[Commlist] CFP for “Passing”: A Cinema and Media Studies Conference

*Conference CFP Theme:* /Passing/

*Organization:* First Forum, a Cinema and Media Studies Conference at 
University of Southern California

*Conference Dates:* October 23-24, 2020

*Submission Deadline:* Please email an abstract of no more than 300 
words for a 15 to 20 minute presentation and a biography of no more than 
150 words by May 31, 2020, at 11:59 PDT to (firstforum2020 /at/ gmail.com)

*Notification of Acceptance:* mid- to late-June

/Passing/ is so /passé/, or so we’re told. In “The ‘Empire’ Strikes 
Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” Sandy Stone ambivalently articulates 
a personal and political imperative for transsexuals generally, and 
male-to-female transsexuals in particular, “to forgo /passing/” and, 
rather, to transition “to read oneself aloud” (232). For Stone, 
/passing/, or its necessity, involves the individual and collective 
scrubbing of enfleshed histories, and forecloses the possibility of 
authentic relationships with others. According to Stone, gender 
/passing/—as a performance of hegemonic discourses, as a 
disidentification with gender normativity, as a movement towards new 
horizons of desire—is analogical to the experience of racial and sexual 
/passing/, against which people of color, gays, and lesbians have 
/already/ imagined new modes of embodiment, resistance, and solidarity.

Stone’s earnest and urgent call to become posttranssexual—to actively 
not /pass/—opens problematics of subjectivity, agency, and authenticity 
that scholars across disciplines have long before and since complicated. 
In “‘A New Hope’: The Psychic Life of Passing,” C. Riley Snorton 
considers how the possibilities of failure, misrecognition, and 
misidentification inherent to /passing/ “serves as a context for the 
emergence of selfhood” (82). In “Passing for Free, Passing for 
Sovereign: Blackness and the Formation of the Nation,” Sandra Harvey 
historicizes /passing/ as a system of “the antebellum slave surveillance 
regime,” and the fabrication of /the pass/ and its policing as the 
context through which Black racial /passing/ came to signify fugitivity, 
deception, and freedom across identificatory milieus.

Following Stone, Snorton, and Harvey’s critical readings of the 
transitivity and transversality of /passing/ across gender, race, and 
sexuality, the /First Forum/ Cinema and Media Studies Conference at the 
University of Southern California invites emerging scholars, educators, 
researchers, artists, activists, and community members to consider 
/passing/, what Snorton identifies "as the practice of moving from an 
oppressed group to a dominant group” (79) and what we consider as a 
technology of and against visual, aesthetic, cinematic, televisual, and 
computational regimes of knowledge.

For us, questions like the following emerge: How do the theoretical 
approaches to /passing/ offered by Black studies, Indigenous studies, 
Chicanx studies, Asian-American studies, trans studies, queer theory, 
gender studies, feminist theory, and disability theory, among others, 
shift questions of (good) representation and authenticity fielded by 
cinema and media studies, and vice versa? How have racial, gender, 
sexual, able, and class /passing/ been central to the historical and 
technical formation of American cinema and spectatorship? Does /passing/ 
open new ways to think about systems of surveillance and capacities to 
perform opacities?

We invite applicants to think across /passing/ both as a minoritarian 
and minoritizing technique of endurance and resistance, and in its 
idiomatic forms. How, for instance, do idioms such as “/passing/ for,” 
“/passing/ up,” “/passing/ through,” “/passing/ away,” and 
“/pass//fail,” among others, gain their significance and cultural force 
through common sense understandings, lived experiences, and 
racialized/racializing and gendered/gendering systems of /passing/?

We take this conference as an opportunity to reflect critically on the 
disciplinary and cultural inheritances, of /passing/ and otherwise, that 
have been /passed/ on to us, and to project the futures that /passing/ 
opens up. How do people and makers tactically (re)appropriate regimes of 
visuality that produce and are produced by paradigms of /passing/ in 
order to survive, collect, escape, destroy, and (re)build? We welcome 
proposals that address /passing/ from a variety of epistemologies, 
methodologies, and lived experiences. We encourage Black, Indigenous, 
person of color, trans, and queer applicants.

*Possible topics for exploration include (but are not limited to):*

transgender historicity, data doubles, racializing surveillance, 
*/making a pass/*, deep fakes, provisionality, */pass/fail/*, attempts 
and desire, cinematic codes of passing, bots, borders, */passing 
through/*, ignorance, cruising, precarity, mourning, */passing by/*, 
paradigms of success and failure, */passing away/*, deep fakes, identity 
and identification, */passing for/*, //belief, embodiment, unbelonging, 
*/passing over/*, temporality, reading, clocking, rejection, transport, 
virality, transition, */passing on/*, genealogy, blood, informatic 
opacity, racebending, whitewashing, death, */passing up/*, 
interpellation, intimacy, disidentification, refusal, authority, 
aeriality, afterlives,

The conference will take place over two days. The first day will feature 
the keynote speaker’s address, with a reception to follow. The second 
day will showcase the work of participants. We invite scholarly and 
creative projects: papers, poetry, performances, programs, etc. 
Presenters may participate via remote teleconferencing service.

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