We are excited to invite proposals for papers and artistic presentations for a day-long symposium on “Queer Failures and Possibilities: Trans Movements in Contemporary South Asia,” for the 51st Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison (Wednesday, October 18, 2023). https://southasiaconference.wisc.edu/.
For over a decade now, trans activism and trans production has accelerated in legal, political, cultural, and artistic realms across South Asia. While these movements have animated possibilities for trans justice, so too have they often perpetuated narrow modes of legitimacy, reproducing hierarchies around class, caste, language, religion, kinship, labor, sexuality, nation and global capital. Violence against khwaja sira-hijra-kothi-trans persons is rampant; surveillance and policing have ensued; legislative achievements have been tremulous at best; while politicians extract votes from the backs of trans and queer bodies. Following Halberstam (2011) and Takemoto (2016), this symposium draws on queer failure to consider the dimensions of loss, elision, and disappointment in and around trans social, legal and political movements, as well as the possibilities of failure as a mode of resistance, intervention, speculation, fabulation, and world making—moving trans in South Asia toward other futures.
The symposium welcomes paper presentations, screenings, and artistic and creative responses coming from a wide variety of disciplines–history, anthropology, theater and performance studies, gender and sexuality studies, sociology, geography, and law. We welcome inquiry into the accelerations and disruptions to trans movements alongside feminist, anti-caste, labor and LGBT and other mobilizations not only in the contemporary moment but also situating these movements in broader colonial and postcolonial histories, in and across the borders of South Asia.
We anticipate the symposium will result in a special journal issue or edited volume and hope that folx accepted for the symposium would commit to developing an 8000-word paper in preparation for this eventuality.
In-person attendance at the symposium is preferred.
Please email a title and 200-300 word abstract of your proposed contribution to: Claire Pamment (William & Mary University, clpamment at the rate of wm.edu) and Jeff Redding (University of Melbourne, jeff.redding at the rate of unimelb.edu.au) by 30 April 2023.
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