Location: LSE Campus (precise location will be emailed to registrants)

Lecture followed by discussion

In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, Jane Ward critiques one of the basic premises of the mainstream LGBT rights movement—that heterosexuality is easier than queerness—by asking for whom, and under what conditions, is straightness easier. Drawing from ethnographic field work, archival research, and cultural studies methods, Ward examines the 20th century emergence of a “heterosexual repair industry”—a self-help empire designed to romanticize and ease heterosexual misery while eliding attention to heteropatriarchy and the queer, feminist interventions poised to undo it. In this talk, Ward takes her analysis in new directions, pointing to the global implications of heterosexual misery by analyzing the global “anti-gender” (or “gender critical”) movement and the collective anxiety about gender and sexuality that animates it. Ward conceptualizes “gender critical” projects as expressions of heteroparanoia and psychic dissonance aimed at reconciling the paradoxes of modern heterosexuality, and offers a feminist assessment of these projects' trajectories.

Speaker: Professor Jane Ward, University of California Santa Barbara

Chair: Dr Rachel O'Neill, LSE

Jane Ward is professor of Feminist Studies at University of California Santa Barbara. She teaches and writes about gender and sexual cultures, and has published on topics including the marriage self-help industry, the rise and fall of pickup artists, how early lesbian feminist ideas shaped contemporary gender politics, the meaning of sex between straight-identified men, queer childhood and parenting, the evolution of straight culture, the corporatization of gay pride festivals, the race politics of same-sex marriage, the social construction of whiteness, feminist pornography, and trans relationships.

Rachel O’Neill is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Her research centres questions of subjectivity, culture, and inequality through a feminist frame. She is the author of Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy (Polity, 2018).

This event is co-hosted by Queer @Kings, Kings College London. Find out more: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/queeratkings

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality in Global Context