Cultural Studies Program

"Queer Curiosity"

[Now rescheduled to April 24th!]

In this talk, Patrick Kindig will theorize curiosity from a queer perspective. Examining the intersections between philosophical understandings of curiosity as a passion for knowledge and more everyday understandings of it as a euphemism for incipient homoerotic desire, he will argue that queer curiosity emerges at the point where nonnormative sexual practices meet and complicate particular forms of knowledge about the self. Bringing the intellectual history of curiosity to bear on the figure of the curious straight man—a stock figure in the Nifty archive, an online archive of self-published queer erotica—Kindig will explore how curiosity disrupts the epistemological relationship between sexual knowledge and erotic experience. Ultimately, he will suggest that curiosity’s characteristic openness—its appetite for novelty and experimentation, its refusal to be contained by existing categories of knowledge about gender and sexuality—makes it a useful tool for thinking through the limitations of modern queer identity and the homonormalizing tendencies of queer identity politics.

Patrick Kindig is Assistant Professor of English at Tarleton State University. He is the author of the monograph Fascination: Trance, Enchantment, and American Modernity (Louisiana State University Press 2022), the forthcoming poetry collection fascinations (Finishing Line Press 2025), the poetry chapbook all the catholic gods (Seven Kitchens Press 2019), and the poetry micro-chapbook Dry Spell (Porkbelly Press 2016). Currently, he is at work on a monograph titled Perceiving Queerly: Sexual and Perceptual Deviance in the Shadow of Sexology, which explores how, since the late nineteenth-century heyday of sexology, popular understandings of sexuality and sense perception have shaped and been articulated through one another. Patrick’s scholarship has appeared in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, Arizona Quarterly, and Textual Practice, and it is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity and Critical Inquiry; his poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, the Cincinnati Review, Washington Square Review, Copper Nickel, and other journals. He recently collaborated with classical saxophonist Derek Granger on The Quarantine Variations, a creative project that combines Patrick’s words with Derek’s music. Patrick holds a PhD in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature from Indiana University (2019) as well as an MA in English (IU 2015) and an MFA in poetry (IU 2017), and his work has received support from the Indiana University Department of English, the Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences, and the National Society of Arts and Letters. In 2023, he was a semifinalist for the 92NY Discovery Poetry Contest. In 2019, he was a finalist for a Junior Fellowship from the Harvard Society of Fellows. He sometimes tweets: @pdkindig.

Series Description

Cultural Studies has often been framed as a method of approach, a way of understanding and interpreting the relationship between cultural narratives and social and political institutions with particular attention to questions of power and resistance. The past few decades have seen several challenges to this method, from the new materialist critique of the linguistic turn to post-critical and auto-theoretical emphases on aesthetics, affect, and memoir. These movements have been especially central to work in queer studies and queer of color critique, most centrally expressed in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s complaint about the stultifying sameness of approach in queer theoretical writing and its mistaken fidelity to exposure and persuasion as activist modes. These challenges have broadened the scope of humanities research, taking in archives formerly left to the sciences and modes of thought once considered too creative to count as academic arguments. The resulting profusion of subjects and styles reflects the robustness of our field in a way often overlooked by the so-called method wars.

This year, Culture Nights seeks to celebrate and enrich our work on how we write and what we write about with a series of meetings that push us beyond the form of scholarly writing. How can we understand these forms as producing criticism, and what sort of criticism do they produce? Our series invites scholars whose works have taken the form of films, pamphlets, and how-to books, archival and visual curation, plastic and fabric art practices, and event-creation, to discuss how (and whether!) they see their work as forms of criticism. As a way of putting our interests into practice, we will encourage presentations that experiment with form and media, including film screenings, interviews, readings, and collaborative workshops.