NOISE Summer School 2025

Sexual Citizenship:

Bodies, Technology, and Governance

Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies

25 – 29 August 2025, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

• How is sexual citizenship constructed and negotiated in relation to contemporary practices and technologies of biopolitical governance?
• How do communities use technology to extend the boundaries of their social and political spaces/networks, whilst interrogating the separation of private and public, the citizen and the foreigner?
• How have queer and trans lives benefited from—or been hindered by—their being imagined and evoked through membership of the nation-state?
• What kinds of “acts of citizenship” are possible for communities of marginalized sexual and gender identities?

This year’s NOISE summer school focuses on how sexuality is negotiated, practiced, and mediated in relation to various notions of citizenship. The concept of “citizenship” can be defined as outlining the contours of the society a community aspires to create (Mouffe 1993). Or, in the words of Judith Butler, “the nation-state can only reiterate its own basis for legitimation by literally producing the nation that serves as the basis for its legitimation” (Butler and Spivak 2007, 31). Citizenship is, therefore, inseparable from border construction and policing. It serves as a mechanism for establishing distinctions between “us” and “them”, “insiders” and “outsiders,” the “good” and the “bad”, “health” and “pathology,” “public” and “private.” This dynamic often involves technologies of management and governance set up to protect preexisting notions of purity and its assumed value . These aspects highlight how citizenship functions not only as a legal or political status but also as an instrument for delineating and regulating societal boundaries.

During the summer school, we will address forms of technologically mediated biopolitical governance and policing that aim to regulate our sexual lives. One of the features of our modern and contemporary societies is how “private decisions and practices have become intertwined with public institutions and state policies, such as public discourse on sexuality, legal codes, medical system, family policy, and the media” (Oleksy 2009, 4). A central concept for our discussions is “sexual citizenship”, which addresses that precise space where “our most intimate lives” become a springboard for a “claim to rights” on the part of citizens (Plummer 2003). Such rights are granted to sexual and gender minorities under very specific conditions insofar as the rights of sexual minorities are seen to benefit and contribute to the reproduction of the hegemonic world system of welfare capitalism (Wilson 2009). As seen with ongoing debates on biocitizenship related to constraints placed on homosexuals when it comes to blood donation (Weil 2023), access to and distribution of HIV Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (Jones et al. 2020), access to gender confirmation therapies, or the ever-present “charmed circle” of “good” sexuality (Rubin 2011), sexual citizenship is inseparable from strategies of biopolitical governance, such as fast-developing “smart” systems of self-quantification, diagnosis, and administration (Lupton 2016; Isin and Ruppert 2020).

Apart from technologies of governance, we will address the many potential political, aesthetic, and ethical “acts of citizenship” (van Klinken 2018) through which individuals and collectives engage with, and express themselves in, the public realm, in particular in relation to sex, gender, and sexuality. Such “acts of citizenship” represent practices through which individuals position themselves as social agents while simultaneously contributing to the imagination of new political and societal possibilities that are yet to come (van Klinken 2018), within or beyond the constraints of the nation-state.

This edition of the NOISE Summer School introduces students to key discussions and debates in queer, feminist, anti-racist, postcolonial, and decolonial, as well as media studies. It focuses on the various mechanisms through which citizenship generates processes of exclusion while also fostering political, aesthetic, and media engagements that redefine sexual and gender norms.

The themes addressed through the 5-day program will be:

•Citizenship and LGBTQI+ Activism in Media, Arts, and Literature
•Sexual Citizenship and Biopolitical Techniques of Governance
•Sexual Citizenship and State Border Control

Aims
Summer School participants will:

• Be introduced to a broad range of theories within queer, feminist, anti-racist, media, postcolonial, and decolonial studies, focusing on how citizenship is mobilized to regulate, displace, and disrupt sex and gender boundaries;
• Learn to develop and apply methodologies and tools to critically address and challenge the construction and policing of borders.
• Learn to critically assess the role of various technologies governing intimate and sexual citizenship.

Target audience
This advanced training course offers a diverse yet coherent program of study from an interdisciplinary perspective. The Summer School is meant for PhD and MA students. Separate seminars for these two groups will be provided in the afternoons.

Formula

  • Lectures in the morning
  • Separate PhD and MA-seminars in the afternoon
  • Plenary sessions
  • Social program
  • Students prepare before NOISE by reading and collecting material for assignments (approximately 40 hours of work). After the school has ended, participants who fulfilled all requirements (preparation of assignments and reading, active participation, and final essay) receive a NOISE Certificate of 5 EC.
  • All students are expected to participate in the entire program for the duration of five days.
  • Please check the website for more information, registration and regular updates.

Venue
The NOISE Summer School 2025 will be hosted by Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

Tuition Fees
The tuition fee is €500,-. If you are selected as a tutor, you are eligible for a reduced fee (you can indicate your interest for a tutor position on the application form). The tuition fees includes digital reading materials but excludes accommodation and subsistence costs (i.e., food, meals, drinks, etc.).
Unfortunately, the NOG cannot offer financial aid for the Summer School. We advise students in need of financial aid to check with their local institutions.

Teachers in the course
The NOISE Summer School is organized by the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG, Utrecht University). The 2025 edition is coordinated by Dr. Aminata Mbaye (Utrecht University, NL), Dr. Gerwin van Schie (Utrecht University, NL) and Prof. dr. João Florêncio (Linköping University, SE). The director of NOISE is Prof. dr. Kathrin Thiele (Utrecht University, NL).

Several renowned international scholars and artists of queer feminist, posthuman and eco-critical, anti-racist and post- and decolonial studies will be teaching at the Summer School. Confirmed scholars and artists who will be lecturing at the summer school will be announced on this page over the next few weeks.

Registration and Deadline:
Deadline: April 30, 2025.
Please download the NOISE 2025 Application form and send it to: noise@uu.nl

For more information, please email: noise@uu.nl