Prohibitions on the study of gender/sexuality are accelerating both globally and locally. For instance, in the American context of this year’s ACLA, new laws have criminalized gender affirming care and restricted the teaching of so-called ‘gender ideology’. Additionally, students and faculty who advocate for Palestinian liberation or against I.C.E. face violent attacks and censorship. Within and beyond these borders, many scholars are withdrawing from commitments due to burnout, fatigue, and risks to their wellbeing or legal status. Yet these are also symptoms of a struggle that requires us to gather and enact solidarity against the multidimensional threat of anti-intellectualism, transphobia, patriarchy, racism, homophobia, neoliberalism, and imperialism.
 

As Clare Hemmings argues in Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (2011), “how feminists tell stories matters in part because of the ways in which they intersect with wider institutionalizations of gendered meanings.” As scholars of literature and language, we understand that how we narrate this moment is integral to how we respond. And as Sara Ahmed writes in Living a Feminist Life (2017), feminism requires “asking ethical questions about how to live better in an unjust and unequal world… how to create relationships with others that are more equal; how to find ways to support those who are not supported or are less supported by social systems; how to keep coming up against histories that have become concrete,” or in short, that feminism is about “a way of thinking how to live.”

The ICLA Research Committee for Comparative Gender Studies invites reflections on what it means to do this work under the pressures of ongoing political injustice. How might the discipline organize or dis-organize itself in the face of such threats? What strategies, affects, and alignments emerge at such moments? What understandings of academic labour result from our encounters with the pressures on trans, queer, and feminist scholarship? How do we understand the crises in our field alongside those in anti/de/postcolonial studies, critical race theory, and interrelated areas of study? What is the relationship between our research or teaching and the complicity of institutions to which we may ‘belong’? Will gender/sexuality studies have an intellectual and institutional ‘home’ in the future? How should the classroom, department, syllabus, canon, or conference panel look in these times? Despite our precarity, we remain committed to cultivating joy, critical thinking, and celebrating intersectional, diverse, and oppositional voices.

Panel organizers will work with participants to cultivate a virtual seminar arrangement that reflects the spirit of the CFP, acknowledging both its bid for collectivity and collaboration, as well as the ongoing protraction and depletion of energies. Please submit abstracts with a title of 300 words to Héctor García-Chávez at [email protected]