Queer/ing Regions: full programme

Below you'll find details of the full programme for the Queer/ing Regions Symposium which takes place on 7 February 2013 in CELS001 and 002 on the Clifton Campus of Nottingham Trent University. The event is free. If you are interested in attending, please contact Dr Cuneyt Cakirlar or Dr Hongwei Bao.  

This research symposium aims to facilitate a critical intellectual exchange focusing on the discourses of the “regional” in contemporary queer criticism. Departing from the “transnational” turn in the second-wave queer scholarship exploring the global/ised intersections between race, ethnicity, nation/diaspora, gender and sexuality, we would like to address the possibilities/potentials of a critical “self-regioning” and thus to question the ways in which the complex regional/local formations of sexual dissidence emerges as objects of theoretical inquiry once situated within a global context by means of the critical, academic and activist practice. We would like to revisit the critical potentials of reclaiming the regional in queer critique. Rather than presuming the regional actors as passive recipients of global flux, this conversation will be delving into the complex dynamics of the global/local binary in sexual politics. How can we understand transnational formations of sexual subjectivities without assuming a radical alterity between the local and the global, or the west and the east? How can we understand the uneasy nexus of community and sexuality in a global framework? How can we identify modes of negotiation and contestation in the encounter of the local sexual politics and practices with the Gay International?

 PROGRAMME

10:20 Arrivals and tea/coffee 

10:45 Welcome

11:00-12:30 PANEL 1:

Chair: Dr. Liz Morrish (NTU)

Professor William Spurlin (Brunel)

Shifting Geopolitical Borders/Shifting Sexual Borders:

Renegotiations of (Queer) Regionalism in a Transnational World

Dr Howard Chiang (Warwick)

(De)Provincializing China:

Queer Historicism and Sinophone Postcolonial Critique

Professor Richard Phillips (Sheffield)

Centres, Margins and Sexuality Politics:

Asians and Muslims as Cultural Minorities in ‘Mostly Liberated Societies’

12:30-1:30 Lunch 

1:30-3:00 PANEL 2:

Chair: Professor Gregory Woods (NTU)

Dr Jon Binnie (Manchester Metropolitan)

In What Sense is There a Regional Problem in Transnational Queer Studies?

Dr Silvia Posocco (Birkbeck)

‘The Problem of Context’:

Issues of Scale, Relation and Perspective in Queer Studies

Dr Gavin Brown (Leicester)

Political Ecologies of Sexuality:

Rethinking the Place of the Region (and Other Scales) in Queer Research

3:00-3:30 Tea/coffee break 

3:30-5:00 PANEL 3:

Chair: Dr Robert Kulpa (UEA)

Dr Camila Bassi (Sheffield Hallam)

What's Radical about Reality TV?

An Unexpected Tale of a Chinese Antihero and Space for Lesbian Identity

Dr Enda McCaffrey (NTU)

From Homographies of Invisibility to Hypervisibility:

Queering and De-Queering City Centre Space

Dr Bethan Stevens (NTU)

Queerly Between: Sussex, England and Kigali, Rwanda (a travel narrative)