Appel à communication : Queer Gothic: Difference and Sexuality (CAA, Chicago, 12-15 février 2014)

Queer Gothic: Difference and Sexuality (CAA, 12-15 Feb 2014)
Chicago, CAA Annual Conference, February 12 – 15, 2014
Deadline: May 6, 2013

Historians of British Art Session CAA Annual Conference 2014
Chairs: Ayla Lepine, Yale University; and Matthew Reeve, Queen’s
University. ayla.lepine@yale.edu and reevem@queensu.ca

Over the past four centuries, the Gothic style and its range of significations (including pre-modernity, romanticism, the foreign, and Catholicism) have been frequently employed as a locus or a cipher for  sexuality. Within broadly Anglican, neo-classical visual cultures, the style could express non-normative, minoritized experience, manifesting the values and ideals of alternative subjectivities. Recent work in art history, literature and gender studies has shown that from the Early Modern period to the present, Gothic aesthetics and ideas were appropriated and critiqued as an alternative historicist landscape within which diverse constructions and expressions of self could take place. Neo-Gothic aesthetics can be productively explored as a method of visual communication wherein queerness has been imagined, signaled, displayed, and censored.

For historians of British art, the Gothic Revival and queer theory are increasingly marshaled as ways of understanding the wider phenomena of sexuality, historiography, and Resistance. This panel welcomes new research on queer Gothic across architecture, art, and design, which may speak to emerging ways of seeing tradition, innovation, futurity, utopianism, and the tensions between survival and revival.

Your submission should include an abstract of 250-500 words, a letter explaining your interest and expertise in the subject as well as CAA membership status, and a CV with contact information (including summer contact information, if applicable). Please also inform us if you are submitting proposals to other sessions at the conference. CAA individual membership is required of all participants. No one may participate in more than one session in any capacity. A paper that has been published previously or presented at another scholarly conference may not be delivered at the CAA Annual conference. Acceptance in this session implies a commitment to attend that session and participate in person.

The submission deadline is May 6 2013. Please send submissions to
ayla.lepine@yale.edu and reevem@queensu.ca.