D.C. Queer Studies 2016: Queer Beyond Repair

Event Information

April 22, 2016
9:00 am - 6:30 pm
2115 Tawes Hall

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.

The event will be a daylong series of conversations on the theme “Queer Beyond Repair.” The day will culminate with a keynote address by Kathryn Bond Stockton, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Utah. Stockton is author of Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” (2006) and The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (2009), both finalists for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies. She is also the author of God between Their Lips: Desire between Women in Irigaray, Bronte, and Eliot (1994).

The symposium also featured a plenary session on Surplus Life and Queer Death with Eric A. Stanley, co-editor of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (2011/2015) and Craig Willse, author of The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States (2015). For more information see the 2016 Lecture Series.

The 2016 Symposium in Pictures

“Queer beyond repair” evokes a double meaning. On one hand, it suggests that queerness itself is, has become, or can be a state of irreparability: that it must bear the burden of histories and structures of violence from which there is no final redress. In such a reading, repair appears, necessarily, as an impossible project. It asks us to account for queer practices—of sex, politics, reading, world-making—as modes of reprieve and endurance that must contend with the unshakeable legacies and foundational logics that undergird already consolidated fantasies of humanness, from imperial rule and anti-blackness, to the psychic and material structures of liberal politics itself. Such an account would require a reinscription of the satisfaction, if not pleasure, we receive from the survival of queer forms of life within a nexus of lives marked by past, ongoing, and potential experiences of irretrievable loss, dread, and death.

On the other hand, “queer beyond repair” also suggests that there is, can be, ormust be a queerness beyond repair. It evokes potentiality: a queerness that is more than the making of room to maneuver, a reinvestment in a politics of transformation, if not the unmaking of a world in which survival—bare survival—has become, for so many, a desirable condition. This queerness insists on forms of reinvention, if not defiance, in excess of the states of decay we have inherited or the symptoms of disrepair we have learned to uncover. It asks us to be estranged from the present as is, even as we acknowledge the limit conditions set by our fear of or incuriosity about what might lie beyond life as we know it. The double meaning of “beyond repair” demands a questioning of deeply held convictions, at once political and theoretical, around amelioration and suspicion, hope and hopelessness, positivity and negativity, and the embrace or rejection of modes of living on made possible and held captive by damaged and damaging worlds.

0900 – 0930 REGISTRATION, First Floor Foyer, Tawes Hall

0930 – 1045 CONCURRENT SESSIONS

Panel 01.1 Relationalities I (Tawes Hall 3252)

GILA ASHTOR, Queerness Reparative or Irreparable: Rethinking the Link Between Relationality and Transformation, Tufts University/Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research

ASHLEY T. SHELDEN, Against Reparation: Barbara Johnson’s Queer Love, Kennesaw State University

JOHN GARRETT GILMORE, All American Eunuch: Faulkner and ‘The Ultimate Slave’, University of California, Irvine

Moderator: CHRISTINA WALTER, University of Maryland, College Park

Panel 01.2 Colonialisms / Nationalisms (Tawes Hall 3250)

C. HEIKE SCHOTTEN, Decolonizing Desire: Queer Theory and the War on Terror, University of Massachusetts, Boston

KHALID YAYA LONG, ‘Our Manhood, Our Living, Black Manhood’: Malcolm X, Queerness, and the Mourning of a Legacy, University of Maryland, College Park

ANNA STORTI, The Glorification of Mixed-Race as Reparations | M!xedness Beyond Repair, University of Maryland, College Park

Moderator: MICHELLE ROWLEY, University of Maryland, College Park

Panel 01.3 Queer Family (Tawes Hall 3134)

BEANS VELOCCI, The Fatal Brink: Death and the End of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Yale University

JOY HAYWARD-JANSEN, Queer Black Childhood in K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

MARTHA ERTMAN, Partial Parenthood, University of Maryland, Baltimore

Moderator: ASHWINI TAMBE, University of Maryland, College Park

Panel 01.4 Victorians: Beyond Repair? (Tawes Hall 3248)

MICHAEL HARWICK, How to do Things With Shame (in Victorian Britain), Ohio State University

MEG DOBBINS, Towards a Queer Political Economy: Sentimental Fiction, the Victorian Miser, and Capitalist Currencies, Washington University in St. Louis

EMILY LYONS, Monstrous Forms: Evolution and Queer Time in The Picture of Dorian Gray, University of Arizona

Moderator: JASON RUDY, University of Maryland, College Park

1100 – 1215 CONCURRENT SESSIONS

Panel 02.1 Relationalities II (Tawes 3252)

NATALIE PRIZEL, A Very Short History of Reparative Sex: 1865-Present, Yale University

DAVID K. SEITZ, The Pain of Integration: Melanie Klein, Race, Sex, and the City, University of Toronto

J. BRENDAN SHAW, Traveling to ‘Dark Places’: Race, Touch, and Sadomasochism, Ohio State University

Moderator: ASHLEY T. SHELDEN, Kennesaw State University

Panel 02.1 Abolition of Beyond: Queer Desire, Black Radicalism, and the Limits of the (Ir)Reparable (Tawes 3250)

CHRISTOPHER CHAMBERLIN, Infecting History: ‘Race Prejudiece’ in the Psychoanalytic Clinic (1940 to 1970), University of California, Irvine

ERIK HOLLIS, Figuring the Angry Inch: On Transnormativity, the Black Femme, and the Fraudulent Phallus, The George Washington University

ADRIÁN I.P.-FLORES, Remnants of Antigone: On Suicide and the Limits of Queer Possibility, University of Arizona

Moderator: LA MARR JURELLE BRUCE, University of Maryland, College Park

Panel 02.3 Reinventions I (Tawes 3134)

WAN-CHUAN KAO, Trans Reparative Pastoralism, Washington and Lee University

MARQUIS BEY, Black Queerness and Trans Bodies, Cornell University

MICHELLE H. S. HO, Spaces of Potentiality: Queer Socialities in Tokyo’s Drag Cafes, Stony Brook University

Moderator: YUMI PAK, California State University, San Bernardino

Panel 02.4 Sex, Data, and the Law (Tawes 3248)

TOM ROACH, SCOTUS Interruptus: Raiding Rentboy.com in the Wake of Obergefell v Hodges, Bryant University

LARS MACKENZIE, The Afterlife of Data: Identity, Capitalism and the Surveillance of Gender Transition in Credit Reporting, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

LINDSEY GREEN-SIMMS, Love in the Time of the Internet: The Affective Modes of Nigerian Literary Responses to the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, American University

Moderator: ALEXIS LOTHIAN, University of Maryland, College Park

1330 – 1445 CONCURRENT SESSIONS

Panel 03.1 Death and Survival (Tawes 3134)

SARAH YAHYAOUI, Death as a Feminist Reclamation: Rereading Le centre blanc, McGill University

JAMES McMASTER, Revolting Self Care: Mark Aguhar’s Abject Aesthetics of Existence, New York University

ANDY EICHER, Prevention as Treatment: Truvada and the Queer Neoliberal, Stony Brook University

Moderator: MERCEDES BAILLARGEON, University of Maryland, College Park

Panel 03.2 Queer Loss and Memory (Tawes 3248)

TIFFANY BALL, Weak Grief, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

DINA MUHIĆ, Ending The Never-ending Story: Traumatic Amnesia, Compulsive Retelling, Therapeutic Forgetting, University of Oregon

MYRL BEAM, Closing Time: On Loving and Losing Queer Non-Profits, Virginia Commonwealth University

Moderator: MARILEE LINDEMANN, University of Maryland, College Park

Panel 03.3 In/Non-Human (Tawes 3250)

COLIN R. JOHNSON, Creature Comforts, Indiana University Bloomington

AMY GROSHEK, Inverted Flowers, Cuckolding Corn, and Interspecies Rape: The Irreparable, Extramodern Ethos of Resistant Reproductivity, University of Wisconsin-Madison

CHRISTOPHER J. LEE, Why Queers Love Astrology, Brown University

Moderator: ZAKIYYAH IMAN JACKSON, George Mason University

Panel 03.4 Reinventions II (Tawes 3252)

LIBBIE RIFKIN, ‘Say Your Favorite Poet in the World is Lying There’: Eileen Myles, James Schuyler, and the Shared Estrangement of Care, Georgetown University

PAMELA VANHAITSMA, The Pedagogical Erotics of Romantic Friendship Beyond Repair, Old Dominion University

YUMI PAK, From Cast the First Stone to Yesterday Will Make You Cry: Queering Blackness Here, Now, and Beyond, California State University, San Bernardino

Moderator: MARTHA NELL SMITH, University of Maryland, College Park

1500 – 1630 PLENARY SESSION: SURPLUS LIFE, QUEER DEATH, Ulrich Recital Hall, Tawes Hall

ERIC A. STANLEY, Death Drop: Becoming the Universe at the End of the World, University of California, Riverside

CRAIG WILLSE, Queer Life ‘After’ AIDS, George Mason University

Moderator: BOBBY BENEDICTO, University of Maryland, College Park

1700 – 1830 KEYNOTE ADDRESS, Ulrich Recital Hall, Tawes Hall

KATHRYN BOND STOCKTON, Impure Thoughts and All They Birth: What Does the Dildo of the Future Look Like?, University of Utah

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The LGBT Studies Program within the Department of Women's Studies, in the College of Arts and Humanities.

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The 2016 Symposium in Pictures

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