Embodied Geographies of Differences: Trans* Spaces, Identities and Solidarities
The 6th European Geographies of Sexualities Conference is planned to be held on-site in Cádiz, Spain, 14-16 September 2022, with the option to deliver papers online.
The discussions on the body, its multiple representations and physical embodiments continue to have a relevant place in the production of knowledge within feminist, gender, sexuality, and queer studies, in multiple geographies. In the last decades, many scholars have underscored the fluidity of gender identity and body transformations (disability, aging, the transbody), thinking of them in terms of their social and cultural constructions. This conference tries to connect with the spirit of the previous one (held in Prague in 2019) envisioning a transnational and transepistemic approach to the body.
In their introduction to a special issue of TSQ (Transgender Studies Quarterly) devoted to tranimalities (2015), Eva Hayward and Jami Weinstein discuss the proliferous potential of the prefixial term trans* as multiplying factor. Understood as “the movement that produces beingness” (196), Hayward and Weinstein consider trans* as “the processes through which thingness and beingness are constituted. In its prefixial state, trans* is prepositionally oriented—marking the with, through, of, in and across that make life possible” (196). Trans* privileges the multifaceted movement towards the very possibility of being claiming for hybridization, assemblage and contamination in what Nikki Sullivan has called a process of “(un)becoming other(s)” (Stryker and Whittle, 2006).
Another relevant issue at stake is how to enact non-colonizing, cross-cultural and multiracial solidarities across difference within contemporary structures of power and privilege. By emphasizing ethics and political solidarity, rather than an identitarian binary system, this conference fosters debates around the inclusion of differences.
Suggested topics for sessions, roundtables and papers include, but are not restricted to, the following :
· The cultural and literary production of trans communities
· Queer theories, queer epistemologies
· The fluidity of gender identity and body transformations (disability, aging, the transbody)
· Reactions to heteroactivism, anti-feminism, right-wing populism, extremism
· Queer migrations, queering beyond urban/rural, center/periphery divides
· New types of collaborations and new types of solidarities: vulnerability, resilience and resistance.
· Affective and political responses to (racial, sexual, cultural, or ethnic) difference
· Intersections of gender and sexualities
· Heteronormativity, heterosexism, homophobia and stigma
· Sexual citizenship, the geopolitics of sexualities, LGBT rights and obligations, privileges and traditions
· Queer knowledge beyond the Anglo-American world
· Sexual (in)difference and violence: hetero/homonormative nationalism
· Rainbow families, nuclear families, chosen families, procreation, queer demographics
· Transgender biopolitics
· Intersections between academia and/or activism
· The variability and contingency of gender across time, space, and cultures
· Transnational alliances in the world system: posthuman nations
To organize a session, please send a 300-word description of the topic, a title, and short biographical details of the session chair. Bear in mind that sessions are not pre-constituted events and will therefore be included within the future call for papers.
To organize a roundtable, please send a 100-word description of the topic, a title, and short biographical details of the participants (3-4 including the chair).
Please, send your session and roundtable proposals through egsconference2022@gmail.com before November 1, 2021.
Submissions of ABSTRACTS for individual papers – from February, 14 2022 – to March, 27 2022*
*The abstract will have to be sent to the chairs of each panel
Registration will begin in May 2022.