Date: 5-6 June 2026
Location: Florence, EUI
Organisers: Queer Feminist Studies Working Group; Queer Budapest; Queer, Trans, Intersex Studies Collective; Politesse
Format: Hybrid
Langauges: English (and according to participants' preference)
We are living through hard times. Wars, social conflicts, worsening life conditions and poverty, resurging authoritarianism, and an ongoing genocide sweep the entire globe. Faced with this grim reality, queer observers note how old and new fascisms are gaining traction by building on so-called “anti-gender” and anti-trans sentiments and agendas (Butler, 2024). LGBTQIA+ rights and lives are facing full-frontal attacks, erasure from mainstream discourse and defunding of queer education and research. Examples from countries such as Hungary show how far-right populism, homo-and transphobia, and the anti-gender rhetoric intersect and are used as a practice of state power over citizens (Rédai, 2024). At the same time, queers are also triggered by how, in times of tensions, risks, and polarisations, queerness is domesticated and instrumentalised, abused and coopted, be it to pinkwash genocides or to save existing social, political, and economic hierarchies. Queer identities in non-Western countries and regions are often portrayed as victims who need liberation through “Europeanisation”, a narrative that positions international institutions and organisations based in Western Europe as role models of humanitarianism, queer rights, and modernity (Rexhepi, 2016).
What to do with these contrasts, what to think of them? Are these times not queer, or are these times where queers should revitalise their struggle, embrace their fragmented selves and turn them into instances of disruption, deconstruction, radicality, repair ‒ in a word: transformation?
Building on the collaboration of different realities working on (and with) queer topics, the Queer Fragments conference was conceived as both a joyful and enraged call to action, bringing together people from different backgrounds and professions, with different identities and statuses, to live, think, feel, and create together a meaningful personal, social, political, and theoretical experience. Queer Fragments calls to researchers, thinkers, workers, and artists who deal with fragments, fragmenting, and fragmentation: fragments as sources and inspirations; fragmenting as an instance of deconstruction and radical imagination; fragmentation as a posture to think through reality and practice change.
Queer Fragments invites its participants to question implied wholes and totalities; to disrupt narratives while celebrating addenda, palimpsests, shreddings; to ask, once again, why are queer lives made dispensable, triable, unlivable.
In short, Queer Fragments aspires to be an opportunity to start thinking and acting from the fragments.
Guiding questions and keywords
What stories do fragments tell? How can we read and understand pieces, shreds, leftovers, ephemera, traces, instead of totalities?
- Keywords: modes of narration, traces, archives, normative bodies, resilience, division, recomposing, fabulation, memory, ephemera.
Is queerness a polarising or a uniting force in society? How to view conceptions of power, hierarchy, normativity, oppression and exploitation, justice and liberation, transformation and future through a queer lens?
- Keywords: unity and conflict, allyship, queer justice, queer identities and subjectivation, intersectionality, heteronormativity/homonormativity, queer of colour critique.
What does taking a queer stance entail for the politics of knowledge production? To what extent does taking a queer position disrupt and fragment academic hierarchies and dynamics?
- Keywords: methodologies, epistemologies, positionality, neutrality, privilege, complicity and silencing, research ethics, power dynamics, knowledge production, media and communication.
Submission: what, when, how
Please send a PDF document including an abstract (up to 350 words) or a poster (combining visuals and up to 300 words), a brief biography (max 100 words), and your language preferences (including English, our main working language, and possible additional languages) to: QueerWG@eui.eu by 9 January 2026. Please be mindful to include the words “Queer Fragments
Conference CfP” in the subject of your email.
Participants will receive a notification of acceptance by 16 February 2026.
We encourage contributions advancing novel and diverse perspectives and adopting interdisciplinary approaches. We welcome queer ideas and practices challenging disciplines and fields, pushing them to their limits, (de) (re)constructing them. We invite submissions not only from scholars, but also from practitioners, activists, workers, artists, performers, journalists, and thinkers. We particularly encourage submissions from those who have yet to present their work at conferences and/or belong to underrepresented
regions, institutions, and/or groups.
Queer fragments warmly invites participants to join in person. While we offer a limited hybrid mode of participation, we emphasise our intention to promote a deep and engaging in-person experience. Participants should cover their accommodation and travel through their home institutions, if possible. Depending on available funds, we hope to be able to support travel and/or accommodation for a limited number of presenters without access to institutional funding.
We value inclusion and access for all participants, and we will do our best to accommodate specific needs determined by, among others, disabilities and nationality/migratory status. Especially concerning the physical accessibility of the conference venue, please find detailed information here. In all these cases, please feel free to reach out at our email (QueerWG@eui.eu) by adding “Queer Fragments Conference Information” in the subject of your email.