LGBTQ+ History Month: Professor Laura Doan

Historicizing the unnatural clarifies its operations as both like and unlike the abnormal, a paradox best unraveled by exploring the innovative interventions of two prominent figures: the composer and writer Gerald Berners and the garden designer and writer, Vita Sackville-West.  We will see that, in the modern west, creative individuals such as these were actively engaged in theorizing the nature of sexuality in ways that resisted sexological arguments organized around normalization.  A handful of artists and writers like Berners and Sackville-West redefined the unnatural as good and marvellous rather than as dangerous or abject, transforming unnaturalness into a site of wonder, radiance, and beauty. 

Professor Laura Doan

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Laura Doan is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History and Sexuality Studies at the University of Manchester.  She is author of Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality and Women's Experience of Modern War (Chicago 2013) and Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (Columbia 2001).  With Lucy Bland, she has edited Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science and Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires (Chicago 1998).  Her new book project (Bees and Birds: An Unnatural History of Modern Sexuality) explores the epistemological consequences of the lingering traces of an earlier discursive system—the natural and unnatural—in the Age of Normality.