Call for Papers
Northeast Modern Language Association Conference
March 30-31, 2001
Hartford, Connecticut
Gay Liberation Theory
This panel seeks, in part, to trace the lineaments of the disjunction
between the queer theory popularized in the early 1990s and an earlier
tradition of gay-activist theorization that might provisionally be dated
back to Donald Webster Cory's (born Edward Sagarin) 1950 polemic _The
Homosexual in America_. Critical of both the American psychoanalytic and
legal discourses that rendered homosexuality either pathological or
criminal, Cory's book began a public mode of writing as gay and lesbian
activism that would go on to include essays in various periodicals (such
as The Mattachine Review, ONE, The Ladder, Fag Rag, The Advocate, and Gay
Sunshine); volumes of lesbian-feminist thought, including Sydney Abbott
and Barbara Love's _Sappho Was a Right-On Woman_, Del Martin and Phyllis
Lyon's _Lesbian/Woman_, and Jill Johnston's _Lesbian Nation_; and
articulations of radical gay politics, including Dennis Altman's
_Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation_ and the essays collected in Karla
Jay and Allen Young's anthology _Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay
Liberation_.
In naming this body of work "Gay Liberation Theory," the panel
means to distinguish these texts from the "Queer Theory" inaugurated in
the 1990s, without producing an unwarranted binary division between these
two critical trends; rather, the panel would imagine a historical
continuity, however conflicted and contestable, between them. Moreover,
the panel invites submissions that consider both the writing of the
"homophile" era (roughly 1950 to 1969) and that of gay liberation proper,
in order to think through the ways in which the former set the stage
theoretically for the latter. Finally, while the panel ostensibly regards
"non-fictional" writing, submissions that examine how various creative
writers of the period (e.g., Vidal, Baldwin, Crowley, Brown, Harris,
Arnold) produce a theory of gay liberation will be considered.
Possible topics for the panel include but are not limited to the
following: the rhetoric of manifestos; gay/lesbian style; theories of
sexual practices (cruising, sadomasochism, penetration, etc.); the
relation of gay male theory to lesbian feminism; separatism; the canon of
gay liberation writing; the difference or similarity between gay
liberation theory and queer theory; and gay liberation poetics.
Please submit 1-2 page abstracts or completed papers to:
Jon Hodge
English Department
Tufts University
Medford, MA 02215
jhodge@emerald.tufts.edu
All panelists must be NEMLA members by November 1, 2000. Information
regarding the conference and NEMLA membership can be obtained at the
following website: www.anna-maria.edu/nemla
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