We propose a panel to examine the expression, subversion, and formal architectural framing of the nature/nurture debate within Anglophone queer fiction across various regions of the globe -- is sexuality innate, learned, both, or ex nihilo? We invite interested participants to explore at least some of the following questions:

• What draws authors, readers, and critics to narrative frameworks that rigidly conform to either biological essentialism (nature) or radical social constructivism (nurture)?
• Do texts that align with the "born this way" paradigm confirm or critique the social, political, and legal prejudices of their historical moments? If so, how?
• In what ways do Anglophone queer novels flout these deterministic boundaries, exposing the fractures and failures within both biological and environmental models of identity?
• Not a few queer narratives locate the ontology of desire outside of Western scientific binaries entirely, finding a middle ground elsewhere. To what effect?
• In what ways do postcolonial, Indigenous, or non-Western Anglophone queer authors keep geopolitical and cultural awareness in play even when the specific mechanics of the nature/nurture debate are not the explicit focal point of a story?
• What are some of the theories (philosophical, psychoanalytic, ecological, new materialist, etc.) that help us think through these questions?

We aim for a panel whose geographic and cultural diversity will generate a strong intercultural component. Its transnational scope invites comparative analysis of how queer fiction both responds to and articulates local histories, legal terrains, and regional evolutions of sexual politics across the Anglophone world. Alongside the literary works themselves, we invite presentations and critiques of sociological, scientific, and philosophical studies of identity, performativity, essentialism, and queer ontology.

This panel invites presentations on Queer Fiction and Sexuality across global Anglophone literatures. Writers who work in this world aim to expose, destabilise, or transcend the entrenched boundaries of how human identity is constructed, policed, and understood. Among the core themes we anticipate are the tensions between innate selfhood and societal engineering, institutional conditioning, ecological fluidities, and the intersections of queer desire with race, class, and colonial legacies. While some popular iterations of queer narratives aim exclusively at representation or celebratory visibility, the literary texts we will study encourage — and often demand — reflection and self-reflection on the very nature of being, even as they challenge the structural binaries imposed by heteronormative discourse.