Twenty years ago, David Eng, Jack Halberstam, and the late José Esteban Muñoz asked “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” in a special issue of Social Text. With this question, they invited the field’s overhaul through considerations of race, debates about temporality/futurity, and interrogations of the transnational assemblages that then shaped refugee and migrant life. At the same time the special issue deconstructed the privileged subjects of queer studies, it echoed, furthered, and made space for field-defining works in queer Latinx studies: Muñoz’s Disidentifications (1999), Juana Maria Rodríguez Queer Latinidad (2003), Richard T. Rodríguez Next of Kin (2009), Larry LaFountain Stokes Queer Ricans (2009), and the landmark Gay Latino Studies edited by Michael Hames-García and Ernesto Martínez (2011).

Orienting this queer Latinx genealogy against a present in which queerness seems less on the horizon than here and under assault, and less marginal than central to the state’s inhumane management of black and brown people at home and abroad, this panel asks: what’s queer about Latinx studies now? As the field reckons with an unbridled second Trump administration intent on fully realizing in the 21st century the transphobic, antiqueer, and anti-migrant exclusionary fantasies of the 20th that informed the special issue that inspires this panel, we invite proposals that interrogate how the assaults against queer, Latinx, and migrant social, public, and civic life square with, upend, and reinvigorate the dynamic methodological debates around themes that have recently animated Latinx studies, including: race and cancellation, temporality and futurity, transness and transnationalism, literary and historical recovery, aesthetics, leisure and refusal, the environment/Anthropocene, occupation and liberation, citizenship and rights, migration, disability, carcerality and abolition. In this sense, the panel also urgently asks, what needs to be queer about Latinx studies at this critical moment when the queer promises of a project like “Latinx,” for instance, seem all but critically obsolete in the face of one of the cruelest assaults against Latinx and migrant communities to date.

Please send brief abstracts (250 word max.) to José de la Garza Valenzuela (delagv@illinois.edu) and Tommy Conners (tconners@ufl.edu) by September 22, 2025. We envision a panel of brief papers at the 2026 LSA conference in Austin, TX with aims of organizing a special issue after.