2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

Recent debates within queer studies have revolved around issues that are central to historical inquiry. Whether queer studies should engage a politics of “no future” or “utopia,” whether it should “feel backward” or “read metaleptically” are essentially historical questions, steeped in considerations of temporality, practices of skeptical reading, and the nature of evidence and archives.  And yet, with very few exceptions, historians have neither engaged these debates, nor has historical work influenced or shaped the contours of these discussions. In a 1995 article, Lisa Duggan referred to this divide as “The Discipline Problem,” one that clearly continues twenty years on. This workshop invites involves essays that take up Laura Doan’s recent suggestion that historians “reconsider” the discipline problem in light of recent developments in queer studies. Workshop participants will consider the relationship between the history of sexuality and other disciplines, including sociology and gender and sexuality studies, by showing how the analytical problems at the center of queer studies can both shape and be shaped by historical approaches to sex, sexuality, and sexual difference. We will ask how the insights of queer studies change the questions historians ask of the past, even as we assert that historians can shape the insights of queer studies in turn. Pre-circulated essays will address themes central to the intersection of queer studies and the history of sexuality, such as temporality, alterity, health and ability, embodiment, genders and sexualities, nature-culture, the nation and nationalism.