LAG - DCQS 2025
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.
Program
Thursday, April 3, 2025
2:00 PM - Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World
Aslı Zengin (Rutgers University) with discussant Sayan Bhattacharyra (WGSS)
4:00 PM - Death as Queer Possibility: Waste and the Normative of Life in Neoliberal Ghana
Kwame Edwin Otu (Georgetown University) with discussant Neda Atanasoski (WGSS)
Friday April 4, 2025
11:00 AM - Belated: Queer Futures in the Anthropology of Gender
Lucinda E.G. Ramberg (Cornell University) with discussant Neel Ahuja (WGSS)
12:30 PM - Lunch & Roundtable with Student Activists on Campus
Moderated by Christina B. Hanhardt (AMST)
2:00 PM - Aesthetics of Survival, Art of Repair: Anti: Authoritarian Trans Politics and Resistance
Cole Rizki (University of Virginia) with discussant Ryan Long (SPAN, CLCS)
4:00 PM - Performing Identities: Navigating Visibility, Violence and Resistance
Tara Asgar (The New School), with discussant Karin Zitzewitz (ARTH)
About the Artwork
Speakers
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.
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
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.
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.
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.