DIAS lecture, Carolyn Dinshaw, "Sodomite, Gay, Queer, Trans: A 14th-Century Document and Its Afterlives"
DIAS lecture on 5 February 2020 by Carolyn Dinshaw (New York University) on "Sodomite, Gay, Queer, Trans: A 14th-Century Document and Its Afterlives". The lecture will take place in the DIAS conference room (SDU) at 12:15-1:15 PM CET
On February 5, Carolyn Dinshaw (New York University) will be giving a talk at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Southern Denmark. Carolyn Dinshaw is Dean for the Humanities as well as Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and English at New York University.
Visit the DIAS website for more information
Abstract
In 1394 in London a person named John Rykener but calling themself Eleanor was arrested in the act of having paid sex with a man from out of town. In a deposition Rykener gave a detailed account of their life as sex worker. Scholars as well as artists (and some scholar-artists) have taken up, researched, imagined, written, danced, and performed with puppets the life of Rykener based on this document. In this talk Dinshaw goes back to the original record and forward to modern and contemporary interpretations of it in order to discern who Rykener was then, and how they are understood - and indeed animated - now.