Provost's Distinguished Women's Lecturer: Professor Helen King - "Gender and Sexuality in History: Did the Eighteenth Century Change Everything?"

Thomas Laqueur’s 1990 book, Making Sex, argued for an eighteenth-century watershed in changing our understandings of the body, gender, and sexuality. Looking at classical, medieval and early modern materials, this lecture will both challenge that view and explore why it has been so powerful. We will think about what happens when we consider more than just the sexual organs in defining sex, and why it is so important to take genre into account when studying the history of the body.

Everyone is welcome.