ECCS Giornata di Studio: We Have Always Been Queer: Queering Medieval & Early Modern Italian Studies- Friday, March 27th 11:30AM-2PM
We owe the coinage of the term “Queer Theory” to an Italian scholar, Teresa DeLauretis, and even the very word “homosexual” seems to have been used first by an Italianist, John Addington Symonds. Yet, Queer Studies have famously had a hard time intersecting with Italian Studies – especially in the sub-field upon which most departments of Italian, outside of Italy, were built: the study of Medieval and Early Modern literature, art, and music. It is only over the past twenty years, since the publication of seminal works such as Carla Freccero’s Queer / Early / Modern (2005) or Queer Italia (edited by Gary Cestaro in 2004), that the most influential and fetishized ages of Italian culture have been pulled out of the closet where conventional historicism, positivistic binary divides, and delusions of essentialism insisted on confining them.
This Giornata di Studi, inspired by panels entirely devoted to pre-modern Queer Studies at recent AAIS conferences, invites Italianists to look at queerness (the queerness of temporality and transmission, of intellectual filiations and aesthetic kinships, of bodies, voices, and desires) not as a representational theme or motif, nor as a momentary disruption of otherwise classical norms, but rather as a central—in fact, defining—feature of Medieval and Early Modern Italian Studies. To appropriate a crucial passage of Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet: not only have there been a queer Italian Humanism, Renaissance, and Baroque, but their names are Italian Humanism, Renaissance, and Baroque.
The Queer caucus will ask AAIS members who have distinguished themselves in the study of Medieval and Early Modern Italian Studies through a queering lens to share a particularly revealing case from either their scholarship or teaching experience. Short talks (around 10 minutes each) will be followed by a reflection from a graduate student respondent, and two sections, separated by a 30-minute break, will be followed by an open conversation. Caucus members will introduce, chair, and moderate the 2-hour event, which will take place on zoom.
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Special Guests Speakers:
Johnny L. Bertolio (Università di Torino)
Shane Butler (Johns Hopkins University)
Gary Cestaro (DePaul University)
Kate Driscoll (Duke University)
Jessica Goethals (University of Alabama)
Timothy McCall (Villanova University)
Gerry Milligan (CUNY - College of Staten Island)
Jessica Peritz (Yale University)
Karen Raizen (Bard College)
Eugenio Refini (New York University)
