L’Axe “Genre, Classe, Race” (ECHELLES – UMR 8264, Université Paris Cité) is organising a session on lesbian arcadia and queer genealogies in literatures and visual cultures of 19th and 20th centuries on Thursday 25th September 2025, 5.00-7.00 pm.
This is a hybrid event and will be held in Room 340, Olympe de Gouges Building, Place Paul Ricoeur, Paris 75013.
The zoom link is pasted below. Professors Kate Thomas (Bryn Mawr College, USA) and Xavier Giudicelli (Université Paris, Nanterre) will deliver talks followed by a Q & A session. Please see the abstracts and biographies below.
Please register at the zoom link: https://u-paris.zoom.us/meeting/register/MSUekNxPS3uXyCOvz4B3HQ
Lesbian Arcadia: Desire and Design in the Fin-de-Siècle Garden
Kate Thomas
At the end of the nineteenth century, British and American lesbian artists settled around Florence, Italy, renovating neglected Renaissance estates. Contemporary accounts describe the hillside region as colonized by a “cult of women.” These women restored, refashioned and theorized gardens as places of queerly mythic erotic encounter. In this lecture Professor Thomas will explore how design features such as nymphaeums, water parterres, secret gardens, grottos and boscos provided both refuge and open-air expression for lesbian subjectivity. Remembering that the first documented use of the term “sexuality” refers to plants, Professor Thomas puts the fields of landscape architecture and queer theory into conversation, arguing that queer theory needs to build a history of lesbian desire that is animated as much by landscape as by other women. Drawing from recent theory on “vibrant matter” and “plant thinking” that sees land and plants – the non-animal generally – as mobile, sentient and desiring, this lecture will propose that ruined and replanted Italian landscapes shaped modern lesbian relationships to materiality and estate.
Revisiting the Tomb in Arcadia: Queer Genealogies from Aubrey Beardsley to Alan Hollinghurst
Xavier Giudicelli
This talk will examine visual and textual variations on the motif of the tomb in Arcadia, focusing on Aubrey Beardsley’s drawing Et in Arcadia Ego (1896) and the visit to the (fictive) mausoleum of Thomas Light Bowerchalke in Alan Hollinghurst’s third novel The Spell (1998). Drawing on an intertextual and intermedial approach, this paper proposes to trace a queer genealogy of this topos, from one fin de siècle to another, not merely as a code for expressing homoerotic desires or mourning gay trauma, but as a dynamic site of re-vision and re-writing. These reinterpretations, I will argue, form a rhizomatic space where text and image, past and present interpenetrate and illuminate each other. In doing so, they give rise to a queer temporality which disrupts the linear course of time through untimely returns and resurgences.
Biographies
Kate Thomas is the K. Laurence Stapleton Professor of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College. The author of Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal and Victorian Letters (Oxford UP, 2012) and Vernon Lee: A Sibyl at Il Palmerino (Centro Di, 2024), she was a recipient of a 2019 Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture. Her current book project, entitled “Lesbian Arcadia,” is about Anglo-American lesbians living and gardening in Italy across the fin-de-siècle.
Xavier Giudicelli is Professor at the University of Paris at Nanterre where he teaches British literature and visual arts as well as translation. He is a member of the Research Centre CREA (Centre de recherches anglophones, UR 370), and the author of Portraits de Dorian Gray. Le texte, le livre, l’image (2016), and of several essays and chapters on book illustration, late nineteenth-century art and literature, translation, Oscar Wilde, E.M. Forster and Alan Hollinghurst. He is currently completing a monograph on intermediality and queer temporality in the works of Alan Hollinghurst.