MLA 2025 – New Orleans

Early American Literature LLC

Queer Infrastructures of/in Early America

When thinking about scholarly practices, infrastructures may be considered the norms and institutions that sustain a field of inquiry, that buttress modes of thought and manage constellations of analysis. Queerness, on the other hand, has historically named the forces and functions of disruption, pointing toward the fractures and fissures that infrastructure aims to stabilize and normalize. In this panel, we think about the explicit and implicit infrastructures that the study of early American literature builds and maintains, and how that focus on the systemic might allow us to consider where and how queerness has a place in the field. Queerness as both a disruptive formation and an aspirational horizon—a corrosive element that untethers norms from power and a radical departure from the status quo—motivates our attention to question the state of the field. With that in mind, how might queerness be deployed by scholars (or be made legible through a variety of heuristics) to offer a more capacious path forward for the study of early America? Additionally, how do contemporary queer infrastructures enable queer expression or become a site of such queering to shape the field’s future?

Possible topics: contemporary reframing, institution histories, material history, material text methods, queer studies, scholarly editing

Please send an abstract (under 250 words) and a CV or brief bio to Ben Bascom (bdbascom@bsu.edu) by March 25, 2024.