Bible Belt Red, Bible Belt Blue (SEWSA LGBTQ Caucus)

BIBLE BELT RED, BIBLE BELT
MAPPING THE POLITICAL COMPLEXITIES OF THE U.S. SOUTHEAST

CFP: SEWSA/LGBTQ CAUCUS PANEL
March 25-27, 2010
University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC)

Abstracts
(300 words) should be submitted to LGBTQ Caucus Chair, Dr. Lisa Johnson, via email (mjohnson@uscupstate.edu) by November 1, 2009.

Borrowing its organizing image from Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, this panel will consider the competing ideologies that circulate in specific cultural sites of the southeastern region of the United States towards an analysis of the “red” and ”blue” (or conservative and progressive) energies that shape the context of our work as LGBTQ faculty, professors of LGBTQ studies, and scholars, students, or activists with an interest in the discourses that regulate sexuality in the Bible Belt.

The region is of course heavily influenced by conservative belief systems, yet individuals, activists, scholars, students, academic courses, and WGS programs nevertheless do find ways to create experiences, careers, lives, workplaces, personal relationships, and social networks dedicated to anti-sexist, anti-heterosexist, anti-racist, and anti-classist principles and movements towards more equitable social arrangements.

3-5 papers are solicited for a panel sponsored by the LGBTQ Caucus of the Southeastern Women’s Studies Association aimed at disrupting monolithic representations of sexual politics, racial politics, and queer lives, communities, and activism in the U.S. Southeast.

These political complexities can be mapped on the microcosmic terrains of everyday life (the body, the class period, the committee meeting, the campus event, matters of personal affectation or comportment or gender variance, an individual performance or work of art) and on the macrocosmic terrains of public institutions (a particular university or the academic culture in general, a particular state legislature or bill or lobbyist campaign for or against a bill, mass media texts or trends, indie media texts or trends, SEWSA, NWSA, or your state or local chapter of NOW).

The following topics are of particular interest for this panel, or they may be used as models for proposals on similar topics:
1. The clash between two Georgia legislators and the academic field of sexuality studies in February of 2009
2.The 2006 documentary Small Town Gay Bar (directed by indie film trendsetter, Kevin Smith) as a complex representation of assimilation, resistance, desire, gender variance, open secrets, back roads, queer subjectivities, and rural economies in red states
3. E. Patrick Johnson’s “Pouring Tea,” a dramatic reading based on his recent book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, an ethnographic study that challenges stereotypes of the south as backwards, repressed, and relentlessly homophobic by proposing that African American gay men draw on a cultural heritage of dissemblance which is both southern and African American to assert voice and identity despite overt marginalization.

Recommended Reading
Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Judith Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place

Recommended Theoretical Contexts
Queer theory, feminist theory, black feminist theory/woman of color theory, queer pedagogy, queer geography, queer phenomenology, queer space theory, queer affect (and the affective dimension of experience in general, as it relates to political agency).

The most successful abstracts will identify a specific example that productively complicates contemporary theoretical conversations in Women’s and Gender Studies about the lived experience, activist concerns, cultural texts, and modes of resistance of LGBTQ lives as they unfold against an uneven background of homophobic bias.

The Southeastern Women's Studies Association (SEWSA) is a feminist organization that actively supports and promotes all aspects of women's studies at every level of involvement. The organization is committed to scholarship on and activism eliminating oppression and discrimination on the basis of sex, race, age, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic background, physical ability, and class. SEWSA is a regional organization under the National Women's Studies Association serving Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.

LGBTQ CAUCUS OF SEWSA
In response to the challenges of institutional and cultural homophobia in the U.S. Southeast, and in an effort to foreground antihomophobic feminist cultural work, SEWSA's LGBTQ Caucus encourages scholarly and pedagogical innovations and high-energy forums to discuss LGBTQ issues and anti-bias initiatives throughout the region.