Abstracts accepted in English and Spanish.
Valerie De Craene
Cesare Di Feliciantonio
Gilly Hartal
Maria Rodó de Zarate
In the last two decades, geographies of sexualities appear to have become a legitimate field of studies in Anglo-American academia and beyond, while it continues to face strong resistance towards recognition in other contexts (e.g. Bonner-Thompson et al., 2020; Silva and Vieira, 2014; Tucker, 2020). Aim of the panel is to explore the situated and intersectional challenges faced by scholars working in geographies of sexualities across different contexts and career stages, avoiding reproducing binary and reductionist readings of ‘progressive’/’advanced’ vs ‘conservative’/’backwards’ academic contexts. Our understanding of ‘challenges’ is broad, including (but not limited to):
● institutional/ political (e.g. publication practices and persisting forms of censorship; the increasing reliance on external funding for research and what gets to constitute ‘relevant’ scholarship; career progression; the emphasis on individual ‘success’ stories vs the everyday, mundane practices of dismissal of sexualities research; the role of ethical committees in disciplining what (and how) can be researched; heteroactivist attacks to sexualities scholarship; the invisibility of specific topics/fields);
● methodological (e.g. positionality, self-reflexivity and desire in conducting research on sexualities; the impact of the pandemic on how we do research; the relationship with research participants and other social actors; co-production, care, collaboration and friendship);
● theoretical/analytical (e.g. the persistence of Anglo-American hegemony in the field and the need to decolonize our understanding of sexual identities and practices; the lack of engagement with the materiality of sex and the squeamishness of geographical knowledge; the interconnections of sexualities with other axes of inequalities).