(Apologies for cross-posting)

Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting
February 24–28, 2012, New York City

Sexual Citizens, Nations, and States: Spaces of Affect, Identity, and Norm

Organizer: Derek Ruez (University of Kentucky)

Speciality Group Sponsorships: Political Geography and Sexuality and Space

This session seeks to continue a geographic engagement with the
promises and perils of sexual citizenship as both an analytical
concept and a political practice in the context of emerging links
between, on the one hand, sexual freedom, inclusion, and tolerance
and, on the other, exclusionary national identities and violent state
projects. Attending to the spaces in, through, and with which sexual
rights are claimed and obligations performed has been a promising area
for geographic contributions to larger debates about sexual
citizenship. These discussions have occurred in the context of rapid
changes in sexual identity and politics in which homonormative
institutions and discourses have emerged as certain LGBT and queer
subjects have been increasingly successful in claiming rights as
citizens, including, in the U.S. context, moves toward participation
in the state institutions of marriage and the military (Duggan 2002;
Nast 2002; Oswin 2008; Eng 2010). These partial and uneven inclusions
are linked to national formations where regimes of sexual normativity
allow for the inclusion or even the celebration of certain privileged
sexual minorities (Puar 2006). From providing fodder to anti-immigrant
political organizing in Europe to legitimizing U.S. foreign policy,
discourses of sexual freedom or democracy may work to legitimate state
actions and policies that marginalize or exclude queer populations and
racialized communities (Puar 2007; Butler 2008; Mepschen, et al. 2010;
Fassin 2010).

In the context of these developments, this session aims to explore:

1.)    The normalization of sexual citizen-subjects through discourses
of state-centered rights and obligations.

2.)    The identificatory and affective processes through which sexual
freedoms or democracy are aligned with the nation in various contexts.

3.)     The place these norms, identities, and affects hold in the
formation of state violences and exclusions.

Potential topics could include (but need not be limited to):
Sexual democracy
Queer liberalisms
Sexuality and the (post)colonial
Queer racializations
Homonormativities/homonationalisms
LGBT/queer communities and international human rights organizing
Emerging forms of gay right-wing organizing
Exceptionalized genders/bodies/lives
State violence, criminalization, and incarceration
Immigration politics and organizing
Sexuality, the military, and war
Family, marriage, and the state

Papers addressing these and related questions are welcome. Abstracts
of 250 words should be directed to Derek Ruez ([log in to unmask]) by
September 20.


References

Butler, J. 2008. “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular time.” The
British Journal of Sociology 59 (1): 1-23.

Duggan, L. 2002. “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of
Neoliberalism” in R. Castronovo & D. Nelson (eds), Materializing
Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke
University Press.

Eng, D. 2010. The Feelings of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the
Racialization of Intimacy. Durham: Duke University Press.

Fassin, E. 2010. National Identities and Transnational Intimacies:
Sexual Democracy and the Politics of Immigration in Europe. Public
Culture 22 (3): 507-529.

Mepschen, P.,  J.W. Duyvendak, & E.H. Tonkens. 2010. “Sexual Politics,
Orientalism and Multicultural Citizenship in the Netherlands.”
Sociology 44 (5): 962-979.

Nast, H. 2002. “Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International.”
Antipode 34 (5): 875-909.

Oswin, N. 2008. “Critical Geographies  and the Uses of Sexuality:
Deconstructing Queer Space.” Progress in Human Geography 32 (1):
89-103.

Puar, J. 2006. “Mapping U.S. Homonormativities.” Gender, Place and
Culture 13 (1): 67-88.

----. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times.
Durham: Duke University Press.