Naomi Wolf will discuss “Victorian Sexualities”
We think that homophobic laws and attitudes have been with us forever — but in fact they were codified into law fairly recently; indeed, the way we think today about gay male identity is a fairly recent invention, dating from the turn of the last century. It was the work of a small group of artists, poets, and “sexual dissidents” who fought a battle, using paintings, verse and essays, to change an “abominable vice” to “the love that dares not speak its name” to, finally. a natural variation of response and sensibility that transcends cultures, among human beings. My talk will tell this story. Similarly, we think that censorship has always been with us, in its modern form — but that too was fairly recently invented and codified into law. I will give a brief overview of that story too, and its relevance to contemporary wars over freedom of speech.
Naomi Wolf is author of eight New York Times nonfiction bestsellers and is at work on Outrages, about the invention of homophobic law and of state censorship in the Victorian period. She is teaching a course in victorian sexualities at Stony Brook University this semester.