CfP: Outside/rs 2022 (Postgraduate and community-conference 04/2022, Brighton and virtual space); by: 09.01.2022

Outside/rs 2022 (Web)

Time: 01.-02.04.2022
Venue: University of Brighton and virtual space
Proposals by: 09.01.2022

Outside/rs 2022 conference is a postgraduate conference, making space at the queer intersections of sex and gender. The conference will be held online on the 1st of April, and in-person on the 2nd April.

Outside/rs aims to build a common understanding of the challenges in accounting for outsider gender identities and sexualities. The organizers seek to define what Outside/Inside means in relation to gender, sex and queerness. Outside/rs is a space to explore how marginalised groups negotiate a relation to exclusion and establish viable cultural possibilities on the margins, just as the monikers Insider and Outsider shape communities through a creation of difference. The organizers ask: what do the Inside and Outside mean for LGBTQIA+ people? And how can we understand and challenge their impact on our collective belonging?

The conference brings together participants whose work explores the possibilities of constructing or imagining Outsides and that examines how queer acceptance, visibility and politics are established and contested on the Inside(s). Exclusions and inclusions make pervasive impacts on individual lives, whether they work through dynamics of gender, sex, sexuality, race, class, able-bodiedness or other metrics of difference. Thus, there is a pressing need to interrogate our relation to Outside(s) and to devise strategies to make space(s) for Outsider identities and experiences.

The organizers invite submissions on any theme relevant to the broad concerns of gender or sexuality that address our conference theme of Outside/rs. They particularly encourage academic interdisciplinary or collaborative approaches to these topics. Example topics of submissions could include:

  • Social marginalisation, disruptive gender identities and dissident sexual cultures
  • Creating safe-spaces and navigating unsafe ones in terms of gender, sex or queerness
  • LGBTQIA+ and Queer political movements or history
  • Gender, family and kinship issues or politics
  • Queer arts, literatures, aesthetics and/or performance
  • New technologies for LGBTQ people: reproductive, non-reproductive and more
  • (Auto-)Biographies and ethnographies within and beyond the gender binary
  • Queer subjectivities, intersubjectivities and phenomenologies
  • Gendered or bodily boundaries, political borders and abolitionist responses
  • Outsides: nomadism, liminality and mobilities

Outside/rs 2022 provides community members the opportunity to present their work or share their experience professionally, politically or personally. It also makes space for ‘outsider’ communities and forms of engagement. We hope to promote lively critical interactions between participants and will endeavour to create an environment where all are encouraged to engage in constructive examinations of our practices and modes of representation.

Source: qstudy-l-request@mailman.rice.edu