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II
Queer Studies Easter Symposium
23
March - 29 March, 2008
Mexico City
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Beach as a liminal space |
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Exclusive Interview
with Christian Mieves about his exhibition On the
Edge in Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana
during the Second Queer Studies Symposium... más |
Welcome to the second Queer
Studies Symposium in Universidad del Claustro de Sor
Juana, Mexico City: Queerness and Otherness
»
Conference
Programme 2008 (updated 15. March)
On
Sunday 23 March, the first three conference sessions,
and a registration session for conference delegates, will
take place in the auditorium of Hotel Catedral (Donceles
# 95, Col. Centro), the inofficial conference hotel
for the Second Queer Studies Easter Symposium.
The official
opening with the welcome speech of Chancellor Carmen
B. López-Portillo Romano will take place in
Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, on 24 March
at 10:00.
From 24 March to 29 March, all conference
activities will take place in the University (in Forum R-38,
Campus
Regina of the Universidad Claustro de Sor Juana).
In the
registration session in Hotel Catedral, delegates will be
given their conference name badge.
»
About the conference location and how to get there
Latest
News:
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» Art Exhibition in the
Symposium 2008
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» Concert in the Symposium
2008
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» Theater in the Symposium
2008
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Inauguración
de la exposición De hueso y esencia. Artista: Juan
Soriano
»
Guidelines
for Sessions Moderators
»
Festival Internacional de Cine
Contemporáneo de la Ciudad de México
»
II
Congreso Nacional los Estudios de Género y los Hombres en México
»
Conference
Programme 2008 (updated 25. Feb)
»
Pre-conference activities 2008
» Pre-Conference
Academic English Course for Students and Academic Staff
»
The Virtual Book Store of the Queer
Studies Symposium
Enkidu Magazine, UCSJ and the International Society for Cultural History and Cultural
Studies (CHICS) in Mexico City invites the global community to a vibrant
and exciting multi-disciplinary, multi-lingual and multi-cultural Queer Studies Easter
Symposium in Mexico City in March 2008. The conference aims at exploring recent developments in theory and method in Queer studies as well the broad themes of sexual diversities through time and space,
gender constructions, sex-gender subjectivities, and sexual identity constructions from
a wide and diverse range of perspectives.
Focus
for Queer Studies Easter Symposium 2008
This
year the conference will have a special focus on Queerness and
Otherness The committee has selected papers addressing related
issues in one way or another, as well as narratives
of identities and identity constructions from a wide range of
different perspectives, in addition to papers focusing on
representations and social constructions of sexual diversities
through time and space.
Conference
Languages
The
conference sessions will be conducted in Castilian and English.
Some sessions will be bilingual and conducted with interpreter.
Other sessions will be conducted with simultaneous translation.
Translation to Sign Language will be available upon request.
About
the Queer Studies Easter Symposium in Mexico City
The first international
academic conference ever with a pronounced focus on Queer
Studies in Mexico was organised by Enkidu Magazine in June 2004
and had the title „Competing Diversities“. This conference
had an overwhelming response both locally and internationally
and brought together a very colourful crowd of scholars from all
over the world, representing a wide range of disciplines. The
discussions in the auditorium in Centro Medico Siglo XXI (A
conference center by the Mexican Ministry of Health)
consequently crossed disciplinary boundaries and stimulated and
generated considerable fresh rethinking and reconsideration of
many topics, in particular regarding the interaction between
traditional gender identities and modern western identity
constructions, which was the main focus of this first conference.
In 2005, Enkidu Magazine organized its traditional Humanities
conference in the UPN, the National Mexican University of
Educational Sciences and dedicated a conference stream of 6
panel sessions to Queer Studies. The papers presented at this
conference also displayed a wide range of innovative Queer
Scholarship, in particular in studies representing
interpretative approaches within the social sciences and
humanities.
Both
conferences reminded us that while Queer Studies has still no
institutional presence in Mexico, and most of Latin America, and
the subject is generally absent and invisible in universities in
this part of the world, there is a growing academic interest in
Queer Studies and several exiting dissertations and research
projects are under development but usually in isolation from
each other, and without any forum where these studies could be
presented.
Encouraged
by these experiences, Enkidu Magazine established the Annual
Queer Studies Easter Symposium as a permanent forum for global
exchange and dialogue between scholars as well as a professional
meeting point for international networking within the field. The
first Queer Studies Easter Symposium finally took place in April
2007 in Teatro Arlequin in Mexico City. The conference united
118 speakers from more than 30 countries. The program was
organised in a large number of special thematic sessions and
sub-conferences covering a highly diverse series of topics
extending from, for example, a special session on „Sexual
Diversities in the Islamic World" to "The History of
GLBT Activism", "Sexual Diversities and Disabilities",
"Traditional sexualities and western gender and sexual
identity constructions" and "Ethnographic studies of
eroticism & fetishism". The complete program for the
conference in 2007 can be consulted here,
while abstracts of the papers selected to be presented are
available here. Photos
from the first Symposium are available here.
The
multicultural and multilingual environment of the conference in
2007 stimulated considerable exiting and eye-opening discussions
in particular about how
colonialism, post-colonialism, nationalism, and globalisation
have reshaped conceptions and perceptions of sex, gender, and
sexuality in different societies and how Queer Studies as an
interdisciplinary field of study can contribute to highly
diverse and innovative readings and re-readings of literatures,
cultures, and societies. The conference also raised the issue
about interaction and networking between queer activism and
queer scholarship and a stream of roundtable discussions on
various topics throughout the conference where both activists
and academics participated, focused on contemporary social and
political issues in various societies and the past, present and
future of the global LGBT/Q
Movements.
All together, the
first edition of the conference consisted of 7 intense days
with more than 40 academic two-hours sessions, 5 round table
discussions and an additional highly diverse cultural and
social program including film screenings, theater performances, poetry
readings and book presentations. Two fascinating art exhibitions completed the
conference activities: The artists of the conference was the
Lesbian art collective La Vaca Feliz (the happy cow) from Chile
that organised the controversial exhibition LesBarbie
which during the Symposium was shown both in Arlequin Theater
and in the Discotheque/Bar DoceTreinta in Zona Rosa. Mexican
anthropologist Antonio Marquet
organised a fascinating and colourful photo-ethnographic
exhibition in the theater during the conference Las
Hermanas Vampiros (The Vampire Sisters).
In 2008 the conference will have
a similar structure as in 2007 and cover an equally broad spectrum of
topics. Of particular interest for the organising committee of
the Queer Studies Symposium in 2008 are contributions that
explore Queerness and Otherness and narratives of identity from
a wide range of different perspectives as well as
representations and social constructions of sexual diversities
through time and space.
The Call for
Papers with instructions
for submitting a paper proposal for the next edition of this
conference cycle is available here. Interested
individuals can submit proposals for individual papers,
as well as panel sessions (a two hour session with 2, 3
or 4 individual presentations) or thematic sub-conferences
(a stream of two or more two hour thematic panel sessions with a
common theme).
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