Queer Directions Symposium: Indigeneities & Sexualities

The Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies hosts our annual Queer Directions Symposium! This year’s theme is Indigeneities & Sexualities. About this Event

Queer Directions is an annual symposium hosted by the Bonham Centre whose primary goal is to offer a dynamic forum for discussion of the most recent and relevant issues in queer, trans, and sexuality studies. This year’s Symposium is “Indigeneities & Sexualities” with guest speakers Audra Simpson, Dayna Danger, Joseph M. Pierce, and T.J. Tallie.

This event will be held as a 500-person Zoom webinar (attendance is first-come, first-served to the webinar on day-of) as well as a Youtube livestream on the online event page. Registration on Eventbrite is required for access to both links.

Live captions will be available.

Audra Simpson (Kahnawake Mohawk) is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her research and writing is rooted within Indigenous polities in the US and Canada and crosses the fields of anthropology, Indigenous Studies, American and Canadian Studies, gender and sexuality studies as well as politics. Her recent research is a genealogy of affective governance and extraction across the US and Canada. She is co-editor of Theorizing Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2014). Her book, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (2014, DUP) won the Sharon Stephens Prize (AES), the “Best first Book Award” (NAISA), and the Lora Romero Award (ASA).

Dayna Danger is a 2Spirit/Queer, Metis/Saulteaux/Polish visual artist who uses photography, sculpture, performance and video to question the lines between empowerment and objectification by claiming space with her larger than life scale work. Ongoing works exploring BDSM and beaded leather fetish masks address the complicated dynamics of sexuality, gender, and power in a consensual and feminist manner. Danger has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in such venues as Latitude 53, Edmonton (AB); Urban Shaman, Winnipeg (MB); Warren G Flowers Art Gallery, Montréal (Québec); dc3 Projects, Edmonton (AB); Gallery 101, Ottawa (OT); Roundhouse, Vancouver (BC), and the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe (NM).

Joseph M. Pierce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) which was awarded 2020 Best Book in the Nineteenth Century by the Nineteenth Century Studies Section of LASA. He is co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” His work has been published in Taller de Letras, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, and has also been featured in Indian Country Today. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

T.J. Tallie is Assistant Professor, History at the University of San Diego. He specializes in the comparative settler colonial and imperial history, with a focus on South Africa. He is the author of Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), which uses queer theory and critical indigenous studies to examine how discourses of European civilization underpinned colonial legislation that policed white settler behaviour and attempted to consign indigenous Africans and Indian migrants to subservient positions within Natal. His current research project, tentatively titled Conjugal States, examines how the concept of monogamy became deeply linked to the idea of white settler reproduction in South Africa, British Columbia and New Zealand.