Session 10: Thinking Sexualities and Development Meeting

6th Global Conference

Tuesday 10th November – Thursday 12th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies
Donald Hall
West Virginia University, USA

This paper will offer an overview of philosophical hermeneutics, and especially the work of the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, as it argues for a hermeneutic approach to the study of sexuality and the erotic. Drawn from the author’s recent book, Reading Sexualities (published by Routledge in 2009), the paper challenges the reigning practices, priorities, and preoccupations of sexuality studies today, which has tended to draw narrowly upon a Foucauldian and Nietzschean theory base. Looking broadly at the text of queer theory, and more narrowly at pop cultural representations of possible changes in sexual identity and erotic inter-relationship, Professor Hall examines the vexed ethical, critical, and political questions arising from desires for self-directed instrumentality. He turns instead to a far-reaching dialogic practice as a mechanism for furthering radical social change and alterations in the individual experience of the erotic. Our sexual desires and bases for identification are being widely challenged in the twenty-first century. Referencing the work of Gadamer, Hall suggests that by approaching sexual diversity with openness and humility, we become active participants in the politically urgent process of reading the self through the perspective of the other.