Queer Hemisphere

Stemming from a broader research collaboration of the same name, this panel stages a multilingual, transnational conversation among minoritized queer studies formations throughout the Americas. In doing so, its aim is to... [ view full abstract ]

Stemming from a broader research collaboration of the same name, this panel stages a multilingual, transnational conversation among minoritized queer studies formations throughout the Americas. In doing so, its aim is to reorient queer scholarship and activism along a hemispheric axis. Despite their theoretical convergences and geo-historical imbrications, Latin American gender and sexuality studies and US-based women and queer of color feminisms are scholarly ferments that have rarely enjoy forums for mutual intellectual exchange and debate. Rather, the hemispheric circulation of sexuality studies research disproportionately showcases the contributions of white, English-speaking scholars in the global north, thus privileging already-dominant sites, subjects, and vocabularies of scholarship and activism. To disrupt these trends, panelists and audience members will collectively contemplate how queer analytics and hemispheric frameworks might be productively combined. By applying geo-political pressure to ‘queer’ as an analytical category, our aim is to collaboratively generate more textured accounts of and nuanced dialogues about how racialized gender and sexual alterity are produced, lived, and circulated throughout the Americas. Panelists will draw on their own research to engage the questions that will guide our discussion, which include: What productive tensions arise from queerly working across the distinctive historical, geographic, linguistic, and epistemological registers of these fields? What scholarly tools, conversations, and venues are needed, then, to strengthen hemispheric conversations within queer scholarship and activism? And, what are some of the scholarly and institutional benefits of and challenges to bridging minoritized ethnic and area studies formations such as these?