Please register to attend the conference here.
Q Scholars and the Program in LGBTQ Studies is proud to present the 2024 annual Q Grad Conference, to be held in person in Hershey Hall on September 27, 2024.
The theme of UCLA’s 27th annual QGrad Conference – NONSENSE – asks us to consider sense and who gets to make it. Queerness, according to Jack Halberstam, stems from “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices.” In other words, nonsense. The day’s varied assortment of graduate student-led panels includes discussions of suturing borders, scrambling archives, trusting spaces, the aesthetics of solidarity, and emerging conceptions of care, to name a few.
We’re pleased to welcome two nationally renowned artists and scholars who champion nonsense: Chris E. Vargas, founder of MOTHA (the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art), a Creative Capital Grantee, and Guggenheim Fellow, as well as Eric A. Stanley, whose 2021 book Atmospheres of Violence (Duke University Press) won the Sylvia Rivera Award for Transgender Studies. Together, they’ve co-directed the queer cult films Criminal Queers and Homotopia, which have screened at Outfest, New Museum, et al.