Queer Accommodations & Displacements
Research Symposium
Thursday 7 May, 2020
London School of Economics, Department of Gender Studies
Keynote: Zethu Matebeni (University of the Western Cape, South Africa.)
The call for papers is now closed. We are no longer accepting abstracts.
Sexuality both constrains and enables spatialized practices of place-making and place-taking. Across the world, places designated specifically for sexual minorities, or those seeking shelter from sexual and gendered harms, are routinely being shut down, de-funded, or pushed underground. At the same time, individuals and communities marked as sexually marginal or perverse are negotiating space-taking and place-making in conciliatory, oppositional, and radical ways. Sexuality is central to the logics of belonging and banishment which undergird the ongoing dynamics of coloniality, the global rise in far-right populisms, climate disasters, neoliberal extraction, and border making projects. As such, the intersectional dynamics of sexuality shape both how people experience local and transnational spaces, and whether or not they are enabled to inhabit, or forced to flee, them.
Queer Accommodations and Displacements aims to critically understand the fraught negotiations over sexual spaces in local and transnational contexts, and to explicate the new sexual subjectivities that are produced in both avowedly ‘queer’ and allegedly ‘non-sexual’ spaces and spatial politics. Following a ‘queer approach to space’ (Oswin 2008: 90), we thus encourage submissions that centre the conceptual language of queer, critical race, feminist, and postcolonial theory to examine the complicities and ambivalences that emerge in the redrawing of boundaries between perverse and permitted sexualities, and the implications this has for space-making, taking, and sharing.
It is in this context that we are seeking contributions for Queer Accommodations and Displacements, a one-day interdisciplinary symposium that explores the intersections of sexuality, space, and social justice. We seek contributions which foreground the polyvalence of these terms, with ‘accommodations’ referring to places of habitation, as well as acts of compromise; and ‘displacements’ referring to both removal or forced departure, as well as the unconscious transfer of intense affect. The symposium seeks to combine detailed analyses of local and everyday acts, with examinations of the political and psychic landscapes of these spatial politics. Indicative topics include, but are not limited to:
- Access, disability and crip studies
- Borders and migration
- Detention and incarceration
- Environmental destruction
- Exile and forced movement
- Gerrymandering
- Homelessness
- Housing policies
- Local activisms and resistances
- Neoliberal re-shaping of cities
- Occupation and settler colonialism
- Privitisation of public services
- Squatting and shared spaces
- Transnational solidarities
We are particularly interested in interventions that incorporate transnational approaches, intersectional analyses, and/or research emerging from the Global South. Speakers with hardships or traveling internationally will have access to some funding for accommodation.
The call for papers is now closed. We are no longer accepting abstracts.
Queer Accommodations & Displacements 