Mourning and Militancy: Bodily Autonomy and Networks of Care

This panel takes its title from Douglas Crimp’s famous 1989 essay written at the height of the AIDS crisis, which argued for the need for both militant activism and collective mourning. How might our current moment similarly demand an attention to collective grief and care, organizing and activism?  This conversation brings together artists and activists, Dean Spade, Amitis Motevalli, Yin Q, and Viva Ruiz, to consider the aesthetic and political strategies they find most necessary to combat the violent curtailing of bodily autonomy faced by queer/trans communities in particular.

Organized by CSGS, co-sponsored by Performance Studies, Social and Cultural Analysis, the Center for Disability Studies, and XE.

Dean Spade has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He’s the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, and Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) the director of the documentary “Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!.” His latest book, Love in a Fucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up and Raise Hell Together, was published by Algonquin Press in January.

Amitis Motevalli is an artist who explores the cultural resistance and survival of people living in poverty, conflict, catastrophe and/or war. Her experiences as a trans-national migrant and in community organizing are foundational in her work and research. Through many media, digital, analog, static and live, her work juxtaposes and contrasts iconography with iconoclasm, memorials with monuments, archive methodologies with canon. Her work intends to ask questions about archiving, documentation and canonization of histories, in particular related to violence. In this line of questioning she subverts populism by invoking the significance of a secular grassroots struggle. She is primarily based  in Los Angeles, exhibiting art internationally as well as organizing to create an active and critical cultural discourse through information exchange, either in art, pedagogy with cultural producers and educators.

Yin Q (b.1974, they/she) is a parent, writer, curator and core organizer with Red Canary Song and founding member of Kink Out. Yin’s writing has been published in The Funambulist, BUST, Apogee Journal (Columbia University), We Too, Stories of Sex Work and Survival (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2021), and Afro Asia (Duke University Press, 2008). Their media work includes “Mercy, Mistress,” (EP Margaret Cho), and Fly In Power, (co-directd with Yoon Grace Ra), a documentary for Red Canary Song and the short youtube video, "Yang Song, Fly in Power." Yin has brought sex worker art to Leslie Lohman Museum, MoMA PS1 (Resident Artist, 2020), Performance Space New York, Brown University (AAPI Resident Artist, 2023), and Storefront Gallery for Art & Architecture.

Viva Ruiz (shethey) is a community/family/nightlife/sex work educated artist, progeny of factory working Ecuadorian migrants born and raised in Jamaica, Queens. They are proud to be the “daughter” of beloved Chloe Dzubilo, punk rock trans femme activist. Ruiz's original telenovelas and short films have screened internationally at art spaces including the Whitney Museum, MoMa PS1 and many more. Ruiz has been building power and birthing pro-abortion aesthetics since 2015 with the #thankgodforabortion experiment. Viva is a 2022 Creative Capital grantee and 2022 Art Matters fellow. She is intentional about calling more beautiful worlds into being with and in service to the spirits that walk with them.