Sexuality and Borders Symposium
by Anouk Madörin
4-5 April 2019
Hosted and funded by: The Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, NYC
Co-sponsored by: The Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University, NYC; The Asian/Pacific/American Institute, New York University, NYC; DFG-funded Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms, University of Potsdam, Germany; and LSE’s Department of Gender Studies
How do sexuality and borders intersect? What role does sexuality play in the production, maintenance and disruption of contemporary border regimes? How do borders as features of racial capitalism multiply inequalities via sexuality and, conversely, how is sexuality mediated through racialized border regimes? The two-day symposium “Sexuality and Borders” addressed these questions by interrogating the role of sexuality in current border regimes. Together with participants from different scholarly backgrounds, we discussed how sexuality plays a key role in how borders are policed and managed ranging from moral panics about migrant sexuality and the pornotropic gaze of surveillance technologies, to media discourses about reproduction and contagion. We further asked how intimacy, desire, and sexuality have become rallying points in challenging borders as seen in queer activism against deportations, critiques of homonationalism and imaginations of different sexual futures and political horizons.
Sexuality and Borders was a two day symposium hosted and funded by New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. It was co-sponsored by NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Asian/Pacific/American <wbr />Institute at NYU, the DFG-funded Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms (University of Potsdam, Germany) and LSE’s Department of Gender Studies.
