Gender politics at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas

When is the right time to have a baby, can women achieve equality in the workplace, where do we draw the line on pornography and what are implications of trans identities for religious faith?

Speakers include the historian Professor Ulinka Rublack, Dr Helena Cronin, Director ofDarwin@LSE, and philosopher Professor Rae Langton.

A panel from two major research projects, Generation to Reproduction and the Casebooks Project, will debate whether women should be having babies at 20.  The question has its roots in current medical recommendations that female fertility declines after the age of 24. More recent scientific studies have revealed that the quality of male sperm also declines after the age of 25. But age is just one consideration in the complex web of social, cultural as well as biological factors that affect when we think is the ideal time to have a baby.

In the Sir Hermann Bondi Lecture – Sex at work - science, policy and the truth about male-female differences,  Helena Cronin, co-director of the Centre for Philosophy of Nature and Social Science at the LSE and Director of Darwin@LSE, will look at how evolutionary science can explain why women and men often gravitate to different fields of work and why there are so few women are at the top of their professions.

The body politic: censorship and the female body will see philosopher Professor Rae Langton, David Bainbridge, author of Curvology: the origins and power of female body shape, Ian Dunt, political editor of the Erotic Review, and poet Hollie McNish debate the politics of pornography, objectification of women and censorship and whether and where the line should be drawn on pornography.

Christina Beardsley, a transgender Anglican hospital chaplain, and Surat-Shaan Knan, founder of Twilight People, will discuss the implications of trans identities for religious faith in Rebellious bodies, faithful minds? Religion and gender identity. Beardsley says trans identities can serve to question narrow and limited assumptions about gender expression and roles and that the church has for too long developed its theology about trans people without them. She is co-editing a book, Trans substantiations: hearing the theology of transgender Christians which aims to help to redress that imbalance.

Other events relating to women and gender politics include:

- Hidden voices: censorship through omission. Censorship is often understood as the act of stopping the expression of views, but sometimes it is more about whose voice is heard rather than what is said. Has the internet made debate more inclusive of gender, sexuality, race and class?

- In all ways that matter, women count - Dr Wendi Momen MBE on why full and equal participation of women in all spheres of life is essential to development and peace.

- WOW Lecture #Upforschool - a discussion of the campaign to ensure all out-of-school children gain the right to education and future action in the light of the Sustainable Development Goals post-2015 to be finalised this week. There will also be a WOW Think-inwhere members of the public can brainstorm ideas for the next Women of the World festival.

- Rapping our way to Islam - rapper Tommy Evans recounts his conversion to Islam as part of a celebration of the Centre for Islamic Studies’ research on Narratives of Conversion.

- The astronomer and the witch - Professor Ulinka Rublack discusses her new book, The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Defence of his mother. It tells the shocking story of how the mother of the well-known 17th century astronomer was accused of witchcraft and how he defended her. Professor Rublack will talk about historical resistance to women and its impact on families.

- Pornography, feminism and resistance - Dr Julia Long will give a brief historical overview of feminist resistance to pornography, and consider how things currently stand in the light of the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon, with claims being made around ‘feminist’ pornography and with women now being championed as both producers and consumers of pornography.

- Challenging the gender binary through science fiction and fantasy - science fiction critic and publisher Cheryl Morgan in conversation with Professor Farah Mendlesohn on how writers of science fiction and fantasy fiction have imagined worlds in which the dominance of binary gender is challenged, subverted and even swept away.

- Awesome women of the stage - Come and meet awesome women of the stage from history over tea and cakes, in a series of encounters in this family event. Have afternoon tea with Sarah Siddons as she learns her lines for her new role as Lady Macbeth; meet Emma Cons in a temperance meeting as she plans her new theatre (The Royal Victoria Hall and Coffee Tavern – now known as the Old Vic); meet Cheryl Crawford as she sublets her New York apartment to save cash for her new Broadway production.

- The Maternity Ward - an exhibition of photos by Kerstin Hacker which reveals a different and provocative view of childbirth.

Established in 2008, Cambridge Festival of Ideas aims to fuel the public’s interest in arts, humanities and social sciences. The events, ranging from talks, debates and film screenings to exhibitions and comedy nights, are held in lecture halls, theatres, museums and galleries around Cambridge. Of the over 250 events at the Festival, most are free.

The Festival sponsors and partners are Cambridge University Press, St John’s College, Anglia Ruskin University, RAND Europe, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Cambridge Live, University of Cambridge Museums and Botanic Garden, Arts Council England, Cambridge Junction, British Science Association, Heritage Lottery Fund, Heffers, WOW Festival, Southbank Centre, Collusion, TTP Group, Goethe Institut, Index on Censorship and BBC Cambridgeshire.