Queer Urban Nights. FRINGE/EROSS conference 2022

1 Programme at a glance Day 1: Friday 27 May 2022 9:00 – 9:45 Ground Floor Registration 9:45 – 10:00 PG02 Welcome 10:00 – 11:00 PG02 Keynote: Will Straw 11:00 – 11:30 Ground Floor Break 1 11:30 – 12:45 PG02 Drifting into the Night 13:00 – 14:00 Main Restaurant Lunch 1 14:00 – 15:15 PG02 Untranslated Nightlives 15:15 – 16:30 PG02 Roundtable: Feminist Nocturnes 16:30 – 17:00 Ground Floor Break 2 17:00 – 18:00 PG02 Screening & Q/A: Love and Revenge 18:30 City Centre Tour: Sex and the City Day 2: Saturday 28 May 2022 9:00 – 9:45 Ground Floor Registration 9:45 – 11:00 PG01 PG02 Exploring Darkness (online) Resistance and Screams 11:00 – 11:30 Ground Floor Break 3 11:30 – 12:45 PG01 PG02 The Surrealist Queer Night Deep Inside 13:00 – 14:00 Main Restaurant Lunch 2 14:00 – 15:15 PG01 PG02 Queer Mappings Transgressive Cityscapes 15:15 – 16:30 PG02 Cruising 16:30 – 17:00 Ground Floor Break 4 17:00 – 18:00 PG01 Keynote: Vanessa Lacey 18:00 Closing words 20:00 Outhouse, city centre Finissage: Fabulous Flikkers (wine reception) The programme is on Irish time. All conference teas and coffees, sessions and plenaries take place in place in Purcell House, All Hallows Campus. Lunches are in Drumcondra House, All Hallows Campus. 2 Sessions Day 1 / 10:00 – 11:00 / PG02 = KEYNOTE Respondent: Dr Patricia García Respondent: Dr Michael Hinds Queer Manhattan, Broadway Brevities and the Figure of the Predatory Lesbian Professor Will Straw, McGill University, Montreal, Canada Day 1 / 11:30 – 12:45 / PG02 = Drifting into the Night Chair: Dr Kit Fryatt Dark Rustlings: Roland Barthes and the Nocturnal Outside Claire Downey, University of Limerick, Ireland A Woman Walks Home Alone at Night? Disorderly Women and the Geographies of Fear in the Fantastic Dr Patricia García, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain Pain, Pleasure and Perversion in Camila Sosa Villada’s Las Malas Jean-Philippe Imbert, Dublin City University, Ireland Day 1 / 14:00 – 15:15 / PG02 = Untranslated Nightlives Chair: Dr Seán Mac Risteaird Languages of the Night, Sex Work and Street Life from a Female Perspective in 1930s Istanbul: An Exploration of Luminous Cevriye by Suat Derviş Dr Deniz Başar, Boğaziçi University, Turkey “Gan aird againn ar an saol”: Cruising as Gaeilge in Micheál Ó Conghaile’s Sna Fir Nathaniel Harrington, University of Toronto, Canada Queer Prairie Punk wahkohtowin: Nightlife kinship in Jas Morgan’s nîtisânak Dr Kai Pyle, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Day 1 / 15:15 – 16:30 / PG02 = Roundtable Feminist Nocturnes On Punt 6 and feminist urban planning Begonya Saez Tajafuerce, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain On women, migration and the city Jean-Philippe Imbert, Dublin City University, Ireland A Conversation with Mary Dorcey Maria Micaela Coppola, Università di Trento, Italy Mary Dorcey, poet and activist, Ireland On theories of embodied and embedded subject towards inclusive spaces Edyta Just, Linköpings Universitet, Sweden [online] 3 Day 2 / 9:45 – 11:00 / PG01 = Exploring Darkness [online] Chair: Dr Angelos Bollas Alice in Darkland: Representations of Urban Nights in 1980s New York Dr Anna Ferrari, Università di Padova, Italy Night Skies, Exit Wounds, and Queer Temporalities in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) Sara Soler i Arjona, University of Barcelona, Spain Day 2 / 9:45 – 11:00 / PG02 = Resistance and Screams Chair: Dr Sarah Meehan O’Callagan When the Subaltern Screams in the Night: Queering the Publics in Monique Wittig’s Across the Acheron Cristina Diamant, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania “We don’t talk about straight spaces”: Exploring the Landscape of Queer Women’s Nightlife Experiences in Cape Town Shannon O’Rourke, The Open University, United Kingdom Day 2 / 11:30 – 12:45 / PG01 = The Surrealist Queer Night Chair: Maighread Medbh The Urban Night as a Space of Queer Belonging in Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York Dr Andrea Gremels, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany Bitter Baptisms: Darkness as Site of Queer Identity in the Poetry of Valentine Penrose Isabelle Pyle, Lancaster University, United Kingdom Journey Towards the Dark: César Moro Sadomasochiste Dr Karla Segura Pantoja, CY Cergy Paris Université, France Day 2 / 11:30 – 12:45 / PG02 = Deep Inside Chair: Dr Donal Mulligan The Impact of COVID-19 on Queer Creatives Working in London Prof. Mark McCormack, University of Roehampton, United Kingdom & & Prof. Fiona Measham, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom Towards a Theory of the Rave Alec Roth, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium & University of Vienna, Austria Exploring Queer Potentialities of Darkness through l’écriture féminine [online] Irina Shirobokova, City University of New York, United States of America 4 Day 2 / 14:00 – 15:15 / PG01 = Queer Mappings Chair: David Carroll Queering the Right to the City through Dissident Night-Time Spaces in Quito Ignacio Espinosa, Universidad Internacional de Ecuador, Ecuador [online] Excessive and Transgressive Emotions in the Literary Urban Night Hanne Juntunen, Tampere University, Finland “You would hear about it, you just knew”: Queer(ing) Aachen Between Dusk and Dawn Pepe Sánchez-Molero, Independent Scholar, Germany Day 2 / 14:00 – 15:15 / PG02 = Transgressive Cityscapes Chair: Dr Olga Springer The City Night as a Space of Transgression and Identity Redefinition in Altri libertini by Pier Vittorio Tondelli Niccolò Amelii, University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy “Hell Granted All of Its Inmates a Leave”: Queer Nocturnal Cityscapes of Weimar-Era Germany and the Question of Metronormativity Mathias Foit, Free University of Berlin, Germany The Construction of Collective Utopian Soundscapes in a Neighbourhood in Rome: Nocturnal Interventions towards a Queer Aesthetics Antonia de Michele, University of Padua, Italy Day 2 / 15:15 – 16:30 / PG02 = Cruising Chair: David O’Mullane Socially Constructing Gay Urban Nights in the Films of William Friedkin Dr Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, Texas Christian University, United States of America Travels from the Underground: Hocquenghem’s Experiences of Nightlife and Unbelonging Dr Thomas Muzart, Duke University, United States of America Still Cruisin' (After All of These Years) Emilio Williams, Georgia State University, United States of America Day 2 / 17:00 – 18:00 / PG01 = KEYNOTE Chair: Jean-Philippe Imbert Through the Night: Transidentities and the City Dr Vanessa Lacey, Gendercare, Ireland 5 Abstracts The City Night as a Space of Transgression and Identity Redefinition in Altri libertini by Pier Vittorio Tondelli Niccolò Amelii, University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy The night time is experienced within the urban context as a strongly diversified and diversifying time, as compared to the patterns of life and behaviour characteristic of daytime diachrony. Freeing, at least temporarily, the city space from exclusive productive and functional tasks, the night, as a temporality open to a constant renegotiation between subjectivity and otherness, tampers with the regularity and canonicity of interpersonal relationships to become the theatre of new forms of sexuality, communication, identity transgression. In the light of Bachtin's concepts of chronotope of the encounter and chronotope of the road, inextricably linked to each other, and at the same time reasoning on the Foucaldian definition of heterotopia, the paper intends to analyse the expressive modalities, the linguistic resources and the thematic continuities through which the nocturnal city becomes in the stories contained in Altri libertini (1980) – first book of Pier Vittorio Tondelli, of which this year marks the thirty years since his death – not only a privileged scenography of the events narrated, but a real mythopoietic space, a representative constant that the author investigates, probes in depth and re-elaborates narratively according to an authorial filter of zero degree, mimetically adhering to the characters and scenes told. Helping us then with Augé's reflections on the nature of non-places, our interest is to investigate the process of re-semantisation for which the nocturnal places that act as a field of tension of diegetic actions – stations, night refreshments, clubs – are transformed into counter-spaces, marginal environments intended exclusively for those individuals whose behaviour turns out to be apparently deviant and transgressive, as compared to the canonical social norms accepted and shared in a certain historical period, to the point of becoming a vehicle for sexual liberation - but also a dimension of traumas and existential tragedies, as well as a palimpsest in which processes of identity redefinition are continuously re-written. Niccolò Amelii is a PhD student in Languages, Literatures and Cultures in Contact at “D’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara. In his research project, he investigates forms, motives and themes of urban literature, focusing on the narrative representations of metropolis and cities in Anglo-American modernist literature and in Italian literature from the twentieth century to the present. His essays and articles have been published in several academic journals, such as Diacritica, Fillide, Enthymema, Kepos, Oblio. He is a member of the ALUS (Association for Literary Urban Studies). [email protected] * Languages of the Night, Sex Work and Street Life from a Female Perspective in 1930s Istanbul: An Exploration of Luminous Cevriye by Suat Derviş Dr Deniz Başar, Boğaziçi University, Turkey Fosforlu Cevriye is a Turkish novel by the early Republican woman writer Suat Derviş. The story was first serialized in a newspaper in the 1940s, and later published as a novel in 1962; the novel was already popular in serialized form and was made into a film in 1969. The protagonist of the novel, Cevriye, is a prostitute in 1930s Istanbul who is famous for her beauty. She has the nickname “Fosforlu”, meaning “Luminous”, because she physically shines through 6 the night: her hair and skin glow around her, making her visible at all times. This glow and charm draw the attention of male customers and allow her to flirt with whomever she wants, but they also make her vulnerable to the police and other authority figures from whom she cannot hide at most needed times. The novel is particularly significant because it is told from the perspective of a woman from the lowest urban classes of Istanbul, a sex worker, and it is written by a woman writer who does not allow Cevriye’s experience to be fetishized at any moment in the narrative. Suat Derviş herself was from the highest classes of Turkish society, but she was a rebel figure: a woman with an upper-class education who chose to become a journalist, in close contact with the urban poor and the criminal landscape; a communist activist; and a novelist who wrote about taboo topics for Turkish society. This presentation will discuss two of the most prominent elements of Fosforlu Cevriye, namely its challenge of the sexist societal belief that a woman’s honour is only defined by her sex life being strictly regulated under marriage contracts, and the nightlife language of the 1930s Istanbul that it documents. Dr Deniz Başar is a theatre researcher, puppet maker and two-time national award-winning playwright. Parts of her research are included in anthologies like Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations by Routledge (2019), Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race (2021), Creative Activism: Research, Pedagogy and Practice by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2022), and Palgrave Handbook on Theatre Censorship (2023). She recently finished her PhD in Concordia University’s Humanities Department with her work on contemporary Turkish theatre, entitled “A Dismissed Heritage: Contemporary Performance in Turkey Defined through Karagöz”. Currently she is an FRQSC post-doctoral fellow, and continuing her research projects in İstanbul. [email protected] * The Construction of Collective Utopian Soundscapes in a Neighbourhood in Rome: Nocturnal Interventions towards a Queer Aesthetics Antonia De Michele, University of Padua, Italy [The abstract is in Spanish. The presentation will be in English] “Tropicantesimo es un laboratorio que posibilita experiencias de exploración, mestizaje, generación de sonido. La riqueza de este laboratorio es que se trata de una infracción voluntaria que activa conexiones entre personas en el fluir de la música. […] Es una utopía colectiva que se realiza a través del sonido. Con sus experimentos sonoros, instalaciones florales, visiones oníricas de jardines no naturales, es la construcción natural de un paraíso artificial ". (Tropicantesimo, 2020) Con estas palabras las artistas del colectivo artístico-musical Tropicantesimo describen la filosofía detrás de las fiestas homónimas que se llevan a cabo desde hace algunos años en diversos espacios culturales del barrio de Pigneto en Roma, recién saltado a la fama como símbolo de la gentrificación romana (Annunziata, 2011). Las actuaciones nocturnas - una especie de ritual compuesto por música, danza e instalaciones florales en que es fundamental seguir el flujo del sonido - invitan a sus participantes a ralentizar, a derribar sus coordenadas identitarias y a conectar con otros cuerpos en movimiento: se producen momentos de suspensión en los que poder expresarse libremente, construir nuevas síntesis más allá de categorías y parámetros preestablecidos, abrazando lo que puede definirse como una estética queer (Williford, 2009: 7). Este aporte tiene como objetivo analizar, a través de un enfoque etnográfico, cómo estas formas de experimentación artística abren espacios de 7 posibilidad para imaginar y dar vida a otras configuraciones identitarias que rechazan la lógica de la normatividad dominante, permitiendo la generación de "nuevas formas de expresión más allá de los horizontes conocidos”(Decandia, 2019: 27); la discusión pretende además resaltar las prácticas de resistencia y los imaginarios inéditos llevados a cabo en general por la comunidad artístico-musical underground (conocida como "la escena de Roma Este") arraigada en la zona, reflexionando sobre la relación que mantiene con el barrio en trasformación. Antonia De Michele is a doctoral student in the the PhD programme in Historical, Geographical and Anthropological Studies at the University of Padova, Ca 'Foscari Venice and the University of Verona. Her background in anthropology at the University of Roma La Sapienza led to her MA in Urban and Territorial Planning at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and an MA in Environmental Humanities at the University Roma Tre. She is particularly interested in the relationship between urbanism and everyday life, the relationships between material and symbolic dimensions in contemporary urban contexts, the construction of new senses of place and the forms of appropriation and meaning-making of by users in space. [email protected] * When the Subaltern Screams in the Night: Queering the Publics in Monique Wittig’s Across the Acheron Cristina Diamant, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania The revolutionary potential of the ’68 generation seems to have been exhausted, even recuperated (in the Situationist sense) and commodified. However, Monique Wittig’s intersectional concerns avant la lettre resist joining the fold of neoliberal publics, especially in Across the Acheron (1985), the irreverent retelling of the Aeneid and of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, inspired by the queer nightlife of San Francisco. Here, subaltern counterpublics (Nancy Fraser) are given a voice that threatens the stability and perceived atemporality of the supposedly neutral mainstream arena. Pleasure and pain are revealed to be political, while sex is revealed to be a class maintained through ritualised violence rather than a caste one is born into. Guided by Manastabal, the protagonist explores spaces of conformity and deviance alike through a variety of urban mobilities, from the threatening railway station to the motorcycles the angels ride to evade patriarchal surveillance. Against her contemporaries’ distaste with “engaged literature,” Wittig sets out to universalise the excluded particular to explode the very categories that make its exclusion comprehensible. Repeatedly accused of “totalitarianism,” she answers systemic violence with epistemic violence, all while carefully cultivating a Brechtian self-awareness. Rather than revel in the outside perspective offered by being a part of the minor publics (Michael Warner), Wittig pokes fun at short-sighted attempts that glamourise oppression or only seek to invert an opposition rather than dismantle it. The novel proves the qualities of Wittig’s political project: radical openness opposed to prescriptive separatism. Cristina Diamant is a PhD candidate at Babeș-Bolyai University and a former visiting scholar at the Centre for Gender, Sexuality, and Writing at the University of Kent. Her thesis on Monique Wittig and Jeanette Winterson investigates the tension between radicalism and assimilation in a transnational framework. Her research interests include death studies, media studies, pop culture, materialist feminism, and posthuman studies, especially in the context of 8 investigating various representations of otherness. Co-director of the London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC) and advisor for the Metacritic Center for Advanced Literary Studies, she edits the Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, the cultural magazine Echinox, as well as Forward, the all-Ireland publication of the Connolly Youth Movement. [email protected] * Dark Rustlings: Roland Barthes and the Nocturnal Outside Claire Downey, University of Limerick, Ireland Darkness disrupts patterns of navigation. It queers the space of the night city as it shifts possibilities. This paper explores the ability of darkness to anticipate alterity within the built frame. Rather than focus on any single manifestation of queer space, it looks at how the fluidity of urban darkness transgresses and even inverts spatial boundaries, allowing new ways of imagining nocturnal architectures. It finds example in the Paris night walks of Roland Barthes, in which moments of possibility are traversed and importantly, transcribed. Barthes kept a journal of his nightly outings from 24 August to 17 September 1979. The assembled writings would be titled ‘Soirées de Paris’ and published posthumously in Incidents (1987). If Barthes detects the ‘rustle’ of possibility in the darkened night – a rustling akin to the building of anticipation – he also acknowledges the unpredictability of a much louder rumbling. His selfdescribed dérives are not the strategic wanderings of the Situationists but a potential drifting out of bounds. Barthes is, in fact, a hesitant walker, continually stepping out into the night only to step back in. His passage through urban darkness is unstable but that is exactly where its potential lies. As present-day Paris moves towards a darkening of its public spaces, generating positive nocturnal experience will require engaging with the unstable and the indeterminant qualities of the urban frame. What Tim Edensor has described as a need to re-valorise darkness is also an opportunity to open the built frame to include the alterity already present in diverse nocturnal cultures and populations. Claire Downey is pursuing an interdisciplinary Research PhD within the School of Architecture and the School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics, at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Entitled Utopian Nights, Navigating No Place in Nocturnal Urban Landscapes, the research reflects interconnected interests in architecture, urban narratives, utopian criticism and night studies. Claire received a Master of Architecture degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology before working for John Portman & Associates in Atlanta and Italy. Currently residing in France, she taught Critical Thinking and Writing, as well as the utopian elective Brave New World at Parsons Paris and the Paris College of Art. Author of Neo-Furniture (Rizzoli), past editor at This City Paris, her writing has been published in Architectural Record, Art Papers, Bauwelt, ID and Progressive Architecture. [email protected] * Queering the Right to the City through Dissident Night-Time Spaces in Quito Ignacio Espinosa, Universidad Internacional de Ecuador, Ecuador 9 Some of the most valuable learning, teaching and spatial knowledge co-production processes I have been involved have not necessarily been inside universities or publishing articles, but queering nocturnal spaces as an artist, curator and co-founder of SinVergüenza. Through interdisciplinary collaborations with my friend J0ya and other artists doing DJ sets, performances, installations, visual art, and more, SinVergüenza showed us that grassroots “queer” transfeminist parties can potentially have a political and pedagogic role that allow spatial and knowledge co-production that queer the right to the city. Firstly, grassroots parties can contribute in the radicalization and articulation of different “queer” collectives and bodies by touching issues like borders, body and territorial sovereignty, homonormativity, spatialmaterial rights and local “queer” history (often invisibilized by imperialist neoliberal Ecuadorian LGBTIQ+ NGOs or gay parties). Secondly, grassroots “queer” parties can allow potential encounters between different bodies and build communities, collective memories, storytelling, and spatial imaginary futures. Thirdly, nocturnal “queer” spatial production can stretch interdisciplinary practices between architectural designers, curators, musicians, performers, dancers, visual artists, activists and planners. Fourthly, night-time “queer” spaces and parties can host organic collaborations between “queer” artists and collectives beyond hegemonic colonial institutions of creative production like galleries and museums. Fifthly, nocturnal “queer” spatial co-production can “queer” theory: organizing and curating grassroots parties often involves notions like informality, private property (and rent), safety and policing, heritage, sanitation, water and urban metabolisms, transportation, smart cities, the right to the city, among other urban issues traditionally portrayed as “non-queer”. Exploring how different urban/spatial issues are “queered” in “queer” night-time spaces can allow the identification of common issues and common spatial struggles between “queer” social movements and other social movements. Finally, grassroots “queer” night-time spaces should not be romanticized, as they can spatially reproduce/reinforce unequal intersectional power relations and oppressions that should constantly be challenged and questioned. Ignacio Espinosa did a B.F.A. in Architecture in the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) and a MSc in Urban Development Planning at the Bartlett, University College London (UCL). Their master’s thesis was titled “Intersecting the Right to the City: the case of 'LGBTI+' spatial struggles in Ecuador”. They have further researched this subject in different contexts of Quito, writing texts and articles that have been published by different local and international organizations and NGOs. They have spoken in different panels, including alternative congresses, the Ecuadorian Ombudsman, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences CLASCSO, the Latin American Forum on Housing, the London School of Economics - LSE Gender, and others. They currently work in the architecture and urbanism faculty at Universidad Internacional del Ecuador (UIDE) in Quito, where they teach an Urban Design Workshop, an Urban Planning course, a Mapping and Counter-Mapping course, and a class about Intersecting the Right to the City and Spatial Justice. The latter focuses on Marxist, decolonial, feminist, “queer”, ecologist and posthumanist approaches of urban-spatial production in Ecuador and “Latin America”. They militate in local “queer” collectives and cofounded SinVergüenza, a marica night-time space and party in Quito. [email protected] * 10 Alice in Darkland: representations of Urban Nights in 1980s New York Dr Anna Ferrari, Università di Padova, Italy When it comes to urban space, New York may be the symbol of the 1980s. After its notorious characterization as ‘Fear City’ in the 1970s, when it was on the brink of bankruptcy, in the 1980s New York lead a ‘double life.’ On the one hand, the middle class started to return from the suburbs, as Wall Street and economic deregulation inflated the economy. On the other, the countercultural underworld went through a particularly prolific period, from street art to literature. The ethos of these two worlds would develop on polar opposites. In literature we can find these two urban levels portrayed in equally polarized ways. A common aspect, though, is darkness – particularly as it pertains to the representation of the exciting, sometimes transgressive, sometimes scary New York nights, which tend to be portrayed as the moment when masks fall and non-normative creatures roam. This feature persists in 1990s American novels about the 1980s. From classics like Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Ellis’ American Psycho, to more underground works such as Larry Mitchell’s The Terminal Bar or Samuel R. Delany’s The Mad Man, New York nights are tinged with darkness as well as excitement and concitated movement. The paper would map the role of darkness in the representation of 1980s New York’s night urban space, outlining the intersections and contrasts that shaped this decade: from anxieties about the economy, the nuclear threat, the Cold War, the AIDS epidemic, to productive underground multicultural tensions and the formation of new queer spaces, we will see how darkness has had a crucial role in defining a decade that is often hastily associated with prosperity, and how the urban space of New York, in particular, has been essential in shaping the dark ethos that characterizes the 1980s. Dr Anna Ferrari holds a PhD in American literature from Sapienza, University of Rome and teaches English at Università di Padova. Her research is focused on the use of humor and camp in AIDS literature. Her writing has appeared in Ácoma. Rivista internazionale di Studi Nordamericani, Book 2.0, JAm It! Journal of American Studies in Italy, and The Polyphony. [email protected] * “Hell Granted All of Its Inmates a Leave”: Queer Nocturnal Cityscapes of Weimar-Era Germany and the Question of Metronormativity Mathias Foit, Free University of Berlin, Germany My understanding of Jack/Judith Halberstam’s idea of metronormativity is twofold: as a critique of queer studies’ inordinate, out-of-proportion attention to cities and resultant neglect of rural or non-urban spaces, bodies and identities on the one hand; and of the progressivist narrative in which the city becomes the ultimate goal and destination of every queer person’s spiritual and geographical journey, a kind of a Promised Land where one’s identity and desires can be lived out fully. While the second of Halberstam’s two objections is justifiable, and the city does not only liberate or provide opportunities, but can also constrain (whether by policing, surveillance or repression), the first is much more problematic, overlooking the plurality of queer urbanisms (for example, lesbian, metropolitan vs. non-metropolitan), their hierarchical structure and mechanisms of othering in queer urban studies. To argue these two points, I will refer to existing critiques of the concept as well as my own doctoral research on the queer spaces of Weimar-era Germany (1919-1933) to offer a more nuanced approach to 11 metronormativity. Also, I would like to take the audience on a journey through the bars, cruising spots, apartments and police stations of night-time Weimar cities: a journey that, given the oftentimes harsh realities of queer people in that period, is far from sentimental or nostalgic, but none the less thrilling. Mathias Foit graduated in English studies from the University of Wrocław and is currently pursuing a PhD degree at the Free University of Berlin. In his doctoral dissertation, which concerns the queer history of Germany's former eastern provinces, he studies Weimar-era queer organisation and queer spaces. In 2022, the scholarly journal Ikonotheka will be publishing his most recent article, in which he considers and compares the topography of cruising in the German-speaking Breslau and the Polish-speaking Wrocław. [email protected] * A Woman Walks Home Alone at Night? Disorderly Women and the Geographies of Fear in the Fantastic Dr Patricia García, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain Feminist geographers have long demonstrated that our gender and sexual orientations affect how we use and appropriate urban spaces. In this paper, I examine different representations of nocturnal female characters who roam the streets in narratives of the urban fantastic, with a particular focus on the film A Girl Walks Alone at Night (2014) by Ana Lily Amirpour. From a gender and queer perspective, I analyse the figure of the inappropriate, unclassifiable, morally-corrupted, “unfeminine” female who takes back the night in revenge and occupies a domain that is not considered decent or safe for her. Drawing on urban scholarship that has focused on the so-called “geographies of fear”, I reflect on the use of the fantastic element as a means of subverting gendered expectations and limitations regarding the urban night. My goal, however, is to go beyond the visibilization of female experiences concerning safety in the city, an aspect that has been central in the feminist urbanism agenda. I argue that the hybridism and indeterminacy characteristic of these nocturnal fictional creatures opens up readings that “disorient” the normative binaries, hierarchies and boundaries embedded in how we classically think about spatiality. To develop this last point, I explore the framework provided by queer understandings of urban space. Dr Patricia García is a Ramón y Cajal researcher in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universidad de Alcalá (Spain). She has previously served as an Associate Professor in Hispanic and Comparative Literature at the University of Nottingham and has been a fellow of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies with a EURIAS/Marie-Curie fellowship. She is interested in urban cultural studies and the intersections between space, gender and the fantastic. She is the author of The Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature (Palgrave, 2022) and Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature (Routledge, 2015). She was the PI of the British-Academy Project Gender and the Hispanic Fantastic and is currently Chair of the network Fringe Urban Narratives: Peripheries, Identities, Intersections (urbanfringes.com/). She is also part of the Executive Committees of the European Society of Comparative Literature and ALUS: Association for Literary Urban Studies. [email protected] * 12 The Urban Night as a Space of Queer Belonging in Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York Andrea Gremels, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany Federico García Lorca’s posthumously published Poet in New York (1940) is his poetry collection that has most strongly been associated with surrealism. The poems of this volume are an intimate and disturbing account of his trip to New York (and later to Havana) in 1929: Lorca approaches sites of the city as dreamscapes that paradoxically convey their terrifying urban realness in terms of New York’s social problems such as anonymity, poverty, and racism. As it has often been underlined, in many of his New York poems he identifies with marginalized groups, especially with African Americans. This identification can be connected to the poet’s reflection on how to create a conviviality at the margins as well as a space of queer belonging. My talk will examine the surrealist urban night with regard to Lorca’s queerness as well as the queering strategies he practices in his poetry. In his “Nocturno”-poems, such as “Landscape of the Urinating Crowd (Nocturne of the Battery Place)” or “City Without Sleep (Nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge)”, the night – rather than referring to eroticism and desire in terms of the pleasure principle – is saturated with feelings of disorientation threat, and violence. I will read this nocturne symbolic, which is also closely linked to his surrealist bestiary that uncovers multiple facets of sexuality, as an expression of Lorca’s conflicted homosexual desire and search of love that he conceives of as impossible and prohibitive. Although it is only under the conditions of precariousness and even self-rejection, Lorca appropriates the urban night as a time and space of queer belonging, in which homosexual desire can be lived beyond the (rational) order of daytime and a heteronormative system of classification. Dr. Andrea Gremels is a scholar in Romance Literature and Cultures at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt. A specialist in Latin American and French literature and culture, global Surrealism and transmedial methodology, her publications include the monographs Kubanische Gegenwartsliteratur in Paris zwischen Exil und Transkulturalität (Cuban Contemporary Literature in Paris between Exile and Transculturality, 2013), and Die Weltkünste des Surrealismus. Netzwerke und Perspektiven aus dem Globalen Süden (The World Arts of Surrealism. Networks and Perspectives from the Global South, 2022). Together with Erin McClenathan, she is preparing a special issue of Dada/Surrealism (No. 24, 2022) entitled Prismatic Fringes: Periodicals and the borders of Surrealism. Her research has been supported by an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at EHESS in Paris. [email protected] * “Gan aird againn ar an saol”: Cruising as Gaeilge in Micheál Ó Conghaile’s Sna Fir Nathaniel Harrington, University of Toronto, Canada Micheál Ó Conghaile’s 1999 Irish-language novel Sna Fir follows a young man from the Conamara Gaeltacht, John Paul, as he navigates his complicated relationship with his home community, his university studies in Galway, and his explorations of Dublin’s gay nightlife. In this paper, I focus primarily on the last of these and consider what is at stake in Ó Conghaile’s portrayal of cruising, bathhouses, nightclubs, and other queer aspects and uses of Dublin’s urban landscape specifically through the medium of Irish, which is often taken to represent the most socially and culturally conservative aspects of Irish society. Ó Conghaile’s novel is keenly (and explicitly) aware of this tension between common associations with the Irish language 13 and the people, places, and — especially — actions that John Paul encounters. Given this awareness, I consider three aspects of the novel: its representations of cruising and other queer uses of urban space through the medium of Irish; its own reflections on the contradictions John Paul feels between his sexuality and the Irish-language community (in both Conamara and Dublin) to which he belongs; and the significance of its title, which idiomatically identifies its theme as coming of age but also literally suggests the sexuality at the heart of the novel. How do the novel at large and its main character in particular deal with the (presumed) disconnect between the conventions of Irish-language cultural expression and the manifestations of gay sexuality and culture that it represents? How does Sna Fir make space for gay (self-)expression in Irish, particularly within the urban environment of Dublin, where the Irish language has long had an ambivalent status? Conversely, how does the novel make space for Irish-language expression within the gay sexual culture it represents? Nathaniel Harrington is a Ph.D. candidate in the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. His dissertation looks at representations of reading in, and reading practices for, fantasy and science fiction in Scottish Gaelic and English, alongside the philosophy of Miguel de Unamuno. His other interests include contemporary denied-language poetics, what might be called “Celtic comparative literature”, contemporary literary theory, and meeting new cats. [email protected] * Socially Constructing Gay Urban Nights in the Films of William Friedkin Dr Kylo-Patrick Hart, Texas Christian University, United States of America This presentation analyzes the influential social construction of gay urban nights in two early films from director William Friedkin: 1970’s The Boys in the Band and 1980’s Cruising. Prior to those years in U.S. cinema history, mainstream audience members did not regularly encounter on-screen representations of common ways that gay urban men spend their evenings with similarly queer others. Friedkin’s films, in contrast, provided many viewers with new social information and unique insights, however distorted or exploitative they might be. The first Hollywood movie within which all of the principal characters are gay, The Boys in the Band is chock-full of loneliness, queer guilt, self-loathing, repression, interpersonal nastiness, and catty bitchery as it presents the emotionally draining interactions of a small group of gay men at a New York City birthday party, for one of their friends, over the course of a long night that goes horribly awry. Perhaps unsurprisingly, such representations of male homosexuality did not go over well with many gay viewers at the time of its release. Friedkin’s relationship with queer audience members became even more complicated a decade later with the filming and release of his next gay-themed project, Cruising, a sordid, exploitation-filled crime thriller about a serial killer who finds his victims at New York City’s leather bars and sex establishments. For many straight viewers (and others), the contents of these two films offered influential social constructions of gay urban nights and the individuals who experience them. Accordingly, this presentation will articulate both the representational strengths and shortcomings of these two noteworthy films with regard to their subject matter, acknowledging that — for better and for worse — they both portray a wider range of queerness than had been common in U.S. cinema prior to their releases. 14 Dr Kylo-Patrick R. Hart is chair of the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at Texas Christian University (USA), where he teaches courses in film and television history, theory, and criticism and queer media studies. He is the author of several books about media (including The AIDS Movie: Representing a Pandemic in Film and Television and Images for a Generation Doomed: The Films and Career of Gregg Araki), founding co-editor of the academic journal Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, and a recipient of the AEJMC Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Interest Group Leroy F. Aarons Award for Lifetime Contributions to LGBTQ Education and Research. [email protected] * Pain, Pleasure and Perversion in Camila Sosa Villada’s Las Malas (2019) Jean-Philippe Imbert, Dublin City University, Ireland This paper will look at the aesthetic treatment of pain, pleasure and perversion (established literary concepts) from the perspective of queer studies, using Las Malas, the diegesis of which is a diegesis of the night, of perverted life, which is also a transcending ode to transgender death. An homage to trans glory and a testament to trans pain Las malas (2019), blends the real and imagined, yet, somehow still manages to convey a stranger-than -fiction feel (Cocking 2021). Indeed, we will look at the dance of death between all the nights and all the spaces of this autofiction, which are haplessly choreographed in dysphoric theatres of abuse and assault, mistreatment, staging all the struggles that come with being poor, trans, and alone. But we will also see how Samiento Park, Camilla’s bedroom, or Tía Encarna’s home are also beautiful places where all happens, without glamorization or sensationalism. First we will see how painful spaces are perverted (that of bodies, of kinships and families, and identities). Then we will look at how pleasure allows for a transcending of perversion (Halberstam, 2018), through the beauty of sex work (Abel, 2021), the spatialisation of the nocturnal abject (Kristeva, 1980) and the celebrating of pain. Finally, we will look at the very role of queering which brings the movements of transgendering and transcendence together through the act of fiction writing, using Paul B. Preciado’s works. Jean-Philippe Imbert lectures in Comparative Literature and Sexuality Studies at Dublin City University. He runs a Research Centre called EROSS@DCU (Expressions, Research, Orientations: Sexuality Studies). He researches and publishes on literary and/or artistic Mexican, Irish or French 20th and 21st centuries, focusing on the relationship between sexuality, gender and the aesthetic treatment of evil, trauma, angst or perversion. He has been president of the ADEFFI (Association des Études Françaises et Francophones d'Irlande) and of the Irish Association of Mexican Studies. He has also curated international art exhibitions (photography) in Delhi, Dublin or Mexico City. [email protected] * 15 Excessive and Transgressive Emotions in the Literary Urban Night Hanne Juntunen, Tampere University, Finland This presentation takes a look at how emotions in the city night are depicted in historical literature, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Literary depictions do not only reflect the lived reality of the urban night, but it also helps create popular beliefs and understandings of the city at night. This means that how emotions in the urban night are depicted in literature has a bearing on people’s behaviour. During the timeframe, a dramatic change occurred in the societal attitudes concerning emotions and their proper display. Towards the beginning, emotions were considered best kept in check. Towards the end, as Romantic notions of deep feelings had become the dominating literary ideal, grand displays of emotion were the ideal – reflected in a variety of genres from Romantic poetry to gothic novels. However, using a combination of close reading and a digital method known as topic modelling, which automatically detects words that occur more often together than separately (thus identifying themes in the text), a data set of 700 texts from the seventeenth to the twentieth century was analysed. The theme of emotions emerged in all four centuries, and in a surprisingly similar guise. It appears that emotions are let loose in the urban night. Excessive, sometimes transgressive, emotions find their literary articulation even at a time when the ideal was refraining from showing too much emotion. Conflicting feelings occupy a confined textual space, existing side by side. These depictions are explored in the presentation with examples drawn directly from historical literature. Hanne Juntunen is a PhD Researcher of English language and literature at Tampere University, Finland. She is working on combining automated digital methods with qualitative literary analysis. Her research interests include thematics, conceptual metaphors, issues of literary spatiality and rhythmicity, and centre on the urban night in historical British literature. [email protected] * The Impact of COVID-19 on Queer Creatives Working in London Prof. Mark McCormack, University of Roehampton, United Kingdom & Prof. Fiona Measham, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom This paper examines the impact of social lockdowns on queer creatives and queer night-time communities in London. In the UK, nightclubs closed for 16 months from March 2020 to July 2021 with other licenced premises periodically closed across the course of three national lockdowns and varying regional restrictions. The paper is based on a research study undertaken between July 2021 and September 2021, funded by Arts Council. It draws on a survey of queer creatives (n=115), alongside seven focus groups and six in-depth interviews (n=43) with members of London’s queer creative industries and nightlife communities, including artists, producers, and venue owners. Social lockdowns impacted all areas of queer creatives lives, and in this presentation we document this through economic impact, on health and wellbeing, and culture and community. We document the profound economic impact of lockdown, with work vanishing and grants failing to cover many costs. We also show the diverse impact on health and well-being—while respondents felt a loss and experienced anxiety and stress, there was an initial relief that speaks to how queer nightlife was not sustainable prior to COVID-19. We also draw out how the dynamics of urban London impacted on the experience of lockdowns. Some 16 participants left London or felt depressed because of the costs of London living without its benefits, yet moving out of London meant separation from queer communities. Others started to explore and inhabit the city in different ways, such as making a point of socialising with friends in public parks or exploring peripheral open spaces such as Hackney Marshes. We also consider how the nature of London as a capital city afforded greater support but also more difficulties for queer nightlife. We conclude by making recommendations for how queer creatives and queer nightlife can be supported to a more sustainable future. Mark McCormack is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social Sciences and Director of the Centre for Equality, Justice and Social Change. Prior to Roehampton he was an Associate Professor at Durham University, where he was also Co-Director of its Centre for Sex, Gender and Sexuality. His research examines how social trends related to gender and sexuality map onto everyday experiences of individuals. A core focus has been documenting how the decrease in homophobia in Britain and the United States influences the experiences of young people, including an expansion of socially acceptable gendered behaviours for male youth and improvement in life experiences of gay and bisexual youth. His work also explores drag cultures, non-exclusive sexualities, consumption of pornography, social deviance and the interface of sexuality with illicit drug use. His research also explores the social impact of COVID-19, with a focus on sexual practices and sexual cultures. He has published on these areas in leading international journals including Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, Qualitative Research, Journal of Sex Research and Archives of Sexual Behavior, across more than 40 journal articles. [email protected] * Travels from the Underground: Hocquenghem’s Experiences of Nightlife and Unbelonging Dr Thomas Muzart, Duke University, United States of America Consistent with Guy Hocquenghem’s reluctance in Le Désir homosexuel (1972) to identify fully as a homosexual while being one, his travel guide entitled Le Gay voyage (1980) uses the trend of gay tourism while denouncing its contributions to capitalism and normativity. The “gay voyage” that Hocquenghem elaborates is not a safe trip to the Club Med at some gayfriendly destination but a way of visiting major Western metropolises (Amsterdam, Berlin, New York, San Francisco) from a minor point of view in order to map various places resisting the weakening of the radical aspect of sexual activism in the late 1970s. In my presentation, I will demonstrate how nightlife occupies a central role in this act of resistance that Jack Halberstam coined as the queering of time and space, and more recently as unworlding. Whether it is a stroll taken in Tiergarten Park in Berlin or a trip to the pier or an S/M club in New York, Hocquenghem’s night experiences explore cruising as a mode of unbecoming that challenges “the human and worlding (we are the world) and claims the space of the not or the nothing” (Halberstam). Because desire is singular, a subject engaging in cruising necessarily will make the urban space his own field and turn the cities into ghettos, which form a network interconnected by the drive of desire. Rather than finding satisfaction from the protective communal sense of the broad daylight ghetto, Hocquenghem favors an internal ghetto that every gay subject carries within himself. Transcending geographical, economic, and political boundaries and challenging the hegemonic structures they support, this internal ghetto represents finally what Heather Love considers as a necessary queer response to the tendency 17 of LGBT activism to focus on present and positivity, such as pride, over the injuries that have historically impacted non-normative sexual subjects. Dr Thomas Muzart is a Postdoctoral Associate in French Studies at Duke University. His research examines the correlation between sexuality, geographical mobility, and grassroots political movements in literary texts and cultural productions from the 1970s onward. The results of his work will be featured in the forthcoming special issue of CF&FS: SITES’ “The Shape of Things to Come.” Thomas also recently published a chapter in the volume Abdellah Taïa’s Queer Migrations: Non-Places, Affect, and Temporalities (Lexington Books, 2021) and is preparing a special issue entitled “Podcasting Disruptive Voices: New Narratives of Race, Gender & Sexuality” for the journal CFC Intersections in collaboration with Dr. Audrey Brunetaux. [email protected] * “We don’t talk about straight spaces”: Exploring the Landscape of Queer Women’s Nightlife Experiences in Cape Town Shannon O’Rourke, The Open University, United Kingdom This research, completed as part of an MA in Visual and Media Anthropology at FU Berlin, explored how queer women in Cape Town, South Africa, seek space and place in the city’s nightlife. While there are many designated social spaces for queer men, there is no formal space designated for queer women. Therefore, the women interviewed described a process of determining which nightlife places allowed for open expression of their sexualities. These spaces are discovered through one’s own lived experienced and the experiences of queer friends. A place becomes a space through encounters; a queer space can be created through the felt presence of queer people. In participant narratives, places are classified as queer or straight spaces, and individual experiences each contribute to a collective understanding of Cape Town’s queer landscape. Lynch (1960) states, “we are continuously engaged in the attempt to organize our surroundings, to structure and identify them” (509). Classifying places as queer/straight spaces allows queer people to structure their relationship to Cape Town around experiences of both belonging and discomfort. All participants discussed how race and selfpresentation impact experiences of harassment and sense of safety. In addition to race playing a role in harassment, participants spoke about racial tensions in the queer scene and described how certain queer spaces can be very “white spaces.” Just as a queer space is created through the presence of queer people, white spaces are those that lack racial diversity and cater to white queer people. In addition to a paper, this presentation will include a map of queer spaces in Cape Town (identified by participants) and short audio segments of participant reflections. Shannon O’Rourke is a current PhD Candidate in Social Psychology at The Open University in the UK. Her PhD research explores the leadership experiences of individuals who identify as LGBQ+ and examines what these experiences may reveal about norms, marginalization, and power relations in leadership and in workplaces. While this project is focused on sexual identity, this research includes transgender/non-binary folks who identify as LGBQ+. Shannon holds a BA in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia and an MA in Visual and Media Anthropology from Freie Universität Berlin. Along with several years of ethnographic research experience, Shannon has worked as a qualitative research analyst on HIV prevention 18 projects in South Africa, Kenya, and the USA. She is passionate about developing ways to share research outside of academia through different forms of audio/visual media. [email protected] * Bitter Baptisms: Darkness as Site of Queer Identity in the Poetry of Valentine Penrose Isabelle Pyle, Lancaster University, United Kingdom Surrealism’s affinity for the exploration of transgressive sexualities and identities presents itself most explicitly in the work of its women artists. Valentine Penrose uses the avant-garde and its rebellion against the tyranny of logic as a space in which to perform queer identity— in particular, her portrayals of queer love and sexuality appear most frequently entwined with mythological imagery and the night. Within her collections, the night becomes a place where logic unravels, and depictions of lesbian desire alongside mythological figures of monsters and deities permeate this liberated environment. The use of darkness and dream logic in her poetry will be examined as a fundamentally avant-garde gesture that posits the night as an environment distant from the heteronormative and phallogocentric, resisting rationality and observability. Penrose uses the night and it’s paralogisms to present a disorienting world where humanity and myth intermingle; drawing from a queer phenomenological analysis, this presentation will argue that the use of darkness as a device to disorient the reader is a reclamation of agency by Penrose as a queer woman artist. This disorientation plays out both spatially and temporally—in the opacity of darkness, it’s facilitation of the unreal, and the nonlinear procession of days and nights, leaving the night as its own, independent sphere. This presentation will detail the ways in which these disorientations subvert even the avant-garde nature of surrealism and broadens its scope beyond what was achieved by more well know canonical surrealists. Isabelle Pyle is a PhD candidate at Lancaster University, with AHRC-NWCDTP funding following her completed MLang at the same institution. Her thesis concerns the use of mythological imagery in women's surrealism, and the ways in which identity is constructed for women in surrealism through a queer phenomenological lens. This partly draws from her MA dissertation, translating the surrealist poetry of Valentine Penrose, and her BA dissertation translating the philosophical novel Tombeau d'Achille, by Vincent Delecroix. She is currently teaching the first-year cultural module on the French Revolution. [email protected] * Queer Prairie Punk wahkohtowin: Nightlife Kinship in Jas Morgan’s nîtisânak Dr Kai Pyle, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States of America Jas Morgan’s 2018 memoir, nîtisânak, vividly reflects on their coming-of-age as a queer/trans Indigenous person on the Canadian prairies in Regina, Saskatchewan. A significant portion of the book focuses on Morgan’s experiences with Regina’s punk scene in the early 2000s, where they learned from their queer kin both the exhilarating joys of nightlife and the dangers of predominantly white patriarchal punk spaces. Their memoir consistently refuses translation; sometimes this is literal, in the case of kinship terms in the Cree language that are present throughout the text. The refusal of translation also comes through in Morgan’s repeated 19 insistence that they are not interested in hiding their pain or “ground[ing] [their] story in neoliberalism” but also that they do not “owe” the reader their pain, either. I read the sections depicting Regina’s punk scene for the tensions Morgan describes between the freedom they experienced for the first time there, and the ever-present risk of violence due to the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the nightlife spaces they moved through. I argue that Morgan’s telling of this place and period is rooted in a sense of queer wahkohtowin, or queer kinship. wahkohtowin is a central concept in Cree and Metis understandings of the world, and by bringing together Indigenous practices of kinship with queer chosen family, Morgan challenges distinctions often assumed between the Indigenous and the urban, the queer, the punk. Their narration portrays queer wahkohtowin as a kind of web-making, the creation of a network of kin who hold each other together even in the dangerous space of the urban punk prairie night. Through memories of this web of queer Indigenous kinship, Morgan constructs a narrative untranslated into the language of pure liberation or victimhood. Dr Kai Pyle is a Metis and Ojibwe writer and researcher from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Currently they are a postdoctoral fellow in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where they are working on a project investigating queer and trans Indigenous kinship-making practices through the lenses of language, history, and literature. In addition to their work on queer Indigeneity, they are also deeply invested in language revitalization of the Michif, Ojibwe, and Cree languages. [email protected] * Towards a Theory of the Rave Alec Roth, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium & University of Vienna, Austria In this paper, the rave will be considered geographically as an event that obtains in space between humans and their environment. I theorize the rave as a particular type of event but also as a mode of becoming. This paper proposes different answers to the questions: what is a rave? How does raving affect participants’ bodies and identities? I will begin with a Deleuzian reading of the rave as developed by Arun Saldanha in “Trance and visibility at dawn: racial dynamics in Goa’s rave scene.” Saldanha theorizes raving but without attending to the specificity of the concept. Whereas Saldanha focuses on the dynamics of race, I will concentrate on the relation between sexuality and Deleuzian musicology. On this topic, I consult the works of queer theorists Paul Preciado (Pornotopia) and José Esteban Muñoz (Cruising Utopia) to theorize the rave as de-subjectivizing. I argue that the rave as an event can be considered an instance of what Friedrich Nietzsche calls the ecstatic dissolution of the self. Raves contain the utopian potential of deterritorialization and yet present the risk of falling into what Saldanha calls, “the chaos of black holes, microfascism, and the death drive.” Alec Roth is an Urban Geographer studying at the Universities of Brussels and Vienna as an Erasmus Mundus Scholar. His research interests are related to the geography of nightlife, with a particular focus on Deleuzian musicology and queer subjectivation. As a dedicated raver and emerging techno DJ, Alec is in a unique position to study how music and dance rearticulate bodies and identities as we move through space. Alec graduated from Rutgers University (NJ, USA) with degrees in Environmental Policy and Portuguese. He previously worked on naturebased solutions to climate change at Conservation International, National Wildlife Federation, and Environmental Defense Fund. In 2016, Alec published an article in the Climate and 20 Carbon Law Review on the availability of forest carbon credits for the international aviation industry. [email protected] * Feminist Nocturnes: Women Reclaiming the City: Workshop Begonya Saez Tajafuerce, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain Maria Micaela Coppola, Università di Trento, Italy Jean-Philippe Imbert, Dublin City University, Ireland Edyta Just, Linköpings Universitet, Sweden In this roundtable we will explore from a multidisciplinary perspective the heterogeneous strategies, actions and narratives by which women and queer communities and subjects have reclaimed their right to safely and freely move through public spaces at night, while questioning and re-defining the very concepts of public spaces or vulnerable subjects. Begonya Saez Tajafuerce will tackle the universal and/or global dimension and the innovative methodological character of the societal challenges carried out by Nocturnas (https://issuu.com/punt6/docs/nocturnas_eng), a project developed by Punt 6 – a cooperative of feminist architects, sociologists and urban planners in Barcelona – on the life of women nightshift workers in the Metropolitan Area of the city. Maria Micaela Coppola will explore narrative ways of reclaiming urban environments and the night for women and lesbians by focusing on the work of contemporary Irish poet Mary Dorcey. Far from being mere nocturnal songs or divertimento, Dorcey’s ‘nocturnes’ make of poetry and narratives the site of struggle and protest as well as of celebration and self- and community empowerment. JeanPhilippe Imbert will discuss the shifting perception of the nocturnal city LGBT migrants have, be it at the start of, during, and at the end of their exile to Paris. We will see how reclaiming a new city to tantamount to reclaiming one’s identity, out of a nightscape of fear, shame, unsafety and trauma. Edyta Just will bring forward the theories of embodied and embedded subject, which can constitute a thinking apparatus, a theoretical and methodological toolbox that can engender actions aiming at the creation of the inclusive public spaces. Dr Begonya Saez Tajafuerce (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) is since 2008 Tenured Associate Professor at the Philosophy Department at the UAB. She has been part of the interdisciplinary international Research Group (SGR) Body and Textuality (http://cositextualitat.uab.es) since it was founded in 2003 at the UAB. She has opened and promoted the line of research on Women, Gender, and Queer studies at the Philosophy Department since her appointment. This has resulted in a significant array of activities, such as the visit in July 2011 by Prof. Judith Butler and Prof. Adriana Cavarero. Dr Maria Micaela Coppola is associate professor of English literature at the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento (Italy). She is the co-director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies of the University of Trento. Coppola holds a MA in Women and Literature from University of Hull (UK) and a PhD in comparative literature and literary theories from the University of Trento. She has published on twentieth century and contemporary women writers in English, lesbian literature, and feminist cultural periodicals; and on fictional and cultural representations of dementia. Her current research focuses on the 21 psychological humanities and the role of fictional narratives in promoting of well-being and building inclusive and affective communities. Mr Jean-Philippe Imbert lectures in Sexuality Studies and Comparative literature at Dublin City University. He has created the first MA in Sexuality Studies of Ireland and was President of ADEFFI (French Studies, Ireland) as well as Mexican Studies Ireland. He was Research and Education Officer for IASSCS (The International Association for the Studies of Sexuality, Culture and Society) and hosted the 2015 World Conference in Sexuality Studies. He publishes on literary and artistic representations of Mexican, Irish and French 20th and 21st centuries, focusing on the relationship between sexuality, gender and the aesthetic treatment of evil, trauma, angst or perversion. He is in charge of EROSS@DCU where he has supervised 16 PhDs relating to 1) the relationships between contemporary sexuality, art and literature (from a masculinity studies or queer theory angle) 2) sexual artivism 3) the aesthetics of queer /LGBT sexual politics through artistic expression and organised about 20 conferences in gender and sexualities. He has also curated art exhibitions in India, Latin America or Europe. Dr Edyta Just is an associate professor and senior lecturer at the Unit of Gender Studies, Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University. She is also a director and coordinator of InterGender International Consortium and a former chair and member of Atgender, The European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation. Her field of expertise includes Gender Studies, Pedagogy (founding member of Teaching and Learning Differently Network) and Medical Humanities (affiliate of Centre for Medical Humanities and Bioethics, Linköping University). Edyta Just’s experience with Gender Studies’ conceptual, theoretical and methodological frameworks dates back to her MA training (2000-2002) and PhD training (2004-2009), and has continued with the work at Gender Studies Units at Utrecht University (The Netherlands), Lodz University (Poland), and Linköping University (Sweden). * “You would hear about it, you just knew“: Queer(ing) Aachen Between Dusk and Dawn Pepe Sánchez-Molero, Independent Scholar, Germany In the history of queer spatial production, nightlife has been a context in which safe spaces have traditionally originated, reproduced and even thrived. It has played an essential role in providing an opportunity to not only experiment with identities, sexualities, and expressions, but also in creating a playground in which to do so. Queer communities have produced spaces in varying architectural, urban and geographical scales (e.g. from the bar to the “Gaybourhood”), in different temporalities (full-time institutions to temporary events), multiple dimensions (physical and/or virtual), each space with its own functions, uses and processes. These spatial productions share common historical origins in the underground, the margins, the alternative, creative, activist queer scenes. Being oppressed by heteronormative morals and systems, these physical, symbolic, and political social constructions have been able to remain resilient by reinventing themselves through time and adapting to societies’ crises. Queer urban research proves that these spaces are nowadays closing more and more in Western cities, while homophobic and transphobic violence is on the rise. Especially since Covid, cities are struggling to keep their safe nightlife spaces open – not only metropolises, but especially smaller cities and towns, with the added difficulty of having less users and financial support, often even lacking a defined queer scene to fall back on. The town of Aachen in the far West of Germany has its own small history of queer infrastructure, always in the shadow of the 22 neighbouring Cologne. Nevertheless, the past 50 years prove a variety of Third Places, informal queerings of public spaces, and innovative solutions created “by and for” queer groups. This paper focuses on three queer “spatial productions” found in Aachen’s nightlife: the queer bar/pub, the queer party/event, and cruising spots/“Klappen”. Analysing the historical development of these typologies and looking into specific examples, we can learn how nightlife has shaped the queer scene in Aachen and how structural crises have been met by spatial innovation and resilience. Pepe Sánchez-Molero (he/they) collaborates internationally with design studios, universities, and organisations in the fields of architectural, urban and regional planning and research, exhibition and communication design, illustration and activism. This article is based on Pepe’s Master’s thesis, which explores queer spatial production in Aachen (Germany) during the past five decades. [email protected] * Journey Towards the Dark: César Moro Sadomasochiste Dr Karla Segura Pantoja, CY Cergy Paris Université César Moro remained rather discreet about his views on politics, religion, and sexuality. In his poems published during his lifetime, his homosexuality is barely hinted at, giving place to a queer strategy face to the conservative societies he lived in. Indeed, César Moro was born in Lima, Peru and lived there until 1925, when he moved to Paris in order to become a dancer. There he joined the surrealist movement and started writing poems in French. Moro moved back to Peru in 1933 and organised collective activities, amongst which a surrealist exhibition in 1935. But he had to leave his home country again in 1938 because of a censored republican publication he was involved with and was then exiled to Mexico. Nevertheless, queer eroticism is latent in Moro's poetic work. His poetry and his letters express fierce passion as well as the violent ritual of love. Sexuality is encrypted in a secret code, as the lexicon of the fragmentation of the lovers’ bodies. In his poetic work Moro builds an intimate, free and nocturnal space where references to fragmentation and darkness lead to a loss of identity and gender. The sexual act unfolds in the night like a cataclysm through the vocabulary of the elements. Some books from his personal library bear the ex-libris “César Moro Sado-masochiste”, a seal that also appears in several manuscripts from his archives, revealing an aesthetic practice that plays with pleasure, pain and identity, as well as his strategy to express a marginal sexuality, well beyond the heteronormative precepts of André Breton. Dr Karla Segura Pantoja is a research associate at the LT2D research team at the CY Cergy Paris Université. She defended her thesis on the surrealists' exile in Mexico in December 2018, for which she studied archival material in France, Mexico, Germany and the USA. She is member of the editorial board of the French Journal Cahiers Benjamin Péret since January 2017. She contributed to two digital library projects by the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris concerning the Archives of Modernity and Art Books of the 20th century. In 2018, she was granted a research stay at the Musée national Picasso de Paris. She has also collaborated with the Fundación Leonora Carrington in the constitution of its digital archives. Her lectures and writings deal with modern art and literature, with a special interest in Surrealism. She has worked on Latin-American Surrealism for the Tate Modern and has 23 recently translated and studied Leonora Carrington’s collected plays for their French edition (Fage: 2022). [email protected] * Exploring Queer Potentialities of Darkness through l’écriture féminine Irina Shirobokova, City University of New York, United States of America The dualism of light/darkness did not arise as a symbolic formula for morality until primordial darkness had been split into light and dark (Anzaldua,1987:49). This contribution is an effort to debunk the Enlightenment myth associated with darkness as the “other” of light–absence, lack, negativity. Through the concept of darkness, I suggest engaging with geography and queer-feminist’s psychoanalysis. This enables respatializing traditional spatial hierarchies where dispossessed female/subaltern body, sexualities, stories, and lands were considered as “dark”/ “ungeographical other”. Methodologically, I start by reconsidering psychoanalysis’s metaphorical language. The latter is filled with spatial coordinates and is never exclusively metaphorical but addresses the very core of material realities. Hélène Cixous used Freud’s metaphor of the “dark continent” (women/female sexuality) to emphasize other potentialities of this location such as the lack of control. I juxtapose her approach to the ideas of black feminists’ geography. Where the “margin is a site of resistance”, paradoxical and powerful site, “the last place they thought of” that is never opposed but integral to the production of space (McKittrick, 2006). Thus, being in the darkness is a fundamentally spatialized experience that incites a political stance–valuable, resistant, and experimental. Empirics were obtained from long-term fieldwork in the Russian industrial Arctic. Drawing on it, the aim of this project is to reassess darkness in a way that enables unfolding the potentialities of female/subaltern’s position in this historically masculinist and colonial context. In particular, through developed by Ciхous’ method of écriture féminine (female writing) that does not belong exclusively to women. She suggests that anyone can occupy the marginalized position, therefore, to shake the stability of exiting order. Considering darkness as a resource for the exploration of pragmatic, erotic, and utopian knowledge, I use this embodied writing practice aiming to challenge the infantilization of interlocutors, rethinking their agencies in co-emancipation. Irina Shirobokova is a PhD student at the Environmental psychology interdisciplinary program at the City University of New York, and a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg. She is specializing in political anthropology, urban geography, and transdisciplinary research with a focus on feminist experimental and collaborative methodologies, and embodied knowledge production. She worked in a number of projects of socio-spatial development and master-planning (from neighborhood to city scale), participatory planning in many Russian cities, also in Kazakhstan. Within the last 10 years, she was co-organizer of various research, art-science, and educational projects in Russia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, supported by: Nordic Council of Ministers, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Goethe Institute, German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Swedish Institute and etc. She currently works on the international research project “Enhancing liveability of small shrinking cities through co-creation” (supported by ERA.Net RUS Plus and RFBR) and in “Urban Margins, Global Transitions: Everyday Security and Mobility in Four Russian Cities” with the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Since 2018 she is the leading researcher and coordinator of the international art-science project “Female Arctic” devoted to women and subalterns’ empowerment in the Russian industrial Arctic. It is a collaborative 24 project developed jointly with different initiatives in the Russian Arctic, Swedish and Icelandic artists, and geographers. [email protected] * Night Skies, Exit Wounds, and Queer Temporalities in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) Sara Soler i Arjona, University of Barcelona, Spain In his poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), Ocean Vuong employs the symbol of the ‘exit wound’ to explore the material consequences of war and violence, especially drawing on his own experience as a Vietnamese refugee. As an injury inflicted by a bullet, an exit wound serves a double meaning: whilst it is a proof of past violence and loss, it also becomes a source of regeneration and healing. Such a dualistic focus on trauma and survival equally permeates Vuong’s debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). Written as a letter to his illiterate mother, Vuong’s non-linear narrative excavates the protagonist’s family history, shifting between past and present, to examine his identity as a queer diasporic subject living in today’s America. I analyze the novel’s temporal fragmentation as a formulation of queer time: by rejecting the heteronormative structure of temporality that normalizes linear patterns of repetition and progression, the novel envisions an alternative understanding of time where the queer subject is endowed with agency (Muñoz 2009; Freeman 2010). Jumping between Vietnam and the US, Vuong’s narrative contests dominant narratives of war―those embedded within US imperialism―and sheds light on the conflict’s ‘exit wounds’, the losses it leaves behind. As a result, the voices of those who have been silenced by Western representation are brought to the fore. At the same time, this temporal mechanism reveals the ongoing histories of violence that queer diasporic subjects must face. The night becomes a catalyst for such an exploration―from the protagonist’s account of his grandmother’s war stories and his mother’s PTSD nightmares, to his coming to terms with his own sexuality. Vuong’s ultimate emphasis, nonetheless, is always on survival: the possibility of imagining a more hospitable future begins in the critique of the present through an evocation of the past (Muñoz 2009). Sara Soler i Arjona is a PhD student at University of Barcelona and a predoctoral researcher at ADHUC Research Center for Theory, Gender, Sexuality (University of Barcelona). After graduating in English Studies at the University of Barcelona (2017), she went on to pursue her academic career at University College Dublin, studying a Master’s Degree in Gender, Sexuality and Culture (2020). Her research has been structured around queer studies and literary studies, especially in relation to contemporary literature. Her PhD dissertation analyzes the relationship between queer identities in contemporary North American fiction and the spaces and temporalities that they inhabit, with special emphasis on the strategies that question and destabilize the dominant system of representation. [email protected] * 25 Queer Manhattan, Broadway Brevities and the Figure of the Predatory Lesbian Professor Will Straw, McGill University, Montreal, Canada My presentation will look at the cartographies of queer New York nights outlined in the 13installment series “Nights in Fairyland,” published in the notorious scandal magazine Broadway Brevities in 1924-25. While queer historians have often referenced this series, coverage has been limited by the difficulty of access to the magazines. My paper will look at the complete series in relation to other varieties of the New York gossip-focused press of the 1920s, including the Harlem-based “Inter-State Tattler” (1922-1932). A central focus of my paper will be the career of Florence Beery, a Los Angeles-based lesbian who came to New York in 1924 carrying copies of her thinly fictionalized novel For Love of Women and was immediately investigated by the New York Police Department. Broadway Brevities played a key role in fanning the flames of feigned indignation at her presence in New York, as part of a broader treatment of queer nightlife in which the predatory lesbian was denounced as a more dangerous inhabitant of such nightlife than the figure of the gay man. An additional focus will be the denunciations, in Broadway Brevities and other forms of print culture, of the Algonquin Hotel as a key site of queer sociability and as the alleged “headquarters” of lesbian culture in Manhattan. Central to such denunciations, in a period marked by the growing interplay of Broadway-based theatrical circles and an ascendant film industry, were claims about the existence of networks of queer women which served to connect circles in New York City and Los Angeles. Professor Will Straw is the author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America (Andrew Roth Gallery, 2006) and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Rock and Pop (with Simon Frith and John Street, 2001), Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture (with Alexandra Boutros, 2010), Formes Urbaines (with Anouk Bélanger and Annie Gérin, 2014), and Night Studies: Regards croisés sur les nouveaux visages de la nuit (Grenoble: Editions Elya, 2020.) He has published over 170 articles on music, cinema, popular culture and the urban night. Still Cruisin' (After All of These Years) Emilio Williams, Georgia State University, United States of America Following Walter Benjamin's recipe to "blast open the continuum of history," this transdisciplinary, fragmented, performative paper braids three lines of inquiry: historical representation of night-time gay cruising in fragmented first-person, non-fictional writing; the auto-ethnography of the author and his encounters in urban queer sites; and visual representations of men looking for sex with other men in collage art. The historical survey looks at the textual shape of the fragmented primary sources and any thematic commonalities, including goading sexualities, deployment of street-smarts against dangers, and unexpected moments of tenderness. The survey travels chronologies towards past night-time queer sites in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, London, Paris, Madrid, with consideration also given to documented cruising locations outside the North Atlantic and ongoing global cases of criminalized same-sex. This vernacular survey will cruise beyond the usual suspects of the incipient queer canon to tap into mostly-forgotten, or recently re-discovered, non-fictional accounts by Patrick Cowley. 26 Emilio Williams is a bilingual (Spanish/English) award-winning writer and educator. His queer, fragmented essays have appeared in Hinterland Magazine (UK), Imagined Theatres, Brevity (USA), The Writing Disorder (USA), and the anthology Beyond Queer Words (Germany). He researches forgotten queer histories, later deploying them in essays and on his performative, collage lectures. As a playwright, his theatre has been produced in Argentina, Estonia, France, Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington DC. His play Smartphones, A Pocket-Size Farce is included in the anthology New Plays from Spain, published by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at CUNY. His play Camas y mesas was published by Ediciones Irreverentes in 2010. Awards include a Teaching Fellowship and an MFA Fellowship Award in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Best International Show for Medea’s got some issues at United Solo Festival, New York; and IV Premio El Espectáculo Teatral for Camas y Mesas. A freelance scholar, he currently holds adjunct positions at DePaul University, Columbia College Chicago, Dominican University, Georgia State University, and Chicago Dramatists where he is a Resident Playwright. He holds an MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago [email protected] 27 List of Participants Niccolò Amelii, "G. D'Annunzio" University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy [email protected] Dr Deniz Başar, Boğaziçi University, Turkey [email protected] Angelos Bollas, Dublin City University, Ireland [email protected] David Carroll, Dublin City University, Ireland [email protected] Dr Maria Micaela Coppola, University of Trento, Italy [email protected] Antonia de Michele, University of Padua, Italy [email protected] Cristina Diamant, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania [email protected] Mary Dorcey, Ireland [email protected] Claire Downey, University of Limerick, Ireland [email protected] Ignacio Espinosa, Universidad Internacional de Ecuador, Ecuador [email protected] Dr Anna Ferrari, Università di Padova, Italy [email protected] Dr Kit Fryatt, Dublin City University, Ireland [email protected] Mathias Foit, Free University of Berlin, Germany [email protected] Dr Patricia García, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain [email protected] Dr Andrea Gremels, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany [email protected] 28 Dr Ann-Marie Hanlon, Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland [email protected] Nathaniel Harrington, University of Toronto, Canada [email protected] Dr Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, Texas Christian University, United States of America [email protected] Dr Michael Hinds, Dublin City University, Ireland [email protected] Jean-Philippe Imbert, Dublin City University, Ireland [email protected] Hanne Juntunen, Tampere University, Finland [email protected] Dr Edyta Just, Linköpings Universitet, Sweden [email protected] Dr Vanessa Lacey, Gendercare, Ireland [email protected] Dr Donal Mulligan, Dublin City University, Ireland [email protected] Eoin Mac Carney, Dublin City University, Ireland [email protected] Dr Seán Mac Risteaird, Dublin City University, Ireland [email protected] Prof. Mark McCormack, University of Roehampton, United Kingdom [email protected] Máighréad Medbh, Dublin City University, Ireland [email protected] Dr Sarah Meehan O’Callagan, Dublin City University, Ireland [email protected] Dr Thomas Muzart, Duke University, United States of America [email protected] David O’Mullane, Dublin City University, Ireland [email protected] Shannon O’Rourke, The Open University, United Kingdom [email protected] 29 Isabelle Pyle, Lancaster University, United Kingdom [email protected] Dr Kai Pyle, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States of America [email protected] Alec Roth, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium & University of Vienna, Austria [email protected] Dr Begonya Saez Tajafuerce, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain [email protected] Pepe Sánchez-Molero, Independent Scholar, Germany [email protected] Dr Karla Segura Pantoja, CY Cergy Paris Université [email protected] Irina Shirobokova, City University of New York, United States of America [email protected] Sara Soler i Arjona, University of Barcelona, Spain [email protected] Olga Springer, Dublin City University, Ireland [email protected] Will Straw, McGill University, Canada [email protected] Emilio Williams, Dominican University, United States of America [email protected] 30 Cultural Programme Sex and the City Tour  Walking tour  Day: Friday May 27  Start time: 18:30, GPO (General Post Office), O’Connell Street (facing the Spire), Dublin 1  Duration: 90 mins  Content: … Monto… Talbot Street… Capel Street… Crane lane… Eustace Street… South William Street… Fabulous Flikkers  Exhibition Finissage  Day: Saturday May 28  Start time: 20:00  Location: Outhouse, LGBT Community Resource Centre, 105 Capel Street, D01R290, Dublin 1  Duration: 60 mins 31 Conference Organisation Patricia García, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain Fringe Urban Narratives Urbanfringes.com Jean-Philippe Imbert, Dublin City University, Ireland EROSS@DCU Dcu-eross.com Scientific Committee Angelos Bollas, Dublin City University, Ireland Fernanda Bustamante Escalona, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain David Carroll, Dublin City University, Ireland Reem Lebbar, Dublin City University, Ireland Michael Monaghan, Dublin City University, Ireland Eoin McCarney, Dublin City University, Ireland Sarah Meehan O’Callagan, Dublin City University, Ireland David O’Mullane, Dublin City University, Ireland Catherine Rottenberg, University of Nottingham, U.K. Olga Springer, Dublin City University, Ireland Caroline West, Dublin City University, Ireland 32 33