Deerfield/Wellesley Symposium 2024: Queer New England

Sponsored by Historic Deerfield, Inc. and the Grace Slack McNeil Program for Studies in American Art at Wellesley College, presented both virtually and in-person.

This symposium will explore the textual, visual, and material cultures of queer New England from the time of European settlement to the present. Conceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality changed dramatically from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, and scholars continue to assess the consequences of those changes for diverse historical subjects. Ideas about sex operated in tandem with ideas about race and class and these perceptions shaped the ways some New Englanders created queer spaces and places by blurring normative boundaries. The symposium will address echoes of queerness where it was expressed explicitly and implicitly and consider the implications of locating queer pasts among more traditional narratives of America’s history, art, literature, and built environment.