Saturday,
April 5, 2008

Nolte Center 125
Institute for Advanced Study
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN

Where are queer studies and queer politics going in the twenty-first century? This conference brings together scholars from around the world to address the complications, contradictions, and crossings that this question raises. QM08@MSP will focus on flows and movements across geographic borders, asking what is at stake in working through a transnational queer framework that blurs distinctions between nation and diaspora, indigenous and mobile, ocean and continent, Global South and Global North. At the same time, conversations will foreground slippages and motion across conceptual borders, considering multiple, culturally specific sexual formations that push distinctions between identities and praxes, pre- and post-modern genders, racialization and sexualization.

To encourage innovative dialogue on these themes, the conference also moves across methodological borders, bringing together presentations by academics, activists, visual artists, creative writers, and dancers to perform the creativity and mobility that queer crossings call for. Panels will be organized around the themes flows, crossings, and movements. Hosting the conference on the banks of the Mississippi River - on Dakota and Ojibwe land that has become the site of ongoing African, Latino, Asian immigration and refugee resettlement - QM08@MSP engages the specificity of region while also disrupting static concepts of "locations" and what they can mean.

Free and open to the public. No registration necessary.