CALL FOR PAPERS:
Contingent Belongings: Queer Reflections on Race, Space, and the State
University of Minnesota, September 16-17, 2011
Keynote speakers:
Christina Hanhardt, Department of American Studies, University of Maryland
Christina Hanhardt will speak about her forthcoming book, Safe Space:
The Sexual and City Politics of Violence, which examines U.S.-based
LGBT activism against violence since the mid-1960s in the context of
the race- and class-stratified city.
Nayan Shah, Department of History, University of California, San Diego
Nayan Shah will speak about his forthcoming book, Stranger Intimacy:
Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West.
Shah is the author of Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San
Francisco's Chinatown.
The field of queer studies has made important contributions to
interrogating the notion of belonging as a technology of cultural,
social, and political membership. Yet scholarship in sexuality studies
has not always attended to the multiple contingencies that structure
belonging, particularly in relation to the unevenness of spatial and
racial formations that shape access to cultural and national
citizenship. Recent discussions of homonormativity and homonationalism
have demonstrated the importance of understanding how social and
political belonging are contingent upon the exclusion of certain
bodies and practices. The recent repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell and
the criminalization of immigration with the passage of SB1070
illustrate the contradictory logics of national, sexual, and racial
belonging.
This conference examines the contingencies of belonging in relation to
racial and sexual imaginaries and practices. How can we understand the
desire to belong? What are the costs of belonging, and who can refuse
to belong? Who gets to determine the framework for belonging? What
does resistance look like under these conditions?
We hope to create a vibrant space for intellectual exchange with an
emphasis on interdisciplinary scholarship. We welcome submissions from
faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars from a wide range
of fields, including gender and sexuality studies, ethnic studies,
American studies, geography, history, education, media and
communication, and cultural studies, among others.
Suggested topics include (but are not limited to):
- immigration, citizenship, and law
- space, movement, and diaspora
- intimacy, kinship, and family
- affect and desire
- U.S. empire and settler colonialism
- labor, neoliberalism, and biopolitics
- culture as a site of critique/resistance/knowledge production
- activism and coalition
- queer world-making and alternative practices
- aesthetics and decolonization
- race, place, and identity
Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words and a brief bio of no more
than 100 words to contingentbelongings@gmail.com by JUNE 20, 2011.
Conference applicants will be notified by July 15th.
