Beyond Borders: Sexuality and the Cold War

This panel event considers the globalization of LGBT identities and politics in Central and Eastern Europe during the twilight years of the Cold War.

The event marks the launch of Transnational Homosexuals in Communist Poland: Cross-Border Flows in Gay and Lesbian Magazines: a new book by Dr Lukasz Szulc, Marie Curie Research Fellow at LSE.

Panel discussions will be followed by a drinks reception.

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This event will be chaired by Dr Urszula Chowaniec, Senior Teaching Fellow in Polish Language at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Her most recent monograph examines contemporary feminist literature by women: Melancholic Migrating Bodies in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2015). Her current project is The Dream of a Common Language in 20th-century Queer Stories: Cultural History of Women’s Emancipation in Poland from the Non-Heteronormative Perspective. The project aims to scrutinise the emancipatory women’s movement in culture from the angle of lesbian narratives in 20th-century Poland, and through the comparative perspectives of lesbians in other Eastern European countries and selected Western countries.

The panel discussions will be introduced by Professor Sonia Corrêa, who is currently holding a Leverhulme professorship at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. Professor Corrêa has been involved in research and advocacy activities related to gender equality, health and sexuality since the late 1970s. She is the founder of SOS-Corpo - Instituto Feminista para Democracia and of the Commission of Citizenship and Reproduction, in Brazil. She is currently a research associate at the Brazilian Interdisciplinary Association for AIDS, in Rio de Janeiro. Since 2002, with Richard Parker, she co-chairs Sexuality Policy Watch (SPW), a global forum comprised of researchers and activists engaged in the analyses of global trends in sexuality related policy and politics. She has published extensively in Portuguese and English. Publications include Population and Reproductive Rights: Feminist Perspectives from the South (Zed Books, 1994) and Sexuality, Health and Human Rights, co-authored with Richard Parker and Rosalind Petchesky (Routledge, 2008).

Dr Lukasz Szulc is Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Media and Communications Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, and co-chair of LGBTQ Interest Group in International Communication Association. His interests include cultural and critical studies of media, identity, sexuality, nationalism and transnationalism. He is author of the book Transnational Homosexuals in Communist Poland: Cross-Border Flows in Gay and Lesbian Magazines (2017, Palgrave) and co-editor of the collection LGBTQs, Media and Culture in Europe (2017, Routledge).

Dr Richard Mole is Senior Lecturer and Head of Social Sciences Research at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. His research focuses the relationship between identity and power, with particular reference to nationalism, sexualities, migration and diaspora. Dr Mole has a strong theoretical interest in discourse - particularly, the post-structuralist discourse theories of Laclau and Mouffe - and a regional interest in Russia, Poland and the Baltic States and increasingly on Brazil and other Latin American societies.

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Beyond Borders: Sexuality and the Cold War is delivered with the support of qUCL, a university-wide initiative that brings together UCL staff and students with research and/or teaching interests in LGBTQ studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory and related fields. qUCL is based in the Institute of Advanced Studies.

Free to attend but registration is essential.

Generously supported by: