History of Sexuality Seminar

Rebecca Jennings, University College London

acob Blanc, University of Edinburgh

This talk uses the history of the Itaipu hydroelectric dam and the struggle of displaced farmers, peasants, and indigenous groups to understand how Brazil's dictatorship was experienced and contested in the countryside. By focusing on rural rather than urban spaces, we invert the conceptual and geographic narrative commonly used to study dictatorship in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America. Magnified by the international spotlight cast on the dam and propelled by the growth of pro-democracy forces in the 1970s and 1980s, communities displaced by Itaipu elevated their fight for land into a referendum on the dictatorship itself. But the immediate backdrop of dictatorship told only part of the story. Long before the 1964 coup, rural violence and rural inequality had existed regardless of whether Brazil was under military or civilian rule. For families displaced by Itaipu, both the dam and the official period of dictatorship marked less of an isolated rupture than an escalation of abusive policies and incidents in the countryside.

Given that the rural conflict at Itaipu existed both within and beyond the official contours of Brazil's military period, this talk centers on the question of visibility in the countryside: how do certain rural communities become seen as legitimate social actors, why are others rendered invisible, and what space does the countryside occupy in national imaginaries? Because the Itaipu dam was so important largely for the image that the government hoped it would project to the world, the idea of visibility tethers the immediate struggle of displaced farmers to the more endemic issue of inequality and representation in the Brazilian countryside. These issues long predated the start of military rule in 1964, and they have long outlasted the official return to democracy in 1985. In the shadow of what would become the largest dam in the world, farmers, peasants, and Indians in the Paraná borderlands defended their particular relationships to land as a means to take a political stand against the military while also attempting to position themselves as a visible social force in a post-dictatorship landscape.

Katie Sutton, Australian National University

Institute of Historical Research

Liberalism, Politics, Identity and Reform of British Sodomy Laws in the Early Nineteenth Century

Charles Upchurch

(Florida State University)

History of Sexuality seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Liberalism, Politics, Identity and Reform of British Sodomy Laws in the Early Nineteenth Century

Charles Upchurch

(Florida State University)

History of Sexuality seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Que(e)rying Social Purity: Sexology, Theology, and Sexual Modernity

Joy Dixon

(University of British Columbia)

History of Sexuality seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

Que(e)rying Social Purity: Sexology, Theology, and Sexual Modernity

Joy Dixon

(University of British Columbia)

History of Sexuality seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

A Permissive Society? Opinion Polls and Social Change in Postwar Britain

Marcus Collins

(Loughborough University)

When (if ever) did Britain become a ‘permissive society’? Were the ‘cultural revolution’ confined to the young, the middle class and the metropolitan? These questions have been a matter of debate within academic and popular circles ever since the 1960s, but remain fundamentally unresolved due to the source materials deployed. Those who identify a ‘cultural revolution’ largely base their arguments on canonical cultural artefacts of the period (music, films, writings, fashions). Revisionists such as Dominic Sandbrook either point to a series of other cultural artefacts that provide a more conservative view of the sixties or else contrast a minority permissive ‘culture’ with a broader ‘society’ displaying stronger continuities with the earlier twentieth century.

This paper addresses these issues by examining the attitudes and beliefs exhibited by representative samples of the British population in opinion polls. Drawing upon polls conducted by Gallup, MORI and the BBC Audience Research Unit covering the period from 1945 to 1990, it argues that public attitudes towards permissiveness (broadly defined as a libertarian stance towards social and cultural norms) varied widely from issue to issue and across different sections of the population. There was a shift towards more acceptance of individual self-governance, particularly regarding heterosexual sexuality and relationships. Yet most people were still not prepared to sanction behaviours which they perceived to disrupt the stability of society. What united such disparate issues as pornography, illicit drug-taking, unregulated immigration, murder in the absence of capital punishment and male homosexuality with the advent of HIV/AIDS was the perceived damage caused by individual behaviour on others. Even when critical of permissive change, the majority did perceive such change as having taken place. In that sense, opinion polls suggest that people in postwar Britain tended to believe that they belonged to a ‘permissive society’ that they opposed in many crucial respects.

History of Sexuality seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

A Permissive Society? Opinion Polls and Social Change in Postwar Britain

Marcus Collins

(Loughborough University)

When (if ever) did Britain become a ‘permissive society’? Were the ‘cultural revolution’ confined to the young, the middle class and the metropolitan? These questions have been a matter of debate within academic and popular circles ever since the 1960s, but remain fundamentally unresolved due to the source materials deployed. Those who identify a ‘cultural revolution’ largely base their arguments on canonical cultural artefacts of the period (music, films, writings, fashions). Revisionists such as Dominic Sandbrook either point to a series of other cultural artefacts that provide a more conservative view of the sixties or else contrast a minority permissive ‘culture’ with a broader ‘society’ displaying stronger continuities with the earlier twentieth century.

This paper addresses these issues by examining the attitudes and beliefs exhibited by representative samples of the British population in opinion polls. Drawing upon polls conducted by Gallup, MORI and the BBC Audience Research Unit covering the period from 1945 to 1990, it argues that public attitudes towards permissiveness (broadly defined as a libertarian stance towards social and cultural norms) varied widely from issue to issue and across different sections of the population. There was a shift towards more acceptance of individual self-governance, particularly regarding heterosexual sexuality and relationships. Yet most people were still not prepared to sanction behaviours which they perceived to disrupt the stability of society. What united such disparate issues as pornography, illicit drug-taking, unregulated immigration, murder in the absence of capital punishment and male homosexuality with the advent of HIV/AIDS was the perceived damage caused by individual behaviour on others. Even when critical of permissive change, the majority did perceive such change as having taken place. In that sense, opinion polls suggest that people in postwar Britain tended to believe that they belonged to a ‘permissive society’ that they opposed in many crucial respects.

History of Sexuality seminar series

Institute of Historical Research

The Labour of Bourgeois Sexuality in the Age of Revolutions

Tom Cutterham

(University of Birmingham)

Elite women in the eighteenth-century were trained in what many conduct-writers called "the art of pleasing." First and foremost, that meant they were taught to be submissive, mild, and deferential towards men. Another eighteenth-century figure, the coquette, temporarily transgressed the injunction to submit. Yet her resistance was part of a ritual of courtship that still ultimately served the pleasure of men. When they participated in the art of pleasing and the culture of coquetry, women were performing varieties of emotional and sexual labour. They performed this labour as the price of participation in genteel society, the price of seeking love and marriage, and indeed simply as a duty inculcated in them by the world in which they lived. This recognition leaves historians with two troubling, unanswered questions—what value was extracted from such labour, and by whom?

History of Sexuality seminar series