Feb. 12, 2018

Some limited online news reports that a Feb. 9 lecture on the University of Michigan campus “appears to ‘dignify and redeem’ sex between men and boys” are completely false.

Neither the event description on the U-M website nor the professor’s talk itself sought to dignify sex between men and boys. In fact, it did just the opposite.

The event description says, in part, “This talk tests the boundaries of the discourse of queer family by investigating a sexually, ethically, and politically dubious kinship form: namely, modern pederasty.”

During his talk, Professor Kadji Amin read from his new book, “Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History.” In the book and the talk, Prof. Amin, “challenges the idealization of (French author and activist) Jean Genet as a paradigmatic figure within queer studies to illuminate the methodological dilemmas at the heart of queer theory.”

The full description can be found here:

https://irwg.umich.edu/events/kadji-amin-pederastic-kinship-deidealizing-queer-studies