WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

Affecting Queer Futures or "What's Love Got to do With It?"

Martin F. Manalansan IV Anthropologist University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Monday, March 2, 2009
4:30 p.m.
Science Center 199

 Despite calls for a post-racial and post-queer society, this talk is a theoretical and practical meditation on the trajectories, limits and possibilities of queer of color activism. Advancing a queer of color critique that explores the limits and possibilities of the "social" and not just the "sexual," we will conduct a panoramic and hopeful exploration of how progressives can construct a set of future scenarios through the words and deeds of queers of color activists.

By focusing on the multiple efforts of queers of color activists in immigration, gender (transgender rights) and anti-globalization movements, we will attempt to locate the idiom and practices of "love" as a collective political project that goes beyond issues of marriage and domesticity, sexual freedom and gender fluidity, and engages with the complexities of social transformation. Inspired by feminist of color writings such as Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Chela Sandoval and others, this political emotion can be mobilized in various settings as a way to escape the numbing and normalizing ethos of neoliberalism.