As we are celebrating Pride Month in Canada, war is raging in multiple parts of the world. These days, LGBTQ+ communities in Ukraine and in Middle East have to navigate the geopolitical impacts of LGBTQ+ rights discourses while physically surviving within the war, organizing for political action and supporting each other.
How do war and colonialism affect queer lives and politics? What is the role of whiteness/proximity to the so called "West" in international support to queers? How can we create transnational queer solidarities across various war-zones?
Transnational activists and scholars from Canada, Ukraine and Middle East will try to answer these difficult questions in this panel discussion. They will discuss the challenges facing LGBTQ+communities in conflict zones and the importance of transnational solidarities.
Date: June 13 at 1 p.m.
Speakers names and bios:
Natalie Kouri-Towe is an interdisciplinary feminist and sexuality studies scholar whose work is primarily concerned with solidarity, kinship, and attachment in social movements and activist responses to war and sexuality-based violence. She is currently an Assistant Professor and Practicum Director for the Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality Program at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. She is currently working in two new areas of research; the first examines responses to the "refugee crisis," and the second investigates sexuality pedagogies in the contemporary classroom.
Marusya Bociurkiw is a scholar, author, filmmaker, and activist. She is a professor in RTA School of Media at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto where she teaches courses on social justice media and documentary production. She is director of The Studio for Media Activism and Critical Thought, a scholarly and activist intervention into the neoliberal university. Her research is broadly concerned with the intersections of affect , nation and media and their gendered, queered and racialized ramifications. She is the author of 6 books, including Feeling Canadian: Television Nationalism & Affect (WLP Press). Her literary work includes over 50 published stories and poems in a range of magazines, journals and books. Her current writing on the Russian invasion of Ukraine can be found in the blog Diaspora War Diary.
Maya El Helou is a Ph.D. candidate in the sociocultural anthropology department in a collaborative program with Women and Gender studies at the University of Toronto. El Helou is a feminist researcher, a queer ethnographer, and a comic artist that works on illustrating her way through ethnographic fieldwork. Her theoretical interests revolve around Necropolitics, State cannibalism, Queer Theory, embodiment, temporality, spatiality, and urban infrastructure.
This is a virtual event and will be held on zoom.
