20-21 C American colloquium: “Queer Senior Living with Charles Henri Ford and Indra Tamang” with Scott Herring

This presentation explores how American surrealist Charles Henri Ford and his Nepalese collaborator Indra Tamang together initiated a sustained experiment in queer senior living at the Dakota apartment building from the mid-1970s up to Ford’s death in 2002.  Examining archival holdings from the Beinecke Library as well as the Getty Research Institute, I discuss how these two artists transformed shared life at the Dakota into a surrealist senior apartment via late-late modernist haiku and collage.  Assessing the intricate aesthetics of this Upper West Side elderscape, I argue, teaches us much about cross-generational contact, creative aging within domestic intimacies, and the possibilities of queer longevity.

English Dept event, cosponsored by IRWGS

The Politics and Rights of Trans and Gender Non-Conforming People

Center for Gender and Sexuality Law event.

This panel will discuss the current state of affairs for trans and gender non-conforming people in the U.S. More specifically, speakers will reflect on arguments recently made before the Supreme Court in cases affecting the trans and GNC community.

About the Panelists

Katherine Franke – Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University.

Alejandra Caraballo – Staff Attorney, Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund (TLDEF).

Paisley Currah – Endowed Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center.

This event is free and open to the public.

Reading of architectural and sensory space in the children’s book “Goodnight Moon” with Matthew-Robin Nye

Grad Fellow event.

About the Speaker

Matthew-Robin Nye is is a visual artist, cultural producer, and has exhibited, lectured and held residencies in Canada and abroad. He is a Joseph-Armand Bombardier PhD student at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University, in Montreal. Employing a research-creation methodology, Nye traverses the fields of contemporary art, process philosophy and performance theory to think towards the problem of creating a ‘queer utopic space’, a wildness which evolves alongside a continually renewing present; or, the production of multiplicities in performance, installation, text-based and conceptual practice. Art-making and artistic experience are used to think about how to bridge the fields of environmental philosophy and queer theory, harnessing their potentials to constitute a limitless subject, unbounded by the pitfalls of either discourse in its singularity.

From Criminalization to Liberation: Organizing Migrant Asian Sex Workers Across Oceans 

Red Canary Song event

Although multiple models of policing sex work- including global anti-trafficking efforts as full criminalization (in the U.S), buyer criminalization (the Swedish model), legalization (in the Netherlands), and full decriminalization (as in New Zealand)- currently compete in activist, governmental, and policy-making circles, they all disproportionately affect migrant sex workers. This conversation centers theories and practices that emerge from organizing with Asian sex worker communities embedded in complex migration networks that span East Asia, Southeast Asia, and North America. The dominant anti-trafficking discourse in relation to migrant sex work reinforces policing and surveillance networks, stigmatizes sex workers, and isolates migrants, with the result that it often harms those who it is meant to “save.” Based on research and organizing in China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Canada, and the United States, the speakers here insist that we think of sex work alongside rather than in contrast to other forms of work- shifting from criminal to labor law frameworks. The implications of migrant sex work organizing go beyond policy, suggesting new ways for transnational communities- arranged by differences of privilege based on language, education, immigration and citizenship status, race, gender, sexuality, and forms of sex work- to imagine futures beyond criminalization and toward liberation.

This panel will be followed by a Q&A and then a series of small breakout group discussions.

Co-sponsored by IRWGS, CSER and Weatherhead

About the Panelists

Khokhoi de la Vida is a member of piliphinx shifterhood collective Walang Hiya (NYC), and works between New York City and the Visayas.

Elene Lam is the founder of Zi Teng, a non-governmental organization that provides assistance and community to women from Hong Kong and China who work as sex workers.

Chanelle Gallant is a co-founder of Migrant Sex Workers Project, a grassroots group of migrants, sex workers, and allies who demand safety and dignity for all sex workers regardless of immigration status based in Canada.

Kate Zen is a founder of Red Canary Song, a grassroots organization advocating and providing resources for Asian Migrant Massage Parlor Workers based in Flushing, Queens.

Elena Shih researches human trafficking, labor migration, and sex work in East and Southeast Asian borderlands. She is the author of the forthcoming Manufacturing Freedom: Rescue, Rehabilitation, and the Slave Free Good, a global ethnography of the transnational social movement to combat human trafficking in China and Thailand.