37.582, Confs: Ethics of Queer In/visibility (Germany)

Thu Feb 12 12:05:02 UTC 2026

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-582. Thu Feb 12 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.582, Confs: Ethics of Queer In/visibility (Germany)

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Date: 03-Feb-2026
From: Theresa Heyd [theresa.heyd at as.uni-heidelberg.de]
Subject: Ethics of Queer In/visibility

Ethics of Queer In/visibility

Date: 30-Sep-2026 - 02-Oct-2026
Location: Heidelberg, Germany
Contact: Theresa Heyd
Contact Email: theresa.heyd at as.uni-heidelberg.de
Meeting URL: https://queer-in-visibility.de/

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Applied Linguistics;
Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics

Submission Deadline: 31-Mar-2026

Note: The following call is being posted on The LINGUIST List because
the conference will include sociolinguistics sessions exploring queer
linguistics, and featuring prominent linguists as speakers.
Starting Point:
Concepts of in/visibility have played an important role in queer
activism and gender studies for a long time. Being seen and being
heard, having a voice and a place at the table have been manifest
political goals but also powerful metaphors of representation through
decades of feminist and queer movements and academic debates. A
vocabulary of in/visibility informs many ways of talking about gender,
from the metaphor of the closet (Sedgwick 1990, Kibbey 2023) with
regard to sexual orientation, to the notion of passing (Goffman 1963)
for gender presentation and gender identity. Many aspects of feminist
and queer practice rely on becoming visible in public space: women’s
marches and pride parades, trans and lesbian days of visibility,
material objects such as rainbow flags and pronoun buttons. And in
media-saturated and digital contexts, being visible has become an
omnipresent metric of the self.
At the same time, visibility has been identified as an ambivalent
mechanism with risky implications (Foucault 1975, Schaffer 2008,
Beauchamp 2019). Representation and exposure can lead to gender-based
surveillance, discrimination, and violence. The very notion of safe
spaces, a topic of ridicule in some public discourses, is borne from
the notion that visibility may entail vulnerability. While queer
visibility has been marketed and commodified under the guise of
visibility politics for a long time (Hennessy 1994), many individuals
and communities are not able to become visible in their plurality,
e.g. people on the move and undocumented migrants (Luibhéid & Chávez
2020), people in war-ridden parts of the Global South (Puar 2007), or
disabled and chronically ill people (Hedva 2022). For queer people of
color, being visible can also mean being subjected to a colonial,
orientalist or white gaze (Ferguson 2003), and visible disabled bodies
are often reduced to ‘inspiration porn’ (Grue 2016). Remaining opaque
(Glissant 1990), resisting through invisibility (Alloa 2023), and
refusing research (Tuck & Yang 2014) have been put forward as
productive objections to the white imperative of visibility.
In current political climates, the risk of visibility has become a
matter of broad societal attention. Symbols of queer visibility such
as pride flags are removed or prohibited; moral panics about gendered
access to public bathrooms, gyms and saunas prompt forms of gender
surveillance; political initiatives promote name registers of trans
individuals; scientific freedom is under threat as DEI mechanisms and
queer research paradigms, programs, and individuals become subjected
to erasure.
Matters of queer in/visibility thus hold implications for the dignity,
identification and well-being of the individual, but they are also
embroiled in some of the most conflictive dynamics in ongoing
negotiations of our societal fabric. Queer in/visibility is of the
highest relevance for ethics in academia—from data and research ethics
to teaching and self-expression—and it affects many areas of human
development and agency, including education, political participation,
job market access, sports, healthcare, and cultural representation.
In this conference, we aim to bring together scholars across
disciplines who are interested in the ethics of in/visibility from a
queer perspective at a time of societal turbulence and moral backlash
against feminist and queer existence. We wish to advance
interdisciplinary insight into implications of in/visibility, control,
and representation; and to foster interaction across academic
disciplines and epistemologies.
Call for Contributions:
We invite abstracts for paper presentations (20+10min) which address
aspects of queer in/visibility from all academic fields and
disciplines. We are particularly interested in the following thematic
areas:
    1. Theories and histories of queer in/visibility;
    2. Intersections of queer in/visibility with disability/health,
race/ethnicity, age, and faith;
    3. Queer in/visibility in mediated and digital contexts;
    4. Queer in/visibility and resistance: ethical responses to
anti-queer societal backlash;
    5. Queer in/visibility as an ethical challenge in and to academia.
Please send your abstract as an anonymized PDF to
queerinv at as.uni-heidelberg.de. Abstracts should not exceed 300 words
(excluding references).
Abstract deadline: March 31, 2026, 23.59 CET.
For inquiries, please contact Theresa Heyd at
theresa.heyd at as.uni-heidelberg.de.
Organizers:
Theresa Heyd, Miriam Neuhausen, Vroni Zieglmeier
Student assistants: Sam Gaugele, Lea Luhr
Keynote speakers
J Calder (she/they), Linguistics, University of Colorado Boulder
Anna Hájková (she/her), History, University of Warwick
The Conference:
The conference will take place from September 30 to October 2, 2026 at
Marsilius Kolleg, Heidelberg University (Im Neuenheimer Feld 130.1,
Heidelberg). The venue is largely wheelchair accessible and has a
fully accessible bathroom; the conference language is English. The
conference is financially supported by the Camilla and Georg Jellinek
Center for Ethics of Heidelberg University.
Early Career Travel Award:
We will be able to offer a limited number of travel awards (250 EUR
each), aimed in particular at early career researchers and/or
participants without academic employment status and/or members of
underrepresented minorities (BIPoC, non-EU citizens, trans scholars,
disabled/chronically ill researchers, first-generation academics,
etc.). If you wish to be considered for a travel award, please
indicate this in your email (and not in your abstract).
References:
Alloa, E. (2023). Invisibility: From discrimination to resistance.
Critical Horizons, 24(4), 325–338.
Beauchamp, T. (2019). Going stealth: Transgender politics and US
surveillance practices. Duke University Press.
Ferguson, R. (2003). Aberrations in black: Toward a queer of color
critique. University of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, M. (1975). Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison.
Éditions Gallimard.
Glissant, E. (1990). Poétique de la relation. Éditions Gallimard.
Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled
identity. Prentice-Hall.
Grue, J. (2016). The problem with inspiration porn: A tentative
definition and a provisional critique.
Disability & Society, 31(6), 838–849.
Hedva, J. (2022). Sick woman theory. Topical Cream.
https://topicalcream.org/features/sick-woman-theory/.
Hennessy, R. (1994). Queer visibility in commodity culture. Cultural
critique, (29), 31-76.
Kibbey, T. (Ed.). (2023). Linguistics out of the closet: The
Interdisciplinarity of Gender and Sexuality in
Language Science. De Gruyter.
Luibhéid, E. & Chávez, K. (Eds.). (2020). Queer and trans migrations:
Dynamics of illegalization, detention, and deportation. University of
Illinois Press.
Puar, J.K. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer
times. Duke University Press.
Schaffer, J. (2008). Ambivalenzen der Sichtbarkeit: Über die visuellen
Strukturen der Anerkennung. Transcript.
Sedgwick, E. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. University of
California Press.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K.W. (2014). R-words: refusing research. In D. Paris
& M.T. Winn (Eds.), Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative
Inquiry with Youth and Communities (pp. 223–248). Sage.

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