Tuesday at Two with Andrew Rimby

This is a virtual program available through the Zoom application. Click [HERE](https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88069605040) to join the Zoom meeting.
Time: Jun 30, 2020 02:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Meeting ID: 880 6960 5040
Password: 062943
Dial by your location +1 646 558 8656 US (New York)

"Queer Literature: Naming and Identifying"
John Addington Symonds, a Victorian sexologist, during Walt Whitman’s final years asked Whitman multiple times if his poetry was about men who romantically desired other men. Whitman infamously responded that he sired six children but that didn’t stop Symonds from claiming Whitman as a homosexual poet. Andrew Rimby, who is a Ph.D. Candidate and Instructor in the English department at Stony Brook University, will use this anecdote as the opening for his talk which asks why Symonds turned to literature to define who and what belongs to the category of “homosexuality”? Another question he will address is where the state of Queer Literary Criticism is in 2020, and why do literary scholars return again and again to literature to name and identify queer bodies and spaces?