Preliminary Programme

Wed 24 March
    11.00 - 12.15
    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Thu 25 March
    11.00 - 12.15
    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Fri 26 March
    11.00 - 12.15
    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Sat 27 March
    11.00 - 12.15
    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.00

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Friday 26 March 2021 14.30 - 15.45
N-11 WOM24 Queer Readings of the Body in Modern Esotericism
N
Networks: Sexuality , Women and Gender Chair: Tine Van Osselaer
Organizers: - Discussant: Tine Van Osselaer
Aurelia Annat : Finding Alternatives – Ireland’s Celtic Revival as a Context for Women’s Mysticism and Queerness, 1880-1924
The cultural movements within the Irish Celtic Revival harnessed creative agency to the broad cause of Irish nationalism. While there has been ample research exploring literary and artistic contributions, less attention has been devoted to mysticism. Yet mysticism both reflected and informed the Irish Revival through various forms, from Dublin ... (Show more)
The cultural movements within the Irish Celtic Revival harnessed creative agency to the broad cause of Irish nationalism. While there has been ample research exploring literary and artistic contributions, less attention has been devoted to mysticism. Yet mysticism both reflected and informed the Irish Revival through various forms, from Dublin Theosophy to W. B. Yeats’ ‘Druidic Order’ and more elusive female –focussed esoteric activity. This paper will use archival papers and published memoirs relating to the poetess Ella Young and Theosophist Margaret Cousins, as well as other women such as Maud Gonne, to consider whether mysticism offered a neutral space in which alternative constructions of gender and sexuality could be tested out and used to enable new codes of femininity and female agency in the Irish nationalist movement before Independence. Using the concept of ‘queerness’, the primary focus of the paper will be an exploration of these women’s alternative identities in this period, including those expressed through celibacy and female same-sex desire, questioning how these were fused to heterodox spiritual subjectivity and political nationalism. However, a secondary aspect will be to consider what happens to these ‘queer’ identities in post-Independence Ireland and to assess the significance of Young’s migration to America and Cousin’s to India. To what extent were these women’s alternative identities ultimately realised in a trans-national rather than a national context? Ultimately, the paper will argue that for these women, personal empowerment was facilitated by mobility that crossed national as well as spiritual and sexual boundaries. (Show less)

Tanya Cheadle : Adepts of Manhood: Progressive Masculinity and Unorthodox Sexuality in Scotland’s Occult Revival, 1880-1914
As in England, the occult revival in Scotland saw an unprecedented interest in the supernatural, with a vibrant and largely autonomous esoteric subculture emerging, including organisations and periodicals unique to its urban centres. To date, however, scholarship has concentrated overwhelmingly on London; furthermore, while gender has been employed as a ... (Show more)
As in England, the occult revival in Scotland saw an unprecedented interest in the supernatural, with a vibrant and largely autonomous esoteric subculture emerging, including organisations and periodicals unique to its urban centres. To date, however, scholarship has concentrated overwhelmingly on London; furthermore, while gender has been employed as a category of analysis, women have constituted the primary focus. This paper instead analyses occult masculinity, through the beliefs and practices of two male adepts. Charles Pearce was a prominent Glasgow socialist and feminist, dubbed by his wife one of the era’s ‘new men’; he was also a key disciple of the Brotherhood of the New Life, an American millenarian organisation of Christian sexual mysticism, led by the charismatic Thomas Lake Harris, who preached that religion needed ‘re-sexed’. Patrick Geddes was an internationally-renowned natural scientist living in Edinburgh who in his Celtic journal and works of popular science conceived of a new progressive form of masculinity in opposition to London decadence; he was also profoundly interested in occult ideas, planning an esoteric society linked to the Golden Dawn and comparable to W. B. Yeat’s Order of Celtic Mysteries. By drawing on the gendered and sexual lives and discourse of both individuals, this paper will ask: to what degree did occult organisations act as crucibles for the formation of a new, progressive form of masculinity? And given the transnational traffic in esoteric ideas, did occult men’s desire to conquer the spiritual realm constitute another form of colonization, or can it be considered an example of ‘affirmative Orientalism’? (Show less)

Jen Manion : Femmes to the Front: Edna Ruddick Hart’s Life and Legacy, 1893-1982
This project concerns the life of Edna Ruddick Hart, who is a footnote in transgender studies because she was married to Dr. Alan L. Hart, widely thought of as the first female-to-male transsexual in the U.S. The pair married in New York in 1925. After two decades of moving around, ... (Show more)
This project concerns the life of Edna Ruddick Hart, who is a footnote in transgender studies because she was married to Dr. Alan L. Hart, widely thought of as the first female-to-male transsexual in the U.S. The pair married in New York in 1925. After two decades of moving around, they settled in Hartford CT in 1945. They remained together until Alan’s death in 1962. Edna survived her husband by twenty years. The fact that Alan was assigned female at birth and underwent a hysterectomy and legal sex change in 1917 does not appear to have been known by their friends, colleagues, or community in Connecticut. The couple was a staple in their West Hartford community. Each was featured in the local paper, The Hartford Courant, for their public talks and service with some frequency. Nothing points to anything unusual about their relationship.

In 1976, six years before Edna’s death, Jonathan Ned Katz published his pathbreaking book Gay American History. In it, Katz identified Dr. Alan L. Hart as the subject of J. Alan Gilbert’s 1920 study “Homo-Sexuality and its Treatment.” Katz learned Edna Hart was still living from a longtime friend from Albany, Oregon. That friend discouraged him from pursuing more information from her, stating, “Let that all be passed now. She is older and does not want any more heart ache now.’” Edna Ruddick Hart was both ordinary and remarkable. She is often mentioned in passing in popular and scholarly discussions of her husband. She grew up in Ridgewood NJ, the only child of a pair of New Yorkers, Martha and Frank. She earned an MA in sociology from Columbia University in 1918 and taught child psychology at Hillyer College, University of Hartford.

This paper grapples with the possibilities for a queer past beyond identity. What does it mean to write Edna into the queer past when she rejected participation in her own queer present? What do we gain and what is lost by writing Edna into the past as a queer femme? What should we make of Hart’s “heartache” as the key reference to her queer life and love? This project expands the reach of the transgender past by centering the lovers and friends who made living life across or between genders both possible and pleasurable. It connects the transgender past to other important themes of the era that more visibly defined Edna’s life such as the rise of a professional class of women involved in education, welfare, and reform work. The Harts are unusual subjects, as most trans people enter public records via the carceral state that disciplined and punished those whose poverty left them vulnerable to excessive policing of their gender. (Show less)



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