Call for Abstracts: 3rd Annual Conference on Queer Imaginaries in the Global South | Deadline: July 4, 2025

June 23, 2025

The 3rd Annual Conference on Queer Imaginaries in the Global South invites abstracts for the theme “Archives, Aesthetics, and Futurities.” This year’s conference, taking place, October 22-24, 2025 at Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa, seeks to critically interrogate the intersections of memory, representation, and temporal imagination within queer epistemologies rooted in Southern geographies. The deadline for submissions is July 4, 2025.

The conference foregrounds the manifold ways queer life, particularly in postcolonial, settler-colonial, and historically marginalised contexts, is archived, rendered visible, and projected toward speculative futures. With a deliberate shift from trauma-centric frameworks that have historically dominated queer scholarship, this edition centers “fugitive, embodied, and disobedient practices that challenge institutional paradigms of archiving, aesthetics, and futurity” (Hartman, 2008; Snorton, 2017).

The theme looks to queer archives as “not simply repositories of the past but insurgent assemblages of lived experience, affect, and cultural production.” This year’s conference seeks to elevate those traces that reside outside formal institutions and dominant cultural imaginaries—gestures found in “oral storytelling, ritual practices, digital intimacies, aesthetic interventions, and quotidian acts of survival.”

The category of aesthetics is approached here as “a deeply political and affective grammar that structures queer modes of self-making, being, feeling, and relating” (Mupotsa, 2018). Aesthetic practices—whether in the form of visual art, performance, drag, film, fashion, sonic experimentation, or movement—are recognized as vital tools of survival, resistance, and worldbuilding.

Futurity, as explored in this conference, rejects linear or progressivist notions of time in favor of temporalities that are “recursive, cyclical, speculative, and ancestral,” drawing from Black, Indigenous, diasporic, and displaced queer epistemologies (Muñoz, 2009; Mupotsa, 2018). These imaginaries challenge normative regimes of visibility and offer “a politics of sensation, affect, and ambivalence.”

The organizers are looking for submissions from scholars, artists, activists, and practitioners that engage with questions such as:

What constitutes a queer archive in the Global South, and how do such archives resist erasure or commodification?
How do visual, sonic, and embodied aesthetics operate as forms of affective historiography and speculative politics?
In what ways do queer bodies function as repositories of collective memory, trauma, eroticism, and joy?
How are digital platforms reconfiguring queer modes of intimacy, surveillance, and resistance?
What roles do queer spirituality, ritual, and cosmological practices play in challenging secular, colonial epistemes?

The conference welcomes submissions in diverse formats, including but not limited to:

Academic papers and panels
Visual art and installation
Performance art and drag
Experimental film and video
Sonic works and soundscapes
Poetry, fiction, and hybrid literary forms
Practice-led and community-based research

Subthemes:

1. Queer Archives and Archival Disobedience

Focus on how queer life is archived outside formal institutions.
Fugitive, embodied, and disobedient memory practices.
Oral storytelling, ritual, digital intimacies, and ephemeral traces.
Reimagining historical evidence beyond dominant epistemologies.

2. Aesthetics as Politics and Survival

Queer aesthetics as a political and affective grammar.
Visual art, drag, performance, fashion, sound, and movement as queer historiography and resistance.
Disidentification, opacity, sensuality, and ambivalence as aesthetic modes of worldmaking.

3. Futurities and Temporal Imagination