Workshop: “Can sex be heritage? A thought experiment”
by: Prof. Dr. Ellen Hertz, Université de Neuchâtel
Venue: Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum 1.610
Date: December 10, 2012 from 12 to 16 pm
One of the most thoroughly coded and meaningful things that human beings do and have traditionally done with their bodies must be sex. Sexual practices involve narratives, rituals, performance, beliefs about nature and the universe and skills, and yet nowhere in the intangible cultural heritage registers does one find them valorized or even mentioned. Why not? Is this just Puritanism, or does making bodies into heritage involve desexualizing them (or are these actually the same thing)? In this presentation, I would like to examine the rare examples or analogies I could find to see what they tell us about the ICH heritage regime’s techniques for disappearing sex.