A Bear Studies Symposium (Wednesday May 14th, 15:00-18:00 UTC+1) will bring 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.

 

This free 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’.

  

Find out more and register at bit.ly/bearstudies.