In June 2021, The Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) Berlin hosted an online symposium titled “What Happened to Lesbian and Gay Studies?”, which featured a number of speakers and panelists, including Dr. Ann Cvetkovich, Director of the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies.
The symposium aimed to answer a range of questions, including: what happened to ‘lesbian and gay studies’? In what ways does such a formulation seem retrograde, if it does? What would the field have looked like without the strong impulse to self-deconstruction on which it was founded? How does this impulse relate (or not) to the structure of other identity knowledge domains? If ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ do not seem like the most urgent or necessary political identifications now, then what else could they be for?
To watch the recordings from the event, please click here.