Conference Presentation: An Incomplete Academic Fellowship
Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFcon 2025)
There are so many amazing spider web photographs in the “stock” photo gallery — I think I may have to do different ones, and have two in each post!
I had almost forgotten submitting a proposal to GIFcon 2025, “Queering the Fantastic”! It’s in early May, and online. I’ve just heard back from the organizers that my proposal has been accepted (YAY!!). This presentation is part of (surprise!) a larger project that has been percolating away since 2017 as I discuss in “The Morass of Feminist/Gender/Queer Approaches to “Tolkien” Part 1” (gotta get around to Part 2 sometime! *makes a note on actual paper*).
The upside of this is that I am not starting from scratch. The downside of this is that my most recent “draft in progress” is 9100 words long (about twice as long as the standard requirement for an academic print journal/anthology). And presentations are limited to 20 minutes (which in my experience means about eight pages NYT 12 CPI DS). So that will be a fun task!
Before then I have to finish my Aspec essay and my PCA essay!
An Incomplete Academic Fellowship: Excluding Queer Feminist Women from Tolkien Studies
The question of how academics recreate, reinterpret, and validate queer approaches to fantasy intersects with my oingoing project on the exclusion of queer women and non-binary people (whether characters, theorists, fans, academics), a question further complicated by the multiple definitions of Queerness (Doty).
Early perceptions of Tolkien as excluding female characters has been challenged, if not demolished, by Croft’s and Donovan’s 2015 Perilous and Fair, but it was not been followed by additional books on the topic until recently, with Cami Agan and Clare Moore’s “Great Heart and Strength” project (deadline March 15, hint hint hint!).
Queer scholarship on Tolkien primarily focuses on Tolkien’s and Jackson’s male characters (Vaccaro, Yandell; Battis, Chance, Cuntz-Leng, Kaufman). In the first bibliographic essay on Queer Tolkien scholarship, Yvette Kisor identifies only two categories of “queer”—‘homosexuality’ and ‘alterity’—avoiding other terms common in contemporary queer communities and theories. Jane Chance’s 2016 monograph, Tolkien, Self and Other: “This Queer Creature,” devotes eight of nine chapters to male characters while declaring her purpose is to defend Tolkien as a “humanist and a feminist.”
This presentation considers the current “morass of feminist/gender/queer” Tolkien scholarship and imagines what acknowledging queer women and non-binary people of all ethnicities as part of an academic Fellowship might look like. I draw from fan studies (Kroner, McCormack, Reid, Sturgiss, Viars and Coker) and medieval feminist queer scholars who identified the tendency to focus on "gay male history and queer male sexualities” and to sideline “women and femininity” fifteen years ago (Watt 452). In 2010, Diane Watt identified a model created by medieval feminist queer scholars who viewed “heterosexuality and homosexuality not merely as linguistic anachronisms but as categories intrinsically unable to serve the complex array of self-perceptions, legal definitions, and visual and literary representations of medieval sexualities” (17). I will start to map how queer women and non-binary people make "Tolkien" their own despite systemic marginalization in academia (Reid; Healy, Savonick and Davidson).
Too rushed to put together a specific Working Bibligraphy for this proposal, so have a link to the Never-Ending Feminist/Gender/Queer Tolkien scholarship!
And another Web picture!
