“Queer(ing) Science, Queer(ing) Knowledge”

As contemporary societies face the rise of anti-intellectual movements linked with anti-gender movements and ideologies, the socio-political and epistemic status of knowledge has emerged as a pivotal locus of resistance and a conduit toward democratization. The formation and legitimation of knowledge entails conflict, negotiation, alliance-building, and consensus-making. The very affective work needed in order to pluralize knowledge as knowledge(s) indicates the complexity of knowledge-making practices, especially when it comes to marginalized social groups, overlooked epistemologies, silent voices, and conflict among different epistemologies and methodologies, especially rivals to science. This affective work is always a movement that seeks to transcend differences among social, epistemological, and disciplinary realms and boundaries, and thereby to democratize. But for knowledge to democratize it needs to wander, as Sara Ahmed argues, even if this movement creates epistemological discomfort. This workshop aims to interrogate such movement and affective work in relation to scientific and experiential forms of knowledge, among others, with special attention to their inter- and intra-relationships. Focusing on how embodied gendered experiences become institutionalized or resist institutionalization, and or/how extitutional knowledges invade scientific structures and spaces, the workshop will emphasize interplays among forensic science, biopolitics, law, medicine, and healthcare, gender, sexuality, race and class, social movements, traumas and wounds, power and violence, in multiple sites of knowledge production.

Bringing together exceptional scholars from diverse disciplinary milieux and geographic locales, this workshop will ground the conceptualization of queer as a site of epistemic endeavor while also exploring queering as a methodology for the study of science and knowledge production. More specifically, the workshop calls on us to queer epistemological categories, epistemic hierarchies, and classifications in order to escape, survive, and resist, to think differently, and to mobilize critique in order to shape new worlds.

It is an invitation to unsettle given epistemological demarcations, such as those between emotion and reason; to investigate responses to social and epistemological injustices and disrupt epistemic orders; to destabilize given categories, such as the natural and the biological; and to refuse to create rigid and narrow definitions regarding experience and knowledge. As Jack Halberstam suggests, queer calls us to explore the chaotic realm of knowing and unknowing. We will thus work to reveal shadow epistemologies, investigating the sites of epistemological disruption, interrogating the epistemic status of experience through the lens of intersectionality, and focusing on the ethics of undoing, inspired by Cipolla Cyd, Kristina Gupta, David Rubin, and Angela Willey, among others.

The workshop will be a half-day event, with two sessions including three presenters, three discussants, and a concluding discussion. The three papers will be pre-circulated so that all workshop participants can discuss them in depth.

The workshop is by invitation only.