AAS Call for Proposals

This panel examines how queer and feminist utopias are imagined, inhabited, and destabilized across Global Asias. Rather than treating refuge as a stable sanctuary or utopia as a distant future, the panel asks how alternative worlds emerge through fragile arrangements of intimacy, law, gender, media, ecology, technology, and storytelling. It foregrounds spaces where queer and feminist life becomes temporarily perceptible: domestic arrangements, literary and speculative worlds, historical forms of chosen kinship, digital platforms, ecological retreats, and embodied practices of gathering.

Situated at the intersections of Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, and Asian Diaspora Studies, the panel asks: What makes queer or feminist refuge possible in moments of social, political, and ecological precarity? How do intimate spaces produce alternative forms of kinship, temporality, and world-making? How do literature, law, speculative fiction, myth, and everyday practice register the instability of utopian life? And how might Global Asias offer methods for thinking futurity not as guaranteed progress, but as something sensed, rehearsed, hallucinated, and briefly inhabited?

My own paper, "Feminist Hallucinations in Dali," examines women-only homestays and feminist gathering spaces in Dali, Yunnan, China. I ask how sensory atmosphere, platform infrastructure, tourism economies, environmental aesthetics, and shared feminist myth-remaking produce momentary hallucinations of futurity within these spaces. By "hallucination," I mean a collective mode of perception through which women sense and partially inhabit a world otherwise foreclosed by marriage, family obligation, economic precarity, and political uncertainty. Together, the panel considers queer utopia as both refuge and method: precarious, ephemeral, and world-making.

I am especially interested in papers that examine women's and queer spaces, temporary dwelling, nonmarital domesticities, chosen kinship, migrant hospitality, digital platforms, ecological refuge, artist residencies, retreat cultures, community economies, or speculative world-making. Comparative, transregional, and interdisciplinary approaches grounded in Asian/Sinophone studies are welcome.

Potential contributors might ask: What sustains queer and feminist havens? Who performs the labor of making refuge possible? How do platforms, land, memory, art, or storytelling shape collective hope? What happens when spaces of safety remain entangled with commercialization, surveillance, displacement, or exclusion?

Please send a tentative title, a couple of sentences about your work, a brief bio, and any questions to zhangzhu.wan@mail.utoronto.ca by July 15th. I look forward to reading your amazing works and possibly working together.