CFP Submission: February 15, 2021
Conference dates: May 6-8, 2021
Location: Online, Zoom conference

Keynote Speaker: Jennifer Doyle
Featured Performer: Dorian Wood

Queerness intertwines with intimacy, or the closely personal. Simultaneously signaling the individual and the relational, intimacy builds lives and the communities that hold them. What are the rules governing queer intimacy, and how have they been imagined in the past and reinvented in the present? When does queer community become a source of exile? Is intimacy absent in such instances, or is it produced in new or different ways? Then and now, how have political institutions sought to control and regulate queer intimacies, and how have queers resisted? How do queer practices of intimacy change or stay the same in this time of COVID-19 and in other times of crisis?

This online graduate conference invites work that explores the potentiality of queer intimacy as a means of curating a larger discussion on how scholars and artists across the disciplines can speak to questions of queer space, place, community, and historiography. We seek diverse, interdisciplinary approaches from all fields (humanities, social sciences, interdisciplinary studies, life sciences, and professional schools), especially in relation to:

-Alienated, racialized and minoritarian positionalities
-Abuse of intimacy and intimate violence
-Autobiography, spoken word, narrative and storytelling
-BDSM/sexual intimacies
-Borders and migration
-Ecological relations and post-humanism
-Embodiment and affect
-Indigeneity and the (post)colonial
-Online and virtual intimacies
-Pedagogies of queer intimacy
-Performance art
-Public policy surrounding intimacy
-Queer futurity
-Queer health and biopolitics
-Queer historiography
-Queer kinship and homosocial intimacy

We are seeking proposals for individual papers, group roundtables, creative workshops, digital humanities projects, and other creative engagement practices including performances and film/media presentations. Please submit an abstract, performance description, or project description no later than February 15, 2021. All questions may be directed to qgradconference@gmail.com.