The Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF) invites proposals for the third annual McGill Queer Research Colloquium (QRC).

The QRC is a forum for the scholarly community at McGill and beyond to share research pertaining to LGBTQI2 studies. Past participants have included faculty, visiting and post-doctoral scholars, and graduate and advanced undergraduate students. If you are interested in sharing your work, please submit a short abstract (max 150 words) and biography (50 words) by September 24, 2018 to mqrc2018@gmail.com. The format is open, but in general we anticipate panels with three or four 15-20-minute presentations, followed by discussion. This year’s colloquium will be held as part of the first LGBTQ+ History Month at McGill and will feature keynote presentations by Heather Love (University of Pennsylvania) and Kadji Amin (Emory University).

Notifications for accepted proposals will be sent by October 1. All panel sessions will be held on October 18. Participants need not be affiliated with McGill University.

This talk considers ethological research on communication in the human and natural sciences after WWII, looking at the two-way traffic between “animal sociology” and naturalistic accounts of group interaction among humans. Ranging from discussions of the signaling behavior of homosexual geese at the Macy Conferences on “Group Processes” to Laud Humphreys’ in situ research on sex in public restrooms in the 1960s, this paper argues that observational research offered an alternative to psychological accounts of both human and animal motivation, and in many cases resulted in less stigmatizing and non-essentialist accounts of non-normative behavior. While it may seem especially perverse to champion observation during the Cold War, I argue that the emphasis on militarized surveillance has obscured the diverse and contradictory uses of observation in this period. This essay is taken from my book project, Underdogs, which traces the roots of queer studies in post-WWII social science.

Heather Love is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard) and the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”) and the co-editor of a special issue of Representations ("Description Across Disciplines"). She has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, reading methods in literary studies, and the history of deviance studies. She is currently completing a book on practices of description in the humanities and social sciences after World War II.

Kadji Amin is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. His book, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Pederasty, and Queer History was published in September 2017 with the Theory Q Series at Duke University Press. The book deidealizes Jean Genet’s coalitional politics with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians by foregrounding their animation by unsavory and outdated modes of attachment, including pederasty, racial fetishism, nostalgia for prison, and fantasies of queer terrorism. His second book project uses the history of transsexual science to rethink the priorities of transgender and feminist theory. His research, which focuses on the disorienting effects of the queer and transgender past on politicized fields of scholarship, is published or forthcoming in GLQ, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Feminist Formations, Women’s Studies Quarterly, French Studies, Études françaises, and L’Esprit créateur.

Bradford Nordeen was born in St. Louis, MO. He holds an MA in Cinema Cultures from King’s College London and a BFA in Photography and Media from CalArts. The founder of Dirty Looks, a monthly platform for queer experimental film and video and the site-specific off-shoot series, Dirty Looks: On Location, a month of queer interventions in New York City spaces, Nordeen has organized screenings internationally at venues like PARTICIPANT INC, The Kitchen, the Hammer Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, White Columns, Artists Space, and Judson Memorial Church. His writing has been published in Art In America, the Huffington Post, Lambda Literary, Little Joe, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and Butt Magazine, among others. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.