27 and 28 May 2026
Organised by the University of Exeter
Supported by the Wellcome-funded Shame and Medicine Project and part of the Sexual Knowledge Unit
About the Conference
This two-day conference in Exeter explores how sexuality and shame is produced, experienced, and interpreted across historical, cultural, and social contexts. Bringing together research from history, the arts, literature, philosophy, and creative practice, it examines how sexual norms and stigma are shaped through institutions, everyday life, and systems of representation.
A central concern is that sexual shame is rarely directly articulated. Instead, it emerges through silence, euphemism, narrative displacement, and affect, requiring careful interpretation. The programme therefore places equal emphasis on lived experience as on the methodological challenges of studying what is partial, coded, or obscured.
Across panels, workshops, and practice-based sessions, the conference considers how shame is generated through discourse, circulated through social and cultural forms, and negotiated by individuals and communities. It also highlights innovative approaches to analysing these processes, including comparative discourse analysis and embodied, material methods.
By moving between empirical research, theoretical reflection, and experimental practice, the conference positions sexual shame not only as a social phenomenon, but as a problem of evidence, interpretation, and ethical responsibility.
SPEAKERS
HANNAH CHARNOCK
PAPER: Shameful Heterosexualities in Twentieth-century Britain.
Hannah explores the intimate and emotional lives of teenage girls in modern Britain, focusing on how sexuality, reputation, and social norms were negotiated within peer cultures. Her work draws on personal and archival sources to reveal how young women actively shaped their own understandings of intimacy, desire and shame.
WANNES DUPONT
PAPER: Shame and the Making of ‘A Strange Love’.
Wannes examines the history of male homosexuality in modern Europe through a transnational lens, focusing on how knowledge about sexuality was produced, circulated, and unevenly understood. His work foregrounds the role of silence, ambiguity, and “unwillingness to know” in shaping how same-sex desire was historically regulated and interpreted.
