About

The Center for the Study of Sexual Culture (CSSC) was founded in 2001 to support research and critical conversations concerning sexuality, sexual culture, and their mutually determining relationship to institutions, social practices and norms, and modes of representation. We understand sexuality to essentially inform diverse fields of social life, such as the state, the economy, civil society, family forms, social identity, and the cultural modes of representation. We draw from a broad field of scholarship in which sexuality is found to participate in discussions as far-reaching as: reproductive control and rights, heredity, marriage, nationalism, welfare systems, property, adoption, animal ethnographies, colonial imaginaries and administrations, performance, language norms, gendered ways and styles, disability politics and culture, visual cultures, materialities, and more.

The CSSC brings together UC Berkeley faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates with a common interest in the ways sexuality is realized in different sites and contexts and for different constituencies transnationally. The Center especially encourages research from two perspectives:

• Research examining the implication of sexuality in cultural formations of various kinds, such as: legal and legislative practices; the production and consumption of literary genres; popular culture; visual culture; the history of the body; and psychological, sociological, biological theories

• Research examining the workings of specific sexual cultures: the precise ways in which sexuality is organized discursively and institutionally at given places and times.

To learn more about the CSSC’s various activities, please join our events mailing list by clicking here. You can also explore the Programs or Events sections on this site. To request event co-sponsorship from the CSSC, please email us.