Brianna Doe, "Black on Purpose: Studying Tragedy From an Africana Epistemology Toward a Black Cosmology Tragedy"
By chronologizing and captioning our family photos, this emergent and experimental archive is a continuation of quotidian praxis initiated by my research interlocutors, the women in my own family whose shared experiences form a genealogy of routinized violence. This work suggests that a queer of color critique intimates the ways that Black matriarchs make and keep life amidst the material constraints of antiblack violence. It is a working complement to my dissertation research, where I examine how Black women (re)produce black subjectivity in the thrust of modernity. In the wake of enslavement and its many afterlives (Sharpe 2016), and in a time-space where the plantation is the conceptual terrain of the inner-city (McKittrich 2013), some theorists argue that African-American culture-bearers operate "...in the absence of the rights of man or the assurances of the self-possessed individual [...]" (Hartman 2010:66), and are thus still enslaved. As a result of antiblackness in the modern world, places of origin, lines of descent, chronicles of cosmology and ritual practice are markedly ephemeral. My art is a sought articulation of something and somewhere else, an alternative metric or horizon through and upon which to tell the story of a family where men do and do not exist, where the worst has already happened, is happening, and is bound to happen again unless they stay anticipatory. For these women, family is counter-historical and alternatively made in the purposeful excommunication of men rather than despite them.
Elio Harlan, "Embracing the Queer Monstrous Body as an Act of Survival and Self-Love"
How is it possible to find joy, let alone live, in a society that desires conformation or cremation as your only path of existence? It is constantly demanded of queer people to somehow prove our own humanness and worth, yet measures of this are held to an entirely arbitrary standard that is infeasible short of self extermination. We are made demon, imp, mutant, and monster: the very borders of our bodies legislated by those willfully ignorant of our own experiences and humanity. But what happens when we embrace this image of monstrosity forced upon us rather than appeal to the humanity of those who choose not recognize us as human? we take the claws and fangs given to us and use them to finally bite back? How does the reclaiming of these narrative devices give us the means to survive and learn to not only accept, but love oneself in our entirety? Through this I want to look at queer monstrous bodies created or imagined in the works of Andrew Joseph White, bodies that are deemed broken and ill by an outside force, ones that are left marked by their own survival, that defy or otherwise confront a conformed society. In combining the creative work of Andrew Joseph White with the theoretical works of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Margrit Shildrick, and several additional scholars, I aim to construct a framework for embodying queer monstrosity as a source of empowerment and reenforce the notion of a queer monstrous—and especially current or post-transitioning—body as a healed body deserving of existence and love above all.
Jeiselynn N. Ríos Rivera, "When Existence is Denied: Identifying Crisis in the Bi+ Community"
How do we know when we are in a crisis?
As a group that has been relegated to the realm of non-existence, Bi+ people are disproportionately likely to suffer from chronic illness, mood disorders, and loneliness. Further, they experience a double constraint from both hetero- and homonormative understandings of sexuality, exposing them to inordinate amounts of violence from both groups. Within academia, this also becomes prevalent as research on Bi+ populations must still continuously justify the uniqueness of this group despite having scholarship since early 1900’s that may very well situate bisexuality studies as a distinct subfield of its very own. Activism faces a similar pitfall, where Bi+ activists are rarely mentioned despite being foundational in the development of the broader LGBTQ movement. How can Bi+ people know we are facing a crisis when there is still an open refusal to acknowledge our existence—never mind recognize the importance of Bi+ specific scholarship?
I argue that both academic and activist approaches must be deployed in order to understand what makes bi+ experiences unique. Through autoethnographic reflection, I examine the practical effects theoretical understandings of oppression can have, especially when articulated in highly accessible and sustainable ways. By grounding myself in a theoretically informed activist project Bisexual Killjoy Podcast, I reveal exactly what can be gained from articulating highly abstract concepts in relatable ways.
For this subjugated population faced by allied political interests in their oppression, theory can emerge as a liberatory practice. It is by asking what theory can do for this group of people that we can begin to understand how we know when we are in crisis – and what steps we can take to liberate ourselves from it.
Tiffany Thompson, "Women and 'the Troubles': Navigating Crisis and Displacement during the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1969--1979"
When studying Northern Ireland’s Troubles, scholars have largely focused on paramilitary violence, militant republicans and their imprisonment, and the peace process, all of which were not only male-dominated spheres, but also subsequently narrated in ways that obscured women’s involvement. My research investigates volatile moments in the first decade of the conflict with consideration to the intersectional, transnational, and post-colonial contexts of the Troubles in order to reflect a broader range of experiences, particularly in terms of working-class women on both sides of the sectarian divide. Burnt-out homes and barricaded neighborhoods were familiar sights in Belfast in the 1970s as the violence of the Troubles left entire families displaced, but it was overwhelmingly women, usually with children in tow, who fled the North. As such this paper will explore the relationship between the British state’s often heavy-handed attempts to manage the armed conflict and the crises that ensued. It also considers the role of institutions in Northern Ireland, Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland that responded in these moments of acute crisis. However, in doing so, my research recenters women and their place in this story, interrogating their particular experiences of violence at the hands of predominantly male crowds, police, and paramilitaries; asking about their experiences of displacement and life in refugee camps; and examining their decisions to accept or reject support offered by various states when navigating the conflict. Through a feminist analysis of Northern Irish women’s experiences of violence and displacement, I ultimately seek to highlight their agency, resiliency, and struggle to protect and care for their families and communities.
