Mixed Media Show: Medieval to Modern: Visualizing Gender and Identity Through Performances of Time and Fashion
Katie Despeaux
Katie Despaux
Digital Embodiments: Creation of a Medieval Pregnancy Source Database
Project Website - Medieval Pregnancy Source Database
My work-in-process presentation will center one part of my broader dissertation project: the creation of an open-source primary source database. My dissertation argues that pregnancy was an active period for royal and aristocratic women throughout the Middle Ages in western Europe. Given the prevalence and importance of birthing heirs, pregnant bodies were public bodies, representing dynasties and power. Women were not always confined and absent from the public during their pregnancies; indeed, many women deliberately displayed their pregnant bodies in public rituals and events to impart political messages or influence those around them. However, much medieval gender and power scholarship prioritizes how mothers used the childhoods and adulthoods of their children to access power and influence, ignoring the acute perinatal period.
There is an assumption that there are not many primary sources that center women’s perinatal experiences, which partially explains this exclusion of pregnancy in scholarship. These sources, nonetheless, do exist, albeit disparately and relatively scarcely. In the early stages of my dissertation research, I have started collecting sources that do discuss conception, miscarriage, quickening, childbirth, and the immediate post-partum period that I will use in my research. Therefore, I want to create an open-source online database that collects medieval sources that discuss pregnancy to counteract the assumptions that they do not exist, to help other scholars who want to research medieval reproduction, and to create a database of sources for my own dissertation project. This work-in-process presentation therefore will demonstrate the methodologies and early stages of my website creation. I will discuss how I locate pregnancy-related topics within sources, record them, and present them in a public and digital format, demonstrating how digital humanities intersects with medieval gender scholarship.
Jonathan Seyfried
Jonathan Seyfried
Molt Cara Companyona: Gender Nonconformity and Medieval Monarchy
Project Website - The Historian’s Notebook, Season 1: Molt Cara Companyona
This project explores the ways that Joan I of Aragon and Violant de Bar resisted gendered expectations as they began their reign in early 1387. General histories of medieval Spain usually depict Joan’s reign as a failure, but methodologies informed by queer and trans theory make visible the role of resistance to gender norms in contemporary criticism from Joan’s political adversaries as well as the blindspots produced by heteronormative historiography. Violant and Joan encouraged gender nonnormativity in each other, and the dynamics of their co-rule suggest new questions and lines of inquiry about medieval marriages. The format of the project, a website with podcast audio content, invites a non-narrative and at times a nonlinear approach to historical argumentation. Both the format and content of the project disrupt expectations in the hopes of making visible the typically hidden processes underlying gender performance and historical narrative.
Zj Johnson
Gender Glitch: Undressing Trans* Expression and Joy Through Fashion
For many queer individuals living outside the gender binary, self-expression serves as a site of both apprehension and resistance. Despite increased visibility of transgender and nonbinary identities, dominant social norms continue to impose strict rules and regulations on queer bodies. Even as gender categories expand, individuals who exist beyond the binary often face pressure to conform to legible forms of defiance. This project confronts these tensions by examining queer fashion through queer interpretive frameworks.
Drawing from queer theory’s critique of gender naturalization, this arts-based performance project investigates how gender is socially constructed, visually regulated, and negotiated through self-styling. Situated within communication studies, the project integrates social identity theory, counterpublic and co-cultural theory, and narrative approaches to understand how transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming individuals mobilize fashion as a form of nonverbal identity work and community signaling.
Using mixed media - including a curated queer fashion show, participant-driven photography, and an accompanying self-reflexive zine - this project positions fashion as both a narrative practice and a queer signaling system. Participants engage fashion as a form of embodied experience, sharing their stories, photos, and reflections behind every outfit.
By centering embodied self-styling as methodological practice, this project argues that queer fashion functions as a powerful site of nonverbal communication. By actively reconstructing dominant binary narratives, this performance aims to show fashion as a critical, arts-based mode of gendered meaning-making and counterpublic world-building.
Chris Armstrong
Chris Armstrong, M.Ed
Queer in Public. Queer in Collapse
Queer in Public. Queer in Collapse. mobilizes queer theory and trans studies to interrogate the conditions under which visibility, recognition, and inclusion are produced as signs of progress amid intensifying carceral governance and institutional instability. Rather than treating queer as an identity category awaiting incorporation, this paper theorizes queer as a positional refusal - an orientation against normalization, respectability politics, and the regulatory logics that structure public life. Drawing from interventions in queer theory that destabilize the naturalization of gender, sexuality, and futurity, and from trans studies - critiques of administrative legibility, biopolitical management, and state recognition, the project reframes public space as enforced space: a terrain shaped by surveillance, policing, zoning, border regimes, and the disciplining of gendered embodiment.
Grounded in Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), the paper situates queer and trans communities as co-producers of theory, foregrounding embodied knowledge, relational accountability, and survival practices as analytic resources. It extends queer critiques of normativity by conceptualizing normalization as slow violence and develops trans studies - insights into legibility by examining how recognition can operate as governance rather than liberation. Through sustained attention to belonging, carcerality, and temporality, the project argues that inclusion without redistribution reinforces structural inequity, and that respectability functions as internalized regulation.
Engaging queer temporalities and trans conceptions of embodiment, the paper advances “queer time” as a refusal of productivity metrics and linear progress narratives that obscure ongoing emergency. It concludes by articulating queer not as a stabilized identity but as a practice - an ongoing pressure that unsettles institutional capture and reorganizes collective survival within conditions of collapse. In doing so, the project reorients queer and trans studies toward material redistribution, embodied accountability, and relational modes of resistance.
Digital Zine, queer in public, queer in collapse