Sexuality and Borders

Presented by the NYU Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

How do sexuality and borders intersect? What role does sexuality play in the production, maintenance and disruption of contemporary border regimes? How do borders as features of racial capitalism multiply inequalities via sexuality and, conversely, how is sexuality mediated through racialized border regimes? The two-day symposium “Sexuality and Borders” will address these questions by interrogating the role of sexuality in current border regimes. Together with participants from different scholarly backgrounds, we discuss how sexuality plays a key role in how borders are policed and managed ranging from moral panics about migrant sexuality and the pornotropic gaze of surveillance technologies, to media discourses about reproduction and contagion. We further ask how intimacy, desire, and sexuality have become rallying points in challenging borders as seen in queer activism against deportations, critiques of homonationalism and imaginations of different sexual futures and political horizons.

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Note on accessibility: The MCC Event space is located on the eighth floor and is accessible via elevators. Restrooms (which are gender-segregated) are accessible.

Image: “Topographic maps and sketch mapping” by James Kip Finch.