Further Travels of Theorygirl
I'd been working on the paper forever, it felt like -- the rather formidably titled "The Queer Theory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick at the Edges of the Popular Romance Genre," to be delivered at the second annual Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, to be held in Brussels, Belgium, Thursday August 5 through Saturday August 7.
And it was a pretty sensible plan, I thought, to show up in Brussels on Wednesday, to shake off my jet lag, make some final, fussy, changes to the paper and get the thing slimmed down at long last, to the 20 minute length the conference organizers had asked for, before I delivered it at at the 11:00 am panel on Friday, the conference's second day.
A sensible, even a good plan. But a plan, alas, that required the cooperation of American Airlines and the weather (as in no thunderstorms in Chicago in August).
So instead, I and my husband Michael found ourselves dragging our wheelies into the Paleis der Academiën (Palace of Academia) some fifteen minutes before the event got underway on Thursday, trying our best not to yawn through a day of fascinating and exciting presentations (Eros! Agape! Shame and Other Good Stuff!) before we tumbled into bed.
We figured we'd sleep in, say to nine or so, before I did the final polishing on my piece. I'm an early riser, accustomed to getting to my desk around dawn. I honestly can't remember ever sleeping past nine in the morning...
...but you see where this storyline is inevitably tending, don't you? So you're surely less surprised than I was when all-too-suddenly I was awakened by the phone ringing in our hotel room, to hear that we'd slept until eleven on Friday, the morning when I was supposed to present my ideas... at a panel that was scheduled to start at, uh, eleven.
Yes, I told long-suffering conference organizer, Professor Eric Selinger. Yes, of course I'll be there. And yes, I was soon running down the street to the Palais, talk clutched in one hand and flash drive (with my first PowerPoint ever on it) in the other.
Amazingly, it came off quite well. Theory, I think you could say, was served -- in my case in under twenty minutes (since the people who'd gotten there in time to present first went way over). And since I do have a pretty good sense of the absurd, I simply rolled with it, felt pretty good about what I was saying, and even pulled a decent ending line out of nowhere.
And now that it's over, I think that I just might have a take on this strange business of how and why recent popular romance, which any non-romance reader would certainly assume to be the most heterosexual of reading activities (not to speak of heterosexist) -- has suddenly developed such an exuberant engagement (at least at the margins of the genre) with m/m and m/m/f love and sex.
All based, of course, on the Queer Theory of the brilliant Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who died last year after a long bout with cancer, and whom I deeply regret never having met.
And the substance of which will constitute my next Hoyden post, written at leisure and at my own desk rather than at O'Hare -- which is where Michael and I are now, en route to home after that delicious if all-too-brief trip to Brussels and thence to Amsterdam, a city we fell in love with for its overwhelming richness of art, canals and bicycles and coffeehouses, delightful cityscapes (as a small person, I take especial joy in small spaces deftly arranged), and its huge, painterly skies. (Has anybody out there read Simon Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches? I've got to finally get to it.)
And although we saw oodles of extraordinary Big Great Art -- not to speak of contemplating sad, sober, awful history (the Anne Frank House is not to be missed), what I want to write about in the remainder of this post is the lightest, most frivolous of our sight-seeing expeditions, the whipped cream on top (also see below), our visit to Amsterdam's fantastic Museum of Bags and Purses (which my sweet and generous husband deserves hugs for having found in the guidebook, knowing I'd adore, and good-humoredly suffering through).
Because what is the fascination for women about handbags? Why can we never have enough of them and why are we willing to spend such indecent amounts for them -- Doreen, are you out there? -- even my beloved consignment shop Prada bag was hardly cheap (and who knows if it's even authentic). You'd think that if I could theorize m/m romance, I could take this on (at some point during the conference, IASPR guiding spirit Professor Sarah Franz said that "you could theorize all day, Pam").
Well, I can speculate, anyway.
Is it something about how we feel ourselves not entirely human without our stuff? Or, purse-shaped as we are, carrying our vital organs in the sacs of our bodies, do we somehow mimic that effect and dress it up?
Or some other bodily metaphor suggested by the Tassenmuseum's awesome, oldest piece, this "buckle bag [o
f goat leather from 16th century France] with 18 secret compartments was worn attached to a belt by men... a status symbol for men of the aristocracy"
but also reminding me childhood memories of those Breugel guys with their codpieces in the paintings section the World Book Encyclopedia.
While a few other marvels featured on the museum's web site prompting me to Hoyden-ish astonishment at the pure, spirited exuberance and also the wretched exce
ss of this stuff are:
This bridal bag of sablé beads, France, 18th century -- called sable because it's made of glass beads that are the size of a grain of sand, having a cross-section of between 0.5 and 0.6mm (did the beaders -- I imagine them as women -- go blind?)
Or this beaded bag with an image of a giraffe, France, ca. 1827, to commemorate the first giraffe shipped to what was perhaps the first Frenc
h zoo, a gift from the Egyptian viceroy to the French king Charles X, the giraffe (named Zarafa) "walked to Paris in 6 weeks, accompanied by 2 Egyptian carers and 100 cows that provided her with milk. The procession attracted immense crowds and on arriving in Paris she became the highpoint of the fashion season."
And if all roads lead to chicklit, this "Cupcake" evening bag, complet
ely covered in Swarovski crystals and featured in the film "Sex and the City ."
And reminding me, that since I'm having dessert, our feast of a trip is almost over and it'll soon be time to get on our plane for the last leg of our journey back to San Francisco...
Where I fully intend to let go of the theory jones for a while and write some romance for a change.
But until then, I'd love to hear your thoughts on handbags, Amsterdam, theory (queer and otherwise) or the joys of travel.
And it was a pretty sensible plan, I thought, to show up in Brussels on Wednesday, to shake off my jet lag, make some final, fussy, changes to the paper and get the thing slimmed down at long last, to the 20 minute length the conference organizers had asked for, before I delivered it at at the 11:00 am panel on Friday, the conference's second day.
A sensible, even a good plan. But a plan, alas, that required the cooperation of American Airlines and the weather (as in no thunderstorms in Chicago in August).
So instead, I and my husband Michael found ourselves dragging our wheelies into the Paleis der Academiën (Palace of Academia) some fifteen minutes before the event got underway on Thursday, trying our best not to yawn through a day of fascinating and exciting presentations (Eros! Agape! Shame and Other Good Stuff!) before we tumbled into bed.
We figured we'd sleep in, say to nine or so, before I did the final polishing on my piece. I'm an early riser, accustomed to getting to my desk around dawn. I honestly can't remember ever sleeping past nine in the morning...
...but you see where this storyline is inevitably tending, don't you? So you're surely less surprised than I was when all-too-suddenly I was awakened by the phone ringing in our hotel room, to hear that we'd slept until eleven on Friday, the morning when I was supposed to present my ideas... at a panel that was scheduled to start at, uh, eleven.
Yes, I told long-suffering conference organizer, Professor Eric Selinger. Yes, of course I'll be there. And yes, I was soon running down the street to the Palais, talk clutched in one hand and flash drive (with my first PowerPoint ever on it) in the other.
Amazingly, it came off quite well. Theory, I think you could say, was served -- in my case in under twenty minutes (since the people who'd gotten there in time to present first went way over). And since I do have a pretty good sense of the absurd, I simply rolled with it, felt pretty good about what I was saying, and even pulled a decent ending line out of nowhere.
And now that it's over, I think that I just might have a take on this strange business of how and why recent popular romance, which any non-romance reader would certainly assume to be the most heterosexual of reading activities (not to speak of heterosexist) -- has suddenly developed such an exuberant engagement (at least at the margins of the genre) with m/m and m/m/f love and sex.
All based, of course, on the Queer Theory of the brilliant Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who died last year after a long bout with cancer, and whom I deeply regret never having met.
And the substance of which will constitute my next Hoyden post, written at leisure and at my own desk rather than at O'Hare -- which is where Michael and I are now, en route to home after that delicious if all-too-brief trip to Brussels and thence to Amsterdam, a city we fell in love with for its overwhelming richness of art, canals and bicycles and coffeehouses, delightful cityscapes (as a small person, I take especial joy in small spaces deftly arranged), and its huge, painterly skies. (Has anybody out there read Simon Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches? I've got to finally get to it.)
And although we saw oodles of extraordinary Big Great Art -- not to speak of contemplating sad, sober, awful history (the Anne Frank House is not to be missed), what I want to write about in the remainder of this post is the lightest, most frivolous of our sight-seeing expeditions, the whipped cream on top (also see below), our visit to Amsterdam's fantastic Museum of Bags and Purses (which my sweet and generous husband deserves hugs for having found in the guidebook, knowing I'd adore, and good-humoredly suffering through).
Because what is the fascination for women about handbags? Why can we never have enough of them and why are we willing to spend such indecent amounts for them -- Doreen, are you out there? -- even my beloved consignment shop Prada bag was hardly cheap (and who knows if it's even authentic). You'd think that if I could theorize m/m romance, I could take this on (at some point during the conference, IASPR guiding spirit Professor Sarah Franz said that "you could theorize all day, Pam").
Well, I can speculate, anyway.
Is it something about how we feel ourselves not entirely human without our stuff? Or, purse-shaped as we are, carrying our vital organs in the sacs of our bodies, do we somehow mimic that effect and dress it up?
Or some other bodily metaphor suggested by the Tassenmuseum's awesome, oldest piece, this "buckle bag [o
f goat leather from 16th century France] with 18 secret compartments was worn attached to a belt by men... a status symbol for men of the aristocracy"
but also reminding me childhood memories of those Breugel guys with their codpieces in the paintings section the World Book Encyclopedia.While a few other marvels featured on the museum's web site prompting me to Hoyden-ish astonishment at the pure, spirited exuberance and also the wretched exce
ss of this stuff are:This bridal bag of sablé beads, France, 18th century -- called sable because it's made of glass beads that are the size of a grain of sand, having a cross-section of between 0.5 and 0.6mm (did the beaders -- I imagine them as women -- go blind?)
Or this beaded bag with an image of a giraffe, France, ca. 1827, to commemorate the first giraffe shipped to what was perhaps the first Frenc
h zoo, a gift from the Egyptian viceroy to the French king Charles X, the giraffe (named Zarafa) "walked to Paris in 6 weeks, accompanied by 2 Egyptian carers and 100 cows that provided her with milk. The procession attracted immense crowds and on arriving in Paris she became the highpoint of the fashion season."And if all roads lead to chicklit, this "Cupcake" evening bag, complet
ely covered in Swarovski crystals and featured in the film "And reminding me, that since I'm having dessert, our feast of a trip is almost over and it'll soon be time to get on our plane for the last leg of our journey back to San Francisco...
Where I fully intend to let go of the theory jones for a while and write some romance for a change.
But until then, I'd love to hear your thoughts on handbags, Amsterdam, theory (queer and otherwise) or the joys of travel.
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