PAMLA 2025 Annual Conference

We invite paper proposals for an accpetd panel titled “Queer Temporalities, Memory, and Resistance in Asia,” to be held at the 2025 Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Convention in San Francisco (November 20–23, 2025), complementing the broader conference theme of “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion.”

This panel explores how non-normative experiences of embodiment, temporality, spatiality, and memory practices intersect with acts of resistance across diverse Asian contexts. We invite submissions that examine these themes across Asia and its diasporas. 

Queer temporality refers to the ways queer lives and cultural texts resist chrononormativity – the enforced linear timeline of heteronormative development. Rather than following a uniform path from past to future, queer experiences often involve nonlinear, recursive, delayed, or parallel relations to time. Memory plays a crucial role in these temporal negotiations: acts of remembering and forgetting shape queer identity and community, especially in societies where official histories have erased or marginalized queer narratives. Everyday life and cultural production become sites of resistance, as queer individuals and groups subvert normative time through alternative life cycles, archival labor (preserving and reanimating queer histories), and affective practices of recollection. Such resistances may range from open political activism to subtle temporal interventions.

We especially welcome interdisciplinary approaches that engage with the intersections of queer temporality, memory, spatiality, and resistance. Submissions may draw from, traverse, or unsettle disciplinary boundaries across media studies, literature, visual culture, performance, digital humanities, archival studies, ethnography, political theory, or beyond. We encourage theoretical innovation as well as grounded, practice-based, or community-engaged work.

Possible topics for submissions include, but are not limited to:

• Queer temporal narratives in film and television
• Queer digital media and networked socialities
• Queer failure
• Fandom and affective economies – queer fan practices (Boys’ Love (BL) fandoms, K-pop fan communities, fan fiction and art) as sites of emotional exchange, subcultural memory, and grassroots resistance.
• Cultural industries and censorship – how film, TV, and publishing industries in various Asian contexts negotiate queer content and temporality (state regulations, market logics, “timeless” depictions to evade censors, independent vs. mainstream production of queer media).
• Queer counterpublics and community spaces – the creation of alternative public spheres such as queer bars, clubs, pride events, zines, or film festivals, and their role in shaping collective memory and political resistance.
• Archival memory and historiography – community archives, oral history projects, memoirs or documentaries that document queer histories; critical analyses of how remembering (or forgetting) queer pasts influences present struggles.
• Queer Futurity
• Aesthetics of slowness, flow, delay, and retroactivity – queer art, literature, or performance that adopts durational or retrospective techniques to critique norms of speed, productivity, etc.
• Queer temporalities of everyday life – non-normative life trajectories and rhythms: intergenerational queer kinship; experiences of temporal disjunction in migration, exile, or aging in queer communities.
• Queer Utopia and Dystopia

Submission Guidelines:

Please submit your paper title, a concise abstract of approximately 50 words, and a proposal of 250–400 words via the PAMLA submission portal: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19515. For any inquiries, please contact Max Yang at yiouy@usc.edu.

Dates

Proposal Submission Deadline: May 15, 2025
Notification of Acceptance: May 25, 2025
Conference Dates: November 20–23, 2025