Tyrell Collins, "Voices of Defiance: Black Queer Memoirs as Resistance" Amidst social, environmental, and political crises, LGBTQ-BIPOC memoirs offer transformative insights into resilience and liberation. By challenging dominant narratives and embodying acts of personal and communal resistance, LGBTQ-BIPOC memoirs contribute to "liberatory practices." Based on intersectionality and queer theory, this study examines LGBTQ-BIPOC memoirists who navigate intersecting oppressive systems while affirming their identities and asserting agency. Using Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectionality and E. Partick Johnson's "quare" studies, I argue that these memoirs are acts of defiance, reflecting the LGBTQ-BIPOC experience as both a site of resistance and survival. Janet Mock and Saeed Jones' memoirs Redefining Realness and How We Fight For Our Lives are examples of core texts that establish a relationship between LGBTQ-BIPOC lived experiences and crisis understanding informed by resilience, resistance, and reimagined futures. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the current discourse on the power of marginalized narratives to disrupt crisis-laden worldviews and foster transformative change.
Kohinur Khyum, "Storytelling as Liberatory Practice for Survivors of Forced Marriage" This paper examines how forced marriage survivors from the South Asian diaspora community from the US and UK are breaking intergenerational cultural abuse by telling their stories. Forced marriage is prevalent and often hides under the guise of arranged marriage in the South Asian culture. However, there are different layers of honor-based violence against women within the diaspora community. This global human rights issue is often deemed a cultural practice ‘over there’ but not a problem in the countries in the global North. However, forced marriage is a concern among several immigrant communities including the South Asian diaspora community in several developed countries including Canada, the US, Britain, Australia, and others. Forced marriage in South Asian diaspora culture is a complex interplay of tradition, cultural abuse, honor violence, religious practice, and gender dynamics. In this paper, I will shed light on how these individuals are often silenced because they are not considered the ‘model victims’ because most of their perpetrators are from their minority communities in the global north. I argue that narrative liberation by breaking the systemic silence imposed on forced marriage survivors by their communities, families, social services, and a section of feminist activists became a major tool to foster advocacy efforts to prevent forced marriages within the South Asian diaspora community.
