The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s StudiesCLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center will host a Queer-Class Relations conference April 17-18, 2026. Proposals are due by September 1, 2025. Successful applicants will be required to register by November 15, 2025.
Commemorating the 40th anniversary of CLAGS’ founding in 1986 and its groundbreaking Homo/Economics conference in 1994, this conference marks a pivotal moment for thinking about queer-class relations. Working in the tradition of thinkers such as Cathy Cohen, Lee Badgett, and Eli Clare–and in memory of our dear friends Urvashi Vaid, Jeffrey Escoffier, and Amber Hollibaugh–the conference invites participants to explore the connections between queer lives and the class experiences that are also shaped by race, caste, disability, and gender. Premised on the idea that queer and class are inevitably intertwined, the conference asks what the construction “queer-class” illuminates, obfuscates, disrupts, and structures. How can we understand erotic, economic, personal, and social relations in ways that help us build queer-class solidarities, for example within university-based queer and trans studies, across activist sites in the Global South, or amidst the wreckage of the current U.S. political landscape?
Keynote speakers: Anne Balay and Anjali Arondekar
Dr. Anne Balay is a labor historian and an organizer with Service Employees International Union Local 509 in Boston. Balay is author of the award winning booksSteel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steelworkers and Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers.
Dr. Anjali Arondekar is Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Founding Director of the Center for South Asian Studies. Arondekar is author of the award-winning books For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India and Abundance: Sexuality’s History.
Balay and Arondekar will frame the conference’s work with keynote addresses focusing on queer labor relations and queer-caste relations. Matt Brim, Executive Director of CLAGS and author of Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University, will open the conference.
