CONGRESS CANCELED Queer Medieval Ecologies (A Roundtable)
Description
In the first three seasons of the reinvigorated Queer Eye (now streaming on Netflix), one hallmark of the show is that despite being based in urban spaces—Atlanta, Kansas City—the Queer Eye hosts often travel to rural towns and communities encountering a queer America rarely discussed. By circulating between urban and rural spaces, this reality show highlights an ecological relationship, one that incorporates queer people, work, and place into a larger queer diaspora. This panel seeks to investigate this queer, ecological phenomenon transhistorically, thinking about the queer ecologies of the Middle Ages. As Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erikson write in their seminal collection Queer Ecologies, queer ecology is “a new practice of ecological knowledge, spaces, and politics that places central attention on challenging hetero-ecologies from the perspective of non-normative sexual and gender positions” (22). We seek papers that interrogate queer spaces, places, ecologies, landscapes, topographies and nature in any period and place of the Middle Ages. Possible topics include: queer diasporas, queer landscapes, trans-spaces, critiques of repro-centric nature, queering the garden, hybrid plants, bi-geographies, and the queer animal. Christopher Roman
CONGRESS CANCELED Queer Medieval Ecologies (A Roundtable)
Bernhard 210
In the first three seasons of the reinvigorated Queer Eye (now streaming on Netflix), one hallmark of the show is that despite being based in urban spaces—Atlanta, Kansas City—the Queer Eye hosts often travel to rural towns and communities encountering a queer America rarely discussed. By circulating between urban and rural spaces, this reality show highlights an ecological relationship, one that incorporates queer people, work, and place into a larger queer diaspora. This panel seeks to investigate this queer, ecological phenomenon transhistorically, thinking about the queer ecologies of the Middle Ages. As Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erikson write in their seminal collection Queer Ecologies, queer ecology is “a new practice of ecological knowledge, spaces, and politics that places central attention on challenging hetero-ecologies from the perspective of non-normative sexual and gender positions” (22). We seek papers that interrogate queer spaces, places, ecologies, landscapes, topographies and nature in any period and place of the Middle Ages. Possible topics include: queer diasporas, queer landscapes, trans-spaces, critiques of repro-centric nature, queering the garden, hybrid plants, bi-geographies, and the queer animal. Christopher Roman