Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

David Halperin Lecture, Com Building RECITAL HALL, 7:00, Monday 15 October 2007

David Halperin is W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality at the University of Michigan. His research interests include:the history and theory of homosexuality; classical studies and its relation to contemporary cultural history; gay men's social practices and cultural identifications.

Read about his book Saint Foucault

In his groundbreaking work How to Do the History of Homosexualty (2002) David M. Halperin revisits and refines the argument he put forward in his classic One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: that hetero- and homosexuality are not biologically constituted but are, instead, historically and culturally produced. How to Do the History of Homosexuality expands on this view, updates it, answers its critics, and makes greater allowance for continuities in the history of sexuality. Above all, Halperin offers a vigorous defense of the historicist approach to the construction of sexuality, an approach that sets a premium on the description of other societies in all their irreducible specificity and does not force them to fit our own conceptions of what sexuality is or ought to be.Dealing both with male homosexuality and with lesbianism, this study imparts to the history of sexuality a renewed sense of adventure and daring. It recovers the radical design of Michel Foucault's epochal work, salvaging Foucault's insights from common misapprehensions and making them newly available to historians, so that they can once again provide a powerful impetus for innovation in the field. Far from having exhausted Foucault's revolutionary ideas, Halperin maintains that we have yet to come to terms with their startling implications. Exploring the broader significance of historicizing desire, Halperin questions the tendency among scholars to reduce the history of sexuality to a mere history of sexual classifications instead of a history of human subjectivity itself. Finally, in a theoretical tour de force, Halperin offers an altogether new strategy for approaching the history of homosexuality—one that can accommodate both ruptures and continuities, both identity and difference in sexual experiences across time and space.

Halperin Biblography

How To Be Gay: Male Homosexuality as a Cultural Practice (forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press).

Gay Shame, edited with Valerie Traub (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008);

What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007);

How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);

**Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);

The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited with Henry Abelove and Michele Aina Barale (New York: Routledge, 1993);

Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited with John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990);

One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and other essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990);

Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).