Sexuality Summer School 2025: Intergenerationality

Sunday 25 – Friday 30 May 2025

The Sexuality Summer School is a week-long event consisting of seminars and workshops for 40 postgraduate students, alongside a public events programme open to all. This year, the SSS will focus on the theme of ‘Intergenerationality’, exploring debates about how generations are constituted and distinguished one from another in the context of feminist, queer and trans theories and practices. 

Our discussions will draw together debates in gender, sexuality and critical race studies about how generationality has marked and regulated certain bodies, spaces and resources in particular times and contexts. Our public events and postgraduate workshops will examine how knowledge, creative practice and activism in the past has shaped current intellectual and political agendas, as well as artistic forms and collaborations. 

Exploring memory work, archives and oral histories, we will consider theories and methods for conceptualising past-present relations in terms of debates about desire, violence, antagonism,  nostalgia, consent and regulation.

Public Events Programme:

Sunday, 25 May, 3.30pm – 5.30pm

Film Screenings: A Place of Rage (1991, 54 mins) and Khush (1991, 26 mins), directed by Pratibha Parmar.

Q&A: Author and poet Jackie Kay will join Pratibha Parmar for a discussion of the films.

In partnership with the Women in Revolt! Exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery and with the Centre for New Writing and Screen Studies.

Venue: HOME Cinema, 2 Tony Wilson Place, Manchester M15 4FN

Tickets required. Click here to book.

Monday, 26 May, 4.00pm – 6.00pm

Opening Academic Plenary Lecture: ‘Between Desire and Dissociation: ‘Queer Magical Thinking in Hetero-Authoritarian Times’

Tavia’ Nyong’o (William Lampson Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, Professor of American Studies and African American Studies, Yale University). 

Venue: International Anthony Burgess Foundation, 3 Cambridge Street, Manchester M1 5BY

No booking required, all welcome.

Tuesday, 27 May, 5.30pm – 7.00pm

Roundtable Discussion on Intergenerationality and Activism. Speakers include: Marc Thompson (Pioneering HIV/AIDS activist, London), Chloe Cousins (Rainbow Noir and Social Justice Manager, Manchester Museum), Robert Broughton (George House Trust) and Agatha Phiri (HIV Activist).

In partnership with George House Trust, celebrating 40 years of supporting people with HIV and AIDS in Manchester. 

Venue: Sister, Renold Building, 81 Sackville Street, Manchester M1 3NJ

Free to attend but booking required. Click here to reserve a spot.

Please email sexualitysummerschool@gmail.com with any questions.

What Does Family Mean to You?

DIVA Magazine partnered with LGBT Foundation to find out more about your rainbow families. This is what family looks like to Mindy.

Words by Mindy

What does family mean to you?

For me, family is chosen as well as a couple of the people I have a genetic connection to. My primary family priority is my wife (we’ve been together for 34 years now) and our cats. 

Tell us about a typical day in your family life.

We get up together, then we meditate before breakfast (that makes us sound a lot more worthy than we are). After breakfast we get on with our day, which includes cat care and the various volunteering things we are involved in. If it’s a Tuesday we go to a singing for wellbeing group, other days Linda plays her guitar and I dance. Sometimes we meet up with close friends for a meal or I go out dancing with other friends.

How have things changed for LGBTQIA+ families over your lifetime?

Big changes! In the 80s I knew I couldn’t adopt or foster so we have no children. The children of friends just take us as we are – all totally ordinary as we’ve known them since they were babies. We are both out to everyone in our lives and it wasn’t like that when I came out in the early 80s or when Linda left Northern Ireland in the late 70s. 

What are your hopes for the future for LGBTQIA+ families?

My hope is that we keep on becoming more and more unremarkable so we are completely embedded in our communities and localities. Here in Manchester it feels like we are totally ordinary but that may just be because we’ve lived in the same house for 30 years and as older women we are largely invisible. 

All of this is why I am part of the Centre For Ageing Better’s Age Without Limits campaign and part of their stock image library as well as a volunteer at the LGBT Foundation here in Manchester.

You can find out more about LGBT Foundation here.

Ready to Protest? – Tuesday, 10 June – 6.00pm – 8.00pm

The Social, Aviva Studios, Water Street, Manchester M3 4JQ

Test your skills at PROTEST! – a Pride Month special quiz – Free to attend

This June, IAP:MCR takes over Factory International’s monthly quiz night. This special edition is part of PROTEST! – a two-year project exploring Section 28, and the history of Queer resistance.

Your compere is Louise Wallwein: legendary poet, performer, and frontliner at the 1988 anti-Section 28 demonstration. Expect big energy and brilliant questions, celebrating protest, pride and resistance. 

There will also be a pop-up display, tracing the history of Section 28.

Produced by IAP:MCR as part of PROTEST!, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Can we get a team together for Out In The City? – Please contact us if interested.

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