On Commitment

In 1998 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner wrote that ‘making a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property and to the nation’. Since then, however, we have witnessed the couple form move from the periphery to the center of queer politics, becoming the major vehicle through which gays and lesbians have achieved access to cultural and legal institutions as well as broader social acceptance. While before the late twentieth century same-sex relations circulated largely outside what Foucault called the ‘monogamic and conjugal cell’, today it seems even the most peripheral of sexualities have been absorbed under the couple’s ever-expanding jurisdiction.

Does the present moment require a more honest reckoning with the central role of the couple in queer politics and everyday life? Or do we need, now more than ever, to revitalize our commitment to the production of a sexual politics that would resist the ideology of the couple?

This two-day symposium brings together some of the most significant voices in Anglo-American queer theory today to address the historical, cultural, and metaphysical force of the couple — and its often unquestioned status in queer life.

THURSDAY – 9 JUNE 2016
10:30
Morning coffee
11:00 Introductions
11:15–13:00
Heather Love and Eng-Beng Lim on Commitment
13:00–14:30 Lunch
14:30–16:15
Elizabeth Freeman and Bobby Benedicto on Reproduction
16:30–18:15
Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman and Peter Coviello on Devotion
18:15 Coffee break
19:00–21:15
Lee Edelman and Joseph Litvak on Estrangement
preceded by an Intermezzo by the organizers
21:15
Reception sponsored by GLQ

FRIDAY – 10 JUNE 2016
13:30
Welcome coffee
14:00–15:45
Michael Cobb and Petrus Liu on Openness
16:00–17:45
C. Riley Snorton and Rinaldo Walco on Arrangement
17:45 Coffee break
18:30–20:15
Laura Kipnis and Annamarie Jagose on Asymmetry