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Jul. 8th, 2017|01:02 am |
Male Bonds is a two-day international conference that aims to explore the place of male bonds in nineteenth-century artistic practice and visual arts. The conference invites participants to reflect on the ways in which changing notions of masculinity and male sexuality impacted forms of sociability between men in the artistic scene of the long nineteenth century. In so doing, it seeks to build a bridge between traditional art-historical scholarship and the fields of gender and gay and lesbian studies: an interdisciplinary exchange of which the full potential for scholarship on the nineteenth century remains to be exploited.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Friendships, professional ties and family relations
- The artist's society, the brotherhood, the academy, the studio
- Links with architecture, music, literature, applied arts, etc.
- Links with politics, law, religion, medicine, sports, the military, etc.
- Intersectionality and the role of class, race, sexuality, age, power, etc.
- Ethnicity, colonialism, orientalism and intercultural encounters
- Homophobia and homoeroticism, same-sex desire, queerness
- Women among men, as solvent and/or detractor of men's bonds
- Male bonds as an artistic theme, the portrait and Freundschaftsporträt, the male nude.
Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium, May 15 - 16, 2018
Deadline: Oct 15, 2017
<http://www.malebonds.ugent.be/>
Call for Papers:
MALE BONDS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART
Male homosociality helped structure nineteenth-century European and
American society. Its pre-eminence at that time follows, inter alia,
from the general separation between men and women in social roles if
not in social spheres, and from the lack of a strictly binary view of
male sexual orientation. The personal lives and careers of men bore the
marks of their relations with other men: with brothers, friends, colleagues, pupils, business associates and many others. Such relations were characterized both by the dynamics of comradeship and by the
hierarchies of class, age, race, professional status, etc. They were
both established between individuals and in collectivities, especially
as fraternal organizations flourished from the late eighteenth century
onwards. So intense could men's relations be that they seem to have
included possibilities of a romantic and erotic kind that are foreign
to normative relationships between men today, even if male-male intimacy relied upon women’s bodies for its consolidation.
Especially in the fast-paced decades around the turn of the century,
changes arose in Europe and the United States that affected male homosociality to varying degrees. Categories such as 'inversion' (i.e.
the reversal of masculine gender identity) and 'homosexuality' came
into being through the interplay of increasingly visible queer
subcultures and of a discursive explosion emanating from the fields of
medicine, psychiatry, law, etc. The increasing conception of same-sex
sexualities coincided and intermingled with other challenges to
traditional notions of manhood - e.g. fears of degeneration, women's
entry into education, politics and the work force - to such an extent
that scholars have described a wide-ranging fin-de-siècle "crisis of
masculinity". Men's answers to these challenges altered the ways in
which they related to other men, establishing for instance a "rough and
tough" hegemonic masculinity and what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has
designated a "male homosexual panic".
This conference strives to probe, challenge and expand upon this
academic grand narrative of male homosociality through the lens of art
history. It aims to establish a multifaceted survey of the male bonds
that underpinned nineteenth-century art, and to consider the theoretical and methodological implications of the study thereof.
Gender studies, queer theory and gay and lesbian studies have made
available a great many histories and concepts with which to critically
examine the specificity of gender and sexuality in art: an exchange
through which all disciplines involved stand to be enriched. We welcome
papers that undertake this interdisciplinary endeavor, and mark men in art history as gendered historical subjects.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers in English, to be sent to
malebonds@ugent.be by October 15. Please combine in one single pdf
file: a 300-word abstract, 1 or 2 images, and a 100-word bio. We also
welcome proposals for presentations in French and German, but - if
accepted - ask that the accompanying PowerPoint be in English. Selected
speakers will be contacted in the course of December. Following the
conference, a selection of papers will be peer reviewed and published
in a journal or edited volume.
Confirmed keynote speakers: Anthea Callen (University of Nottingham and
the Australian National University) and Michael Hatt (University of
Warwick)
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