Desiring Just Economies / Just Economies of Desire Location: Call for Papers Deadline: 2010-01-20

International Conference, 24-26 June 2010, at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry
Confirmed Speakers: Lisa Duggan, Kevin Floyd, Josephine Ho, Ratna Kapur, Desiree Lewis, Anne McClintock, Donald Morton

The conference seeks to explore how desire not only sustains current economies, but also carries the potential for inciting new forms of understanding and doing economy. We propose to focus on the notion of desire as a tool to explore economy’s sexual dimension as much as the economic dimension of sexuality. Drawing on Queer Theory we understand desire as historically structured by heterosexual norms, while simultaneously functioning as a structuring force itself – thus inscribing reproductive heteronormativity to subjectivity and society. Presuming that desire can be envisioned beyond heteronormative restrictions and that this bears on the idea of justice, the question arises whether the pursuit of economic and sexual justice can be made to coincide when economy is queered by desire. Rather than a realisable universal norm, the term justice is employed as a contestable term, offering possibility for debate and political practice. The conference's twin interest lies in unpacking how sexuality is implicit in economic processes and in unfolding how economy is linked to sexuality. How do current global economic processes (including production, reproduction, consumption, circulation, speculation) constitute specific sexual identities and practices that collaborate in relations of exploitation, domination, and subjectivation? Conversely, how do ways of organizing sexuality influence economic processes?

In addition to exploring the reciprocal relation between sexuality and economy, the conference inquires into how a queer reconceptualization of desire may emerge as a destabilizing and transformative force in economic relations. One of the aims of the conference is to fashion space for imagining “other” economies or imagining economy “otherwise”, as well as for the deployment of the concept of desire in ways that allow for a reworking of social relationships and economic practices. The presumption here is that global capitalism is not a monolith; rather, there exist diverse capitalisms and diverse economies. For instance, economic practices in the fields of migration and diasporas, subcultural economies, gift and barter economies and cooperative economies do not all conform to the capitalist logics.

“Desiring Just Economies / Just Economies of Desire” is an international, transdisciplinary conference that welcomes a wide range of presentations, from academic papers to experimental writing, lecture performances, and visual presentations. We invite scholars, activists and artists inspired by queer and postcolonial theory to submit abstracts that relate to the questions raised in the full CFP available at: http://www.desiring-just-economies.de

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 20 January 2010

Organizers: Nikita Dhawan (Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies [FRCPS], Excellence Cluster “Formation of Normative Orders” Goethe-University Frankfurt), Antke Engel (Institute for Queer Theory, Berlin/Hamburg), Christoph Holzhey (ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry), Volker Woltersdorff (SFB “Cultures of the Performative”, FU Berlin)

Christoph Holzhey
ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry
Christinenstr. 18/19
10119 Berlin
Germany
Email: cfp@desiring-just-economies.de
Visit the website here