The Politics of Visibility, Surveillance, and Biopower in Authoritarian Times
About the Symposium
The InQueery Symposium is an annual event that highlights cutting-edge research in queer and trans studies while fostering dialogue across disciplines and communities. This year, we are honored to welcome Toby Beauchamp as our keynote speaker. In Going Stealth, Beauchamp demonstrates how surveillance regimes—from airport security screenings to national identification systems—are never neutral. They enforce compulsory gender expectations, entrench racial profiling, and extend state power into the most intimate aspects of life.
Beauchamp’s work challenges us to consider: How do structures of recognition and misrecognition not only harm trans communities but also shape the lives of cis, queer, disabled, and racialized people more broadly? How do surveillance states exploit categories of gender, race, and ability to decide who belongs, who is suspect, and who is expendable? These questions resonate with current struggles from the policing of immigrants to the genocide in Palestine, and they invite us to think about how regimes of control demand both compliance and resistance.