Preparing for the 'Zoo

As usual, I'll be heading off the the annual medieval congress in Kalamazoo next week. (I do skip the occasional year, but it's my default plan.) This year I'll be presenting a paper that draws on my research for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, looking at the language of cross-dressing narratives.(But calling the topic "cross-dressing narratives" I hope to signal that I'm going to skip over all the complexities of gender and sexuality lying under the surface of these texts.) The key question is: when pre-modern Europeans are talking about AFAB (assigned female at birth) people who are wearing male-coded garments -- especially when trying to pass as male either situationally or for an extended period -- what part do actual references and descriptions of the clothing play in those texts?

It isn't an earth-shaking topic, but some of the conclusions aren't necessarily what I'd expect. (Sorry, no spoilers until after the paper is presented.) I'm going to confess that it's one of those times when I came up with the paper title before I'd quite nailed down exactly what it was that I planned to talk about: "Passing and Failing" (sub-titled "The Role of Clothing in Gender Disguise Narratives").

I may not be doing my detailed live-blogging of the sessions I attend this year. The conference has a new policy about social media that basically boils down to "panel participants must provide consent for live reporting of sessions". It may be that participants will shift to making an explicit announcement for each session, but I feel it would be disruptive to ask specially for permission. So we'll see.