This seminar invites papers on queer homecoming from across East Asian literature and media which present and wrestle with expanded definitions of home outside of the normative family and state regimes. We are interested in works and even presentation styles that invite us to reconceive what community may mean, to sense expanded forms of kinship structures. Additionally, we seek studies of literature/media from both the scholar and artist perspective that mobilize the inherently fluidity of queerness to formally speak to a potentially strained intimacy and closeness between those pushed toward the margins and those aligned with the hegemony.
Building on theoretical frameworks that underpinned last year's ACLA seminar on implicating queer spectacle, this seminar senses queerness in broad terms as a radical political project–one that fosters estranging yet empowering transnational solidarities between those othered on the basis of identity by social/legal/technical means. We share a conception of "queer homecoming" as defined by E.K. Tan—a "critical intervention to the normative patrilineal kinship structure in Sinophone societies defined by traditional family values, such as those of Confucianism.” Tan goes on to productively frame queer homecoming as an “intervention to heteronormative kinship system [which] enables the articulations of alternative kinship structures in mainstream cultural expressions (in literature, film, social and new media)." Our panel extends Tan’s framework to encompass East Asia, broadly conceived. We find such spaces of queer homecoming to be places of new kinship practices, ones that, as Judith Butler argues, “emerge to address fundamental forms of human dependency, which may include… relations of emotional dependency and support.” We mean here only to delineate our conceptions of queer homecoming and the resulting kinship structures and invite panelists to offer their own definitions.
Inspired by Butler’s note that “the relations that bind are no longer traced to heterosexual procreation,” our seminar seeks to asks: what new bonds are foregrounded within spaces of queer homecoming? Is the center and its mainstream normative strictures decentered therein? Or, more unsettlingly, is the center merely reinforced and reified? How might media teach the public about queerness in/about Asia along with both the potential challenges to its flourishing and to potential pockets of resistance, to sites of queer homecoming that may be enmeshed within the tapestry of everyday social norms? Through our seminar, we hope to create a vibrant scholarly community with an expansive geographic and cross-media focus (perhaps itself modeling a kind of queer homecoming) to answer such questions.
If applicants have questions about any aspect of potential proposals, please reach out to the seminar organizers. Please note that we seek papers from across disciplines and genres as well as pieces of creative work and visual media.
Building on theoretical frameworks that underpinned last year's ACLA seminar on implicating queer spectacle, this seminar senses queerness in broad terms as a radical political project–one that fosters estranging yet empowering transnational solidarities between those othered on the basis of identity by social/legal/technical means. We share a conception of "queer homecoming" as defined by E.K. Tan—a "critical intervention to the normative patrilineal kinship structure in Sinophone societies defined by traditional family values, such as those of Confucianism.” Tan goes on to productively frame queer homecoming as an “intervention to heteronormative kinship system [which] enables the articulations of alternative kinship structures in mainstream cultural expressions (in literature, film, social and new media)." Our panel extends Tan’s framework to encompass East Asia, broadly conceived. We find such spaces of queer homecoming to be places of new kinship practices, ones that, as Judith Butler argues, “emerge to address fundamental forms of human dependency, which may include… relations of emotional dependency and support.” We mean here only to delineate our conceptions of queer homecoming and the resulting kinship structures and invite panelists to offer their own definitions.
Inspired by Butler’s note that “the relations that bind are no longer traced to heterosexual procreation,” our seminar seeks to asks: what new bonds are foregrounded within spaces of queer homecoming? Is the center and its mainstream normative strictures decentered therein? Or, more unsettlingly, is the center merely reinforced and reified? How might media teach the public about queerness in/about Asia along with both the potential challenges to its flourishing and to potential pockets of resistance, to sites of queer homecoming that may be enmeshed within the tapestry of everyday social norms? Through our seminar, we hope to create a vibrant scholarly community with an expansive geographic and cross-media focus (perhaps itself modeling a kind of queer homecoming) to answer such questions.
If applicants have questions about any aspect of potential proposals, please reach out to the seminar organizers. Please note that we seek papers from across disciplines and genres as well as pieces of creative work and visual media.