“Welcome to the Monkey House: Human Evolution, Sexuality and the Iron Curtain of Science ”

CELEBRATING THE 15TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF GENDER STUDIES AND THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF CEU

 THE DEPARTMENT OF GENDER STUDIES PROUDLY PRESENTS THE LECTURE SERIES

VOICING GENDERS, ENGENDERING VOICES

“Welcome to the Monkey House: 

Human Evolution, Sexuality and the Iron Curtain of Science ”

A public lecture by

Hadley Z. Renkin

Assistant Professor, Department of Gender Studies

February 28, 2012, 3:30 pm, Auditorium

Both sexuality and geographical difference have long been central to scientific demarcations of the boundaries between Humanness and its Others. They have also been critical to recent discourses on postsocialist politics and homophobia. In this talk I will explore the roots of this apparent coincidence by tracing the roles of biological and spatial distinctions in a classic set of anthropological debates about human evolution: the nature of the relationship of the creatures commonly known as “Neandertals” to “modern humans.” Locating the debates about Neandertals in relation to pivotal 17th and 18th century scientific debates about the borders of the human and non-human, and the modern and non-modern, I bring together perspectives from paleoanthropology, critical science studies, postcolonial theory, and sexuality studies in order to argue that these “nested debates,” taken together, functioned to establish a deeply rooted temporal and ontological border between Western and Eastern Europe. I then go on to suggest that the “scientific” nature of this boundary powerfully underscores recent interpretations of Hungarian politics in general, and resurgent public homophobia in particular, profoundly naturalizing Hungary as a space of non-modern intolerance, and its inhabitants as failures of modern humanity - and legitimizing the moral and political hegemony of the “West.”

Hadley Z. Renkin received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan (2007), and an MA in Gender Studies from CEU (1997). He has been a member of the Department of Gender Studies at CEU since 2009. His research interests include postsocialist sexual politics movements and their implications for questions of citizenship and belonging, discourses of postsocialist homophobia and their role in neo-Orientalist moral geographies, and the intersecting histories of anthropology, sexology, and evolutionary theory. He has published articles on postsocialist homophobia and Hungarian LGBT history-making, and is revising the manuscript for a book, ‘Gay, Hungarian, Human’: Space, Time, and Sexual Citizenship in Postsocialist Hungary, an ethnographic study of the emergence of Hungary’s LGBT movement, how it has used national and transnational temporalities and geographies to assert multiple forms of identity and belonging, and the resistance its claims have faced.

The Voicing Genders, Engendering Voices lecture series is a joint celebration of the Department’s 15^th anniversary and the 20^th anniversary of CEU. The lecture series shares our diverse faculty’s most recent research with the wider academic community and showcases the multiple and interdisciplinary ways in which our field contributes to the themes of CEU’s university-wide celebrations: disciplinary self-reflexivity and academia’s social responsibility. Thus our lecture series is intended to contribute to the larger intellectual debates initiated in celebration of CEU’s 20^th anniversary. 

^[1] with apologies to Kurt Vonnegut