New Directions in Queer, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

The LUC Transdisciplinary Colloquium of Gender and Queer Studies is seeking proposals that align with the theme of this year’s colloquium—“New Directions”—that point toward emerging directions within Queer, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Inspired by David Eng and Jasbir Puar from the Social Text issue Left of Queer, we seek explorations that are working at the edges of queer, trans, feminist, and masculinity studies and theory (broadly construed). Per Eng and Puar, “What is left of queer now?” It is both a critical call to interrogate our own constructed and contingent discourses and a rallying cry to understand how exceptionality (US, sexual, West, Christian, etc.) is a process of exclusionary operations, and we must ask the following:  

What populations, and what processes of relationality and sociality, are left out of this worlding? Is this “left” new? What purposes does contextualization serve? What does it mean to direct a field in a direction through critique, reflection, resistance, or reiteration? How does utilizing this context ready this field and others to respond to geopolitical circumstances, humanitarian crises, and realities of life? What place does the sexual subject still have—or not have—in contemporary trends of gender and queer studies? Is the expansion of subjectless critique to the objectless critique worthwhile? Where do these questions align? Where do they diverge? How do these questions “play out” in different disciplines? 

The LUC Transdisciplinary Colloquium of Gender and Queer Studies is imagined as a space for the collaborative cross-pollination when one mode of study meets another, creating something new and perhaps unexpected.  

This year we invite proposals along the following topics: 

• Intersectional Theory (queer, trans*, critical race, postcolonial, decolonial, disability, etc.); 
• Intersectional Studies (African American, Black, LGBTQ/gay and lesbian, disability, etc.) 
• Future(s) of Feminism (transformative, eco-, xeno-, glitch, cyborg, analysis of war); 
• Men* & Masculinity Studies (new, toxic, soft, de/construction, etc.); 
• Posthumanism (cyborg, AI, prosthesis, object oriented ontologies, etc.); 
• Binary-bending (female masculinity/male femininity; queering trans/transing queer, etc.); 
• Applied Theory and Praxis (pedagogy, social work, activism, etc.); 
• Queer and Trans* Studies in... (religious studies, theology, history, etc.); 
• Contemporary Geopolitics (humanitarian crises, war, government destabilization, etc.); 
• Media studies (literature, cinema, television, social media, art etc.); 
• Open (if you feel your research does not neatly fit into the above listed categories, please suggest your own). 

More imformation TBA in the Fall for a Spring 2025.