Preliminary Programme

Wed 11 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 12 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.00 - 18.30

Fri 13 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 14 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 11 April 2012 16.30 - 18.30
P-4 SEX04 Oral History, Memory, Archiving
JWS Room J361 (J7)
Network: Sexuality Chair: Christabelle Sethna
Organizers: - Discussant: Christabelle Sethna
Mark Cornwall : Reading a New European Lesbian Writer: The Vibrant Novels of Lida Merlinova (1906-88)
This paper is a first analysis for a western audience of the work of the prolific Czech writer Lída Merlínová (1906-88, born Ludmila Skokanová). In 1929 she published the first short lesbian novel in Czech, Vyhnanci lásky [Exiles of Love], which sold out in a few months. Highly praised for ... (Show more)
This paper is a first analysis for a western audience of the work of the prolific Czech writer Lída Merlínová (1906-88, born Ludmila Skokanová). In 1929 she published the first short lesbian novel in Czech, Vyhnanci lásky [Exiles of Love], which sold out in a few months. Highly praised for its realism by the Czech decadent poet and homosexual campaigner Jiří Karásek, it secured for Merlínová a post-bag of three hundred female ‘tragic letters and confessions’. Despite this sudden impact, the novel has received virtually no attention in Czech or any other language. Like all of Merlínová’s works it was banned during the communist era after 1948. Only recently, in the official Czech literary lexicon (2000), has Merlínová rated a mention. In the 1930s and 40s she proceeded to write a range of novels for young adults and teenagers. Some of them contain a lesbian sub-text, notably the ‘Marie and Marta’ series or the 1938 novel Činská dívka [Chinese Girl] about an independent young woman coping in central Europe. The aim of this paper then is to assess the lesbian dimension to her writings, taking into account also her contributions to the Czech journal for homosexual emancipation, Hlas sexuální menšiny [The Voice of the Sexual Minority]. Lastly there is the context of her private and professional life – as a dancer in the Czech city of Olomouc, turned author in Prague, who seems to have made a marriage of convenience but then (post-1945) found a female partner for the rest of her life. The paper draws on the novels, on Merlínová’s archive in Prague, and on a range of vivid illustrations and photographs. (Show less)

Sara Edenheim : The Epistemology of the Archive: Encountering Queer Theory as a Philosophy of History
This article is an investigation into the archive and historical methodology. The paper investigates the implications of queer theorist Lee Edelman’s Lacanian influenced take on the sinthom (“sinthomosexual”). What does negativity (in its Lacanian sense) indicate in the field of history? Is it the untouchable past per se (as opposed ... (Show more)
This article is an investigation into the archive and historical methodology. The paper investigates the implications of queer theorist Lee Edelman’s Lacanian influenced take on the sinthom (“sinthomosexual”). What does negativity (in its Lacanian sense) indicate in the field of history? Is it the untouchable past per se (as opposed to written history) and, if so, what does this place called the archive really consist of? This problematization is put in relation to literary queer scholars Cvetkovich’s and Halberstam’s call for a “queer archive of feelings” and the art exhibition Lost and Found – Queerying the Archive. This queer(ed) archive is described as a unique and radical queer activism while the traditional archive is scorned as excluding queer and/or feelings.
As most historians are well aware of, however, an archive is always founded with the future in mind. Even though most archives do not exist for the historian, they have a bureaucratic function directed towards guaranteeing a “recollection” of a certain institutional organization and societal status quo. Since this quest can also be discerned in Cvetkovich, et al, as well as in many other queer circumstances concerning temporality, I propose that a radical (non-)historiography is necessary where neither the future, nor history, can serve as legitimate ontologies for political claims. (Show less)

Patrizia Gentile : Using Memory Studies as Queer Methodology: Canadian Queers, National Security and Trauma
This paper will examine the historical and interdisciplinary methodologies used by historians committed to collecting queer oral histories in the context of new influences derived from the field of memory studies. Memory studies dislodge the central aim of oral history by placing emphasis on how the past is remembered instead ... (Show more)
This paper will examine the historical and interdisciplinary methodologies used by historians committed to collecting queer oral histories in the context of new influences derived from the field of memory studies. Memory studies dislodge the central aim of oral history by placing emphasis on how the past is remembered instead of focusing on ascertaining an understanding of what transpired in the past. This methodological shift is particularly useful for historians interested in excavating queer “stories,” because queer pasts are historically silenced, forgotten, erased, and missing from government archives. Ann Cvetkovich’s conceptualization of an archive of feelings informs much of this work in memory studies.
The interviews for The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation (UBC Press, 2010) were used to mediate the official texts created by the national security state and thus functioned as a form of non-cooperation and resistance to the social organization of forgetting. As a co-author of the above mentioned book, I reexamine these interviews to show how queers and queer communities remembered and forgot the traumatic events associated with surveillance, interrogation and state regulation using memory studies as a queer methodology. In this sense, the interviews form an archive of feelings rather than an oral history of the Cold War. The lessons and methodologies introduced by memory studies scholars examine and excavate these “missing” memories by including forgetting as key to the act of remembering and archiving. (Show less)



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