Join us for a screening of the Welcome and Announcements video in the 'Track 1' room, and have a cup of coffee before we get started!

The following papers will explore Tolkien’s queer landscapes of Middle-earth: from Arda’s highest peaks and hidden underbellies, to her liminal, fae places, using the lens of Michel Foucault’s heterotopias.

Marita Arvaniti will introduce the panel and discuss Tolkien’s Faerian Drama and its relationship to the much-maligned Tom Bombadil episode, focusing on the queer figure of Tom Bombadil himself and his heterotopic domain.

Mariana Rios Maldonado will analyse the Barrow-downs, Dead Marshes, and Paths of the Dead as symbolic sites of death created during harrowing moments in the history of Middle-earth. These are no-places: spaces of Otherness containing the evil and accursed; borders between the living and the undead; and frozen “slices in time” from which the characters must emerge to continue with their quest.

Will Sherwood will discuss Tolkien’s mountains following the collapse of mountain civilisations (e.g. First Age Elves and Third Age Dwarves). These liminal, phenomenologically queer spaces evolve into ecocosms that attract Otherness (Sméagol/Gollum, Balrogs, Ungoliant’s offspring & Shelob, Orcs) following their rejection by anthropocentric groups. Mountains are paradoxical symbols of immortality and sterility, hollow shells that on the surface refuse to succumb to Arda’s decay.

The queer is often defined by its relation to normativity. Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal situates queerness in opposition to normalcy, even gay normalcy. Karma Lochrie’s Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t deconstructs a monolithic hetero-normativity. Within the fantasy genre, protagonists frequently reside in a queer relation to normative communities. J. R. R. Tolkien quite often depicts his major characters within his mythopoeic framework as in some way outside of the normal; they’re often odd, fringe outsiders in relation to the larger community to which they are a part. The texts of his legendarium present this queerness fairly clearly—so do artists who have conceptualized Tolkien’s characters. They use space, color, lines, the placement of a viewer’s gaze, semiotics, and intertextual resonances to include or exclude a character from those around them, underscoring their difference or firm opposition in relation to the “normal” of their community.

The focus of this paper is the fallen wizard Saruman, who becomes a pulsating icon of heterodoxy and villainy but also of a queer eros positioned as alterior in the text. Artists have produced conflicting and significant inflections to his character, sometimes isolating his cruelty, sometimes amplifying his scintillating rainbow of color in such a way that reads today much more as symbol of sexual diversity. I’ll be exploring the queerest of these illustrations.

The Mariner (and his wife): Rethinking Aldarion’s (A)sexuality Rory Queripel

“Aldarion and Erendis” (Unfinished Tales) is a rare example in Tolkien’s work of a marriage gone severely awry. Many readings of the tale apportion blame to Aldarion, who is seen as “unwilling” to make the marriage work (Fitzsimmons, 2015), cruel and unfeeling towards Erendis, who herself is characterised as resentful and unaccepting (Rosenthal, 2004). However, these readings rely on an assumption of a cisheteronormative and, more importantly, allosexual relationship between the couple.

This paper proposes an alternate view of Aldarion and his role in the story, suggesting the possibility that he is asexual and/or aromantic (i.e. he does not experience sexual and/or romantic attraction in ways considered societally normative), and is therefore constrained by a system of marriage and duty that is anathema to him and to which he does not connect in any personal way.

By queering Aldarion’s (a)sexuality, this paper seeks a reading more compassionate towards both him and Erendis, understanding them as people wronged by societal expectation and ‘normality’ as characterised by the couple’s “failure” to reach a balance between their gendered characteristics (Rawls, 2014). While Aldarion may not be exonerated from the harm his decisions have caused, this view shifts the blame from him personally to an amatonormative system that makes a villain of him, as well as Erendis and those around them.

Wide Seas Islander, Asexual, & Autist: The Intersectional Mythopoeic Characterization of Cliopher (Kip) Mdang Robin Anne Reid

Victoria Goddard’s Nine Worlds Series (consisting of seven interlaced sub-series containing, as of the writing of this proposal, twenty longer works [novels and novellas] and four collections of short stories) is a tour de force of mythopoeic worldbuilding, genre-blending, and queer characterization. I completely agree with Alexandra Rowland that “You [all] Should Really Be Reading Victoria Goddard’s Nine Worlds Series.”

In this presentation, I analyze how Goddard’s intersectional characterization of Cliopher (Kip) Mdang, a co-protagonist and point of view character in the “Lays of the Hearth Fire” sub-series, queers a number of the major conventions of epic fantasy while creating a strongly mythopoeic work of fantasy that writes back to Tolkien’s legendarium.

Cliopher/Kip’s intersectional identity as a Wide Seas Islander, an asexual, and an autist meets the sixth of Alexander Doty’s definitions of “queer” as:

those aspects of. . . textual coding that seem to establish spaces not described by, or contained within, straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual or transgendered understandings and categorization of gender and sexuality—this is a more radical understanding of queer, as queerness here is something apart from established gender and sexuality categories, not the result of vague or confused coding or positioning (6-7).

The narrative foregrounds the importance of Kip being a Wide Seas Islander, a national identity dismissed by most of the Last Emperor’s court as “primitive,” even barbaric, and establishes the specific parameters of his asexuality in At the Feet of the Sun. Characterizing him as an autist is my interpretation of a number of his characteristics and behaviors as described in the series.

Throughout Octavia Butler’s Kindred the author raises numerous tensions around the notions of accessibility, disability, equality, and inclusion, exposing the crisis of black futures. My analysis focuses on the way that queerness informs the protagonist Dana’s experiences in the context of slavery, her positioning in the contemporary discourse of neo-liberalism, and her positioning in the prospective future. Very few scholars perceive Dana’s subjectivity as an actual state of being that carries value both materially as well as metaphorically. The materiality of queerness has not constituted part of the larger discourse of the American slave system. By examining how Butler renders queerness both figuratively and materially, I establish a connection between the past, the present, and the future. The different figurations of space and time, exposed through Dana’s time-traveling help conceptualize her mobility in different structures. Previous scholarship has focused primarily on the origin and legacy of trauma, inflicted on the Black female body of the twentieth century, however; there has only been little criticism in relation to the active construction of Black female subjectivity, located at the level of the body. I explore the question of how Black women are relegated to a space outside of proper liberal subjectivity, to move forward. I argue that Butler evokes a politics and ethics of care by presenting the reservation of Rufus’ life at all costs evoking Black labor and kinship as key to democratic possibility.

I'd Rather Be a River than a Man: The Trans Jewish Golem Dean Leetal

This critical commentary revisits the Jewish story of the Golem and reads it as a transgender text. Some say that the Golem inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a story famously interpreted by Susan Stryker as an allegory for her own trans experience: living on the edge of society, her humanity debated, defined by a morally questionable medical establishment. But there are important differences between Frankenstein and the Golem. The Golem is brought to life through language, particularly the Hebrew word ‘emet,’ and is an animated clay tasked with protecting Jewish marginalized communities. Today, questions of language and truth are at the center of many debates regarding the validity and nature of transgender people. The concept of protecting marginalized communities, even while being rejected from them, is also painfully relevant. Unlike Frankenstein, though, the Golem is not verbal, which is linked to autism. Thus, I argue that a neurogender analysis of their story that accounts for both gender and neurodivergence is critical. This reading focuses on these points of relation and what they may bring to light.

Trans Inequity, Intersectional Ritual, and Jewish Tikkun Olam (Healing of the World) Valerie Estelle Frankel

As Jewish science fiction expands into twenty-first-century questions of identity, some authors explore the trans experience and build bridges towards intersectionality. Ritual and tradition become popular subjects. In the post-apocalyptic Fragments of the Brooklyn Talmud by Andrew Ramer, diverse rabbis create new prayers and practices. A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys offers protagonists from a diverse commune. There, Judy Wallach-Stevens encounters aliens and negotiates with them, since they find nursing mothers better suited to the peace process. The story ends with an inclusive Passover seder, even as the new allies resist their oppressors, the corporations. Bogi Takács’ short story “Three Partitions” questions where to segregate the shapeshifting alien Adira, and why the Orthodox space colony must make changes. In “Unifications,” the characters of different eras quest to gather the sparks of the shattered world to bring universal healing. Several of these stories ask how comfortable Jewish protagonists are with alien rituals and explore incorporating or blending them for a truly universal experience. All consider how to change practice for a more inclusive twenty-first century religion.

My proposal is a paper on the inherent queerness of the liminal in Jeff Vandermeer’s works, through examples such as the transitional narrative present in the transformation of the Biologist in Annihilation. Especially pertinent is the inherent fighting of Yonic/Phallic imagery happening between her interpretation of a concrete structure as a tower as opposed to a tunnel, which is important to understanding how the Biologist’s trans-masculinity manifests symbolically in the narrative as antithesis to the other cis women on the expedition. Vandermeer’s liminal space in Dead Astronauts also connects to the characters of Moss, a non-binary life form who exists simultaneously across the multiverse; Grayson, an astronaut who was stranded alone in space for decades after the death of her planet while she was on a mission; and Chen, a worker for The Company who is taught by Moss to break their body apart into different objects and elements constantly fighting against their body’s want to dissolve and separate. All three characters embody a different kind of liminality: only their mutual overt love for one another keeps them existing in the between states.

Arthurian narratives have traditionally worked to establish the collective memory of a shared past that has resulted in them regularly aligning with hegemonic ideologies. The continual retelling and adaptation of the Arthurian narrative can thus be recognized as consistently relying on and upholding a narrow understanding of who is accepted within the borders of Camelot and who is made Othered, and often monstrous, by those borders. However, there has been an increase in scholarship that has begun to read and write Arthurian literature from the ‘Other side’ in a way that asks readers to consider who the Arthurian mythos have traditionally excluded, or ‘made monstrous;’ to protect, regulate, or expand its borders and what methods have been used to do so. In this paper, I will explore the way that the threat of ravishment and raptus is utilized in Malory’s Morte Darthur to create and contain the ‘borders’ of Camelot and to position Arthur as both a worthy King at home and a colonial power outside his territory. I will then explore the way that Tracy Deonn, in her young adult novel Legendborn, writes from the ‘Other side,’ using the same reliance on ravishment and raptus, to explore and dismantle the hegemonic ideologies of the medieval Arthur.

The team behind Queer Lodgings: A Tolkien Podcast share the social media realities of producing content centered around LGBTQIA+ readings of Tolkien’s Legendarium. Discussion will include uplifting and diverse community events, backlash against the very idea of queer readings of Tolkien, targeted harassment campaigns involving large conservative media news outlets, and attempted erasure of well-documented historical instances of homophobia in Tolkien spaces. We aim to illuminate some of the darker corners of online fandom, and demonstrate the importance of accepting, tolerant spaces in which queer and diverse fans and scholars can share their personal interpretations of Tolkien’s worlds, characters, and relationships.

Although ekphrasis is most commonly posited as a poetic tool—poetry responding to visual art—the practice of ekphrasis at its heart is a merging of worlds in which an artist of any medium interprets a work in a different medium. Likewise, a Tarot reader interprets imagery and symbolism through the medium of speech, applying old archetypes and images to unique, new problems or questions. In this workshop, I will present on the medium of ekphrasis as a poetic form using W.H. Auden’s poetic interpretation of Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, itself an iconic work of mythopoeic ekphrasis. Then, I will offer a quick primer on the Tarot, after which participants will draw their own Tarot cards—from their own decks at home or from a digitally shared Tarot deck—and perform their own ekphrastic free-writes, poetic or otherwise. The presentation will culminate with a demonstration of ekphrastic mythopoesis from my own body of work. Attendees are encouraged to be prepared both to write creatively/reflectively and to engage in discussion during the presentation about Auden’s work and the Tarot.

In Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature (2022), I argue that fantasy affords sexually marginalized people the ability to re-vision Christian theology in queer ways, thanks to its fixation on strange bodies, its longing for other worlds, and the ways in which both of these may reflect back on theological narratives of incarnation and salvation. Yet this project raises further questions that remain unresolved: namely, how might the framework of Christian theology constrain, as well as illuminate, queer imaginaries? If fantasy allows us to envision livable lives for ourselves as unruly bodies, just what forms of relating may those lives entail? Fantasy may, as Jes Battis (2007) has argued, serve as a magical conduit for channeling melancholic desires into action in our world, but what drives the desire for religious belonging? What other desires—sexual, national, racial—might be bound up with it, and what sort of spell are we casting from it?

In this talk, I build on José Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) notion of ‘cruising utopia’ to reaffirm that, rather than merely representing or validating existing LGBTQ+ identities, fantasy’s worldmaking impulse can help us map the conditions for queer ways of life yet to be realized. Yet, following precedents set by George MacDonald and J.R.R. Tolkien, I also deviate from Muñoz’s utopian vision to posit fantasy as an ambivalent third space where queer desires can be both celebrated and interrogated. In this analysis, both fantasy and queerness are profoundly formed by dominant, primary-world cultures even as they attempt to look beyond them. With reference to fantasy works by Chaz Brenchley, Laurie J. Marks, Samuel R. Delany, and others, I suggest that fantasy can map relations between religious devotion, queer desire, and sexually dissident lives that complicate the liberatory frame presented in Queering Faith while continuing to affirm the act of imagining otherwise as the beginning—though crucially far from the end—of queer resistance to a hostile world.

Fantasy is finally learning to embrace its power to create and celebrate queerness. Works such as The Forever Sea by Joshua Philip Johnson and The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon feature queer leads, revealing creative capacities to imagine worlds where queerness is at the centre. But something mighty queer is already present in 1937 at the very dawn of modern fantasy. Following emerging interpretations of The Hobbit, I argue that the hero, Bilbo Baggins, exhibits significantly queer characteristics. In this deconstructive reading, Bilbo’s gender will first be reversed, arguing that his domesticity, intense emotional responses and his placement in patriarchal culture grant him more features conventionally associated with women. For a book that has often been critiqued for its lack of female characters, Bilbo provides an entry point for reading and recognising feminine experiences. Merely a reversal, however, runs the risk of essentialising gender roles and norms. This reading’s strength lies precisely in the displacement of gender hierarchies by which the adventurous and domestic sides of Bilbo’s being are brought into productive conflict with one another. In being “both” and “in between,” it appears that there is something (more than just) a bit “queer” to the hobbit which meets the reader’s eye.

In “The Feminine Principle in Tolkien,” Melanie Rawls creates a framework for reading masculine and feminine drives in the characters of Tolkien’s legendarium. Feminine characteristics are inward-facing, focused on the self and inner life, whereas masculine characteristics are outward-facing, focused on affecting the wider society. Shelob and Sauron are used as two examples of the negative expression of these gendered drives: Shelob being so inwardly focused she only devours, and Sauron being so outwardly focused he cares only for world domination. However, other than his outward focus, Sauron doesn’t neatly align with the other negative masculine traits — he is not rash, but cunning, he does not default to aggression, but uses temptation and manipulation to achieve his ends. This pattern is visible in nearly all of Tolkien’s evil-coded characters, from Melkor to Wormtongue — they embody what Rawls considers feminine characteristics and contemporary media tropes of feminine villainy — these characters beguile, consume, and seduce to achieve their goals. This raises the question: could the primary nature of evil in Middle-earth be feminine?

Holly Munro, the office assistant come agent in Jonathan Stroud’s young-adult series Lockwood and Co., is the sole character in the five books to hint at living in a queer relationship. Lockwood and Co. is a small agency in London, fighting against the Problem, the nightly recurrence of ghosts and specters. In The Empty Grave, the final book in the series, Holly and Lucy Carlyle are crouched in the kitchen at 35 Portland Row, waiting for an attack of a group of thugs on the house. Holly and Lucy are nervously exchanging confidences, and Holly makes the point that Antony Lockwood, the leader of the company and owner of Portland Row, is not her type: “Holly laughed again; her eyes sparkled as she glanced at me sidelong. ‘You must know there are other possibilities in this world’” (ch. 19).

Such a half-hinted suggestion of sexual orientation is not enough to position Stroud’s series as a queer text, but the presence of ghosts throughout Britain operate as a destabilizing force, undermining family, social, and governmental organization. The Problem destabilizes the country so completely that children and teens, the only ones with the ability to see ghosts, must lead the fight against the hauntings. The Problem is not what Pauline Palmer calls a case of “queer spectrality;” however, the epidemic of ghosts and hauntings across the country works to both undermine and reconfigure normative and hegemonic power structures.

Lucy Carlyle, the narrator of the series, lives her life in the liminal space between life and death. She is an operative, a ghost hunter, and most of all a listener: she is one of only two people in England who can talk to spirits. As a teen girl, Lucy undermines conventional representations of femininity, and as an agent, she undermines accepted and safe ways of dealing with spirits. Even her attachment to Anthony Lockwood minimizes sexual tension and undercuts the romantic trope that so often dominates teen fiction. I want to argue that Stroud’s series, while not overtly queer in its representation of gender or gender identities, presents a secondary world that is queered by its destabilization of normative societal, institutional, and young adult romantic tropes.

Eleanor is a guest of honor at next summer’ s Mythcon 53, and I’ve been reading her work for many years. I think her novel, and the associated short stories of Hwarhath Stories, provide a fine set of texts for your purpose. There are also queer aspects to many of Eleanor’s other books and stories, for instance in To the Resurrection Station, and some of her shorter fiction. I would certainly review the existing critical literature, and also present some critical comments and reflections on reception of Arnason’s work, and suggestions for further study.

How are we related? Queer(ed) families—typically framed through terms such as Found Family, Chosen Family, or Family of Choice—are more often formed by agency and voluntary participation than they are by legal or genetic connections. For the purposes of this paper, kin will be defined by affect, behavior, and declaration. The three fictional texts—Are You Listening? by Tillie Walden, Life of Melody by Mari Costa, and I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane—will serve as a basis to illustrate how kinship is defined, particularly in queer speculative narratives. Speculative fiction allows for particular metaphors of power. These metaphors often tie into agency because the kin unit is chosen even through (or perhaps especially through) hardships and tension. Ultimately, found family and queer kinship revolve around the idea of empowerment. Specifically, this is a kind of empowerment marked by agency and choice without the enforcement of domination or cruel hierarchies. Marginalized characters have the opportunity to try and regain control, to shape their own lives/paths in a world that feels like it is not made for them to survive, nonetheless thrive.

Ever since Luke Skywalker and Han Solo first appeared onscreen together in 1977, LGBTQ+ Star Wars fans have harnessed the power of queer reading to write themselves back into a galaxy far, far away, despite Lucasfilm’s long-term disapproval of such practices. Nonetheless, there exists little scholarly literature on queerness in the franchise, and even less on the potentially sapphic characters. Queen Padmé Amidala, first introduced onscreen in Episode I: The Phantom Menace, proves a surprising—but no less salient—queer figure in Star Wars. From her intimate relationships with her handmaidens, to her experimentation with gender performativity, to her quiet yet intense desire for her best friend Sabé, I analyze how Padmé can be viewed as a queer figure in media throughout the Star Wars franchise, including but not limited to Episodes I-III, The Clone Wars television series, and E.K. Johnston’s Queen’s Shadow trilogy. Ultimately, I encourage fans to embrace queer reading as a means of reclaiming the Star Wars franchise for themselves, while still demanding better representation from the Disney-Lucasfilm canon.