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Queer Theater against the State

University of Regensburg, Jun 5–6, 2025 | CfP Deadline: Jan 29, 2025

Organizer: Tatiana Klepikova (U of Regensburg)

Queer theater has always been the site of utopia, hope, and community-building (Dolan 2005; Muñoz 2009), where queer desire and non-normative imaginaries are celebrated. That said, it has never come without a struggle. In 2024–25, there are many places around the world where queer theater seems impossible but still exists; where it thrives in the open but had to take a long road to do so; or where the futures may seem uncertain.

This conference seeks to explore the paths that queer theater companies, directors, and playwrights across the world have taken throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries to speak queerness to power against normative orders of gender and sexuality. The latter have undergone massive transformations since the early modern era and have come to constitute a core element of the biopolitics of power from the Americas to Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia and Oceania. Darkened theater rooms across the planet have been one site of many, where queerness has come to be negotiated vis-à-vis authoritarian regimes, conservative governments, and religious ideologies. This conference sets out to map such theater spaces across the globe, historicize and contextualize them, while also examining their generative potential for critical theory.

We invite academic and artistic contributions from Gender and Queer Studies, Theater and Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, History, and other disciplines. We welcome abstracts that explore state-funded theaters, underground theaters, and independent theater collectives, as well as directing, drama, and playwriting in the context of global and regional shifts in thinking about non-normative gender and sexuality throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. We start the conversation with the following questions in mind but do not limit the inquiry to them:

  • What counts as queer theater and gets censored in different contexts?
  • What are the modalities of such censorship?
  • How does queer theater articulate itself as such vis-à-vis hegemonic norms of gender and sexuality? What is the role of identity, desire, gender subversion?
  • What role do other aspects of identity, such as race, class, age, ethnicity, ability, and beyond, play in negotiating the place of queer theater in the state and society?
  • What is the role of communities, audiences, critics, etc. in the process of negotiating queer theater as queer in such conditions? What broader infrastructures may be in place for this process?
  • What does queer theater offer that goes beyond other forms of protest theater/art/performance more broadly?
  • What are the politics of withstanding the broader society or the state? How are these articulated?
  • What are the aesthetic and performative languages of (queer) “againstness”?
  • How do different theater genres lend themselves to speaking queerness to power?
  • What are the (embodied) economies and materialities of “againstness”?
  • What role do digital cultures play in reshaping the potential of queer theater?
  • What new theoretical and methodological directions can the examination of such case studies offer to critical theory?

Please submit an abstract of about 250 words and a short bio of about 150 words (both as one PDF document) by January 29, 2025, to tatiana.klepikova@ur.de. Notification of acceptance will follow by mid-February 2025.

Our conference will take place just before IFTR 2025 in Cologne—the city connected to Regensburg by direct train. We therefore warmly welcome audience members who would like to benefit from the proximity of both events. If you would like to attend as an audience member at your own cost, please get in touch with Tatiana Klepikova (tatiana.klepikova@ur.de).

Our research group has some funding to contribute to travel and accommodation costs of invited speakers—in particular, we are endeavoring to provide support to early-career researchers and colleagues from lower-income countries. If you have your own funding or have received funding from the IFTR to travel to Cologne that you could use to also attend this conference, please indicate this information in your application—it might help us sponsor more participants from across the world who do not have access to these kinds of funds.

HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia:
The Humanities and Social Sciences Perspectives

Konstanz, October 9–10, 2025 | CfP Deadline: December 10, 2024

Organizers:  Katerina Suverina (U of Konstanz), Tatiana Klepikova (U of Regensburg), Nikolay Lunchenkov (TU Munich)

Since its emergence in the late twentieth century, the HIV/AIDS virus has caused one of the longest-lasting and deadliest pandemics in human history.[1] This pandemic has had vastly different fates across the world, shaping the image of whole continents (Africa),[2] animating identitarian movements (gay and lesbian movements in the US, the UK, and Western Europe),[3] or facing silence in the public discourse (socialist and post-socialist countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia).[4]

While primarily situated in the domain of medical science, in Western countries, this pandemic has drawn close attention of researchers focused on the cultural, historical, and anthropological analyses of the phenomenon of HIV/AIDS. They emphasize that the virus has played a central role in challenging not only the healthcare system but also academia, especially the humanities. As Stuart Hall rightly observes, HIV/AIDS “challenges us in its complexity, and in so doing has things to teach us about the future of serious theoretical work.” [5]. American researcher Paula A. Treichler, echoing Hall’s ideas, characterizes HIV/AIDS as an “epidemic of signification”[6] and so does Susan Sontag who famously speaks about “AIDS and its metaphors” in an eponymous essay, where she points out that the question of the new virus is a question of language and representation[7]. In advancing these theorizations of the pandemic, these and other scholars urge us to pause in response to a crisis that creates confusion, panic, and an acceleration of fear, and to diagnose societies, not patients.

Our conference orients this call for building up theoretical work in the humanities and social sciences in relation to the HIV/AIDS pandemic towards Eastern Europe and Central Asia. This region has infamously been a hotspot of the pandemic in Eurasia,[8] with the situation worsening steadily. UNAIDS reports foreground ideological rather than medical reasons behind the growing number of HIV-positive people in Eastern Europe.[9] Since the very arrival of the virus in the region during the socialist era, local governments and religious authorities have played a crucial role in silencing the HIV/AIDS-related discourse, obscuring the situation from the public, or weaponized it.[10]

While biomedical professionals and the NGO-sector have been attuned to the growing numbers and have addressed the situation in professional forums,[11] researchers in the humanities and social sciences with expertise in our region are yet to develop comprehensive theoretical approaches to this virus and its role in the socialist and post-socialist context. To this end, we invite researchers and artists to consider the following questions:

What do we know about HIV/AIDS outside the Western world – in Eastern Europe and Central Asia? What happens when we look at the history, culture, and politics of these regions through their relation to the HIV/AIDS? How have these regions imagined HIV/AIDS, and how have they, in turn, been imagined by others through the virus? What was the role of socialism and the post-socialist condition in the development of the pandemic in our region? What do transnational and transregional solidarities in treating the virus and/or silencing it tell us about global flows of power, ideology, and capital? What stigmas has the pandemic fostered? What are the affective histories of this virus? How does the HIV/AIDS lens contribute to our understanding of histories of violence and vulnerability in Eastern Europe and Central Asia? And how can it shape the advancement of critical theory in our Area Studies?

We invite academic and artistic contributions from Cultural Studies, Anthropology, the History of Law, the History of Sexuality, Gender and Queer Studies, the History of Medicine, Media Studies, and other disciplines that look at cultural, social, and biopolitical aspects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that align with the questions above and go beyond them. In terms of Eastern Europe, proposals covering all its regions — the Baltics, East-Central Europe, Southeast Europe, Eastern Europe, South Caucasus — are welcome.

Please submit an abstract of about 250 words and a short bio by December 10, 2024
to ekaterina.suverina@uni-konstanz.de AND tatiana.klepikova@ur.de. Following the selection of participants in December 2024, organizers will be applying for third-party funding to cover travel and accommodation costs – in particular, we are endeavoring to offer support to early-career researchers and colleagues from lower-income countries.

[1] Sampath, Shrikanth, Anwar Khedr, Shahraz Qamar, Aysun Tekin, Romil Singh, Ronya Green, and Rahul Kashyap. “Pandemics throughout the history.” Cureus 13, no. 9 (2021). doi: 10.7759/cureus.18136.

[2] Patton, Cindy. “Inventing ‘African AIDS’.” In Culture, Society and Sexuality, pp. 387-404. Routledge, 2002 [1990]; Epprecht, Marc. Heterosexual Africa?: The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS. Ohio University Press, 2008.

[3] Youde, Jeremy. “The Global HIV/AIDS and LGBT Movement.” In: Bosia, Michael J., Sandra M. McEvoy, and Momin Rahman, eds. The Oxford handbook of global LGBT and sexual diversity politics. Oxford University Press, 2020, 301-314.

[4] Alexander, Rustam. “AIDS/HIV and Homophobia in the USSR, 1983–90.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 24, no. 1 (2023): 121-150; Pape, Ulla. The politics of HIV/AIDS in Russia. Routledge, 2013.

[5] Hall, Stuart “Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies” In Stuart Hall. Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies ed. Morley, David. and Chen, Kuan-Hsing, Routledge. 1996, 261–273.

[6] Treichler Paula A. How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS. Duke University Press. 1999, 13.

[7] Sontag, Susan. Illness As Metaphor and AIDS And Its Metaphors: And, AIDS And Its Metaphors. Picador. 2001.

[8] Global HIV & AIDS statistics — Fact sheet | UNAIDS (https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet).

[9] UNAIDS Eastern Europe and Central Asia Report (https://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/2024-unaids-global-aids-update-eeca_en.pdf )

[10] Bohdziewicz , Goździalska, Mikuła , Wiercińska-Drapało “What do Polish students know about HIV infections after 35 years of the first confirmed case?”. HIV and AIDS Review Vol. 21(4). 2022. Pp. 284–289.

[11] A testament to this are multiple medical conferences focused on HIV/AIDS which have centered on Eastern Europe – including the most recent 2024 World AIDS Congress in Munich (Osteuropakonferenz 2020 | Aktionsbündnis gegen AIDS; HIV-Epidemie in Osteuropa stoppen; AIDS 2024).