Queering Ireland 2017: QUEER TIME(S)
May 18-20, 2017
University of South Carolina, Columbia SC
19th Annual Comparative Literature Conference
Keynotes
Jack Halberstam (University of Southern California) and Ailbhe Smyth (Repeal the 8th)
Theatre Performance: TheatreofplucK (Belfast)
In In a Queer Time and Place (2005), Judith Halberstam argued that “part of what has made queerness compelling as a form of self-description […] has to do with the [its] potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space.” Queer uses of time and space can operate “in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.” Halberstam suggests that we consider queerness beyond the merely sexual to understand queer identity as a mark of “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices.” Elsewhere, David Lloyd has argued, in Irish Times (2014), that Irish culture is marked by “layered time”: haunted by unfinished pasts that may resist capitalist logic and historical time. How might these insights be thought together?
Queering Ireland 2017, the fifth in a series of international conferences, asks that we think about queer times—strange temporalities, queer life schedules and narratives, eccentric economic practices—as well as issues of age and movement sustainability that were raised at Queering Ireland in Dublin (2015). How can queer time help us to understand Irish times? What can queer time say about the representation and politics of marriage, about the intersections and disjunctures of feminist and queer politics? How does queer time inflect citizenship? How do we think about queer time across borders, nations, communities? How can queer time reframe economic crisis, austerity politics, the biopolitical, and the narratives of nation, economy, culture, and family? How can the theoretical work on queer time and space (Dinshaw, Edelman, Freeman, Halberstam, Love, Muñoz, Stockton, and others) enrich our understanding of Irish history, literature, and culture and its Anglo-European contexts? Proposals might consider:
· queer temporalities, trans temporalities: queer life narratives, queer economics; legibility and limitations; queer futurity and the queer political imagination
· methodology and temporality; temporalities of resistance and witness; the work of misogyny, homophobia, or transphobia in time; AIDS and movement history
· relations of body and time; “straight time” and non-normative bodies; labor and time
· temporality and narrative: histories and counter-histories; lost, hidden, or secret histories; before and after, cause and effect, duration, progression, chronology and continuity
· memory studies; memory, repetition, trauma; commemoration and public memory; queer counter-publics and public memory; queer nostalgias
· generation/s, generational differences or continuities; age and aging; queer elders and queer youth; movement sustainability; HIV/AIDS and temporality
· archives and archival work
Proposals of no more than 300 words to edward.madden@gmail.com by 21 October 2016. There will be a small number of travel scholarships for students and activists.