Symposium theme: 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.
Call for Proposals
We invite undergraduate and graduate students from all fields and disciplines to submit proposals for presentations at the InQueery Symposium. Proposals may address themes directly inspired by Beauchamp’s work or engage related questions more broadly in queer, trans, feminist, disability, critical race, or decolonial studies. Presentations may take the form of research papers, creative projects, performances, or other critical/creative engagements.
Possible Areas of Exploration
- Surveillance & State Power: Gender and sexuality in relation to technologies of control—from airport screenings to algorithmic policing to pregnant bodies, biometric tracking, in-app data collection (i.e., Meta has been collecting user data to the Flo period tracking app), social media monitoring, and online ordering (i.e., abortion pills).
- Compulsory Gender Expectations: How gender norms regulate not only trans people but also cis, queer, and disabled communities— for example, through family regulation, workplace standards, athletics, or military service.
- Medical Gatekeeping (Trans & Disability Studies Intersections): How diagnostic categories, medical expertise, and bureaucratic requirements structure access to care, recognition, or legitimacy. What does it mean to need to “prove” one’s gender or disability in order to survive? How might trans studies and disability studies together illuminate the costs of these gatekeeping systems?
- Race, Nation, and Security: How gender regulation and racialization operate together in state security logics, from immigration enforcement to counterterrorism. How do categories like “innocence” or “suspicion” map onto bodies differently depending on age, race, gender presentation, or pregnancy status?
- Global Struggles–Palestine and Beyond: How surveillance and recognition work in the context of colonial violence. For example, U.S. conservative acknowledgment of Palestinian genocide often depends on images of dead or injured children, which raises urgent questions about whose suffering “counts” as evidence. How do “right to exist” rhetorics reinforce settler colonial claims while demanding that populations justify their survival? Parallel questions can be asked in contexts of deportation, climate migration, asylum, and humanitarian aid.
- Aesthetics, Media, & Cultural Work: How literature, film, visual art, or performance take up surveillance and stealth. How do artists imagine opacity, refusal, or alternative ways of knowing outside state logics of recognition? How might we complicate the politics of visibility within or beyond a neoliberal framework?
- Everyday Life & Resistance: The ordinary practices through which communities navigate, subvert, or refuse surveillance — encryption, mutual aid, kinship networks, “quiet refusal,” or mundane acts of non-compliance.
Submission Guidelines
- Abstract (250–300 words): Describe your project, methodology, and relevance to symposium themes.
- Brief bio (100 words): Include your name, pronouns, program/major, and year.
- Submission deadline: September 30, 2025 (midnight, Pacific time)
- Submit to: wgss@wsu.edu
Accessibility & Participation
We welcome proposals from students at all levels of experience. Submissions may include traditional research, creative writing, visual art, performance, or other experimental formats. The symposium will prioritize accessibility and provide space for dialogue across disciplines, levels, and communities.