Call for Papers for Session

Queer(ing) Medieval Art (1)

Queer Spatiality

61st International Congress on Medieval Studies

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI

May 14-16, 2026

Due by 15 September 2025

De balneis Puteolanis, Italy, ca. 1400 (New York, Morgan Library and Museum, detail of MS G.74 fol. 19r)

Centering the relational as subject, this session defines spatiality through the interpersonal and intermedial, seeking papers addressing queer places and spaces. Although typically evocative of architectural studies, we envision "Queer Spatiality" as an expansive category, encompassing a variety of subfields, including performance studies, sensory studies, and textual studies. This session seeks papers addressing the places and spaces where queer people moved, lived, died, bathed, and made. Where was medieval queerness practiced, resisted, felt out, negotiated, managed, materialized, forbidden, or visualized?

Presenters might address how liquid waterworks or textile architectures shaped queer medieval identities and communities, discussing, for example, caravansaries or bathhouses, or soundscapes generated by itinerant sexworkers' pavilions. How did class factor into making and archiving queer space? Other subjects might include the production of queer olfactory zones, "unsettled" living or settlement rejection (broadly defined, from migration to enslavement), burial settings as utopian community building, explorations of the materials, construction methods, and iconographies that characterized or archived these spaces and architectures, etc. We particularly welcome papers with a secular/non-Christian medieval queer or Trans* focus and especially papers on lesbians/wlw.

*The ICMA is able to offer Kress Foundation reimbursements for this session for domestic travel up to $600; overseas travel up to $1200: https://www.medievalart.org/kress-travel-grant

Please submit proposals, including an abstract of no more than 100 words, via the ICMS-Kalamazoo Confex website by September 15, 2025: https://icms.confex.com/icms/2026/prelim.cgi/Session/7380

Questions? Contact Kris Racaniello (kris.racaniello@gmail.com) or Erika Loic (eloic@fsu.edu).

Please consider submitting to one of two Queer(ing) Medieval Art sessions at Kalamazoo! This IN-PERSON session is sponsored by the ICMA (reimbursements for domestic travel up to $600; overseas travel up to $1200).