IMC 2026: Sessions

In Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (1999), Carolyn Dinshaw describes the queer historical impulse as guided by a “desire [...] for partial affective connections, for community, for even a touch across time.” In the twenty-five-odd years since the publication of Getting Medieval, the possibility that a ‘touch across time’ can provide ‘emotional rescue’ is alluring, even as it feels increasingly remote in a contemporary moment when queer and trans lives face increased institutional threat and social scrutiny. This is the first panel in a series entitled ''Beyond Touch’, which moves beyond ‘touch’ as the governing method and metaphor for studies of medieval queerness and transness to offer new approaches to to queer and trans temporalities, with the aim of rethinking our contemporary affective and political investments in the distant, often untouchable past. This panel responds to the trans turn within medieval trans studies by questioning its emphasis on transtemporal recognition, recuperation, and reconciliation as tools for trans survivance. Instead, through close-readings of Old Norse, Old Irish, and Old French narratives, this panel insists instead upon the critical and political necessity of trans negativity within the nascent field of ‘trans medieval studies.’