A Call to Rethink and Reimagine
It is a privilege to open this gathering—a space carved out for critical reflection, intellectual risk, and collaborative reimagining. Today, we come together to think with and through the entangled themes of gender, knowledge, and borders, with close attention to the relational dynamics of sexuality, intimacy, eroticism, displacement, and belonging. We do so not to speak about a particular gender or identity, but to interrogate the forces that produce gendered worlds and shape the conditions of possibility for knowing, feeling, and resisting.
This symposium emerges from a deep awareness that knowledge is never neutral. It is shaped by power—by who has the authority to define, to include, to silence. The production of knowledge about gender and sexuality, in particular, is fraught with layers of erasure, commodification, and desire. Our task is not to smooth over these tensions but to sit with them, to ask what forms of knowing have been legitimized, and at what cost.
In recent decades, gender studies has made strides in centering gender and sexuality in historical and political analysis. But we must also ask: what remains foreclosed when these categories are treated as fixed truths rather than as sites of opacity and negotiation? What paths of inquiry have we not pursued? What new perspectives have we overlooked as our frameworks became too comfortable or too dominant?
This symposium invites us to reflect on how histories of gender are not merely uncovered but actively constructed—often retroactively, through the lens of modern epistemologies. What if we approach gender as something that resists clear definition—as something that obstructs rather than reveals? Perhaps this opens up new possibilities for critique. Barriers to understanding can become starting points for different modes of inquiry, prompting us to explore not only what we know, but how we come to know—and what remains unknowable.
Let us resist the temptation to resolve complexity, and instead embrace it as the very condition of critical thought. Let us move through this symposium not in search of tidy conclusions, but with a shared commitment to discomfort, to dialogue, and to the transformative work of thinking otherwise.
Jaleh Ebrahimi
Mahdieh Mazloomi
Ayda Javid
Symposium co-chairs