Conference Week!

This week has been a busy week on the conference front.  Monday and Tuesday saw me at Intersections of Ageing, Gender, Sexualities (I-AGES) Conference where I presented Family carer or lesbian: Is it a choice or can I be both?.  Whilst yesterday saw me attend the first day of the BPS Psychology of Women Section Annual Conference where I presented Family carer or lesbian – do I have to choose?

Intersections of Ageing, Gender, Sexualities 6th-7th July, 2015

This two day conference was a multidisciplinary international conference hosted by the Centre for Research on Age and Gender based at the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey.  This was truly a multidisciplinary conference with contributions from academics in a variety of social science and arts disciplines.  It was also very friendly conference with some fantastic papers on a variety of different intersections of age, gender and sexuality.  The highlights for me came from Andy King (University of Surrey) with his paper Intersecting what? Exploring intersections of ageing, gender, sexualities in talk-in-interaction, and one of the Keynotes The Secret Garden: Oral History of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong by Travis Kong from the University of Hong Kong.  That said, I enjoyed all the papers that I managed to get to.  Unfortunately due to being double booked the one paper I really wanted to get to was by Rebecca Jones (The Open University) ‘Queer’ and ‘traditional’ families in bisexual people’s imagined and experienced later life which I think would have some interesting points in common with my focus group study with young lesbians about their hopes and fears about their future lived outness: Lesbian Futures.

PoWS Annual Conference 2015, 8th-10th July 2015

Unfortunately I could only attend for one day of the PoWS Conference so by default attended on the day I was scheduled to present my paper, the first day of the conference.  The conference was opened by Lindsay O’Dell, chair of POWS (The Open University).  Up next was the first Keynote of the event Gender, Sexuality and Asylum in South Africa by Ingrid Palmary from University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg who told us that asylum seekers fleeing from gender based persecution are up against a system that works to exclude rather than include.  I was up next followed by Sonia Soans (ManMet).  After a coffee break and a chance to catch up with a few people the POWS Postgraduate Prize Winner Emille Appertain presented her MSc dissertation Man vs Vagina –  A Foucauldian Analysis of Men’s Discourses About the Perfect Vagina and Female Genital Grooming.  All the papers I was able to take  in were interesting, I am just disappointed that I couldn’t be there for longer than one day – hopefully next year I will make all three days.