Queer Encounters: Defying Imperial and Racial Violence

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The ongoing crises, fueled by white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and imperialist expansions, prompt concerns regarding responses to oppressive politics. This panel explores the potential of queer studies in addressing imperial and racial violence. It centers on queer encounters from the past and present, highlighting the needs and experiences of marginalized communities and their pursuit in defying imperial and racial violence. Specifically, the panel urges us to contemplate a unique dimension of political interactions and solidarities—one that prioritizes interconnectedness between marginalized communities affected by imperial and racial violence, rather than state-to-state relations and high politics. Queer encounters encompass practices of caring, sharing, dreaming, surviving, and desiring that disrupt oppressive powers. The term “queer” is employed not to impose a vision of a universal queer subject or identity but to underscore configurations of desire, sexuality, and gender resisting hegemonic colonial and racial paradigms of intimacy. In this context, the panel draws on scholarship elucidating how forms of desire and sexuality resist global geopolitics and hegemonic colonial and racial paradigms. Additionally, queer encounters contribute to "queer world-making," constructing alternative sociality and futurity outside heteronormativity and racial hierarchies. Through diverse examples, the panelists shed light on alternative pathways for communities to connect across various geographies, particularly in the face of imperial and racial violence.

Sub Unit

• Gender/LGBTQ Studies

Chair

• Lesia Pagulich, U of Vienna (Austria)

Papers

• Cultivating Queer Feminist Utopias: A Reading of Bety Catfur and Its Screening at Ukrainian Feminist Festival Filma - Lesia Pagulich, U of Vienna (Austria)

• A Queering Audiotopia of the 1990s: The Women, the Freaks, the Ukraine - Iuliana Matasova, Independent Scholar

• Queer Intimacies: Rethinking Audre Lorde’s Trip to the Soviet Union in 1976 - Tatsiana Shchurko, U of South Florida

Discussant

• Ileana Nachescu, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey