The Politics of Desire: Recognition, Belonging, and the Regulation of Intimacy

This session proposes a sustained interdisciplinary inquiry into desire as a political force—a mechanism through which belonging is organized, legitimized, and denied across literary, cultural, legal, and pedagogical terrain. Moving beyond frameworks that treat desire as a private psychological impulse, the panel argues that intimacy constitutes a key site through which normative regimes inscribe their most consequential boundaries. The "regulation of belonging," as this panel theorizes it, connects the micro-politics of intimate life with the macro-politics of citizenship, recognition, and exclusion.

The rationale for organizing this session is both scholarly and timely. At a moment when questions of national belonging, migration, and the legal recognition of intimate bonds are increasingly central to political conflict globally, literary and cultural studies has a distinctive contribution to make: demonstrating how narrative forms, legal archives, popular culture, and classroom practice function as sites where the governance of desire is narrated, contested, and reimagined. While existing scholarship has examined intimacy from sociological (Illouz, Giddens), ethical (Srinivasan), and affective (Cvetkovich, Ahmed, Yao) perspectives, this panel advances a structural account of how intimacy operates as a biopolitical technology of governance—drawing on Foucault, Agamben, Mbembe, and Yuval-Davis to connect the regulation of sexuality and kinship with the broader architecture of political belonging. Crucially, the panel extends these theoretical frameworks beyond their most familiar Anglophone and Western European contexts, bringing them into conversation with Ottoman historiography, Latin American necropolitics, hemispheric legal archives, and U.S. popular culture—demonstrating both the explanatory power and the necessary limits of existing frameworks when applied across distinct geopolitical and cultural formations.

The four papers assembled here move across distinct geographic, historical, and generic contexts while remaining unified by this central theoretical framework. Suleyman Bölükbaş (Penn State University) reads Fernanda Melchor's Hurricane Season through necropolitics and "gore capitalism" (Valencia), arguing that the murder of a transgender woman in rural Mexico functions as a sanctioning ritual that stabilizes fragile masculinity and polices the boundaries of queer desire within zones of state abandonment. Christopher Rivera examines how LGBTQ+ marriage rights have developed across the Americas—from Mexico and Brazil to Puerto Rico and Colombia—demonstrating that love is not simply made legal but reshaped through ongoing contests over sovereignty, family, and postcolonial national identity. Jennifer Reimer (Oregon State University–Cascades) argues that teaching Taylor Swift's cultural persona in a writing-intensive American Studies course reveals intimacy not as private feeling but as a socially regulated practice structured by gender, race, capitalism, and media infrastructure—positioning the classroom itself as a site for analyzing how belonging is authorized and contested. Özge Ege reads Suat Derviş's early Gothic fiction against the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic, arguing that Derviş's haunted konaks and spectral female figures constitute a counter-archive of belonging that resists the sanitizing modernity of the new nationalist symbolic order.

Together, these papers span Latin American literature, hemispheric legal studies, American popular culture and pedagogy, and Turkish women's writing—demonstrating that the governance of desire operates not within a single national tradition but through global regimes of citizenship, recognition, and exclusion.

The session will operate as follows within the allotted time: each of the four papers will be presented in ten-twelve minute time slots. The remaining time will be reserved for open, unstructured discussion with the audience. Rather than a formal respondent, the presider will offer two to three brief connective observations across the papers before opening the floor, keeping the session oriented toward genuine exchange rather than summary.

This panel deliberately brings together a diversity of voices, perspectives, and institutional contexts. The panelists represent different career stages, from a PhD candidate to a tenure-track faculty member, and different disciplinary homes, including comparative literature, women's and gender studies, legal studies, and American studies. The panel's geographic and linguistic range—papers engaging texts in Spanish, English, and Turkish, and legal contexts spanning the Americas and the Middle East—reflects a genuinely transnational feminist commitment rather than a token gesture toward diversity. The session also brings together scholars working across multiple national traditions, methodological approaches, and institutional settings, including a large research university and a regional campus, ensuring that the conversation it models reflects the actual heterogeneity of the profession.