Queer and Trans Research Lab Faculty Fellowships

Liza Blake is Associate Professor of English, with research interests in early modern literature, the histories of philosophy and science, and asexuality studies. With two U of T students, she founded the online Asexuality and Aromanticism Bibliography, a resource with tagged bibliography entries meant to help scholars find relevant writing on the topics of asexuality and aromanticism studies. She has published on “Teaching Premodern Asexualities and Aromanticisms” in The Sundial and is co-editing (with Catherine Clifford and Aley O’Mara) a collection called Early Modern Asexualities. While at the QTRL, she will be bringing the edited collection to completion, updating the online Bibliography, and beginning work on a new monograph entitled “I want not love”: The Asexuality and Aromanticism of Early Modern Love Poetry. The book argues that though the modern trend is to read Renaissance love poetry as erotic and saturated with desire, it is in this body of work that we can find some of the clearest first-person assertions of never having experienced attraction or desire, so that we might label this poetry as one of our earliest “asexual archives.” But it also argues we cannot embrace these early forms of ace and aro representation without critically analyzing the misogyny, racism, and ableism that that “asexuality” includes. Through careful close reading and in conversation with modern theory, the book will dissect early modern love poetry, tracing the long afterlife of this poetry in the ways we talk about, theorize, and normalize sexual desire and romantic attraction today.

Rafael Grohmann is Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Critical Platform Studies in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media & Faculty of Information. His research focuses on how workers are learning and failing to govern digital technologies, such as platforms, data, and artificial intelligence (AI), with a focus in Latin America. During the faculty fellowship, Grohmann will conduct the research for his project Failure in Queer and Trans Worker-Owned Platforms. The aim of this project is to analyze how the concept of queer failure can be applied to understand platform cooperatives owned by queer and trans working people. Working with and on these queer and trans-led platform labour cooperatives in São Paulo and Buenos Aires, Grohmann engages platform and digital labour studies via queer and trans methodological innovations in digital research. The project informs his SSHRC-funded project Worker-Owned Intersectional Platforms (WOIP), with a focus in Brazil and Argentina. During the faculty fellowship, Grohmann will also work on his first book project in English, Laboratories of Organizing: Workers Failing and Learning How to Govern Digital Technologies. The notion of queer failure is one of the core concepts of the book, which will provide a notion of failure from a queer and anti-capitalist framework to understand the experimental, out of place, incomplete movements of Latin American workers – especially queer, trans, black and brown people, and women – in their struggles around platform labour as they work to build and govern their own digital technologies.