Attachments: Queer Investments in Capital and Globalizations
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
March 6-8, 2014
Organized by the Graduate Interdisciplinary Group in Sexuality Studies
Sponsored by the Steven J. Schochet Endowment for GLBT Studies

With keynote speaker, Robert McRuer, Professor of English, George
Washington University. Professor McRuer will be presenting on his latest
book project on “cripping global austerity politics.” McRuer is the author
of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability and co-editor of Sex
and Disability.

The Graduate Interdisciplinary Group in Sexuality Studies invites proposals
for our second conference, “Attachments: Queer Investments in Capital and
Globalizations,” at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. The
conference will be a two-day series of conversations in race, ethnic,
queer, sexuality, gender, and disability studies, attending to the
affective and economic investments in and resistance to financial, sexual,
cultural, legal, political, national, and global economies. We invite
papers which extend recent debates about homonationalism and “slow death”
to consider the ways in which queer attachments to and resistance of
capital, globalization, and the state trouble dominant notions of progress.
We encourage presenters to consider the multitude of ways in which
investments and attachments can be or have been made queerly: investment in
communities, in institutions, in movements, in “the future,” in
citizenship, as well as time and monetary investments; and attachments to
debt, relationships, dreams, contracts, medicine/medical interventions, to
prosthetics, identities, to cultural and political obligations, to
liberalism, radicalism, and so on.

We hope to create a vibrant space for intellectual exchange with an
emphasis on interdisciplinary scholarship. We welcome submissions from
graduate students from a wide range of fields, including gender and
sexuality studies, ethnic studies, American studies, geography, history,
education, media and communication, sociology, and cultural studies, among
others.

Suggested topics include (but are not limited to):

Affect, attachments, and investments

Immigration, citizenship, and diaspora

Empire and colonialism

Labor: sexual, affective, activist, academic, etc.

Production and consumption of media, aesthetics, and culture

Race, place, and identity

The politics of idleness, unproductivity, and failure

Kinship, family, and coalition

Consumption, consumer culture, and tourism

Neoliberalism and biopolitics

-Industrial complexes: military, non-profit, prison, and medical

Disability and crip politics

Post-humanism, animality, and technoscience

Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words and a brief bio of no more than
100 words to queerattachments@gmail.com by NOVEMBER  1, 2013. Conference
applicants will be notified by December 1.

TRAVEL GRANTS for presenters will be available, sponsored by the Steven J.
Schochet Endowment for GLBT Studies. We will award up to three travel
grants of up to $500 each. More details will be available upon acceptance
to present.

The Graduate Interdisciplinary Group in Sexuality Studies (GIGSS) is a
group of graduate students from all disciplines and all levels who are
committed to creating new opportunities for interdisciplinary conversation
and research in sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota.

The Steven J. Schochet Endowment for GLBT Studies, named for the late
University of Minnesota alumnus, is dedicated to the advancement of GLBT
scholarship across the University and in the broader Twin Cities community.