Queer Intimacies, Queer Spaces, & Scales of Desire
Queer Intimacies, Queer Spaces, & Scales of Desire
This panel is searching for papers that address how LGBTQ* texts of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries construct varieties of queer intimacy and attempt to anatomize the epistemological, formal, and affective structures that make such intimacies possible—whether in public or private. We are looking for papers that discuss the ways queerness operates in a variety of spaces: city streets, forest clearings, parks, gardens, restrooms, bedrooms, manor homes, and apartment buildings.
We are also interested in exploring the varying intensities of affective attachment—the furtive glance, the crush, the routine, the all-consuming passion. Examining these spaces and scales of desire allows for interrogations of the systems that ascribe value preferentially to heteronormative models of affection, attraction, and sociability. In particular, we hope to create a critical conversation about not just the orientation of sexuality, but also its situatedness within various and changing environmental and formal contexts. Furthermore, we hope to elucidate how the conversation around queer sexualities can be opened to questions of proximity and intensity.
What are the various scales of LGBTQ* desire? At what point is connection achieved? How is it missed? How is it sought? How do texts formalize, facilitate, or reproduce desire? By what discursive means can intimacy circulate or ensure uptake and reciprocity? How is desire shaped or determined by its spatial circumstances or environment?
We welcome papers on:
- Queer poetics of space
- Queer affective connections to the environment
- Queer domesticity and dwellings
- LGBTQ* ecologies
- Queer utopias
- Closeness and distance
- Race, gender, sexuality, and ecopoetics
- LGBTQ* histories and their imprint on contemporary spaces and landscapes
- LGBTQ* fantasies, fantasias, and film
Interested scholars must create a NeMLA user account at www.nemla.org in order to submit abstracts directly for this panel. The due date for submissions is *September 30, 2015.* For a direct link to this session, please go to:
https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/15886
For more information, please contact Francisco Robles (frobles@princeton.edu) or Brandon Menke (brandon.menke@yale.edu).