GenderQueer
/ QueerGenders
Conversations Among Artists, Activists
& Academics
University of California, Santa Barbara
February 11, 12, and 13, 2005
GenderQueer/QueerGenders is a multidiscplinary, multimedia conference
that will take place in Santa Barbara, CA, this coming February.
It will be a forum for people who’ve been thinking about
queerness and gender from different places (institutions, geographic
locations, identities) and through different means (performance,
scholarship, organizing , cultural politics, etc). The conference
will bring together artists, scholars and activists as equal
contributors to conduct workshops, exhibit and perform art,
and present academic research. A priority of this conference
is to reflect the diversity and complexity of gender expressions
and the meanings gender has in different racial and cultural
locations. To that end, we particularly encourage proposals
by and for people of color, working-class people, and people
with disabilities.
GenderQueer/QueerGenders
will be a forum for discussing the multiplicity of queer gender
identities as they are experienced and expressed simultaneously
with race, region, class, access, ability and other identities.
One catalyst for this project has been our collective frustration
with the lack of certain critical discourses about intersections
of genders and sexualities. Specifically, we are concerned
about the limited discourse on “emerging” queer
genders including, for example, queer femininities, heterosexual
queers, and the ways that gaps like these overlap with existing
silences about race, class and privilege. We fear that these
discourses are sometimes overshadowed by homogenizing “conventional”
narratives of genderqueer and transgender communities. We
hope to create a space to theorize a wider range of queer
genders more fully representative of our identities, communities,
and political/artistic work.
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE CONFERENCE WILL INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING EVENTS:
