Workshop attendees should read and be prepared to discuss Dr. Churchill's paper. To obtain a copy, please contact Professor Steven Maynard (steven.maynard@queensu.ca).
Abstract
For nearly a century, two statues dominated the building and grounds of the Manitoba Legislature in Winnipeg, Manitoba. These were a monumental statue of Queen Victoria on the law fronting the Legislature and the colossal Eternal Youth and the Spirit of Enterprise (The Golden Boy) set atop the Legislature Building's cupola. This talk explores the figurative representations of Queen Victoria and youthful male beauty, the aesthetic politics of settler colonialism and whiteness, and the complicated familial iconography vested in these two statues. More tangentially it will touch on queer history, Peter Pan, cruising, and the resistant and redemptive possibility of artistic recontextualization.
Bio
David S. Churchill is the Graduate Chair and Professor in the Department of History at the University of Manitoba, where he teaches the History of the United States and the Histories of Gender and Sexuality. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he is the past Director of the University of Manitoba Institute of the Humanities and a Rockefeller Humanities Fellow at Columbia University. Between 2010-2012 he was the Principal Investigator and Coordinator of the "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Two-Spirited (LGBTTQ) Archival and Oral History Initiative." In 2015, he was awarded the Outstanding Professor Award from the Faculty of Arts, and he is a two-time recipient of the Outstanding Teaching (Student Recognition) Award (2008/2018). He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and a visual culture writer and reviewer for Border Crossing magazine. With his colleague Tina M. Chen, he published two edited collections, Sites of Production: Film, History and Cultural Citizenship (Routledge 2007) and The Material of World History (Routledge 2015).
