CFP: C19 - - Queer Eccentricity in the Long Nineteenth Century - - 

Queer Eccentricity in the Long Nineteenth Century

What are the historical, cultural, and aesthetic components that define and interconnect the terms ‘queer’ and ‘eccentric’ in the long nineteenth century? How are they related to—or perhaps weird derivatives of—one another, and what other strange histories might be elaborated through attending to these categories? This panel proposes to center eccentricity in order to reframe questions of canonicity, belonging, and consensus in the nineteenth century. Often preserved in local histories, figures of eccentricity in the nineteenth century may seem at first particularly benign. Yet their actual lives may prove far more disruptive to normative protocols—or at least disruptive of the historical consensus that often imagines the past. This panel proposes to focus both on the queer, destabilizing potentialities of figures of eccentricity as well as the institutions and infrastructures that seek to normalize types of eccentricities (whether cognitive, social, or interpersonal). Paper proposals are invited that rethink how the indices of race, gender, class, and ethnicity shape the reception and interpretation of the aesthetics of eccentricity in nineteenth-century contexts.

This C19 conference will be held in Coral Gables, FL on April 2-5, 2020. 

Please send an abstract (under 250 words) and a CV or brief bio to Ben Bascom (bdbascom@bsu.edu) by August 25.