Jeffrey Weeks OBE is an historian and sociologist specialising in work on sexuality. He is among the academics in the early period of gay men's studies in Britain that emerged from the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) which he joined in 1970 and the Gay Left of which he was a founding member. [1] He has been described as "the most significant British intellectual working on sexuality to emerge from the radical sexual movements of the 1970s.” [2] [3]
Weeks was born in 1945 in the small town of Porth in the Rhondda Valleys in South Wales, historically one of the most famous coal mining areas in the world. His parents were both from mining stock. He grew up in a loving family in an overwhelmingly working class area where a strong sense of community was the basis for everyday life, and was educated in local schools and at Porth County Grammar School, one of the leading boys’ schools in the area. But he increasingly felt a tension between the strongly conservative gender and sexual values of the mining valleys and his own developing sexuality. He left home to go to university in London in 1964, and studied at University College London 1964-1969, where he obtained a BA (Hons) in History in 1967, followed by an MPhil in the History of Political Theory. His years as a student in London gave him the opportunity to explore his sexuality fully, and to begin to live a queer life. [4] [5]
The beginning of the Gay Liberation Front in London in October, 1970, proved to be a transformative moment in his life. Through his involvement he came out publicly as gay, encountered new radical ideologies and beliefs, got involved in social activism and met new life long friends and his first long term partner, Angus Suttie, later an innovative potter. With Angus he was a founder member of the Gay Left journal which became a focus for debate about gay liberation and the left, and provided an opportunity for Weeks to begin writing about the history and sociology of gay politics and wider sexualities. Through early books, including Socialism and the New Life (with Sheila Rowbotham); Coming Out (1977), a study of the history of homosexual politics in Britain; Sex, Politics and Society (1981); Sexuality and Its Discontents ; (1985), and Sexuality (1986), he developed an influential critique of essentialist theories of sexuality and gender (that is approaches which relied on deterministic biological and psychological explanations for sexual behaviour). He emphasised instead the social and historical factors which shape sexual values and identities and gendered assumptions, an approach that became known as social constructionism - though Weeks rarely used that term himself, regarding it as too mechanistic and narrow. [6]
Weeks’ research and writings on sexuality made it difficult at first for him to obtain a permanent academic post. He taught and researched at a number of universities, including London School of Economics, Essex, Kent (from where he gained his PhD in 1983), Southampton, and West of England, where he first became a full professor, finally moving to London South Bank University (LSBU) in 1994 as Professor of Sociology. [7] He was the Executive Dean of Arts and Human Sciences at LSBU (2003–2008). He was also the Director of the Social Policy and Urban Regeneration Research Institute (SPUR) in 2005–2009, and university director of research. He subsequently became Emeritus Professor of Sociology at LSBU. [8] He has been on the editorial board of several journals including History Workshop Journal , the Journal of the History of Sexuality , the Journal of Homosexuality , the Sociological Review and Victorian Studies ; and has delivered lectures and seminars in a wide range of conferences and universities in Europe, Australia, Latin America and North America. His articles and books have been translated into a number of languages, including French, Spanish, Catalan, Serbian, German, Chinese and Japanese.
Weeks was featured in the 2017 Pinc List of leading LGBTQ figures in Wales. [9] He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FacSS), and was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to social science.
He lives in London with Mark McNestry, his life-partner since 1990. They became civil partners in 2006.
