UCLA’s QGrad: Queer Graduate Student Conference

Queering Love: Across Subjectivities, Temporalities, and Decolonial Imaginaries

See the Program for details. For guaranteed free meals, please RSVP until January 24, 2020. 

QGrad is the oldest, interdisciplinary queer research conference in the United States. LGBTQ Studies and QGrad invites you to our annual Queer Graduate Conference! This year’s conference will take place on Friday, January 31st, 2020 from 8AM to 7PM in Royce Hall Rooms 314 & 306 at the UCLA Campus. It is a pleasure to announce that Philosophy Professor, Dr. Talia Mae Bettcher from Cal State LA and activist/actress Marianna Marroquín will be the keynote speakers.

This year’s conference theme explores how different variations of queer love transcend and are practiced. In an age of hate, this year’s theme highlights how LGBTQ+ individuals have and continue to use love to resist oppression against homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and capitalism. Shifting times and worlds have transformed what queer love looks and feels like. As a result, we seek to examine how distinct intersectional LGBTQ+ bodies and identities define and express queer love in their (and others) lives, societies, relationships, histories, literature, art, and spiritualities. What does it mean to queer love? How do marginalized individuals use queer love to defy and resist? How can queering love help us imagine and create different worlds? Where is queer love found in LGBTQ+ histories and narratives? How does love help us deconstruct and dismantle colonial frameworks? Paper/presentations include topics such as:

• Intersections between race, class, gender, sexuality, and love
• Love hermeneutics and other queer women of color Feminisms
• The politics (and Biopolitics) of queer love
• Pedagogies and epistemologies of care
• Chosen and nontraditional families and rainbow kids
• LGBTQ+ Sexual desires and longings
• Philosophy of Queer Love
• LGBTQ+ relationships in media
• Self-love, identity, acceptance, and other forms of Radical Love
• Spaces and times where love is absent but necessary
• Music and art that queers love
• Love, intimacy, and solidarity in activism and social movements
• Queer loving and sex in biology and sociology