Conference call for papers Queer Kinship: Migrations, Diasporas, Communities, University of Toronto, St. George Campus, 16-17 October 2026

Da Silvia Antosa

You are invited to submit a proposal for the third international conference organized by the Queer Kinship Network Siena-Oxford-Toronto. The Network seeks to explore queer kinship: affective bonds, relationships, solidarities, and family forms that diverge from, innovate beyond, and challenge models of heteronormative families and communities. With a primary focus on the Italian and English-speaking worlds – though proactively not limited to these contexts – this project investigates culturally marginalised histories and new transformative queer kinship dynamics, across different cultural dimensions and time periods. As well as rendering forms of queer kinship more visible, the project seeks to inform current debates on social justice, wellbeing, and representation. Forthe conference in Tsí Tkaròn:to/Toronto, we welcome proposals on any approach to queer kinship
studies. However, priority will be given to interventions that focus on the connections among queer and trans kinship, migration, and/or transnationalism as categories that also intersect with colonialism, racialization, and ethnicity. Exploring queer and trans kinship, migration, and transnationalism in/from the context of Turtle Island-Abya Yala requires grounding this work in Indigenous histories and scholarships. Martin J. Cannon (Onyota’a:ka) highlights how colonial policies have subverted many Indigenous relational systems on this land by “institutionalizing a structure of power and kinship relations that [are] both patriarchal and heterosexist” through which “the sexuality of Native North Americans was quite simply racialized and engendered.” Given this context, we take direction from the introduction to “Cuir/Queer Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable,” in which
Joseph M. Pierce et al. note that a “critical appraisal of the relationship between queer studies and decolonial praxis remains a crucial site for investigation, as do regional, intra-, and interregional frameworks.”
Thinking about diasporas through the lenses of colonialism and supremacy, we also aim to take up David Eng’s question on “what might be gained politically by reconceptualizing diaspora not in conventional terms of ethnic dispersion, filiation, and biological traceability, but rather in terms of queerness, affiliation, and social contingency.” Through this work, we strive to contribute to the “unruly body of scholarship,” as Eithne Luibhéid names it, that lies at the intersection of queer and migration studies. Luibhéid highlights that this intersection has “enhanced scholarship about the emergence of multiple, hybrid sexual cultures,
identities, identifications, practices, and politics” and that “these are marked by power, contestation, and creative adaptation.” One such “emergence” has taken place in Italian-Canadian communities, where queer and trans experiences have recently surfaced as influential categories of belonging, solidarity- building, activism, and reckoning. In this latter cultural space, Liana Cusmano’s writing exemplifies Eng’s queer reconceptualization of diaspora by conjugating mutual recognition with acknowledgement of loss;
in one of their poems, Cusmano writes: “We all carry with us / in our skin and bones / a ghost language / that we can see in one another / and name / but not speak.”5 Many powerful intersections of queerness, migration, and cultural identity exist on this territory and elsewhere; the aim of our conference is indeed to create a space for intercultural sharing and listening, interdisciplinary learning, debate, solidarity, political
growth, and joy. Info and deadline for submissions: www.queerkinshipnetwork.com