Queer Symposium

Queer Studies Graduate Symposium
University of California, Davis
June 2, 2007

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Jasbir Puar, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University.
Jasbir Puar works on queer biopolitics, tourism, race and sexuality, transnational feminism, and discourses of counter/terrorism.

Keynote Address: “In Retrospect: Terrorist Assemblages and Homonationalism in Queer Times”

The war on terror has become the monolithic face of violence in dominant cultural discourse at the same time that hate crime legislation has been positioned as a marker of progress for the gay rights movement. Both of these moves create an obsession with safety while simultaneously ignoring other violences, such as police violence, domestic violence, the prison industrial complex, and violences produced by medical establishments, that continuously take and harm lives.

In what ways have queerness and violence been linked? How and why might this link be productive, and what are its limitations? What counts as violence? In what ways is violence always already raced, classed, sexualized, and gendered, and how do systems of violence depend on the effacement of these relationships? How might queerness itself function violently, either as a violence against heteronormativity and gender binaries, or as a neoliberal, violent homonormativity/homonationalism? If queerness is not always automatically transgressive, how might we rethink what we mean by violence? How has violence been positioned as that which is both outside of and uniting queer/trans communities, linked to a call for state intervention and buttressing discourses of human rights? In what ways can we think of subjectivity itself as violent, and how might queerness function in this process? What is the time of violence, and what relationship might alternative temporalities have to particular violences? This symposium seeks to interrogate the ways queerness and violence function together in contemporary as well as historical practices, and puzzle out creative possibilities for transformation and resistance.

We invite scholarship from a broad range of disciplines, especially interdisciplinary work in queer theory and transgender theory. We especially encourage work that critically engages mutually constitutive articulations of race, class, sexuality, ability, gender, citizenship, religion, and nationality. We also welcome papers that engage activism and community organizing.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Resistances to Violence
• Queerness as violence (to heteronormativity, gender norms etc. as well as violence of homonormativity)
• State violences/state responses to violences—including legal, medical, and police violence
• Violence and public/private space
• Queerness and Terrorism/Queer Terrorism
• Violences of in/visibility
• Violence and pleasure/BDSM
• Pain/and embodiment/and pleasure
• Performances of violence/queer rage
• Embodiment and violence/violent embodiment
• Violent representations/representations of violence/spectacles of violence
• Human rights discourses
• Violences of language, narrative violences, il/legibility
• Sexual violences/relationship violences
• Homonormativity/neoliberalism/globalization/violences of capital
• Violences within queer/trans communities
• Aftermaths of violence (trauma, memorial, work of mourning, etc.)
• Violence of disciplinarity—including erasures within and/or of queer scholarship
• Violences of “home”

Please send 250-500 word abstracts with a CV to queersymposium2007@gmail.com by
FEBRUARY 24, 2007 .
Along with this abstract, please indicate if your presentation requires any AV equipment.
Acceptances will be sent out by MARCH 14, 2007.

For more information, email Cathy Hannabach, Toby Beauchamp, and Cynthia Degnan at queersymposium2007@gmail.com.