SUBMISSIONS ARE INVITED FOR the session "Found in Translation: Performing Queer Injuries and Desires" at the 2013 Association of American Geographers meeting to be held in Los Angeles, CA. Organizers for this session are Begum Basas (Bilgi University, Turkey) or Lorena Munoz (University of Minnesota), and they aim to engage with the term "queer" and the perfromances of its translation while the term travels. Abstracts due to one of the organizers by October 8, 2012.
CFP for the 2013 Association of American Geographers in Los Angeles
Presentations invited for session titled: Found in Translation: Performing queer injuries and desires
Sponsored by the Geographic Perspectives on Women and the Sexuality and Space specialty groups
Sponsored by the Sexuality and Space specialty group
Organizers: Lorena Munoz Ph.D. (University of Minnesota) and Begum Basdas Ph.D. (Bilgi University, Turkey.)
This session aims to engage with the term "queer" and the performances of its translation while the term travels. While it is argued that "queer" is a difficult term to translate to different languages and acts, we are interested in finding how the performances of translation actually open up new possibilities of queering. However, such possibilities create spaces of both injuries and desires. Here, we refer to different understandings of the practice of "translation." First, we would like to engage with the literal translation of Anglo-American texts and acts to diverse languages. Second, we refer to works by academics, artists, film directors, and others, who tell stories of "other" ways of being queer. Third, and probably not the last, we refer to how different ways of being queer and queering are performed through translation in different histories and materialities. We hope to articulate "translation" as a more multi-way relationship, rather than a one-way street. If the term queer, as Butler argued, "will have to remain that which is in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes," (1993: 228) how do we translate, write, and perform "other" ways of being/loving/fucking/playing/hurting (and more) without the limitations of the hegemonic binaries, such as the West/rest and hetero/homo?
We invite presentations in writing and as performance that deal with (but not limited to) the following:
• Queering the uses of the term "queer" that does not articulate the
West as the hegemonic language and depict the rest as the bounded,
particular resistances. (For detailed discussion see Cakirlar and
Delice, 2012)
• If queering involves possibilities of subverting heteronormative
(and homonormative) institutions through our sexualities, how can we
imagine alternative experiences of queering our relationships?
• Imagining different approaches to "queering," the subaltern.
• Engaging with how the term "queer" travels and performs reciprocal
practices of translation and within those spaces how we may find
"other" ways of being queer embodied in desires, pleasures, and
injuries.
Please submit abstracts to Begum Basdas bbasdas@gmail.com or Lorena
Munoz lmunoz@umn.edu. Please contact us for questions and/or
additional information. Deadline for submitting abstracts is October 8, 2011.
