Abstract
Alan Turing is known for both his mathematical creativity and genius and role in cryptography war efforts, and for his homosexuality, for which he was persecuted. Yet there is little work that brings these two parts of his life together. This paper deconstructs and moves beyond the extant stereotypes around perceived associations between gay men and creativity, to consider how Turing’s lived experience as a queer mathematician provides a rich seam of insight into the ways in which his life, relationships, and working environment shaped his work.
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Notes
The latter focuses on female make-overs but is presented by openly gay men in across several countries including Gok Wan (UK), Carson Kreesley (USA) and Jani Kazaltis (Belgium), allowing the show to ‘harness essentialist notions’ of gay men as imbued with natural good taste (Morrish and O’Mara 2004; Frith et al. 2010).
All material is taken from Andrew Hodges’ (1983) biography of Alan Turing, unless indicated otherwise, as this is agreed in the field to be the most comprehensive source on Turing’s life.
Such inscription persists in contemporary popular culture: in addition to Turing’s erasure from Enigma, John Nash’s bisexuality was expunged from the film about his life, A Beautiful Mind; both films instead make masculinity and heterosexual love a central theme of their narrative, culminating with both heroes getting the girl (Mendick 2005).
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Voss, G.S. ‘It is a beautiful experiment’: queer(y)ing the work of Alan Turing. AI & Soc 28, 567–573 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-013-0517-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-013-0517-4