InQueery 2025

“The Politics of Visibility, Surveillance, and Biopower in Authoritarian Times”

This year’s InQueery Symposium invites work that explores how visibility, surveillance, and biopower shape everyday life under authoritarian systems. Drawing inspiration from keynote speaker Toby Beauchamp’s Going Stealth, the symposium asks how surveillance—from airport screenings to online tracking—enforces gender norms, racial profiling, and state control.

Beauchamp’s work challenges us to think about how systems of recognition and misrecognition harm trans communities while also impacting cis, queer, disabled, and racialized people. The symposium calls for critical and creative engagements that examine how surveillance regimes demand both compliance and resistance, and how queer, feminist, disability, and decolonial politics can disrupt these logics.

In a moment marked by global struggles—from immigration enforcement to the genocide in Palestine—this year’s theme asks: Who gets to be seen, who is made invisible, and what does it mean to refuse recognition on empire’s terms?

2025 Keynote

This annual event brings in guest speakers to create an intellectual space for intersectional and interdisciplinary conversations that center issues around gender, race, sexuality, and identity. 

This event is hosted in partnership with the LGBTQ+ Center and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. 

InQueery 2024

"No Pride in Genocide": Queer Politics in the Wake of Palestine

This year’s InQueery Symposium calls for work that considers the intersections that are at the heart of this slogan. “No Pride in Genocide” implicitly expresses queer solidarity with Palestinians, but it is also a provocation to consider the connections between queer, feminist, and anti-imperialist politics. The slogan performs a queer kind of refusal. It is a rejection of settler colonialism, occupation, and genocide on the one hand; but it is also a refusal of instrumentalization and a literal weaponization of queer identities in the service of empire’s brutal violence. As Palestinian and queer studies scholar (and InQueery keynote speaker this year) Sa’ed Atshan reminds us: “Queer liberation cannot be realized while colonial subjugation persists” (Queer Palestine, 222). Atshan’s work and the symposium in general aim to highlight the untenability of gay tunnel vision—at all times, but especially in this moment. No pride in genocide is another way of saying not in our name. This year’s symposium thus calls for work which reminds us that queerness—both as a theoretical analytic and political project— must contravene forever war. Queer and feminist projects of liberation can never be compatible with roadblocks, checkpoints, and the bombing of schools and hospitals.

2024 Keynote

Atshan is the author of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020). He is also the coauthor, with Katharina Galor (Judaic Studies, Brown University), of The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Duke University Press, 2020). The German translation of The Moral Triangle is entitled Israelis, Palästinenser und Deutsche in Berlin: Geschichten einer komplexen Beziehung (De Gruyter, 2021). Atshan and Galor also coedited the volume, Reel Gender: Palestinian and Israeli Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2022). 

His forthcoming book, Paradoxes of Humanitarianism: The Social Life of Aid in the Palestinian Territories, is under contract with Stanford University Press in their Anthropology of Policy Series.

This annual event brings in guest speakers to create an intellectual space for intersectional and interdisciplinary conversations that center issues around gender, race, sexuality, and identity. 

This event is hosted in partnership with the LGBTQ+ Center and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.