28–29 November 2024
Athens

Two-day seminar organised by the Institute for Gender, Equality and Différence (RIKK) and the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research (FAC)

It is often imagined that people persecuted for their queerness will find a utopia in liberal Western democracies. The truth is that queer spaces in supposedly progressive countries can be ambivalent for displaced queer people. Not only do neoliberal structures intersect with racism, classism, and oppressive border regimes to make it difficult for displaced queers to find support; they also kill our imagination, and the right to dream and play. In particular, our bordered reality makes it difficult to imagine futures without borders.

Thinking of queerness as something that hasn’t fully arrived yet, that it is always on the horizon, it’s about different forms of belonging that come together as a collective (Muñoz, 2009). Thus, we need to be critical of how utopias are represented. For instance, how LGBTQI+ rights are often portrayed as fitting into mainstream, capitalist, and heteronormative ideals. When looking at issues affecting queer and trans people, especially refugees, we see how racism and economic exploitation are connected with heteronormativity and cisnormativity. Western countries often present themselves as safe havens, but their border regimes erect legal barriers and enact systemic violence against queer people. Moreover, in the anti-gender politics rising in Europe, there is a danger of normative acceptance or apathy forming in relation to border violence, including the legal categories ascribed to queer refugees.

We welcome abstracts that engage critically with the themes of queer utopia, bordering, belonging-in-difference and queer temporality in one way or another.

Read the Call for Participants: https://feministresearch.org/CFP_Queer-Utopias (Link in bio @fac_research )

Call for Participants closes: 16 September 2024 (11:59 pm)

 Bek Sultan