Queer Foxes. Also, Queer Movie Medievalisms.

by J J Cohen

Where does one find whiskey, foxes, poetry, theory, and queer heterotopoi cohabitating? Under the editorship of Dan Remein, of course, at a promising new journal that many ITM readers will want to read. From the call for submissions (vivid orange coloration preserved):

we are interested in poetry and poetics committed to theory and historiography, and theory and historiography committed to poetry and poetics. The journal is interested currently in shorter forms or fragments, forms which might be classified as a missive, an aphorism, or a raid--although other forms and modes will be considered.

"All those other words make sense," you observe. "But why foxes?" Tsk, tsk, have you not read your bestiary lately? "The fox is crafty and deceitful. When it is hungry it rolls in red earth to look as if it is covered in blood. It feigns death by holding its breath. Birds come to sit on the body whereupon the fox jumps up and eats them."

Many an ITM reader will also be interested in the following book as well, forthcoming from Ashgate Press in the astonishing Queer Interventions series:

Queer Movie Medievalisms
edited by Tison Pugh and Kathleen Coyne Kelly

How is history even possible, since it involves the recuperation of a past that is already lost? In the urge to understand and even to feel or experience history, “medieval” films attempt to re-create the past, but can only do so through a queer re-visioning that inevitably replicates modernity. In these mediations between past and present, history becomes misty, and so, too, do constructions of gender and sexuality. Hence the impossibility of heterosexuality, or of any sexuality, predicated upon cinematic medievalism: identity as constructed through the past cannot escape the charge of presentism, and thus queerness can serve as the defining metaphor for studying both sexuality and historical films. In the collected essays of Queer Movie Medievalisms, contributors grapple with the ways in which mediations between past and present as registered on the silver screen queerly undercut assumptions about sexuality throughout time.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Queer History, Medievalism, and the Impossibility of Sexuality
Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Northeastern University, and Tison Pugh, University of Central Florida

Chapter 1
“In the Company of Orcs”: Peter Jackson’s Queer Tolkien
Jane Chance, Rice University

Chapter 2
Queering the Lionheart: Richard I in The Lion in Winter on Stage and Screen
R. Barton Palmer, Clemson University

Chapter 3
“He’s not an ardent suitor, is he, brother?”: Richard the Lionheart’s Ambiguous Sexuality in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1935 The Crusades”
Lorraine Kochanske Stock, University of Houston

Chapter 4
The Law of the Daughter: Queer Family Politics in Bertrand Tavernier’s La Passion Béatrice
Lisa Manter, St. Mary’s College of California

Chapter 5
Performance, Camp, and Queering History in Luc Besson’s Jeanne d’Arc
Susan Hayward, Exeter University

Chapter 6
The Eastern Western: Camp as a Response to Cultural Failure in The Conqueror
Anna Klosowska, Miami University, Ohio

Chapter 7
“In My Own Idiom”: Social Critique, Campy Gender, and Queer Performance in Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Susan Aronstein, University of Wyoming

Chapter 8
Sean Connery’s Star Persona and the Queer Middle Ages
Tison Pugh, University of Central Florida

Chapter 9
Will Rogers’ Pink Spot: A Connecticut Yankee
Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Northeastern University

Chapter 10
Danny Kaye and the “Fairy Tale” of Queerness in The Court Jester
Martha Bayless, University of Oregon

Chapter 11
Mourning and Sexual Difference in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal
Michelle Bolduc, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Chapter 12
Superficial Medievalism and the Queer Futures of Film
Cary Howie, Cornell University

Afterword
Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, Queen’s College, City University of New York

Thanks, MOR, for the tip on this one. The book looks terrific, and I have to say: do we not behold here our next ITMBC4DSoMA?