"Queer Medievalism"
University of Chicago
October 16, 2020
Kris Trujillo, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

A growing body of scholarship has brought important attention to the co-opting of the Middle Ages by white supremacist myths of national origin. But in what ways has or can the medieval offer a resource for political projects of resistance and liberation? This session will explore how and why queer theorists, artists, and writers re-signified the medieval in the face of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and 1990s. And it will ask how these aesthetic, political, and even spiritual strategies may inform contemporary responses to the inequities the COVID-19 pandemic rendered more acute.

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