Call for Presentations: Regulation and its Discontents – The Sex and the State Project

Inter-Disciplinary.Net have issued a call for presentations for the 4th global meeting of the Sex and the State Project. The meeting will take place on Sunday 20th September – Tuesday 22nd September 2015 at Mansfield College, Oxford.

The social organization of sexuality reflects cultural, economic, educational, legal, and religious ideologies and practices. These commitments are especially evident in the ways in which the state and its agents regulate sexuality: who are “good” sexual citizens and who are the outlaws? How does the state respond and deter sexual crimes and sexual violence? How do economic, educational, legal, and religious practices and movements reinforce and/or resist state-sanctioned sexual hierarchies? How do regulatory practices reflect politics of inclusion/exclusion?

These sorts of questions lie at the centre of this project, which explores the issue of sexual citizenship and its terms of belonging and exclusion sexuality in a global context and across a range of critical, contextual and cultural perspectives.

The project aims to critically engage with the ways in which sexual citizenship, or “erotic civility”, and sex crime, or “erotic incivility”, have been articulated and regulated, encouraged and discouraged, in a manner that moves beyond simple disciplinary attentions to policy, social norms and values. The terrain of sex Law, its prohibitions and its sanctions, will be examined with a particular focus on the dual function of the Law, its normative and its executive functions, which define the parameters of good erotic citizenship while policing the “erotically uncivil”.

It also aims to make central the issue of Ethics and examine its role in guiding prohibitions, permissions and regulations of different sexual conduct and sexualities, to flesh out the complex ways states and social institutions regulate sexual conduct in contemporary societies. Specifically we aim to explore the ways in which the Law and other forms of regulation have been used to police and repress desire and pleasure, and the ways in which such prohibitions and regulations have been changed, subverted, challenged or transgressed, at the institutional and individual level.

Proposals, papers, presentations, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited by Friday 1st May 2015.

For full details on themes and how to submit material, visit: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/gender-and-sexuality/sex-and-the-state/call-for-papers/