Huh?

Every weekend I get around 100 emails from various liberal arts disciplines issuing calls for conference papers (CFP). These cover most every literary and cultural topic available and range from tiny regional meetings in the academic hinterlands through the largest conferences in the nation (many of which draw thousands of academics).

Since scholarship is required for continued excellence in teaching (ummm, as well as for tenure) I subscribe to a listserv that sends out these CFPs by the truckload. And many of them are rather interesting.

This one caught my eye. It is a CFP for a graduate student seminar at New York University. After giving a basic outline of the conference, it offers the following suggestions for paper topics:

Proposals may address, but are not restricted to, the following topics:
Influence, tradition, and intellectual debt
Debt and civic participation
Translation and debt
Debt and the gift
Responsibility, restitution, reconciliation, revenge
Debt as a category of relation to an other
Debt and the national imaginary
Remembering, memorializing, and monumentalizing debt
Debt and inheritance
Exchange, interest, and accumulation
Debt and class
The ethics of the loan
Debt and historiography
Queering debt
Licensing, permission, and intellectual property
Debt and the State/the State of the Debt
Monitoring debt: justice and forgiveness
Debt and the (academic) institution

I am utterly bumfuzzled by the suggested proposal “Queering Debt”. Queer studies has become established over the last several years as an area of literary studies, but I have absolutely no idea what gender theory has to do with running up your credit card. (In fact, Googling “Queering Debt” reveals only publications of this call for papers.) So while Queer Studies is more established than say Fat Studies, this particular call for papers leaves me confused.