POSTPONED Conference | Queer Representation: Pasts, Presents, Futures

This conference – May 21st – 22nd 2020 – aims to examine how LGBTQ representation has changed through time, continues to evolve in the present, and what role it might play in the future.

It draws on recent developments in queer on-screen representation – ranging from the increased focus on transgender and queer of colour protagonists in series such as Pose (2018, FX-), Transparent (2014-2019, Amazon Prime), Vida (2018-, Starz) and Orange is the New Black (2013-2019, Netflix), to depictions of queer characters in children’s programmes such as Cartoon Network’s Steven Universe (2013-) – in order to trace how LGBTQ media comments on both the current state of queer rights, as well as the possibility of queer futurity (Edelman 2004; Muñoz 2009).

We invite presentations on queer art, film, television, and literature, as well as social media and digital scholarship. The conference will work to represent a multiplicity of queer experiences, spanning divergent historical and geographical areas of representation, as well as the plurality of ideas of what it means to identify as queer today, and what this identification might look like in the future.