The pasts, presents, and futures of queer mobilities: transnational movements of ideas, concepts, and people
2nd Workshop of the European Network for Queer Anthropology (ENQA)
7th-8th of September, 2017 – Central European University, Budapest
Conference home page: https://enqa2017.wordpress.com/
Theme
Mobility is a foundational element of queer life, queer ideas and concepts as well as of queer scholarship. As such, queer mobilities - literally and conceptually - characterize European modernity and its academic interpretations in fundamental ways. Queer ideas and concepts, for example, are often born out of movements across margins, norms, and boundaries while also being critically attuned to the risks of reconstituting these separating orders of social life and thought. Another dimension of queer mobilities is the movement of LGBTQ people in search of queer spaces and communities. The constitutive Othering and violent exclusion of queer people from families, friends, and loved ones on grounds of their desires has repeatedly led to the destruction and construction of queer spaces and communities and to the queerly mobile lives of those on the move in European contexts. Heteronormative reactions to queer mobilities as well as the marking of migrants, refugees, vagrants, and travelers as perverse and dangerous, have been constant drivers of social change and its scholarly analysis in Europe. Queer theories, activisms, and politics can be understood as emerging in reaction to the normativities of national socialist ideology, the post-World War Two re-traditionalization of European gender relations, and the mainstreaming of late-twentieth century identity politics. Such movements arise from ongoing disidentifications with oppressive violence, normative concepts of identity, exclusionary ideas of community, and not least also the disciplines of “liberation”. These intertwined dynamics of queer mobilities have been critically consequential for modern social life, politics, and scientific thought. In this workshop, we want to engage with the multifaceted ideas, concepts, conditions, and practices of queer mobilities in order to assess and challenge past, present, and future understandings of the relationships between queerness and mobility.
The European Network for Queer Anthropology invites contributions to re-assess the past, present, and future of queer mobilities in Europe and European academic discourse. As the workshop’s aim is to further discussion and academic exchange, we welcome a range of different formats, ranging from more traditional paper presentations to work in progress (development of ideas, projects, and thoughts), to roundtables and performances, short films and other more artistic or activistic means of representation. We seek contributions that empirically investigate the complex relations between “queerness” and “mobility” as they emerge in the shifting contexts of modern Europe and their analysis by scholars of queer anthropology. We encourage submissions focusing on these concerns in relation to the following (but not limited to) range of topics and sites:
- the development of queer concepts, ideas, and scholarship
- queer(ing) interdisciplinarity and the history of science(s)
- queer mobilities, technologies, education
- transnational migration, race and criminalisation
- patriotism, expat(riotism), urban mobilities and gentrification
- global histories of LGBTQ people
- trans* and queer activism
- trans* and queer (mobility) infrastructures and global intimacies
Timetable
Time |
Thursday 7th of September, 2017 |
Friday 8th of September, 2017 |
9:00 |
Welcome 1st day |
Welcome 2nd day |
1st Keynote: Mark Graham, Stockholm: In praise of staying put |
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10:00 |
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11:00 |
Break |
Break |
Panel 4: Queer (im)mobilities, queer (in)visibilities: case studies from East and South Africa |
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12:00 |
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13:00 |
Lunch |
Lunch |
14:00 |
Panel 2: Mobilizing emotions: feminist methodologies in transnational scholarship |
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15:00 |
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Coffee |
Coffee |
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16:00 |
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17:30 |
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Break |
Break |
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18:00 |
ENQA meeting |
Roundtable: The Uses of Biopolitics in Postcolonial, Queer Ethnography |
19:00 |
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20:00 |
Dinner |
Dinner/Party |
Programme
1st Keynote: Mark Graham – In praise of staying put
A lecture praising immobility might seem a tad perverse or just a way of getting attention at a workshop devoted to stuff that moves. Perhaps it is both. But making a point with inversions and contrasts has a long history in anthropology. Think of rituals of reversal and worlds turned upside-down. Closer to queer interests one only has to think of how quickly queer shame, as opposed to gay pride, made a fruitful appearance. Maybe, as some have suggested, the emphasis on mobility in queer theory reflects a class perspective, that of the privileged mobile flâneur and one to which we are all too easily prone, but also perhaps the assumption, still present in some quarters, that anthropology in order to be done properly requires moving away rather than staying at home. Yet demanding or expecting mobility arguably directs attention from what is in front of you, perhaps hiding in the light, or directly under your feet waiting to be uncovered. Arguably, too, the imperative to be mobile is at least partially at odds with elements of queer theorising that stress queerness within and not only without and elsewhere.
2nd Keynote: Kira Kosnick – Queer mobilities and the challenge of activism in a Europe of retrenchment
In my talk, I want to reflect upon the challenges to both mobilities and activism that arise from the political dynamics in different parts of Europe today. I want to reflect upon the consequences of a surge in right-wing populist sentiment and politics that often combines an anti-immigrant agenda with a heterosexist re-centering of the imagined national community, and ask about the possibilities for trans* and queer activism that could counter these trends. In order to do so, I will reflect upon the historical continuities and discontinuities when it comes to European articulations of sexuality with 'race', and ponder what these might mean for different kinds of queer subjects and their relation to politics.
1. Queer Space and World Making
Chair: Michael Jackman
Francis Seeck – Moblizing Solidarity and Intimacy - European Networks of Trans* and Non-Binary Community Care
Ioana Fotache – Queer Diasporas in Japan: A Case Study of the 2017 Dyke Weekend
Richard Karl Deang – Queer Migrations and the Masculinity of Modernity: Filipino Gay Pageants in the Diaspora
Melanie Rickert – Rise and Resist: Queer World-making in St-Petersburg, Russia
2. Mobilizing emotions: feminist methodologies in transnational scholarship
Chair: Heather Tucker
Nadia Jones-Gailani – ‘Sensing’ the Silence: The Codependence of Silence and the Senses in Feminist Ethnographic Methodology
Rebekah Cupitt – Caring deeply: Working towards theories for deaf ways of being
Heather Tucker – Mobility, Vulnerability, and Positionality: Exploring Queer Ethnography in Ghana
Elissa Helms – Humor as a Method in Feminist Transnational Research
Mert Kocak – Queer Necropolitics and Mobility: An Oral History of Trans Women's Deaths in Turkey
3. Homonationalism
Chair: Hadley Renkin
Keith McNeal and Sarah French Brennan – Between Homonationalism and Islamophobia: Comparing Queer Asylum-Seeking to the Netherlands from the Caribbean Versus the Muslim World
Judit Takács, Tamás PTóth, and Adrienne Csizmady – Where do Hungarian LGBTQ+ people migrate (and why)?
Patrick Wielowiejski – Moving to the Right: Gay-Friendliness in Western European Far-Right Parties
Erin L. Durban-Albrecht – Imperialism and Transnational Sexual Politics: Homophobia and Homoprotectionism
4. Queer (im)mobilities, queer (in)visibilities: case studies from East and South Africa
Chair: Eileen Moyer
Lucy Mungala – Queer activism in Kenya and beyond: media advocacy and the importance of transnational networks
Katlego Disemelo – Insta-Queers in Johannesburg, South Africa: The production of queer subbjectivities in social media
Jasmine Shio – "Let us just leave": Mobility as a coping strategy among gay men in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Emmy Kageha Igonya – Queer wombs in Kenya: The extension of homophobia to mothers of gay men
5. Queering Border Logics
Chair: Rebekah Cupitt
Linda Sólveigar Gudmundsdóttir – Exclusionary moments: Same-sex sexualities and migrants sense of belonging
Anouk Madörin – Imagining No Future? The sexualized logics of non/reproductivity in the Visuality of the European Border Regime
Vitor Lopes Andrade – Sexual Orientation and Refuge: an ethnographic research in the city of São Paulo, Brazil
Cornelius Rijneveld – 'I will never miss Uganda!' - LGBT asylum, Danishness, and the homonational order of things
6. Identity Borders
Chair: Sebastian Mohr
Marie Bjerre Odgaard – Patchwork identities and urban ‘queer’ lives in the Middle East
Dany Carnassale – The transnational construction of queerness in everyday life of Senegalese migrants living in Italy
Victor Trofimov – Living in a transnational space: mobility and negotiations of sexuality among male migrant street-based sex workers in Berlin
Aureliano Lopes da Silva Junior – Made in Brazil, made in Thailand and made in Europe: the cross boarders connections in the embodiment of beauty for Brazilian transgender women
7. Roundtable: The Uses of Biopolitics in Postcolonial, Queer Ethnography
Richard Karl Deang
Heather Tucker
Hadley Renkin
Sebastian Mohr
