What's New in Queer Studies?

Professor Love

Ever spend your nights awake thinking, "What are young queer scholars doing right now?" I do. I also ask, "Who are young queer scholars doing right now?" Those questions go hand in hand for me. But now the former question can be answered with some certainty.

Wednesday (That's tomorrow! Eeeeeee!) in the Chicano Culture room inside the University of Texas Union building a day-long conference will be held on the topic of "New Directions in Queer Studies". The conference is capped off by Heather Love, who wrote the exquisitely beautiful book Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Seriously, if you don't own this book buy yourself an early Chrismakwaannukah present and be done with it. The conference itself is the culminating work of the members of a graduate seminar taught by Ann Cvetkovich. Another smartypants (no Dockers) whose work you should own.

Also: A new GayPlace blogger will be presenting a paper at this conference… Who is it? We can't say just yet! But you'll meet this mystery soonsoonsoon.

Here's the schedule!

9-10:30am

Queer Positions: Theories of Humility and Vulnerability
Panel moderated by Professor Ann Cvetkovich

Coming Out: Disability and the Nonvisible Identity
Katherine Briggs

The Healthy and the Disabled
Stephanie Rosen

To Touch and to Hold: Reaching Toward a Medieval Past
Brianna Jewell

Epistemological Humility
Kendall Gerdes

10:45am - 12:15pm

Bodily Projects: Self-Display and the Queer Archive
Panel moderated by Professor Ann Reynolds

Lady Glitterati of the New Movie Uprising: Joanie 4 Jackie, Memory and Me
Ricky Hill

Getting Pissy with Ray Johnson
Kate Dempsey

The Body as a Queer Archive in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
Cynthia Francica

Public Anonymity and Refracted Temporality: Systems of Exposure on GuysWithiPhones.com
Alex Cho

12:15-1:15pm Lunch

1:30-3pm

Genre Trouble: Affect, Autobiography, and Subculture in 'Queer' Genres
Panel moderated by Professor Lisa Moore

The Affective Politics of a Kink Meme
Amanda Wall

Illustrating Shame: Queer Identity in Michelle Tea's Rent Girl
Patricia Nelson

Cherrie Moraga's Critics: Performance, Autobiography, and the Contingency of Genre
Sarah Orem

Queering Television: Anton Perich Presents and Manhattan’s Public Access Channels
Kara Carmack

3:15-4:45pm

Reading Queer Geographies and Histories
Panel moderated by Dr. Simone Brown

Theoretical Nobodies like Lou Andreas-Salomé
S. Pearl Brilmyer

Queer Space in South Africa: Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow
Jordan Lamfers "The Shaky High Wire between Subcultures": Jeff Mann's Loving Mountains, Loving Men
Rachel Wise

The Soul's Essence: Bodies, Virginity, and Lucretian Materialism in Milton's Masque
Thomas Lindsay

5-6:30pm

Eye on the Teacher: Queer Routes of Upward Mobility
Keynote Speech by Heather Love