Border Crossings: Global Migration in a Queer/Feminist Frame

A One-Day Symposium organized by NYU’s Intersectional Feminist/Queer Studies Collective

October 13, 2023, Friday, 3 to 7 pm ET

20 Cooper Square room 101

This event is free & open to the public. RSVP is required for audience members without an active NYU ID.

For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at csgs@nyu.edu.

War and militarism, the global right turn and nationalist populism, racial capitalism in crisis, environmental degradation, and the heightened persecution of people due to sexual orientation and gender identification, have all been leading causes of the contemporary crisis of global displacement. With over 70 million displaced peoples worldwide, and another 40,000 fatalities among refugees seeking asylum in “fortress Europe,” this one day symposium brings together artists and scholars who situate migrant justice struggles within a queer/feminist frame. Collectively they foreground the voices of those directly impacted by carceral systems of policing, surveillance, and detention. From the SWANA diaspora to the US-Mexico border to Puerto Rico, they illuminate the ways in which these migrant communities engage in myriad movements for social justice and imagine worlds beyond sexual, gender, national, and racial borders and boundaries.

Panel 1: Voices from the Camps: Citizenship, Diasporas, Social Movements│3:00 pm to 4:30 pm

This panel engages questions of displacement utilizing a global framework which places various ethnic, national, racial, sexual and gendered communities and geographic coordinates into conversation with one another. Centering the narratives of those affected by the extremities of the crisis– people exiled as a result of war, state sanctioned violence and exclusion, and indigenous land dispossession–the panelists consider how a global framework for understanding the depths of disaster can also enable new forms of solidarity between affected communities.

Panelists: Loubna Qatami, Alborz Ghandehari, Cinthia Martinez

Moderator: Maysam Taher

Panel 2: Dissonant Sounds, Disruptive Images: Queer/Trans/Feminist Aesthetics │4:30 pm to 6:00 pm

What do queer/trans/feminist migrant imaginaries look, sound, and feel like? Ranging across diverse media (sound, installation, performance), the artists on this panel challenge, repudiate, and critique dominant logics of sexuality, gender, nation, and race, while simultaneously imagining alternatives to these logics.

Panelists: Cassils, Arshia Fatima Haq, Dorian Wood

Moderator: Gayatri Gopinath

Performances by: Vena Cava, Warhola Pop │6:00 pm to 7:00 pm

Reception 7:00 pm (open food/drinks at 3 pm, coffee/tea)

Register to attend in-person here.

For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at csgs@nyu.edu.

Organized by the NYU Intersectional Feminist/Queer Studies Collective; co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and the Latinx Project at NYU.

Voices from the Camps: Citizenship, Diasporas, Social Movements Panelists:

Cinthya Martinez is a first-generation Chicana scholar and community organizer focusing on migrant detention, state sexual violence, and feminist abolition theory/praxis. She earned her PhD in ethnic studies from the University of California, Riverside in 2022. She is currently a UC Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Part of her community organizing work includes her role as a deportation defense coordinator supporting queer migrants in ICE detention in Adelanto, CA. Cinthya’s research focuses on sexual violence and reproductive (in)justice in ICE detention facilities, while examining how affected communities, and migrant activists more broadly, are forging geographies of abolition through confronting the connections between carceral and border regimes.

Loubna Qutami is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Qutami is a former President’s Postdoctoral Fellow from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (2018-2020) and received her PhD from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside (2018). Qutami’s research examines transnational Palestinian youth movements after the 1993 Oslo Accords through the 2011 Arab Uprisings. Her work is based on scholar-activist ethnographic research methods. Qutami’s broader scholarly interests include Palestine, critical refugee studies, the racialization of Arab and Muslim communities in the U.S., settler-colonialism, youth movements, transnationalism and indigenous and Third World Feminism.

Alborz Ghandehari is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah. His research centers protest movements in Iran and Southwest Asia/North Africa, as well as movements in the region’s migrant diasporas. His forthcoming book, Post/Revolutionary Conditions: Renewed Visions of the Iranian Freedom Struggle will be out with Northwestern University Press in Fall 2024. The book puts oral histories with contemporary Iranian feminist, labor, and student organizers in conversation with resistance literature and art, to explore the ongoing struggle against dictatorship and imperialism in Iran and its solidarities with popular resistance movements worldwide. Alborz is also a performance artist whose most recent credit was a performance of Nassim Soleimanpour’s play “White Rabbit Red Rabbit” in association with Aurora Nova Productions.

Moderator: Maysam Taher

Dissonant Sounds, Disruptive Images: Queer/Trans/Feminist Aesthetics Panelists:

Cassils is a transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils’ art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle, survival, empowerment and systems of care. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils’ work excavates historical contexts to examine the present moment.

Cassils has had recent solo exhibitions at HOME Manchester, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC; Institute for Contemporary Art, AU; Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts; School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Bemis Center, Omaha; MU Eindhoven, Netherlands.

They are the recipient of the National Creation Fund (2022), a 2020 Fleck Residency from the Banff Center for the Arts, a Princeton Lewis Artist Fellowship finalist (2020), a Villa Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (2019), a United States Artist Fellowship (2018), a Guggenheim Fellowship and a COLA Grant (2017) and a Creative Capital Award (2015). They have received the inaugural ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, California Community Foundation Grant, MOTHA (Museum of Transgender Hirstory) award, and numerous Visual Artist Fellowships from the Canada Council of the Arts. Their work has been featured in New York Times, Boston Globe, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Wired, The Guardian, TDR, Performance Research, Art Journal and was the subject of the monograph Cassils published by MU Eindhoven 92015) and their new catalog Solutions, is published by the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, TX (2020). Cassils’ work was recently acquired by the Victoria Albert Museum, London, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and the Leslie Lohman Museum.

Cassils is an Associate Professor in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto.

Arshia Fatima Haq (born in Hyderabad, India) is a Los Angeles-based artist who works across film, visual art, performance, and sound. She works through counter-archives and speculative narratives, and is currently exploring themes of indigenous and localized knowledge within the context of Sufism. Haq is the founder of Discostan, a collaborative club-based project, radio show and record label drawing from the cultural production of South and West Asia and North Africa and their diasporas. She hosts and produces monthly radio shows on NTS. Her projects have been presented nationally and internationally at museums, galleries, nightclubs, and in the streets, and have been featured at the Broad Museum; LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions); the Hammer Museum; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson; Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston; Onassis Stegi, Athens; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Toronto International Film Festival; and NPR; among others. Haq received an MFA in Film and Video from California Institute of the Arts.

Dorian Wood (pronouns: she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her intent of “infecting” spaces and ideologies with her artistic practice is born from a desire to challenge traditions and systems that have contributed to the marginalization of people. Wood has performed at institutions that include The Broad, Los Angeles, CA; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Del Prado, Madrid, Spain; the City Hall of Madrid, Spain; and Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris, Mexico City, Mexico. From 2019 to 2020, Wood completed several successful international tours with her chamber orchestra tribute to Chavela Vargas, XAVELA LUX AETERNA. In 2022, Wood debuted her tribute to the singer Lhasa De Sela, entitled LHASA, at the Festival Internacional de Arte Sacro in Madrid. As a visual artist, Wood’s illustrations and installations have been exhibited in galleries around the world, including Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles; La Carboneria, Huesca, Spain; Fierman Gallery, New York; and the Queer Biennial, Los Angeles. Wood is a recipient of the NALAC Fund For the Arts Award, the Creative Capital Award and the Art Matters Foundation grant, and is also a MacDowell fellow and a Loghaven fellow. Wood has released over a dozen recordings, most recently the album You are clearly in perversion (Astral Editions). In 2023, Wood debuted Canto de Todes, a 12-hour composition and installation, at REDCAT in Los Angeles.

Moderator: 

Gayatri Gopinath is a Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of two monographs: Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke UP, 2005), and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke UP, 2018). She has published numerous essays on gender, sexuality, and queer diasporic cultural production in journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, GLQ, Social Text, and positions.

Performers:

Born and raised in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, Vena Cava is a drag performer and event producer currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She initiated her Drag career in Rio Piedras where she was one of the first wave of performers to emerge from a currently thriving alternative queer scene. In Brooklyn, she is known as the Puerto Rican It Girl who produces Latine and Caribbean centric events. In her five years as an active drag queen, she has collaborated with brands and been featured in publications including: Paper Magazine, Refinery 29, Happy Socks, Scruff, Out Magazine, Gayletter, Yelp, Public Hotels and Standard Hotels.

Jafet Márquez a.k.a. Warhola Pop (drag name) was born and raised on the tropical island of Puerto Rico and has resided in Brooklyn, NY for the last seven years. She describes herself as a campy artist who uses her body like a canvas. Her name signals her passion for visual and performance art and encompasses her limitlessness when she is on the stage. Warhola Pop was created from a mix of her Latinx roots, glamour and makeup. At NYU, she/he has worked with the Center for the Humanities, the Department of Performance Studies, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics, and the Latinx Project. She/he has collaborated with Gayletter Magazine, Paper Magazine, Bushwig Drag Festival, PROMESA, the Bronx Opioid Collective, the Nasty Woman Project, Univision New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Jewish Museum and OASIS Latino AIDS and LGBTQ Center, among other organizations. She/he participated as the main characters in Las Venas de mi País, a short film where she/he wanders across two islands (New York and Puerto Rico) contemplating the diaspora and how this relates to their identities as a queer person. The film is currently being presented at different alternative film festivals around the world, including Puerto Rico Film Festival and Filmfest Dresden in Germany. Apart from this, she/he is an active worker in set design for productions at Navy Studios and Company XIV, a theater company that combines the arts of ballet, burlesque, opera, circus and cabaret in an immersive theater setting. With this experience, Márquez had the opportunity to be in contact with Broadway-style performance and theater productions.

This event is free & open to the public. RSVP is required for audience members without an active NYU ID.

For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at csgs@nyu.edu.

Image:

Artist: Yosimar Reys
CHINGA TU MIGRA
Location: LA Metropoliton Jail
Performance Still: Dee Gonzalez, July 3, 2020.
Part of In Plain Sight a coalition of 80 artists fighting immigrant detention and the culture of incarceration conceived of by Cassils and rafa esparza