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EV’RY BODY, THIS TIME: A Sexuality Studies Conference

Special Events
12 Apr, 2018

EV’RY BODY, THIS TIME: A Sexuality Studies Conference

A conference free and open to the public hosted by the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture

“Ev’ry Body, This Time.” The elision in ev’ry gestures in multiple ways: to the bodies that have been exempted in various iterations of sexuality studies, and to our quixotic desire to (re-)emplace them. It refers as well to the shifting and ever-proliferating fact of bodies: the way that apparent gaps may not represent incompleteness, but point instead to troubled standards of perceiving or evaluating wholeness; that filling a gap can thus provisionally flesh out bodies that are at once legible and illegible. Race and gender, in their mutable complexities, sit at the core of these questions. Our apostrophe calls to a multitude of bodies, recognizing the potential for thinking through, substituting, re-visioning, and, ultimately, holding space for, bodies that exceed categorical legislation and rhetorical disciplinarity. We also note that embodiment is not everyone’s cup of tea. We flag the body, ev’ry body, because sensuousness has too often been left out of considerations of sexuality and politics. Simultaneously, we wonder how given languages about sex and meaning work in relation to disability, debility; in the realm of the digital; under the aegis of asexuality?

This Time means both that we view this as a conference that belongs to a history of academic conferences in queer studies and that we view this as a conference that is happening in a perilous present moment. How is the critical study of sexuality evolving and in response to what imperatives? What is the relation of this time to other times (and places) and how are the particular urgencies of this time tied to other moments? Is the critical study of sexuality always explicitly about sexuality, now?

In conjoining Ev’ry Body and This Time, we issue a challenge (one with a dash of utopianism in it) to ourselves and to the conference participants: What future do “we” want looking forward from where we stand?

The conference will feature both panels assembled in response to an open call for abstracts, as well as invited speakers who currently include: Qwo-li Driskill, Alison Kafer, Amber Musser, Gemma Romain, Nayan Shah, Amy Sueyoshi, Omi’seke Natasha Tinsley, Qian Wang, Gloria Wekker, and more to be confirmed, alongside workshops and other conference events. Please check cssc.berkeley.edu for further announcements concerning the call for papers and abstract submission, accessibility information, and reserving a spot for attendees.

Read more about the Center for Study of Sexual Culture here.

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