Queertopia 2020: New Queer & Trans Politics?

Queertopia 2020: New Queer & Trans Politics?

Entering its 13th year, Queertopia is an annual LGBTQ+ academic conference organized by Northwestern University’s Queer Pride Graduate Student Association. The conference features research across disciplines and fosters critical dialogue on topics related to gender and sexuality. Queertopia is an opportunity for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, undergraduates, activists, organizers, and community practitioners to build intellectual community.

This year, we aim to explore queer politics, engaging questions around the limits and possibilities of the term 'queer' for political resistance and transformation with the theme: New Queer & Trans Poiltics? The word “new” in our theme is a common attribution to revitalized areas of study or culture (e.g., new media, new materialism, new queer cinema), so here, too, we attach “new” both to prompt inquiries in current LGBTQ+ politics and to irrigate future political forms and formations.

Queertopia features a morning keynote speech by Kim L. Hunt, executive Director of Pride Action Tank and inductee of the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame. We also have several multidisciplinary panels on various works by graduate students and young scholars on politics, (in)justice, and activism. We close the conference with film screening and panel discussion of Criminal Queers, a film on the radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex. Panelists include LaSaia Wade, founder and executive director of Brave Space Alliance which is the first Black-led, trans-led LGBTQ Center located on the South Side of Chicago; Marquis Bey, Northwestern assistant professor and author of “Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism” and “Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism”; and Raymond San Diego, visiting assistant professor of the Asian American Studies program at Northwestern.

More details and register for free: bit.ly/queertopia2020