Queer and minor audiovisual practices increasingly challenge the assumption that any form of visibility offers a reliable route to recognition or to political and evidentiary clarity. This panel asks how, rather than treating visibility or audibility as stable states, we might attend to the ways vocal fabulations, relational and spatial practices of telling, and imaginative or speculative interventions unsettle the evidentiary burdens traditionally placed on marginalized histories. In other words, we are interested in forms that make presence felt without fully disclosing it, and in the tensions that emerge when bodies, voices, images, and testimonies exceed the representational frames built to contain them.

We are proposing this panel for the European Network of Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) Annual Conference 18-20 June, 2026 in Montpellier, France. We invite contributions that examine audiovisual practices capable of opening perceptual worlds beyond visual certainty, works that expand the sensorial and imaginative field of what can be encountered, and that propose alternative ways of relating to histories of harm, endurance, and becoming.

Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:

• queer formulations of visibility, audibility, and opacity;

• minor, migrant, or transnational audiovisual forms that challenge the politics of representational certainty;

• vocal fabulation, the vocalic body, and sounded forms of self-making;

• relational and spatial practices that reconfigure how harm or survival becomes perceptible;

• speculative, imaginative, or fabulative strategies that resist documentary evidentiary norms;

• aesthetics of indirection, or withholding

The deadline for abstract submission is January 10. Please submit your abstracts to: Alanna Beroiza ab2070@english.rutgers.edu