AAS Call for Proposals

Dear colleagues, greetings! My name is Zhangzhu, and I am a 3rd-year gender studies PhD student at the University of Toronto. I am organizing a proposed panel for the 2027 conference, and am seeking 2–3 additional presenters, as well as a possible chair and/or discussant.

• This proposed panel asks how feminist, queer, migrant, and otherwise marginalized communities in Asia create spaces of refuge amid gendered precarity, family obligations, platform governance, ecological pressures, tourism development, and uneven mobility. Rather than approaching havens as stable shelters outside power, the panel considers how refuge is materially and affectively built: through care work, housing, hospitality, social media, mutual aid, environmental imaginaries, community archives, speculative storytelling, and everyday practices of intimacy.

My own paper examines women-only homestays in Dali, Yunnan, as temporary infrastructures of queer/feminist intimacy, asking how platform visibility, tourism economies, environmental aesthetics, and nonmarital forms of care help produce "utopia" as both a lived space and a contested fantasy.

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. 

Attachment(s)

AAS Panel CFP.pdf   68 KB 1 version