Growing up in fundamentalist environments, queers often have to learn to assume a public persona and how to traverse the difficulties of entangled identities and unaccepting spaces. In this presentation, Lance Weldy discusses how fundamentalism has served as a social construct that greatly influenced his own upbringing and the ideological outlook of his generation, while also serving as an unlikely paradigm to see traces of similarities between various queer communities, institutional and otherw...
Growing up in fundamentalist environments, queers often have to learn to assume a public persona and how to traverse the difficulties of entangled identities and unaccepting spaces. In this presentation, Lance Weldy discusses how fundamentalism has served as a social construct that greatly influenced his own upbringing and the ideological outlook of his generation, while also serving as an unlikely paradigm to see traces of similarities between various queer communities, institutional and otherwise. Weldy will describe the cultural climate of Bob Jones University to better illustrate how its fundamentalism plays a strong part in the overall queerness of the campus. This presentation is part of a larger project where Weldy is creating a collection of first-person narratives titled Voices from the Fundy Closet: Queer Life at Bob Jones University, some of which can be found at http://bjunity.org/who-we-are.
Co-sponsored with the Ph.D Program in English.
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Lance Weldy is Associate Professor of English at Francis Marion University, where he teaches children’s and young adult literature. In 1998, he received his BA in Creative Writing from Bob Jones University, and he finished his PhD in English from Texas A&M-Commerce in 2004. He recently co-edited a new collection of scholarly essays about The Chronicles of Narnia, published by Palgrave Macmillan, and he co-edited a special issue on Sexualities and Children’s Cultures for Children’s Literature Quarterly. Currently, he is working on a book proposal tentatively titled Voices from the Fundy Closet: Queer Life at Bob Jones University.