Is Visibility Still a Trap? Rethinking Visibility in Queer and Trans Studies (MLA 2025 Session)
Dominant queer and trans studies frameworks still tend to see visibility as a ‘trap’. We invite 200-word abstracts for a special session to be proposed for the 2025 MLA convention that will offer a more complex picture, specifying and historicizing the changing meanings of visibility in queer and trans representation. Please send 200-word abstracts and short bio notes to Guy Davidson and Ben Nichols (guy@uow.edu.au, ben.nichols@manchester.ac.uk) by 18th March 2024.
In contemporary queer and trans studies, the increased ‘visibility’ of queer and trans people is often imagined primarily as a problem. Some of the issues with ‘visibility’ are: it tends to promote only the most privileged subjects amongst those made visible; it presages the assimilation of queer/trans subjects into a liberal social order (rather than the disruption of that order); and it exposes queer/trans subjects to pernicious surveillance and violence. This orientation to visibility was largely forged via the reading of Michel Foucault that grounded 1990s US-based queer studies. In Foucault’s famous aphorism, ‘visibility is a trap’. But while this theoretical orientation to visibility has remained largely in place, the contexts of Western queer and trans visibility have drastically changed. Across myriad popular cultural forms and in social life, LGBTQ+ people are more visible than ever, while cultural literacy around LGBTQ+ identities, cultures and lives is massively increased. How do the changing contexts of queer/trans visibility prompt a rethinking of our theoretical frameworks?
This session will open space to do this rethinking. Among the questions to be addressed are: how can we historicise and specify the changing meanings of visibility in queer/trans representation? Can we move beyond the straightforward condemnation or endorsement of visibility that we see in queer/trans studies and in popular discourse respectively? What cultural forms, genres and intersecting categories have played a role in making queer/trans people visible and to what effects? What cultural forms or genres have tended to be sidelined in queer/trans scholarship because of their relation to unambiguous ‘visibility’? What might returning to these sidelined forms and genres reveal?
Please send 200-word abstracts and short bios to Guy Davidson and Ben Nichols (guy@uow.edu.au, ben.nichols@manchester.ac.uk) by 18th March 2024.
See the CfP on the MLA website here: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2025/webprogrampreliminary/Paper26598.html