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LAG - DCQS 2025

Black text on a light background next to a decorative image of by Shyam Thandar

RSVP for DCQS 2025

About the DC Queer Studies Symposium

 

The 2025 edition of the DC Queer Studies symposium builds on the renewed emphasis on geopolitics in North America-based queer and transgender studies by gathering together scholars and artists who engage productive tensions between sites and citations and who go beyond the case study model to generate theoretical frameworks that think area and trans and queer life together.

 

About the Artwork

A colorful piece of artwork rendered in a clay red and red, yellow, blue, and green of six different creatures animal and human coming together
It Takes All Kinds,  Shyam Thandar, 210×297 cm, Watercolour on Paper, 2024, Kirnahar/New Delhi
Sexual love and all the aspects of eros are Shyam Thandar's most favoured visual interests. He traps the eros in a 'design of his own' with a multiverse of characters - like the ones in this painting. Here love flows upstream, downstream and in all kinds of positions - among humans, hybrids and non-humans. But this love is not a universal white light, rather a multihued bloom, of which each can see but one colourful petal at a time - as above, so below. 
 
About the Artist
Shyam Thandar poses crouched under the leaves of a large fruit tree heavy with citrus
Born in 1972, Shyam Thandar is a self-taught artist. He started painting out of the blue one night in October 2018 and has not stopped painting, sculpting, making and assembling ever since. A fatherless child since he was eight years old, he has had all kinds of odd jobs and wanderings since his teenage years. He has seen and lived life in very many out-of-the-ordinary ways. All the while, his 'mobile eye' and a storyteller's ears have been gathering images all his life. Shyam's works bristle with the Art Brut pleasures of looking and showing, made from an outsider's point of view.

Speakers

A centered image of Asli Zengin

Aslı Zengin, Ph.D

Aslı Zengin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research lies at the intersection of ethnography of queer and trans lives and deaths; medico-legal regimes of sex, gender and sexuality; critical studies of violence and sovereignty; as well as transnational aspects of LGBTQ movements in the Middle East with a special focus on Turkey.

A centered headshot of Kwame Edwin Otu

Kwame Edwin Otu, Ph.D

Kwame Edwin Otu is an Associate Professor in the African Studies Program at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Otu is a cultural anthropologist with interests ranging from the politics of sexual, environmental, and technological citizenships, public health, and shifting racial formations in neocolonial and neoliberal Africa and the African Diaspora

A centered headshot of Lucinda Ramberg

Lucinda E.G. Ramberg, Ph.D

Lucinda Ramberg is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. Her research projects in South India have focused on the body as an artifact of culture and power in relation to questions of caste, sexuality, religiosity, and projects of social transformation.

A centered headshot of Cole Rizki

Cole Rizki, PhD

Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies (University of Virginia) and ACLS Fellow. A trans studies scholar and Latin Americanist, Rizki examines the entanglements of trans cultural production and activisms with histories of state violence and terror throughout the Américas. His work appears in Feminist Theory, JVC, JLACS, and RHR.

Centered headshot of Tara Asgar

Tara Asgar

Tara Asgar is a Bangladeshi transgender artist, activist, and educator. Her research focuses on trans sociality, resource mobilization, and the politics of transgender recognition in Bangladesh. Tara’s work combines protest, social critique, and storytelling, grounded in grassroots efforts to support the Trans, Hijra, and Koti communities. She teaches part-time at The New School and Pace University in New York City.