CFP: Queer Performance in the Americas: 1945-1954 (11/21/03; 4/2/04-4/4/04)

Queer Performance in the Americas: 1945-1954
Yale University, April 2-4, 2004

Many historians of gay and lesbian life tend to describe World War II
as a period of unprecedented mobility, liberty, and association for
queer subjects in the United States. By contrast, the argument goes,
the end of the war ushered in an era of increased oppression and an
intensified return to heteronormative values. Some significant academic
interventions have challenged this narrative of American sexual
politics, but it nevertheless remains the dominant paradigm through
which most scholars interpret the social and cultural phenomena of the
postwar period.

This conference seeks to nuance the received wisdom that postwar
America was marked chiefly by sexual paranoia and surveillance. With an
emphasis on queer performance, we hope to indicate both the extent to
which dissident subjects in this period gave voice to a wide range of
libidinal energies and the challenge that expressing these energies
necessarily entailed. The summer of 1952 found Joe McCarthy calling in
a stump speech for the removal of unorthodox professors from American
universities, but in the very same summer John Cage and his colleagues
at Black Mountain College staged Theater Piece No. 1, America’s
first “Happening” and an event that would profoundly influence radical
experiments in dance, art, music, and theater for many years to come.

The 1950s were also a decade of unprecedented academic interest in the
roles, behaviors, and, indeed, performances of the individual in
society. Taking a cue from such works as David Riesman’s The Lonely
Crowd, William Whyte’s The Organization Man, and Erving Goffman’s The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, we want to investigate a range
of practices that cross the porous boundary between the public and
private spheres. Further, by foregrounding “queer performance,” we hope
to put pressure on both of these highly contested terms. Understood
most broadly as organized human behavior presented before witnesses,
what events in, but also beyond, the theater constituted “performances”
in the postwar period? What elements of production and reception might
have made those performances “queer” in a richer and stranger sense
than either “gay” or “lesbian” connotes? And how did the degree to
which performances in this period violated medium and disciplinary
boundaries queer the notion of performance itself?

Many American performances of the 1950s can be read within or against
the discourse of the Cold War. But how did subjects outside the United
States situate themselves toward this global rhetoric? How do queer
performances in Canada, Mexico, and Central and South America
complicate the picture of an “America” dominated by Red Scares and the
closet in all its various forms? What varieties of racial, ethnic,
religious, and political allegiances are imbricated with “queerness” in
postwar performances in all of the Americas?

We welcome a wide and diverse range of papers, but we also encourage
work on the following suggested topics:
• Black Mountain performances
• Beat performances
• Early television performances
• Films, musical concerts, and radio broadcasts
• Latin American performances

Co-sponsored by Yale University’s Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian
and Gay Studies and the Yale Department of American Studies, the
conference will be held at Yale University from April 2 through April
4, 2004. We will not offer honoraria, but we will provide compensation
for travel expenses and hotel accommodations. We also plan to publish
the conference proceedings in an anthology or a special issue of an
academic journal.

The deadline for paper proposals is November 21, 2003, and we will
notify all respondents of our selections by mid-December. Please send
abstracts of no more than 500 words, along with c.v., to Nicholas
Salvato at nicholas.salvato_at_yale.edu. All attachments must be in
Microsoft Word format. Further questions should be directed to Jonathan
D. Katz, who directs the Larry Kramer Initiative
(jonathan.d.katz_at_yale.edu). For further information about the Larry
Kramer Initiative at Yale please go to www.yale.edu/lesbiangay.

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Received on Sun Sep 14 2003 - 17:12:59 EDT