Sexuality Summer School

Sexuality Summer School SSS is a postgraduate summer school held annually in May in Manchester, hosting lectures, seminars, films and performances

We are so excited for SSS '26 to begin tomorrow, with a plenary lecture from C. Riley Snorton as our first public event!...
24/05/2026

We are so excited for SSS '26 to begin tomorrow, with a plenary lecture from C. Riley Snorton as our first public event! In the meantime, we have been looking back at our fantastic programme last year and can't wait for more.

Our events last year included screenings of 'A Place of Rage' and 'Khush' by Pratibha Parmar, a plenary lecture by Tavia Nyong'o, a roundtable discussion on intergenerationality and activism featuring Marc Thompson, Chloe Cousins, Agatha Phiri and Robert Broughton, Jon Savage and Richard Dyer in conversation on Savage's book 'The Secret Public', and a roundtable on 'Desi Qu**rs' with Churnjeet Mahn, Rohit K. Dasgupta, Sunil Gupta and Ibtisam Ahmed.

We were thrilled to see our events attended by so many members of the public, and hope you can join us again this year! Please take a look at our blog and previous posts for more info.

https://sexualitysummerschool.wordpress.com/

A week today we will be hosting our final public events of the year. Please join us in the morning for Prof. Celia Rober...
21/05/2026

A week today we will be hosting our final public events of the year. Please join us in the morning for Prof. Celia Roberts' fantastic lecture at the John Rylands, and in the evening for a truly unmissable performance from Krishna Istha at The Lowry, produced by SICK! Productions (ticket details on our blog). Please take a look at previous individual event posts for more details.

NB: Celia Roberts will be joining us via Zoom for her public lecture. The audience for this event will be in-person only.

https://sexualitysummerschool.wordpress.com/

Please join us next Wednesday for another day of public events: Kane Race's brilliant lecture in C1.18, Ellen Wilkinson ...
20/05/2026

Please join us next Wednesday for another day of public events: Kane Race's brilliant lecture in C1.18, Ellen Wilkinson Building, followed by a performance reading of Jonathan Larkin's 'All The Devils' at the Anthony Burgess Foundation. These events are open to all, please check our blog and previous individual event posts for tickets and more information!

https://sexualitysummerschool.wordpress.com/

A week today, we will be bringing you not just one but two exciting public events! Please see previous posts and our blo...
19/05/2026

A week today, we will be bringing you not just one but two exciting public events! Please see previous posts and our blog for more details, including speaker bios and ticket information. We hope to see you there!

Please join us a week today, when we will be welcoming C. Riley Snorton for our opening event: a fantastic plenary lectu...
18/05/2026

Please join us a week today, when we will be welcoming C. Riley Snorton for our opening event: a fantastic plenary lecture at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, near Oxford Road station. Please join us, and see previous posts and our blog for more detail.

NB: It has been a particularly intense challenge to finalise the programme this year: the state-sanctioned levels of racism and transphobia in North America have made international movement for many people increasingly difficult; global travel routes that many academics have previously had the privilege to take for granted have now become unstable and unpredictable in the geo-political context of the violence in the ‘Middle East’; and the UK’s own expanding border control regulations have resulted in bureaucratic delays and obstacles. Given this context, C. Riley Snorton and Celia Roberts will be joining us via Zoom for their public lectures. The audience for these events will be in-person only.

SSS ’26 starts NEXT WEEK! Have you seen our poster yet? We are back with seven (!) public events this year, open to all....
18/05/2026

SSS ’26 starts NEXT WEEK!

Have you seen our poster yet? We are back with seven (!) public events this year, open to all. Please share widely and take a look at our blog for more info: https://sexualitysummerschool.wordpress.com/

We can’t wait to see you there!

Please join us at the Lowry for our final event of the year. See the Lowry website and our blog for more details!Krishna...
01/05/2026

Please join us at the Lowry for our final event of the year. See the Lowry website and our blog for more details!

Krishna Istha is a London-based performance artist, theatre-maker, comedian and screenwriter. They create socially conscious form-pushing works about taboo or underrepresented experiences of gender, race and sexual politics. Most recently, they wrote on Netflix’s S*X EDUCATION (Season 4), and was one of the comedians featured on the Netflix Comedy Special Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda. Krishna was a Barbican Centre Open Lab artist (2021-22), an Arts Admin Bursary Artist (2020-21), and one of two shortlisted writers for the SKY Arts & Royal Society of Literature Writers Awards [rsliterature.org] under screenwriting (2022).

Krishna’s most recent theatre show First Trimester (‘Addictive’ Whats on Stage ★★★★★, ‘An antidote of the age’ - Irish Times ★★★★) is a one-of-a-kind durational theatre experience, in which Krishna interviewed 100s of participants live on stage, in a quest to find them and their partner a s***m donor. In the end, Krishna interviewed 310 participants across 91 hours of performances by touring the work in the UK, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland, and Australia. First Trimester won Judge’s Choice Award at Dublin Fringe Festival, and was nominated for an Off West End Award (OFFIES 2024), under the category IDEA PRODUCTION: Experimental Theatre. Krishna and their partner Logan Rea were recipients of the Netflix Documentary Talent Fund [about.netflix.com], and made the short film S***M DONORS WANTED! [youtube.com] about First Trimester and their journey together as a trans couple trying to start a family.

Currently, Krishna is writing their first feature film for BBC Films and premiering a new theatre show, Second Trimester (a show performed with their mother), in April 2026 at Battersea Arts Centre, before touring. You can find tour dates for Second Trimester on krishnaistha.com

Photo credits: (1) Jordon Rossi & Emily Drake, (2) Josh Quinton, (3) Christa Holka, (4) Jordon Rossi & Emily Drake, Ru Parker-Harbord

We simply can't wait for our final Plenary Lecture of the week, by Professor Celia Roberts! Please join us on the mornin...
29/04/2026

We simply can't wait for our final Plenary Lecture of the week, by Professor Celia Roberts! Please join us on the morning on 28th May at John Rylands Library.

Celia Roberts is a Professor in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University, Canberra. Prior to this she worked for 18 years at Lancaster University. As a feminist technoscience studies scholar, she has long been obsessed with thinking critically about biological actors such as hormones, genes and epigenomes. She is currently leading a new project, with colleagues Helen Keane and Mary Lou Rasmussen, called ‘Experimenting with Estrogen’ and undertaking ethnographic observations of feminist and q***r scientific practice around this important hormone.

All The Devils is a new theatre production by playwright Jonathan Larkin (Cherry Jezebel, ★★★★ The Guardian, ★★★★ The St...
28/04/2026

All The Devils is a new theatre production by playwright Jonathan Larkin (Cherry Jezebel, ★★★★ The Guardian, ★★★★ The Stage).

Step into a world of desire, dark thrills, and deadly games. How far would you go to experience the next big high?

All The Devils is an LGBTQIA operatic stage thriller about wanting to connect and the extremes people will go to in order to achieve it. Brandon Bolt has made a fortune filming exclusive parties for his devoted online followers, curating nights of increasingly dangerous games. But when a guest arrives determined to up the stakes, the performance slips and the night spins out of control.

Taking its cue from Patrick Hamilton’s Rope, this dark comic play drags the thriller genre into the contemporary world of dating apps, online performance, and digital anxiety. A delirious journey through an all-night party with murder on the menu, All The Devils brings q***r characters to centre stage and opens urgent conversations about desire, risk, intimacy, and self-destruction.

All The Devils asks how far into darkness we are willing to go, just to feel something.

Join us on Tuesday 26th May for a night of film screenings in collaboration with Club Des Femmes, introduced by So Mayer...
24/04/2026

Join us on Tuesday 26th May for a night of film screenings in collaboration with Club Des Femmes, introduced by So Mayer! Ticket info on our blog and HOME website.

LAWS OF LOVE is a completely unique piece of silent cinema history: a performance lecture by legendary gay campaigner Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld that puts the work of the Institute for S*xology on screen, combining early nature documentary (birds, bees and… hermaphroditic snails!) with campaigning information about LGBTIQ+ community, culminating in an edited version of the first ever gay drama written by Hirschfeld and banned under Weimar-era censorship. Moving from the biological to suggest what Donna Haraway would later call natureculture, LAWS OF LOVE is not just an argument for tolerance or inclusion, but a dazzling document of being here, q***r and integral throughout the natural world and human history. Once thought lost forever, the film has been restored and scored by the Munich Film Museum, from a recently-discovered rare print.

LAWS OF LOVE screens with SANCTUS, Barbara Hammer’s playful and poignant investigation of another q***r pioneer of both narrative cinema and biomedical imaging, Dr James Sibley Watson, co-director of LOT IN S***M, regarded as one of the first gay (or at least super-camp) Hollywood films – but here explored through his X-Ray experiments, reframed by Hammer as part of her career-long q***r look at the body and how it’s made (in)visible.

So Mayer is a writer, editor, bookseller, organiser and film curator. Their most recent book is Bad Language (Peninsula Press, 2025), a memoir and manifesto on language and power. Their speculative collection Truth and Dare (Cipher Press, 2023) was longlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize and Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and their book-length essay A N**i Word for a N**i Thing (Peninsula Press, 2022) inspired the BBC Sounds podcast The Film We Can’t See. They co-edited The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin and the Locus Award-winning collection Space Crone by Ursula K. Le Guin with Sarah Shin for Silver Press, and Unreal S*x with Adam Zmith for Cipher Press. So works with Burley Fisher Books, q***r feminist film curation collective Club Des Femmes, and Outburst Arts in Belfast, as editor of catflap magazine.

We hope to see you there!

***rstudies ***r

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