SSHMA session update...

I am almost ready to announce to you all how wonderful it will be when the session on which I posted below actually happens next spring.

But, I could still use one more submission to make this thing exactly as wonderful as it should be. If , YOU, dear reader, might contribute something, send and abstract and form and all that jazz to drake@geneseo.edu--or feel free to contact me with any questions about the session as it stands already. Unless, it isn't you, but your friend who should submit an abstract--then see to it that your friend submits! And quickly, you only have until September 15!

Here's the session description again:

Sex, Theory, and Philology: Queering Anglo-Saxon Studies

Taking a hint from Carolyn Dinshaw's claim that an affective historiography could queer historiography itself, as well as the 2008 BABEL session at Kalamazoo titled "Is there a Theory in the House of Old English Studies?," this session especially aims to consider the significance that a Queer history of Anglo-Saxon writing has for contemporary Queer communities. Papers should consider not only a mapping of queer literary history in the Anglo-Saxon period, but also the specific ways that we might queer the very procedures of study for those texts in question. Under examination will be the potential for Queer pleasure in the practice of philology, Queer desire specific to Old English texts, as well as how Queer theory and philology might be better understood as working together—in opposition to traditional views of the opposition of theory and philology. The session will thus provide for possible new discoveries and new directions in the role of Queer theory in Anglo-Saxon studies, while also considering how Anglo-Saxon studies can in turn make theoretical interventions in the contemporary.