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. The sexual identity of 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 LGBTIQ 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 usable heritage, a politics of survival or resistance. (81)

LGBTIQ people in twentieth-first century Wales are engaged in building just such a “usable 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 LGBTIQ 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 sexuality
•Welsh lesbian identities
•Education and sexual identity in Wales
•Gay youth in Wales
•Homophobia in Wales
•Creative industries and urban Welsh queerness
•Wales, sport, and sexual identity
•Rural queer Wales
•Welsh regionalism and sexuality
•Welsh religion and sexuality
•Sex work
•Tourism and sexuality in Wales
•LGBTIQ emigration
•Queerness in the Welsh classroom
•Queer Wales in television and/or film
•Queer Welsh communities
•AIDS and sexual health
•Gay activism in Wales
•Intersections of class and gender in queer Wales
•Queering Welsh masculinity and Welsh nationalism
•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 via email (osborne@rmc.ca) abstracts of 500 words along with brief CVs to Huw Osborne, Department of English, Royal Military College of Canada, PO BOX 17000 Station Forces Kingston, Kingston, Ontario, CANADA, K7K 7B4.