Asexuality Studies Call for Papers: Decoloniality
2016 Call for Proposals about Asexualities
Asexuality Studies Interest Group
2016 NWSA Annual Conference: Decoloniality
November 10-13, 2016 • Montréal, Québec
The NWSA Asexuality Studies Interest Group is organizing a series of panels that will be submitted to the 2016 NWSA annual conference. The general call for proposals for the conference can be found here: http://www.nwsa.org/cfp
If you are interested in being a part of the 2016 Asexuality Studies Interest Group panels at NWSA, please review the following individual CFPs below and then complete the following form by Monday, February 8, 2016:*
http://goo.gl/forms/iumSOZzaDU
We will try to accommodate as many qualified papers as possible, but panels are limited to 3-4 presenters. NWSA will make the final decision about which panels are accepted. Presenters accepted into the conference program must become members of NWSA in addition to registering for the conference.
*If you are unable to complete the form, alternatively you may email the following to the appropriate panel organizer (listed under each theme):
Name, Affiliation, Mailing Address, Email, Phone
NWSA Theme your paper fits under
50-100 word abstract (with relevant citations**)
**NWSA now requires a panel rationale with a works cited section. Panel organizers will incorporate the citations from individuals abstracts into the final panel rationale.
Theme 1: Unsettling Settler Logics
Panel Title: “Settler and Supremacist Interpellations: Unsettling Asexual Intimacies and Figurations”
Panel CFP: The NWSA “Unsettling Settler Logics” subtheme call asks, “How might we decenter (enlightenment/modern) human subjectivity as the center of knowing and being?” Broadly, this panel seeks interventions in the theorization of asexuality, race and the human. This panel seeks papers that examine representations of asexuals and asexuality as they are influenced or informed by prevailing logics of settler and racial regimes of power, knowledge and truth. Is it possible to rewrite and reimagine specifically asexual intimacies beyond the logics of settler colonialism, white supremacy, imperialism and war that have strategically held particular racialized subjects to be either excessively or insufficiently “sexual” as the grounds for their exclusion from or contingent inclusion in categories of citizenship, personhood, and sovereignty? Scott Morgensen writes, “gendered and sexual power condition, or even generate the power relations we call ‘settler colonialism'” (14-15). How might attention to asexuality aid in the effort of fleshing out this terrain? In what manners are asexual structures of feeling influenced or animated by the logics of settler colonialism and white (and other) supremacies (Rifkin 2011)?
Works Cited: Arondekar, Anjali. 2005. “Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive.” Journal of the History of Sexuality. 14.½: 10-27; Morgensen, Scott Lauria. 2012. “Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism: An Introduction.” Settler Colonial Studies, 2:2, 2-22; Przybylo, Ela and Danielle Cooper. 2014. “Asexual Resonances: Tracing a Queerly Asexual Archive.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 20.3: 297-318; Rifkin, Mark. 2011. “Settler States of Feeling: National Belonging and the Erasure of Native American Presence.” In A Companion to American Literary Studies, edited by Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell; Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review. 3.3: 257-337.
Theme 2: Movements and Migrations
Panel Title: “Asexual Flows”
Panel CFP: Drawing on the theme of movements and migrations, this panel asks us to think about the movement flows of asexuality transnationally. Asexuality scholarship and activism is emerging as both a robust network of identities and a compelling series of perspectives for thinking about sex, sexual citizenship, community-making, normativity, gender, bodies, and abilities. In this sense, asexuality has emerged, like other sexual identities, as a movement. At the same time, asexuality’s movements and the asexual movement itself has been articulated mostly within the parameters of Western, colonial, urban, and secular flows (one exception is Wong 2015). The focus of this panel is thus to think of asexual movements against the Western model, and specifically with attentiveness to how asexuality moves in non-Western contexts and sites, in non-secular iterations, and in decolonizing frameworks.
Questions to consider include:
-How can we make sense of asexuality alongside border imperialism (Walia 2013), homonationalism (Puar 2007), and settler colonialism (Finley 2011)?
-What meanings and iterations does asexuality acquire when framed through non-Western knowledge systems?
-How has asexual activism and scholarship been on the move, in movement across geopolitical sites?
-If asexuality is true to people across historical and cultural sites, how is it experienced and named in non-Western paradigms?
-What coalitions and solidarities can be formed among asexualities transnationally?
Works Cited: Finley, Chris. 2011. “Decolonizing the Queer Native Body (and Recovering the Native Bull-Dyke): Bringing ‘Sexy Back’ and Out of the Native Studies Closet.” In Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature. Tuscon: The University of Arizona Press. 31-42; Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham and London: Duke University Press; Walia, Harsha. 2013. Undoing Border Imperialism. Oakland: AK Press; Wong, Day. 2015. “Asexuality in China’s Sexual Revolution: Asexual Marriage as Coping Strategy.” Sexualities 18.1-2: 100-116.
Theme 3: Bodies and Biopolitics
Panel Title: “Asexual and Trans & Gender Non-Conforming Bodies and Biopolitics”
Panel CFP: The legacies of colonialism and its social order has informed the structure of society to the present (Quijano, 2000). As the NWSA 2016 CFP states, “coloniality has played a central role in producing particular understandings of bodies, sexes, races, abilities, and genders. These categorizations are often tied to deficit models of human difference that undergird pathologization.” This panel will consider biopolitical questions related to the intersection between asexuality and gender - particularly trans, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and/or gender non-conforming identities. This panel will consider: how have colonial categorizations led to the pathologization of asexual and gender non-conforming bodies? How can feminist decolonial frameworks work to deconstruct deficit models of asexual and gender non-conforming bodies?
• What can thinking about gender non-conformity and asexuality together teach us about the ways in which gender and sexuality can be colonial impositions that sustain racialized, heteronormative, patriarchal hierarchies and that reinforce distinctions between persons and non-persons?
• How do decolonial feminist frameworks help to name coloniality’s wounds, unpack its legacies of trauma, and contest the governance of bodies and intimacies, specifically in the case of asexuality and gender non-conformity? Relatedly, what are the contours of decolonized asexual and trans, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and/or gender non-conforming bodies, and how are they performed, inhabited, felt, represented, known?
• How do multiple control practices operate simultaneously to try to contain and/or manage asexual and trans, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and/or gender non-conforming bodies?
• What are the contours of decolonized asexual and trans, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and/or gender non-conforming bodies, and how are they performed, inhabited, felt, represented, known?
• What are asexual and trans, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and/or gender non-conforming examples of lived resilience/resistance and alternatives to normative physical bodies?
• How can thinking about asexual and trans, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and/or gender non-conforming identities help us in reimagining or resisting the (normative) national body?
• When thinking about the intersections of asexuality and trans, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and/or gender non-conforming identities, why is it essential to examine connections between environmental degradation, illness, reproductive violence and in/justice, and the medico-industrial complex?
Sources Cited: Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of power and Eurocentrism in Latin America."International Sociology 15.2 (2000): 215-232.
Theme 4: Borders and Be/longings
Panel Title: “Bordering Asexuality: Longings, Belongings, and Unbelongings”
Panel CFP: As the NWSA organizers note, “Borders actively structure, produce, regulate, and secure hierarchies of race, class, disability, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality (Luibhéid 2002). Borders help to produce the conditions for belonging, but also un-belonging, erasure, and violence, including genocidal and gendered violence.” How can we think about asexuality within and across borders, whether they be literal national borders or epistemological, hierarchical, psychosocial borders that dictate the spaces of belonging or unbelonging of different types of asexual or asexualized bodies?
If “settler colonial states, moreover, mobilize (and manipulate) affects of belonging, in part to inspire subjects to yearn for or take up the state’s desires,” where does asexuality fit into settler colonial logics of yearning and desire; how does asexuality break down those logics? What does it mean to yearn, to long for, to belong, or not belong against, across, and within imposed boundaries and borders constructed by settler colonial logics? How might we employ the (il)logics of asexuality as a decolonial framework? How might we address the critique of the asexual’s dominant image as the unassailable, cis-normative, able-bodied white asexual through interrogations of borders, citizenship, race, gender, age, religion, and ability? Who are the asexuals who have not belonged even within normative asexual borders? Where are the stories and bodies we long for?
We welcome submissions that take up asexualities (broadly defined and understood) in relation to borders (broadly defined and understood) and notions of both longing and belonging (or unbelonging).
Further questions to consider:
• How can decolonial feminist work help to denaturalize borders, especially those that dictate the place of sexuality, in order to reframe geographies of power or otherwise disrupt colonial cartographies? How does it take up questions of sovereignty, co-resistance, and co-existence?
• By what means can we contest the “physical borders that enforce a global system of apartheid and…conceptual borders that keep us separated from one another” (Walia 2013, 2)? How do those who are colonized and disenfranchised challenge the state’s imposed borders of belonging and not belonging on a daily basis?
• What might it mean for feminist scholars and asexuality studies scholars situated in North America to confront and consider the historic and ongoing erasures, omissions, and occlusions accomplished by the imposition of borders and boundaries?
• How do decolonial approaches to borders and their structuring il/logics of being, affect, and belonging expose mechanisms of power that reproduce sexual and gender hierarchies and exclusions and how do these relate to queer, trans, and asexual histories, peoples, and communities?
Theme 5: World-Making and Resistant Imaginaries
Panel Title: “Creating Asexual Worlds”
Panel CFP: According to the NWSA call for proposals, “Critical, performative, creative work has long been pivotal to anti-colonial, queer, and coalitional resistances, including those that expose colonialist fantasies and histories, refuse silences and forgetting, or dismantle colonial regimes of racialized genders and sexualities.” For this panel, we invite both creative works and analyses of creative works that seek to create asexual-positive spaces and/or challenge the settler logic of compulsory sexuality. We are interested in visual and performance art and poetry and creative writing, as well as scholarly analyses of art and creative writing. Further questions to consider:
What are some examples of creative resistance or performance that refuse to soothe or accommodate the settler logic of compulsory sexuality?
How can creative/performative work help to spark revolutionary ace-positive struggles?
How can asexuality, as a lived identity or as a mode of analysis, help to foster radical visions and performances, mobilize memory, and reimagine landscapes (whether sonic, visual, imagined, or physical)?
In the contexts of decolonial feminist and ace-positive work, why is it important to consider collaborative, relational ways of knowing, inquiring, and creating, or to engage (or craft) work that disrupts or refuses false divides (e.g., between the aesthetic and the analytical, the creative and critical, the affective and the theoretical, the human and non-human, the animate and inanimate)?
How can everyday social and cultural practices, including those that are ephemeral (e.g., street demonstrations, graffiti, pop-up performances), be understood as essential forms of decolonial, feminist, and ace-positive world-making?
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