cfp.english.upenn.edu

Queer Wales, a collection of essays on sexuality, identity, and Wales

In recent years, we have become more aware of the complexity of Welsh identities (national, European, racial, colonial, economic, etc), and a major feature of this complexity is the queering of Welsh history and culture. Queer Wales is currently being studied, written, performed, legislated, mapped, bought and sold, yet, as far as sexuality is concerned, to what extent is Wales still “The Land of my Fathers” and the “Land of the White Gloves”? At what point may we begin to articulate a coherent queer history and community in Wales?

As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains in Epistemology of the Closet,

gay people, who seldom grow up in gay families; who are exposed to their culture’s, if not their parents’, high ambient homophobia long before either they or those who care for them know that they are among those who most urgently need to define themselves against it;…have with difficulty and always belatedly to patch together from fragments a community, a useable heritage, a politics of survival or resistance. (81)

GLBT people in twentieth-first century Wales are engaged in building just such a “useable heritage” and “politics of survival and resistance,” but this heritage, while it may be belated, need not be patchwork and fragmentary. This interdisciplinary collection of essays seeks to locate a gay tradition, culture and community within a history and nation that have been largely hostile to its expression.

This call for papers solicits essays written from a variety of disciplinary approaches on all aspects of gay life and culture, past and present. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Policing Welsh queerness
• Education and sexual identity in Wales
• Creative industries and urban Welsh queerness
• Rural queer Wales
• Welsh regionalism and sexuality
• Tourism and sexuality in Wales
• Queerness in the Welsh classroom
• Queer Wales in television and/or film
• Queer Welsh communities
• Gay activism in Wales
• Intersections of class and gender in queer Wales
• Writing the Welsh queer, past and present
• Performing Welsh sexual identity: queer Welsh drama
• Queering the Welsh past
• Sex and sexuality in the Welsh legal system, past and present

Please submit abstracts of 500 words along with brief CVs to Huw Osborne (osborne@rmc.ca) by January 2010 2009.

Huw Osborne
Department of English
The Royal Military College of Canada
PO BOX 17000
Station Forces Kingston
Kingston Ontario
CANADA
K7K 7B4
osborne@rmc.ca
(613) 541-6000 (6269)