Queer + Public + Performance is a research cluster that will engage the intersection of queer scholarship, performance, art, and technologies within the university and beyond. To do this work, we intend to mobilize queer and allied scholars, teachers, artists, and activists to engage cross-disciplinary, cross-platform public cultural and intellectual work. This year will focus specifically on queer publics and counterpublics to explore the practices, projects, and lived experiences situated on the peripheries of official publics. We hope to emphasize the co-constitutive and at times antagonistic intersections between “sex,” “gender,” “race,” “class,” and “nation” as we think about how keywords such as “sexuality,” “intimacy,” “queer theory and performance,” and “publicity” are constituted and complicated by changes (both conservative and transgressive) in regional and global political, economic, academic, and cultural interchanges.
