QUEER IMAGINARIES: April 16-17, 2004

Special Collections Section of the Main Library at the University of Arizona

Free and open to the public

schedule

 

The Sex, Race, and Globalization Project at The University of Arizona is pleased to present Queer Imaginaries, a two-day forum which continues to address, but now also reassess, the fundamental premises and terms structuring our multi-year, Rockefeller-funded project.

 

When we proposed the project five years ago, "globalization" was a pervasive-if already problematic-term, shaping our explorations of the imbrication of sexuality, gender and race with economic, political and informational processes across local, regional, national and transnational scales. Our exploration was informed by queer theory's emphasis on the social construction of sexuality and the mutually constitutive relation of sexuality, gender, race and economic processes.

 

Over the last five years, the term "globalization" has lost some of its charge. It has become clear, for example, that the state is a more forceful and complex determinant of social formations than the literature on globalization would have predicted and that shifting configurations of race and sexuality are still deeply dependent on geo-political demarcations. These last five years have also revealed the increasing appropriation and circulation for capital accumulation of an array of "communal"-sexed, gendered, racialized-identity formations by transnational NGOs and multilateral organizations such as the World Bank. Queer Imaginaries, then, seeks not only to explore how supranational structural forces work themselves out as differently scaled and situated social actors confront those forces through local practices and identity formations but also to take particular account of the nation-state's role in shaping such practices and identities.

 

In addressing these issues, we will foreground explorations of how queers figure, and are figured in, representations of the imaginary relations of subjects to these multi-scaled social forces. By focusing on the politics of representation-in contexts ranging from theatrical performances to the political activism of NGOs, from corporate advertising to media representations of border crossers, vigilantes, and the INS, from the texts of multilateral organizations such as the World Bank to literary productions-we hope to open up interdisciplinary methodologies, cutting across the usual divisions between the cultural, the political and the economic (assigned as they are to specific disciplines in the humanities and social sciences). We recognize that, across such diverse sites, represented identities are always mediated by multiple, overlapping and incomplete local, national and transnational discourses.

 

We invite participants to address some or all of the following specific questions:

What are the possibilities and impossibilities of applying queer theory to postcolonial geographical contexts and/or cultures? While the question, "How does the US interrelate with queer imaginaries from outside and how do these imaginaries draw upon the US and its traditions of identity politics and rights" has often been posed, we are particularly interested in contributions that decenter the US, recognizing dynamics and relationships that bypass the US, or disrupt the notion of a singular and unitary US. Likewise, recognizing simultaneously the critical importance of continued study of US racial formations as well as racial formations in other sites, we invite participants to explore how critical race theory does or does not apply beyond the US and how US racial formations impact and are impacted by racial formations in other sites.

 

How are Queer Imaginaries shaped by globalization? How do state policies and nationalist movements shape queer imaginaries? Given that sexuality from the so-called "Third World" isn't pure/indigenous, but always already entangled with imperialism and colonialism, how do we account for cultural specificities in a way that doesn't essentialize cultural/national difference, but engages with these specificities' historical imbrication with the colonial and the imperial in enabling ways?

What role can and do queers, queer theory, queer cultural productions of all sorts, in various racialized contexts, play in shaping the globe? How are we to assess the works of artists and activists who deploy images that have already been congealed in the collective/cultural imaginary through nationalist or capitalist appropriation? What do these artists and activists reveal in their process of deconstructing and/or unmasking these identities? At the same time, given the differential ability of various cultural forms (mass media, experimental performance, in English versus other languages) to "travel," what methodologies are best suited to understanding the politics of representations across cultural difference?

 

 

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

 

Friday, April 16th

9am Coffee and Pastries

9:15am Welcome and Introductions
Miranda Joseph, Director, Sex, Race and Globalization Project

9:30am-noon On the Limits and Possibilities of Queering
Sandra Soto, moderator

Antonio Viego "The Invert Is an Historian of the West"

Neville Hoad "Decolonizing the Body: Race, Africa and African America in Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters"

Darieck Scott "A Politics of Black Bottom-ing: Samuel R. Delany's Mad Man and Lusting for the N-Word"

Peter Chua "Globalizing Sexualities, Sexing Global Projects: Critical Questions, Divergent Interests"

Noon-1pm Lunch (provided)

1-3pm Performative Interventions and Queer Expressions
Javier Durán, moderator

Guillermo Núñez Noriega "Male Intimacy in Northern Mexico: A Field to Research"

Laura G. Gutiérrez "Queer Medi(t)ations: Ximena Cuevas's Transnational Performative Interventions"

Amy Sara Carroll "Specters of Freud in Contemporary Mexican Lesbian Cultural Production"

3:15-4:15pm Carmelita Tropicana "America: Above the Fruited Plains"

 

Saturday, April 17th

9am Coffee and pastries

9:30am-Noon Activism, Citizenship and Perversion
Caren Zimmerman, moderator

Marcia Ochoa "Perverse Citizenship: Divas, Marginality and Participation in 'Loca-lization'"

Maylei Blackwell "Mapping the Politics of Desire: Transnational Lesbian Organizing in Mexico and the U.S."

Nishant Shahani "Interrogating the 'Specifically Female': Towards a Performative Analysis of Indian Feminism"

Ashley Tellis "NGOs and the Future of Activism"

Noon-1pm Lunch (provided)

1-3pm Queer/ing Objects and Spaces
Dereka Rushbrook, moderator

Richard T. Rodriguez "When the Bar Becomes Home: Capitalism, Kinship, and Queer Latino/a Space"

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes "On Puerto Rican Flags, Parades, Drag Queens, and T-Shirts: Inscriptions of the Queer on the (Diasporic) Nation"

Maribel Alvarez "A Queer Reading of Mexican Curios"

3:15-4:30pm Summary Panel
Sallie Marston
Laura Briggs

7:30pm "A Tail of Two Cities" written and performed by Carmelita Tropicana
Pima Community College Center for the Arts Recital Hall

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