CFP: BARS Digital Sympsium: Expanding Queer Romanticisms

Friday 25^th July 2025

In 2004, a special issue of Romanticism on the Net brought together existing work on queering Romanticism and proposed a list of suggestions for how such scholarship might expand.¹ Despite this, work on queer Romanticism continues to be difficult to find, although a great amount of work is being done which might broadly be called queer due to a focus on liminality, non-normative genders and transgressive sexualities. This symposium on Queer Romanticism aims to bring some of this scholarship together and create a dialogue around what constitutes Queer Romanticism today. It presents an important opportunity for connecting scholars in what is currently quite a disparate field. Indeed, queer approaches to Romanticism can be found within existing scholarship on the Gothic, gender, empire and orientalism, and class, to name but a few.

Whilst participants are very welcome to offer their own definitions of queerness – especially as it relates to Romanticism – we suggest as a starting point Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s definition of queerness as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically”.² Such a definition encompasses both historical and biographical work on queerness, as well as more textual or theoretical approaches. It also allows for research on Romantic genders and sexualities which may not consider queerness as a primary focus, but which nevertheless challenge heteronormative essentialisms in important and interesting ways.

¹ Michael O’Rourke and David Collings, ‘Introduction: Queer Romanticisms: Past, Present, and Future’, Romanticism on the Net, 36–37, 2004, doi:10.7202/011132ar.

²Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Duke University Press, 1993) p.8.