CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF LAW WORKSHOP
presents
Benjamin Kahan
Louisiana State University
"The Walk-in Closet: Situational Homosexuality,
Lillian Hellman v. Mary McCarthy, and the Legal Consensus Against Immutability”
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
12:30 - 2:00
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park
Legal scholars like Janet Halley, Kenji Yoshino, Kendall Thomas, Toni Massaro, and others have argued against making a strong claim for sexuality as an “immutable characteristic” in spite of such a claim’s potential to confer equal protection. I recontextualize this debate historically and transnationally, drawing on a range of sexological and legal sources from Germany, Great Britain, and the U.S. to theorize a pro-gay litigational strategy that does not partake of “strategic essentialism” and yet accesses immutability’s powerful protections. In order to do so I turn to the resources of defamation law and Lillian Hellman’s suit of Mary McCarthy in particular. This suit was the culmination of one of the most exciting and colorful literary feuds of the 1980s and provides a tool to consider the merits of immutability without rooting such arguments in essentialism.
Benjamin Kahan is an Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at Washington University in St. Louis, Emory University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Sydney, the National Humanities Center, and the Reed Foundation. He is the author of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Duke, 2013) and the editor of Heinrich Kaan’s “Psychopathia Sexualis” (1844): A Classic Text in the History of Sexuality (Cornell, 2016). His book Sexual Etiologies and the Great Paradigm Shift is currently under advance contract with University of Chicago Press.
A light lunch will be provided.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
