Lecture - Dr John Potvin: From Theatre Stage, to Fashion Cover to Bedroom Design
On November 6, 2013, Dr John Potvin will be giving a lecture, 'From Theatre Stage, to Fashion Cover to Bedroom Design: Fashioning a Dancing Queen in 1920s Paris' as part of the Ogden Glass Lecture Series, co-sponsored by the Departments of English and History at Bishop's University (Cleghorn Common Room, in McGreer, 2600 College Street, Sherbrooke, Quebec).
Dr John Potvin will be giving a lecture, 'From Theatre Stage, to Fashion Cover to Bedroom Design: Fashioning a Dancing Queen in 1920s Paris'
This lecture will consider the queer spaces that Swedish modernist ballet dancer Jean Börlin (1893-1930) inhabited in Paris after leaving Sweden. Representations of Börlin in the press pictured him in decidedly modern flats and often described him in highly sexualized terms. These reviews at once portrayed and vilified him for his modernism and effeminate perversity. A discussion of the interstices between domestic space, celebrity, queer identity and media is teased out to think through if and how the queer (male) subject can ever truly find 'a room of his own', on his own terms.