A joint seminar with the Gender and Feminist Theory Reading Group.

Refreshments will be served, all are welcome.

In recent years, national governments and national psychological associations have begun to express concern about the ‘sexualization of culture.’ In this talk I will present a plan for a ‘recent history’ of psychology’s engagement with sexuality that draws on the recognition in psychology that sexuality can change over historical time. Using this insight, I aim to develop a critical and engaged history of recent psychology. I will argue that a renewed interest in the immutable nature of sexuality in the 1990s ceded to a discourse on the complexity of sexual choice in the earliest years of the 21^st century. I focus on the models of human personhood in such science and consider their effects in developmental, social and clinical psychology. This project aims to inform historians as to how psychology has changed in response to the wider range of disciplines that have claimed ‘sexuality’ as an object of study in recent decades.