MLA 2027 – Early American and Sexuality Studies Forum 

“The Body Before Sex”

This collaborative panel by the Early American LLC and Sexuality Studies TC of the Modern Language Association aims to bring forward trans, environmental, and affect methodologies to consider the historically and culturally specific ways the body and sex intersect and depart. We are particularly interested in papers that stretch and transgress temporal and spatial domains, offering critical juxtapositions that reexamine the materialities and temporalities that make visible the body before it becomes associated with, and attached to, sex. 

We use the spatial and temporal preposition before in order to highlight the specific conjunctions and coordinations that constitute the body and that turn sex into its heuristic. Thinking with edited collections by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman (Sex, or The Unbearable), Janet Halley and Andrew Parker (After Sex?), and James M. Bromley and Will Stockton (Sex before Sex), and wondering alongside the work of Elizabeth Freeman on sense methods and Kadji Amin’s theorization of queer studies’ problematic attachments, we hope to foster a vibrant conversation that speaks to and with many disciplines. We are also thinking of the particular individuals--the bodies--that created a body of work that enhances contemporary understandings of comparative sexuality studies and area studies. That work might include Gayle Salamon’s work on trans embodiment and phenomenology, Tani Barlow’s temporal take on Chinese Feminism, and many others. 

Please send 150-250 word proposals to Ben Bascom (ben.bascom@mail.wvu.edu) and Alvin K. Wong (akhwong@hku.hk) before March 16, 2026.