Materializing Queer Space: toward a radical pragmatics:
Queer theory has, since its inception in the late 1980s/ early 1990s, stretched the boundaries of sex, sexuality and gender; particularly in the ways these relate to queer bodies and the multiple possibilities in which sexuality and gender are/can be deployed. As queer theory has come into its own as a set of academic discourses, its methodological potentials to interrogate not only the contingency and complexity of human subjectivity through an optic of sexualized/ gendered constructions, but other social and political formations have become ever more apparent. Referring to Sedgwick (1993), Gibson-Graham note that ‘[b]reaking apart these associations [that maintain normative understandings] is the theoretical job of ‘queering’ sexuality and its representations’ (1999: 81) that can be applied to multiple and shifting subjectivities not limited to sex and gender. Recently, a handful of other possibilities for queer theory have emerged alongside the realm of gender/sex/uality. ‘Queering’ Marxism (Floyd 2009), capitalism (Gibson-Graham 1999), globalization (Puar, Rushbrook and Schein 2003), and terrorist assemblages and nationalisms (Puar 2007, 2001, Butler 2005), among others, have all contributed to the durability of queer theory to grasp a vast array of possible social worlds. In this way, the queer is that which disrupts the norm, disarticulates its representations, and finds new, if not shifting and unstable, ways to imagine how they go together.
While these provocative and promising new uses of the ‘queer’ have blazed new lines of inquiry, queer theory is still impoverished of a material critique that locates its theoretical potentials on the ground and in the everyday (Gamson 1995). A growing critique of performativity is drawing the body back into the flesh foregrounding new empirical work in the social sciences and humanities. Recently, a growing cadre of queer theory methodologies (Browne and Nash, forthcoming) and scholarship (see for example Browne, Lim and Brown 2007) specifically within geography have addressed this critique through a more grounded material queer analysis. The hope of this session is to draw in geographers thinking with and through queer theory for an examination of how they are using the theories and methods of the queer toward a robust material and spatial framing of their work. We are seeking a discussion for the potential materialities and spatialities that exist within the queer to come toward a radical pragmatics, in the Deleuzian sense, to excavate the everyday politics and practices of the queer on the ground, in regards to LGBTIQ lives and identities, as well as, other identities, categories, practices and processes.
We welcome papers that touch on any of these concepts and how they apply to material interpretations of their work. This session is particularly interested in relating to the reinvestment of the material in bodies, and burgeoning notions of ‘unmaking’ community that explore more nuanced and complex understandings of material networks on the ground. In this way, community is a far less stable political object that must be brought back to its contingencies, exigencies, and corporealities. Questions to consider: How does the material inform the queer? How does the queer inform the material? How can this intersection prove advantageous for the spatailities we seek to investigate and hold up? Similarly, how are other practices and processes of ‘undoing’ in relation to materiality feeding our work and studies? What materialities are furthered by this turn to bodies? How are these developments represented in your work and how can queer theory further bring them to light? What can geography uniquely contribute to these developments?
Please submit a 500 word abstract and title the full-length paper you seek to present at the AAG to both Mathias Detamore (mathiasd at yahoo.com) and Jen Gieseking (jgieseking at gc.cuny.edu) by 12 October 2009.