Ngender Graduate Seminars will be held on Tuesdays 1-2pm Silverstone Building SB317 at the University of Sussex.

February 8: Benjamin Michael Litherland (Media and Film, Sussex).
'Hitman vs Hatton's Tale of the Tape: Boxing, Binging and Masculinity'.
Chair: Nick McGlynn.
The presentation will analyse Ricky Hatton in regards to the hegemony of sport in general and boxing in particular, and its relationship to heterosexual masculinity, race and class; the competing commodification and subjugation of the male body; and the anxieties and pleasures elicited from the working-class male body in popular culture. What do the tabloids' reactions to Hatton tell us about our relationship to our own bodies?

March 1: Rachel Wood (Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies, Sussex)
'Intelligible sexualities in and out of the closet'.
Chair: Andy Medhurst.

March 8: Cassandra Smith (English, Sussex)  
'Reclaiming Scars: Thinking through Trans Bodies'.
Chair: Dr Akshay Khanna.
The paper explores how the concepts of stigma and shame and the related bodily motifs of the monstrous, the scar and deformation are at work in both the othering of cis women and trans people. It asks: How might we think through the trans body as resistant to the patriarchal mind/body split found within medical narratives? How does it resist the essentialism associated with Corporeal Feminism on the one hand and, on the other, the disembodiment associated with Queer Theory?

March 15: Aristea Fotopoulou (Centre for Digital Material Culture, Sussex)
'Feminist publics and policy shifts around egg donation'.
Chair: Dr Kate O'Riordan.
Having the 2011 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority consultation about the payment of donors as its departure point, the paper examines some feminist publics which have formed around the issues of egg donation for reproduction and genetic research in the UK and elsewhere. It looks at the ways these activist/ academic publics challenge emerging forms of social stratification and  influence policy.

March 16, 5pm in Fulton Lecture Theatre Building B
Dr Pawel Leszkowicz will give a lecture: The Other Art of the Other Europe: The erotics and politics of gay and lesbian art in East/Central Europe, that will present contemporary artworks and visual campaigns about social changes and political conflicts around LGBT rights in Central and Eastern Europe.   

Dr Paweł Leszkowicz has written widely on contemporary art and sexuality in journals, magazines and collected volumes. He has also curated queer art exhibitions Love and Democracy (2006) in Poznan and Gdansk, Vogue (2009) in Gdansk and Ars Homo Erotica (2010) in Warsaw’s National Museum.