Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

This paper questions the frequently articulated wisdom that Australia is a sport loving and active nation.
Drawing on survey data from both the sport and media fields, the author considers various patterns of sport
participation and spectatorship according to variables such as class, gender, Indigeneity, ethnicity and age.
The paper suggests that Australians are rather more ambivalent about sport, and selective in their sporting
tastes, than is commonly assumed. In pursuing the analysis, the Bourdieusian concepts of doxa and illusio
are brought into play in the critical examination of the cultures of physical play. It is suggested that, in
demographically, socially and culturally complex nations like Australia, the strategic celebration of cultural
fields such as sport serves to obscure internal differentiation and the effects of transnationalism and
globalisation.
10E
Sexuality and Violence: Social Dynamics, Resistance and Activism (Chair, Daniella Villegas)
Marta Cabrera Memory Traces: Sensory and Emotional Cartography of a high impact zone
This paper reviews the performance “Acción de gracia” (“Thanksgiving”, Vividero Colectivo, 2013) and its
sensory and emotional exploration of social dynamics of the Santa Fe neighborhood (Bogotá) such as
prostitution and odd jobs as well as ritual and funerary practices centered around its protagonists –
transvestites, transgendered persons, salespeople, musicians and singers from Bogota´s Cementerio Central
(Central Cemetery) – and even ghostly presences such as María Salomé, patron saint of prostitutes, or trans
leader Wanda Fox, murdered in 2009. This neighborhood (where prostitution is legal) is of particular interest
as a complex entanglement of public policies (land use code, cultural patrimony, memory, LGBT), of citizen
movements, memories of popular classes, resistances, marginalities, violences, gender dissidences, attempts
of control, experiments of social inclusion and dreams of urban modernization.
Robert McKee Irwin
The Semiotics of a Serial Killing: Migration, Racialization, Sexuality
This paper draws from an archive of 25 bodies found buried in peach fields of Yuba City, California, 1971.
Most were identified as middle-aged white male “fruit tramps”: vagrants, who worked occasionally as
agricultural laborers. Many were found with faces brutally slashed, pants down and penises exposed. Their
violent deaths were casually referred to as “homosexual killings.” Many doubted whether Juan Corona, the
Mexican-born labor contractor accused of the murders, was guilty, suspecting that the real killer was his
half-brother Natividad, a “known homosexual.” Drawing from scholarship on “queer violence” and “the
semiotics of violence,” and on the story’s transnational public trajectory, this paper analyzes the implications
of the forensic semiotics the case generated in its day, then considers what alternative interpretations might
reveal about intersecting problematics of migration, racialization, and sexuality in the US-Mexico
borderlands.
Cesar Sanchez-Avella “De un mundo raro”: Cultural Activism against Violence and Discrimination based in Gender
Identity and Sexualities in Colombia and Mexico
Colombia and Mexico have witnessed increasing legal mobilizations struggling with the discrimination and
violence affecting people with non-normative gender and sexualities. Such mobilizations have been
relatively successful, achieving the formulation of public policies, legal decisions and laws that recognise
rights for this vulnerable population. However, acts of violence and discrimination against them are still very
frequent. For this reason, expressions of cultural activism, understood as alternative strategies for
mobilization against violence and discrimination, should be considered more seriously. To take this path,
questions related to the dynamics of individuals and collectives working with cultural activism around
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