Queer Conference
October 23, 2009, 9:30 a.m.
Essex Room of the Paul Robeson Campus Center

The Graduate Program of American Studies at Rutgers-Newark will be hosting a free, open conference at Rutgers University Newark on October 23, 2009 in the Essex Room of the Paul Robeson Campus Center, 350 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd., Newark, beginning at 9:30am. The meeting, titled “Queering American Studies”, will examine the possible ways the Queer Theory can reframe the disciplinary approaches of American Studies as well as discuss what access gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer people have to the “public sphere” of civic power. Featured are four guest speakers, Robert Diaz, Wayne State University; Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Duke Univerity; Licia Fiol Matta, Lehman College; and Hiram Perez, Vassar College. They will introduced and moderated by Aimee Cox, professor of African and African American Studies, Rutgers-Newark, and Taylor Black, a graduate student of the American Studies Ph.D. program, Rutgers-Newark. Following the speakers will be a question and answer session.

The afternoon portion of the program will focus on the emergence of the Queer Theory in the academic areas of English and cultural studies in the 1990s while examining its roots in gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender activism as well as Foucaultian and poststructuralist thought. In the subsequent time since its emergence, the Queer Theory has become essential to both scholars and activists when dealing with the issues of citizenship, nationalism, immigration and migration, and globalism and imperialism.