Richard Yuill

Dr Richard Yuill, who was awarded his PhD in Sociology from Glasgow University in December 2004 is a Foucaldian researcher and critical analyst known for his work on Queer Theory and Intergenerational Sexualities.

PhD thesis

Due to a legal agreement of Yuill with the University of Glasgow, his highly controversial thesis will not be published until 2009. For this work, he gained high distinction from examiners and colleagues alike, but was nevertheless defamed in the reactionary media.

Controversy

Throughout the five years from 2000 to 2005, he faced two lengthy University Senate investigations, thefts of material from his office, a series of hysterical attacks from the Daily Mail, Guardian, News of the World, and the freelance journalist Marcello Mega. The Scottish Mail on Sunday and the Scottish edition of News of the World tabloid published articles slating him. Glasgow University decided to place his PhD dissertation on a 5-year access ban. A series of ad hominem political attacks and sensationalist media reporting by the Times Higher Education Supplement subsequently followed, with Liz Kelly, Chris Harrison, and Rachel O'Connell co-opting to provide negative and distorted commentaries on a PhD they had not even read.

Radical conservative websites turned up the heat by describing Yuill as a "moral cretin".

Marcello Mega

In 2004, Yuill was attacked and libelled following an undercover investigation, carried out by Ireen van Engelen, who passed information on to the Scottish Daily Mail journalist Marcello Mega.

Despite eventually failing to uncover highly sensitive information, Mega has since embarked on a campaign, attempting to discredit Yuill by referring to the fact that he once joined and visited Ipce for research purposes. Mega alleges that Yuill described himself as a "boylover" to Ipce members, a charge that if correct was likely to have been part of a standard naturalisation technique used by social researchers. The integrity of this accusation or Mega's inference is called into question by his more recent comment that Yuill was discharged from teaching for "inappropriate sexual ‘horseplay’ with boys in his care"[1] a totally false and defamatory accusation that had previously lead to a successful PCC report.[2]

Sexual politics

Yuill's thesis tackles the range of contested positions on man-boy love from a sociological perspective. He applies both materialist and Foucauldian frameworks on late modern sexualities to the related subjects of childhood, adolescence and adult sexual attraction to children and young people. Yuill critiques both mainstream gay and "radical" feminist analyses on intergenerational sexualities for their reductionist and simplistic adoption of problematic and largely discredited "child sexual abuse" (CSA) assumptions on power, subjectivity and outcomes in such relationships. His approach provides a number of profound policy and theoretical insights on child, youth, and intergenerational sexual rights, coupled with a thoroughly comprehensive analysis of the likely direction future transformations towards wider forms of sexual citizenship and child empowerment will take.

Major works

Despite censorship of his work from Sociological Research Online, Sexualities, and Sociological Review, Yuill has published two Encyclopedia articles in “The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology” in 2007, and Greenwood’s “Love, Courtship and Sexuality through history, Volume 6” in 2008. He also has published a critical commentary of Diederik Janssen's "Re-Queering queer youth development: A Post-Developmental Approach to Childhood and Pedagogy" entitled "Re-scheduling child sexual trajectories” in the Journal of LGBT Youth, 2008, 5(3). At present, Yuill is working on a book proposal and further journal articles.

External links

• Yuill PhD Abstract
• Yuill PhD Biblio