A pre-launch plenary for the 3rd Edition of The Regulation of Desire convened by Gary Kinsman, the SSA’s 2022 Academic Leadership in Sexuality Studies Award Recipient
Wednesday | 31 May 2023 | 10:45am – 12:30pm,
@ York University, Curtis Lecture Hall G
- Please wear a mask!
This fall Concordia University Press will publish the third edition of Gary Kinsman’s The Regulation of Desire, first published in 1987, with an expanded edition in 1996. This plenary will be a preview of what is coming in the 2023 edition focusing on both the emergence and resistance against the white Neoliberal Queer. The third edition includes a new Introduction, a revised chapter on the colonization and resistance of Indigenous peoples, an updated chapter on what has taken place since 1996 including the emergence of the Neoliberal Queer, and a revised conclusion based on abolitionist hope and revolutionary love.
Speakers include Gary Kinsman (also co-author of The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation) who will refer to sections from the Introduction and Conclusion of the third edition; OmiSoore Dryden, of #GotBlood2Give, co-editor (with Suzanne Lenon) of Disrupting Queer Inclusions: Canadian Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging (UBC Press, 2015), who has written the Forward for the third edition and is the James R. Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie; Beverly Bain, Black Radical Queer anti-capitalist feminist revolutionary who teaches in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga; and queer historian Tom Hooper who has written extensively on the bath raids and the limitations of the 1969 criminal code reform and the Afterword to this edition. This sets the stage for an engaged discussion on how we can move beyond the Neoliberal Queer.
Gary Kinsman is a queer liberation, anti-oppression, and anti-capitalist activist and the co-author of The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation.
Some praise for the 3rd edition.
“Gary Kinsman has once again undertaken the formidable challenge of tracing histories or queer and trans social movements and activism. Kinsman succeeds at this project by weaving the concepts of colonialism, neoliberalism, homonationalism, and anti-Black racism throughout. This new edition of The Regulation of Desire is also successful, and impactful, because it is based on the author’s activism, which has spanned decades and has engaged in critically important issues for queer and trans people. The inclusion of personal experiences and perspectives grounds and humanizes the texts, making it more accessible to researchers and students, and accountable to activists. These additions model how members of queer and trans communities can be self-reflective while engaging in research, activism, and community building.” —Alexa DeGagne, Women’s and Gender Studies, Athabasca University
“The 3rd edition of The Regulation of Desire is a pleasure to read and fills in many gaps on queer and trans social-movement literatures. Kinsman’s intellectual work de-essentializes historical materialism and simultaneously makes clear the relevance of queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and racialized lives in anti-capitalist struggle. This theoretical work comes alive through its documentation of contemporary social struggles and it is a stunning update of social-movement history and theory informing sexuality studies.” —Jamie Magnusson, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto