Gayatri Gopinath's foundational work on queer diaspora, which she theorizes as “global networks of affiliation constantly being produced and reproduced along the lines of race, ethnicity and/or sexuality,” has opened up critical questions about how diaspora itself might be queered. Yet Gopinath's framework, developed primarily through South Asian contexts, has rarely been brought into sustained dialogue with Iranian diasporic cultural production. This seminar asks: what happens when we read Iranian diasporic literature, film, and digital culture through a queer diasporic lens? How do Iranian queer cultural producers navigate not only the heteronormativity of the Iranian nation-state but also the racialized and homonationalist frames of Western host societies? And what new forms of kinship, belonging, and worldmaking emerge from these interstitial spaces?

Contemporary Iranian diasporic literature offers rich sites for exploring these questions. Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! (2024) centres on Cyrus Shams, an Iranian-American poet whose obsession with martyrdom cannot be disentangled from his Iranianness, his bisexuality, or his precarious relationship to faith, inviting us to theorize Muslim witnessness as a mode of queer diasporic testimony. Adib Khorram's Darius the Great Is Not Okay (2018) and its sequel Darius the Great Deserves Better (2020) follow Darius Kellner, an Iranian American teenager whose diasporic return becomes a transformative journey as he negotiates his Iranian identity and sexuality through new forms of kinship and belonging in the homeland. And Négar Djavadi's Disoriental (2016) tells a family history of diasporic loss and healing in a nonlinear mode, while resisting gender essentialism and heteronormativity through a plot propelled by engagement with the subversive powers of music, specifically the conceit of the B-side. Across language, genre, nation, and faith, we see how Iranian queer diasporic writers navigate, resist, and reinvent the terms of belonging.

We invite papers that engage with Iranian queer and trans diasporic cultural production across genres, media, and geographies. Topics may include but are not limited to: queer and trans readings of Iranian diasporic literature and cinema; the politics of visibility, opacity, and embodiment; digital and social media as sites of community formation; intersections of queer/trans with race, class, religion; critical engagements with homonationalism, transphobia, and asylum regimes; and comparative approaches to Iranian queer and trans diaspora across different host societies.