia—and its client states like Chechnya—have carried out the brutal persecution of sexual and gender minorities, particularly gay men, with tacit approval from the Russian Orthodox Church. This violence is framed as a defense of “traditional family values,” part of a nostalgic vision of Russia ...

Psyche

“Masc Only”

When gender conformity is enforced everywhere from laws to dating apps, opacity becomes a site of resistance

September 30, 2025 • by Yann Phesans

A gay man lowers his voice in the boardroom. A trans woman is detained at border control when her appearance does not match her passport photo. A nonbinary teenager avoids mirrors. A butch lesbian is asked to leave the women’s changing room for “making others uncomfortable.” These are not moments of ...

Body & Mind

Mothers Resist!

Why communal care must be at the heart of feminism

September 12, 2025 • by Maggie Wyss

Privatized parenting asks individuals to do the work of a village and then punishes them when they can’t keep up....

Sex & Gender

“Normal” Sex?

An excerpt from The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report

Re-Revolutionizing the Female Orgasm

A conversation with Rosa Campbell on Shere Hite’s fight for feminist sexuality

Minigolf, Watercolors, and Other Opportunities for “Doing Reproductive Justice Queerly”

An interview with Carly Thomsen about her forthcoming book, Reproductive Justice, Queerly, out this August

Everyone Loves the Straight-Passing Gay Man

What Heated Rivalry tells us about queer acceptability

Hold Onto This

Why young queer artists and music lovers are turning again to physical media like zines and tapes

A League of Their Own

From Rio’s local pitches to the Gay Games, queer athletes challenge the presumed heterosexuality of Brazil’s national sport

Untranslating Lemebel

A Last Supper of Queer Apostles refuses to domesticate the Chilean author’s queer vernacular

Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

An excerpt from The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence

Attacks on Women’s Bodies Reveal the Logic of Genocide in Sudan

Sexual violence and the destruction of medical infrastructure are not separate catastrophes

The Gospel According to Queer Russians

Sergey Khazov-Cassia’s newly translated novel reimagines Christ’s story as a parable of queer suffering and resistance in Putin’s Russia

“Masc Only”

When gender conformity is enforced everywhere from laws to dating apps, opacity becomes a site of resistance

Mothers Resist!

Why communal care must be at the heart of feminism

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