Queer/ing Regions Symposium: update

We now have a confirmed list of speakers for the 'Queer/ing Regions' Symposium. The event will take place on 7 February 2013, 10.30-17.00 on the Clifton campus (room CELS001) of Nottingham Trent University. The event is free: if you are interested in attending, please contact Dr Cuneyt Cakirlar or Dr Hongwei Bao.

The speakers are:

Camila Bassi (Sheffield Hallam)

Jon Binnie (Manchester Metropolitan)

Gavin Brown (Leicester)

Howard Chiang (Warwick)

Enda Mccaffrey (NTU)

Richard Phillips (Sheffield)

Silvia Posocco (Birkbeck)

William Spurlin (Brunel)

Bethan Stevens (NTU)

 
This research symposium aims to facilitate a critical intellectual exchange focusing on the discourses of the “regional” in contemporary queer criticism. Departing from the “transnational” turn in the second-wave queer scholarship exploring the global/ised intersections between race, ethnicity, nation/diaspora, gender and sexuality, we would like to address the possibilities/potentials of a critical “self-regioning” and thus to question the ways in which the complex regional/local formations of sexual dissidence emerges as objects of theoretical inquiry once situated within a global context by means of the critical, academic and activist practice.

We would like to revisit the critical potentials of reclaiming the regional in queer critique. Rather than presuming the regional actors as passive recipients of global flux, this conversation will be delving into the complex dynamics of the global/local binary in sexual politics. How can we understand transnational formations of sexual subjectivities without assuming a radical alterity between the local and the global, or the west and the east? How can we understand the uneasy nexus of community and sexuality in a global framework? How can we identify modes of negotiation and contestation in the encounter of the local sexual politics and practices with the Gay International?