Americanist Forum, Graduate

Americanist Dinner Forum "Doc Du Jour" with Jay Buchanan

"Document Du Jour" Dinner Forum is an opportunity for an AMCS graduate student to present an intriguing or puzzling document or artifact from their dissertation research - one that will be of wide interest to Americanists across disciplinary lines - and to puzzle through it with colleagues.

This semester's presenter is Jay Buchanan.

Fabulating Pleasures: The Archive and the Bathhouse

It can be challenging to conduct archival research on historical figures and sites which deliberately sought to evade notice in their time. As spaces of public sanitation established in an era before widespread legislation required running water in all residential buildings, turn-of-the-century urban bathhouses marketed themselves to a wide public as places of health, relaxation, cleanliness, exoticizing fashion, and state-of-the-art technology. Within these public spaces of semi-privacy, though, men seeking sex with men found a permissive and pleasurable space to make liaisons otherwise prohibited by codes of hygiene and propriety at work everywhere else in the modern city. 

This Doc du Jour event will source responses from participants to an array of archival images that shed light on the early New York gay bathhouse milieu. Participants will also be asked to respond “cold” to an instructive fictional narrative based on the scant archive of early bathhouse sources and drafted using Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation methodology.

Jay Buchanan is an historian of modern and contemporary art with a background in performance and creative writing. His work examines queer cultural production in conversation with the history of infrastructural technologies, and his nascent dissertation project will offer a visual history of queer and trans identity as historically visualized in relation to water infrastructures and sanitation codes, 1829-present. Jay's work appears in Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Theatre History Studies, ASAP/J, and elsewhere. 

Prior to the event we will circulate the document along with a brief cover note from the presenter.

Dinner will be provided.

The rsvp deadline for this event has passed, please contact Alison Eigel Zade (ealison@wustl.edu) with questions.