Future / NO Future: Graduate Student Conference, Gender and Sexuality Studies - University of Pennsylvania, Sept. 16-17, 2010

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University of Pennsylvania

Future / NO Future

An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference on the Future of Gender and Sexuality Studies

Keynote Address: Lisa Duggan (New York University)

16th and 17th of September 2010, University of Pennsylvania

We are interested in the future of gender and sexuality studies as an interdisciplinary field. We envision this field as a generative methodology for the broad study of identity, subjectivity, kinship, and power. This fall, we would like to rethink the political, social and intellectual developments that are shaping the roles of gender and sexuality in academic work, as well as ask how the study of gender and sexuality deals with futurity.

Why futurity? There is an ongoing debate in queer theory which has concerned itself with the political and strategic potential of positive or negative affect, and pessimistic, optimistic, or utopian modes of imagining the future. We hope to encourage debate across a wide range of disciplines: How does futurity relate to the political commitments of academics? What are the pros and cons of envisioning a specific future? How do political pessimism, and the pleasures of cynicism, encounter the rhetoric of hope and change? Can passivity and hopelessness, or an optimism that is tailored in specific ways, be effective political strategies? What is attractive about these rallying cries—"The Future!" vs. "No Future!"—and what is meant by future in each case?

As graduate students working on gender and sexuality, we are interested in the future of this field. What do we, the future of this field, do? What methodologies and theories inform our work? Might the future of the field be a consolidation across the tracks of individual departments and methodologies? What are the limits or problems of interdisciplinarity? What discipline-specific lexicons are used to define gendered and sexualized selves, bodies, or structures, and whose future do they serve?

We invite submission of abstracts from the sciences, social sciences and humanities. Potential topics include, but are by no means limited to:

* Gendered and racialized bodies
* Gender dynamics of optimism and pessimism
* Sexual subcultures
* Spaces and geographies
* Medical practice
* Global gender
* Transgender rights
* Institutional structuring of Gender and Sexuality Studies
* Qualitative and quantitative modes of prediction
* Futurity and history
* Theology and optimism/pessimism
* Family and kinship
* Critical race studies
* Feminisms
* Queer theory
* Affect studies
* Performativity
* Gender and sexuality as studied in ALL fields

Submit abstracts (ca 500 words) to futurenofuture2010@gmail.com

Submission deadline: 31 March 2010

Please visit http://futurenofuture.wordpress.com/ for (no)future updates