On Wednesday 25 October, Dr Sam Rutherford delivered The Brock Lecture to a packed auditorium. By 1904, all British universities except Oxford and Cambridge admitted women to degrees. By 1919, UK higher education was nationalised, with the typical student attending a gender-integrated nonresidential university. In these newly gender-integrated environments, heterosexuality offered a useful script for negotiating cross-gender interaction; this quickly became the normative way of organising relations between women and men in middle-class culture more widely. Yet some men sought to leverage a unique and increasingly marginal institutional structure in higher education—the Oxbridge college—to resist the gender integration and heterosexualisation of bourgeois society that they saw happening around them.
In this lecture Dr Rutherford told the story of these Oxford and Cambridge men (including Corpus's own E.P. Warren), the claims they made for the exceptional value of the intimate community of the men's residential college, and how they drew on the intellectual and cultural resources of the college to develop new ideas about the nature of male homosexuality. They discussed how the resulting understanding of male homosexuality, like heterosexuality, limited the possibilities for conceptualising gender and sexual diversity, and why university history is important to queer history and the history of sexuality.
Watch the recording of the Brock Lecture 2023 here.