Queer New England: CFP for the 2024 Deerfield-Wellesley Symposium
CALL FOR PAPERS: Queer New England
A one-day symposium sponsored by Historic Deerfield, and the Grace Slack McNeil Program for Studies in American Art at Wellesley College
Date: Saturday, March 9, 2024
CFP Deadline: December 11, 2023
Location: Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, MA
A one-day symposium sponsored by Historic Deerfield, and the Grace Slack McNeil Program for Studies in American Art at Wellesley College
Date: Saturday, March 9, 2024
CFP Deadline: December 11, 2023
Location: Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, MA
This symposium will explore the textual, visual, and material cultures of queer New England from the time of European settlement to the present. Conceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality changed dramatically from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, and scholars continue to assess the consequences of those changes for diverse historical subjects. Ideas about sex operated in tandem with ideas about race and class and these perceptions shaped the ways some New Englanders created queer spaces and places by blurring normative boundaries. The symposium will address echoes of queerness where it was expressed explicitly and implicitly and consider the implications of locating queer pasts among more traditional narratives of America’s history, art, literature, and built environment.
We invite paper proposals that evaluate some of the terminological and methodological challenges inherent in scholarly approaches to determining queer expressions in the past. Is it fruitful to question the apparent shift from conceiving of same-sex eroticism as based in acts as opposed to individual identities? What comprised queerness in visual and literary sources, and how did that differ from its resonance in design, architecture, and social spaces? How did New Englanders’ race, class, ethnicity, or disability factor into conceptions and expressions of queerness? How did New Englanders leverage notions of queerness both to restrict and to amplify individuals’ self-expression? How should twenty-first-century museums and historical sites interpret queer pasts for public audiences?
The symposium aims to attract scholars from various disciplines and those working in public-facing cultural organizations who are undertaking work on topics as varied as the New England resonances of particular queer identities (such as indigenous two-spirit people), intersections between queer artists, authors, and architects and their creative work (such as same-sex relationships and the Colonial Revival), and ways in which New Englanders imbued landscapes and social spaces with queer meanings (as in queer resort towns).
Papers should be theoretical or analytical in nature rather than descriptive and should be approximately 20 minutes long. All proposals will be peer-reviewed. Speakers invited to present papers will receive overnight accommodation and are expected to participate fully in the in-person symposium program on site.
Please submit via email a 250-word proposal and a two-page c.v. to Erika Gasser egasser@historic-deerfield.org and Martha McNamara mmcnamar@wellesley.edu. Proposals should include the title of the paper and the presenter's name. The deadline for submissions is December 11, 2023.
