Nino Testa (Fort Worth, Texas) and Catherine Evans (Pittsburgh, PA) (Web)

Proposals due: 01.03.2023

Drag is an art form with a rich legacy of challenging dominant norms and systems of oppression; building and sustaining queer community, and cultivating experiences of queer joy in a hostile world. Drag performers are often local celebrities who invite patrons into moments of queer worldmaking, opening spaces for pleasure in spectation, play, and experimentation. At a time when moral panics and violence against drag performers (in the forms of physical attacks, criminalization, and right-wing political discourse) have reached a fever pitch, the editors want to reflect on the ways that drag can anchor queer histories, politics, and activism. What does it mean to approach these expansive projects through the lens of drag performance?
This edited collection aims to intervene in critical conversations in drag studies from the perspective that drag can be a coalitional practice, promoting acts of resistance, and creating community through performance. The editors are interested in the idea of community as an actionable project organized by and centered on drag performance. While they are open to research about famous drag performers and their influence, they especially seek proposals that take seriously the local politics, aesthetics, and culture of drag, even as these are in conversation with mass and social media and situated in complex transnational contexts. The editors value and welcome critiques of drag celebrities contributing to the gentrification of local drag markets; work that interrogates the racial, gender, and class politics of drag venues; and other manifestations of power in drag scenes.
The editors aim to collaborate with scholars who want their work to circulate widely beyond academia and who might contribute to related programming on college campuses, gay bars, Pride events, and other community spaces. They wish to create a community-centered work of scholarship that offers a blueprint for drag resistance not only to scholars and students, but to performers, fans, and queer communities looking to meet this politically perilous moment with glitter, glamour, and grit. Read more … (Web)

Source: qstudy-l@mailman.rice.edu

Research Platform „Transformations and Eastern Europe“ at the Univ. of Vienna; Rasa Navickaite (Web)

Time: 29.-30.06.2023
Venue: University of Vienna
Proposals due: 28.02.2023

This two-day workshop invites doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers to reflect on the impact that the modernization of states and societies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) had on the construction of sexual and gender identities and experiences, as well as the notion of sexual deviance. While the 20th century was marked by increasingly modern (secular, science-based, medicalized, etc.) conception of sexuality across Europe, this new understanding interacted in complex ways with traditional and religious notions of morality and sin. Furthermore, the 20th century in CEE was marked by multiple regime and ideological changes, which also impacted the ways people lived and understood their personal lives, gender identities, and sexual experiences. Considering the limitations of the Foucauldian narrative of the history of sexuality in the West, the workshop invites participants to reflect on the methodological and theoretical tools that are needed to interrogate the continuity and change of sexual discourses and practices in CEE.
In particular, the workshop invites participants to reflect: Can we see gender as one of the central categories of analysis in understanding the construction of hetero- and cis- normativity and morality, even in societies which prided themselves on achieving gender equality? How do we approach the categories of class and race in relation to sexuality, when talking about CEE region, which experienced modernity largely in its state-socialist form and had a peripheral role in the global history of colonialism and imperial expansion? How did the modernizing institutions of medicine, science, law, police, and other state and non-state actors participate in creating some subject positions as socially acceptable, while others as deviant in CEE countries? In what ways did queer people experience, pursue, and express their desires in modernizing societies, and how can we research, understand, and commemorate them from a contemporary perspective? What can we learn about modern CEE societies and politics when applying queer and feminist theoretical instruments? Continue reading →