It has been 30 years since Carla Freccero (1994) coined ‘queer philology’, but it is in the last decade that the term has reached its widest circulation—in works of linguistics, codicology, literary criticism, and cultural studies, covering texts that range from the medieval (Magnani and Watt 2018) through the early modern (Masten 2016) to the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries (Nicolazzo 2014; Turton 2022; Snediker 2015). Concurrently, queer philology has been joined by a number of related analytical lenses that have been trained on particular languages, times, and places: a ‘trans philology’ of early modern England (Gamble 2019), an ‘erotic philology’ of the Spanish Golden Age (Martín 2008), and an ‘eroto-philology’ of early twentieth-century Yiddish (Weiman-Kelman 2019).

Queer & Trans Philologies is a two-day hybrid conference that seeks to give a platform to this unruly family of philologies by bringing together researchers working across disciplines on the historical ties between language, sexuality, and embodiment. The conference invites historically inflected research that builds on and broadens the linguistic and geographical scope of queer and trans philologies, that attends to the present afterlives of past taxonomies (Amin 2023), or that places trans and queer heuristics in dialogue with other modes of understanding language/sexuality/embodiment from feminist, critical race, and postcolonial studies—whether under the rubric of vocabularies of feeling (Spillers 1984), seductive sapphistry (Marcus 1987), nonce taxonomy (Sedgwick 1990), ephemeral archives (Muñoz 1996), histories of use (Ahmed 2019), or queer historical linguistics (Leap 2020).

Call for Papers:

We invite 15-minute papers on:
- Historical vocabularies of sex/gender/sexuality.
- Studies of erotic/somatic wordplay, neologism, and other forms of linguistic creativity in literary and non-literary texts.
- Trans/queer readings of grammars, dictionaries, manuals of rhetoric, and other reference works.
- Analyses of the discursive entanglement of sexed bodies/sexual behaviours with race, class, ability, and/or neurodiversity.

The language of presentation is English, but we encourage research on all languages.

Please submit abstracts (150–300 words) to queertransphilologies@gmail.com, along with your name, institution (if any), and paper title. Please indicate whether you would be able to present in person or virtually.

Deadline 31 October 2023.