New Critical Frameworks for the Queer Caribbean

Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Congress
27-30 May 2015
San Juan, Puerto Rico

Call for papers for panel “New Critical Frameworks for the Queer Caribbean”
Sponsored by the Sexualities Section

Deadline for abstracts: 15 August 2014; electronically to mhorn@barnard.edu

This past decade has seen a remarkable increase in scholarship about non-heteronormative Caribbean sexualities. Many of these studies foreground how both local and global forces and epistemologies intersect and shape sexualities in the region together with experiences of migration. Thus, the categories of the local/global as well as those of nation/diaspora, along with that of (s)exile, have played key roles in apprehending queer Caribbean sexualities; yet, scholars have also found these to be insufficient for apprehending in more nuanced ways Caribbean queer subjects’ movements across and belonging to various cultural contexts. Hence scholars have offered new critical-interpretative frameworks, including, for example, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes’ articulation of the “transloca” subject and Rosamond S. King’s notion of the “Caribglobal” cultural space, to better account for these realities. We seek papers for this panel that explore the lived experience and/or cultural representations of queer Caribbean subjects and how these, beyond the local and the global and nation/diaspora/exile, gesture to and demand new conceptual paradigms and critical frameworks for apprehending sexual alterities in the region.

Please submit a 250 word abstract and brief bio by August 15th to:

mhorn@barnard.edu.
Maja Horn, Associate Professor
Spanish and Latin American Cultures
Barnard College