Call for Papers

The Center for Women's & Gender Studies (CWGS) conference offers graduate students the opportunity to share their research with the students and faculty of CWGS, The University of Texas at Austin community, and CWGS community partners. We invite individual papers, panels, research posters, workshops, roundtables, film/video, creative writing, artistic posters, and performance pieces from participants in any discipline whose research focuses on women's, gender, sexuality, transgender, and/or queer studies. As we remain in a precarious state due to the pandemic, CWGS has decided to plan for a hybrid conference where students will present their work virtually and we will offer in-person optional gatherings to foster a sense of community for the conference.

As we reach a second year of heightened isolation, grief, and uncertainty we may find ourselves questioning what desire means in this time and how might isolation catalyze our queer desire for survival, connection, community, and self realization? As we move through and against constraint and change, we use queer here as an expansive verb that disrupts understanding desire through a lens of white, cis-heteropatriarchy. Thus, queering desire explores a wide variety of romantic, platonic, familial, political, and discursive avenues.
How, then, does a queered desire change our engagements with and expectations of the future? As we journey through shifting desires in the present, queerness opens up our want for more. More time, more space, more care. It foregrounds intersectional possibilities wherein desire’s interaction with different identity categories — race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, and transnationalism to name a few — points us towards an opening, a refusal, a disruption into clandestine visions of a reparative and caring future. Desire can then be understood as a journey itself rather than a goal to be met.
Desires, the constructs of our wants and needs, are often kept behind closed doors where systems of oppression tame unruly and messy expressions of longing. The desires we express in the open are often sanitized versions of the lives we want to lead. Yet, how does queer desire combat this rigidity and ignite movement, discourse, and destabilization? This conference opens up a space to discuss desire in its queered multiplicities while rejecting the need for restrictive definition.
How does desire constrain queered experience, especially under racial capitalism?
What does it mean to queer desire under settler colonialism?
How does queer desire align with or destabilize your methodological frameworks?
Does queer desire impact futurity? If so, how and for whom?
What is the journey of desire and how is that journey queered by desire?
How do predetermined pathways in academia and/or other educational spaces limit desire?
Does queer desire shape our personhood and, by extension, our kinship networks?
If agency and desire are intertwined, what roles do harm, injury, and trauma play?
What impact do queered narratives seen in literature and media have on our desires and does this always work to disrupt social norms?
Does queering desire catalyze coalitional work?
What does it mean to be in coalition and how do queer coalitional politics expand our understandings of repair?