Sexuality Summer School (SSS)

The Sexuality Summer School (SSS) is an annual five-day, city-wide event, combining daytime seminars and workshops for postgraduates from the UK and beyond with evening and lunchtime events open to the public.

One of fifty partners in the Greater Manchester LGBT Arts and Culture Network, the SSS offers a model for public engagement and impact work, showing students how a range of event formats – lectures, readings, film screenings, workshops, and seminars – can engage wider audiences in key academic debates on feminist and queer issues.

As a platform at the intersection of rigorous academic study and arts and cultural production, the SSS provides a supportive environment for postgraduates engaged in the study of gender and sexuality to discuss their research and ideas with peers, and to engage with high-profile artists, activists, and academics, enabling the formation of new research networks across the UK and beyond.

In 2026, Sexuality Summer School returns with the theme 'On the Biological', exploring contemporary political and intellectual debates about how 'the biological' shapes current and historical understandings of sex, gender, race and sexuality. Our public events and postgraduate workshops will examine biological discourse across a range of academic research, artistic practice and activist histories, such as work on HIV/AIDS, chemsex, motherhood, racialisation, 'sex', hormones and trans healthcare, with keynote contributions from C. Riley Snorton, Kane Race, and Sarah Richardson.

Inaugurated by Prof Jackie Stacey in 2007, SSS themes have included:

  • Love and Its Others (2016);
  • Why Be Normal? (2017);
  • Queer Longing (2018);
  • Queer Dialogues (2019);
  • Queering the Archive: A Digital Prequel (2020).
  • Queering the Archive (In-person Edition, 2021);
  • The Desire for Identity (2022);
  • (Up) Against Nature (2023);
  • Queer Friendship and Other Intimacies (2024);
  • Intergenerationality (2025).

For more information on SSS, visit our blog. You can also find SSS on Facebook and Twitter.