UCLA Queer Studies Conference 2012: Friday, October 19

Organized by Maylei Blackwell and Uri McMillan, Queer of Color Genealogies, the UCLA Queer Studies Conference 2012, will take place this Friday, October 19, in 314 Royce Hall. Free and open to the public, the conference will feature four panels and two keynote addresses on a variety of Queer Studies topics. The panels of the one-day conference are: "Addressing the Community Needs of LGBT Youth of Color," featuring Laura E. Durso
, Angeliki Kastanis
, and Lisa Powell; "Queer Indigeneities Unsettling Settler Colonialism," featuring Jodi A. Byrd
, Qwo-Li Driskill, and 
Dan Taulapappa McMullin; "The Other Archive of Desire: Remapping LGBT Histories," featuring Kai M. Green, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, 
Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, and Alice Y. Hom; and "Transnational Aesthetics/Erotics," featuring Vanessa Agard-Jones, 
Chitra Ganesh, Lawrence La Fontaine-Stokes, and 
Roy Pérez. Panel presenters include scholars from a range of universities, as well as non-academic professionals in fields such as law and art. 

Sandra K. Soto, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, University of Arizona, is the morning keynote speaker. Her presentation is titled “For Those Who Were Never Meant to Survive: Queering Attrition in Arizona.” Soto's work focuses on Chicana/o and Latina/o literary and cultural studies, feminist theory, gender studies, and queer theory. Her latest, in-progress book uses queer theories to explore how critical transnational studies and U.S. ethnic studies connect in unexpected ways. At the University of Arizona, Soto is an Executive Committee Member of the Institute of LGBT Studies, as well as an affiliate of English, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Mexican American Studies and Research Center.

Jafari Sinclaire Allen, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African American Sudies, Yale University, is the afternoon keynote speaker. His presentation is titled “All the Things We Are Now: A Meditation on Black Queer Genealogies.” Allen’s work explores (queer) sexuality, gender, and blackness. He teaches courses on the cultural politics of race, sexuality, and gender in Black diasporas; Black feminist and queer theory; and ethnography methodology and writing, among other subjects. Allen has written ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba (Duke University Press, Fall 2011) and edited Black/Queer/Diaspora, a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. He is currently researching cultural and political circuits of transnational queer desire in travel, tourism, (im)migration, art, and activism.

Maylei Blackwell is an Assistant Professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies and Women's Studies Department, and is affiliated faculty in the American Indian Studies and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies departments. Her research analyzes how women's social movements in the U.S. and Mexico are shaped by race, indigeneity, class, sexuality, and citizenship status, and how these factors impact the possibilities and challenges of transnational organizing. Most recently, she has sought to understand new forms of grassroots transnationalism by conducting research with farm worker women and indigenous migrants. Her latest book is ¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (University of Texas Press, 2011).

Uri McMillan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English. His research interests include cultural studies, feminist theory, queer studies, African American literature, and post-colonial literature and theory, and he has taught courses on contemporary African American literature, U.S. gay and lesbian history, post-Stonewall GLBT literature, narratives of racial difference, and Black and Latino popular culture and performance, among other topics. He has a manuscript titled Embodied Avatars: The Art of Black Performance under contract at New York University Press.

The UCLA Queer Studies Conference 2012 has been organized by Maylei Blackwell and Uri McMillan for the UCLA Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Program, with generous support from:

David Bohnett Foundation, UCLA Division of Humanities, UCLA Division of Social Sciences, UCLA Graduate Division, UCLA Office of Faculty Diversity and Development, UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, UCLA Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, UCLA Bunche Center for African American Studies, UCLA Asian American Studies Center, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, UCLA Center for the Study of Women, UCLA Interdepartmental Program in Afro-American Studies, and the UCLA departments of Anthropology, Art History, Asian American Studies, Asian Languages and Cultures, Chicana/o Studies, Comparative Literature, English, Film Television and Digital Media, French and Francophone Studies, Gender Studies, Germanic Languages, History, Information Studies, Musicology, Psychology, Sociology, and Theater.

For more conference information, visit: http://lgbtstudies.ucla.edu/events/upcoming-events.html