The Department of Gender Studies
cordially invites you to a public lecture by
Anna Loutfi
Gender and the Trope of Slavery
to be held on
Thursday, September 13, 10 a.m., Popper Room
Anna Loutfi's zero week lecture, Gender and the Trope of Slavery, will examine how historical debates over slavery have shaped our understanding of unequal sexual relations between men and women (especially within the social institutional contexts of marriage and prostitution). This process works two ways, however, and historical research has shown that the idea of sexual inequality or exploitation has also powerfully shaped our understanding - in modern times - of slavery, so that sexual slavery (especially in the context of modern debates about sex trafficking) appears today an almost inevitable and 'natural' if not entirely legal dimension of human societies.
Anna Loutfi is an Assistant Professor in Gender Studies at Central European University. Her PhD is in social and legal gender history and her earlier teaching and publications have focused on questions of identity (social and national), social movements, the construction and regulation of legal subjects, and themes around empire. For the last several years, she has focused on sociological, historical, and philosophical approaches to the body and human biology as a set of political questions, looking at body politics and medicine since the Enlightenment, Foucauldian and feminist theories of biopolitics and biotechnology, as well as broader themes organised around social Darwinism, modern eugenics (past and present) and the genetic revolutions of our time. She is currently working on a book about the historical figure of the professional scientist.
The lecture is presented as part of the Department of Gender Studies Zero Week lecture series Interdisciplinary and Transnational Perspectives in Gender Studies.