29 NOVEMBER 2013
Against Equality:
Ryan Conran, Karma Chávez, Yasmin Nair
in conversation with: Nila Kamol Krishna Gupta
Chair: Sarah Keenan (6-8 PM)
The Queer African Reader:
Sokari Ekine, Sandeep Bakshi, Mia Nikasimo and Diriye Osman (8 – 9 PM)
With a Reception to follow.
29 November 2013 (6-9 PM)
***Room 402*** (Birkbeck Main Building), Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX, UK
Maps and directions: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/maps
Against Equality: An Economic Critique of the Queer Imagination (6-8 PM) & Celebrating the Publication of the Queer African Reader (8-9 PM).
An evening dedicated to transnational queer critique, critical resistance to the politics of inclusion – including gay marriage and LGBT connivance with the military and prison industrial complexes – and celebration of transnational activist scholarship and struggles, recognising resonances and dissonances, and building on spaces of connection.
Against Equality members’ panel participation focuses on dissecting the three cornerstone issues of the mainstream gay and lesbian rights movement in the United States: marriage, military inclusion, and hate crime legislation. Against Equality examines how mobilization around rights-based discourses collapses the queer political imagination into the narrow confines of contemporary gay pragmatism as espoused by gay and lesbian neoconservatives and so called progressives alike. The panel further details how supporting military inclusion bolsters the military industrial complex, and backing laws to protect against so-called hate crimes only reinforce the prison industrial complex—both institutions which are violent to queers and non-queers alike. In discussing these issues, Against Equality will consider what an economic critique and analysis of queer politics, outside of simply critiquing “homonormativity” or “sex-negativity”, might really look like. Speakers will also talk about the Against Equality archive and its function as a historical anchor for radical queer political thought/imagination in the present and hopefully decades to come.
Bios:
The Collective: Against Equality is an online archive, publishing, and arts collective focused on critiquing mainstream gay and lesbian politics. As a transnational cabal of queer thinkers, writers and artists, we are committed to dislodging the centrality of equality rhetoric and challenging the demand for inclusion in the institutions of marriage, the military, and the prison industrial complex via hate crime legislation. AE has produced three widely circulated anthologies on these topics, and our archive can be found at www.againstequality.org. We want to reinvigorate the queer political imagination with fantastic possibility.
Ryan Conrad is an outlaw artist, terrorist academic, and petty thief from a mill town in central Maine. He is the co-founder of Against Equality and continues his involvement in the project as a member of the editorial collective. His work as a visual and performing artist has exhibited internationally in Europe, Asia, and across the United States and Canada. He continues to write for both academic and non-academic presses as well as present his written and visual work at academic and activist conferences. Conrad is currently a Sexuality Studies PhD candidate at Concordia University in Montréal and holds an MFA from the Maine College of Art. His work and record of community organizing is archived on www.faggotz.org.
Karma Chávez is a queer Chicana feminist teacher and scholar who grew up in rural Nebraska. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin where she teaches in Communication Arts and Chican@ and Latin@ Studies at UW-Madison. She also works with various queer, immigration and leftist organizing projects, and she is the host of a radio show on WORT FM Community Radio called “A Public Affair.” Chávez is the author of several academic and non-academic articles on feminism, queer theory and politics, migration, and social movements. Her book, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities will be out with University of Illinois Press in Fall 2013. She is the co-founder of the Queer Migration Research Network (http://queermigration.com).
Yasmin Nair is a writer in Uptown, Chicago and the co-founder of Against Equality. Nair has been an activist and organizer in Chicago since she moved there in 1997. She was, from 1999-2003, a member of the now-defunct Queer to the Left. She is currently a member of the Chicago grassroots organization Gender JUST (Justice United for Societal Transformation) and recently became its Policy Director (a volunteer position). Her activist work includes gentrification, immigration, public education, and youth at risk. Her written work can be found at www.yasminnair.net.
Nila is a qtipoc creator, activist and recovering sometime academic. Over the last ten years, he has organized around lived experiences of being bi, trans, queer, poc, a mental health worker and service user, a BDSM’er and intersectionality. He had presented at conferences in Berlin, London, Brighton, and been published in magazine, academic and creative contexts.He’s increasingly focussing on/returning to a childhood passion for making art. He’ll be reflecting on creating and working on Translations: Trans, Gender Variant and Intersex People of Colour in the UK as a project of decolonising trans culture.
Sandeep Bakshi recently completed his PhD from the School of English at the University of Leicester, UK. His thesis examines contemporary queer fiction in English from South Asia and its diasporas. It interrupts routine practices of absorption and gradual obliteration of non-Western/non-White subjects in standard accounts of queerness and concurrently locates queer self-representation from postcolonial/diasporic South Asian writers as central to a discussion of the larger conceptual debates in queer theory. Sandeep is currently turning his PhD into a monograph. Additionally, he is working on transnational queer paradigms in academic/activist spaces in the UK and France. His research interests cover: Queer and Postcolonial Theories, Postcolonial Anglophone and Francophone Literatures, Literature, Cinema and Culture of South Asia and its Diasporas, Transgender Articulations, and Punjabi Folk Representations.
Sokari Ekine is Founder and editor of Black Looks, is a writer, educationalist and digital activist. She is editor of SMS Uprising: Mobile Phone Activism in Africa [2010] co-editor of African Awakenings [Firoze Manji, 2011] and the forthcoming Queer African Reader [Hakima Abbas. 2012]. Sokari is a weekly contributor to Pambazuka News and her writings have appeared in progressive media and academic journals in Africa, Europe and the US. Sokari also blogs at Tumblr.
Sarah Keenan teaches feminist and critical race theory at the School of Oriental and African Studies and has been active in various anti-racist community campaigns.
Mia Nikashimo is a creative writer, essayist, poet and playwright. She is currently working on a novella and other stories entitled Trans.
Diriye Osman is a Somali-born British writer, visual artist and editor. His collection of short stories Fairytale For Lost Children has just been published, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fairytales-Lost-Children-Diriye-Osman/dp/0956971946 He is the deputy editor of SCARF magazine.