Queering the Everyday: Identity, Sport, and the Minor Improvisations of Queer Life

Session Submission Type: Constructed Paper Session

Abstract

These three papers examine the mundane sites where queer identity gets worked out, often messily and without resolution. One paper reads Desiree Akhavan's Appropriate Behavior as a meditation on improvised adulthood — asking what it means to "grow sideways" when the scripts of girl power and assimilation have run out. Another examines USA Ultimate's gender inclusion policy in action, reading the sport as an improvisational site where the institutional politics of trans inclusion play out in real bodies on a field. The session closes with a reading of Jerrod Carmichael's reality show as a text that deliberately withholds the clarifying optic it seems to promise — queerness as refusal of resolution.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Playing with Gender: An Exploration of USA Ultimate's Gender Inclusion Policy in Action - Janeanne M Levenstein

• Jerrod Carmichael Lacks Focus - Michelle Robinson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Chair

• Matty Hemming, Rice University