In August 2025, the University of Costa Rica hosted the First International and Interdisciplinary Congress, "Unlivable Lives: Masculinities in Ibero-America." This gathering addressed hegemonic masculinity as an imaginary construct permeating social and legal realities, as well as artistic and literary works, establishing boundaries and exclusions. Numerous reflections on gender and masculinities were developed from diverse fields. Social changes in the relationships between men and women, the breakdown of dominant binary narratives, the efforts of various activist movements, feminist and LGBTQ+ struggles, and studies on the body, sex, gender, and identities, among others, revealed at the congress the importance of rethinking, within the system of social and sexual practices, what we understand as masculinity.

The proposal to hold the second congress at the University of La Laguna in 2026 seeks to continue and deepen the lines of discussion opened at the University of Costa Rica, but with a more specific focus for this call: human displacement and its representations in the cultural imaginary from a gender and LGBTQIA+ perspective. Today, it is essential to create these kinds of interdisciplinary spaces for dialogue between the social and legal sciences, the humanities, and activist groups that investigate, create, and denounce the structural violence that accompanies human mobility in a global border system that forgets that migration is a right, that no one is illegal.

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