Politics and Desire in a Decadent Age
Department of English and the Sexual Cultures Research Group
Queen Mary University of London
May 15, 2020
Keynote Speaker: Dennis Denisoff (McFarlin Chair of English, University of Tulsa, author of Aestheticism and Sexual Parody and Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film)
The symposium committee invites papers from a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds, including literature, sexuality and gender studies, history, visual art, film, and environmental studies, that interpret any aspect of the symposium theme of ‘Politics and Desire in a Decadent Age’.
- Topics may include (but are not limited to):
- Urban sexual communities or conflicts
- The sexual imagination and colonial decadence
- Sexual identity in mass consumerism
- Desires and the environmental humanities
- Trans politics
- Feminist fantasies
- Desires and the decadent movement
- Science and medicine of decadence
- Gendered and erotic ecologies
- Cultural rot
- Intersections of race, indigeneity, and gender
- Ignored, invisible, and secreted desires
- Decadent occultures
Proposals of up to 250 words for 15-minutes papers (along with a 100-word biographical note) should be submitted by 1 February 2020 to Catherine Maxwell: c.h.maxwell@qmul.ac.uk.