TCGQT 2025
Date/Location: April 4-6th, 2025
Loyola University Chicago, Lakeshore Campus
Chicago, IL
Theme: Looking to the Past to Envision the Future
The inaugural Transdisciplinary Colloquium of Gender, Queer, and Trans Studies (TCGQT) explored new directions concerning these fields’ various intersections with other disciplines. Last year, talks included topics such as historical narratives of Black sexuality and gender as excess to whiteness, tradwives on social media and their relation to the League of Women Voters of Chicago, artistic responses to the AIDS crisis, transnational ethnic identities, and much more. As is apparent from these topics, concomitant with our discussions of new directions, we named histories (whether ignored, forgotten, erased, or imagined). This naming was the foundation for this year’s theme: Looking to the Past to Envision the Future
What is the role of history, historical perspectives, genealogical research, and more in our current time? Are historical studies “for the past” or must it serve a use to us in the present? What fragments from the past have shaped gender, queer, and trans studies? What are the complex histories, critical distinctions, or moments of coalitional solidarity in our amorphous discipline/s? What are our complex relationships to our own embodied histories? Who gets to record/have history? How has/is history told? How do these histories impact and inform our research? As the dust from the 2024 election settles, some postmortem questions have arisen: How did we get here? Is this who we really are? What do we do now? How safe am I where I live? What do the histories of gender, queer, and trans studies have to offer in this time marked by political and social crisis? What are the mechanisms of in/visibility that activists have already fought for that are once-again threatened? What legislative protocols, both past and present, tether our bodies to materiality and history? What historical transnational solidarity informs our contemporary solidarity? Controversially, we can meet the haters head on. Has gender, queer, and trans studies contributed to this political and social quagmire? Can the negativity present within gender, queer, and trans theory also offer a way out? When gender, queer, and trans gets “political,” what are the implications? How might histories of gender, queer, and trans political action inform, shape, and/or guide a political response in the present? How did/do we struggle to survive? How did/do we create community? Where did/do we turn to for gender, queer, and trans joys and pleasures?
The Transdisciplinary Colloquium of Gender, Queer, and Trans Studies invites research, projects, activist accounts, and artistic responses to this role of history. We affirm transdisciplinarity eschews academic boundaries, so please understand the following categories to aid our committee in program formation and less about needing to fit the precise parameters; we do invite you to name your own transdisciplinary niche should you understand your work to escape our categories.
The TCGQT invites work from graduate, undergraduate students, and early career (4-5 years) scholars for abstract submission. We ask that undergraduate submissions are accompanied by a recommendation letter from faculty at their home institution.
As an example, these were categories last year:
- Intersectional Theory (queer, trans*, critical race, postcolonial, decolonial, disability, etc.);
- Intersectional Studies (African American, Black, LGBTQ/gay and lesbian, disability, etc.)
- Future(s) of Feminism (transformative, eco-, xeno-, glitch, cyborg, analysis of war);
- Men* & Masculinity Studies (new, toxic, soft, de/construction, etc.);
- Posthumanism (cyborg, AI, prosthesis, object-oriented ontologies, etc.);
- Binary-bending (female masculinity/male femininity; queering trans/transing queer, etc.);
- Applied Theory and Praxis (pedagogy, social work, activism, etc.);
- Queer and Trans* Studies in... (religious studies, theology, history, psychology, philosophy, etc.);
- Contemporary Geopolitics (humanitarian crises, war, government destabilization, etc.);
- Media, Language and Cultural Studies (literature, cinema, television, social media, art etc.);
- Open (if you feel your research does not neatly fit into the above listed categories, please suggest your own).
Please use this Google Form to submit your proposals.
Deadline: January 31, 2025
Date/Location: April 4-6th, 2025
Loyola University Chicago, Lakeshore Campus
Chicago, IL
Theme: Looking to the Past to Envision the Future
The inaugural Transdisciplinary Colloquium of Gender, Queer, and Trans Studies (TCGQT) explored new directions concerning these fields’ various intersections with other disciplines. Last year, talks included topics such as historical narratives of Black sexuality and gender as excess to whiteness, tradwives on social media and their relation to the League of Women Voters of Chicago, artistic responses to the AIDS crisis, transnational ethnic identities, and much more. As is apparent from these topics, concomitant with our discussions of new directions, we named histories (whether ignored, forgotten, erased, or imagined). This naming was the foundation for this year’s theme: Looking to the Past to Envision the Future
What is the role of history, historical perspectives, genealogical research, and more in our current time? Are historical studies “for the past” or must it serve a use to us in the present? What fragments from the past have shaped gender, queer, and trans studies? What are the complex histories, critical distinctions, or moments of coalitional solidarity in our amorphous discipline/s? What are our complex relationships to our own embodied histories? Who gets to record/have history? How has/is history told? How do these histories impact and inform our research? As the dust from the 2024 election settles, some postmortem questions have arisen: How did we get here? Is this who we really are? What do we do now? How safe am I where I live? What do the histories of gender, queer, and trans studies have to offer in this time marked by political and social crisis? What are the mechanisms of in/visibility that activists have already fought for that are once-again threatened? What legislative protocols, both past and present, tether our bodies to materiality and history? What historical transnational solidarity informs our contemporary solidarity? Controversially, we can meet the haters head on. Has gender, queer, and trans studies contributed to this political and social quagmire? Can the negativity present within gender, queer, and trans theory also offer a way out? When gender, queer, and trans gets “political,” what are the implications? How might histories of gender, queer, and trans political action inform, shape, and/or guide a political response in the present? How did/do we struggle to survive? How did/do we create community? Where did/do we turn to for gender, queer, and trans joys and pleasures?
The Transdisciplinary Colloquium of Gender, Queer, and Trans Studies invites research, projects, activist accounts, and artistic responses to this role of history. We affirm transdisciplinarity eschews academic boundaries, so please understand the following categories to aid our committee in program formation and less about needing to fit the precise parameters; we do invite you to name your own transdisciplinary niche should you understand your work to escape our categories.
The TCGQT invites work from graduate, undergraduate students, and early career (4-5 years) scholars for abstract submission. We ask that undergraduate submissions are accompanied by a recommendation letter from faculty at their home institution.
As an example, these were categories last year:
- Intersectional Theory (queer, trans*, critical race, postcolonial, decolonial, disability, etc.);
- Intersectional Studies (African American, Black, LGBTQ/gay and lesbian, disability, etc.)
- Future(s) of Feminism (transformative, eco-, xeno-, glitch, cyborg, analysis of war);
- Men* & Masculinity Studies (new, toxic, soft, de/construction, etc.);
- Posthumanism (cyborg, AI, prosthesis, object-oriented ontologies, etc.);
- Binary-bending (female masculinity/male femininity; queering trans/transing queer, etc.);
- Applied Theory and Praxis (pedagogy, social work, activism, etc.);
- Queer and Trans* Studies in... (religious studies, theology, history, psychology, philosophy, etc.);
- Contemporary Geopolitics (humanitarian crises, war, government destabilization, etc.);
- Media, Language and Cultural Studies (literature, cinema, television, social media, art etc.);
- Open (if you feel your research does not neatly fit into the above listed categories, please suggest your own).
Please use this Google Form to submit your proposals.
Deadline: January 31, 2025