Pat Moloney

Pat Moloney is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at Victoria University of Wellington. He has been on the teaching staff of Victoria University since 1995. In addition to teaching POLS112: Introduction to Political Ideas, he coordinates FHSS111: Sexuality and Society with Allison Kirkman from Sociology, as well as a POLS 362: Sexuality and the Modern World and an Honours paper, POLS 402: Indigenous Peoples Through European Eyes: 1550 -1850.

His research interests include early modern political thought, political ideology, sexuality, and colonisation. His latest research project is a book entitled, Sexuality and Political Thought which will examine the views of key political theorists on sexual desire and political order. Given that European thinkers from Plato to Foucault have considered the sexual appetite to be an important topic of inquiry and its cultivation or repression a crucial aspect of social control, why, in the twentieth century, has the Anglo-American tradition of political theory banished sexuality to the realm of the 'private' and thus beyond the purview of the discipline? Why did religious fundamentalists give special significance to sexuality?

With Allison Kirkman he is coeditor of Sexuality Down Under: Social and Historical Perspectives (Otag Univerity Press, 2006)