QUEER POLITICAL ASSEMBLAGES 5.0
Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India
Organization: Jadavpur University
Jadavpur University
Department of English
Presents
QUEER POLITICAL ASSEMBLAGES 5.0
Theme:
Queer and the Cyborg in the Contemporary Understanding of Gender
Coordinated by
Prof. Kaustav Bakshi
Department of English, Jadavpur University.
Important dates:
Last Date of Abstract Submission: 1 February 2026
Confirmation of Selection: 15 February 2026
Date of Conference: 10 March 2026
Abstracts are to be submitted through the Abstract Submission Form, available at: https://forms.gle/EfJZ7g7SgVcw4AV5A.
Please Note: Participants would need to register with due fees after the confirmation of selection of abstracts. Registration details will be shared only after the selection of abstracts. For queries, please write to us at queerassemblages@gmail.com.
Call for Papers:
This conference proposes to look at the predictable meeting site of the ‘queer’ and the ‘cyborg’ – a convergence that was not just inevitable but already implicated in the discursive paradigm of what the ‘cyborg’ implied. It has become more and more pronounced and self-evident with the leaps and bounds with which technology has progressed, to the point when entire personas began to be shaped, modified, and redefined by the Internet and Artificial Intelligence. While a digital-human continuum has emerged whereby it is impossible to filter out one’s being out of one’s social media presence, somewhere the ‘queer’ has manifestly emerged as a fluid and speeding entity which refuses to fit into and relentlessly defies any human cognition of ‘gender’, bending it, freeing it from shackles and even erasing it. The ‘queer’ is glued and mosaicked into the matrix of technology in such a way, that even machine-generated humanoids or AI cannot capture its excess or lack, both defining its existence. The ‘nature’ question that has beleaguered queers for centuries now seems dated and perhaps unnecessary, since queerness eludes any tangible site of existence, by messing up binaries and enabling polyvalent lives and non-lives technologically.
MacCormack writes: “Like queer, the post-human does not seek to exchange or go beyond toward a set goal. Both interrogate the arbitrary nature of systems of power masquerading as truth. Through a negotiation of alterity within self and an address to oppressed entities, queer theory and the posthuman mobilise and radicalise the here and now through desire, pleasure and pure potentiality.” The ‘queer’ is the post-human in its most powerful appearance – as an entity that dismantles the normative.
‘Queer’ is not only about sexuality, it is a lens which disrupts power structures in such a way that what was accepted as the ‘truth’ so far, is rendered questionable. In critical theory, ‘queer’ facilitated a departure and a permanent breakaway from liberal humanist thinking when the ‘human subject’ itself became suspect with all its supremacy, having to confront the ‘other’. The human selfhood when faced with the ‘other’ – not just the racial or sexual other but also the animal and robotic other – fractured into uncountable pieces which was difficult to put together again.
The cyborg, the monster, and the collective, in particular, challenge and render impossible ‘essentialism, biologism, and naturalism’ (Grosz). The cyborg as ‘a creature in a post-gender world’ that is “resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity… is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence” (Haraway), fits well and aligns with the ‘queer’, whether technologically ‘produced’ by advanced medical science or just by its very existence as an amorphous, hard to categorise entity, unfixed, unpredictable and fantastical at times. Again, Edmond Y. Chang builds on the concept of the “technoqueer” that “reorients and restructures the cyborg as both technologically queer and queerly technological” and underlines how the queer and the cyborg are in a sense always contingent and emergent. On the other hand, Braidotti theorizes the monster –a hybrid figure that holds in it emergent forms of embodiment and experience – as “the bodily incarnation of difference from the basic human norm; it is a deviant, an anomaly; it is abnormal.” In other words, the queer becomes the posthuman or the posthuman becomes the queer.
The queer and posthuman are also closely aligned with the concepts of prolonged life, dying and death. As Harari observes, death is no longer seen as “a metaphysical mystery,” but as “a technical problem that we can and should solve.” However, in case of the end of a queer life, the death is scarcely identified as ‘queer death’ – but only as the loss of a human (if at all) imagined only within normative boundaries of existence (or non-existence). Ahmed has shown how queers are always already dead; therefore, the real death itself has no meaning, apart from the death of the bodily organs.
Again, those who are endlessly harassed for having body dysphoria and undergoing gender assignment procedures, are in a way, not very dissimilar to those who go to every possible extent to prolong life or arrest ageing – both being desirable candidates of techno-capitalism. Death-defying and life-affirming technologies, though expensive, are becoming more and more accessible, whereby ‘normativity’ seems to breathe its last.
Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, the discovery of powerful antibiotics, the extraordinary advancement in the development of nano-tech immune systems, and the possibility of reversing telomere attrition responsible for damaging the DNA and hastening death have enhanced the prospect of human beings becoming “a-mortal,” if not “immortal,” as Harari claims. Simultaneously, the cosmetic industry is peddling a plethora of actives and make-up products to keep away the wrinkles – almost threatening to change the ‘natural’ process of ageing in arresting the body in a technological trap, while also enabling visible transition in gendered appearances in more sophisticated ways.
Looming large over all of this, is the fear of condensed time – what if all these technological breakthroughs are leading the human world faster towards complete extinction in a few centuries? There is no escape. With hetero-patriarchy, racism, capitalism and technocracy working hand in hand, in the most amicable relationship ever under such circumstances, how does reconceptualization of ‘gender’ through the convergence of the queer and the cyborg can make a difference, with each sharing a very contested relationship with capitalism and technology?
This conference proposes to look at this question through the examination of social media, cultural texts – literature, films, web series, comics, graphics, etc., technological advancement – medical, cosmetic, food, and e-communication and other industries, political configuration and imagination of the self in the digital world of unreliable information, global migration, neo-liberal tokenisms, artificial intelligence and related topics not just limited to ones mentioned above.
Submission Guidelines:
Please submit your abstracts (300 words) with a proposed title and a 50-word bio-note by 1st February 2026 through the Abstract Submission Form available at: https://forms.gle/EfJZ7g7SgVcw4AV5A.
For queries, email us at queerassemblages@gmail.com. Confirmation of selection of abstracts will be communicated by 15th February 2026.
The conference will be in hybrid mode; the registration fees are as follows:
1. Professionals: 2000 INR
2. Researchers and in-between jobs: 1500 INR
3. Students: 1000 INR
Please Note: Only after the confirmation of selection of abstracts, participants would need to register with the due fees. Registration details will be shared only when final abstracts are selected.
Those who wish to simply attend the conference (without a presentation) should register by paying 800 INR.
Prof. Kaustav Bakshi