Gender and Diversity Research Network
The university-wide Gender and Diversity Research Network is an inter- and trans-disciplinary academic and political network of scholars. It has the following goals:
- Make gender and diversity related research and teaching visible at Leuphana
- Support dialogue and cooperation among academic disciplines at Leuphana University of Lüneburg
- Step up research and teaching on gender and diversity
- Improve the gender and diversity sensitive training of students and early career researchers through the pooling of expertise in these areas
- Network, coordinate and implement inter- and trans-disciplinary research within and beyond Leuphana University of Lüneburg
- Support and develop networking within and beyond the university
- Host guest lectures; conceptualise and implement events, conferences, and colloquia for junior academics
- Introduce issues of gender and diversity to different publics
Enduring Otherwise: Muslim Queer and Trans Worldmaking in Indonesia - Ferdiansyah Thajib
At this event hosted by the Gender and Diversity Research Network, Ferdiansyah Thajib will present his new book Enduring Otherwise (New York University Press, 2026) exploring Muslim queer and trans experiences in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.
Tues. 15 December 2026. 6:15pm. C 40.154.
Many gender and sexual minorities in Indonesia remain practicing Muslims, but they face violence stemming from Muslim society’s rejection of their sexual and gender identities. With their faith often pitted against their desires and ways of living, many are confronted with a forced choice between two seemingly irreconcilable ways of being.
Drawing on ethnographic research in multiple locations in Indonesia, Enduring Otherwise examines how Muslim individuals and communities grapple with the challenges and possibilities of inhabiting queer and trans religiosity. Some distance themselves from religious tenets because of the harms implicated in them, while others immerse themselves in religious practices and spiritual values, seeking to reimagine them. There are also those who remain caught in tensions, having to navigate a life entrenched in ambivalence. Yet across these varied engagements, they continue to find ways to keep going.
This book showcases how everyday gestures of endurance complicate widely held notions of survival and resilience. Through such actions, Muslim queer and trans subjectivities build complex relationships with faith, piety, and religious norms, while also laying the groundwork to transform the conditions that marginalize them.
Offering a nuanced account of the affective politics of worldmaking at the intersection of sexuality, gender, and religion, Enduring Otherwise highlights how the drawn-out moments of hope, failure, improvisation, and exhaustion experienced by queer and gender non-conforming Indonesians configure efforts to create a world where no one will have to endure the unendurable anymore.”
Dr. Ferdiansyah Thajib is senior lecturer in the Elite Graduate Program “Standards of Decision-Making Across Cultures” at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He is author of Enduring Otherwise: Muslim Queer and Trans Worldmaking in Indonesia (New York University Press, 2026) and co-editor of Embracing Faith and Desire: Queer and Feminist Engagements with Islam and Christianity as Lived Religions as well as Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography.
Hosted by the Gender and Diversity Research Network and the Center for Critical Studies.
Language: English.
Registration is not required.
Performing Politics: Drag, Queer Migration, and the Aesthetic of Postmigrant Survival
In this talk, Tunay Altay (Humboldt University of Berlin) draws on a book-in-progress that examines migrant drag performance as a lens onto the politics of queer migrant representation, the limits of legibility, and the changing conditions of queer migrant political life under intensifying anti-gender, anti-migrant, and anti-trans mobilizations.
Weds. 20.01.27. 6:15pm. C 40.601.
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2026, Altay’s book focuses on Germany’s migrant drag scene and the ways it has been shaped by histories of migration, displacement, and racialized belonging. At the centre of the book is a double movement. Drag has increasingly become a discursive battleground onto which anxieties about gender, sexuality, migration, and the nation are projected, turning aesthetic difference into an object of political contestation and demands for regulation. At the same time, migrant performers use drag to navigate and contest racialized and sexualized regimes of citizenship: forging alternative pathways to political participation, reclaiming stages and public space, and producing forms of visibility that exceed liberal frameworks of recognition and inclusion. Migrant drag therefore emerges not simply as representation, but as a political and aesthetic practice of world-making through which experiences of marginalization and exclusion are reworked into infrastructures of care, endurance, collective identification, and political imagination. The book ultimately asks what migrant drag can tell us about the changing relationship between sexuality, migration, and citizenship at a moment when the boundaries of legitimate gender, belonging, and public visibility are being aggressively redrawn.
Dr. Tunay Altay is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology and Co-Head of the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Migration at Humboldt University of Berlin. Tunay’s research focuses on migration and sexuality in Germany, Turkey, and the broader context of Europe and the Middle East. He is the co-editor of Queer and Trans Life: Anthropological Future (2025) and Resisting Far-Right Politics: Queer Feminist Critiques(2024). Tunay published in top-ranked journals, including Sexualities, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and European Journal of Politics and Gender. Tunay is the co-chair of the Gender and Sexuality Research Network at the Council for European Studies.
Hosted by the Gender and Diversity Research Network and the Center for Critical Studies.
Language: English.
Registration is not required.
Memberships
LAGEN (Working Group of Institutions for Women’s and Gender Studies in Lower Saxony): The LAGEN newsletter provides news and updates about research, events, calls for papers and job. You can subscribe here.
FG Gender(Gender Studies Association). The Gender Studies Association publishes news and updates here.
AT Gender (The European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation). News and updates here.
The Gender and Diversity Research Network is also a member of "Netzwerk deutschsprachige Diversitätsforschung" (Diversitätsforschung D-A-CH). The network facilitates interdisciplinary exchange among scholars of diversity. You can subscribe to the "Netzwerk deutschsprachige Diversitätsforschung" email list here.
GENDER AND DIVERSITY RESEARCH NETWORK SPOKESPEOPLE
Dr. Ben Trott (School of Culture and Society)
ben.trott@leuphana.de
Prof. Dr. Hannah Trittin-Ulbrich (School of Management and Technology)
hannah.trittin@leuphana.de