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| WELCOME |
A conference at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University, April 25, 2008
Artist Tanja Ostojic discusses her image
here: http://www.kultur.at/howl/tanja/ot/set01/docu08.htm
The aim of this symposium is to investigate the role of sexual politics - issues of gender, sexuality, and family - in current debates about Europe and "European" identity. It will examine the intersections and contradictions at work in a host of coincident debates about sex, marriage, kinship on the one hand, and religion, culture, and national and European belonging, on the other. In bringing together historians and sociologists, whose work is both based in national cultures and reaches beyond them (specifically France, Holland, Poland, Germany, and Turkey), the symposium examines how gender and sexuality are central categories for representing cultural and religious differences and how they in turn operate in the construction of the limits of "Europe." We explore what internal tensions have been suppressed or occluded in recent discussions as well as how scholars of gender and sexuality can productively intervene in these debates. A concluding roundtable will put these debates in transatlantic perspective, with a comparative account of "American" and "European" secularisms and their conceptions of sexual rights.
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