“Queerly Canadian: Changing Narratives” highlights scholarship that explores fictional and non-fictional narratives that make and measure change (individual, political, community, and cultural). Specifically, the conference will ask how queer narratives have changed, not only the changes from l/g to l/g/b to l/g/b/t to queer, but our changing sense of ourselves in relation to society and to history.
The impetus for the conference is to recognize the importance of the narratives that Jane Rule created in her fiction and her essays. Born in the U.S., Rule chose to be Canadian and created narratives of queer possibilities before there was a major political movement. Once the g/l/b/t movement became an important presence, her fictional narratives and her essays provided a critical voice within the g/l/b/t and feminist movements. Her analysis of the relation of individuals to the state, her critique of regulation within minority communities and her resistance to narrowly defined identity politics provide a much-needed perspective for queer politics and cultures today.
The conference marks the expansion of the Rule archives at the University of British Columbia this year. We want to encourage scholars and graduate students to consider Rule’s papers and other archives that are becoming available that give us a fuller and often rather different picture of the twentieth century in North America, especially the lives and work of lesbians whose histories tend to be under-researched.
While Jane Rule’s work is the impetus for the conference, we want to include attention to other North American writers, artists, activists and scholars who have enriched and complicated narratives of l/g/b/t or queer lives and communities.
Roundtable discussions and panel presentations by scholars, artists, and activists:
L/g/b/t and queer narratives from the 1960s to the present
Mining the queer archive
Small presses and queer journalism: making our narratives known
Visual narratives: film, video, & graphic novels.
Please submit 500 word proposals for fifteen minute presentations related to any one of the four roundtable/panel discussion topics by January 30th to:
University of British Columbia
Janice Stewart
Department of English
391-1873 East Mall
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6T 1Z1
This conference is made possible through the generous support of The Jane Rule Endowment for the Study of Human Relationships
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