Precarious Mediations: Queer Bodies in Virtual Spaces
Description
Kleist’s queer marionettes (1810), Haraway’s anti-identitarian cyborgs (1985), and Murakami’s wind-up bird (1994) offer us instances of post-human glitches that resist normalizations despite their embodied precarities. Hardt and Negri’s “new post-human bodies (Empire 2013) and Latour’s confrontation of “the time of the Anthropocene” (2014) demand a remapping of the human as conventionally traced, in order to recognize it as an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). The Comparative Gender Studies Research Committee invites presentations on both earlier and contemporary materials. We particularly encourage submissions from scholars, writers, and activists that investigate how expressive artists represent, challenge, and reflect the lived experiences of those with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and/or mental health conditions when considered in relation to gender and sexuality. We seek papers reflecting the diverse experiences and narratives of marginalized groups, especially those from 2SLGBTQI+ and BIPOC communities We will attend to technology in both our potentially posthuman virtuality as well as earlier moments of simulacra through interrogating all 6 terms: precarious, mediation, queer, body, virtual, and space. Mindful that a session on precarity offered in the privileged context of an international congress needs to adopt a position of allyship and avow its positionality, this session will recognize those who for various reasons are unable to be present. Papers might consider precarious labor, contrareproductivity, queer temporality, homonationalism, queer counterpublics, queering technological affordances, cooptation and fragility, queering conventional technologies, transmediation, queer play and gaming, fanfiction and queer networks, affect and ambivalence, technologies of identity, queer(ing) AI.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Tegan Zimmerman is Chair of the Alexa McDonough Institute at Mount Saint Vincent University, the Editor of Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice, and Chair of the International Comparative Literature Association’s Comparative Gender Studies Research Committee. She is the author of Matria Redux:Caribbean Women Novelize the Past and Chronotropics: Caribbean Women Writing Spacetime, a co-edited collection with Odile Ferly.
Speaker Bio
Richmond-Garza is UT Regents’ and Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of English at UT Austin. She directed UT’s Program in Comparative Literature (2001-2022) and was CAO of the ACLA (2002-2011). Also affiliated with CREEES and HDO, she holds degrees from Berkeley, Oxford and Columbia and has held a Mellon and Fulbright. She writes on Wilde, the gothic, detective stories, theory in eight languages. Her multimedia teaching has earned a dozen teaching awards at UT Austin and across Texas.
Speaker Bio
Specializing in sexuality in contemporary culture, Jordana Greenblatt publishes on topics including circus arts and HIV/AIDS discourse/representation. Their current monograph project investigates dissident gender and sexuality in contemporary circus. Also a professional circus performer, their group devised creation circus aerial project, "Lifting Belly," created in conversation with the Gertrude Stein poem of the same name, was funded by Canada Council for the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council.
Speaker Bio
A Lecturer in the Department of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University, Mélanie Heydari received her PhD from the Sorbonne, Paris, in 2012. Her recent publications include a monograph titled Vikram Seth’s Poetics of Pastiche (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), and a book chapter on Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipur, titled “‘A Cold Rage Penetrated Her Body’: The Transformative Power of Rage in Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men” (2025).