Other events and activity will involve:
EMERGING PERSPECTIVES SESSIONS
Each participant gives a 10-minute presentation of their research followed by a discussion with attendee questions, and answers.
Session One: Institutions, Lived Experience, and the Politics of Stigma
This session examines how stigma is actively produced through institutional systems, embedded in everyday social environments, and contested through personal and collective action. It brings together work on medicine, education, and media to show how sexual norms and reputations are shaped, enforced, and lived across different contexts. At the same time, it explores how individuals and communities respond to and rework these pressures through identity formation, activism, and public discourse. Spanning historical and contemporary perspectives, the session highlights the relationship between structural power and lived experience, with a focus on gendered regulation, social stigma, and political resistance.
Participants:
India Bree Archer
Paper: The Clinical Production of Sexual Shame in Feminised Mental Health Diagnoses
Caroline Lloyd
Paper: Adolescent Pregnancy Loss and the Social Construction of Sexual Reputation
Sebastian Beaumont
Paper: What We Carry: Re-languaging Gay Shame through Autoethnography and Sculptural Practice
Marcus Webb
Paper: OutRageously Shameful: The Uses of Shame in 1990s Queer Campaigning
Filipa Teixeira
Paper: Media Narratives of Rough Sex and the Construction of Feminist Sexual Shame
Session Two: Representation, Interpretation, and the Limits of Knowledge
This session examines how sexuality, affect, and stigma are shaped through cultural representation and brought into meaning through acts of interpretation. It brings together work on literature, performance, visual culture, and theory to show how these experiences are staged, narrated, and made legible, while also revealing what remains obscured or difficult to express. At the same time, it explores the limits of language and ethical frameworks in accounting for subjective experience and desire. Spanning historical and contemporary perspectives, the session highlights the relationship between representation and knowledge, with a focus on spectatorship, discourse, and the boundaries of interpretation.
Participants:
Lucy Hurst
Paper: Staging Shame: Spectatorship, Dance, and Humiliation in Early Modern Drama
Andy Irwin
Paper: Queer Optimism and the Reworking of Shame in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Helga Henson
Paper: Subjective Discourse, Affect, and the Epistemic Limits of Writing Sexuality
Claudia Treacher
Paper: Art, Conscientious Objection, and the Expression of Sexual Shame in Wartime Britain
Ayesha Chakravarti
Paper: The Moral Status of Transgressive Sexual Desire
ROUNDTABLE
Reading Between Silences: Evidence, Ethics, and Method in Researching Sexual Shame
This roundtable foregrounds the methodological and ethical challenges of researching sexual shame, with particular attention to how knowledge is produced from partial, sensitive, and often mediated sources. It asks how researchers approach material that is shaped by silence, stigma, and structural constraint, and what responsibilities arise in making such material legible. Central to the discussion are questions of consent, representation, and the limits of analysis: whether individuals or communities have a right not to be interpreted, and how research can avoid reproducing harm, stigma, or epistemic violence.
The session also considers how disciplinary frameworks. How legal, cultural, historical and interpretation shape what can be known, and how these frameworks may be challenged through decolonising approaches that attend to power, voice, and positionality. Alongside this, it addresses the often-overlooked dimension of researcher wellbeing, reflecting on the affective and emotional demands of working with difficult material and the strategies required to sustain ethical engagement over time.
Participants to be announced.
PARTICIPATORY WORKSHOP
Media and Moral Panic
Interactive small group analysis of contrasting media coverage, focusing on tone, euphemism, framing, and panic rhetoric. Moves from theory into practice by examining how sexual shame is actively generated and circulated.
This session invites participants to act as ‘discourse detectives.’ In small, facilitated groups, attendees will conduct a comparative analysis of how specific sexual ‘events’ or ‘scandals’ were framed across different sources.
Participants will work with curated sets of contrasting media coverage and other primary sources (letters and diaries etc) to see how the same event is transformed through different lenses. Comparing rhetoric and identifying how language is used to either defend or attack those involved. Groups will identify ‘dog-whistle’ language used to manufacture ‘moral panic’.
SANDBOX SESSION
Embodying and Masking Sexual Shame
More details to follow.
CONTRIBUTION WITHOUT PAPER
QIngyu Wang
Research: ‘Never Forget National Shame’: Using Gender, Sociology, and Affective Politics Perspectives to Analyse the Security Narratives of ‘Comfort Women’ in China
Flora Hemming
Research: Relationship and Sex Education in a Youth Work Setting
Kgaladi Makhafola
Research: Negotiating Black African Queer Women Identities through a Black Queer Cultural Capital
Arjun Krishan Goswami
Research: The Lived Experiences of Queer Men of Colour Within the UK, and how it Relates to Mental Health