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The Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London presents: ROMANCE, MARRIAGE AND HETEROSEXUAL DESIRES a seminar with Laurie Essig (Middlebury College, Vermont, US), Alison Rooke (Goldsmiths, University of London) and Debra Benita Shaw (University of East London). 2pm, Wednesday, 24th February Room tba, East Building, University of East London, Docklands Campus 4-6 University Way, London, E16 2RD www.uel.ac.uk The Conservative leader David Cameron seems to think that supporting the institution of marriage will fix 'broken Britain' but what is the meaning of marriage in the 21st century? How does the concept of romantic love function as a political ideology? Why is our close relationship to animal species so often invoked to support the claim that pair-bonding is 'natural'? And how do supposed 'deviant' sexual practices among heterosexual couples re-assert normative understandings of paired relationships? Laurie Essig is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Middlebury College and the author of Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999) and the forthcoming American Plastic: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards and the Spirit of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010). Her blog can be found at www.trueslant.com/laurieessig Alison Rooke is a visual sociologist whose research interests are focused around class, gender and sexualities in urban contexts. She has written on issues relating to cosmopolitanism, visibility, embodiment and belonging in classed and queer cultures. Her most recent publication is 'Beyond 'Key Parties and 'Wife Swapping': The Visual Culture of Online Swinging' (with Monica Moreno) in Porn.com: making sense of on-line Pornography (ed. Feona Attwood, Peter Lang, 2009). Debra Benita Shaw is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London and a member of the Centre for Cultural Studies Research managing collective. She is the author of Women, Science & Fiction: The Frankenstein Inheritance (Palgrave, 2000), Technoculture: The Key Concepts (Berg, 2008) and editor of special issue of Science as Culture, Technology, Death & The Cultural Imagination (2009). She writes about science fiction, posthumanism, gender and the body, the biopolitics of evolutionary psychology and political activism and the city. www.uel.ac.uk/ccsr