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Subject: Call for Presenters: ICA 2024 Panel on Digital Queer Cultures, Intimacies, and Movements in the Asia-Pacific | Deadline: October 15

We invite presenters to submit paper abstracts for a panel for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer Studies Interest Group at the International Communication Association (ICA) Annual Conference held on June 20-24, 2024 in Gold Coast, Australia.

Digital Queer Cultures, Intimacies, and Movements in the Asia-Pacific

Chairs/Organizers: Woori Han, Exeter University and Michelle Ho, National University of Singapore

Digital media in the Asia Pacific region are a contested site for local expressions of global cultural and political flows, troubling and rewriting the narratives of modernity and development, the nation-state, and gendered and sexual norms. Especially in recent years, we have witnessed, for example, the cases of digital counterpublics, proliferation of LGBTQ media representations, digital intimacies, and the advent of trans-exclusionary feminisms. This panel  bridges queer digital studies with queer Asian studies and queer Pacific studies, to explore how media and technology intersect with and change the ways in which gendered and sexed bodies, practices, and desires in the Asia-Pacific have been constructed.   

Possible topics may include but aren't limited to:

• Digital queer and transgender activism, resistance, and solidarity

• Digital queer and trans communities and intimacies on gaming, dating apps, and social media platforms

• LGBTQ representation in media

• Digital embodiment and gendered bodies and their intersections with queerness, race/ethnicity, and disability  

• Technology-facilitated (sexual) violence, (gender-based) abuse, and other forms of digital harms experienced by LGBTQ persons

• Anti-LGBTQ hate, backlash, and discourse on social media platforms

• Queer and trans indigenous virtual world-building and online cultures, such as in the Pacific Islands

Interested presenters should email a 400-word abstract, including a working title for your paper, and short author bio to Woori Han (W.Han@exeter.ac.uk) by Sunday October 15, 2023. 

Graduate students and junior scholars are especially welcome to join us. There may also be an opportunity for a special issue or edited volume to come out of this conference.