Queer People 5: The Uses of the History of Sexuality
14th-17th July 2009
Christ’s College, Cambridge
Wednesday 14th July
12 noon - 2.00 Arrival and registration
2.15 Welcome and introduction.
This and all sessions will be in the Lloyd Room
2.30-4.00 Panel 1: Queer (Inter)Nationality
Christopher Burke (University of Otago), “Queerly Intimate: James Courage’s
Transnational Erotic and Social Worlds”
Katherine O'Donnell (University College Dublin), “Making Camp in Ireland: The Annual
Alternative Miss Ireland Contest and Narratives of Nation and Home”
Wolfgang Nedobity (Universität Wien) “Continental Britons: a historical overview of
male effeminacy and queer influences from abroad”
4.00-4.30 Tea
4.30-6.00 Panel 2: Queer Thematics in Scandinavian Literature
Olivia Gunn (University of California Irvine), “Late Early Decadence and the (Queer)
Figure of the Future in Herman Bang’s De uden Fædreland”
Pål Bjørby (University of Bergen), “Homosexuality, Narcissism and the Modernist
Masculinist Erotic Imaginary”
Lars Rune Waage (University of Bergen), “'An abnormal and queer human': two
Norwegian literary depictions of the 'homosexual suicide' at the beginning of the 20th
Century”
7.00 Dinner (Red and White College Wine available for purchase by the bottle)
After dinner: Emma Donoghue, reading from and talking about her new book,
Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature
Thursday 15th July
8.00-9.00 Breakfast
9.30-11.00 Panel 3: The Queer Eighteenth Century 1
Sally O'Driscoll (Fairfield University), “Not to be Conceived: Eliza Haywood's NonReproductive Women”
Christopher Nagle (Western Michigan University) & Courtney Wennerstrom (Indiana
University), “Polyamorousness and the Eighteenth-Century Novel”
Conrad Brunström and Tanya Cassidy (NUI Maynooth), “Performing her ‘Gay’ sport in
the ‘Queen of Cities’: the theatre of the cricket field, eighteenth-century London, and the
extraordinary spectacle of bodies”
11.00-11.30 Coffee
11.30-12.30 Plenary 1 – Chair: Chris Mounsey
George Haggerty (University of California Riverside), “An Imagined Genealogy of
Queerness”
12.30-2.00 Lunch
2.00-3.30 Panel 4: Sexual Aesthetes
Meredith Collins (Temple University), “Suggestive Silences: Pornography,
Homosexuality, and the Aesthetic Novel”
Romana Byrne (University of Melbourne), “Aesthetic sexuality: an ars erotica of the
modern West?”
Chris Mounsey (University of Winchester), “E.F. Benson’s aesthetic homosexuality”
3.30-4.00 Tea
4.00-5.30 Panel 5: Theoretical Approaches 1
Abby Coykendall (Eastern Michigan University), “Queer Counterhistory and the Specter
of Effeminacy”
Ana deFreitas Boe (Baldwin-Wallace College), “Mainstreaming Queer and the Limits of
Subversion”
Annie Moore (University of California Irvine), “Up your ass! reading fatal lyric fears
with Erin Mouré’s queer coincidences”
Informal, pay-as-you-go dinner at a local Italian restaurant
Friday 16th July
8.00-9.00 Breakfast
9.30-11.00 Panel 6: The Queer Eighteenth Century 2
Marilyn Morris (University of North Texas), “The Queerness of Late Eighteenth-Century
Party Politics”
Declan William Kavanagh (Trinity College Dublin), “‘Put on the breeches, be yourself a
man’: triangles of sexual exchange in the ‘performance’ of An Essay on Woman”
Clorinda Donato (California State University, Long Beach), “The End of the Line: Queer
Glory and Politics at the Court of Gian Gastone de' Medici (1671-1737)”
11.00-11.30 Coffee
11.30-1.00 Panel 7: Theoretical Approaches 2
David Orvis (Appalachian State University), “Is Boswell Useful for Understanding Early
Modern Sexuality?”
Joe Campana (Rice University), “The Future of the History of Sexuality”
Stephen Guy-Bray (University of British Columbia), “Difference, Sameness, and the
Object of Study”
1.00-2.00 Lunch
2.00-3.30 Panel 8: Regulating Desire
Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz (University of Málaga), “The Uses of the History of
Sexuality: The London Lock Asylum Committee (1836-1842) and the Asylum
Regulations for 1840”
Marco Wan (University of Hong Kong), “An identity that must be suppressed: legal
hermeneutics and the construction of lesbian identity in the Well of Loneliness trials”
Christine Roulston (University of Western Ontario), “Interpreting Lesbian Desire in the
Codrington Divorce Trial of 1864”
3.30-4.00 Tea
4.00-5.30 Panel 9: Trans/Formations
Jennifer Gartner (University of Western Ontario), “The Terminological Signification of
'Trans' and the Socio-political Ramifications of Transgender Identity”
Lisa Isherwood (University of Winchester), “Transpeople and Christian History”
Karin Smith (University of Winchester), “The Church's Attitude to Bisexuality”
7.00 Dinner (Red and White College Wine available for purchase by the bottle)
Saturday 17th July
8.00-9.00 Breakfast
All conference guests must check out of their rooms in Christ's by 10 a.m.
10-11.15
Panel 10: French Connections
Marianne Legault (University of British Columbia Okanagan), “Non Monsieur, There
Are No Queers Here: 400 Years of French Resistance”
Andrew Counter (University of Cambridge) “Armance in the Closet: The Politics of
Interpreting a Novel of 1827”
11.15-11.45 Coffee
11.45-1.00 Final plenary session – The Practice of Sexual History
Laura Doan (University of Manchester), “Disturbing Practices”
Valerie Traub (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), “Making Sexual Knowledge”