Workshop: Gender and Sexualities in Legal History

Workshop

  • Date: Oct 7, 2019
  • Time: 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Organisation: Luisa Stella Coutinho
  • Location: Max Planck Institute for European Legal History
  • Room: Lecture hall of the MPI
Workshop: Gender and Sexualities in Legal History

Since the 1970s, interactions between the disciplines of law, history, and women’s and gender studies have promoted specific developments and intersectional connections that improved the discussion of the conceptions of sex and gender and created new and productive fields of research in legal history. The most recent advances are reflected in a rich literature that shapes a number of emerging fields and courses in law schools, e.g., Feminist Legal History, Women’s Legal History, Transgender Legal History, Queer Legal History, and Lesbian and Gay Legal History. They all, in different ways, reflect on how sexual orientation and gender differences were treated in the past, problematizing  gendered and heterosexual subjectivities and dismantling the idea of heteronormativity as universal. They also challenge the notion of biological sex as naturally immutable, highlighting it as a tool used in law to normalize sexualities. Nonetheless, a methodology of these new approaches in Legal History is still in its early stage, and mostly concentrated in the discussion of a specific legal historical narrative in the context of first-wave feminism, the fight for equality, access to the legal professions and the right to vote and in specific places, mainly the United States and England. This workshop intends to discuss the state of the art of these approaches in legal history, focusing on different localities, such as Latin America and Asia, and intersectionality and postcolonial perspectives. The workshop will be held in English


Illustration from: Album di disegni, illustranti usi e costumi dei popoli d'Asia e d'Africa con brevi dichiarazioni in lingua portoghese, Casanata Library, Rome. http://opac.casanatense.it

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