Queer Symposium

Keynote Speaker: Siobhan Somerville, Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Gender & Women’s Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Somerville has written extensively on the intersection of race and sexuality in U.S. literature and history, and her current book project is entitled A Queer Genealogy of Naturalization in the U.S.

Featured Speaker: Debanuj DasGupta, noted gender, sexuality and immigrant rights activist. His work has spanned over fifteen years and across two continents. In 1994 Debanuj founded the first HIV/AIDS prevention program for gay men and men-who-have-sex-with-men in Kolkata, India. Since relocating to the U.S., Debanuj has been deeply involved with HIV/AIDS, Anti-Violence, LGBTQ liberation and immigrant rights movements.

Featured Artist: mónica enríquez-enríquez — On Thursday, May 28th, the conference will feature an opening event with bay area video artist mónica enríquez-enríquez.

Recent queer scholarship reflects an investment in studies of transnationalism and a concern with questions of mobility and citizenship. Scholarship within the growing field of transnational queer studies, as exemplified in works such as Social Text’s 2005 special issue “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now” and GLQ’s 2008 special issue “Queer/Migrations,” investigates the imbrications of gender and sexuality with racial, national, and diasporic formations; circuits of travel, migration, and displacement; and immigration, asylum, and citizenship policies. To interrogate discourses of sexuality, desire, and political change within the current phase of globalization, transnational queer studies requires attention to the ways in which constructions of sexuality are linked to the movements of bodies, ideas, and capital as well as to local, regional, and global systems of inclusion and exclusion. This conference emerges at a moment in which technologies of war and information simultaneously transcend and reinscribe modern boundaries of time and space. Therefore, we invite conversations around how queer modes of mobility and citizenship may be at once complicit with and disruptive of the temporal, spatial, and affective logics of nation-states, economic formations, and liberal personhood.

What does the study of mobility and citizenship offer queer scholarship? Who is denied or granted access to various forms of mobility? How is that access/denial contingent upon and constitutive of one’s citizenship status? When and how are non-normative genders and non-reproductive desires in synchrony with the state and when do they expose the fissures, inconsistencies, and ambivalences of the state? Is queerness compatible with the pursuit of liberal citizenship and is queer citizenship possible? How does a focus on mobility and citizenship further demonstrate the necessity of interrogating the racial, class, and gendered formations inherent in discourses of sexuality? How can considerations of different scales of mobility and forms of embodiment bring together studies of sexuality, dis/ability, and citizenship? How are metaphors of mobility (coming out, “fluid” identities, access) central to queerness? What are the links between citizenship and in/voluntary modes of travel, im/migration, and displacement? How is the production of modern citizen-subjects embedded in histories of colonialism, war, and empire-making, and what is particular about the role of mobility in the construction of queer subjectivities? How does queer fail or succeed as a transnational and translatable concept, identity or politic?

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. Papers engaging activism and community organizing are also encouraged. For information on past symposium please visit www.queersymposium.org.

Please send 250-500 word abstracts with a CV to queersymposium2009@gmail.com by March 15, 2009. Along with this abstract, please indicate if your presentation requires any AV equipment. Acceptances will be sent out by March 29, 2009.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

-Histories of queerness mobility and citizenship
-Gay/lesbian tourism and travel
-Immigration and asylum law
-Technology / digital and virtual spaces
-”Global Gay” / the gay international
-Embodiment/Disability Studies
-Queerness and mobile capital
-Border crossing and borderlands
-Violence, war, and the State
-Immobility/Stasis
-Local and regional belonging
-Temporal mobility, temporal belonging
-Affective and cultural citizenship
-Homonormativity, neoliberalism and mobile citizenship