Inventing Sexuality: Ben Miller & Amardeep Singh Dhillon
Ben Miller and Amardeep Singh Dhillon join Eleanor Penny to explore the historical complexities of same-sex desire and gender deviance.
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Ben Miller is a writer, researcher, and Doctoral Fellow at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is also a board member of the Schwules Museum and co-hosts the popular podcast Bad Gays alongside writer Huw Lemney. Miller and Lemmey have written a book based on their podcast, also titled Bad Gays, out this month in paperback.
Amardeep Singh Dhillon is a writer and co-editor at Red Pepper Magazine, whose work has been featured in prominent outlets such as The Independent, Novara Media, and Vice. They are the programme coordinator at The World Transformed, and an organizer with both the South London Bartenders Network and Lesbian and Gays Support the Migrants.
In this episode, Miller and Dhillon move from discussions around the origins of sexuality as an identity, to the issues of hunting for gay life in the archive, before reflecting on the relationships that exist between gender, sexuality, and the border. Within their conversation gay figures from history feature as landmarks that can help us demarcate the changing relationships between queer liberation struggles and state power.
With the global resurgence of facism over the last decade or more, Miller and Dhillon also extend their analysis to unpack the historically complex and often ambivalent relationship between homosexuality and reactionary politics, as well as the false promise of liberal gay identities for queer liberation.
Subscribe to the Verso Podcast today - you won’t want to miss this fascinating and enlightening discussion, or any of the exciting shows we have coming up for you over the coming weeks and months. Next up, Robin DG Kelley and Kevin Ochieng Okoth will be joining our host, Eleanor Penny, to discuss the revolutionary life and legacy of Walter Rodney.
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