SAGEF

Queering Emancipation: Breaking Gender and Genre Limits in Anglophone Contexts

Re-thinking modes and representations of queer and gender emancipation in the English-speaking world.

From the perspective of gender studies, it might be tempting to view women’s and queer emancipation through a teleological lens as a (relatively) seamless trajectory towards equality, rights and social acceptance — a path shaped by activism and resistance, leading towards more enlightened and nuanced understandings of alternative sexualities and liberated expressions of womanhood.

Yet as the recent social and legislative anti-trans backlash, including from other sexually marginalized groups, has demonstrated all too readily, such a model is no longer sustainable (if it ever was). The emergence of a newly empowered masculinism has shaken cis women’s rights to the core, as US anti-abortion legislation has shown, while the success of the #tradwife movement might question the perennity of feminist givens.

From a literary perspective, fictional characters have equally contributed to queering emancipation, from both gender and genre norms. Modernists, especially, such as Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf, have written works that defy linear fictions and binary protagonists. Women’s, queer and trans life writing has liberated stories of selfhood from patriarchal, heterosexual and cis normativity. Visual and media studies, particularly through those series available via streaming, have also contributed to creating non-binary and non-traditional narratives, such as RuPaul’s Dragrace, Pose, or Tales of the City. Additionally, the rewriting of classical tales with gender reversals, such as Lucy Lui as Dr. Watson in Elementary, has freed writers’ and viewers’ imaginations to recast favorite stories in queer ways.

LGBTQIA+ and feminist discourses similarly constitute a form of liberation from dominant linguistic and discursive norms, while the use of non-binary pronouns and the revision of gender categories further call into question language conventions. By subverting hegemonic discourse, these liberatory strategies engender new discursive representations and render visible hitherto marginalized identities

However, taking inspiration from the 1990 turn created by Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, not to mention Butler’s more recent Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024)a closer look at history shows how women’s and queer emancipation has never been a “straight path”: in the USA, 60 years of feminist campaigning failed to ratify the ERA, in Ireland, independence from the UK heralded the rise of the Catholic church returning women to the hearth, with the role of the “mother in the home” still enshrined in the state constitution today, while the radical, plural promise of Stonewall in 1969 has arguably given way to social assimilation and political conformity in the twenty-first century. The interventions of intersectional theorists such as bell hooks and Kimberle Crenshaw who fought to expand women’s and queer liberation beyond the confines of white middle-class feminism exposed the glaring limits of existing models of gender emancipation

With this in mind, this workshop proposes to take a critical look, or to queer, the notion of emancipation. Just as queer sexuality questions clearly defined gender identities, so using queering as a cultural practice invites to complicate familiar paradigms and question well-worn narratives, altering and enriching mainstream visions of liberation.

Topics and issues to be addressed may include but are not limited to the following:

• Expressions of queer emancipation
• Modes of feminist/ queer / trans resistance to the recent conservative backlash
• Queer art and activism
• Questioning or “queering” conventional tropes of emancipation
• Black feminism
• Breaking gender and genre limits in cinema and the visual arts
• Emancipating discourse from linguistic norms
• Queering of traditional narrative forms (fairy & folk tales, myth, legends…)
• LGBTQIA+ and women’s life writing as gender emancipation
• “Liberating” past LGBTQIA+ and women’s texts from literary obscurity
• Reassessing the domestic sphere as a space of emancipation
• Emancipation through Jack Halberstam’s “Gaga Feminism” (2012)
• Gay marriage: freedom from stigma or retreat into conformity?
• Neo-liberal recuperation of emancipatory impetuses (e.g. designer “We should all be feminists” or “Save the Dolls” T-shirts)

Submission deadline

Please send your abstracts (250-300 words with a brief bio-bibliography) by 30th November to Amy D. Wells   ([email protected]) and Margaret Gillespie ([email protected])