The Sex Salon Speaker Series, University College,
The University of Toronto Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies SEX SALON presents
Homonationalism and Transnational Sexual Politics
Chair: Evan Vipond
Homonationalism, the Neo-Liberal Queer and class struggle: Towards an internationalist queer marxist sexual/gender politics by Gary Kinsman
In a League of their Own: Sex Trafficking Governance at the League of Nations by Megan Ross
Homonationalist Expulsions from Toronto’s Gaybourhood by Amy Verhaeghe
Where: University College Room 240
When: Thurday, February 25, 2016 from 4:00pm – 6:30pm
ALL WELCOME!
This event is wheelchair accessible. For barrier free access, questions, or more information contact us at sds.sexsalon@gmail.com
Abstracts and Bios:
Homonationalism, the Neo-Liberal Queer and class struggle: Towards an internationalist queer marxist sexual/gender politics by Gary Kinsman
Abstract:
Using my historical sociological work on the emergence of the neo-liberal queer in the ‘Canadian’ context as a resource I engage with questions raised by three recent books. These are: Joseph Massad’s Desiring Arabs (2007); Peter Drucker’s Warped, Gay Normality and Queer Anticapitalism (2014); and David Murray’s Real Queer? Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Refugees in the Canadian Refugee Apparatus (2015). Out of this engagement I develop suggestions for the development of an internationalist anti-racist queer marxist sexual/gender politics that resists neo-liberalism and homonationalism and the global imposition of the hetero/homo binary around the world as part of capitalist globalization. While defending sexual/gender diversity (including third and fourth genders) this approach refuses to see sexual or gender identity as the ‘truth’ of people’s beings and refuses to view gender and sexual formation in other parts of the world as more ‘primitive’ or as less ‘advanced’ that in the ‘west’ and ‘north.’ I will also point how current LGBT refugee regimes are part of this imposition of ‘western’ LGBT identifications onto people of colour coming from the ‘global south.’ Using the tools of a queered historical materialism this approach finds the social basis for homonationalism in class and class struggles. The talk closes with a call to answer neo-liberal homonationalist classed and raced struggle with our own working class, anti-colonialist and anti-racist sexual political struggles.
Bio:
Gary Kinsman is a long-time queer liberation, anti-poverty, and anti-capitalist activist living on indigenous land. He is currently involved in the AIDS Activist History Project and with Queer Trans Community Defence and is the author of The Regulation of Desire, co-author (with Patrizia Gentile) of The Canadian War on Queers, and editor of Whose National Security? and Sociology for Changing the World. He currently shares his time between Toronto and Sudbury, where he is a professor emeritus at Laurentian University. His website is http://radicalnoise.ca/
Abstracts and Bios:
In a League of their Own: Sex Trafficking Governance at the League of Nations by Megan Ross
Abstract:
This article explores the work of the largely unstudied Advisory Committee for the Trafficking of Women and Children at the League of Nations. It provides the first sustained account of how this international organization operated, assesses the transnational aspects of its work and demonstrates its sophisticated governance structure. It establishes how transnationalism allowed non-member states and smaller member states of the League of Nations to not only participate in the activities of the Committee, but also direct its work and set its agenda. It narrates how an ideological tension around whether states should abolish prostitution, led the Committee to bypass national interests by setting up a transnational web of police forces dedicated fighting sex trafficking. It further elaborates how sexuality more broadly was policed, under the auspices of this transnational sex trafficking regulation.
Bio:
Megan Ross is a SJD student in the Faculty of Law under the supervision of Brenda Cossman. Her research focuses on the relationship between criminal laws and sexuality, explored through legal history. She is a board member at Maggies: Toronto Sex Worker Action Project, and is currently teaching Gender Issues in the Law at the Women and Gender Studies Institute here at the University of Toronto. She has published in the Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy, and worked as a legal advisor at UNICEF on international human trafficking laws.
Homonationalist Expulsions from Toronto’s Gaybourhood by Amy Verhaeghe
Abstract:
My paper explores the ways in which localized manifestations of homonationalism can discursively and materially expel racialized and poor people from homonormativized spaces. Taking the media discourse generated by Jarvis Collegiate students throwing slushies at people in the Church-Wellesley Village in early 2011 as a case study, I argue that Canadian human rights discourse is being mobilized by predominately white gay men with class privilege to secure constructions of people who are racialized as violently homophobic and of people who are poor, have precarious access to housing, and who use drugs as threats to public safety. I focus on the concurrent spatialized reconfigurations of the village fuelled by the slushie incidents which helped secure the discursive construction of a border between the village and St. James Town and prompted internal changes to the village which made the space increasingly dangerous for people who are poor, precariously housed, or who use drugs.
Bio:
Amy Verhaeghe is a second year PhD student in Gender, Feminist, & Women’s Studies at York University. Her work takes a transnational approach to analyzing Canadian settler homonationalism.