LAG: Labor, Aesthetics, Geopolitics - 2025 DC Queer Studies Symposium

Black text on a light background next to a decorative image of by Shyam Thandar

LAG: Labor, Aesthetics, Geopolitics - 2025 DC Queer Studies Symposium

Full size poster showcasing art from Shyam Thandar and the full schedule for the DC Queer Studies Symposium

The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is proud to announce LAG the 2025 DC Queer Studies Symposium.

The 2025 edition of the DC Queer Studies symposium builds on the renewed emphasis on geopolitics in North America-based queer and transgender studies by gathering together scholars and artists who engage productive tensions between sites and citations and who go beyond the case study model to generate theoretical frameworks that think area and trans and queer life together. Rather than lump together diverse concerns from the “elsewhere” into a single panel under the rubric of “transnational,” this two-day symposium gathers thinkers whose scholarship centers questions of political economy, global division of labor, and aesthetics, and how they are informed by relations of colonialism, geopolitics, and racial capitalism (among much else).

Our title for the symposium is LAG. Here we hope to play with theorizations of temporality in postcolonial studies and queer studies. Scholars of postcolonial studies dwell on the civilizational time of the West that consigns the global South to the waiting room of history thus producing an other who lags behind developmental time. Queer theorists have also explored how those who exceed the norms of gender and sexual normativity are out of time with the linear temporality of heteronormativity. Besides these formulations of lag time, LAG also stands for our central keywords of this year’s convening: Labor, Aesthetics and Geopolitics. Focusing on these keywords helps us move beyond the US exceptionalism of the fields of queer and transgender studies.

This year our keynotes will be given by Aslı Zengin (Rutgers, a scholar of transgender life and death and trans negotiations with Islam in Turkey); Cole Rizki (University of Virginia, a scholar of transgender cultural production in the wake of totalitarianism in Argentina); Kwame Otu (Georgetown, a scholar of gender and queerness and the geopolitics of waste management in Ghana); Lucinda Ramberg (Cornell, a scholar of religion, caste, and sexuality in India), and Tara Asgar (The New School, an artist and scholar whose performance practices engage themes of trans/gender aesthetics, trauma, humanitarian regimes of precarity and migration in and between Bangladesh and the United States). Taken together, our speakers address many critical questions from interdisciplinary perspectives that are foundational to how the humanities respond to contemporary political, social, and cultural challenges such as climate change, democracy, migration, gender and sexual diversity, and the importance of art to visions of justice. Additionally, we will have lunch time programming with student speakers; details TBA.

Program

Thursday, April 3, 2025

2:00 PM

Welcome

Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World
Aslı Zengin (Rutgers University) with discussant Sayan Bhattacharyra (WGSS)

4:00 PM

Death as Queer Possibility: Waste and the Normative of Life in Neoliberal Ghana
Kwame Edwin Otu (Georgetown University) with discussant Neda Atanasoski (WGSS)

Friday April 4, 2025

11:00 AM

Belated: Queer Futures in the Anthropology of Gender
Lucinda E.G. Ramberg (Cornell University) with discussant Neel Ahuja (WGSS)

12:30 PM

Lunch & Student Panel
Moderated by Christina B. Hanhardt (AMST)

2:00 PM

Aesthetics of Survival, Art of Repair: Anti: Authoritarian Trans Politics and Resistance
Cole Rizki (University of Virginia) with discussant Ryan Long (SPAN, CLCS)

4:00 PM

Performing Identities: Navigating Visibility, Violence and Resistance
Tara Asgar (The New School), with discussant Karin Zitzewitz (ARTH)

About the Artist and Speakers

This program is brought to you with the generous support of our co-sponsors:

The College of Arts and Humanities
Arts for All
LGBTQ+ Equity Center
Department of American Studies
Arabic Flagship
Department of French and Italian
Center for East Asian Studies
Department of English
Center for Literary and Comparative Studies
Department of Cinema and Media Studies
The Language House
Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
Roshan Institute for Persian Studies
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
School of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
Department of Art History and Archaeology
Department of Anthropology
Department of African American and Africana Studies
UMD MICA

RSVP

This event is free and open to the public. RSVP is highly encouraged to attend but not required. To RSVP, please register using the link in the "Get Tickets" section

Get Tickets

RSVP

Cost

Free

Event Dates

Thursday, Apr 03, 2025 2:00 pm
04/03/25 14:00:00 04/03/25 17:30:00 America/New_York LAG: Labor, Aesthetics, Geopolitics - 2025 DC Queer Studies Symposium
The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is proud to announce LAG the 2025 DC Queer Studies Symposium.
The 2025 edition of the DC Queer Studies symposium builds on the renewed emphasis on geopolitics in North America-based queer and transgender studies by gathering together scholars and artists who engage productive tensions between sites and citations and who go beyond the case study model to generate theoretical frameworks that think area and trans and queer life together. Rather than lump together diverse concerns from the “elsewhere” into a single panel under the rubric of “transnational,” this two-day symposium gathers thinkers whose scholarship centers questions of political economy, global division of labor, and aesthetics, and how they are informed by relations of colonialism, geopolitics, and racial capitalism (among much else).
Our title for the symposium is LAG. Here we hope to play with theorizations of temporality in postcolonial studies and queer studies. Scholars of postcolonial studies dwell on the civilizational time of the West that consigns the global South to the waiting room of history thus producing an other who lags behind developmental time. Queer theorists have also explored how those who exceed the norms of gender and sexual normativity are out of time with the linear temporality of heteronormativity. Besides these formulations of lag time, LAG also stands for our central keywords of this year’s convening: Labor, Aesthetics and Geopolitics. Focusing on these keywords helps us move beyond the US exceptionalism of the fields of queer and transgender studies.
This year our keynotes will be given by Aslı Zengin (Rutgers, a scholar of transgender life and death and trans negotiations with Islam in Turkey); Cole Rizki (University of Virginia, a scholar of transgender cultural production in the wake of totalitarianism in Argentina); Kwame Otu (Georgetown, a scholar of gender and queerness and the geopolitics of waste management in Ghana); Lucinda Ramberg (Cornell, a scholar of religion, caste, and sexuality in India), and Tara Asgar (The New School, an artist and scholar whose performance practices engage themes of trans/gender aesthetics, trauma, humanitarian regimes of precarity and migration in and between Bangladesh and the United States). Taken together, our speakers address many critical questions from interdisciplinary perspectives that are foundational to how the humanities respond to contemporary political, social, and cultural challenges such as climate change, democracy, migration, gender and sexual diversity, and the importance of art to visions of justice. Additionally, we will have lunch time programming with student speakers; details TBA.
Program
Thursday, April 3, 2025
2:00 PM
Welcome
Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World
Aslı Zengin (Rutgers University) with discussant Sayan Bhattacharyra (WGSS)

4:00 PM
Death as Queer Possibility: Waste and the Normative of Life in Neoliberal Ghana
Kwame Edwin Otu (Georgetown University) with discussant Neda Atanasoski (WGSS)

Friday April 4, 2025
11:00 AM
Belated: Queer Futures in the Anthropology of Gender
Lucinda E.G. Ramberg (Cornell University) with discussant Neel Ahuja (WGSS)
12:30 PM
Lunch & Student Panel
Moderated by Christina B. Hanhardt (AMST)
2:00 PM
Aesthetics of Survival, Art of Repair: Anti: Authoritarian Trans Politics and Resistance
Cole Rizki (University of Virginia) with discussant Ryan Long (SPAN, CLCS)
4:00 PM
Performing Identities: Navigating Visibility, Violence and Resistance
Tara Asgar (The New School), with discussant Karin Zitzewitz (ARTH)
About the Artist and Speakers
This program is brought to you with the generous support of our co-sponsors:
- The College of Arts and Humanities
- Arts for All
- LGBTQ+ Equity Center
- Department of American Studies
- Arabic Flagship
- Department of French and Italian
- Center for East Asian Studies
- Department of English
- Center for Literary and Comparative Studies
- Department of Cinema and Media Studies
- The Language House
- Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
- Roshan Institute for Persian Studies
- School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
- School of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
- Department of Art History and Archaeology
- Department of Anthropology
- Department of African American and Africana Studies
- UMD MICA
Adele H. Stamp Student Union false
Friday, Apr 04, 2025 11:00 am
04/04/25 11:00:00 04/04/25 17:00:00 America/New_York LAG: Labor, Aesthetics, Geopolitics - 2025 DC Queer Studies Symposium
The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is proud to announce LAG the 2025 DC Queer Studies Symposium.
The 2025 edition of the DC Queer Studies symposium builds on the renewed emphasis on geopolitics in North America-based queer and transgender studies by gathering together scholars and artists who engage productive tensions between sites and citations and who go beyond the case study model to generate theoretical frameworks that think area and trans and queer life together. Rather than lump together diverse concerns from the “elsewhere” into a single panel under the rubric of “transnational,” this two-day symposium gathers thinkers whose scholarship centers questions of political economy, global division of labor, and aesthetics, and how they are informed by relations of colonialism, geopolitics, and racial capitalism (among much else).
Our title for the symposium is LAG. Here we hope to play with theorizations of temporality in postcolonial studies and queer studies. Scholars of postcolonial studies dwell on the civilizational time of the West that consigns the global South to the waiting room of history thus producing an other who lags behind developmental time. Queer theorists have also explored how those who exceed the norms of gender and sexual normativity are out of time with the linear temporality of heteronormativity. Besides these formulations of lag time, LAG also stands for our central keywords of this year’s convening: Labor, Aesthetics and Geopolitics. Focusing on these keywords helps us move beyond the US exceptionalism of the fields of queer and transgender studies.
This year our keynotes will be given by Aslı Zengin (Rutgers, a scholar of transgender life and death and trans negotiations with Islam in Turkey); Cole Rizki (University of Virginia, a scholar of transgender cultural production in the wake of totalitarianism in Argentina); Kwame Otu (Georgetown, a scholar of gender and queerness and the geopolitics of waste management in Ghana); Lucinda Ramberg (Cornell, a scholar of religion, caste, and sexuality in India), and Tara Asgar (The New School, an artist and scholar whose performance practices engage themes of trans/gender aesthetics, trauma, humanitarian regimes of precarity and migration in and between Bangladesh and the United States). Taken together, our speakers address many critical questions from interdisciplinary perspectives that are foundational to how the humanities respond to contemporary political, social, and cultural challenges such as climate change, democracy, migration, gender and sexual diversity, and the importance of art to visions of justice. Additionally, we will have lunch time programming with student speakers; details TBA.
Program
Thursday, April 3, 2025
2:00 PM
Welcome
Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World
Aslı Zengin (Rutgers University) with discussant Sayan Bhattacharyra (WGSS)

4:00 PM
Death as Queer Possibility: Waste and the Normative of Life in Neoliberal Ghana
Kwame Edwin Otu (Georgetown University) with discussant Neda Atanasoski (WGSS)

Friday April 4, 2025
11:00 AM
Belated: Queer Futures in the Anthropology of Gender
Lucinda E.G. Ramberg (Cornell University) with discussant Neel Ahuja (WGSS)
12:30 PM
Lunch & Student Panel
Moderated by Christina B. Hanhardt (AMST)
2:00 PM
Aesthetics of Survival, Art of Repair: Anti: Authoritarian Trans Politics and Resistance
Cole Rizki (University of Virginia) with discussant Ryan Long (SPAN, CLCS)
4:00 PM
Performing Identities: Navigating Visibility, Violence and Resistance
Tara Asgar (The New School), with discussant Karin Zitzewitz (ARTH)
About the Artist and Speakers
This program is brought to you with the generous support of our co-sponsors:
- The College of Arts and Humanities
- Arts for All
- LGBTQ+ Equity Center
- Department of American Studies
- Arabic Flagship
- Department of French and Italian
- Center for East Asian Studies
- Department of English
- Center for Literary and Comparative Studies
- Department of Cinema and Media Studies
- The Language House
- Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
- Roshan Institute for Persian Studies
- School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
- School of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
- Department of Art History and Archaeology
- Department of Anthropology
- Department of African American and Africana Studies
- UMD MICA
Adele H. Stamp Student Union false