The Queer Art of Feeling
The Queer Art of Feeling: Sensation, Emotion and the Body in Queer Cultures
2-3 May 2019
University of Cambridge, UK
with a keynote lecture by Sara Ahmed
We are delighted to announce that registration is now open for The Queer Art of Feeling conference. There is a reduced rate available for postgraduate students, postdoctoral and early career researchers not on full-time permanent contracts, and independent scholars. More information is available on the registration website. See below for the programme, which is also available to download here: Programme.
**Bitte beachten Sie, dass die Konferenzsprache Englisch ist. Bei Rückfragen in deutscher Sprache stehen wir aber gerne jederzeit unter der E-Mail-Adresse queerartoffeeling@gmail.com zur Verfügung.**
***
Since the earliest works of queer theory, scholars have placed the body at the centre of queer experience, and especially the performative constitution of identity. But in the last decade, influenced by phenomenology, approaches to queer culture have looked to the body as a site of queer knowledge production more broadly, combining ways of thinking, sensing and feeling. Affect studies, trans theory, new materialism, embodiment theory and cognitive approaches to the humanities have revolutionised our understanding of queer experience and perception, togetherness and community, art and creativity.
The political power, even the essence, of queerness has often been located in its disruptive and destabilising relationship with dominant ways of thinking and social norms. Yet from the ‘anti-social thesis’ to recent discussions of ‘queer theory without antinormativity’, debates in queer studies challenge us to understand queer belonging to and orientation within societies also in embodied, interconnected terms. At once within and outside wider cultures and norms, queer bodies become a site of uniquely contested lived experiences, and of peculiar creativity in shaping and re-creating our selves, communities and worlds.
This conference explores the potential of the arts to represent, explore, challenge and create modes of queer lived, felt and embodied experience. Taking ‘feeling’ in all its meanings – touch, hapticity, sensation, emotion, a hunch or gut reaction, as well as tentativeness when ‘feeling one’s way’ – the conference will explore the complex relationships to culture and society that are at stake in queer artworks and queer experience.
***
Wednesday 1 May
20.00 - Art Tour: Queer Art of the New Hall Art Collection (New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College)
Thursday 2 May
9.20 - Coffee and Registration (Buckingham House Foyer)
9.50 - Welcome (Buckingham House Lecture Theatre)
Geoffrey Maguire (Cambridge), Fraser Riddell (Oxford), Tom Smith (St Andrews)
10.00 - Panel 1 - Dismembered and Disembodied: Reading Queer Poetry (Buckingham House Lecture Theatre)
Robert Gillett (Queen Mary University of London), Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Art of Queer Feeling in A Shropshire Lad Poem 48.
Benjamin Westwood (Oxford), The Queer Art of Reading: Poems, Parts and Partiality in the Writing of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Emily E. Roach (University of York, UK), Transgender Performance Poetry and the Ghosts of Childhood
11.30 - Break (Buckingham House Foyer)
11.45 - Panel 2 - Parallel Panels
Affective Afterlives of HIV/AIDS (Buckingham House Lecture Theatre)
Simon Dickel (Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen), Vitalizing AIDS-Activism
Robbie Mills (King's College London), Regarding Those Other Activisms: Recuperative Historiographies and the Promise of Film Theory
Louisa Hann (Manchester), 'If We Can't Have A Conversation with Our Past, the What Will Be Our Future?' HIV/AIDS, Queer Generationalism and Utopian Performatives in Matthew Lopez's The Inheritance
Compassion and Care (Buckingham House Seminar Room)
Ervin Malakaj (British Columbia), Feeling Hirschfeld
Jaimee Stockman-Young (Auckland), The Archive Keeps the Score: Healing Community Trauma through Creative Practice
Andrea Aramburú Villavisencio (Cambridge), Curations of a Nepantlera: Kaleidoscopic Bodies, Minor Translations and Affective Becomings in Inés Estrada's Impatience (2016)
13.15 - Lunch (Fellows' Drawing Room)
14.15 - Panel 3 - Parallel Panels
Religion, Spirituality and the Queer Body (Buckingham House Lecture Theatre)
Greg Salter (Birmingham), Rotimi Fani-Kayode, the Body and the Intimacy of Queer History
Toni R. Juncosa (Barcelona), 'The Ashy Hallelujah of Knees': From Queer Disorientation to Sexual Empowerment in Danez Smith's Poetry
Rey Conquer (Oxford), 'No One Gets Out of Here Alive'? Jesse Darling's Queer Theology of Feeling
Embodied Form in Writing and Art (Buckingham House Seminar Room)
Sherilyn Hellberg (Berkeley), On the Bodily Education of Young Girls: Colette, Wedekind, Jaeggy
Jess Hannah (University College London), 'Our Programme - Undo the Normative Conquest': Representing Embodied Experience in Brigid Brophy's In Transit
Olivia K. Young (Berkeley), A Sway in Tandem: Sensorial Distortions in Black Feminist Art
15.45 - Coffee (Buckingham House Foyer)
16.15 - Panel 4 - Feeling in Public: Visibility and Privacy
Kyle Frackman (British Columbia), The Orientation of the Living Room: Queer Eroticism and Political Critique within East German Domestic Spaces
Alice Kronberger (Marburg), Æffects in Queer New Media Art: A New Materialistic Approach to the Alphabet of Feeling Bad
Lawrence Alexander (Cambridge), Foundation, Gloss, Concealer: Make-Up and the Minoritarian Subject in Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning and Hito Steyerl's How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File
17.45 - Break
18.00 - Performances and Wine Reception: Queer Classicisms (Fellows' Drawing Room)
Co-organised with the LGBTQ+@Cam Initiative and Andrew Webber (University of Cambridge Equality Champion)
Emma Johnson (London) and Evan Silver (Cambridge), Odd Odysseys: Queering the Classics
Naomi Wood (Cambridge) and Sophie Seita (Cambridge), Beethoven Was A Lesbian
20.30 - Conference Dinner
Friday 3 May
9.30 - Keynote (Buckingham House Lecture Theatre)
Sara Ahmed, Complaint as Queer Method
11.00 - Coffee (Buckingham House Foyer)
11.30 - Panel 5 - Parallel Panels
Emotions of Vulnerability (Buckingham House Lecture Theatre)
Dominika Gasiorowski (Queen Mary University of London), Staging Survival and Resistance to Lesbian Erasure in Contemporary Ecuadorian Photography
Asilia Franklin-Phipps (City University of New York) and Laura Smithers (Old Dominion), The Potential of Despair: Queer Isolation and the Pedagogy of Cinema
Kiersten van Vliet (McGill), 'I Put Myself Down in Order to Speak': Humorous Self-Deprecation in Hannah Gadsby's Nanette
Contemporary Queer Intimacies (Buckingham House Seminar Room)
Simone Pfleger (Alberta), Queer Intimacies in Christoph Hochhäusler's I Am Guilty (2005)
Tyler Carson (Rutgers University - New Brunswick), Engendering the Anti-Social Thesis: The Queerness of Pregnancy in Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts
Tom Bridgewater (Birmingham), Forms of Unfeeling in Contemporary Gay Romance
13.00 - Lunch (Fellows' Drawing Room)
13.45 - Panel 6 - Parallel Panels
Sound and Sense (Buckingham House Lecture Theatre)
Lloyd Whitesell (McGill), Mantles of Evil: Monstrosity as a Queer Aesthetic
Rachel Avery (McGill), A Queer Orientation to Pop: Song Form in the Music of Laura Nyro
Jacob Mallinson Bird (Oxford), Haptic Aurality: Touching the Voice in Drag Lip-Sync
Sensing and Disability Studies (Buckingham House Seminar Room)
Benjamin Quarshie (Cambridge), Dedicated to the Kids on the Block: The Politics and Prosthetics of Glue in the Work of Pedro Lemebel and Victor Gaviria
Dávid Baqais (Central European University, Budapest), The Way He Looks: Tactility, Queerness and Blind Affect on Screen
Renee Dumaresque (York University, Canada), Queering Pain(ful) Perception: Sonic Materialism and the Unfolding of Cripped Gender(s)
15.15 - Coffee (Buckingham House Foyer)
15.30 - Panel 7 - Feeling Digitally (Buckingham House Lecture Theatre)
Andrea Giomi (Grenoble-Alpes), Fluid Anatomies and Technological Alterities: Notes on a Techno-Queer Theory and Performing Arts
Kiona Hagen Niehaus (Goldsmiths, University of London), Digital Tools, Experiential Walls: Normative Limitations in 3D Human Figure Creation Tools
Lucas LaRochelle (Concordia), Queering the Map: Co-Creating an Archive of Queer Feeling
17.00 - Performances: Queer Memories (Buckingham House Lecture Theatre)
Wanja Kimani (SOAS), Expectations
Alexandra Tálamo (New South Wales), Bodies that Remember: Postmemorial Performance and the Choreographies of Transfer
***
The Queer Art of Feeling is kindly sponsored by the Institute of Latin American Studies (University of London), the Section of Spanish and Portuguese (University of Cambridge), and Murray Edwards College (University of Cambridge).
Conference Organisers: Geoffrey Maguire (Cambridge), Fraser Riddell (Oxford), Tom Smith (St Andrews)
Contact: queerartoffeeling@gmail.com