QGrad 2025 – Glittering Rage

Sticking to Each Other: Defiant Sociality as an Otherwise Ethics of Care

Moderator: Jamilet Ochoa, University of California, Los Angeles

• “The Doctor is Out: Harm Reduction, Health Care, and the Relational Dynamics of Well-Being”
  Jason Contino
  University of California, Los Angeles
• “The Dolls Protect Ourselves: Vengeful Survival as Transfeminist Healing Justice”
  Harper Rowan
  San Diego State University
• “Reimagining Abortion Care Through the Lens of LGBTQ+ Communities”
  Faith Chinnapong
  San Diego State University

On the Edge: Insurgency, Affect, and Queer Space

Moderator: Beren Azizi, University of California, Los Angeles

• “Insurgent Knowledges of Oceanwide Plaza Towers: Graffiti as Insurgent Planning in Downtown Los Angeles”
  Jordan Wynne
  University of California, Los Angeles
• “Urbanism from the Trans Undercommons: Trans Placemaking for Liberation and Community Care”
  Brita Higgins
  University of California, Los Angeles
• “Hot (White Cis) Girls Hit Curbs: The Racialized and Gendered Dynamics of Road Rage”
  Abigail Corcoran
  University of Arizona
• “‘I am the Will’ Exhibition: Lubunya State of Emergence”
  Lalu Ozban
  University of California, Santa Cruz

Undisciplining Aesthetics: Desire and Negativity in Contemporary Art

Moderator: Wesleigh Gates, University of California, Los Angeles

• “It Feels Like Love but it’s the Drugs: Desire, Precarity, and Material Poetics in the Poem-Sculptures of José Luis Cortés”
  Enrique Olivares Pesante                                                                                                                                                                                                University of California, Los Angeles
• “The Problem of Measure: A Rhetorical Thought-Experiment Concerning Camp Aesthetics, Metron, and Black Conceptual Art”
  Russell Ladson
  University of California, Berkeley
• “Modes of Upset in Andrew Henderson’s ‘Taking It To The Grave’”
  Christine Negus
  University of California, San Diego
• “Trans Photographic Negativity in the Greer Lankton Archive”
  Lily Wolf
  The Ohio State University

Working Group: Literature

Moderator: Nicole Prucha, University of California, Los Angeles

• “Diachronic Gender: Affirmation and Abolition in Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox”
  James Vitiello
  University of California, Irvine
• “Glittering Rage and the Quest(ion) for Reparations in The Safekeep (2024)”
  Alona Weimer
  University of California, Los Angeles
• “Trans Rage on the Literary Stage: Mignon’s Disidentificatory Performance”
  Evan Martens
  University of California, Davis
• “Reading for Quiet: A Black Cultural Study of Black Queer Boyhood and Masculinity in Moonlight”
  Tirrezz Hudson
  University of California, San Diego

Performance Panel: Queer Diaspora Breakages: Badness and Cleansing as Sensual Rage 

Moderator: Naz Oktay, University of California, Los Angeles

• Renatta Fordyce
  University of California, Los Angeles
• Dena Harry Saleh
  University of Colorado, Boulder
• Asher Firestone
  University of Colorado, Boulder

Becoming Together: Friction, Skin, and Surface as Sensorial Nexus

Moderator: Bri Reddick, University of California, Santa Barbara

• “Blood and plasma: ruminating on (tender) magic”
  Mariana Villegas
  University of California, Los Angeles
• “Stoned Femme Blues: Intoxicated Genders, Transsexual Rave Poetics, and Daniel Paul Schreber”
  Willa Smart
  University of California, Davis
• “Spilt Ink and Glittering Refusals: On Rage, Refusal, and the Stickiness of Survival”
  H.R. Gordon
  State University of New York at Buffalo
• “Glitching Circuits of Desire: Pleasure, Belonging, and Survival Across the Diasporic Digital Worlds of Trans-of-Color Nightlife”
  Rae Landingin
  University of Florida, Gainesville

Working Group: Archive/Disruption

Moderator: Kristen Nelson, University of California, Santa Cruz

• “WJT Love(d/s) His Queer Daughters: The Contortion of Memory as Punishment for Queer Presence”
  Sydney M. Triola
  University of California, Los Angeles
• “Ceramic Resistance in the Work of ARIA XYX: Love Medicine, Kink, and the IndigiQueer Archive in Kuskatan/El Salvador
  Armando Perla
  University of Montreal
• “Travestipolitics of Care”
  Lucas Ruppel
  University of California, Davis
• “Grounded Ephemerality: Aesthetic Production, Ephemera, and the Archive/s of Protest”
  Taylor Marie Doherty
  University of Arizona

Workshop: “Unraveling the Role of STEM in Justice-Oriented Epistemologies”

• Dr. Sergio Carbajo
  Associate Professor
  Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
  University of California, Los Angeles

Styles of Resistance: Performance, Protest, and Hemispheric Crossings

Moderator: Nidia Bautista, University of California, Los Angeles

• “Operations of Quotidian Life: Performance and Performativity as Resilience Tactics”
  Florence Ho
  University of California, Los Angeles
• “‘Quisimos ser buenas’: Sex worker organizing and queer care networks across borders”
  Viviana Valle Gomez
  University of California, Santa Barbara
• “Baile de Protesta: Embodying Transnational Resistance in El Salvador’s Kiki Ballroom”
  Katherine Funes
  University of California, Irvine
• “‘QueerUltraViolence is beauty’: the Mary Nardini Gang, the Destruction of Hope, and the Possibility of Becoming”
  Jake Licker
  University of Arizona

Ordering Identities, Unruly Materialities

Moderator: Mustafa Siddiqui, Northwestern University

• “Affective Refusals: Anger and the Rejection of Gay Identity in Geneva’s Cruising Spaces”
  Cihangir Can
  University of California, Los Angeles
• “Representing Queerness in Chinese Commercial Movies: Atomic Identification, the Practice of Care, and New Mode of Queer Relationality in Shao Yihui’s Her Story (2024)”
  Eugenia Yuan
  University of California, Los Angeles
• “A Study of the Gay Latino (Chicano, Mexican, Mexican-American) Assumed Bottom Stereotype Glittering through the Rage of Social Media and Pornography in the US”
  Gilberto Martinez Martinez
  University of California, Los Angeles
• “The Art of Unmaking: Trans Rage as a Politics of Aesthetic Interference”
  Robin Konuk
  Rutgers University

Queer Ruptures: Somatic Processes and Critically Disruptive Affects

Moderator: Ebony Oldham, University of California, Los Angeles

• “Screaming Rage Beyond the Page: Black Queer Feminist Practices of (Dis)Rupture”
  Alyiah Marie Gonzales
  Cornell University
• “#femalerage, #relatable: Feminine Rage in TikTok Fan Edits”
  Graciela Sierra-Moreno
  University of California, Santa Cruz
• “The Animal That Therefore Blackness Is: Animality, Blackness, and the Ontology of Sexual Difference”
  Nam Do
  University of Southern California

“Critical Pathways: Kiyoshi Kuromiya, queer history, and blackness’s radicality”

Che Gossett
Associate Director
The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies
University of Pennsylvania