Historicism, Homonormativity,
and Queer Political Formations
Saturday, May 12 / 9 AM – 6:30 PM / College 8, Room 240
LISA DUGGAN’s analysis of “the new homonormativity… a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them” points to the problem of U.S.-based lesbian and gay political aspirations toward acceptance within contemporary economic and political systems, aspirations that risk jettisoning earlier queer commitments to economic redistribution and liberation. Examples include the formal endorsement of normative domestic kinship arrangements, neoliberal economic philosophies, the marginalization of non-normative sexualities, U.S. exceptionalism and the concomitant embrace of models of gay globalization, teleological models of historical progress, presentism, and models of identity based on traditional humanist exclusions.
This conference asks participants to think about questions of relationality/community/solidarity that coexist tensely within queer political formations and queer studies. Do norms of history-making and normativizations of identity threaten to domesticate and/or foreclose the radical and outlaw possibilities of queer, or do they produce “imagined communities” from which effective politics can emerge? What sorts of models—past, present, or future—exist or can be imagined for theories and practices of queer political formations and their geographically, culturally, and psychically disparate aspirations?
The conference will highlight and showcase the work of graduate students from northern California universities focusing on a range of histories and periodicities, geopolitical formations, transnational comparisons, racial and gender formations, and methodological/theoretical approaches.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Lisa Duggan – “Feeling Neoliberal: Homonormative Desires, Imperial Dreams”
Lisa Duggan is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Director of the American Studies Program, in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her books include Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy (Beacon, 2003); Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest, co-edited with Lauren Berlant (NYU, 2001); and Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity (Duke, 2000). Her next book, The End of Marriage: The War over the Future of State Sponsored Love, is forthcoming from University of California Press in 2008.
Marcia Ochoa – “Becoming a Man in Yndias: The Mediations of Catalina de Erauso, The Lieutenant Nun”
Marcia Ochoa is Assistant Professor of Community Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her book project is entitled “Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Misses and Mass Media in Venezuela.” Her field research explores beauty pageant contestants’ and transgender women’s strategic use of beauty and feminity. Beginning in 1994, she worked in San Francisco with Proyecto Contra SIDA Por Vida, a multigender Latina/o HIV/AIDS service organization. In 2006 she began supervising the programs El/La Transgender Latina HIV Prevention Program. Ochoa has done extensive work on HIV prevention media campaigns, media literacy, and human rights for Latin American transgender people in Venezuela and the U.S.
Jasbir K. Puar – “Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times”
Jasbir K. Puar is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and a member of the Graduate Program in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University. Her forthcoming book is entitled Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke, 2007). Puar is also working on India Shining, a video project about the challenges of South Asian progressive organizations in New York City to the Hindutva nationalist and communalist politics of the annual India Day parade. Recent publications include “Mapping U.S. Homonormativities,” Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography (February 2006) and “On Torture: Abu Ghraib,” Radical History Review (Fall 2005).
Karen Tongson – “Relocations: Queer of Color Suburban Imaginaries”
Karen Tongson is Assistant Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in the journals Social Text, GLQ, and Nineteenth-Century Literature, as well as in the anthology Queering the Popular Pitch (eds. Rycenga and Whiteley, Routledge, 2006). Her talk is drawn from her book project of the same title. For additional material from and about the project, see her blog, the INLAND EMPEROR: http://theinlandemperor.blogspot.com
For further information, please contact freccero@ucsc.edu and mef@ucsc.edu.
Sponsored by the Queer Theory and Africana Dialogues Research Clusters of the Center for Cultural Studies, the Institute for Humanities Research, and the Feminist Studies Department