Dear All,

Please see below a call for papers for the “Gender and Sexualities in Contemporary Southeast Asia” panel at the 2nd Annual Southeast Asian Studies Symposium. The conference will be held on 9-10 March 2013 at the University of Oxford. For more information, please see: www.projectsoutheastasia.com

Gender and Sexualities in Contemporary Southeast Asia

Alongside the ubiquitous effects of the authoritarian neoliberal system, the intimate lives of citizens and consumers in Southeast Asia are facing intricate challenges to global socio-political thought. It is vis-à-vis the everyday sociality of production and consumption – cinema, music, literature, erotica and other social media – that American-European discourses become charged with an imperialist and hegemonic potentiality. Precisely because the appeal of advancing technologies and mixed transculturation has remained virile for the region, Southeast Asian societies have arguably been subsumed under an elitist epistemology that pits individuals under the false categories of racial, gender, national and sexual differences.

Over the past decade, scholars and activists working in the Global South in general and Southeast Asia in particular have been reviewing their strategic responses to these pertinent issues that have the potential to, and can be seen to have already had the effect of, troubling Southeast Asian communities. Recent aspirations are directed towards a juxtaposition of Chen Kuan Hsing's 'Asia as Method' and Walter Mignolo's 'Decolonial Option'. Perhaps only intersectional grassroots methodologies can realign the discursive borders of Southeast Asia.

Papers of 20-minutes are welcome from all academics and postgraduates. Please send the title of your paper and an abstract of 250 words to the convenor Art Mitchells-Urwin ([log in to unmask]) by Friday 14 December 2012.

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Art Mitchells-Urwin

PhD Candidate

Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies (CCLPS)

SOAS, University of London