D.C. Queer Studies
Each year the department hosts a lecture or symposium to stimulate important conversations among the LGBTQ studies community in greater Washington, D.C.
In conjunction with the official start of the LGBTQ Studies Program at the University of Maryland in 2003 it began hosting an LGBT Studies Speaker Series. In 2006 a group of faculty from schools in the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area formed to discuss new works in the field and to exchange, support, and cultivate new ways of engaging with LGBT/Queer/Sexuality Studies across the disciplines and across institutions. That group, the DC Queer Studies Consortium, was integral to the inception of the first DC Queer Studies Symposium in 2008. Although the original DC Queer Studies Consortium has since dissolved, the Harriet Tubman Department of Women Gender, and Sexuality Studies has taken on the organization of an annual lecture or symposium also referred to as DC Queer Studies or sometimes DCQS.
April 3-4, 2025 LAG: Labor, Aesthetics, Geopolitics
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. Rather than lump together diverse concerns from the “elsewhere” into a single panel under the rubric of “transnational,” this two-day symposium gathers thinkers whose scholarship centers questions of political economy, global division of labor, and aesthetics, and how they are informed by relations of colonialism, geopolitics, and racial capitalism (among much else).
Our title for the symposium is LAG. Here we hope to play with theorizations of temporality in postcolonial studies and queer studies. Scholars of postcolonial studies dwell on the civilizational time of the West that consigns the global South to the waiting room of history thus producing an other who lags behind developmental time. Queer theorists have also explored how those who exceed the norms of gender and sexual normativity are out of time with the linear temporality of heteronormativity. Besides these formulations of lag time, LAG also stands for our central keywords of this year’s convening: Labor, Aesthetics and Geopolitics. Focusing on these keywords helps us move beyond the US exceptionalism of the fields of queer and transgender studies.
This year our keynotes will be given by Aslı Zengin (Rutgers, a scholar of transgender life and death and trans negotiations with Islam in Turkey); Cole Rizki (University of Virginia, a scholar of transgender cultural production in the wake of totalitarianism in Argentina); Kwame Otu (Georgetown, a scholar of gender and queerness and the geopolitics of waste management in Ghana); Lucinda Ramberg (Cornell, a scholar of religion, caste, and sexuality in India), and Tara Asgar (The New School, an artist and scholar whose performance practices engage themes of trans/gender aesthetics, trauma, humanitarian regimes of precarity and migration in and between Bangladesh and the United States). Taken together, our speakers address many critical questions from interdisciplinary perspectives that are foundational to how the humanities respond to contemporary political, social, and cultural challenges such as climate change, democracy, migration, gender and sexual diversity, and the importance of art to visions of justice. Additionally, we also have lunch time programming with undergraduate student activists on campus who will share their thoughts on how these themes resonate with the work they do in their respective communities.
View a slideshow of posters from previous events:
