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Porn is a longstanding site of feminist debate. In contrast to those who see it as a form of violence against women, this panel centers feminist artists and academics who see pornography as a tool for pleasure and politics. Sex educator, artist, and pornographer Annie Sprinkle inspired the Postpornography movement, which is currently thriving among sexual and gender dissidents throughout Latin America and Europe, who make their own porn from a queer or feminist lens. Black Feminist scholars in the United States have re-examined racialized pornography (which was associated with violence and pain), pushing for reading ecstasy, pleasure, and agency into the work of Black women pornographers. Further, scholars and activists have pushed for seeing porn as a form of labor that can be both a site of exploitation and of pleasure. We invite panelists to reflect upon both new pornographies and new ways of interpreting pornography as they intersect with feminist, queer, and anti-racist approaches.

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2024 marks 50 years since the iconic radical Black feminist group, Combahee River Collective, began meeting. As they write in their statement, which is unanimously recognized as an ur-text of radical feminist politics: “We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements.” Taking the work of Combahee as a point of departure, we take the occasion to meditate on “feminist collective/s” as an organizing force, a practice, and concept that is just as urgent in the 21st century as it has been in the history. Whether it reference a group acting together to achieve a goal, a gathering of people to be in community, or the power of collective organizing the idea of the “collective/s” is essential to feminist praxis. Our speakers will ruminate of the collective/s in various forms and from multiple perspectives. 

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This panel focuses upon emergent creative sexual pedagogies. Formal sex education often emphasizes risk, reproduction, and a cisheteronormative model of sex, seeking to discipline racially marked and low-income populations and often excluding while also pathologizing  queer, trans, or gender nonconforming people. Thinking expansively about sexual pedagogies, this panel incorporates scholars, activists, and artists working in or writing about sexual pedagogy through an intersectional lens in contexts such as educational workshops, performance art, music videos, and postpornography. This panel asks: What is the relationship between sexualities education and social justice?

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Reproduction is increasingly the locus of political panic, from attacks on abortion rights to ethical debates about new reproductive technologies. But moral panics about reproduction are nothing new. The reproduction of bodies and labor has been regulated and surveilled in the service of a variety of projects in a variety of historical contexts–tied to nationalism, capitalism, racial domination, class, gender, and sexual regulation. How can feminist scholarship, art, and activism clarify the forms reproductive governance can take, while pushing us to imagine more radical forms of reproductive care? 

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With every feminist critique of contemporary arrangements lies a vision of the world beyond–a feminist imagination. This panel explores artistic, scholarly, and activist practice and the utopian visions that drive and sustain it. What kinds of worlds do feminist, queer, trans, and other visionaries dream of? How do those worlds not only disrupt the existing gendered, sexual, racial, and imperialist capitalist order, but offer the possibility of new forms of collective and creative existence, and new forms of collaboration? What insights do these utopian visions have for feminist technologies, embodiments, labor relations, ecological arrangements, and creative practice? What fractures or failures do our utopian visions reveal? How do they link our feminist histories to our feminist futures? How do they begin to enact those visions in the present?

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This panel brings together scholars, activists, and artists whose work attends to pleasure (sexual and otherwise) as a way of creating new worlds in contexts of inequalities and violence. Panelists work in different geographical and cultural contexts who center the powerful pleasures, joys, and world-making of populations at the intersection of sexual/gender dissidence and being marked by their race, class, or caste.

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In the past decade we have seen renewed energy infused to the concept of care in feminist theorizing, writing, teaching, and organizing. How might we articulate a feminist ethic of care, and why does it matter? What does care look like in visual culture, writing, organizing, and thinking? If, indeed Black feminist theory in particular is “emphatically preoccupied with care” (as Jennifer Nash states in Black Feminism Re-imagined) how does one develop, display, and espouse an ethic of care in relation to feminist work? Why has care come to characterize so much of our work and what are the stakes of our preoccupation with care? In the context of 21st century assaults on racialized, sexualized, and gendered bodies, what does turning to care clear space for on the page, in the mind, in the community, and in the world? How does an ethic of care issue a challenge to models of consumption, accumulation, or production? What does it mean, look like, or feel like to place care at the center of feminisms?

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With the provocation of return we invite panelists’ meditations in any of a number of possible directions. Return suggests resumption and rootedness, with attendant notions of convention, propriety, and origin. If it is commonplace to invoke detour and routes to counter these conscripting tendencies (or to question the desire for “returning to normal” in a year that has starkly illuminated the inequities we have learned to live with) are there also registers of precarity that may make return inviting or comforting? How is the returnee potentially persecuted (forced out to “secure borders”) in one space, and/or welcomed back as privileged national subject in the other? Return transforms the space of presence into perpetual deferral, into a scene of waiting, an interregnum. Repatriated cultural artifacts press us to imagine imperial histories of violent accumulation as well as orders of value, as in the assessment of returns on an investment. Finally, if return also suggests that which perpetually haunts, the refusal of what has been violently disappeared to stay away, then what are the spiritual practices that either counter or invite such visitations? We invite panelists to think through these and other inflections with us.

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This roundtable is interested in the ways that sex, intimacy, and erotics are not only objects of study but also methods and methodologies for feminist, queer, and transgender studies. Queer ethnography has offered an extended engagement with the value of intimacy and desire in the field, and Black feminist theory has developed erotics as a means of thinking the political, sacred, and sexual together. In critical race and colonialism studies, intimacy has been used to describe the proximities and frictions that result from geopolitical rearrangements of power and capital. In queer and trans studies, BDSM, dungeons, public sex, erotic vomiting, and other dissident acts are crucial venues for re-organizing hegemonic formations of gender, class, and race, dragging colonial histories to the present, and inventing sexual futures. These are but some of the ways that sex, intimacy, and erotics open up new ways of thinking across disciplines.

Subaltern histories and lives within this apparatus are narrated through the lenses of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and social disposability. Feminist and queer cultural production nevertheless while conjuring such normative representational aesthetics simultaneously reimagine suffering, futurity, and human aspirations. Beyond representational revision, correction or uplift, expressive cultures have the capacity to call into question the very grounds of knowledge that make them possible and at the same time hint at new horizons of surviving and thriving.

“Going Viral” is an opportunity to think with the logics and lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic about the ways that intimacy, mobility, information, body, nation, gender, and sexuality are imbricated through viruses, and other transmittable forms.

The current pandemic is an accumulation of many viral histories. This panel invites scholars to draw form their original research to explore the traffic in viral discourse and the pathways of transmission—of data, bodies, feelings, ideology—through feminist, queer, and trans lenses.

From Australia to Hong Kong, USA to UK, Brazil to Bangladesh people are marching – masked, undeterred and resistant- demanding attention and justice with bold messages like “Silence is Violence”, “I Can’t Breathe”, and “No Justice No Peace.” These messages and movements lay bare the asymmetries of privilege and oppression, the unevenness of growth and wellbeing, and simultaneously encourage a social transformation that takes seriously interdependencies of life, humanity, and ecology. We invite panelists to think through the lessons of their areas of research and expertise and to shed light on how they are thinking about the paradoxes and power of protests.

As some statues are torn down and disappear before our very eyes, some quietly deteriorate unseen and unheralded, raising questions about posterity, and about the extent to which movements for justice depend on visual representation: what, then, of the resources of opacity and abstraction? Recent protests convened nightly vibrate with energy as statues are made to move differently, countering a terrible decades-long visual sovereignty. In this way removal also prompts reflection on the ways in which subaltern creativity has long been fueled by ingesting rather than excising the objectionable element. Finally, how do these public forms convene us (publicly or otherwise) as mourners, as defenders of the republic, as newly independent, as agents of reparative justice?

This panel takes its inspiration from our insistent critique of the academic corporation in which we find ourselves working today. Increasingly, our new colleagues are temporary and underpaid hires, who are nevertheless often expected to give service beyond teaching. Our senior administrators, compensated at the same levels as the corporate structure, are hired as much for their fundraising abilities as for their academic inclinations or interests. Juggling multiple jobs, our students are enmeshed in an aggregation of precarity that is not only financial: their protests of the institution’s raced, gendered, sexed and classed inequities, for instance, are repurposed into website photographs designed to advertise the institution’s openness to critique.

This panel will reflect and discuss means to implement conscious pedagogies of resistance, or critical pedagogy in the classroom and beyond. both in and out of the classroom. Panelists will share how they draw on the political through their teaching, in the subjects they teach, or the methodologies they utilize.

This panel will discuss how media and technology is deployed, negotiated and redressed in activism. Engaging technologies such as hackathon, civic media, data and computation, the panelists will share their stories of making technology work for feminism, freedom, and justice.

This panel seeks to critically engage with heritage from environmental justice and ecofeminisms by asking questions such as: In the current time of environmental crisis, how can we build affective solidarities with the planet? What lessons can we learn from past debates and how to move toward sustainable feminist futures without essentializing human beings, nature, or technologies?

This panel invites scholars to consider the confluences between science and technology studies and gender and sexuality studies in their own research. Feminist, queer, and trans studies scholars attending to science, technology, environment, and disability are dismantling the rubrics of gender and body at the core of our fields in order to think more critically about the material conditions of living inside racial capitalism.

We invite panelists to respond to the questions of how human rights narrations have evolved and been expressed through fictional imaginations in literature, film and visual culture. How can we conceptualize the ethico-politics of human rights in such a way that it cannot be reduced to humanitarian “right to intervene” in the affairs of others?

This roundtable features a conversation about the genealogies and futures of black queer and trans studies across geographic and disciplinary borders, conversations that can help us take stock of the contradictory and complicated cultural moment we are in.

Can feminist praxis embrace an inherently anti-disciplinary vulnerability and refuse strictly bound notions, labels, frameworks, fields, or genres – including those assumed by invocations of ‘feminisms,’ ‘ethnography,’ or ‘research? Can notions such as solidarity and responsibility, trust and hope, vulnerability and reflexivity serve a useful purpose in ethically navigating the forms of epistemic violence in which metropolitan academics are, and will always remain, complicit?

With "The time of the border” we mean to invoke, of course, the terrible urgency of our current moment: the distinct but also overlapping historical, geographical, and other contexts that bear on the displacements of our time; border-crossings that claim our attention and others that remain invisible; conceptual frameworks that have meaningful explanatory power, but also do harm.

Roundtable discussion about Undoing Empire: Form, Function, Feminism