Erotohistoriography

Elizabeth Freeman is associate professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She specializes in American literature and gender/sexuality/queer studies, and her articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals. Her first book was The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture, and she is the editor of Queer Temporalities, a special double issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian Gay Studies 13.2/3 (Winter/Spring 2007). Her second book, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, will be published by Duke University Press next year. Her talk will be drawn from this forthcoming project and frame the project of erotohistoriography—loosely, a project of encountering the past in which the body is an instrument. It seeks to offer a revised history of sexuality by centering queer pleasures and proposing the body as site of historical encounter, in and across time. Through these encounters across time, we might get a glimpse of historically specific pleasures and ways of organizing a life that exceed the current cramped politics of same-sex marriage as end game of sexual liberation.

Rescheduled from last semester.