Berkeley: Queer Bonds Conference

Queer Bonds is a three-day symposium at the University of California, Berkeley, dedicated to exploring the intersections between sexuality and sociability. While its genealogies are multiple, the field of queer studies has been shaped by two powerful trajectories: on the one hand, an attempt to account for the creative forms of social and sexual bonding that have existed around, outside of, or in the interstices of "normal" sociality; on the other, an insistence on queerness as a force of subversion, refusal, and antipathy towards the social. How do conditions in our world today make it imperative that queer theory comprehend both the adhesive and corrosive dimensions of our queer bonds?

The work we are canvassing asks in different ways how we can theorize sociability and relationality without either unilaterally embracing the positive existence of a queer social bond or insisting on its categorical refusal. Queer bonds must engage connections that span both moments of radical impersonality and of the all-too-personal. We invoke "bonds" in their multiple senses as deliberately redolent of the identity movements of the 1970s that provided much of the energy that served to define our field both academically and politically — alongside the denomination "queer" which suggests the enduring impact of the theories of subversion, resignification, and appropriation we associate with the art and theory of the 1980s and 1990s. We thus invite our speakers to pay heed to the rich traditions of queer culture, politics, and thought which have preceded our own, even as they reinvent them for the conditions of our world today.

For a full conference description and schedule details, go to http://www.queerbonds.com.

All events are free of charge and open to the public. PRE-REGISTRATION IS AVAILABLE by sending an email to queerbonds [at] gmail.com, stating name and affiliation.