Transgressing Disciplines: a trans studies lecture series

Convened by Dr. Qui Alexander

As trans studies continues to emerge within a colonial, capitalist and carceral academic landscape, Transgressing Disciplines seeks to offer a collective intervention to interrupt, agitate and transform how we engage trans studies as a field and a discipline. This series invites conversations and collaborations with emerging Black trans thinkers, artists and cultural workers whose crafts transcend traditional modes of knowledge production. To transgress means to go beyond a limit or boundary; this series aims to push the boundaries of what trans studies can do to nourish (rather than extract from) Black trans people and communities. Embracing both an interdisciplinary and anti-carceral approach to trans studies, this series centers Black trans life in an effort to deepen our understandings of race, class and gender in our intellectual, artistic and cultural work.

2024-2025
Black Boundlessness: Aesthetics, Performance and Ethics Under Duress

This talk presents an overview of my forthcoming book entitled Black Boundlessness: Aesthetics, Performance and Ethics Under Duress which theorizes that Black life is simultaneously capacious, complex and contradictory precipitating Black artists and everyday people to respond to the myriad manifestations of antiblackness—namely, gratuitous violence, socioeconomic marginalization and spatial exclusion—by establishing freedom practices that enable the cultivation of a meaningful life despite ongoing annihilation. Black Boundlessness investigates freedom practices including multiplicity, transmutation/shapeshifting and critical nonmonogamy to reveal how artists such as such as Moses Sumney and Yves Tumor and writers including Audre Lorde and Taiye Selasi in addition to quotidian Black people engage performance, aesthetics and ethics in visionary ways which hold the potential to propel Black people into a space of boundless possibility.

About the Speaker

Julian Kevon Kamilah Glover (she/they) is a scholar and artist who graduated with honors from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, holds an MPA from Indiana University and earned a PhD in Black Studies from Northwestern University. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Genders, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and the Department of Dance & Choreography at Virginia Commonwealth University where their research focuses on Black/brown queer cultural formations, performance, ethnography, embodied knowledge, performance theory and Black futurity. They were awarded a Franke Fellowship at Northwestern’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, a Humanities Research Center fellowship (VCU) and their work appears in journals including American Quarterly, Feminist Formations, South Atlantic Quarterly, Souls, GLQ and Text & Performance Quarterly. Among their numerous awards, she was inducted into the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society at Yale University and is a longtime member of the ballroom scene. They have also worked with the Grammy award winning Swedish singer Robyn and appeared in the music video for the title track of her 2018 album Honey. A classically trained cellist, their creative work is multidisciplinary and engages sonic, visual, affective, written and kinesthetic registers with the aim of bringing viewers into critical dialogue with themselves towards psychic, spiritual and interpersonal transformation.

2023-24

Join us on February 28, 2024 for the talk “Rehearsals & Refusals: notes on trans* imagination” with Alan Pelaez Lopez (@migrantscribble). This is the inaugural lecture in our new speaker series Crossings: Conversations from the &, curated by Dr. Qui Alexander and Dr. SA Smythe. Reserve your ticket at uoft.me/crossings2024.

About The Talk
Gender and sexual diversity are categories mobilized by countries in the Global North to narrate progress, liberal democracy, and unity. However, these same countries force trans* migrants into nonconsensual performance contracts in exchange for conditional protection. Rehearsals & Refusals is a poetic and theoretical address that centers the lived experiences of Black trans* migrants who have been illegalized by Western empires. The talk attends to the way trans* migrants rehearse the performative junctions of race and gender to practice refusal and activate a radical trans*imagination. By weaving Black trans* studies and Indigenous studies, Rehearsals & Refusals proposes kinship and dreaming as methods that negate empire.

About the Speaker
Alan Pelaez Lopez (AfroZapotec) is an artist and scholar from Oaxaca, Mexico invested in the Black Indigenous imagination, trans futurities, abstraction, and opacity.

Image Credit: Jess X Snow (@jessxsnow), “I Will Never Stop Reaching For You,” 2015