New Directions In Queer Studies: Conference Keynote by Heather Love

Today, I'll be participating in what is surely to be a wonderful experience: a one-day conference on "new directions in queer studies." See here for the complete schedule, including an abstract of the keynote address. It is the direct result of a Prof. Ann Cvetkovich's graduate course of the same name, from which all of its presenters also come. So I'm excited to hear papers by my fellow graduate students not only from the English Department but across the university, too. The entire conference, as I understand it, was also planned and carried out by the students, and this in lieu of the more traditional end of semester seminar papers. Prof. Lisa Moore, another queer studies scholar at UT Austin and a specialist in sapphic genres of the eighteenth century, has also enabled such alternative pedagogical practices.

Although I do have some reservations about a few particulars in these formats (and here's not the occasion for such diatribe), I think such alternative pedagogies are vitally important, not least in their professionalizing capacities and recognition that the traditional seminar paper is probably least useful for most of today's graduate students in contrast to other potential areas for developing analyses and arguments (e.g., construction of syllabi, conference papers, book reviews, etc.)

The day will end with a much anticipated keynote by Prof. Heather Love (see here for her personal webpage), who will speak on the "queer routes of upward mobility." Love is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard, 2007), an elegant and powerful study -- part literary analysis, part exquisite meditation -- on what Michael Snediker called in his GLQ "Books in Brief" review the "non-transparency of negativity." The book has justly received many accolades (see here for a sampling of its many endorsements). Back in July, The Feminist Review had this to say about Love's book. Late last week, I offered a brief Facebook status update, saying that the most arresting aspect of any literary critic's work is the degree to which she compels her readers to re/turn to the texts under consideration. I'm now enthralled with the texts Love reads by Walter Pater and Willa Cather in ways that I have never been before. With grace and tenderness, Love contests what she most recently terms the "compulsory happiness" operative within queer existence, which, by means of its "climate of emotional conformism," obdurates other forms of queer living, not least in the post-Stonewall gay and lesbian movement's failure to attend to the persistent complexity of pyschic shame. Any effort to recalibrate the categories by which queer existence today might be made more livable must turn backward to a negative archive of "shyness, ambivalence, failure, melancholia, loneliness, regression, victimhood, heart-break, antimodernity, immaturity, self-hatred, despair, shame" (Feeling Backward, p. 146 and passim).

I'm hoping to provide some post-conference thoughts and pictures. I especially want to entice the willing to blog their papers/abstracts, and so increase the possible range of their feedback. Fingers crossed!

On Categories

Sorry to have been away and not posting, but Ive been a bit preoccupied trying to finish a few writing obligations and prepare for the new term. More on all that later -- including my promised post on Dinshaw/Manning. For now, however, I would like to solicit opinions on the following outline.

I noted in an earlier post that I'm composing the 5000-word entry on "queer studies" for the forthcoming Handbook of Trends in Medieval Studies (ed., Albrecht Classen). Be aware that my aim is to present something like a history or summary of scholarship on the topic, and not to discuss in detail and particular texts. That said, it does seem to me that much of the literary (and historical?) scholarship emerges around key textual artifacts: e.g., Chaucer, Roman de la Rose, Libro de Beun Amor, the Latin writings of Peter Damian and Alain de Lille. The texts, then, might be described as nodal points for the field's discursive energies. In fact, one way I've been thinking about a queer[ing] Middle Ages is as itself an aleatory point. There is something beautifully and thrillingly rhizomatic about queer medieval studies, something that reminds why I so love being a medievalist. Or, as Ive sometimes been "accused" of being, a theorist who uses the medieval as an archive -- an accusation in whose wake I would happily self-narrate. Still, this something is an aleatoriness that is irreducible to interdisciplinarity, and I'm coming to think more about the materialities of such academic undertakings. Perhaps a vitalist medievalism?

Anyway, back to my topic at hand. I do have a bibliography that I'll post soon. While I've been doing much research, reading, and summarizing -- and accepting the fact there is a necessary violence that must be done to the topic for this type of project -- I'm still trying to be as thorough (but not exhaustive) as possible. This means that I'm attempting to cover a range of sub-disciplines in medieval studies, since the intended audience of the project isn't just scholars of literature nor only English speakers.

So, I've been laboring over how to best organize the information in way that both makes sense and is helpful. Being pragmatic and economical are, of course, forefront in my mind. I'd would welcome any feedback and questions on or about the outline. I'm especially interested in knowing if anyone thinks I've missed anything glaringly obvious, and/or if anything in my section on "emerging issues" [anybody got a better subtitle?] seems not to belong. Note that some of these latter issues I've culled not only from what medievalists are writing about now but also from where certain trends in queer studies more generally are headed. In some ways, I suppose I'm availing myself of the performative rhetoric that such a section enables: my analysis of such emergent scholarly trajectories is as predicative as it is summarative.

Entry Outline

Overview [very brief]
• What this entry aims to do and its sections
• Introduce concept of sodomy

Orientations
• Boswell Thesis [project of CSTH and its reception and continued importance]
• Queer/ing [Foucault, queer theory] -- need a better subtitle

Geographies
• Whirling overview of selected scholarship for England [including Anglo-Saxon studies], France, Italy, Iberia [including Arabic/Islamic issues], Germany. The section is more heavily focused on the vernaculars, but will include certain important Latin writings (e.g., Peter Damian, Alain de Lille).

Vectors
• Nonconformities [discursive overlappings of heretics, Jews, Saracens w/ sodomites]
• Visual and Aural Cultures [scholarship from art and music]
• Law, Pedagogy, Medicine [yeah, sort of a catchall, I know]
• Godly Eros [religious desires/erotics] -- better title?

Between Women
• Historiographic issues in the study of female same-sex eroticism [I think this is important enough to deserve a separate treatment]

Emergent Issues
• Hetero/sexualities
• Temporality
• Eccentric Bodies & the Otherwise Gendered [disabilities, eunuchs, trans]
• Senses [esp., aural and olfactory erotics; fecopoetics/"waste studies"]
• Animals
• Being Alone [singleness, anti-sociality, solitude]