And a lot of those paper sessions at Kalamazoo are dedicated to “Queer” topics: homosexuality, sodomy, gay, lesbian - whatever the catch word might be.
One of the most celebrated (not necessarily in a good way) paper sessions (or maybe it was the specific paper title since it was published as an article later) at Kalamazoo years ago was called “Jousting without a Lance” which was about lesbian “homoeroticism”. We laughed about that title FOR YEARS AND YEARS.
They seem to be cutting back on the number of sessions--in previous years they had over 600. There was an essay in The Weekly Standard many years ago written by someone who had attended the medieval conference in Kalamazoo which did a good job of conveying the experience.
I went to the 2019 Kalamazoo congress which ended last Sunday—551 sessions with the usual variety. A lot of topics I have no interest in but with so many sessions at the same time there was almost always one I wanted to attend—and there were a lot of book exhibits as usual. I talked to one Polish woman who thought that the congress had declined in quality (it was her third congress) but it seemed about the same as the other two I had been to. Apparently there has been pressure from the SJW types to tailor the program more to their tastes. There were a few “visible minorities” there but the people attending were overwhelmingly white...and a lot of them old. I enjoyed it—no one made me attend a session I didn’t want to attend.