Queer CUNY VIII: The Twilight of Queerness? is a student conference that seeks to end reductionist political discourse. Too much contemporary Queer/LGBT political activism and scholarship is bogged down by bitterly dichotomous academic disputes. The marriage/anti-marriage and relational/anti-relational debates, for instance, wildly miss a larger political and intellectual potential for queer studies to be a project that breaks apart and surpasses ideological binaries.

The organizers contend that the original possibilities of queer theory, while inspiring, have not been fully realized, and aim to provide more than just space in which to consider this quandary. Instead, the conference will encourage queer students, activists, teachers, community members, and others to imagine life and scholarship beyond the limits of ongoing dichotomy and division.

Anyone who is interested in attending the conference and/or helping produce it should email Taylor at QueerCUNY@gmail.com

Lisa Duggan, Professor, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director, American Studies Program at NYU, is the author of Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity and Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy. She is also co-author with Nan Hunter of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture.