Translating Queer Historicities

Description

This workshop, organised by the Queer Italia Network, entitled 'Translating Queer Historicities', took place at the IGRS in London, in June 2017. It addressed the following questions: 1. Historical Queerness: How might we frame our understanding of the possibilities of past/historical Italian queerness? What is at stake when we trace queerness in historical excavations and analyses of dissidence (both sexual and otherwise)? 2. Queerness and the Italian Archive: How do we identify, remember or otherwise engage with the Italian queer archive on the level of form, content, or memory? 3. Queering Time and Language: How have forms of queerness migrated and evolved across time, cultures and languages? What may Italian specific studies contribute to queering temporal-linguistic relations? 4. Time and Translation: What processes of ‘translation’ are at work when we seek to make sense of queerness in other temporal, cultural and linguistic zones? What are the ways that translation can be queered to understand the relationships between texts and time? 5. Translation as/and Italian Activism: When engaging in LGBTQAI activism in the Italian context, what role might translation play? Can translation be activism? What might queering translation contribute to historical understandings of activism? The workshop was attended by scholars, activists, artists and members of the general public. It included a series of academic work-in-progress papers, as well as presentations of recent work by two artists, and an overview of the activist association 'Archivio Queer Italia'. Discussion centred on questions of queer archives, how and where these are identified, accessed and made available, including through translation. Some of those attending had also been present at the first workshop in Verona, leading to a helpful continuity between events, and a feeling of momentum. We continued to discuss plans for future collaborations, and there was a clear view that the quality and focus of the discussion had enabled colleagues to make new links between their work and other perspectives, and that particular key issues were starting to emerge that require further investigation, such as the question of queer precarity, or the precarity of queer lives, material and practices.

Period	23 Jun 2017 → 24 Jun 2017
Event title	Translating Queer Historicities
Event type	Workshop
Location	London, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International