Homosocial Spaces in Monastic Places
62nd International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 13-15, 2027)Kalamazoo, MI, USAHybrid Session Medieval monks cultivated gender-segregated networks which supported their own learning, dialogues, and customs, which meant people assigned female at birth were essentially locked out of much of intellectual life. Eve Sedgewick’s work on homosociality has described “the continuum between 'men loving men' and 'men promoting the interests of other men'." This panel invites work which interrogates the ways in which the patriarchal system of monasticism created structures of male bonding and loyalty which excluded women except for utility, and examines the limits of those structures: questions of resistance and reinvention, male exclusion from policed masculinity, and women’s own complicity. If interested, please apply by September 15, 2026. If you have any questions, please feel free to email the panel organizers:Lindsay Gill (lg8@iu.edu) or Zac Engledow (zacclift@iu.edu). In order to submit a proposal, please do so through the ICMS confex site (https://icms.confex.com/icms/2027/prelim.cgi/Session/8792).