Annual LGBTQ2S+ lecture

The speaker for this lecture was Dr. Kenneth Kidd, Professor of English at the University of Florida and an expert in children's literature and culture. In his lecture, Dr. Kidd addressed the dramatic increase in censorship of information about queer issues for young people in the United States, noting that such efforts are now extending into Canada. The lecture examined new laws in states like Florida and Texas that restrict discussions of LGBTQ2S+ topics in K-12 classrooms and book bans that target titles by and about queer and BIPOC people. Using Florida as a case study, Dr. Kidd situated the current controversies within the broader context of queer literature for children and the longer history of Florida LGBTQ2S+ community and activism, offering a critical perspective on the escalating battle over young people's access to queer narratives. 

The 2024 lecture was presented by Dr. Dan Healey, Emeritus Professor of Modern Russian History at the University of Oxford. Dr. Healey is a leading historian of sexuality in modern Russia and the Soviet Union, whose publications include Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the first full-length history of homosexuality in Russia, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (University of Chicago Press, 2001). In his lecture, "Ukraine, Russia, and the struggle for LGBTQ freedom," Dr. Healey examined the surprising centrality of LGBTQ politics to President Vladimir Putin's war against Ukraine. The lecture discussed how Putin has weaponized anti-Western homophobia and how LGBTQ communities across the region have responded to this threat. The lecture was moderated by Dr. Heather J. Coleman, a historian of Russia and Ukraine.  

The speaker for this lecture was Dr. Amy Villarejo, Chair and Professor in UCLA's Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media, and a leading scholar of queer cinema and media studies whose work examines the intersections of sexuality, gender, and visual culture across film, television, and digital platforms. In her lecture, Dr. Villarejo explored the landscape of contemporary queer and trans storytelling. Queer narratives have become ubiquitous across media. At the same time, queer and trans lives face escalating threats from the right. In this moment, what priorities should guide us and what kinds of stories should claim our attention? Rather than offering a comprehensive survey of the field, Dr. Villarejo presented a selection of inspiring examples by queer and trans makers, submitting them for collective scrutiny and enjoyment, and inviting the audience to consider how media representation intersects with the urgent realities facing LGBTQ+ communities.

Dr. Jules Gill-Peterson is a leading scholar of transgender history. Her book, Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), received a Children’s Literature Association Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction; it was the first book to challenge the myth that transgender children are a twenty-first-century phenomenon by drawing on a century's worth of medical archival evidence to demonstrate that trans children have a verifiable history. In her lecture, "The Colonial History of Global Trans Panic," Dr. Gill-Peterson examined the historical origins of disproportionate violence against trans women by tracing what she terms a "global trans panic" back to nineteenth-century colonialism, arguing that the targeting of trans femininity has been a deliberate and integral component of colonial statecraft worldwide over the past 150 years. The talk was moderated by Dr. Annette Timm.