Grad students present on queer spiritualities

The Department of Gender Studies hosted a “Queer (un)Belonging” Symposium on April 11 with the Notre Dame Graduate School. The symposium included presentations given by Notre Dame graduate students and finished with a keynote lecture by guest speaker Kris Trujillo.

The conference was first announced by the Gender Studies Department on January 27, though the page has since been moved to the “We Are All Notre Dame” site, itself a recent replacement of the university’s “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion page.” The announcement called for papers from graduate students that explored the theme of “Queer (un)Belonging,” which was described as a topic requiring “grave urgency amidst increasing attempts to map out the terrain of queerness through fixed identities and classifications.”

The conference borrowed the concept of “queer belonging” from Elizabeth Freeman, an 18th-century freed slave from Massachusetts, who described the term as “the desire to belong [and] to offer oneself beyond one’s time.” The announcement stated, “Whereas queer belonging centers on the longing for legibility and community building, we find radical sociability in the act of ‘unbelonging’ to withdraw as well as to extend in our shared experience of not belonging.”

Though it was originally advertised as a two-day event, the conference lasted one day. A total of 51 members signed up, though actual participants numbered in the thirties. The symposium began in a Hesburgh Library classroom with student-led presentations, which were categorized into four panels by topic, beginning with a series of lectures delivered under the topic, “Queer Utopias.”

The second panel, “Intersections of (un)Belonging: Class, Gender, and Race,” included a talk from psychology department PhD candidate Alijah Chalas titled, “The Protective Role of Family: Intersectional Minority Stress and Self-Esteem in Latiné Gender Non-Conforming Students.” In his presentation, Chalas outlined the plan for his survey research project, which aims to prove that there exists a high correlation between feelings of “intersectional minority stress” and “high levels of family connectedness” among Latino gender non-comforming college students.

Chalas defined intersectional minority stress as “the ways in which multiple minority identities interact and influence each other to create unique stressor for individuals.” He described “family connectedness” as the level of attachment one might have to cultural family values and the “traditional gender roles that maintain an imbalance of power through breach of gender differences.”

Describing his sample, Chalas stated, “This sample represents one of the most at-risk populations in our country. … And, as I’m sure we’re all aware, these populations represent two of this administration’s biggest targets.”

The subsequent panels, “Home, Family, and Space” and “Alternative Kinships/Belonging” included the presentation topics “(un)belonging Theologies: The Queer Spiritualities of Julian of Norwich and Simone Weil,” and “Queer Poly Homemaking: An exercise in Queer Counterfactual Fanfic Poetry,” among others. 

Twenty-five audience members filed into the Bond Hall auditorium for the final symposium event. In his keynote presentation titled “Brown Jubilation,” Professor Kris Trujillo drew a connection between queer theory and melismatic elements in medieval liturgical music.

Trujillo is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. His current works include, Ecstasy: The Queerness of Being beside Oneself and Jubilation of the Heart: How Monastic Song Became Mystical Poetics. At UChicago, he teaches classes titled “Queer Theology and Queer of Color Critique,” “Racial Melancholia,” and “Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations,” among other courses.

Trujillo centered his lecture on the acts of the 12th century mystic, Christina the Astonishing. After describing a story of Christina, who subjected herself to torturous acts of self-mortification prior to praising and kissing her own body, Trujillo said, “The astonishing jubilus that Christina performs during the last year of her life combines both contorted bodily violence and self-pleasure, which together signal, like the song of the sirens, a particularly horrifying kind of jubilation.”

Using this story as a bodily comparison to the notation of final notes of the “Alleluia” in a piece of Gregorian chant, Trujillo stated, “Jubilee … provides an aesthetic reflection of a theological truth: that to be a medieval Christian who desires and yearns for God is to experience an overwhelming admixture of pain, pleasure, agony, and ecstasy.”

Trujillo also described the disjunction between the sung syllable and notes that exists in melismatic liturgical music in comparison to Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Citing author José Esteban Muñoz, Trujillo said, “Ecstasy is having a sense of a timeliness in motion, comprehending a temporal unity, which includes the past having been the future, and the not yet present, making the present.” He continued, “This temporally calibrated idea of ecstasy contains the potential to help us encounter a queer temporality.”

To close the keynote, Trujillo played Whitney Houstin’s “I Will Always Love You” as a contemporary demonstration of the “jubilant climax” of melismatic music.

A sophomore in Pasquerilla West who attended the conference told the Rover, “I was honestly unimpressed by the academic caliber of the presentations. Rigorous and serious research was replaced with an over-readiness to deliver politically correct findings.”

She continued, “There was a lot of hypocrisy in the presenters’ express wishes not to generalize or ‘place people in boxes’ and their simultaneous categorization of people as ‘white,’ ‘black,’ ‘gender non-conforming,’ ‘non-binary,’ and the like. It was incredibly disheartening to see a conference that promoted such a confused understanding of the human person held at Notre Dame.”

Trujillo and the Department of Gender Studies did not respond to the Rover’s requests for comment.

Clare DiFranco is a sophomore studying accounting and Italian. Find her at O’Rourke’s karaoke on Tuesday night as she pours her heart out in a jaw-dropping, melismatic performance of “I Will Always Love You.” Send fan mail or noise complaints to cdifranco@nd.edu.

Photo Credit: ND Graduate Student “Queer (un)belonging” Symposium 

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