Postponed: Queer Directions Symposium 2022: Queer Care and Radical Hospitality

Queer Directions is an annual event hosted by the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, whose mandate is to feature major developments in queer and trans studies, focusing on vital themes and emerging critiques. This year’s topic is Queer Care and Radical Hospitality and seeks to ask a series of pressing questions: how can people on the fringes of mainstream economies collectively access resources that normative practices of care keep them from? How can we form networks of care that create racial, economic, and disability justice? How do trans studies, intersectional queer theory, and critical race theory provide us with the histories, theories, and material practices we need to address and transform the current crisis of everyday life? Our guest speakers are: Dean Spade, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Hil Malatino, and Savannah Shange.

This event will be held as a Zoom webinar on March 18th 2022, 4:30pm – 6:30pm EST. Live captions will be available and ASL is available upon request. Please contact sexual.diversity@utoronto.ca with any access requests. Queer Directions 2022 is co-sponsored by the Centre for Global Disability Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough. You can find more information about the Centre here.

Registration through Zoom is required for access to the webinar.

Dean Spade is Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law. He is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (2015) and Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the next) (2020). In 2002, Spade founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a collective organization focused on providing free legal services, engaging in impact litigation, and building community organizing led by and for trans and gender nonconforming people who are low-income and/or people of color. In 2016, he co-founded Big Door Brigade, a collective organized around the significance of mutual aid as a strategy for survival and mobilization.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer, disabled, nonbinary femme poet, writer, educator, and social activist.  They are the author or co-editor of nine books, including Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, and Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon). They are the 2020 recipient of the Lambda Literary 2020 Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction recognizing “a lifetime of work documenting the complexity of queer experience.” They are also the recipient of the 2020 Ford Foundation’s Disability Futures Fellowship.

Hil Malatino is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Research Associate at the Rock Ethics Institute at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (2019), which examines the relationship between intersex embodiment, biomedical technologies, and the forms of subjectivity both enabled and constrained by the medicalization of gender non-conformance. His second book, Trans Care (2020), offers a critical intervention in how care labor and care ethics have been thought, arguing that dominant modes of conceiving and critiquing the politics and distribution of care entrench normative and cis-centric familial structures and gendered arrangements.

Savannah Shange is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz and serves as principal faculty in Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. She is the author of Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco (2019), which sees San Francisco as a social laboratory for how Black communities survive the end of their worlds and argues for abolition over progressive reform as the needed path toward Black freedom. The book was the winner of the 2020 Gregory Bateson Book Prize from the Society of Cultural Anthropology. Her research interests include gentrification, multiracial coalition, ethnographic ethics, and Black femme gender. She is the author of multiple articles published in Transforming Anthropology, The Black Scholar, and Women & Society.