Dr. Le Blond participated in two conferences this academic year. The first one, SAMLA (South Atlantic Modern Language Association) was held in Atlanta Nov. 15-17. He chaired and presented in a panel called “Morphology: A Conversation on (Dis)Embodiment.” His presentation “Making Queer Disability Visible: The Case of Netflix’s Special” explored the representation of queer disabled character on television, and more specifically looked at the character of Ryan in the Netflix show Special as a catalyst for a new representation of disability.
The second conference, NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association), was held in Boston March 5-8. Dr. Le Blond is a board member of NeMLA, as he is the French and Francophone Studies Area Director for the convention. In Boston, he chaired and presented in a panel called “Queer Spaces in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature and Media.” His presentation “Dans la chambre de Dustan: Paris and le Marais as Loci of Extremes” explored the rhetoric of Guillaume Dustan, a writer that lived through the AIDS pandemic in Paris, advocating for people not to use protection during a time triple combination therapy was just emerging and many people were still dying of AIDS.