246 research outputs found
Historians of the Closet: Queering the Past in Contemporary Gay, Lesbian, and Trans Fiction
No full textThis chapter traces how history is queerly put to use in contemporary gay, lesbian, and trans fiction. The chapter explores three Anglophone gay, lesbian, and trans novels of the last decade which have engaged in questions of queer historiography: namely, Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman (2013); Katherine O’Donnell’s Slant (2023); and Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of The Fox (2018). These novels each track very different gay, lesbian, and trans characters in history; however, they are all united in making queer experience itself historical whilst also unsettling some of the ontological assumptions that undergird a historicism that might discount such experience. In foregrounding historiographic modes as a concern, I argue that recent gay, lesbian, and trans fictions have absorbed, and importantly recast, one of the strongest debates in queer historiography of the last twenty years or so: namely, ‘historicism versus unhistoricism.’ In taking up queer historiographic concerns, Anglophone gay, lesbian, and trans fictions over the past decade have positioned characters as both chroniclers of the closet and as historians of the unrecorded, each prompting decisive consequences for how we might, in our present, reparatively curate a queer past beyond fiction that finds queers in history as much as it queers history tout court
Introduction: On Queer Reading with Companions
No full textWhither queer studies, theories, and readings in the 2020s? This edited collection unites a diverse array of scholars to emphasise the necessity of queer reading for a new decade. In locating the intellectual, activist, and everyday spaces in which queer reading is flourishing in the 2020s we have followed paths into trans, eco, temporal, high and low theory, as well as other domains of enquiry. The work collated here also crisscrosses disciplinary bounds and norms in chapters that refuse easy accommodations—easy companionships—in several areas of mainstream study: namely, history, literary studies, media studies, philosophy, political science, autotheory, health humanities, and the social sciences. Across chapters that are richly interdisciplinary, The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading maps out the ways in which queer studies promises, in fact offers up, reading itself as a disruptive and generative practice. However, rather than take this foundational promise of queer studies for granted, each contributor here models and interrogates the use of queer reading in their own work. Put another way, each contributor reads queerly because reading queerly has, at some point in their life, caught and held their attention. Queer reading is part of our own individual histories. It has meant in different times and various places a way forward, survival, as well as a failure and, perhaps, obliteration (of sorts). We know that we speak for many when we say that reading queerly has, overtime, become how we read and are read. In myriad ways, queer reading offers itself as a continual companion to us; it confers upon us ways of being with ourselves and others in the world. As readers of this collection will discover or discover afresh, queer readings amplify the promise of other possibilities, of other worlds, which continue to catch our readerly attention both urgently and creatively
Episode 6. Disability in Britain and Ireland – 1714 to 1785
No full textFilm Series: Power and freedom in Britain and Ireland: 1714-2010
In Episode 6, Dr Declan Kavanagh (University of Kent) discusses the development of ideas around, and responses to, disability in Britain and Ireland in the 18th century.
Dr Kavanagh examines the definition given in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary in 1755 and looks at the medical and charity models of responding to disability in this period. He then turns to William Hay’s landmark essay on ‘Deformity’, in which Hay offers a candid and personal description of living with disability in the 18th century. Hay reflects that his lived experience is a valuable and unique resource which has enabled him to perfect his mind in ways that wider society could and should learn from
Declan Kavanagh in conversation about queer literature studies, effeminacy and identity, Researching The Rainbow Podcast
No full textAbout the show
Join us on Researching the Rainbow to hear more about the exciting and thought-provoking advances in LGBTQIA+ research. Listen to staff and student researchers across a wide range of disciplines talk about their work… and themselves!
Researching the Rainbow is coming (out) to you from a flamboyant little closet in the Locke Building at the University of Kent, UK. Hosted by the wonderful Rasa Mikelyte (she/her), and produced by the fabulous Josh Turner (he/him) this podcast is for anyone who’s into exploring the big queer questions
Sleep, executive functioning and behaviour in children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes
No full textAbstract not availableNicole C. Caruso, Branka Radovanovic, J. Declan Kennedy, Jennifer Couper, Mark Kohler, Phillip S. Kavanagh, A. James Martin, Kurt Lushingto
Staying with the Sodomy at Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman and Nature’s Queer Negativity
No full textThis chapter discusses contemporary representations of Derek Jarman’s garden and the interpretative tendency towards reparative logics, or what Leo Bersani calls the ‘culture of redemption’. Following theorists concerned with the relation between queer ecology and anti-social queer theory, it goes on to explore the negative aspects of Jarman’s garden through the notion of ‘nature as pharmakon’. It ends by suggesting that Jarman’s garden resists a simply reparative or negative interpretation, and instead can be understood to embody a sodomitical logic, which shatters theoretical certainty
“I Will Rise Again”: The Life and Legacy of the U.S.S. Monitor
No full textAbout the author:
Declan Riley Kunkel is an award winning writer, author, and consultant. Originally from Fort Worth, Texas, Declan writes about history, politics, and philosophy. He is pursing a degree in history at Yale
Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain
No full textKavanagh (Univ. of Kent, UK) presents an investigation into the twilight world of gender/sex-fluid men--referred to as, among other monikers, sodomites, catamites, and mollies--during Britain's Georgian period. Kavanagh's critical examination of the works of Charles Churchill, Edmund Burke, John Wilkes, and others illuminates the role effeminacy played in shaping discourse of the day. Kavanagh's embedded thesis is that fluid identity and outré sexual practices of this period challenged the era's sensibilities and set the precedent for current efforts to broaden gender and sexual categorizations. In this regard, Kavanagh's book complements extant research on the subject. Kavanagh's obvious authority on the subject matter qualifies him for inclusion among the field's most credible scholars.... [T]he book's value to English history, literary studies, and gender and sexuality studies stands unquestioned. Summing Up: Essential. Researchers and faculty.--CHOIC
Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain
No full textEffeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain investigates the gendered, eroticized, and xenophobic ways in which the controversies in the 1760s surrounding the political figure John Wilkes (1725-97) legitimated some men as political subjects, while forcefully excluding others on the basis of their perceived effeminacy or foreignness. However, this book is not a literary analysis of the Wilkes affair in the 1760s, nor is it a linear account of Wilkes's political career. Instead, Effeminate Years examines the cultural crisis of effeminacy that made Wilkes's politicking so appealing. The central theoretical problem that this study addresses is the argument about what is and is not political: where does individual autonomy begin and end? Addressing this question, Kavanagh traces the shaping influence of the discourse of effeminacy in the literature that was generated by Wilkes's legal and sexual scandals, while, at the same time, he also reads Wilkes's spectacular drumming up of support as a timely exploitation of the broader cultural crisis of effeminacy during the mid-century in Britain
Declan Kiberd. The Irish Writer and the World
No full textThe Irish author and the world is a collection of nineteen articles originally published by Declan Kiberd between 1978 and 2003. A note on the text specifies that the articles have not been altered in order to be included in this volume. They are not arranged in chronological order, which is accounted for in the introduction. The introductory chapter gives useful information on the political and cultural context – either specifically Irish or more global – in which the articles were originall..
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