IMC 2022: Sessions
Session 118: The Queerness of Early English Drama
Monday 4 July 2022, 11.15-12.45
Sponsor: | Medieval & Renaissance Drama Society |
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Organiser: | Jeffery G. Stoyanoff, Department of English, Duquesne University, Pennsylvania |
Moderator/Chair: | Jeffery G. Stoyanoff, Department of English, Duquesne University, Pennsylvania |
Paper 118-a | Breaking the Law of Identity: Re-Examining Lydgate's Dramatic Corpora (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Performance Arts - Drama |
Paper 118-b | The Governor, the Wife and the Cock-Blocking Constable: Spatial Policing and Heterosexual Parody in the York Pageant The Dream of Pilate's Wife (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English, Performance Arts - Drama, Sexuality |
Paper 118-c | Everyman's Queer Failure (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English, Performance Arts - Drama, Sexuality |
Abstract | Over 20 years ago, Robert Clark and Claire Sponsler asked, 'why should we assume that medieval spectators could not ask: "What if?"'' (341), referring to a question of interpretive possibility vis-a-vis queer potentiality in medieval drama. Since then the field of queer studies has expanded and continues to seek out queerness in early dramatic texts. Most recently, Tison Pugh writes, 'The word queerness alludes to an ambiguous yet highly productive mode of critical inquiry, pertaining to disruptions of social, ideological, and sexual normativity that allow repressed, subversive, "sinful", or otherwise unexpected gendered and erotic identities to become visible' (11). This panel hopes to explore the ability of queer studies to question borders of all sorts - especially the body and time - and the borders that dramatic texts may breach by their nature in standing in for or representing performances. |