The Bear Studies Symposium (Wednesday May 14th, 15:00-18:00 UTC+1) brings together academic and non-academic scholars, students, and researchers investigating gay/bi/queer (GBQ) 'Bears'.
The Bear label for GBQ men has been in use since at least the early 1980s. Since then the label has spread from the west coast of the USA, with Bear now a heterogeneous global phenomenon. Researchers have explored Bear cultures (Wright 1997; 2001), masculinities (Hennen 2008), identities (Quidley-Rodriguez & De Santis 2019), and geographies (McGlynn 2024). But both inside and outside of academia, scholarship on Bears remains both scarce and fragmented. Therefore this online symposium aims to 1) support scholars across all disciplines and none in sharing their research, 2) generate new research through networking, and 3) to kindle the transdisciplinary field of 'Bear Studies'.
The keynote speaker will be pre-eminent Bear scholar Dr Les Wright (editor of The Bear Book and The Bear Book II). Dr Wright will share his most recent writing on Bears, and discuss changes to Bear culture in the decades since his seminal books were published. Other speakers include Dr Nick McGlynn (author of Bodies & Boundaries of UK Bear Spaces) and Vinicius Flauaus (author of Ursos, Filhotes e Caçadores: história da comunidade «Bear» em São Paulo), with time for discussion, networking, and snacks.
The Bear Studies Symposium understands Bear as a broad and changing phenomenon, rather than a restrictive one. It is intended to build towards a planned special issue of an academic journal (e.g. Journal of Homosexuality), to which attendees will be invited to contribute. We also hope that it will build a small but stimulating online network of scholars and researchers focused on Bears, through which attendees can continue to share and collaborate in the future. Such a network could take the form of a mailing list, a social media platform, or another approach.
The event will take place via Microsoft Teams. We encourage cross-linguistic communication, and will use automated translation tools to support this. Presentations and facilitation will be in English, but live translation of captions into other languages will be available (including Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and more). We recommend tools such as Google Translate for cross-linguistic discussion via chat sidebars. Presentations will be recorded and shared with attendees.