Symposium Call for Papers

the audacity of pleasure: race, aesthetics, and the politics of desire 

Fri, Oct 24, 2025

at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder

Format: hybrid

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Mireille Miller-Young, PhD, Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara

Sponsored by the Department of Art & Art History and the CU Boulder Research & Innovation Office

“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”

          —Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power”

"the audacity of pleasure: race, aesthetics, and the politics of desire" calls for papers that engage with the aesthetics and politics of pleasure and joy and where they converge with critical race theory and visual culture. For centuries, QTBIPOC communities have been intimately associated with pain, suffering, trauma, woundedness, and death. This culture of pain haunts us as we try to live. It stalks us in the news media. It obsessively pursues us in scholarship. As a result, a visual culture of racialized suffering has coalesced around QTBIPOC communities such that these images of violated bodies in ruin have come to define our lived experiences. But we live. We live even in the face of deprivation. And we experience pleasure and joy. What does it look like? How are pleasure and joy expressed visually? How is pleasure depicted in certain spaces in QTBIPOC life? In what ways do artists reveal pleasure as embodied in QTBIPOC life? How do we visualize the affective register of QTBIPOC pleasure? We are interested in provocative papers that address these and other related topics, including, but not exclusive to:

· Intercultural practices of pleasure and their artistic expressions

· The aesthetics of Black/Brown boy joy and Black/Brown girl magic

· Visual QTBIPOC histories of pleasure

· The intersection of art and pleasure

· Theorizations of pleasure and joy as resistance

· Pleasure and joy as a visual praxis

· Queer/quare engagements with pleasure and the visual

· Pleasure and women-of-color feminist visual culture

Papers should be theoretical or analytical in nature rather than descriptive and should be 15-20 minutes long. All abstracts will be peer-reviewed. Invited speakers will receive one night’s accommodation in Boulder.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words, a 2-page CV, and a 250-word bio. The deadline to submit abstracts is February 28, 2025. Notifications of acceptance or rejection will go out by March 30. Selected papers will be included in the symposium edited volume. Papers selected for inclusion must be original work and not previously published, and the paper cannot be under consideration for publication elsewhere. 

Please email Dr. crystal am nelson with questions at crystal.nelson@colorado.edu.

In-person attendance is limited.