Queer Ecology and the Supernatural Symposium and Exhibition

This symposium hosted by the Emerging Ecology and Radical Practice Group will consider the connections and intersections of queerness, feminism, identity, folklore, the supernatural, ecology, natural history and their artistic and cultural manifestations. Tracing the roots of historical politics, statecraft and resistance to societal expectations through the corporeal, spiritual and divergent communities. Witchcraft and pagan activities as surveyed by Arthur Evans in Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (1978), established sex and the heretical supernatural as a defiance of the hegemonic order, of a feudal and capitalist society. Queer human ecologies and land ecologies are intrinsically linked to tales, coded or otherwise, of magical creatures in folklore, warnings to the curious and speculative visions of, and beyond, environmental change. Jack Halberstam in Wild Things – The Disorder of Desire (2020), delivers an alternative vision of history, tracing wildness and sexuality outside of the established and structured order. Queer activist groups such as The Radical Faeries, active since 1979 have provided contemporary cognisance of queer and feminist connections to ecology-based care and defiance.

The symposium is a two-day event with keynote speakers and IAS Fellows Catriona Sandilands and Callum Angus, and invited artists and writers. The symposium will be accompanied by an exhibition and performances that will draw on the local significance of the Holywell spring and East Midlands folklore. 

The symposium take place across 18 September (9am to 5pm) & 19 September (9am to 1pm) at Fearon Hall Community Centre: Rectory Road Loughborough, LE11 1PL.

The exhibition takes place on September 18th (5pm to 7pm) at Modern Painters, New Decorators, Aumberry Gap, Loughborough LE11 1DP.